Game Geek

I Fixed My Laptop with Floss:

That's right, I said floss. One of the weird things about a tablet PC is the unorthodox hinge system they use. Rather than a pair of hinges on the edge, they need one central hinge contraption that also rotates so that you can put the thing into slate mode. This hinge gets a lot of wear, and seems to collect dirt and debris. Dirt and debris makes hinges not only stick, but make noise. A horrid, primordial screeching crackling sound similar to a combination of nails on a chalkboard and bones being crushed by a rabid hyena. You think I'm kidding? The creaking on my tablet got so loud that I was able to wake a person who was in the depths of a dreamless ambien coma, and coworkers have been giving me odd looks. It was LOUD.

Sadly, there's just about jack shit online as far as suggestions go for fixing this issue. Most suggest just cleaning it out, but other people, like myself, noticed that the solid dry lubricating pad had degraded form use and crumbled away. Not good.

The one thing I did find suggested using, of all things, waxed floss. The floss is actually good for cleaning out the metal residue and dust to stop the creaking, and the wax seems to make a pretty good dry lubricant. So what the hell, I tried it out, and holy shit, it worked. It cleaned out the black metal dust and dirt, and mostly stopped the creaking. The joints were still pretty stiff, even after trying to work the wax into the bastards for a while, so just for good measure I zotted each joint with a blast of dry waxy teflon spray that I just happened to have hanging around from another never-finished project of mine. Yeah, that's right, I have dry wax teflon spray just sitting there waiting for a good use. I'm weird like that.

So anyway, after all was said and done, it works again. I had briefly tried some silicon grease that was used for paintball guns, but it doesn't come even close to the amount of viscosity needed, and the hinge seized up after a day. So don't do that: Floss and Teflon spray. It works, bitches!

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Lemming Toad:

In other news, I drew a Lemming Toad, seen above, who is now up on Mojizu waiting to make the grade (or not). Fun little guy; I tried out some different line colors, but in the end I wound up darkening them anyway. I can't seem to quite hack the light line styles of some other artists yet. Guess I'll try again another time.

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Huge Packages:

And in YET OTHER news, I'd like to give my personal superfluous and completely ridiculous packaging award to Razer for their Mamba gaming mouse. The mouse itself is superb, and I love that I've gone from a chunky 800 DPI to a nearly unnecessary 5600 DPI of sniping accuracy for gaming, so I'll give them a little link/plug here for a fantastic product (I got mine on Amazon; cheaper!), but holy shit guys, did you need to ship the mouse in a giant plastic display case with an honest to god pedestal for the mouse to be displayed on? I get that you want the packaging to be nice and all, but this is sort of a 'fuck the environment and the green movement and all that hippie shit, let's go the other way and just cram as much unnecessary bullshit into the package as we possibly can! SUCK IT ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!'

I mean, the case comes with a little three tire bureau underneath it with drawers for storing the various parts of the mouse. Why you need these, I dunno, because once the mouse is up and running there's no reason to store anything in them. Well, perhaps it could make a poor woman's jewelry case, as I think about it, it's that friggin huge. And the plastic case could probably make a decent planter for, oh, say, some sort of vegetable or herb that needs good root space.

I do get that I'm sort of hypocritical for bitching about excessive packaging when I'm dropping a chunk of cash on a gamers mouse, but still, I think they could have scaled back a little and been a little more environmentally conscious while also saving themselves and the end consumer a few bucks on the over the top packaging.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

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In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

I used to play Shadowrun back in highschool, quite a bit actually. Fun game; it was the first real successful RPG that mixed high tech and magic into one interesting alternate-earth type setting. Good stuff. We geeked out with second edition, mostly.

So I've been getting way into this whole Paizo/Pathfinder D&D 3.75 thing. It's fun, and interesting, because they're asking fans to come up with ideas and do brain storming to help them develop and re-work the 3.x D&D rule set.

So a company I've not known a lot about till recently named Paizo has decided to put out a new version of D&D. They're doing it under the OGL from Wizards of the Coast. Why would they do this you ask?

Lots to talk about for once!

First of all: D&D co-creator Gary Gygax passed away on March 4th; he is now beyond the scope of healing spells.

Yep, I almost cut my big toe off. It sucked.

The Wife and I finally decided to replace our craptacular old hand-me-down computer desks, if you can call ten pounds of cheap steel and chip board a desk, with actual nice mostly wood desks.

So Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons and Dragons game line, has just put out a new book. This book is called Wizards Presents: Races and Classes. This book costs about twenty bucks. It has no rules. It has no actual game info.

So I just got done playing a Cthulhu Mythos themed game of forum-based Mafia over at RnR, and decided to do a little Lovecraft/

tabletop tactical game that lets you build whatever you want and fight where ever you want.Well, I finally got around to doing a dry-run of one of my game systems.