Entertainment – Weaponized Fluff

Edge of Tomorrow

In this post I said, “As of now, I probably won’t resubmit [Edge Cases] to Apple Podcasts”.

I wasn’t going to.

But now I have.

And the details might be mildly interesting to someone.

I needed to log in to my Apple Podcasts Connect account anyway, for the sake of the podcast I’m on that we’re moving from the Incomparable.

Once I logged in, I saw the deactivated Edge Cases podcast. What the heck, I said to myself. Let’s try submitting it now that the files are back up, and see if it works.

Nope!

But the only error was that we needed a larger artwork file.

Here’s the original (shrunk down so it doesn’t disrupt the flow of this article):

It’s just the title “edge cases” in white text on black, 512 by 512 pixels.

Apple’s error message said it needed to be 3,000 by 3,000 pixels.

I could have just taken the existing file and upscaled it, but I wanted to do better than that.

Whatever original art file Wolf used to generate this is lost in the seas of time. So to make a bigger version, I’d have to recreate it.

First problem: the font is unusual. I didn’t know what it was, and it didn’t appear to exist on my computer.

The Internet to the rescue! There are apparently websites out there which take an image, and spit back out the names of the fonts that are used in it.

I’m going to try not to think about how free websites like this make their money, probably by taking the image and uploading it to evil ChatGPT artwork generators, but hey, free service.

Here’s the one I used: https://www.fontsquirrel.com/matcherator

It told me that the font was “Gara”. Yeah, I definitely didn’t have that one already. Another Internet search told me that I could indeed download the Gara font for free from a variety of websites. The one I chose was FontZillion: https://www.fontzillion.com/fonts/iaki-marqunez/gara

(It apparently was added to FontZillion a quarter century ago.)

So, first of all, I downloaded the font files and added them to my Mac via the Font Book application.

Then I went about recreating the logo, in Acorn. I upscaled the old image into a new 3,000 x 3,000 Acorn image file, and typed in, resized, and arranged the new text until it matched as much as it was going to. If you squint at this animated gif long enough, you’ll see the minute changes that occur when I switch from the old file to the new one:

I uploaded the new file to the https://edgecases.com website with the same name as the old one, waited a bit for that change to propagate, and bam, the next time I submitted the podcast to Apple, it was accepted.

Case closed!

A Podcast of Thousands

Let’s talk podcasts!

First, the website for Edge Cases, the developer podcast that Wolf Rentzsch and I hosted some years ago, is back online — in case you even noticed it was down.

To be clear: the podcast is still over. Apologies, anyone hoping for new episodes!

As of now, I probably won’t resubmit it to Apple Podcasts, so sorry if you wanted to find it there. You can always use the RSS feed link that’s on the website directly.

Second, let’s talk about my other podcasts.

I was on Team Cockroach, a podcast about the NBC comedy The Good Place, on the Incomparable podcast network. This podcast is also over (as is the TV show!) but if you’re looking for per-episode reviews and season wrap-ups from me and some lovely friends of mine, you might want to check it out.

A podcast I’m still on is Stargate SG-Fun, a podcast about the late-90s/early-2000s science fiction show Stargate SG-1, that (a) is currently also on the Incomparable podcast network, and (b) has been on hiatus. Both of those things are going to change! We’ll be switching to our own standalone website shortly, and will have new episodes up soon. I’ll let you know when that happens. While the TV show is long finished, me and some other lovely friends are still working our way through reviews of the noteworthy episodes of it, and are currently on season 2.

So there’s lots more to come.

Object Permanence in Roll20

About a year ago, I described how you, as GM (Game Master), could improve to your players’ token settings — but how these improvements couldn’t be made “sticky”, i.e. wouldn’t persist if your players dragged their token onto a new Roll20 page.

Turns out, they can be made permanent — if you take a particular extra step.

First, follow all the steps from this post.
Then, select the token on the current Roll20 map page, and go back to the Edit window.
Now, in the Default Token (Optional) box, the Use Selected Token button should be enabled. Click that. This should make that selected token the default token, including all the settings changes you’ve just made to it.

Now, every time the player drags out that character’s token, it should be configured the way you want.

There’s no step four!

In My Bag of Holding: Helpful D&D Links

I talked previously about using Roll20 to play D&D during the pandemic, but there’s a plenty of other D&D resources I’ve also found handy.

In addition to Roll20, the other star of the show is D&D Beyond.

The good news: first, their online character sheets and character generation options are tremendous.

Second, they’ve got all the content from the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and everything else from Wizards of the Coast, like Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, all usable in your character sheets, and all searchable without needing to fumble through multiple books to find what you need in the middle of a session.

