A Story from the East

I met an old woman from Tennessee this morning as I walked my dog. She was from the far side of the fall of the western world. Our town used to be like Leesburg, she said, before the homeless moved into the old train station. One-in-five affected by the storm, and we're sending food to Africa. I could only nod dumbly, but my heart said this.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Slog

Today was the longest of all possible Tuesdays, for no reason at all.

Analogue Stockade

I've spent most weekends of the last few months on the road, back and forth between home and Oklahoma, getting the last dregs of things owned by the missus, or in this case attending weddings. Everyone is getting married this summer, have you noticed? If you aren't: try harder.

To pass the time we've been listening to Dan Brown's Digital Fortress through the missus' GPS. I did a little reading into the book before I started writing this and found that one of my main quibbles, that the book's jargon seemed anachronistic from time to time, was because it was written eleven years ago. That's like dozens of lifetimes for tech. I have to give it a pass. I can barely remember what I was doing online 11 years ago, but I bet it was poorly formatted.

What really kills me is the climax. We've spent something like 10 hours getting to this point, following the twists and turns, only to have the book pull a complete 180 and dash all the playing pieces onto the floor. Dan decides that the finely tuned plots-within-plots he's been... plotting aren't good enough and discards them the last moment. The entire plot becomes a red herring, and the cryptographic geniuses we've been rooting for from the start become complete and total morons. The last few chapters to what had otherwise been a suspenseful and entertaining novel were cringe-inducing almost to the point of seizure.

And what's the deal with hating on Spain?

Sketchdump

A sketch I did on my off time for the last couple of days, the silhouette for a spring-loaded sword design I'm working on and funky little water-seller type guy.

UP

Here's your heart! It says. Do you feel it? Now watch.

Fracture Point

A job approaches, perhaps. I've applied for a 3d modeling job working on flight sims for L-3 in Arlington. Not a game industry job, but using the same tools. If this works out I should be able to live comfortably until I can find a real industry job. The GDC in San Fran is coming at the end of March, and hopefully I'll be able to scare up some interviews there. Zenimax might also be hiring around then. We'll see!

The DH campaign last Saturday went well. 2/5s of the group had yet to create a character, so we got started a little later, but the rest weren't too bored by the time they were finished. The group got off track seconds into the game. I'd planned on winging most of the game anyway, just using my (far too detailed) notes as an outline, but they took it in an entirely different direction. Because of this I wound up throwing a lot of theme out the window. Guytoga is apparently the only planet in the 40k universe with Arbites officers bursting with local lore. A lot of the set pieces I'd hoped to bring into play were never visited, although hopefully the next session I'll be able to use them. Tony swears the 40k universe is apologetics for Nazi Germany, but that way lies madness.

Deadly Arctic Apocalypse 2009 - The Revenge

Guess we dodged the bullet this time. One-third an inch of ice cannot douse the flames our our hearts.