eddyfate

Haven't updated seriously in... well, a while. ( Here goes... )

Health: Dizzy spells faded near the end of the day, because they turned into a screaming headache. banzaigrrl was kind enough to give me some ibuprofen, so I could actually think through the last half of class. The dizzy spells are very mild thus far today. Still haven't heard from my doctor.

Media: Finally got through my second watching of Firefly in preparation for the Serenity game. Such a great show, and it holds up to watching a year later. I'm going to make time for the Serenity movie again, and then probably move on to some other backlogged watching I need to do (like Battlestar Galactica).

Gaming: Kind of in a lull, save for Requiem. D&D is next Sunday. Also, in another form of gaming, garchangel got an XBox 360 with his work bonus, but we haven't found a really decent game to play for more than 10 minutes on it, and we have to scam a connection to XBox Live to download the emulators to play our current XBox Classic games.

Finances: Complex. We have money coming in and going out. We're doing okay, but 48 hours after we got the XBox 360, the washer spontaneously died. This kind of money drain just when we think we can splurge a bit has been dogging us since early 2005. Once a few things fall into place it should all be sorted out, though.

Puck: Still a pug dog. Still a puppy.

Past weekend I was feeling antisocial. Went to Friday Requiem game and Saturday Forsaken game, and was fairly blase at both (although the latter I attribute more toward trying to play a brand-new character in a game I know very little about, but I did get some good RP out of it overall and the starting plot is fairly interesting). Outside of that, was minimally social with people outside my house. I finished my homework, read a little of my ubar-cool annotated Sherlock Holmes book, but mostly ran errands and poked around with TV and online fan films (1).

My workout on Sunday marked my second full week of working out. I didn't increase my exercise repetitions, but I did add crunches and pushups, and I'm going to try to do them before or after my treadmill on Tuesday and Thursday as well. I am much less sore than I was last week (hardly sore at all, in fact), so I plan to slowly increase the reps on the various exercises until I'm up to the level of greebotrill and garchangel, and then maybe starting to add weight. I don't feel any improvement, but that's okay because I feel better for doing it, and I can feel that I'm starting to hit the point where it's a habit.

My Palm freaked out on me Sunday (or, more actively, the SD card did), but I uninstalled some applications that were just taking up space and managed to salvage just about everything else before reformatting the Palm and the card, so it's fine now.

UWA is building up nicely. There's still a handful of people who haven't submitted their characters yet, but there are a few players who are really enthusiastic about it, and I have a nice system in place that will help build continuity and structure without me having to keep too much information in my head. If all goes well, I won't spend more than half an hour a week on average running it.

Footnote 1: For example -

Friday Night Smackdown on TiVo: Entertaining. Was surprised to see Super Crazy and Randy Orton put on a good match, and was really into the Undertaker and Kurt Angle match until the end.

Jarhead: Surprisingly good movie. Not awesome, but a philosophical military movie that kept me interested and made me think (and also made me hate Thin Red Line that much more).

Starship Exeter: Fan-made series set in the original Star Trek continuity, complete with cheezy 60s miniskirts and sound effects. The production quality, however, is incredible -- it looks just like the original series. There's only two episodes online (as they come out at the rate of about one a year), but it's well worth watching. There are a few other Star Trek fan series I'm checking out as a result.

Happy New Year!

Last night was the local New Year's/Birthday party for banzaigrrl and myself. Everyone dressed up nice and brought alcohol and finger food. I got pretty drunk, played Kung Fu Chaos, and got a lot of late swag:

* A knock-off Optimus Primal Transformer.
* A DVD of Night Tide to mock.
* Tool Aenima
* A Perfect Circle Mer De Noms
* Queens of the Stone Age Songs For The Deaf
* Three mix CDs (one for birthday, one for my Requiem PC, and one for banzaigrrl's PC).
* Two of the Hard Case Crime novels that I already had (but I will be able to exchange for more HCC novels!)
* Serenity RPG (complete with requests on when I will run it).
* The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume III: The Novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edited with Notes by Leslie S. Klinger

Now I have lots of DVDs to watch, books to read, toys to play with, CDs to listen to, and RPGs to learn and complain I don't have time to run.

Many thanks to mrogre and banzaigrrl for inviting us into their home and throwing a wonderful party, and to everyone who attended for making the party so enjoyable.

Last night I worked on my review of Dead of Night for RPG.net, and watched The Christmas Invasion. I also poked around at some Midway City stuff. Tonight I plan to do some background material to a large number of interconnected projects. If that goes well (and if I get Thursday and Friday off of work like I'm hoping), I want to try to get a draft of "PunkRock" done by 2006.

