So we are supposed to get a metric ton of snow this weekend, which is a good thing for me as I can plant my butt in a chair and work on some projects.  Well, I plan to make some serious headway on the Fantasy Firearms project and so I decided to organize the art I have for the project into a single folder.  In conjunction with that I decided to go look for some high quality stock art for the project to mix in with the for-hire stuff I have.

[Begin Rant]

After wading through the dozens and dozens of pages of utter crap that fills the Publisher Resources section, along with scrolling past all the 3D generated uber-babes, I did manage to find a few likely prospects.  But so many of them did not show you what you are buying it rapidly degenerated into a crap shoot.  If you have a Stock Art selection of magic items, or armor or whatever, why in the *fcuk* can’t I see a thumbnail of the image? Seriously, you want me to spend my money on artwork *THAT YOU WILL NOT SHOW ME*? Who thinks thats a good idea?  How about you show me what I am getting like Shamman’s Stock art or the Image Portfolio line or even my very own stock art offerings the Skortched Urf’ Studios Sketchbook line? But no, instead I had to waste my time sifting through the crap, checking licences and squinting at near-microscopic thumbnails.

I spent damn near three hours last night sifting stock art. Did I find some useful art?  Yes, I actually did.  But it was far harder than it should have been.

So, rather than just bitch about the current state, I figured I would offer a few suggestions…

If you sell stock art; please for the love of all that is Holy include a good preview or thumbnail!  Preferably embedded in the listing itself rather than some external file or other means that will take me away from the listing.  The RPGNow flip book is ideal, or a large image as Shamman’s stock art uses would be fine.  While your at it, it would be a good idea to include the license terms *in the sales listing* so we know what we can and can’t do with it once we purchase it.  Can I color it?  Can I modify it?  Must I include your logo inside the image? These are important considerations to a publisher, and we prefer not to be surprised after we have dropped the money.

I have no real problem with the 3D generated stock art.  I especially like it for vehicles, guns and other things with sharp edges.  But I also feel it needs to be seperated out inside the stock art category.  I don’t want to use 3D stock art in my projects, so why must I scroll through pages and pages of it to find what I am really after?  I think we need to add some sub-categories in the Publisher Resources section.  I found fonts, page templates, cover templates, illustrations and 3D art all lumped in together.  I also found some very cool images that were not stock art, but intended only for private use in games.  I’m glad the publisher was careful to mention that in the sales listing, but a seperate category other that the broad Publisher Resources is in order. I would suggest sub-categories like Full Color Stock Art, B&W Stock Art, 3D Stock Art, Fonts, Design Elements, Personal Use Stock Art (i.e. not for publishers but for your GM to use), and a catch all Other Publisher Resources to round it out.

Let’s talk about quality for a second.  Some of the art for sale is, quite frankly, so bad that I felt it came out of a middle school kids sketchbook.  Seriously, do you really think people are going to buy this:

or this…

I’m not trying to be mean, but seriously how many of these do you think have sold?  I know we all want to make a few bucks, but slapping crap from a sketchbook or your kids scribblings up on RPGNow is not going to catapult you to fame and wealth.  A little self-policing is a good thing.  I am not proposing we institute some arbitrary quality standard; but I would suggest that quality will get you further than sheer quantity when it comes to stock art.

[End Rant]

First off, congratulations must go out to President-Elect Barack Obama.  I may not have voted for him, but the will of the people has prevailed and he has been duly elected in a fair democratic election.  He will be my President; and I pray along with he rest of America that he carries the mantle of leadership with the same poise and skill he demonstrated in his election campaign.

(I really do mean that.  Back when Clinton won, I remember seeing a lot of bumper stickers proclaiming that “Charlton Heston is my President”; that never sat well with me despite my un-wavering support of gun rights. The President of the United States is our President, even if you didn’t vote for him.)

My thoughts on the McCain campaign:

Frankly, it never should have been a McCain campaign in the first place.  Romney, Thompson or Guiliani should have been at the top of the ticket.  McCain got the nomination because he kept coming in second place.  All the other candidates had a core of supporters and brought real strength to the table.  McCain brought what, exactly?  He’s never been conservative enough to appeal to the small-government, fiscal conservative Republicans and Libertarians.  Palin was a great choice to appeal to that core of the party, but you don’t win over “The Base” by tossing them a bone for Vice President. The case could be made that he was centrist enough to win over people that would normally have voted Democratic, but clearly you need to sew up your conservative base before you start worrying about taking away Democratic votes.  The Republican Party failed to do that.

David Codrea over at The War on Guns put it thusly:

Seems to me, now is the time to send the GOP a message, loud and clear: This is what happens when you abandon core principles. If you intend to regain center stage, you’re going to need to actually become leaders in liberty.

