K-Squared Ramblings » D&D

Links: Paper, Flickr, D&D Advice, LEGO Firefox, etc.

Kelson — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:16:42 +0000

Some interesting links I’ve encountered over the past week or two.

Help! My Half-Elf is Pregnant! – The 11 strangest Dungeons and Dragons questions from the “Sage Advice” Column
15 things worth knowing about coffee by The Oatmeal.
Photos: When Niagra Falls Ran Dry

And now some techie stuff:

Interesting idea: Paper.li extracts links posted by Twitter and Facebook accounts you follow, then creates a daily newspaper page featuring headlines, links and excerpts from the top stories.
Who Came Up With Computer Symbols?
Thomas Hawk’s Open Letter to Carol Bartz, CEO Yahoo Inc. on why Yahoo! should consider Flickr a core product.
Firefox made of LEGO

Edit: Not a link, but I should mention: between a bug in Akismet and me not having time to go through it, I ended up with more than 2,000 comments in the spam folder just from the last 3 weeks. I don’t have time to look through that many items for false positives, so I just cleared it all out. If you left a legitimate comment that hasn’t shown up on the site, I apologize.

Quick, Roll a D16!

Kelson — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:10:50 +0000

Or maybe “tumble” would be more appropriate…

Needless to say, the dryer was out of order. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a 16-sided die?

OC D&D

Kelson — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 01:00:21 +0000

Something like 10 years ago, Katie saw a self-storage place in which the opening S was unlit, making it read, “Elf Storage.” She’s been looking for another one ever since, and we finally caught one in Newport Beach a few months ago. This one was even better, because the S had actually fallen off.

Of course, there are other things in the area that could easily come out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Such as this Kobold Construction truck.

And then there’s the fact that all fire engines in Orange County are labeled ORC.

Let’s not forget the previously-blogged Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach.

And that’s not even getting into all the Tolkien-inspired street names in Lake Forest…

From DM of the Rings to Chainmail Bikini

Kelson — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 03:37:29 +0000

After a year, DM of the Rings is finished. The comic recast Lord of the Rings as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, using stills (sometimes brilliantly chosen) from the Peter Jackson–directed movie trilogy in a comic-strip format.

The series poked fun at RPG tropes and player types, with the players’ dialog given to the LOTR characters. Every once in a while, someone would speak in character. But mostly, they’d be asking about the Cheetos, or why there wasn’t enough loot. And speaking of loot, it also pointed out where the story would fall down as a game.

Anyway, cartoonist Shamus Young has already started his next project, this time with artist Shawn Gaston: The webcomic Chainmail Bikini: The Nightmare Legend of Deuce Baaj started today. From the first strip, it looks to be covering the same territory—foibles of role-playing games—this time explored through an original story. It’s not clear where the title comes in, though.

Update Dec. 2008: Chainmail Bikini ended in May 2008, and seems to have been taken down. Sorry to all of the people looking for it and landing on this page.

Acronym Overload: is that D&D or D&D?

Kelson — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:09:27 +0000

On Friday I received an email about the “IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 D&D FORUM.”

My first thought on seeing the subject was, “Well, it’s clearly not Dungeons and Dragons.” So I thought about other D&Ds, and the next thing I thought of was drag and drop. I knew that couldn’t be it, either. Who would hold a conference on drag-n-drop? (Now, I can see a D&D game dealing with a “dragon drop” contest, but that’s another issue entirely!)

I opened the newsletter, and of course it was a design and development conference. Should’ve been obvious, but I just didn’t think of it.

Any acronyms/abbreviations you’ve mixed up? Not just acronyms for which you know more than one meaning, but the ones that you’ve seen in one context, and the first meaning you thought of was from some other field entirely.