Blue Kae

There are two bookstores between the office where I work and most of the places where I eat lunch. This means that usually once a week I stop in at one or both places and browse the shelves. This is a bad habit of mine because of have a pile (which is not an exaggeration) of books that I want to read but haven’t gotten to yet, so buying more books is really not something I should be doing. Still, it’s a daily temptation to stop in and see what’s new and twice in recent weeks I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

My latest surprise was finding a Burn Notice novel called The Giveaway. Partially because it was in the Science-Fiction/Fantasy section (I’m guessing someone changed their mind and left it there). The show is one of my favorites, but my initial reaction was, “Bleh, a novel?” Out of morbid curiosity, I opened it up and read the first page to see what it was like. It starts out with, ”When you’re a spy…” and then goes into one of the show’s trademark voice-overs by Weston. So now I was curious and decided to buy it and give it a read.

It was a quick read, took me a day or so, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Enough, actually, that I ordered the other two books The Fix and The End.

The plot is a typical one for the show. Friend Barry, the money launderer, needs a favor. He has a friend, who’s a retired bank robber, that did one last job but ended up ripping of a motorcycle gang and now needs help cleaning up the mess.

The dialog, monologues, and action are all very true to the show. The book does bring something new to the series though, there are a couple of chapters written from Sam and Fiona’s viewpoints. This is not something that the show does and I’m not sure it would very well if they tried it, but it worked well in the book and made for interesting insights into the characters.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Star Trek Online Season 2 was released yesterday. Tipa has a good overview of the update, and there’s a lot of detail in the release notes, so I don’t want to rehash it too much.

Two of the big highlights: skill cap (level) increase and diplomacy.

The skill cap was increased allowing for new ranks of Rear Admiral Upper Half (yeah I know but it’s canon) and Vice Admiral. In WoW-terms that’s a level increase from 45 to 51. There’s also new high level content to match, but I haven’t done any of it yet.

The big feature I’ve been excited about is the addition of the Federation Diplomatic Corps. Cryptic has added a diplomatic rank system to the game. There are seven new non-combat missions to Memory Alpha, Vulcan, Bajor, and Starbase 39 that are quite good (and include some branching). Unfortunately I haven’t gotten a chance to do any First Contact missions on the live server (Holodeck) since that requires the Attache diplomatic rank, which I haven’t earned yet. I have played a few of those on Tribble though and they were interesting, although I’ve enjoyed the investigations on Bajor and K7 (one of the missions that starts on Memory Alpha) more.

I also spent a lot of time scanning anomalies, which is not something new for me, but now that there’s a signal matching mini-game, those missions are a bit more interactive.

I’m planning a few non-spoiler, in character, write-ups of those episodes. Hopefully the first one will go up on Friday.

As Anjin noted recently, Cryptic has been very quiet about Champions Online since the Serpent Lantern update last month. I don’t mean that I was expecting another update, but just that it would’ve been nice to have an idea of where the dev’s were focusing for the next major patch to the game.

Thankfully Poz has released a State of the Game that outlines the planned Summer Update for August 17th and a sneak peak at the next adventure pack, The Demonflame.

Summer Update

• Super Groups are getting a revamp of their UI that looks very similar to the Fleet screens in Star Trek Online.
• The Renaissance Center is being remodeled to provide better feng shui for social activities.
• New emotes (20+) and a better UI screen.
• C-Store UI update, there were no screenshots included but I’m betting it’ll match the recent update in STO.
• Costume creator will have more tights options in the costume creator (something I’m looking forward to) and more high heeled shoes and boots for females.
• A new difficulty setting above Very Hard, I vote for Are You Happy Yet?

Like the recent melee powers update that took place, Cryptic is also working on a revamp of the pet systems. This includes a more explicit way of controlling pets, an increase in the damage they do, and a new mechanic for keeping them powered.

I’ve not played with the pet powers at all, but I’ve heard that there are also problems with the pathing and having to resummon all pets when one dies. Hopefully these changes will help with those problems as well.

The Demonflame

Scheduled for the end of September, The Demonflame focuses on DEMON similarly to how The Serpent Lantern focused on Viper. We’ll be going to the Qliphotic realm and battling a new monster group. Check out the screenshots on the site.

Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.

After the brewing and the bottling, there’s the waiting, and then the drinking. After bottling a homebrew it takes about two weeks for the yeast in the bottle to carbonate the beer.