The bad news: it’s commercial content, so anything beyond the basics isn’t available for free. This can be especially unfortunate if you’ve already bought the physical books, and now have to buy them again, at basically the same price, for online convenience.

But there’s more good news: if somebody else you know has already bought the content on D&D Beyond, they can share it with you. It’s especially good news if they’ve bought one of the bundles, which can include…well, everything. (And that’s pricey.)

Just, don’t get confused by D&D Beyond subscriptions. They don’t include the WotC content.

If you want to use the stats of your D&D Beyond character sheets in Roll20 during a session, such as your attack/damage/ability rolls, you can install the browser plug-in Beyond20. I use it, as do lots of other players I know.

(A quick aside: if you want to roll your D&D dice on your Mac or iPhone/iPad with a little more graphical flair, I recommend Dice by PCalc by James Thompson. No character sheet integration, but gorgeous graphics and some amazing About box Easter eggs.)

If you want to import your D&D Beyond character sheets, with all their details, directly in Roll20 instead of retyping or regenerating everything, you can use the BeyondImporter from Kyle B’s version of the Roll20APIScripts. You need a Roll20 Pro account to use scripts, and it’s a little fiddly (and subject to breakage over time), but it’s worked so far for me.

And, once you have your character sheet in Roll20, if you want to give your character’s avatar a nifty and colorful frame, you can use the free website Token Stamp to do so.

While the WotC game modules have maps for their stories, I often found myself wanting additional maps for the side adventures I create as a DM. So, I went looking for artists online who were providing these so-called “battle maps”.

The best I found was Party of Two, whose maps are gorgeous:

Preview Tumblr: https://partyoftwo.tumblr.com
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/partyoftwo

I’ve been a happy Patreon subscriber of theirs for almost a year now, and have used their maps for:

A magic shop fronting a hidden dungeon
Rooms at an inn where the party was attacked by assassins
An extended cave system with a giant crab, sea hags, and a hydra
A lighthouse guarded by undead minotaurs

Their maps are lushly colored and intricate, and thus relatively specific, so it’s hard to slot them into encounters whose details I’d already written. I’ve solved this in two ways:

The easy way: rewrite the encounter, or start with the map and make up new details to match it.

The hard way: take pieces of Party of Two maps and edit them together with my own meager photoshopping skills. For this, I use, not Photoshop, but Acorn, by Gus Mueller. The cave system mentioned above is an example of this, as well as other, more ambitious projects, which will remain [REDACTED] for now.

And lastly, when I invent homebrew monsters for my encounters, I find myself wanting to display their stats in the layout the Monster Manual does: that familiar golden-yellow box.

While nothing I’ve found matches it exactly, Statbock5e comes the closest, while being customizable enough for my needs.

Here’s a quick-reference list of everything I’ve talked about:

Obduction Seduction

Obduction is a relatively recent graphical adventure game by the creators of Myst. I played it recently and have some thoughts.

Hey, have you heard of Obduction? A graphical adventure game by the guys who made Myst, but released within the last decade?

In most ways, it really is just another Myst, though the story and setting are unrelated. Did you love Myst? Then you’ll love Obduction.

Never played Myst? How do lush graphics, fantastical world building, and atmospheric music sound to you?

“Adventure games” are also known as “interactive fiction”, because there’s a story behind all the locked doors, all the unexplained mysteries, all the obstacles you have to overcome.

The best IF shines where the time it takes you to solve the puzzles adds to the suspense of the narrative.

If that’s true, then boy did my experience have a lot of suspense.

There were two points where I got really stuck. Just couldn’t think of how to move forward. Got more and more frustrated.

In the past, I’ve often given in and looked at hints or walkthroughs. The trouble with that, for me at least, is that once I’ve looked at one hint, it’s almost impossible not to look at the next, and the next. The game becomes a plodding exercise in following instructions, and I almost always give up.

With Obduction, given that, nowadays, I personally have many hours inside with few distractions, I decided to tough it out. And indeed, even if it took days and days, after looking around over and over, I would eventually have a stray thought come in to my head, a new thing to try. The puzzle never turned out to be particularly fiendish or unexpected, it was always something simple I missed.

The game works fine on modern hardware, with one exception: the documents (and there are many) are blurred and almost unreadable on Retina displays. The only way I was able to read them was to connect my laptop up to an older, non-Retina display, and switch the game to full-screen mode.

I suspect that the graphical optimizations from as little as 7 years ago don’t play well with Retina.

