A month or so ago, I finished Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time. It only took me about three days to finish it, spread out over a few weeks. I would have done it earlier, but I was trying to finish Final Fantasy XIII for over a year before giving up on it.

There are a few reasons that I’m just finishing a relatively old game. Three are the easier ones: I have a 26 month old in our house and he has a higher priority, I’ve been writing heavily this year and that takes a significant amount of my time, and I seriously don’t relax enough for my own health.

The last one is the hardest: I’ve gotten into a philosophical disconnect with my PlayStation 3 and Wii. This is the strange thing, but I just don’t want to play it because of the system (and company) itself instead of the individual games.

A month or so ago, I finished Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time. It only took me about three days to finish it, spread out over a few weeks....

I don’t play a lot of games. There are two big reasons. The first is that both EDM and my writing take a higher priority than that mythical “relaxing” thing. And when I’m relaxing, I feel like I’m wasting my time. Ignore the fact that relaxing actually makes it easier to write and I have more energy, but that’s a hangup I’ve been struggling with for the years.

The second is that the programmer side of me starts to pull apart games. I think about “how could I write that” somewhere in the 30+ hours that I end up playing. Most of the time, the grind coupled with the what-ifs ruin it for me.

Of the games I do play, Glitch is probably the longest I’ve played a social game in years. I loved its quirky charm so I was sad to see that it is shutting down.

I don’t play a lot of games. There are two big reasons. The first is that both EDM and my writing take a higher priority than that mythical “relaxing” thing....

There is a walking challenge at work for the next six weeks. Trying to get as many steps as possible, so I’m aiming for 500,000. It is a doable goal, but will require me to push a lot harder than I have been. Which is perfect since I really need to push if I want to keep losing weight. I got my 5% by GenCon so I’m hoping to hit my 10% goal by the end of the year.

Bah, decided not to do a day-by-day for GenCon right now. Basically, the second day was great. The games got a lot more exciting, except for Shooting Ladders. While Fluffy and I were looking forward to it, the game ended up being more tactical and tedious than we expected. Just too many things to keep track of and too much strategy in the type of games we like.

I also played in the League of Unextraordinary Gentlemen, set in a HERO system. That was a fair amount of fun, mainly because we had a GM who could handle anything we threw at it. While it still had the normal railroaded plot that I expected in a con game, it was fun playing Mario from Super Mario Brothers and Lydia Deets from Beetlejuice.

On the third day, Saturday, I lost half the day for other reasons. Sen So looked like a lot of fun; Fluffy played that without me. She said she loved it so I went to buy it. One of the other players was right in front of me and basically cleaned out the store of all the cards. Bummer, but the next day I found out they had more so I got to get almost everything for her. This will definitely be showing up at our next board game night.

I also got to play a Desolation game (kind of fantasy post apoplictic game). I playtested that a few years ago at GenCon at it was cool to see how it evolved (including a few rules that came up during our session).

The last game, at just about midnight, was Snakes on a Train. A very fun HERO 6 game. I got the “worthless” character who couldn’t tell anyone he was using his powers or have anyone use them. But he had a 75 point VPP pool. So, I got to play an old-style Mage from World of Darkness. Except, my weapons were “look out for the cow!” and the world’s second largest ball of twine. Overall, definitely worth playing until three in the morning.

I only had one game on Sunday. I was an hour late (didn’t pay attention to the start) and they stopped an hour early (car checkout was 14:00). But, for the little bit I got to play, I had fun.

When I got back, I was seriously ready to head home. We actually got all the driving done on Sunday: four hours to Illinois, an hour getting dogs and my luggage *sigh*, then another four getting back to Iowa.

This was probably the most miserable GenCon I ever had, but I still had a lot of fun. Just took the effort to not let my pain ruin my having fun and it actually seemed to work. I missed a lot that I wanted to do: I missed some comics I wanted to pick up, hunting down Anton Strout to say hi, and going to some of the writer seminars. I’ll post about the authors as soon as Fluffy uploads her pictures; might as well have images for those who enjoy it.

Weight Loss (7.4 of 14.7 kg) Commission (15,238 of 15,000 words) Steps (5,372 of 500,000) There is a walking challenge at work for the next six weeks. Trying to get...

Happily, I managed to ascend again in the Kingdom of Loathing. This would be my 15th ascension and not even remotely my fastest. But, still, 30 day hardcore ascension is nothing to sneeze at since I took over double that the first two times. The key part is that I still really enjoy the game and every morning, first thing, I get online to burn through my turns.

Though, I kind of rushed the ascension itself because I was running late to work. Ended up being a “just one more thing” type of morning. Going to be worse in the new house (week from Wednesday!) because I think I’m 10-15 minutes further from work which means I’ll need to get up twenty minutes earlier to get my fix in.

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Happily, I managed to ascend again in the Kingdom of Loathing. This would be my 15th ascension and not even remotely my fastest. But, still, 30 day hardcore ascension is...