eddyfate

It's been a while since I've done this, and I'm getting ready for a LARP in a few minutes, so let's get to this.

• 30 Rock: I admit, when I first caught a couple of episodes of this show, I didn't find it all that funny. But we kept hearing lots of good things about the show, so on a lark we started watching season 2 through Netflix Streaming. We got so hooked that we went back and watching the first season, and now we're catching up on the latest season on Hulu. It's a surprisingly entertaining show with a dose of weirdness that keeps it entertaining.
• Uncharted 2: I wasn't a big fan of Uncharted, so I wasn't all that excited about Uncharted 2. But David picked it up and started playing it, and one night after getting frustrated with Brutal Legend, I decided to give it a try. The best summary I can give is that this game reminded me of the excitement I had when I first watched the Indiana Jones movies. It's more Indiana Jones than any Indiana Jones game I've played.
• Star Guard: On the completely opposite end of graphics quality and price, Star Guard is a free Flash run and gun platformer that just shouldn't be as much fun as it is. The way the story unfolds adds an interesting layer to "green guy kills all the red guys." There's also a checkpoint system and infinite lives, but the corpses of your previous incarnations litter the battlefield as you work through the game.

More as I get a chance.

Things have been pretty busy 'round here lately. A couple of weeks ago I took on some new job responsibilities[1] which have involved a lot of learning new things. It also involved moving from an office with a Mac computer to a cube with a Vista computer. It's really exciting, and I'm enjoying the challenge, but man, shit be crazy trying to stay on top of things right around now. As an example, something that I thought would only take me a few hours over the weekend pretty much took up most of it. I'm still managing to keep a lot of balls in the air (like Whitechapel), but some other things have had to be put on hold for a bit while I settle into a new routine (like the White Wolf Blogcast).

When I've had a moment to reflect here and there, I've been poking around with more old-school gaming. NetHack and AngBand have been an entertaining distraction, and the sheer unrepentantly wacky fantasy has been surprisingly refreshing. Elf ninjas mixing it up with cyborg barbarians is just so unabashedly and unrepentantly fun. Sure, I still prefer games with strong narratives and deep immersion, but memories of Final Fantasy VII[2] and Thundarr the Barbarian[3] remind me of a time when I thought wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat while wielding a katana actually was cool, and not just a stereotype.

So I've been flipping through everything from retroclone games like Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy to loving parodies like Encounter Critical to actual classic game experiences like Rifts and red box D&D. Playing in a D&D 4e game at work has been helping to scratch that itch a bit, but I admit I'm not entirely sure if I really want to break out a new game to recapture the fun of wahoo fantasy, or if the idea of such a game is more interesting than actually playing one. Nostalgia is a fickle mistress.

I've also recently (and somewhat coincidentally) been watching a lot of comedic sci-fi: Red Dwarf, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (TV show), and Red Vs. Blue, which have been leading me to some ideas for a new fiction project... but that's later. Probably after Whitechapel is done.

Speaking of nostalgia, I've been slowly reconnecting with some of my old elementary and high school friends on Facebook. I mean, most people talk about using Facebook to find old classmates, but I didn't really look any of them up. They just kind of found me. And it's been a weird (but very pleasant) experience. It's all been coalescing into a stew of contemplation.

I finally picked up a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street after seven million people[4] expressed disbelief that I hadn't read it yet. Overall it's been enjoyable. Plus, right now it's a bit easier to read a short story in between things going on instead of trying to stay on top of a 2,000 page novel from George R. R. Martin.

Eh, that's that. Brain's dry.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: No, I can't really talk about them at the moment.

Footnote 2: Swords that shoot bullets and have magic gem slots in a cyberpunk world? FUCK YES.

Footnote 3: Ditto for laser swords and sorcery.

Footnote 4: Give or take 6,999,993.

Shit be crazy, yo.

Since GenCon, I've been running pretty hard. Getting the second episode of Whitechapel written and up, trying desperately to finish a short story for consideration in an anthology, going to a company retreat for a day, and going to see Alton Brown and Chris Hardwick live all kind of fell in at the same time. (Both shows were awesome, by the way -- just happened to be that the tickets we got months in advance had them both on the same day, so it was a full day going to see them both.)

Somewhere in there, a couple more podcast interviews made their way into the world:

• The Bear Swarm! podcast did an episode with an "interview" with me (really me just talking about Whitechapel and bring a writer in this crazy business of ours).
• The Darker Days podcast had me as a guest host for their eighth episode, as well as doing a lengthy Q&A with me.

In the craziness, I did get a chance to watch the first season of Leverage, which wasn't bad. It took me a bit to get into it (after the really intense drama of Dexter), but when I mentally approached it as "The Italian Job, The Series," my appreciate for it jumped a lot. It's a fun show, and I'm looking forward to season two.

