Anotherblog

Anotherblog updates

August 29, 2003 on 2:19 pm | No Comments

Anotherblog updates
I’ve done some changes and I’ll do some more. Give it a couple of days to settle down - though if you’ve ever clicked through the links or looked at the pages before, you’ll probably be accustomed to errors. I did some very minor touch-ups to the Spit webpage, and I’ve finally linked to Cesura, which some of you may not have seen before - it’s my webcomic that hasn’t been updated in a long time, though I keep taking pictures for it and working on plot details. Maybe there will be further updates some day soon. Speaking of which…

No graph
I forgot to update the graph stuff this morning, so no graph showing my lack of progress for you today. Unless I do it tonight, which is plausable.

Tai Chi
A woman standing in a park, ritualistically moving her arms as she watches the passing traffic. Her hand reaches her face, and there’s a sudden puff of smoke. She is not doing Tai Chi. She is smoking.

New Order: Get Ready
I bought the New Order album “Get Ready” (2001) in the very-cheap-CD-store in town, and have been enjoying it a lot. Just a touch of the ’80s, that familiar voice, some lovely tuneful beats and grooves. I suspect my thrashing period will be over in another week or so, but at the moment, I wake up humming it, I listen to it all day, and I go to bed unable to get it out of my head but wanting to - because it’s good, but not that good.

The continuing non-saga

August 28, 2003 on 4:48 pm | No Comments

The continuing non-saga
Let’s get this progress thing out of the way:

Games
I’ve been thinking a bit more about this politician game. Here’s the scenario: each player is a politician, running a dirty political race against the opponent or opponents. The game ends when the election is held, obviously, so there are a fixed number of turns to win the hearts and minds of the voters - represented as a pile of counters, say, initially all the same colour. The players can play some cards that change the colours of voters (”propaganda” cards), and can play other cards that make them more appealing to voters of a particular colour (”agenda” cards). Finally, there are cards to raise money to perform these two basic activities (”fundraiser” cards).

The game mechanic I’m keen on, is that all these cards can be played face down. The players can assert that a card does something, and the other players can accept that or attempt to disprove it.
The backs of the cards will have two spaces on them: one for the “claims” on the card - what the owner of that card says it can do - and another for the “checks” - the confirmation of those checks. Onto these spaces, the players place poker chips of a variety of colours representing the different types of claim that can be made.

For example, a player may play a face-down propaganda card, and use it as if it was face-up to change a number of voters from one colour to another. When they do so, they place chips representing that change onto the “claims” side - other players can then use other cards (which I figure will have to be face-up propaganda cards of the type “journalist”) to match those claims and reveal the card. The punishment (or otherwise) is then proportional to the degree to which the claims was exaggerated.
Players can also take actions to remove chips from the “claims” side (using, say, “spin” cards) so that by the time the truth is revealed, their claims are no longer false, according to the voters, at least.

It’s all beginning to come together. I might try and get the lunchtime guys together to begin brainstorming and playtesting next week, if I can get some poker chips together before then.

Further not-a-lot

August 27, 2003 on 4:12 pm | No Comments

Further not-a-lot
Magnificent progress last night, just magnificent:

In my ragged defence, I was tired and went to bed early. I fully expect to make crap progress on the novel tonight as well, as I am playing D&D until midnight or thereabouts.

Guitar
More guitar practice last night. I have learned the pentatonic scale and have been given a wee bit of homework to learn to play it quickly. Fortunately, scales are fun and easy, and also wonderful distracting activities from editing novels.

Card games
I can’t stop thinking about card game mechanics. I’ve come up with a couple of new ideas for card games recently, none of them in any fit state for play-testing.

Game: Politics
The first revolves around politics - all cards are played face down, and can be used face down. The main aim of the game is to accumulate points, but one of the best ways of getting points is to reveal that another player was lying about what a card could do. I’m struggling with the mechanic of proof at the moment - working out how to say “This player was lying when they said this card could do that”.

Game: Fightin’ with magic
Pretty much all collectable card games around at the moment are duelling games that have monsters beating each other up. I thought it might be an interesting variation to have a card game based on the traditional old wizard’s duel - y’know, no proxy monsters, just people hitting each other. There are a bunch of games that do that - Firetop Mountain (a.k.a. Waving Hands) being an excellent example - but I thought it might be fun to try a varient of my own. I’m particularly touched by the transformation war that you see wizards doing in books and films (eg. Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, Morpheus’ battle in Hell in Sandman #4). And, of course, attempting to evoke the spirit of Mornington Crescent without having *quite* so complicated a rule-set. The mechanics of Armchair Cricket are appealing as a starting point.

Imaginary Reviews
I’ve also been thinking about reviewing some films that don’t exist (inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s Imaginary Book reviews). More on this if I can overcome the guilt of writing non-Lotus stuff (which, let’s face it, I seem to be doing fairly well with the weblog at the moment, not to mention Lorenzo’s journal in The Dragon Coast, which details our D&D sessions.

