I know I haven’t posted about our Japan vacation (soon! .. I think) but wanted everyone (all 2 of you) that EVE Online now runs on Mac and Linux. No excuses now!
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Tags: eve online, Games, mmo
Since I haven’t posted an update lately, I figured I would run down the list of movies we’ve seen recently:
Aeon Flux - Action sci-fi. I haven’t seen the original cartoon series but apparently it’s pretty funky. I liked the movie, though the people who over analyze movies probably won’t like it as much. ***1/2
Jarhead - Movie about Marine snipers during Desert Storm: Part 1. More of a drama than an action flick, but very good and shows you what a lot of guys go through while deployed and working in the Armed Forces. ****1/2
Memoirs of a Geisha - Pretty good, though slow in some parts. A drama, so hardly anything exciting going on. But still good. ***1/2
Narnia - Done very well, much better than the TV series I’ve seen a bit of. ****1/2
Syriana - Action/Drama. Basically, our (America’s) oil corporations are evil. So is our gov’ment. Interesting and pretty good. ***1/2
The Ringer - Eh. **
Walk the Line - The Johnny Cash movie. Good, but slow in parts. Another drama. The best parts were the performances. ***1/2
And now, books!
I’ve started reading the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I have to admit, it’s nothing like I thought it would be, but it’s very good. It’s basically a collection of short(er) stories during this upheaval and removal of a galactic empire. I’m now on book 3 and the time compression has slowed down quite a bit.
I was reading the Dark Tower books by Stephen King but those can be fairly intense, it’s nice to read something a little faster and less emotional.
And, not to leave the other two Media topics out:
Music - I got Monster Magnet: Monolithic Baby! for Christmas, and it’s pretty good. I don’t think I’ve gotten any other music lately, but that’s no surprise.
Games - Started playing EVE Online again recently with a bunch of folks from F13.Net. This is one of those games where you play for awhile, quit, come back, play for awhile, quit, come back… A lot of changes have been made since I last played, so I’m getting caught up on those and trying to figure out what exactly to do with our new Corporation.
And that’s about it for Media updates. Oh oh I forgot one!
Lost - We’ve recently started watching the first season of this show. It’s pretty good! Of course, the second season has already started so there’s no way to catch up. Next season I will have to setup Tivo to record the shows so they are ready for us once we have caught up.
L8trz!
I thought I was being sly when I decided to order all the gifts I could online. Oh, I was able to order 8/10 gifts online, but that final gift I ordered for Cheryl was a big snafu. I just reordered a similar (but not exact) gift just yesterday with the SuperSpeedyShippingFor$50 option selected: I sure hope it gets here in time (they promise it will).
Other than that, everything went well. Had most of my shopping done by Dec 10th or so, with a few items to pick up at the mall.
I felt bad not updating the blog, but I was (am) just having way too much fun playing Worlds of Warcraft with my spare time. If you have more free time than you know what to do with, I recommend you pick it up and say “Hi” to Viin on the Icecrown server.
I had pre-ordered a copy of Raph Koster’s new book, Theory of Fun for Game Design. So far: interesting. It’s a pretty light read, with drawings and all, but interesting. Raph is one of the guys that I try to keep up with, not least because he’s made a career of making games (the dream of many, I’m sure).
Due to most of my time being spent playing WOW I haven’t finished the last Reality Dysfunction book yet, but I’m getting close. I haven’t even gotten to play Half-Life 2 much, darn it Blizzard!
We had our little Buckley ANG holiday party earlier this month, which was fun if only because we got to wear civilian (normal) clothes, have a good breakfast, and leave early. Funnily, the day before we played dodge ball in one of the aircraft hangers - not something you would except a bunch of on-duty military folks to be doing - but it was pretty fun. It’s interesting to see how competitive people can get even with a silly game like dodge ball.
Cheryl and I will have the Christmas Hop to play this Saturday, but it shouldn’t be too bad. We’re doing our own Christmas dinner (mm, pizza) on Christmas Eve and then heading to my mom’s house Christmas morning. After that, we head over to her sister’s house for another Christmas dinner. Thankfully, both of our families are pretty close by so we don’t have to travel with everyone else - yuck.
On a sad note: quite a few people were cut in the layoffs in AOL a few weeks ago, including a few friends on the development side of stuff here in Denver. While it sucks, I know that they are smart individuals and will be able to find something as good or better. Good luck to them!