This week, things calm down a bit more, which will be a nice change of pace before they start getting crazy again in October. (Except that I volunteered for a rush company project -- whoops.)

It's been a while, so let me catch up.

Car and Internet: Last week I switched Michelle's SmartCar for my Mazda 6 again to commute to and from work. Friday after work the Check Engine light came on, but I was able to get the car back home. Saturday morning, the car refused to start. Since we had just replaced the battery, it clearly had to be something else, so we had to have it towed to the dealership. It didn't get looked at until today, and they want to keep it overnight to make sure that it's working right (apparently a pin in an electrical switch was loose).

So I worked from home today -- since Mondays are usually just taking care of my administrative stuff, it's easy enough to do from home, but I need a steady VPN connection to access the Exchange server and the company intranet sites. So, naturally, our Comcast connection crapped out around 3:30pm today, not coming back until several hours later. I had a couple of things I could do offline, but it means that some things I wanted to get done today I have to do tomorrow instead, and I'll have to work those around picking up a car at some point tomorrow.

Writing: Aside from my White Wolf work, I'm taking more steps toward more personal writing. oakthorne, emprint and I are going to start a small writing critique group to workshop each other's writing. I'm looking forward to it -- we all know each other's writing, we've all developed for each other and we've all had lengthy conversations about style, so it should be very helpful. I got oakthorne's first couple of chapters to read over.

Reading: As my 50-hour weeks have finally died down, I've been taking more time to read. If you haven't found it already, I've been keeping track of my reading list on Goodreads.com.

The most significant recent book I've read, though, was A Game of Thrones. I haven't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire series before, but I've had a number of friends recommend the series to me over the year. The weird thing is, I'm actually not a big fan of epic fantasy -- I was always more of a horror and sci-fi kid growing up, and long books with dozens of characters all doing the same thing over and over just bore me. However, some co-workers made some compelling arguments, and I agreed to borrow the books and tried them out. I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised, and once I can borrow the next book I'll check that out as well.

I'm also two-thirds of the way through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is everything I expected it would be, with the addition of ninjas.

Video Games: I have slowly working through my second time playing Fallout 3 -- this time, picking up as many side quests as I can and exploring as much as possible. I can't find out where to determine specifically how long I've been playing, but I'm pretty sure it's around twenty hours right now. I'm also poking at Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, which I picked up in a Sherlock Holmes package for $20 at Best Buy. It's a bit simpler than I thought, but otherwise not bad. (Which reminds me -- I need to snag a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street some day....)

I am trying very, very hard to resist the urge to take a Sherlock Holmes story and a Lovecraft story and mash them together a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Jonathan Coulton: Went to the Jonathan Coulton concert on Saturday. It was three and a half hours of pure awesome, and probably the best $20 I've spent on live entertainment in a while. The opening act was Paul and Storm, whom I had never experienced before, but they're definitely a group I'm going to check out. Also, just noticed that the three of them have put out a RiffTrax for Tron.

That should be enough to tide y'all over for a bit.

The past month or so has been challenging. Most of it has been revolving around work, my main hobby, or the incredibly murky gray area between them, with a few personal things that have nothing in common with either of the previous two things (except for the fact that I really can't talk about them). This week has been closer to my usual level -- closer to fifty hours a week instead of the seventy hour weeks that have been going on. Plus, work has swung back from "shit that needs to be done" to "shit that's fucking awesome to work on," which always helps. And the haters seem to be growing more and more incoherent and hilariously paranoid, which means it's moved from being sincerely upsetting to something closer to watching your dog try to catch his own tail. Especially when it doesn't have much of a tail. Or neck, for that matter.

So, I figured I would take a moment to do some catching up on my Media Whore segment.

Reading: While in Canada, one of our hosts let me browse through a bookstore, and I managed to pick up a copy of Spade & Archer, a prequel to The Maltese Falcon. Apparently it's still fairly new (the book had a 2009 copyright date), which I take as an indication that Canada likes me. While the book doesn't have as much Archer in it as the title would imply, and the plots are far more convoluted than Hammett did, the writing and feel are very close to the original. I also picked up Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which I'm still working on. Apparently it surprised Russell that I hadn't read Ellroy before.

Television: Yes, I watched the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. In Canada, even, with about six other people. I've also been watching the first couple of episodes of MI-5 (Spooks in the UK), which is a lot of fun -- a bit like a British version of 24. I've (finally) started watching Burn Notice as well, so apparently I'm on a modern spy kick right now.

Video Games: Not a whole lot, but I am picking up Mass Effect again once in a while. I might poke at another game for a bit in the near future.

Podcasts: I think I stumbled across it by accident, but Two Minute Danger Theatre is an entertaining send-up of old radio serials, and you really can't beat the time investment. I got caught up on the 60+ episodes on my flight to Toronto. I also finished up the first season of The Takeover, which was entertaining.

Life on Mars is awesome. That is all.