The Nathanomicon

Big Move

2012-01-15T12:32:00.000-07:00

Despite my best intentions, I haven't had the opportunity to update my blog for a while. The reason being, we made a huge move.

We now live in Austin, Texas. I work for KingsIsle Entertainment as a Lead Designer on Wizard101. I can't tell you how exciting this is. Ever since I started making games professionally, I've wanted to be working on a role-playing game. And now I get to work on a great one.

The move to Austin was a huge move. We're getting settled in, and I'm working on getting into a new routine both at work and at home. It may be a little rocky for a while, but I promise I'll start posting more stuff here in the near future. I have several more short stories to post, and I mean to start writing again.

Short Story 003 - Terra Immortalis Story - The Order of the Kirisau

2011-09-19T15:26:00.000-06:00

Another of the short stories I wrote for my role-playing game Terra Immortalis.

The Order of the Kirisau

His eyes travelled to the gray Mantii above the roaring fire. Its carapace was flawless, a shining chitinous armor that danced with the reflected orange glow of the flames crackling beneath it. The thing must have stood as tall as a man, but twice as long. The razor-edged serrations along its forearms gleamed in the firelight. Its compound eyes stared out in a shivering gaze perfectly preserved in its death.

How had Dolomy done it? Staloph wondered, taking another swallow of the rich ale in his stein.

The renowned knight Dolomy had travelled into the lands south of Redclaw, into the daunting territory of the Mantii, where few if any ever returned to tell the tale. The Mantii were rumored to possess but one mind among their race, and they all knew what each experienced. Yet the knight from the Order of the Kirisau had returned with his trophy. Intact. No indication of sword-mark or arrow having penetrated the creature's armored exoskeleton.

How am I to top that? the young man wondered further. How am I to top any one of dozens of similar feats?

He turned his back to the flames roaring in the hearth and looked out over the grand Hall of the Kirisau, the home of his order here in the land of Fauna. It was an impressive structure, both inside and out. The only windows lined the very tops of the walls, allowing ample wall space for the vast arrays of trophies and tokens. It was still fairly dark, as the sun had risen but a short time ago, and the day was barely beginning. Only the fire in the massive hearth cast sufficient light by which to see. There was still a bit of a haze from the previous evening’s pipe smoke, for the farewell party, and the spiced smell of Jade tobacco still lingered. The scent added a bit of mystery to one of the city's most beautiful and imposing buildings. It was a hall of great renown throughout the East. The Kirisau were the best of the Monster Slayers in the entirety of Charon. And he was their youngest member.

A small smile played across Staloph's mouth as he looked at the head over the entranceway. A lavender-scaled head of a Kirisau gazed back at him, fearsome and formidable, even in death. That was his father's greatest trophy. His father, the mighty and renowned Stanol, whose exploits were lavishly recounted in numerous volumes of the order's history. The shelves of accounts and tales lined the walls of the room, below the order's many trophies.

Staloph gazed at the Kraa battle standards (some of them his own, how he had gained entrance into the order), the stuffed Grotterlings, the tail of a Crichter, a maw from a young Gnawer, mounted heads, stuffed bodies, weapons and shields from numerous foe. And their greatest trophy of all, the great Kirisau skull seated over the Hallmaster's throne. Three men could hardly lift the relic. He shivered at the thought that such fearsome creatures had ever roamed the land he knew.

If he had been any other member of the order, he would have felt that he had earned his place among this elite of elites, this order of knights. His conquests against the war bands of the Kraa were no small feat. But he wasn't any other member. He was the son of Stanol, one of the greatest among them. And though none of the other knights would say it directly, he saw in the eyes of many who felt that his father's merits had contributed greatly to Staloph’s acceptance into the order. He knew it was foolish to think so, but he had to prove himself, to step out from under his father's shadow. For that, the farewell party had been thrown.

The outer door opened and another entered.

"Greetings, young knight," the deep voice echoed through the stillness of the room. It issued from the throat of an imposing Barol, outfitted in Charon Half-Plate Armor adorned with sigils and crests. Black leather creaked beneath the high-polished metal plates, and his claws clicked across the tile floor.

"Good morn, Garilus," Staloph greeting, a genuine smile on his lips. "I take it you are to join me after all?"

The Barol nodded, a smile also tugging at his normally stern visage. Garilus stood a full head taller than the young human, who was not small himself. Garilus was one of the order's most loved members. The Barol, it seemed, had seen most of the surface of Charon during his years. He was one of the older members of the order, having been in these halls for nearly forty years. His tan fur was graying slightly, contrasting with the bright maroons and teals of his fur-dyed tattoos. But, at times, it was Garilus's gaze that brought him the most attention. Many claimed that his eyes had seen much more than his years could account.

Staloph was one of the few in the Barol's lifetime who knew exactly how old the knight was. Garilus was Immortal, and the young human knew the knight had seen nearly four centuries pass.

"The preparations are almost complete, my friend. We will be able to depart within the hour." He paused, and his deep voice grew a little softer. "You know that no one would fault you if we were to change our itinerary. There are other expeditions we could undertake."

The same argument, but he also knew that Garilus didn't really expect him to change his mind. A nod and a small smile were his only answer. They stood in silence for a few moments, lost in their thoughts.

Staloph knew that Garilus was not only one of the Kirisau's more accomplished knights, he was also a member of the legendary Order of Catompic, an order of knights who were all Immortal. The fact that Garilus had revealed his secret to the young man only emphasized his esteem of Staloph's character. Most Immortals lived in fear that their nature would be revealed. When found, many Immortals were killed. Superstitions and folklore contended that they sucked the life away from those around them, but Staloph knew the fallacy of all this. And if the Immortal were to perhaps leech away a few days of his life's expectancy, it was a small price to pay for the pleasure of his company.

A log popped in the hearth, the blaze intensifying suddenly before sinking down once again to its comforting warmth. Garilus stretched his clawed hands out towards the fire, warming the hands that had seen nearly so many years of battle and exploration.

"Your father is very proud of you, you know," Garilus said. "I'm sure he won't tell you himself, but he relayed it to me. He thinks that, in the years to come, his name will be eclipsed by your own, and he will no longer be known as a great knight, but as the man that trained you in your youth."

Staloph snorted. "You have no need of flattery, Garilus. I have few reservations of our expedition."

Garilus looked at the young man seriously. The raven-black hair and equally dark eyes were a mirror of Stanol's own. The young man was even beginning to gray at the temples, exactly as his father had thirty years earlier. And the resemblance went beyond facial features. Stanol was a man of integrity and courage, one of a rare breed upon whom one could place their trust. Hard found in a world where most concentrated solely upon survival.

"You should, my friend. This is no light undertaking we're on." And that was the truth. They were to meet a party of ten strong from the Knighthood Order of the Cordovans, in Smierthin. From there, they were to go towards Moonfall. No one else, from either order of knights, nor from the Order of Catompic, had returned from such an expedition. "Your father himself charged me to look after you. He is terribly concerned for your safety."

Staloph snorted again, disbelieving, but the Barol continued. "He told me he wished his accomplishments hadn't been so grand, for your burden is now that much greater."

The man looked at the Immortal knight beside him, trying to determine his motives. Finally, he smiled and placed his arm on the Barol's shoulder and placed his empty stein upon a table near the fire. "Let us go, Garilus. We have much ahead of us. And you will not have much need to watch over me. My father taught me well enough. As I recall, it was I who saved you from the Kraa war chieftain."

"What?" Garilus cried indignantly. "Saved me..?"

"We must be off, my old friend. Are you sure your old bones can manage the trip?"

"Now you go too far," the Barol grumbled, adjusting the sword at his hip as he followed Staloph outside. "Old bones indeed. You'll be happy to have these old bones along once we get near Moonfall."

Staloph's laughter echoed behind them as they left, ringing in the hall among the trophies after the door had shut.

What I'm Playing

2011-09-13T12:12:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd just mention a few of the games I'm currently playing. Surprisingly, the majority of my game-playing is on my iPod recently. In no meaningful order, here they are:

Ninja Fishing

This game is great to kill a few minutes at a time. The kids loved to play it too. Simple to play, fun, the art style is great. I definitely got my dollar's worth out of the game.

CityVille Hometown

Ah, CityVille. I successfully quit playing the Facebook version of the game. The relentless spamming to add friends, buy energy, etc. was too much to enjoy. The iOS app is much more enjoyable. It's a shorter experience, for sure. I wish I could just buy the game in order to get more energy at my disposal, but at least I'm not hit over the head with being asked to buy more. And I spend some time on this one every day, so it can't be too bad.

Doodle God

I wish I could tell you why I love this game so much. It is literally nothing more than tapping two icons to mix them together to make something new. But the combinations are fun, the pacing is great, and I think it just completes some happy part of my OCD-ness that makes me want to find all those combinations.

Ascension

I love the physical card game of Ascension, and this is a decent port of the game to the iOS system. It definitely could use wifi multiplayer, especially given how much it costs, but I'll play a couple games before going to bed at night.

Tomb Raider Legend

Xbox 360.

I made a goal to play through some of my unplayed games before buying any new ones. And I have a lot of unplayed games. I tried Resident Evil 5 for about an hour and gave up. Then I pulled this one out of the pile. There are definitely a few things I have problems with, but I'm really having fun playing this.

Funny side note: I used to have Tomb Raider dreams back when the first one came out. Now, most guys, saying they have Tomb Raider dreams probably means dreams about intimate explorations with Lara. My dreams were nothing like that. Really! I had dreams that my entire world was divided up into 10x10 grids, I would walk 2 strides per grid, it was all about how the space was built. Sigh.

Red Dead Redemption

Xbox 360.

I do love this game, but I've started it about 3 times and never finished. I get distracted just riding the horse around (which is funny, because that is one of my least favorite things to do in real life). When I would get a few spare moments at work, I would occasionally fire this up and do a mission or two.

But... my save file is at my old work, on a different gamertag. So if I want to continue, I'll have to start over. Again. For any other game I probably wouldn't bother, but I doubt I'll be able to resist the lure of the Old West much longer!

Short Story 002 - Terra Immortalis Story - The Decision

2011-09-09T13:01:00.001-06:00

This is a second short story based in the world of Charon, the world setting for my game Terra Immortalis. Again, the intent with these stories was to provide a little introduction to the world, motivations and characters that players could use in their own adventures. Here, a local ruler is presented with a devil's bargain.

The Decision

Dorimor stared out the window, lost in thought. He looked at the peace that reigned in the squalor of his city -- the peace during daylight hours at least. He was the leader of this community. He held the title of Baron, though in Riepirth that didn’t amount to much: enough of an income to keep himself in food through the year, and entertain any nobility that might happen to get stranded in the area, and the responsibility for several dozen villagers and farmers in addition to those hundreds huddled together in the town.

“How many were killed last night?” he asked the deputy at his side.

The Baron returned his attention to his office. It sat in the lone tower of the keep overlooking Ptolem, a small rural community in Riepirth. His town was as poor as any in the country, but he honestly strived to improve the quality of life for his townspeople. The fact that people were being killed was extremely distressing to him.

“Four, milord,” the deputy said. “Four were killed.”

Dorimor sighed wearily and sat in his oaken chair. The chair was the only luxury he afforded himself. He had heard of other Barons who used their people’s taxes to buy themselves riches, but he had not the conscience for it. His keep was minimally staffed, the walls bare though sound, and all his coffers were used for only the most essential necessities.

He dared not turn to the Carpathian moneybrokers for aid. Riepirth hadn’t fought for its independence only to buy back their servitude. The community could get by, the crops they harvested and the livestock they raised would eventually earn them enough to make them financially stable again.

If they lived that long.

The deputy continued, “There were reported sightings of Shadow Grifters, milord. Within the city walls. One of our guards was killed trying to defend a citizen.”

“Hitmur’s Whims,” Dorimor swore. They only had a garrison of six men to guard the town, and all of them were irreplaceable. But without the money to hire Seekers, there was little they could do. The only Seeker the town had been assigned, a kind man evidently at odds with his own order to have been assigned a town of such little consequence, had disappeared two nights past. Dorimor had appealed to the King, but help would not be soon in coming. Ptolem was not of strategic importance in the realm.

“The Peddler, he is still here?” Dorimor asked.

The deputy grimaced distastefully. “Aye, milord.”

The Baron paused, not wanting to speak these next words but not seeing any alternative. “Send him in.”

The deputy made as if he would object, but bowed to his lord’s wishes. He left the room.

The Peddler. A bitter taste came to the Baron’s mouth. The Peddler, as the man called himself, had arrived in Ptolem about three weeks after the creatures first started plaguing the town. During the night, Grifters and other creatures Tainted by the Corruption had appeared within the walls, killing and abducting citizens. The guards had been powerless to combat them. For every creature they managed to kill, two or three more would take their place. But this Peddler... he claimed to have the solution to their problems.

The mysterious man entered the room, trailed by the suspicious deputy. Truthfully, the man did little to inspire confidence. His complexion was deathly pale, his body cadaverously thin. His eyes had dark circles beneath them and they bulged with a sort of maniac gleam. The sunlight glared off of his bald head, but the rest of the light seemed absorbed by his dark, raggedy clothing. The sleeves hung in tatters down to his wrists, a threadbare cloak obscured the bags and pouches about his body. He leered at the two men in the room, chuckling to himself and breathing heavily.

Dorimor reacted with a start. He detected the Corruption oozing off of this man. Before having assumed the rank of Baron, Dorimor had given a try at becoming a Seeker. He left the guild at the death of his father, when he had to assume the role of leadership for Ptolem. But he had learned some of the basic Seeker Manipulations and senses.

“Milord,” the Peddler greeted, his voice a wheeze of breath that seemed to slide around the ears.

“You claim you can rid us of these creatures attacking our town,” Dorimor said. Is was not a question.

“Of course, milord. I will free you from your fears of the night.”

Dorimor sat silently, regarding the figure before him. His senses were telling him that he should not, could not trust this man.

“Are you a Seeker?” the Baron asked, knowing the man was not.

“No, milord, nothing so noble as that. But my talents lie along similar lines. I can guarantee you protection from these things.”

Dorimor nodded. He glanced at some of the items about the Peddler’s waist, causing the man to pull his cloak tighter about him.

“What would you charge for your... services?”

“Ah, milord,” the Peddler whispered, bowing humbly. “If I wanted riches, I certainly would not have come here.”

Dorimor smiled indulgently.

“I came here out of your need. My only wish is to save the lives of your people. I wish only the cost of putting modest food on my table, and a roof over my head, for the duration of my stay.”

“A modest price,” murmured the Baron.

“I am a modest man, milord.”

“How long would you expect your services to take, sir?”

The Peddler shrugged, a calculated smile on his lips. “I cannot say for certain, milord. Services of this nature can be somewhat... complex.”

Dorimor nodded and rose. “I see. My deputy will see you to our commons, where you can receive a meal. I will get back to you this evening with my decision.”

The Peddler bowed and followed the deputy out of the room. The deputy looked back at his lord, urging caution with his gaze.

The Baron settled back into his chair and turned his gaze once again out the window. The sun would set again, in a handful of hours. And with its setting, death would once again stalk his town. But could he trust this man, this Peddler? The object that had caught his gaze, the item at the Peddler’s waist had been a dagger. A simple dagger, but a blade Dorimor knew had belonged to the missing Seeker. What was the Peddler’s connection to the Seeker’s disappearance? Was he connected even to the appearance of the creatures?

He doubted he could trust the fellow, but as the sun continued its course to night, what choice did he really have?

Upheaval

2011-09-09T12:50:00.000-06:00

Sorry for missing a post last week. I really am committed to getting at least one major update a week on this site. But last week was an exception. I got laid off from my job at Disney. So I've been spending my free time getting my home office set up and deciding what I'm going to be doing from here on out. As soon as I figure that out, I'll let everyone know!

Short Story 001 - Terra Immortalis Story - Beginnings

2011-08-27T18:59:00.000-06:00

One of the goals of this blog is for it to be a place for me to post short stories both old and new. I'm going to start writing a serialized piece of fiction, but before I start it I want to make sure I have a few installments in the bag. So in the meantime, I've got some old short stories laying around I'd like to post. I want to make sure I'm providing a new story here at least once a week. And what better way to kick things off than with a story entitled "Beginnings"?

This is one of four short stories that were printed in my role-playing game Terra Immortalis. The idea behind these stories was to provide a glimpse of life in the world of Charon, where the game takes place. Each of the stories is very short, intended to tantilize the reader. Here, an explorer leading an expedition from a university runs into a small challenge.

Beginnings

The dust finally settled from the structure’s collapse. Maron coughed repeatedly, trying to clear his lungs and breathe fresh air. He had been the last one to make it through the doorway, out into the clearing before the ruined structure. Two others had been behind him. They had not made it out.

"Blood and Death!" Maron swore. He looked around at the rest of his group. The six men and two women with him all nursed various wounds and injuries, but they were all glad to still be breathing.

"No secret passage, eh?" Laur asked sarcastically. She was Fierthi, from the university in Pelarné-Moln, and had been sent to oversee the expedition. Maron was the guide that was supposed to keep everyone alive and get them to where they were going. He had been doing poorly at both so far.

Maron limped as he stood up and walked over to the rest of the group. Dargin was Kintahl, a Barol who had been using his skills almost exclusively for healing injuries the entirety of the expedition. He approached the guide and bent to tend his wounds.

The guide had no words. Nearly a year ago now, Maron had found a tome in the ruins of a former city. He hadn’t been sure who had lived in this city. It didn’t appear to have been inhabited by any of the major races still existing. There hadn’t been much left to find in the city, as looters had already picked most of it clean. Still, he had unearthed enough to make him a sizable profit when he brought his finds to the renowned university. He had helped in the translation of some of the text, as he was an expert in the Old Speech of Charon. And what he had read there had excited him.

The book spoke of an underground passage in an ancient city. Even at the time the tome was written, it claimed that the city held untold wonders. Brave merchants and traders would risk the voyage. The tome mentioned nothing specific of the dangers, but alluded that the journey was fraught with peril. The prospect of such a city made Maron’s bones ache. He had considerable renown as an accomplished archeologist (and an equally disreputable reputation as a tomb robber). But a find of such magnitude would be the crowning achievement of his career.

The university had agreed to fund the expedition, and several hardy individuals had agreed to participate in the voyage.

Maron looked over what remained of them. Laur and the other two from the university were tired, miserable and near mutinous. Just like scholars, they expected to be lead directly to where they could study. Dargin and the others at least had field experience in these matters. Still, Maron had to admit this expedition was more hazardous than most.

They had started from some of the more well-known ruins west of Goldava. It was a rugged and dangerous terrain, but not necessarily lethal if one took the proper precautions. Grotterlings could be avoided, and with Dargin nearby the Undead they ran into were merely a nuisance. Still, various creatures had killed two of their party before they reached the end of charted territory.

They reached the limit of Maron’s previous expeditions two days ago. He had successfully lead them to the ruins of this city. The other explorers had been impressed, for the trail had been exceptionally difficult to follow. Still, they were all disappointed when they discovered that the ruins had already been looted. The only thing of any note left in the ruins was the Trapper that had killed one of their number and had forced them to cave the structure down atop it to give them a chance at escape.

The other explorers realized the difficulty Maron had faced in getting them even this far. Many of the maps and trade routes mentioned in the tome dated to before Moonfall. The lay of the land would be considerably different now. He had avoided several predators throughout the journey, or his knowledge of them had aided them in defeating the creatures. Still, they had little to show for their journey thusfar. A few relics, a handful or pottery and jewels from pre-Moonfall. But no Aura Gems. And they had yet to find their prize.

"What now, oh great leader?" Laur asked. Maron gave her a withering glance and was tempted to tell her where she could put her funding. Fortunately, Dargin interceded and calmed everyone down.

The party waited for Maron’s decision. Though they had met with limited success the past few days, the other explorers recognized Maron’s experience. He had unearthed more discoveries and lead more expeditions safely than the rest of them combined.

"Let me consult my maps," he said. They set up camp in what had once been a town square. Maron poured over his sheaf of maps and charts. He looked to the stars, and performed small Manipulations to determine the direction.

By morning, he had made his decision.

