Game Plan 2010
19 Jan 2010 20:43 Filed in: Games
It’s a tradition on some the BBS boards that I frequent related to gaming to post plans for the next year, kind of a New Year’s resolution. This is my take on that challenge. I’m trying to keep this as simple as possible this year as I think that 2009 was overly ambitious and doomed to failure from the start!
Writing:
*Complete "This Fear of Gods" for Traveller, a scenario I've been playing with since Furnace 2006!
*Rewrite "Singularities" into a full setting for Wordplay (which means doubling or tripling its size).
*Several other Wordplay related projects that I have bubbling in the background.
*Get "Power Projection: Reinforcements" off the ground after far too long in development, probably by some initial PDF releases.
Playing:
*Attend more TomCons (ideally run Doctor Who, Wordplay and maybe some indie fun stuff)
*Get another block games day together
*Try and run something by Skype again.
Conventions:
*Travcon, Continuum and Furnace as a minimum.
Writing:
*Complete "This Fear of Gods" for Traveller, a scenario I've been playing with since Furnace 2006!
*Rewrite "Singularities" into a full setting for Wordplay (which means doubling or tripling its size).
*Several other Wordplay related projects that I have bubbling in the background.
*Get "Power Projection: Reinforcements" off the ground after far too long in development, probably by some initial PDF releases.
Playing:
*Attend more TomCons (ideally run Doctor Who, Wordplay and maybe some indie fun stuff)
*Get another block games day together
*Try and run something by Skype again.
Conventions:
*Travcon, Continuum and Furnace as a minimum.
12th Night
06 Jan 2010 21:41 Filed in: Personal
Today brought the inevitable return to work after a lovely break away from work with Jill and Nathan. The early part of the holiday was spent at my parent's house, celebrating Christmas with them. It was great to see my mum looking well after yet another operation; she wasn't up to being bounced on by Nathan (but who is?), but she appears to be making steady progress in her recovery.
It's fair to say that I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd planned during the break, but when it comes down to it, the time out in itself was more than welcome in itself, and I was probably deceiving myself about what I could achieve in the time that I had.
Nathan really enjoyed himself and was generally spoiled in the way that you'd expect from his grandparents. He had lots of lovely presents, including a farm set and a toy cooker, plus quantities of toy tractors. He wasn't overwhelmed in the way he had been in previous years, and got extremely excited shredding the paper off presents, with not a care as to whether they belonged to him or someone else. The excitement and thrill of ripping the paper off was the best part of the whole experience to him.
I was very lucky in getting an upgraded version of the Flip Ultra, which records in HD, as my present. It was one of those things that Jill and I had chatted about, as the original Flip Ultra I bought on a whim got used very heavily over the whole of 2009, culmulating in the Furnace video being released on YouTube. It's excellent, and my hard disk drive continues to disappear under a digital media onslaught. In reality, it's a present for the family rather than just myself, but it did fill that gadget rush need I seem to have.
We spent Christmas Day with my parents, and Boxing Day with Jill's mum and dad. They were both lovely days, all family time, something that I feel is the best thing about Christmas.
Other strong memories of the break include a visit to one of the local Mere's to walk the dog with my dad, chancing the ice and enjoying the strange glow of the light off the water surface. Nathan was absolutely fascinated by the ducks, geese and swans on top of the ice and swimming in flotillas to keep part of the lake unfrozen.
We also visited a nearby garden centre which had a ride on train for entertainment. Nathan managed to blag two full trips around the gardens; one with Jill, and the other with my dad and I. We'll definitely have to go back there again when we next visit.
I guess that the other thing that's worth mentioning was how much that Nathan has loved the snow; he has seen it before, but much like Christmas itself, this has been the first time that he has had a real chance to interact with it properly, and he loved it. However, he wasn't impressed that it was cold!
New Year was different this year; for a start, we weren't ill, which had been the story of the past two years. We actually had a very quiet evening in, with Nathan in bed early, watching the latest Harry Potter DVD ("Rock and Roll" Yeah!) and answering some IT support questions from Jill's dad. Fortunately, having upgraded his eMac on boxing day I could now see what he was talking about when helping out, which made things much more simple to do. The quiet evening was partly as I was dry (on two hour emergency call as a favour to a colleague who swapped Boxing Day with me), and partly as we'd not got a party to go to. However, it was a good night...
It's fair to say that I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd planned during the break, but when it comes down to it, the time out in itself was more than welcome in itself, and I was probably deceiving myself about what I could achieve in the time that I had.
Nathan really enjoyed himself and was generally spoiled in the way that you'd expect from his grandparents. He had lots of lovely presents, including a farm set and a toy cooker, plus quantities of toy tractors. He wasn't overwhelmed in the way he had been in previous years, and got extremely excited shredding the paper off presents, with not a care as to whether they belonged to him or someone else. The excitement and thrill of ripping the paper off was the best part of the whole experience to him.
I was very lucky in getting an upgraded version of the Flip Ultra, which records in HD, as my present. It was one of those things that Jill and I had chatted about, as the original Flip Ultra I bought on a whim got used very heavily over the whole of 2009, culmulating in the Furnace video being released on YouTube. It's excellent, and my hard disk drive continues to disappear under a digital media onslaught. In reality, it's a present for the family rather than just myself, but it did fill that gadget rush need I seem to have.
We spent Christmas Day with my parents, and Boxing Day with Jill's mum and dad. They were both lovely days, all family time, something that I feel is the best thing about Christmas.
Other strong memories of the break include a visit to one of the local Mere's to walk the dog with my dad, chancing the ice and enjoying the strange glow of the light off the water surface. Nathan was absolutely fascinated by the ducks, geese and swans on top of the ice and swimming in flotillas to keep part of the lake unfrozen.
We also visited a nearby garden centre which had a ride on train for entertainment. Nathan managed to blag two full trips around the gardens; one with Jill, and the other with my dad and I. We'll definitely have to go back there again when we next visit.
I guess that the other thing that's worth mentioning was how much that Nathan has loved the snow; he has seen it before, but much like Christmas itself, this has been the first time that he has had a real chance to interact with it properly, and he loved it. However, he wasn't impressed that it was cold!
New Year was different this year; for a start, we weren't ill, which had been the story of the past two years. We actually had a very quiet evening in, with Nathan in bed early, watching the latest Harry Potter DVD ("Rock and Roll" Yeah!) and answering some IT support questions from Jill's dad. Fortunately, having upgraded his eMac on boxing day I could now see what he was talking about when helping out, which made things much more simple to do. The quiet evening was partly as I was dry (on two hour emergency call as a favour to a colleague who swapped Boxing Day with me), and partly as we'd not got a party to go to. However, it was a good night...