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At the closing of the year

by Drey on December 27, 2011 in Board Games, Life with No comments
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This will be my last weekly post for the One a Day project. While I veered off course during the last few months, I think the important thing is that I followed through to the end. Finishing something after making a commitment is important to me. I haven’t completed the Dune game yet. In the coming year I need to figure out how to partition off time for creative projects in my post-single life. I think I will actually make new year’s resolutions for 2012. I want to lose some weight, figure out some other life stuff, and re-prioritize.

This was a great year for me. I want 2012 to be a year where I shape and focus the potential energy from 2011.

Bye for now.

Happy Birthday 2011

by Drey on December 20, 2011 in Board Games, Life with No comments
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I love my birthday. For me, it has lost that quality of a milestone that comes around to prompt reflection on the past year. Those milestones are happening throughout the year. My birthday is MY day. I get to do whatever I want, no matter how ridiculous. Usually this involves a party. This time around I had some folks over early in the afternoon to play the board game Talisman with almost all of the expansions. Later on, more people arrived to play Rock Band and enjoy beverages. My house was partitioned into the Rock Band Room, the Board Game Room, the Chill Out Room, and the Smoker’s Back Porch. While I did enjoy myself a great deal, I wish I could have had more time to hang out in each area.

Close to 30 people showed up, and that isn’t even all of my Austin friends. For me there is no fame, no heaven, no children, no inheritance, no stock options. There’s just my friends. They are my only reward in this life. Having a house full of them for just a few hours is the only metric I need to assess how I did this past year.

Thanks, guys.

BoardGameGeek.Con 2011

by Drey on November 22, 2011 in Board Games with 1 Comment
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Here are some of the games I played at BGG this year.

Last Will - Your eccentric uncle has died, leaving you with a fortune. Thing is, the will stipulates you must spend your inheritance before the rest of the family in order to get the real inheritance. You can accomplish this by making poor real estate decisions, hiring expensive servants, going on expensive cruises and generally surrounding yourself with freeloaders. I liked this game enough to play it three times at the con. There’s lots of strategies to try once you get past the daunting list of special abilities the cards grant you.

Blood Bowl: Team Manager – I had initially blown this off as Fantasy Flight saying “Blood Bowl would be too expensive to re-issue, so here’s a card game knock off instead.” Thankfully, I was wrong. This is a fun game that distills an entire season of Blood Bowl into just the best parts.

Eminent Domain – Sleek, sci-fi deck building game with Puerto Rico-style role selection. Only got to play it once, but eager for another go.

Auf Achse – An older Wolfgang Kramer game about trucking. Think Ticket to Ride but with money and cargo. Only some of the cards had English translations, so I employed the magic of Google Goggles to do on the fly translations.

Panic Station – I really need to give this game another shot as I seem to be the only one who didn’t like it. The game aims to recreate the events of John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Each player controls a human and an android who are searching through an abandoned science station in search of an alien hive. One of the players is secretly infected with an alien parasite, seeking to infect the other players. I found the game clunky and full of odd design choices.

El Caballero – The love child of Carcassonne and El Grande, two of my favorite Euros. Supposedly Rio Grande is putting this game back in print.

Lost Temple – Citadels Lite in the jungle. Fun, light game for people who have never played Citadels.

Kingdom Builder – Being the designer of Dominion probably gives you carte blanche to make any kind of game you want. This includes very light, Through the Desert-esque games. Pretty but not very fun. Good intro game, though.

I played a lot of other games, mostly short filler games, but these were the ones that stuck in my mind.

 

Rex Commeth

by Drey on November 7, 2011 in Board Games with No comments
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I have not touched my custom Dune board game project in many months. Mostly this is due to my weekends being taken up by Scare for a Cure and the overwhelming success of the Find a Girlfriend project.

This month, Fantasy Flight is releasing Rex: Final Days of an Empire, which is a re-themed version of Dune set in the Twilight Imperium universe. My plan is to play it (maybe at BoardGameGeek.con) and see if Fantasy Flight has any ideas worth stealing. They have an impressive track record for taking old classics and making them better.

Regardless of any game mechanic changes, I ought to return to making art for the game at some point. Anyhow, that’s all for now.

Cloudy

by Drey on November 1, 2011 in Geek with No comments
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Storage space is a currency of potential for me. Whenever I move into a new place I look at the drawers and cabinets, thinking “What could I fill these with?” The more compartmentalized a storage array is, the more appealing it is to me. Large storage capacities with inversely sized cosmetic footprints are also coveted. Deep cabinets set into a wall, for example. The workstation I sit at retracts into a closet so I can close the doors and forget it is even there. Delicious!

