And IRC Bear comes to a close. It’s been what, three years of fun? Well, three years of badly spelled blather anyway. But all things must come to an end, good or otherwise.
On an unrelated note, my back hurts like it hasn’t done in months.
And on another unrelated note, if I’m going to write a book, I need to get new batteries for my keyboard. I’m fed up smashing it off the desk to get an extra charge.
As I’ve mentioned before, November is National Novel Writing Month, which I’m going to participating in. I’ve been thinking about three potential ideas, one of which revolved significantly around ducks and their wish to take over the planet.
I spent some time on Friday doing some research into ducks in general, picked a suitable species and started to build a story around why they would want to take these actions and the fact they’ve been controlling most major events that have taken place over the past 70 years in order to satisfy their plan.
Unfortunately when people ask what my book is going to be about and I tell them this, there’s a look on their face that tells me to think of something else instead. Something that makes more sense perhaps. Something that doesn’t make people assume I’m just a complete loon.
But with less than 48 hours to go until I’ve got to start, I’m not leaving myself much time. But then I guess a tight deadline is an inherent part of the fun.
Today marks the second anniversary of my time spent in this flat, and like my first year here, the second one has been equally turbulent. The energy that once filled the walls returned again only to disappear as quickly as it came, lost to who knows what, leaving me sitting here wondering what’s going to happen next.
But unlike before, hope no longer springs eternal. Thankfully time has at least given me enough of an arsenal to deal with that. I may not have been ready had it happened sooner.
Another year of memories for the scrapbook, another year to wonder what could have been. Year three awaits and hey, at least it can’t get any worse.
Right?
These are the stupid things that change Azeroth from being a collection of maps in a game to feeling like a world that is actually alive.
The expansion pack looks potentially interesting, but with so little information released and the release still a long way off, I’m not ready to make any claims to how much it’s going to effect my enjoyment of it.
Yes, it looks good, but HL2 already looked good, so it just didn’t seem like that much of a graphical leap. The HDR is a nice touch, but to be honest, I hardly noticed it most of the time. There was one area where you went through a tunnel and the commentary mentions how coming out of the dark makes everything bloom up, but I hadn’t even noticed until it told me.
The commentary is an interesting idea, but it’s almost universally dull. It’s the kind of thing you’d get on a DVD, telling you more about what you’re seeing on screen, and in this case enabled by using the little floating bubbles displayed around the map. A nice idea anyway.
In summary, I was suitably underwhelmed.
And it made me motion sick.
Tonight was my first proper session of WoW in about six months. And I died. A lot.
I’ve completely forgotten how to play, I’ve no sense of the interface, I can’t find my way around Stormwind, and getting back into the quests I started so long ago has been much harder than I thought.
But unbelievably, it’s been fun. A break from it has made all the reasons I stopped playing take a back seat, and hopefully if I can level up quickly and start discovering some new areas then things will stay that way.
I never bother to put Fury on the lead when I bring her back in from our pre-bedtime walk. There’s nobody around, she stays close, it’s not very far from the flat. Unfortunately tonight she decided to throw herself in front of a car.
It started when she began to eat some crisps, or something crunchy anyway, off the pavement. This is never a good thing, as it usually ends up with her being sick on the kitchen floor during the night. So I shouted at her and gave her a bit of a kick when she walked past. Nothing hard, just a poke.
Unfortunately this freaked her out a little, and she basically fell backwards onto the road, just at the moment a car deciding to pass. The car swerved, tooted its horn, and Fury leaped back onto the pavement again, appearing unphased.
Me, bit more phased. Not sure what the next step would have been had she had been splattered across the road and pavement.
I renewed my World of Warcraft account tonight. I have succumbed to the evil again.
Graham made an interesting comment that he didn’t miss the game, but he missed the place. That’s not a sentiment I’ve ever heard for a film, TV show or book before, let alone a videogame. I see where he’s coming from though, Azeroth is so well designed that returning to it really did feel like a homecoming.
There’s no doubt Blizzard have made some optimisations, everything seems to load much faster, and I can even play it on my laptop with almost everything switched on without too much hassle. And remember, this was the super cheap laptop, so it’s not exactly packing fancy video hardware (an Intel 900 shared-memory graphics accelerator).
Anyway, now I’ve renewed we’ll see how much I play. I ger the impression from reading stuff online that the grind is worth it to get to the later stages, instances and Battlegrounds, so grind I shall.
*SPOILERS*
Absolutely fabulous episode of the West Wing yesterday, best of the season. Toby’s exit was handled just the right way, with enough gravitas, and some really interesting visual direction.
Not quite so sure about the way they handled Josh changing the staff of the campaign, all seemed to happen really fast, Santos agreed to it so quickly… hard to explain really, just didn’t buy it.
Amazed at the number of people who still haven’t checked this show out, you’ve no idea what you’re missing. Get yourself the first season on DVD, start at the beginning, I guarantee you’ll be hooked pretty quickly.
No coding, but fresh whatinterest content. Didn’t meet my article quota for the week, but there’s two new ones for you there nontheless.
