Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures Facebook app

Evidently the fine people at Wizards of the Coast (WotC) saw fit to create a Dungeons & Dragons Facebook application called D&D Tiny Adventures (not to be confused with Tiny TOON Adventures). In this app, you can select from a significantly narrow list of adventurers and begin your own solo campaign, where all of the interaction, storytelling, dice rolling, and camaraderie that make a D&D event fun are completely removed.

To be honest, it’s actually a very well-designed app. Unfortunately, it appears as though WotC didn’t have any clue just how popular the app would be, and it has been functioning poorly since launch. Currently, as I type this, it is simply unavailable. In a thread on the app forums, WotC admits to both broadband issues as well as server errors; both of which they are attempting to resolve so that the app can run smoothly.

In the meantime, I’ve been able to run one complete adventure, and half of another. The way it works is once you’ve defined your character and named him (or her, though the female options are few), you select an adventure from the list of available scenarios. Once launched, you are given a small introduction to the adventure that establishes the setting. And then, you wait. Ten minutes to be precise. You see, every adventure is split up into several encounters, which can consist of either a battle with a monster, brigand, or an attempt to locate a secret entrance or avoid a trap. Once you have launched one encounter, you have to wait ten minutes for the next encounter to become available. This is actually a good idea, because it means you can launch an adventure when you have a free moment, and then you can come back at your own convenience and look back at what you have “accomplished”. This concept has gone far, far beyond the concept of “casual gamer” and into the realm of “utterly uninvolved gamer”. But for a Facebook app, it works.

Each encounter will consist of you “encountering” something, and then the system will give you a skill with a target die roll that you have to hit in order to be successful at whatever task the encounter is asking you to perform. For example, you may encounter an old man that asks you to correctly answer a riddle in order to proceed. As such, you perform an Intelligence check d20 die roll against 14. The system rolls for you; with your roll combined with any Intelligence modifiers, you either succeed or fail. Success gains you movement towards your desination, a sizable amount of experience points, and potentially items or gold. Failure usually also gains you movement towards your destination, but at the loss of some amount of your health.

The dice rolls are really sketchy. In my current adventure, I had three successive encounters where EVERY roll ended up as a 4. I was down to just 10 hit points, and luckily had a Potion of Healing on hand in case of just such a situation. At any point you can enter your adventure and administer a potion to yourself, to either regain health or increase your skill statistics. Between adventures, you can buy and sell weapons and armor, potions, and other items. Also, if you have any friends playing the game, you can help them out by healing them or assisting in their battles.

All in all, it’s a pretty good system for a Facebook app. I wish they had built in a bit more interactivity, but for what it is designed to accomplish, it does it well.

I just wish it were actually, you know, UP right now. I have a Drow stronghold to clean out.

Playing around with Paint.NET post-processing

I’ve been using GIMP off and on for a couple of years now, but I just haven’t been completely happy with it. I hate the multiple separated windows “feature”. And it always took way too long to load, even after I completely reformatted my computer recently. I’ve been looking for an alternative. Something with more features than Picnik, but works better than GIMP.

Somewhere along the way I heard about Paint.NET, asked around about it, and decided to give it a try. The first thing I have noticed is that Paint.NET loads approximately 47.35 times faster than GIMP, which was by far my biggest complaint with the software. I went ahead and took some photos and played around with some post-processing, something I could never quite get the hang of while using GIMP. Here are the results.

Alex with Dandelion
This one didn’t turn out so great, mainly because I tried to use too many of the image adjustment options. After some hue saturation, some level mixing, a glow affect, and some contrast adjusting, the dandelion ended up blending in almost completely with Alex’ hands. Still, I think it looks better than the original. Okay, maybe not.

Before

After

Flowering Tree
I thought this would be a good one to work on because I could focus on making the purple color of the flowers really pop out with some warmth and glow. I adjusted the color bringing out the lavender and gave it some softness. I think this one really turned out well.

Before

After

Guitar Top
This one I am most proud of. I did the least amount of adjustments to this photo. All I did was give it some light saturation to really deepen the color of the wood on the guitar surface, and a little bit of contrast to darken the pick guard (thereby removing my head from the reflection in the photo). I think the result is a much more pleasing photograph that has some definite richness to it.

Before

After

All in all, I’m really happy with Paint.NET. It seems to be much friendlier to use than GIMP (at least to me), and just as extensible with its own set of plug-ins (though I never bothered to extend GIMP, so I doubt I’ll do so with Paint.NET). I just love the fact that it opens so much faster. The transparency of the various windows on top of the working canvas helps, too. With this result, I’ve already uninstalled GIMP. If it keeps working out for me so well, I may even give the developers a donation.

