Update: After breaking the disks, I took the next step. The ultimate step. The no going back step. I cancelled Julie and my account, and then changed our passwords to gibberish. Even if I bought new disks and reactivated our accounts, we would have to start over, a terrible thought.
Julie logged in before I was able to affect the password change. She now swears that she will never log out again. Of course, that won't happen. The servers will be reset or her account will expire or there'll be a blackout, or, more likely, she'll forget that it's running and reboot her machine, and then it's all over.
We were trying to figure out what we were going to do, now that there would be no more video gaming nights. We're afraid we'll turn into those couples that stare at each other all day. Constant staring. (What happens when we get bored of staring?) I guess we can always wait for the next MMORPG to come out so we can get readdicted.
Rest in peace:
Asmin, the beautifully blue-haired 30th level hunter with her wolf Snowflake
and
Zankor, the angry-looking 30th level human Warlock with his blue demon
We knew you for too brief a time.
My second D&D doodle. Drawing these characters keeps me sane when my hands start to shake and I think of World of Warcraft or Dark Age of Camelot or Everquest or any of the MMORPG or RPG or D&D nights that kept me up long hours. Conjuring these costumed Horribles is as good as rolling up a new character, leveling him up, and then casting large fireballs. Well, almost.
Notice Julie is in front, and we're cowering behind her. That's exactly how we play video games: Julie runs ahead, and I cast from behind. Allegory for life, or just my love of magic coming out. I'll let you decide.
When I drew this, Julie thought the dragon looked too wolf-like. I was never able to fix his snout to make him less wolfy.
The rain finally broke in Seattle. Today was beautiful, and tomorrow I hope to jump back in the saddle and bike home from work. I can't wait.
I play many RPGs (that's Role Playing Games for the uninitiated) on the computer/xbox. These are games where you usually find yourself in a fantasy world where elves, magic, and bad Old English collide. I started playing a new one, Two Worlds, with Steven yesterday. From the little I played last night, it's a decent game with some bugs and lag issues. Since there's been a derth of RPGs that work over the inter-webs, Steven and I are not choosy about quality.
In these games, the goal is to create a character, and build him to be as powerful as possible. You do this but killing monsters for experience (which increases your level or power), and collecting magical items, such as armor, swords, and jewelry.
Many times you have to choose between two magical items: one is much more powerful but extremely ugly, and the other less powerful, but goes very well with the aesthetics of your character. (And here you thought video games never provided you real, meaningful choices!)
Because I'm a min-maxer, (i.e., someone who tries to create the most powerful character possible), I usually choose the ugly clothing or jewelry. Julie, when she plays, is very fashion conscious, and will choose the pretty furry brown boots over the uglier red and green polka-dotted shoes. Steven, who is the ultimate min-maxer tends to look like the Little Guy.
We're planning to play again on Thursday. I can't wait. Now, if only Julie shared my enthusiasm. While she usually joins us in this types of games (she particularly likes the pretty elves), because of technical limitations, only one of us can play with Steven at the same time.
Julie and I went to see Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix. We were both very excited, and the movie was quite good. The wizard fight at the end was one of the best magic fights I've seen. I'm more convinced than ever that these are books that were written to be watched and not read.
Since I wrote that paragraph I read passed the first book, and started rewatching the movies (yes, I am a Harry Potter addict). While the books are not much deeper than the movies, the differences become more apparent and meaningful in the later books. As with all books, there are more details that fill in the whitespaces in the world. I still think the movies are more enjoyable, but it's best when you combine the two.
Julie was convinced my original rendition of the wand looked phallic. I explained to her it's very difficult drawing something coming toward the viewer. She nodded in agreement, and again asked why there was a penis sticking out of the wall.
In the posted version, I tried to make it more pointed, and less penis-like.
I'm on the seventh book of the Harry Potter series now. As I said before, she's a very good storyteller. The books don't have the meat of a deep fantasy series, say Robert Jordan's overly long saga, or George R. R. Martin's incredibly original series. But for all its faults, it is a great and addicting read. Ask Julie, who barely sees me without my nose buried in the middle of a book, waving her off so I can concentrate on finishing the latest chapter.
We were discussing the new Warhammer Online with Steven. Julie and I haven't played a MMORPG since I destroyed my second set of World of Warcraft discs. We decided it was time for us to try again when Warhammer releases.
We talked to Steven, who is an even worse addict than me. He hasn't played since Everquest because of his addiction. We told him that as long as we stick together and only play when we all play, he should join us. This strategy has failed me in the past, but there's always this time.
So come mid to late 2008, we'll be knee deep in orcs and swords.
