Gen Con is coming.

I realized today that GenCon is a week away (roughly if you count the early stuff that starts Wednesday night). I’m excited to go, yet I’m a little nervous as well. Last year was the first time that I bought a four day pass and scheduled some events and actually played some games. I had a lot of fun, although by Sunday I was pretty wiped out. Given all that, I wasn’t sure why I was feeling nervous until I realized that I hadn’t scheduled any events this year which I did intentionally because last year I ended up feeling like I’d scheduled too much and couldn’t just do what I wanted. My nervousness (and is) was coming from not knowing exactly what I’m going to be doing.

Some people are able to just take off for somewhere without knowing where they’re going to be sleeping that night. I’m not one of those people. I don’t need to have every minute of the day planned, but I like to know roughly what I’m doing and definitely where I’m sleeping.

Now if only know why I was nervous made it stop, and while I’m wishing I’d like to get rid of this cold. I’d rather not be patient zero for the con crud this year.

Sort of unrelated, definitely random though: when I was a kid I always thought of board games as bored games because my parents only got them out on rainy weekends when my sister and I where driving them nuts.

Shop smart, shop S-mart. Day 6 of Blaugust

Stuff and things.

I’m still thinking about Guardians of the Galaxy. The movie has really gotten stuck in my head, which is fitting since it’s the love child of Firefly and Farscape.

Lists

It looks like January was the last time I posted a real update on my Lists Resolution. Fortunately even though I haven’t been writing about it I have still been working them. My comics list has shrunk by about half after finally finishing Transmetropolitan and catching up on Saga, Captain Marvel, Infinity Gauntlet, and a dozen other short run titles like Revelations. My movie list hasn’t changed much, I did watch Amazing Spider-Man a few weeks ago but somehow when I sit down at night either I’m in the mood to look at a screen and play a game or I want a break from electronics and I pick up a book or comic. My big list is of course books and I’ve been doing, well let’s call it okay. My practical goal for the year is 50 books, and I’m about 8 books behind schedule. I didn’t read anything in March or April. But I’m still sure that I can catch up. Even when I hit 50 books for the year, it’s going to be hard to feel a lot of satisfaction when I’m looking at a list 156 books lone. Especially when it tends to grow by another book or two every other week.

Minecraft

Gaming-wise I’ve gotten sucked into playing the custom Minecraft maps Agrarian Skies and Crash Landing. They both rely on a mod called Hardcore Questing Mode (HQM) which adds quests and rewards to the game.

Agrarian Skies is a skyblock map, meaning there’s no ground. You start out on a small island floating in the void and go through a series of challenges to basically build a world. There’ve been skyblock maps before, but I really like how HQM allows map makers to add some structure to the game.

Crash Landing is similar although it’s set in a flat world map not a skyblock. The challenges are different there as well. In Agrarian Skies the challenge is to build up resources without starving. Crash Landing is set in a desert world and adds dehydration that that as well as a defensive aspect since the mod AI/aggression has been enhanced a bit.

They’re both very fun, although I’ve gotten to the point in Agrarian Skies where the goal is to amass ludicrous amounts of certain items, for instance 100,000 purple wool, and as a result I’ve been playing a bit more Crash Landing. Which I think is the reason why Minecraft has such longevity. You have the basic survival mode for that initial challenge, and creative mode for when you just want to build. When that gets old, mods allow for adding hundreds or new systems to the game from magic wands to nuclear reactors, and when that gets old then there are custom challenge maps.

It’s a moral imperative! Day 5 of Blaugust

Solitude

For most of my adult life, I’ve had a hangup about going to restaurants and movie theaters by myself. I used to travel for work and I would always either order room service or hit a drive through for meals, neither of which was all that healthy, but meh 20’s. Two years ago I ended up going to see the Avengers by myself, and it was amazing. I mean both the movie and the watching experience.

Having a wife and two young kids means I’m never really alone anymore. Of course, I have time to write and play games late at night, but it’s not quite the same when I know there’s a two year old sleeping five feet away as part of my brain is apparently always listening for noises from either kids’ room. So going to a theater completely alone and not having to worry about anyone else for a few hours, is a great guilt-free break from family life.

Sidestory: Sitting in the theater Friday night for the 10:15 pm show and I can’t help but overhear the two kids (high school? no idea, they all look like baby’s to me now) talking about how they can’t believe they’re at the movies so early. I guess they didn’t have to get up at 7:30 am to give their dog thyroid and heart medications or take their kids to swimming lessons a 9 am.