That was the ultimate failure of the Republican Party and the McCain campaign this election.  Republicans squandered their chance to accomplish something…anything…during the first years of the Bush Presidency. Sure we got a couple of good Supreme Court justices; but where was the Social Security fix?  How about a balanced budget?  Did they fix the tax code?  Did they decrease government spending?  What did they actually do to move a conservative agenda forward?

They lost the base because they became indistinguishable from Democrats.  And you don’t win elections by voting against the other guy, you have to put up a candidate that people want to vote for.  I for one was never so fired up about McCain that I wanted to paste his sticker on my car, or talk him up to my friends and collegues.  Sure, I was behind the Conservative/Libertarian message, but McCain never quite measured up to that message.  (Stimulus package, anyone? How about all the “F%$k it, McCain” web banners displayed throughout the Blogosphere?)

On Hillary:

America doesn’t like royalty or dynasty.  The Clinton and Bush names now represent such political royalty and dynasty in U.S. Politics. I think this is the real reason Hillary lost the nomination to Barack Obama.  (I also think that Jeb Bush should take notice as well.)  We’ll put up with it in the Senate or the Congress; just look at the Kennedy’s and the vast number of long-term politicians.  But President is a different animal.

On America:

Our political system has been working for over 200 years now.  No revolutions, no bloodshed, just lots of words and a peaceful transfer of power.  (No, I didn’t forget the Civil War; just follow the thought.) We’ve survived incompetent Presidents and truly great Presidents.  We will survive this President, and the next, and the one after that. Out country cannot be undone in two years (the time until the next mid-term election).  While I don’t share the political views of those in power now, I do believe in the strength of our political system.  I am not despairing at the outcome as some seem to be. Our country will veer one way and then the next over the years, but the rudder is ultimately in the hands of “We the People”.

What do we do now?

We take the day off.  Let everyone take a deep breath.  Celebrate the fact that America has elected the first Black President.  That’s a big deal.  Lets not forget that there were two women the mix this go-around as well.  It’s only a matter of time.

Then, first thing tomorrow morning get back to work.  Get to know you local and state representatives.  Be sure to know who your Senators and Congressmen are.  We are going to have one hell of the first two years; the Democrats will try to pass many things we Conservative/Libertarians must oppose.  The political process does not only take place on November 4th every four years; it takes place Every. Single. Day.

I got the new laptop yesterday.  I also got the full Adobe Creative Suite installed last night after work.  Today I transferred all the Skortched Urf’ Studios files to it so I can work from either my desktop at home or my laptop anywhere else.

I see that WOTC will be releasing a revised GSL.  It seems to me that the cold response of the third party publishers, everyone from the Piazo and Kenzer “Big Dogs” to the legion of mid-tier publishers as well as the little fish like yours truly have prompted WOTC to find something a little more appealing.  I don’t have much hope it will do any good.  You simply can’t go from an open license like the OGL and think most folks will be happy with anything more restrictive, especially when the first license was so fucked up as to be laughable.  Who in their right mind would toss all their IP eggs in the WOTC basket with no hope of ever, EVER getting them out again?  Utter bullshit.  So yeah, they are gonna take out a few things and try to get a bunch of support for the new license, but I think it will end up being too little to make any difference.

If WOTC wants active, enthusiastic third party support for 4E they need to allow works to be published in multiple formats like 4E, 3.5, True20 etc. None of this “I must either choose 4E or some other license” and NEVER be able to change it back BS.  They also need to let people publish friggin’ stat blocks in their products.  What the hell good is a module if it simply sez “The party then fights six Kobolds. (See page 52 of the MM.)”  Oh wait, you can’t even do that cuz its a PAGE NUMBER!  Yeah, that’s gonna make lots of third party modules real easy to us.  Don’t get me started on the “You pay all our court costs even if we lose” clause.  Sign me up!  When this is where we are starting from, forgive me if I am not all excited about where  the “revised” GSL will take us.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I will be.

WOTC has also fumbled the ball significantly on many other fronts.  Retire Dungeon and Dragon mags for digital versions, including an online tabletop where we can get together and play with our friends spread across the internet.  Yeah, hows that working out?  You’d think a company as big as Hasbro could afford some software programmers to, you know, hit a realese deadline.  (Yes, I know about the guy that killed himself and his wife.  While a tragedy, he didn’t go in and bust caps on the WOTC programmers so I don’t buy that ONE GUY is the cause of the hold up.)

Oh, and while the production values are first rate on the 4E products; a friggin 1st level module is selling for $29.95 retail.  Wow.  The two follow-on modules are $24.95 each, which looks like the new price-point for WOTC modules. Those will take you to 10th level; so in order to “play out” until 30th level using WOTC released modules your gonna shell out $225.00 in MODULES if you get ten levels out of three modules.  (How much is the full subscription to the War of the Burning Sky Campaign Saga again?)

