Category: Uncategorized

Beasts we are lest beef we become

Over the summer I fell into obsession with old west miniature gaming, well, painting them that is as I only got to play once so far.  I had a goal to get through that involved painting 8 miniatures and completing two full gangs for Warhammer Historicals Legends of the Old West–gangs that I have been ‘working’ on since 2005.  Over the Xmas break, I was able to finish all but two, and knocked the remainder out over the worst weeks of January.

Rock lobber, doom diver with a bunch of goblin meat between

Now after my first play of Warhammer 8th edition, I took a long view over my painting table and backlog in order to get to 2000 points painted.  50 beastmen, 1 chariot, a chaos spawn, a hound of scathatch, a giant and 5 harpies.  59 miniatures all told, with two of those being big models that will take weeks to complete. At my rate– about 5 miniatures per year that will take me until my kids are deep into high school.    The bottom line is, I’ve never tried to paint an entire army before– sure Necromunda gangs, blood bowl teams, etc. but nothing equaling over 100 models– it seems totally insane.  So to keep it reasonable, but to have a goal, I’m going to try to paint 10 miniatures per month, not including the big shit–the Giant will take me more than a month probably.  At that rate I should be able to spend a few hours here and there on week nights and then one big chunk of time on either weekend day.

The motivational part is that my 1000 points painted hit the table this weekend, and though it was  chaotic game where we absolutely did not get the rules right, my stuff just looked totally awesome on the table,  even painted as mediocre as it is.  Of course, the game itself was just great fun, 4 hours went by in a snap (and I stood for the whole game, forgetting to get a chair!).

Yes that's the tower from Dark Tower

The game was against Night Goblins, with their whirling fanatics, a doom diver and a stone thrower.  All three did horrific damage during the initial turns of the game, but not enough to save the hapless goblins once the beastmen closed in for the kill.  The beastmen themselves aren’t that great, just tough, but when you take into account that most of the time they can reroll misses on any round of combat with a slight chance of Frenzy happening, they get a ton of hits in combat with the potential, however slight, of just going totally fucking apeshit.  Though the beasts smashed most of the Goblin army it was actually a very close run thing and a lot of luck in the pinch.

What I loved was the huge combats– just too fun, but also the insane terrain on the board.  We randomly rolled and just about every roll had some crazy magical mystery terrain.  The forest on my left was a fungus forest that caused Stupidity in my army, but helped the goblins!  In the center was some sort of Necrosphinx who granted wishes or ate characters who tried to solve her riddle, and on the right flank was a Tower of Blood overlooking a dismal fen.  The tower of blood shot the dicepools into the stratosphere– causing units within 6″ to have Frenzy (double attacks) and Hatred (Reroll misses).  Never in my wargaming career have I rolled so many dice.

Agile is 10!

Back in 2001 a bunch of project managers and software developers got together somewhere in Colorado, drank some beer, smoked some of them tweeds (I can only assume) and came up with a document that has since defined my career as a project manager.  I LIVE it every work day and fight the battles with my teams to balance out the left and the right of it with a focus on what works uber alles.  What I’ve seen in the years I’ve attempted to reach the Agile goals is that the Manifesto continues to be wholly relevant to every single day I work and has come to reside as a core philosophy, even when I’m stuck on some dismal waterfail project (yes, even I believe that not all projects are a good fit for Agile).

Another thing I’ve seen as companies and project groups start to implement Agile more (and in almost all cases fail in the beginning) is that there are so many ways you can get it wrong if you forget to keep referring to the Manifesto itself.  One of the old companies I worked for tried to implement Agile recently and even got a consultant to help them– but their implementation decries from great heights that they don’t even have a basic understanding of the underpinnings of the why of it all– and it has already descended into scrumfailland and to be blunt, abject stupidity.

Just like any discipline, you have to understand the philosophical underpinnings, the why of it all, to form the core beliefs that lead to success– and the creators of the Agile Manifesto has handed us this on a platter for easy consumption.  I’m never one to sit around on soft pillows talking about theory– I don’t think any project managers in existence are– but that is no excuse to not understand what the core system forming your tactical methods is all about and continuing to refer to it as arguments on systems escalate.   Granted there have been mass tomes written since on how to actually utilize the Agile methods tactically, some far better and more accessible than others so it’s much easier today to start implementation in your organization, but I feel you still need to really look yourself at the Manifesto and glean from in what’s going to work for you–then start in on the massive amounts of tactical implementation literature.  I reiterate that the tenants put forward by the writers of the manifesto are as relevant today as ever and though battles have been won against the PMI generic project management waterfail methods (i.e.: as a PMI, you can project management anything! Sorry, no.) across the planet, the war against bad software project management has only just begun.

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 3

shoedrinker hit lv20! fucking not too hard really. a barbarian is built to take the damage while punching everything until it disappears into the crowd.

there’s a nice lv10 to lv20 breakdown picture above, click it to see all the dirty character details. i think it is interesting to see how a hardcore character in diablo 2 changes after ten levels of play. i’m playing a double fisting sword swinger, so all my skill points are going towards the hard hitting skills like bash, double swing, stun, concentrate.  i mainly use double swing, and throw in some bashes, stuns and concentrates. lv17-20 i was just crushing shit with concentrate. i’m holding off on weapon specialization skills until i’m sure i know what type of weapons i want to use long term. i don’t care about the war cries at all, will this doom my barbarian?

i have a ring of +9% magic find, which really seemed to make a significant difference, i am surprised by this. i found 3 set items with the shoedrinker while flyingassbang found zero. could it be that each +9% magic find??? i can’t be too sure right now, more play time with the other characters will tell perhaps. the set items at this stage seem pretty fucking nice and that rune word’d sword fucks shit up bad. i’m not sure if having over 1000 attack rating is pretty normal for a lv20 barb, or if i’m ahead of the curve.

here is a video of ShoeDrinker killing boss monsters on his way from lv10-20.

shoedrinker’s resistances are HORRIBLE.  lightening enchanted shit almost killed him 2-3 times, and we’re talking normal shit not even unique stuff.

next up is TugandRun the nerco! i have a bad feeling he’s dooooommmmmmeed.

