Redwolf's Journal (continued)

Ah, what to say about the year? Work remains about the same. Things are cyclical, and we're in a moderately busy part of the cycle. There's new upper management which is set on doing things, often too fast for anyone's good. This leads to a good bit of scrambling at times and some outright mistakes. I'm glad we have a manager to buffer some of that. To my eyes, it's a familiar mess. But what can you do? I keep my head down and try to keep everything working and moving as best I can. In the last year, I became a salaried employee, which included a raise (not really a life-changing one in any way, but it's something). Real life is pretty static. In the coming year, I should get to travel to Ireland with my dad and stepmom - something I both look forward to and not-quite-dread. I got into some local hiking in the summer, which was great, but I've not been able to keep up any real activity level since things have cooled off. That's not so great. Health

Not a whole lot to say. It was fairly low-key, with gifts and talk revolving around the Ireland trip in a few months. I would have been hard pressed to come up with any more recreational things to put on a list anyway. Though, of all things, we did learn that plasma TVs create interference for devices like IR headphones, and that interference varies based on picture brightness. Who knew?

I've managed to get involved with a relatively "new" little set of players on the MUCK. There's definite ups and downs to that. I find the fresher view of things invigorating at times. But I also see behavior that I grew out of years ago. It's a little weird. But from a more objective standpoint, it's also a little fascinating to see the old guard perceptions of the place versus the new. For these newer players, their vision of the setting is based on what's in the Wiki (which is outdated and incomplete in many cases) mingled with their own biases. To those of us of the "old guard" we experienced a lot of the stories directly and (at least in my case) haven't even looked at what the Wiki says for months or years. Of course, it doesn't help that a lot of things existed primarily in one person's head, and getting all that onto a web page is virtually impossible. In some cases, this has led to two (if not more) completely different t

Almost Christmas again. Sheesh. And again, it sort of doesn't feel that way. We did get some snow recently, but it exists primarily in shady patches on the ground right now. Usually it seems like we have a little bit more/fresher snow for Christmas day, but it is what it is. Since the Ireland trip at the end of May is a big thing, we're officially doing a "light" gift-giving this year. I still need to whip up some creme brulee for my overnight visit, though. Something reminded me about the F2P MMO Neverwinter recently. After watching a little review, I decided to try it a bit. Gameplay-wise, it's not bad, if just different enough in some keys to throw me. It's more actiony, with mouse-driven camera movement and aiming that requires exiting normal play to use the mouse to navigate menus. It's got some 4E feel, though there are more limited slots for abilities and numbers ramp up in on more MMO-standard scale. The world feels somewhat disconnected, as you

All last week, plus two days this week... but finally a day without something breaking on my watch or being run ragged over the workday. Woo! It also gave me the opportunity to finish the latest in the Chronicles of Elantra, last commented on here . Pretty much all my previous comments remain. This book "finishes" the previous one - and I rather think the two should have been edited down into a single volume, but what can you do? I continue to find a certain charm an appeal in the series, though there are technical issues that bug me even while reading. It's enough to bother me, but I still enjoy the stories. Kaylin remains herself, with clumsy fumbling along her destined path seeming to be a character trait that precludes developing much wisdom. None of the dragon characters make an appearance, though the "small dragon" familiar finally gets some explanation. Severn continues to bother me a bit with how little he depth of his own he seems to have, even if t

I made some initial remarks on the game already. And I stand by those. The big flaw of the game is one of pacing. Activities open up before the introduction to them, offering freedom at the cost of confusion. Some abilities are really only unlocked very late in the game, giving little chance to use them. I also had some frustrating times with, of all things, the metagame hacking puzzles. And the freerunning has its ups and downs, making it easy to accidentally jump the wrong way. But, the game plays pretty well overall. On land, it's reasonably fun. Occasionally, the mission objects hedge you in a lot, but sneaking around and picking off targets is satisfying. At sea, it's as good or better. Steering the Jackdaw feels "good." I can't compare to reality, of course, but there's a certain feel of weight and resistance, and wind that is anything but consistent. Ship boardings can get a little repetitive after a while, and offer a strange "health orb"

I'm tired. Part of that is simply the stress of work this week. I've had worse weeks, but this one felt pretty relentless with several projects looming, some of which I really should have found out about before now, and still things going wrong. I probably spent half my time time this week "putting out fires." Being in what I term "crisis mode," where I'm trying to fix something as quickly as possible because it's impacting current operations, is draining. This week, there was not one day without that. Things were moved over the weekend, causing some problems. We had a laptop suffer some sort of hard drive issues that, after a lot of time sunk into troubleshooting, necessitated formatting and reinstalling everything from scratch. I've seen files on one computer deleted for no conceivable reason. We had Windows Updates cause an odd interaction on our domain controller that screwed up our ability to even communicate across our network - that one

... I just want to let myself fall. But I know there's no one who can catch me.

I'm not following it super-closely, since I hate to get tangled up in hype too early, but I have backed Star Citizen, and I do receive (and sometimes even read) updated. It seems the team is looking toward a near-future release of organization-creation tools on the web site, with such groups later imported to the game. This... raises some personal questions in my mind. So far as I know, no one among my regular gaming friends has expressed any real interest in a B2P persistent space flight sim MMO., I was a huge fan of the Wing Commander games, but I don't personally know anyone else who was. And since the game is likely to allow only belonging to one organization (assumption, but, I haven't heard otherwise), joining a group is probably a pretty big commitment. So should I look elsewhere for a group to join? Or should I just try to go it alone? And if the latter, am I even going to care long-term, given that most of my "staying power" in MMOs is based on who I

So I did pick up the latest Assassin's Creed game, both for myself and a gift for a friend. I've only gotten a few hours of play time in, but it's been a very odd, flailing time so far. In some cases, the game doesn't seem to know what's unlocked and what isn't. On the starting island, Edward distinctly did not have the trademark Assassin wrist blades, instead getting them a little bit later in the story. And yet, I'm pretty sure the animation on those boar kills involved them rather than a sword or knife. I cleared one mission and noticed an icon on the map for the Jackdaw (Edward's ship for the game) only to run over to an empty dock - apparently, he doesn't yet have said ship. I also did a little "save the pirates" event, taking out the soldiers threatening a pirate or two and I'd swear I heard him call Edward "Captain" and make some comment about meeting back at the ship. Yeah, the ship that doesn't exist yet for Edw