Rafe's 3 Month Birthday

29 March 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

Rafe (a.k.a. Adik) turned 3 months old! His first quarter of the year mark. He has been growing and growing (and maybe getting a little cheeky too!)

Thhptt!

He enjoys tummy time and can keep his head upright, looking at things while his little legs kick and push. Perhaps not long before he's mobile?

* Mouse over the pictures for captions

 

I Should Be Looking Like This All The Time

28 March 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork
 

I thought I'd whip up a new avatar for my DeviantArt profile.

ಠ_ಠ

 

ಠ_ಠ

 

44 Months

22 March 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

It has been a busy and activity-filled month for our Yaya! And very quickly she turned 44 months old. She has definitely come a long way from the little baby that we brought home from the hospital. She can even successfully blow her own bubbles!

Mari kita main buih sabun (Let us play bubbles)

*Mouse over the pictures for additional captions.

 

Eclipse Phase: Boom Goes The Octopus

18 March 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork, Eclipse Phase, Role Playing Games
 
Ink sac, I will miss you...

And that is the story of how Hokusai Tarnungshaut, my Eclipse Phase neo-octopus character, got himself resleeved in a used worker pod morph.

At least he didn't go insane during the resleeving proces.

 

Eclipse Phase: Sheldon-class Drone

15 March 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork, Eclipse Phase, Role Playing Games
 

Here's a type of drone which we use in Eclipse Phase: the Sheldon-class drone, named after the chick Sheldon of Garfield and Friends. It's small, it's egg-sized and it has a puppetsock. It can get through enclosed spaces and scout secure rooms. However, it has problems opening doors thanks to its lack of any sort of manipulator waldos: It has no arms.

If you have an entire fleet of Sheldons, you could use them to carry a load like a crate or an unconscious sleeve back to safety.

From Garfield and Friends

It uses the Gnat robot stats from page 346 of the Eclipse Phase core rule book, "except we use legs and cyberbrain with puppetsock," says Ivan Tam the GM.

 

Call of Cthulhu: The First Game Ever

10 March 2012 | Hisham | | RPG Actual Play, RPG Irfan Plays, Role Playing Games, Stark Future of San Francisco
 
Retroactively created 26th March 2016

I've had the Call of Cthulhu RPG for a decade now. I've never run it... til now. It was a gift from Gary before Irfan was born. We used to joke that if I couldn't find anyone to run it for, I should someday run it for Irfan - who was then still unborn. And at the time I had yet to discover GOKL.

Almost ten years later, I have refereed Irfan in a Call of Cthulhu game, who rolled up his character yesterday: a young detective in San Francisco named D.J. Stark.

There's too much enthusiasm for horror with this 10-year-old

Episode 1

Here follows the actual play report:

 

RIP Ralph McQuarrie

04 March 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork, Star Wars
 

Once upon a time, Ralph McQuarrie illustrated a coffee table art book written by Kevin J. Anderson called The Illustrated Star Wars Universe. McQuarrie, if you didn't know, was one of the first conceptual artists for Star Wars. It was with his paintings that George Lucas was able to convince funders to invest in his movie. He passed away on Saturday.

He painted a chapter for Coruscant in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, which hitherto had not been seen before anywhere else in Star Wars literature (except for renamed early concept art in some books for a planet called Had Abbadon for the then-titled Revenge of the Jedi). The planet's name "Coruscant" had only been officially named by Timothy Zahn in his novel Heir To The Empire a couple of years earlier.

Entertainment District, Coruscant

One of his artwork in The Illustrated Star Wars Universe was a night scene of "Monument Plaza", on top of the Mount Manarai where the only geological feature of Coruscant is exposed to the sky.

If you were paying attention 2 years ago, this entire painting was more or less converted and animated as a CGI environment in a Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode entitled "Duchess of Mandalore" where Obi-Wan met up with the fugutive Duchess Satine.

The original McQuarrie painting can be seen as a reference art at the bottom of this concept artwork, linked from the Star Wars official site.

More building set elevation and plans for the virtual environment here, part of which can be viewed in the following image

Building a CGI environment
 

A lighting concept from an alternate view of the plaza can be seen here.

Ralph McQuarrie would have been in a postion to see this episode. And if he did, I wonder what he thought of it.

RIP Ralph McQuarrie, you gifted artist. You've been a real inspiration to me.

Originally posted on Google+.

 

A Yaya and Adik Story - February 2012

02 March 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

When we were kids, Hisham and I went through a "Choose your own adventure" book phase. You know, where you read the story and at the end of a chapter, you decide what the character should do. For instance, cross the bridge, proceed to Chapter 5, or take the footpath along the river go to Chapter 7. Wiki says this about it. But I think of it as kind of a watered-down RPG. Perhaps it led to Hisham's enduring passion (and my old love) for it.

In any case, what does that have to do with Yaya and Adik, you ask? Simple. This entry contains nine photos of a single interaction between the two children. For my version, I have ordered Photos 1 through 9 chronologically. The captions tell my fictional version of the story. But If you were to reorder the pictures, what kind of story could you come up with for these photos?