Dark Liquid

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game I’m playing in is nuts. My character, Albrecht, started off as a lowly thug before slowly progressing into the career of an interrogator and from there into the careers of a physician.

During his life he’s made dodgy deals, been tortured and hideously scarred as a result, caught disfiguring diseases and survived, tortured people, plotted and carried out revenge and more recently got into quite an adventure indeed.

The party was sent to assassinate someone in the Chaos Dwarf empire and on the way we were confronted by a slaving band. Before they could get close enough to see us properly we decided to fake being a slave band, with me playing. The role of slaver and putting the rest of the group in chains (bar two, who would be my guards). Anyway, meeting with the slavers, they had a much larger group and so afraid we’d all get captured (assuming no honour amongst slavers) I sold the chained up party members into slavery for a tidy profit and got myself a ride to the city. The plan was to steal them back or buy them back later at the city where it was arguably safer, at least when it came to being grabbed and forced into slavery.

Anyway, what happened next was that it became clear I’d been ripped off selling my friends and I had no chance of buying them back with my meagre sums of cash. So, gambling time!

Through gambling, first in a bar with dice games, and later at the gladatorial arena, I managed to amass 27 million gold pieces! With that seed fund, I started looking into hiring some assassins to do our mission for us, after all this was a city of evil people and I expected assassins and assassinations were common place. Eventually, through setting up various meetups, dead drops and other indirect communications channels, I managed to get a clan of assassins to work for me on retainer. However, as proof I was serious, they wanted me to kill someone – another party member, one of my ‘guards’ that had been sticking his mode into fights that didn’t concern him and had consequently killed some guys from the clan. They’d tried to kill him themselves but so far failed. So, I found someone that looked similar, had him killed and roughed up enough so it’d be hard to say the differences weren’t from injuries and sent his head to the assassins. Not pleasant, I know, but I assumed everyone in thus city was a bastard slaver or warmonger it evil in some way so I had no qualms about it. Anyway, we still needed to make the party member disappear, so being a trained surgeon and physician, I did some face surgery. After some botched attempts that nearly left him insane, he ended up looking different, if a little messed up.

Now, during my gambling I’d made friends with a hobgoblin that had a lot of money and seemed well connected. I’d heard some of my friends were sold to the gladatorial arena and through thus hobgoblin learnt they were going face ogre and likely die. Using charm and gambling prowess, I convinced him to enter into a plan with me to deliberately leak info that the ogre were the next challengers (in order to manipulate the odds at the bookies) and to get some poisoned weapons over to the slaves. That way we could place a bet with huge odds against with a good chance at winning and making a tasty profit.

It worked and at 3000-1 and a 1 million hold bet, I came away with 3 billion gold. Cha-ching! I also bumped into another party member at the arena and so got to talking with her owner. Eventually we made a business deal for me to acquire slaves (i’d used some trepanning I’d done previously on a dwarvish party member as evidence of my Dwarf pacification techniques, dwarfs being highly prized slaves) and got myself a massive ship and crew for a 10 million gold investment. I also offered to buy the slave back from him, using the story I’d need obedient empire stock, as I could hardly show up in the empire with a bunch of dark elves on my crew and so would need a fake crew for show whilst in port. Unfortunately, he wasn’t her owner, only her master, and so I had to go to the owner to buy her back. To make it seem legitimate I bought all the empire slaves they guy had (he only had two) and as luck would have it, the other slave turned out to be a spy sent by the same people who sent us. Turned out that the people we were sent to kill were some of the mist powerful people in the world and we had no chance – basically we’d been sent to die – deliberately – our boss being an agent for dark powers previously unbeknownst to us. He also let it be known that there was a hut out on all of us and that my gambling buddy was their boss so all my assassination plans were in ruins. Luckily their retainer hadn’t been paid yet for thus month! Anyway, with new slaves in tow, I decided it was time to leave before we for killed.

