This is a follow up to my first Eschalon post.

I’ve made fairly good progress since.

I’ve travelled to Bordertown, found Lilith, defeated the Hive Queen, and got chased right off the map section by my very first encounter on the way to Blackwater…

Bordertown is up near the keep where you take the letter after almost accidentally poisoning the sick guy in the hut (if you play, you’ll see). View the sign so you can add it to your quick travel list. There is a lot of walking to be done as you work through the two map zones to the south, as camping near Bordertown is your best bet for healing.

The blacksmith and ranged weapons instructor can help defeat the baddies that spawn while sleeping. You use them to farm, as the bad guys drop loot sacks, but save each time before you camp, because they can be killed, and you don’t want to lose either.

Hive Drones (wasps) are the main enemy for these map zones, though there are some Fungal Slimes as well. This is also where you find the grubs for the dude in the mortuary cellar.

Wasps are tough and do a lot of damage. One on one they’re not to bad, but more than one at a time can be dicey. If you flee between map zones, stick to one side of the path, so you can reenter from the other after healing up and get a ranged attack in before they close on you again.

The Hive Queen is a beast in close combat. I used environmental factors to take her out (not giving details), but you should be able to hit and run with ranged attacks.

For those with the short bladed weapons skill, her stinger can be used as a weapon (w/ poison).

All in all, I am really enjoying this RPG. Its simplicity is what makes it a great game.

When I was a kid, every bicycle pump screwed onto the valve stem. The pump hose had a threaded end that you would twist on, pump and be done.

Sometime in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I think) someone came up with these lever style pumps, where you push the nozzle onto the valve stem and crank the lever over. This was a “convenience” apparently, except they suck.

Applying pressure to push the nozzle onto the stem while also applying lateral pressure to push the lever over is a pain, and the rubber inside the nozzle wears out from gripping the threaded metal of the stem (of course it does) and the plastic part that is meant to push in the little doohickey that opens the valve is plastic, and also wears out. And if it’s one of those bend in the middle ones you pump with your foot, the whole thing would simply break into pieces.

The screw on type, threaded pumps of my childhood never had any of those issues.

Over the course of years I have periodically searched for “screw on bike pump,” “threaded bicycle pump,” “pump for threaded valve,” etc. Unfortunately, the bicycle pump industry has been entirely unaware of my search and pain point. For years I searched. Years!

My riding mower developed a bit of a thorn-hole in the left front tire, and even after taking it into the tire center, the left front still goes flat with frequency, so when my floor pump with the crank over lever finally stopped working at all, I redoubled my search, desperate to find the elusive threaded bicycle pump.

I tried all my searches again, “screw on,” “twist on,” “threaded,” “goes onto a Schrader valve in a sort of round and round twisty motion,” to no avail.

Then one day, I picked up the phone and called Lezyne, a pump manufacturer with great reviews and ratings, one I’d seen many times during the course of my years long search, one I had previously been scouring in a manual hunt for the thing that had eluded the search engines, and I asked the person who answered the phone, “Do you have ANY pumps that will thread onto a Schrader valve stem?”

There was a very confused pause on the other end, and then he said something that stunned me.

“All of them.”

“What? Not a single product description on your entire website says as much. Were you aware?”

“Uh…”

Long story short I’d found a bike pump with a twist on nozzle, one with threads, threaded, the thing I had been searching for! I immediately ordered a Lezyne Sport Bike Pump in yellow (look at that yellow!). Lezyne was out, so I got it off Amazon, and let me just say, this pump is awesome!

The nozzle is a little cumbersome at first, and if you twist in the wrong spot you can take the red part off by accident (it’s made to fit every manner of valve from Schrader to Presta to blow-up doll), but it freaking threads on! I live on a small farm, so tractors, trailers, mowers, cars, bikes, everything rolls around on air-filled tires with threaded stems. I use it constantly. This pump has delivered.

Maybe you just have a bike. Well, it’ll work for you too. The 3.5″ diameter analog pressure gauge is huge and easy to read, and the pump can handle up to 220psi or 15bar, which is a lot. Road and track cyclists will be pleased. And there’s a handy pressure release button if you go too far. The base is wide enough to provide stability, even on gravel or mud. Mountain bikers, that’s you.

And, did you catch the length of that hose? It’s more than double the length of any hose on any bicycle pump I’ve ever owned.

Because here’s the thing, this pump is better than those of my childhood. It’s high end, that’s for sure, and more than you’ll pay at a big box store, but the quality is there to justify it. This is the best pump I’ve ever owned, bar none. It’s worth the price.

For those that don’t know me personally, I’ve been in Internet marketing since 1997. You wouldn’t know it looking around this blog (because, come on man!), but I have.

In late ’97, my then girlfriend called me from a job interview at a dot com startup and asked if I wanted to come down and talk to them. I had shot myself in the hand with a nail gun at work the day before, so of course I said “Yes.”

I had a website at the time, which was enough to get me hired. My job was to learn SEO, and can I just say, the late ’90s were a fantastic time to get into SEO. Infoseek, Webcrawler, Alta Vista, Excite, G.O.D., Inktomi, early Google, it was a helluva time!

