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.

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!

Demons, Dragons, and Angels, Oh My!

So, here I am again. This time (surprisingly enough) of my own accord. Mostly to gloat about the fact that the firs two panels of my latest project, a webcomic entitled Strife, are finished and out of the way. A preview of what’s to come:

This should be officially starting up in about a week or so. I’ll begin by posting it here, but it may get posted other places as well eventually. I’ll actually start using this blog on a weekly basis! Yes! That’s never happened before! LANDMARK!

And in other news, kidko and I have again had a sleepover. Nothing much actually happened besides the making of a rather crappy Flash animation and a Brikwars match, in which kidko’s forces where totally demolished. All of his units moved at nearly half of the speed of mine, and therefore moved less than a foot across the field before they all died horrible deaths. It was honestly quite sad. As a result of this, I utilized his large supply of Legos horses and made him a couple of fast moving cavalry squads. Another match was held the following morning, and kidko did decidedly better. Not actually winning, but still better.

The battle on the noveling front goes well. If by ‘well’ I mean nothing but a small paragraph has been written in the past month and a half. My head’s burgeoning to the point of overflow with plot ideas, cut scenes, fights, and characters, but all of them for the six novels I’m trying NOT to focus on until Nightwater is at least mostly finished. Nightwater is receiving no signal in my mind. I’m having a drought of plot ideas.
Hopefully this will be remedied soon enough. Hopefully.

My RPG endeavors have come to a grinding halt over the past few months, leaving me battered senseless with rules, histories, Knights Templar research and more. Distress is especially doomed to travel along the road going nowhere for at least a couple weeks longer (Distress being the setting in which the afore-mentioned novels take place. Yes, it’s getting an RPG too), until the remnants of my somewhat fragile mind recollect themselves and come to the rescue of the poor in-progress game setting.

… I’m fairly certain that wraps up my ramblings for the moment. I’ll keep you posted on my weekly events (if anyone besides kidko and my girlfriend every actually read any of this bullshit). Toodles!