Only one more week of content before we take a break for November, so savour it while you can.
I spent hours today drawing 14×14 pixel icons for Chatbear v3. I only produced one. Yes, I said hours.
It occurred to me that in actual fact, the amount of time spent drawing this icon (over and over again) combined with the amount of time I’ve spent designing the new board listings page (which is measured in days) is far more than I spent writing the basic code that currently allows v3 to show boards, topics, posts and accept new posts.
Programming is easy. Creativity takes time.
I like trying the new hip thing, so I installed Flock.
And then uninstalled it within 5 minutes.
I know it’s a beta, but I found it so confusing to use that it just came across as useless and pointless. Maybe I’ll give it a shot again later.
Oh yea, and while I’m slamming things that are meant to be cool, Flickr sucks. Why does nobody see this?
November is officially novel writing month, but I still don’t have a story idea.
I read through No Plot? No Problem! last night, a great read for anybody not only looking for a reason to try this challenge, but those who have already decided to do it. It tells you not to spend a lot of time planning, because you’ll overthink the process and end up making the writing more difficult, but I still think I need to go into this with some form of idea. Some form of chapter structure, plot points I have to hit along the way.
Just over a week and a half to go. I’m so screwed.
I mentioned Podcasting already, but I’m really loving this even more now. There’s something just so nice about having content delivered to you.
On my subscribe list now is Accident Hash, Adam Curry, Diggnation, Ebert & Roeper, Gamespot’s Hot Spot and Lugradio.
All of these shows are available through iTunes.
The biggest problem is still finding the good stuff. That’s a problem that needs solved. Hopefully if you’re looking for a start list, then my selection above will get you going.
I still have this thing in my head of doing my own, but I don’t think I have anything to say. Then I think I should do a weekly whatinterest one, but I’m not sure how that’d work either. We’ll see.
Told you I should have been a doctor, I diagnosed my ear infection, just like the real one did. More drugs for me to forget to take.
And totally unrelated, but another quick reminder that IRC Bear closes at the end of this month.
No more sneezing or coughing, no more sore throat, but I do have a sore ear. Occassional twinges of pain, very itchy, but especially sore to the touch. I thought at first it was another cold symptom, but since everything else has cleared up, maybe not.
Going to the doctors tomorrow anyway to get my head examined, so I’ll bring it up then. I’ve always thought the best way to cure my headache problem was just to cut my head off, I’m sure it’s no coincidence that will solve my ear issue as well. In fact, it’d solve everything. With you too I’m sure.
I’d make a great doctor.
Despite getting a new chair a couple of months back, I headed out to Ikea today to buy another one, having sold that first one to my dad for his office.
I said at the time that it didn’t feel right, the seat was too shallow, and it was a bit too solid for my liking, and I finally just got fed up with it. Sitting on the new one now, and it’s a huge improvement. Every time my buttocks touch the seat it’s a pleasure.
What wasn’t a pleasure was building the damn thing. It’s really a two person job, or the job of a person with three arms. Trying to hold the seat and the back together so you can screw the arm into both is almost impossible, and it took me about 25 minutes just to do that. The rest is simple, but that part got me with the last chair, and it got me with this one too.
Funnily enough, this new chair was half the price of the one I got from MFI. Price is certainly no indicator of quality.
I’ve been working for the past couple of days on the Chatbear v3 interface. Damn, it’s hard. There’s such a wealth of new features I have to get in there, but not only do I have to do that in a way that doesn’t make the whole thing suddenly feel cluttered and over-complicated, but I can’t design around a particular set of colours or with too many graphics.
That’s because unlike a normal website, Chatbear has to be easily switchable to other colour schemes based on the choice of the user, precluding using too many graphics (like curvy box corners) because there’s no way you can provide them in every colour (and I don’t want to start generating them on the fly either).
It’s funny how creating something like this ends up taking just as much time as actually writing the code to make it work.
The problem with writing two articles a week for whatinterest is that it means consuming some form of entertainment so that you might review it. Even returning to review one of my top ten films requires re-watching it with a critical eye. So when you miss a week, as I did last week due to Chatbear responsibilities, the workload is doubled, and so is the need to be entertained.
It’s not as easy as it sounds either, finding time to read a book or watch a film or play a game can be a challenge among all the TV there is to watch, and I can’t just review individual TV episodes every week.
I am a bit worried that our reviews are positively skewed, since we’re paying for what we write about it and tend not to buy crap in the first place, but since I have no idea how to start getting sent items to review, I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But I have the feeling we’ll have some less positive stuff up this weekend.
I’m sure it’s because I’m on holiday. I’m positive. But whatever the reason, the germs decided to wait until this week to attack me. Not all at once either, one group at a time. First there was the sore throat, then the blocked up nose and the sneezing, then the headaches, then the coughing fits last night which were so hard my throat feels bruised.
There can’t be many more cold symptoms left, so if each one continues to just last just a day, I’m sure I’ll be healthy before it’s time to go back to work. Sigh.
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