Well, I’ll leave it at that for now. I hope everyone has a Good Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Ever have one of those days where everything is fine until a certain point and then it just rolls downhill from there? That was yesterday. Why? No clue. Maybe it had something to do with the Lunar Eclipse? Which, btw, was pretty cool.
The Red Sox have won the World Series. Yay.
Today also marks the beginning of the Guild Wars World Preview Event. You should hop on if you need something to do this weekend and want to check out a forth-coming game. It’s probably a total of 55megs to download to start playing, but you can create a character after the first initial 10megs or so. Some folks from F13 will be playing as well, hopefully we can get a guild going to try some Guild Vs Guild combat. If you play, look me up - I’ll be ‘Viin Seeven’.
I had a SUTA drill last weekend with our new One man; Ben is still the three man so we basically know what’s going on already, but our One man is new to being a One man and has to get use to his functions. We started our Initial Certification for weapons loading which is basically going through the steps to perform 60-day (use to be 30) Functional Checks and load various munitions (within a specified time frame). We got through the functional checks, Mk-82’s, AIM-9s, and AIM-120s. We’ll be doing another SUTA in November where we should be loading the rest of the standard munition types: Mavericks, GBUs, CBUs, JDAMs, and whatever else they think we should know. Unfortunately, I also have to go in for our new annual physical fitness exam on the 6th (which is the normal drill weekend, as opposed to the SUTA weekend); hopefully it won’t take more than a few hours, I don’t really want to be there for two weekends in a single month!
Jeremy and I saw the Van Helsing movie last week: It wasn’t that bad, it could have been worse (maybe not by much). It was sorta interesting, but some of the FX were funny and kinda threw it off. Of course, I like vampires and things of that nature so maybe I liked it a bit more than the average joe. 2 and 1/2 stars from me! **`
I also started watching Samurai Deeper Kyo but have only seen two episodes. Not sure what to make of it yet, so I’ll tell you more later. :)
For those of you familiar with SOE games such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and the new EverQuest 2, this quote from Raph Koster is pretty funny: FWIW, SOE has no such policy of intentionally releasing early. :P
You can find the full thread here at this Terra Nova thread I said Lunch, Not Launch!.
With the approach of Half-Life 2’s release, November 16th, I’ve thought a lot about doing some kind of PvP mod for it. Whenever I’m in the “game designer” mood I tend to read a lot:
* GameDev.Net
* Gamasutra
* Game Matters [blog]
* GameDevBlog [blog]
* particleblog [blog]
* Terra Nova [blog]
* Game Architecture and Design [book]
* Designing Virtual Worlds [book]
* Mud-Dev [mailing list]
Plus other things I come across in my blog travels. There’s certainly a ton involved with any kind of mod, even though the game engine is ready to be used. Well, a ton if you want a good one. I was trying to think of a fun scenario/theme to play (Wizards and Ogres? Wizards and Warriors? Wizard vs Wizard? (yes, I was stuck)) when I realized I already had a PvP scenario sketched out for the elder game in Tajana (the MUD I never finished). All I’d have to do was refine it and remove the MMO parts! Now, if I can only find that silly design document somewhere ..
Of course, I might be able to create the best-est design document in the world for a HalfLife 2 Team vs Team mod/total conversion, but without some art assets and some help programming it’s going to be a game of flying Counter-Terrorists with guns that shoot slow.
(For some reason I’m not in a writing mood, so the following blog will be short short-ish).
Our week long trip to Seattle went pretty well. It rained the first few days we were there, but it wasn’t very cold. It was raining during our sea kayak tour but it was still a blast. In this picture you can see Cheryl and I at Friday Harbor [picture], on San Juan Island, where we did our kayaking.
We headed down to Oregon on Thursday; it was a nice drive, and not very long at all (3 hours or so). After visiting the beach at Seaside we headed to Cheryl’s Aunt’s house to meet up with her relatives for dinner. A little bit overwhelming for me, but all-in-all it was a good time. (Like I’m very social in “crowds” of people I don’t know anyways, but I guess these aren’t people “I don’t know” any longer).
Since we were in a hotel right downtown we had easy access to the Seattle Aquarium and Pike Place Market, not to mention lots of different places to eat. (Seattle has a great assortment of Asian restaurant, I’m so jealous!). The hotel didn’t have any air conditioning so it got rather warm in our 8th floor room during the day, but since it never got over 80 it wasn’t so bad.
