I needed to get out of the house for a bit this morning; the lockdown thing is starting to wear on me.
Fortunately I live on the eastern edge of Denver, so if I go a mile or two east there is literally nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.
Here’s a picture of the middle of nowhere about ten minutes from my driveway.
Looks like I will be stuck at home for another couple of weeks. Yay…
With the economic downturn I’m shutting down Roanoak in Second Life once again. While I enjoy the fact so many other people enjoy the place, I really don’t need to be spending an extra $300 a month on the server for a virtual empire right now.
I gather the players will be moving to a virtual tabletop system and using the characters they already have. There are 56 characters in the database, so that should be a good number of options for adventures. 🙂
As for SL, I’ve returned to just visiting various sims, standing around looking fabulous, and chit-chatting. Casual conversation is easier to manage while I’m working on things than role-play as it takes less concentration. So, for now, you can find me in Luskwood on occasion should you want to chat.
Just for posterity:
And yes, I do have a Unicorn as my lock screen — doesn’t everyone?
The last of the stuff from the old condo was hauled out on Friday, and this morning the cleaning crew I hired to ensure the place was in tip-top shape finished. So I’m officially moved I guess.
Now to hand over the keys some day soon (virus willing) and that will be that.
On the 12th I purchased a new Vespa scooter to get around on when I’m not going far enough or hauling enough to warrant using the Murano. I’ve already ridden it to work and back, which takes about 15 minutes each way.
It’s nice to be riding again, even if it is a mere 50cc scooter. 🙂
I guess the big news is COVID-19; or the Kung Flu as it were, which has essentially shut down everything and resulted in huge dents to my retirement fund.
Work-wise I had everything prepared for something like this back in 2012 as part of the company’s “Blizzard Plan” — where I expected a hundred employees to be working from home for a week or so… So the switch over from everyone at the office to no one at the office was exceptionably painless. Yay me.
And now I’ve been “working from home” since Wednesday of last week and enjoying it quite a bit… Even the Google Hangouts with various employees to work out their unique VPN issues have been nice as they’re not barging into my office anymore.
Several people I know are saying they are going stir crazy; meanwhile not a lot has changed for me save for not having to drive into work at 5:30AM… The wonders of being a recluse I guess.
Pretty much everything that supports a gathering of a dozen or more people is closed. Grocery stores are still open, but have lots of barren shelves… I stocked up as I was moving, so I have quite a bit of non-perishable food on-hand. I’m saving all of the long shelf-life stuff though being as restaurants are still doing carry-out and delivery. That and the grocers have limited things so I just go shopping twice a week now and replace the fresh foods I ate.
I’m a big salad eater, and salad goes bad pretty quick — so I just buy my leafy greens on Saturdays and Wednesdays now. 🙂
And that’s about it… The new townhouse is really, really nice — and I’m actually getting a chance to enjoy it!
In my last entry I mentioned that I was moving; and two days ago I picked up the keys to the new place.
Initially I had planned to start the actual moving process this coming weekend, but the showings for the condo started almost immediately (there was one Saturday and another yesterday)… So this prompted me to move a bit faster than anticipated…
So, I spent the weekend either schlepping things out of a condo or into a townhouse. And I’m beat. 🙂
During this I discovered the Murano can basically hold everything I own all at once… I put the back seats down, put down one of my moving blankets to protect all of the leather, and this creates a cavern I could probably put my old Abarth in with room to spare. I was really impressed.
The down-side to this is the garage at the townhouse is a 2-car — if you drive two Fiat 500s. The Murano just fits in the garage front to back and there is about two feet of space between it and the Jeep when both are in there.
It works, but it’s a tight fit.
As for the new townhouse, it’s actually new — as in it was finished being built in December and doesn’t even show up on Google Maps yet. This means there is a slew of fiddly little things that need to be touched up as builders aren’t horribly interested in the little details when they are building a hundred houses a month.
The location is much quieter and more laid-back than being in the Denver Tech Center and right off of I-25, which is nice. There are also lots of amenities nearby such as a dinner theater, two grocery stores, lots of restaurants, and other assorted things. And one of the bigger malls in the area, “Southlands”, is about 5 minutes away… So ample opportunity to be out and about in the sunshine.