FUCKUATARI

Atari you fail at giving shit away for free! I registered for a Star Trek beta account in 2009 or early 2010 and now that account can’t be used to download this free space piss called Cham-pee-yaaaahns Online? WHUT? So I try to do a password reset because you tell me my email is already in use. The reset password dialog box tells me the email is not registered.

10 print “FUCKUATARI ”

20 goto 10

run

d2 hardcore mraakairy – part 2

flyingassbang update  lv10-20

she made it. she’s not dead, yet. i’m a little more then halfway through act 2 with flyingassbang. i’ve only had 2-3 close calls that put her damn near death. these close calls stem from running into room full of baddies and getting hammered by ranged baddies and almost surrounded by melee baddies. simple rule of thumb, don’t fucking rush into rooms. with her lighting rez at 60% the most feared lightening enchanted fuckers don’t do shit to her.

i’m not found much in the way of good loot for her yet. i mean really nothing to brag about at all. the unique club that gives her 60% lightening rez is about the coolest shit she has, and she’s a sorc! i do have a nice 3 socket grey staff i want to put some runes in soon, but that’s about it. i don’t like that i have to get out some internet FAQ to find out what can be made with runes, that is gaytownusa. i’m glad crafting will be more ingame friendly for diablo 3.

when flyingassbang’s amazon hireling hit lv17 she got a sweet-ass rune/gemmed bow, 150 poison damage over 5 seconds and 8-12 fire damage. so while flyingassbang is freezing shit that little amazon woman hireling is mr. yuck fucking all the frozen enemies to death.

flyingassbang is mostly in the cold skill tree for now, with a bit of lightening and fire to help deal with any cold immune assbags that show up. she trys to keep Shiver Armor running at all times, helping protect her from any shitcakes that get close, while blasting away with Glacial Spike. She used Ice Blast for a while there, but switched to Glacial Spike when it became available. A bit of Frost Nova to help in crowds and a Static Field here and there on bosses.

is this the right way to play? use only 1-2 skills the entire time mostly? goddamn that seems broken, so badly broken. i very much am looking forward to using 7 skills in diablo 3, just beling able to use 6 different skills direclty without having to swap out right mouse button with a new skill will be great. when i played the d3 demo in 2010 i loved how the skills could be easily combo’d as you have directly keystroke access to them.

overall i enjoy this d2 hardcore mode a lot more then regular d2. you are forced to be careful about how you play. i do worry about not being able to get past duriel or having to grind up lv’s to beat him… we shall see what happens. mraak! it’s on to ShoeDrinker – lv10 Barbarian now.

Happy New Year

I will soon go to a party where I will show people my ass and it will be a party wide topic of conversation.  That said, here is an obligatory hot chick picture to harken in the new year.

Yay! We're in another interactive bubble

Back in 1999 there was the DACK bullshit generator– a harbinger of the collapse of the dot.com bubble that we could look at and use every day in our presentations to clients, and now there’s a new one: http://www.whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com/.  Along with the dry up of available developers, if this isn’t an indication of a mountain of social media horseapples swaying back and forth looking for a place to fall, I don’t know what is. Luckily this shouldn’t take the economy down with it– that a give we’ll get from the Gov’t/bank-sustained housing bubble 2.0 fail.

I stayed a while and did more then just listen, I played Diablo 3

I had about 3 hours hours of play with the Diablo 3 BlizzCon 2009 build. The play was mostly broken up into 15 minute session, with a couple 30 min runs. I played each of the four classes in a portion of act two. The characters were already lv’d to around lv10.

Here are my impressions:
– Holy fucking shit it’s great.
– Witch Doctor seems over powered with his summons able to take almost all mob agro, leaving him free to deal damage from a distance free from danger.
– I died the most playing the Monk. Correctly timing his skills in combos seemed critical. This is no doubt part of the new play style being drawn up for Diablo 3. Less mashing attach and one spell, more balanced timed attacks with multiple spells interwoven.
– Spell interrupts seem unpolished, casts don’t start sometimes if you are melee’ing.
– The physics on the dead monsters have weight and feel “right”, bodies fall down, and rag-doll nicely, not like some games which heavily abuse rag-doll.
– Skill customizing with ruins/stones might be the best idea ever. It was not enabled in the build i played, but from how I was using skills constantly, being able to change your skills with mods should help to keep the game fresh.
– Good depth to the scenery around the level. Sometimes the scenery gets in the way of the game field covering the lower part of the screen hiding items, monsters and quest objectives.
– Move speed seems okay for combat the is no run/walk.
– The wizard had some fucking awesome spells, the Mirror Image spell had this incredible effect of the wizard splitting in two, you could almost feel the pulling and splitting.
– Barbarian two handed weapons sucked. I did way more damage using two single handed weapons.
– Mana regen allowed constant skill usage, you really had to spam skills to zap mana.
– Wizard had the best flow of skills I think.
– Largest mobs are around 15-20 monsters.
– Monsters required different approaches to kill, you can just see how much balance the Diablo 3 is designing when you have to change how you fight every couple minutes.
– Screen scrolling dropped frames every once in a while, shuttering a little bit.
– There was a couple here with their 2 children, one like 1.5 years old the other kid must have been 5-6 months. The childern were completely ignored so that the parents could play Diablo 3. Kinda disturbing.
– There’d are some tween girls being interviewed about their wow habits.
– Social awkwardness was at max.