D.E.D – Dead from Cute

The most adorable multi-player online turn-based startegy game EVAR. Take Final Fantasy Tactics, take out the magic, add lots of tanks and artillery, and you’ve basically got WeeWar. The setup is brilliant, but not for the impatient (games can take months, depending on who’s playing and how often they decide to grace you with their presence). Now, I will admit that now the trial version that you get without paying is damn near useless and deep into the fail side of the tracks, but one-the-less, if you can goad any of the pro players to invite you to their games, you’re set (asking the people who are looking for new map testers is always a good way to do this). On the pro level, you have access to tons of units, including ridiculously over-powered ones that are terribly expensive (but worth it in game).

Go check it out. It’s totally worth the moeny for a pro account (and did I mention that until May 15th, the price for a full year of pro account is $12, instead of the normal $24?)

And… Refresh!

I’m fairly certain it’s a miracle that I ever even touched this site again. But here I am, and ready to come back. Every week.

Woah. Every week? Did he really just say that after posting maybe once every two months?

Yes. Yes, I did. Blame my mother. You see, she found this exciting new motivational thing called 101 Goals in 1,001 Days. Yes, it sounds kinda cheesy. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds. The person in question comes up with a list of 101 things that he/she would like to do, trying to stretch themselves occasionally and take themselves out of their comfort zones. Then, their primary goal is to get all 101 things done before a little under three years is up (thus the 1,001 days, which equates to about 2.75 years).

A lot of my goals came out as rather… mundane and far-off things, but some of them are more down-to-Earth. And some of them are just plain odd. Here goes:

1. Finish a NaNoWriMo novel
2. Become a published author
3. Compose a song using nothing but my voice
4. Buy a Macbook Air
5. Be able to play along with Joanie Madden’s Lord Mayo on the bodrhan.
6. Finish the Distress setting for Savage Worlds
7. Read one book every month
8. Have band practice every week
9. Work on Cabinet of Curiosities every lunch period (Cabinet of Curiosities being my band)
10. Fill a sketchbook with doodles
11. Clean off any program on my computer that isn’t used on a monthly basis
12. Make ten beading projects
13. Create a monthly COC podcast
14. Finish Life of Jason (Life of Jason is a comedic miniseries on Jason Vorhees and Freddy Krueger, two former college roommates now attempting to live normal lives)
15. Do one writing exercise a week
16. Build a trebuchet
17. Host a boffer weapon party
18. Finish BrikSpace development with kidko
19. Write a scene for Quantum every week (Quantum is a machinima that I’m producing and acting in with Graham)
20. Build a coordinated Reaver BrikSpace fleet
21. Complete 3,000 points of Tau and use them in an Apocalypse game
22. Create six pieces of Tau-themed terrain
23. Enter a squad in the Golden Demon
24. Make on speed painting on GIMP every week
25. Spend an afternoon organizing my room
26. Write 1 Distress Tiddler every week
27. Direct a film with Graham besides Life of Jason and Quantum
28. Get my picture taken every month in an interesting pose
29. Create a scratch-made journal/diary
30. Buy the portable photo studio from ThinkGeek and use it to post #31 both here and on the Brikwars Battle forums
31. Build one LEGO MOC a week
32. Beat Halo 3 on Legendary alone
33. Create one blueprint a month on graph paper (could be anything)
34. Draw every L5R mon
35. Write 1,001 haiku (that’s one haiku a day for the next three years. In case you hadn’t caught that)
36. Create a wood burning
37. Create a recipe
38. Complete the 200 sit-ups challenge
39. Enter a talent show (blame my mother… )
40. Write a blog entry in French (that’s the day it’ll get exciting)
41. Run a campaign (any setting, any style, as long as it is a full-length campaign)
42. Get my driver’s license (blame my father)
43. Read a magazine article a week (mainly my backlogs of Popular Mechanics)
44. Spend an afternoon watching Mushi-Shi with my mother
45. Submit an entry to Paizo’s RPG Superstar
46. Blog every week and blog successes in this list monthly
47. Plan, purchase, and prepare an entire meal on my own
48. Finish at least two of the Distress novels (let’s dance, kidko)
49. Produce a Flash animation
50. Visit a park at least once a month
51. Achieve straight A’s for a quarter/semester/whatever
52. Start a savings account
53. Request information from five different colleges
54. Make a video of myself and post it to YouTube (and here, as long as I’m at it)
55. Produce an epic lightsaber duel
56. Visit a museum in DC by myself
57. Crochet a baby blanket
58. Write at least ten short stories
59. Bake a cake
60. Learn to read heiroglyphics
61. Create a personal holiday (think Talk Like a Pirate Day)
62. After #4, compose one GarageBand song a month
63. Scan a previous drawing in and paint it with GIMP
64. Get my surname changed to Bennett (the way it should be)
65. Acquire storage for and organize LEGOs
66. Get and arrange a display area for LEGO MOCs
67. Take my girlfriend on at least ten dates before we move
68. Have a COC backyard concert type-thing
69. Attend or host a potluck dinner
70. Start a club at school (high-school or college, or both, if it strikes my fancy)
71. Create a piece of pottery
72. Go somewhere new and different every birthday dinner
73. Organize and sell all of my CCGs
74. Engage my father in a game of Go at least once a month
75. Read a page from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War every week
76. Produce something unique and sell it on Etsy
77. Attempt a brass etching
78. Create a clay/Sculpey sculture
79. Acquire a Commodore 64
80. Get a new damn office chair
81. Learn hiragana
82. Learn katakana
83. Purge clothing
84. Buy a Chevy HHR
85. Plant carnivorous plants
86. Create and render a 3D model
87. Find an archery range
88. Make a personalized dice bag
89. Write a campaign
90. Write an adventure for friends
91. Cook one family meal a month (breakfast, lunch, or dinner)
92. Host at least ten sleepovers next year
93. Run a game for Franklin
94. Burn a CD from the stash onto my iTunes once a week
95. Memorize the notes on a piano
96. Learn one musical technique a month (fugue, aria, ballad, etc.)
97. Do weekly laundry
98. Write a thank you note for every gift recieved
99. Lern to make five origami things without looking at instructions
100. Collect a steampunk costume
101. Host a monthly Brikwars get-together