Tomorrow the new furniture I ordered should arrive, which will be nice. Last night I slept on the floor in my sleeping bag as everything I needed to get ready for work was there and I didn’t want to drive across town from the condo to take a shower. Luckily, I have a pretty nice sleeping bag with a nice thick pad that goes under it, so I wasn’t put out at all.
Once the new furniture arrives then I need to hire someone to remove the old stuff from the condo — and after that I’ll be done!
I like music, so much so that I’ve had some pretty stellar equipment over the years to reproduce it; signed-by-Bob-Carver Phase Linear stuff, prototype Adcom amps, speakers from such greats as Accoustat and Magnepan, a dragon made by Nakamichi, and gear from the likes of SAE, NAD, NHT…
Pretty heady stuff — back in the day.
These days though, with digital everything and ‘good enough’ mix and compression prevalent in nearly every studio, I’ve been rocking a pair of Bowers & Wilkins P5’s plugged into whatever computer I’m sitting near since the P5’s came out like a decade ago. The B&W’s are just accurate enough to please me, but not so accurate they make me wince when connected to the cheap DAC of the week used in whatever onboard audio solution I’m stuck with.
I’m also rarely in a good listening environment for delicate and nuanced gear; at work I’m surrounded by servers and ventilation and people walking into the office every 5 minutes — not a place for wide soundstage open-backed headphones. And at home I have a roommate who is into banging around the kitchen and running a TV — and being as the condo is an open floor-plan with my desk and whatnot in the common area, I’m subjected to a constant rattle and hum.
But! All of that is changing as soon as I move. My office will be on one end of the townhouse, on the second floor, with several doors between me and the perpetual chaos. And due to this I’ve started picking up some better gear…
This evening my Audeze LCD-1’s arrived and I’ve got them hooked to a new SoundBlaster X3 for DAC/AMP duty, and spent an hour or so streaming Steven Wilson’s remix of Jethro Tull’s ‘Heavy Horses’ in 24/96 FLAC from the MacBook.
I’m a huge fan of electrostatic speakers; the speed and transparency simply cannot be beat, and these LCD-1’s are essentially small electrostats that you bolt to your head. Granted they’re not $4000 LCD-4’s, but they still sound incredible and I don’t need a nuclear power plant to run them… So that means the SB X3 can drive them in a shockingly competent fashion.
The X3 gets pretty rave reviews from some fairly stodgy audio-snobs, but its still a “SoundBlaster” and I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact it doesn’t suck. Hehe.
I’ve now spent another hour running Armin Van Burren’s “A State of Trance Year Mix 2017” though the LCD-1’s and — yeah, they’re amazing.
Anyway, the whole setup was right at $500 — not bad!
It’s been a month or so since the last update, so I should post something simply for proof of life.
I’ve been incredibly busy with work and have not had much time for anything creative or extracurricular in a bit over three months now. For example, I think I’ve been in SecondLife for a grand total of fifteen minutes since Halloween and I’ve not written anything but sales materials and company blog posts since the first snowfall.
I do wish all of the extra work equated to extra money, but all it is really doing is just keeping the doors open… Which is a form of extra money I suppose.
I’ve not had to interview for a position in about twenty years — so if I can keep from having to do so it’s probably in my best interest. I’m north of 50 now, and while I’ve been doing computer ‘stuff’ since computers became personal, and I’ve literally worked on the technologies that created the Internet we all use today, I can feel it getting harder to keep up.
The art of passing time.
Let’s see here… My Murano just passed 10,000 miles, so that means since I purchased it in July of 2018 I’ve averaged 555.555 miles per month. Which is a nice side-effect of doing nothing but driving back and forth to work; the car is still practically brand new!
Hehe.
I’m still working toward my ten year plan I began on May first 2016, so I’m coming up on four years and I think I’m still on-track. I’ve not managed much headway on the homestead over the winter with work and all though. I’m still down-sizing, which is where the MacBook I’ve written about came from. I recently gave away a bunch of kitchen gadgets like a crock pot, two popcorn makers, a tea maker, a keurig coffee machine, and some other stuff to some friends. And that’s probably a car-load of stuff I no longer have to move. 🙂
Lastly for this update is the potential of moving in a month or so. The costs on the condo I’m in now is going way up while the area is going down hill quickly — so I think it’s time to make another move…
Where I am now is in the Denver Tech Center, right near one of the lightrail stations, and over the last three years it become more and more like L.A. here; homelessness, drugs, and crime are all on the rise and the neighbors are becoming unsavory… There’s been trash in the hallway a couple of times now, which is new, and it’s getting louder and louder as people move out and rent the condos…
I’ve found a new townhouse about four miles from work that is literally new; they were just finished a month or two ago in a nice area further away from Denver. And it has an attached 2-car garage!
