my mental sieve...
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| Evil Wayne my mental sieve... |
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Thursday, April 28, 2005 Haunted Box, Family Curse Normally, I don't try to repost things I get off other people's blogs, but Mike has this up there on Trogdor, and it deserves further exploit. The Haunted Box posted by Evil Wayne | 1:54 PM 0 comments Wednesday, April 27, 2005 Worship the Computer The new computer came today. About 4 days earlier than I expected (although I knew it was coming yesterday). We're going to swap the current CPU for the new, bigger, badder version and relegate the old PC (about 3-4 years old) to the dining room so the kids have a computer and stop hogging mine. Now the only problem is the mass amount of data, pics, music, etc that I have on that machine that need to find their way on to the new one. I thought I would have this weekend to start archiving and prepping, but that's just not the case anymore. So I've got to start tonight and it'll probably take me until the weekend to be finished. Part of the point is so the kids can have their email and IM stuff on a whole other machine, and that machine is clearly visible. On top of that I have to find some kind of monitoring software that can keep tabs on who they talk to and whatnot (yeah, we're evil like that. My advice? Have kids, then judge, non-breeder). Not to mention that the only way I'm actually going to get all this to work is to network them together. That might require a wireless card for the old PC but the wireless network is acting funky - always has. So I don't know if it's a hardware problem or my house is made out of some kind of stealth-technology. Good for confusing homing missiles, bad for WLANs. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:28 PM 0 comments Monday, April 25, 2005 RPG I've been going over some of the GURPS books I found and really feeling the pull. Traveller was another setting I never got to try, but I'm sure would have been a blast. I've been scouring the forums at sjgames.com and I actually ordered the Supers book I found on sale online. Not that there's anyone to play with. Most of the old group lives at least an hour away, some further. I'm stupid like that... Not that I was actually soliciting Shaun to play (and I certainly wouldn't reject the idea wholesale, but the distance thing is a problem) but I was lamenting it to him and, well, here's his response: I mean, play the game in real time - or slower, in the case of combat and such. Wow, how much would that suck as a game. "I then take a shit in 7 minutes, the first four of which are consumed with straining at a level of 6 out of ten. Keep in mind, the prunes I ate 3 hours ago will not have started to counteract the lack of roughage from my limited diet of the last week yet." So, as you can see, as dorky as I am, there will always be a faster gun. posted by Evil Wayne | 8:11 PM 2 comments Wednesday, April 20, 2005 The Season Between Spring and Summer My Dad calls it Mud, but he's only half right. Yes, there's so much rain that dirt cannot actually exist sometimes. It's a nice period where you don't know if the land that was your lawn last year will actually have the same configuration this year. Personally, I keep hoping more and more of it will fall into the pond giving us less and less to mow. However, it's not just the mud. It's Blackfly Season. I don't know why I'm always surpised by the sudden swarms of blackflies that arrive around this time, but I am. I go outside to start the car in the morning and I can see it's going to be a nice day. I walk down the driveway and suddenly there's a cloud of them. They can smell the flesh of men. I unlock the car with the keypad and jump in, usually only a half dozen get in with me. And, if I'm real lucky, they get all messed up with the whole glass-barrier problem. If not I get bit. And it's a nasty bit too. For such a small little bug, they have some powerful jaws. I think a blackfly is wings and teeth actually. No brain, no digestive track, they have no useful purpose other than to rend flesh from bone. I swear I saw a swarm carry off a cat last year. The only good news is that most of them will be dead by June. Unless the Mud portion of the season lasts that long. The two are intertwined. posted by Evil Wayne | 2:04 PM 0 comments Tuesday, April 19, 2005 Happy Birthday Sean Normally I would call as well, but I have no idea when your freakinstien schedule would allow you to talk to the rest of the world. It's like you're in prison and you have these elaborate rules that dictate when you can and cannot speak to the outside.  