Had a productive email conversation with someone I thought I was going to have a huge fight with. It's not perfect, and it's not over just yet, but it went better than expected. I'm a little more confident in my ability to assess a situation.

After years of hating it and months of being worn down by my co-worker and my love of Joss Whedon's writing, I've decided to borrow the first season of Buffy to watch. I'm giving it one more chance. If it doesn't grab me, it never will. Of course, this will be after I finish I, Claudius, The Prisoner, my collected of Godfather movies, and so on.

As a side note, people who are knowledgable on the tiny details of the world of Midway City and who want a sneak peek at some behind-the-scenes work on the game, send me an email at spectrum (at) spectrum-games (dot) com; I will need some help soon on checking the details on something I'm working on, and I'm starting to get a little muddled on all of the drafts I've worked on over the years.

What I did on my Christmas vacation: Not a lot.

Sure, lots of stuff happened. I played Burnout 3 and Burnout Revenge. I watched The Cave, Bruce Almighty, some Doctor Who, some I, Claudius, and some The Prisoner. I tried to read Werewolf: The Forsaken, lost interest by chapter two, and switched to The Deryni Adventure Game. I played with Puck, did some chores, and bought some stuff from Borders with a $50 gift card I got from a co-worker (including three of the Hard Case Crime novels).

However, what I didn't do was any writing. I did very little email. I printed up a few things for future consideration, and then filed them away. I took a vacation.

Granted, now I'm behind a bit. I have one review to write, as well as more work on "IndyPirates" and "PunkRock." I need to update my notes for the next Midway City playtest session in January. School starts in a few weeks, too. I'm hoping to be able to take Thursday and Friday off of work and use the five-day weekend to catch up on things. But it was nice to just blow off for a few days.

Edit: I feel it important to point out that both my birthday and Christmas were made awesome because of greebotrill and garchangel.

Saturday was mostly shopping for house things and a few things for myself (like shoes and bits for my office).

Yesterday, went to see Serenity (wonderful movie), watched the remake of Amityville Horror (not bad, but probably will not watch again for other reasons), played some more KotOR, worked on some administration bits for Midway City, and didn't get to actually write anything. No productivity (and don't feel like scrounging up the bar here at work).

Today, woke up with a bad feeling in my gut that hasn't gone away. Work's been pretty heavy this morning, but that's typical for a Monday.

Aside from observational rambling, I finally finished Casshern last night. Pretty movie, and somewhat entertaining.

Note: Link contains trailer.

Last night I started watching Out of the Past when I started feeling kind of blah. After a few moments checking myself, I think it was more physical than mental, so I turned in early. The movie is good so far at 50 minutes in; maybe I'll get to finish it tonight.

Got turned on to a feed called 365__tomorrows. It's daily short speculative fiction (sci-fi microfiction, in other words) that will post from August 1, 2005 until July 31, 2006. Should be entertaining.

Ugly rainy day today, so that combined with my general blah state makes it hard to move fast today (although I woke up to receive a nice text message from someone I hadn't heard from in a while but who had been on my mind a bit recently). What's worse is that I might either be really busy for the next two days at work, or really slow. We shall see, I suppose.

Yesterday, after I wrote up 49 more notecards, greebotrill, garchangel, and I watched the first four episodes of Lost. Not bad, but not yet the "OH MY GOD YOU MUST WATCH THIS" show people say it is. Nice use of in media res, though. Also started reading The Portrait of Dorian Grey again, and having a much more entertaining time with this attempt, even if Oscar Wilde is a radical gear-shift from melodramatic hopeful romance.

Yesterday was an important day to remember... the anniversary of two very important women in my life. Thank you both for continuing to be a part of my life as well as a part of each other's.

Now I bend my back and start to work, but I am utterly exhausted. Most of this week I need to get into a nice work pattern, because after next Friday my ability to work is going to be a bit fuzzy for a couple of weeks.

SlackCon 3 was yesterday. Unlike previous SlackCons, it wasn't very organized, because a few people were at GenCon and a couple of people unfortunately had plans for part of the day. However, we still have a nice six-person SlackCon, watching Varsity Blues and Layer Cake, playing a game of Ninja Burger (card game, not RPG), enjoying a nice dinner of stuffed peppers, spinach salad, cupcakes, and two kinds of pie (apple and pumpkin), playing of video games, and general chatting and relaxing. cresida got her copy of Cartoon Action Hour, so I admit that I goobed with her about it for quite some time, and I think next SlackCon I might run a game of CAH just for fun. However, another RPG project has resurrected itself in my mind, so I might take a poke at that. It's not a project I can make money on, but it is a design I've been poking at in some form or fashion for about twenty years.

The first season of the Muppet Show just got released on DVD a couple of days ago.

I covet.