And that’s that. It got a little hectic near the end as I tried to find things that I hadn’t already put down, but I pulled through. Each person in my immediate family has their own list, and each of them is implementing them today. The first of 1,001 days.

Geekage!

DO WANT!

This nifty little device is available on ThinkGeek for almost $200. Also available is the Stylophone Retro Pocket Synthesizer, which is just as intense. I like their little commercial for this one, too.

Default To Manic

This is me, reporting in after a several month long blog post drought. Erm… sorry?

Moving right along. Much has happened since I’ve last spoken here on my humble little WordPress blog. I’ve managed to conjure up some new M.O.Cs, which I posted to the Brikwars Battle Forums only a month ago, or thereabouts. Also, another good post on the BBF was my Brikspace thread, with what I think to be my most successful microscale lego stuff to date.

I’ve also recently (as in past-few-weeks recently) started contemplating building my own Racer Mecha to go along with that fad that Legohaulic started a ways back. The few attempts I’ve made have only come to limited success. More on that later…

As for up-and-coming events, Hlbeta’s Halloween sleepover thing is looming in the distance (on Halloween night, of course). The events to take place there are (from my point of view) are as follows:

• Dress as the most fabulous viking ever (purple fuzzy viking helmet with sparkly horns and everything).
• Arrive and cause the guests there seizures.
• Serve candy to small children roaming the streets in costumes that may or may not be worse than mine.
• Retreat to the gaming basement for some Little Big Planet on Hlbeta’s new PS3, and assorted other gaming goodies.
• 3AM-CAST!
• Synchronize the poodle’s Lamborghinis to the tune of Dragostea Din Tei.
• Pray that morning never comes.
• Lose faith in the night and crash.
• Groggily awaken the next day at the smell of some home-made waffles (or some-such delicacy)

Well… that’s all I can think of for the moment. I suppose I should expect to forget about this for the next few months. I suppose that’s what the little green book I keep in my back pocket is for! Until next time, folks.

Can (Software Boxes)

Hello, all! I actually managed to both NOT double post last time and also manage to remember to post again in the same month! Woo-hoo! Not much going on, though… besides kidko’s newfound obsession with GIMP software boxes. Examples:

Yep, that about sums it up.