Friday morning Cheryl and I went to the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, including a quick walk-through of an old Air Force One. Pretty cool place, almost as cool as the one in DC.
Jeremy flew in on Friday afternoon, so we headed to the Experience Music Project (and the SciFi Experience) which was pretty fun. Lots of interesting music paraphernalia and trivia. The SciFi part was a bit more interesting simply because I knew more about the subject.
Jeremy and I showed up for PAX at about 10am on Saturday morning, we figured we didn’t want to go very early so we wouldn’t have to stand in line. Boy were we wrong. There were two lines already, each going halfway around the block! It took us until 11:30 to get inside (including a short Starbucks hop) and boy was it crowded in there too.
While PAX had it’s moments, most of the time I found myself trying to find something to do/see. With so many people (something like 3000?) it was very very crowded and everything was occupied. We were lucky to get into the first panel in the theater Saturday morning, everything after that required standing in line for 1 or more hours. I was really looking forward to the musical performances (as was everyone else it seems) but there was no way I was going to stand in line for 3 hours! We did get in to the Penny Arcade Q&A on Sunday morning which was interesting and funny, but we left after that. Hopefully next year will be a lot better (bigger venue, larger theater please!). I missed the Red vs Blue showing/Q&A, but Jeremy made it. Hopefully the PAX DVD will have that session on it!
Since Cheryl was sick when we went through EMP, we didn’t make the Space Needle that night. We had already bought the tickets for it with our EMP passes so we went up on Sunday night. It was getting rather cold at that point, but it was a very nice view. Didn’t really get any good pictures, but I combined two pictures I took of Cheryl in front of the Space Needle [picture] and it turned out ok.
And that was that. Cheryl and I flew home Monday afternoon and were back at work the following day. I will say that I really like Seattle. I didn’t even mind driving our rental around downtown; maybe Denver is good training for driving around a larger, busier city.
Our next vacation: Maybe a short trip back to Ouray on Thanksgiving? After that, how about Brazil?
We watched the Bourne Supremacy and Metallica: Some Kind of Monster this weekend. While Bourne was kinda same-ol’ same-ol’and a bit slow, Metallica was pretty interesting. Even if you don’t care for Metallica this is a great film highlighting the changes they’ve gone through over the years and an insight into what a multi-million dollar band deals with daily. Forget Bourne, see Metallica.
Cheryl and I are finishing up the arrangements for our trip to Seattle later this month. I was originally going simply to be at PAX (the Penny-Arcade Expo) in Bellevue. It’s turned into a vacation with Cheryl (which is more than fine), so we’ll be spending a week in Seattle. We hope to get to do some sea kayaking, sightsee Victoria, BC, and visit some of her relatives in Oregon.
PAX should be fun, I’m looking forward to the Soul Caliber 2 tournament. Jeremy is going as well; we’re suppose to be in the Splinter Cell tournament but since we haven’t been playing it I doubt we’ll get past the first round. Oh well, should still be fun! Maybe. If we last longer than 30 seconds.
Cheryl and I have been trying to plan out the days we have there, ie: go here this day, here this other day, blah blah. The Seattle area has so many islands and ferries that it’s getting annoying! We just want to go to Port Townsend and maybe jaunt over to Whidbey Island, but that means 4 ferries (there and back) unless we want an even longer car drive. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll all work out.
I thought it was time I did something on this site, so I figured now was a good time to introduce the Downloads section.
It’s kinda sparse right now, but those of you who are on IM all the time might consider downloading Gaim and use the plugin available for download on said Download page. Which was humbly provided by Jeremy V.
If anyone else out there needs a place to make downloads available, let me know. Of course, it has to be cool stuff!
On to another topic, not much is going on right now. Winter is kicking in, so doing inexpensive things such as walking are out of the question. My TiVo likes to keep me company, which is nice - but you can only watch so much Anime before your eyes start to cross.
Haven’t been playing a whole lot for SWG lately, mostly due to my computer problems. However, a couple of cool things have happened lately: a) Player cities are now in - meaning you can build your own city wherever you want. You can even setup a shuttle port! This is kinda cool, I can’t wait to see more of these show up. b) Player mounts. This allows us to ride Dewbacks and other StarWars horse-esque animals. It’s much faster than jogging everywhere. But what we really want are vehicles!
Until next time … have fun!