So much for that.

I think there's a line in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about the great number of unbelievable things Arthur saw all at once making him wish for a nice familiar packet of cornflakes. That's about how I'm feeling now...

In a matter of days I went from "DAoC looks dull" to "DAoC sounds kind of interesting" to "good thing it's a weekend 'cause I'm hooked." I'm not into Norse stuff much... but I'm playing in Midgard. I don't like Dwarves, find female Dwarves in nearly every fantasy setting I've ever seen to be incredibly unattractive... and here I am playing a kind-of-cute female Dwarf. I always play games in 1st person view when I can, but I'm finding I prefer 3rd person in DAoC.

If I start listening to pop music and saying "hella cool" please shoot me.

I know I said on the boards that I would finish something first before getting into DAoC. It looks like I'm probably "finished" with Pool of Radiance... not that I didn't enjoy it, but this is one of those all-consuming games. :)

EverQuest wasn't much fun for me, but DAoC seems to have put some thought into avoiding things that annoy and frustrate players, and in a few places sacrificed "realism" for convenience. For example, there are no banks; you always carry your money, but it cannot be stolen or lost in death, and as soon as you earn 100 coppers it becomes 1 silver. City layouts are simpler than EQ's, and "zones" are fewer, larger and quick to load.

Not everything is 100% convenient. One of the first things I want to do when I try a new RPG is see what all my character choices look like, but once you choose a server you are locked into one of three kingdoms, and you cannot switch servers without exiting the program and reloading entirely. Since each kingdom has a different selection of races, you'd have to do a lot of restarting to see everything. You also cannot redefine keyboard shortcuts, change resolution, adjust music volume, etc. without logging off. And while they did a pretty good job on making the interface customizeable, there are a couple of glitches and a few places where more graphical controls would have simplified matters (add/delete buttons on the friends list for example).

So far nobody has been rude, I haven't seen any really bad character names (even on a "non-roleplaying" server), and it's been a pleasant experience overall. Dwalla is (after about 5 hours of playing, including some exploration and a few deaths due to being incautious) a 4th level Rogue, soon to be a Hunter -- she'll be able to soften up targets with a composite bow, finish them off with a sword or else hide while a "pet" fights for her. Tonight I will probably try a Hibernian Enchanter, but will poke around fansites first and see if I can find some interesting profession guides. :)

Johnny's not the only one. I'm not trying to give up smoking (since I never started, whew) but had to involuntarily give up my computer for a while today. C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM got hosed and I couldn't boot, as I discovered after the CD-ROM refused to relinquish its death grip on one of my new CDs. This happened while Jim was on his lunch break, so I kept poking at it and not really going anywhere but crazy. Thankfully when he got back, he was able to find an ancient copy of the file in C:\WINNT\REPAIR... and lo and behold, very few of my settings were actually messed up. A few drivers forgotten, but not the huge mess of registry settings I was expecting to lose. Whew!

Scary how much I was freaking out while it wasn't working though. I realize how much I depend on this computer to do anything at all around here. At home, there's always stuff to read or old TiVo stuff to catch up on or my cat, but here at the office it's a depression trigger. I was ready to throw things and break stuff, and was wondering whether I would just plain quit if it turned out all the stuff on the hard drive would be lost. And now I just feel stupid about feeling like that.

New music arrived last night. We got home late after a D&D session, so though I tried to listen to the Yasnaïa while I fell asleep, the boombox/headphones combo doesn't work well and I gave up. Today I managed to turn that one and Claire Voyant into MP3s before the great crash... so it was late afternoon before I got to even listen to anything. Aiee!

The premature reviews are in:

• Claire Voyant: pretty good stuff, and fairly accessible. I'm not sure who to compare it to, but they have an MP3.com page so you can hear for yourself. "Riptide" (the Front 242 remix) isn't on the album, but grab it anyway... nice one. "Her" too.



• Yasnaïa: mixed feelings. She tends very much toward the atmospheric (despite CDNOW spuriously filing it under "dance", and band photos tending toward the kinky goth side) and it sounds as Eastern European as it is. The cover design is really, really cheesy and I doubt I'd have bought the CD if I saw it first. A few tracks are not even as interesting as some things I recorded myself 10 years ago and threw away -- but others have real quality. This is also the kind of music that changes completely with the listening environment -- one of the tracks that plays fast and loose with rhythm to mess with your head(phones) sounds much simpler and less subtle when you play it in the background. Oddly enough, the artist is working entirely within the same set of rules on most tracks... just not the rules most people are used to. She's very conservative in her unconventionality. Perhaps she should have broken those rules a bit more often and fulfilled some of that great potential she seems to have...

