Tag Archives: Games

a busy week

Well sorry I haven’t been around to blather at the internet but it has been a busy week here.

I have gotten the actual scripting started in the next version of Cawdor and the first draft if the first chapter is finished. Now only 29 or so more to go.

I had to deal with my xbox dying over the weekend, just two months after the warranty expired. It turns out that buying a refurbished xbox 360 is cheaper than repairing one. So, that is the route I took. In a strange way it worked out well because this Xbox, though refurbished, is newer and has a better graphic out than my older one.

Saw my rheumatologist and things seem to be going well on that front too.

It seems I am getting sucked back into the world of SFB gaming. For those who do not know SFB stands for Star Fleet Battles and in the 80’s it was a pretty fun game for starship combat in the Star Trek Universe. (Romulans, Klingons and the like.) Sadly the game kept expanding with new rules and new weapons which required new rules and rule for how the new rules worked with the old rules until the game collapsed under it own weight like a radiation enlarged ant. I gave up on the game because it turned into just who knew the rules better and it took fricking long to play.

Well, apparent retailer told the company that they would no longer carry the game because it was too complex. A game that can not attract new players is a dead game. So the game designer stripped the game down and made a new game out of it. I’ve read through the rule and it seems pretty playable again. I found a used set for more than half off the retaile price. (A used set that had never been played.) and I went ahead and ordered it.

Ahh the Gorns will fly again.

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A photo

So this afternoon on my second break of the day I walked outside and took in a bit of a constitutional. (I didn’t have enough battery power in my laptop to continue writing at work.)

I turned the corner looking north/west towards UCSD and La Jolla. Fog rolled over the hills and buildings in a thick blanket. I loved the site and tried to capture it with my cell phoner.

Here it is.

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Super Saturday

So I picked up Call of Duty: Black Ops for my Xbox 306 and that has proved to be a very enjoyable game. I love a couple of the new feature, such as theaters where you can watch and clip your past games as movies and I love that you can now take a friend on-line as a guest. (Shame it doesn’t allow two friends.)

Tonight I’ll be heading out to San Diego Vintage SF for a screening of Them!, so tonight is looking good.

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Blew my streak

I had posted, even if it was just a tiny, every singe days for nearly two months. I think that was a new record for me, until yesterday.

Sadly I was afflicted with a fairly intense headache yesterday. It passed, but I had to scrambled to get ready for the D&D (3.5) game I run. This was the introductory run of a new campaign with new characters starting over at first level. Sorry I missed posting, but on the plus side the game seemed to go rather well and people seemed happy with the change in gamemastering style I started.

Tonight I shall relax by watching a Sunday Night Movie.

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Weekend Update

So today I hung out with my pal Bear. It was a typical Sunday Afternoon for us. First we visited our local specialty bookstore, Mysterious Galaxy. I did not buy anything as my ‘to read’ stack is currently five books high. (I personally am not a fan of buying books when I have not finished reading the ones I purchased the trip before.) Then a  quick stop at our local games store Game Empire — nicely located next to Mysterious Galaxy — where I picked up an expansion deck for Munchkin as a gift to my sweetie-wife.

We had a large lunch at Outback Steakhouse. hmm I love that Sundays I do not count calories. we discussed my re-invented zombies and I am pleased to say that now two friends — both fans of the zombie movie genre — have enjoyed the ideas I bounded around about re-inventing the zombie. I still am not sure that I have a plot that will fully form, but it could be that it will just take time. My Macbeth ideas bounced around my skull for nearly a decade before they became Cawdor late last year.

I am very sorry that Conjecture’s programming looked so weak this year. I love going to my local conventions, but I am there primarily for programming and it is on that basis that I judge if a con was a failure or a success for myself.

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A moment from last night’s D&D game

So Twice a month I run a D&D (3.5, not 4.0) game. This particular campaign has been going for something like five years now and is about the reach its conclusion.

I just wanted share my favorite moment from the game last night.

The characters were having breakfast in a besieged Dwarven city under the mountain. From the kitchen they heard a violent disturbance. At once they sprang into action and one, a barbarian,  of the characters rushed to spot next to the kitchen door. A moment later a woman wielding two bloody scimitars came through, the barbarian swung and player confidently announce his roll to hit was a 37. (For those who do not play you general a number between 1-20 and add you modifiers to determine you roll to hit, 37 was an exceptionally high number to generate.)

