I wrote over 3500 words today for my game project… I did a complete redesign and now it’s so much the better.
Damn I need to write like this more often.
Sep 30
Wow, it’s been almost two months since I’ve actually written a real update to this blog. Really sorry about the large batch of twitter posts that have taken up the time time. Somewhere between the beginning of August and now I’ve been distracted with so many things that it’s hard to figure out where to begin. Well, let’s take things in order.
At the beginning of August I ended up doing two things involving my gaming. First, I took an official step down from United Role Play duties. I’m still on this hiatus for the most part. Currently I am looking at picking up official duties come October. My presence as a game administer is being tiered down and I will instead focus my efforts as lead forum administer and web development. The former is a sure thing but the later not so much. I’ve also joined a more general group of gamers, F7 Lans, a group of gamers currently focused on Team Fortress 2 gaming. I’m paying to be a supporter for them and I’m enjoying my time with them. I’m not taking up any official stance with them beyond fan and occasional advertiser to new folks to the servers. I want to keep my relationship with them purely based on fun and recreation.
In addition to the efforts in my gaming communities, I’ve jumped on the Spore bandwagon. It’s a pretty fun game and I do recommend it. If you have it, my name is nulloperations if you want to buddy me.
Continuing the time line, early September hosted my first convention, SLCC. This was so much fun. I was able to meet Frans, Rhiannon, Amu, Armath, Harper, and a number of new folks while we were down there. Disappointed Caycee and Kevin didn’t show up (with them living so close and all). In addition to learning many useful SL business tidbits, I also got to really sit down and use Raven’s Mac. Okay, I admit it, I really enjoyed the experience. NOT FROM USING A MAC! But from using a laptop. Still hate Macs, but I do like laptops now. I’m already planning on buying one next year.
The convention was such a great experience that when we came home in the evenings that weekend I started a crazed effort into building the new House of RFyre store. I had the bulk of the shape finished by Sunday evening. As it stands, texture work on the build it at 90% for the core structure. Detail work will come later but for now the core of the build is complete save the last bits of paint. I will start posting images later as the structure comes together and we near the final release date of October 20th. That’s the day we’re clearing out the rest of the island and moving the structure down into place. Vendors will start moving in those nights too.
Speaking of mid-October, I will be officially losing my job on the 17th. I don’t hold any grudges against my work place. Its business and sometimes folks get swept under in the choices. No, I still won’t say where I work as that’s part of that crazy employee contract.
Those are the current updates in a nut shell. I’m going to try (again) to get back to posting more often. I also need to get back into finishing up the new design for the website. I have some nice texture work done and I think it comes off rather nicely.
Later for now,
Justin
So in the last week I have been working a bit more on a number of projects. Things are going okay for the most part, although I admit this week I have back-slide alittle with gaming some in the afternoon before work. It wouldn’t be a problem if it was only a few minutes, but the last few days it’s been over an hour. Can’t do that.
Website project is taking a bit longer than I thought. Turns out frames do suck and I’m probably going to end up going with tables. This should be interesting. With that in mind, I’ve got some other things I need to work on. Mainly the House of Rfyre website. The basic design is staying, but there’s some things I need to figure out how to insert.
Another social network joins the matrix I’m creating with my main site as the nexus. I now have a Facebook profile. I’m not sure how much individual attention I’m going to give that site, but at least now I have another network presence established. Why I do this is so I lay the ground work for the future. I have a hope that, some day, I’ll be a successful published writer or something that might require me to have a public face in order for people to reach out to me. If nothing else, it’ll help some of my future projects.
I’ve been messing around with Zulupad more lately. Fun stuff. Think of it as a personal wiki journal. I’m using it to keep track of a story bible I’m writing. Have a fun universe in mind that I’ve been crafting for almost 4-5 years now. Updates on that in the future. I’m still using the freebie version of Zulupad, but I’ll be using the Pro version of it later once I have some images and styles I want to drop in for us.
Alright, enough distraction, back to work.
Justin
Aug 03
Okay, lots of things are changing, some fast, some slow and deliberate. So let’s start the list off:
Website
I have plans for development. A new skins/style, maybe some personal coding, and general all around updates. I do intend to post more once this has occurred (mostly since I fear having to reset the blog… again). There’s a lot of things I want to do with the website, besides it just being a blog. I want it to be my virtual face, so to speak. I want people to be able to come here and know who and what I am as far as my virtual self. This includes my writing self, my developer self, my gamer self, and my business self. There’s a lot I can do with this place and so far I do feel like I’m wasting it.
That said, the website development is going slow. I need to have some more focus.
Writing
Slowed to a stop for the time being. That will be changing tomorrow. I say tomorrow because right now I’m writing this to help get some of my groove back. I also took the time to write a podcast review for 12 volt Theater. I owed Jack that much since I have completed failed to help him with the T-shirt thing I was looking at back in May and well, it being only 25-30 days left to Dragon Con… yeah… sorry about that Jack. I’ll make it up to you.
Non-fiction topic covered, my fiction will be returning this week with a passion. I’m determined to answer M. Stackpole’s challenge from Dragon Page: Cover to Cover. Not going to say which one though, not until I actually get it done. I hate saying I’m going to do something and not following through (READ: Previous paragraph). My mind has been racing with ship design and space physics lately. Need to really start studying that more. And South-American ancient architecture… Shh, secret story.
Second Life
I’ve flown in full swing into helping House of Rfyre. I’m really determined to keep focused this time around. I owe Raven that much. That said, my current topics of interest are RFyre Security, RFyre web design, RFyre future island developments, and RFyre advertisements.
