2007-12-29

Looking Back and Forward from 2007 to 2008

Filed under: Education, Family, Games, Graphics, Writing — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:15

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging for two years now. I started this journal about a month after my other, in-character one. Originally, it was just there to comment on friends, but I started posting one or two things on occasion. Now, as my brother said, “I’m a pretty good blogger.” Or at least I do it fairly consistently and I’ve gotten a few compliments on letting everyone in on the trials and joys of my life.

This year is probably the year I started to really blogging on two of my major themes of life: writing and programming. I will, of course, blame the the other Dylan for getting me into writing about writing. After meeting with him at GenCon 2006, it really pushed me to finally take that step toward trying to be a “real” writer again instead of just hanging my hat on my one relatively minor success. I’ve been a lot of really cool writers in this last year and I’m pretty thankful for making that step. Now, I just have to follow their footsteps and get published again. On the programming/gaming side, I haven’t really done much with networking, but I blog about it almost as much as my writing. Even if I occasionally give “too technical” details as more than one said. Oh well, just who I am.

The end of the year is the time when I look at my major projects for the year. I plan them ahead of time, sometimes even figure out when I’ll work on it, but mainly it is a framework for my personal projects throughout the year. I also like to remember what I have succeeded at.

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Followups, Golden Compass, and friends

Filed under: Family, Friends — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 00:21

I think Fluffy is getting familed-out. She is resisting coming with me on Sunday to visit my dad for the holidays, mainly because we are also going to have a friend over for five days and we’ll be gone for about four to five of those just to visit him (he’s an hour’s drive away).

It is definitely a season of reconnecting for me. A friend, Phyllis, came out of the blue and invited us to lunch. We had a nice little meeting, even if we were close to a half hour late, which I despise being.

I spent close to thirty hours helping a friend’s forum. They needed their SMF forum converted over to InnoDB so their hosting provider would stop complaining about the damage they were doing to the shared hosting machine. Fairly simple, but it took a long time to covert a quarter of a million row tables on a production, shared machine. Thank the gods that MySQL added a “ALTER TABLE bob TYPE=InnoDB” feature which I didn’t know about until yesterday.

While that was running, I went out and saw the Golden Compass. I liked it. It was a neat movie, some lovely special effects, and I like stories that stick with one fantasy world (no, I won’t watch any sequel that goes into “our world” no, no, no, hate those). After being burned by the Bridge of Tarabithia, I was plesantly surprised. Though, I can see why people claim that the story is a jab against the Catholic Church, I didn’t feel it was that. I felt it was jab against all organized religions and fascist governments. Anyone who tries to control your mind and the truth, so I had no trouble with the movie at all.

But, it is the end of the year. A reminder of things to come and plans coming to life. I sat down and renewed my membership for the ACLU, EFF, and FSF today. Not to mention paying a ton of bills and cleaning off my monetary worries for another month. It is nice getting paid (this Wednesday) and getting my car back again. With a flush on the accounts, I don’t worry nearly as much.

Character Builder (91%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Braik (7%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

2007-12-25

Holiday Tow Trucks

Filed under: Family — D. Moonfire @ 16:21

My plans for this holiday was to wander over to Iowa to spend a lovely night and day with Fluffy while she visits her family. She left on Friday and wasn’t going to come back to Wednesday, but I’m more of a hermit and two days out of the house starts to give me the shakes. So, bright and early, right at the crack of 14:00, I got out of the house and headed toward Iowa.

Now, after an hour of dropping off the puppies, chatting with my mom, and seeing Fightertype’s new Wii game, I was reminded of how much plans can change in an instant. This reminder came at a very appropriate time, while I was waiting for the tow truck to pick me up and take me back home.

I’m back home now, my puppies passed out in the other room and a sick wife in Iowa who desperately needed some wrapping-paper cuddles. My Subaru is back at the body shop with what looks like a cracked hose or a bad coupling that caused it to overheat and smoke.

I think it is safe to say, this part of the holiday isn’t going so great. :)

Character Builder (91%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Braik (7%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

2007-12-23

Happy Holidays

Filed under: Family — D. Moonfire @ 15:45

This is the year that I rejoined my family for exchanging gifts. How that came to be, both me stop giving gifts and also me starting up, are both a long story, but we can make it short. The latter is easier, my dad asked me to start again and, well, after what I wrote, I said yes. The former is less easy, but it came down to someone giving me an ultimatum: give presents that cost more (as opposed to homemade gifts) or stop getting gifts. So, I stopped giving and getting gifts really about five years ago or so. But, that changed. And it was actually nice.

I kind of ran out of money to get gifts for my mother, so I painted her two watercolor paintings (bet you didn’t know I painted too) and wrote her a poem. To my surprise, she actually started to cry from it, so I think I gave the perfect gift.

I got a bunch of games too, three Xbox 360 ones, two PS3 ones, and one PS2 one. Great, except that I don’t have a Xbox 360 yet. :) Well, unlike Anton Strout and love, when encountering a game for a system I don’t have, I”ll just pick up the new system. Actually, I can understand why they don’t want to do that, but I wanted an Xbox 360 for a while now, just never got one. Now I have three excuses.