One last TrustyPig post

Last one, I PROMISE!

I just realized that in my last post, I was far too kind to TrustyPig. I gave the TrustyPig admin too much credit, thinking that he was simply the victim of some freelance web developer from China that stole the site design from SmartyPig.

Why did I allow myself to swallow that ridiculously lame excuse?

The site had the exact same design as SmartyPig. The site has the NAME TrustyPig. It was a complete and total, absolutely blatant rip-off, pure and simple, right from the start. No one at TrustyPig is even remotely innocent in this situation. It was an utterly intentional attempt to subvert the popularity of the brand SmartyPig created and ride the wave to stardom (or at the very least, a relatively insignificant amount of attention). Regardless of what this “Costy” fellow claims, TrustyPig is nothing more than a pathetic shadow of what SmartyPig brings us. A poser. A worthless pretender.

I was a fool to think otherwise.

Maybe this won’t be my last TrustyPig post, after all (but I am going to shut up about it, at least for a little while).

More on TrustyPig

I know, I know – I’m already sick of talking about TrustyPig myself. But today, we received word that the TrustyPig admin (“Costy”?) has responded to our claims that the SmartyPig website design was stolen.

Rather than post the response on their own blog (which any transparent company would do), TrustyPig opts instead to work through an affiliate at Money News Online. The response is actually two-fold: first coming from a poorly-constructed, grammatically-challenged response from the Money News Online editor; followed by a fairly articulate and seemingly authentic reply from the admin of TrustyPig. I’ll cull the details and highlight the interesting parts from the full post for you right here (because I’m just that nice).

First, the MNO editor doesn’t think too highly of our friend Andy:

I will not name this blog or give a link to it as I think that the admin of this blog only needs to bask into spotlight of an already popular TrustyPig and get attention to his junk blog.

Really, MNO? You’re going there? Well, fine. According to Compete data, TrustyPig doesn’t even register, while Andy’s blog is generating a modest, but existing, traffic flow. I don’t know how much traffic connecting himself to TrustyPig will gain him, but I doubt it will be enough to make everything he’s done worth the effort. Rather, he’s doing it to help SmartyPig.

This is so called “call to action” probably came from the competitors of TrustyPig who failed to destroy the program by sending constant DDoS-attacks to the site at first.

Nope, sorry, MNO. As much as you would probably like to believe that TrustyPig has legions of enemies willing to go to the ends of the Earth in order to destroy the immense power of their service, we Iowans didn’t even know TrustyPig existed until yesterday. A quick Twitter search (our primary communication and organization platform) shows we started talking about this yesterday. Apparently this DDOS attack they suffered was sometime last week. We don’t support direct attacks like that. In fact, I doubt any of us even know how to do something like that.

Now, a response allegedly coming from TrustyPig.

I got several comments on the blog regarding this issue last night and I must confess that I was shocked to find out about this. I initially hired to developers to build the site, a programmer from Romania and a freelance designer from China. You have to trust me that I wasn’t aware of this problem, I never heard about smartypig.com and moreover I obviously didn’t want to copy their visual identity. I ordered the designer to make me a project related to my domain name and in a web 2.0 style. Now that I think about it I was surprised that he had ready the design in 2 days

Yeah, I would be concerned if a developer returned such an amazing site design in just two days.

I already contacted a designer here in Romania and he’s on the job. Shortly we’ll have a makeover of the design. I do realize that I cannot totally change the layout because it would affect the site generally and it would require to much time that would be better invested in developing the program rather than this. But we’ll sure change the site in such a way that it will not resemble smartypig anymore.

Which they have already done, and we applaud their timely redesign.

As soon as I get the designed changed I’ll give an official communicate and offer my official appologies to the smartypig people.

We look forward to hearing from SmartyPig that this has actually been done.

It’s true that the main guilty person here is me because I’m responsible with the site

One-hundred percent true. I won’t deny that at all.

I’m sorry that the people from smartypig didn’t contact me immediately and explain the situation, they would have surely find an understanding attitude from me. They prefered to go on the blogs and now I got hundreds of tickets and messages about this situation.

