 Nearly 24 hours early with this one. I should be able to get a decent backlog up if this goes on! Heck, I even spent half the morning touring the galaxy in Celestia - it's even better than my old RedShift2 in terms of eye candy (and extrasolar planets), and it's free (albeit an 11Mb download). Recommended to all true geeks. Forgot to mention it before, but I picked up Rising Stars 21 the other day, which is much fun, and I think I have an inkling of what's going to happen, but we'll see. Probably in another 6 months, we'll see. (It's been coming out since mid-1999, you see.) Finally, seems like Pillars of Faith is back from Christmas holiday, full of vamp-hunting goodness. Thou who'ren't reading it, do thee so anon, ere I lose all grasp of standardised English completely. HISTORY First, to the history at hand. Venetian glass, while readily available, isn't in the hands of these peasants except as panes in the lantern (small pieces of glass held in by lead plumbing). So they still drink out of ceramic or lacquered wood vessels. And if you think that's bad, note that Voltan has to use a crust of bread (known as a trencher) as a plate. That wasn't so uncommon, even amongst the upper class of Europe; bread was fairly tough, it could soak up gravy and the like, and you could eat it afterwards with no need to wash up. The ruined fortress isn't Roman design; it owes more to Crusaders-era architecture than the antique era. If you look closely at the culvert emerging from the cliff-face, you can see the keystone arch typical of Roman architecture, indicating that someone built this castle over the top of a Roman ruin. Now for some ongoing stuff. Ray writes: Oldest Person Ever: 122 Years, 164 Days: Jeanne Louise Calment (France). Oldest Living Woman: Maude Farris-Luse (nee Davis), Born: Jan. 21, 1887 (So 116 on the 21st of this year). Note that these are confirmable records... There are probably a few (very few) folks that have been older... But that's all we got in the records for the record books. PS: History of Guinness World Records, just FYI, it is, indeed, the same company that makes the infamous Guinness Beer. They put out the book to stop arguements (And, thus, spilt beer) in bars over records. Now, the Barflies can just look it up rather than get into fights and waste good beer drinking time. :-) So there you have it, Thetis is officially older than any known human. And on a somewhat seasonal subject, I can't find any more specifics, but apparently the pagan festival that Christmas was hijacked onto was to celebrate a Persian deity... or at least, that's what a reader tells me. Any takers for more detail? (You'd think I'd be able to find out more... but I doubt I'd be able to find a single useful fact in a week of digging through the theological tomes that line this house.) ART It came together quite well, methinks. I've started adding secondary lightsources to certain parts of the coloured image, and putting extra layers of shadow over the top just brought out the topology of the clifface. The lightning also looked pretty good. I'm hoping to do something new for the upcoming dungeon scenes. I'll poke about with the colour balances of entire images, and probably concentrate on doing bigger panels with more happening in them. We'll see how it turns out. GAME Thankful villagers are always neat. However, this is as close to a tavern scene as you're ever likely to get (well, until Part 2, and even then it's brief and atypical). So much for stereotype. |
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