I’d previously set up a deal to fund development if new battle mechs in exchange for the arena’s prized fighters (my friends that beat the ogres) but with my new timetable I couldn’t wait. I sent one if my guards to bribe/buy the slaves with 200 million gold and another with the same amount to buy assorted slaves and weaponry. In the meantime, I went to the bank, emptied my accounts and spent 500 million on getting buying warehouses full of weapons at the five and as many orc slaves for dock hands as possible.

Everything went smoothly and so I had the guard with slaves separate out the humans and bring them plus some weapons to the ship whilst leaving the 20 thousand goblin and orc slaves left over to be free at the opposite side of the city (and in charge if some wagons that happened to be full of weapons). We just made it the ship as the assassin clan came after us. I told my dock hands they were free and could help themselves to the warehouses and so the assassins were trapped between two armed riots of about 30-50 thousand slaves each. Quite the distraction to escape with. So everyone was saved, I saved 5000 human slaves and also made 1.8 billion gold. Also got a very, very fine ship (though I’ll need to replace the crew, though I’m sure my party plus 5000 freed slaves with access to weaponry can manage that).

All of this achieved with planning, manipulation, lying, gambling, murder and other business dealings with evil people – and I’m one of the good guys!

It’s stuff like this which is why roleplay games are awesome.

I play the odd game or two under Linux and some games really, really hate running on a dual-screen system (using Nvidia TwinView), Either getting the resolutions completely screwed or having their windows or fullscreens positioned on one screen or the other, but the content of those windows pushed to the centre of dual-desktop meaning half the game is missing. The same thing occasionally happens only with mouse input in these games, rather than the graphics, so I can’t move the mouse past the invisible divide.

Anyway, fed up with this and wanting a simple one-click solution I knocked up a shell script that I run from a button on my panel. First of all, I did a simple toggle with xrandr, but found I’d occasionally accidentally click it and switch res, annoying the hell out of me so I knocked up a slightly less automatic version. It uses zenity to give me a choice of one of two resolutions (a single screen one or my dual-screen one) and then uses xrandr to apply the changes. I would just use the Monitors app, but it complains about not supporting the driver and I just wanted something click and simple (the Monitors app is slow to start, plus that annoying not-supported dialogue adds an additional click).

Here is the script:

I’ve been ill now since August 2009. That’s 10 months or so, at time of writing. I’ve had pills and potions, diets, X-Rays, examinations by multiple consultants, a sigmoidoscopy and so far, nothing. No idea what it is.

The doctors are sticking to a diagnosis of IBS, which essentially means they don’t know either, IBS being a sort of catch-all term for any problem in that general area. The problems initially started as persistent diarrhoea, eventually though that subsided to be replaced with abdominal pain, which slowly grew worse and worse. My sides hurt, by lower abdomen hurts, just under my ribs hurt and my kidneys hurt. I’ve been taking codeine every 4 hours for almost 3 months or so now for the pain (it still hurts, but at least it hurts less) and I haven’t been able to sleep properly (even temazepam is having no effect whatsoever on my sleep patterns).

I’ve been away from work for months, working from home because travel is too painful, walking at any speed for any amount of time more than a few minutes become agony. I’ve not left the house in months except to go to a doctor or hospital appointment. Lifting things like a full 2l bottle or a kettle hurt. Hell, sometimes (depending on when I last took a painkiller) just pushing open the doors at home hurts.

As you might expect, this has caused all sorts of problems. Things aren’t ideal with work (and they have been incredibly helpful and understanding and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t kept them in the loop as much as I should have done, considering how good they’ve been about the whole situation) and I’m getting depressed by it all – being in pain all the time, being tired all the time and never going outside and not even being able to open a stubborn bottle for yourself tend to get you down after a while, especially when every single examination, doctor and consultant say there is nothing wrong as far as they can tell and slap me with a meaningless IBS label which does not help you at all.

I’m just tired, both figuratively and literally. I just want it to end.

So this year there is another Barcamp in Bournemouth. For those unaware, barcamp bills itself as a ‘self-organising un-conference’. For anyone not familiar with that particular piece of geek parlance that basically means that people turn up and organise their own talks and schedule the only preorganised part of the ‘conference’ is usually the venue and sometimes the basic catering.

