Programming will return to usual computer related bloggery shortly.

I've lived with 3 other guys, who I've known for a long time now, for several years. In that time frame we're yet to have a major disagreement over anything. I know they say ‘if you can't spot the crazy in the room, then you're the crazy’, but I'm pretty sure it's all good.

This Christmas I decided to surprise everyone with personalised gifts. Normally we do a house gift, but we honestly didn't need anything. So I did what any sane mid-twenties nerd would do. Buy Nerf guns. The only hint I gave them when a large box arrived, was that it was to aid conflict resolution. Confused them no end.

Stage #1 complete. Stage #2 is personalisation. I did want to paint them, but honestly I'm not really capable of doing that well enough, so I started looking at other options. Since we're all gamers, mostly, and we'd all played Borderlands 2 recently, what better than to make up and print personalised stats cards - like you'd get in-game? I spent an afternoon in Inkscape and came up with some in-jokes to put on them.

Now, I'm no artist, but I think they came out pretty well. As I mentioned they're full of in-jokes, however if you'd like to reproduce these yourself the template is available here. You'll need the following 2 fonts as well: “Compacta Bd Bt” and “Carnevalee Freakshow”.

I got them professionally printed on A5 280gsm silk paper and they look awesome. So if you're stuck for a present idea, for your gamer kid, or adult who wants to be a kid, why not a Nerf gun, a stats card and some in-jokes?

If you do get yours professionally printed I highly recommend exporting from Inkscape as a PDF, and converting the text to paths. This way your printer doesn't need to faff with fonts and you can ensure it comes out exactly as you want them.