Burrowowl

In the never-ending quest for visual perfection, countless webgurus, mathnerds, and aesthetic wonks have put forward their own color-picking and color-matching tools. These vary wildly in both usefulness and presentation, but Color Scheme by Pixy stands out in my mind as one of the better ones. It displays complimentary colors in a manner that allows you to see each color next to each of the other colors chosen, allows you to pick what method of computing complimentary colors will be chosen, and allows for a variety of color-perception disorders. Go, you crazy Czech, you!

*edit on 2004-11-19: the colorpicker’s URL has changed to http://wellstyled.com/tools/

As my play-experience has been maturing this past month, I’m finding more to like and less to dislike about FFXI than I had initially expected. I’m still chafing at the flagrant recipe-following tendancies that a great many players have (see previous reference to fansite resources). This results in areas such as the Valkrum Dunes being chock-full of adventurers, including a lot of my fellow Windurstans. Meanwhile the Tahrongi region (right next door to the Sarutabaruta Plains, the heartland of the Republic of Windurst) is neglected to the point that none of the civilized kingdoms exert control over it.

Many of my brave young countrymen are making a long voyage by sea to Selbina in order to partake in a quest to acquire the “subjob” ability. A similar quest is possible closer to home, but our blackmages, warriors, and monks have been emigrating steadily at the behest of their web-found follow-the-instructions recipies. The result of this has been neglect of our own hinterland. How are our Dhalmel herders to get Papaka Grass? Who will ensure that our books of lore and magic are properly accounted for?

As a Windurstan nationalist and patriot, I find this to be inexcusable, and am doing my utmost to remedy the situation. Alas, game mechanics restrict Expeditionary missions to citizens that are both powerful and in high regard (level 25 and rank 3 required), so I have only been able to participate thus far by thinning out the Goblin, Dhalmel, and Rarab populations of the Tahrongi Canyons and Buburimu Peninsula areas. Keep those signets up, folks!

File under “be careful what you wish for.”

Matt Wilson from Privateer Press recently announced that the IKCG will likely hit the streets in April of 2004. We’ve heard things like this before, and the IKCG has been notoriously over-delayed by a variety of factors before. Not the least of these factors was the sheer volume of material that the PP crew came up with. They were shooting for a 300-page resource to help players and DMs immerse themselves into the Iron Kingdoms. Instead the project snowballed into 700 pages of art, rules, and flavor, of which they were loathe to drop… anything.

So here’s the mixed blessing: Instead of a single 300-page IKCG with a bunch of savage cuts to flavor and rules, we’re going to be getting two hefty tomes instead, an IKCG in April full of crunchy rules, prestige classes, feats, spells, and equipment, and an IKWG released sometime later full of fluffy historical, religious, cultural, and regional information. I have mixed feelings about this, as I was hoping for more fluff sooner than later, but I suppose this is better than perfectly good setting information ending up on the cutting-room floor, eh?

It has occurred to me that in all my postings about such silliness as Itsudatte My Santa and Green Green and other titles that I’ve had a passing interest in, I’ve neglected to mention prominently one that I’ve truely been enjoying for several months now. The fine folks at akatsukimanga.com have been translating Pretty Face, a title by Yasuhiro Kano.

Brief summary is: boy is horribly injured in an accident, but the doctors don’t know who he is to help reconstruct his face. They use a picture of the girl he has a crush on as representative of what he is to look like. Now he looks like that same girl’s twin. Stupid? Yes. Silly? Absolutely. Overflowing with cheap sexual humor possibilities? You betcha. Worth a try.