In The Beginning…

Growing up I was shy, quiet and very reserved. These days, I’d be labeled an introvert but back when I was growing up I was a considered a nerd and had very few friends. I’d tried Hockey but it wasn’t for me. I’d tried Cubs and it wasn’t for me. I’d tried soccer and I liked it but I wasn’t amazing at it. While I was never picked on or harassed like the extreme end of the nerd spectrum, I wasn’t ever part of the cool kids cliques either. I was a blip on the school radar and that was it. Which made me very happy. I enjoyed the invisibility (though the slew of 80s teen movies had me secretly dreaming to be the hero of my own story). I  survived by telling stories inside my head and hanging with the few friends I did have.

My mind was a far better place than this drab reality that we currently subscribe to. My cousin had turned me on to Tolkien and Lewis and they fueled my early imagination. Narnia and Middle Earth were my homes away from home, along with Treasure Island and a thousand other fantasies. My imagination roamed these worlds created by others and dreamt of something more. Then, in the summer of ’84, I met a kid named Brian Henderson and everything changed. Continue reading “In The Beginning…”

Where Do We Go From Here?

So, you may have noticed that this post constitutes the fifth day in a row where I’ve added content to the site. *boggle*. I don’t think I’ve had a run this long since late 2010 or so. I’m not guaranteeing that I’ll post daily, but I am trying to update more regularly, even if it is only just a meme or something silly that catches my fancy.

As I said a few posts ago. I’m trying to keep the blog focused on writing, rpgs and painting. with the predominance being on roleplaying and painting which will hopefully lead to more creativity in the writing.

In my last post I showed off a recent WIP miniature that I’ve been working on and I expect to show more in time. My focus with miniatures is for fun and show. I always hated painting “bulk” armies. In fact I have a whole chapter of old Ultramarines kicking around my bitz bin that will probably never see a lick of paint by themselves because I just can’t stomach repetition.

Most of my painting lately has been on cool minis that I can use in my Star Wars campaign or just cool show pieces.I also have teams of Blood Bowl and Necromunda that I plan to paint for the new editions of those rules.

I don’t play D&D anymore, but I still love the cool and unique minis. The ones I like best are ones with some sort of dynamism to them. Whether it be a flowing cape or a non-standard pose, as long as it has character I’m usually attracted to it. Usually what gets me into trouble is I see an amazing painter’s work on a particular figure and I have to have it because I want to do the same thing. This can be frustrating as my skills aren’t there yet but I’m always trying to be better. One of these days I will master my airbrush, the wet-blending technique and paint OSL and NMM in my sleep.

My gaming recently has been intentionally limited. If I’m lucky and the stars align, my group gets together once a month for a couple of hours. Usually we’re playing in a Star wars campaign that I’m running using Fantasy Flight Games’ Edge of the Empire narrative rules. Occasionally we’ll play something else. If you’re at all interested, we (I) keep a campaign log over at Obsidian Portal.  It’s usually somewhat up to date.

When I’m not playing Star Wars, I’m more than likely involved in a new board game. While I’m not the most prolific board gamer, I still enjoy most of the ones I’ve played. One of these days, my friends and I will manage to play through every game we have at least once….. one of these days.

Right I think that’s enough babbling for one night. Off to bed.

Tidying up

Alright. I think I’ve finally settled on a simple theme I can work with. If you’ve stumbled here in the past few days you may have seen a couple of different iterations. I wasn’t wholly satisfied with them and they weren’t clean and minimalistic enough for me while still being somewhat aesthetically pleasing.

I think this one will work for the time being. I’m sure if/when I start posting more frequently I will look at other options, but for now I’m satisfied.

Now I shall go back to fiddling with the upcoming script of my group’s latest adventure. It should be fun. Thankfully I found a couple of new tools to make my GMing life so much easier. I’ve been using Scapple to storyboard the adventure. It suits my free-form, semi-sandbox style of GMing with it’s flowcharts, interchangeability and simple ease of use.

Pile O’ Shame

Everyone has them. That pile of games or movies or music that you bought and have every intention of playing (or watching or listening) but never get around to it. Your reasons, whatever they may be, are valid (I know mine are) but the pile still exists in spite of them, and in most cases grows.

