Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Another year winding down and... yeah, not much to say about that itself, I guess. Been feeling sort of out of it most of the day. Hit the ground running at work. More laptops to set up. More things to work out for the phone system. More things to do for the circulation software upgrade. No shortage of things going on there. We had our annual HOA meeting last Thursday night. It went more smoothly than last year, but that was pretty much a given. The buildings are in decent, if not perfect, shape. We've a loan to pay off, but no looming expenses otherwise and no contractors to argue with. The most vocal and hostile of our membership were not in attendance. So it was over pretty quick. My term on the board lasts another year by default and I think by then I'd like some time off - but with no one wanting to volunteer for the positions, I don't know if I'll get it. Almost immediately after (that night? the next morning?) we were contacted by an owner complaining that

I recently wrote about a character in a book who came across as too perfect . This spawned some tangential discussion, but when I say that as a bad thing, I'm generally not saying "I don't like him because he's an upstanding citizen who always makes the morally right choices." No, what I'm saying is closer to "I don't like him because he always seems to make the narratively right choices, thus coming across more as an obvious plot device than a person ." That's my perfect or flawless in a bad way. Sometimes, it's simply because there's not enough explanation of the character's reason and motivations. That happens a lot in roleplaying situations, where so much goes on in a player's mind that may not be conveyed to others. It also happens a lot in movies, where time constraints limit what can be told. When I thought of a prime example for this sort of character, Riddick came to mind. I could probably argue the point from

Random notes on a setting in mind... or the background for one. I see a world that rose to great heights of magical prowess and understanding, which all fell apart in a vicious war. This leaves a world of crumbling ruins, lost knowledge, and some great wonders still around. In the decades after, civilizations on a smaller scale rebuild. Would-be mages struggle to regain the understanding of the height of society, some cities are still guarded by small armies of automaton soldiers, creatures and races that were brought into being by the great mages of old run rampant or struggle to find their place... Torvarian Magocracy Magic and Science Magic, simply put, isn't fully understood in a quantifiable fashion. It's most often defined as the use of one's will to exert unnatural change upon reality. It's understood that magical energy exists both within the human being and existing within the rest of the world, and that there is a connection between those reservoirs. A

Zombie apocalypse dreams last night - probably connected to seeing a few minutes of a Saw movie just before bed. @whee! I was wish a group of survivors who had set up around a few houses in the ruins of a sparsely-built area. I came across some kid and was showing him the ropes when we got back to find the houses under attack. These zombies were tearing down doors and proving more resilient than usual to the frequent metal bat or crowbar to the head, prompting some discussion about how they're getting tougher and what to do. Finding a suitable place to wall off was a favored suggestion, even perhaps using something like school buses as a basis for the walls. I wondered, but my dream never actually answered whether we were dealing with infectious zombies or global ones. The latter scenerio, which seems less common in media these days, has always seemed to me the scarier one. No matter what precautions you take as a survivor, if someone dies quietly in the night, you've got a

Reading books is sometimes fascinating just for the opportunity to see how people view them differently. So... point off for being two books when it all deserved to be one. I think I covered that when discussing The Initiate Brother . But that's not a huge problem when you get both books together. It's a real annoyance when you're buying a series as it comes out, though, having to wait a year for the continuation. Even worse if an author hits a certain popularity along the way and you're suddenly faced with acquiring hardbacks or waiting even longer. But I digress. I still like the books overall. The story is generally interesting. The fantasy-Oriental culture is fairly well done, with plenty of conflicts between duty and desire. I found most of the characters to be enjoyable to follow. Lord Shonto is the man . Komawara is pretty well done, though his emotional turn after the war seems a little abrupt even if it may be realistic. Jaku Katta sort of grew on me, but

