Burrowowl

Recently while playing FFXI I decided to put away my axes and spear and spend some quality time as a spellcaster. To see how the other side lives. To give back some of the spell-hurling love to the community that has given me so much. Unfortunately, I did this right as the Playstation2 release hit the streets. Now I know how many of the japanese players must have felt when the north americans showed up last fall. Hint to all players with low-level jobs, new or otherwise: please don’t ever say that something is the case because your strategy guide or some website said so. Such resources are no substitue for experience. When I tell you a “bogy” is going to kick your sorry lvl16 butt, believe me. I’ve seen it happen more often than you might think.

File under “I’m a lazy DM…” Our buddies at WotC have been putting out a map a week for those of us who are work-ethic-challenged. Many people, myself included, like to be nice and prepared, with relevant statistics for NPCs, notes on general plot flow, and bookmarks for quick rules-referencing. However, toiling away with a pencil and graph paper is time consuming, and compter-assisted cartography software has a bit of a learning curve before you can generate quality output. The Map a Week feature has been a godsend for such lazy DMs. Now we’re taking things a bit further.

Can’t be bothered to draw your own maps? Don’t want to use paper and toner? Don’t have a printer handy? Check out the upcoming Map Folio supplement, complete with what are tauted to be high-quality one-page prints of general-purpose duneon, stronghold, building, and town maps. I may not be motivated enough by my own sense of slack to dish out money for 32 maps, color or otherwise, but I’m sure there will be a lot of folks who will truely appreciate this stuff.

It looks like my loving ISP has added another RBL to our mail servers. Huge chunks of the internet, mostly consisting of active spamhaus establishments and compromised systems (got broadband but no firewall? shame on you!) are having their traffic to mx.sonic.net dropped without comment. Recent stats show that we’re down from roughly 400-500 spams per minute to roughly 200. Thank you, spamhaus.org, your hard work is greatly appreciated.

See the stats for yourself

So… Now that the Tenjo Tenge anime has been released (and fansubbed), I’ll chitter on about something else entirely for a while. While in Japan earlier this year, I was suprised to see that One Piece is still on the shelves there. Amazed by its staying power in the fickle Consumer Market of the Rising Sun, I resolved to finally check it out when I got home. And check it out I did… I’ve read 23 volumes of it now, and I’m quite thoroughly hooked. It entails the journey of Luffy D Monkey, a young man determined to become the King of Pirates…. No mere verbal description can do this series justice. Just check out the anime or the manga and see for yourself. If you don’t instantly drop your pants in excitement, give it a couple chapters. It grows on you like a fungus.