Wizardry 8 is not a simple, easy to pick up game. I went through three parties and almost gave up on the fourth before everything clicked and I started to really understand how to survive.

The most important thing to do is to ignore 70-100% of the official strategy guide. Check the web instead, and explore and experiment on your own. With few fixed exceptions, the book is flat out wrong about what loot and monsters you encounter because they're random and based on your party levels. It claims to be a complete walkthrough, but it misses a few interesting nooks and crannies. It doesn't really analyze the race/class combos, how to train/use classes effectively, the pros and cons of various formations, which spells are the handiest and how you should train to get them, how to deal with certain difficult types of creatures, and so on. It might get an RPG newbie through the game on the Novice setting. Maybe. But they'd miss a lot.

My party as it stands now:

Melli Hobbit Bard	Usually spends the first few rounds of combat playing songs to make the enemy slow and insane, then wails on the bagpipes to whittle away at them until she runs out of stamina. Guards the casters' backs but isn't too hot in combat.
Gratchit Gnome Alchemist	Basically, area-effect artillery support and curing. Makes serious money for the party by mixing cheap potions into expensive ones.
Nyderra Elf Bishop	Utility mage, psionicist and healer. While her area-effect mental attacks can be nice, they're mostly duplicated by the bard.
Claudia Fellpurr Rogue	Very fast, very stealthy, doesn't hit hard but hits a lot, picks locks with ease.
Skale Lizardman Rogue	Tough, reasonably fast, doesn't hit quite as often as Claudia but can cause a lot of pain when he does. Basically a fighter, without actually being in the fighter class.
Dwamma Dwarf Valkyrie	Another fighter mostly, with a few healing spells. She carries the resurrection powder since she can Cheat Death (and has had to a couple times).

With what I know about the game now I'd probably pick a different bunch, but they're getting the job done so I plan to stick with 'em. :)

I'd be playing Dungeon Siege this weekend, except I left my CDs at the office after Thursday night's LAN party. Oops.

While I didn't really enjoy the first multiplayer experience I had with DS, I had a blast Thursday. The teamwork and communication were more solid, and I played a melee fighter with a little bit of Nature Magic rather than trying to just go all Nature Magic. You find more interesting loot you can use that way, I've noticed, and you feel more like you're contributing to the group. Hm.

DS is fun, but I don't think there's a lot of long-term play value in DS for me. Not enough character options...

The Thursday and Saturday D&D campaigns are going to be split/merged/something. Mike will run two campaigns, but each player has to choose one or the other, 'cause our big slow groups are just not working out. Livia and Gengh will both be retired. Each was fun, but I'll take the opportunity to try something new.

One possibility is a fighter-type Dragon Disciple who uses a spiked chain -- for flavor and abilities I like that better than the Master of Chains prestige class. But if "The Trio" winds up in the campaign where we're working for a dragon hunter, I'm not sure whether I want to look like one myself. :)

Another possibility is some kind of Earth Genasi unarmed brawler, if I can find or make a class/prestige class combo that I'm happy with... I didn't like the ones from this month's Dragon Magazine, and I'm not sure whether I want to just stick with the base monk class.

I've cancelled DAoC. Haven't logged in in two months, and haven't been tempted to go back and look around or try a new character. Got that urge covered by Wiz8, really. :) Had to download a 14.9 meg patch to get to the place where I could cancel... not quite as painful as the mega-patch and DirectX "upgrade" (from the development runtime to the standard one) to cancel EverQuest, but still. You'd think somebody would put their account cancellation stuff where you can get it if you just plain can't run the application anymore, or just don't want to sit through the download. I pity those without broadband...

Dungeon Siege is all it's cracked up to be. The debate around the office seems to be whether it's similar to Diablo and whether or not that's a good thing.

Graphically it doesn't look like Diablo... it looks an awful lot like the Hero's Journey Prototype we had at E3 a couple years ago, proving the success of that approach (whether or not we use it for the "new" HJ). Lighting is used dramatically and successfully. The visual effects of low level spells are dull at first -- but with more powerful spells come cooler effects, so that's fine. The only quibble is the avaible range of view angles only let you see so far ahead -- there are good technical reasons for it, but sometimes it's a hindrance.

Gameplay-wise it doesn't really play like Diablo. There are obvious Diablo elements -- particularly those red and blue health/mana potions (improved) and the random treasure system (Mighty Hammer of the Bull or Gliding Bow of Starlight for instance). The packmule was put in place because of a specific deficiency of Diablo, which is a sure sign that it's at least partially in the same genre.

