So it's now official, I suck at blogging.  Maybe if I had a mobile device with better blogging and interface I would be better... but...

So what's new?  I'm finishing the tile in the foyer and will post photos when I get it all done.  Other than that I've been working on websites for a few clients and trying to get more until school starts in the fall. Still not sure what I want to do but I at least have some ideas.  So far I have it narrowed between staying in web design or electrical engineering.  I still want to do game design though... that's really what I enjoy doing and something I miss terribly.

We will see though, who knows what the future has to offer.  One step at a time.

So I thought I would see how I stack up against the BBC Book list since I consider myself fairly well read, from a couple comments on people also posting this the BBC seems to think most people may only have ever read six of these... so I guess 46 isn't too bad, I thought I'd be about to the halfway mark. Gotta pick up more books then :)

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read. ( Read Book )
2) Italicize those you intend to read. ( Plan to read book )
3) Underline the books you love. ( Book I love )
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading. ( Junk )
5) Tally your total at the bottom.

How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( JUNK )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total Read 46

So I'm back home from the Court appointment.  For those of you who don't know, when I was much younger and not nearly as wise as I am today :: cough cough :: I got married.  Getting married isn't a dumb thing to do mind you, it all depends on the who and why of it.  Getting married because the gal you are diddling gets pregnant... that's dumb.  Getting married because of family pressure, that's also dumb.  In my case, I honestly have no idea why I got married.  At the time I didn't want to get married until I had a career so that I could support a family.  However, for some reason I decided to get married to a gal that I worked with and had been dating for only a couple months.  I should mention that at the time I worked bar security at a strip club and she was a stripper.  So three days after Christmas in 1994, we got married in Kentucky with no rings, her goofy brother as our witness, and the sound of common sense and good judgement dying around us.

Two and a half weeks later, we separated while I was staying at my mothers for a weekend looking for a job since driving 45 one way was too expensive.  At the time we lived in a college town and there wasn't a job to be had, so I decided to look 45 minutes away where I lived originally.  During that time she just up and vanished, without a word, without a trace.  So I was hurt, miserable, tried to see if she was home but the doors were all locked and I didn't have a key.  I waited all day, and all night in my van in the middle of January for her to return home, but she didn't. So I returned to my mothers and stayed with her, still trying to get in touch to figure out what the heck happened.  Finally I heard she was home on Valentines Day and that she wanted to see me.  That was a lie told to me by someone though, she didn't want to see me.  As a matter of fact when I got to our apartment she was there with one of her customers from the strip club.  I used the opportunity to threaten him nicely and to gather up what belongings of mine didn't get burnt in the dumpster next to our apartment.... yeah, she burnt nearly everything I owned.

So that was it, I didn't hear from her again except a few times in between.  One day here, one day there.  Each time I tried to get information so that I could get a divorce, each time being told that her personal information was none of my bleepity bleep business.  Six months after the split I would stop hearing from her all together.  During this time her current boss, who was my former boss, has me followed, has jobs taken away by telling potential employers that I was a thief, lazy, and all sorts of lies... even goes so far as to call the cops on me saying that I'm stalking my *wife*.  I even got questioned by the police when my former boss burnt down his strip club for the insurance money.  One year or so after the split my former boss gets put under federal indictment for tax fraud, money laundering, a veritable list of federal crimes.

A little over one year later I hear she's moved out of the state ( now I hear that it was because of pressure from the feds over testifying against her boss )

Four years later I hear absolutely nothing.

Six years later I hear that she's remarried and has gotten a divorce so I begin to really try and live my life once again.

Fourteen Years later I hear form her and she never did get the divorce so we're actually still married.  So she got married again without it being over, and so have I... quite the perdicament.

Yesterday Morning we had a divorce hearing and the judge declared us divorced. So after 14 years, the deed is finally done and I can rest assured that my life can move on happily.  This was a very needed thing for this time of year for me, I already feel like *too little butter spread over too much bread* as it is and this just adds a little more butter to go around.

Life is good once again.

