#alternate format

Are you having trouble getting local game stores to care about your stupid little giant robot game? Annoyed that Classic games take so long that any event usually needs to be an all day affair? Fan of goofy gladiator fights and blind boxes? Well, I have the scenario packet for you:

Introducing the Salvage Free For All

"Sonny.”

“Yes?”

“Come out from under the blanket.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t see me right now.”

“You’re wearing sweatpants and a tee shirt. I saw you five minutes ago. What could have possible changed?”

“You told me I’m beautiful.”

“You are.”

“So now you can’t see me.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this right; you’re hiding under the blanket because you’re blushing?”

“...No...”

“Last chance, babe.”

“Mikey- no-”

“I’m stronger than you, you had to know I’d get the blanket out of the way eventually.”

“Don’t look at me!”

“But you’re so-” ... “-damn-” ... “-gorgeous.”

“You are too, shut up.”

“Make me.”

Hot Potato

After each turn, players swap consoles.

Here are the rules

Players must be in the same physical location (because I have no idea how to make this happen without that being a rule).

Players need to bring a full team of 6 pokemon.

Any generation can be used.

Players can decide between themselves if there should be any restrictions on what pokemon are used (e.g. no legendaries, no explosion)

At the start of each turn, players swap consoles.

The winner is the player who holds the console that says it won.

I haven't played this but I told a few friends and we started thinking about weird dumb strategies you can do. Bringing a full team of six came about because I realized you could bring a pokemon that can just knock itself out immediately and, like, a level 1 Magikarp and just win turn 2.

Now that Vivid Voltage has released, it is time to make a few small updates to this format.

New Card Pool Additions:

Ordinary Rod

Ruling Updates: Added Ruling for PokePower and PokeBodies

All Pokemon Power and Pokebodies are treated as Abilities. Any card effects that affect either, will affect all of them.

New Ban-List Additions:

Aerodactyl (Fossil 1)

Ancient Mew

Sneasel (Neo Genesis 25)

My playgroup got together this past weekend and we tried out an alternate Commander format: Piñata. If you’re unfamiliar with this format, it’s pretty straightforward. Players can’t attack or do damage to each other. The only things you can attack are planeswalkers & the piñata. The piñata has 25 life times however many players there are (for example, if there are 3 players: 3*25=75 life). And lastly, players can use their creatures to block for the piñata (or their planeswalkers). The winner is the person who delivers the killing blow to the piñata.

I was really excited to try out this format because I thought it would solve the main issue I have with multiplayer formats such as Commander: it’s boring for people who have been removed from the game. Often in multiplayer games the best strategy is to take an opposing player out and thus improve your chances of winning. However, removing somebody from the game isn’t very fun for them and having fun is kind of the whole point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing the strategy or even people who pursue that strategy, I’m just pointing out that some people have very limited time available to play Magic and don’t want to spend that time watching the rest of their playgroup play.

As an Adaptive Technologist (AT for short - Important: not to be confused as IT) I spend a portion of my job creating what we call Alternate Format, or what can also be called electronic format. This is a process by which a physical document or book is scanned and/or converted into a format that is accessible electronically. 

Working with publishers to get a good copy of the original text is the best way to start this process, and more and more it is becoming the norm. However, there are some times when, for what ever reason, the text has to be scanned in manually. Depending on the individual performing the scanning, or the quality of the original, we still sometimes end up with almost unusable results.

With poor quality electronic scans, our OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software has a much more difficult time creating live text, thus making electron reading difficult or impossible. 

What I want to share here today is a method I recently discovered that can help increase the success rate of running an OCR of a poorly scanned or faded document. This process will require Adobe Acrobat Pro, and Photoshop CS6. This is the software I used, but it may work with an older version of these Adobe products.

Step 1: Open the faded PDF file in Adobe Pro. Once opened, select File > Save As > Image > and TIFF.

This will create individual graphic TIFF files of each page.

Step 2: Open Photoshop with one of your TIFF files, it doesn't matter which file, we won't be saving this one, we just need it to test our settings with, then select Window > Actions.

Step 3: From the Actions palette, click on the Create new action button, give it a name, and click on Record. From this point on, everything you do to your document will be recorded into this Action. It's a good idea to explore the settings you want to apply first, before you start recording your action.

Step 4: At this point you will need to begin adjusting the Brightness/Contrast and the Exposure settings, you can find them in the Image menu. If you have Live Preview on you can see what works for you. I played with these settings before actually recording my batch action so I'd know which setting worked best for my document.

In my case, adjusting the Exposure to it's maximum setting (+20.00) and the offset to it's lowest setting (-0.5000) seemed to work perfectly, darkening the text, and making the background page brighter.

Step 5: When everything looks good with your document just go to the Actions palette and click Stop.

Now that we have our created Action, we can use it to process all the TIFF files and perform the same action on every file. If you are working with a 600 page textbook, your life just got a lot easier.

To run the batch action on your TIFF files, do the following;

Step 1: Click on File > Automate > Batch and select your newly created action under the Play section at the top.

Step 2: Select your Source folder (The one you saved all your TIFF files to.) Make sure you check off the suppress warnings and options. This will prevent the batch action from continually asking you to click on popup boxes.

Step 3: Select your destination folder. I'd recommend creating a new folder to save all the image corrected TIFF files.

All you have to do now is sit back and watch the computer do all the work. Now is a great time to go get a coffee.

When Photoshop has finished working it's magic, all you need to do is go into the destination folder, select all the files (Keyboard Shortcut: Control A) and Right click. From the now open context menu, choose to combine all the files. Adobe Acrobat will now create a single PDF file with all the pages back in order.

This newly created document can now be run through your OCR software of choice and if your Photoshop adjustments worked, should process at a higher success rate.

Your success rate will vary depending on the quality of your original document, but by using these techniques you should hopfully find some kind of improvement.

Here is a sample from my original text.

Here is the corrected text sample.

                                   lines of                      c                      o                      k                      e in the spoon lighter hurts your  fucking thumb syringe sucks greedily mirror of your own desire.

scattered mass of scars mark your fragile arms takes you so long now to find your vein.