My initial impression after reading a bit of the GSL hullaballoo is that it's nothing really worrying about...
... so long as you're willing to walk away from it. Yeah, it represents a sticky legal bog into which many a game company could walk and few could come out. Yes, it's a disappointment for many folks who thought they could make some more money like before by creating products supporting the biggest dog on the block.
But for Evil Hat Productions (and hopefully, for many others), it's a big So What. Sure, maybe EHP could someday put out a 4E supporting product (I certainly think I have a setting concept that could go interesting places, and Rob's been talking about a modular add-on concept that could fit to nearly any campaign world), but it's not essential that we do -- and it never really was. The 3E OGL days gave us a lot of opportunity to get us some strongly developed second and third tiers. Plenty of companies and one-guy shops made their bones in that environment; they've got a name and a brand from that time. If they play their cards right and leverage that brand well, they don't need 4E to continue growing their fan-base. It'd just be nice. Phil Reed has plenty of folks standing shoulder to shoulder willing to follow Ronin Arts wherever he takes it. Green Ronin's supporters are legion. And so on.
If anything, the GSL tells us that we can probably comfortably give 4E a year to see where it goes, to see how it settles out from its awkward early stages. But more than anything, at least from where I stand, the 4E GSL is -- for my money -- a move by WOTC to support diversity in the RPG market (however unintentional that move may be). Fewer companies will be producing 4E stuff. Some will because some are willing even in the face of some pretty nasty legal terms -- every swamp-bog has its explorers, however few -- but many won't. But those many won't be standing still.
And as a few folks have pointed out, there are plenty of options for the second and third tier to get some all-star team-up action going on. True20 and Pathfinder provide successful, proven branches of the d20 oeuvre for folks interested in staying "close to home". If WEG ever gets off its ass, there's talk of making d6 an open license. Savage Worlds now has a free license (once you're approved) and a second license that provides solid support of fan-sites doing whatever they want, legally. And, yeah, Evil Hat's Fate system (and the open content of Spirit of the Century) remains free for use via the OGL (plus, we're happy to negotiate reasonable brand license terms for SOTC and DRYH if someone becomes interested -- as we already have).
Haven't had good internet connectivity, when I've had it at all, for the entire week to date. Comcast's shit-grade cable lines are of course to blame again.
Our signal strength is so low that it's not possible for digital signal unpackers to get a coherent picture/sound off the line, so we're stuck without the ability to TiVo the shows we watch each week, as some of them are nearing their last few episodes of the season. The second to last episode of Reaper has already been a casualty of this, though we did at least get to catch the Idol performances in real time on a non-digital signal reception. Having to sit through commercials was almost a novelty.
Comcast's leisurely response to this, of course, has been to send out a guy who was actually reasonably competent at diagnosing the signal strength issue, but was not empowered/able to do the kind of deep, trace-it-back-to-the-source cause and fix it. So he pledged to call in a service appointment for us to do "maintenance", and said we should call Comcast and ask 'em WTF if they weren't here by today. So we called them today and... no record of any service/maintenance appointment whatsoever. But they'll send someone out tomorrow!
Fuck you, Comcast. Fuck you in the ear.
Here's hoping that Verizon is not a big fat liar about FiOS being freshly available in the area. I ain't seen nobody diggin' up no roads to lay in the fiber, so that'd be a gigantic shock, but dear god I am so tired of the rinky-dink fourth-rate antics of this particular cable monopoly.
Anyway, I'm pretty intermittently scarce on the internet ... all week, at this rate, maybe some of next. This is why.
If anyone out there in Jim Butcher land is wondering why the forum website (http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/) is crashing a lot lately, it MIGHT have something to do with
That's a graph of the amount of forum traffic as judged by the number of Google Adsense impressions tallied up each day.
Think you might be able to spot where Small Favor came out with a dedication to the forum fans on its first couple pages? :)
I need to come to terms for a bit with the fact that while I like extra cash, I am seriously oversubscribing myself in the layout department right now. After I get done with Starblazer Adventures, a supplement for Fae Noir, and some remaining commitments to Arc Dream, I think that's going to be it for non-Evil Hat/non-IPR projects for a while. (If I'm on your roster and you're not on this list, please drop me an email ASAP so I can figure out what's doable there.)
It's not that my other stuff has started to suffer (unless it's a podcast, in which case, yeah, those are always the first to suffer when I get busy), it's that it will soon if I don't ease off and have more of my time to me for the stuff that's fully mine.
Item #2: Given some of my recent reactions to things -- taking on Story-Games vacation out of necessity, getting incredibly grumpy with some other folks in the community, etc -- I am clearly in vast vast need of a chill pill. So effective immediately, I'm going to try to work less, for a couple weeks, and try to stick to a firm 6pm(ish, okay, I have to admit that's ish) end of my computing day. This means some of you will be unable to reach me for the usual evening chats. I'm sure you'll somehow survive. :)
I put a rectangle in it and fill it with the [Black] swatch.
My preferences are set to "output blacks as rich black" in the preferences panel.
I export the document to a PDF.
The PDF has a wimpy, limp-ass greyish rectangle in it -- not black at all, more like C=0,M=0,Y=0,K=100 (or worse).
Despite the "output blacks as rich black" setting.
A few weeks ago when I was creating PDFs, the blacks came out as rich black -- super dark, just the way you'd want. I've since moved my computer, but not really changed anything else (that I recall -- my memory is very bad due in part to doing lots of things; if it didn't happen in the last 5 minutes, my recollection is not accurate because 3 other things have come up).
It's affecting black text, black strokes and shapes in InDesign, and the blacks in placed black & white TIFFs -- all coming out as that weak-shit paler grey.
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