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Cat-sniffed Computer Crossroads

09/19/2015 Daily Minutiae

Here I stand at a crossroads, well sitting mainly and not at a real crossroads more along the lines of a metaphysical one. I’m actually sitting in front of my computer and my cat is currently sniffing around my keyboard, and that doesn’t feel very crossroady to me.

Lets try again.

Here I sit in front of my cat friendly computer and I must question my desires for the future. I have often told myself that, other than being a veterinarian, what I want to be most is a writer. I have progressed very little on that front with the fine exception of the yearly post I make to the blog. While that does titillate the writing senses it really only helps me write and share about me. I want to write and share worlds and characters I have in my head and give those things the life they need to reach beyond my imagination and in to others and continue to grow and thrive long after I’m gone.

While I have the desire I certainly lack the motivation.  I try to re-read old stories written by friends in the past to strengthen the creativity that I felt I had in surplus in my youth but often it just makes me more nostalgic than anything else.  Good times.  I remember all the hours I spent reading the latest short story and the anticipation felt for the one in progress.  I even remember my own attempts at putting pen to paper with only marginal success.  I may not have written anything special but I was at least immersed in that creative energy.  I enjoyed that and I want more of it.  I want more of it and I want to take it further.

A completed published work would be a good result but an ideal result would be a career in doing that over and over again.

-v- out.

2015 the Mid Year Review

07/11/2015 Daily Minutiae

The only thing being updated on this site with any regularity is the word press software it seems. If only writing out a chunk of text were as easy as pushing the update button on the wordpress dashboard.

In the intervening time between posts I’ve played a few games both on and offline. Had a wonderful Star Wars the Old Republic renaissance for a few months after their last big expansion. The best part about that game and many others is playing with friends and once they grow tired of it, it isn’t long after that I put it back on the shelf myself. SWtoR just announced yet another major expansion release for later this year so I’ll likely check that out again since I enjoy it so much. This time they’ll be focused a lot more on the story so hopefully it will hold my interest as a solo player long enough to see it through.

I’ve just recently jumped in to the world of the MOBA or multiplayer online battle arena with a new release from Blizzard called Heroes of the Storm. Its basically a somewhat scaled down version of Diablo 3 but only the player versus player aspects. It features some great characters from across all their properties so you have plenty to choose from when it comes to picking your hero. I’ve been slowly collecting all the Diablo heroes since that’s been my favorite franchise of theirs for as long as I can remember. People say its not near as complex or as deep as League of Legends but unfortunately I can’t compare the two since I’ve barely even logged on to a game of League of Legends despite its immense popularity.

As for offline related activities we had a small push of regular game design early in the year but it has fallen off quite rapidly sad to say due to other things coming up. The summers are always hard for bro gatherings because everyone is generally pretty busy, but hopefully that will turn around again soon.

Might check out Tokyo in Tulsa this month, Wizard World in Oct and BGGCON in November. Its a con-tastic year!

-v- out

The horrible truth about cats, haunted houses and shrinking potions

10/26/2014 Gaming

One of the many, many downsides (many) of having a trusted comrade BETRAY you by shrinking you and your fellows down to Lilliputian sized test subjects whilst exploring a giant poorly designed haunted house, is that inevitably  they release their hungry (albeit playful) feline friends to hunt you down while you try to escape their slavering maws and sharp claws.  Another downside is that your plans don’t always work out near as well when faced with poor dice rolls.  Also crappy plans don’t help.

As a child I remember fondly the days leading up to Halloween, the anticipation of all the future dental bills that the sudden and vast influx of sugary treats would bring. These days I run towards the simpler, less tooth decay causing activities, usually just long for a night where I can play some of the many zombie, Cthulhu, ghost or other horror themed board games I have collected since my discovery that such things exist.  And this year it finally happened.  Enough at least to satiate my desires for another year and perhaps urge me towards completion of my own games in the genre.