One thing I’m thinking of is the fact I listen to so many podcasts (how many did I mention already in this post?) that I really need to think of what can these things do to help RFyre. There’s the possibility of getting our own, but I fear that will only hit up the current SL audience. That’s a good thing, but I want to really expand our market. A number of podcasters have mentioned their audience sizes before on their casts and many of them are very respectful. If spending money to advertise on a popular cast makes us money in return… well I’m very interested in embracing new media. After all, isn’t Second Life a growing new medium? It’s not just a game, it’s a growing world.
United Role Play
And here’s why I have more free time. I’ve left URP as a member and admin. I still hang out with the gang on weekends, but not during the weekdays anymore. I’ve got more time to focus on work now that I’m not spending all of my free time gaming on an RP server.
I still hope the best for Dave and the rest of the URP crew, but right now it’s not the right place for me. Best of luck you guys.
Alrighty, that’s really the mussings that are rolling around right now. There are other things swimming around right now, but nothing I’ve hammered out fully.
I’ll be around more often,
Justin
I spent the last few days thinking things over. Not completely yet, but I have been putting some pieces of the puzzle together. Key notes of interest include going back to my roots as far as writing goes. I know for a long time I found inspiration from song. I would hear a song of any length and come up with a story inspired by it. Mind you, this wasn’t a story about the song’s story, just inspired by it. Example includes a story inspired by Comfortably Numb from Pink Floyd’s The Wall that has nothing to do with comatose fictional singers. In that line of thinking, I’m pondering a few songs and the stories they make me think about. I wonder if that’s what has hurt me in the past with my writing. I’d start a chapter one with a song inspiring it, but I never find a song for chapter two. I need to expierment and try that out.
Brief post. One quick update, look for a new series I will be starting soon here. Maybe once a month, maybe bi weekly, maybe whenever I feel about it, but it will be called “it’s early presents…” in which I review something of interest to me. This could be a podcast, a novel, a game, a piece of tech hardware, a song, the list goes on. It’s whatever I want to review really. I’ll be doing it first on the featured podcast on my blog roll, 12 Volt Theater. It makes sense to do so since I’ve taken the time to add it to the blog roll. I think I’ll rename that catergory to “latest it’s early presents…” and just keep up the last ten things I have reviewed. Mental note, start making pages so I can have a back log of what I’ve reviewed.
Later folks,
Justin
I’m a gamer. Have been a gamer for close to 23 years now. I’ve forgotten more matches, stories, and adventures than most casual players will ever experience in my years. I’m not the best, far from the worse, and I always strive to have fun. Something about that has been changing over the last few years.
When I was a kid, I gamed with my three brothers. We played hours and hours of NES, PC, Sega, and eventually Play Station and X-Box games. Singleplayer, multiplayer, saved or fresh game, it didn’t matter. A lot of my childhood revolved around games. Not that I spent my time only in gaming, but there was a great deal spent around electronic interactive entertainment.
As a teenager and young(er) adult, I still gamed a great deal, but I became more introduced to the true multi-player experience. Gaming with your buddies and family was fun but over time you learned them, you could tell their strategy, and for the most part there wasn’t as great of a challenge (Yes Alex, you still kept surprising me and I still say we were equals when we played the same games). It was still a blast to play with them, but for those who were only casual gamers, or at least casual in the genre of your choice, it wasn’t as challenging. Fun for sure, but you like to test yourself.
So steps in online gaming. Here you are open to a world of challengers and champions. Will your next opponent be a newer player who hasn’t learned the gaming system yet or will you face someone with less of a life than you? You could never tell and there was such pleasure in facing opponents that were your equal. The adrenaline, the comradery, and the joy of defeating odds where you really didn’t know where the coin would land. Such is the pleasure and addiction that is online gaming.
In the last year, I’ve drawn more away from single player gaming nearly completely. Sure there was the joy of Oblivion, but honestly I don’t enjoy it unless I’m sitting on Ventrillo listening to my friends chatter about their characters. I’ve drawn myself away from story and more into action. This worries me, in a way. especially since in the last (except for very recently) I have always drawn myself away from writing as often as I have. Interactive visual medium seems to have taken over a great deal of my leisure time. I still feel the urge to write, but when I do I tend to think in action games terms.
So what’s the point in all this? I’m not sure. I suppose it’s observation really. I know part of me wants to get away from all the gaming, yet at the same time I’m finding it hard to. When my friends are online, I want to hang out with them, after all, they are my social group really. I’ve a few friends offline here in Tampa, but the uprooting after the storm in ‘05 sent most of my close connections to internet online interaction. Personally, I don’t find this too bad, or at least I didn’t last year when I wasn’t working 5pm-1:30am. These days, working the night shift has pulled me away from my other friends too. Saturdays are my only social days for the most part.
Let me wrap this up before this becomes a “woe is me” post. I’m going to lay out some plans for my life in the coming weeks. The hard drive I mentioned yesterday is coming later tonight instead. I’m going to use that to start learning more useful skills centered around the PC. In addition to that, I’m going to try to take some Dragon Page and I Should Be Writing Advice and put butt into chair and start writing. I’m the only one providing excuses for why I can’t be writing. I’m going to lay off the games more, at least I will try to. It’s not too easy because despite what people say, gaming is an addiction. That adrenaline high is powerful and exciting stuff and will hook you.
Gee, if I spent this time writing fiction instead of blogging I’d have another page or two. Aw nuts.
Justin