The player was confident he scored a hit and I throughly enjoyed the look on his face when I announced, missed.

He turned to the others and said something along the lines of, “Oh, we’re in trouble.”

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Been Sick

Sorry I have been away so long my friends but I have been ill.

Now, not all of my absence has been due to the illness. On Sunday , my sweetie-wife, Gun-And Rockets, and myself drove north to Pasadena visiting the Jet Propulsion Lab on their open house. It’s really a geek disneyland with kiosks about their missions, but past and future. It was fun, though my knees hated me by the end of the day.

Anyway I got home way too tired for a Sunday Night Movie.

Monday my throat began to hurt and I did not feel up to making any sort of postings here.

I struggled to work through nasty stomach cramps, but after just two hours I called it quits and returned home and to bed.

I can say I have truly broken in my CPAP machine. When I am sick I sleep. With a fever of 102 I slept a lot, and I used my CPAP machine throughout. Well I missed work the next day and that brigs us up to today.

I made it back to work, struggled through another tough day, then I skipped dinner as my stomach was in no mood for one. Instead I watched Dr Who with my sweetie-wife and finished a round of edits on Cawdor. (More than 60,000 words, 240 pages or past the 2/3rds mark.)

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Sunday Night Movie: The Sword and The Sorcerer

So last night I was in the mood for something fantastic. By that I do not mean something of such tremendous quality that decades later people ares till amazed with the filmmaking, but rather in the mood for a film that dealt with a fantastic premise.

Thanks to my new nifty database program, I was able to sort the movies by time, I was looking for something under one hours fifty minutes, and then I just scanned the titles until I saw something that struck my fancy.

So The Sword And The Sorcerer is a fantasy film that came out in 1982 about the same time that Conan: The Barbarian was released into theaters. While Conan was a big budget film, 20 million dollars, which grossed nearly 40 million dollars domestically, The Sword And The Sorcerer was a much more modest production. Reportedly The Sword and The Sorcerer was made for the price of a single set on Conan: The Barbarian, and yet it still gross 39 million dollars domestically as well. Clearly the better return on investment went with the little film that could. Continue reading →

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Political Monsters

So, off the top of my head here are some correlations between select politicians and the D&D monster that best represent. This is list is for from exhaustive.

Bill Clinton: Come on this was a gimme, a Satyr. Nothign else fits this horny old goat.

Hillary Clinton: A harpy.

Sarah Palin: No doubt about it in my eyes, a Succubus. All charm and deception while she bleed you dry.

Barack Obama: A Rakshasa The shaping changing tiger that is smart, charming, and deadly. You never know exactly who he is cause he’s never in he real form.

Joe Biden: His’s the Gnome.

more when I think of them.

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The decades spin past.

No, this post isn’t about 2009 turning into 2010, ti’s about the memories that are fresh and vibrant in my head that have turned out to be 25 years old.

Way back in 1985 I was playing in a Starfleet Battles campaign. For those not in the know, Starfleet Battles is a game of ship-to-ship combat set in the Star Trek universe.

The game was a large and complex affair that just cried out for computer management. Sadly the makers of the game never seemed to understand that each addition, supplement, and rule errata contributed to making the game less and less playable. When I quite it had become the game you could not teach to new players.

Anyway in this campaign, players took on the roles of running star spanning empires, many that were in the original series and some that were created just for the game itself. (The game was a product of that time after the series was canceled but before the movies had gotten started. A curiously licensed product somehow outside of the control of Paramount.) I was the Gorn player. (Check the season one episode, Arena, to see the Gorns.)

Twenty five years latter I still remember the games, the players, the battles, and the man who ran all of it the incomparable Jimmy Diggs. Jimmy was  man of great energy, fun, and vitality. When I knew him he was a security guard, but he went on to write scripts for episodes of Star Trek DS9, Star Trek Voyager, and other works.

How good were those times. No matter how good my times are now, and they are good, nor how much better they may grow, I’ll never have times like that again.

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