I saw this first from Raph, then Lum, and lastly Tesh, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Â A $20 donation through DriveThruRPG gets you $1,481.31 worth of gaming stuff. Â I have a healthy interest in games and game design, and just like most writers will tell aspiring writers that the best thing to do is read, most game designers will tell you that the best thing to do is play games. Â If you don’t have $20 to give, they’ll take and match any $5 and $10 donations. Â But hey, why not just go for $20 and get the free stuff?
Category: Random Thoughts
The general category for posts on this blog.
If Only Spam Were True…
Having run a blog for quite some time now, I’ve seen my fair share of spam. Since installing Akismet with whatever version of WordPress it became included with, my site has blocked over ninety-six thousand spam comments. This number is actually low because for a period of time I also ran the Bad Behavior plug-in that would block some spam before it got to Akismet (I had to disable Bad Behavior because it was causing other plug-ins to fail – long story).
Because of this, I have seen spam evolve over the years. You still get the usual vigra and tramadol and other pharmaceuticals, and you get the porn, but as administration and spam catching have changed, so have the spammers.
One of the more common spam protections is to simply force all comments to be moderated. Then, when a valid comment comes in and you approve it, that poster, assuming they use the same credentials, will bypass the moderation queue from that point forward. To that end, more than half of my spam these days are attempts to get approved. They say things like “Love your site. Adding it to my bookmarks!” and “I never thought of it that way, but now I am. Thank you for posting this!” and other similar things. They almost look real. In fact, if you dig through my comments you’ll probably find one or two that I’ve let slip through. Of course, I don’t use that level of moderation, I use Akismet, so being approved once doesn’t mean you are approved in the future, and the ones that have slipped through are likely early spams before Akismet learned it was spam.
According to my feedburner and a few other tools, there are about 100 people who are not bots (as far as I and my tools can tell) who read this site. Less than a dozen have probably ever commented. Perhaps that is because I’m not writing things that are comment worthy. Or it could be when people agree they are less likely to reply than if they disagree.
In any event, one of the things I am going to try to do in the future is to comment on the blogs that I read. Maybe not every post, but at least every once in a while just to say “Hey, enjoyed reading this!” or something. Because, you know, it is kind of lonely when only the spam tells you you are doing a good job. Heh.
Hello 2010!
I am excited for this new year. The job is going well, life is good, and everything is swinging upward. Awesome.
The best part however is that my birthday, being October 10th, will fall this year on 10/10/10. I don’t want to jinx it, but that is going to be a perfect day.
So, what sort of resolutions shall I make for the new year?
First, losing twenty pounds over the last year has been great, and I want to keep going. That said, the new year is going to bring an examining of my diet and a look at shaking up my exercise a little. I also want to run the Peachtree Road Race in July, so I have a goal. Lack of a goal is usually the hard part. I lost my last twenty because I wanted to be under 200 pounds, and since then I haven’t had much in the way of a solid goal.
Second, writing… One of the issues I have with writing is that it is almost impossible to do on my desktop PC. The location of my desktop is not inspiring, and the PC has too many distracting things installed on it. Luckily, I may have an opportunity to obtain a netbook, one of those little mini laptops, and that should help, allowing me to take my writing with me anywhere. We shall see… in any event, I want to spend a little more time writing, and to help with that I have vowed not to start watching any new TV shows. I refuse to get sucked in to shows that get canceled or wind up being mediocre. Instead, I will only watch shows I am already invested in and new shows I’ll see on DVD or streaming courtesy of Netflix.
Third, programming… I am still, occasionally, working on my little games and my one business idea (see progress meters on the right). I hope to be able to finish something in 2010. I think I will try to work on finishing one of the smaller games and get it posted just to see if I can. It is going to be lame, and for that I apologize in advance, but finishing something is an important step I need to take.
Fourth, the house… yeah, um, I might clean up the yard or something when the weather gets warmer, and there are a few trees I need to take down. But let’s not get our hopes up…
Not a resolution, but this year will also be my first participating as staff for the MMO Track at Dragon*Con. I’ve reached a point with the con that most of the panels are retreads of panels I’ve already seen. This isn’t a bad thing, as newcomers will find those panels to be as exciting as I did when I was a newcomer. But it means that the last couple of years I’ve been bored in some of them and more willing to skip them altogether when given the chance. In fact, I pretty much only go to the MMO and Writing tracks with the occasional special event. So I decided since I was spending so much time down in the MMO rooms, why not volunteer and help out? I did, and I am. Should be a lot of work and a lot of fun.
