Hooray! It's finally done! The Maid RPG Character Generator is completed, including saving and viewing characters. This should let us record the best of the worst crazy characters we come up with. I did opt not to have a "Notes" section on each character; the characters stored on sup/tg/ for the various generators are more character summaries than fully working character sheets, so such a textbox doesn't really add anything to an entry. (Once UsuallyRandom provides a PDF character sheet, *then* players can add all the notes they want!)
Movie night was partially a success and partially a failure; on the one hand, I got it to work and just about everyone could connect with a couple exceptions, but the encoding was wrong (I used a too-low bitrate) and the audio ended up getting more and more desynchronized as time went on. I'm trying again, and hopefully tomorrow night we'll be able to watch this delicious film.
And now, I'm going to bed. We'll try to watch The Haunting again tomorrow night, probably around 1:00am EDT or so (no guarantees though). If anyone else would like to VeeJay, the steps are basically like this:
Live streaming video's easier, since you can just select an input and stream that, but getting from DVD to SHOUTcast is a bit of a trial. If anyone has a method of transcoding the IFO or ISO directly into NSV, please let me know, because I know it must be a painful hit on the film quality to keep reconverting it like this.
Edity: I just wanted to say that the first sup/tg/ Horror Movie Night went off beautifully. The Haunting was as creepy and scary as I remembered it and the stream was wonderful. We're going to be doing something else tomorrow (Monday) night, though we're not sure what yet. I would have made a new newspost but Ruler's masterpiece deserves to be up on the page for a while longer.
Oh yeah? I see your It and raise you a Thing:
Some people are afraid of clowns. Everyone is terrified of a fucking spider-head-thing. Also, Species? Pff, that wasn't scary, unless misogyny is terrifying. (Best part of the movie is where they find the guy with the needle, but it's just insulin for his diabetes; it's not like a male could possibly be evil in that shitfest and be hooked on heroin or something.) And as for House, the original was ntended to be horror-comedy; it's got too much silliness amidst the horror to have been a serious movie. (I prefer not to think about the sequel.)
The three movies I watch in rotation every Halloween are House on Haunted Hill (the remake, I didn't much like the Vincent Price original), Phantoms (based on the book by Koontz), and Event Horizon. You may roll your eyes at one or all of them, but they've each got some fucking spectacular moments. Phantoms has an empty town, brain-sucking moths, a few really good "boo" moments, and a bitchin' villain (or two). Hill has some great moments with Geoffrey Rush losing his mind, Jacob's Ladder-inspired special effects, and some pretty intense scenes (like when he's trapped in the scary-go-round, the asylum bit in the beginning, and anything with The Doctor). And, of course, Event Horizon. Haunted house in space. How can you not love that?
I completely reject the entire genre of torture-porn as "scary" because it's just idiotic. The only exception to the entire genre, which seemed to have actually started the whole mess, was the original Saw: a thriller-mystery with a brilliant plot and plenty of twists. I classify it as a thriller, not horror. The sequels basically forgot what made the first one such a smash success and all its imitators focused on the limb-removal instead of the "whodunit."
Anyway, yes, we're still on for tonight for horror movies. I'm fairly certain that SHOUTcast can stream video; I just need to get the right tools to encode a movie and then broadcast it to the SHOUTcast. Again, if anyone has any experience in doing this, please let me know as I'd love to have someone help me get this shit going as soon as possible.
I keep putting it off, so tomorrow night's the night: We're going to stream some movies on the SHOUTcast or by whatever means necessary, starting with The Haunting and In the Mouth of Madness. I don't know yet exactly how to do this, although I've got a few leads in that regard. Ideally I'd like to marathon some horror movies this month, and after that we'll see what else people want. I've got a sizeable (150+) collection of public domain or abandoned movies for sharing, and we can all heckle them together.
The chargen is almost completed, I copied the tables from Javascript to PHP tonight so it's just a matter of making it save to database and retrieve it. I could even potentially do this in work tomorrow, though I've got a lot of shit to do. We'll see.
Also BEARS. Also, nice icon, Purple. I see your Freddy and raise you a Jason:
YOUR MOVE.
Feh, have to get up early tomorrow, or I'd have this done tonight... quick note, the MaidRPG chargen is almost done, I just need to finish copying the tables into PHP and saving to the database (which is set up already). I really will try to force myself to have it done tomorrow otherwise.
For October's delicious HORRORFESTAN I'd like to start playing movies for everyone via SHOUTcast or some other medium, delicious grindhouse movies like Driller Killer or public domain stuff like the original The Haunting and House on Haunted Hill and old-old-old-school shit like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. If anyone knows the best way to accomplish this through SHOUTcast or some other application (ala /b/tv) let me know.
Also I'm making Ruler or Purple or someone update the frontpage just to get them to do it. So hopefully we can expect a post from one of them shortly. RIGHT GUYS.
So I did end up changing the color scheme at like 5:00 this morning, as you have probably noticed (unless you are colorblind, in which case the site might be hard to read, or you're blind blind, in which case I would ask how you got here). Normally I suck at the whole color selection thing, but then I found this wonderful Jack-O-Lantern palette over at COLOURlovers, and I decided to implement it there and then. I've left a couple pages alone and there are some spots where the CSS needs to be fixed but all in all I'm liking the new theme.