But, at least once you start picking up more party members, it's a very different game. Diablo is all about spending training points wisely, getting l33t equipment, and spastically clicking on monsters. DS is a much more tactical game, all about identifying likely ambush points, carefully picking off enemies a few at a time whenever possible, regrouping or retreating when necessary, and so on. You're more likely to choose which bow each character should use based on its range than its other stats, so you can keep formation. But then that might vary with play style. ;) To me, it feels like a more intuitive style of play rather than an analytical, min-max sort of game.

Is it fun? Yeah. Worth every penny. But, probably because of the less statistical nature of it, I'm not as obsessed over it as I was over Diablo and am over...

Wizardry 8.

Fun fun fun. Classic turn-based computer RPG with lots of stats and spells and stuff. The graphics don't make the Unreal 2 people fear for their careers, but they don't suck either, which is saying a lot for any game in this genre. :) Your characters seem to have a bit more personality than in the days when 16 colors were a lot -- the choice of portrait and voice really can make them come alive.

Skarrg, the Lizardman Fighter, is that sort of cold and calculating tough guy that for some reason, people like.

Shirow, the Human Samurai (I almost named him Morimoto), is both gung-ho and a smarmy bastard. Overall, I don't like him much.

Hyanna, my Rawulf Priest/Valkyrie, has a determined, nothing-can-stand-in-our-way attitude. (I kinda messed up her stats at character creation and she's been stuck as a Priest longer than I intended, so she's going to have more healing power and less fighting prowess. But I haven't needed the extra defense on my flank yet, so she should turn out fine.)

Yallama, my Mook Ranger, is a bit of a mess. You see, she has the same voice as the Bishop from my first (throwaway) party, a friendly Southern gal who calls people darlin'. But that Bishop was a black female Elf, and the portrait of the blonde baboon-thing that the Ranger has just isn't working for me. I'm going to have to put the Elf portrait back and just ignore where it says "mook" on the character sheet.

Dougall, the Hobbit Gadgeteer, is a Scottish engineer. E's always wantin ta ken what this or that jobbie does. The portrait is theoretically a Dwarf, but it looks more like one of the lads in the football club to me, heh.

Myell, the Faerie Mage/Bishop, is kind of whiny and annoying. I'm not sure I've settled on the voice -- she and Shirow will probably get adjusted until I can find a voice that I can stand to listen to and a portrait that looks like the voice.

Both games have that "must see what's around the next corner!" aspect. Dungeon Siege has it a bit less, because once an hour or so that next corner kills you, and you get snapped back into reality. Wizardry 8, so far, doesn't have that braking mechanism -- I played it until 4 AM last night after a D&D session and totally lost track of time. But according to Russ, W8 does get significantly harder after the first bit and I'll be doing a lot of reloading. We'll see. ;)

Today my cubicle smells pleasantly like jasmine tea. The order I placed with Nature's Gift arrived today, making me wonder if I fell into some weird time wormhole or something. They included lots of little samples of things such as Butane and Lawnmower Essential Oil, or so they smelled like. Red Mandarine is nice though, and should mix nicely with the jasmine sambac and sandalwood that were the real reason for the order.

Dealing with SSM Health Care is like being back in college: you have to deal with multiple offices, none of which know what the other ones are doing.

First blood test, I showed up at the lab (a couple doors down from the doctor's office) and they had no clue who I was. Turned out my orders were still with my chart and I had to go pick them up and shuttle them over myself.

Second blood test (this morning)... same thing. Except on the first try at the paperwork, the assistant or nurse or whoever gave me the orders for the diabetes nurse educator, instead of the lab.

(I am convinced now that the main difference between a standard glucose test and a Hemoglobin A1C test, which measures average glucose over the past 3 months, is that they have to take 3 months' worth of blood. That was the biggest fricking test tube I have ever seen. You know you're in trouble when they hook up a garden hose to the needle in your arm.)

Calling the scheduling office for the diabetes nurse educator, I was told they couldn't schedule me because my doctor is behind on paperwork. So I call the doctor's office and a nurse arranges to schedule me by lying about who my doctor is. The nearest available time is 3 weeks from now. By then, I might have the results of the HbA1C back and the course of action may change.

Now if only I had to drive to some other office to pick up insurance papers for some other place to sign, write two checks to one office so I can deliver a form to another office 60 miles away that writes me two separate checks than I can take back to the first office so they can tear up one of them, and receive a diploma by mail just after the midterm of a class they told me I needed but actually didn't, I'd start looking for the USF logo.