Was there a period in which fantasy writers somehow lost knowledge of how to write a complete book that's also part of a series? I'm sure it's coincidence, but after reading a trilogy that didn't hit any approaching a real narrative climax until the third book, now I get a two book series in which the first ends on a cliffhanger and... yeah, doesn't have any real climax. Things happen, but everything is obvious building toward later events. On the whole, The Initiate Brother, was a perfectly fine read. It comes across as excellent inspiration for a Legend of Five Rings game, or something along those lines - Oriental fantasy with low-grade supernatural elements so far. It generally has (what seems to me) the right flavor, with lots of political elements and personal ambitions hidden behind fascades. Perhaps my least favorite character, however, is Brother Shuyun - the title character. His entire purpose in the book seems to boil down to two main points. First, th

"I" was part of a mystical sisterhood in some fantasy world. Ordered to retrieve an turn over an evil artifact, I had suspicions that my superior was actually corrupt and wanted to use the orb's power to release the evil for her own gain. So I played it safe - used a decoy and gathered some allies to help should I be proven right. All this culminated in a cross-country chase where her treachery was exposed and the day was saved.

So my time spent at work over the weekend was, thankfully, minimal. I did have to deal with a call Sunday afternoon, too, but that wasn't too bad and could be handled remotely. GW: So we wrapped up the War in Kryta chain Sunday evening. It's good to finally get through that even, though it doesn't feel greatly monumental for me. Certainly it involved many waves of various mobs in the defense of Lion's Arch and wraps up some character stories (though there remains one really big "missing in action"), but I still didn't really feel much affected by it. Maybe that's me. I haven't really been able to get into the story so much while being rushed around from one accomplishment to the next. WoW: The guild is... not quite diving into Cataclysm with the momentum it had several months ago in Wrath. Not as a whole, anyway. As a group we're roughly at the point of being geared to start raiding, but the pieces aren't quite in place. We lack eno

... about coming in to work on a weekend morning. No interruptions.

It's not quite the note I would have liked to go out on this week. Yesterday went better. More problems cropped up with the new computers today than previously. Mostly, that was user familiarity. Some were stupid little things, like me missing a folder to copy or one user who used his recycle bin "as an archive folder." And Outlook 2010 doesn't seem to like certain emails, crashing frequently - consistently on certain messages. Setting it to read in plain text works around that, but it's thoroughly annoying and not uncommon for something that's a big-time email program. I lost some time to a meeting that I would have rather not. And while I made good progress in a lot of areas, a couple computers are not set up sufficiently for me to be comfortable with, so I'll be going in sometime this weekend to tend to that further. And I still didn't get out until late due to an end-of-the-day error with our system. Troubleshooting on our end failed. I final

I don't think words can adequately convey feelings in their entire depth and focus. Yet sometimes, I still feel compelled to try... My job has ups and downs. This week is a down. In the last 48+ hours, I have: - wanted to hit someone - nearly screamed more than once - felt like if breathing were voluntary, I'd just stop - been too exhausted to do anything I might enjoy - cursed more than I probably have in the last six months - said "I don't know" so many times I've lost track - ached desperately to cry - laughed giddily - of the near-insane, overwhelmed sort rather than of any joy I've also experienced a moment of serenity. The tragedy of it was I realized it and knew it to be fleeting. I could say I've been stressed. That's entirely true, but doesn't really do justice to how I've felt. There's pressure from a board member through a manager, unto me to accomplish replacement of some eighteen computers quickly. But we&

So in GW, we're down to the last mission and a half in the War in Kryta. We might be done next weekend. Some of the missions are still a hassle either in running or sheer quantity of things to go through, but... I'm looking forward to finishing it at least. In WoW, I'm working on archaeology with one character - that's not quite as boring as fishing, but involves a ton of travel time. I'm keeping up with dailies on my main and watching reputations gains, seeming to be the first one to revered with the guild (tip: use the armory to track weekly contribution to the guild and try to reach the cap each week) and nearly exalted with Ramkahen. Heroic Lost City seemed fairly easy. Heroic Stonecore seemed fairly hard (which is annoying, as there are three drops of worth there for me still), though should be a little easier since I seem to have learned things about the Orzuk fight. Heroic dungeons in general are daunting to me at the moment less because of difficulty and m