After six months on the job, the company stopped making payroll. Eventually we all walked out, and eleven of us started a new company where we failed to make payroll for three years.

During that time, I got good at SEO.

I became Google Forum moderator at SearchEngineForums.com, ran a site called the Spider Knowledgebase, shared all my early experiments with IP specific content delivery (later iterations were called “cloaking,” but that’s not on me), and essentially lived in a world of server logs and search algorithms.

One day I got an email from some dude, we’ll call him “Kevin,” because his name is Kevin. I did not know him at the time, but in the email he invited me to Los Angeles to talk about a job. In my mind I was like, “We haven’t made payroll in three years. Damn-skippy, I’ll fly to L.A.”

Long story short, I took the job and a modest signing bonus, bought a used car and moved to Playa del Rey, CA.

A whole lot has gone down in the mean time, so I’ll bullet point some of the high and low lights:

• Built out a 5,000 domain traffic generation and resale system
• Did some other stuff that was vaguely affiliate marketing related
• Became an indirect subject of a very negative Salon.com article
• Joined a startup and built an affiliate program that hit $100,000,000 in revenue by year 2
• Testified before a federal grand jury
• Worked on several more affiliate networks
• Built a successful ecommerce company
• Bought a warehouse
• Bought a competitor
• Got hacked + cheated by a developer + robbed by a supplier, all same year
• Struggled to recover

I still own the ecommerce business if you ever need a gold pan, but in recent years I also took a job in Corporate Sales Support to help cover bills.

Recently, a friend, we’ll call him “Kevin,” because he’s the same Kevin who emailed me back in 2001 about coming down to L.A., gave me a call and asked if I’d like to get involved with his company, MagCast.

Damn-skippy! I had great coworkers in my side job, but it was pretty low pay, without much opportunity. I gave notice, and started working on MagCast stuff.

It is much more satisfying work. I get to write content like the following page with scary fish:

BTW, before I posted this pic, I used ‘save for the web’ in Photoshop and then ran it through TinyPNG.com to make it nice and lean. Page load speeds matter, folks. You want to rank, keep your page load times fast.

I’ve also been actively recruiting affiliates, working on SEO (did you know that “digital magazine publishing platform” is “platform voor het publiceren van digitale tijdschriften” in Dutch?), and just generally getting my head back into the startup mindset.

It’s been great!

Don’t get me wrong, MagCast is a ten year old SaaS company, so not a startup by any stretch, but the feel is there of making things happen, being agile, adapting quickly.

As far as a plateforme de publication de magazines digitaux (French) goes, MagCast is, IMO, head and shoulders above the rest.

For one, all the competitors (that I’ve looked at anyway), have a ‘call for pricing’ mentality. Does anyone looking at a SaaS solution really want to call for pricing?

MagCast links to their pricing from every page. It’s up front, and entirely transparent. There are also zero additional fees for volume, bandwidth, etc.

They are also super new-publisher-friendly. Like, they make it really easy, and actively help new publishers get off the ground. Every membership includes 90 days access to live Zoom courses on the business of magazine publishing. These are geared towards launching, growing and monetizing new magazines, and they’re taught by fellow publishers. It’s pretty cool.

Magazine apps are published for iOS and Android in the App Store and Google Play, but they also have a store built exclusively for MagCast publishers that lets readers buy magazine apps that they can access on Apple and Google devices, as well as their computers. In other words, readers can make operating system agnostic magazine purchases.

Anyway, if you are looking for a plattform für die Veröffentlichung von digitalen Magazinen (German, and yes, I need to stop with all the languages), check out MagCast.

If you’re a marketer or content creator in the Internet business opportunity and/or content marketing space, and have a ready list of potential publishers, let’s put together a webinar for your audience. Join our affiliate program.

And if you do none of the above, at least wish me luck on this leg of my journey.

Cheers!

My family and I have enjoyed various laser cut projects. From dragons to film projectors to working trebuchets, there are a ton of cool projects on the market. And ever since our first play of Wingspan, we’ve talked about making dice towers, token organizers and other fun things on a laser cutter. This builds on all the organizers we’ve 3dD printed for our collection of board games.

We broke out Above and Below this past Thanksgiving – so organized! 😛

So, long story short, when my wife and eldest came to me with the idea of getting a laser cutter and potentially starting a side hustle, I didn’t take a lot of convincing. I may have been the one to suggest we upgrade to the 20w…

Our new xTool D1 Pro arrived this week. I had never used a laser cutter, never touched the software, and only downloaded it that day during breaks from a 12 hour workday (Please, side hustle, take me away from this madness!). I fiddled with the software at lunch and during those same breaks and sometime after 10pm when I got off work, we tried our first project, a hex based gaming coaster!