I've just enrolled in the "3D Game Programming with Direct3D" course at gameinstitute.com. It's hard to say whether I'll be barely able to keep up, or whether I'll want lessons flying at me faster than once a week. Probably depends on the math. The intro lecture didn't lose me anyway, which already puts it ahead of some of the books I've looked at.

Steph has let me change Few -- something I have resisted for a while because of his story, but the last session just seemed to reiterate that he needs to have more focus.

He's dropping the majority of magic stuff... no Cleric, Divine Agent or Contemplative. He'll instead be a Paladin/Templar, focusing mainly on combat. An Elven tank. Still not the greatest warrior ever, but he'll be able to contribute more consistently to the party's efforts. Nothing about his background story has to change, in fact in this actually brings him closer to what he was at the beginning of the campaign.

Dungeon Siege to be released tommorow. I'm trying not to drool. OTOH, I thought about stopping by the mall this morning to pick up Wizardry 8. The old-school turn based RPG from Canada or the neo-Diablo style of Chris Taylor... which will it be? Whose RPG cuisine reigns supreme?

First I just want to exclaim over a bit of news that waited for me to get home to read it: I have a new sister! Not a biological relative that is... but a member of the faith newly divined as a daughter of Seshat. Congrats Kristina! :)

It's good not to be an "only child" anymore -- another perspective to triangulate from, and help me figure out what's just my bias and what I might actually be right about. Heh!

And more motivation to actually do the rewrite of the site. What's up there now isn't wrong per se (except in a couple minor details) but it's not entirely right anymore either. The more people who read it and say "wow, that was great!" the more often I twitch and think "I've gotta fix that."

Yesterday I wrote 13+ pages of stuff the low-tech way, to be posted now that I'm back. But I'm not gonna, because I already have different things to say about my experience...

I spent the week in a cabin near Ellijay, GA with my parents. No computer, no internet access, no cable TV, in Georgia's Apple Capital, one hill away from Jimmy Carter's cabin, near the southern end of Approach Trail (the other end turns into the official Appalaichan Trail). Sound a bit like Survivor and its ilk? It should, I had to actually watch that with them at one point... :)

I've had more exciting vacations, but that wasn't the point. I didn't get away from it all, but most of "it" was kept at bay for a while. :) One could sit on the porch and hear only the wind. More usually, the wind and birds. Not untypically, the wind, birds, squirrels crashing around in the fallen leaves, and the occasional dog bark that echoes in the mountains like thunder. The thunder echoed pretty impressively Friday night too.

Between the quiet, peaceful setting and the reading material I brought along, I couldn't help but get philosophical. I wrote the longest and ramblinglest letter I've ever written to "Mom," even with a edge of desperation. As usual, the answer was a combination of subtle signs and my inner voice telling me I know the answers I'm asking for. (I still wish the part of me that knows the score and is so in touch with things, would notify the more oblivious majority parts of me a bit more often.) You really want 30 foot high letters of fire, but usually you get a fortune cookie with the pronouns wrong, or your conscience telling you to just shut up and figure out the answer yourself. Or maybe the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob taps you on the shoulder, ready to sell you a ticket but startling you the heck out of there.

Ah, mixed metaphors. Where was I...?

Finally got a call from the doctor on Tuesday, 17 days after my blood was drawn. I am indeed diabetic. My base blood sugar was 243, when it should be 140 or lower (preferably lower). Cholesterol and triglycerides are a little high, but the doctor expects that they will drop as a result of working on the blood sugar, and I don't need to worry too much about them right now.

I'll have more blood drawn this week for a second glucose check and a HbA1C, which will determine whether I go on medication or not. I'm also going to contact a Diabetes Nurse Educator and schedule whatever I need to do there.

I'm reading up on the glucose monitor kits and there's some slick stuff out there. Some that require a fraction of a microliter of blood to operate, so you can stick yourself on the arm instead of a finger and not even feel it; some that have data ports for downloading results to your PC, calculate weekly or monthly averages, all kinds of things. On the bleeding edge (so to speak) there are laser lancets and non-invasive glucometer watches approved by the FDA, but both of those are still in the first-generation, expensive-yet-sucky stage.

See, I can turn even this bad (but not unexpected) news into a geeky pursuit of technology...

It snuck up on me, but I'm going on vacation next week with my parents in a cabin in Georgia. No internet access. Aiee!