Anyway, yesterday was the first day of Barcamp Bournemouth 2, to start off I ran a small set of 1v1 games of Polarity and then afterwards went to an interesting talk on design and what it means and when copying the status quo isn’t design. Next I went to an interesting talk on concurrency and occam-pi and saw some cool demonstrations of the language and how the concurrency model worked.

Afterwards Lostprocess and I did a session introducing people to Dungeons & Dragons, we only had a small group of people interested but we had a cool game and people seemed to enjoy it. The rest of the night was spent playing Polarity and Werewolf. I’d never played werewolf before but is was a cool exercise in lying, manipulation, people-reading and social engineering. I managed the get killed off in both games I played but I lasted a fair while in both.

Suddenly it ended up being 2:30 and so it was time for bed!

Looking forwards to the rest of the barcamp today.

So I’ve been busy, busy, busy as usual and have once again neglected by blog. Shame on me.

Over the last month or so a few things have happened, I had my hospital appointment about this illness I’ve been having and that also turned up inconclusive so I have no idea what’s going on. Some more appointments in the future, some more samples and maybe they’ll eventually figure it out. A friend of mine suggested another possibility to the list – Fibromyalgia, which led me to look into Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I exhibit more or less all the symptoms of both of them, so that’s something to look into as well I suppose.

Last Thursday I went up to Newbury as part of work to work as staff at the Multiplay iSeries LAN-gaming event i39. It was pretty awesome and I am absolutely knackered now. While I was there I was mostly in charge of the food ordering system but I managed to get a few games of Teeworlds in. I’d discovered Teeworlds at the event and it is by far one of the most polished open-source games I have seen. It’s a sort of 2D Quake 3 with Kirby-style characters and grappling hooks. The atmosphere at the event was really great and there were some great things going on. I managed to end up on the main stage during the pub quiz, having Jesus chanted at me by a few hundred people – a bit of a step up from the random yobs yelling at me from cars It was all great fun though, even for me as someone who isn’t particularly a massive gamer. I think I might have gotten a little bored if I hadn’t been working a lot of the time though, purely because I’m not much of a gamer, though the various exhibitors had lots of cool things to do as well. Sadly I managed to miss out on most of the freebies since I was busy working during much of the giveaways.

I’ve also been trying to take a more active role in our democracy recently. Just know Dru and I watched the debate of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Commons live on the BBC parliament website while simultaneously following and contributing to the online commentary on twitter. I was saddened to see that our representatives decided that representing us during an important debate on an issue that effects thousands of people wasn’t important enough to bother showing up for. At points, we only had 10 or so MPs debating in there out of the 600 odd we have to represent us as a country. Unsurprisingly, it’s been pushed through to 2nd reading. Some of the MPs at the debate actually knew what they were talking about and some made good, reasons arguments from the pro-DEB Bill and against movement about pushing it back till after the election because of concerns about being given time to understand it and debate it properly. Now it will have about an hour or so tomorrow before it reaches the final stages before becoming law as I understand it.

As part of trying to be more involved I’ve been writing to my MP and contacting my local candidates for the election about their position on things. I’ve had a disappointing number of responses on the whole, some form-letters that while generally positive are vague enough to not really to commit to any affirmative action and also some good responses, such as the one from my local Lib Dem candidate about whole-heartedly agreeing with and supporting the Power2010 pledge, which I think contains some very important policies for overhauling our political system.

I think half the problem with the way politics work at the moment is down to a combination of ignorance and apathy. A lot of people don’t feel represented or feel their voices are otherwise unheard and so don’t bother to join the debate at all. Some people feel that any choice is a bad one and so abstain entirely. I’ve decided that it’s mistake to act like that. Democracy relies on participation and it’s each and every one of ours responsibility to participate, not only to make our own voices heard, but to let those people that represent us know what we think. Our representatives can hardly represent us if they don’t know what we want and so we need to make ourselves heard by engaging with them. People are disillusioned with MPs and parties because they feel they only serve their own interests and that of lobbyists but if we don’t make them aware of their responsibilities to us and our opinions, they have no voices to listen to by which to form their policies other than the lobbyists and what not that are left the only ones speaking.