My holidays have been pretty busy, they usually are. My schedule used to be: 

1. Visit the in-laws for Christmas which was only 2 hours away from where we lived.  That also involved visiting the grandparents and extended side of my wife's family.
2. Visit my family for a week for the holidays usually around the second week of January.  They used to be 8 hours away from where we lived so it was a long drive up for the visit and tended to be a little less festive because it was not Christmas.
3. During this whole time, from the week before Thanksgiving to the week after New Years, I have to be the Strong Rock that supports my wife through the most dreadful retail time of year.

Of course, all of this takes place in late fall early winter and during the darkest time of the year.  If you know me you know that I suffer from pretty fierce Seasonal Affective Disorder ( SAD ) so the holidays can take a while to recover from.  For the most part I do a decent enough job putting on a happy face and suffering in silence, stay strong, be happy, stay awake, do what needs to be done... but when it's all over...  well it's not easy.  Right now I'm physically and emotionally exhausted, and just like trying to describe a Migraine to someone who's never had one, there's really no way to explain it better than the immortal words of Mr. Bilbo Baggins "I feel thin, like too little butter spread over too much bread".

It would be impossible for me to blog during this period of time, hence the long silence since I posted last even though I tried, and as most will notice... this is the time when projects die.  This is when I lose interest in everything, projects, relationships, friends, family, life... you name it.  Some things I pick back up after I'm recovered sometime in Spring, some I don't.  This is probably more than a lot of you knew about me, especially those who seem to think that I'm an arrogant rock hard ass devoid of heart or many endearing qualities... but hey, I'm just as human as the next guy and just as flawed.  I'm just a better actor than the next guy so you wouldn't have guessed as much.

This year though, my schedule changed.  The family visits are reversed so I got to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family and then we visited my wife's family the second week of January.  Also this was one of the most stressful when it came to the retail support that I do as a loving loyal husband each year.  Bad Economy + New Store = Bonus Stress.  My wife asked me today if I Was alright and she had the audacity to ask what I have to be stressed about ( since I'm an at home husband )... what does she think I'm stressed about?  If she's stressed, I'm stressed.  Add all of her stress on top of my SAD and having to be strong to support her... it's truly a wonder she hasn't come home and found me swinging from the rafters at this point.  To add fuel to the fire, I have a court hearing involving a long overdue personal matter that is finally being put to rest and I'm worried about that as well.

So if there's a lull this winter in the blog entries ( since I'm really trying to regulate my blogging and make it a more frequent affair ) just chock it up to Winter Blues and I'll be back at the keys before too long with more uninteresting stuff to muddle through :)

I have a love/ hate relationship with carpets.  I love the added warmth they give to your home, not having to walk across cold hard wood or tile floors in the winter time is a blessing and a half... but I hate cleaning them.  Considering we have two special needs kitty pee leaking cats that either dribble or just full on pee wherever they want... it makes keeping the floors clean an every day job.

Fortunately I've found something to completely remove the smell from the rugs and carpets... but the stain cleaning is still one massive pain in my rump!  Outside of having black carpets it's darn near a daily cleaning process for me, right now I have beige carpets and I've tried about 6 different cleaners and so far all they seem to do is spread the dirt around instead of clean it up... of course, I don't have a super awesome floor cleaner either.  So it's decided, our first house project will be to pull up the little 10x12 section of carpet and putting down tile, stone, or something that's not cloth based.

In my years gaming there has always been an issue with campaign power levels, some groups like to play simple farmers thrust into a chaotic world of adventure and growth while others enjoy playing grizzled veterans in the last throws of their epic careers.  Problem with that is that most game systems cater only to the first play style.  You create a character that's paper tough and Chia Pet useful.

So I decided to add something that another system had in a much more convoluted fashion, Campaign Power Level.  This is basically a gauge where the Narrator ( Storyteller, Game Master, Dungeon Master, Host, whatever you want to call yourself ) can set the base power level for character creation his players will use.  This allows you to start play as anything from a bumbling stable boy to a special forces assassin.  It's all up to the Narrator and how he wants you to come into play. 