So slightly less money, less travel time to-from work, nicer area with a ton of stuff in walking distance, a brand new build, and my own garage.
Anyway, I’ll be heading over to talk to them Tuesday and getting more information to base a decision upon.
The artwork this time is by Holivi, an artist from Finland! I keep thinking I should build a map that shows all of the neat places my commissions come from. 🙂
It’s been a busy month…
First was Generation 4 MLP coming to a close after nine years, which prompted me to throw a bit of a party in SL. And with that I got enthused to rekindle Roanoak and embarked on another damn fool idealistic crusade — with ponies.
Said crusade has 21 registered characters played by 19 players and has been pretty busy — and we’re only two weeks into it!
Anyway, it’s been nice to let The Empress run around again, and that has caused another spate of commissioned artwork:
I was able to get TurnipBerry to do another supremely epic piece for me, and that instigated a ton of questions about Aurora, Roanoak, SL, and everything else. And some of the questions led to needing a reference for Aurora — which has never been done…
Until now…
When Aurora was originally built in SL, there were some serious limitations to the available avatars… Even things like wings were super simplistic and the ‘feathers’ were just four straight lines on a flat color. You see, textures were limited to basic flat colors and something as simple as a gradient was really, really hard – if not impossible because of sculpts not having good UVs. And everything was made of sculpts to get that easy cell-shade outline, so pretty much everyone was solid colors. Which is okay, the show was also mostly solid colors too so it worked out.
Since then, everything that has been done since Aurora was built in early 2011, art-wise, has been based on my initial avatar that I was never truly happy with. In the stories, Aurora has always been a bit closer to the new reference because I’m big on details and have an entire cosmology that determines what she should look like…
I was fortunate that TurnipBerry was willing to listen to me rattle on about character details, and then add her own touches (like the countershading which is really nice) to create a reference for future works.
Which leads to updating Aurora in SecondLife:
Folks in SL will undoubtedly do a double-take when Aurora shows up – after all, Aurora has looked pretty much the same for almost a decade… But I figure Aurora is just getting a jump on Gen5. 😀
The event in Second Life to see off Gen4 ponies went off without a hitch.
I wrote about the events and my synopsis over on my Deviant Art page. 🙂
I also received some new art for Aurora, the Empress of that little place called Roanoak…
These were done for me by “Marbola” on Deviant Art.
It occurs to me that the vast majority of art for Aurora was made by artists in either Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, or Poland.
Aurora is quite the International Mare of Mystery! 😀
After announcing the event on the 12th to celebrate nine years of Gen4 MLP, I was approached by some two dozen people asking what would become of the Roanoak story…
You see, the world of Roanoak is quite vast and rather detailed, and there are places on the map that beg a lot of questions that the players never got to ask. On top of this there were several loose ends in a couple of major story arcs that left a lot of questions too!
Well, given the interest — and the fact there won’t be any more official material from Hasbro for some time to keep the fans afloat — I decided to bring Roanoak back from the mists for an encore performance…
The clock for Roanoak has been rolled forward 20 years from the retaking of the capital, and it has been a fairly peaceful 20 years full of prosperity for the Empire.
But things are afoot in the world, and that peace and prosperity is now threatened by shadowy actors… And it will fall to the players to discover these nefarious plans and put a stop to them!
Some of the old settings have made a return as well — such as the Royal Library…
It has taken me about a week to re-build everything; buildings, forests, ruins, etc. And last evening I got the database hooked to the new racials, skills, and perks tables and cleaned up. And the RP tool is working again as well!
The tool I use is really pretty fancy in that all of the characters and their stats, skills, inventory, etc. are kept in a database and the character ‘sheet’ is made available via the worn item. This allows a character’s pertinent details (name, status, health, etc.) to be displayed above the avatar’s head.
It makes Roanoak a bit like a cross between a tabletop roleplaying game, and an MMO. 🙂
A song that I think is very fitting for Aurora’s event on the 12th… I think I might end the party with this.