For me, my pile is populated with games that I’ve started but never finished. Thankfully my movie pile is negligent with only two titles that are purchased but unwatched and I can’t remember the last time I bought a cd so let’s not even go there.

My game pile of shame consists of the following (in no particular order):

Infamous
Darksiders
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Uncharted 2
Assassin’s Creed 2
The Saboteur
Bayonetta
Dragon Age: Origins
Fallout 3
Ghostbusters
Little Big Planet

The sad thing is I can easily think of 5 or so more games that aren’t out yet that will join this list soon enough.

Bioshock 2
Dante’s Inferno
God of War III
Final Fantasy XIII
Star Ocean – The Last Hope
Heavy Rain

On the bright side, I’m close to 65% done Infamous so that can be crossed off soon. And I’m on the last story level for LBP so that also will be crossed off soon

Now, to incorporate another 8 hours into the day to accomplish that. Heh

So, I’ve shown you mine. How about you show me yours. What does your pile o’ shame consist of?

House Of Cards

Hello once again my dear friends (pretending that there is more than one of you still reading this makes it easier on my fragile ego). I seem to have become quite the delinquent blogger over the past little while. I guess having a family and a job that takes up all your time does sort of prevent certain time wasting elements of life.

So, let me ‘splain… no there is too much. I’ll sum up. Prince Humperdinck marry… errr nevermind. You all know the joke. I’ve used it enough times already that you can all just finish it in your heads at your convenience. Think of it as my gift to you.

So let’s see how things are in Gregtown.

Baby is somewhere in the 5th Month and making mommy rather grumptastic with it’s kickfests. Apparently the Five Nations Cup is being played in Tamara’s Uterus. We still don’t know the sex but that’s intentional. We decided not to find out… or rather, I did. Tamara would’ve prefered knowing that way if it is a boy then she can get rid of all of Kayden’s old clothes but I opted for the “Surprise! it’s a 2-headed alien” option and Tam grudgingly aquiesced.

We have decided on names for both sexes though. I know I said in a previous post that I wasn’t going to say what they were but I figure what the hell. Barring any last minute changes of heart after we’re introduced to the squidlet, the name(s) will be as such: If it’s a girl, Zoe Elizabeth and if it’s a boy, Liam James. If it’s a two headed alien… obviously the name will be Zaphod Trillian. Duuuuh!

And just because we figured that the squidlet should have more than a box over it’s head, Tam and I have been looking at houses for the past little while. Apparently some drunken dolt forgot to carry the one and I’m eligible for a mortgage. Who knew!??!? The bad news is it’s not the greatest amount known to man, but the good news is we’ve found a house and have an offer on it pending approval of our conditions (financing and home inspection). For those of you interested in where… if everything goes as planned, we’ll be moving back to the Fort come September. Yeah, you heard me. I’m moving back to Fort Saskatchewan. Trust me… it wasn’t something that I had intended to do but my money went farther there and so I shall once again be residing in the town that I spent 20 years trying to move out of. I know I keep hearing that old sawhorse “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. Somehow I keep thinking that they’re trying to tell me something.

I’d show you the MLS listing but there are limits to the amout of info I will share. If you need to know though, I’m sure you can figure out how to contact me if you need to.

On the plus side I guess I’ll be closer to Dale’s place for D&D night… yeah you heard that right as well. I got suckered into playing 4th Edition D&D and despite my earlier misgivings, I actually kind of like it. Now if only we played more than once a month for 4 hrs. Oh to be young and burden free once again.

I haven’t done much of my own game world design in ages. The demands on my time are just too much these days for me to do much of anything beyond idle tweaking of things in my head. Never fear though. I am sure to get back to it once I get the house set up. I have been given a whole room in the basement for geekery and gamedom. I shall rule supreme! I wonder if I can sneak in one of those really high end custom made gaming tables without Tam noticing. Yeah, me either.

Alright. There’s a new theme up and running. I am going to see how I like it over the next couple of days. I might switch back to the yellowy parchment-ish theme but this one might stay… it’ll all depend on my mood (and time).

On that note. I’m off to have a quick game of Bloodbowl and then bed. If anyone wants to play me. Give me a shout and I’ll try and hook up with you online and we can play a game.