Another neat feature of the Campaign Power Level is that it allows new players to create characters that will fit into existing campaigns that have been active for a long time period.  Nothing is more of a turnoff for any new player to an old campaign than being a Turnip Farmer in the presence of Demigods.  On the same token, nothing is more of a pain in the butt than for a Narrator to have to figure out where every other character is at for experience and then calculate how many points the new character should have.  A few games are fairly easy since they are level based, other more advanced games get a little more difficult since you can't just assign a level and pop here comes Johnny Hero to join the merry band.

On the same token, I've also decided on the Default Token Game World that I plan on using with the system, much like Greyhawk is to D&D ( or should that be was? You know, back when D&D was actually D&D and not DDO on Paper ).  That world will be SteamShot, which is a Science Fantasy / Steampunk world set in an alternate victorian time period.  So without further ado, here is the temporary first mockup of the logo image :

So the last couple days were filled with playing WAR while my account was still active since they launched the new live event.  Today though is a completely different story, today I've been pounding the pages of my rulebook to get more of it finished.  It's kinda refreshing, now that I'm not frustrated by the novel long list of Inadequacies that WAR has, for me anyhow, I can focus better on that which I want to do.  So it begs the question, if I'm that aggravated with Warhammer Online... why am I playing it?  I may not be to be honest, I've been thinking about canceling for a while now, the main reason that I haven't is that my Wife misses a lot of her old friends from Northern Guard and this is the first chance she's had to play with a lot of them in a long while.  So I stay so that she doesn't feel guilty playing on her own, and so she doesn't feel that she needs to play another game with me so that we can spend time together... that was how it was when we first met and were dating, but we're married now and live in the same house.... we spend a lot of time together and don't really need to play together to keep close.  Granted, it's a lot more fun to play together, but it's no longer an essential like it was.

If anything I might just reactivate for one more month, if anything just to liquidate my inventory.

On a more positive note, I think I'm going to give a few sneak peeks into the progress of the game that I've been toiling on for so many years, so every Friday I'll post a new feature, blurb, example power, or other tidbit from the game.

So yesterday, I spent running to the Vet, doing some grocery shopping, and spending the day with the wife.  When she's off work I like to spend as much time doing fun stuff with her as possible so that she doesn't spend all of her time brewing over work related things.  Sometimes I think she would try to spend every waking hour there if she was able.  So as of late, that distraction has been Warhammer Online, a MMOG based in the Warhammer Fantasy world which was created by Games Workshop.  For those not quite sure, it is much older than Warcraft and Warcraft is a blatant and cheesy ripoff of Warhammer ( much like Warcraft is a blatant cheesy ripoff of everything in the game industry... it's only claim to fame being that it takes all these other games, rips them off, and make them easy enough a vegetable can play them ).

Enough Warcraft bashing, a hobby I could practice for hours and hours and never get tired of... on to Warhammer Online.  While Warhammer Online is a good game, and in a lot of ways excellent in comparison to its peers... it's not a great game.  Like many other games it could be a great game, but right now it's just a good game.  The best thing about the game is that my wife and I are reconnected with a lot of guildmates and IRL friends that we've not been able to game with for several years.  That's really the best part of Warhammer Online for us... followed closely by it's pretty awesome ( though still unbalanced ) PvP setup.  But the bad things in the game are quickly catching up...

What bad things?  Well lets take a look :

1.  The fact that the game is not release quality yet.  There are a TON of bugs in the game, balance issues, broken classes, all around the game looks and feels unfinished and poorly put together.  On top of that, every time Mythic goes and fixes one thing, they break three other things that worked fine. Take my case for instance. The 1.05 patch brought me random client crashes that occured about every 15 minutes, now I might only crash once every couple hours but my graphics are screwed up somethign terrible!  The models in the game are fine ( other than the extremely messed up animations for moving models near clipping range )  but the textures are all just washed out like they ran under a rain of paint thinner... they are all blurred and look like I'm getting the textures for models that should be at the edge of my clipping range when they are right next to me... which bring me to problem 2.

