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.

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.

Failure to Win (and post since December)

Kidko has chided me into updating my blog, so here I am. Not much to say, other than… ‘hello’. And the fact that a grand total of two Brikwars games have taken place in my supposed absence. One of them you can view here, on the Brikwars Battle Forums. The other never got a written report, due the fact that it took place at 3:00 Am on a Sunday morning. Basically it involved kidko’s army and mine charging at eachother, while the immobile superweapons at either end of the field attempted to blast eachother to bits. The units in the middle clashed, causing nothing but small craters and gore and all out carnage. Then, there was the last turn of the game, where my superweapon pulled off a shot at his superweapon, which promptly exploded. This, combined with the explosive shell ammunition it used, was enough to blow a crater the size of half of the battlefield (a 4×6 foot space) AND demolish his army in the process. The only thing left to his name was a useless skeletal janitor and a guy on a motorcycle. My squad ran up and shot him down, and then promptly blew the door off of an underwater-except-not bunker, for reasons I cannot recall.

The new addition to my video game collection that I didn’t mention earlier is actually a wonderfully good game. Star Ocean till the end of time. Look it up, you lazy bastards. Game review incoming shortly, after i finish making Season 2 of my podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, Season 1 of Punch Drunk Mayhem is out (this took place on the same night/morning that made the above Brikwars skirmish)! You can view that here. I put it on Youtube for two reasons:

A) I wanted to show off the cool cover art we had put together

B) I had nowhere else to host it.

I do hop you enjoy.

Slowly losing momentum, I think this will be the last thing I discuss before going and eating my fathers hastily prepared tacos. One more thing on Brikwars; I have my army theme in sight, and this will be the first landmark for me, as I’m actually going somewhere with it! My Undying Tek forces are coming out great, complete with the Mk VI Archangel Hellfire Laser, the Mk III Remora, a butt-load of skeletal cavalry with weapons, two skeletal chariots, a group of skeletal heavy weapons troops, several mounted Two-Handed Weapon Buffs (for lack of a better name at the moment), and a Tekmage. Also working on the inclusion of an MDP (Mobile Defense Platform). Basically a tank, but with less armor, more guns, and a lot more cargo room. I hope you all will look forward to pictures, as well as my first battle report with them, which should be coming up this Saturday (the 9th)!