I took copious notes and, based on my experiences and the under-annotated drawings provided in the game itself, constructed detailed maps. I suppose in the end that’s why I’m writing this post: to show off my maps. While everything else in this post is light on spoilers, the maps have a lot of spoilers in them, so only look if you don’t plan on playing the game.

Enjoy!

Seeing It All in Roll20

I’ve been playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons lately. You might have suspected if you saw my current Twitter account icon.

Since the Pandemic started, my campaigns have all taken place over the Internet. The way most people play D&D over the Internet is through a site called Roll20, which gives you easy access to your character information, maps, and a bunch of other things.

Roll20 is a very powerful website, free to use, and…a little fiddly. If you’re a GM (Game Master) for a game on Roll20, and you’ve already gone through the in-editor tutorials and tried things out for yourself, there’s a couple of steps I’ve found that you can follow to make the experience better for your players.

1. Visible Character Sheets
I’ve found it helpful for each player to be able to see, not just their own character sheet, but the character sheets of all the other players in the game.

When, as a GM, you first create a character sheet for a player, you need to set both who can see that sheet, and who that sheet is controlled and editable by.

These are modified by clicking the character name to open the sheet, then clicking the edit Edit button, and finally going to the In Player’s Journals and Can Be Edited & Controlled By sections, respectively.

Most GMs start out by setting both fields only to the individual player who owns the character.

But if, instead, you set In Player’s Journals to the special All Players option, that character will be visible to all existing players, including the controlling player, and any new players you add, without any further work from you. That’s what I would recommend.

Screenshot of the edit view for a character sheet. The "In Player's Journals" section has been set to a single token called "All Players", and the "Can Be Edited & Controlled By" section below it has been set to a single token called "Player 1".

2. Visible Token Labels
Now that you’ve made the character sheets, you or the controlling player can drag those character tokens on to the current map page. (Be sure to start the drag in the character’s name, not the icon.)

By default, this doesn’t show the name of the character, either to you or to the players.

You can change this, first, by clicking the token on the map to select it, then clicking the gear icon.

Under the Basic tab, in the Name section, there is a checkbox labeled Show nameplate? If you check that, the character’s name will be visible to both you and the controlling player.

Screenshot of the edit view for a map token, with the "Basic" tab selected. The "Name" section has a checkbox called "Show nameplate?" that has been checked.

If you want the label to be visible to everyone, which I would recommend, go to the Advanced tab and, in the Name section, check the See checkbox.

Screenshot of the edit view for a map token, with the "Advanced" tab selected. The "Name" section has a checkbox called "See" that has been checked.

Note the players can’t set these values for themselves. You need to do it as the GM, for every dragged-out token, individually.

Unfortunately, these changes aren’t “sticky”. Editor’s note: you can make these changes permanent, see my newer post for details. ~~If someone drags out a second token for a character, say, on a new map page, these changes have to be made all over again. That’s annoying!~~

Instead, select the tokens that you’ve already edited and that you want to appear on another page, and copy them. Go to the second page, and then paste the tokens there. This way, you’ll have the tokens available on the second page, with all your changes.

I hope this is helpful!

Not That Kind of Troll

Looks like my first Entertainment post will be a review of a kids’ show.

Not just any kids’ show, however: as far as I know, it’s Guillermo del Toro’s only TV show, and it’s on Netflix: Trollhunters.

The good:

Amazing, movie-quality animation. It has a gorgeous, colorful 3D look, used to good effect on the non-human characters.
A fantasy world that seemed like a nice blend of del Toro’s usual penchant for the grotesque and the safer world of children’s cartoons.
Great comic timing. Lots of throwaway pratfalls and one-liners that made me think of Pratchett (high praise from me).
Some really fun writing and voice acting. Kelsey Grammer stole every scene he was in (and he was in a lot), as did Jimmie Wood as “Not-Enrique”.
Some nice character growth and a few notable turns. Not Shakespeare, but fun to watch.

The bad:

I disliked that “the girl” was just “the girl,” i.e. the romantic target of “the boy,” for maybe half or two-third of the episodes. We didn’t see much of anything from her side for far too long — though to their credit they eventually changed that.
One very very bad episode that was trying to skewer tropes about the tropical island Natives but really just ended up repeating them. Ugh.
Some sexist jokes involving a Barbie doll. Also ugh.

So yeah, there was some racism and sexism. I can understand if that’s a deal-breaker. I would hope they do better next season, if there is a next season.

They want to (the last episode ends on a cliffhanger), but here’s possibly the most interesting thing about the show: its lead voice actor was Anton Yelchin, who died in an accident in June of 2016. del Toro chose specifically to keep him in the show because he fulfilled his vision of the part so well.

But now they’ll need someone new.