We played Betrayal at House on the Hill, Cthulhu Gloom, Ghost Stories and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  All great games and very enjoyable.  Maybe this year I can clean off my desk enough to try a solo game of Arkham Horror on Halloween night unless that might be too much for the Old Ones ones to overlook….

-v- out.

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley

10/20/2014 Daily Minutiae

It’s true.  I have grand plans when I sit down here at night in front of the ol’ computron 2000, but alas it never seems to lead to anything more than just perusing websites for no more than a minute or two. Heaven forbid I have any kind of attention span longer than the time it takes to eat half a Twinkie.  (Sweetest comeback ever!)

Oh I’ll jot down an idea or two for whatever game design is currently in the front of the queue to help make me feel a tad more productive.  Although I don’t know if writing “do more better fun good” is really game design but it helps me to sleep better on my… I just randomly searched a folder on my hard drive for a video that I didn’t even watch as I started typing that last sentence.  To be fair in my head I thought it would have been a really good video to watch just then but when I found it and remembered what was in it after seeing the name it really wasn’t worth the time.  It wasn’t even worth the time it took me to write about it in that last sentence.

This is getting out of hand.  It’s almost bedtime anyway I guess.

-v- out.

Taken away to another place and time

10/17/2014 Daily Minutiae

That’s what happens whenever I listen to the right music.  Certain songs or just certain styles of music can take me to places I’ve never been but can experience in my mind just through allowing myself to be immersed in the music.  That’s one of the great things about browsing a variety of vids on the youtubes, great music can be found in the strangest places.  I also get a fair share of auditory titillation from all the soundtracks I’ve accumulated over the years, music that’s geared towards evoking specific emotions or feelings is a great way for me to sit back and relax after (or sometimes during) a long stressful day.

Just random thoughts while listening to some new music.

-v- out.

The internal struggle wages on eternally…

10/08/2014 Daily Minutiae

I seem to think that I’m not too bright.   I’m no psychologist, but I do believe that my id is trying to trick me.  I’ve been pretty meh on the whole game design/writing thing and I think its because I lack a certain device.  At least thats what I think I want me to believe.  I know I don’t need it but I surely want it and I must be telling myself that if I get it a unicorn with its magical horn (or is the unicorn inherently magical horn notwithstanding?) will shatter with extreme prejudice the creative barriers that have slowly been erected around me freeing me in my pursuit of pure awesomeness.  Picture all that with a lot more rainbows and colors and you get an idea of the kind of lies I seem to be telling myself.

Like I said I must not think I’m very smart.

I want a new laptop/tablet and I’ve almost convinced myself that I would totally be more productive if I had such a thing.  Totally.  I could write or design no matter where I go or what time of day or night it is because of that fantastic fancy new tech that I just don’t have.  While in part that may be true, I know deep down that I really don’t go anywhere so here in front of my computer is where I spend the vast majority of my time.  I know this.  It doesn’t stop me from trying to convince me otherwise though. Bless my conniving little heart, at least I care enough about my own happiness that I’m willing to lie to me to achieve it.

*self hug*

-v- out.

A clock, a calendar and a sundial walk in to my life…

10/05/2014 Daily Minutiae

Gentle readers, I propose to you that I am in need of some kind of scheduling system in order to better deliver content in a more timely and palatable manner.

I’ll work something up and let you know.  I mainly would like to start thinking out loud about various game design topics and I think if I were to do so at regular intervals I might actually start doing it.   As always my lazy nature works against me and this may be another idea that fails to survive to fruition.

-v- out.

Minutiae by the Minute

10/02/2014 Daily Minutiae - Gaming - Vampyres
Where my time goes to die...

Might as well continue the trend and get another post out there while the mood is right.  Time to relax and listen to some Louis’ greatest hits while I think of something to post.

