How The Game Is Played

One holiday almost down...

Well, its the night before new year's eve and I've had a week to myself.  Shelley has been doing duty in California at her sponsoring parish. (My wife, Shelley, is studying to be an Episcopal priest)  And Sun has been closed for the week.

I've been spending my time writing, watching movies and, honestly, sleeping too much.  This winter has been  particularly dark in  Boston and I am a bit surprised at how hard its hit both of us.  I bought Shelley a full spectrum SAD therapy lamp but I may borrow it a bit.  I also just bought myself a dawn-simulator.

A dawn simulator  is a full spectrum light designed to ramp up over a period to simulate the arrival of the sun, since here  in Boston it seems we can get to noon on cloudy winter days and still be in twilight.  I'm hoping this helps me get up as I've been sleeping til noon which is too much.  Its on order, I'll probably blog about whether it works or not after I've had it a few weeks.

I lucked out and got the entire Neon Genesis Evangelion Anime used  on DVD for $4.00 a disc.  Its one of my favorite anime series and at $4.00 a disc its even reasonably priced.  I've been watching them in Japanese with English subtitles and catching a lot of detaisl I missed when I saw it on TV.

As wonderful as the script and art direction were, the production on it was a mess and really fell apart at the end.  The director himself has commented on the fact that it got very sloppy and badly done by the last few episodes and he eventually released two additional movie length episodes to try to fix it that replace the last two episodes in the original series.  I've had those on DVD for awhile as it was the only way I could get to see them but they make a lot more sense viewed right after the episodes they are supposed to come after.

I've also started watching my way through my restored Bond films collection.  I just watched The Man with the Golden Gun.  Before that of course I watched Live and let Die, and beforr that one of my favorites- Diamonds are Forever.  I caught a plot hole i had never noticed before but it turns out its filled by a deleted scene thats on the extras disc.

I was noticing plot holes in TMWTGG too.  I'm not so sure if there are deleted scenes to explain that or if its just sloppy writing by that point in the series, but I'm going to look on the extra's disc and see.

Other then that, its been mostly writing.  I'm up to a bit over 75 pages of rough  draft on "Writing Massively Multiplayer Online Games with Project Darkstar", mostly on Bunny Hunters Online.  When my co-author Dan Templeton gets his chapters on DarkMUD in I'm expecting that will put us pretty close to half-way through writing the rough of the book.  Dan, by the way, just had his first child so I'd be remiss if I didn't say a public congratulations on that!

I'll be glad to be done with writing about Bunny Hunters.  It was kind of fun to write but I'm itching to get at the second half of the book, which is DarkMMO and is going to be built on my earlier JNWN experiments.

I'm also running the first of what I hope will be monthly Pen and Paper Fantasy HERO games at Pandemonium Books and Games in Camebridge next month.  I'm really looking forward to getting back into the pen and paper RPG scene and have been using that as impetus to do some more serious work on my Fantasy RPG setting that I've been working on for years. 

To go with it I've been building a custom template for Hero Designer, which is the official HERO System character editor and management program.  It happens to be written in Java and use XML templates to control its functionality.  I bought a personal license to Oxygen which is a very fine XML editor (really a suite of XML tools) thats also written in Java and it has made the effort much easier.  I highly recommend it to anyone doing serious XML hacking.

Thats about it for what I've been working on.  Its a bit of a mixed ramble this time, but I hope you found at least parts of it interesting.  Oh, and if your a pen and paper roleplay gamer and in the Camebridge area-- my run will be the second Saturday of January.  Come on by to play or at least kibbitz!

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Posted at 12:50AM Dec 30, 2007 by gameguy in General  |