I would have loved — even preferred — to have contacted TrustyPig directly, but their website expressly prohibits this activity. The site is completely and utterly devoid of any sort of contact information. No email, no feedback form, nothing. The contact page is a link to a help desk form which requires you to create an account in order to utilize — something I was not willing to do given the shady nature of TrustyPig’s operation. Our only recourse was to leave comments on the blog, which were apparently deleted before they ever got posted. At the very least, he knew we were trying to contact him, but since he never responded, we had no idea anyone was actually listening.

Since TrustyPig seemed particularly uninterested in being contacted, and no one was talking back, we opted for blogging the hell out of the situation. Obviously the noise we made caught their ears. If they had only had the foresight to have an email address on their contact page, maybe this entire situation could have been completely avoided. Now, their brand has likely been irreparably damaged.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m done wasting time with all of this. I was prepared to find out more about TrustyPig and unravel some shady history, but actually I think this guy was just the victim of a cheap, pathetic web developer. TrustyPig still deserves the bulk of the blame for not being transparent about the situation, and also not looking into the credentials of the web developer responsible for building their site. But now that the situation has been (essentially) resolved, it simply doesn’t deserve any more attention.

So, yeah – I’m pretty much done talking about TrustyPig now. Everyone can go back to sleep.

TrustyPig changed their site (but I still don’t trust them)

You would have thought that after yesterday’s efforts by the Des Moines online community to destroy TrustyPig’s reputation that something would have changed by now. And will you look at that. Someone has a new site design today!

Beautiful. A search on Google for trustypig reveals why that site design has been posted so quickly. To shut us all up!

That’s two separate posts by Andy Brudtkuhl followed by my post soon after. All three results following directly behind the link to TrustyPig. Absolutely gorgeous. Andy knows his SEO, and once he got us all organized and blogging, linking, bookmarking, FriendFeeding, we successfully disrupted the general order of things.

But I’m not prepared to shut up about this just yet. Yes, they’ve finally decided to change their site, but what TrustyPig did was still utterly despicable. If they are willing to steal someone’s site design, then obviously they can’t be trusted as a company. I haven’t investigated their services too closely, but whatever products they’re peddling, or software they’re encouraging you to download, DON’T DO IT. Who knows what sorts of things they might be secretly installing onto your computer. I won’t ever be back to their website, on the off chance that the site itself may even be infected. Their entire business model and method of operation just reeks of back-alley criminal activity, and I want to make sure no one becomes a victim to their idea of “business”.

I’m going to be looking more in-depth into their operations. Maybe I’ll find out something interesting, maybe I won’t. But rest assured, I’m not done blogging about TrustyPig.

TrustyPig steals SmartyPig website

We don’t have many web 2.0 products coming out of Des Moines these days (you can read my commentary about that here). So when something hideous and wrong happens to one of our few entrepreneurial successes, we take notice, and we do something about it.

Des Moines-based SmartyPig is a site where you can start a goal-oriented savings account that friends and family can contribute to. It’s a great concept with a fantastic web presence, and is also backed by FDIC. Here’s SmartyPig’s website.

Great, right? Of course it’s great.

Well, here’s the website of Romania-based TrustyPig, which apparently is some sort of scam advertising platform. How do I know it’s probably a scam? Would a legitimate company steal another site’s design, right down to the CSS and logo?

It’s disgusting, and we Iowans will not stand for it, and we’re hoping some of you non-Iowans won’t stand for it, either. Troy Rutter was the first to let us know about this (I think), and since then, Andy Brudtkuhl has started a merciless brand hijacking campaign that so far has yielded excellent results:

To see how this works, I’ve attached a screenshot of the Google results of my attempt at brand hijack via blogging. Notice I’m #2 behind the target brand when searching on Google – exactly where I want to be. Also notice the message I’ve attached to the brand. Success.

I don’t know what the eventual result of this campaign will be. I doubt we can convince TrustyPig to see the error of its ways and take down the site design. I also don’t think we will be successful in getting the site or its “service” completely shut down (and no, I wouldn’t support a series of DDOS attacks against this company). I suppose at the very least, just getting people informed about TrustyPig’s completely unacceptable practice of site design stealing will be enough. In the end, after all the hoopla, I just hope we’ve done enough brand damage to cause the site to fade into obscurity.

I can call them ‘Legos’ if I want to (and you can’t stop me)

Since the concept of playing with Legos is so near and dear to my heart, I found this FriendFeed thread by Iowa native Chris Pirillo (FriendFeed | blog) to be terribly interesting.

