Sheesh, just found out Myspace is reporting all links this site as a source of spam, spyware, and/or viruses.

Anyone who knows me and is familiar with this site and what we do here (and have done since 2001) know better. Not only is this site clean of spam, spyware, viruses, and phishing tactics. You’ll also find it’s totally and completely free of any ads, banners, or link exchange programs. I do not make or even attempt to make any profit from this site. Nor do I promote or condone any activities which would harm anyone or their property.  IMHO, Myspace is completely full of shit for even blocking us. Hell you probably stand a better chance of getting a virus or malware from Myspace than you ever would here.

-TM

Well, today I hacked my first ATX PSU. Wasn’t much to it really, just followed the directions over at http://web2.murraystate.edu/andy.batts/ps/powersupply.htm and it went pretty straight forward. I took a few liberties with the general design (blame Radio Shack, they were out of Binding Posts) - actually like the way I did it better anyways. The plan is to use this one to power the talking skull (5v) and the DC motors (12v) which control both the neck of the armature and the stirring action of the witch.

Here’s a quick peak at my handy work.

I covered the vent where I zip tied the sandbar resister with a strip of electronical tape. The reason being is that I didn’t want to expose the heat sink lube as it oozed out - that stuff is like super toxic and I don’t me or anyone who happens to handle this baby the unknowingly touch the stuff.

An astute observer (at least one who’s done this before) will notice I’m missing the blue -12v wire. That’s because the dag nabbit thing came loose from the circuit board when I was organizing wires. I didn’t bother soldering it back because I was feeling a bit a lazy not wanting to remove the circuit board from the chassis to get to the bottom. And because I figured well, the motors only run off +12v anyways so I currently don’t need it.

I have it powering a miniature string of Christmas LEDs that typically ran off 4 AA batteries as a load test. We’ll see how she does.

-TM

Well the time has come to put coding projects asside and start gearing up for Halloween 2008. “Wow TM, it’s still only May?! October is a way off still, starting a little early?” you may ask… YES! Last year I nearly ran myself to the ground trying to get the all the things I had planned going - money and time were extremely tight; I was making last minute adjustments not just days but mere minutes before the ToTs (Trick or Treaters) arrived; and even with that I cut a good number of corners and ideas from the final display.  At the end of the evening I tore most of it down alone. The next day I had to take a PTO from work just to wrap up the cleanup and recooperate.

I’ve got a big agenda planned for this year where I’ll be introducing some cool new custom built props and concepts. The theme will center around another peak into the haunted lands of Khatharia, this time we’ll take a look into a yet unnamed disenchanted woods of dark faeries, black magic, and of course the undead. The theme is loosely based and inspired by Nox Arcana’s latest CD entitled Grimm Tales.

Some of the things to keep an eye out for is the faerie queen’s fortress, an old crone brewing a cauldron of fright, living trees and vines, and perhaps even an appearance by a distant cousin of El Fauno (of Pan’s Labyrinth). The graveyard will see several enhancements including a more realistic fence and a few new denizens to boot.

So yes I have a busy summer lined up. Keep an eye out for updates.

-TM

Well I’ve toyed with the demo of RPG Maker VX (used the English mod). While the return of world map support, random dungeons, and even character portraits were welcome, some of the newer features leaves much to be desired.

Why can’t Enterbrain just leave features in and just add to the existing product instead of rebuilding the engine entirely each time? Don’t any of their developers reuse code and keep a library of stuff? While XP was lacking in a few areas (most notably missing was support for world maps, vehicles, encounter areas, and character portraits) it added a crap load of fantastic features which are no where to be found in VX.

The largest area with missing and limited stuff are maps. Gone is the ability to add fog to your map (granted this can be emulated with script). Pictures are again now limited to 20 (this used to be the limit in 2000 and was upped to 50 in XP - this MAY be a demo limitation only but I thought I’d point it out).

