- That's a great setup for Apples To Apples, great as ever for a pickup game and icebreaker.
- Once basically everyone had arrived, we were too big for a good game of A2A. Next up was Citadels, which I love and have been wanting to play for the last 7 game days I've been to. 5 players new to one of the most beautifully balanced games I've ever played!
- While the other half of us played
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
soupkills' Spank the Monkey.
Next one: May 21, 2009!
- Mood:
chipper
So I've been poking around the world of the Connected Wii. There are some cool looking games for WiiWare, available only via download. I went and got the Everybody Votes channel, and now
ali_wildgoose , Zuko, and I are competing to predict how the world will vote on silly questions like whether you prefer the blue of a tropical ocean or the blue of the midnight sky. For the record, Ali is the weirdest (votes furthest from popular opinion) but also the most accurate predictor of where the vote will go. Zuko is the furthest from popular opinion and the worst predictor, presumably because he grew up isolated by his royalty and his general self-centeredness. I'm halfway in between. These things are important, I know!There is enough cool stuff in WiiWare, in fact, that I really want some of it, but am keenly aware of my expenses right now. Agony! So here is my motivational plan: there is a bunch of stuff that I've been wanting to do for a while, but keep putting off as low-priority or as A Pain. Each time I tick off one of those things, I become eligible for a WiiWare game, as budget allows.
The tasks are:
- Boxes/papers in my office: two credits, because damn there are a lot of boxes. 7 boxes a credit.
- Hanging shelves in the apartment. We just got some little sheves for the kitchen and I still haven't hung some media shelves from when we moved in (!!!). Hanging all of them is worth a credit.
- Four consecutive weeks of doing WiiFit four days a week. No cheating, no excusing myself for a park walk.
- Catching up on Quicken AND using it to make monthly budgets
- Mega Man 9
- Lost Winds
- World of Goo
- Art Style: Orbient (is the Art Style series what used to be Bit Generations or something like that?)
- Mood: amused
A close friend (not on LJ) sent me an article about games from the London Review of Books entitled, "Is It Art?". The conclusion seems to be "well, certainly not even as much as film, but someday, perhaps." However, the author John Lanchester put the article together pretty well. He raises points I've seen elsewhere but not together, and which I haven't seen discussed outside "the industry". He's 90% of the way there, but I want desperately to fill in that last 10%. So I wrote a lengthy response email, and while it's not ready for prime-time as a freestanding piece, it's a good first response. I want to post more about the cool, critical side of my work, so here it is.
( Read much, much more )
I'm ranting, here, in that I haven't revised this much, and I hope I haven't become incoherent. I think it's important to realize this different thing about games, and so when someone outside the field like Lanchester is so close to getting it, but is still missing it, I want to make that last step.
- Location:Carlsbad, CA
- Mood:
enthralled
I am writing something that may be very loosely described by "Hellboy fanfic in a 10th Century AU". That's not *actually* a very fair description, but it's the half-sentence version. It will be a character profile for a fellow that lived in the late 10th century near the black sea, and who, on hitting that age finds out that he's the village's cursed child, will grow horns & sharp teeth, may be fated to bring doom and destruction on at least his little corner of the world, and sets out to prove the prophesies wrong, even if they're not. Classic adventuring setup, eh? ICO + Hellboy.
I'd like to do this as well as I can. What should I read? Things about tenth-cent eastern Europe, Bulgaria, curses or devils, dusty corners of Christian mythology, etc.
And I'm trying to do more frequent Game Days now that my job is back to only consuming 60% of my life (down from 85% over the summer).
So: Board Game Geek! I've been reading it for years, and have used it as the Prime Reference when checking on a game that's not going right, or when I'd like to try something new. They're a great community site. The page on a game will have a few reviews, none Now I'm a member, and have entered my collection of games!
On that note, who's up for a game day? It has been a while since I asked my flist whether you're interested in the occasional game day invitation. If you are, comment or email me, as I don't usually spam everyone with the notices... especially as "everyone" is too large a quantity for my apartment.
