Hey, it’s up.

I really am looking forward to getting an iPad, although my plans for purchasing technology gang aft agley. I can completely see why people wouldn’t be enthused by it. Someone at Metafilter said it occupies “the uncanney valley of gadgetry,” which is fair enough. I just happen to have a timeshare in that valley.

I also might be influenced by the fact that I’m currently working on an app for the iPhone, so anything else that can run it is fine by me.

Anyhow! I liked my drawing of a cat, so here’s a desktop wallpaper of that same art. Might look good on an iPad, guess I’ll find out.

People (Hi, Rick!) have been asking for an Alt Text feed, so that they can make sure not to miss a morsel of my prose. I’ve got one for you. If you add http://www.wired.com/underwire/author/loresjoberg/rss2 to your feeds, you’ll get my links to everything I write for Underwire, which these days is just Alt Text.

Let me know if that works properly for you, it seemed to be coming across well in Google Reader for me.

Your Geek Guide to Poker Chip Snobbery

Clever Murdoch Turns News Into Hip Underground Club

So hi! I haven’t been updating Bad Gods recently, but I’m working on something behind the scenes.

A Belligerent Guide to Board Games

I don’t usually talk about how I feel about my own work, because I don’t like to influence the readers’ opinions. But just as an experiment, I’m going to mention it here: I feel like this could have been a better essay. In fact, there are much funnier articles/lists on Board Game Geek, like Crisis on Infinite BGGs, but they tend to assume you know who Reiner Knizia is and understand BGG’s odd fixation on Busen Memo. So I kind of tried to straddle the in-the-know world and the have-no-idea world, and I’m not sure I really did well by either.

At any rate, I never participated in the last board game thread, so I’ll mention some of my favorites here. I’m completely obsessed by Vegas Showdown, which is not actually a game about gambling. It’s an auction/resource building game with some tile placement added just for kicks. It’s out of print but I got my copy for less than retail (even after shipping) on eBay.

I also like Stone Age, another resource building game. It’s simpler than similar games like Agricola and Pillars of the Earth, so I keep expecting to get bored with it, but I haven’t yet.

Finally — for now — I never really warmed up to Carcassonne, but then I bought it on Xbox Live and I’ve been playing a lot with Colette on the Xbox 360. Having a computer handle the setup and scoring, and tell you which moves are legal, speeds the game up and makes me like it quite a bit more. And it’s cheaper on Xbox Live, too.

Social Media, Your Constant Friend in Any Crisis.

Torn from the minor and ultimately unimportant headlines!

Also if you want to discuss Bad Gods and/or good board games here, feel free.

An All-Star Cavalcade of Product Reviews

The story behind this one is pretty obvious: I think it’s funny how polarized product reviews tend to be on the Web. The reviews here are based mostly on Amazon, but I stopped paying much attention to Yelp’s reviews when I saw that someone had given a barbecue place one star, even though they had never visited it, because it had too many salad options.

I think I burned out my narrative gland in that last big story arc, because I’m just not feelin’ it for writing another multi-strip story, even a short one. Conversely, I’m having fun with the format seen in Light and Cute. So maybe I’ll do more of those. At any rate, I’m going back to an every-weekday schedule for August, yay whee.

Feel free to use this as an open Bad Gods thread, or to discuss recipes for delicious Chinese sauces. I just went to 99 Ranch and picked up big things of mirin and oyster sauce.

Sam Raimi’s Warcraft Movie Production Diary. I gotta say, I’m pretty happy with that cartoon. There are still various perspective and anatomy issues with it, but I feel like I’m starting to get my drawings to look like I want them too.

Anyway, here’s the original intro to the piece, which I cut for reasons of space (spaaaace reasons!)

Video games and movies get along like cats made of oil and dogs made of water. The only thing worse than a video game based on a movie is a movie based on a video game. Maybe there’s some clandestine mutual destruction pact, with movie directors and game producers meeting in some evil underground entertainment temple and vowing to prevent audience cross-over.

“Our Bloodrayne movie ensured that nobody who watches it will have the slightest inclination to pick up the video game!”

“Very well, but you realize that no one who played the Speed Racer game wanted to see the movie!”

“Nobody wanted to see Speed Racer anyway!”

“It is decided then. To the death!”

If so, video games seem to be wavering in their dedication to producing only crap. There have been some good video games based on movies, but the best you can say about movies based on video games is that they haven’t actually killed anyone yet.

However, the movie industry may have just blinked. By giving respected director Sam Raimi the reins to the Warcraft movie, Hollywood is giving us hope that finally we’ll have a video game movie at least as good as Darkman.

Dare we hope? Dare we dream? Dare we stand in line for weeks dressed as a Night Elf druid? Luckily, Wired has a device that’s able to grab random objects from the near future, and after some fiddling we were able to get ahold of Sam Raimi’s production diary for the Warcraft movie. We’ve reprinted some of the highlights below.

In writing that last Sean & Wormwood arc and redesigning Bad Gods, I realized I’m not really happy with the standard webcomics approach of breaking down longer stories into daily updates. It makes sense for comics that are one big long story, but it just feels awkward to me to have part three of a five-part story taking up the page for a day.

So from here through the end of August, I’m going to try a little experiment. I’m going to update three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, Friday — and use Tuesday and Thursday to work on longer stories. Not as long as The Seat of Power, I’m not ready to dive back into something like that, but stories with three to eight installments. So by the end of August you should see about as many pages as you normally would, but some of them will come as multi-page updates.