Here we are at Adik’s 18 month entry! The boy is now 1 and a half years old! [[image:2013_0629_rafe22.jpg:Short break in the action:center:0]] * Mouse over the picture for captions Adik is now fully mobile – walking, running, and climbing. He can now manage to walk down the stage steps face first without falling over (after some practising of course), while carrying something in his hands. He was determined to not be the only one backing down those steps I suppose. He climbs up the stairs when we go up to bed, but we do not allow him to come down the stairs yet as he thinks he is too big to go backwards, feet first. But overall, his coordination is pretty good. He can throw objects with pretty good speed and accuracy, and loves to bounce a ball off the wall and chase after it. He loves to run […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: June 2013
Westward RPG: Brawling
I sometimes use MyPaint, an open source painting program to create my work. It has less features than GIMP, but I love how the brush paint digitally as I move the Wacom tablet stylus. This is how I painted the “Brawling” artwork for Wicked North Games upcoming Westward RPG that was featured in a previous post. At first I sketched the scene quickly in MyPaint using one of the Pencil tools. Initially the person who was throwing the punch was a man, but then I changed it to a woman in mid-sketch. I decided on a yellowish hue for the image before I started painting the sky upon the layer immediately below the pencil sketch layer. Then I started colour blocking one character, playing with some colours over it to see if they meshed well. I started to block the other character as well as refine the punch thrower. The […]
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Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving
The adventure continued on and around Venus… even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we’re not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we’re talking about last Sunday’s Eclipse Phase session. As Kage’s people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock. Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecraft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane… toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to […]
Continue reading59 Months
One more month till Yaya hits the half decade mark! Woohooo! [[image:2013-yaya59month-01.jpg:Poster child for barrettes?:center:0]] Note: Mouse over the pictures for captions It has been a busy month of June. We started off at the end of May going to Maryland to visit the family, and then working in New Jersey and Pennsylvania before returning home at the end of the first week of June. I think we are all still recovering from that long and crazy ride! But everyone did well, and we made it home and back to our usual routine. Food status: No change. What can I say? The child is strong willed. We were never able to get her to do anything she wasn’t ready to do (e.g., talking, potty training) and we just have to keep being patient I guess. One day, she will snap out of this and start eating normally again, inshallah. Yaya […]
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Star Wars Living Card Game and Not Dying
Another gift from the GOKL gang, I finally started playing with Irfan the Star Wars: The Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games. Designed for two players, but with a future expansion rule that would allow for more than two players, I spent the last couple of days duelling cards with Irfan. He has won once and I twice. It was enjoyable. I’m certain we got some details of the rules wrong because we played and read the rules on the fly – and I never really played any card games before this. We kept discovering new things that we missed when we played earlier. In any case, you can view the video tutorial by FFG here. I was worried that the rules would only let you play numbers against numbers, but had no narrative quality to it. Sure you can’t really form a solid story out of your gameplay, but […]
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Avocado Sandwich
When we balik kampung a couple of weekends ago, we bumped into our old neighbours in Sitiawan, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Ling, who lives near Atok and Opah’s house. Ain and I had a brief chat with them about the good old days, and they gave us some freshly-picked avocados from their yard. Removing the flesh from the pit by twisting the fruit was novel, I thought. Then I cut up the flesh into slices because I am a sociopath who does not care about cutting up fruits. Boom.
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Monsters of the Shattered World Podcast, Season 2
In the début season of Monsters of the Shattered World, an imaginative fantasy podcast that features the story of an adventuring party produced by Brent Newhall, I was commissioned to illustrate two out of the five episodes that were made. The second season, however, I was tasked with completing all seven episodes of the podcasts. Here are some of the illustrations I drew for season two. To listen to each episode, click on the link above to download them for free at Troll in the Corner, or obtain them from iTunes here. Click here to view artwork from the first episode of the first season.
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Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems
The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign “Fastball Express” has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two. So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited “for security reasons”. (That doesn’t sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had […]
Continue readingOpah’s Orchids
It’s the school holidays! So we headed back to Sitiawan to spend time with Irfan’s Atok and Opah. [[image:sitiawan-garden01.jpg:The pond has a school of koi in it:center:0]] When we arrived, some orchids hanging at Irfan’s grandparents’ garden over the koi pond were blooming. It was quite a spectacular sight as the following photos of the individual plants show. Does anyone know what species of orchids they are? [[image:sitiawan-garden02.jpg:Some yellow orchid with a red centre:center:0]] [[image:sitiawan-garden03.jpg:Some red-speckled yellow orchid:center:0]] [[image:sitiawan-garden04.jpg:Some violet orchid with a yellow centre:center:0]] Someday we might even have some place with our own garden. Someday.
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Westward Scenes
Here are some scenes I drew as filler are in the Characters, Attributes and Skills section of the Westward RPG by Wicked North Games. These scenes, also drawn by Alexander Gustafson, Ryan Rhodes and Cory DeVore, gives players an idea of what your players can be doing on the steampunk planet of Westward and what the millieux feels like. You could arm-wrestle an Enclave – a steampunk cyborg – and win! You could write a secret messages! You could punch a guy in the jaw because he hadn’t showered in two months. You could blow up a water tower for shits and giggles. Not really for giggles since water is precious here. Westward RPG will be available online or at your FLGS later this year.
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