Twice as much progress as yesterday

August 26, 2003 on 10:09 am | No Comments

Twice as much progress as yesterday
I made twice as much progress as I did yesterday, today:

I had vague ideas of doing some writing, given that roleplaying was cancelled, but I made the mistake of grabbing some dinner from the Thai restaurant next to the Video Ezy store, which has released “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” a day early. Or possibly earlier, I’m not sure.

Two Towers

I watched through a bunch of the extra features, and it was all good and jolly. Sean Astin’s short film, which I’d been looking forward to, was a fair bit simpler than I had thought, and very reminiscent of tropfest fare - actually pretty encouraging to watch. If it had been brilliant, I’d have been exceedingly jealous.

The documentary about the making of Sean Astin’s film was very funny, though.
I had also been debating about whether to watch the “Return of the King” preview or not, and in the face of having it right there, gave in. Of course. It wasn’t overwhelming - more a gawk at a work in progress than a showreel designed to impress - but there were a couple of acting moments that I really liked.

Sugar
No sugar! Bad! Today is a no-sugar day. The vast quantities of food consumed over the weekend finally caught up with me - I just squeezed in under 86 kg on Monday morning, but not today… it’ll probably be a struggle over the rest of the week to get back under. I’m thinking… maybe I should push the target down to 85kg. Dad’s at 82kg and has a similar build and height, and it obviously isn’t doing him any harm - mind you, he’s ridiculously fit and does far more exercise than I do. Mebbe if I walked to work tomorrow.

Wedding

August 25, 2003 on 11:53 am | No Comments

Wedding
Alix and Dave-from-Wellington should be getting married just about… now. Thanks to a thoughtless celibrant having an inconveniently-timed stroke and no backup, the wedding ceremony (held in a park on Rowes bay on a bright, warm, windy day) didn’t have quite the legal impact they were hoping for. A quick bit of signing this morning, and everything should be back on track.

Townsville
I wasn’t really expecting to be able to make it to Alix’ wedding in Townsville, as I haven’t a lot of spare time from work, but the combination of the wedding, frequent-flyer points, and grandma being in Townsville at the same time, lead to a last-minute booking. Anna and I headed up on Thursday evening and had such a packed schedule we didn’t even have time to see any friends except at the wedding. I really should have suggested to Sandor & Marco that they gatecrash.

It’s an odd combination of “I haven’t been at work for ages” and “That time went very quickly indeed”. Everything old is new again.

Resolutions

Obviously, I didn’t manage any writing in the time away, as I still haven’t bought a laptop computer despite the deep discount offered by work. I could probably have done something on the old laptop, except that I gave it to Anna and she now uses it for work stuff.
But I did a bit of thinking. I’ll have to admit I’m stung by Dave’s repeated jabs at my lack of progress (ignoring for a moment the fact that this is coming from Dave) and I’m quite keen on getting more stuff out there on otherleg. The list of my incomplete projects include:

- editing Bullethole, Once Upon A Time, Elder Sibling, Society Cookery 2
- mixing the latest two Spit albums
- finishing my post-Spit-session song
- editing Lotus
- finishing Dark Forest
- writing Fork
- creating more Cesura
- writing other movie projects - Dave the Headless Chicken, Leaf Heist, Swap, Swapya, Orange People, Dancing Ghosts
- finishing my Morse Code computer game
- turning Amoeba into a proper card game

There’s probably more. The point is, it’s a nice set of projects to dip into, but a worrying indication that my procrastinating powers are getting on top of me at the moment. Hell, I’m barely replying to email nowadays. What to do? The obvious answer is: drop some projects, or put some on indefinite hold while I finish off others.
So far, I’ve been driven purely by my changeable enthusiasms: at the moment, my only thoughts are on how I might revamp sections of otherleg to use xml/xslt instead of hand-coded html - maybe create an area with a couple of lists in it; favorite movies, books, music, and so on.

So yeah, dunno what I’ll do. Still hovering. If only I enjoyed discipline more.

Events
Given that there’s been a good two weeks of non-posting, you’d think there’d be a bit to talk about, wouldn’t you?

You’d be right.

Guitar
Guitar practice has been much fun. Last Tuesday I learned the major, minor and major 7th barre chords, which has opened up (at least in theory) a whole lot of guitar possibilities. I was amazed at how easy they were. Oh, sure, there’s a lot of practice between now and me-playing-anything-decent, but I can finally see the point at which it will happen. Even better, I’m finally beginning to be able to hear music and have a stab at the chords that make it up - I’ve been relistening to a even more of the Spit back-catalog and making a go of them, though I’ve noticed that Ev doesn’t usually make much use of barre chords himself.