Today was a beautiful Post-Headache Day. That means, of course, that yesterday was an absolutely painful, over-tired, stop hitting me with a frying pan day. I was miserable. But since I'm an eternal optimist (when not being hit by a frying pan), I want to focus on today's renewed energy.
The house buying continues to move along. We're in negotiations over the inspection contingency. The Castle is getting in shape for showing. We're thinking of listing it next week. We have lots to do before then.
I like to pretend I create worlds: whether they are story worlds or video game worlds. When I create them, I imagine I look like this guy.
Julie and I had this discussion on Sunday: we were sitting around in the evening after visiting the Villa to choose paint colors. We had watched too much Grey's Anatomy (a wonderful show I found on the xbox a few weeks ago), and I needed to get out of the Castle as I was being smothered by the television and the dogs and the stillness. We couldn't figure out where to go. We already ate dinner (leftover Drunken Chicken, which was better the first time around), and it was getting late and dark and cold. It wasn't snowing anymore, thankfully, or thunderstorming, although it has been doing more of both lately. (Funny thing about Grey's Anatomy: it's set in a fictitious hospital in Seattle, and, not surprisingly, it's always raining. But instead of rain it's always thunderstorming, which is probably easier to portray than the sprinkling rain Seattle is famous for. I pointed this out to Julie, and she agreed: it almost never thunderstorms in Seattle. That night it snowed, thunderstormed, and the sun came out. I think it all happened in a fifteen minute window.) Anyway, so we're sitting around and I'm slowly going crazy and I'm trying to figure out what we can do. It's getting late as I download and begin watching yet another episode of Grey's. We can't go to the movies anymore because tomorrow (that is the tomorrow of the weekend, which was on Sunday which meant Monday) was a work day, and I needed to sleep at a normal time to be normal and get work done. So after three more episodes, we decided to call it a night and go to bed. We never did end up doing very much. The next day I thought we should have gone to Lottie's Lounge and drank something. Julie doesn't drink and I'm not much of a drinker either. That said, we could have done something, which would have made this paragraph much shorter--a win-win for all of us.
Don't ask. I'm in a weird mood after closing yesterday and I felt like sharing. The doodle brought it up.
The World of Warcraft doodles are here. Don't worry, there are only two. The first one is Zankor, my 30th level Warlock (that probably means something to only two of my readers). I drew these when the addiction pangs grew too strong. It was either doodle my characters, or resubscribe and start playing again. I chose the lesser of the two evils. It's true what they say about addiction: you never truly kick the habit, you only suppress it. Okay, it's probably more true for drugs and alchohol than video games, but the feeling is the same. (I think I spent too much time reading Infinite Jest, with its addiction themes.) After Erik visited, I started going through WoW withdrawal again. We're still resisting, as Julie doesn't believe we need such addicting games because we're no longer in a long-distance relationship. I think she's in denial.
I've been depressed most of this week (and not the good depression where I write soul-wretching prose). I'm not sure if it's the strange weather, or just that time of the year (or month). I'm hoping with the forecast at 75 degrees and sunny today, things will turn around. If nothing else, the weekend is almost here.
The World of Warcraft doodles continue. This is Asmin, Julie's Hunter character, and her pet wolf Snowflake. They haven't been calling to us lately, but I'm hopeful a new Asmin will one day rise from her ashes.
A headache found me this afternoon. I'm hoping it loses track of me soon.
Returning to our regularly scheduled program. It's amazing how much of life's obstacles are seemingly random. Life is like D&D only you don't know what you rolled until long after you threw the dice.
Steven and I continued our slow drudgery through Too Human during last evening's video game night. It has a D&D-esque character building and loot collecting substory. The rest of the game is rather blah.
Today is the company meeting. I'm wearing my corporate-love t-shirt. They give us free shirts to show our loyalty to our particular group. I'm wearing a jacket for two reasons: (1) I hate advertising on my chest, and (2) it's usually very cold in the baseball stadium where they hold the meeting. This morning is overcast but warm. This might be my first meeting where I'm not slowly freezing to the bone.
I love these D&D tagged doodles. Little did I know that this doodle was the precursor to our Warhammer Online addiction. We are finally over that game, as it grew a bit repetitive at the end. Julie still wants to play, but after trying out all the character classes, I'm satiated. The only thing left to do is choose our favorite characters and doodle them. I'll try to resist playing when we log in for the group photograph.
The cold weather has left Seattle, and we're now in the midst of warm, wet rainstorms. While the snow was nice for the first day, thanks to the terrible plowing and lack of salted streets (!), it grew tiresome quickly.