So hopefully you'll enjoy your b-day in some way. We've got a Quake III game going on tonight, rock on! BTW, in three, short years you'll be 30. posted by Evil Wayne | 3:25 PM 0 comments Monday, April 18, 2005 Feeling RPG-ish I saw Return of the King again Saturday night (not to mention Shaun of the Dead on Friday—2 movies in one weekend? Somebody pinch me). Tine hadn't seen the last Lord of the Rings movie, so I borrowed it from my brother and it's a solid 3 hours of fantastic action. Having never read the books, I can definitively state it's the best version eva. Watching it I recall how I felt the first time I saw; Damn, if I don't miss playing Dungeon & Dragons. (I know that Tolkien is pretty responsible for the whole rise of D&D and that the character create the archetype for any self-respecting D&D party.) I spent the rest of the night surfing around the web for related material. When I found Dungeon Crawl Classics, I can't tell you how nostalgic it made me feel. I used to go downtown to the local comic book store just to browse through their module section and decide what I was going to spend a month's worth of allowance on. I even surfed back to Wizards.com to see what the core books were selling for, contemplating if I could afford to invest in them again (also, I bit unclear, are the new D&D rules 3.5 the same as the open-source d20 thing? Or is that something completely different?) The whole thing had me longing for the days when we would spend the whole weekend playing some RPG without much care for anything else. Even the later years at college where it was just a few hours on Sunday night. Me, Leebone, Neil, and Rick—glorious Rick, who had a noble fighter character, but he himself lacked any kind of social grace. No matter what happened, Rick would attack. Lee and I always played some kind of mage. Usually with a thief thrown in for good measure. We played in the Dragonlance universe for a while and that has it's own special charms. Including 3 moons that dictate what kind of magic is more powerful. There was a moon-cycle chart to keep track and when a grand conjunction came to pass, it was a time to rock the casbah. One of the best things about Neil's Krynn was illusions were *real* unless disbelieved. Which required an active disbelieve roll. So lesser creatures were generally screwed. Illusion could be one powerful spell. Man, I really miss it sometimes. Anyway, after spending a few hours rolling around the internet, I came to the conclusion that I was being an idiot. There's nobody to play with, plus I have trouble with time-management as it is right now. I still might buy a module from those guys, because I'm stupid like that, but it'll probably get read and stuck in with the rest of my stuff. I also found Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies. Which could be neat, if it did a good job of explaining the whole RPG thing to non-dorks in a way that actually made it sound cool. On Sunday we began clearing out the barn. We had stored everything there last January ('04) to make room for the work on the house. The kids all had bins of stuff and it was a little like Christmas, except you were opening stuff you already had and some of it was broken. TheBoy really made out, because Mike had a bin full of toys that he was probably already too old for when he put them away the first time. A year and half is a long time for kids. Mike was 11 when he store them. At 13, they're baby toys. Oddly, Tine and I had almost nothing out there. But the one bin I did have was full of my RPG stuff. Actually I had two. One of just gaming books (almost all GURPS) and another with a hodge-podge of books, notebooks and other supplement stuff. Strangly, I couldn't locate my actual D&D books, although they'd be woefully out of date - I bought them back in the early 80s. Heck I think I have a 1st edition Monster Manual. Much to Tine's dismay I brought in the books bin (I think if I had tried to bring in both, she would have tied me down and set them on fire). At least the GURPS books are tidy and not a tornado of scraps of paper. I didn't really get a chance to look at them, but I have more than I originally thought I did. There has to be at least 25 books in there (and most of them Sci-Fi related). One of my favorite is BlackOps, where you get to take on the part of a secret government organization that hunts down paranormal activities and blows the crap out of them. Kind of a mix of the X-Files, Ghostbusters and Rambo. Although GURPS Steampunk should come in very handy for my little Floating Isles BrikWar scenarios. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:52 PM 0 comments Friday, April 15, 2005 Sorting and Stuff Our sitter has been sick all week with ... you know, I don't really know with what. Strange, you'd think I would pay better attention. Anyway, I had to be home yesterday with TheBoy™ and I did manage to put a dent in the amount of sorting I've been doing. Well, not doing lately. I've been finding ways to avoid sorting, mainly using the computer to play games. I keep tossing between Knights of the Old Republic and Halo. I like Halo's story, although I'm freakin' stuck at an early part. I can't get my team (or me) onto the conveyer lift of the Convent ship. They keep beaming down guys that blast the crap out of me, because I'm usually the only one to survive the initial charge to the area. And KOTR is going good, but as an RPG, I don't ever seem to have that big of a block of time to actually devote to it. Not to mention that I keep stumbling across all these side-quests; The funny thing about them is they're all related to bounty-hunting right now. So I can either kill these dweebs with bounties on their heads or help them out in some way. Part of me can't wait to try this on EVIL-MODE, and another part of me is, "When the hell are you gonna have time to play a game twice?!? So I gave up. I pulled out the two large bins and started sorting out the big bulk. TheBoy™ wanted to help at first, but he just wants to take stuff from one bin and put it in another. Usually into one of my sorted bins, thus negating my efforts. But the lure of the PC was too great for him and he played Quake all freakin' day. At least I got some sorting done. Oh, and The Hulk was on; the TV show, not the movie. All day too, like 8 episodes or something. The kind of thing that's perfect to leave on and sort by. You don't really have to pay attention (because every episode is the same). One thing I noticed was how much Lou Ferrigno seemed less scary than I remembered him to be. But I was 10, so I'm not overly concerned. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:40 PM 0 comments Wednesday, April 13, 2005 The Big Quarter Century  Just remember: No matter what rain falls upon you, Or sun shines down to warm you. No matter who picks you up when you fall, Loves you no matter where you go. No matter what matter where you go Or who you meet... You are still gonna die some day. Now, just a little bit sooner. Happy Birthday Atikay! If it's any consolation, I wish I were 25 again. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:37 PM 0 comments Monday, April 11, 2005 Best. LAN. Ever. Saturday's MoonLAN came off pretty well. Setup, while not quite the snap it should have been (which is really my fault for assuming the router would assign all the LAN info correctly) it was, by far, the quickest we've ever done this. A lot of thanks to Jorge who brought a 16-port hub and a nice industrial power strip that got everyone in the dining room hooked up fast. Renting tables is so the way to go from now on. That totally made the physical space much more manageable. With the power strip in the middle, all the cables ran down the center and were completely out of the way. Only the network cables that ran from room to room were visible.  We played 2 game the entire time. There was about 5 hours of Aliens vs Predator 2. There's a mod called Survivor, where everyone starts as a Marine trooper and one person starts as an Alien. The Alien tries to kill the Marines, and the Marines try to survive, the longer you survive, the higher your score. Every Marine that's killed respawns as an Alien. So it's a game of slow attrition and panic fire. Tine said it was just amusing to hear us yelling at each other and Jorge yelling out things like: "Alien on top!", "Alien on bottom!", "Hugh Jass coming this way!" and "Die! Die! Die!" This of course competely gave themselves away when I was on the alien side of things and made it much easier to turn them into tasty bits of meat. We should have recorded some of it. Kate and I were in the living room. Whenever we were both Aliens we would whisper to each other about how to attack the group. At least once we totally pulled it off when the group was hold up in one of the outdoor maps. She came in from the left as I pounced from above and we massacred almost the entire lot (FatBoy was hard to kill, the bastard). If you got three kills in a row, you were promoted to Queen Alien, a title I got at least 3 times. One one of the indoor maps, I was so huge that I couldn't fit through the corridors. Unfortantley, I never actually saw what I looked like, but all accounts seem to indicate it was frickkin' cool. AvP2 is a great LAN game. The second game was Quake III, although not as long as AvP. We didn't start Quake III until around 6:00 Joe brought a mod for it called SuperHeroes and it was just as amusing. The skins were various superheros and the best part was the powers. You could select an active and passive superpower to use, plus a power that happened when you died. It was a capture the flag game. Joe was Batman with some kind of laservision that vaporized targets. I was Green Goblin for a while, with flight and Color Bottle Grenades which looked like gummy bottles falling and bouncing and exploding. There were things like Shrink Ray, Teleporters, Freeze Grenades, Lightsabers, Decoys and other weirdness. The Chicken game was freaky. Same SuperHero mod, but instead of CTF, one person got the Chicken and it clucked and circled the player as he ran from everyone else. About this time TheBoy started to edge me out of my machine. Quake is an easy point-and-shoot game and he loves them. So for while, my guy would suddenly start acting like a retard, shooting everyone and then standing still. I lucked out in that the laptop actually ran Quake okay, so I was able to get back in after being completely evicted from my machine. This LAN was, by far, the best one to date. If we can just get 2 or 3 more players, I think that would put us over the top. A 10-player game would rock and we could do more CTF and actually act like teams. Just that planning it is such a bitch. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:26 PM 0 comments Tuesday, April 05, 2005 And Then There Were Six... See?!? This is why a LAN is so hard to pull off. We've lost Dan and possibly Kate, which is okay, because you gotta do what you gotta do, you know? But we're down to six if Kate bows out (and I'm guessing she will) and that's fine. Our first LAN only had 4 of us. But our last one had 8 and that spoils ya. 4 vs 4 is probably only better by 5 vs 5. The worst part about Dan's departure is the fact I was leaving all the networking problems in his hands. Which I was more than glad to do. Last time, I spent way too much of the day debugging the network. Although, I think I might be okay this time. But we're down some critical hardware. Dan was also building us a router for everyone to link thru. Without it, someone will have to come up with a second router to link to my home network and that's sort of sketchy at this point. Man, it's never easy. posted by Evil Wayne | 3:58 PM 0 comments |
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