Jeff

So this is going to be a large mass of info vomit. I have kind of neglected updating this for a while (almost 3 months in fact) so this is a long time coming. My one excuse for this delay is I was moving this site and my dad’s over to a VPS that hopefully gives better performance for loading stuff and I don’t have to depend on a less than dependable home ISP to host the stuff. So this should be getting read from my VPS, I need to update my dad’s site there before pointing his DNS to it still…

Kim graduates in the next few weeks. We get to live together pretty much from then on, which will be nice. The first time we really get to be around each other without constant chaos and stress (school and long distance). It will be nice tasting the future and getting used to it. She got a job so she will get to stay in the US, even though there is still a bunch to figure out in terms of visas for stuff, but that is all a nice hurdle to have to overcome. Hopefully everything works out great in these next few months :).

I realized that I am over a year behind in posting images to this site. I also realized just how crappy the UI design of the gallery is. I will probably find some time in the next few weeks to overhaul that. But that will come after I have revamped my desktop. I have wanted to move to XMonad for a while, but due to some technical hurdles (the nVidia XOrg drivers don’t support Xinerama easily, meaning I lose two monitors) I have been slow to make the change. I am going to try and spend some time soon trying to get past that and dive into a more productive system. Then I shall try and draw up a not sucky UI and set that up and then migrate over the images from Japan, Frisbee, and the other random ones I have.

I should probably write a follow up when I have a better organization of my thoughts. Sorry about this sudden and messy pile of info being vomited onto your browser…

tagged with:
• personal
• site
• random

So last night I stayed up for 5 hours reading/finishing the book I have been on for the past few weeks. It was one of the best books I have read of recent. It is called The City & The City by China Mieville. He calls it “weird fiction” which places the genre in a sort of weird middle ground. I first heard of the book when it tied for the 2010 Hugo prize with The Windup Girl, another book I have read. The Hugo prize is a prestigious prize given out for Science Fiction and Fantasy writing each year, and I find that the selections are very deserving. But it is hard to classify this as sci fi or fantasy, yet I in some grey sense of the idea of fantasy, it fits in. It is more of a detective story set in a slightly fantastical setting. Nothing pulp, like magic or dragons, just a regular world with a twist…

The story follows a detective solving a crime. The twist is a very odd concept that is ingrained in everything that goes on in the story and the author remains very dedicated to the concept. Maybe it is that dedication to the concept that makes the story so interesting. The concept is also slowly revealed in the first 20% of the book (once you get a Kindle, you are stuck using percentages) as you remained veiled that something odd is going on until it is finally explained. He then continues to weave this odd world as the protagonist travels through it. The mystery continues to slowly develop and get more mysterious, but at the same time, I felt that the end result was more of a let down. The major drawing point for me was the mystery and the concept in which it was twisted with the setting. Yet in the end, it seemed to lack some of that spectacular oddity that fleshed out such an interesting world. The characters were interesting, but dull. They held some personality, but seemed to have odd mood swings and were hard to be believable. Sometimes it was frustrating reading their conversations or trying to understand their odd behavior. It also hurt that he would spend some time developing a character and then forget them as the story moved on. It feels like the characters become a vehicle for the actual star, the setting, which for me was true. But the setting doesn’t draw any emotional investment, I don’t feel bad when a building gets blown up or a character moves to another house.

So I find the “hangover” from the book very minimal, which is sad. Usually when I read a good book, it means the characters are very developed and I am drawn into their world. I develop an emotional attachment/investment in the characters and begin to care about them somewhat, as their adventure is something I am beginning to share in (this is why I have to stop watching movies about heartbreak, those suck). When the story is over, I usually end up sitting around realizing that the adventure is over. The characters are done and I will not get to know what happens from then on, which is tough. In this book, there was none of that, which makes it seem a let down compared to past books.

I would recommend anyone who is interested in something slightly different to try this. It is a unique book that is hard to classify. The concept is good because of the dedication the author has for it, but it inevitably damages the characters and you are left with a setting and a mystery and some random blobs of characters that you really don’t care about. I would still say read it, its like a new food which is always worth a try.

tagged with:
• random
• reading

So I am adding a bit more to my progress log. I have started building up the structure for general game play. I currently enable the cards that can be played and have a rudimentary form of cards being played (this only is being done with Treasure cards) so I have a lot more to do in terms of playing action cards properly. On playing treasure cards, the amount of money to spend increases and the available supply cards are capable of being boughten (even though the buy doesn’t get processed yet, I just got as far as sending the message to the server). I probably won’t get to work on it any more this week, maybe I will do the buying tomorrow after Frisbee and dinner. So the next progress jump will probably happen sometime next week. My short term goal will be being ready to start testing an action card by next weekend, I will probably select a simple one like Village and then a more difficult one (e.g. one that does more than just increase Actions or Coins) like Workshop or Remodel. Then my final efforts will go to Attack cards like Militia and the Reaction cards like Moat. (The starter set is a good sample of various scenario cards) For now I just want the stuff to go through, I have a lot of styling to do after that. I will probably try and have the starter set working sometime in February with the game play being finished by the end. Testing would then begin with anyone I can get to volunteer. Then I can begin developing the rest of the Base deck cards and move on from there.

tagged with:
• random
• dominion