Golden Anvil

Wow, 9 days since my last post! Some of that is excused because I was off on vacation (although I technically had internet access there, even if it was slow). Then I had the excuse of having to catch up with things after getting back from vacation. My only excuse after that can only be that we had a deadline at work on Friday, and we've got another this coming Wednesday. So, I've come home after some long days kind of tired out.

Oh yeah, then there's the fact that I threw my back out again on the way home from vacation (running in the airport with heavy bags, having been delayed finding a gas station at which to fill up the tank of the rental car (it took 30 minutes to find a place (and we had to call the rental agency (and they only told us directions (but it was to a Costco, where we don't have a membership (but they gave us directions to another station)))))). Honestly, it shouldn't take that long to find a gas station near an airport. Don't people want to get gas near an airport? Oh, and honestly it shouldn't take that many nested parenthetical statements to tell a story... Anyway, fortunately our insurance covers some chiropractor visits, so I was only on my back for one day.

Anyway, this is the first chance I feel like I've had to actually sit down and post. There's been plenty of stuff going on, so the rest of this might get kind of long...

Let's see...

Vacation went very well. We had a nice, relaxing time. We got to visit the Oregon coast on a rather nice day. We got to eat some wonderful fish and chips and chowder. I got to sleep in. We got to play a fun new game called Sequence (we're going to have to pick that one up). All in all a very enjoyable trip.

I even got a chance to sit around and play some games on my laptop. Actually, I should just say A game. I rediscovered Demise. It's a dungeon-crawling-kill-the-monster-find-treasure-level-up type of game. It supports single player and multi player (sort of). It's got 3D graphics (sort of). It's kind of old, but I re-remembered that it's an awful lot of fun. I've been playing some of that since I got back.

...which is ok, because my Vanguard account expired the day I left for vacation (nice timing). Due to my busy schedule, I'm not going to bother resubscribing to that for another 2 weeks or so. That's fine, because it'll give them a little bit more time to fix a few more problems.

Before I left I found out that there are a couple other people at my church interested in learning Greek. So, I'm going to form a small group of people to meet periodically and help each other stay motivated with learning. I'm pretty excited! I know a husband and wife who are interested, and I may find one or two others who want to join. This should be an immense help with continued learning.

I finished up the first Raymond E. Feist book (fantasy author) over vacation. I haven't read any of his stuff since high school, and I'd wanted to give him another read to see if I wanted to start picking up his books. I was very pleased to find that I still enjoyed Magician: Apprentice. I think I'll go ahead and start picking up his other books.

Gauntman and I are going to participate in the seven day roguelike programming challenge. This is a challenge to see what kind of roguelike game you can write within a seven day period. If you don't know what a roguelike game is, take a look here or here. Essentially it's a action game (like Diablo) that emphasizes gameplay elements and replayability over graphical appeal. Roguelike games are typically available for free, and tend to have a very rabid fanbase (people tend to either love them or hate them). Anyway, so gauntman and I have been doing some design work over the last few days, and our week starts tomorrow. We've got some rather interesting concepts that will hopefully give us some interesting results. I'll certainly let you guys know how it turns out.

Oh yes, now that sareth is back in the country, he and another friend are wanting me to start up the Jannot campaign, a fantasy roleplaying campaign we'd started playing via online chat tools quite some time ago. I'm actually really looking forward to that, because it's definitely been one of my favorite campaigns I've ever run. However, I do have to do some work to get everything ready to go again, and of course it'll mean I'm running two campaigns, and I've got a couple technical (internet connectivity) problems to iron out. More things to keep life busy...

Well, I think that's probably enough of an update for now. Expect to continue hearing from me more consistently now that I'm settled in.