Filming: session 1
In the absence of any other volunteers, I had agreed to do the main acting role in Tony’s short film. We did the first bit of filming on Friday, the 8th of August with me, Tony, Anna, and one of Tony’s friends, who I (of course) have forgotten the name of. I will use my usual scheme and name him Marlon, thanks to a faint resemblance to Marlon Brando.
I had been unable to organise any of my friends to help out in time - Jon Blum was busy with his “Prisoner” book, Carey was sick, and Paul was unwilling. I wasn’t keen on calling in any favours for this shoot as it was pretty much a favour in itself, so we made do with just the four - I figured it would be fine (and it was) as the shoot was fairly simple. I showed Tony how to use the camera and Marlon the sound gear, we sorted through the shots and made sure we had a decent shot list, we set up the lights, and we went for it. It took a while. As it turns out, Tony had a very good idea of what he wanted - he’s a confident director, which is great, but it ended up taking so much time that we didn’t get any of the outdoor scenes done. By the time 11:00pm rolled on, we’d done all the indoor shots and were too pooped to try any outdoor shots, which would have been a hassle anyway because it had rained earlier in the night.
We didn’t do any filming on the Sunday, as Tony was unwell.

Sickness
There’s been something going around. On the Thursday and Friday of the 14th-15th of August, I was sick enough to take two days of work and lie in bed the whole time. I called Tony to cancel the second filming session on Friday, which was just as well because Tony had been unable to arrange the location he wanted. We agreed to reconvene on the Sunday.

Filming: session 2
So it was that last Sunday at 11:30pm, I found myself in a strange suburb far from home, doing the last scene of Tony’s short film, standing outside the front door of Tony’s girlfriend’s house wearing no trousers.
It was a cold night. We were quite some distance from the road, which was nice, and I had very bright lights on me, which warmed my legs nicely and made me rather more visible for the video camera, and passing cars. Tony and three of his friends stood around in various attitudes of embarassment while I tried to remember the lines and not think about how, the previous night, I had been to a party in which I had been introduced as a porn film-maker.
Once again, the shots took quite some time as we worked hard to get the lighting right. One of the difficulties of this film shoot has been (and will continue to be - we have quite a bit to go) that we can’t film below my waist, as the punchline of the film is that I wasn’t wearing any pants during the course of the film. It’s a fairly obvious punch-line, so we’ve been concentrating on distracting the audience (which I think the script does a fairly good job of doing - for most of the film, the point seems to be that events are conspiring to make him late), and of course if the shot choice is too unusual, it’ll be a dead giveaway.

Squash
I haven’t been improving much, but had a surprisingly good session against Ted last Sunday, and a reasonable go against Dad this Sunday. Volleys continue to be the main issue - Dad’s lob serve is as devastating as ever, and most of the games consisted of volley practice for me. Perfect! The trouble with the Townsville games were mostly that the weather was so hot and humid that I got exhausted well before I got exercised. I would get through a point dripping with sweat and run-off-my-feet, having done something as trivial as run from one side of the court to the other. A minute later I’d be fine again. By contrast, playing against Ted in Sydney, we’d be running all around the court, get exhausted, and still be feeling it three days later.

Golf
Played a bit of golf with papa on Friday morning, and discovered that my driving has completely gone to pot. Ya boo sucks. We were playing ambrose, and the rules of the competition (for it was a competition) were that we each had to contribute two drives. Fortunately, my iron shots were going as well as they have ever gone, so I contributed two five-iron-onto-the-green-on-par-3. Fantastic! We even managed an eagle on one hole, in which I contributed the putt. Happy. Though I doubt I’ll be playing golf again until I line it up with Sandor and Marco. Maybe that golfing holiday we’ve been talking about for years.

Walk to work
I’ve decided to try and walk to work once a week. It’s about 20k. I did it on the 11th, and it worked pretty well apart from all the blisters - I set off at 6:15am and arrived at 9:30. I’ve bought some decent shoes now, I hope, so the next time it’ll be a little easier.

Japanese
I got the Pimsleur language CDs for Japanese a couple of weeks ago as well, so I’ve started chugging into those - up to lesson 4 at the moment, thanks to the odd drive-into-work and the walk-to-work, of course. Walking into work looks like it’ll be the best solid batch of language learning time - given that it takes about 3:15, that’s six lessons (actually, two lessons done three times each). Worked really well last time.
The Japanese CDs have the same format as the Greek tapes, of course, but what makes them particularly amusing/tricky is that they are teaching the same phrases in the same order. A couple of times, I’ve caught myself answering the questions with the equivalent Greek phrases - I suspect that things will get increasingly confusing as time goes on. Anna admits that when she was learning Japanese, she was switching between English/Japanese/Greek throughout, and George-from-work says much the same thing. You’d think that English/Japanese/Greek would be an unusual combination of languages, but I now know two people who are fluent/semi-fluent in this combination (without knowing any other languages). It kinda makes sense - both Anna and George know Greek because they *are* Greek, and learning Japanese is getting more common in Australia.
All hail multi-culturalism!

Progress: Pants

August 20, 2003 on 8:01 am | No Comments

Progress: Pants
Yes, well, I haven’t made any progress, and that lack of progress has kinda made me stop updating the weblog out of embarassment. Bugger. Wasn’t supposed to happen like that.