"We are in the right place. This must be Fal-Halon, a small outpost spoken of in the book. This is the starting point for the tunnel to our goal."

Laur shook her head in exasperation, crossing her arms. "Fie. There is nothing here. You have wasted our time and money, quite possibly our lives. We are no closer now than we were at the beginning."

Maron smiled. "Ah, but there you are wrong. You see... I know where the tunnel is!"

The others shot to their feet, looking wonderingly at him. A dozen questions assailed him at once. Finally Dargin’s drowned out the others.

"Where, man?"

Maron pointed to the recently collapsed ruins. "It is there. I am now sure this is the gateway."

Laur laughed, her feline eyes blazing. "There is nothing there but rock and a recently fed spider."

Maron’s smile grew even wider. "Exactly."

The others were confused, so he continued. "Where exactly do Trapper’s make their homes?"

One of the explorers exclaimed, "It’s using the tunnel! Of course."

Several of the men began packing up their supplies. Maron was excited, looking over at the ruins. There would begin the greatest expedition of his life.

Laur walked over to join him. "Do you think the Trapper’s dead?"

Maron shrugged. If it wasn’t, they would finish the job.

"Even if it is," Laur continued, "there’s no guarantee the tunnel hasn’t collapsed since Moonfall."

"Of course," Maron replied, grinning. "But that’s the beauty of what we do. We won’t know, no one will know, until we find out."

Maron walked towards the fallen structure as the others fell in behind him.

NPR's Top 100 Books of Fantasy and Sci-Fi

2011-08-26T09:41:00.000-06:00

NPR recently polled their readers, and after receiving around 60,000 responses, they posted their list of the top 100 books of fantasy and science-fiction. For the most part, I'm very happy with the choices. I think in a lot of surveys like this, it's the "Flavor of the Month" that scores more highly than it deserves. But this list contains an impressive amount of classics in their fields. I think the Elric series by Moorcock and the Conan series by Howard deserve to be way higher on the list, though.

NPR's Top 100 Books of Fantasy and Science-Fiction.

I consider myself fairly well-read in these areas. How many of the top 100 have I read? By my count, 59. I've started creating a new reading list based on the books I haven't read from this list. I'm looking forward to it!

Pardon the Dust...

2011-08-23T21:14:00.000-06:00

You'll have to pardon the dust here. No, not the dust of neglect and disuse. The dust of I'm redesigning this blog and I'm going to start using it again. I'm going to be adding some new pages and do some reorganization and repurposing. So bear with me, I hope to soon make this blog worth the stop.

Rejection #1

2011-08-13T12:53:00.003-06:00

As part of my goal to complete some of my long-lingering projects, I finished a couple of short stories, prepared the manuscripts and submitted them to a couple of magazines. I'm hoping to get them published, obviously, but I'm not expecting much. This is more the first step in what I anticipate as a long process. But it is fulfilling that I'm at least submitting stories.

I got my first rejection letter yesterday. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction passed on the story I sent them. Getting into this magazine is an important goal for me. Growing up, my dad had boxes of old issues packed away in the garage, and I would read through them. They really helped introduce me to speculative fiction, and I would love to write something good enough to get in there someday. I was pretty impressed with the rejection letter too. It wasn't some form letter. The editor actually referred to the story by name, and explained the reason he was passing on it. Considering how many stories those guys probably have to wade through each month, that's pretty impressive.

Playing Card Games

2011-08-04T16:25:00.004-06:00

I think it's funny that I'm spending most of my video game-playing time actually playing digital versions of card games. My games of choice right now:

Magic 2012 on XBLA
Kard Combat on my iPod
Ascension on my iPod

I recommend all of them for sure.

I have a second short story written and ready to submit to magazines. I'll be sending it out tomorrow. That was the last of my simple writing projects. Now I have to decide what I'll do next.

Good App, Horrible App

2011-07-25T09:39:00.004-06:00

I downloaded and have been playing a couple of new apps recently. One is great, one is possibly the worst I have ever encountered.

Kard Combat
I'll start with the good one. Kard Combat is made by the guy who originally created Magic the Gathering. And it shows. There are a few variations to the formula, but it's basically the same thing: two wizards battle each other by summoning monsters and slinging spells. You power your spells by using mana. Of course, given that I love Magic, this isn't a bad thing for me. I'm still getting the hang of it. There's still a few things to the strategy I'm not getting yet, but I'm still pretty early in playing it. For $2.99, you get a lot of game. Anyone that enjoys Magic or similar games, I recommend this one.

Words With Friends
Now let's move on to the horrible game. Words with Friends by those same guys that make Farmville and Cityville. I mean basically, this is Scrabble. How can you possibly screw that up, right? It has been a nightmare of an experience so far.

I started off downloading it on my iPod, and that was fine. Linked it to my Facebook account, all good. Then I made the mistake of downloading the free version for my Droid phone. First off, this should be familiar to anyone who's played Zynga products on Facebook, the advertising is RELENTLESS! Every time you make a move, you are presented with a full-page ad that you have to button-press to dismiss. EVERY MOVE! I would gladly pay money to not have to deal with that, but on the Android version you don't get that option.

Then I made mistake #2. I entered a different e-mail address than the one I use for Facebook. No matter how many changes I've tried making to my account settings, I can't get a single account now, they are split into two. And there's no way to undo anything. No, if I want to change how I log in to the game, I have to UNINSTALL the app. It's utterly ridiculous. I've deleted and uninstalled and re-installed the game on both my phone and iPod multiple times, and I can't get my accounts to merge. And now I can't get the version on my phone to synch up with Facebook at all, since there's already an account tied to my Facebook.

So if you want to play this game, DO NOT MAKE A MISTAKE ENTERING YOUR E-MAIL. And I would strongly recommend avoiding the android version altogether. Stick with the iOS version, make no mistakes hooking up your account, and you should be fine.

Hello, is this on?

2011-07-22T12:32:00.006-06:00

Image swiped from Matthew Armstrong at zotozo.com

I realize it's been seven months since my last post. But I'm determined to give this another shot. This blog has seen more resurrections than Frankenstein's lab.

One of my big goals this year is to finish up some of the huge piles of unfinished projects I have laying around. Recently, I gathered them together into one location. I have folders of old comic book ideas, role-playing game ideas, short stories, novels, card games, board games, online games, video games, screenplays. It was pretty staggering really.

So the goal: get them polished up, finished and do something with them before going crazy on new projects.

We'll see how it goes.

First step accomplished: I submitted a short story to a magazine today. In a few weeks, I hope to report about the rejection slip (or longshot acceptance letter) I'll be getting.

Any projects that I deem unlikely to be published elsewhere, and aren't too embarrassingly bad to share, I'll post here. I mean, I have to come up with something to put here to avoid another half-year between posts.

The Great CD Migration

2011-01-21T13:45:00.002-07:00

Now that both Becky and I have iPods, the time has come to get our entire music collection ripped to mp3 format and available to us. This is no small task. I have years worth of digital music files in various formats, as well as hundreds of cds to convert over. It has been a bit of a challenge trying to figure out the whole synching my library thing. How do Becky and I share the same music without having to share the same iTunes account, stuff like that. I'm sure I haven't got it completely figured out, but I'm starting.

I have most of my digital files converted to mp3 now. Some have DRM I can no longer use, licenses that are long gone, etc. So I'll have to repurchase some of my songs (which really irritates me).

I'm also noticing that when I rip songs from a cd, the song info attached to the file isn't always complete or accurate, so I have to spend time fixing all that so the songs will list properly in iTunes. That's a real pain.

But soon we'll have a glorious ginormous digital music collection that we'll be able to enjoy.

In the meantime, I picked up Darksiders and Uncharted 2. If I can tear myself away from World of Warcraft for a while, I might even play them.

Still Alive

2011-01-13T16:39:00.003-07:00

Yup. Still alive. Not that you'd know from reading this blog. My schedule has been a bit disorganized lately, and I haven't found a suitable time or location to work on my blog. I'm trying to set up a work space at home, we'll see how that goes.

I recently joined the gadget elite, when Becky got me an iPod Touch. I've never had one, just looked longingly over other's people's shoulders at theirs. I'm very excited to have one, and have been spending a lot of time with it. I'd love to hear of any good apps or games. So far, I've been loving Death Worm, Settlers of Catan, and even Scrabble.

I have to say, my biggest disappointment so far is the comic readers. I've checked out both ComiXology and the Marvel Reader App. The comics look great, the readers are easy to navigate. My problem? The pricing. Are you kidding me? The pricing on the comics is outrageous. The majority of comics I've looked at are $2 per issue. Maybe if they were new comics, comics currently on the stand, I could understand that. But we're talking comics that are 10 years old or more. And many of them are series with 6+ books in them. I'm supposed to pay $12 to read a 10 year old comic story? It's not just lame, it's insulting. Back in the day, I used to read tons of comics. Now, hardly ever. I would LOVE to read them, I would even pay for them, but not at that price. Even at $1 an issue, it's tolerable at best.

So the comic publishers have priced me (likely their main demographic, old comic nerds) out of spending any money on their products.

I did get a cool case for my iPod though. Skulls = cool.

I've still got a huge pile of games to play, and what am I playing? World of Warcraft. And having a blast. My kids are playing this great game called Animal Jam. It's really cute, a lot of fun, and they can't get enough of it. I highly recommend it for those young game players out there.

Gearing up for the Holidays

2010-11-18T15:06:00.003-07:00

I've been pretty busy recently, trying to get a lot done at work so that I can enjoy some much-needed time off. For that reason, I haven't been updated my blog much.

I'm enjoying reading Harry Potter et le Prisonnier d'Azkaban. En Francais. They are such great books, and I'm liking the fact I can still actually read them in French.

I'm playing Fable 3 still, having more fun with it now that the little intro section is done. Playing World of Warcraft a little bit, mainly treading water until the new expasion is released.

We're going to try out Animal Jam with the kids. Developed by Smart Bomb, I know some of the guys who helped make it, and they are all super talented, so I'm looking forward to playing this with my kids.

I played a couple of really fun games recently too. GoSu, a game about building goblin armies, and Ascension, a deck-building game. I'm planning on picking both of them up soon.

We added a new member to our family. Our Great Dane passed away recently, at the age of 4. We decided our house was a little empty without her, so we now have a 6 month old Golden Retriever named Sookie. She's a handful!

If I don't get to posting again before next week, hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!

Level 80 x2!

2010-11-03T16:26:00.002-06:00

I've been playing World of Warcraft since day 1. Well, off-and-on since day 1. And I finally got my second character to level 80. I play so sporadically that this is a real achievement for me. I was hoping to get him to 80 before the next expansion comes out, so it is a success! Now I just have to wait for Cataclysm.

I watched The Walking Dead on AMC this weekend. I was cautiously optimistic about the show. I love the comic, it seemed like AMC was taking a good approach to it. And yeah, it was pretty awesome. It took a while to get going, but I can't wait for the next episode. I was getting down on this new season of TV, I mean there aren't ANY other shows that premiered this season that I liked, so I was glad there is at least one new show worth watching.

I bought Fable 3 the day it came out, but I haven't even put in an hour of play yet. So it's a little early for me to give any impressions. Hopefully I can put in some time on it this week.

New Stuff

2010-10-22T09:27:00.005-06:00

I picked up a couple of fun things this week.

The first is the re-release of the Dungeons and Dragons Red Box. They have updated it to the new 4th Edition Rules, but it is meant to otherwise be faithful to the look and feel of the original. I bought the original red box when I was about 10 years old. I loved it, and I played it a lot. It brought back some great memories for me. I doubt I'll be getting anyone to play it with me any time soon, but it's fun to see that the game itself has stood up so well over time.

I remember walking down to the Woolco, which had a rack of D&D games. I was hooked from my first exposure to the game. Something about fighting orcs and goblins just really fired my imagination. I would buy a staggering amount of rpgs either there or at Hobby Town if I could convince my parents to drive me.

I can't seem to coordinate getting into a group to play a game any more. It was so much easier when a group of us lived only a few minutes away and we had no pressing responsibilities.

I got a great book this week too. It's called Ten Little Zombies, A Love Story. Very clever, very funny. Highly recommend it.

So Far So Good

2010-10-20T10:00:00.002-06:00

The Magic Tourney is going well for me so far. Hopefully this doesn't jinx it. But I've won my first two matches so far. I have to say, I think the Infect mechanic is a little over-powered right now. If there was any way of removing poison counters, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But my deck is very weak against Infect decks.

Nicky scored a goal in his soccer scrimmage match last night. You should have seen how excited he was about it! It was great.

I would love to get some advice from anyone about how to manage side-projects alongside with working a full-time job and spending quality time with my family. I just can't manage to do it. The only time I am able to work on any writing project is during my bus ride to-and-from work, IF I can find a seat to sit in. Sometimes it's just easier to read, and more relaxing.

I found another web comic I like. Kiskaloo by Chris Sanders. He's the guy behind Lilo and Stitch. He has got such a great drawing style, I love looking at his work.

Finished The Way of Kings

2010-10-15T10:13:00.004-06:00

I finally finished reading The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This book took me longer than usual to read for a couple reasons. One, it's freaking HUGE. It is a massive book, but unlike a lot of books of that size, I didn't feel the story was padded to fill space. There was simply that much story to tell. Second reason it took me a while to read is related to the first reason... it was so big, I didn't want to lug it back and forth to work with me. I do most of my reading on the bus or on Trax, so I like using my Nook or a light paperback. Hauling a brick (or cement block) back and forth every day wasn't ideal, and I didn't want to shell out the bucks to buy the ebook as well as the hardback.

So it took me a while. But it was worth it. I think it's Brandon's best book so far. And I've liked all his books. If you haven't read any of Brandon's stuff so far, this is a great place to start and see why everyone's talking.

Now that I've completed that mammoth book, I'm reading the Harry Potter books again. This time, though, I'm reading them in French. It's fun I can still read them in French, and for the most part, I read at about the same speed as English. I just get tripped up over the occasional word. But my droid phone has a translation app I can use to look up words, so it isn't too bad. I'm also eagerly awaiting The Fall by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, it's on reserve for me at the library. I really enjoyed The Strain they wrote, and I hope this one is just as good.

I've had to dial back my personal projects a bit. I need to concentrate on my work for Disney and make sure that gets enough attention, so I may not be posting updates here as frequently as I have been. I don't want to abandon it completely though.

Scars of Mirrodin Draft

2010-10-05T13:36:00.006-06:00

We had our Scars of Mirrodin draft today at lunch. It went pretty well for me. I certainly won't have the best deck in the tourney, but I'm hoping it won't be a colossal failure. I grabbed a couple good cards.

I was hoping to go a little more aggressive with a Red/White deck this time around, but the drafting wasn't going that way. We'll see how it does over the next couple of weeks.

Dead Space and Car Woes

2010-10-01T09:18:00.002-06:00

I tried starting Dead Space the other night. This is one of the games I got for Christmas this past year, and I finally pulled the shrink wrap off it to give it a try. Unfortunately, it's not looking likely that I'll have much chance to play it. Part of what gives the game its cool atmosphere is the audio. There are little scurrying sounds in the vents, moaning from the space zombies that are approaching, which causes you to spin around wildly trying to locate the source of the noise. That really pulls you into the game.

That is also my problem, one which designers of the game couldn't have anticipated. The game is gory enough and scary enough that I can't play it when my kids are around, I have to wait until they are asleep. But in order for me to hear those cool little ambient noises and sounds, I have to turn my volume up REALLY LOUD. So when it's time for actual combat, the gun blasts and my screaming like a little girl wake up my kids. I'll have to shelve it for a while until I can figure out a way of playing it without waking them up.

I'll be choosing between Fable 2, Dragon Age, Starcraft 2, Red Dead Redemption or Final Fantasy 13 next, I'm thinking.

We've had bittersweet events happen with our cars. I posted a couple weeks ago we bought a new truck (well, 2001 but it's new to us). The good news is that we have finally sold our VW Bug. That was a bit of a stress, we didn't anticipate it would take so long to sell it. I got all that taken care of yesterday and it is officially no longer ours.

Now to the bitter part. We love the truck and we're very happy with it, but... it failed both safety and emissions inspections. We got most of the repairs needed made for around $200, but the big problem: the tires on the truck are too big. They hit the sway bar. In order to pass safety, we need new tires. Not cheap. We're still looking into it, but my wallet is already crying big tears.

Heroscape Heroes

2010-09-27T16:29:00.002-06:00

The team of Josh and Nick rolled over dad in Heroscape this weekend. Nick's lowest-point guy, some generic alien grunt, 1-shotted my uber dragon. I never even got an attack off with it. Sigh...

I watched Machete over the weekend. It was awesome! There were two stand-out laugh-out-loud moments that I'm still chuckling over. Although Josh asked me if it was the same Machete from the Spy Kids movies. Eh... well, yes, same name, same actor. But no way in the world does he get to watch the movie!

It was a busy weekend. Josh was so awesome at his soccer game! He came so close to scoring a goal, it was right on the line when the goalie got it. Then on Sunday we went to a mission farewell for one nephew, went to watch another nephew set-apart as an Elder, because he's getting ready to go on his mission. Two open houses. We were exhausted.

And some of us at work are gearing up for a new Magic tournament. We're going to do a sealed deck or draft using the new Scars of Mirrodin set. I'm sure I'll get slaughtered, but still looking forward to it.

Betrayed!

2010-09-24T08:01:00.004-06:00

Last night I finally managed to track down and purchase a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. I've been meaning to buy it for a long time, but then it went out-of-print and I didn't get my chance. Sure, a new edition is coming out, but I wanted this one. I drove out to West Valley, dragged my wife along, and got it. Don't know when I'm going to actually play it, but I have it!

I also inherited a copy of Heroscape. (Thanks, Jon!) This game is for me to play with my boys, and they are super excited. That's our plan for tonight. We're having a boys night tonight, my wife and daughter are going to be off having fun and the boys are holding down the fort. Gaming party!

And we've finally come up with a name for the truck. You can see photos from a couple posts ago it's a nice black Ford F150. We've decided to call it Vader. I was hoping it was because Darth Vader was this cool, intimidating force of awesomeness. But I suspect it's more like Darth Vader was this cool black armored outer shell with a chubby pasty white guy on the inside...

Got to cut down on the TV

2010-09-22T16:31:00.003-06:00

I don't watch a lot of TV. At least, I don't think I do. My wife and I will usually watch one program in the evening after the kids are in bed. Occasionally two, but that's rare. Even so, I think I'm going to try and cut down on how much time I spend watching TV. Usually, this is something my wife and I do together, so we'll see if there's something else we'd rather do together that's a little more interactive.

We watched Warehouse 13 last night. Fun show, in a "turn-your-brain-off" kind of way. It's done until next summer (unless it isn't renewed, which SyFy hasn't announced yet).

There isn't a whole lot of new shows I'm all that interested in. I recorded Hawaii 5-0, but I don't know if I'll even get around to watching it. Might try Blue Bloods, just because it has Tom Selleck, but I'm not really excited about it. I'm going to record Sym-bionic Titan for the kids, because it's a creation of the guy who did Dexter's Lab and the Clone Wars cartoons.

Anyone have any good recommendations?

I Like Abney Park

2010-09-21T13:34:00.003-06:00

I'm listening to Abney Park today. I'll get into moods where I'll only listen to one group or one type of music for long periods on end. And I've been on an Abney Park kick lately. They're a fun band, most of their songs are fun to listen to.

And c'mon, they're airship pirates.

Commercial Art Seminar at Utah State

2010-09-15T15:57:00.002-06:00

I'll be traveling up to Logan tomorrow to give a presentation to the Graphic Arts department, for one of their Commercial Art Seminars. The seminars were one of my favorite parts of the program when I was a student there, so I'm excited to be asked back to give one. I'll be talking about some of the games I've worked on, what I think makes a good designer, and recommendations on how to get into the industry.

To switch the topic completely, I wanted to talk about a Magic game variant that I played with some co-workers yesterday. It's called the Stack Variant. Basically, you take a huge pile of your old cards, everyone draws from the same stack, sharing a common graveyard as well. You can choose to draw land or a card from the stack. I kind of liked it. I think it's a fun way to use all those old Magic cards laying around that never get any use. But there didn't seem to be a whole lot of strategy to the game. For me, a lot of the fun comes from building a cool deck. All the actual "playing" of the game does is validate your deck construction. But if I didn't have any pre-constructed decks handy, this would be a good time killer with some friends.

