Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Just finished the second book in an ongoing series. I commented before on The Black Prism , including some more spoilery thoughts. This is a worthy sequel in most respects. It's good. It's got some emotional gravity. It's got some big philosophical thoughts, mostly through the opposing sides in the budding war of lawful/restrictive/established versus chaotic/freedom-preaching/rebels. I find some amusement in the fact that the back story of the setting made me think of the Brothers War in Magic the Gathering. According to the acknowledgements in the end of this book, the author was asked by someone who read the first book if he played MtG. He hadn't, but became familiar with it and drew on it somewhat as inspiration for the Nine Kings card game that makes a notable appearance in this second book. That inspiration is definitely there. The author seems to delight in jarring, abrupt twists - sometimes even to the extent of axing lingering plot threads or throwing out u

Still have a minor urging to run a fantasy game. And many problems with that, which still keep me from going anywhere with it... I recently read a blog post that's had me thinking about it. There's some truth there. Character advancement in RPGs tends to fall into one of two categories: stat gains and new abilities. The former have an appeal, but when you consider how the GM generally ramps up challenge to match PC abilities, it's often a wash. Sometimes a character with focus will come out a little ahead, but it's difficult to see and usually hard to get real excited about. New abilities, on the other hand, are usually cool. Advancement of a mage leads to new spells. Fireball. Flight. Teleportation. New things that are exciting. A warrior, on the other hand, gets better at dishing out and taking damage, sure, but not so much in the way of new capabilities. Feats, in D&D3E offer a little something, though they're often stat bonuses. 4E is built more toward

That was probably the best eleven-and-a-half-hour day workday I've had in... possibly ever. Matter of perspective, of course. Plenty of work (expected), plenty of problems (mostly expected), but... nothing truly insurmountable. I think I only cursed at a few of the unexpected issues that came up while trying to deal with setting up new email everywhere else. Of course, the trade-off is I'm getting home a bit late tonight and I basically gave up my night last night in order to get to sleep early enough to get in at 6 am. It did, however, mean I got around eight our of sleep (when I usually manage closer to six), so... maybe better even in some respects. Though coming off my cold, I feel like my voice is a bit weak after verbally instructing so many people. @.@

Still sniffling. Work originally scheduled for last week bumped to this week will have me coming in a couple hours early tomorrow. Ugh. Hard enough to wake up in the dark. Saw this Saturday morning and the flowers cracked me up. Formed a raid in WoW , but no progress Saturday night. Planning to try poking the first boss in Heart of Fear instead next week, as we hope that less crazy environmental damage effect may allow people to do better. I suspect DPS will still be an issue, but we'll see. Mostly just helped out with other personal story missions in GW2 last night. "Temptation is fun... giving in is even better!" - from a chocolate wrapper

Not feeling as well today. Not terrible, but a little bit more runny-nosy. Whee. I'm sure the five hours of sleep last night, getting called by work at 9:30 this morning, scarfing down a small bowl of from-frozen Chinese food, and coming in roughly five hours before I was scheduled to a stressful day of fixing problems (rather than making forward progress on our hosted email setup as expected) has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all. No matter how many times an install team says "we've done this before" we seem to be mired in a nightmare when it comes time to go live. It's like this place is a black hole of bad upgrade karma or something.

Monday evening, I started to notice a scratchy feeling in my throat, and was sniffing some. "Lovely," thought I, "this feels like the onset of a cold." I made a point of drinking more fluids and getting some extra sleep. Tuesday morning felt a little worse, but by Tuesday night I felt... mostly okay. Today I've been a touch stuffed up, but barely noticeable. It feels like my taking care of myself has kicked a cold before it really fully manifested. Go team? The irony being I almost wish I'd done otherwise. Being sick would at least be an excuse to take some time off work. And I seem to need excuses these days to justify such things to myself. I finished up The Janus Affair last night, the second Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novel. I seem to be unable to find my comments on the previous one to link at the moment. Steampunk secret agent adventure, this time about miraculous abductions and the parties responsible. The setting isn't bad, but I find

Sheesh, work has felt busy lately. @.@ But taking a moment to note a few minor amusements of late. A couple neat musical parody videos: Batman Maybe (Dark Knight Rises spoilers?) and Lo Pan Style off the gloriously 80's movie Big Trouble in Little China. Someone pointed out that Bill Paxton has the distinction of dying on-screen to not only a xenomorph in Aliens, but also the original Terminator and a predator in Predator 2. Heh. Who'da thought? I'm also going to make note of this Big Bear Butt post referencing and linking a rather long article on gun control. Food for thought.

So someone (and not even a usual someone) asked me a couple days ago if I preferred exploration or adventure in roleplaying. Now, that question alone is pretty limiting. Two options? Still, I thought about it and answered something like: "Adventure. I suppose exploring - seeing neat places and such - feels too non-interactive to me. However neat and pretty a setting/area may be, if there isn't stuff going on there isn't much to do other than to say 'okay, I go on to the next place.'" Of course, a good scene/campaign could (and perhaps should) include both to some degree, along with other aspects as well. Exploration can add a sense of novelty and interest, but that's very rarely enough to carry the day itself in my book. Adventure... could, depending on the particular implementation of it, though pushing plot continuously can get problematic itself. What else? Action? That has its place. Characters can be a huge element in garnering my interest - both

Down, generally speaking. Friday took more out of me than I would have liked, and I spent most of the weekend clawing my way up from a depressive mood that actually probably started with New Years Eve - my first notable bout since my last doctor visit a few months ago, and cause for consideration. WoW didn't pick up after last week, we're still in a lull as a group, with only 6-7 interested folks online and some of those (myself included) not at our best. Some remarks nearly had me leave early myself, but I hung out for a while. There was one dungeon run, though I wasn't in it. That made it a little harder to reach VP cap for the week, but not that difficult. GW2 wasn't much better, all told. Three guild members pulled in two strangers to hit up the Sorrow's Embrace dungeon. I thought I'd been there, but I guess I only marked the waypoint outside because nothing inside was familiar. It was challenging for a while, though I managed to keep from actually

Got in, said "hi," looked around, discussed briefly, then drove to Cortez to work on a virus-infected computer there since their tech is out for a couple weeks. Six hours of not catching a break there, I think I managed to get something functional (even if it required using another hard drive). That left me driving back at 10 pm on one of the darkest nights I've seen in a while with the still-infected hard drive. Whee. I'm tired. I'm a little frustrated. And I'm hungry. For the second night in a row, I sort of pushed dinner back until getting home. ... Now I just have to actually go home. And eat. *flop*

Ups and downs to that. I spent most of the evening/day feeling pretty darn down, though I think I'm managing to shake that off. Is that more brief than usual? Hmm... Finished my first play-through of XCom: EU . My earlier impressions hold true for the most part, though I would add a few thoughts. The pressure eases off considerably as the game goes on. While you run into more difficult enemies, the better gear that's unlocked helps. Satellite coverage increases income and cuts down on abduction missions. Research and development time ramps up. Seriously, before I hit the alien base, I felt lucky to get through four uninterrupted days of research and I was constantly worried about panic levels. Afterward, that all tapered off and I finished the game without the loss of any member nations. I think I'm going to have to be more cautious on the next difficulty level, though. We actually raided on Saturday in WoW . That is to say we had ten people who made some attempts at t