Anyway… welcome to 2010…
Goodbye 2009…
Looking over the last year, it started off rocky as I remained unemployed for a couple of months, but I did find work, and as a bonus I actually enjoy it. I’m working at a small company again, only this time the boss seems to know what he’s doing and things are progressing rather than collapsing. I’m still working on spending less and getting our budget under control, but I’ve also lost around twenty pounds and I’m floating around 194 and having trouble getting lower… looks like I might have to actually change my diet.
As far as gaming goes, I’ve canceled my last subscription MMO. I simply don’t have the available time to make $15 a month worth the price. Instead I’m playing some Free-to-Play games with micro transactions where that $15 makes for easily three or four months worth of play.
On the writing front, I failed the NaNoWriMo again, but made it further than I have before, and I completed a very short story, The Last Christmas, that I am quite proud of, enough that I posted it and plan to make revisions and keep working it.
In just about every way, 2009 has turned out to be a pretty good year.
I’m looking forward to 2010, but I’ll save that for tomorrow. For now let’s just send 2009 out in style… have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve!
Less Remake, More Reinvention
I recently learned that there is a remake of The Karate Kid coming down the pipe. However, he does Kung-Fu instead of Karate, it happens in another country, and lots of other changes. In essence, this isn’t a remake but a name theft. They’ve take the name “The Karate Kid” and are slapping it on a movie with a few similar themes. On the other hand, the theaters in recent years have been littered with remakes. Taking an old movie and essentially re-shooting it with maybe a few minor changes, or a couple of big drastic ones that either ruin the movie or ultimately have no impact.
Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of remaking an old film they were to take an old film and tell the story from another angle? Take The Karate Kid for example. Rather than retread the same ground, why not tell The Johnny Lawrence Story instead – the story of a bully who learns that violence isn’t answer through the ongoing conflict with a scrawny kid named Daniel LaRusso. Or rather than doing yet another remake of Hamlet, make Gertrude instead – the original story from the point of view of the mother watching her son go mad. There are so many stories that this can be done to. Pick another character and turn the tale inside-out and view the whole thing in a new light.
A man can dream…
Undead Labs
One thing I will be keeping my eye on is Undead Labs. Â They plan to make a console based zombie themed MMO. Â If they succeed and it is fun to play, I’ll be a subscriber forever.
Last week, Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats posted an interview with Jeff Strain that is worth reading if you are into that sort of thing.
Cats & Bags, Ledges & Jumping
Mostly, this post exists entirely to commit me to action so that I can’t back out and if I do people can call me out on it and say, “You said you were going to, then didn’t!”
Last year, I sat down on December first, thoroughly disappointed that I’d failed the NaNoWriMo, again, and thought to myself, “What I need is a smaller goal.” So I decided I was going to write a short story and post it on Christmas Eve. The story that I wrote, however, was very very depressing. Not that I had intended to write something light and happy, but my initial turn toward darkness wound up being a death spiral into oblivion. In the year since I didn’t post it I’ve only read the story twice and hated it both times because it was not only dark it was needlessly so. It wasn’t just dark, it was black. There was just nothing redeeming about it at all because it wasn’t even well written. Obviously, I didn’t post it.
So, another NaNoWriMo has gone by and I didn’t win, again, but I had the same thought as last year. That I just needed a smaller goal. I kicked around the idea that sparked last year’s short and decided that since I, personally, am not in such a dark place this year (last year in addition to failing the WriMo I was also unemployed and a number of other things) I would take another crack at it. I am very pleased with the results. I still need to make another pass or two at it for glaring errors and then give my editorial staff (wife) a shot at it, but I do think it will be ready before Christmas.
As such, I am stating here and now that I will be posting a short story on Christmas Eve. It is entitled “The Last Christmas” and I hope you return to read it and enjoy it.
The Road to Fit
I am no longer doing 100 push-ups a day. The reason I began doing them is because I recognized that the first step to getting fit is actually starting. Honestly, getting started is usually the hardest part of almost any project. For me, anyway. I’m not an amatuercrastinator, I’m a procrastinator. So to get started on the road to fitness I needed an easy way to get into the habit. Push-ups are simple in that practically anyone can do them, even if you have to start on your knees instead of your toes and it takes you all day to do the whole hundred. Eventually I did get myself down to being able to do the hundred, on my toes, in under ten minutes. But the real achievement was that I was doing this (nearly) every day.