To owe it to ourselves and each other to make public opinion heard otherwise we only have ourselves to blame when politicians become the mouthpieces of lobbyists and specific, minority interests that don’t reflect the overall public opinion.

So, the doctor yesterday didn’t exactly have any answers about this condition of mine. I have many of the symptoms of IBS and I’m now on a course of pills to deal with that in the hopes that’s what I have. However, I have a bunch of additional symptoms that are somewhat concerning even though all my tests so far have shown no issues so I’m getting referred to a consultant. Hopefully these pills will sort me out but if not at least there is this consultant to hopefully fix me in the future.

Things have been crazy busy recently but I seem to finally be getting on top of things. Been having fun dealing with git-svn – I’ve been using git locally and syncing to an svn server for coding at work and I’ve found it generally quite nice though working out how to do merges between branches that are tracking svn branches is a bit of an arse. I think I need to be looking at rebase for pulling changes from master (which is tracking trunk on svn) into my development branch (that’s tracking a dev branch on svn) but I’m having issues doing so, which has been annoying and confusing to say the least. I need to experiment more I guess. I wish I was just using a pure git setup but oh well.

I’m also writing this on my phone using the new wordpress android app. It seems quite nice so far, reasonable interface and generally gets out of your way. I also have been using GDocs for syncing with google docs which has been useful. Nice to have a note taking, document writing app that can do that well.

I saw the Sonic 4 trailer the other day and wow, everything I could want about a classic platform game brought to the present day. I generally don’t enjoy modern games and am somewhat indifferent about them. Sonic 3 & Knuckles was probably the last truly great sonic game and I’ve glad to see a return to the roots of the franchise. This is what sonic is about, not this bullshit 3D action games with bad stories and crappy characters. Sonic 4 looks like it is back to focussing on what Sonic games shoulfd be all about – fluidity of movement and speed. Momentum, even. I can pick up Sonic 3 & Knuckles any time and enjoy it like I did the first time around. There are few, few games nowadays I can do the same with.

I feel a little sad because, working at a company that is heavily focused on multiplayer PC gaming, I feel a little off. I’m just not interested in the latest FPS, regardless of the awesome features and enhanced tactics, etc. They all boil down to the same thing for me and I’ve just got bored of the genre. Quake 1 was the last FPS I truly enjoyed and I still have fond memories of it, back when I used to write maps and mods like crazy for it. Quake 3 is fun, and I occasionally play on Quake Live to relive those days but it just doesn’t have the same charm Q1 did.

Final Fantasy VIII was released on the PSN today and so I will be getting that most likely. I enjoy the Final Fantasy games and it is one of the few franchises I’ve found I actually enjoyed the transition from 2D to 3D of. Speaking of PSN, I find I enjoy playing Fat Princess quite a lot. It’s fun, cute and simple, while still having enough bite for it to not be an entirely throwaway casual experience. It’s lightheartedness also makes it easy to pick up or put down whenever you like though and I think that ability to easily engage or disengage with a game is a key feature for any modern game, sadly most in my opinion require more of a long term commitment just to play effectively. I want the challenge to be one of skill, not of who can slog the most hours. Conversely, I also find many games far too short, which is why I tend to stick to RPGs. I can sink easily 70 hours into a quality RPG because of the rich world and storyline combined with the ways battles work and are paced. In most other games I tend to complete them too soon for my liking and end up feeling disappointed. Either that or I end up getting frustrated when games ruin the difficulty curve to force you to grind or otherwise drastically change your play style without warning in order to inflate the hours you need to play. I’m not much of a gamer, and what little gaming I do tends to be console based these days, much like in my youth. PCs are patently superior for certain games such as RTS and FPS games but there are just not enough decent ones that introduce something new enough and interesting enough to make it worth the effort to deal with both Windows and the eternal hardware arms race that seems to exist. I don’t have the money to spend on components I will only use occasionally and need to be replaced when broken. My PS3 is an appliance I can replace relatively easily, it’s convenient. I just can’t be bothered with dealing with things on a PC.

