Hobby log (needs snappier title)
to follow-up on the last post
Mogo: I took 2nd place in the SPDC on Thursday! I was playing a RBg Burn Blightning variant. Fun, down-to-the-wire matches abounded. You can find a decklist & more details on the PDC site.
A/V: Watched the Royal Tenebaums on Saturday for the first time. Fantastic cast of Wes Anderson’s trademark larger-than-life losers. Loved all the little touches. It’s probably become my second-fave Anderson flick, after The Darjeeling Limited.
Text: Still reading A Feast for Crows.
Audio: Listened to a few of podcasts & NPR shows this week, per usual, though not as many as most weeks– it’s been rainy, so I only worked half-days in the greenhouse. Narrative Control was interesting this week, and got me thinking about indie RPGs again, specifically Dogs in the Vineyard. Mike Birbiglia’s story on This American Life was great too, though I’d heard it before.
Next week: Herb plantin’. Postcard writin’. Maybe even Nodeslam recordin’…
Well…
The trouble here is that I never know where this log fits into my day. Let’s see if I can get in the habit.
A/V: I took a break from Oblivion a couple weeks ago to have a look at Fallout 3. First impressions: FO3 is a game I want to play, but not right now. It seems more like a winter game, while Oblivion is definitely a summer game.
I also borrowed Bioshock from Alan on Tuesday and have been playing that this week– I like to cozy up in the dark around 10pm-1am, after my housemates have gone to bed, plug in my headphones to our stereo receiver and crank up the sound. Definitely the good way to enjoy (and get mercilessly creeped-out) by a survival-horror game.
I’ve just finished the first level and survived my first tussle with Big Daddy– afterward, you have to choose whether to “harvest” his Little Sister for ADAM, or rescue her. I’ve decided I going to rescue them. 1) I like playing heroes, generally; and 2) that Russian splicer (her name escapes me… Anatolia?) said she’d make it “worth my while”. I’m interested to see what that’s about.
Mogo: I played in two tourneys earlier this week. AltPDC on Monday, & XPDC on Wednesday. I went 2-2 in each, which I’m… okay with, I guess. My goal in Mogo lately has been to try and get my record back up to 50%, and breaking-even in a tourney at least keeps me from drifting further off the mark.
Excited for SPDC tonight. I’ve got a green-splash Blightning deck that tore it up in a few practice games w/ Hunter. I think it’ll be fun.
Text: I’m about 200 pages in to A Feast for Crows, the fourth volume of George Martin’s fantasy epic. Love the characters, especially the odd new viewpoint characters like Hotah the bodyguard and Damphair the prophet. Still unclear as to where the overall plot is going, which is why I probably set it down around this point last time I picked it up… (where the heck is Daenerys, for instance? etc)
A/V: Oblivion, days 7-12
I’m going to summarize as much as possible here. It occurs to me that I’m updating this thing more than my actual blog, and that’s weirding me out.
7: Left Bruma for Chorrol. Stumbled onto a bandit hideout. Cleared them out. When I came out, I saw another armed figure snooping around near my horse in the distance. I look a hail-mary shot at him with my bow… good news: it connected, bad news: it was an Imperial officer. He promptly arrested me. :/
8: While in the Bruma jail, I was locked up with a shady thief named Jormundr. I get embroiled in a scheme to uncover some gold he’d stashed.
9: I head off towards Chorrol again, and this time I encounter an Oblivion Gate spewing out daedra scouts near a small farm in the mountains. I skulk into Oblivion, find the sigil stone & close the gate.
10: I reach Chorrol. I recover an ancient book called The Fingers of the Mountain from a ruin called Cloud Top, and return it to the mage’s guildmaster, earning his recommendation.
11: I ride on toward Imperial City. Along the rode I encounter a third Oblivion Gate. I seal it.
12: I arrive in the Imperial City and speak with Baurus of the Blades. He asks me to investigate a cult called the Mythic Dawn by finding all four volumes of a rare book. The book contains a hidden message which, once decoded, will lead me to the cult.
A/V: Oblivion, days 1 & 2
So, I’ve started into Oblivion.
(explication: Oblivion is a single-player RPG for the Xbox 360, in which you take on the role of a fantasy hero and explore a fully-realized three-dimensional faerie world called Cyrodiil. For more info, click the link. I’m going to assume that anyone reading this is probably well-familiar with RPG video games.)
I thought it’d be fun to keep a game log. Writing about it makes the whole thing seem (slightly) less frivolous & self-contained. Anyway:
The story begins with your character locked in a dank dungeon cell. You get to choose everything about your character, including how your character got there in the first place, so I decided that my character would be named Mkuti the Wayfinder. Mkuti is a Khajit (imagine a “lion-man”, essentially). He makes his way in the world as a wilderness guide and herb-gatherer, but ran afoul of the Imperial authorities when a nobleman had a violent allergic reaction to a poultice that Mkuti had concocted.