I’m on the fence about whether or not to buy the upcoming Borderlands game Borderlands The Pre-Sequel.  Much like the previous iterations, I’m sure ill finish the game and enjoy it a great deal.  The concern is whether or not I can hold out long enough for it to go on sale or even a bundle with the season pass.  I have a current backlog of games that I need to finish or even start.  Some of my favorite gaming moments are when playing with friends and while a few others might get the game release day, it’s highly unlikely I’d end up playing co-op with them.  I tend to chew through the content at a pretty rapid pace and become despondent when I finish the game.  I also don’t enjoy playing the game immediately after with another character just because the content is too fresh in my mind which is one reason why I love Borderlands with all its expansion packs and content updates.   Anyway I’m on the fence about that one, but its a rickety fence and I’m already leaning toward the side that has cel-shaded open arms waiting for me.

One of the games I was hoping to get this year from Kickstarter was Pillars of Eternity, but it looks like that has been pushed back until next year so will have to hold longer for that one.

Speaking of Kickstarter, thats where a big chunk of my backlog is waiting for me.  For completed games I still have Banner Saga, Shadowrun Dragonfall, and Wasteland 2 (although I’m close on that one) to finish.  Not to mention all the ones that are already in early access like Dead State, Shadowrun online, Dead Linger, and Stonehearth that are fun to just check out and see where they are at in the development.  I need someone to manage my time since it seems I have too many things to play and not enough time to play them.

First world problems.

-v- out.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

09/30/2014 Daily Minutiae - Gaming - News
Arr avast ye!

Or however that saying goes.  Another year come and gone and while a lot has happened, at least I’m pretty sure that a lot has happened, not much has really changed.  Not enough to post about it seems which is strange since the tag for this blog is “daily minutiae” and you would think that that implies I post about just about every little thing.   At least it does to me.  I’ve let blog me down.

New year (well 10 months in to the new year anyway) and it’s time for a a blog post.

Just got through with a great weekend of gaming with friends.   Since we won’t be attending BGGCon this year we felt we should attempt to at have some major gaming sessions to make up for it.  Friday and Saturday were jam packed with games of all types from an epic 7 player Battlestar Galactica session that started much too late on Friday to even just a few quick games of Love Letter games of all types were played.   I had the great fortune of playing in BSG and for once was not a cylon.  The humans held out for a while but in the end humanity was not worthy of being victorious.  Mistrust, backstabbing and greed were the typical responses by the humans while the Cylons tried to save us from ourselves.  Frakkin’ toasters.

Let’s see if I can remember a rundown of all the games I was able to play.

Friday:

Koryŏ
Doomtown Reloaded
Settlers of Catan Card Game
Boss Monster
Alien Frontiers
Mascarade
Shadow Hunters
Battlestar Galactica

Doesn’t seem like a lot but that took up just about all of Friday and ran into about 2AM of Saturday.  I think if I play BSG again it won’t be with 7 people at least not when the game starts after 9PM.  Still a great game though and a very excellent start to BroCon 2014.

By the time I got back to BroCon on Saturday I was already feeling pretty worn out.  The old gaming stamina ain’t what it used to be, but there were still plenty of games to be played.

Saturday:

Castles of Burgundy
Kingsburg
Cutthroat Caverns
Mission Red Planet
London
Pirate’s Cove

There could be one or two more that I’m missing since I was pretty sleepy most of the day.  I soldiered on though like a good gamer though.  Fatigue be damned!

I’ve also been trying to get back in to some more creative outlets like game design and writing (which I hope to practice here).  I’d like to start chronicling my game design or writing efforts with the belief that it will help me process those idea and keep them at the forefront of my mind and focus my energies.

I won’t lie and lead you on with the promise of more posts, but if you’re lucky there may be more than one per year.

-v- out.

Not Sure What a Sol is but I’m Forging it

09/18/2013 Daily Minutiae - Gaming

I had some fancy alliterative sentence featuring the words sol, sole and soul but I gave up on that because the amount of effort to smash all that together just wasn’t worth the effort. That’s the kind of quality assurance I try to deliver in each and every post.