Finally, I have to share some fun from the Sumsion household. We were sitting at the kitchen counter (me, my wife and her sister). Our two boys come racing past us. Shortly after, Mandy comes walking after them, arms out in front of her, saying in a loud voice, "BRAAAIIIIINNNSS!" Yeah, my kids were playing zombies in the house. Proud dad moment.

Chim Chum and the Portly Samurai

2010-09-14T08:17:00.005-06:00

I thought I'd mention one of the few web comics I take the time to read. Chim Chum and the Portly Samurai is a fun web comic created and maintained by one of my co-workers. It's fun, cute and worth following. (And he's having a contest to win free stuff for people that mention it on their blogs, so that motivated me to finally get the word out).

I like web-comics, though I don't take the time to follow very many of them. In fact, the only other ones I regularly follow are:

The Order of the Stick. A brilliant comic I never miss. If you've played any kind of rpg in the past 20 years, you'll enjoy this one.

Penny Arcade. Hilarious video-game themed comic.

Back from vacation

2010-09-10T12:29:00.003-06:00

I took a little break from posting on my blog to take a family vacation. We had a great time down at Boulder Mountain in southern Utah, camping with our family and most of Becky's family too. We had about 25 people all camping together. It was a lot of fun. The kids really had a blast. They got to play in the dirt and with their cousins for 3 solid days.

In other big news, we bought a truck. I finally found the truck I wanted, and we found one that fit our price range. We bought a 2001 Ford F150. Can't wait to take this camping next time! Here's some pics:

I'll get back on a regular posting schedule next week.

Magic Deck 2 - Goblin Horde

2010-09-01T14:03:00.003-06:00

Here's my second constructed deck I've been using in casual games here at work. This is my favorite deck to play. It's not necessarily my most powerful deck, but the play style is so different from what I normally play that I find it very fun.

The entire goal to this deck is to send my Goblins into the meat grinder. It is actually to my benefit to get my Goblins killed, because I have multiple ways of bringing dead Goblins back into play. I kill a Goblin, he does a point of damage when he hits the graveyard thanks to my Boggart Shenanigans, then I fish him back out with the Boggart Birth Rite (or other means), put him back into play, and repeat.

The majority of my spells are around either bringing back Goblins into my hand, or inflicting direct damage. Then I have a couple of powerhouses, like the Taurean Mauler, which counts as a Goblin and gets bigger as the game goes. (Last game was a multiplayer game, and I got him up to 17/17 before he got removed). I think I'm only running 2 creatures that are not Goblins: the Voracious Dragon (which eats Goblins to get powerful) and a Corrosive Mentor (which grants all of my black creatures Wither).

One of the other guys here also has a Goblin deck. His is Red/Green, as opposed to my Red/Black. And his is way more powerful than mine. Still, I just love how obnoxious this deck can get.

I'd say on a power scale of 1 - 10, this falls in at around a 6. It gets shut down often, but when it works it's really fun.

Next up, I'll tell you about my milling deck. I need to play it a bit more before I can tell you if it's even a viable deck. But it's fun to try and get it to work.

The Way of Kings is out

2010-09-01T09:11:00.003-06:00

I went to Barnes and Noble last night and picked up my copy of Brandon Sanderson's The Way of Kings. Very excited to read this book. I showed up for Brandon's signing, but it didn't quite go as planned. I brought Josh with me. Josh had a pack of Magic cards to give to Brandon. (I like having something to give people at signings. Last time, I gave Brandon a copy of my role-playing game Terra Immortalis. I figured this time around he'd like something he might actually play, hence the Magic cards. And I had just taught Josh earlier in the day how to play, so he was really excited to give Brandon the cards).

We showed up early, and were among the first 20 or so people there. There wasn't a designated line space, though. 2 hours later, after Brandon finished his reading and his Q&A session, a line began to form. And it was right then that Josh decided he had to use the bathroom right away. So I couldn't even have someone hold our place in line. After using the bathroom, we were at the end of the line, probably 100 people back or so. And we couldn't wait, I had to get Josh home.

So we left. We did sneak up to the front of the line to give Brandon his magic cards. And he almost remembered me, I had to jog his memory a bit. But it was good to see him. And I'm glad he's meeting with such an enthusiastic response to his latest book.

I'm confident I'll have another chance to get my book signed by him. I'm bummed I missed out on some bookmarks and getting the book numbered. But I can't wait to start reading it. It looks great. I'll let you know. Right now I'm working my way through Robin Hobb's Dragon Haven.

Completed Mass Effect 2

2010-08-30T10:28:00.003-06:00

I finally finished Mass Effect 2. My wife got me the Collector's Edition for Christmas this past year. I had to restart it because so much time had passed since the first time I tried playing it. But once I was done working on Toy Story 3, and I had a little more free time, I started it all over again. It was fantastic.

I never actually finished the first game, despite how much I liked it. But ME2 was a superior experience. The cut scenes looked great (though some were a little choppy). The conversations looked great. The combat was much smoother this time around. Basically, I actually understood the combat system. I kept giving up in the first Mass Effect because I'd get to a combat that I absolutely couldn't win. I never ran into that problem this time around. I was still challenged, but it was manageable.

I like the cover system used in combat. The weapon switching was easy to do, as was changing up ammo types. I was always a little anxious about finding more ammo, so I tried to conserve it whenever I could.

I chose Miranda for my romance mission. I really liked the option of being able to pursue a romance with various main characters. I completed most of the side missions in the game. I obsessively explored every solar system in every galaxy, and gathered as much of the resources as I could. I upgraded everything I could find. I had a great time playing the game (much to the dismay of my sons, who couldn't play it with me, and couldn't play any of their 360 games while I played ME2).

All in all, a great game experience. I probably won't replay it, simply because I have so many other games that need my attention. I would love to go back and earn some more achievements, since I think I'm pretty close to a few of them. But I'd rather play more games first. Maybe later.

Next game up: Batman Arkham Asylum.

Piss on The Other Guys

2010-08-27T09:58:00.002-06:00

Becky and I went and saw The Other Guys last night. Word of advice: don't bother. Take my word for it, I suffered the pain of this movie so you don't have to. There were a few funny parts, sure, but overall I don't think it was worth the time.

The highlight of the night was when we got home. Mandy was asleep on the couch. She's potty trained pretty well, but she still wears Pull-ups at night. So I picked her up and started to carry her upstairs to put on her Pull-up.

As I got about five steps away from the couch... she started peeing on me. All over me, since I was holding her up close. Yeah, that was awesome. I told Becky, it's been a long time since I had a date end with someone peeing on me.

What is it with Zombies?

2010-08-25T09:40:00.004-06:00

I'll admit it. I love zombie movies. I've seen a lot of them. Lots. Fast zombies, slow zombies, gross zombies, silly zombies, nazi zombies, space zombies... You get what I'm saying. Even though the concept of a zombie is fairly well established, I still appreciate a decent zombie film.

But I have a pet peeve. This peeve has a broader application than just zombie films, but I think this is the best example. I hate all the self-referencing that happens. Most of the recent zombie films I've seen (and books I've read, which prompted this rant) have to refer to other zombie films during the course of the story. The kids all sitting around, talking about zombie films they've seen. And that just totally ruins it for me.

Yes, I get it. You like zombie films. That is why you're making one, or you're writing a zombie book. But c'mon, you are not impressing me with your breadth of zombie film watching. It's like a person that's a name-dropper. No one likes those people. I don't care that you've seen Night of the Living Dead, and I don't want to hear characters in a movie refer to other zombie films. It destroys my suspension of disbelief (which you need liberally to enjoy a zombie movie). It doesn't give your film extra credibility because you made a nod to another film. It just reminds me that I'm watching a movie, that's too lazy to establish its own background and setting and instead just refers to someone else who took the time to do it better.

It's like this... thing that eats itself, cannibalizes others of its kind... thinking by consuming things like it, it will be better somehow, more fulfilled. Something that mindlessly wanders around trying to find more like itself to devour... like, like, hmm, a good analogy is escaping me right now...

It bugs me. That's all I'm saying. I don't want to see any more movies where a bunch of dumb kids are sitting around pretending to be smart because they watch horror films and suddenly find themselves inside of one. It worked for Scream, very clever, but enough.

Now I'm going to listen to my new Rob Zombie Hellbilly Deluxe 2 CD, and try to forget about stupid zombie movies.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2010-08-24T13:42:00.004-06:00

I just finished playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on my DS. What a great game. I know it's a few years old, but I finally got around to playing it. I highly recommend it if you haven't played it yet. Basically, it was just a point-and-click adventure game, but it was presented in such a clever way. I loved cross-examining witnesses, trying to find the contradictions in their statements, presenting evidence. Even when I made mistakes, the results were comical enough that it didn't feel like much of a penalty. The cases were detailed, full of unexpected twists. The characters were well-developed, and most were hilarious.

I can't wait for the next one, I'll be starting it soon.

Magic Deck 1 - Oversoul Deck

2010-08-20T09:55:00.007-06:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been playing some Magic with guys at work during our lunches. We're in between tourneys right now, every few months we'll have a casual draft tourney with whichever is the latest set. But right now we're just doing some constructed deck battles. The bonus of this laid-back format is that we get to try out some of our weirder ideas for deck themes. The only rule we're following is simply that we use any cards from our personal collections. This isn't "buy cards to make the most powerful deck imagineable" but rather "what cool deck can I make using any cards from my collection?"

So my Oversoul Deck is my first attempt. I've always enjoyed playing a White/Green deck. There isn't really much of a theme to this one. I use my white cards like Journey to Nowhere to keep my opponent's creatures out of action. I'll use my Planeswalker to pump out some disposable 3/3 creatures. Then I try and get my Shield of the Oversoul slapped on my Oversoul of Dusk, making it a 7/7 flying indestructible protected from Red, Black and Blue. That's pretty fun when I get it to work.

I'd say on a power scale of 1 - 10, this falls in at around a 6. It is fairly reliable, but certainly not a deck of wanton destruction. It gets shut down often, but when it works it's really fun.

I'll fill you in soon on my Goblin Deck. It's the most fun to play of the decks I've put together.

Min / Max Vs. Role-Playing

2010-08-19T09:43:00.002-06:00

I've been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering lately. There's a group of guys I work with that like to play, so we have regular informal tournaments and leagues. We're currently playing some casual constructed decks against each other. And I'll talk about my decks soon, have no fear! But some of the theories behind the decks reminded me about something I wanted to talk about.

The mindset of the Min/Max player versus the mindset of the role-player. When designing good games, I think you have to appeal to both camps. And they are wildly different camps.

The Min/Max player finds joy in beating the system, in tweaking the game mechanics to his personal maximum advantage. This is the player who will only play a Dwarf Paladin in a particular game because that gives him the most points to spend in crucial abilities. This is the player in World of Warcraft who has the specific talent build paired with specific items, gems and enchantments, all designed to give him the maximum damage-per-second output. In RPGs, I've found that the HERO System is particularly appealing to this group of players, as the entire system is designed around the ability to maximize a player's abilities spending a minimum amount of points. When I played games using this system, the whole feel of the game was different than other systems I was used to.

The role-player finds joy in playing the story. The game mechanics are there to provide structure, but the fun is in how the story directly applies to the player. And I don't necessarily mean that all of these players are the ones who always speak "in character" or play only on Role-Playing Servers in MMOs. In D&D, this is the player who wants to create a dwarf thief, not because they are the best, but because this combination appeals to some sensibility of the player. Or they will make a decision for their character to perform that might not be in the character's best interest, but it would be "in character" for them to do that.

I find myself squarely in the role-playing camp. For me, the game mechanics have always been there as a means of facilitating the story, the overall experience. When I'm running games, I will fudge rolls if it is for the better outcome dramatically. I create characters that appeal to me without worrying about how their stats will affect my gameplay. When I played World of Warcraft, I had the most fun in questing and adventuring, getting a group together to go into a dungeon (an instance in the current lingo). I totally lost interest in the game once I reached the level cap, and the game became raiding, endlessly running the same encounters over and over to be able to add one new item that would bump a stat up a couple points.

As I said though, the best games appeal to both camps. World of Warcraft is popular because both kinds of players can play the game side by side (usually mocking each other mercilessly the whole while). I've noticed this in building my Magic decks as well. Some guys try to build a deck that has crazy damage output in turn 4, or has the ultimate unstoppable combo. And for me, I tend to build decks around a theme. "I want a milling deck. Or a vampire deck." Then I try and build a deck around the theme. On a power scale, my decks are never power houses. But they are fun for me to play.

How about anyone else? Do you fall into either of these camps?

Authors You Should be Reading: Brandon Sanderson

2010-08-17T11:34:00.006-06:00

Okay, this is cheating. Full disclosure: I know Brandon. Not only is he an excellent writer, but he's a really nice guy and has been a family friend for a long time. He could be a goat-herder and I'd say, "You've got to check out this guy's goats, they're awesome." So bearing that in mind, I'm still going to list him in my list of great authors to be checking out.

I've read most of what he's written so far. He had a strong stand-alone first novel, Elantris. Very creative. I also loved Warbreaker (who doesn't like bloodthirsty sentient swords?), it had a very inventive, unique magic system.

I especially liked the Mistborn trilogy. Cool characters. An epic feel unlike anything else I've read. A believable magic system that didn't feel contrived.

And, of course, he's completing the Wheel of Time books. I have a love/hate relationship with the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan. I think they started off so strong, and I liked them up through about book 4. Then was the spiraling death that drug out over books 5 - 11. I mean, NOTHING HAPPENED for thousands of pages. It was ridiculous. I tried multiple times to read those books, and finally resulted to audiobooks and wikipedia summaries. I was beyond caring what happened to characters I had liked a long time ago.

Then Brandon was handed the reins to take over. And you know what? I really liked his first book. It had the spirit true to the books without slavishly following the style. And there was actually resolution happening to the plot. Things were falling into place. There is an end in sight.

So, I don't know if I can actually recommend reading Brandon's Wheel of Time book The Gathering Storm, because if you're not familiar with this series, you'd have to beat your head against 4 good large books, then 7 books of tedium to reach where Brandon starts. And if you've already read those, odds are you've already read Brandon's book anyway.

But I think they couldn't have picked a better person to take over. My advice, start with Mistborn and go from there. He's got a new book on the horizon too that I'm looking forward to. I'll let you know what I think once I've read it.

And I'm super jealous. Fans keep sending him packs of Magic cards to encourage him to keep working. I have GOT to figure out a way to replicate this system! I guess that would involve developing a ton of talent, generating some actual writings, and then have enough charisma to earn a loyal following of fans. Sheesh, maybe it'll be easier for me to just buy the cards...

Organization!

2010-08-17T09:49:00.003-06:00

This weekend, my wife and I took on a huge project. We organized our storage room. To explain, we've lived in our house for about 5 years, and in that time the storage room has just been a dumping ground for any accumulated excess stuff. And after watching one too many shows on HGTV, we decided to finally do something about it.

We went through boxes of old toys, and filled up the entire back of our SUV with toys to haul off to the DI. Then we went to Home Depot, and bought some cinderblocks and shelves to build a shelf for my 12 boxes of comics. Then we moved everything else in the room, got most of the boxes onto storage shelves, unburied the exercise equipment so they can be used, unburied the air hockey table so it can be used. It was a lot of work.

The end result, tons of new room to store more accumulated stuff. The ability for me to get at my comic collection and read it. Play air hockey and find a new excuse to not be able to exercise.

I Want This

2010-08-13T15:58:00.003-06:00

I want this. I keep looking for a complete copy of this on ebay. And a complete set that's not outrageously expensive. I remember going out to San Jose to my grandparents' house during the summers when I was young. I'd poke around in the bedrooms looking for stuff to do. I would invariably look through my uncle's stuff, because he had all kinds of cool things. (Although his stack of old Heavy Metal magazines mysteriously disappeared when I was 10, after I got caught reading them).

One of the things I remember fondly is this Mighty Men and Monster Maker. Basically a Fashion Plates for boys. Awesome! I'd spend hours making pictures of monsters. Good times.

Soapbox

2010-08-09T08:56:00.003-06:00

My family likes watching movies. We have a lot of DVDS. We have a big TV we like to watch them on. We pay a lot of money for our DVDS, we pay a lot of attention to what our kids watch, and we like to let them watch movies on their own that we've approved for them. They are pretty good about not watching anything inappropriate (which is a good thing, given that certain Pink Panther episodes still give them nightmares).

But turning 3 little kids loose on stacks of DVDS means that we invariably have piles of DVDS lying around, not in their cases, getting scratched up and lost. And it gets old for us to put in DVDS for them and have to wait around to skip through all the trailers, promos, adds, etc. just to get the movie started for them.

So we came up with a solution: copy our dvds to a hard drive, and let the kids watch those. The end result is pretty slick. We have a 1 TB hard drive where we copy all the avis, and we use a Western Digital Media Player to hook the hard drive up to our TV. It comes with a remote, so they can scroll through nearly every movie we own, pick one, and it instantly starts playing.

Sounds pretty sweet, right? So what's my soapbox all about? It's about the process of copying my DVDS for my own personal use, and the attitude nearly every movie studio has towards me, a paying consumer.

Someone made this little infographic that I really like that perfectly illustrates my complaints about DVDS in general.

I can't think of any other industry that treats it's paying customers like criminals before I can access the things I bought from them. Every time I put in a DVD, I have to sit through FBI warnings, trailers, fancy menus, ads before I can get to the actual movie I want to watch.

By ripping the DVDS to computer files, I get to skip all that. I can hit play, and my kids get to immediately start watching the movie. So how do I actually get that computer file from the DVD? I have to use 3 separate programs.

1. AnyDVD will break the encryption on the DVD (usually).
2. DVD Decrypter rips the DVD to a file on my computer.
3. Auto Gordian Knot converts the ripped file to an avi that I can watch.

I have to use all 3 programs on each DVD, and the entire process probably takes anywhere from 30 - 60 mintues per DVD. And it doesn't always work, I have some DVDS that I can't copy. It is very irritating.

You know what? Don't punish me for buying the DVD, punish me if I upload files to other people. Pirating movies isn't tempting to me because I'm trying to save money. I like owning the DVD, I like having a physical collection I can look at. No, pirating movies is tempting to me because it's a hell of a lot easier than the process I go through.

Some DVDS are starting to get it right, offering a free digital download of the movie when I purchase the DVD. I like this option and I use it. But I've lost the activation code on a couple of DVDS (you know, because the kids open up the DVD and lose the little piece of paper with my code on it), so it's not a perfect system. But it is relatively painless.

For me, this is how you beat piracy and how you should be treating your customers in the first place. Make purchasing the product more convenient and of greater value to me than by pirating it. Give me the option to see all your fancy previews and movie trailers, but don't force me to watch them every single time.

I could probably go on more about it, but that's my main point. Now, I'll get back to trying to convert my DVDS over to avi. I think I'm about halfway through, a few more weeks to go...

Elric of Melnibone

2010-08-06T10:32:00.005-06:00

I'm a big fan of the Eternal Champion books by Michael Moorcock. I don't know that any set of books was more defining to my taste in literature than these. Especially the Elric saga (well, the ones up through Stormbringer at least). A drug-addicted anti-hero with a bloodthirsty sentient sword. An ongoing epic struggle between the forces of Order and Law versus the forces of Disorder and Chaos. I've read them several times over, in English and in French, and I'm sure I'll be reading them a few more times.

In addition to the books, many of my fondest experiences playing role-playing games involve playing the Stormbringer RPG. It wasn't a perfect system, but it allowed a great deal of freedom for creating characters, creating unique weapons and armor, serving the lords of Law, Chaos or elementals. The setting was perfect for fantasy role-playing. I think I spent way more time in the world of the Elric and the Young Kingdoms than in any D&D game setting.

