Category: Uncategorized

Maybe I’m just a little too far out east of Denver…

With work and all, my gaming pastimes have been fairly limited these days.

In Second Life my divestiture is complete and I am down to three regions from the twenty three I had at peak last year. Currently I have two rental homesteads I run for a friend and “Diablo Canyon”, a post-apocalyptic setting I built for a role-play group.

Diablo Canyon is probably my most detailed build to date…

Unfortunately I do not really play there. I tried, but the setting is far too first person shooter and RP is a byproduct of RNG-based firefights. It is neat to watch though – I just wish there was more story to it all as I have a devil of a time figuring out why people are shooting at each other… The old RP regions generated reams and reams of character story for me to read. This one generates transaction receipts, statistical changes to rule systems, and equipment updates on character sheets.

It is very popular though, so there is that. 😉

Videogame-wise I have been poking around at “Skyforge” as time permits. Skyforge is very interesting as it is, well, strange… It is a sci-fi / fantasy setting similar to Marvel’s interpretation of Asgard, where the gods are gods because they are, for the most part, immortal – but their god-like powers are manifest through their super-advanced technology.

In Skyforge you play the role of a newly discovered immortal – a by-product of a battle amongst the mortals that led to your death and subsequent waking up in the capital city of the gods.

The game is, essentially, your hero’s journey – your evolution from a nobody to a full-fledged god of this universe. You do this by way of the completion of Herculean ‘labors’ in defense of the mortal realms, gaining believers in your divinity, and facilitating the building of temples and such in your name. The more ‘true believers’ you acquire, the more powerful you become.

So it is at once an MMO, where you are out in the world fending off alien invasions and defeating the mysterious efforts of various groups of other immortals bent on being contrary. But it is also a management simulator at the divine level, where you are attempting to build a religion in your name…

And all of this is to fuel your ascension to true godhood, along what is possibly the most convoluted and detailed character progression system I have ever seen…

Like I said, strange, but anything that can have an MMO veteran like myself head-scratching and unsure of what they are supposed to do next is a good thing, as it is certainly not formulaic. 🙂

Ultimately though, the reason for playing Skyforge is that it is a lobby-based game, meaning the world is highly instanced. This sort of design allows for a very rapid login to gameplay mechanic, and the ‘adventure’ happens in compartmentalized bits and pieces… Meaning I can log in, instantly get into some sort of adventure that has relevance, and in fifteen minutes to an hour accomplish something that feels like I am progressing.

This is contrary to the common MMO where it may take longer than the above total play session just to get to where the fun is.

The down-side to Skyforge is it can be kind of repetitive – as heavily instanced games tend to be. But given my limited daily play-time, I am okay with doing the same ‘zone’ again every few days as I’ve not been in the game for fifteen hours straight at any one time.

So there’s the state of the game, as it were. 😉

Well, as usually happens when I get going on any sort of creative endeavor, life rises up and attempts to consume every iota of free time.

This time it is a gargantuan project for a client I can’t talk about, working on things I can’t talk about, that has required the company to move to three shifts 24/7. I think we’ve hired about 55 people in the last two weeks…

Not bad, and it’s good for the company… But wow has it been a ton of work to get to this point. I think I’ve been averaging about 60 hours a week for a month now.

But, things are getting to a point where the project managers for this endeavor can handle it, so I’m getting a bit more free time here and there. 🙂

So, let’s see – what else?

Oh, Linden Lab – the company that ostensibly runs Second Life – has managed to once again horribly screw up all of the billing for the 20-ish regions I own there.

It’s a quarterly thing with these guys; missed invoices, double billing, random service failures… But this time they won’t allow me to pay them, and won’t tell me anything with regards to fixing it.

I’ve never encountered a ‘company’ that makes it so hard to give them money…

So last week I decided enough was enough, and that I’m getting out of the virtual land baron game. With this decision comes the work and expense to hand off everything I have running to other people to ensure continuity of service. So my scant free time has been taken up with “How2SL” for a half dozen new land owners.

And then I will not have dozens of renters!

In that regard I’m introducing Caerth to the wide world of the Internet – so you can expect to see literary bits and art featuring the world popping up here and there. I’ve dusted off my original SL account from 2004 and am in the process of reworking it for some on-line adventures in Vardale.

The fresh perspective has already spawned a few story ideas – so stay tuned for some magipunk adventures.

