Silvanus' Blog

Just finished this latest entry in The Hollows series. I was pretty impressed with the whole thing, except the end felt sort of meh. I still thoroughly enjoyed it, but not exactly sure if the ending was necessarily the best. If you read this series, definitely get this one, you’ll enjoy it.

So, I purchased this game quite a while ago, shortly after it had been released.

I had a lot of nostalgia around this game, as it was one of my favorite adventures from my days of playing D&D.
Ultimately, I love this game, I haven’t managed to get through all of the scenarios yet, but what I’ve played I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve read some reviews of people complaining that it is too difficult, that they often fail. I say, you suck! I have come soooo close to failing this so many times, only to pull off the adventure by the skin of my teeth, I LOOOOOVVVVEEE IT! A game that comes that close to killing you is a CHALLENGE, and I love a good challenge. I can easily see how you could die repeatedly, but only if you aren’t cooperating with your party. If everyone at the table is playing cooperatively, instead of competitively, this game is difficult, but well worth the struggle.

Anyway, I think if you enjoy board games, and rpg’s, this is a great, non-commital way to get your fix. It only takes a few hours to run through an adventure, and you don’t feel obligated to ever do more than that. A great game.

On a side note, I was so impressed with Ravenloft, I also just ordered Wrath of Ashardalon, designed similarly, and with house rules can be combined with Ravenloft.

So, something at work got us talking about how we never have enough time to get stuff done, and it made me think of this book I read when I was a kid. Except, I couldn’t remember what the book was actually called. So I quested about a bit, and found it: Singularity by William Sleator
For some reason this book always had a bit of a profound effect on me, it’s a really interesting story about a pair of twins, one a bit bigger, and somewhat of a bully to the other. Well they happen to coincidentally find a time anomaly in the shed out behind their house (go fig). After a frustrating batch of bullying from the bigger brother, the smaller brother sneaks out one ‘night’ and stays for an entire year within the anomaly of the shed, working out, getting stronger, and becoming one year older than his twin. It was a very interesting read.

Found a pretty good tutorial on how to make seamless backgrounds for webpages in photoshop.

500×500 is a bit large for my tastes on a bg image, since I usually just do simple gradients at about 5×250. Haven’t tried this yet, but it’s theory is rock-solid, I really hate seeing that nasty ‘seam’ when repeating images bump into each other.