Digital storage holds a similar appeal. My two terabyte external drive is a tiny black library of universes. Worlds drift inside it. Years are spooled about its cores. Will it ever be full? Time will tell. With the recent popularity of cloud storage I find myself with gigabytes of potential floating out there. Somewhere in the heavens orbits the crystalline webwork which contains my data. Or so I envision it. I have vaults at Google, A2 Hosting, Amazon, DropBox, Apple, and Box.net. I feel the need to store particular data at particular places. My music is scattered between several locations. My documents as well. Some of these services are backup solutions. Some file sharing. I have a whole DropBox folder dedicated to board game rules! It is time to analyze each service and decide what goes where.

Beyond that, what *could* I be doing with all this space? What clever uses might there be?

Thoughts?

XBox Lives

by Drey on October 18, 2011 in Video Games with No comments
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On the morning of August 30th I noticed that my IM client was having trouble logging in to Windows Messenger. Seems the login credentials were wrong. So I went to the Windows Live site and tried to log in there. Hmmm. Maybe I had forgotten the password. So I reset it. When I checked my email for the confirmation message, I noticed a ton of receipts from XBox Live. Either I had sleepwalked and ordered up about $260 worth of Microsoft Points or somehow my account had been compromised.

I felt some panic at first, mostly for my XBox Live account. Was someone out there pretending to be me and hassling my online friends? Maybe they were dressing my avatar in sports clothes! I couldn’t log in to my account via my XBox. So I called up tech support and explained the situation. The guy immediately went into triage mode, calm but urgent. The patient had a few bullet holes, but this was nothing he hadn’t seen before.

It took about 15-20 minutes to give all the details. Fortunately the idiot hacker had left his email address behind. Even so, the guy told me that there was a backlog of investigations and it could be a month before I heard anything. During that time I couldn’t use my Xbox Live gamertag or my Windows Live ID. Fine. I had enough to keep me occupied on other consoles.

A month goes by and I don’t hear a word. Not even an automated email telling me that I had a case open with Microsoft. So I call them back up to see what is going on. Turns out my case was “not escalated properly” and nothing had been done at all. My case had just sat in a file, ignored. The tech told me we’d have to start over from the beginning. I tried not to completely lose my shit on this guy, which I managed to do. Although I did make it clear that I was disappointed with their performance. The tech told me he would add a note to fast track my case as it had been neglected for so long.

Fortunately, that worked. About a week later I received a call that I would receive an email within a week detailing the results of the investigation. Another week later I received a series of emails explaining how to get back online with my XBox Live Gamertag. I was also notified that I would receive a full refund for the charges made on my account. Additionally, Microsoft was giving me two free months of XBox Live. I was able to get back online with my original gamertag and found nothing amiss other than all my friends were gone. I’ll have to add them all back again.

So, other than the massive delay in processing the case, Microsoft set things right in a professional manner and I am pleased with the results.

Fantastic Fest 2011

by Drey on September 26, 2011 in Movies with No comments
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As has become the tradition, I will be posting my list of films I saw at Fantastic Fest, roughly in order of most enjoyable to least enjoyable.

Melancholia – Lars Von Trier’s ode to depression. Absolutely gorgeous, populated with real characters. Left me haunted.

The Corridor – I think this movie struck a peculiar chord with me, so I can’t really look at it objectively. I love movies where extraordinary realities invade normal ones and there is no real explanation. But the story isn’t *about* the extraordinary reality.

Headhunters – The show Leverage wishes it could be as clever as this movie. Plus it has Jaime Lannister.

We Need to Talk About Kevin – Oscar-worthy performance by Tilda Swinton. Difficult subject matter perfectly rendered.

Clown – Hysterically funny Hangover-style comedy based on a TV show which I must now track down.

Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope – Morgan Spurlock’s wonderful documentary on Comic-Con. Joyful and inspiring. It restored my love of geekdom.

The Yellow Sea – Up there with Old Boy as far as crazy Korean action/crime dramas.

You Said What? – Inspired by Miike’s “Audition”, a bunch of guys make a movie so their friend can get the girl. Charming and fun.

Extraterrestrial – Once again, Nacho subverts audience expectations and turns an alien invasion film into a romantic comedy.

El Narco – Beautifully shot and plotted. The Mexican Godfather.