And with that, let me leave you with a sketch of Raesh…

Today’s adventures began with a walk around a couple parks here in downtown, and some sight seeing around the city center – such as the old PacBell building:

Then we had breakfast at de Vere’s Irish Pub, where I had the most delicious biscuits and gravy I have ever had…

The car was then pointed into a westerly direction and away we went. The first stop was the top of Mount Vaca – pretty much the highest point in the middle of California.

From here we could actually see the overcast and drizzle we would hit at our western most point today, Bodega Bay, about 80 miles out there in the distance –  under those clouds on the horizon.

Like any high point with unlimited view for a hundred miles, the top of Mount Vaca is festooned with antennas – one of which being this very cool (and very bald) cold-war era Army Radio Tower…

From here we trekked back down the mountain, only catching the brakes on Clinton’s CR-V lightly on fire in the process. 🙂

Eventually we made it to the next stop on our trek to the edge of the continent, the Mare Island Naval shipyard.

This Naval Base was essentially abandoned in place – meaning it is pretty much a ghost town mixed with a post-apocalyptic industrial setting that you expect to be overrun by zombies at any moment…

I’m really kind of surprised I’ve not seen Mare Island in a post-apocalypse / zombie movie yet – it is perfect for one… 😀

Once done with Zombieland we continued on to Bodega Bay…

Bodega Bay was cold, windy, overcast, and drizzling as we saw previously from the top of Mount Vaca…

After a few fridgid minutes we piled back into the car and pointed it at Sacramento, opting to return whence we came by way of a small ferry – just for S&G’s…

And once we’d made it back to civilization, we called it a night. Clinton has work tomorrow, and I have to get rested up for a long day of airplanes and airports that will see me getting home to my bed at about 12:30am… Just in time to get up at 5am and get to work so I can manage a security audit by a client…

Yay…

Overall though, this has been a fantastic micro-vacation! Thanks Clinton for dragging my sorry tail all over northern California.

I’m not going to be horribly verbose this evening as I am exhausted…

The day began with seeing the 9am showing of “Avengers – Age of Ultron” at the Esquire IMAX here in downtown Sacramento with Clinton. Being as this is an actual 70′ IMAX screen using two 70/15 projectors running at 48fps to create the 3D, the movie was absolutely mindblowing.

From here Clinton decicded I needed to see Lake Tahoe, so he pointed his CR-V eastward and away we went.

Along the way we ran into a very cool bridge: The Foresthill Bridge, which is 730 feet over the river it crosses… So I opted to walk the length of the bridge, round trip, to get some photos…

From here we pressed on and eventually ended up at Lake Tahoe, where I got to hike around the Tallac historic site for an hour and take pictures of how the 1% lived in 1920. 🙂

And from here we ended up on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe and stopped to have dinner at the Harrah’s Casino buffet… Thankfully all I’d had to eat prior to this was some popcorn at the theatre, so I was able to get my money’s worth in prime rib and fixins. 😀

Then we drove a hundred miles back to Sacramento, where I am now entirely exhausted and planning to call it an early night.

The day started off as it usually does, with me getting up at the break of dawn. I finished packing, got my affairs in order for while I am out of state, dealt with a few work things, and got out of the house at 08:30 for my 11am flight.

Being as it was Friday, and not 0-dark thirty in the morning, I knew the TSA line would be incredible so I wanted to ensure I had plenty of time to stand around. And being as I live a good half an hour from the airport, leaving at 08:30 would put me at DIA two hours before the flight…

The TSA line was about a half an hour long, the train ride was another 15 minutes, and getting to the veeeeery end of concourse A took another 15 or so minutes – so I had an hour to enjoy a nice, sedate cup of coffee.

Then I discovered the plane due to leave DIA at 11:05 would not even be arriving until 11:30. Which means it would not be departing DIA until at least noon – but probably closer to 12:30 with deplaning and boarding, and it is 2.5 hours to Seattle… Meaning I would not get to Seattle until 14:30 local…

I had a connecting flight in Seattle due to depart at 14:30 local…

On top of this the plane at DIA was smaller, so we were asked to check our bags versus carry them on – so my one carry-on was tagged and tossed onto the plane at the gate. I’ve never had much luck with random bag shenanigans resulting in my luggage arriving in the same place I am going.

As we pulled away from the gate, the pilot came over the PA to explain that he was going to attempt to make up some lost time by using some very high tech pilot stuff called “punching it” – and as we rocketed off the runway, engines screaming as we shot to 40,000 feet, I believed him.

To his credit, and the heroic efforts of the flight crew to prioritize folks getting off the plane, I made it to my connecting flight with three minutes to spare, and made it to Sacramento on time.

And even my bag made it!