In the first section of the game, the plot is kind of on rails. Here it is in a nutshell: The Emperor of the realm, Uriel Septim, is attacked by assassins. He attempts to flee the palace via a secret passage which– by happenstance– leads through your cell. The guards allow you to follow to help protect the Emperor, but ultimately the assassins catch up with you in the sewers and murder the liege. Before he dies, he gives you his necklace– the Amulet of Kings– and tells you to deliver it to his heir, via an ex-guard named Jauffre (now an abbot in a monastery called Weynon Priory).
On the first day, I escaped the sewers and arrived blinking in the bright light of day just beyond the walls of the city. (From this point onward, the game is open-ended. The world is spread before you and you can go & do essentially anything you want… but I decide to follow the storyline and head toward Weynon Priory, which my map says is on the outskirts of a far-away town called Chorral.)
It’s near sunset, so I decide to camp for the night in some nearby ruins… but the ruins are already inhabited by a pair of brigands, who ambush me! I fight them to the death and scavenge through their gear & loot for weapons and armor. At the end of the day, I’m rudely equipped with a serviceable steel sword, a bow, iron-tipped arrows, a wooden shield, and some raggedy fur-lined leather armor.
On day 2, I make it to the Priory and meet Jauffre. He tells me that I must seek out a man named Martin, a bastard son of Uriel Septim who is now– unbeknownst to him– the rightful heir to the throne. He gives me some supplies and his old paint horse and tells to ride toward another distant town called Kvatchl, and locate Martin… before the mysterious assassins find him first.
VISUAL: Hey Okay
Just another fine Tumblr-ish repository of silly photos and images (introduced to me by enth):
AUDIO: Parasites ~ Radiolab
Radiolab is a clever, always interesting twice-monthly science podcast (and radio broadcast) produced by WNYC in New York. It’s one of the best podcasts around.
Their recent episode on Parasites was a tad gross but way fascinating. (For instance, one of the stories poses the question: “Could the crazy cat-lady phenomenon have a scientific, even biological basis?” Strange science indeed.)
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/25
COMIX: Scary Go Round
John Allison, one of my long-time faves, recently changed his already awesome comic Scary Go Round into a new comic with a new layout and art style, a new website, and a new storyline w/ a new set of teenage characters. It’s new new newness and no one has any idea where it’s going or what happened in the 3-year gap between this story and the last one, which makes it extra fun.
The story is called Bad Machinery and it starts here: http://scarygoround.com/?date=20090918
Well, first hurdle: I’m going to be out of town from tomorrow through Sunday, so in order to keep up a daily posting schedule I’ll have to post 5 entries today. No sweat.
First up, books. I want to go on the record here: Aaron Allston writes a damn good space-fantasy yarn.
As a Star Wars fan from way back, I’ve easily read about 30 Star Wars novels, but I’ll freely admit that a lot of them have such horrible writing and characterization that they offended even my junior high school sensibilities. There *are* a couple of well written novel series that I recommend even to non-hardcore SW fans: Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command) and the nine X-wing novels by Mike Stackpole & Aaron Allston. And now add this one: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal.
Betrayal is set about 30 years after the events of Return of the Jedi (and about 10 years after the New Jedi Order novels, which I completely avoided due to their massive suckitude). Allston does a great job of wiping the slate clean and starting fresh while still respecting the continuity of earlier (suckier) books.
It’s all and all a great jumping-on point for new readers. I’m on page 250 or so, and unless the story flies off a cliff in the last third I’ll likely be reading the rest of the series.
AUDIO: Far ~ Regina Spektor
My main idea for this side-project blog is to post a little bit of something each day. A snippet of something I’m working on, or something interesting, or something that still exists only in my head.
Today: The best album of 2009. I figure that’s as good a place to start as any.
That album is Far by the wonderful Miss Regina Spektor. Maybe it’s premature to call my best-of list in October. Fair statement. But appending a “… so far” to the end of the descriptor feels just as dodgy. That’d imply that I thought an even greater set of songs might come along in the next 3 months or so. I find that quite unlikely.
Every song on the disc is pleasant enough to freeze a body in front of the stereo the first time they hear it. There are at least 3 songs on this album (Folding Chair, Blue Lips, Laughing With) that are tackle-the-person-next-to-you-and-force-your-headphones-onto-their-ears good. If you’d like to avoid the potential rug-burn or scruffed-up hair from that situation, please act preemptively listen to it this instant.