Finished the third book of the Symphony of Ages over the weekend. There's another three books, but they take place later, from what I understand. And hey, there's actually some closure here. I may or may not look for the follow-ups later. Overall, the series feels to me like a roleplaying game run by an enthusiastic, but probably inexperienced, friend. There are some really neat ideas in there. There's a lot of worldbuilding, laying out histories and culture. And yet, it still feels like there's something missing on a technical, literary level. The pacing isn't very satisfying (with no real climax until the third book), the central characters are really over the top, and the relationships get painfully soap opera-esque. So it was okay entertainment, but not one of those series that I'm compelled to read through because it strikes a chord or is just that good. Rhapsody really didn't need to be awesome at so much. Namer of incomparable, unrealized power

... is taking a lot out of me. Going through another cold certainly isn't helping. My mornings, especially, have been a stuffy-headed, foggy haze. My co-tech at work has been out two days now - from the aches he mentioned on Monday, I wonder if he might actually have gotten hit with a flu. That leaves me coming in for the afternoon and scrambling for at least a few hours just to try to catch up. Then the periodic postal updates last night didn't all work right, making that process take a lot longer than usual. And I had other unplanned fixes. And tonight (after coming in early to make a meeting) I'm stuck working on a computer stuck in a loop at booting, whether due to malware or hard drive failure I'm not sure yet. Nevermind that we have a pallet of laptops to prep and put into service, and two pallets of VOIP phone hardware to get in place (even though I think we may be missing something there). Urgh. And it's already Wednesday when I went through most of th

I'm running out of "new" things to comment on about Cataclysm content, but there's still a few things... Potions It didn't sink in right away, but Cataclysm-level potions seem to only be available via Alchemy. Previously, you'd get some from quests or dropped off monsters, but in the level 80+ content, I haven't seen a single potion drop or reward. I guess that's a deliberate choice made to emphasize a profession a little more, but it seems strange. Then again, even healing 10k out of a health pool of 130+k is a smaller percentage than what I think we were seeing before, too. But I've managed to get some made for my main, at least. Tol Barad I'll always have mixed feelings about the PVP content, I suppose. Or, at least, I'll always have some negative and might have some positive. Tol Barad is reasonably pretty, if a little dark. I like that they split the battleground from a non-battleground area, so there are things to do there wi

We seem to have fewer people on for Sunday night Guild Wars sessions. We were pretty much filling groups of eight for a while. Now we might have half that. I can't help but wonder if it's been more permanent schedule shifts, or seasonal ones... Working through the War in Kryta quests. There's a lot more to it than I expected, I guess, including a few long slogs through heavily-occupied zones. We cleared one path to get to a goal and had to circle back around... through spawns every so often. It was actually quicker to die and get rezzed back a ways. That doesn't seem like the greatest design choice there. Still, I'm glad to be making progress. And I've been given several more things to log into my Hall of Monuments. I'm up to 16 points! Out of 50. >.>

Over the weekend, I finished Prophecy, the sequel to Rhapsody . It is more of the same, really - no surprise there. I still like the characters overall. I still like the grand story overall. But it still feels like a lot is happening, while nothing happens. So much has been made of the prophecies and the F'dor threat that having a 650-page novel climax with perhaps a dozen pages of confrontation with a minion if a bit of a let down. The details of the Rakshas are interesting, even if it sort of further makes Ashe over-the-top as far as fuckeduppedness. Jo's fate hardly comes as a surprise. As said before, she felt sort of expendable - a low level character among epics who doesn't even like to follow orders. The story also needed some example of this insidious evil the reader has been warned about since almost the beginning. The Gwydion/Emily situation is revealed! Then concealed. Oy. This is like some soap opera with how it's being drawn out. I also tend to be

Thought I was over my cold last week. This morning, I woke with all sorts of sinusy crap going on. Back to the tissue boxes for the new year. Whee.