A friend of mine, Clinton, picked me up at the airport and shuttled me to the hotel here in the heart of Sacramento to drop off my stuff, and then we trundled over to Winters California to a place called the Buckhorn Steakhouse for dinner.

It was amazing.

Along the way there and back I got to see a side of California I’ve never seen, as my trips here tend to center around L.A. or SanFran – farmland. There really are large sections of California that do not have a highrise building on them… Shocking!

Once we returned to Sacramento, we decided to walk off the steak by cruising Old Town Sacramento for a bit…

Old Town is interesting because it completely flooded, ages ago, and the solution to this problem back then was to elevate the roads by building new roads on top of the old ones, and either jack up the buildings to the new street level, or build new buildings on top of the old ones. So the whole town area has creepy weird basements made out of old ruined buildings, and some of those basements have basements!

So there is this wonderfully preserved ‘Wild West’ town in the center of as much newer town, sitting on top of a gold rush town…

And the mix of eras is jarring – but kind of neat…

Meaning you get scenes like this street, lined with preserved 1800’s era buildings, and at the far end of the street a super modern 21st century glowing ziggurat of an insurance building – and between them a 1900’s era steam powered paddlewheeler sitting on the river that has been converted into a hotel…

It’s a strange place. Neat! But strange. 🙂

I’m going to be in Sacramento over the weekend, visiting, and will be back Monday evening.

The flights there and back have a layover in Seattle, which is convenient for a cup of coffee. 😉

I’ll be sure to post any cool photos I get.

I don’t bowl, but my friends do…

I’m just here for the bowling alley grub. 😀

I was number 6842…

I am so glad that is over…

I’ve started up a new RP setting; Selentia.

Selentia is a sort of magical steampunk scifi place populated with anthropomorphic critters – furries, in the common vernacular. So it is chock full of fantastical steam powered stuff, Victorian sensibilities, ancient alien technology, and shed hair all over the furniture… And I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of an Elder God or two. 😉

It looks a bit like this:

I will attempt to post some of the shenanigans that happen there as they happen…

It has been a little bit since I’ve updated ye olde journal, so I should recap recent events.

Computer:

This last weekend I upgraded the video card in my gaming rig to the bleeding edge Nvidia GTX Titan X… Pretty much the fastest video card on Earth – this week. 😉

It lives up to the hype.

• Corsair Vengeance C70 mil-spec case w/ RM1000 modular PSU
• MSI X99S Gaming 7 motherboard
• Intel i7 5820K @ 3.30 Ghz with the Corsair H100i liquid cooling setup
• 32 gigs of DDR4-2666
• Nvidia GTX Titan X (12 gigs DDR5)
• 512G Samsung XP941 M.2 NGFF boot drive / 2TB WD Caviar Black storage drive
• And a lot of modded Corsair AF and SP 120mm fans using 400nm violet LEDs (it’s real pretty at night)

All of this graphical horsepower runs out to two Dell U2412M displays, and is controlled by a Roccat Ryos keyboard and a Razer Imperator mouse.

Which brings us to…

Gaming:

As of right now there are two days left in the kickstarter for Crowfall

(https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crowfall/crowfall-throne-war-pc-mmo)

and to say there is support for an MMO like this is an understatement… 14,000+ backers and the game is currently the 17th largest game kickstarter in history.

Given that the folks making Crowfall have pretty much made every other North American MMO in the history of MMOs, it has some really intriguing races, and appeals to my desires for global conquest via political end economic means – I’ve backed the game at a very high level.

A good friend of mine who runs the military end of my SL endeavors, and who is currently serving in the army as an artillery officer, will be heading up the military arm of our Crowfall endeavors as well. He started Ordo Imperialis – a military gaming guild with some ten years of history behind it – so I am expecting amazing things. 🙂

From the web site tonight:

“If you have a juror number between 1546 and 7000, you have not been scheduled for individual questioning at this time. However, you may be scheduled for individual questioning at a later date. Please check this website again on March 27, 2015 after 5:00 p.m. for additional information regarding the scheduling of your individual questioning session.”

I’m in the high 6000’s

They are going to drag out the getting to the part where this drags out – for months.

They finally updated the juror list and – I have to go back in for a second round of questions and answers.

When will this happen? No one knows. There are potential juror numbers between 1 and 7000, I am in the high 6000’s, the web site has information for jurors between 1 and almost 300.

I have a feeling this will take months…

The judge-directed “BE SURE TO CHECK THIS PAGE WEDNESDAY NIGHT OR YOU WILL BE KILLED” web page regarding my jury service is, as of this morning, within a few hundred people of my juror number!