My nights lately have been taken up with more than just watching Hearthstone streams. I’ve been playing SolForge. It’s another free to play online strategy card game. It has some interesting mechanics it brings to bear to the lane based card game genre. I’m not sure if that’s really a genre but for the purposes of this post it will be. Currently in open beta there are plenty of planned features that aren’t in yet, but so far the basic game play seems solid. Play two cards a turn in one of your five lanes and try to damage your opponent and bring their life to zero. One novel mechanic is that your cards each have three levels and after you play a particular card the next level card is placed in your discard pile. The higher level cards feature better stats and abilities than its predecessors and are generally more useful. It creates a nice overall flow to the game since as your cards level up the tension level also increases and hastens the end of the game.

The game has both single player and multiplayer modes and they feel the same. The computer opponent is generally not as good as a human player but it does make a nice easy method to test out new deck ideas before braving the wilds of multiplayer arena. Overall I feel with 300+ cards in the opening set there is good mix of themes and abilities spread across four factions with each faction having its own particular shticks to fit a good variety of play styles. I’m not a huge lane based card game fan, but SolForge offers a few interesting ideas to the genre.

Next up we hunt cards!

-v- out.

Hearthstone, SolForge and Card Hunter

09/16/2013 Daily Minutiae - Gaming

Hearthstone Gnome ArtI am become Lust, demander of awesome online card gaming… awesomeness.

Let’s start with Hearthstone seeing as how that’s probably the game that I’m most looking forward to playing out of this tantalizing trio of temptation. I have not played the game myself, but I’ve watched/listened to many hours of streams on Twitch TV of others playing. It is basically a clone of the, soon to be retired, World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. Many aspects of WoWTCG have been streamlined and beaten into what is now Hearthstone. Gone are potentially confusing timing rules, the resource row constraints and overall fiddlyness of having to manually track your health and your enemy health. Many of the cards from the original game are even found in Hearthstone so the feeling of familiarity is fairly overwhelming. That could be good or bad depending on your experience with Hearthstone’s cardboard counterpart. You’re left with, what I believe to be, the core game experience which is what makes it something I’m looking forward to playing for myself. In particular I like the look of the Arena, which is a limited draft and its one part of the WoWTCG (and CCG/TCGs in general) I wish I had done a lot more of since I found it to be some of the most fun I’ve had in the game. Speaking as the Midwest Regional A Game of Thrones Draft Champion of 2005 I speak from experience. Game mechanics aside, the interface for Hearthstone seems very inviting and just screams Blizzard/World of Warcraft. Blizzard has taken nothing for granted when it comes to delivering what looks to be another high quality experience to one of my favorite genres of gaming.

Next couple posts I’ll share my views on the other two games which I’ve actually been fortunate enough to play.

-v- out.

Writing, Games and Everything Else I’d Like to Do but Don’t

09/08/2013 Daily Minutiae - Gaming - Vampyres - Writing

Once again the idea of removing distractions, mainly games, has floated to the surface of my meandering stream of consciousness. The detachment of games from my life would be akin to the surgical removal of a much needed body part. I’m talking like limbs, toes or something equally necessary to do stuff with on a daily basis type of hard. I’d like to write more, whether its in a blog, short stories or even a novel, it’s something I’d like to pursue as a method of extricating myself from the current drudgery of “working for the man”. Of course, after about two seconds I realize that I am also accustomed to a certain level of lifestyle which would be taken away almost certainly since I could no longer afford to buy or do the things that facilitate that lifestyle. Like games. If only you could hear the sigh from where you are gentle readers. Its epic.

Anyway, another endeavor I’d like to continue with is the compilation of an e-book of short stories that two of my oldest friends wrote during our formative childhood years. I have quite a few that I would need to type in manually and perhaps do a little editing, but there is a literal stack of papers sitting near my desk that I have to manage and I just don’t ever seem to have the energy or the drive to go through it. Every once in a while I will take out the stack and put it in front of me in order to sort through and compare what I have in digital form versus what I have in hard copy. Every time I do this I end up reading one or two and it really takes me back to a time that I think needs to be remembered if only for the idea that we were a creative bunch and enjoyed it. I’ll keep you updated if there is any progress on this front.

