Yes, it’s been that long.

I’ve been writing, if you can call composing in my head “writing”.  I’ve got quite a lot to say, and I’ve got a few drafts of things, particularly on game difficulty.  I’m re-reading Emotional Design as part of this, and trying to get to and through the interactive media chapter in order to talk more about it.  This has been churning in my brain for more than two weeks, which is why I was so glad to see this month’s Round Table is about game difficulty.

We’ve been doing a lot game-wise.  We’re still playing through Keep on the  Shadowfell, and we’re finding it moderately difficult to stay alive.  Or the players are, but that could be because I’m a big meanie.  I want to write about that, because I think it’s partly an expectations thing — comparing it to 3rd edition — and it’s partly an emotional thing.  I experienced it on game day, and Girl has experienced it in our gaming sessions.  I did buy the Monster Manual, and am perusing it now.  The module doesn’t really require any other books, which is good. It should keep us busy until the rest of the Heroic modules are out anyway.  I’ll be writing more about this soon.

The other thing we’ve been doing a lot of is Rock Band.  I temporarily fixed our Rock Band guitar controller, and then replaced it with a GH3 controller. I could probably re-fix the RB controller, but, ultimately, it’s about the clickiness/mushiness.  The GH3 guitars have a clicky feel, while the RB is mushy.  And we’re clicky-keyboard type people too.

In other entertainment news, SexyWife and I went to see Sexy Lips Wanted on Thursday. It was an enjoyable popcorn movie.  We chose it from a rather long (for us) list of popcorn movies because it was the only one rated R, and the only one with Angelina Jolie naked.  I want a picture of the bullet at the end that Jolie uses. I could have sworn it said “Goddess” on it.

Girl and I saw Hancock Saturday morning.  I wanted to see the new Brendan Fraser movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth (mainly as a palliative, until The Mummy comes out).  It was playing in the IMAX, and thus 1) not cheap seats and 2) vastly disapointing in the past.  The only movie I was glad I saw there (as opposed to seeing elsewhere) was Beowulf.  Not particularly glad I saw that one overall, but in IMAX it was cool(er?).  [Note the Jolie theme here.]

I had heard that Hancock makes sense for the first 2/3 of the movie, and then takes a sharp left turn. A left turn was taken, but I felt it had been largely telegraphed by the actors.  It just hadn’t been spelled out in minute detail ahead of time.  I appreciate that.  Will Smith has become an impressive actor, even though he’ll always be the rapping Fresh Prince to me on some level.  Still, there were points in the movie where he completely sucked me into the emotional mess that was his character, and I forgot that he was Will Smith.

I’m not saying that Hancock is the best movie ever.  I liked it more than Iron Man and Wanted, the other two popcorn movies I’ve seen this summer.  And perhaps that was because they didn’t explain every little detail.  It felt like there was this huge mythos behind the movie that was there but never surfaced to the movie.  It lent it some richness that other more explanatory movies don’t have. That was part of what I enjoyed about it.

I’ve been kind of out of communication for three weeks to pretty much everyone I don’t physically see.  I’m sorry for that, and I’m working on it.  One of these days I’ll know why this is so much easier than more personal communication.  But I see you there, and I want to talk.

Hard to get back into the swing of writing.  Work has been keeping me busy in interesting ways that tap my creative energy.  This isn’t bad, but I’ve realized that I have so much and it goes into work, gaming writing, and sexual play.  They are all outlets that I have chosen to spend my time and energy on, and all are important to me.  Balancing them is difficult, sometimes.  And if the writing on this blog is sporadic, it’s because the other stuff is taking precedence.  And that’s why I had the schedule.

I’ve got two really long pieces of erotica done, and with my most wonderful editors. Even they are busy lately, and I’m trying to be a responsible long-story poster, and have some advance work done before I post the pieces I have.  It’s probably time to do an inventory of storylines and plot some things out — I’ve got a bad habit of wanting to write (and abandoning serials).

