Get a drawing of a favorite kobold character from Koboldnomicon cover artist Herman Lau:
With the impending release of the Koboldnomicon, we thought it would be fun to spread the koboldic cheer with a new contest. So in the spirit of kobold vanity, we are going to give you the chance to immortalize your favorite kobold with your own CUSTOM PORTRAIT, courtesy artist Herman Lau!
Just share a little tale of koboldness regarding your favorite kobold PC or NPC. We want to hear about actual tales of kobolds from actual gameplay. One lucky winner, chosen by a secret conclave of kobold dragon-worshippers, will receive an 11″ x 17″ glossy poster featuring a custom, full color illustration of their kobold. Visit Herman’s online portfolio to see samples of some of his kobolds that are featured in the book.
Details here.
My mother sent me an e-mail about my California Casserole recipe, mentioning how many variants were online. While looking around Google, I stumbled on one that includes frozen peas and other strange-to-me variants, but I also came across the author unleashing some LA hatred:
Recently it occurred to me that for all practical purposes, Los Angeles has already tumbled into the Pacific. I am old enough to remember the 80s, and this means I remember when New York was considered a shithole and L.A. was, for all the jealous disparagement, considered the epicenter of hip. Wolfgang Puck and California Cuisine were on the rise. Nowadays, of course, New York is rightly known as the place to be and L.A. is about as cool as creamed corn.
So it makes sense, somehow, to combine the term “California” with something equally passe, casserole, and hope that two wrongs make a right. In this case, they do. This recipe for California Casserole came to me from Laurie’s grandmother, who lives in Lompoc, California, an hour from Santa Barbara and therefore far enough from L.A. that it still retains a glimmer of personality.
I’ve never really gotten the hatred of Los Angeles. I lived in New York, on my brother’s couch, for several months after returning from living in Egypt and while I had some fun there, whatever inherent specialness the city has and that residents go on about, I don’t see. (I also don’t get the cult of San Francisco, either, for what it’s worth.)
When I moved out to Los Angeles, I had been primed by decades of bashing by East Coast types to find it a soulless awful place, but instead found it to be a sunny sprawling city with a great mix of folks of all sorts, lots to do, an amazing variety of restaurants and a keen awareness of “the business.” (In DC, everyone follows Capitol Hill goings-on to an extent that is alien to the rest of the country, probably to their detriment.) In other words, it’s New York with better weather and worse transportation.
Unless you’re a rapper (and living in the mid-1990s), the whole East Coast/West Coast rivalry thing is sort of dumb, in my opinion, sort of like two very similar siblings unleashing a full-on hatred of one another and pretending they’re not more similar than they are different.
One of the funniest complaints I’ve heard about LA is that it’s so fake because — and I’m not making this up — people are so polite and friendly. (This is coming from a New Yorker, so anything short of shoving another person off the curb in front of a taxi is seen as polite.) That’s right: Manners are a reason to complain about Los Angeles. Riiiiight …
Now, I’m sure that “the business” is full of fakes and jerks, but that’s not endemic to Los Angeles, or even the entertainment business. It’s certainly not enough to color a whole city by the industry’s presence here.
We should all save our hatred of those sneaky Canadians, eyeing us from across the border, them and their crazy duck money …
This explains a lot about MMORPG raiding:
Recently, a team of psychologists led by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs in Helsinki, Finland, decided to study precisely what sort of emotions people experience while playing games. So they took a bunch of gamers in their 20s and had them play Super Monkey Ball 2 bowling, competing amongst each other (the top scorer won free movie tickets). While they played, the gamers were wired up to a bunch of biosensors — including skin-conductance meters, cardiac monitors and facial electromyographs. Psychologists have long found that by detecting spikes in one’s physiological activity, they can pinpoint the precise moment you find something fun or frustrating.
As the subjects played Monkey Ball, their pleasure spiked upward when they knocked down a lot of pins. On the other hand, if the ball closely missed the pins and landed in the gutter at the end of the lane, it produced frustration. This is pretty much what you’d expect.
But then something odd happened: When the players aimed really poorly and sent the ball zooming off the edge into space, their brains didn’t register frustration. They registered pleasure. “Although the event in question represents a clear failure,” the researchers wrote, “several physiological indices showed that it elicited positively valenced high-arousal emotion (i.e., joy), rather than disappointment.”
Sucking, it seems, can be fun.
This is a totally counterintuitive result. Gamers are utterly obsessed with success — who’s l33t, who’s the suXX0r. Indeed, much like the Inuit with their 40 different words for snow, gamers have created a sprawling lexicon of slang designed to quantify — with surgical precision — exactly how much you suck or rock. (Dude, I totally pwned that n00b llama in pvp!) In theory, totally failing at a game ought to bring nothing but the sting of defeat, right?
Sure, except in one case: When you’re playing a game so well-designed that it is delightful even when you screw up.
I know my World of Warcraft guild really liked getting spanked like a naughty little girl by Jin’do the Hexxer last week. If you’re going to get beat down, getting beat down in an interesting way is, yeah, kinda fun …
I’m happy with my glow-in-the-dark iSkin case for my 20 GB iPod (although the case is starting to tear a tiny bit, after 18 months of use), but it’s a lot of fun to play with the case creator at iFrogz.
When I finally upgrade my iPod (I’m thinking next January, with my annual bonus), I’ll likely get an iFrogz case.
But, frankly, I just like playing with these sorts of sites. I can fool around customizing a car for ages on an auto manufacturer’s site.
Fill in your own conjugal visit joke here.
But make no mistake: this will not be a beauty-only pageant. It is important that the winner be well-rounded, and that is why I have added a talent portion to the program. In addition to the raw votes she receives from readers, each candidate will receive 1 bonus point for every $100 in bond set by her assigned magistrate.
The winner, Jesika, is kind of cute. I’m sure she’s just misunderstood …
(Source.)
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