Also, I got my ASCII Art Reward from Bay 12 Games for donating a couple months ago. I'm on their Champions list now. Here was the art and story I got:
###,.@@@@,.///M The dwarves wandered up the side of the icy mountain. They crossed glacier after glacier in search of a spot to tunnel inward. It was said that great treasures abound in these mountains. Expedition leader Dornson held up his hand. A howling could be heard all around them, but the echoing canyons made its source impossible to pin point. Suddenly an icy boulder crashed into the mountain trail, nearly knocking a dwarf over the side. Dornson looked up to see the characteristic pointed ears of a blizzard man. "Oh creature of the mountain," said Thalman, the sculptor, "please let us share these great cliffs with you." "Yes," said miner Drak in a mocking tone, "ask your friend which way to the adamantine." Another boulder crashed down and Dornson told the two to hush. How would they pass this creature? Was there another way around the mountain? Another boulder crashed down, peeling part of the trail away. Now there was no way but back. The creature howled in a manner that almost resembled an evil laugh. Dornson reached for his crossbow.
Now I need to start a fortress in a glacier.
It's October first today, which means it's time to start delicious horrorfest. I'm going to try to watch a horror movie every night if possible, probably starting off with The Haunting from 1964. (Yes, that's right, the original, not the massively over-budgeted special effects shitpile from a few years ago.) I'm also going to finally sit down and actually finish reading the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I've had in ebook form forever but never finished.
Speaking of which, I'm also going to play the shit out of Arkham Horror... which is starting to inspire me to make a short browser-based game. I've loved randomly-generated events since I wrote a dungeon crawler on my TI-83 in high school (which included creepy events such as "The paintings seem to watch you as you pass"); now that I've refreshed myself on Javascript thanks to the generators, I can probably whip up a short little Lovecraftian browser game. We'll see, though, there are a lot of projects I need to complete (still need to set up the Maid RPG character database) before I can work on this one.
I've also got delicious candy corn, so, bonus. Mmm, candy corn. Maybe I'll update the site's CSS for a Halloween theme... no, will make changes later, it's 4:42am, must sleep damnit!
So, I'm going to the Deerfield Fair tomorrow in (hurrdurr) Deerfield, NH. I won't be around much, if at all, and I'm going to bed ridiculously early tonight (I can't even remember when "midnight" seemed "late" anymore) so I can get up at 6:30am. I intend to purchase an oversized, baked-just-that-minute honey glazed donut and delicious meat products of some kind or other, amidst what will probably be ceaseless rain. Yay!
The Maid RPG character generator is almost done, but I think I'll leave it off until tomorrow; I'm feeling a little feverish again and I've been coding all day for a variety of things, so a break would be nice. Some other people have access to update the frontpage now, so you can look forward to random things at random times from random people. Hooray! After this, I'm going to look at creating a comment system, then a poll system, and finally I'll put together the article section. (Yes, I could just use Wordpress or some shit like that, but really, it doesn't do anything that I can't do and it takes direct control out of my hands.)
Man, I'm really feeling feverish. That or it's just hot in here. I should go lie down or something. ... nah. It's not midnight yet.
So, I finally got off my ass and automated the frontpage news. Instead of just using Notepad and copypasta for new items, it's actually automated. Hooray for automation! I've also added an RSS feed, not that anyone will ever use it, but I recently developed one for another website for work and decided I might as well implement it while the memory is fresh.
In other other news, I'm going to be letting a couple other people update the frontpage with random shit, just to keep things lively. I'm still intending to do the rants/articles/fiction/whatever section, but for now letting a trusted few make general updates seems like a good start.
I'm going to have one of said trusted individuals make an update right now to test it, in fact...
So guess what I found waiting for me in the mail?
Ross Watson, senior RPG editor for Dark Heresy at Fantasy Flight Games, was kind enough to send me a free copy of both Arkham Horror and the expansion Kingsport Horror as a thank you gift for the Dark Heresy character generator.
Awesome. Now I just need to trick my friends into playing it with me. They trusted me with Catan, and one of them is a Lovecraft fanatic, so hopefully it won't be too hard to rope them into it.
OHGOD
I've added a new section for relevant /tg/-related sites to the sidebar. So far, I've got 1d4chan, CR 25 Hypermitotic Dungeon Master (the "This Just Happened" guy), Fantasy Flight Games (Dark Heresy), and Tony's currently empty Violent Bees. I've considered adding Dark Reign to the sidebar, but... I dunno. I certainly don't mind being linked, and they're not taking credit for my Dark Heresy character generator, but it would be nice to have been asked before they slapped it on their homepage sidebar. I only found out about it because someone from their forums mentioned their membership, and I happened to check out the site.
Anyway, this pile of links brings me to my actual question: What /tg/-related sites should be there? I guess FFG and VB don't really need to be there, but I don't want to have just two links. The only real site I can think of is 1d4chan. If anyone has suggestions for additional sites, or runs a /tg/-related site and wants a link, let me know.
So Comcast decided that I didn't need phone or internet service at 2am - who'll notice, amirite? - and everything went out for no apparent reason. It gave me plenty of time to work on the character generator without distractions, but it's seriously irritating. I'm trying to look up the string replacement function in Javascript, assholes! Give me my goddamn Google!
Oh, yeah, and the site was inaccessible as a result. Once again, it's here, you guys just can't get to it. Guess I'll just have to play The Witcher until it's back up.
Edity: UsuallyRandom, when you've got a moment, can you drop by the IRC? I had a couple questions, namely the kinds of notes you wanted and what to do about abilities like Giant Weapons when the weapons table is turned off.
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