So I was without a computer more-or-less for the first 5 days or so. I was keeping myself busy with Zelda: Wind Waker for the most part; I challenged myself to beat the game with 3 hearts and the 1 bottle they force you to take – a minimalist challenge. The game wasn’t really challenging me much, I was only killed once but that was because I was distracted but my bottled fairy brought be back – so it doesn’t count. I last saved just before a series of Phantom Ganon monsters near the end of the game. It passed some time.
I made a couple of purchases the night after my rig went, and wound up spending about $200. I bought three Dungeons & Dragons v3 core rulebooks: Player’s Manual, Dungeon Master’s Manual, and Monster Manual. Now I haven’t read them all through yet – it feels way too much like studying and not enough like fun. I’m more surprised that it took me until I was 30 to buy any of these! What kind of nerd hasn’t bought the D&D core rulebooks? Well now I’ve got them in my library. I’ve been trying to get around to making up some characters and doing a small “kick in the door” dungeon RP by myself, to practice the basics of combat and char creation. I’m sure I’ll post about that when I get there.
I also wound up buying a theme deck and 75 card addition pack of Magic: The Gathering. I used to play this every once in a while in university, but I found myself preferring the simpler Pokemon card game. While I’ve got a binder of Pokemon cards, (three inches thick with them!) I still decided to take a shot again with MTG. I sat down with the proprietor of the store I purchased them at and we had two games. He apparently had put together an Artifact themed deck. I frustrated him badly in the first game, but apparently my social skills hadn’t rusted badly enough that I couldn’t bring him around for a second game. We had a nice, even match and his deck finally worked out for him. That was good times, and I look forward to it again.
I found myself hanging out with one of my neighbors in the apartment downstairs, and found out that her boyfriend was taking a digital media course in the local community college. He has a couple of books and a copy of Maya. He’s quite a bit better than I am, which makes sense to me because he’s been more focused on it than I’ve been. It’s a different thing to talk to someone in real life about this kind of thing, I just haven’t ever met anyone that was even half as interested in these things as I am. I highly recommend it.
As if to trump that, she and her boyfriend had some friends over on the weekend – and one of them worked at an Animation Studio. We bored our girlfriends something awful, but I can’t think of a better way to spend a friday night than talking about How Bad Anime Is from an animator’s point of view, over some drinks. Actually, if I could shift the topic to things Video Game -related I think that’d probably do me in. My mind couldn’t handle that kind of awesomeness.
Well, I’m back up and running (and backed up!) thanks to someone’s big heart. He probably won’t read this, so I won’t get all mushy and bleary-eyed over it. I owe him a drink. Or two. It turned out that the HDD in the rig I was using went, but I recovered pretty much everything I thought I lost. And then I promptly burned off 4 dvds of the stuff. My records show that the last time I made a backup was back in 2003. I never should have waited that long. I’d like for anyone who is reading this, to leave a note about how they’ve got their backup scheme set-up. Some people I know are happy to rely on their CVS server, some people back up nightly. Please, share your preference. I’m going to cobble together a backup method soon. Also, mention the difference between Code and Assets and how you deal with each. You can’t really CVS a .png, you know?
Though I’ve gotten my stuff backed up and this new box is set to start coding on again, I’m in no rush to jump back into ActionRPG. I’m not sure why that is, actually. Maybe I’m suffering from the winter blues? Probably not. I think I’ve writtten enough for now. Take it easy.