Children Of The Aesir

Hello all, again. It’s nearly the beginning of the new week, and I take the opportunity that I have at the moment to write you guys another enjoyable blog post! Don’t mind any spelling/grammatical errors, I’m not fully awake yet, even after coffee. Hopefully the AMP that I get at the top of the hour will help. Go team energy drink!

In this post, I think I’ll bring up something new; Scion. Scion is a table-top RPG in which you, the player-character, play the son/daughter of a GOD. Yes, you did read that correctly. You have choice of six pantheons to choose from, each from a different ancient civilization. All of it is mythology based (which makes playing the child of a Greek God especially fun). Within the next two hours, I will be sitting down and running a game of Scion for a group of three players, all of whom chose to be sons/daughters of one of the Gods of the Aesir, or the Norse pantheon. Unfortunately, two of those players have links to this site, so I can’t post any of the nasty horrible things that I might manage to actually succeed in effectively throwing on them (last time I ran Scion, my player-characters blasted through all of the encounters I faced them with. Damn Godly might).

In other news, Distress is coming along nicely at this point. I have new concepts as to where I want the rules to go and such. Unfortunately, the play testing itself… I get the impression that kidko would be the only one interested in doing so with me, and even then only vaguely. I’ll figure out a way to entice him into it, I suppose. His parents (who seem to be the type who find D&D and other such roleplaying games are some sort of satanic pass time played by the inhabitants of evil, cthullhu-worshiping cults) might not find Distress as bad as all that, it’s not nearly as God-dependent as, say, Scion or D&D. I’m really hoping not. The Gods in Distress, while they have a cool set up and such, are really just an extra fiddly bit for both the authors of the series (kidko and I) and any/all player-characters to mess with. It builds character, however it is not in any way, shape, or form, a necessity.

I’m fairly certain that that’s all I’ve got to update you guys (whoever you all are) on at the moment. Be watching for another double post… that seems to have become a bad tendency of mine.

The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning

A couple more things, as long as I’m here today.

The site (in case any of you hadn’t noticed) has a new and shiny design. It’s even purple, which just HAPPENS to be my favorite color. Don’t call me gay, it’s not terribly nice. Yeah, I’m a guy that likes purple. So what? I know kids that nurse pink as their favorite color. They’re not gay. And don’t give me any of that “True men wear pink”. It’s a load of bullshit, in my opinion.

Wow, that wasn’t fun. Moving right along, I also wanted to mention that everything that I didn’t mention in my last post is going fine. Brikwars has had yet another glorious match, in which I used my LATEST army concept, the Mercenary Mechaniks. I actually managed to make a complete, 300 cp army that DIDN’T involve a single undead model. Of course, that said, all it consisted of was four minfigs and two vehicles. It still kicked kidko’s ass (::ahem:: excuse me, his army’s ass. And yes, I did just say I put all 300 cp into four minifigs and two vehicles). it was awesome. On that same day, we also got TERRIBLY close to playing a game of Mechaton for the first time in AGES. Unofrtunately, this was rudely interrupted by two things:

• Dinner

• My Father coming to pick me up

It wasn’t terribly cool. But, hey, at least we CONSIDERED Mechaton as a possible game again. It’s a step in the right direction.

On a completely different note, Distress (both the RPG and the game world) are coming together nicely once again. I’ve got new ideas, and over the past couple of weeks have actually extended Nightwater by a couple more paragraphs. Once again, a step in the right direction.

I plan on also resurrecting a couple of kidko and I’s older projects that halted and got discontinued, including a movie we were making on a run-away bandit who attempts to save the King who imprisoned him (it’s all explained in the script, folks. Don’t you worry). Also, another project that we randomly dropped and never picked up again was Brickspace, a game we were making which intended on being a hybrid cross between Vanguard Space and the Brikwars rules. It was going to be seriously intense and made of win, but, as I said, it’s been gathering dust on my hard-drive for over a few months now. Hopefully I can convince kidko to get back into it with me, because I believe that that could actually go somewhere.

Also, kinda old news, but kidko now has his very own website! It hasn’t got much yet, but it’s there, and boy, does he have plans for it. Check it out.

Genocidal Confusion

Okay. I once again find myself in this position. The same position i’ve been in ever since I started this blog. That position involves me apologizing to whatever readers there are out there that actually give a damn about what I type here for not posting on a frequent enough basis.