(BTW, did you know there's a Russian Gothic Page... complete with Russian cemetary galleries? I'm more than a little intrigued.)

• The Changelings, Epicycles and Amphibian: I knew these would suit me since I've got about half their content in MP3's thanks to their MP3.com page... so I don't feel bad about "reviewing" them without popping the CDs on yet. ;) Amphibian is their usual sort of thing, but Epicycles is a collection of nice soundtrack music written for the game Noble Armada (which I think got canned?) and a haunted house.

Steph is running her Friday night game tonight since she's taking off for CA this weekend. Hopefully we'll finish Death in Freeport without any other party members exploding or turning into Paladins... gotta run!

Saturday's event was great. We should do something like it more often... minus the marathon cleaning sessions and driving all over St. Louis to buy stuff at the last minute. ;) If only we could keep the house clean all the time... heh. ;)

Reinstalled Alpha Centauri, played through one game (University with another Transcendence victory) and was considering the next when I found out that Civ III has gone gold. Whee! It seems like all the games I got hooked on over the years are making a comeback in some form, from Pool of Radiance to Rogue Spear. The only one missing is a turn-based tactical mecha game...

Seems like it's been... oh, about 11 months since last time I played SMAC. Heh.

Pool of Radiance just got more interesting and much more difficult. Unfortunately, some of the difficulty is from the game "cheating" -- deciding to grant a surprise round in combat to whoever doesn't get in the last word when you first meet a large group of Drow. Deciding to make True Seeing not actually see things inside a Darkness spell area. Grr!

Devil May Cry looks spiffy, as do Dead or Alive 3 and Soul Calibur 2. And of course with Final Fantasy MCLXVII (or whatever it's up to now) and Gran Turismo 3, we're just going to have to get ourselves a PS2. Or three.

People are saying Dark Age of Camelot is a good thing -- but every time I start to think about it, I look at some screenshots and think "it's basically EverQuest, but with badly proportioned models." Classic example of how the graphics, while probably the least important aspect in the long term, make the first impression that either gets people hooked or makes them yawn. And for now at least, I choose to yawn.

Rogue Spear: Black Thorn and especially Ghost Recon have my attention though. Yum.

I finally got around to uploading some of the wallpaper I've done in the past several months, over at dave.mooville.net. There's more on my other machine, when I get around to uploading that as well. :)

I've been really worn out this past week or so. No gumption to post entries, work much on my D&D campaign, or the article rewrite. Haven't even pushed hard in Pool of Radiance.

Yesterday we did clean the "basement" though. My poor airsoft gear... cat pee has taken its toll on two pairs of goggles (including the expensive one with the fan), tactical vest, hat, and the functioning part of the Camelbak (the outer shell is okay after 3 washings). I got lucky though -- the FAMAS was almost untouched (though I did have to scrub the detachable part of the battery compartment, and 3 of the clips) and the pistols were in their boxes and completely out of harm's way.

I haven't played a game in forever though; it's just too physically exhausting for me to fully enjoy in my current shape. I'll probably be selling the FAMAS to Bubba or someone else and just keeping the pistols for now. I do still have a few airsoft guns on my wish list, just because they're cool, but I'll upgrade my computer first. Which comes after getting my car fixed and new lenses for my glasses. :)

The D&D campaign is at 9 players now and I'll probably freeze it there. Maybe Jeff will start a second campaign so I won't have to run such a large group. :)

I'm slow with the news, but the new website was released Monday. Between that, eScape, a multitude of new releases in DragonRealms, and the Elven Nations expansion in GemStone, the company has been insanely busy... but we have a lot to be proud of and happy about.

In some ways it seems like we're about to enter a new era, or at least a new phase. There's a certain other big project at work -- it has fallen off industry radar but we are still serious about it, and if things go as planned I'll soon be getting up to speed on 3D graphics programming. I've started writing content for the new article, and will soon be picking up a new duty as a priest-in-training. And I'm planning to DM a new D&D campaign, the office's fifth one.

The campaign will be set at the height of the Seven Star Empire in DragonRealms history, but will begin on the eastern continent that has very rarely been mentioned even in passing. It'll use a large portion of the new Oriental Adventures material, as well as standard 3rd Edition stuff and a few things converted from DragonRealms. Having never DM'd a paper and pencil game before though, I have my work cut out for me :)

Pool of Radiance 2 continues to entertain. Definitely not perfect, but it has "don't stop playing" value. I figure after I get a couple of things done for the website today, I'll roll up a new party and see how they do compared to my current group. :)