So when my brother mentioned that he was going to try and start a new Stormbringer campaign, I knew I had to try and get in on it. I was surprised to find out that Chaosium is no longer publishing the Elric books, but Mongoose Publishing has taken it over. Elric is now part of the Runequest system. I've played Runequest before (it's been a while), so it wasn't totally disappointing. And Mongoose makes great products, their books are some of the highest quality (and most expensive) in the market.

I'll let you know what I think of the new system. If my brother can actually find time in his insanely busy schedule to run a game. And if I can get Skype running so that I can be there virutally. And if I can find time in my insanely busy schedule to join.

Sigh. Didn't it used to be easier to sit down and play games? Why does all this Real-Life stuff keep getting in the way?

Ludus Venalis!

2010-08-05T13:39:00.003-06:00

Everquest was my first experience with MMOs. And I have a lot of great memories playing that game. It's funny having fond memories of a game that was so sadistic to its players. When I worked at Acclaim, a bunch of us there started playing, and we created a guild called Ludus Venalis. That was a great experience, the guild was really close and we had a lot of good times together.

Last night, a few of us from the guild got together over at Tasaran's house for some great BBQ'd hot dogs and drinks. Fun times! It was good to see Tas, Kline, Levi, Euxius and Tomic.

I remember putting a ton of time into EQ. It was a game that truly punished you for not playing the way the designers wanted you to play, and that involved tons of time OUTSIDE the game in order to play.

I remember printing out tons of maps of each zone in the game, creating a huge binder of maps. I played a Shadowknight, so I didn't have a way of quickly teleporting myself around, so it would literally take me HOURS to get from one place to another. Doing any kind of raiding required massive groups organized over several hours of play.

I vividly remember Becky's first experience with me playing EQ. I said I was going to play for a while.

2 hours later, Becky asks, "Are you about done playing?"

"No, we just got our group together. We're almost ready to start."

2 hours later, Becky asks, "Are you about done playing?"

"No, we just fought our way down to where we want to be. NOW we're ready to start doing what we set out to do."

2 hours later. "We wiped on our last pull. Everyone's dead. Now we have to find someone to help us get our bodies back."

2 more hours before we finally got our bodies back and ended. And she's still married to me! My wife loves me.

I can't imagine playing 8 hour gaming sessions any more. But I'll admit, when I did get something cool in the game, it definitely felt like I had earned it.

I'm more of a casual player now, I believe. I can't invest hundreds of hours into a game any more. I've probably put more than my fair share into World of Warcraft. And I'm waiting for the next big one, I haven't turned away from them completely.

Until then, Ludus Venalis FTW. Hope to see you guys again soon.

Sick today

2010-08-04T10:36:00.001-06:00

Ugh. Not feeling well today. While I'm not promising to post updates every day, I am trying to be fairly consistent. And this is just to explain it's not happening today. I'll have a few fun things to share in the next day or two (hopefully not germs).

Authors You Should be Reading: Steven Erikson

2010-08-02T10:48:00.003-06:00

Steven Erikson is an author I heartily recommend, and his Malazan Empire books are jaw-droppingly amazing. But when I recommend him to people, I also add a warning: these are tough books. You really have to pay attention, he crams more details into a smaller space than any author I've ever read.

The Malazan books are high fantasy with a low fantasy feel. I mean, he's got gods, he's got wizards who can wipe out armies, undead dragons, guys with hammers that can crack the world in half, and there's always someone even more bad-ass around the corner. Normally, if I tried describing a book like that to someone, it would sound ridiculous. But Erikson pulls it off believably, and I can't put the books down. They're gritty, action-packed stories with characters that are living, breathing people, fully thought out and realized. There is such an amazing authenticity to the societies and kingdoms.

If you like fantasy, this is a great one to be reading. And if they're confusing to you, Tor.com is just starting a great re-read of the entire series, breaking it down chapter by chapter. You can check it out here: Malazan Reread of the Fallen.

Authors You Should be Reading: Jim Butcher

2010-07-30T09:38:00.005-06:00

Jim Butcher is next in my recommended reading list. He is the creator of the wizard Harry Dresden, the main protagonist in The Dresden Files series of books.

The series was made into an entertaining TV series on SciFi Channel for a season too.

Butcher writes urban fantasy the way it should be written. He somehow makes pizza-craving pixies, demons, vampires, wizards, cops, fallen angels and mystical dogs all seem to make sense in a modern world setting. Harry Dresden is a great character, not a white knight by any stretch but a good guy you want to root for. And his life just plain sucks sometimes, but he always manages to get out of whatever fix he is in, for better or for worse.

If you haven't read any of the Dresden books, start with Storm Front. You won't be disappointed.

Sucker Punch = Nerd Orgasm

2010-07-29T13:51:00.005-06:00

Here's the teaser trailer to Zack Snyder's upcoming film Sucker Punch. It's like he got a bunch of nerds together at a table and asked, "What do you think would be cool in a movie?"

Samurai! Dragons! Babes! Robots! Zepplins! Babes in leather! Explosions!

And yet, that nerd part of me can't wait to see it...

Authors You Should be Reading: Joe Abercrombie

2010-07-29T09:02:00.004-06:00

I read a lot. I always have. If you follow my GoodReads updates, you'll see that I get a lot of reading done. And I like talking about what I've read. Mostly it's fantasy, sci-fi and horror, but I'll sometimes stray out of these areas. I've decided to share my thoughts on a few authors I really like, books I highly recommend people reading. And I've decided to start with Joe Abercrombie.

I've always enjoyed fantasy books. I read The Hobbit in fifth grade, and all through Jr High and High School I absorbed as much as I could get my hands on. The Eternal Champion books by Moorcock, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser by Lieber, Conan, Lord of the Rings, I enjoyed it all. But I had started to despair with a lot of current fantasy. Don't get me wrong, there are many talented authors writing fantasy today, but most of the shelf space was taken up by these monolithic epic fantasy series like The Wheel of Time, The Sword of Truth, and I was craving some good gritty low-fantasy. And most of that was tied to franchise tie-ins, the D&D books, other gaming properities. Again, some of those are really good, but I was definitely feeling a gap in what I would like to read.

And then came Joe Abercrombie.

Awesome characters. Flawed characters. Bloody characters. Villains and bastards you're cheering for. A believable world setting with lots of mystery and danger. And the writing keeps the pace moving briskly. I can't remember how many nights I stayed up WAY later than I should have so that I could read what was going to happen next.

Do yourself a favor. If you haven't read Abercrombie, don't hesitate any longer. Get The Blade Itself, read it, and let me know what you think.

And you're welcome.

There are still more authors I want to talk about, so stay tuned.

Time to dust this thing off

2010-07-28T07:51:00.003-06:00

I actually want to start using my blog again. I'm not going to promise daily updates, but hopefully more regular updates. I'll probably talk about books, games and movies, for the most part. And lists. I think I'll make some lists. We'll see.

My last post was the beginning of March, where I mentioned Becky and I had gotten our new phones. In the few months we've had them, I have to say I'm pretty happy with my Droid. I thought I would use the slide-out keyboard more, but I hardly ever use it. The keys aren't clicky enough for me. If I had it to do again, I'd probably go for the Eris version (that's the one without the keyboard, right?). It's super handy. It's about the only way I check Facebook anymore. My biggest complaint is the lack of decent games. For the most part it's knock-offs of casual games, card games. I play Sudoku occasionally. But I haven't found anything much more exciting than solitaire. If anyone comes across a decent Droid game, let me know.

We saw Predators last week. I really liked it. I haven't really liked a Predators movie since the original, so it was a nice surprise.

I haven't picked up my copy of Starcraft 2 yet, but I hope to do that soon. I haven't been playing much World of Warcraft lately. Maybe an hour every week or two. I've been spending more time playing Duels of the Planeswalkers.

I got the Goodreads widget displaying on the right of my blog, so you can see what I'm reading. I'm trying to find something similar for games I'm playing and movies I'm watching. If anyone knows of a good one for either let me know.

Until next time (which hopefully isn't a few months away).

New Phone

2010-03-02T11:04:00.002-07:00

Becky and I got new phones this weekend. It may take me a little time to figure it out completely, so please bear with me. But so far, it looks really fun!

Of course, I have the lightsaber app...

New Toy Story 3 Trailer

2010-02-11T11:19:00.002-07:00

Here's a trailer for the new Toy Story 3 movie. It looks great!

Toy Story 3 trailer

I apologize for the gross lack of posts here over the past several months. I promise I will be updating this blog soon. I have plans for it. Unfortunately, these plans will not start until my current work project is finished.

Taking the Plunge

2009-08-19T11:06:00.003-06:00

Well, I did it. Last night, Becky and I cancelled our World of Warcraft accounts. We've had a ton of fun playing the game over the past few years, but we recognized it was time to call it quits. We're not having as much fun playing it as we used to, and frankly it came down to us deciding we could make better use of our time. I used my time playing WoW to unwind, and I expect I'll find something new to unwind with. There are other games I can be playing (games I can study rather than a game I know inside-out), projects I can be working on around the house, and other things.

I suppose when the next expansion comes out, we may want to check it out. But until then, I honestly don't think I'll miss it. Farewell, Azeroth.

Next up, Champions Online!

Camping

2009-08-17T18:44:00.002-06:00

We went on a family camping trip this past weekend. I found out Thursday night that I probably wouldn't have to work over the weekend, so Becky got us ready to go through a flurry of activity on Friday. She got people lined up to take care of our dogs, cover our nursery class at church, got us all packed, the campground reserved, meals planned and purchased, and kids ready to go, all by the time I got home.

How cool is that? Since that's my least favorite part of camping (the getting ready and planning stage), it started off great.

We drove up to Crystal Hot Springs (just north of Brigham City) and got to our campsite. We were up on the ridge of a hill, and the wind was blowing so hard it was actually snapping tent poles on my brother-in-law's tent as he was setting it up. It was crazy. So we did what any sane dedicated camper would do... we got a hotel room.

We all decided to bag it and got adjoining rooms at the Crystal Inn in Brigham City. Now that's how to camp! We spent Saturday morning and evening in the swimming pool. The kids had a blast. We piled into our hotel room to watch Wolverine in the afternoon. We had dinner with the in-laws at the RV back at the campsite, which was a lot of fun. Sunday morning, more time in the pool.

When everyone left, we took a detour and went up to Logan to look around. I hadn't been there in a few years, and I used to live up there when I was going to school at Utah State. We stopped in a Chris Andersen's family's house, to find out he had also spent the weekend there, and we missed him by just a couple of hours. If you know either of us, that's pretty typical.

Anyway, we had a great weekend, kids had a lot of fun swimming and playing with their cousins. Mandy was the constant center of attention wherever she was, and she loved that. The house was still standing when we got home.

All-in-all, great camping trip. Can't wait for the next one.

I Give Up

2009-08-17T18:34:00.003-06:00

I can't force myself to complete The Wheel of Time. I really, really tried, but Crossroads of Twilight did me in. I already gave up trying to actually read them, and switched to the audio books to get through them. But I literally couldn't force myself to listen to another word of the book. I figured when I was screaming out loud in frustration at the story, in my car, while driving home from work (probably looking like a raving lunatic), it was time to admit defeat.

I'm one of those people who needs to see a story through all the way to the end. It's probably why I've suffered through so many lousy movies. No matter how bad the story, I want to see how it ends. Fortunately, we now have the lovely internet, so I was able to go to wikipedia and read the summary.

If anything, this made me more mad. The book was summed up in about 1 paragraph. And in nearly every point of the summary, the various plot threads remained unresolved at the end. So after torturing yourself to get through the 800 or so pages of the book, you find out that NOTHING HAS CHANGED IN THE STORY. You're still in exactly the same place you were at the beginning.

Unbelievable. Unbearable.

I didn't even try and read book 11, Knife of Dreams. I just read the summary in a couple of minutes and saved myself weeks worth of misery. Now I will await Brandon Sanderson's final books, and I may even read them.

The Wheel of Time is well-named

2009-07-29T19:01:00.002-06:00

Warning: shameless name-dropping ahead. I happen to know Brandon Sanderson and consider him a friend. You may have heard of him. He's an immensely talented writer. I mean, I consider myself a writer, I do a lot of writing for video games, even some you may have played. I wrote a comic book a while back (you probably never read it). I wrote my own role-playing game (see the nice link and cover photo on my sidebar), but I never really tried to sell it. I think it's awesome, but it's mostly just a vanity project. But Brandon... he's the real deal.

He's written Elantris, the Mistborn trilogy, the Alcatraz young-readers books, and his recently released book Warbreaker has a plug on it from Michael-freaking-Moorcock, one of my all-time heroes. Brandon's getting all kinds of hype (deservedly so) for his work. So much so, he was asked to complete the Wheel of Time series, the work of Robert Jordan.

Very, very cool.

So in anticipation of reading Brandon's final Wheel of Time books, and seeing how this colossal story is finally going to come to an end, I decided to re-read the books, so I'd be all ready. I have tried on two separate occasions in the past to read the entire series. The first time I made it through the first four books. The second time I reached book six. This time, I'm actually at book 10.

And it is excruciatingly painful.

These books just do not end. They go into mind-numbing detail about the most trivial of events... for hundreds of pages. By the time you get to the sixth, seventh books and beyond, the books follow a similar pattern. Each book will have... oh, 2-3 major plot points, and Jordan will fill in 800 pages worth of story to connect the dots between these couple of plot points. Some of these plot points the reader can see coming a mile away, but it will take several books to reach a semi-resolution to these points. Many times, a villain will die at the end of a book (bang! the big finale!) only to conveniently re-appear some after to churn through a new series of events all over again.

By the end of the seventh book, I was going crazy. I could not force myself to read another page. But I'd made it so far, and I wanted to be ready for Brandon's books. How could I finish the never-ending series without going completely insane? I discovered the audio books at the library. So my daily commute for the past few months has been listening to books 8, 9 and now 10. And they are still painfully, agonizingly slow-paced. I'm resigned to listening to 20 cds a book, full of long-winded conversations that never resolve anything, travel back and forth across the world (usually ending back up where they started), some random fights, male characters making cracks about not understanding women, and women characters making cracks about not understanding men, and reaching 1 or 2 (if I'm lucky, 3) plot pillars.

The books keep churning along, going no where, slowly moving from scene to scene.

Wheel. Of. Time. Indeed.

Hopefully the pain will all be worth it. No pressure, Brandon!

Lights!

2009-06-09T13:35:00.002-06:00

Our aquarium lights went out over the weekend. This is not a good thing. We have coral in our salt-water tank that will die if not given enough light. And lights are very expensive. The system we had was kind of home-constructed by the person we bought the tank from. Let's just say, it probably wasn't very safe. So we had to find a new solution fast. We ended up buying a whole new setup with 150 Watt metal halide bulbs, some power compacts, moonlights and a cooling system. We got a great deal on it, but it was still barely this side of $700. Yeah, ouch. But at least our tank looks great now. I'll post some photos soon.

Then I wasn't done with lights. Last night I finally took our christmas lights down off the outside of the house. Ha! They were up over half the year. My neighbor asked me why I was even bothering. But now I won't feel quite as self-conscious whenever I look at the house.

And I read an article in the NY Times yesterday that made me feel a little better about how bad I am at updating my blog. Basically, about 95% of blogs have been abandoned. Of the 133 million blogs some place tracked, only 7 million had been updated in the last 4 months. So while this may not be updated daily, at least it's not completely abandoned.

Twitter, though, I have abandoned. I officially closed down my account today. Someone I didn't know started tracking me on it, and I realized I hadn't updated it in over a year, so I put it out of its misery.

Drood and Dragonmaster

2009-06-04T14:26:00.003-06:00

I've been reading quite a bit lately, mostly shorter or "light" books. But I started reading Drood by Dan Simmons. It's an incredible book, wonderfully written... and I just couldn't finish it. I was only about 100 pages into it (out of around 900 pages) when it was due back to the library, and I couldn't renew it because someone else had it reserved. So I had to quit just a little ways in. Hopefully I'll be able to give it another try in a few weeks.

In the mean time, I'm reading Turn Coat, the new Harry Dresden book by Jim Butcher. Awesome books. Becky and I both have read them all.

I actually bid on something at ebay this week too. I won an auction for an old card game from the early 80s called Dragonmaster. Hurray! Can't wait to get it.

We had some air conditioner problems a week or so ago, which turned out to be furnace problems preventing our air conditioner from working. Yeah, fun and not cheap. And we painted half our master bedroom the other day. Two walls are a nice cobalt blue. We'll finish painting it soon. We have paint and supplies to paint all the bedrooms, we just have to find time and energy to do them all.

Work is still keeping me busy. E3 is this week, with lots of cool game announcements. Can't wait for Brual Legend, Uncharted 2, Lego Harry Potter, Marvel Hero Super Squad among others. I'm not super impressed with Microsoft's Natal, but it could be cool I guess. The PSP Go looks pretty cool, as long as it doesn't completely make my old PSP obsolete.

Kids are doing great. Nicky is done with pre-school. Josh has a few weeks left of Kindergarten. He'll start 1st grade next month, which means he'll have to be at school in the mornings, which means I'll have to drive him there, which means I'll have to start getting up early and regularly. That will certainly be a change.

Hope all is going well.

I'm a big loser

2009-05-01T10:39:00.003-06:00

I'm a big loser, and not just because I never update my blog. We've been having a weight-loss contest at work, which I decided to join. We are divided into 4 teams, and each week we weigh in and see how we're doing. While I'm not the biggest loser by any stretch (you can debate that amongst yourselves), I have to-date lost 12 1/2 lbs. In less than 4 weeks. We're going a total of 13 weeks I think, so hopefully I can stick with it and continue to shed some weight. My personal goal for the entire competition was to lose 10 lbs. So I've already hit that. But I'm not giving up yet, I'll keep plugging along.

I have actually been updating my blog all week, but not in a way that anyone would probably notice. Yahoo! announced they are going to be shutting down Geocities, and that is where I had been storing all my photos for my blog. Every photo on this blog was linked to my free account at Geocities, and within the next week or so that was going to shut down. So I've spent the past week updating the links to all my photos on the blog, storing them on the blogger site instead (Picasa web album I think). I think I got them all now, but we'll see. I may have skipped a couple.

Things are going well at home. We're using our new laundry nook upstairs, even though there's still a little bit of work left to do on it. It's super nice having that upstairs. We've had to start our yard work. The grass is getting green, and the weeds are proliferating. The plan for tomorrow is to mow and fertilize. We still have several rooms to paint, but I'm not sure when we'll get to that yet. We want to finish projects before starting more.

On the entertainment front:

We're really enjoying watching Castle on ABC. Probably our favorite show on tv right now. Reaper, Dollhouse and The Unusuals are also favorites.

I'm still slowly making my way through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. I'm currently on book 7. I checked out the audio book on cd from the library, and listen to that on my commute. (Way better than talk radio). I recently read The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, and really enjoyed that. I tried reading Vampirates, and was really not impressed. Disappointing, because the idea was great. Now I've moved on to Staked by J. F. Lewis. I let you know if I like it.

Playing a lot of World of Warcraft. Grimgully is level 80 and doing the occasional Naxx run and heroics. Spezi is 69 and out in Northrend finally. A couple others are getting close. I'm playing Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction on the PS3. I love the Ratchet games, and this one doesn't disappoint. When possible, I'm also playing a little Fallout 3.

I don't have photos of the kids with me, but I'll probably put some up soon.

Work wise, I'll be giving a presentation to the game club over at ITT on May 9th. I'm putting in some long hours at work, it's tiring, but the game is really shaping up nicely. I think it's going to be great. When I can actually tell you what it is, I will.

Hope everyone is doing well.

GDC, Anniversary, Biggest Loser, Remodel and more!

2009-04-13T14:04:00.000-06:00

It’s been a busy few weeks around the Sumsion house.

At the end of March, I travelled out to San Francisco to attend the Game Developer’s Conference 2009. I always love going to this conference, and this year was no exception. The past few times I went it was held in San Jose, and I was close enough to my grandma and aunts and uncles to visit. Although I couldn’t visit anyone this time around, it was still a fun time. I listened to some good lectures on game design (and some boring ones), took home some good information, and was able to see some friends and former co-workers. Plus, Disney put me up at the Hotel Palomar just a few blocks from the convention center. That was pretty swank.