I’ve mainly been playing Diablo 3 once again in anticipation of the upcoming expansion and despite my utter hatred of the auction house I always did enjoy that game as my over 150+ hours on multiple characters can attest. I’ve heard the console does away with the auction house portion of the game but instead increases the drop rate of the higher quality items. While I’m not sure that’s a bad thing I certainly don’t think its the right “fix” to make it more loot friendly. I will not be getting it on console as far as I know even though I really enjoyed the first Diablo on the PSX but I will probably keep playing the PC version for a while longer just because I still enjoy the game itself.

-v- out.

(Very Short) Crisis of Faith

07/22/2013 Daily Minutiae - Gaming - Writing

For the briefest of moments I toyed with the idea of quitting video games for a year. Two seconds total. Maybe three but I think the heart crushing depression that came with that idea slowed down my cognitive processes somewhat. The reasons that lead to the point where I would even consider doing something so drastic are pretty common and may be something everyone experiences at one point in their lives.

I love being creative. Whether that’s writing, game designing or even thinking up some nifty (yet utterly futile) new feature to add on my blog that I barely use. I love thinking that I made something that I enjoy or if I’m lucky, something other people might enjoy. I derive a great amount of pleasure from the creative process especially the beginning. The middle is a tad tedious but necessary and I hardly ever make it to the end but that is one of the reasons why I think I need to devote less time to video games. I’d like to finish more of those creative projects that I start. I’m far too easily distracted and if I’ve had a bad day or stressful day at work (which happens more and more and more) I tend to just do something mindless and non-productive. It helps in the short term I think, taking my mind off that bad day, but eventually I’d like to change my mindset to do something creative instead.

What makes it hard though is that I love to play games. Whenever Steam has a sale, it takes quite a bit of discipline to not buy everything in sight even if I know I’m not going to get to it. Just the knowledge that I have it available whenever I want is akin to eating a big bowl o’comfort food. That’s another reason to try and stop or maybe even just cut back. Spend less money. Between board games and video games I’d need at least three full time jobs to pay for all the games and hardware I want.

The end goal for me in all this would be to get to a point where I am good enough and disciplined enough to write and game design in order to make enough money to live on. Or even just enough of a side income to get in to job where I might actually look forward to going to work.

So anyway I’ve been playing The Walking Dead that was just on sale on Steam and…

aw crap.

-v- out.

The Great Migration is Over

07/04/2013 Daily Minutiae

I have finally moved off all the hosted virtual machines from Cyndi’s mac-mini over to an older unused computer running Solaris 11.1.  I figured I might as well work on keeping up with some Solaris skillz in some form or another just in case.   I had a little trouble copying over the vmdk/vdi files from one host to another which was unexpected.  I tried using a USB drive but the only filesystem on Solaris by default that is readable by OS X is fat32 and that unfortunately had a 4gb filesize limit.  I then tried to ssh the files over (after plugging in a cat 5 to the mac so it wasn’t over wireless) but even that didn’t work due to some kind of communication error over ssh.  I then tried to set up nfs and just could not get anything talking properly.  Finally I ended up using wget+ftp and transferred the files over while watching a movie and folding laundry.   Whew!

I’ve also updated the webserver to the latest and greatest version of Gentoo with a completely clean emerge as part of the migration and that wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.  I had been working on a Gentoo template for a while now and keeping it up to date.  I installed fresh versions of all the applications I could think of that would be needed on the new webserver and left off stuff that I know I’ve installed but never used so hopefully that keeps it nice and clean.  Luckily, I had moved all the “important” web directories to their own filesystems/disks a while back so just assigning the vmdk files from one host to another was all it took.  Yay!

I look forward to playing with zfs and zones on the Solaris box and continuing to update my Gentoo virtual machine template for future fun and excitement!

-v-. out.

P.S. If you don’t care about any of that stuff above then its unfortunate for you that you’re already finished. If you’re hoping to read an apology here then you’re doubly screwed.