The second phase of my journey was portion control. One of the main issues many people face in getting thinner is that they overeat. And I’m not talking about sitting down with a bucket of chicken or a tub of ice cream and polishing it off. I’m talking about eating a little too much at every meal that adds up over time. Before starting this road to fitness for real, I wrote about cutting my morning cereal down to one cup. I started doing this again, and limiting my lunches, and watching out for sizes of dinners, and cutting out extra snacks. I also switched to drinking mainly water except for special occasions and sometimes for meals. And I also trained myself to order smaller when we eat out, or order with the expectation that half the meal is going home in a box for another time. Eating at restaurants is really bad for you when it comes to portion control because they often won’t let you control the portions, you just get the plate of food they serve and it is left to you to stop eating. Of course, having a spot of unemployment and being broke really helps here since eating out is one of the first things to go. Fast food is also a pain here since many places have eliminated their old “small” size and made “medium” the new small, “large” the new medium, and the bucket of soda with a barrel of fries the new large. If you are in the habit of ordering the large or medium combos, you might need to reevaluate and switch to the small, or even start ordering off the kid’s menu.
Following these two phases I was able to reach one of my big goals: 200lbs. Phase three is now in full effect. What is phase three? Realistic expectations.
Look, I didn’t get up to 250lbs overnight, or even in a couple months, not even a year. It took a long time for the weight to creep up on me. With that in mind, I don’t expect to lose it all in a short period of time either. I’ve seen tons of propaganda for diets and exercise plans that claim I can shed thirty, fifty, even a hundred pounds in a matter of weeks or months, but the largest problem with losing weight fast is that you usually lack the discipline to keep the weight off. The “crash” in most crash diets isn’t the sudden loss of weight but the crash of depression when months later you find you’ve gained most or all of it back. With that in mind, my current goal is to lose just one pound a week. That seems very small, and it is, purposefully so. Each pound that goes away I am determined to keep gone.
I’ve stopped doing my push-ups and sit-ups routine. It served its purpose of getting me in the habit of exercising and now it is time to move on. I was a big fan of the idea of the Wii Fit, but the implementation was lacking. Since I already owned the balance board, buying Wii Fit Plus for under $20 was a no-brainer. Having used it for a month now, I can say that this sequel successfully fixed all the issues I had with the original. The main fix being that I can build a workout, not have to stop between exercises to choose another and also not have to see the scores and rankings which I really don’t care about. The best part being you can simply select an amount of time, select a type of workout (yoga, strength, or a mix of both) and hit start. I now do a random selection of yoga three days a week, and a random selection of strength exercises two days a week, each workout for thirty minutes. Of course, I continue to examine what I eat, making small changes as I see places to improve without throwing out all the foods I love just to see an improvement in my waste line.
If I can maintain my goal of one pound a week that is fifty-two pounds in a year. 148lbs is my new goal for October 2010. I’m looking forward to it…
Putting Down a Book
It is not often that I will actually put down a book for good. I mean, I have never finished — don’t hold this against me — The Lord of the Rings. I’ve read Fellowship probably five times and Two Towers three times, but I’ve never read Return of the King. I just get bored. I almost didn’t finish The Once and Future King, but I powered through. Dune was another rough one.  Not too long ago I posted about the First Law Trilogy that I waded through. There are books that I have put down, a number of them in fact, but I usually go back eventually and finish. I swear, I will read Return of the King before I die.
But there are rare books that I have put down and never intend to go back to. Recently I’ve run into two and both of them have to do with the writing itself, not the subject matter. The first was Working for the Devil by Lilith Saintcrow. The story itself is something I would be interested in, and I’ve actually heard good things about the series, however, the author decided that her main character’s profession would be called a “necromance”. Even now my spell checker is telling me that I’ve dropped an “r” off the end. For whatever reason, she went with this spelling, and it bugs the crap out of me. It happens just often enough in the text that it pops me out of the story and back into myself where I commence screaming “ER! ER! NecromancER!” I had a similar problem when reading Dead Witch Walking about that author’s choice to make up her own swear words, but I was able to gloss over that. For some reason this use of “necromance” is something I just couldn’t get past.
More recently I made a stab at reading James Patterson’s The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. At first, the description of a superhero book sounds like it would be right up my alley. However, I might have skipped it had I read the red box on the inside back flap of the cover. It reads:
In the spirit of the most enduring hit movies and books, James Patterson has written this story for readers from ten to a hundred and ten. Special care has been taken with the language and content of The Dangerous Days of Daniel X.
I’ve read a number of Patterson’s books, but mostly his more adult murder mystery stuff. Going into this book with that mindset I was terribly disappointed and felt like I was being talked down to. The story itself was interesting enough, but the simplicity of the language intended to be good reading for kids as young as ten just left me with an odd feeling. I can’t say for sure that I’ve put this book down for good, but I definitely probably won’t pick it up again until I have a ten year old to read it with, either as a bedtime story or something we share and discuss.
So… have you ever put down a book? Why?
Zombie Driver
Thanks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun I now have another zombie game to look forward to: Zombie Driver. Think the original GTA but with zombies. Here is some game footage.
Now I just hope they release this on the Xbox 360.