Tennis

I'm pretty much clueless when it comes to tennis, but occasionally there are some things that amaze me. Here's one:




This is apparently not the first time he's used that shot. The camera angle on the older one is better, too.

Creating Cards (Addendum)

I decided the second graphics style I used for the other card was pretty crappy (though easy to do/apply). The problem was that it was based off a inbuilt style that was very neat, but I had to recolor it and the inbuilt style was defined in terms of local process colors, rather than a global process color or spot color so it was difficult to change the base color and get all the gradients to re-tint correctly. The styles I was using before were all done by me, so they all used global process colors and thus it was simple to re-tint everything by just applying a different color so I could have encounter colors, at-will, etc. Anyways, I gave another shot at a simple style and ended up with one I liked, shown on the left below. It's basically one area/edge graphics style, plus a quickly tossed together text style that was applied to the header/footer text style tags. Compare to the previous style, on the right. I think I might make a new edge style to use, but otherwise pretty happy with this one.

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NOTE: I changed the original post to use the updated graphics style. You can check out my entire set of images used for this sequence of posts, below the fold.

Creating Cards, part 3

It's time for the final post in this sequence: Final touches & Applying a graphics style to the card.

Creating Cards, part 2

Note to self: When you're in your illustrator document and try to run the customize script and it fails (gracefully!) and you can't figure out why it's complaining that you don't have the layers you think you do, check what document you're in. It's probably right. In this case, I had a document open which had a screenshot pasted into it that I was using to create the images for these posts - looked exactly like my Illustrator workspace, it was the strangest thing when the buttons didn't work...

Anyways, part 2 of this illustrated guide after the jump: I create a customized action card, complete with text, graphic styles and more!

Creating Cards

So I recently did a bunch of Illustrator scripting to make building power cards for my short adventure easier. I was writing up a bunch of this to give an overview in an email, then I realized a blog post is actually a much better venue for explaining this sort of thing, so here it is - be warned it's a fair bit of images, though hopefully they are all pretty small! I'm not sure how it'll look on a RSS feed, either, but as long as you can get near 900 pixels width it'll be pretty good (I think).

Here's the idea: Make it easy to create a very customized card for our game. Here's an example of one such card.


What did I do to create this card? Well, obviously many areas of the card have been customized, and the whole thing has been colored specifically for Sira. More details after the break - all the images here are from my card setup and templates, but it's pretty easy to customize.

Note that it was a bit tricky to get decent image quality for the web while not making huge files, up until I realized I'd chosen a poor format to use. All of the base stuff is in a vector format, so any low quality images here are just my choice of resolutions, etc.

Blog layout.

Howdy all my shy readers. I was preparing a post and realized I really couldn't stand my current blog layout. So it's been redone. Still some bugs in the system though, so post a comment here if there's something that's hard to read / etc.  I noticed one already is that the post times are colored nearly invisible.  The reason I changed is that I was having trouble with the width of the main posts making it really tough to do anything with complicated images in the posts, so removing that sidebar and putting it at the bottom really helped. For those of you viewing by RSS, let me know if it's any better. I did reformat my latest post to take advantage of the new style, so let me know what you think - another post probably up later today that also uses it.

Newsflash

This just in: I married an artist. I hadn't realized it but it came to me yesterday, when this appeared:

A pretty amazing dress, and I like the color.
It's a familiar color, too, perhaps like I had seen it somewhere before?

A detail shot of the top

Here's a shot of the bottom detailing: The buttons and colors are very awesome. Lorian says that my photography really got the colors well, but I think she's being polite - the two tones around the button detail are just gorgeous and it's not my photography that put them there!

Laughter is happiness

Two awesome videos. Pick one depending on if you like Hungarian or just Blink 182 music accompanying the video. I actually prefer the Hungarian - the priest is clearly teaching the kids watching him, and it just makes me happy to see someone genuinely interested and helping people laugh. I guess it's that laughter makes me happy, at least when it's not at someone but with someone. I also really appreciate clergy who really try to connect with people no matter how different they may be; but then again, I really appreciate empathy, especially in those who are looked up to and respected as examples. :)





Here's the article that lead me to the above videos:
Skateboarding Priest

Baseball

So the the angels angels of Anaheim have a new center fielder. I just saw some of his highlights and man he's fun to watch:   (Man he can dive) and (That's some speed!)

Also he was in a nice suicide squeeze play, but that's one of my favorite plays in baseball when it's executed. Here's the one he was in: (Bourjos squeeze). Here's one by the Braves earlier this year, that won the game for them: (Conrad squeeze play woot)

Ukulele = Awesome. Actually, more like Molly Lewis = Awesome.

Because I found I can link youtube videos really easily, here's a link to two awesome ones.

Which one you play should be up to personal taste.

A Jonathan Coulton cover:

A Lady Gaga cover:

The singer/musician is Molly Lewis, her blog is pretty awesome - Star Tours is closing? Oh no!
More videos on her youtube channel - sweetafton23 - keep an eye out for the one where she's crashing Dr. Horrible's place.

Anyways. Trying to post more frequently, maybe?  Oh, and I found these via Wil Wheaton's blog. I'm hoping there's a wootstock nearby that I don't flake out on!