The Spore-t of Kings

Man… my post titles are getting lamer and lamer. I really had to dig for that one. I’m going to blame having to be up at 4am to take my girlfriend’s mom to the airport. Guh. It’s far too early and I have had far too few Monsters to be walking and talking, let alone blogging but hey, we all can’t be morning people now can we.

I will say that getting up at 4 did make me somewhat nostalgic for the late nights that I haven’t had in quite some time. Perhaps it was also the time of year. There was that crisp sharpness to the air that autumn always brings and that I love so much and the peace and quiet was exquisitely enjoyable. To make the morning perfect, there was a full (or nearly full) moon with a haze around it that made the whole sky glow and that alone was reason enough to be up that early.  Joy!

Now I’m home alone, the girlfiend girlfriend has gone to work and the kidlet is at the day home, the house is clean and all my chores are done save making lunch. I have a couple of hours to waste and I shall be spending them here online. No, I’m not going to be playing WoW for once. This morning we’re going to be delving into the tide pools of a planet I have named Raxacoricofallapatorius (Are you a Doctor Who nerd too? Good. I won’t have to kill you then.) and a little amoeba I have named Slitheen. Hooray for the glory that is Spore… okay perhaps a game where 80% of the creatures made to date are ambulatory phalloi made by twelve year olds isn’t all that glorious but the fact that you can make anything you want is quite brilliant.

I’ve not played past the Tide Pool phase yet. I’m still having fun fiddling with the creature widgets and deciding if my amoeba is going to be carnivorous or herbivorous (or possibly omnivorous if I can find the upgrade) and I am really looking forward to all the other stages too. If I have anything decent, I’ll post some screenshots, and perhaps I’ll even get around to posting those photos of our place.

However, this is more than enough babble to keep you all enthralled with the wonder that is my life and the more I type here, the less time I have to play. I say good day sir. Good Day.

I Can Haz Laptop!

And my toy arrived bright and early this morning. Thankfully my dog likes to bark at the doorbell or I wouldn’t have heard the courier, but I did and I now have a fancy new toy. Yay. I’m currently upgrading the software and tweaking it to remove as many traces of Internet Exploder that I possibly can. Firefox all the way baby!

The speed of this thing is glorious. Copying my whole 10GB of songs on my ipod amounted to a whole 5 minutes as opposed to the hour or so it took before. This rocks. Now I am sitting here, getting comfortable with the keyboard layout and downloading all the mail that I’ve received since I last had a functioning computer back in September. Anyone care to take a guess as to how many messages that I have (not including deleted messages and spam)?

No, higher than that. I now have a total of 2887 Messages in my inbox since Sept. Go me!

Anyway. I need to start patching WoW. That will sadly take all afternoon using Blizzard’s useless updater. Oh well. I’m back online. The little things like that don’t bother me at all any more.

*happy dance*

Minor Gaming Update

For those of you who’ve been wondering what all I’ve been doing with regards to my little game world I have two very minor updates for you. The rest of you can probably just go ahead and skip this post… or better yet, just get bent. 😛

First up, I’ve updated the temporary world map in the section to the right. It’s still just a photo of the map rather than a proper scan but through the miracle of photoshop, I was able to overlay and roughly label some of the landmarks, countries and notable features which will hopefully flesh it out somewhat until such time as I can get a proper scan done.

As I’ve commented on before, I’ve had a living bitch of a time getting the individual sheets scanned and ported properly due to the previously mentioned scanner limitations, so much so that I’ve essentially given up on the project and will get them professionally scanned only when I finish the map itself.

The second item is somewhat impressive. I’ve been writing up the history of the world, from the mythical birth of the universe through to modern day, briefly touching on all the notable points in between. Now when I say writing, I do mean the handwritten, ink on paper deal. I’ve written about 30 pages to date and I’m still not quite done. I have a short laundry list containing the last thousand years or so to flesh out and then I’ll be “done”. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to type it all up yet so those of you who’re interested in it will have to wait just a little while longer. I’m only about a quarter of the way through that part yet and my “editor” still needs to sign off on it (he really only claims this title because it gives him first dibs at reading stuff) but it should be up within the week but because I love putting the cart before the horse, you will shortly find the page framework already laid out in the right hand menu.

Enjoy