I set out to make my mark
To forge a road despite the dark
Though clouds of doubt have grayed the path
I followed through and faced the wrath
My sword was cast in songs of light
In sparks and waves – enchanted nights
Crafting tales and magic spells
Clever sounds in silent realms
When I find my way to that peaceful glen
There will be no regrets left on that road
Though the burden is great, every now and then
I would still go back and carry that load
Meet me there as lights fall
This will be my curtain call
Meet me there as lights fall
A humble bow to close the show
My heartfelt thanks before I go
When the curtain falls I’ll fade away
We’ll meet again in a magic glade
When I find my way to that peaceful glen
There will be no regrets left on that road
Though the burden is great, every now and then
I would still go back and carry that load
Meet me there as lights fall
This will be my curtain call
Meet me there as lights fall
Oh for one more trip around the sun
One more dance behind the moon
When my final feat is done
I’ll share the moment here with you
Meet me there as lights fall
This will be my curtain call
Meet me there as lights fall
This will be my last call
On Saturday the 12th of October, the last three episodes of the current generation of My Little Pony will air on Discovery Family — and bring a nine year adventure to a close.
I got involved with this current incarnation of the fandom on October 10th, 2010 when episode one of season one aired… Several of us in an animation forum I frequent had been looking forward to it from when it was announced that Lauren Faust would helm the reboot.
And it was actually really good; tons of world building and far more ‘adult’ than we had been anticipating for the franchise.
It was about six months later that I started pondering building something Gen-4-esque in Secondlife…
Through the rise and fall of “Roanoak”, the several sims for “Fallout: Roanoak“, and the other various pony-like enterprises I’ve undertaken in SL, I’ve made so many friendships, been to a half dozen conventions, and met so many great people…
All because of a cartoon about tiny talking horses.
It’s a bittersweet end for me, as so much of the last nine years for me has been wrapped up in all of this ‘horseplay’. But it’s best that the show end strong with its legion of fans.
In secondlife I will be hosting a bit of a wake on the 12th on the sim Trotsdale — the sim I created over eight years ago to support the pony fandom in SL. I’m trying to get all of my old admin and players together for a final bow on that day as well.
And, because of this, I’ve had to re-create the Empress for the event.
The original avatar for the Empress was lost in the passage of time, but she deserves to be updated anyway — so after a dozen hours of work she wanders the realm once more. Her outfit has been updated to reflect the passage of time as well; a modern yet stylish look referencing more of the 30’s than the Victorian era.
A few of the old-timers from the last nine years have asked about continuing Roanoak a bit — so it’s possible that there will be another chapter over the holidays. But this is just a thought currently. 🙂
A couple of years ago I bought into a Kickstarter for a couple of things.
I found out about this particular Kickstarter project from the art lead, who dropped me a PM on Deviant Art asking about a couple of the artists who did some of my unicorn commissions…
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago the items I helped bring into the world finally arrived!
Let’s take a look!
Yes, it is the “The Last Unicorn” tarot card set!
While I’m not a big tarot card user, I do know they are really big (70mm x 120mm) and there’s a lot of them — so there’s a lot of potentially neat art involved. Which meant I simply had to help make it a reality.
So, here’s a small sample of the cards:
These are really gorgeous and the pictures simply don’t do them justice. But that’s not all I got!
The best part about this kickstarter though was that a portion of the proceeds went directly to Peter S. Beagle, the author of “The Last Unicorn” and possibly the sweetest person on the planet. I’ve met him in person several times, and he’s just the kindest, funniest, and most story-filled person I’ve ever encountered.
And that brings me to the coolest part of the post today:
If you would like a set of these cards, pins, or stickers for yourself, you can now get them at Geekify.
Be sure to tell them a unicorn sent you. 😉
I’ve recently discovered that there’s a musical genera out there called “Retro Wave”, which is essentially the synth-pop stylings that were so popular in the fluorescent and neon soaked 80’s.
And, as someone who was essentially a synth-pop styling of the 80’s, back in the 80’s, I thought I should give this ‘Retro Wave’ a try — for science of course.
For a few days now I’ve had some of these albums in the car, and they definitely work as advertised. It’s amazing to me how sound can be so deeply involved in memory, because I can put on these albums and be instantly transported to my High School era of ’82 — ’84; hanging out at the Cinderella City Mall, cruising nights on Colfax, the campus of Golden High School, and evenings spent toying with the fledgling computers of the era.