At this rate, I should know if I can get on with my life some time next week… The complication to this is the next question session starts next week – so I may not know if I need to attend until it is over, or something.

While it is true, I did have unreasonable expectations that a government entity would be able to pull this off – I am also the eternal optimist.

So I was told to check the web site Wednesday evening after 6pm to see if I was still involved in this, or if I was excused and able to continue on with my life.

Wednesday evening at 6pm I checked, and the indicated area of the state web site was still missing every juror number above 5000 (I am in the high 6000’s).

This morning they have posted up most numbers into the low 6000’s, so I am still unsure if I am involved or not.

I think they dramatically underestimated the amount of effort it would be to involve 9000 people in the already ponderous legal process. 🙂

The flu I picked up at the courthouse knocked me flat for the bottom half of Tuesday and all day Wednesday – and I’m still ill with the damnable thing but I cannot be away from work any longer. So I have barricaded myself in my office to avoid spreading the plague and am trying to get caught up.

Whee!

So yesterday I got to spend many, many hours sitting in various court rooms wishing someone in charge would tell me something about what was going on.

Myself, and about 60 total strangers, sat in a cramped room with crap ventilation for a few hours before anyone bothered to come and tell us anything. Being as cellular reception was sketchy at best so the phone was of little entertainment, there was little else to do but critically observe my fellow jurors.

The court folks had provided us with a hot/cold bottled water dispenser, styrofoam cups, and a selection of Bigelow herbal teas. This allowed me to witness that one out of four random strangers will take tea over water, and one half of those will not be able to figure out the child-resistant tap on the hot water.

If these are my “peers”, I want off this planet.

Additionally, if you put 60 random people in a small stuffy room, the one sick one will manage to infect the rest – so I have developed the flu, just like the woman who was coughing all over everyone.

All in all it was a very miserable experience that continues to get worse even though I am not there…

Wednesday evening I will find out if I have been excused, or if the fun continues on.

I am off to the Arapahoe County courthouse to do my civic duty…

Unfortunately I was called for what is probably the Holmes trial – the guy who shot up that theater. If that is the case, and I’m chosen to sit on the trial, it may be 4-6 months long…

4-6 months at the standard $50 a day recompence from the state for the inconvenience. $250 a week…

Not sure how happy I am with that.

Fortunately I think I can just work my day job after hours / weekends and not take too massive of a hit financially.

And if I am chosen for this shindig, I will not be able to talk about it. So – yeah. Fun stuff…

  Welcome to a new year, and a new update to the journal.

  Going forward I will attempt to be a bit more attentive to this decade+ running log of my life…

  Things these days tend to happen in such rapid-fire succession and with such amazing complexity, that I do not stop to write about events as all of my efforts are consumed by resolving said events.

  But, maybe I can work in ye olde journal a bit more – so onward with this update.

  Firstly my efforts in Second Life are back on again as of November.

  For a month or two before this I had started up a region for Avarin – the homeland of my chief villain Ruina and her second in command Metus. But Avarin is very much a dark and dangerous place, and was not a huge hit with the players. They all seem to like dark and dangerous as something to contend with over living there. 🙂

  So I decided to bring back Roanoak…

  When last we saw our heroes, the Changelings had sacked the city of Morning Light and Castle Morgan. A year after these events I re-created the city and the castle in all of their bug-infested, slime-covered glory and the players engaged the Enemy and re-took their homeland.

  The players then rebuilt their city and life is getting back to normal in good old Roanoak.

  Morgan Castle was severely damaged in the event and is currently being repaired, and is not currently a setting people can visit.

  If you want the details on what is transpiring within my little world of candy-colored equines, go here: http://www.manelands.com/

  With all of this Second Life stuff going on, which requires me to do a lot of 3D models, textures, and other graphically intensive stuff, I decided it was high time for me to get a new computer.

  So my Christmas present to myself was the fully custom gaming PC that I mentioned last post…

  It’s a mind-meltingly fast computer…

  This also meant that I needed to stop enjoying the good life in OSX and move to Windows 8… I really do not like Windows these days – Microsoft is trying too hard to do too many things at the OS level, and is not doing any of them well.

  But if I want a supercomputer on my desk and be able to run things like Photoshop, Z-Brush, and Word as well – Windows it is.

  So that has been taking up precious time too.

  The novel I am writing is progressing at a fair pace once again now that I have the computer thing settled. Being as this is just something I am doing for fun, it often takes a back seat to everything else, but it is always simmering away on the stove of my creative endeavors.