Upon reading this, it is your formal duty to bust anybody who violates this rule in FF threads. It’s not Legos, it’s LEGO. It’s not Lego, it’s LEGO. It’s not LEGOS, it’s LEGO. It’s not LEGOs, it’s LEGO. ALWAYS. </prick>

It’s actually somewhat true. Lego has always asserted that the term “legos” is not proper use of their brand name. Lego is supposed to be an adjective, and should always be capitalized: for example, LEGO toys, LEGO bricks, LEGO minifigs, LEGO universe, etc.

However, this is an archaic and ill-informed manner of operating. Essentially, Lego has attempted to force the control of their brand on consumers. Placing the burden of maintaining their brand presence on the very people that purchase their products is a practice that consumers will almost always reject — or simply ignore completely.

Brand management should always be a corporation’s job, never a consumer’s job. Sure, a smart company will allow the consumer to somehow take part in controlling the message — sometimes even without the consumer realizing they were acting as a marketing pawn. But forcing an arbitrary rule on consumers in order to protect your own brand recognition? That’s just a recipe for rebellion.

The most common way to circumvent this apparent Lego Law™ is to use the term “brick” instead. That’s why the premier Lego community is called Brickshelf and a lot of Lego-related blogs contain the word “brick”, such as the Brothers Brick. But even this is done almost as an act of defiance against Lego for their rule. So in attempting to “protect their brand”, Lego has forced people instead to simply abandon it altogether. Well done, Lego.

If I want to refer to Coca-Cola as “Coke”, there is nothing that the Coca-Cola company can do to avoid this. In fact, historically, they have even encouraged such an association through their advertising. Instead of pushing a backwards-thinking concept on their consumer base, Lego should instead be embracing the “legos” concept and encouraging people to associate the term “legos” with their products. Continuing to force this brand recognition practice on their consumer base doesn’t necessarily hurt their fan loyalty in any way. It’s not like there’s a better alternative competing lego-style product available anywhere (there really isn’t, I’ve looked – MEGA BLOKS hurt my brain). But it does more to hurt their overall brand than I think they will ever realize.

It’s Iowa State Fair time!

It’s that magical, sensational time of year. That’s right, it’s FAIR TIME! Tomorrow morning, at the absolute crack of dawn, the Iowa state fairgrounds will awaken and begin a sensory overload the likes of which haven’t been seen since…well, last year, I suppose.

I’ve taken the day off so that we can arrive by 8:00 am. Why so early? Well, how else can you be a part of the historic Corndog Chomp (and get in for free)? And then there’s funnel cakes and deep fat fried Twinkies and lamb burgers and various “-on-a-stick” items that require ravenous consumption. There’s a butter cow and (apparently) a butter Shawn Johnson to behold! And there’s music (I think). And, of course, more food! And lots and lots of PEOPLE! EVERYWHERE! Adorned in clothing they rightfully should not be wearing in public.

And the smells – oh, goodness gracious, the SMELLS! Scents that truly you cannot find anywhere else – natural or unnatural.

Sarcasm aside, the fair is quite simply an annual event that absolutely, unequivocally MUST be attended, regardless of how far beneath your place in life you might consider it. It is not a fair; it is an experience. One that I am more than happy to indulge in once (or twice) every year. If only for the wonderful memories our children gain while trapped within the confines of the concrete fairground jungle. And I suppose I can be convinced to enjoy it, too.

So long as I get my lamb burger.

Introducing the Brick Boys Lego blog!

I was inspired by a preacher friend of mine recently. He and his son have a fascination with reptiles. In order to feed that fascination, and have something they can both do together, they started a reptile blog where they share pictures and stories about reptiles they come across in their daily travels.

I thought that was a great way for a father and son to share their hobby with each other, and with others. And I started trying to come up with something that my son Caleb and I could do together that would make for a great blogging experience.

There’s lots of things we like to do together. Play video games, read books, play superheroes. But the thing we both have a deep and connecting passion for is LEGOs. Caleb is a prolific Lego builder, and many lazy Sunday afternoons are spent with the two of us surrounded by bins of Legos, constructing spaceships and castles and vehicles and monsters of every shape and kind.

So, we’ve started a Lego blog showing off our creations. It’s called the Brick Boys, and will feature mostly pictures of Caleb’s constructs, with one or two of mine popping up every now and again. There might end up being the random anecdote or story, as well. And maybe we’ll link to some creations we find online that spark our interest. We’ll have links to our new Flickr photostream, which is already piled up with some photos we took this weekend. There’s more on the way, I know Caleb’s already busily building away at home as I write this.

Enjoy!