In my daily travels around the interblag I randomly come across such gems of either truly inspired goodness or stupidity of such untold magnitude that it not only boggles the mind it makes one wonder how such a vacuum of intelligent thought could not be creating microscopic black holes the world over.  First off though this must be gotten out of the way.  Michael Jackson died, GET THE FUCK OVER IT!  Jebus H Christ on a fucking crutch people.  He had Lupus (everyone knows it’s never Lupus), he took some drugs, he died. 

So I am just posting a quick update to share some hilarious goodness that I have ran across on the net.

First off, Ubuntu Satanic.  This was sent to me by my buddy Ray over at http://raybdbomb.com/.  For those of you who are offended by this, get a fucking life you right wing conservative douche nozzles.  Myself, being a Pastafarian find this not only perfectly acceptable but also highly ingenious and hilarious. 

So I haven’t posted in awhile.  Yea, not like anyone ever read this.   Not like they read it now.   But I have finally gotten back into programming.  And my first project is kinda retarded I guess.   See, GNOME has uber crappy support for multiple monitor desktops.   You can set one picture for the desktop background and that’s it.  No matter how many monitors, just one background.  This, personally, is highly annoying.  Now I know that with about 5 minutes and GIMP I could just as easily combine two pictures into a proper sized wallpaper to span the two monitors, however, I suck with graphics and always get it wrong.   So this means I do things the fun way.  I write a program to take two pictures, mash them together, and spit out a nice spiffy third picture that I can use as a wallpaper.  This also gives me a reason to come back to blogging.  I can use the site and give it new life (well, about as much life as a 90 year old man after his 4th triple bypass) by posting my programs and such that I create.  Right now the program is kinda basic and ugly, but I’m relearning alot of crap as I go.   So expect to hear more from me and see a download section sometime soon.

So I know it’s been awhile since I did my last post.  And I’m sure everyone that read this (yes, all two of you) were thinking that this blog died like many others.   It hasn’t died so much as I have had to take a hiatus due to a lack of creativity.  Also I am reimagining what this website is going to be.  Anyway, my reason for this post today is for one simple thing.  To bitch.  Nothing more, nothing less.

So obviously it’s been a busy week for me and I haven’t had much time to do an actual post so far.  I’m still trying to work out a format for the site as well as a schedule for what posts will come when.  Maybe it will help me figure out what to write about if I impose a deadline on myself.   If you have something you would like for me to cover in an article, something you saw, heard about, a question you have, whatever. Feel free to email me through the contact form, leave a comment, send a carrier pidgeon (RFC 1149), however you want to do it.

I am going to be working on a new campaign for my weekly D&D group that I hope to publish on here once I get it finished.  As none of my players read this site or even know about it I hopefully shouldn’t have to worry about them reading it.

So Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead came out today.  And the question in most peoples mind has to be, Is it worth it?  What makes this book worth going out and dropping the $30 for it.  Well that’s what I hope to answer for you today, or at least give you some general idea on. Be warned all ye who enter though, this way lies madness (and alot of bad analogies and catch phrases).

So going by a bit of web surfing and looking at Google Analytics it seems that much like me people are quite unhappy that there is once again not a yeti in the new Monster Manual. Well, fear no more for I shall give you that which you seek.  I did a bit of looking around and found one or two sources for this elusive beast such as at ENWorld but overall I am not exactly impressed with it.  Taking for instance the Yeti templates that Jester created on ENWorld I must say he really did massively fail on this one.  I have looked at some of his other monsters and normally he is quite good at conversion and creation but this time idiot mode just engaged.

So what can be done about something like this? Why, I give you the ones that I use myself of course.  And what better person to give you the yeti’s then the cranky bastard that is named after them.  Also I am going to be throwing down on a few monsters that you aren’t going to be using in a campaign but hopefully will still find yourself unexpectedly throwing at players when they deserve it.  But more on that in a later post.  For now lets get into what you probably came here for.

So for those of you who don’t do all of your posting and site maintenance in the middle of the night     you may not be aware of this yet.  If you are, well I’m reporting on it anyway and shouldn’t you be in bed right now?

Welcome to the new home of The Yeti Cave. For those of you who are wondering what is going on, basically we moved. With the move comes the ability for the site to do much more and for me to have much better control over it. It is no longer being hosted by the mouth breathers at Blogger. Yes I know I seem to love Google but I have no love for that department.

Honestly, Blogger is a great service. And while it caters quite well to people with little or no technological savvy, and even those who are quite literate, I felt that it was time to move on. Yes this came fairly quickly but the old blog was just lacking in several aspects.  With direct and full control over the server and the page itself it has opened up the ability to have a much more dynamic page. Along with this comes more power and everyone wants that. In addition there were just several things seriously lacking with the Blogger software. My site was not being indexed very often, hell not even “occasionaly”, it was maybe indexed once every month or so if I was lucky.  Also, I did not have the ability to generate XML sitemaps or several other basic, yet still somewhat higher end functions.

All in all I would consider this a good move and hopefully it will allow me to do alot more with the site and I will feel like doing more, more often.

For those of you reading this via the RSS feed the new home is now at http://www.theyeticave.net  So make sure to update your bookmarks.

How do you track player and NPC initiative in combat?  This is a question that I see asked often on various D&D and many other roleplaying boards across the blogosphere. The problem is there isn’t really a good answer for it. Oh, answers there are, don’t get me wrong. The problem is there aren’t many good ones and alot of times they just boil down to however the person wants or an example of how the responder does it. That isn’t to say that none of the answers aren’t the right answer. Let’s go over a few of the more common methods.