- Location:the office
- Mood:
accomplished - Music:Sasha - Airdrawndagger
I'm afraid that I just need to bite the bullet and use Photoshop or Illustrator. Sad.
- Location:the office
- Mood:
frustrated - Music:Halo 3 Soundtrack
"We're Rollin',They're Hatin', is a large-scale contemporary art show that examines the role of Dungeons and Dragons, Escapism and Fantasy in contemporary art and culture. The exhibition is an art show and interactive platform to explore how artists are influenced by fantasy and role playing games. Over 30 artists will create work for the show and dozens more will perform. The show includes several elements and project rooms that will create an unforgettable, hopefully magical, experience for visitors and attendees."
APRIL 20 - MAY 20, 2007
@ Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219 S. Morgan - Chicago
Gallery hours: Friday & Saturday 1-6
http://rollinhatin.blogspot.com/index.html
And there's an awesome official T-shirt here:
http://www.threadless.com/product/813/Rollin_Hatin
- Location:work
- Mood:
disappointed
ali_wildgoose and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth for my birthday, and it was better than I expected. I was worried that it would be a boring speech by Gore. Instead it was an interesting speech by Gore with a lot more interesting non-Gore stuff inserted into it. It made its point and, more importantly perhaps, enabled the audience to make its point later when talking about it. Seeing that made the trailer for Who Killed the Electric Car? catch my eye. Sad... like the story behind Roger Rabbit.Gotta read this. Sounds Scary.
Journey To Forever looks like an interesting project, albeit one with a very badly designed website. If I can figure out whether it's still going on I think I'll follow it.
The Making of GoldenEye 007, an article by one of the designers, warmed my gaming-crazy heart. There are some nuggets in there, though a good bit of it is about how they didn't really design it, and I'm not sure how to work with that. I think the next thing I need to do now is actually make some low-budget games to cut my teeth on what's really involved, so reading about how they were anti-design doesn't help me much.
It sounds like "they" have gotten better at making ethanol from corn. Perhaps even better enough that it would be cost effective, and possibly better enough that they could make it with stuff other than corn. I actually got some stock-market spam about one of the companies mentioned in the article several days before the article. That shook my world... spam is supposed to be inherently wrong or sketchy.
Bird clouds. I saw these in Rome, where there were plazas that were known for having bird clouds. Regular pedestrians would bring umbrellas on sunny days if they had to walk across 'clouded' plazas, for obvious reasons. The Danes call it the "Black Sun", and I'll bet they did so even before Dead Can Dance or Soundgarden.
I'm back on a GTD kick because of the madness of my schedule right now. I really like GTD, but I currently lack two things: a system which is easy to use and encompasses 'contexts' for tasks and a system that I can use without a computer in front of me. For contexts, it's Tinderbox vs. OmniOutliner again.
Kinkless is beautiful but requires OmniOutliner Pro at $80; I own Tinderbox but haven't been impressed with previous GTD implementations. Maybe the new one will be better.
- Music:Baida by Cheb Mami
If you're playing in The Great Ward, please don't read the cut yet. It'll be more fun if you don't read it until you've known Maarten for a bit.
( Maarten and Etsuko )
I'm excited because my characters don't always come together this well, as evidenced by Lleryn (III) in the Octopaign. Despite having a clear backstory and a rich world, I just can't find his character. He's affable, a clear chaotic good ranger, and he's specialized a bit in his equipment; nevertheless, I wander with him through session after session, and he's little more than some muscle with a tracking proficiency. I have my theories about why this is, but if I'm right the causes aren't going to change; I need to find a way to force some personality into him. Maarten, on the other hand, is rich already. I'm excited.
Also, GIP! Well, in this case the entry is not a Gratuitous Icon Post, but rather a Gaming Icon Post. I was totally amazed to find the Doombunny, who was the primary cause of my fanatic interest in evil rabbits, as one of the two icons of my friend
soupkills. I have shamelessly ganked it and used it to replace old Marius from Correllendor as my gaming icon of choice. (soupkills, tell me if this theft offends!)- Mood: creative
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