Just a few days prior to the conference, Becky and I celebrated our 7th Anniversary. It’s been the greatest 7 years ever. Thanks, Sweetie! We still haven’t had our official celebration though, we had to postpone it for a variety of reasons. We should be tackling that very soon. (I haven’t forgotten, honest!)

We decided to do a fairly major renovation to our house. We hired a contractor, who came over with a couple guys to build a laundry nook on our upstairs level. For the past 3+ years, our bedrooms are on the 2nd floor and our washer/dryer have been in the basement. That’s hauling all our laundry up and down 2 flights of stairs. It gets tiring. So we knocked out a nook in the upstairs hallway (taking a chunk out of the master closet behind it), got it hooked up with electricity and plumbing, some shelves, some new tile. In the master closet, even though we lost a little space, the way the closet has been rebuilt, it actually added space for hanging up clothes, so we gained there. And in the master bedroom, they installed a huge built-in bookcase.

We’re not quite done yet. He still needs to come back and hang up the folding door and do some of the finish work. Then we’ll be repainting the hallway, master bedroom, master closet and all three kids’ rooms. Sheesh.

For added fun, at work we’ve started a Biggest Loser contest, and I decided my scale couldn’t take much more abuse so I signed up. My first official weigh-in after week 1 is tomorrow, but according to my own scale I should have lost around 5-6 lbs in my first week. Not too shabby. I don’t know that I’m ever going to get used to diet soda though. /shudder.

Easter was fun. Big family bbq at our house (with about 28 people), Easter Egg hunt on Sunday. Mandy got to carry around an easter basket and find eggs, she loved it. Boys tanked up on candy. Zelda our Great Dane tanked up on something too, she was puking Sunday night… ah, Easter memories.

If you’ve been keeping up with my profile on Goodreads, you’ll know that I’ve recently read some Neil Gaiman stuff (always entertaining), and I’m still plugging through the Wheel of Time books by Robert Jordan. I’m on book 7, which is where I gave up the first time around. I would like to read them all so that I can enjoy the last few books being written by the talented Brandon Sanderson. We’ll see if I can make it. I’ll have to take a small break, though, because I just went to the library and grabbed Dan Simmons’ new book called Drood.

On the video game front, I picked up a new Nintendo DSi (black, of course). It’s pretty sweet. First, it plays all my old DS games, many of which I haven’t finished playing yet. It has 2 web-cams, and you can take photos and play around with a small set of distortion filters. It also has a mic and a few sound filters you can use to distort voice recordings. I downloaded the free web-browser for it, and purchased Wario Snapped off the Nintendo Store. All in all, I’m pretty happy with it. I’m playing Rhythm Heaven right now, and discovering to my dismay that I have absolutely NO Rhythm. Of course, to those that know me, this is probably no big surprise.

I’m finally getting around to playing Fallout 3, though I can only spare an hour or two a week on it. At this rate I might finish it before the end of the year. Still playing World of Warcraft, though that too has cut back quite a bit. Still waiting to play Fable 2, and I need to pick up a copy of Little Big Planet at some point, though I’ll have to break down and buy the EyeToy for the PS3 to go along with it.

TV news. Best shows we enjoy right now are Reaper (super funny, but rumors I’m hearing don’t sound good for it lasting beyond this season), Castle (awesome new show on ABC) and Dollhouse (slow start, but it’s growing on me… and again, it would be nice if it lasted beyond this season, but things don’t sound too good). The Batman Brave and the Bold cartoon is the boys’ favorite right now, with Ben 10 and Secret Saturdays close contenders.

And that’s probably about it. Hope you all are having a great time.

Pardon the Dust

2009-01-26T13:57:00.001-07:00

I'm updating this page, it may take me a few days to get everything the way I want it. So please bear with me. Who knows, I may even post something in the near future.

Wow! An update!

2009-01-06T09:09:00.001-07:00

How about this? An update to the blog! It's not a new-year's resolution or anything, just thought it was about time for one.

Things are going pretty well for us. Mandy turned 1 year old in November, she's growing up fast. She has a pretty decent vocabulary now, and is walking and getting into everything around the house. Nicky is having fun in pre-school, and he just started primary this week at church. Joshua loves kindergarten and is doing really well there. He is playing basketball and loving that too.

We had a good christmas. We were worried initially, because the night of the 23rd we smelled something burning in the house but couldn't find anything. When I woke up the next morning, I found that the furnace had gone out, it was about 47 degrees in the house. Yikes! Fortunately, I was able to get a repair guy out. The family spent the day at Becky's sister's house while I waited for the repairman to come out. $500 and a new furnace motor later, we had heat restored to the house. Merry Christmas! In hindsight though, if it had gone out one night later, we wouldn't have been able to get someone out all weekend though, so it's good it happened when it did.

We enjoyed watching some football over the break. How about the Huskers! Nice Gator Bowl win over Clemson. And we loved watching the Utes win the Sugar Bowl. It'll be fun to see how much they get screwed in the rankings since they're not part of the BCS. The only disappointing game was seeing the Vikings lose. Oh well.

Work is going great, keeping me very busy. But I was able to take some time off over the holidays, so that helped me recharge. And the boys got to come in to work with me a few times. I know I'm totally destroying their concept of what a job is. Going to work with dad means coming in and playing games, watching movies and drinking soda all day.

Speaking of soda, I'm doing well on my new year's resolution so far. I've cut soda from my diet. Yes, no more Mountain Dew. I've decided I'll allow myself some if I go out to eat, but otherwise none at work or at home. My body hasn't totally crashed and burned yet from the Dew Deprivation. We'll see how it goes. We actually got our exercise room set up, dusted off the treadmill and the exercise bike. We even used them! For something besides stacking clothes on!

I got a few games for christmas. Fallout 3 and The Orange Box for the Xbox 360, Warhammer Squad Commander for the DS. But I'm still playing World of Warcraft, which is crowding my gaming time. And we're watching stuff on Netflix through the 360 (in theory the service is cool, but we're having lots of problems with it).

Well, I need to get to work. Here's a couple of photos of the kids from Christmas.

Back from San Jose

2008-09-02T15:09:00.001-06:00

Becky and I just got back from a quick trip out to San Jose, where we were able to show off our little girl. We had a great time, we got to visit with family and friends, and we spent a day up in San Francisco at Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39. I don't have time for a lengthy update, so I thought I would just post a couple of quick photos from the trip.

Becky and Mandy at Grandma's house.

Here's a close-up of Mandy.

I thought I'd actually include a picture of me.

Fun Times

2008-08-22T15:06:00.000-06:00

I noticed I haven't updated my blog since May! It's been so long that no one probably checks this any more, but I thought I'd give a brief update nonetheless.

Joshua started kindergarten. Can you believe that! He's doing great at school, and we're hoping he'll have a really good school experience. He's still a big video gamer. He recently beat Lego Indiana Jones on both the PS2 and DS, and he played the last few levels for me on my Xbox 360 version. And this produced maybe one of his best quotes this year...

Josh: Mom! I just beat Indiana Jones!
Mom: That's great, Josh. You're so awesome!
Josh: Yup, I'm just like dad. I'm smart and I can do things -- even on medium!

I'm glad I raised the bar so high for him.

Nick will also be starting school soon, pre-school for him. We've been going the rounds with potty-training him. He's doing really well, we finally found something that motivates him: Skittles! We have jars of Skittles by the toilets in the house.

Mandy is also doing great. She is crawling around at top speed all over the house. She is such a happy baby, super fun to be around.

Work is going well for me. I stay pretty busy, writing most of the day, and in many many meetings. The commute is getting a little tricky. I generally carpool in the morings and then take the bus home at night. The last bus leaves earlier than I would like, but taking the train gets me home considerably later. And I just learned I won't be able to use bus tokens on the train any more when I do have to take it. It seems too many people are making bogus tokens that trick the machines, so I'll have to use cash now. It will be a pain. Hopefully we'll get a semi-decent tax return next year and I can buy a beater of a car that can get me to the train station and back every day. If I can do that, I think most of my commute problems will be solved.

I actually have green grass at my home now! We finally, finally got my sprinkler system fixed and working. Some of the guys from church came over and helped me add in a new sprinkler line, and we reassigned some of the heads to new zones, and we figured out there was a major problem with the filter. All that now means that my water pressure is back to what it once was, and our lawn is greener than it's ever been. Now I just need to work on getting our weed problem under control.

We're loving our new deck. We don't have patio furniture for it yet (that will have to wait until next year I think), but Becky hooked up a nice mister system to our pergola, so now we can sit in the shade and cool, have a place for the kids to play and still let the dogs out (Zelda, our Great Dane, has a tendancy to bowl the kids over when she's playing with them). BBQs are actually fun to have.

Games I'm currently playing: Lego Indiana Jones, Oblivion, World of Warcraft, Star Trek Tactical Assault.

Games that I'm getting ready to play: Mass Effect, GTA 4, Rogue Galaxy, Zelda Phantom Hourglass, Super Mario Galaxy, Braid.

Games on my MUST BUY WHEN THEY COME OUT list: Star Wars The Force Unleashed, Spore, Lego Batman, Fable 2, Dead Space, World of Warcraft The Wrath of the Lich King (2 copies).

Games on my MUST BUY WHEN I ACTUALLY HAVE MONEY TO AFFORD THEM list: Fallout 3, Too Human, Gears of War 2, Warhammer Online.

I'm sure I'm missing some from both lists.

Hope all is well with my friends and family.

Social Networking Overload

2008-05-20T12:03:00.001-06:00

I've been trying to organize all of my social networking sites. And frankly the task is pretty daunting. There are just so many of them. I can't believe I need to maintain so many different ways of keeping in contact with people. I thought since I've put so much effort into updating and creating them, I'll share them with you.

Brace yourselves.

I'll start with Facebook. It seems okay, in a generic sort of way. Nice place to put photos and such. Both my wife and I have created pages over there, and we'll work on getting more photos up there soon.

I haven't bothered with MySpace yet. I suppose I will soon. It just seems like too much of an online personal ad for my tastes. I may make a page someday if I can feel like I'm not trolling there.

Then there's Twitter. This one baffles me. I created an account and kept it updated for all of about 20 minutes. This one is all about constant updates. And if you regularly read my blog, you know that I'm lucky to update this once a month. Why on earth would I want to maintain something I'm expected to update multiple times a day?

Good Reads is a fun one. It is very similar to Library Thing. They are both about books. The main difference in my eyes is that Good Reads focuses on books you have READ, where Library Thing focuses on books you OWN. I like both, I would like to display the many books in my collection, but I am a regular patron of the library, and I read A LOT. So talking about books I've read is just as appealing. Ultimately, it boiled down to: which site made it easier for me to enter books into my collection? Good Reads wins hands down. On Library Thing I have to enter a search, scroll through a list, select one book and then start again. Good Reads allows me to select several books at a time, very easy to do. And I set up a tag that marks whether or not I own the book. Check Good Reads out, I really like it.

There's Board Game Geek where I can display all the games in my collection. (Board and Card games anyway, my piles of RPGs aren't listed there). There's 1UP for my video game collection (which I haven't updated in a long time).

There's Plaxo and LinkedIn for my business networks.

Of course, if you're reading this, you know about the blog. There's AOLIM (I'm Shubbilicious) and MSNIM.

There's Comic Collector Live for all my comics.

There's some high school alum site I can never remember.

It's staggering. So no guarantees any of it will stay up to date, but I'll try and maintain them from time to time.

What's New?

2008-05-07T10:22:00.002-06:00

It's been a while since my last post. I find I have less and less time to update my blog, so I'll have to keep this brief.

Things have been going well, and we've been keeping busy. I got the sprinklers turned on at the house, a friend came over and fixed my zone that wasn't working last summer, so all my sprinklers are working now. I've been offered some help to dig them up and make some improvements to the system, hopefully I can get that done soon.

Mandy is doing great. She's 5 months old now. She's super happy, just an adorable baby.

The boys are really happy that the weather's warming up and they can start playing outside more. Josh is in his last month of pre-school. Kindergarten begins in the fall, and he can't wait.

We have had some visits from friends recently. Scott Shicoff was able to come out for a while and I got to see him over lunch with some other friends from the office. And Rod Harper came out from NC for a business trip and was able to swing by for a bbq/Wow party. That was great.

I have received my ISBN # for Terra Immortalis, the RPG I've been working on for the past few years. Yes, it is really almost done. All I have to do is put the ISBN on the cover and it's done. That should happen this week. As soon as the book is available, I'll let those of you who are interested know how to get your hands on a copy.

I've been reading a lot. My commute is still long, and plenty of time to read. I've read a few books by Kim Harrison (the Rachel Morgan witch books). At first they were a guilty pleasure, but now they're just a pleasure. Fun books to read. I tried reading L. A. Banks, whose books are in the same genre, and just could not get into them at all. I'm currently reading the 5th book in the Malazan Empire books by Steven Erikson. Amazing books. They make my head hurt trying to keep all the characters and plot twists straight.

Still waiting for the new Game of Thrones book by George R. R. Martin.

In video games, I recently finished playing God of War: Chains of Olympus on the PSP. I'll be starting Final Fantasy Crisis Core next. We just got Mario Kart for the Wii. Legos Star Wars 2 for Xbox 360. Still playing Mass Effect. Going to start Oblivion (it was the first 360 game I bought and I still haven't played it). Zelda Phantom Hourglass on the DS. Still playing World of Warcraft of course. Now my brother John is playing too! And his wife Sabrina. And I transferred my original character over to the server we're on. And we let Josh create a few characters, he loves playing with us (although we make sure he only plays when we're there to supervise and help).

Monday was my mom's birthday (and my dad's). Yes, they share the same birthday. My dad would have been 65 this year. I still miss him a lot.

This week we'll be scheduling the work to get a new fence and deck for our house. We can't wait!

Work is going really well, I'm having a great time. I keep pretty busy, our projects are going great, Disney as a whole is doing better than ever. It's a fun time to be working here.

Here's a couple photos of the kids.

Fun kids and crying for Far Cry

2008-02-15T10:47:00.001-07:00

I suppose it's about time for another post, to prove to everyone I'm still alive. Things have been going very well for us. We're loving having Amanda as part of our family. She's starting to smile a lot, and we can even get giggles out of her occasionally.

Nicky turned 3 years old yesterday, and we're having a party for him tomorrow. He's been loving this little Spiderwick book he got out of a cereal box, so we're taking him to the Spiderwick movie tomorrow with his brother and some cousins. We also bought both boys bicycles. We still have to put them together, but we got them Spider-man bikes. They have the same bike, but different sizes. I think they'll have a lot of fun with them.

Here's a couple super cutes pictures...

My two cute girls!

And on another topic entirely, the trailer for the Far Cry movie was posted online... It makes me sad. I have to admit, the movie has a decent cast. Udo Kier, Ralf Moeller, Emmanuelle Vaughier... all good choices. But the movie's being directed by Uwe Boll. As much as I really don't like to slam people's talents, the guy is a horrible director. His movies are awful, awful experiences, and I can't imagine that he will suddenly improve to "marginally good" in time for this film. Will I see it? Of course, I worked on the game, I'll go see the movie. Do I expect to enjoy any portion of the 90 minute experience? Not a chance.

See for yourself if you think my fears are justified... Far Cry Trailer.

And in other news from games I worked on... Dead Head Fred won the WGA Best Video Game Writing award. Congratulations to the guys at Vicious Cycle! Here's a bit more on the award. Dead Head Fred wins WGA video game writing award.

Our Baby is here

2008-01-03T14:18:00.001-07:00

Yes, it took me quite a while to update the blog... again. But I wanted to officially announce here that Amanda Michelle Sumsion is doing very well. We're so happy to have her in our family. She's a great little baby.

I don't have time for a detailed update, but I just wanted to hit the basics.

Christmas went well. The kids got great presents, we got to spend lots of time with family and friends, and we just had a super holiday break this year.

My brother John and his wife Sabrina also welcomed their new little daughter over the holidays. Welcome Jasmine!

Work is going well, fun as always.

Here are a few photos to enjoy...

Josh and Nicky are painting ceramic figures as their gift to their new baby sister.

Josh and his friend Jayden help me plant a new tree in the front yard. It's still standing!

Our new little girl, only hours old.

My pumpkin that took 2nd place honors in the company pumpkin-carving contest for halloween! (Granted, out of 3 entries).

Me and my little girl.

Me and the boys out front, building a snow man and preparing for a snowball fight.

Our photo for this year's christmas cards.

Another shot of the kids at Christmas

Hope you all had a great Christmas holiday.

One Week to Go!

2007-11-20T11:07:00.000-07:00

Our baby girl will be here in one week! Next Tuesday. We're very excited. We've got her room mostly set up. The crib is ready, the dresser and changing table. We have a couple of outfits for her. We still need to set up the playpen next to our bed for her, and get some toys and diapers and such.

The boys are getting excited too. Josh has been counting down the days with Becky. He can't wait for a baby sister. Nicholas is pretty indifferent to it all, but gets excited that we're excited, so it all works out.

I'll be taking about 3 weeks off of work to stay home. I don't know how much sleep or free time I'll have, but I'm bringing home a stack of games to look at (Lost Planet, Conan, Ghosthunter, Oblivion, Spyro, Resistance, Bioshock). A couple books and some dvds. We're only watching a few shows on TV, so the writers' strike will impact us very little. So what if the shows go into reruns, we're barely watching them anyway.

We've already set up most of our christmas decorations, and we're done with most of our christmas shopping. Since Becky won't be in any shape to go out after the 27th, we figured we'd better get it all done now.

Hope you're all doing well. We'll post baby news as soon as we can.

Over 2 months

2007-10-03T17:40:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's been over two months since my last post. Inexcusable, I know. I only have a couple minutes now, so I'll sum up briefly.

We're doing great. Our Great Dane Zelda is getting huge. She's figured out that with a little effort she can knock the slats down on our fence and get into the neighbors' yards, so I've been spending time fixing the fence. She's too big for her crate, so we aren't able to kennel her as much as she needs.

Becky has 8 weeks to go before she's due. Our little girl is developing nicely and everything looks well.

Josh is enjoying pre-school, Nick is enjoying just about everything. He's a total Scooby-Doo nut. He even sings the theme song now.

I'll try and post some more stuff soon. Hopefully in less than another 2 months.

The Right Hand of Doom

2007-07-23T14:05:00.001-06:00

I had a little bit of an accident this past weekend. I finished mowing my yard with my riding mower, and dragged out my regular mower to get some of the harder to reach spots. Part way through that, I stopped to adjust the height on the front wheels of the mower, and I accidently touched the exhaust of the mower with the back of my right hand. It peeled some skin off the back of my hand and gave me a nice 2nd-3rd degree burn. I had to go to an Instacare, where they cleaned it up, gave me a tetanus shot, and I had to go in the following day to determine if I needed skin grafts or not. Fortunately, it wasn't that severe, and if I can keep it clean, it should heal up without excessive scarring.

My brothers-in-law were a little disappointed though. If I had needed skin grafts, I may have used skin grafts from my butt to fix my hands, so they were looking forward to being able to call me Butthand and the like. Well actually, they would have liked a legitimate reason, as they feel free to call me that anyway. But I got to thinking, I could have had some really cool nicknames had that happened (besides being able to moon people just by holding up my hand). Possibilities include:

Butthand

Asshand

The Right Hand of Ass

Stinkhand

The Right Hand of Doom

Any other suggestions?

We picked up a copy of Harry Potter this weekend. Becky gets first crack at it, though, so I'll have to content myself with other stuff until then. Just finished reading The Golden Compass. I wasn't super enamored with it. It was okay.

Of course, the big news of the weekend: I finally hit level 70 in World of Warcraft. Grimgully the dwarf warrior now has his flying mount. I'll put up some pics soon.

And now for some photos:

Joshua at Easter

Yes, light saber battles in our house are probably a little different than for most other Jedi.

Ignore the dead grass in the background. At least it's short.

Two whole months!

2007-07-13T14:10:00.000-06:00

I can't believe it's been two months since my last post. I'm not very good at this blogging thing I guess. We're doing well. As you may have read on Becky's blog, we are having a girl. We're very excited about this. We actually get to buy little girl clothes. We actually get to get rid of all our old little boy clothes.

