I’ve had a few domains over the years, most with large hard to spell and harder to remember names.  The last two were so long that I had the occasional problems with web forms not accepting them.  I’ve recently been forced to change hosting firm, the old one was shutting down it’s private hosting service, and with the new service came a new .com domain if I wanted it.

So welcome to StormRook.com.  My new on-line home, hopefully with a shorter,  easier to remember name that will fit in all web forms and won’t be a pain to dictate over the phone.  I’ll be redirecting my old domains to here eventually and eventually retiring both them and their email addresses in favour of one based here.  The old domains and emails aren’t going any place for a while yet though, there’s still a year left on the registrations.

Any posts older than this one are carried over from older blogs.

Albert Einstein asked, “The question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I or the others crazy?”

If your looking for a detailed review of the camera written by professionals I recommend the article on dpreview.com.  Its detailed, horribly technical, massivly geeky and generally very good.  This article is just a collection of my initial thoughts and some sample photos taken this weekend and last.

In a nutshell: It’s an excellent camera though obviously weighted towards the amateur side of the pro-sumer category.

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This is a port over of a post from an old blog (www.theilluminatedengineer.com) on setting up a VPN server on the non-server edition of OSX.  It’s from a few years ago and was written for OSX 10.6 and may not be valid anymore but it’s worth keeping for reference.

The contents are culled from a variety of sources and while I understand enough to pull them together and use them I don’t know all the things going on.  As such I can’t answer any questions.  If you need help I recomend the comments thread on the original Mac OSX Hints page that the majority of this comes from, there’s lots of smart people over there.

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In the last post I settled on a mechanic for the game but left a few threads hanging.  This post will address them.

This weeks random steam punk picture is a picture of a steampunk horse by dasAdam.

There’s no lore sections in here.  I’ve been banging my head against a wall with them for a week now with no real inspiration so I’ve decided its better to get this post out without them than have it sit here any longer.  Just pretend I said something entertaining at the start of each section.

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In the last post I discussed the general kind of dice mechanics available and settled on a Bucket’O'Dice system.  In this post I’ll look at the core probabilities and difficulty levels of the system.  This is probably the single most important post of the entire system, everything hinges on getting good probabilities set down here.  Mistakes will be compounded and expanded through the rest of the system.

This weeks random steam punk picture is a photo of a difference engine by IvanAndrevich.

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In the last post I decided on the list of statistics used to model a character, this post will briefly look at skills and then move on to discussing various dice mechanics.

This weeks random steam punk picture is a sculpture by Diarment.

This ones a bit late out and its not got any nice lore bits in it.  I just bought a new car and the weekend was taken up with collecting it, arranging insurance and such.

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Following on from the previous post this time I’ll cover picking statistics.

I’ve been told these posts need broken up a bit. I’m not an artist so I can’t really show of concept art.  I do however write so I’ll include little lore snippets and such at the start of each section.  Let me know if there worth keeping.

This weeks steam punk picture comes from UrsalaV and can be seen in full on DeviantArt.

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Currently I’m working on my own “pen & paper” RPG setting and system. The two are advancing hand in hand and I thought I would post occasionally about the development of the game. I haven’t got a name yet (I suck at name things, just ask the players in my games) so I’m just referring to the game by the name “GEAR” at the moment, and while I think that name may stick for the system it certainly wont hold for the game as a whole.

The setting is still mostly in my head with most things still unnamed so I’ll leave off posting much detail about that for a while, instead I’ll concentrate on the system to start with.

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This is a short story I wrote a few years ago for an evening course on creative writing. I never really had the enthusiasm to put real time into the course after the first few assignments (which I regret and should really do something about, a lack of enthusiasm is the bane of my life).

This was always one of the stories I was happiest with and when I came across it during a data trawl through my NAS I thought I would repost it here.

Enjoy it, or slag it off, at your leisure.

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