Rafe's 4 Month Birthday

29 April 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

Here we are, at the four month mark. He's just getting so big now! He seems to be just growing up almost too quickly!

I'm droooooling!

* Mouse over the pictures for captions

 

Avengers - A Review Of Some Sort

28 April 2012 | Hisham | | Comics, Movie Review
 

It was released here a full week ahead of the USA.
After five years of buildup by Marvel Studios across 5 movies from Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2009), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger (both 2011), we've finally reached its culmination this year in The Avengers for the Marvel Studios' movie continuity, also know as Earth-199999. (Regular Marvel Universe is Earth-616, by the way.)

Here follows a SPOILER-FREE review of the movie co-written and directed by Joss Whedon. Heck, I wont even give away anything by having a synopsis.

 

45 Months

22 April 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

This cheeky girl is 3 months away from her fourth birthday!

Waaaaa!

Amazingly, that is what you get when you ask Yaya to cry! She can't help smiling while she does it :-). Another month of fun-filled days has passed very quickly!

* Mouse over the pictures for captions

 

Goooooooooolllllll!!!!!

21 April 2012 | sila | | Family Pics
 

So we signed Yaya up for the Itty Bitty Soccer league (for three-year-olds) at the local Y and it's been an interesting time. She had her very first soccer practise a few weeks ago:

Wearing her Tigers uniform courtesy of Aunty Yati

She loved the practise so much that she cried when it was over!

* Mouse over pictures for captions

 

Vicious Crucible Art Preview

20 April 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork, Role Playing Games
 

Here are five pieces of color art that give us a glimpse into Kallisti Press' Vicious Crucible fantasy role-playing game by Josh Roby. These artwork I did are part of a single large image that features major and minor characters from the games in a combined stylistic view of the realm.

But what's really going on in these images? I guess we'll have to wait for the upcoming release of Vicious Crucible.

 

Small World

13 April 2012 | Hisham | | Board and Card Games, Friends, Role Playing Games, Trawling The Net
 

Created by Felicia Day and Wil Wheaton, Geek and Sundry's new biweekly TableTop web series features 30 minutes of tabletop gaming video that shows how much fun it is to pay tabletop games from boardgames like Ticket to Ride to card games like Munchkin to roleplaying games like Fiasco! Each episode, hosted by Wil, shows how each game is played by playing it onscreen. Every episode also has different guests.

Irfan and I saw the first episode together and he totally fell in love with the board game they played, Small World.

Societies of fantasy races rise and fall!

Small World allows a player to control a society of one fantasy race after another, allowing your race to expand or decline each round using the game rules. The game randomly mixes in special abilities and racial abilities, and by planning a combination of these abilities you are able to maximise the number of points you acquire each round. At the end of a set number of rounds (which depends on the number of players) the player with the most points win.

 

Wallpaprometheus

12 April 2012 | Hisham | | Linux, Misc Sci-Fi
 

PromeffeusI appear to have a new wallpaper for the Artist X 1.0 desktop.

It's that ship sent by Weyland Industries.

S.S. Lollipop or something.

Can't wait for the movie.

I'm not saying it's ALIEN, but it's ALIEN.

 

Irfan's Transmogrifying Present

04 April 2012 | Hisham | | Books, Family Pics, Friends
 

Irfan received a gift over the mail from Ryan Rhodes.

There is a great sketch of Irfan with the octopus plushie at Wan Chor's house in the inner cover! Here's hoping Irfan will never stop dreaming. (Although he has been dreaming of zombie attacks these days...)

Octopus on the head!

It's a Calvin and Hobbes collection - which in my opinion is tied with Bloom County as the best newspaper comic ever.

He will learn the scientific method from this book

Irfan says, "Thanks for the book, Uncle Ryan."

Bo shuda.

 

Sabacc Cards of SWAG

02 April 2012 | Hisham | | Artwork, Star Wars
 

Back in 2002, the first iteration of the Star Wars Artsts' Guild made an exclusive deck of unofficial Star Wars sabacc cards. It was unofficial in that it wasn't a Lucasfilm-sanctioned project. However, the cards and how it was played used the play description as detailed in L. Neil Smith's The Lando Calrissian Adventures novel trilogy and West End Games' Crisis on Cloud City role-playing game supplement. A bunch of SWAG artists contributed artwork for the face cards, including myself.

Recently, Bob Rodgers the former Baron Administrator of SWAG reminded me that I have a copy of the SWAG sabacc deck. So I dug around for it and found it. Here are some photos I took of the deck.

How to play!

The fold-out rules, with cover art by the esteemed Reverend Strone.

Suit cards

The suit cards; clockwise from top left: Coins, Staves, Sabres and Flasks.

A single suit

Clockwise from bottom right: 1 of Sabres, Master of Sabres, Commander of Sabres and Mistress of Sabres.