Josh is enjoying pre-school. Nick is talking in nearly comprehensible sentences. I can do the same on some days.

Becky celebrated her birthday in the beginning of July. And by celebrated, I mean that we had a bbq and she didn't get much in the way of presents because we had to replace our water softener that weekend. I've promised her a do-over birthday celebration that will be a little more appropriate. Fortunately, Becky's brother Dave came over to help install the new water softener, or even that wouldn't have happened. (And when I say he came over to help, I mean he came over and I watched him do it).

We're trying to get out and see all the movies that are in theaters this summer. There's so many. We still haven't seen Spidey 3, but we have managed to go out and see Pirates 3, Shrek 3. I saw Ratatouille with co-workers, but still need to take the family to see it. And I really want to take the boys to see Transformers. Plus there's Ocean's 13, Harry Potter, Die Hard and who knows what else.

Most of my game playing time revolves around World of Warcraft. My dwarf warrior is level 68 now, I'm trying to reach 70 to catch up with Becky. I have managed to find some time to play through Meet The Robinsons (trying to pad out my Xbox Gamerscore), Puzzle Quest and Spectrobes. I'm playing Gears of War every now and again at work. I want to get some time in on Elder Scrolls Oblivion before next month though, because some awesome games are coming out next month (including Dead Head Fred!).

I've been reading a lot of Jim Butcher lately. I've read all the Harry Dresden books (awesome!) and the Calderon's Fury books (also awesome). I picked up a book called The Book of Assassins at Barnes & Noble. Kind of a biography on famous assassins. It's interesting. I also just started reading The Golden Compass. I'll see if it lives up to the hype.

We're looking forward to visits from family at the end of the month. John and Sabrina and their kids will be out, and my Grandma June. It'll be a big Sumsion get-together.

Hope all is well.

Video Game, Work and Life Updates

2007-05-17T14:51:00.001-06:00

I have some various items to report, to catch you up with things from the past little while.

My mom's move was a success. We drove her out to Lincoln, got everything packed up for both her and my grandma Oweita, loaded up their stuff in a U-haul, and drove them out to Salt Lake. She is now moved in to her new home in Draper. It's a cute little place, and I think her and grandma really like it. They live about 10 minutes away from us now, much easier to get to than a 14 hour drive out to Lincoln.

In video game news, Dead Head Fred now has a voice! John McGinley has been signed to voice the title character in the game. I think he's a great choice for the character. The game is now scheduled to come out in August for the PSP.

I'm totally addicted to Puzzle Quest on my PSP. My good friends over at Vicious Cycle did a great job on the port, I can't get enough of the game. It's available on PC and DS as well, and will be coming out soon for Xbox Live. Definitely check it out.

I'm also reading books again. There was a while where I didn't have the time, but now I'm riding the bus again to work and can get some reading in during my day. I've been reading the Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher. Fun stuff. And I'm currently reading The Terror by Dan Simmons. Wow is this book cool. It's a stand-along novel about the ill-fated Franklin Expedition to find the North-West Passage in the mid 1800s. Excellent work from Simmons, as always. I'm only halfway through, but racing towards the end.

Meet the Robinsons the game is doing well. It's gotten some good reviews, and Josh loves to play it, so I'm satisfied. I've picked up the GameCube and Xbox 360 versions. (Yes, I'm playing the 360 version to boost up my Achievement score, so what? I'll crack 1000 points yet).

Well, back to work...

Sigh... Wyoming...

2007-05-06T11:19:00.000-06:00

Once again, I am stranded in Wyoming. I've lost count of how many times this has happened to me now. I am not just sitting in a hotel room in Cheyenne right now, I am stuck here. I-80 is closed to the West of us, snow closing the route (we made it through in time). Tornados and flash floods and hail are to the East of us. I'm travelling to Lincoln with my mom, and while we stayed here last night, we were expecting to finish our trip today. Instead, I'll be enjoying the wild and crazy happenings here in Cheyenne...

Yeah, or I'll be playing World of Warcraft soon.

My mom stayed with us for just over 6 weeks in Salt Lake. She's bought a house a few minutes away from us, and so now I'm driving her back to Lincoln, where we'll pack up all her stuff, pack up all of her mom's stuff, and then all of us will drive back out to Salt Lake.

We're excited to have my mom and grandma so close to us. They bought a cute little house, and it's very close to both us and Noelle. I'll be in Lincoln for a few days this week, and hopefully we'll have them moved in to their new house and squared away by the end of the week.

Everything else is going well. Work is going great, I'm having fun and we're working on a great game. Becky, Josh and Nicky are doing well. Now that the weather is warmer, we can play out in the yard more. My goal this summer is to not have the worst lawn on the street. It's off to a decent start, but I'll need to do some maintenance on my sprinkler system. (Yeah, that chill you just got up your spine is reading "Maintenance" and "me" in the same sentence.)

I'm playing a lot of Puzzle Quest on my PSP. Definitely worth checking out (it's available on the DS, PC and soon on XBL).

More updates soon.

Yes, I'm still alive

2007-03-26T10:45:00.001-06:00

I realize that I haven't posted for a long time. A looonnng time. I was caught up in my crunch time at work, and basically everything else just fell by the wayside. To try and do a detailed post on everything that's happened over the past couple of months would take way too much time, so I'll be brief.

Meet the Robinsons is done. It should be on store shelves this week. It's available on the Playstation 2, Xbox 360, GameCube, and Wii. (Those are the versions our studio worked on for North America). The movie comes out at the end of this week. I'm pretty proud of this game. It looks great, it is fun to play.

Then I had a few weeks of comp time, and we made the most of it. We took the boys to Disneyland. They had a blast! Check out Becky's blog for more details. We're definitely going to do it again. I hadn't been there for 30 years!

We got a new puppy named Zelda. She's a Great Dane. She's great, but is the clumsiest dog I have ever met. Probably because she's growing so fast. We got her about 2 months ago when she was 8 weeks old and smaller than our Boston Terrier Grr. Now she's over twice his size! She's a very sweet dog, and is really good with the kids.

My first class at ITT is done. I was teaching a class in Video Game Design Process. It was a fun experience. I'm now teaching a new class this quarter, Game Interface Design. The class is really going to be a challenge.

I'm working on a new game at work now, the project I wanted to be on. I can't talk about it yet, but it looks to be very cool.

We had to drive out to Lincoln, NE to check on my mom, and she drove back home with us. She'll be staying with us for a month or two. She brought her Boston Terrier Fella, so it's a full house. We're really excited to have her stay with us, it will be fun.

Becky surprised me and flew my brother John out to visit during my comp time. He stayed about 4 days with us, playing games, eating out, watching movies. It was great. He's working the day shift now as a police officer. Better for the family life, but not filled with as much excitement.

Here's some photos for your enjoyment. I will attempt to update this more frequently.

The Crunch Time Crunch

2006-12-04T11:12:00.000-07:00

I apologize to those of you who actually take the time to read this. My updates have been non-existant lately. Suffice it to say, my crunch time at work is completely stopping me from being able to spend a lot of time here posting things. Plus, do you really want to read about me slaving away at work all the time and complaining about it?

I'll just summarize a few things that have been happening recently.

We're getting ready for Christmas. The boys are super excited. We're intentionally scaling back on the gifts this year. Last year I think they got buried in all the presents. The tree is up, Becky decorated the inside of the house. Somehow I'm going to have to find some time to hang up the lights on the outside of the house.

We had a great Thanksgiving. We joined Becky's whole family over at her parents' house. It was nice. Good food, fun time. I'm still getting teased about making a desperate call from my cell phone while in the bathroom, asking where more tp was to be found.

I've started teaching a class at ITT-Tech. I'm the teacher for GD330, Game Design Process. I have a class of 11 students, and I'm going to be teaching them the skills needed by good designers, and the role of the designer in the process of created games. I'm really enjoying it so far (I've taught 1 class). I'll teach a total of 11 classes. I'm hoping it's a good experience.

Other than that, I'm keeping busy at work, barely enjoying time for anything else. I finally got to see a Nebraska game on TV... of course they lost to Oklahoma. But I'm looking forward to the bowl game against Auburn now.

My crunch time will continue through into January, hopefully not too much longer than that... and then maybe, MAYBE, I can enjoy some normal work hours again.

San Antonio and other things

2006-10-30T18:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's been a while since I updated my blog. I'm not charging you to read it, so you don't get to complain too much. Work has been very busy. I've been in crunch time since the beginning of June, and I still have a ways to go. But I did take some time out of my schedule to travel down to San Antonio.

My friend Mike Clayton teaches Graphic Design down at the University of the Incarnate Word, and I was asked to go down and give a little presentation on game design. I got to see him and his family, and Adam who also teaches at the school. This is the second time I've been down there, so hopefully that means that they like my presentations. Becky came down with me this time too, so it was a fun little vacation. We flew down on Wednesday and stayed until Saturday morning. We had a great time. I gave my presentation on Thursday evening (and went about a 1/2 hour over what I was supposed to, but I didn't see too many heads nodding, so I guess that's okay). I dazzled them with my knowledge of the games industry and entertained them with my wit and charm... okay, I had pretty pictures on the slide show at least. Becky and I were able to go down to the River Walk, take one of the boat tours, wander around. We ate at some nice places (Rudy's was a blast).

The only tough part of the trip was the mosquito attack during a bbq at the mouth of the San Antonio River (which is on the campus of UOIW). I think Becky had over 20 bites around her ankles. That was bad, but Mike did a great job on the burgers! We loved San Antonio, and we're definitely looking forward to the next time we can go down there. Maybe we'll even make sure Becky's parents are there the next time, since they live there half the year.

We left Josh and Nicky with their Aunt Amy. They had a tough time being away from mom and dad for that long, but they also had a great time with their aunt and cousins. Nicky only kept them up for one night while he wouldn't go to sleep. But he must have learned a new trick while he was there. His first night back home, he climbed out of his crib! It was a sad day, our little boy is growing up. Yesterday we took apart his crib and put it into storage. He inherited the guest bed, a full-size bed that absolutely dwarfs him. But he loves waking up in it. He doesn't like falling asleep in it though. He won't stay in it when we put him down to sleep. Fortunately he can't open doors yet, so at least he stays in his room until he falls asleep.

It looks like I may be teaching a course at ITT Tech. I've had the initial interview, and just have a few more forms to fill out. They have to do a background check on me. But if all goes well, I'll be teaching a class on Game Design starting at the end of November. I'm really looking forward to this. It will be pretty crazy at first, given my work schedule, but it's something I really want to try.

If that wasn't enough, I've got a new responsibility at church too. I'm the Stake Technology Specialist. Which is a fancy title meaning I have to hook up all the audio/visual equipment anytime it is required for a meeting. I'll also be scheduling activities in the building through the stake web-site. I think it's actually going to be a lot of work. It will be really nice once I get trained to actually know what I'm doing.

Becky still loves me and is still loves being married to me. Which I greatly appreciate. Given all the work I'm doing and all the stuff I'm trying to stay on top of, it's not leaving as much time as I would like to spend time with my family. I think the comment she made was that divorced fathers get more time with their children than I do right now. We're nearing the end of the project though. Hopefully come Christmas or thereabouts I'll be coming home at a decent hour and spending hours playing World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero with my family. (We bought the boys the Curious George game on the PS2. They love it! It was made by Vicious Cycle, where I used to work. I'm having a lot of fun playing it with Josh. And Nicky watches the Curious George movie all the time, it's his favorite).

Hopefully I'll be posting more soon.

Nicky's New Trick

2006-10-02T18:47:00.000-06:00

It's been a little while since I've made a post. Crunch time kind of kills all other concerns. My contact with friends and family dwindles, my leisure time activities are drastically reduced, any side projects or home-improvement projects get abandoned (as evidenced by my sprinkler system). Basically I get time to go home, play with my boys for a few minutes before they go to bed, and relax with Becky before going to bed and starting all over the next day. If I leave on time in the morning, it is generally before anyone else wakes up. This has been going on for a few months straight now. It gets old.

Nicholas has learned a new trick. He has discovered that he can whip his diaper off with no help from mom or dad. This is so not hilarious. We've been sick the past couple of days, and it's taken us a little longer than normal to wake up when we hear the boys in the morning. We knew Nicky was awake yesterday morning, but it took us a few minutes to go in there and get him. What did Becky discover? Nicky had taken off his pjs and diaper, and proceeded to pee through the bars of the crib onto the floor. Yeah, it's funny for anyone that didn't have to clean it up.

I went out to Burbank, CA last week on a business trip. I got to go to Disney HQ, take a tour around their feature animation department, check out the offices of BVG. It was very cool. I got to see some of the pre-production work for some upcoming animated Disney features. Can't say what they are, of course, but I thought they looked great! My biggest celebrity sighting was Jim J. Bullock (Too Close for Comfort). I really liked LA, it was my first time really away from the Convention Center downtown... but I don't know that I would like living there. I think if it was just me alone, or just Becky and I, we could have fun, but with a family... I don't know that I could afford anything beyond a little hole of a 2-bedroom apartment. I think I'll stick with our home and where we're at for a while.

I've been playing some Dead Rising, and some World of Warcraft. Having fun with both. We recently bought an Xbox Vision Camera, a web-camera we hooked up to our Xbox 360. So we can have video chats now, we tested it out with our friends Greg and Tara up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and it worked great. Joshua loved seeing himself on the TV. While very cool, I can definitely see the potential for abuse with a gadget like this. Let's just say I think I'll only be allowing video with people I actually know.

If you haven't heard from me in a while, I apologize. I've still got a bit to go before my current game is done. (It's Meet The Robinsons if I haven't mentioned it before). But I'll try and maintain some degree of social life if at all possible.

Video Game Recommendations

2006-09-07T18:58:00.001-06:00

Finally!

Every day at work, me and a group of my co-workers get together for a little round of Mario Kart action on the DS. We set up a series of 3-4 races, and we generally have 6-8 players each day. And almost every time, if I don’t finish dead last, I’m usually in the rear of the pack. After a couple of months of racing, though, I finally won. I was beginning to despair at how bad I sucked at the game, but at least now I’ve had one shining moment of glory.

I thought I would take some time to make some general video game recommendations. There are some great games coming out in the next few months, and this will probably be the last hurrah for great games on the PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox systems. I’m not going to bother listing every great game that’s coming out, because frankly it would take up too much space. (If you want to see a good preview of numerous upcoming games, check out this feature on IGN, linked through EvilAvatar.com). But I am going to list a handful of games for each platform that I think you should check out.

For the record, these are my personal preferences for games I think people would like. If I stand to make any profit off of these recommendations, I’ll be sure to point that out so you don’t think I’m just trying to drum up some royalty payments for my wallet or something.

Parents, please pay attention to the ratings. Don’t let your kids play age-inappropriate games. As with any form of media or entertainment, know what your kids are playing. I will list the games that are rated Mature.

So let’s get started. How about we begin with the GameCube.

GameCube

The Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess. You can get it for the GC or the Wii (Nintendo’s new game system coming out in the next month or two). Either way, you need to get this game. To tide you over, be sure to play The Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker, both of which are available on the GC.

I wish I could list more games coming out for the GC that you should buy, but frankly that was the only one of interest to me. There are a few coming out that are hitting multiple platforms (like LEGO Star Wars 2, for example), but if you can play the game on a different system, I’d have to recommend you do.

Games you should own for the GameCube: Eternal Darkness (Rated M), Mario Kart Double Dash, Super Smash Brothers Melee, Metroid Prime, Resident Evil 4 (Rated M), Animal Crossing.

Nintendo DS

Final Fantasy 3. Incredible series, this one is being redesigned and rebuilt for the DS, not just a straight port. It looks beautiful. I can’t wait.

This is the only upcoming title for the DS that I really want. Mario Hoops 3-on-3 was almost a contender, but if I want to play multiplayer mayhem, I’ll stick to Mario Kart.

Games you should own for the DS: Mario Kart DS, Advance Wars Dual Strike, New Super Mario Brothers, Final Fantasy 4.

PC

Neverwinter Nights 2. If it’s even close to as good as the first one, this will be an amazing game to play. I played the first one many times through, and loved all the community tools and assets. And I like a great single-player rpg. Here’s hoping this is the one.

WOW: Burning Crusade. Okay, only get this one if you’re playing World of Warcraft. If you’re not playing WOW yet… maybe it’s better you stay away. It’s so good it will consume many, many hours.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Rated M). A beautiful looking action rpg, medieval fantasy setting. This is an old-school rpg in a shiny new wrapper.

Games you should own for your PC: yeah, there’s really too many to mention. Anything by Blizzard or ID or Bioware. Far Cry (Rated M) (which I worked on), Civilization 4, Battlefield 2 and countless others.

PS2

Bully. Rockstar’s latest. Despite the controversy surrounding the title, it promises some fun schoolyard hijinks. This isn’t GTA in school or a Columbine simulator. But it probably won’t be something to play in front of the little kids either.

Final Fantasy XII. It’s beautiful, amazing. I can’t wait!

Okami. Great high-concept. Visually stunning. I’ve heard this referred to as PS2’s Zelda.

Games you should own for the PS2: GTA San Andreas (Rated M), any Ratchet and Clank games, Sly Cooper games, Jak games, God of War (Rated M), Kingdom Hearts 2 (I work for Disney, so take this for what you will).

PSP

Yeah… there’s not a single PSP game coming out that I’m excited about. A lot of people have been raving about LocoRoco, but it just doesn’t do anything for me. But there are some games out that have finally hit the Greatest Hits status, meaning they’re only $20 now. If you want a good PSP game for the holidays, go pick up Hot Shots Golf.

Games you should own on your PSP: Daxter, GTA Liberty City Stories (Rated M), Hot Shots Golf.

Xbox

Justice League Heroes. The JLA fighting as a team, and it looks great. One of my favorites from E3. (Also on PS2)

Games you should own for the Xbox: Halo (Rated M), Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, Fable (Rated M).

Xbox 360

Marvel Ultimate Alliance. By the folks who did the great X-Men Legends games, this looks amazing. I can’t wait to make my own Marvel universe super team. (Also available on the Xbox, PS2 and PSP)

LEGO Star Wars 2. The first game was awesome. It is so fun to just play the levels over and over. The first one is my son’s hands-down favorite game. Can’t wait for this one… and we’ll see who shot first: Han or Guido! (Also on Xbox, PS2, GC)

Gears of War (Rated M). This is the game you bought your 360 for. It looks incredible visually. Since it’s made by the Unreal guys, I’m hoping it plays well too.

Games you should own for the Xbox 360: Elder Scrolls Oblivion (Rated M), Dead Rising (Rated M).

I didn’t list any PS3 or Wii games. I just don’t know enough about how well the Wii is going to be (though I’m planning on buying one pretty early on). And there’s just no way I’m forking out the $600 + to get a PS3. That’s ridiculous.

And there are plenty of great games I didn’t mention, just because they don’t particularly interest me. The Madden games, or various racing titles (Need for Speed, Forza, etc.) Plenty of RTS and squad-based shooters (Company of Heroes (Rated M), any Ubisoft games, Age of Empires, etc.) And anything coming out by Vicious Cycle. Basically the games I pointed out are all ones I’m planning on picking up at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later, but the pocketbook will be the deciding factor.

Hope you enjoyed this. I’ve got some games to get playing. (I’m currently playing Stubbs the Zombie. (Rated M) Sick and wrong, but absolutely hilarious).

Finally, I just want to express my sadness at the passing of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter.

I really enjoyed his shows, his personality and enthusiasm for animals and nature. The news of his death really saddened me. Sure, you can say this shouldn't come as a surprise, given the situations he put himself in. But it's still sad. And I'll miss him. Crikey, mate, thanks for the memories.

Trip to Lincoln

2006-08-29T17:58:00.001-06:00

Our trip out to Lincoln was a blast. We had a great time seeing family and friends. We left Salt Lake Thursday afternoon and drove for about eight hours. It was just enough to get through Wyoming (we don’t like staying there any more than we have to). We spent a short night in a hotel in Sydney, NE. We spent another eight hours the next day driving out Lincoln. The boys had a rough time in the car. That is a long drive for them. We tried to keep them entertained with movies on the dvd player, with treats and toys. But after eight hours they were ready to be out of the car.