I tend to enjoy more indie/non-mainstream things nowadays as well I find. My music tastes are eclectic and spread pretty wide and I’m open to new things. I enjoy playing oddball, often unheard of roleplaying games and the odd weird indie computer game. I like experiencing the new ideas and expanded boundaries people are creating when making massive profit from majority markets isn’t a primary concern. I think that, most of all, is why I generally play fewer games, especially from the FPS genre, nowadays.

I really need to work on mmy games programming course but I still have next to no spare time, sadly. I hate having a bunch of ideas in my head and no way to express them. I also need to get back into writing. Between doing this judging on protagonize and work I’ve had little time for anything else. Many ideas that need releasing there too. The DRYH game on Google Wave is going well, it’s very enjoyable. The D&D I’m playing on there as well is quite good, though it’s progressing a little slowly. Hopefully things will pick up soon though.

Only a few weeks till Dru and I will be in Canada. I’m really looking forwards to it. I need a holiday and some time to just hang with my wife and my friends so this will be a welcome break.

Anyway, that concludes this rambling test of WordPress for android.

Well, it’s been a while since my last post. What’s been happening over this last month?

Well, I’ve been ill – still. For the last six months or so I’ve had stomach cramps and generally unpleasant gastrointestinal issues which have come and gone and they’ve been rearing their ugly ahead again this month. I’ve had bloodtests and given various samples and what not so hopefully they can figure out what it is and get me sorted.

In happier news, I’m enjoying the new job. Multiplay is a cool place to work, full of fun people and interesting projects. Sometimes I get the odd surprise when I realise just how big they really are, having not had much experience working for large companies wheeling and dealing with heavyweights in the gaming industry. It’s pretty exciting and even though it’s a complete arse to get there, it’s totally worth it. That said, I will be so glad when I can drive there. This commute as it stands is slowly killing me. At least everyone there is really understanding about the commute, my various ailments and so working from home is an option, though I try not to take advantage of it too often because I feel bad shuttered off at home and miss out on the working atmosphere in the office.

Which leads me on to the driving. So far, so good. No major incidents as of yet, no remnants of children to be scraped off the instructors car quite yet. It’s been interesting, I started off my first lesson on hills, my second lesson was on ice and in my last lesson I had the pleasure of being on a steep hill I couldn’t see over, when two buses came over all while I had a white van man right behind me. Considering this was my first time ever on roads with other road users, this was mildly concerning and I screwed up a little, but not so badly anything bad happened. To me shame the instructor (who is a very nice woman working under the AA) had to intervene a bit on that particular incident, but not to worry, it’s early days yet. The main issue I find I have with driving is getting feedback from the pedals. My feet are often pretty numb and so I find it hard to tell whether I’m pushing down on them or not. Gentle pressure on things like the accelerator I can’t feel at all and so I have to judge by ear. It also doesn’t help that my giant clown feet in my huge boots keep catching on the footwell when pressing/depressing the clutch. Hopefully I’m going to get some trainers at some point which should alleviate some of those issues.

The AA website is a bit shit and makes paying people a bit of an arse. You’d think something like that would be fairly important. I might have to resort to cheques or something.

At the end of February Dru and I are heading over to Canada to stay with our good friend Asheyna, whom we met on Protagonize. Collaborative writing, bringing people together – NickB should use that as a sickeningly cheesy tag line I’m really looking forwards to it, I could do with a holiday, this commute and busy period at work has taken it out of me a bit. It’s odd, I never really saw myself as the kind of person who needs a break from work. I’ve always enjoyed what I do and so holidays have mostly been “you don’t have to come in” days to me, rather than a respite from working. With this commute though, that has changed which makes me feel a little sad. Something else that I find mildly depressing is that I rarely do any coding outside of work any more. Admittedly, I rarely do much of anything outside of work at the moment – I get up at 0530, spend and hour getting ready then get to the train station for 0711 to reach Southampton by 0800 where I catch a bus to the ferry terminal for 0810 where I catch a ferry at 0835 to reach Hythe by 0855 where I then get a lift into work. Then I do the whole thing in reverse, starting at 1800 and arriving home at around 2030. That leaves me barely any time to do anything and the weekends are spent mostly recovering on lack of sleep so thinking isn’t high on my list of pursuits, usually I vegetate to mindless internet browsing, watching TV and the occasional PS3 game session because I’m just too exhausted for anything else.