I sat in my Murano with its 15 speaker sound system, half dozen cameras and computers, radar systems and laser guidance, and multiple LCD screens — and smiled. I recalled sitting in my 1969 Toyota Corona and imagining what cars would be like in the future based on things like KITT from the tv show ‘Knight Rider’…
I can honestly say the future is way cooler than I ever could have imagined. 🙂
When I feel overwhelmed I like to pause and take a moment to think about all the stuff I gotta do, how little time I have to do it, and how my best efforts will ultimately achieve nothing.
Then I feel WAY more overwhelmed, let out a big scream, and then keep going.
It’s a system that works for me. 😀
I’ve been playing a bit of “classic” World of Warcraft for the last couple of weeks — and it’s been great!
Back in late 2004 I started playing the game with a bunch of folks here at work, and we hit it pretty hard all the way through the original raids, and it was great fun.
As the years progressed though, Blizzard kept chasing the lowest common denominator; the game got easier and more hand-holdy, and more homogenized… Class identity was winnowed out, along with any real option to make a character uniquely yours. And I lost interest near the end of the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ expansion.
I’ve returned briefly — a month or two — for each expansion, but I’ve not really been hooked like I was in the original game.
Now, sure, there have been some strong expansions; Legion for example was really good, and got me to stick around for about six months… Which is about as long as it took for me to see the conclusion to the story started in “Burning Crusade”.
Anyway, I’m back in the original world with about a million other people, and having an absolute blast!
I play a shaman named “Mishakawe” in a guild called “Hand of Lordaeron” on the Grobbulous ‘RP-PvP’ server.
The guild is really interesting as it’s primarily a Forsaken guild (the playable undead race in the game), but they do allow black-furred Tauren of the Grimtotem tribe to join. See, the back-story for the Forsaken is that Magatha Grimtotem was the one who argued for their inclusion into the Horde in the first place. There are also several quests in the game that hint that the Grimtotem are working with the Forsaken for nefarious reasons.
The guild also spans both factions, meaning that there is a couple hundred Alliance members as well — so we stage a lot of role-played skirmishes. 🙂
It’s been a ton of fun.
I got a bit of a surprise in the mail yesterday; a copy of the signed deed for my property down in southern Colorado!
All in all, it took almost exactly a year to purchase the land — which is the end result of both ‘boonies’ and ‘bureaucracy’.
Huerfano County, where my property sits, has a population of about 6500 people scattered over its 1600 square miles, and half of those people are in Walsenburg — the ‘big city’ for the area… So most of the county is pretty remote.
This makes it a bit tricky to get things done at the county-level as there aren’t a lot of people available to do things. Life is also a lot slower down there, so no one is exactly in a hurry to do anything. 🙂
But! Now I can start on phase two: a foundation and utilities.
I have no idea how much phase two will cost, or how long it will take… There are a lot of government things involved with permits and engineering and inspections — so I’m guessing another year.
But as soon as there is a foundation on the property, then I can get an address for it!
It will be such a trip to get the first piece of mail delivered to what was once an empty field of wildflowers and wildlife. Said first piece of mail will undoubtedly be some junk-mail flyer for something no one needs, but I might frame it none the less. 🙂
Last night I sat down, moved the dozens of things I generally have on my plate aside, and started plotting out the story for my next adventure.
Since the 90’s I’ve used an app called “Dramatica Pro” to nail down the characters, premise, structure, and acts for my settings and writing. It’s a fantastic bit of kit for anyone who does world-building or writing; highly recommended.
Anyway, I hammered out the rough genera, theme, plot, and characters last night, and am at the ‘let it simmer’ stage where I give it a day before going back and looking it over critically. I’ll probably have most of the 20-ish pages of first draft done over the weekend, and will be in a position to put pen to paper some time next week.
I’m fairly certain this effort will take place in my Caerth setting as I’ve been vacationing there since the early 80’s and know most of the place intimately. This usually makes it easier to come up with shenanigans for the characters to contend with.
The goal this time is to put together an actual self-contained novel-length three-act story for publishing, being as self-publishing is actually a thing now.
A self-contained tale is a bit outside of my comfort zone as I tend to create settings for other players to do things with, so being both the “GM” and the “Player” for the entire process will be interesting.
As I mentioned back in April, I’m also kicking around the idea of writing in a friend of mine as a character. Which is fraught with peril… I’m not one for playing other people’s characters or putting words in their mouths so to speak, so the perpetual fret over if I’m being faithful to the character might overly complicate things.