Printer-friendly versionLady Bee
Once I decided what I was going to make for people, Lady Bee was the first one that I started working on. A while back when I created a poll asking people what their superpower would be, Leah had answered 'Self Healing'. This brought to mind pure regeneraters like Wolverine of Claire from Heroes but I wanted something a little quirkier.
I drew inspiration from an old (7th Doctor) aventure called 'Delta and the Bannermen'. In it, a young human falls for a human-looking alien queen bee and ends up consuming a bunch of royal jelly to transform himself so he could be with her. Continuing with the Bee theme, this got me thinking of the recent Colony Collapse Disorder. Going with some classic Marvel tropes, I put together the idea of a scientist working on CCD through an enhanced Royal Jelly that ends up in her system. This gives her wings, extra strength and tougheness as well as regeneration. I want to avoid the control of bees thing beause that's a bit too cliched. Instead I wanted to touch on the Spiderman web shooters by giving her a set of invented bee stingers.. basically a dart gun that can deliver different types of toxins or even cures.
For the figure itself, I used astraight forward Wasp Heroclix as the base. It was pretty straight forward to give her a bee themed outfit rather than the red one she came with. The real fun in modifying the figure was popping off the wings so that I wouldn't get the yellow and black paint all over the wings.
Galatea
This was my gift for Tricia and she was the hardest one for me to do. Over a decade ago now, Tricia played in a Play-by-Email Aberrant game I was running. Her character for that game was a native american powerhouse named Thunderbird. Basically that world's answer to Wonder Woman. My first thought in setting down was to try and recreate that character. Canabalizing my Hero Clix I took Jinx's body for the flowing skirts and general lack of clothes and mixed it with Arclight's head because it had the closest hair for what I wanted. The head was slightly too big for the body. I figured I'd paint it and that would cover up some of the imperfections. This unfortunately just made it worse and she ended up looking like and elderly fae character with exam. In the end I started over.
Introduction to the Craft Meme
A year ago on LiveJournal I participated in an internet Meme that was going around at the time. The basic setup was based around a craft exchange. Here, I'll just post the original text as I re-posted it.
The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.
This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
- What I create will be just for you.
- It'll be done this year.
- You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a song. It may be a something costume-y. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.
The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!
Website Redesign
It has been a while (almost a year) since I posted about the state of my website. I greatly enjoy my attempts to clean it up and make it work the way I want it to. Over the past couple of weeks, I gave the site a pretty major overhaul visually. If you are running your own Drupal installation or are just curious what I've done to the site you might find this a handy guide.
Christmas Letter 2009
Happy Holidays to our Friends and Family,
For at least as long as I've been writing these letters, Alyson and I have had a plan – every other year we put up our artificial tree and go to Massachusetts for the holidays, but on the opposite years we stay in Maryland and get ourselves a real tree. As I write this letter, I am fretting over our tree as it isn't drinking enough water. What are we going to do if it doesn't start? I am, however, looking forward to a nice quiet Christmas at home this year.
A Different Bill Olander
Bill Olander.. William R. Olander.. passed away March 18th, 1989. He died of complications resulting from AIDS. He was by all accounts an amazing man. I've linked to NY Time's obit below.
I've been vaguely aware of this particular Bill Olander who is not myself for several years. Its one of those things you find out when you google yourself to see what people are saying about you on the internet. Today someone came looking for this man on my site for the first time that I'm aware. I thought it was worth while to talk about someone who I would be honored to be mistaken for.
Paragons of Freedom Adventure #1 Session #1 Part 2
The Prologue: I started the game with a quick overview of Freedom City and how this world was different from our own. Specifically there was the bloodier American Revolution that culminated in the British surrender at Freedom City and detonation of the first nuclear bomb in Germany rather than Japan. After that I let the player's each describe an only slightly guided prologue for their character.
Big Planet Comics
A few years ago I was in the midst of my first Mutants and Mastermind's game and started getting into comics. It started out with a few graphic novels as I worked my way through Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I made the leap to stand alone comics when DC put out their 52 series. I was drawn in to the series by the promise of an entire year where I didn't have to know what was going on in any other comics and could just read that one comic. It of course didn't stay there. As the guys at the gaming table said, it was my gateway drug.
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Paragons of Freedom: Adventure #1, Session #1
I have been talking about this game for a while. Getting it off the ground was a little bit of a hassle with real life issues getting in the way. In the end though, I was able to get three players together only two months later than the original start date. Here is how it went down.
The Psychic's Handbook and a little history of Psionics
When Wizards of the Coast moved Dungeons and Dragons from version 3.5 to 4th Edition the licensing of 3rd edition 3rd party products went away. For Green Ronin, the solution they came up with was to rebrand those old products as '3rd Era' and re-release them as PDF documents. One of the first I've seen advertised was 'The Psychic's Handbook', an alternate set of Psionics Rules for D&D. Seeing this come through put me in mind of psionics in general. I've always been a fan and if I play another D&D game (unlikely right now) I will definitely lobby to play a psion or related class.