I want to write a bit about 4e D&D, as we’ve played one session of it now, and saw a presentation by WotC at Marcon.  It’s less than 10 days to the arrival of all three books (no waiting a month at a time this go round).  The D&D Insider site, and Gleemaxare supposed to be part of that, but unless it’s a lot better soon, I can’t see reliably using the site.  I’d gotten used to the quirks of it, but every time they redesign the D&D site, it gets harder to use and find things.  I know there’s a lot there, but if I can’t get past the gate, it’s kind of pointless.  Gleemax doesn’t even work half the time I go there, so I admit I don’t have high expectations for how well WotC is going to do the online thing.  It just doesn’t seem to be a core competency for them.  And does the world need another social networking site? Maybe I’m just showing my grey hairs there, but I’ve already got too many logins.

I also want to talk a bit about Marcon.  It was a bit disappointing in terms of the dealers.  I did attend a few entertaining panels, and one where I learned some useful life skills.  Of course, the sad thing is that the GoH, Robert Asprin died.  So no more Skeeve and Aahz adventures, which makes me sad.  I devoured them in High School, and while the later works weren’t up to my (probably nostalgic) memory of the earlier ones, I still enjoy the characters.  I’m generally glad I went to Marcon, it reminded me about the board game thing on Mondays, and whetted my appetite for Origins, which seems more inline with my interests.

I’m also trying to puzzle out the plots to my erotica, in an attempt to do what I always seem to be attempting: to finish something.  I originally started online journalling (what we called blogging 11 years ago) in an effort to do writing that didn’t have a finite structure.  I was writing a few short stories at the time, but nothing really long, and nothing with a complicated plot.  I was (and am) bad at finishing things, so a daily journal was perfect for me: routine and never-ending.  It’s still a good format, but I’ve been trying to finish a novel (any novel) for over five years now.  My short writing has suffered because I haven’t been doing it, and I haven’t finished much either.  But I’ve written lots and lots of words.

I also want to write something for Corvus’ round table, but I find I just don’t grok the topic very well.  It seems odd to me, but I don’t think of characters in terms of flaws, but in terms of motivations and desires (positive and negative).  To me they are like vectors heading towards a particular destiny, characters which bounce and collide against each other in interesting ways.  Maybe that makes me a wierd writer, and perhaps explains my inability to finish things.

I dunno. There will be a new topic in a few days, though, and perhaps that will inspire me.

So, with much regretfulness, the Wii was returned to my home over the weekend.

It is interesting to me the way that Girl feels about the two games (and for now, we’ll treat them as two separate games): Okami for PS2 and Okami for Wii. She was going to keep the Wii until the end of the month — which should have been enough time to finish the game. She wants to play the PS2 version, so she’s not spoiled on the game, but I doubt she’ll ever play the Wii version again. I’ll let her say how she feels about the game in comments, if she wants.

As I said earlier, I’ve tried some of the pieces of the game, and there’s no doubt that some of the recognition isn’t working correctly. I can draw a line, it looks like a line, but it isn’t interpreted as a line. I always had problems with the wind and bloom powers, in both versions. It seems worse in the current version. I just got the fire power, which is context sensitive (it only works if you start on fire, and end on something that can be melted/burned — and you know this as you draw the line.)

I’m going to continue playing it, in order to assess it for myself. My current thesis is still the same: it’s not about making the motions, it’s about how the game recognizes them. My thought is that the recognition should be joyful and fun, if it works. I haven’t played enough Okami to determine if the is joyful and fun.

However, the main reason that I am glad I got the Wii is alluded into the title of this post: downloadable games. This week marked the begining of WiiWare, which is Nintendo’s version of XBLA. It’s misssing demos, which means I’ll almost certainly buy less games. (I download most of the XBLA games that seem remotely interesting, and have purchased things I had no idea were going to be as fun as they are.) So I’ll be going more heavily on reviews to make my Wii purchases.

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Well, it was only a “long” weekend because I took Friday off. And while I don’t have personal days yet, it was totally worth it.