My Sound Blaster Audigy arrived from Amazon on Friday. I knew it had some problems with Windows XP, but they have a driver patch on their site for that, so I went into the installation expecting minor trouble that would clear up after the patch.

I had minor trouble, followed by major trouble and serious trouble. :P

Download the updated Audigy drivers -- check. Still crashes.

Got latest BIOS update for my computer -- check. Had to delete USB driver and let Windows reinstall it. Still crashes.

Latest Windows XP patches -- check. They donwload automatically anyway.

Latest video card driver -- check. Already had it.

Change BIOS PCI Latency Timer or 15-16MB memory hole settings -- can't. My Dell doesn't allow it.

Disable ACPI -- check. Still crashes. And they don't tell you that you can NEVER TURN IT BACK ON AGAIN without reinstalling Windows. The effect? I can't suspend my computer any more (which was my standard way of shutting down), and Windows can't turn the power off automatically when you tell it to power off.

Check for IRQ conflicts -- check. There weren't any. I changed IRQs around anyway. Still crashes.

Remove unnecessary cards -- there aren't any. Shuffle cards around into different slots -- check. Still crashes.

Read Dell tech support forum. Discover that Audigy problems are chronic with Dells. There's a BIOS patch for the Dimension 8200, plastered with dire warnings NOT to install it if you don't have an Audigy (what happens if you remove the Audigy later?) or any other Dell model. I have a Dimension 4300, so... still crashes.

Check Amazon for return policy, print return shipping label, put Audigy back in box, buy and install a Hercules Game Theater XP instead -- check. No more crashes!

I've had trouble with Creative cards before. My SB Live gave me fits when I first installed it in my 166MHz Acer, until I shuffled cards around into the magic combination of slots that didn't cause IRQ conflicts. It didn't have trouble in two subsequent machines I installed it in, but it was a big hassle in my current machine at work until some combination of drivers and slots finally got it working.

Creative's software quality has been going down the tubes too, if you ask me. The bundle that came with the original SB Live was great -- Cakewalk, Sound Forge, and control panels/mixer that didn't look too weird.

The second version of the Live drivers had pointlessly curvy windows and annoying interface "enhancements" that run slower and display no good taste.

The Audigy control panels suffer even more from the "ooh, shiny" design philosophy. And for some unfathomable reason, installation sets up an animated EAX logo AVI that plays at Windows startup -- which you can't see in Windows XP because it's behind the "Welcome" screen. So all it does is slow down startup and play a sound you can't turn off without hacking the registry. The bundled software (at least with the Audigy MP3+) is useless junk, nothing at all on the level of Cakewalk or Sound Forge.

So when I found one complaint of Windows XP related problems with my second choice, the Sound Blaster Extigy, I decided to just walk away from Creative entirely and look for alternatives.

The Game Theater XP is weird, but nice. The card is just an interface for an external box where the processing really happens (isolating it from the interference inside the computer, which makes it clean and noise-free). A big fat cable runs between them. The box has a USB hub, MIDI and game ports, and every kind of analog and digital audio input and output known to mankind except old-school XLR microphone jacks. The thing actually supports Dolby 7.1 (!), thus the "Theater" part of the name. :)

My overall impression of the sound quality is that it's a half a notch above the SB Live and half a notch below the Audigy. Which puts it about six notches above the built-in audio that the machine had. ;) At first I thought there was a problem with the 3D sound stuff not going through the otherwise very nice hardware equalizer, making Diablo II sound really weak... but turning off the stereo widener option (which didn't do much for it) fixed that.

The software bundle is still mostly useless flashy stuff, but it did include Acid Express and Yamaha XG at least, the control panels are all reasonable. There's a weird-looking app called Virtual Ear, which has some minor effect on the stereo placement but nothing major (at least with a 2-speaker setup). The drivers are not Microsoft certified, but they are stable and work just fine. The only real downside is there's no EAX control panel that lets you apply and tweak reverb and other DSP effects in real time to MP3s/CD/input/etc. as there is with the SB Live... maybe I can find a third-party app to do that, or even use Creative's. :)

My blood was taken last Saturday... quickly, easily and painlessly, unlike my experience at the walk-in clinic in Bradenton a few years ago. Still waiting on the results, which they say can take up to 14 days. I'll call them at the end of next week if they don't call me first.

Lots of updates to Splunge. The latest project was to give it a persistent high score table... which was very, um, educational. I had to learn about applet security, mySQL, PHP, sockets, some inner workings of HTTP, and talking to applets through JavaScript. I'm kinda proud of the fact that this all works in the gimped Microsoft VM and I still don't have to make people download anything.