I usually try a beer around that point to see how it tastes. With stouts, it’s recommended to wait another two weeks to age a bit, and I like to have a before to compare to the after.

This beer was bottled June 12th, so it’s almost six weeks old now. The first beer I drank (around the 27th) was well carbonated but the taste wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, it was a little too sweet and felt a little thin. Happily, the beer I’m having tonight is much better, it’s still go some sweetness to it but it’s balanced better with the bitterness and leaves a nice aftertaste in the mouth.

That’s one of the great things about bottle conditioned beers, usually if they’re a bit off you can just let the yeast work a little longer on it.

Auditorium and Fractal are at the top of the list of the list of games that I should have bought but haven’t yet. Honestly, I’m not sure why I hadn’t bought them before now. Their normal price was decent and the demos were excellent. It’s moot now, because I snapped them up today after seeing Tesh (thanks Tesh!) mention that they are both 50% off.

Both games are very fun and unique experiences which I can’t recommend enough. At least go check out the demos, which you can play online at Auditorium and Fractal.

Only issue I have is that you can’t buy both at once, you have to make two separate purchases. From the comments on their sale blog post it’s a technical issue that is being worked on.

The Steam Perils of Summer sale is over. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle on money spent at $70. For only $10 more than getting a single console game, I now own:

• Audiosurf
• Beat Hazard
• Borderlands + all the DLC
• Dawn of Discovery – Venice
• Galcon Fusion
• Introversion Complete Pack (Uplink, DefCon, Darwinia, Multiwinia)
• King’s Bounty: Gold Edition
• Supreme Commander 2
• Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I’ve been torn about whether or not to get Borderlands since it first launched. As a co-op focused game, I couldn’t decide if I’d end up playing more with Xbox friends or PC friends, plus there’s always GamerScore to think about. At $11 (+$12 for all the DLC), it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, I saw a lot of my Steam friends getting it as well, so I figure there’ll be lots of people to play with.

I already own the original Witcher on DVD, but I bought the Enhance Edition anyway. This was purely out of laziness, now I don’t have to mess with patching the game when I reinstall it find the disc.

SupCom 2 and King’s Bounty are games I’d thought about getting at one point or another. I didn’t have a PC that would run SupCom2 well enough when it came out, and then when I had a PC that would run it, it was too old for me to buy at full price. King’s Bounty was one I wanted to buy when it launched but didn’t because of some DRM or retail issue, I can’t remember at this point.

Of all my purchases, Dawn of Discovery – Venice, was the only game I’d planned to buy soon. I really like Dawn of Discovery for city building, but I was waiting on getting the expansion until I’d finished a few more of my console games.

The rest of my purchases were all impulse buys: Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, Galcon Fusion, and the Introversion games. I’d demoed Audiosurf and Galcon before and liked them, but I’ve been out of a casual gaming mood for a long time now. Still at under $5 for each, they were worth adding to my library for whenever I was in the mood for a quick play session.

I haven’t played all of my purchases yet, but I did want to mention how surprised and thrilled I am with Beat Hazard. I picked this game up because it sounded fun and was only $2.50, but I didn’t expect to play it a bunch. It’s a shooter similar to Geometry Wars, but it uses your music collection to drive the gameplay. Oddly enough, it fills the same gaming niche for me that Rockband 2 does. Rockband is a game I play only once a month or so, but when I do, I play for a couple of hours. It’s a chance to listen to music that I like while also gaming. Beat Hazard is pretty much the same thing, only it’s an Asteroids-like shooter  instead of a rhythm game. Unlike Rockband, Beat Hazard is quick to pickup and play for five minutes at a time, and I think it’ll become a part of my regular gaming-life.

Last week I left off with my beer just starting fermentation (which was May 29th). Checking on the fermenter a few hours later, I was seeing a few bubble in the airlock already. This is good, the bubbles are CO2 and it means that fermentation has started. At this point, things get pretty easy: check on the fermenter once a day or two, make sure the temperature is reading around 70F and see if the airlock is still producing bubbles.