2. None of the graphics really jump out and grab you, there are no fantasticly breath-taking models that I've seen outside of the CG Intro Movie, and there's really no scenery that has made me want to stop and take a screenshot.  It's all very bland and cookie cutter... other than a limited selection of Dyes, your character will look like every other of your class.  In a word, Warhammer online is visually BORING AS HELL.

3. The lack of crafting just sucks... I've heard all the reasons for no crafting in the game ( Everyone should be off fighting and not knitting! ) but every war has a supply line of artisans, doctors, cooks, hookers, etc... all to keep the soldiers going.  Sure, they have filled those spots with NPC Healers, Renown Gear Merchants, and a limited player crafting system to turn out consumables... but there are a lot of people that do enjoy crafting, and I've said it over and over, I would rather appeal to the *crafter corner* than the Counterstrike Culture and the newly added WoW Culture.

4. Name enforcement.  I play on an RP server.  I'm not an avid roleplayer throwing out thees and thous and all that pretentious rubbish, but I will lightly roleplay when I speak in public, my characters all have their own personalities, and they all have viable names.  By that I mean, a name that a normal non-hollywood parent would name their child instead of some BlizzKid Counterstrike Emo 3l337 d00d name.  I've seen characters on the RP server names Healus Maximus, Puckerfactor, Battlebiscuit, Lilbit, and just about every other horrible combination of retarded you can imagine on here... and the CSRs are just takign their time getting to them.  If you are waiting for things to settle, you fail as a CSR.  Sure, let them get settled in, let them develop their identity on the server with that stupid name, so that when they are Rank 40 / Renown 60 and you do get around to changing their name, they throw an ungodly fit... as opposed to doing it when they are level 12 and can either get over it or switch servers.  Smart Call Mythic... you fail.

That's all I'm going to go into for now... I'm sure that if my friends read this ( which they are almost all rabid fanboi's for WAR ) they will grunt and disagree just because Beta was so much worse... but it doesn't matter how much worse beta was... compare the launch and first three months of WAR to it's peers and look at how miserably amature it is.  Oh sure, the servers are mostly stable... NOW... and the mail system works... NOW... and the game crashes a lot less... NOW... but did LotRO have this many problems at launch and for its first three months?  Hardly.  Did CoX have this many issues at launch?  Not even close.  For that matter, did SWG have this many problems after launch?  Nope, they had one database issue in the first couple weeks and then took three days to switch to a new database and it was fine from there ( till NGE that is)..

Well there's my mostly pent up anger at Mythic and WAR... another victim in the declining trends of the game industry and their quest to appease the LCD.

The industry needs more elitism.

Don't really have much to talk about today, still cleaning, still working, still trying to meet the deadline for a contest in six days... don't think I'm going to make it though.

For now, just playing Warhammer Online with the wife.

Yeah, I know... odd topic title right? Well that's because I just got done putting thermal plastic ( Thermal Shrink Film ) on the big picture windows here in the back of the house. The great thing about this stuff, is that it significantly reduces any draft or energy loss due to old windows. These aren't drafty, but they aren't insulated in the slightest... well they weren't insulated in the slightest. Yay to saving money right? 

Click Here for the Picture Window

Click Here for the View From it

Try to ignore the cheesy fishing *cabins* down by the river.  Unfortunately almost every inch of riverside property is owned by people who insist on putting these rinky dinky shitty cabins all round for people to rent out seasonally for hunting and fishing.  It's horribly tacky and disturbing and just douches up the perfect view of the cliffs and the Red Tailed Hawk Aerie that's roughly around the top right of the picture ( off frame a bit actually ).

Nothing beats waking up in the morning to the fog rolling off the river, and there is even what looks like a woman's peaceful face in the cliffs across the way, and in the Spring, Summer, and Fall the trees frame her face and she looks like a leaf crowned nymph watching me through the window... kinda creepy in one way, kinda peaceful in another.  Kinda like Mother Nature watching in a way that would probably make my friend Hippy Jesus get all squishy in his pagan parts.

Now I need to get insulating foam for the basement windows and this place will be snug as a bug in a rug.  Now, I need to get back to my daily dose of Laundry, Dishes, Cleaning up Cat PIss, and some writing.

Till Next Time...
If ya don't like it, skip it.