Manborg – Homage to awesome/terrible 80s films. A labor of love shot on green screen over several years. Very funny.

Haunters – Reminded me of Unbreakable.

Carre Blanc – Darkly humorous dystopian tale of corporate life.

Borderline – The French movie version of the show “Weeds”.

Revenge: A Love Story – Liked the twists and turns in this one. Plays with audience expectations.

Elite Squad 2 – Kind of ordinary cop drama.

Penumbra – Did not live up to the hype. Great set up that really doesn’t go anywhere.

The Day – Totally ordinary post-apocalyptic survivor tale.

Angels & Airwaves Presents “Love” – Had a few neat visuals, but it was kind of bland.

Livid – A gorgeous mess.

Beyond the Black Rainbow – Tedious.

Human Centipede 2 – Filth. A cinematic crime. Offensive and disgusting.

See more detailed information about all of the films at the festival.

Boldly Go

by Drey on September 19, 2011 in Music, Symposium, Video Games with 3 Comments
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For this month’s Symposium, we had Reed and Isaac from their band World Racketeering Squad share some music with us. It was very “VH1 Behind the Music” as they shared their writing process as well as the inspiration for several of their songs. Isaac was able to describe some of the more technical aspects of songwriting in a way that I, the average non-musical person, could understand. They also treated us to two new songs still in beta. Their homage to Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was well received indeed. After that, Reed and Isaac blew my mind by creating songs on the fly, based on audience input, improv style. It was like a friend suddenly revealing a mutant power.

For the amusement portion of the evening, we returned to the bridge of the Artemis for a few hours of space exploration. This time around, we set up a network of laptops in the office. The laptops were then paired wirelessly with iPads which controlled the laptops remotely. That way we could all stand on the bridge with nothing but a slick Star Trekky-looking slate and play the game.

We had all six stations in play: Captain, Helm, Engineering, Comms, Science and Weapons. It was great to see how quickly everyone fell into using the bridge communication patter we’ve all been trained to use by Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. Even though the Artemis was destroyed more often than not, everyone seemed to have a really good time.

I’m amazed that Artemis is not more widely known. Thom Robertson could be the next Markus Persson, bathing in money. Artemis is the Rock Band of sci-fi games, hours of fun. If you have a couple of Windows computers, a large screen, $40, and some buddies, I definitely recommend you check it out.

Blarg

by Drey on September 11, 2011 in Board Games, Life with No comments
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I admit it, I am phoning it in today. I can’t think of anything to write about. I hadn’t been working on the Dune artwork for a while, so I spun that up today and rendered out another character. The impending release of Rex took the wind out of my sails a bit. I know it isn’t Dune per se, but it has the same game mechanics. Since it is from Fantasy Flight, I’m sure it will be fantastic. The same thing happened when I started work on a custom Cosmic Encounter set. Fantasy Flight brought it back so there was no point in making my own.

In other news, the girlfriend project is going really well. :) I look forward to experiencing even the most mundane events like doing laundry because I want to see what it is like to do them with Bess. I see her just about every day and she isn’t sick of me, which I take as a good sign.

An Embarrassment of Riches

by Drey on September 4, 2011 in Anime, Board Games, Books, Comics, Movies, Music, RPGs, Television, Video Games with 1 Comment
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I may have mentioned this before, but there are too many things. And by “things” I mean books, video games, movies, TV shows, board games, songs, apps, and any other media one might experience. Right now, today, there are probably more things that I’d like to have a look at than I have time remaining in my life to do so. And tomorrow, someone will add even more.

I don’t like to leave things unfinished, no loose ends. But now I have this frayed blanket of partially read books, half-watched shows, unfinished video games, barely messed with apps, and board games still in shrink wrap. At one point these things were rare and hard won. As a child I created an impromptu garage sale to fund the purchase of the BattleTech board game, shutting the sale down the moment I could afford to buy. And then I played BattleTech for ages. Now everything is so easy to obtain, effortlessly plucked from the ether. But I feel like it takes a greater force of will to slow down and appreciate a single thing, knowing there are thousands more awaiting my attention. It is like touring the Louvre in a formula one race car.

I’ve decided I need to shift my perception of all this media, or at least to try. I’m trying to see it as another planetary ecosystem, something vast and ever present. In the same way that I do not need to play with every breed of dog on the planet, I do not need to play every game. If I see one I like, I will pet it and enjoy that moment. I’m really happy just knowing that all those things are out there and that sometimes my path will intersect with some of them.

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