Now, that sounds a lot worse than it is. It’s not like I’m zombified the entire time, but I am sufficiently tired that it’s just hard to do anything that I want to do, because I never feel very ‘fresh’ mentally. Squeezing in a Warhammer fantasy roleplay on Thursdays and a D&D 4th Edition on Sundays is taxing enough, but I’m glad I do them, if I did nothing at all every night I’d go insane. Monday nights on the G3 Show are becoming problematic for me at the moment. Admittedly, this is mostly due to the poor performance of the train system. The weather recently has thrown a complete spanner in the works and it takes them forever to fix anything. To their credit though, I’ve found SouthWest Trains’ twitter information feed very helpful and it’s been nice to actually know I’m going to be late before hand so I can give people warning or decide to work from home.

Speaking of roleplays, I’ve decided to fulfil my ambition to play a Don’t Rest Your head game by playing it from the other side of the screen as a GM. Normally I don’t GM very much, it’s both a lot of work and I don’t like my game-running style meshes well with a lot of my players, at least not to my observations, which whether it actually is the case or not still demoralises me enough to make most of my games fail miserably. However, these Don’t rest Your Head games I’m running are different for two reason. Firstly, Don’t Rest Your head is an awesome systems that seems likes it was designed for the exact kind of narrative control I like to use, with an awesome setting to boot. Secondly, I’m running the games on Google Wave for players I’ve never played with before. Running it in a non-real-time way gives me time to perfect things and think ahead, so there isn’t so much pressure to plan ahead before each game or on improvising quickly during a session. So far, I’ve found Google Wave works very much like running a game on a forum or site like RPoL.net is. The real-time aspects are useful and I plan on writing some gadgets to help with things like dice rolls in the Don’t Rest Your Head format, which should be nice. All my players are also from Protagonize. That site is slowly becoming the center of my internet life. Don’t rest Your Head is such an awesome system and setting, I highly recommend it. I also bought the supplement Don’t Lose Your Mind which has some really awesome Madness talents. I strongly urge you to check out DRYH and DLYM at Evil Hat. You can buy them in the UK without paying crazy international delivery prices from Leisure Games. I’m also playing in a D&D 4th Edition game on there

Speaking of Protagonize.com, I volunteered my services as a judge in the current unofficial poetry tournament. It’s been pretty fun and I’ve tried to make a real effort to give some good critique on each poem, though this last found has suffered a bit due to being busy at work. I’ve had some nice feedback on my feedback – it’s always nice to be appreciated.

February looks like it’s going to be yet another busy and interesting month. I’m looking forwards to Canana and meeting Asheyna in person and hopefully some of my other friends from Protagonize that happen to live in Vancouver including NickB himself.

And that’s this last month or so.

I’ve switched to using Chrome recently as my browser of choice but recently came across a rather annoying problem with it.

I was writing a new chapter of a story on Protagonize and didn’t notice that the server migration they were doing happened to star during the course of my writing. I click submit and pow, my work was gone as the site didn’t exist any more. I thought I might have lost it but luckily Chrome still had it and tried to repost it every time I did a refresh. However, I had no way of getting the text out of Chrome as it would not display the original text entry form. Crap. I had two choice, either wait until the migration was complete or lose my work.

I decided to wait and the migration went through fine but one last problem! The server had changed IP address and none of the DNS had updated yet! I set up an entry in my hosts file expecting Chrome to honour it but it ignored it. Oh noes!

So, I did what any self-respecting geek would do, set up my own DNS server, changed my computer to use that as it’s primary DNS and had that DNS server use my hosts file. That way Chrome was unknowingly using my hosts file and all was well. I saved my story chapter and got it posted. Geek solutions for the win!

