Just got my game books this morning, arriving a day before the official release. (Amazon has been telling me, even after it shipped yesterday, that they wouldn't arrive until the 9th, so I was quite shocked.)
It's a fantastic system overall. I have a few little nitpicks about it but nothing major, I'm very much looking forward to trying it out.
Still waiting to find out if they can deploy everything properly, but the Phoenix lander survived landing. The first pictures should be coming in soon. :)
I need to rant a bit, but the point of this post isn't to complain. A) This is a brand new game and only has 3 staff, one of which is a builder and another is the web staffer (who is also IRL sick this week), and maybe 5 players, so I understand the difficulties, and really expect them. B) Two weeks of the waiting are on my own head, so I obviously am not blaming staff.
Even if I had been approved, there hasn't been any RP the last couple days to get involved in, but I'm frustrated nonetheless.
Spore actually has an official release date. I've been following this game since it was announced, and this is big news. (Before there were estimates, which kept getting pushed back, but now they're actually giving an actual date.)
I found this website that lets you create a city, gives you a unique URL, and the city grows based on hits. Every time someone goes to the page, it adds population. I don't know enough people to make my city grow fast, but I'd still appreciate any hits. :) I'm not expecting success, just I'm curious what kind of population can be built.
What I like about this is there is a strategy component. After a city gets a certain population, it opens up different URLs to add things instead of population, like industry. Of course, this works better for entire communities, like Gaming Steve whose fans have gotten their city to the 126th ranked in the US in just a couple of weeks.
Just wanted to wish everybody a Merry Christmas. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas in particular, I hope you have a great day and a great whatever holiday you celebrate.
Yep, two livejournal posts in a row with absolutely nothing to do with MU*ing.
Sunday was my 29th birthday and the day my cold started getting better instead of worse every day. (Today's been even better.)
My parents actually got me a cake. (Being allergic to wheat this wasn't expected. They custom-ordered it from the baker that supplies me the wheat-free pizza, buns, cookies, and butter tarts that makes up a good quarter or more of my diet. (Wheat-free products are harder to find than you'd think.)) Of course, I had trouble tasting the cake due to stuffy nose at the time, but the thought was nice. (And I managed to save quite a bit for later. Today I was actually able to have a piece and taste it.)
We might be moving soon, and I'm hoping. I'm tired of living where there's only wheelchair transit for medical visits. I want to see a movie in the theatre again. I also miss back when we ran the game store, the community that developed there, and want to find something like that again.
Not to mention it'll be nice to get away from the neighbour who thinks it's justice to put a running lawnmower by our window and fill our house with fumes. (Which happened last week, right in the middle of my cold.) Or who calls the cops claiming my father threatened him when he (my father) was just sitting on the back porch drinking a beer. Or who stands in our driveway when someone's coming in and, should they actually honk the horn or try to drive around him to park call the cops claiming we tried to run him over. Or threatened to burn down our house once, going so far as to pile wood up along the side of our house until he saw us taking a picture of it. Or many other such incidents.
For me, colds always go to my chest. It has to do with the steroids I take for my asthma, it lowers immune reaction especially in the lungs. So, when I get a cold, I cough and cough and cough and cough and cough. For weeks sometimes, as my immune system has a harder time fighting stuff off. (Again, the steroids.)
This one has lasted for over a week. It started around the 1st, after I got a new novel I'd been waiting for (Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik) and spent all weekend reading it. I'm betting someone with a cold had looked at it in the store and I cought it that way.
In any event, that's why I've been rather quiet, or in some games not on at all, the last week. Just been rather sore and tired from coughing. It's not really at the point I can say it's getting better yet, but I just wanted to explain.
Wizards of the Coast posted an article today showing a preview of a major change to wizards in 4th edition. It doesn't include any actual rules, but does a preview of the wizard class and one of the new aspects: wizard implements.
I've been generally postive about everything I've heard about 4th edition, but this one I seem to be bouncing back and forth on. One minute I hate it, since it's such a major change to the flavour that it'll be hard to change some settings. (Forgotten Realms will be easy, what with the Spellplague. And Ptolus seems all setup to have a major event change things. But Eberron? Dragonlance? Let alone the many custom settings out there.)
The next minute, I love it, since a wizard that wields magic through his staff is such a major archetype, (see Dresden and Gandalf), as are wands (see Harry Potter) and orbs (see Saruman). (In an earlier draft of the article they also included Tomes, but seem to have removed them sometime this afternoon.)
