Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Sometimes Poke's assessment of my school is right

/rant

He usually characterizes us with extreme generalizations (I mean, we can't ALL be hippies, otherwise those of you in DG would be able to smell the pot/BO from home), but at the moment I'm pretty annoyed at the cliched liberalism here. I mean, I'm all for most liberal things, but THINK about your political stances and actions, people. For instance, this Friday is Hurricane Katrina Reflection Day, filled with panels and mini-seminars on various aspects of the hurricane. Now, I wouldn't normally have any objection to this, but for some reason this particular cause is worthy of cancelling classes and devoting the whole fucking day to it. This from the school which has classes as normal on NATIONAL HOLIDAYS. Not like, Flag Day or Arbor Day or one of the "...and it was the best ____ ever!" at the end of a story. Holidays such as Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And yet, a horrible (but not in comparison to much of the rest of the stuff going on in the world today) natural disaster that occurred 7+ months ago somehow warrants this special treatment. WTF, Carleton, WTF. OMG, at least give us a BBQ. Ahem. It's just that, though well-intentioned, this event is not only horribly contrived but also, the special treatment being afforded it just cries out "Look prospective students who happen to be visiting around this time of year! We're really liberal here! Don't you like liberals?" Ugh. Have some PRIDE, school. And democrats. Andy's right.

/end rant

In other, more fun news, it's only about 14 hours until the demo of Gal Civ 2 comes out, and then I get to enjoy my delicious 4-day weekend (the upshot of the above annoying school event) with that, girlfriend, parties, and other such ways in which to fritter away my time. More work is being done on the Werewolf stories, and also EXALTED! Good times will hopefully ensue from this, and the more I see of 2nd Edition, the more I like. I'm going to be running a game for some of my friends up here, so it'll be a good chance to get a feel for the new rules for this summer.

WELL, thanks for reading this far (if you gave up earlier, well, you don't get these kind thanks, do you?) and I'm off to play a little more Murloc RPG. Classic.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Flurry of Posts (6 ticks, -2 DV)

Click for full-size goodness. This is the first page (the bottom got cut off thanks to a crappy scanner) of a werewolf comic (ahem..."graphic novel") that my friend Carl and I are working on. Thanks to my writer's block/our "edjookayshun", it hasn't seen much progress in a while, but I just sent off the direction for page 2, so hopefully it'll move along a little bit. So far, my creativity hasn't been too elusive the last few days. Here's hoping it stays.

Bouldering


It's like rock wall climbing, only with less vertigo! Yay less vertigo! I started doing the bouldering thing back fall term when, incidentally, the Rec Center got a bouldering room installed, and I was hooked, though at this point it's been a while since I last did any climbing. BUT that all changed today, when I monkeyed around on teh wall for about half an hour. Good times, good exercise. I have a giant blister and my fingers/forearms/shoulders are sore as crap, but it's a ton of fun.

Now, back to hopefully writing some more about werewolves.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Ares is staring at me

Not the god of war though, sadly. This Ares is still pretty bad-ass, though; he's a beta fish I'm taking care of while I'm here at school over spring break. Someday he'll be out of his testing phase; we're looking at a May 2006 release date if the stress test goes as hoped. *rim shot*

Ahem. So yeah, I'm here at school instead of going to the sunny beaches of Cancun and getting really drunk and flashing people with video cameras, as I've been led by the media to believe is the normal mode of behavior for college students on spring break. Given that it's below freezing and the ground is covered with snow, I have to say that it's something of a let down. But hey, I'm making money, so it all evens out.

I've also been playing Civ 4, Homeworld 2, and ChronoTrigger, all excellent games. Civ 4 is wonderful and a worthy successor to Civ 2 (I never played Civ 3, but I've heard it was solid, mostly from Poke's ramblings about it) and is immensely fun. The addition of religions to the Civ model is really interesting-they're powerful for cultural imperialism, plus they let you monkey with history in the most hilarious fashion - like my Spanish Jewish theocracy, ofr the predominantly Buddhist American empire I'm leading at the moment. Though I probably get more of a kick out of that than normal people.

ChronoTrigger is just classic. 'Nuff said. We'll ignore the fact that I never played SNES games when I was younger and that my declaring the game to be "classic" means nothing; it's really fun though.

Homeworld 2 has all the good things of Homeworld, none of the minor flaws, and massively sexier graphics. There's a mission INSIDE an asteroid field/dustcloud. Did you see the Battlestar Galactica episode where the fleet was stuck in a really dense asteroid/dust field and it was all gorgeous SFX? Yeah. That's the HW2 mission. And when your ships fire, it creates static electricity lightning. It's gorgeous. Plus the whole game has this exotic quasi-Arabic overtone and fantastic music. Yay game series that improve with time.

I can't really remember where I intended to go with this post, except that, thanks to the fairly crappy, very pulpy Werewolf Tribe novels, I may be yet again starting to get my writing mojo back. Now if I move very, very slowly, maybe I won't spook it...
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Waiting for Exalted 2.0 - those hosers at Amazon had better get it to me soon, I need to get excited about Solars finally having Charms on par with the other types of Exalts.