We stayed at my mom’s house, and the boys loved spending time with Grandma Barbie. They got to play with some toys and got lots of attention from their grandma. I don’t think we could have gotten Nicholas in a car again at this point for anything, so we left him with grandma and took Joshua with us to the rehearsal dinner for John and Jana’s wedding.

It was great seeing everyone again. Just about everyone was there. We had a fun evening catching up with people, and Josh loved having all those folks to impress. He was running around, climbing on walls (he watched a lot of Spider-man recently), and jumping. What was really funny though was when he went on a potty break, and while he was sitting on the toilet he started singing the Super-man theme song at the top of his lungs. (DA-da-da-da-DAAA, DA-DA-DA...)

After the dinner, I dropped Becky and Josh off back at my mom’s, and then I drove downtown to meet up with my brother. I got to go for a ride along with him. It was awesome! I got a quick tour of the precinct, then hopped into the car with him as he went on patrol. First we drove around several of the campus parking lots, just making sure everything was normal. John pulled someone over for making an illegal turn. Then we went into the stadium and I got to stand at the 50-yard line on Cornhusker field, that was super cool. Then we went to do one of his favorite routine activities…

Busting public urinators. This was hilarious. The university campus kind of spills into the downtown area, and there are a few campus parking lots downtown that are conveniently right near the bar district. John pulled his squad car into the parking lot, and parked it prominently right in front of university building, under the outdoor lights. I mean, there’s just no way you could NOT see the car. Which was actually the point, as he wasn’t there to bust urinators specifically, he was there to provide a security presence for people leaving the bars and returning to their cars. He was supposed to be seen. I just couldn’t believe that anyone would be clueless enough to not see him there.

Boy, was I wrong.

There was a fenced off area surrounding some dumpsters, and there must have been about four people who staggered over there on their way to their cars, and who were getting ready to urinate before being stopped by friends, who pointed over to John. (“Dude, there’s a cop RIGHT THERE.”) Finally this guy walks by, SEES the officers standing there, makes a huge show of handing his keys off to a friend, makes sure the officers see how responsible he’s being by doing this… and then he walks over to his car and starts peeing by it. I’m shaking my head laughing at this, but then things go crazy. As John and another officer are heading over to the guy, a mini-van screeches up and 3 Lincoln Police Officers jump out. So all of a sudden, 5 cops are descending on this guy. I was thinking that if he hadn’t been peeing already, that would have probably caused him to start.

What I want to know is: is public urinating a problem specific to Lincoln? I mean, it sounds like they have to deal with it on a nightly basis. Is it just Nebraskans that have this problem, or is it more of a college campus type of issue? It’s a puzzler.

We had more fun that night. Breaking up a “fight” over at a fraternity (turns out the guys were just WWE-wannabes chucking each other against dumpsters), backing up another pair of officers stopping someone with a warrant, and we finally ended up busting another urinator, who John had to haul down to detox. The guy was peeing out of the bed of his pick-up truck, and when John walked up to him the guy turned to look at John and fell out of the truck. When checking the guy in to detox, they asked the guy for his address, which turned out to be a house RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from where my brother lives. Hilarious.

I didn’t get home until about 3am, and then had to get up nice and early for the wedding the next day.

John and Jana Clark’s wedding was great. It was really nice. It was at a nice older home with a fenced-in yard. The size was perfect, the weather couldn’t have been better. Both John and Jana looked great. It was just the way you would want a wedding to go. Congratulations to both of them! And we got to show off both boys to our friends, and I’m sure they were all suitably impressed. I was amazed at how many people commented they were glad the boys look more like their mother than their dad though…

Saturday night we couldn’t get the boys to go to sleep, so we drove back out to see my brother John and let him give Becky the tour of the place. We got to see him come back from making a drug bust at one of the residence halls. The boys finally fell asleep in the car while we were driving around. Again, we were up pretty late that night.

Sunday we went to church to show off our kids to some of the people I grew up with. Originally we were going to head home that afternoon, but we decided to stay a bit later. We had dinner with the family, got to hang out with my brother, Sabrina and their kids, play some games, relax. It was nice. We then headed home, got packed up and ready to go.

We left at around 5am. I woke up at 3:30am and started to get ready, Becky had stayed up talking to my mom and didn’t get any sleep at all. So we were both super tired for the trip back, but it went really smoothly. We were out of Nebraska before noon, and made it back home by 6pm. The boys were great on the way back.

Here are some photos from our trip:

Josh and Nick ready for a final day on the road

Here we are! Don't I have a cute family. They make me look good.

Here I am, looking somewhat respectable, next to Tad and Gary.

Here's Nicky with his cousin Scotty (my brother's youngest boy).

Keeping the streets of Lincoln safe!

These guys are trouble! Pat and Chris enjoying some time at the wedding

Tad surrounded by beautiful women, as usual. In this case, Michelle and Erika.

Last Sons of Krypton

2006-08-22T17:53:00.001-06:00

Check out how cute my two little boys are! Becky went out and bought them Superman pjs, and they love them. They run around the house singing the music to the Superman movie. Very fun.

We're getting ready to take our trip out to Lincoln. John and Jana are getting married this weekend, and we're really happy for them. We're really looking forward to our trip. Sure, the drive is long, but this time we'll be traveling in style in our SUV. We'll have audio books, movies on the dvd player, I've loaded some stuff on my PSP (I found an affordable 1 GB Memory Stick, so I've downloaded some episodes of Bleach on it, as well as From Dusk Til Dawn and a slew of photos).

While trying to download stuff to my new Memory Stick on the PSP, I discovered that there is really no user-friendly process to do this. All the hype Sony had put around being able to do this, and then it's really left hanging. After a lot of research, I finally found DVDShrink which would rip my dvd to a digital format, then I would use PSPVideo Converter 9 to convert the files to mpeg 4 format, then i would use PSP Max Media Manager to transfer the files from my PC over to my PSP. Talk about a pain. But I'm hoping it will be worth it!

We took the boys us to Silver Lake for a hike this past weekend. That's up Big Cottonwood canyon, by Solitude ski resort. They have a blast walking around the lake and having a picnic up in the mountains. I've got some good photos, I'll try and post them later.

Josh had his first sleep-over this past weekend too. He got to go over to his cousins' house. He did great, and had so much fun he got invited to another one last night. We loved it too, because that meant our nightly ritual to get to bed was cut by about an hour, and we didn't have a little boy climbing into our bed at 3 in the morning.

And on a completely unrelated topic... I must play Dead Rising. Soon. Zombies in a mall, trying to eat brains. Fun times!

Lunch on a train

2006-08-18T09:55:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I was on the train riding in to work. I exited the train at my normal station, walked the block over to my office, and as I was getting ready to enter the building, I realized that I had left my lunch on the train. Man was I bummed. Not only had Becky made this killer sweet & sour pork for me, it was in her favorite tupperware container and everything. And I had just left it on the train. So I hope someone else enjoyed it.

I ended up going out to lunch yesterday with my former advisor from school. That was a lot of fun, he's a fun guy to talk to, and he gave me some advice on applying for graduate school. I really want to, even though I got a little discouraged about my chances of actually getting accepted. It's not going to stop me from applying, however.

I wandered over to a book store downtown, where Brandon Sanderson was doing a reading and signing. Brandon is an old comrade from back in Lincoln, I've known him and his family for nearly the whole time I lived in Lincoln. My brother used to hang out at his place all the time. Brandon is now a big-shot fantasy author. His first book, Elantris, was an excellent debut stand-alone novel. His new book, Mistborn, is out now, the first of a trilogy. I'm reading Mistborn now and enjoying it. It was fun chatting with him for the few minutes he had available, and I think it's great one of the Lincoln crew has made it big. Definitely check out his books if you haven't already.

We're getting excited to go back to Lincoln next weekend. It will be a long drive (we haven't done a long drive like this with Nicky since he was a couple months old). Hopefully this won't be a painful experience.

The Incredible Josh

2006-08-09T08:59:00.001-06:00

Here is a photo of Josh "Hulking up." Lately he's been into a Hulk kick. I bought him The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction game, and he's been having a blast playing it. I literally handed him the controller without telling him how to play, and he immediately started running the Hulk around hitting things, destroying buildings, picking things up and throwing them. It's a great game for him, because he can literally run around the training area for as long as he wants, just destroying stuff. And I'm amazed at how well he is at the controls. I better enjoy my victories in Mario Kart now, because it probably won't be too much longer before I won't be able to beat him at video games any more.

We had a visit from our friends the Claytons the other night. It was fun catching up with them. We get to see them about once a year if we're lucky, when they come up from San Antonio to visit Utah. While they were here, though, the kids were all playing together, and Josh fell off the bed (he wasn't supposed to be playing on), hit his head on the stand of a fan and gave himself a 1" gash in the back of his head. We had to take him into the after-hours insta-care, where he got 3 staples to stitch it back up. He was a tough little guy about it, didn't cry at all when he got the shot to numb the area of the scalp. We got the staples out a week later and everything is fine.

The funny part is, while he was at the insta-care getting the staples removed, the nurse asked him, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" This was the first time anyone had really asked him that question. He thought about it for a second, and said, "The Incredible Hulk."

Work is going well. I'm very busy, working a lot of late hours, but the game is progressing along nicely. I've started re-teaching myself Maya. It's been nearly 8 years since I really last used it, and I've decided that I need to learn it again. I bought a nice book by Adam Watkins called "Introduction to 3D Graphics and Animation Using Maya." I've had the pleasure of meeting Adam, and not only does he know his stuff, but he's a nice guy too. If you want to learn the basics of 3D art (or re-learn as in my case), this is a good book to start with.

Good-bye E3, Hello Saint Vitus

2006-08-01T09:49:00.001-06:00

This past weekend marked the end of an era. The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) announced that they were basically ending E3 as we currently know it.

In many ways, this does not come as a surprise, and I recognize that it really makes a lot of sense. It still makes me sad though. It costs a publisher millions of dollars to set up a booth at E3, and every year I've been making games, I've had to put in tons of extra hours and crazy amounts of work to prepare a demo of whatever game I'm working on to show at E3. Finally, some of the big presenters decided to back out of E3, mainly because they were getting too little return on their investment to warrant continuing the show. Yes, it makes sense, but it's still depressing.

I've been to three E3s. The first two I was working in the Accliam booth, showing off the current games I was working on. The last time I actually got to enjoy the show floor, playing the latest and greatest games from 3 days. For those of you keeping score, the last show was my favorite by far. Working the show wasn't nearly as fun as playing at it. I enjoyed the free swag, the noise and excitement. The first time I enjoyed noticing the booth babes, but return trips I was definitely more interested in the games than any other distractions.

The show had gotten so enormously large and crazy though, that it was definitely more of a hassle. There were just too many people there. I'll certainly miss going in the future, and I've been reading the city of LA is upset about the news too (E3 was the largest expo in LA, and will cost the city millions of dollars of revenue). I'll have to content myself with going to GDC (which has always been my favorite conference anyway).

In good news, however, I finally got my Saint Vitus music!

I have been searching for an album by Saint Vitus for a while, called Hallow's Victim. I haven't been able to find it, but I did find this album, which is a compilation which contains the best songs from the album. I won an auction off ebay, and it's brand new. I'm very happy, jamming out to some old, dark metal tunes.

I also picked up a copy of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the Xbox. I'm hoping it will be simple enough for Josh to pick up and let Hulk unleash some mayhem. I'll have to take a photo sometime of Josh "hulking out" and Nicky "showing his muscles." They are both very cute.

Dishwasher Dilemma

2006-07-28T17:58:00.000-06:00

We had a little surprise the other day. I get home from work, and the dishwasher is on fire. ON FIRE. There was smoke pouring out of the thing. Fortunately it didn't do any damage, Becky caught it and shut it down. A plastic cup had gotten stuck to the heating element, melted, and started smoking. We could have just replaced the heating element (probably, that's expecting quite a bit out of me), but the dishwasher was so beat up anyway, we just decided to go get a new one.

So we now have a new dishwasher. Not something we were expecting to have to buy, although we did know it was going to be the first appliance we needed to replace. We just weren't expecting to have to do it already.

I've had success in my Saint Vitus quest. I've been trying to find a copy of Hallow's Victim by Saint Vitus. Yeah, not easy to find. And I still haven't found that particular one, but I did find a compilation cd put out by SST Records that has the main songs from Hallow's Victim that I like. I won the cd in an ebay auction, and should get it soon. It's got songs by Saint Vitus, Black Flag, Overkill and a couple others. Yea me!

Work is going well, though the crunch hours aren't so agreeable. I've been working 12-hour days Monday - Friday plus a half day on Saturday each week. I'll need to keep this up at least until the beginning of September. So if you don't get regular updates from me, please bear my work schedule in mind.

Eyeful of Bleach

2006-07-25T14:16:00.001-06:00

Some guys at work recently introduced me to a japanese anime called Bleach. It rocks! I've watched all the episodes released so far (89) over the past few months. I've liked other japanese animes in the past, but always in kind of a love-hate sort of way, putting up with some of the lameness in order to get to the cool. But I have been thoroughly enjoying this. If you can find it, please take the time to watch it, you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of disappointed, I finally got around to playing The Chronicles of Riddick on the Xbox. I had heard about how all kinds of awesome the game was. And the first hour or two of the game were very entertaining. But I finally had to put it away in disgust. I think the thing that did it the most for me was the lack of a save system. The game will auto-save for you, but I could never really tell where my game was being saved. I would reach a point in the game, it would say "saving" up in the corner of the screen, but if I quit the game there, it didn't mean the game had ACTUALLY saved my game. And there were a host of other annoyances. I will give the game credit though, it just oozed atmosphere. The visuals were great, the story good, Vin Diesel did a great job in the role. Watching the game was great, playing it was not.

Nicholas has been enjoying playing video games with the rest of the family. He likes wrestling with mom and dad, and he loves playing outside in the back yard. With Josh, he always stayed right next to us where we were outside, holding hands. But Nicky takes off like a rocket. He loves to run, and doesn't stop when we call him. And man, does the kid have a temper! I don't know where he got that from ;) But most of the time he's super cute and having fun.

Becky humored me in a BIG way last night (no, not that!). We played World of Warcraft together. It worked out great! We were able to each play on a separate computer, my little dwarf and her little gnome teamed up to kick some butt. We rocketed our way up to level 3. Level 60, here we come!

We added another anemone to our healthy tank. Our main tank is still struggling. The water is cleaner after its change, but our corals aren't bouncing back to full health. At least it hasn't been a total crash. Once our water levels are back in line, we'll have to pick up a few new additions.

Second Computer Up and Running

2006-07-21T16:40:00.001-06:00

I finally got my second computer up and running at home. I've had the computer for a while now, collecting dust in my closet. But I finally got everything together to fire it up again, but was having these brutal blue screen crashes that I couldn't pinpoint. After a lot of troubleshooting, some excellent advice and help from friends and co-workers, I finally discovered that I had a bad hard drive. One trip to Best Buy later, and I had a spiffy new 120 gb hard drive, and the computer is working great! First things first, I installed Windows, MS Office, and World of Warcraft.

I can't tell you how much fun I have with Josh and Nicky. Those two little guys are just a riot. I love coming home in the evenings and playing with them a couple hours before they go to bed. When we play Mario Kart, we give Nicky a controller that's not hooked up to anything, but he is so excited to be "playing" with the rest of us. He and Josh have two little folding chairs they set up and we play a few rounds. Josh is really good at setting off the big weapons, and he do this villainous laugh when he takes out Becky and I with a good shot. Then Nicky immitates it.

Last night we spent a few hours trying to fix up one of our aquariums. A bunch of our fish and coral were dying off, so we had to take some drastic measures. First off, some major cleaning and adjusting on the filter to make sure that was working. Then we had to drain out about 20% of the water from the tank (around 10 gallons). We mixed up some new salt water and added that back in. We also yanked out what Bristle Worms we could find (we have a worm infestation in the tank). The tank looks a lot better now, but we still lost several of our favorite pieces, and a couple more aren't faring so well. Our shrimp, coral beauty, most of our monopora, decorator crab, plate coral and our torch didn't make it. Our Brittle Star and Bubble Coral also aren't doing too well and we don't know if they'll make it. So I guess this means we'll have to start stocking up on new stuff again soon.

Here's another photo of Joshua and Nicholas for your enjoyment.

Adieu, Rodeo

2006-07-14T08:17:00.000-06:00

Becky's brother David sold our rodeo for us! We are officially down to one car for our family. And we're getting enough money from the sale of the Rodeo to pay off our vet bills for fixing Grr's leg. Now that's exciting! I'm really going to miss the Rodeo. Truly, despite the thousands of dollars we pumped into it to keep it running. It's a cool looking car, and it was convenient having two vehicles. But we just couldn't afford to pay for gas for 2 SUVs, let alone insuring both of them.

Work is going very well for me. I really love my job here at Avalanche. It's fun working on Disney properties, and our current game of Meet The Robinsons is starting to get really fun. However, now is that time in every product cycle that invariably comes too soon: Crunch Time. I'll be working 12 hour days plus Saturdays for the next couple of months. Which doesn't leave me much time to do anything else. Please bear this in mind when you start wondering what ever happened to your friend Nathan who never writes or calls any more.

I don't have much else to say right now. I seem to remember there being some things I wanted to mention here on the blog, but now that I'm writing I can't recall them. Oh well. I'll post more again when I remember what it was.

4th of July weekend

2006-07-05T11:30:00.002-06:00

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July weekend. Our family had a great time. The 4th is always a fun time in our family, because Becky's birthday is on the 2nd of July. This year we had a big get-together at the house, and Becky's entire family showed up. (For those of you counting, that means that we have around 18 kids stampeding around the house). We had birthday cakes, let the kids go crazy and generally had a good time. We lit off some fireworks at the end of the night, which our boys thoroughly enjoyed.

We also visited the Riverton Carnival, and let the boys try out some of the carnival rides. They loved it. The big hit was the ducky pond, though, because they had these little plastic samurai swords. I think we ended up with 3 of them. Josh won a stuffed animal by popping a balloon with a dart, and dad won a big stuffed animal for Nicky by hitting a little star target with a dart. All in all, it was a blast. We made sure to go in the evening, so we didn't have to suffer the 90+ degree heat.

I spent most of Saturday out in that same heat trying to fix some of the sprinklers in our yard. We've got one area of the yard that is not getting good coverage from the sprinklers. I dug up and replaced about a half-dozen sprinklers. I cleaned the filter out. It's made a marginal improvement.

Here are some photos from our time at the carnival. Hope everyone is doing well.

Nasty Sinus Infection

2006-06-27T13:36:00.000-06:00

No, it's not the name of a new band (though it would be a really cool name for one). This is what I had all of last week. Sunday night I woke up in major pain. My left ear had incredible pressure in it, I couldn't sleep, and so I finally drove myself to the ER. I had a sinus infection that had gotten into my ear canal. I missed work most of last week, and spent most of my time in a heavily medicated haze on the couch in my house. I was taking an antibiotic, some Lortab, ear drops and Claritin, all to try and kick this. And that wasn't enough. By Thursday the pain had receded from my ear but was massing behind my eyes, and any movement of my head was painful. So on Friday I went back to the doctor, got put on a new antibiotic, got a shot in each arm each morning over a period of 3 days with another antibiotic, and continued my bed rest.

It still hasn't cleared out. I'll find out more from the doctor what I need to do, though I'm sure it will be nothing major.

I'm back at work now, trying to get caught up on a week's worth of missed work.

I was able to spend the week playing games with Joshua. He loves playing that Legos Star Wars. We've completed episodes 1, 2, and 3 and we're working on unlocking the secret level. Josh is getting pretty good too, he's starting to figure out the whole jumping thing and he swings a pretty mean light saber.

My friend Leo is working downtown now, just a block away, so we went out to lunch today. Very cool that he's back in town again. I'm looking forward to seeing the Claytons while they're out visiting from San Antonio. And Chris Andersen and family should be out to visit over July. That coupled with Becky's birthday and a couple holidays should make for a very fun month of July.