Some time between 7 and 10 days the fermentation is usually done. In this case by the following Sunday, there no bubbles in the airlock but my weekend was a bit busy, so I put off bottling until the following weekend (June 12th). It’s not a good idea to leave beer in the primary fermenter longer than two weeks because the beer can start to pickup astringent flavors from the yeast at the bottom of the bucket. Some beers require secondary fermentation or just additional time, and that’s when people will siphon over to a secondary fermenter (usually glass). Making a low gravity, low alcohol, stout is pretty forgiving though. Continue reading ‘Crafting IRL: Bottling’ »

I got a little shock today from Twitter. Craig Zinkievich, the Executive Producer and a seven year veteran of Cryptic Studio, is leaving. In the full announcement, Craig basically says he’s taking the summer off to spend time with his family; although, he is planning to continue playing the game (I look forward to him posting gripes at the devs).

I was completely caught off-guard by Zinc leaving, and initially very concerned at what his departure might hint about the game’s future. Unlike with Roper’s management of Champions, overall I’ve been very happy with Zinc’s tenure as EP. Still, that initial fear reaction was just  my normal reaction to change. After reading the announcement twice and heading over to the forum thread, I was much less concerned.

Daniel Stahl, formerly a Producer on the game, is taking over for Craig and has brand new Twitter account, Cryptic_dStahl, if you’re interested in following him. Daniel is very active on the forums and well respected by the community, at least for now. MMO forum communities being what they are, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

If you want an idea of what kind of person is taking over management of the game, just read Stahl’s awesome response in the forum thread about Zinc leaving. There’s also a good follow up by Zinc to some of the comments in the thread, and an additional post by Daniel to address some of the conspiracy theorists. My cynical side suggests that all of this is exactly what Cryptic would post, but given the number of dev posts I’ve seen by Cryptic staff I don’t think that’s true.

Of course how this will actually affect the game is any one’s guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Besides PC and console games, reading books, and sleeping, I like beer. I’m not talking about PBR (be thankful if you don’t know what that is) or Bud Lite, I’m talking about the good stuff: Guinness and micro-brews and such. I don’t drink a lot, and haven’t had a hangover in years, but I do enjoy a good beer or two.

I’ve wanted to try making my own beer for a long time, but I always thought it required having a basement because it would stink up the apartment or house and required cool temperatures. Neither one of these is true. Well the temperature thing can be true if you’re making a lager but it’s not true for making ales.

I started brewing in 2007 and have done seven batches (mostly stouts). I’m an extract brewer, which is a little easier than all-grain and requires less equipment and skill.

I realized recently that I hadn’t brewed in quite a while (August 2008), let’s blame fatherhood for that although it’s probably just laziness, so last month I decided it was time to get back to it and picked Saturday, May 29th. My favorite recipe that I’d made so far was a milk stout which is called that because it has milk sugar in it, lactose, which yeast cannot convert to alcohol. This makes a sweeter stout, and I’d really enjoyed my first batch (beer number 5) but it was almost gone. Continue reading ‘Crafting IRL: Brewing’ »

I’m a long-time fan of the Ethshar series by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The first book I read, With a Single Spell, is actually the second in the series, and I picked it up as a kid during a regular scouring of a favorite used bookstore. I never ran across the other books, and it never occurred to me to look and see if his other works were part of the same world or not until rereading it a few years ago. Thanks to the magic of the Internet I found his site, a whole series of stand alone novels set in that world, and went on an Ethshar binge.

There are ten published novels, starting with The Misenchanted Sword and finishing with The Vondish Ambassador (the linked page is slightly out of date as VA is now published). The interesting thing is that the last two books: The Spriggan Mirror and The Vondish Ambassador were originally published on-line as serials.

In 2005, a combination of lack of publisher interest in continuing the series and fans clamoring for additional books led Watt-Evans to try an experiment. He wrote The Spriggan Mirror as a serial. To his surprise, it was successful and was completed and published. Since then he has completed a second serial, The Vondish Ambassador. It’s an interesting variation on the normal author/publisher model and apparently a good way to prove to a publisher that there is a market for stories they’re not otherwise interested in.

So, I was excited when I saw recently that he was working on a new serial called The Final Calling. I’m especially excited for this one since it deals with Warlockry, which has been a long running mystery in the series.

The details about how serialization works are here. The short version is: the first chapter is posted for free, each chapter after that is $250, and one chapter posted per week or more slowly depending on donations. Donors over $25 get a printed copy.

Of course there’s no guarantee that enough donations will come in to cover finishing the book. But, Watt-Evans is three for three so far and good at keeping to a schedule as well. Based on his last serial status update, the story is paid up through Chapter Seven (which he’s currently writing), Chapters One and Two are posted, and Chapter Three is scheduled to post on June 30th.