Fromm Larry over at Monster Hunter Nation…

So, the question you’ve got to ask yourself is this… if a bad guy did walk into your classroom, would you A. rather have somebody like one of my people there, able to fight back,  OR  B. hide under your desk and pray to God that you’re not the next one to die?  Option B does allow you to have wishful thoughts about how the police will be here in any second, as you hear your friends and classmates choking to death on their own blood.

If you answer A.  Good for you.  If you answer B.  Sorry, you fail Darwinian Evolution 101.  The correct answer is C.  Get your own damn gun, and quit waiting around for somebody else to come save your ass.

Amen brother!

-The Mangement

Or do they?

I wish I had written this piece myself.

But since I didn’t, I’ll let the munchkin wrangler say it for me:

Here are my two cents on the atrocity in Blacksburg, Virginia.

I am already dreading the sound bites coming from both the right and the left in response to what the press salaciously describes as “the worst mass shooting in United States history.”

Yes, you read right…I know I won’t care for the left’s instant condemnation of our “loose weapons laws” (the Brady Crowd already put out a press release to that effect), but I’m also not totally in love with the gun crowd howling about how Virginia Tech has “blood on their hands” because they disallow otherwise legal VA CCW holders from toting on campus. This statement may ruffle some feathers, but every CCW holder on that campus who didn’t carry a weapon did so by choice. There may have been some who did have a valid license to carry, but they weighed the risk of expulsion against the risk of being caught defenseless, and they made their choice. There’s no malice or moral judgment in that statement. It doesn’t assign blame to the victims or take it away from the killer–it’s merely a statement of fact.

Here’s one thing that both pro-and anti-gun folks can agree upon: making guns illegal in any given location does not stop shootings in that location. The notion that someone with murder on his mind will obey proscriptions against the carrying of firearms is ludicrous, whether you’re talking about a college campus, a shopping mall, a city, or even an entire country. The only people obeying gun bans are the people you don’t have to worry about–the law-abiding folks. If you declare a location a “gun-free zone”, you basically hang out a gigantic invitation for anyone willing to disobey the decree. What you create is not a safe zone, but a safe work environment for criminals and killers, because they can now be assured of unarmed victims.

Now, the Dems and their assorted hoplophobic entourage will draw precisely the wrong conclusions from the shooting in Blacksburg. They’ll say that the weapons ban on campus was a correct and necessary measure, but that the problem lies with gun laws in general. There are too many guns out there, they’re too easy to obtain, and blah blah blah.

Assume for a moment that they are correct, and that there are far too many weapons out there in the wrong hands. The problem here is that you simply cannot stuff the genie back into the bottle, and you cannot un-invent technology. Places like New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago still have substantial gun crime despite their draconian local gun bans. The folks who support the gun bans in those locations will tell you that this is the fault of the loose gun laws of surrounding states, making it easy for criminals to get guns somewhere else and bring them into the gun-free utopias. Give us a strict nationwide ban on handguns, they say, and the problem will disappear. They completely disregard the fact that there are already a hundred million functioning firearms out there in private hands, and that confiscating all those weapons would be a logistical and technical impossibility even if the police measures necessary for the enforcement of a total gun prohibition wouldn’t obliterate the Bill of Rights. Think of the Prohibition: all the might of the government at all levels couldn’t suppress the smuggling and consumption of booze, and a case of whiskey is far more difficult to smuggle and hide than a handgun. Let them argue all they want, for or against more gun control, but the simple fact remains that the nation (and indeed the world) is awash in firearms, and that no amount of wishing or legislating can make those guns disappear.

There will be a heated and emotional discussion about the ramifications of the Virginia Tech massacre in the next weeks and months. It will take place in the media, in Congress, and on the expanses of the Internet, and in the end we may either get some sensible legislation that eliminates Victim Disarmament Zones, or a new and far-reaching federal gun law that aims to “stop the carnage” by disarming all the folks who didn’t shoot anybody today. (My money is on the latter.)

However, in the end it will not matter one bit. The only thing that ought to matter to anyone, whether they love or hate guns, is the knowledge that in the end it’s a matter of personal responsibility. The question you need to ask yourself is this:

Do I trust others to keep me safe, or do I shoulder that responsibility myself?

No law ever passed has ever had the power to put a gun into your belt, or to remove it from there. You alone choose to carry a weapon, or to not carry one. One day, some nutcase with murderous intent may come calling at your place of study or employment or recreation. Then you will be faced with the consequences of your decision, and all the laws and judges and police officers in the world will be inconsequential at that particular moment.

You alone have to make that call every day of your life, and you alone will face the consequences if that day ever comes. And regardless of your stance on guns or your personal decision in that matter, there will be consequences. Trust the law and the police to protect you, and you may find yourself cowering under a desk and waiting for your turn. Trust your skill with the gun on your hip to protect you, and you may find yourself expelled from school, charged with illegal carry, sued into bankruptcy, or dead anyway.

The choice is yours, and I won’t belittle you regardless of the path you choose to tread. Just make sure you can accept the possible consequences of your choice with a clear conscience.