Work is busy after the holidays. It's a pleasant busy, kind of how you feel after a good meal, full but not overly so. I've been doodling a bunch but haven't seriously put pen to paper since the Marathon. I had high hopes. Now I barely have hopes in that direction. At least my Kindle is seeing lots of use.
Dogs playing D&D! I know I'm using too many exclamation marks these days. It's part of my new optimistic outlook. Okay that even made me laugh.
I miss playing D&D. The last time I played was in college. Yes, I was and continue to be a geek. I like to think of myself as the king of geeks. Not in the sense of being the best geek, just in the sense of moving seamlessly between the world of geeks and the world or normal peeps. As I said, I like to think of it that way. In reality, I'm not that good at geekdom, and rather terrible at normal livinghood.
Did you notice Button (that's the dog on the left) staring at the Cheetos? She loves food. And Ziggy with the cigar? It's like that dogs playing poker painting, only not as good, and with D&D.
I do, I really do! We're almost out of video games. We're scraping the bottom of the console. There's not much we want to play. We've played through Horde mode on Gears of War II too many times, hitting the ceiling at level 40. It looks unlikely we'll make it to 50 unless we find a fourth person. We gave up on Warhammer Online a couple of months ago. We talked about going through Halo 3 again--although that seems tiring. We need a good sword and sorcery game, something that lets us level up and keel the bad guys with large lightning bolts; preferably one with nice outfits for the Julies.
After a bad start yesterday morning, I evened out after a dose of Advil and a small cup of coffee along with our delicious Crepes. I even managed to make a new chicken recipe for dinner. It turns out not all beer is the same in chicken stews.
This is certainly not timely. We played and beat Castle Crashers back in September 2008. It's a fun 2.5D romp with four square-masked and armored heroes through a cartoony world filled with damsels in distress and oversized ogres. It was a good three or four night game with a very shallow learning curve. We even had a fourth player, which is rare for us. My fingers were a bit tired at the end, and it reminded me how challenging the old-school games were in finding the proper horizontal plane to attack the enemies.
This is the opposite of timely. It's been so long, I almost forgot the name of this game. We stopped playing a few months ago. It was fun while it lasted--lots of keeling other players and buying new weapons and armor. We settled into familiar roles: Julie, the brawny fighter rushing to the front. David, the lightly armored healer/mage hiding in the back and trying to keep Julie from keeling herself too quickly. The memories.
It's an early rainy morning without coffee. (Okay, it's not that early.) I'm not sure I'm going to survive.
My sickness, it keeps dragging me back. I thought a restful three day weekend working on my secret project would make me well. I was almost there (the wellness) on Sunday, but by Monday it was back. It's just the edges of sick, but even the edges make me uncomfortable. I didn't sleep last night because I couldn't figure out if I was cold or hot. And then all these ideas started bubbling over in my brain and I had to jot them down before they would let me sleep.
. . . nothing at all. We went to a soccer game last night: the Seattle Sounders verse DC United (which is a different team from Manchester United, very different). We arrived a little before half time, and watched as the Sounders blew a 2-1 lead to tie at 3 (or something like that).
Tomorrow my internets get an upgrade. I also have big plans to drop ethernet wires in more rooms as I'm sick of fighting the losing wifi battles (draft-N my left foot!). This involves crawling up into the attic, fighting large spiders and insulation monsters, and trying to avoid cutting unseemly holes in the walls--at least avoiding it when Julie is watching.
Soon I'll be flying through the internets. Flying! This should improve the Horribles quality tenfold. Imagine, more bits on your screen, faster. I haven't exactly figured out how this benefits my overly large and thoroughly engaged internets audience. But somehow improving my video game playing and movie watching will indirectly benefit you, my dear readers.
I've been waiting to post this one for a while. It's one of my favorite D&D doodles. I need to create more of these.
Tomorrow we're off to a hike for the first time this summer. We used to be such good hikers.
Ah, I've come full circle. This is a mock-up of a video game I started to design. I worked on for a few months, changing the design significantly. After I had it working I realized that it wasn't fun. The graphics were cute, in that Horrible-y way, but the gameplay was terrible.
We had good 70-degree weather this weekend. We did manage a Wallace Falls hike on our Naginata-free weekend (go PNNF!). My legs are still paying for the five mile hike. The last three miles or so were straight uphill. The climb combined with Julie's level-6 complaining left me exhausted and headachy yesterday, and achy today. Thankfully I'm on my PHD today.
I know the type of magic I was thinking about when I doodled this. Of magic today, I have a few ideas but it's nothing definite.
The weather is achanging in Seattle. The warm days are giving over to rainy nights and cloudy mornings. It'll soon be fleece and umbrella weather. All I can say is bring it on!
