Guardians Page Reborn!

C. J. Burke's Guardians Page has found a new, maybe temporary, maybe not, home at:

http://www.mrburkemath.net/guardians/

No ".html" needed. Just go to that directory as you did in the old days.

Right now, the pages were uploaded as they were. I haven't updated them for about seven years now. I'll get to that.

Please ignore all references to the io.com domain -- and that includes the e-mail address!

Be sure to come back here with Suggestions and Comments.

Enjoy.

It's Gone, But Not Forgotten ...

July 1 has come and gone, and with it, all my old pages.

However, I spent the last two days of June using an old ftp program and copied all (or almost all) of the files I had there, trying to keep the directory structures in tact. (For one thing, I had a million files named INDEX.HTML and DATA.

My next little side project will be to go through those pages, remove the references to the old domain, and upload them somewhere. Possibly mrburkemath.net, owned by yours truly, Mr. Burke, who teaches math.

Yes, I'm known by many names.

Why a math site? For one thing, I already own the site for my job. Second, I don't want to pay for another site to hold, essentially, ten megabytes of information. And, finally, it is conceivable that someone, some day, could come along and say, "Hey, you can't have tannikermsith.net! That's our intellectual property!"

And, no, I wouldn't argue with someone about that. I may have taken on that identity because it's a cool name, but I wouldn't challenge the creator for not protecting it.

C.J. Burke's Guardians Page is Going Away

My original page, which I haven't updated in many, many years, will finally be coming down. Not because I've lost interest in the game -- although I can't find an opponent to play against locally.

No, the fact is that the domain name io.com has been sold (again), and everyone is being evicted. A quick summary can be found here.

I've only kept that account for Guardians web page and some other files I had there. Those URLs are archived in more places than I could imagine, and they still get hits. I know, because even though I only check that email every couple months (a lot of spam gets through the filter, so it's bothersome), I still get email about the old stuff. (Guardians and Car Wars, mostly.)

If the name has to change, and I'm losing something I've had for most of two decades, then there's no reason to keep the account at all. I can move the pages elsewhere. It's just a matter of figuring out where.

Once Upon a Time, There was a Card Game named Guardians...

Back in the mid-90s, there was a glut of collectible card games, also called trading card games. Many were quickly-produced, jump-on-the-bandwagon, make-a-quick-buck games, which tried to cash in on the success of Magic: the Gathering.

One game that was better than all that was FPG's Guardians. It was fun to plan, had great artwork and simple rules. And it didn't take itself too seriously. Sadly, I discovered this game right about the time the company decided to discontinue it.

That didn't bother me much, because there was a fan base on usenet and a handful of webpages. In fact, at one point, I had risen in the ranks of geekdom to have been the go-to guy for information if you couldn't find a representative from FPG. (Paging Dave Gentzler! Paging Dave Gentzler!) Folks said that if you stopped by my webpage, you might learn a thing or two. (I'd point you to the webpage, but I really need to take it down as I haven't used that account in many, many years even though I'm still paying for it. But I digress...)

When I posted on usenet, and later on a mailing list, I used to add what I called ".sig cards", homebrew card ideas which might've been serious or silly or possibly related to whatever I was posting. (As an aside, the idea to try to have different funny signatures came from following a Master, the late John M. Ford. If only I could be that good!)

I have recently discovered (as in a half-hour ago) that there is a Guardians blog (which I knew about) which has been taking my ideas and creating cards out of them using artwork from some of the original contributors of the game. He specifically took my cards and wanted to make a set out of them. In fact, he started this past May and just finished, and I discovered it accidentally while looking for something else.

Okay, now this doesn't have much to do with math, other than stuff about Probability and Statistics and Game Theory and the fact that Magic was created by a mathematician, but it's something I'm proud of, and I would like to share it with as many people as I can.

And it's frikkin' cool.

My .sig cards, as imagined by Jackalware.

Outsmarting Myself!!

Now that I finished the Trifectas, I was looking for something else to post, preferably something that I still had the original HTML files for. (The Creature Class Critique files don't exist anymore -- I had to copy them from the Guardians Yahoo Group.)

I decided I was going to import my The Table of Elements.

Unfortunately, I created that file in Javascript, which I was experimenting with at the time, you know, to learn a new skill. I have NO IDEA how to import it other than to cut and paste the final page and then add all the formatting tags ... AGAIN.

sigh

Vacation Coming

My family and I are going on vacation next week. If I have time today during my lunch hour, I'll queue up some more files, but today is definitely the last day I'll be updating this page for the next couple of weeks.

So if you don't see any new posts, it's not because I gave up already but because I'm busy.

Welcome to Tanniker Smith's Guardians Page

This is a new blog dedicated to the defunct CCG "Guardians", published by FPG, Inc. in the mid-90s.

"New" isn't exactly true. I currently, as of this posting, already have a Guardians page at http://www.io.com/~cjburke/guardians/

However, I haven't really used that Internet account for much of anything -- not even mail -- in ages. It's mostly there as a storage depot for my files. And I'm still forking over a fee every month for no real reason. Kinda silly.

So my first order of business will be to copy the postings from that page to this one. However, you are all welcome to comment on this page, which you couldn't do over there.

I have no great plans to announce this page until I have more material going, but feel free to pass the word around.