Redwolf's Journal (continued)

City-state on an isolated peninsula founded on the ruins of some ancient civilization when a powerful mage brought people there from a foreign land. 200-ish years of settlement, time to get well established, but not having developed long-range sea travel and explorations tend to end up with people not returning. Possible catacomb/dungeon in the mountains on the inland end, possibly set up by the very mage that established the settlement. - The thought is the mage (possibly demon-possessed) made himself out as savior, magically transporting a population away from a supposed threat while really establishing a supply of test subjects. Over a couple hundred years, the necessities of survival have obscured some of the reality of what happened. Class and racial biases transferred over, but then the lines became somewhat blurred. Nobles could only retain status if they had enough loyal followers to help hold it, since possessions were, to an extent, reset. And anyone who really looks

Naturally when the full day of testing yesterday turned up no major issues, it had to be too good to be true. Ten hour work days of stress are draining. Tired. Edit: And then with the evening of lunch-not-agreeing-with-me. Ugh.

Lately, I've been in one of my "casting about for a video game to play" phases again. Destiny's the big name of the day, but I don't really like console shooters (I'm weird, I guess) so picking it up for PS3 didn't appeal. If it were on PC... but it's not yet. And looking ahead, I really don't see much in the near future. Maybe Dragon Age 3 whenever it releases (theoretically not that far away). Maybe Warlord of Draenor, though... I'm far less certain of that than when it was first announced. So instead, I went and got a copy of Final Fantasy XIV. Thirty days, then I have to decide if it's worth a subscription of some sort. We'll see. I believe my beta review boiled down to "it's pretty, but pretty standard MMORPG fare." My experience thus far with the release version has not been far different, but it's been reasonably enjoyable so far, too. I'm up to Lancer level 23 after a few days. The main story quests pus

Fairly "big" day today, though most of it is likely spent in waiting. I'm working a day shift and have been handling minor things since before 8 AM already. Whee. Mostly I'm just glad that for all the rain we got over the weekend, the roof doesn't seem to be leaking. We've about to change the "web width" of the paper, however, going to a slightly narrower size. That means a number of changes in the system that have to be made by yours truly after the layout of the last pages in the previous size is done tonight. Not sure how long that'll end up taking, or when precisely I can begin, but it'll be a long day either way.

Is there a correlation? Between about 2:30 and 4 this morning, there was a torrential downpour that kept me from really getting to back to sleep. My cell phone even buzzed me up at some point with a flash flood warning. The intensity of the storm was pretty insane. Yet I wake this morning from a dream in which I was some sort of over-the-top James Bond badass. What started as a resort vacation with family got crazy when a paramilitary guy and his Cobra-like mercenary force decided to try to kill me. When the dust settled, most of the force was wiped out, and the bad guy in charge was convinced by Wonder Woman (working with him because he'd promised some sort of help to Themyscira) to keep my family alive as bait. Hey, I said awesome, I said nothing about the dreams not being weird.

I'm in sort of a gray haze of "bleh" at present. On the up side, I can be pretty sure that a year ago this exact same situation would have put me in a downward spiral of black. Huzzah for medication! I had a conversation online which, while kind of a bummer, is something I've been saying (or trying to, and perhaps being unclear) for a looong time now. I'm not wholly unappreciative of one-off roleplay scenes, but at their best they tend to be 'a reasonably entertaining few hours.' In cases where they don't really align with my mood, they're more like 'difficult to pay attention to, but maybe better than nothing, I guess?' And just hanging out online without any actual playing has some social interaction value, but not much beyond that, especially when fumbling for shared interests to discuss or catch up on. All of that's at least a very minor positive. The problem is, when I'm sitting through any of that, I'm generally want

Tired. Brain's fuzzy. Wanna go back to sleep. Mmmf. It may be a smart thing to try to get to bed earlier on day-shift weeks. Feh. I've had a few thoughts rattling around in my head. Mostly, I blame recent reading. I'm not sure they're fully developed, though... Character Mistakes Characters in The Broken Eye make a lot of mistakes in the area of social interactions and conversations. Maybe they can't speak freely because of an invisible assassin the other person doesn't know about, or maybe they're just too uncertain or embarrassed. Most of the time, however, it seems it either doesn't occur to them to say something or they don't fully trust the other person with the information. That might be the biggest hindrance among the "good guys" of the story - they don't always trust one another to share. On the other hand, given the various allegiances revealed over the books so far, maybe they're right in some cases. But it got me

What a glorious mess! Which is not to say the third book in the Lightbringer series is a glorious mess of a story, rather it's a story of a glorious mess. A nation at war, people growing up, assassinations, plots... it's really pretty crazy. I only read the first book of A Song of Fire and Ice, so I can't make any sweeping comparisons there, but the shady politics are pretty high-level, even if Andross Guile's advantage border on plot-based rather than skill-based. I also wonder if Brett Weeks and Jim Butcher have some sort of bet over who can drag their character through the most hell. Dresden's had some lows, but Gavin Guile... wrrf. It seems like every time things are going well for the characters, a massive stumbling block is thrown in the way. And every time the chips are seriously down, the characters manage to scrape by. It's hard to root for the corrupt establishment. It's hard to root for the destructive rebellion. It's hard to see any l

Monday and Tuesday this week... ugh. My work days are rarely that dense with non-stop activity. The saving grace has been the existence of more forward progress than just fixing the "broken." Still, it's draining. DLC quietly snuck out for Dark Souls 2 . Picking it back up has been somewhat difficult, though. The DLC is accessible halfway or more into the game, and I found left my character after finishing my first playthrough at the beginning of the New Game+, so there was old stuff to repeat at higher difficulty to even get there. On top of that, I found PVP invasions waaaay more frequent, probably both due to activity in the game and a character level that was higher. I've ended up making slow progress in offline mode. I picked up the players handbook for Dungeons and Dragons (5E), and sort of skimmed through it. It looks more like D&D to me than 4E did. Formerly simple classes look more fluffed out than they were pre-4E. At a glance, it looks fine and da

Maybe I missed something by not seeing it in theaters. That's not to say I found it to be bad. I didn't. It was pretty good all around and fun. But there are a few details that fall short for me. I sort of like how the mixed messages of creativity and individualism versus cooperation come together. Either could have been pitched successfully, but to bring both to the table without seriously pushing one over the other feels sort of ballsy. For me, it works. There are two points that didn't work so well for me, though: 1) The word that came to mind as far as the pacing of the movie is frenetic . It's very busy, flying from one thing to the next at incredible speed. It doesn't quite push out anything too fast to be followed, but it all felt just a little bit on the side of "too much." 2) The "meta" twist in the movie... fits and works, but still comes off as a mild negative to my view. This has to do with how it subverts the expectations that

I picked up book one of the Grimnoir Chronicles on recommendation of a fellow player/wiz on the MUCK. The blurb says it's a cross between The Maltese Falcon and Twilight. That gave me pause, though he said it's more like Dresden Files than Twilight. Personally, I'd say it's less Twilight or Dresden and more X-men, albeit set in the early 1900's. The supernatural stuff may be "magic," but the way people with powers tend to have only one and use it pretty instinctively makes it feel more like a mutant ability than any sort of scholarly art. There's a good amount of alternate-history going on, with references to big name people and events from real history given a twist in some fashion. Powers were used in the Great War, but it looks like there probably won't be a World War 2, given a lack of Hitler and the development of Tesla's "Peace Ray." It's interesting to see, though not quite as radical as what's present in most Steampu