CSCC, the school Girl graduated from, was having the Downtown Digital Arts Festival, which I found out via Brenda Brathwaite’s blog. Brenda is on the IGDA board and has worked in games for years. I first became aware of her via the IGDA Sex SIG, where she posted and ran things while working on Playboy : the Mansion, and her book Sex in Video Games. I was excited, because I’d been reading her words for several years, and pow! she’s coming to Columbus. It’s not everyday that you meet someone with their own Wikipedia entry.

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This weekend, we shifted a bit: we only did a little Rock Band, and without the full group, but still fun. Unfortunately, our Rock Band guitar’s strum bar is sticky, and has to be pushed down very hard to register — this makes fast notes nearly impossible, although up-strumming still works fine.  This is enough of a barrier that we quit playing for the night.  We’re going to look at it — but does anybody know how the warranty info for these works out? I remember seeing something about returning instruments directly to Harmonix, instead of the retailer.

Anyway, SexyWife got Juiced 2 from GameTap, and I was seriously underwhelmed by all but the Barbie aspects of the game, some of which seemed stupid.  Why do I care what my driver looks like? It was almost as complicated as Oblivion, and I didn’t know why (and then couldn’t find similar controls for the cars).  SexyWife pimped her car out, but I was having trouble getting excited by driving small economy cars around an annoying track.

We had real trouble with the drifting tutorial so I suggested we get a used copy of one of the Burnout games.  Not Paradise, whose open world is more of a hindrance than a help, but Takedown — which is a compatible XBox game — and Revenge which is for the 360, and thus has crackachievements.  I loved these games on the PS2, but we haven’t turned on our PS2 since we got tired of Persona 3, and bought the 360.

In a fit of “I want to play something different,”  (before we went to GameStop), I played Psychonauts again.  It just makes me lust for Brutal Legend, but it’s amazing to me how well it holds up on the 360.  Most of the games I have left over from my XBox days either don’t play (SSX Tricky *sniff*) , don’t play right (Munch’s Odyssey *sniffle*), or look crappy (pretty much everything else). 

Pyschonauts’ consistent art style still manages to look decent on the newer machine.  I don’t have an HD, of course, so I can’t compare there.  But this game clearly understand that naturalistic looks and hyper-realism limits a game.  If you’re a game of the week, that’s no big deal, but Psychonauts is worth playing through more than once (this is my third or fourth go at it).

The Wii is still at Girl’s house, happily looping Okami animations.  We did the quizzes over the weekend, and negotiated when the Wii would return to its One True Home.  Satisfied I could play Okami to my heart’s content in a month, I restarted No More Heroes in Mild mode.  Evidently “Mild” is harder than “Sweet.” I evidently missed this on the first play through, so this one is a bit more challenging, so perhaps I’ll finish it this time.

Going back to the lack-of-playing-the-PS2, I see a lot of people talking about the change in palette in Okami.  We can’t tell.  Maybe we’ve got crappy TVs or bad memory, but it looks basically the same to us.  Of course, we haven’t looked at the PS2 version is a really long time, and I’m not turning it on just to do ‘Picture 1′ or ‘Picture 2′.  The game is still fun, although Girl half-complains that it’s easier.  I think it’s just less annoying.  But then we know which one of us is the Zelda Fanatic here. *cough*cough* (not me)

When I picked up Burnout (deciding to buy both Takedown and Revenge), GameStop was having a buy 2 get 1 sale.  We looked at a bunch of stuff, and I wound up buying Enchanted Arms, because with the sale and my discount it was cheap enough to justify, even if it wasn’t great.  And it’s not great, but with movie-based budget considerations, I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it.

So far I’ve

1. Been asleep on the special day (In class, the day of the festival)
2. Accidentally awakened the Great Evil™
3. Escaped my home town (which was a whole city) after it was destroyed by the Great Evil™
4. Then I was thrown in jail as part of cutscenes that let me to the next city.
5. That’s ok, because I escaped into the sewer
6. Aided by rebels, of course.  Who are led by a noble lady.