GROOT! Day 4 of Blaugust

Guardians of the Galaxy

GOTG_Payoff_1-Sht_v4b_LgA talking racoon? That’s going to suck! What are they thinking?!

That may not be word for word what I said when I heard about Marvel’s plans for a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but it’s close. I’ve always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC one. Spider-Man has been my favorite superhero for as long as I can remember. Batman is my second, but he’s the only DC Hero I’ve really loved. Whereas Marvel’s X-men, Iron Man, Hulk, and Captain America are all titles I’ve followed at one time or another. So I’ve been ecstatic about how well Marvel Studios has been doing since the release of Iron Man 1.

It wasn’t until I saw the first teasers that my expectations changed from “this will be a train wreck” to “it might be good.” The more videos that came out, the more interested I got. At some point “it might be good” turned into “it will be good” the turned into “excited, can’t wait to see it.”

So how was it? I saw it twice this weekend. My expectations going into the show were exceeded. When I walked out, I checked the time because if there had been any more showings that night I would have bought another ticket right then. Unfortunately it was 12:30 and there weren’t any more showings so I had to wait for Saturday evening.

What do I love about this movie so much? It’s funny, it’s got smart dialog, and great characters. I loved that I walked out of the theater and couldn’t pick which Guardian was my favorite. Even Drax, whom I expected to be my least favorite, had several of the funniest lines in the movie. The casting, writing, directing, and acting all came together perfectly. It’s really amazing to me that James Gunn was able to introduce five characters all one movie, compared to Marvel using four separate movies to prepare for the Joss’s Avengers movie.

Woot! Day 3 of Blaugust

Nirvana

Raising two sons, aged  five and two, is not easy. Well at least not given how my mine are, something which amuses my parents immensely I’m sure. Karma at work.

It does make the good moments that happen extra sweet though and I got one of those on Friday. I was picking up my boys from daycare to take them for haircuts and as we got onto the road my oldest asked to listen to music.

“What do you want to hear?”

“The hot song.”

“The what?”

“The rock song, the one we listened to last time.”

I got a huge grin then because the last thing I’d played for them had been Smells Like Teen Spirit from Nirvana’s Nevermind. An album that I literally listen to non-stop during my senior year in high school. Back in the days of tape players I had one that would automatically reverse when it hit the end of a tape and play the opposite side. So I could put Nevermind in, hit play and just listen for hours. Nirvana accompanied me through a lot of long van rides to swim meets.

Starting Nirvana playing through my phone in the truck and watching two little heads start bobbing up and down in my rearview mirror made my week.

Woot! Day 2 of Blaugust

It’s Blaugust!

blaugust_450Today marks the beginning of a little experiment. Belghast has put together a community drive to get people blogging every day this month, and in a moment of insanity I decided to join in.

It’s the first time I’ve tried for a post every day schedule. Back in 2011 I tried out a weekdays posting schedule, but I stopped after a few months. I had proven to myself that I could do it but I didn’t want to make blogging feel like work. This time isn’t so much about proving anything to myself so much as it is a good community pressured way to get back in the blogging habit. After all my schedule the last two years probably shouldn’t even be described as sporadic. Maybe sparse? Besides getting back in the habit, this is also going to be an opportunity for me to finally push myself to edit less. I have a bad habit of writing posts and leaving them sit as drafts for weeks until whatever topic they deal with isn’t worth discussing and then deleting them.

This is actually a good month to do an everyday schedule. GenCon is coming up so that’ll be four days where I’ll easily have things to post about. I’m also likely to be straying from gaming more than usual. This month is a big one for me as a parent, since my oldest son starts Kindergarten on Monday. If I get especially brave or desperate for writing ideas, I’m going to write and post some fiction. Some rough, draft zero, scene and dialog snippets that occasionally pop into my head.

Post Script: Bel has some writing prompts up today and this one caught my eye:

What is your favorite grouping experience?  Even the most staunch solo artist eventually groups up, what is the best thing that has happened while grouped with other players?

My favorite grouping experience is still one of my first ones. Back in the ancient pre-WoW days I played a Troll Shaman in Dark Age of Camelot. I ended up in a random group with some people out in the PVE frontier areas and we ended up playing together for a couple of hours and having a lot of fun. So much that they invited me to their guild, Hammer and Anvil, which I think was the first MMO guild I ever joined. I still have fond memories of logging in every evening to a chorus of greetings.