Gone is the ability to assign tileset/chipsets to a map. In fact tilesets are completely gone from the database. Instead you are given one large chipset/tileset thats shared across your entire project. This severely limits the diversity in maps. Once you fill the five banks (A-E) thats it, you can’t even expand the PNG file downwards to add more chips. I know it was a neat idea to share world chips with town chips but come on Enterbrain what the hell were you thinking here? The way it was implemented in XP was a step in the right direction, now you’ve taken at least two steps back.

Auto-layers - ok, this is a neat idea that makes map building easy for even noobs. But at least let those with mad leet map skillz edit on layers if we want. Also, the third layer added in XP seems to be gone.

Auto-shadows - another nice feature that should be optional. Not all of us want to see a shadow for a wall along the east side. What if the sun or light source is coming from the east? What if we’re indoors or underground? Not to mention the feature is a bit buggy and doesn’t always calculate where the shadow should be. This fluff should have either been  dropped from the release or made optional at the map or database level.

Battle-system. I admit I didn’t dig too deeply here because I always roll my own in each project. However they’ve returned to the PhantasyStar style combat. Personally I feel that they should have included several different combat models as plugins and let the user decide which one to use in their project.

There’s a lot of other little things that irked my nerves but this isn’t really a review so I won’t go into details. But my overall reaction is there’s nothing in this product to justify upgrading or the $40 price difference between VX and XP - yes, VX is gonna hit the English speaking market this February at a whopping $100 US.

My advice is if you’re gonna dish money out on a maker pick up RPG Maker XP and stay clear of VX. Otherwise stay with the reliable RPG Maker 2000 or 2003.

-TM

Man, I get engrossed with my Halloween projects this past October and Enterbrain goes and make an announcement when I’m not looking. I know this news is probably old to anyone who’s been avidly still following the Maker line. But apparently, as the title suggests, Enterbrain is about to unleash RPG Maker VX unto the masses. In fact the Japanese version will be released this month followed by an official English release in February 2008.

Ok I’m sure that those who were disappointed by the last release, RPG Maker XP are probably thinking - oh brother (or some other explicative)! But let me be the first to tell you right now that from what I’ve seen of VX, everything that pissed off fans of 2k and 2k3 when XP came out have been addressed in VX.

Thats right, Enterbrain has gone back to a lot of the winning features from both RPG Maker 2000 and 2003. Miss world maps? Miss vehicles? Miss character portraits? Miss the random dungeon generator from RPG Maker 2003? Miss being able to pile multiple characters in one chipset? It’s all back while still maintaining a lot of the powerful features they added in XP. It’s like they’ve taken the best features from 2000, 2003, and XP, and created a new product. In addition, it looks like they’ve also borrowed some features from other popular makers such as wall shadows from RPG Toolkit and added some things that we’ve been hacking into our games for years such as character emote bubbles.

Don’t take my word for it, head over to the official Enterbrain RPG Maker VX English page: http://www.enterbrain.co.jp/tkool/products/rpgvx/eng/index.html

Also check out http://www.rpgmakervx.com/ to follow the latest updates and scoops including screenshops and direct from the developer technical information not present on the official site.

-TM

Well Halloween 2007 has come and gone - and what a great night it was. I didn’t get to set up a few things the way I originally wanted to: the woods Scene Setter doesn’t go all the way up the sides due to a lack of a sufficient height ladder and I didn’t get to setup the tent in the driveway (aka The Tomb of Vile Goodies). Actually in the end, the table worked out better because everyone wanted to come up the walkway anyways. The wind earlier around dusk and near the end of the evening played a little havoc on the facade. And for some reason the fog rarely left the left side of the yard.

Overall though it was a fantastic evening and 2007 by far blew away what I’ve done in 2005 and 2006 by a long shot. For the first time I felt like a celebrity as I had so many adult and teens taking photo’s with their cameras and cellphones, some having their kids pose with me or one or more of the props. Nearly every adult had nothing but complimentary things to say. One teenage girl said she was posting the pictures she took on her Myspace page (i’ll have to track down a link to that for here). A few of the smaller kids were a little scared to enter but most eventually worked up the nerve at the coaxing of their parents. One woman even says I should go into the business professional (thanks, but I feel I have a lot more ummm boning up to do).