Lots of cliche’s here, but they all have a slightly different spin than I’ve seen before.  The lisping gay guy who was all over my (now apparently dead or kidnapped) best friend meant I’d never take this very seriously.  Also involved in that was the main character’s voice, whose tone and intonation is almost exactly like Galstaff, Sorceror of Light.  (and always have to mention this: Mordenkainen’s Faithful Hound is not a first level spell)

Anyhow, I never got around to playing Burnout but the wife has, and she’s enjoying it.  Which is cool, ’cause now I want to play.  And so I’m gonna go do that now, if it please ya (or if it don’t)

This week has been really busy at work, finally. We rolled out the major project that I’ve been working on (on and off again) since I got hired. Admittedly, I took some time to completely rewrite the underlying code for the system, including switching programming languages from ColdFusion to PHP, and working on other projects in the interim (some of which, like so many projects got canned.)

Our roommate JB leaves today, after spending more than a year with us. I understand his reasons, and they don’t belong here. I just want to wish him well in his new endeavors, and know that he has friends here in Columbus.

One of the truisms of the poly lifestyle is that things don’t stay the same for very long; that’s neither a good thing nor bad (as it can be both at the same time), it’s just the way things are. Our group has been pretty well blessed with a lot of stability lately. No group of four (or 5 or 6 or…) is ever stable the way a couple can be. But then sometimes that “stability” hides other problems, so I believe that being poly, despite these occasional shakeups, and changes is stronger. Not even despite, really, but because of.

In terms of the ongoing game of CotT, I’m down a visual arts piece this week, but I’ll be posting more photos of the new building today. I wrote a visual piece but it wasn’t ready in time to post yesterday, and it needs to go up on a Thursday. It’s in the can and ready to auto-post (love that feature of WordPress, oh, yes, I do!) next week.

Tomorrow I have a stained glass class, so I’ll get some pictures and post them. That should catch up my visual arts score! Of course, I hear my Girl clamoring for Erotica. So, if I get some time today, I’m going to try to finish up a couple of pieces that have been sitting in my drafts for a while. But no promises… sometimes it works, sometimes I fight with the evil Writer’s Block.

If things work the way I’ve planned, then we’re down three for the first four weeks of the new schedule. I’ve missed two erotica postings and one visual arts piece. I’m considering doing something else on the erotica days, but haven’t decided what yet. It needs to be a bit easier, and I’ve got some performance anxiety about it. My erotica needs to be good and less than good isn’t good enough to post.

But I also just need to be writing. I’m not so interested in writing perfect pieces for my Wednesday blog posts, but to keep my hand in. That made me turn back to the thing I last used successfully to write short pieces on demand: writing prompts. Unfortunatly, I couldn’t find anything as good as the book I’d had, the name and author of which I couldn’t remember, nor could I find the book.

That has changed. I know have The Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves. It has the best prompts I’ve ever seen, mainly because they aren’t so restrictive. Writer’s Digest has prompts, and I found some others online. The journal’s prompts are detailed, and not very flexible. The others are what I used to write the Cleo story, and I’m not uhappy, but I found myself pressing the random button too much.

Judy’s prompts are very vague, and as I typed them into a spreadsheet on Wednesday, I found them inspiring me as I typed each one. I think randomized them away from their dates so that I can pick them one at a time, since I’ll be doing this more weekly than daily. I didn’t want to do them in order, since that’s what I did with the images, and I didn’t want to have the same sequence show up again. This will work, and I’m sure when I’m done, I can recycle them again, and do more.

If that’s even necessary:)

Also this weekend I’m going to upgrade to wordpress 2.5. I hope it’s new visual editor is a bit better, and I definitely am interested in the shortcode system. I could use it for the images I use here to simplifiy adding them to the entry (although I doubt I’d use the gallery feature, since I want more control than it seems to have.)

If it works, I’ll probably do the other blogs here, if the ladies don’t mind.