Clearing the mental registers
Latest reading / writing progress: Finished a re-read of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, which is like The Lord Of The Rings of military thrillers; long and complicated, but internally consistent and plausible and worth the read if you can stick it out. Trying to read Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms or The Truth, but I keep stalling in the early pages of each. Last year, Witches Abroad did a much better job of sucking me in.
Wrote a bunch of flavor text last night, and a few hundred words for “Cat Out Of Hell” over the weekend. Also figured out what the MacGuffin should be for “That Goat Doesn’t Belong To You”, making it more a part of the story and slightly less of a MacGuffin.
Our Lord of the Rings CCG is addictive, and I’m not saying that as an employee, either. raininva keeps killing me at the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, though.
I got honked at on the way to work this morning because someone mistimed his sudden acceleration and wasn’t able to cut me off as he’d planned. I guess he was trying to say, How dare you prevent me from being rude to you!
I did nothing for Mardi Gras last night, continuing a tradition I’ve maintained as long as I can remember. I will probably continue that tradition next month in a few months for Cinco de Mayo too. But at least Card Night will probably be a go this weekend – MarsCon and sicknesses have put a damper on the last few.
Just discovered NeoOffice, the OS X port of OpenOffice. Basic MS Word / Excel functionality, for free? I knew this had to suck… except it doesn’t. Now I’ve got it installed on all the machines I use at work or home.
And that’s Wednesday morning.
Marscon and stuff
Got back from Marscon Sunday. It was an interesting weekend – all the rooms were taken over by a military group preparing for special training, so all the attendees had to drive back and forth to their hotels. Put a damper on things, that’s for sure. I wish I’d remembered that there would be a Rocky Horror show on Saturday night – maybe they’ll do it again next year.
Caught up with kittykatya, impink, tzel, Tom & Donna, Jesse, Suzanne, Dave & Jodi, Dwight, Helen, and a bunch of other folk. I got some cheap Discworld paperbacks, and another Steve Jackson card game; for $1, I also bought a memory – the two books of the 1978 D&D Basic set (4th or 5th printing). We also got some Deadlands modules, and raininva won an auction for a signed uncut sheet of WARS: Nowhere to Hide!
Screen-capture trivia: the men’s miniskirt Starfleet uniform from the early Season One episodes of TNG. Strange that this didn’t catch on. I mean, can’t you just see Worf running around in it?
There was something else on my mind, but it’s gone now.
Continuing the saga of the books I’ve read this year – just finished a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I have to give Asimov credit for, in the space of a few short stories, giving me the feel of observing the fall of a Galactic Empire.
“Merovingian” is hard to say
I finished The DaVinci Code this weekend. To the point: I’m glad it was a library book. I’d have been okay paying paperback price for it, but it wasn’t worth hardcover cost to me. The actual “These are coded messages in DaVinci’s works” part was interesting enough that I plan to look some of them up when I have the time, but some of them appear to depend heavily on the bias of the researcher. On the other hand, the supposed content of the secret messages startled me not at all: I’d already read about it in GURPS Warehouse 23 (yes, a role-playing game sourcebook). The remaining plot was basic thriller stuff, adequate but not fascinating. The movie will probably do quite well.
I’m happy my cell phone is working again! It got wet last week, and appeared dead as a doornail; but once it dried out completely and the battery recharged, it went back to beeping happily. So that’s a surprise expense I don’t have to worry about.
raininva has a huge article in the new issue of Undefeated magazine talking about Mechwarrior: Age of Destruction, with color CGI ‘Mech illustrations and everything. Kelly Bonilla’s design notes are kind of fun too. According to the website, it will be on shelves Jan 18th.
That’s all for now. The clock just struck 9, so time to get to work.
Devil in the Details
My writing suffers from an issue I’ve had since 3rd grade: I often find settings to be more interesting than plot. I eagerly bought the Atlas of Middle Earth when it came out, enjoy looking up technical speculations on the construction of the Ringworld (or even the Halo), and spend time considering how Hogwarts was built with such odd geometry, and why.
I think I sympathize with the authors of old Dungeons and Dragons game modules in that respect. Many of those old booklets contained fascinating, detailed maps, but the purpose to explore those maps generally centered around “looting”. Recognizing that, I tried to resurrect my old copy of Vault of the Drow as a basis for a campaign a few years back, but I didn’t do enough prep work and the effort failed. A sizeable underground metropolis shouldn’t be a place that the characters pass through with three sentences of description.
Short stories don’t tempt me as strongly to lose myself in world-building: the characters have things to do, and I need to get on with discussing what they’re up to. But a setting for a novel’s resided in my head for almost 15 years, and none of the conflicts I’ve hung on it seem adequate. In fact, many of the plots I’ve considered have a strong derivative aroma, and given my complaints that 68% of the SF/Fantasy section at Waldenbooks is actually the same book with the names and dates moved around, I’d like to make an original contribution to the field.
The work I’m doing for Decipher is having the effect of making me pay more attention to my style, anyway. I’m watching passive voice even more carefully than I had been, and checking out web pages such as Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See.
Rulebooks and Reviews
I have another gaming credit now, from a different company, no less. The rulebook for WizKids’ “MechWarrior: Age of Destruction” has been posted in PDF format, and Rain and I sit comfortably on page 47 as playtesters.
Rain and I watched “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “All The Queen’s Men” this weekend. ATQM was only worth watching for Eddie Izzard’s lines – it didn’t seem to know whether it was a comedy, a romance, or an espionage caper, so it failed at all three. And while I wouldn’t suggest that years of experience playing Shadowrun qualifies Rain and me as intelligence agents, that experience did reveal several big plot issues to us long before the trained secret agents noticed them. “Thomas Crown” opened and closed with better capers – the ending had us going, “Ohhhhhh…” – but the hour in the middle was tedious and irritating.
We’ve noticed in movies like “Ocean’s Eleven”, “National Treasure”, and these two that we’re often a little ahead of the film’s twist; this adds to the fun if the movie’s good anyway, and makes a weak movie weaker.
In the spirit of the breakdancing Soundwave, here’s another transforming mech that wants to boogie While I’m linking, southernsinger should find the premise behind this comic strip strangely familiar.
Happy belated birthday to jazzfish 🙂
Photo ops
My hometown newspaper made someone’s blog! I’m so proud.
Decipher officially launched the WARS game yesterday – I even showed up in the staff pic on the web site. (Green shirt, right side, partially obscured.) The sense of optimism and excitement was very high… unlike all the licensed properties from our past, this is our baby and practically everyone in the building had a hand in it.
I’m really glad I’ve taken this job.
Edit: There seems to be a problem with the link to the staff pic. Going to “http://warstcg.fanhq.com“, clicking on “Articles” in the right-hand sidebar, and clicking on “Happy WARS TCG Release Day From the Gang at Decipher!” should show the pic.
I am all about the Fluff
With only a few weeks left before the release of Decipher’s WARS Trading Card Game, we’ve posted a PDF copy of the rulebook for the first set so that people who want to can brush up on the rules before hand.
There’s a nice little piece of text on the 21st page of the PDF, in the “Credits” section: “Concepting: Tim Ellington, Michael Girard, Kathy Lischke, Tom Lischke, Andy Lupp, Michael O’Brien, Justin Pakes, Erika Stensvaag.”
Me happy.
It’s a… uhh… bunker! Yeah!
All the Battletech players, Clix players, Warhammer 40K players, and modelers on my friends list need to read today’s Dork Tower.
(hmm… that’s a big chunk of my friends list, isn’t it…)