The best compliment was from someone I never expected. While cleaning up and putting stuff away for the night the town police stopped in front of my house (they’ve been patrolling the neighborhood since about 8:30pm or so) and rolled their window down. I was expecting to get reprimanded for maybe have the music too loud at almost 10pm. Instead they just wanted to tell me that I had the best house they had seen all evening (for sanity’s sake I did ask about the volume which turned out to be fine).

Overall I think we saw nearly 200 TOTs (not including parents) based on the 7+ large bags of candy we nearly depleted. Head over to the Halloween section to see more pictures from the evening.

What a great night… Now to start planning for next year - looking at either Black Magic or Pirates next year. I think we’ll actually try and keep a real tally of the TOTs as well as take more pictures of the traffic coming through.

“Spiders are scary, witches are scary, I am scary… You are not scary.” -The Flying Dutchman to Spongebob Squarepants

This weekend I was down in Louisiana visiting the parental units. Being that Connecticut has some of the most boring professional haunted houses in the nation I thought I’d treat my wife to a real haunted attraction experience.

Keep in mind I hadn’t been to a Louisiana based haunt in about eight years. Being that long, even with Katrina, I expected SOME improvements to a haunt that I used to think was totally awesome. Boy were we both in for a surprise.

The wait to get tickets wasn’t terribly bad, we got there 20 minutes before they opened the window. They did move the ticket entrance about two blocks away from the actual attraction so there was a bit of a walk - no biggie, I work in the city so walking is not a new concept to me.

There may have been about 100 people in line in front of us. Then all of a sudden a guy came out from behind the barricade and waved to someone way in the back. A large cheer ensued from the crowd in the back and a group of about 50 or so folks wearing “The 13th Gate” t-shirts came forward and were allowed special entrance (The 13th Gate is another haunted attraction in Louisiana) - so now we had about 150 people in front of us.

Once the booth opened the line moved pretty quickly. We each paid our $18 bucks entrance fee and walked the two blocks down through the warehouse district under the Huey P. Long bridge. I expected to see some kind of themed decor but there was nothing but rows of truck trailers lined up forming a pseudo street.

We get to the back where the attraction is located. Not too bad - a paid photo-op with a demonic statue, a couple concession stands, a stage with a live rock band I didn’t recognize (most likely a local band), a souvenir stand, and of course the cue line. We weren’t interested in anything but the attraction so we got right in the cue line at approximately 8:15p.

In front of the cue line was a massive stage setup with a nice stonework like facade. In the center was a huge TV screen showing clips from various horror movies - some scenes were recognizable and some were a little more obscure. Ok, that’s neat… But that wore off after about 15 minutes of waiting and not moving. At this point things started going down hill.

They had a few ghouls wondering about the cue line being creepy. But one of them crossed the line when he directly and intentionally touched my wife’s face in a caressing manner (in that demonic, you look tasty way). Now I know House of Shock has a disclaimer saying that they’re an interactive haunted attraction and there may be incidental contact. Incidental my ass, that was intentional. We were both pretty pissed off. But we paid our $18 bucks and with their strict no refund policy I was determined to keep my cool and see it through to the end - get my money’s worth.

At about 8:45 or so the stage lit up and out came Reverend B. Dangerous. Essentially a side show type act, this man did some pretty sick stuff to his own body including putting a whirling drill, hammering a nail, and sticking a full length screwdriver into his nostrils; stapling a cloth to his arms and tongue; hanging a large video camera from his tongue; and brain flossing with a condom. For his finale the crazy bastard set off a small pack of firecrackers in the front side of his trousers. As sick as it was, the show broke the tension we were feeling from the earlier touching incident.