There, apology over with, and hopefully accepted. Moving on.

Now, couple of new things going on here. First off, and probably more importantly, I’m writing a new trilogy! Whoot! It’s entitled (so far) The First Generation Series, and it’s going to be awesome, assuming it ever gets finished. Which I’m really, REALLY hoping it will. Working on this with me is Kathleen (well, actually, reverse that statement. I’m HELPING her write a story concept she thought up AGES ago. She considers me a co-author. I consider myself a helpful friend). Either way, it’s an awesome storyline, and I got to write one of the battle sequences. The very first book in the trilogy is entitled The Beginning Of The End.

My SECOND point, and one that actually created the title of this ::ahem:: LOVELY blog post is Nethack. I’ve been playing on NAO (nethack.alt.org, a telnet address that allows you to play Nethack online) for the past week or so now, and it’s absolutely awesome. Especially if you (like I do) play while chatting on the #nethack channel on the IRC. Hilariousness ensues, including a ChanServ named Rodney, which posts all of the deaths that happen to each of the online players as they happen, so that everyone knows how, when, and why you died. The online telnet even RECORDS your games, so that both you and your friends can review your games in awe (or, more likely, peels of laughter).

After reading what I just wrote, that’s actually more embarrassing than anything else sometimes… but, hey, it’s none-the-less incredibly awesome. I highly suggest it to all you Nethack players out there. All you gotta do is go into your command prompt and type in [telnet nethack.alt.org] and it’ll take you through the login process from there. Also, if you want the chat (and you use Firefox), there’s this handy little Firefox Add-On call ChatZilla. Install that, then log on to Freenode, and then type in [/join #nethack] and you’ll be there!

I’m fairly certain that’s all I’ve got for the moment. Hopefully I’ll remember to post sooner next time. Well, until then!

SOUND: CRIPPLE VENGEANCE

This is less of a new post, and more of a suffix to the last one, Small Screen Media is at it again, this time continuing the epic saga of The Lone Hobo and his loyal Cripple in two new PDM episodes, The Lone Hobo Meets His Creators, and Anne Versus Hobo – Clash Of Giants (this is the one in which the epic quote in the title takes place). Once again, we come back to the fact that I can’t actually post these, you just get to listen to me spout random quotes from them. Kinda like this:

“THE CRIPPLE HAS NO PULSE!”

Hi-Ho Cripple, AWAY!

Indeed, it is that time again… the time that PDM will arise and take it’s place atop the sheer peak of Podcast greatness. It’s time… for the Adventures Of The Lone Hobo And His Faithful, If, Broken, Cripple! Recorded a grand total of two hours ago, cleaned out, edited, and (as of now) officially posted (beware, it’s about 5 and a half minutes long), Small Screen Media releases the beginnings of the Lone Hobo series (belonging to the PDM series) to an awe-inspired public (this would include you, reader. You can begin being awe-inspired any moment now). The production team (kidko and ) had great fun recording and cleaning it, and who knows; we may even release a blooper reel sometime in the near future *wink, wink*.

Okay, so I totally would post it, if WordPress accepted .mp3 files. Oh, well. Well, if any of you have 4sharing, the free web downloader, you can totally go find it, by the same title mentioned before.

As for Strife… well… it’s got a Piece of Flair on Facebook! That’s basically the only progress made since my last post. So, um… the advertisement for it has begun, at least to some small degree. Hey, you gotta start somewhere…

kidko and I also plan on having another of those mind-blowing, earth-shattering, spleen-combusting sleepovers in the near future, to be joined (once again) by the infamous Hlbeta. A list of vague tasks to be accomplished at some point during said sleepover:

• Play some more Brikwars
• Eat the damn pizza, already!
• PDMS 4 (or 3, depends. I may/may not be making more random musical tracks to go along with it)
• Insane video-gamage, mostly involving Burnout (ROADSIDE TAKEDOOOOOOWN!)
• If only we could, we would also be playing Gauntlet, mostly for the hilarity factor thusly involved (Red Wizard needs food badly!)

… And much more, less predictable crap, mostly involving the afore-mentioned spleen-combusting. And possibly Mechaton, but that’s a definite maybe.

Anywho… I believe the talking needs to stop. Until next time…