Dark Age of Camelot doesn't enchant me anymore, it only frustrates. The honeymoon is over I guess. Not cancelling the account quite yet, but I'm on the verge.

Several friends are having fun in DragonRealms: The Fallen, but I will admit that I don't. Even after a couple of years of NOT being an active GM, I still can't help but think like one. I see stuff I want to fix, expand or create... and I just can't get into playing. I also get lost all too easily, between just teleporting everywhere as a GM and having no sense of direction anyway. :)

Diablo II doesn't gleam as brightly now either; my Assassin has been through Act V, is level 37, and I don't see much point in continuing through Nightmare and Hell difficulty.

Time to get into something else. Dungeon Siege is now scheduled for an April 4 release...

So the (sort of) big news is that I had my doctor appointment today. Not a blood test yet since I will need to fast for that, but a brief general exam and consultation. I'm in pretty good health overall, except for being overweight, and the doc says I don't have to worry too much. Yay! I'm going to go in some morning this week (tommorow if I wake in time and am up to it) for a blood sugar and cholesterol test, the former because it's a possibility (but not the foregone conclusion that I thought), the latter because I've never had one and every adult should.

It is utterly possible that I don't have any major health problems, and the dire warning had another purpose -- to make me confront it and make sure, so I can be confident about it. Sort of like a unit test for software (i.e. does this thing even work on its own, before I plug it in to a huge system? If you don't test it, you're never sure.).

But of course it's possible that I do have a mild problem that needs to be addressed before it deteriorates into a serious problem. Thus, the test.

Already I feel a lot better having gone to the doc and hearing that things are not dire for me. :)

Right next to the doctor's office is a drum shop. Muahahaha.

I treated myself to a Rhythm Makers 9x20 Ashiko. It's nowhere near as deep as KI Nakht's Sky Shakes, but then, a thing can only have one foundation. It's got a nice booming resonant wood sound, about a fifth below my ceramic doumbek, without that quasi-metallic clay ringing that the gunta has. And it's easily the best looking of the bunch.

I didn't like the harness thing they had at the store though, so I'll have to rig up some kind of support for it or just tuck the whole thing under an arm and play it like the stretch limo of doumbeks. Heh.

I've been reading Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen with gusto. Vodou has its similarities to Kemetic Orthodoxy, but now I have a much clearer idea of where those similarities begin and end. Ancient Egypt was almost excessively prosperous, while Haiti is a hard place, and that difference has had as much influence as time, distance and contact with other cultures.

I found it interesting that the loa Ayizan shares certain core things with Seshat, even down to the symbol of the palm branch. Writing is not one of the things they have in common, which to me, supports the idea that Seshat isn't so much a "scribe goddess" so much as one who uses the written word as a tool to accomplish the important stuff.

I haven't gotten to the appendices yet, but I have to say, for a non-fiction book it has a dramatic plot twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan proud. Maybe more "anthropology" books need to be written by artists. In any case, it was maybe not something I should have read right before bed on an already strange night. Any dream with Nebt-Het in it is guaranteed to be freaky-weird from the start, even when one isn't attending a college class taught by one's spiritual leader where one dissects an evil buglike gelatin creature that unscrupulous magicians use to take over peoples' minds. Urrrr?

In between meetings and XP programming, I've been tooling around with Splunge. It might be more fun for me to just tinker with the game than it is for anyone to actually play it, but at least it's looking a little more cool these days. ;)

"Now you need to make it multiplayer," says Jeff, but that's a whole nother can of worms. I don't expect to try that one for a long time. :)

I've started up another DAoC character. (Big surprise, eh?) I have been generally frustrated with the game for the past couple weeks, but it's mostly the inability to deal with tougher-than-expected creatures that is the issue. Dying is no fun because you feel like you've lost progress that you've made, and that only contributes to making that progress the ultimate challenge and goal. Running away is not a lot of fun either; you feel like you shouldn't have to.

But when grouping, things are different. You don't necessarily die less often, but you usually feel less inadequate. If you get into a bad situation, you have a chance that the group can pull together and get you out. So I decided I need to group more, and to encourage that I've made myself a grouping sort of character -- an Avalonian Cleric specializing in Rejuvenation (healing). Haven't had time to take it far yet, but I'll see how it goes.

I may find myself going back to Eiteag the Mentalist, but grouping more than before. Mentalists are decent groupers too. But practically every hunting group in Albion needs a Cleric, and those that don't strictly need them can still use them. :)