I am really pleased with the results! I think I mentioned I’d never done this before. Seriously, you set your drink on that while rolling a D20, right, right?

xTool’s software isn’t crazy intuitive as far as image editing goes, but the cutting/etching part is pretty straightforward. If you have Illustrator, Photoshop, or some other editing software, prep your images there first. This coaster was cut with the pre-sets for Basswood ply. Not sure if that’s what came in the sample pack, but there you go. IWe got a little better detail with slightly less power on future attempts, but those are all cut up from experimenting on both sides of the wood. The Yin Yang Tiger/Dragon is pretty badass. Will maybe update once our wood arrives.

One thing I personally love about xTool Creative Space is that it has a hexagon shape built in. Hexagons are not easy to create out of thin air, so what a relief!

I have more designs in the works, but I burned through the wood that came in the sample pack while testing settings to try to dial in the perfect cut and etch. We have 30 sheets of Baltic Birch plywood on the way from WoodworkersSource.com, and I have some small plum lumber I milled myself off our property, but we really should have ordered wood in advance. Initially I want to develop some cool gaming coaster sets, maybe four and six packs, hopefully followed up by an assemble-it-yourself dice tower design, and then many, many more.

Anyway, what do you all think?

I was just reading the beginnings of an essay I started, about getting a new bike for Christmas. I wasn’t happy with it, the essay, not the bike, and I realized part of it was the experience, the aesthetic, in short, the font. The developers of LibreOffice defaulted the font in Writer to Liberation Serif, an appalling choice.

Liberation Serif, the name, is lovely. It sounds free and easy, clean with a flourish. Escape the chains of stodgy ol’ Word, and live the good life, the Writer life. On the page, it’s more like my cluttered (understatement) carport, or desk, where I can’t even count the snack options from memory, and where at least one pack of mixed nuts (which I just had to dig for) is best before August, two years ago. I thought I had composted all of those…

To be fair, the writing wasn’t great either. I was trying to capture what it felt like as a kid to be visiting my dad with my brother, and have the police knock on the door Christmas Eve and take him away. We had only just met his new girlfriend, and neither she nor we knew what to do. Anyway, that’s what drafts are for. The font was the real problem.

Writer is similar to Word, it’s writing software. Its users use it to type documents, so a default font that appears jumbled onto the page, and then kicked about by chickens is a poor choice, but that’s programmers for you, at least the type of programmer that would code a free competitor to MS Office.

Don’t get wrong. I say that with some affection. I’ve worked with programmers for decades, and they’re a varied bunch of smart people that can type a fuck-ton faster than I can, but there is a quirk shared by many programmers. They have a baked in feeling of being right. It may not be as true now, as it was back in the day, before everyone started taking Computer Science, but for a time anyway, programmers called themselves “Engineers,” and thought they knew everything.

Clever programmers, who would set out to write complex, but boring software like LibreOffice, don’t often pause to think, maybe I should ask some writers what font they’d like to stare at all day. It’s the reason we get things like old Outlook starting to search our inboxes before we’ve finished typing, one of the most inconvenient things ever.

I mean seriously, I get it that inbox maintenance ain’t my thing, and 40K is a lot of emails, but that’s why I’m using the search function! Let me type the full query before you start spinning!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I switched to Malgun Gothic for a change. It’s better, but the name confuses me. It’s essentially Calibri. What’s Gothic about Calibri?

As 3D printing gains in popularity, more and more fully printable games are becoming available. Print your rules, print your cards, and with 3D printing, printing your playing pieces and game boards!

Everything from 3D versions of classic games like Settlers of Catan, to all new, fully printable  games, to custom units and counters to organizers for all your Machi Koro coins and expansion cards are now readily available to download the files and print.

I’ve selected a few here, just to get you started, but new games are coming out all the time. I’ll try to keep up…

Settlers of Catan

The very existence of Catan Junior, Catan Dice, Catanatonic from Ben and Jerry’s (I kid) and on and on makes it quite clear people are not fed up with Catan. It’s fast becoming a classic, and now’s your chance to upgrade from your flat cardboard bits and bobs to a fully 3D game!

Grab the files at Thingiverse

Hive

I’ve never played this one, not the classic version, nor this super cool 3D version, but all the crawlies make me want to! Who doesn’t want a tabletop game full of 3D printed bugs?

Grab the files at Thingiverse

1775 Join or Die

I recently found this game on Kickstarter. It’s almost funded. This is a fully printable game, where you print the rules, print the character cards and pieces, and optionally 3D print all the characters, including this guy above, who happens to be available as a free .stl through the Kickstarter page.

Check it out on Kickstarter!

Many newer UniWar players bring out the big guns just as soon as they can afford them, but this is almost always too early. Batteries, Wyrms and Walkers are all fantastic units, but they’re expensive and ineffectual early on when you don’t have enough units to protect them. Early artillery is almost always an expensive liability, and the range just isn’t worth it.

As the following video clearly illustrates, it takes more than one long-range shot to kill most units, so putting all your credits into a big gun early is a quick way to lose a match.

I grew up gaming, and hex based games like Melee and BattleTech always had a special appeal. In more recent years, well, going back to 2012 now, I have been absolutely hooked on the mobile game UniWar, and when my brother passed, Takenoko helped me grieve.

It is my hope that this site will help introduce new players to the wide world of hex based gaming.