We finished watching the first season of Legend of the Seeker. It was surprisingly enjoyable given that it is based on that terrible Terry Goodkind series. I read the first book and hated it: it reads more like an old-school adventure video game than a novel. You find a shiny purple sword. You see a monster. The monster can only be killed with shiny purple swords. You kill the monster! You see a magical key. Three rooms later there is a door. Only a magical key can open the door!
Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad. There were some elements of the magic and world in the television show that appeared to be taken from the book that were quite enjoyable. I might not have given the series a proper chance. Speaking of chances, I've been speed reading through a bunch of fantasy novels. I'm not sure what brought on my new addiction. I'm hoping it's my body's way of preparing for November.
It's another week. I wish it was a good week. I did manage lots of doodles. Sometimes my doodling reflects my mood. You'll find out the type of mood in a few months when these Horribles come around. At least we're having good weather. See? Always a silver lining of sorts.
Thanks to continuing jetlag sleep eluded us last night. I woke up at 1:30am and went to read in the other room. Julie woke up when I returned to bed a couple of hours later, and neither of us could sleep. We lay in bed talking until 6am when we managed to find sleep for a few more hours before work. Hopefully this weekend will cure us of our ills.
I hope to have one more Horrible posted on Monday before I lose myself to the insanity. This has not been a good couple of months for Horribles.
We watched Avatar on Christmas Eve after we participated in the rest of a traditional Jewish Christmas by eating at a (vegetarian) Chinese restaurant. I ended up getting sick probably from a cold virus mixed with the 3D effects and a very nasty Avocado milkshake. Thinking about Chinese food now makes me nauseous, which is hard on the Julies.
Avatar is a beautifully rendered movie. I wish I could say the same for its characters and story. There will one day be a movie about a benevolent corporation that is trying to save the Earth from runaway Nature and the do-gooders who try to protect her by deifying her. Oh and there will be military people who are, like, real people who don’t want to fight just because they can, but actually care about their soldiers and civilians. And there won’t be any giant robots in this movie. Or flying blue people.
Otherwise the weekend was nice and long. We finally took the dogs out of the house thanks to the sun and mild temperature.
Happy New Years!
If you visit my website then you might have noticed I spruced up the place. I decided to go with a cleaner more colorful look. Let me know if what you think (and if you see any bugs). I fixed a few internal bugs, but mostly played with the CSS and formatting. Julie helped by suggesting I add the Horribles to the menu above (check out the cool hover effects). I still have plans for a photo slideshow. One of these days.
I was inspired to code after helping my sister update her website.
Or a different place. I have lots of greener grass fantasies. I imagine I'm not the only one.
Sorry for the late update. We hosted a group of high school students this morning. They did a mock negotiation of the type I normally do at work. I'm worried that maybe I'm a bit more replaceable than I suspected.
Regrettably I do conflict for a living.
Happy Monday!
I refreshed the design of Cast of Horribles this weekend. I tried to clean off the dark lines and used handwriting instead of a font for the titles. I also added a nifty navigation section. Julie thinks the navigation is confusing. I decided to stay with the grays instead of move to colors. I tried different colors but nothing stuck. Don't forget to refresh the website (F5) to clear your cache. I didn't think to rename some of the graphical elements when I recreated them.
A busy Thursday morning. The weather promises to be decent this weekend. I hope it holds to its promise.
There's a version of this comic where the troll has a head. Julie didn't like it so I cut it off. It had the added benefit of making the troll taller. Everyone wins.
It's sunny again. And the forecast shows sun all weekend. These are good days, good days.
It's been a long time since we've watched a good anime--or any anime for that matter. Here's my take on Morbito - Guardian of the Spirit. It sort of looks like she has naginata if you squint and forget that it's a short spear.
It's warm and sunny again today. Soon I'll stop bothering you with weather reports. You can just assume it's low seventies and sunny.
Happy Tuesday morning! It's warm and sunny, and expected to get more so. Too much so, if you ask me. We go from a bad Spring to a bad Summer, all in a single day! Yeah!
Blood+ is an anime series based loosely on Blood:The Last Vampire, which was turned into a feature-length movie of the same name. Phew, figuring out that history was tiring.
In terms of enjoyment: Anime > Movie > Anime Series
The Horrible is based on the anime series, where Saya, the main character (the co-sire of all vampires) is followed around by a coffin-wielding vampire as they fight against Saya's sister (the other sire) and minions. It's as convoluted as it sounds.
Happy thoughts. Just think happy thoughts.
This Horrible was based on the Claymore anime series.