But, lovely presents aside, it was really nice talking to my brother for a couple hours, then just spending the day with my mother, step-father, my brother, and his wife. It was, just nice connecting with people and being family. I wish the same and the best of holidays for everyone this year.

Blessed Be.

Character Builder (91%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Braik (7%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

2007-12-21

Mandate of Heaven and Science

Filed under: Games — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:06

I saw on the random news sites I listen to that the House and Senate have been working hard on the budget and slashing one of the more critical, in my opinion, budgets: science. I know politics is a juggling game, but it is sad to see exactly how many things were slashed or cut with the budget, mainly because of the drain from other sources. It also hits personally since my father is directly affected by the cut. He is doing some really interesting things out there, but I’m sure the same troubles that are going to hit Fermilab are going to hit his laboratory also.

In other news, I was trolling… I mean, reading the White Wolf forums for random tibits when I saw a conversation that lead into something I personally was interested with. I like the idea of Mandate of Heaven, but the rules were unplayable in our game. So, I… subtly mentioned that I was working on a replacement set of rules. And, to my utter surprise, someone liked it! More than one somebody, actually. So, that was really cool and it makes me want to work on those mechanics again. Nothing like comments to fuel the creativity, right?

Plus, anything to avoid working on the computer game apparently.

Character Builder (91%)
World Builder (2%)
Kitteh Braik (0%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

2007-12-19

Everything but what I should have done

Filed under: Family, Games, Graphics — Tags: , , , — D. Moonfire @ 22:29

One bloody thing left on the character builder and I find everything else in the world to work on except for that one blood thing! *sigh* Today was productive, I managed to do four Glorious Saber strips which should give me breathing room to work on other things. Hopefully they’ll be fun, but it was pretty easy to make and I took some liberties to speed up the graphics creation.

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2007-12-17

Some days, I think I do too much

Filed under: Family, Games, Graphics, Programming, Writing — Tags: , , , , , , — D. Moonfire @ 19:30

Visited my dad this weekend. Kind of strange, thing have really changed between us in the years and it was neat to see some of our old relationship coming back. Well, the relationship we kind of had, but I didn’t really see or understand until I sat down to write My Father’s Bike. They also recently extended I-355, so I got lost since it was so easy to get to his house instead of wandering through the backroads. That should take a bit to get used to. But… it was really nice.

The Subaru got back from the dealer on Friday night. The Saturn went into the shop for minor stuff. This morning, the Subaru wouldn’t start. :( And the toilet doesn’t appear to be working either. Not really a good sign when I’m scraping the bottom of the bank account. Hoping to get paid this week, if we do, everything is fine. If we don’t, then I’m going to be miserable and Fluffy won’t be able to get a hotel in Iowa. She loves hotels and I hate not giving them to her.

Oh, I updated the theme for mfgames.com to reflect the winter season. If I did it right, it will automatically change the theme based on the time of year. So, December through Feburary it will be winter, then it will cut over to plain after that, but you can use page styles to change between the two if you want. I also updated the Exalted pages since I was talking about them over at White Wolf’s forum.

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2007-12-14

To create a pony…

Filed under: Games, Graphics — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 00:49

How do you make a horse? Yeah, I know the way through biology, that’s fairly simple, but this is actually in reference to Ponies Among Us. When I created Glorious Saber, I chose to steal… I mean, be inspired by the Thing Thing games. Now, I’m doing an exact copy for more than a few reasons, mainly because I want to expand into my own style, but Thing Thing characters have this wonderful sense of abstract proportions.

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2007-12-12

KnitML

Filed under: Technology — D. Moonfire @ 20:28

This was just an interesting little thing I saw on Boing Boing: KnitML. Basically an XML markup language for describing knitting patterns in a consistent and generic manner. A long time ago, I used to knit. I also sew, cook, and do home improvements, but I never thought about doing a generic manner. So, I think it is one of those seriously interesting ways that technology and “old world crafts” as a friend used to call it, interact.

Now, I have done a PoetryML at one point, mainly for my poetry and to give me a nice consistent markup of the various poems I have written in the years. That kind of died somewhere in there, maybe I should resurrect it?

Na, too many projects.

Character Builder (10%)
World Builder (2%)
Kittah Break (0%)
Case of the Morning Zombies (Edit #1, 0 of 37 chapters)

Finally! Ponies Among Us

Filed under: Games, Graphics, Programming — Tags: , , — D. Moonfire @ 15:08

This year, GameDev’s 4E6 started on September 27. Six months of writing a game to compare it against your peers. I’m apparently starting on December 10. I’d like to say it was giving everyone else a chance, but my ego already knows I’m not that good of a game programmer. But, I finally started. I’m breaking Ponies Among Us into a couple steps, mainly to give me distinct goals to work on, but also to let me sit back and be happy at progress.

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