Here is how I did it (obviously this is only applicable to Linux, Ubuntu Karmic in my specific case):

# edited /etc/hosts and added the new protagonize DNS entry
sudo aptitude install dnsmasq
# edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and added the line: listen-address=127.0.0.1
/etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
# edit /etc/resolv.conf and added this line as the first nameserver entry: nameserver 127.0.0.1

I also decided I wanted to keep using dnsmasq as a local DNS cache (for faster DNS queries and dealing with evil issues like this) so I added an entry to my

/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

file (which controls what happens when your computer gets new network details automatically via DHCP, which is what I use on my network) to ensure it updated the

/etc/resolve.conf

with the entry for the local DNS cache. I did this by adding the line

prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

This year, like every other, I’ve been throwing myself at NaNoWriMo, desperately trying to squeeze out 50000 words of pure novelly goodness. Every year, I’ve failed, usually even before I reach the half way mark. This year however, I finally did it.

I won NaNoWriMo!

I’m completely chuffed. it’s a story I’ve wanted to write for ages even even though this particular revision of it is absolutely terrible, I’m proud to have finally completed it none-the-less. I may edit it come March in NaNoEdMo but for now I’m just blown away to have achieved it at all.

If you feel the need to read a piece of utterly terrible literature that emerged from some in-depth world-building combined with basically no story planning whatsoever, then you can find the story on Protagonize.com. It’s called Triad: Hath Three Parts Wrought, and it’s a piece of shit but I love it

Yesterday evening (and most of the very early morning today) we had a party round Lorcian’s new flat as a sort of belated house warming. We did a massive radio show special for around 5 hours or so on TGR with several of the other GRN DJs that came down to visit. We had a laugh, everyone got very drunk and we played highly disturbing, homoerotic Japanese muscle flexing games on the Wii (which I apparently have a knack for, I held the highest score of the night!)

In other news, I’ve completed a whole month at Multiplay! It’s been awesome and I’m really enjoying myself there. There been some minor technical hiccups since switching from developing on a Mac to using Linux (everyone else there is using Windows but I’d literally go insane if I had to) but I feel I’m really starting to come into my role there and hopefully things will progress a bit faster now that I’ve found my feet. I still miss Textmate and any of the alternatives I’ve tried have various issues. At the moment I’m using netbeans, but it’s terribly slow when doing code completion after having been running for a few hours, especially on a large codebase like I’m working on. I’d like to try the E text editor but it’s been an arse trying to compile it under Linux on Ubuntu Karmic. I might try running the Windows version with WINE, though I don’t fancy relying on a non-native piece of kit for my primary editor.

I’ve recently switched to using the Chrome browser daily builds from the karmic ppa and damn, it’s crazy fast. I am astonished at how fast it runs and for now it’s become my primary browser. It really makes the web an entirely different place, the difference is that much.

So yes, it’s been an interesting month. Rubbish and filth are piled high where both Dru and I have been ignoring chores, housework or basic human hygiene in lieu of writing as much as we can in any spare our we have so we’ll have some interesting times ahead but all I can think of now is how awesome it is to have finally won NaNoWriMo.

Hell yes.

Things have been up, down, left, right (a and start) and any which way else. It’s been hectic, let me tell you.

I’m starting my new job in a few days and am consequently filled with both excitement and apprehension. It will cost me about 10 times as much as my commute costs now to get there each month, which will probably end up actually costing me money, even given the extra pay, initially. The commute is quite long as well and while I’m confident I can do it without a doubt (I’ve deliberately been waking up early and going to bed late to acclimatise myself to the longer hours due to travel) I can’t say I’m perfectly happy about it, mostly due to not knowing the route very well have only done it end-to-end once. Also, I’ve not had much time to practice or find out additional information because annoyingly I’ve been very busy the whole of the time since I was offered the position and haven’t been able to do any research, such as whether or not I can buy a season ticket on the Hythe Ferry.

