Friday, October 16th, 2009

'm actually in disbelief that there's still fans of Life In Plastic Pants! After screwing around with WordPress and ComicPress, I found a number of jubilant comments regarding LIPP's return.

Eventually, I ditched the idea of using WordPress and ComicPress, as you have to be some sort of coding guru (despite claims to the contrary) in order to get the systems to have the layout you want. To those folks who left comments in the short time LIPP was run by those systems, I thank you. I wish I could've kept the comments in some form or another, but both systems blew up on me twice.

So! Changes to the site: I've decided to ditch the forum. It was a nice (free) idea for a while, but scripts began taking over the forums and leaving stupid junk messages all over the place. The forum itself is still around, and maybe I'll implement it again later on down the road. It's going to stay gone for now.

I'm reworking the archive system, too. It's going to take a little while to complete. I've considered including archive comics in future updates (a la Max Cannon and his great site, RedMeat.com). As of yet, I'm undecided.

On a personal front, some friends and I recently took up Dungeons & Dragons again. We were big into playing D&D 2nd Edition, but ended up retiring from play after a few of us went our separate ways.

I got very nostalgic for D&D after playing World Of Warcraft for about a year. The big problem with WOW was that none of it was actually role-playing. Everyone was so concerned about their numbers and crit values and how much gold they were going to get for farming themselves like whores! It got boring quickly. The only fun I found was going to Red Ridge and tormenting lowbie characters with powerful damage-over-time spells they didn't have a hope in hell of surviving.

Just over a year ago, Wizards released D&D 4th Edition. I somehow convinced my former 2nd Edition companions to take on 4th Edition. I offered to DM, which helped in that they only had to drop money on the Player's Handbook.

My ever-tolerant girlfriend even joined in, though she can often be found with a glass of wine in her hand. It helps to ease the sting of becoming a geek and hanging around geek-types. Regardless, I think she gets a kick out of the game, too, if nothing more than just having a set of seven sparkly pink dice (she's also reading Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress, which helps).

The new system is almost completely different than 2nd Edition. It's much more numbers-oriented, but not in a bad way. It helps to make the game more interesting for even low-level characters (wizards start out with much more than 4 hit points at first level). We completed our first long-run adventure a few weeks ago and had a damn good time doing it.

I could geek out on the game all day long, so I'll just cut it short there.

(That, and Nintendo just released Final Fantasy for Wii's Virtual Console.)