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Kicking off the 2011 Nuketown Redesign

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It’s been five years since Nuketown’s last redesign. The imputus then was to experiment with this nifty new open source content management system I’d heard about: Drupal. I converted Nuketown from the homegrown CMS I’d written, created a Drupal theme, and then had fun experimenting with views, content types and way too many modules.

Five year later it’s time for another Drupal upgrade: Drupal 7. Unlike the last few Drupal upgrades, Drupal 7 changes a lot of things under the hood, including the theme. Rebuilding the current Nuketown theme — which has sabertooth-like incisors — seems like a waste of time … why not take the opportunity to do something new?

Thus, the redesign. A lot has changed in the last five years and as I re-work Nuketown, I want to acknowledge those changes and incorporate them into the design. A good example is social media and the microcontent associated with it. In 2006, Facebook was still largely a college phenomenon and Twitter had just launched. Five years later I’ve made 14,339 tweets, much of which might have been a blog post in an earlier age, almost all of which isn’t captured on Nuketown in anyway.

Nuketown SF @ Twitter

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Nuketown now has an official twitter feed: NuketownSF. The new @NuketownSF feed updates about the ol’thermonuclear burg as well as news and reviews about stuff we’ve seen or read that we don’t have time to cover in the webzine. I setup the feed so that Nuketown could have a formal voice on the microblogging service. … Read more

Tablets at the Table, 2011 Edition

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When the iPad hit a little over a year ago, there was a flurry of posts in RPG circles about tablet gaming. Since then we haven’t seen a lot of talk about them – I’m not sure if folks grew bored with the topic, or if they’ve now become so common place that they’re not … Read more

Follow Friday for 5/20/2011

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Here are my Follow Friday picks for Friday, May 20, 2011: @flagonsdragons A podcast dedicated to role-playing games and beer, two of my favorite subjects. @RealityBlurs Publisher of Savage Worlds books like Realms of Cthulhu and RunePunk @DragonAgeOracle Excellent source for Dragon Age RPG related news, posts, rules & commentary

cnn.com: Return of the Commodore 64

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The Commodore 64 was the second computer I owned. The first was a Timex Sinclair (an ancient bit of technology that used a tape recorder for storing programs, and had a too-small, inflexible chicklet keyboard. Of course, it’s big advantage was that it was mine — while my mom taught me to program on an Apple II+, the Timex was the computer that I wrote my first original programs on.

The Commodore was a huge leap leap forward. For one, I got to hook it up to the spiffy new color TV I got for Confirmation. For another, it had an external floppy drive! No more having to carefully advance through the tape recorder, looking for exactly the right number to execute my program at. And the Commodore 64 had an amazing 64 kilobytes of memory, which made it ideal as a gaming platform for one of my all time favorite computer rpgs: Ultima II.

When Baseball Meets Lord of the Rings

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This may be one of the best newspaper corrections I’ve ever seen, courtesy the MetsBlog. Apparently, the RA Dickey named his bat “Orcist the Goblin Cleaver”, but mis-attributed it to belonging to Bilbo Baggins. It actually belonged to Thorin Oakenshield. It’s not often that baseball and speculative fiction combine — the last time I can … Read more

Picture of the Day: Castle Ravenloft

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Castle RavenloftMy Picture of the Day project is continuing — progress has been somewhat haphazard, but I have been taking and posting pictures.

This one’s from Game Day on March 4, 2011. It was a board game week, so we decided to give the Castle Ravenloft boardgame another try. A separate set of Blackrazors had tried it a few weeks earlier and had been underwhelmed. This week’s didn’t fair much better.

The game is essentially a stripped-down version of D&D 4E. That’s not a bad thing (at least for the half of the group that likes 4E) and tt runs well enough. The problem we found was there wasn’t enough immergent story in the game — meaning unlike Arkham Horror’s expansions, there wasn’t much story meat holding the game’s adventure skeleton together.

MEPACON Spring 2011 Events: Savage Worlds, Dragon Age, Pandemic

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An elven archer, dwarven warrior, and human mage fight off dark spawn.

MEPACon Spring 2011 is being held Friday, April 8 through Sunday, April 10. It’s the 10th anniversary of the convention, and they’re going to be having a special reception Friday night. As always I’m looking forward to the convention, but this time around I’m taking my own advice and only running two RPGs. Given that … Read more

The Geek Tree, 2010 Edition

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Two starships from Star Trek face each other within pine tree boughs.

The Geek Tree returned in 2010, but not in its standard format. In an effort to conserve space, and to avoid having rampant two-year-olds Godzilla the ornaments, I combined the Geek Tree with the Family Tree. The upside was that I was able to easily fit all of the geek ornaments on the larger tree, … Read more

Launching Picture of the Day

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Picture of the Day Kickoff“Picture of the Day” has been one of the most popular memes among my photography geek friends for the last year or so. The idea is that you take a picture a day, and then post it for the world to see, usually on Flickr or Facebook. Different people approach the project in different ways — some take a picture and post it on the same day, some take a series of shots, and then post one a day.

I’m shooting for the former approach. I think it’s more creative and challenging, and more likely to get me back into that “camera’s eye” mindset. That said, I’m not going to be a slave to the format; if I have a couple of good shots I may run them over successive days.

My goals for this project are twofold. I want to learn more about my camera, the Nikon D60. It’s a digital SLR that we bought a few years back, and it can do far, far more than I’ve done with it. The same goes for my new iPhone 4, which has a decent camera built in, and the advantage of being with me where ever I go.