I’m still pretty cut up about leaving SonicIQ. It was my first full time job and the first job of any kind where I was paid to do what I love, so it holds a special place for me. I’ve wanted to help it grow and become something more and invested a lot of myself in it so leaving it behind is a bit of a blow, especially since the only reason I was looking initially was out of fear the company would fail during the recession. This appears to not be the case any more – as my new job approaches we seem to be getting busier and busier. Typical really. However, I have no regrets. Multiplay looks like it’s just as awesome a place to work as SonicIQ is and I’m excited about starting there, the reduction in responsibility (I wont be managing several servers anymore as far as I’m aware) and the increase in pay helps too. Still I can’t help but feel a little bit bad about the whole situation but oh well, life must go on.

In other news, the last ever LUGRadio Live was awesome, as was OggCamp that followed the day after. Hanging out with a bunch of geeks and learning about cool projects and other things for 2 days straight is about as awesome as it gets. Managed to get some hacking in on some google wave gadgets despite the dodgy wireless.

I probably shouldn’t have gone. A few hours before we left, I went to pick up my new bike. As part of the commute to the new job I will be cycling and not currently owning a bike I’d purchased one at Halfords and was going to pick it up. I haven’t ridden a bike in quite a while, perhaps as much 10 years, so I’m a little rusty as you might expect. Anyway, I grabbed my bike and was a little wobbly at first as I got used to it again but was fine after about 5 minutes. 10 minutes into my journey home though I had quite a bad accident. I basically decided to go down a steep hill, a bad decision by itself but compounded by the fact the hill was coated entirely in wet leaves. Thin road tyre + wet-leaves + 40-ish degree decline hill + me going faster than I probably should with super-sensitive brakes = FAIL.

I lost control and hit the ground. I don’t remember the impact and think I may have passed out for a second or two but I remember skidding down the hill on my side for about 2 or so meters and feeling very dizzy and sick. It was quite lucky really as any slower and my fall would have curved me into the road down the hill where two cars were right behind me. Any faster and I’d have slide into the two lanes of busy traffic at the bottom of the hill. I guess you have to see the bright side in these sort of things. I picked myself up but had to stop shortly and sit down lest I faint. I had a mild concussion and was seeing stars but generally fine. Some nasty scrapes that by now are mostly healed and my keychain was terribly bent so I guess I fell on it with some force. The bike was looking trashed at that point, one brake handle was screwed up, the rear gear assembly was poking into the spokes and the chain was going back on. I was too out of it to do much about it so after a sit down I walked the bike the rest of the way home.

10 minutes of owning it and I’d almost killed myself and probably cost myself a lot of money for repairs. Bloody fantastic. This didn’t exactly inspire me with confidence for this commute I was to be undertaking.

Luckily my friend lostprocess fixed the gear assembly partially by bending it back into place and my brother-in-law Owen applied his epic handiwork skills to fixing the rest of it. It’s more or less fine now, bar some scrapes. I feel nervous going down even the faintest slope though. The bike goes incredibly fast down even the most shallow of slopes under no power but gravity itself. I need to practice my braking more.

After that we needed to head up to Wolverhampton for LUGRadio so we left almost immediately, opting not to go to A&E as I was mostly feeling fine by then. However, being out of it I managed to forget my wallet. Luckily I didn’t need it to check into the hotel. Dru managed to forget her money as well when we went out after arriving at the hotel (which was very nice) so we had to borrow stuff from lostprocess, bytey and darksatana. Despite the seemingly unending chain of fail the weekend was awesome, so that was a plus.

I’m apprehensive about NaNoWriMo this year. I’ve done zero planning or prep work as I’ve been too busy, I’m writing a sci-fi romance and I’ve never really been one to read romance let alone write it. With the new job and the long commute I’ll have even less time to complete it than usual. Considering I’ve failed every year til now and those years were not quite as hectic I don’t see this ending well.

One final random thing before I go. I was composing a poem/song on the way to work in a lullaby-esque style about a man who murder/suicides with his baby son because his wife died during childbirth and he resents him for it. I’ve entirely forgotten everything about it except the tune now, annoyingly. Cheerful mornings as always for me