Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I have an evil little grin, usually paired with an impolite cackle, and I find myself using them both fairly often.

Addicting flash game like Pingu.

My friend Dave Szulborski‘s book was released today – check it out: This is Not a Game – A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming. He honored me by asking if I would contribute a piece to it, which I happily did. Being a puppetmaster for Dread House was insanely fun. I only wish I could figure out a way to do that full-time and get paid for it. If I could choose any career, I think that would be it. It’s what I want to do when I grow up.

I got my garnet set into a ring. The stone changes from red to purple to blue to teal to green depending on the light source. Jewelry is so much fun. I think I’m going to set up a piggybank and put my extra change into it for future purchases.

Tomorrow my earrings should be ready. A couple of years ago Hub took a tennis bracelet that was left to me by my grandmother in to be lengthened, but it ended up being too big, so I took it in and asked my jeweler to shorten it. He’s going to set the little diamonds that are taken out into stud earrings. The nice part is that there are 6 extra diamonds, so there will be three pairs. One for me, one for each daughter. If we have any more daughters, I guess I’ll have to give my pair up. Since my health insurance doesn’t cover pregnancy and I am (even three years later) still traumatized from my second daughter’s delivery, there’s nothing on the baby radar at the moment.

After months of a dry spell in regards to beta testing, suddenly I have three games I’m working on! I’ve been beta testing computer games since 2000. Usually they are games being ported over from PC versions to the Macintosh. It’s not for pay, but most of the time I receive a boxed copy of the final product once it’s out in stores. A hobby where my nitpicking comes in handy. Although it seems like being able to play games before they’re released sounds like everyone’s dream, it’s not always idyllic. Most of the time something’s broken. Lots of the time I’ll spend a few hours testing a game, and it will crash and lose my saved game, so I have to start over from scratch. I’m also constantly pausing to write down notes, or trying to do things that will “break” it. Not as glamorous as it sounds, but I enjoy it!

Yes, I am alive! I’ve been horribly busy lately and my time has been taken up with two major projects:

Gunstock was a 3 day shooting event just east of Waco that I did a great deal of planning on and helped to run.

Dread House was an Alternate Reality Game that 5 other people and I put on over the course of several months. We started planning in March, launched it in July, and wrapped it today. It was an incredible experience and I was so fortunate to work with the talented people behind the scenes. I got to practice my web design skills (I designed the pages here, here, here, and here) and writing skills (like the stories on here). I’m already going a little nuts without a project to do.

Anyway, so I’m around, just been underground and swamped.

I jump through hoops to get rid of the comment spammers and then today I get 90 trackback spams. Sheesh. So I’ve renamed my trackback script, and it won’t work anymore. Spammers suck the joy right out of life.

Go check out ARGN, lots of exciting news in the last week!

Rumors of the demise of both Acheron and my cell phone may have been highly exaggerated.

Film at 11.

It wasn’t enough that Acheron died and Sprint was mean to me, no. Now I tried running the updater on my Treo 300 and it died in the middle of flashing the ROM, and now the phone is completely and utterly dead and worthless. Now I get to arm-wrestle with Sprint once more for a replacement.

We are not a happy camper.

Well, I’m in serious mourning. After 3 great weeks of play, it looks like Acheron has shut down. There’s a new Matrix-based ARG that popped up on October 1st, but holy carp, it’s a huge and elaborate production and I have a feeling the pace is going to move too quickly for me to keep up.

My only hope is that this is a temporary glitch in Acheron (or even part of the plot), but it’s a slim hope. Now what in the hell am I going to obsess on?

I’ve been pretty quiet lately… the new game that I’ve been waiting on, Acheron, started the other day with a bang, and there’s this miserable awful devilish puzzle that nobody seems to be able to figure out. So yeah, I’m obsessing.

The girls have been completely at each others’ throats for the past few days, and I have no idea why. The constant fighting, screaming, and thud of fist against flesh has been tattooed into my brain.

In happier news, a friend is painting my AR-15 bubblegum pink and I think it’s beautiful. I was considering a Barbie logo, with a little daisy to dot the ‘i’, but thought that might be too much.

I’m thinking about stopping work on the puzzle and doing something more enjoyable, like coating myself with honey and lying on an ant hill.