I'm not currently reading anything, and I'm not sure what I want to read next. I just finished the Liveship Traders Trilogy by Robin Hobb. Excellent books. Suggestions are welcome.

Not Metal Enough

2006-06-09T09:50:00.001-06:00

Evidently I'm not metal enough. The past week or so I have been trying to track down an old metal cd I remember from high school (Saint Vitus - Hallow's Victim), and I haven't been having any luck. I found one place I can download it from online, but I have to spend at least $20 for the privilege. So I decided to swing by the nearby Heavy Metal Shop and see if they had it.

I walked in the little store and started searching through the cds. I hadn't seen the guy at the counter behind the cash register, but after I had searched the cds unsuccessfully, I saw him and asked him, "I'm trying to find a cd by Saint Vitus."

He had been staring at the wall, pointedly ignoring me. Now he turned to me and said. "We don't have it." And then he turned and started staring at the wall again. I stared back at him for a few seconds, waiting. Would he offer to help me? Maybe ask me which cd? Nope, I'm getting the cold shoulder. Since I was the only customer in the shop, it's not like he was busy doing anything else. Finally I gave up, thanked him and walked out.

So what was the deal? The only thing I can think of is that I just wasn't metal enough. My brother-in-law Dave joked that I might have looked like I was buying something for one of my kids, but I didn't think that was funny. No way I look that old. And I'm sure I still radiate all kinds of cool.

Sigh... I guess I'll just stick to the comic shop and the game store, where I instantly fit in and am accepted.

Quick Update

2006-05-30T18:23:00.000-06:00

I just wanted to make a quick post to keep you up to date on the most recent events. First off, Grr is doing well. His right rear leg was broken when he fell badly off our back porch, or rather when Joshua pushed him off the porch. We had our choice of opting for the cheap fix or the thorough fix. As much as I wanted to go for the cheap route, there was the likelihood of a permanent limp if we did that, and I couldn't look at him for the next 10 years without feeling guilt if he limped all the time. So we had to go the expensive route, around $1500, to get him fixed up. He's got a contraption of pins sticking out of his leg right now, so we have to keep a close eye on him, keep him off stairs and away from the boys. He's bearing it very well though, and at his check-up the vet said he was doing fine.

At a little activity we had at our house for Memorial Day, Nicholas injured his foot. (I don't know what it is about injured legs at our house). Nicky has discovered that he can climb up on chairs, so he does it whenever possible. He climbed up on a chair and tipped it over. The chair fell down on his left ankle. All that night and most of today he would be fine if he was sitting down, but would immediately start crying if he stood up or put any weight on the foot. Poor guy. It didn't swell up much, so we're hoping it should heal fairly soon.

I've started working some crunch hours at work. This isn't my full-on death-march yet, but it's a few extra hours each day.

I picked up the New Super Mario Brothers for the DS. What a great game! I also got X-Men Legends 2 for the PSP, another great one. I'll be busy on my commutes.

That's about all I have time for today. Hopefully I'll have better news in my next post.

E3 2006

2006-05-16T16:35:00.000-06:00

I spent last week in LA for this year's E3. It was a great time. This show was especially cool because I didn't have to work in a booth during the show, but I got to spend my time wandering around the convention center checking out all the new games. Yes, my company paid for me to fly out to LA and play video games for 3 days. It was awesome!

The most common question I have been asked is what did I think of the 3 consoles, what are my impressions. Here's what I think: I was not impressed with Sony and the PS3. There was not a single game I saw that would make me want to run out and pay $600 for a PS3. Some of the games were pretty, but I just didn't see them as a generational leap forward. The Nintendo Wii was cool, and I think they will succeed as the 2nd system of choice (meaning, most gamers will buy either the PS3 or Xbox 360 first, and then their second machine will be the Wii). The games for the Wii looked like a lot of fun, and the controller is fun too. I'll want to buy one for sure. And I finally saw games coming out for the Xbox 360 that have convinced me to buy the system. Of course, I'll wait until the PS3 comes out, since I'm presuming Microsoft will drop their price.

So what were the cool games of the show? Here's a list of the ones that impressed me:

Dead Rising (360) – My favorite game of the show. Trapped in a mall, you have to pick up any objects you can get your hands on to try and take out the dozens of zombies on screen.

Lost Planet (360) – Beautiful game, fun to play. Great weather effects, mech combat. This and Dead Rising (both by Capcom) are why I want to now get a 360.

Spore (PC) – Unbelievable scope on this game. Great interface, player customization options, this game is amazing. No idea on a time frame for its release though.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance (All consoles) – Made by the same team that did the X-Men Legends games, this one has characters from across the Marvel Universe. Up to 140 Marvel characters (20-30 of which are playable). We saw a level where Galactus was laying waste around him. Very cool.

Crysis (PC) – I’m clearly biased on this game, as I used to work at Crytech. But this one sure looked pretty. And it’s TOTALLY DIFFERENT than Far Cry. This one is on a jungle island, but you’re fighting aliens instead of mutants.

God of War 2 (PS2) – This looks like more of the same of the first game. And in this case, this is a good thing.

Final Fantasy 12 (PS2) – Beautiful, as always in this series.

New Super Mario Brothers (DS) – Fun to play, impressive visuals for a DS title. The people in the booth had to ask me to put it down to give others a chance to play.

Okami (PS2) – This game has a fantastic art style, visually it is really amazing. It almost feels like a living painting. I wasn’t able to look at it much, but it definitely made an impression.

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (PC) – 2 new races. Socketed items. Level cap at 70. Jewel Crafting. More goodness from Blizzard.

Justice League Heroes (PS2, Xbox, PSP) - Forget Superman Returns, this is the Superman game I want to play. The Flash absolutely rocks too. I can't wait for this one.

Rogue Galaxy (PS2)

Neverwinter Nights 2 (PC)

Enchanted Arms (PS2)

Heavenly Sword (PS3) - The only game for the PS3 that looked cool at all.

Quake Wars (PC)

Hellgate London (PC)

Titan Quest (PC)

Dead Head Fred (PSP) - Hehe, this one is being made by Vicious Cycle. I worked on the initial design, and the team there has turned it into something even cooler. This will be a fun game.

Dungeon Runners (PC)

In other news, Grr broke his leg today. We're talking to the vet right now about our options, but we're looking at some seriously huge charges to fix him up. Sigh...

A New Pilot and "Ahoy There, Me Hearties!"

2006-05-09T09:41:00.001-06:00

Several things I should mention that have happened to us recently. The first thing I want to mention is that we got a new car! We bought a 2006 Honda Pilot (it looks pretty sweet). We loved our Honda Civic, but with 2 little boys it just wasn't big enough for us. I think the last straw was when Becky came to pick me up from work last week, and I was taking a computer home, we couldn't fit the monitor anywhere in the car except for the front passenger seat, so she had to cram into the back with the 2 car seats, the floors were full of toys and stuff, and she had to contort to fit in. We loved the Civic, but ultimately we had to go with a bigger car. But we really love our Pilot. It's got plenty of room and we're looking forward to having this one for a long time.

Becky's brother Dave will be taking our Isuzu Rodeo off our hands, so we'll only have one car now. We got so tired of dumping money into that car, and only have it work a few days before something else breaks down. Dave can fix the car, so any incidental repairs will be no big deal. For me, who doesn't know anything about fixing cars, it was a huge pain.

We took Joshua to see The Wiggles last week. We had a blast. We weren't on the main floor, but we were directly back from the stage and Josh had a great unobstructed view of the stage. We got him a little T-Shirt (his first concert tour shirt!), he really had a fun time. And of course, he got to see Captain Feathersword, the Friendly Pirate (who always says "Ahoy there, me hearties" hence the title of this post).

We've gotten some new additions to our fish tanks. We got a Grouper for one of the tanks. He's white with black spots. We'll have to keep an eye on him though. He's aggressive and will swallow other fish whole, we just have to make sure he doesn't get bigger than the other fish in the tank and we should be fine.

Nicky has about 3 teeth coming in, so by the end of the day he's pretty wiped out. He's having a rough time of it. But he's still happy most of the day, and loves to play. Joshua is getting close to being completely potty-trained. He wears underwear all day now, and we only use pull-ups at night. Exciting times. We're looking into Pre-School for him now.

Yard work is exhausting. It officially takes me 4 hours to mow my lawn. So half my saturday every saturday is devoted to mowing. If I were to miss a week, it would add another couple hours, so I don't dare miss one. We're getting the flower beds set up, the garden trimmed back, I got the sprinkler system up and running again (I had to repair the spigot out in the garden to get it working again). We're mid-way through painting the shed and playhouse. Busy, busy.

Tomorrow I'll be flying out to LA to attend this year's E3. I'm very excited. This isn't my first time attending, but this time I don't have to work the show floor, I can just enjoy checking out all the new games.

Speaking of new games, there is an official trailer out for Dead Head Fred. This is a game I helped pitch while working at Vicious Cycle. You have got to check out the trailer and read about the game. The team there at VC have been fleshing this game out, and it looks much improved from the initial pitch, I really like the direction they have been going on the game. This will be coming out for the PSP and I'll be counting down the days.

http://www.gamespot.com/psp/action/deadheadfred/index.html

For those of you heading out to E3, I hope to see you there.

It's Alive!

2006-05-01T09:44:00.001-06:00

We finally got our Rodeo up and running. In the past 3 years, I think that thing has only been operational for about 3 months. But it's working now. It has a new starter and (another) new battery. Now we just need to get the thing inspected and get the tags current. Sigh.

We had some casualties in our aquarium. We had to get rid of one of our anemones, because it kept attacking the other one. Pretty wild to see this anemone ripping across the tank trying to eat something, I didn't realize they moved that quickly. In our main reef tank, our decorator crab and our coral beauty both died at the same time. We're not sure what happened, but we're keeping a close eye on things.

We've been doing a lot of work around our yard. I've got a nice sunburn to prove it. Mowing my yard took up 16 large lawn bags of grass clippings. And then 1 week later another 8 bags. Which should be fairly average, at least until I start using the sprinklers and the grass grows a little thicker. We put a brick border around our front flower garden. Becky's been working on that for a couple weeks, and it looks great now. And we're repainting our playhouse and shed in the back yard. So yeah, it's been keeping us busy.

Work is keeping me very busy, hence the lack of regular updates on my blog. I'll try and get some more photos up soon of our nice yard and fun little boys. To tide you over, here's a recent shot of Nicholas at the zoo.

Purple Lightsaber - Epic Quest Rare Drop

2006-04-20T11:24:00.001-06:00

We finally went out the other night and bought Joshua a Purple Lightsaber. Why is this significant? Well, it's the only color lightsaber he didn't have (he now has 6 lightsabers). We had been looking for a purple one for a few months now. We realized we had to do something though, when the other night, at 4am, Joshua walks into our room, wakes me up and says, "Dad, will you buy me a Mace Windu toy?" I blearily opened my eyes, saw him standing there, and said, "Josh, please let Daddy go back to sleep." But clearly the kid has Star Wars on the brain, he must have been dreaming about it.

Hehe, that's so cool.

We also picked Josh up his very own skateboard. We got him a little Spider-man scooter with a helmet and elbow & knee pads. He's very excited about it. He's seen all of dad's old skateboards out in the shed (my shrine to my past glory, I have about 4-5 broken skateboard decks that have managed to survive all those many years since high school). And he watches Back to the Future all the time, and Marty in the movie rides a skateboard everywhere.

My commute to and from work has radically changed. This week they changed the bus schedules, and the bus I took over to the light rail station is no longer running. So the new bus I have to take leaves at 7 am, about 1-1/2 hours earlier than before. I am NOT a morning person. (Back when I had a paper route in the mornings, I would usually go deliver papers and then come back home and go back to sleep for a bit before going to school. I remember a few times waking up for school and not remembering if I had already delivered the papers or not). So I get in to work now before 8 am, which at most game developers would be about an hour before anyone else. The new bus takes me right into work though, I no longer have to transfer to get on the train. And since the return bus takes me right back home, Becky doesn't have to pick me up at the train station anymore at night.

We're doing well, starting to do some yard work around the house, and we're having lots of fun.

Congratulations Officer Sumsion!

2006-04-13T17:51:00.000-06:00

My brother John graduated from the Police Academy today. Big congratulations! He is now officially a police officer at the University of Nebraska. Woohoo! No sorority party is now safe. Seriously though, it took a lot of hard work and effort to reach this point, and I'm very proud of him.

We've been having some problems with our aquariums. We just spent a lot of money we really couldn't afford getting our second tank started. We got the tank cleaned out, converted over to salt-water. We bought new live sand, a new filter and new lights. Then we bought a live rock and put a couple anemones and a clown fish in it.

So what happens? The lights on our main tank go out. We were looking at the hood, and the reflective surface inside it was falling apart. We pulled that out and saw that the heat from the bulbs had melted the plastic off the wires underneath, so we had exposed live wires sitting a couple inches above the surface of our water. Yeah, recipe for disaster. So we had to go out today and buy new lights for our main tank. We finally had saved up enough money to get our Rodeo fixed and running again, and then we blew all the money (and then some) on the fish tanks.

The good news is that, unless Josh shatters the glass on the aquariums, we shouldn't have anything expensive left to replace.

Sad little story to end with here. Our family was driving in the car, and I was talking to Becky. We were talking about some kid Josh plays with that is a little of a bad influence on him. I said, "I really don't like Josh playing with him." Then from the backseat I hear Josh's heartbroken little voice say, "You don't like me, daddy?" It was so sad! He had only understood the first part of what I said, and so took it out of context. I assured him, of course, that daddy loved him very much. Just illustrates how careful I have to be when I'm around my boys.

Rob Zombie Vs. The Wiggles

2006-03-31T12:48:00.001-07:00

Vs.

Who wins, you ask? The Wiggles, hands down.

I went online this morning to buy some tickets to a Rob Zombie concert coming to Salt Lake in a few weeks. The site I visited didn't have the tickets, and as I was scrolling around looking for them, I notice that The Wiggles are coming in the beginning of May. Unless Darth Vader was visiting town to put on a live lightsaber battle, there's no one Joshua would rather be able to go see. I couldn't let The Wiggles come into town without taking my son to see them.

So I spent my Rob Zombie money and bought tickets to The Wiggles instead. Josh is excited, and I'm happy to make my boy so thrilled. But I'm still a little let down I can't go see Zombie come through on tour this time. I guess it's just the price of being a dad.

Josh humorous moment last night. We're at a big family get together over at Becky's parent's house. Josh is telling people about our family trip to San Francisco when he announces, "My mommy has crabs!" Of course, what he meant to say was that while we were in San Francisco we bought a big live crab for lunch. But the way he said it was way funnier.

Check out Becky's blog for some photos from our little vacation out to San Jose. I'll be posting some comments about it soon, as well as some comments from my time at the recent Game Developers Conference.

Joshua's 3rd Birthday

2006-03-13T10:25:00.001-07:00

We had a party for Joshua's 3rd Birthday this past weekend. It was our first official birthday party for either of our kids. We sent out invitations, decorated the house, had activities planned, the whole works. Becky really pulled off a fantastic little party, and I think everyone had fun. The theme to the party was a Rock Star party. There were streamers and stars and even inflatable guitars and microphones. We had some pizza and punch, and we made a little cd of fun music for the party. Becky decorated a great Guitar Cake (strawberry). And we made a cd for each kid that came to the party, we took photos of them on our digital camera, and printed out a personalized cd cover for each child with their photo on the front. They were very cute.

Joshua brought in an impressive haul of gifts. He got a new Buzz Lightyear action figure, some new new books for his Leap Pad, and a ton of Star Wars toys. Using some birthday money we even got him a Darth Vader costume and a Lego Star Wars Video Game. He also got a new set of Batman sheets complete with a Batman throw blanket.

To add to the birthday glee, when we were at Walmart buying his Darth Vader costume, we stumbled onto an employee who was loading up a cart with toys that were getting placed in the $1.00 clearance isle. So we basically got first shot at a ton of toys. We figured out that we bought $260 worth of toys for $10. We got about four of those plug-n-play video games (Spiderman, Batman, Hot Wheels, and a Light Gun one), a huge Barbie playset, some electronic water video games of Mario and Pokemon, and a couple other things. It was awesome.

Here are some photos from the party.

Here's Josh blowing out the candles on his cake.

Becky's incredible Guitar Cake.

Rock Star Joshua.

Nicky taking a whack at the pinata.

Here's Darth Joshua showing off his new costume.

Here are another couple of photos I wanted to include from earlier. The first is a light saber battle between Joshua, Nicholas and myself. Nicky picked up a light saber and joined in to help defeat the evil Darth Daddy.

And finally, I brought Joshua with me in to work a couple weeks back. It was fun, even though I had to bring him to a meeting with me. While I'm trying to meet with some of the heads of the project, he was doing combat rolls and light saber battles in the back of the room. But he also took some "notes" during the meeting. He drew individual characters within the lines and everything. It was pretty impressive. So I had to scan them in. Pretty cool, huh?

My Trip to Mario-Land

2006-02-24T14:00:00.001-07:00

This past Tuesday I flew up to Seattle to meet with some people at Nintendo of America. So I got to see some of the stuff for their Nintendo Revolution. Since I signed some NDAs, I can't divulge any specific details about the machine or even why I was up there. But I think it is safe to say that out of all three of the next-gen systems (Xbox 360, PS3 and Revolution), this is the one that I personally want to purchase at launch. It was very cool.

After our business was done there, they were nice enough to turn me loose in the employee store. I was pure blissful goodness. I splurged in a big way. I picked myself up a Nintendo DS (and I've been playing it non-stop ever since), a case, Advance Wars DS, Mario and Luigi Superstar GBA, Metroid Prime and Super Smash Bros Melee for the GameCube, and a couple of plush toys for my boys. It was awesome.

Work is going well, I'm loving my job and where I work. I definitely miss Vicious Cycle and Crytek at times, as I loved working at both places. But I have no complaints with my current job, it's one of the best places I've ever worked, and I'm really enjoying the project I'm on.

Life at home is going really well. We bought a new exercise bike and we're even using it! Man, was I feeling the burn. We got Josh some lightsabers, because he's been on a Star Wars kick recently. During a little light saber battle, I asked him, "Who are you?" He said, "Darth Vader!" So I asked, "What does Darth Vader say?" Josh puts his hand over his mouth, breathes heavily in a spot-on imitation of Vader's breathing, and says, "Come to the Dark Side!" It was one of those proud dad moments.

Nicholas is 1 Year Old!

2006-02-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

Today is Nicholas' first birthday. He's going to have a little party tonight and have some birthday cake. Since it's his first birthday party, that is going to be our Valentine's Day celebration tonight. (I already bought Becky flowers, so I'm not totally ignoring the holiday).

Joshua got to come to work with me this past Friday. He had a blast. We both woke up early, and Becky helped him get ready. He got dressed, and brought in a sack with his breakfast in it. We walked over to the bus stop, and took the bus over to the light-rail station. Then we got to take the train down into work. He got to ride on both the bus and the train, and he thought that was pretty cool. We got to my work, and I let him wear my ID Badges so that he could open all the doors. He ate breakfast at my desk while I worked, and he watched Toy Story and some Scooby-Doo on the TV on my desk while I got some work done. I'm worried that I've forever spoiled his concept of what going to work means, when he gets to watch movies and play video games while "working." Becky and Nicholas came down to join us for lunch, and we went over to the Hard Rock Cafe. Josh was pretty impressed with all the guitars on the walls.

The Xenia in our fish tank is growing out of control. We had to go to the petstore and buy some small rocks, and then I spent a while harvesting the other night. We have about 7 huge frags of the stuff that we're going to try and trade in. Shawn brought us over a little Clown Fish (it looks just like Nemo, which is what Josh and I named him, much to Becky's dismay).

Happy Valentine's Day everyone. Hope it's a good one for you.

New Family Photos

2006-02-13T16:10:00.001-07:00

We had our photos taken over the weekend. We are very happy with the results. Take a look:

One of the whole family.

My two little boys.

Josh looking cute

And check out Nicky standing up!

I have a lot more I'd like to write about, like how Josh came into work with me on Friday, changing some rooms around the house, changes to our aquarium, but I have too much to do at work. You'll just have to content yourselves with the photos.