At about 9:30 the main show began. On the upper stage was the devil Belial who talked about declaring war on god and that the House of Shock would be a training ground for his new soldiers. He introduced his general who turns against him and kills him. But Belial was not to be easily defeated and lived on. The show was emphasized with an awesome show of pyrotechnics around the stage (man those flames are hot) and some decent visual effects on the huge monitor. The stage was set and I was getting pumped up again… The doors opened and people started going in.

When I got to the entrance, security made me put my ankh necklace inside my shirt (still not quite sure why - if I had to guess it be so the actors don’t tug at any jewelery when touching you) and we proceeded to enter. And downhill it all went again.

The rooms were a bit stereotypical - graveyards, meat shops, hillbilly swamps, caves, a satanic church, guys with chainsaws and buzz saws. The sounds were downright annoying, overly loud, and consisted of machinery and high voltage buzzing. But nothing at all scary. The props were all obviously props with tons of poor placements where all the mechanics of the pneumatics were completely visible. The scares were all predictable. There was one room where the entrance was dark and had the usual fabric type barrier except the barrier was drenched in what I could only hope was water. Not only was it gross to feel but I’m sure it was loaded with germs from all the other various patrons - totally unsanitary.

I’ll give them this much, the number of live actors versus props was astounding - nearly every room had a bare minimum of two actors and some with upwards of maybe ten actors. And that doesn’t include the random actors in the halls and the wondering ghouls.

There were many occasions where the things they did just skirted the lines of what was legal and tasteful to do in a haunted attraction. In one room was an actor sitting on the floor, his legs blocking the only egress. You had to literally step over his legs to get out. Anyone not watching their step could have tripped over him and gotten hurt - lawsuit waiting to happen. In another room was a demon actor licking the crotch of a baby doll - offensive and disgusting yes, but not scary. And one of my favorite things, the huge horned demons walking around, was gone.

Speaking of actors I will note that throughout the house I was directly and intentionally touched on at least three occasions: one grab on my arm, one grabbed my shirt to pull me closer, and another grabbed my ankle. My wife had her face touched yet again in the same manner as earlier and had her arm grabbed at least once or twice. I don’t mind having my personal space invaded, the “in your face” thing is part of the experience… But direct intentional contact is a HUGE no-no. If I wanted to pay someone to touch me I would have gone down to the Quarter instead - at least it would have been more entertaining.

Overall it was an unpleasant experience and a complete waste of $36 bucks. Shocking, that they’re still in business… Scary, hell no… Annoying, better believe it. The House of Shock is nothing but an assault on your senses more than scary and I get enough of that every time I hear Bush try to speak.

Things that annoyed me:

* Actors touching the guests;
* Annoying machinery sound effects;
* Poor placement and use of props;
* Use of gross out tactics overboard;
* Potentially unsafe paths;
* Reckless actors;
* Ridiculous wait before the show started;
* No horned demons in any of the rooms.

Things I liked:

* The squishy floored hallway;
* The opening stage shows.

If you happen to be in the New Orleans area, don’t waste your money on House of Shock. I can only hope the The 13th Gate is much better (considering they’re ranked #2 in the nation I would think so) and only wish we’d had gone there instead. And we would have if it weren’t for the 1.5h drive to Baton Rouge.

-TM

*WHEW* I started the front yard today. Mowed the lawn and put up the gothic skull fences. Had a tough time with them as we haven’t been getting a lot of rain which left the soil pretty dry and packed. In addition I out the core tombstones.

We had picked up about six mid-sized tombstones from Party City last week - they had a great buy 2 get 1 free deal on the $6.99 tombstones. I’m not a huge Party City fan but I really liked the tombstones we got from them as they all came with these neat T shaped plastic spikes. The only complaint was the cross shaped one which felt a little light and flimsy compared to the others.

You can follow the progress on my main Halloween page. Below are the current pictures.

Found a nice sized garden spider in my back yard with a beautiful orb spun between the house and the laundry line. The pic is terrible really and you can’t see the gold and white spider. Looks like she arrived just in time for Halloween