I'm not really sure what to think. I will note, my objection, in those on-again-off-again moments where I am objecting, come purely on flavour. I like the idea of getting mostly rid of the Vancian magic system. In stories it can be fun, but in gameplay it was annoying.
As one of the new batch of staffers at XMA, I know I'm probably not expected to ever agree with legionfalcon about anything. To be honest, while I may not get along with him the greatest, he ran some great plots. In any case, I still was quite surprised myself when I found myself in total agreement with him about something. This post here.
I've had insomnia for the last few weeks. At first it was always because of a cough, but just when we finally got some Nyquil, it went away. But I still find it either takes me hours to get to sleep at night, (or should I say in the morning), or I wake up half an hour to an hour after falling asleep and then can't get back to sleep for hours. It's really annoying.
RP has been interesting lately. Chrome Sunrise has gotten kind of sparse. However, I've been getting a lot more on Victorian Nights lately. I never knew playing a vamp could be so much fun.
Superhero RP is picking up a little. XMA is still pretty quiet, but I've just worked out a mini-TP with another player. Peter (Parker, yes Spider-man, but he's more mutant-themed than canon) is into gymnastics. Of course, he's very good. Before, he wouldn't have entered competition outside of school-level, however, feeling his abilities made it unfair. However, recently in conversation wiith one of the X-Men, he's come to realize that while he may not have gotten his abilities naturally, they are a natural part of him now, and he shouldn't deny it. There's a girl at his school who succeeded in very preliminary qualifications for the olympic gymnastics team, so he's going to work with her to try to train and get into the main qualifier event in July. (Yes, even Spider-man has to train hard to get into the olympics. Talent only takes you so far in such a precision sport.) So, that should give me some great opportunities to RP over the next few months.
Now, thinking of other MUSHes, I'd like to see a MUSH where I can actively play Astroboy. I actually already play him on one, but the RP scenes there are few and far between, and the good ones are even farther between. Astroboy was the superhero that got me interested in superheroes. If it wasn't for that character, I never would have been as interested in superheroes as I am today, and yet all the superhero places I know he wouldn't fit because he's not from DC or Marvel.
Another setting I'd like to play is the Enderverse. (Ender's Game, for example.) I did find one place where one could RP Battle School, but everybody just sat in the barracks and idled. I don't even know why anybody logged in, I was there for weeks before giving up and had *1* scene the entire time. It's one of the few literature settings I think could hold my interest.
Pern and Harry Potter I've tried in MU* form, but in both cases I lose interest if I'm not reading the books then. (Though, that could be the places I tried. PernMUSH just gets...boring. No plots at all beyond personal stuff, it seems, which can get boring. Harry Potter is a lot of fun, but I may have just played at the wrong place to fit my RP style. I might have to try another.)
I'll have to look around for a DC place that might take Impulse (pre-Kid-Flash) or a cartoon-style Beast Boy. Those have got to be two of the funniest characters I have seen, and both are the kind of character I can play best.
Haven't updated this in ages. To be honest, for the first while nothing much was happening. Lately, I forgot I had this here.
To be honest, I don't have much to talk about that those who know about this journal don't all know about already. The Superhero places I play on have been rather inactive for me lately. Not so much that RP hasn't been available, but there's only one plot happening that I'm involved with, and I'm lacking goals. XMA (X-Men: Alpha) is especially hard with this problem, as it doesn't feel like *anything* is going on beyond the one plot I'm involved in with Green Goblin. There's only been 2 news bbposts since early November, both about very specific things that it's hard to feel involved with. It's like there's nothing to react to. Player-run plots also have an apping process that is more a pain than anything, so we're not getting many of those. I've tried mentioning all of this, but all I keep hearing is, 'stuff is in the works, and players need to get involved more.' As for Ultimate: Rebirth, we hardly have anybody active on there, need to get more blood.
Chrome Sunrise and Metro are getting bigger for me of late. Changeling is such a great theme, I can play characters that are fun to play in any situation. And with the staffer we have on both places, there's always fun stuff going on.
If anybody wants, I'll go through describing each of my characters on the 4 MU*'s I've mentioned above. (I have people reading this from both superhero and WoD sides of things.)
Anyway, for a bit of fun in the X-theme, I did a survey on Quizilla and got totally shocked by the answer:
You are Professor X!
You are a very effective teacher, and you are very committed to those who learn from you. You put your all into everything you do, to some extent because you fear failure more than anything else. You are always seeking self-improvement, even in areas where there is nothing you can do to improve.
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fobok's journal
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