Even without the fall of the Goa’uld, the galaxy was a dangerous place. But now everyone wants a piece of the action. What can I say? I’ll ship your goods … even keep my mouth shut … for a little Naquada more.

You can also read this episode online.

 

 For a little naquada more - 004 - Cough [2:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (347)

The MMORPG.com newsletter had this to say about Stargate Worlds:

The MMORPG.com crew has just returned from the San Diego Comic Con and the general consensus is that Stargate Worlds was the highlight of the show.

The Stargate booth was a madhouse, with fans lined up around the corner. You couldn’t turn around without seeing some form of advertisement for SGW, in the form of water bottles, t-shirts, and full sized ads covering buses out front. Stargate Worlds also had a heavy presence at the premier of Stargate: Continuum, the latest DVD movie for the franchise, which was held on the USS Midway.

But what’s better than all of that is that the folks at FireSky were finally ready to grant us a glimpse of the game, with an in depth look at combat, mini-games, and more.

Very cool! Take a look at their website for details (that is, videos) of the in-game gameplay.

It’s been a while coming but WELL worth the wait. FireSky have released an official trailer for Stargate Worlds that consists of real in-game footage. (video hosted by Game Videos website).

I plan on sitting down tonight and composing my thoughts. Right now I’m all “sqeeee!”

Two nice pieces over on IGN regarding Stargate Continuum:

• SDCC 08: Stargate: Continuum Impressions
• SDCC 08: Stargate: Continuum Red Carpet

Oh, and 14,500 total downloads of the podcast! The 15k milestone is coming around fast!

Trawling through the various news postings, I ran across this image of the SGW booth, in a gallery on the IGN website.

That’s a NICE looking “live” startgate in the background, with (I believe) Chris Klug visible.

Khatie blogged about her arrival in San Diego for Comic-Con. Nice to see someone applying rules of spelling to create a word though: she mentioned the team “mantling” (as the opposite of “dismantling”) booth #3535 at the convention centre. Now THAT is my kind of word creation. It follows rules. It validates me when I talk about being a “gruntled” employee (the opposite of “disgruntled”).

Over on SGW-IRC there’s an interesting news post - SGWircTV - there will be either [a] a live streaming video feed direct from Comic-Con, courtesy of Gods-of-Valhalla.com and their on-the-spot reporter ooryl2.

Looks like an unofficial Comic-Con thread in the SGW forums will be pulling things together, definitely a place to watch, as is the more official thread.

Note: the SGW specific news page over at MMORPG.com looks to be a little out of date, but as a site they are usually up on the latest developments (coverage of E3 was good for instance). Its worth keeping an eye open for what they have to say about Comic-Con.

Looks like Chris Klug is getting in on the Comic-Con blogging action too.

(edit - 3:35pm)

Looks like a nice (but more film related) blog is covering Comic-Con - http://screenrant.com/tag/comic-con/

I’ve seen people posting details of their rig on other sites, so I thought it was high-time I did so here too.

To walk through the image:

• On the far left: HP LaserJet 2420 printer - far better than my old printer by leaps and bounds.
• Tucked in under the printer - Apple Mac Mini computer. The workhorse that has been the centre of the rig since I started and now relegated to just file and print sharing.
• ProLine mini boom desktop mic stand
• Kel HM-1 condenser mic, in a shock-mount
• Sterling Audio PF-1 pop-filter - gets rid of the nasty pop noises of “p” and “b” blowing air into the mic.
• At the back, my Alesis mixing desk with firewire hookup to the studio computer.
• Samsung 22" widescreen LCD monitor
• Apple MacBook laptop - now the centre of my world. Not only did it supplant the Mac Mini for podcasting, but its beaten off competition from my Dell Inspiron laptop to become my main machine.
• Tucked between the MacBook and the big-ass monitor, is an Apple Keyboard (for the Mac Mini)
• An ancient pair of Labtec speakers that provide me with sound
• Underneath the speaker, Western Digital “MyBook” 750 Gb external drive - there are only 2 kinds of people in the world … those who obsessively back up their data, and those who have yet to experience a hard-drive crash. There are 3 Apple computers in my house, and all three run “Time Machine” for backups. (Drive/volume names: Zippy, Bungle, Geoffrey & George … can anyone guess what inspired the names?)
• Lastly a lovely old Logitech “TrackMan Marble” trackball

This is proof, from episode 21 of the podcast, that I script the whole thing. To the left is a text editor with my script, and to the right is Apple GarageBand, showing the first 40-seconds of the episode.

My very first steps in podcasting made us of a tool called Propaganda - surprisingly capable for the price but it had some severe limitations too. On the strength of Propaganda I took a look at the DJ Mixing software from the same company and fell in love with MixMeister Express.

In January 2007 I posted to my personal blog about issues I’d encountered with Flash based audio players. Detailed there was my next step - record raw audio in the fabulous “Audacity” audio editing software. Export, and use MixMeister or Propaganda to do the mixing/editing of things. Save as a WAV file and encode to MP3 using a command-line utility called “lame”. I mentioned yearning for the simplicity of the one-stop Propaganda software.

Then I took a look at what Apple had to offer, and was seduced by GarageBand. All the mixing and editing power I needed, great audio recording, and could export into iTunes for final ID3 tag editing. All-in-all my new favourite tool.

So, that’s the rig. Modular enough that different pieces can be upgraded for better at any time, but still within the bounds of reason as far as price. I believe (before the most recent upgrades) I’d invested around $1200 in things but that was before adding the backup disk and new laptop.

I went back through the trivia scores this evening, overall scores ranged from 21 - 32, with a distinct cluster in the upper 20’s. Khatie was given the names of the 4 highest scoring entries, and it did come down to the tie-breaker question to make the final determination! Great work everyone. Khatie was also notified of the winner of the fiction contest. That wraps up all 5 of the beta keys I was given and I have to say, they were well deserved in all cases. I wish I had a bunch more to give to the runners-up!

Even without the fall of the Goa’uld, the galaxy was a dangerous place. But now everyone wants a piece of the action. What can I say? I’ll ship your goods … even keep my mouth shut … for a little Naquada more.

You can also read this episode online.

 

 For a little naquada more - 003 - Venom [3:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (368)

Even without the fall of the Goa’uld, the galaxy was a dangerous place. But now everyone wants a piece of the action. What can I say? I’ll ship your goods … even keep my mouth shut … for a little Naquada more.

You can also read this episode online.

 

 For a little naquada more - 002 - Waiting [2:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (432)