Farewell GTX, Hello GTX

Saturday night I sat down at my gaming desktop to check in on some MMOs that I hadn’t logged into in months, namely LotRO, Rift, and Defiance.

I spent about 15 minutes in Rift moving all my inventory over to my Vault and then redeeming all of the patronage rewards that had been stacking up before canceling my subscription. I haven’t touched the game since before it went free-to-play, it’s just too much work to get back up to speed with all of the soul changes, and had been waiting on my last renewal to run out.

Then I hopped into LotRO just intending to pay my housing upkeep, but I ended up fiddling around and discovered that the inventory system changed. I was able to merge all my individual bags into a single window! Maybe I’m easily amused, but it makes thing so much easier when only one large window pops open instead of six little windows. I imagine people running mods have been enjoying something similar for a while, but I really dislike messing with mods for MMO clients.

Anyway, I ended up playing with my Hunter a bit and figuring out the big class changes from a few months back. I had just finished and ported back to where I’d left off questing when the game crashed. I chalked it up to LotRO being old, after all it is still slow to load and still doesn’t support full-screen windowed mode, and decided to move on to Defiance.

Watching the Season 2 premiere got me curious about what state the game was in. When I logged in, I found that I had more than a dozen items to claim in the shop. Once I got my inventory squared away, I got on my ATV and headed out only to have the game crash. Again, not thinking anything of it, I relaunched and noticed a button to update appearance on the login screen, and decided to have a makeover. While tweaking my character’s appearance I had the screen go black and then a Windows message popped up that my graphics kernel has crashed and restarted.

I had recently update my drivers and wondered if that had been a mistake, but went ahead and went back to fiddling with my character’s appearance. Then red lines started to appear on the screen, followed by my machine rebooting.

Crap.

When my machine came back up in safe mode and there were still red lines on the screen, I knew it wasn’t the drivers. Or at least wasn’t only the drivers.

I’ve never had a video card die on me before, especially one that’s only a coupe of years old. I’m not sure when but sometime in the last five years I’d upgrades the original GTX 275 that I’d used in the build with a GTX 580, so it’s no older than that. It has seen pretty constant use though.

Regardless, I took a trip to Fry’s on Sunday and picked up a new GTX 760, which isn’t quite top of the line, but is still better than the 580 without being ludicrously expensive. Plus my motherboard is old enough to be PCI-express 2.0 not 3.0 so I’m already capping my performance with the 760 as it is.

Bye Riv

I’ve been pretty obsessed with Space Engineers lately and hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else, but I happened to bring up Twitter last night and caught a blog post tweet from @Girl_grey. Since Feedly’s been down I clicked through and couldn’t believe it. River, the guy behind A High Latency Life, had died suddenly.

My brain’s still not really processing the news. We weren’t super close, but he was great fun to chat/joke with on Twitter and is one of the few bloggers that I read who could write a rant and be both funny and abrasive. I’m going to miss you, Riv.

Roll 20s

Skin Game Trailer

The next Dresden Files book is due out near the end of this month and I’m excited!

I’ve been following a group on Youtube for a while now that’s been working on a fan film. While it’s hard to tell from the snippets I’ve seen, overall it looks really well done. Even cooler is they’ve made a trailer for Skin Game, check it out.

Editing, Revising, or Rewriting

Scrivener outlineFirst off, many thanks to my friend Todd who offered to give me a deadline and read what I had! I wanted to take him up on it and that was enough to break my inertia, but now that I have spent some time looking at what I have, I’m not sure the term editing really covers the magnitude of the work that my NaNo draft needs.

Editing implies to me, that a draft is more than 75% done. It needs the rough edges sanded, possibly some few scenes reordered, and maybe a few additional scenes added, but the foundations of the structure are sound. This doesn’t describe what I have. Revising doesn’t sound strong enough to me either. What I need to do is take the whole thing and rebuild it. I need a writing term more akin to gutting a house as opposed to remodeling a kitchen.

It seems daunting but it’s also become an opportunity. I’ve been interested in learning Scrivener for a while now and this seemed like the perfect use for it. So I imported my NaNo draft and split it into it’s original chapters and then skimmed each chapter and split it into rough scenes. So far, Scrivener looks like an excellent tool for organizing and rearranging text. I’m working now on adding one to two sentence summaries of each scene as well as tagging what parts are really story and what parts are the original framing narrative that I used. This has been helpful in giving me a clearer picture of what I have and what the problems are. Of course fixing them is a whole different story, but at least now I’m able to work more easily on smaller pieces.