I have part six half finished and ready to go. I left it because I was tired and decided to head to bed. Couldnt sleep so I figured I’d just do one quick mission. Oh how I regret that. A quick bit of background, missions range from Level 1 – 4, each increase in level is a fairly big jump in difficulty (and usually in ship class). However thanks to siding with the Amarr during the Sisters of Eve ESA I’d enough standing with the Amarr to jump straight to Level 2 missions. I’d done about ten or so of them and while some of them had been tough I’d managed to pull through, earn some ISK and upgrade my Destroyer. So I logged in and requested a mission (which are semi random), got a simple courier mission which I banged out and figured, sure why not one more before I hit the hay? I wont have time to play tomorrow because I’ve loads of cooking and prep work to do for Christmas dinner. Oh past Mick, you are a fucking idiot. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 05 – Silent Night
When we last left our interpid capsuleer I was complaining that I wasnt really getting the return I wanted in my mining efforts. Unfortunately while I’ve done a number of things to address that I havent had a huge amount of success. On the other hand I have killed a lot of pirates, a lot a lot. So when I logged off the last time I was ready for a bit of a break from the game. But the next day (well technically later that day) Patrick, as always, pulled me back in. He needed help with a mission and I kindly decided to help him out. Of course the fact that I owned a destroyer entirely bereft of armaments or any kind of defense meant he was going to have to wait a little while for that to happen. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 04 – The dark of the night
Last night’s plan was to post the previous blog entry and go to bed. Both of which I did. Unfortunately a tag team of caffeine overconsumption and a storm blowing outside conspired to help sleep elude me. After giving up on sleeping for a bit I figured I’d just log-in to EVE to do one or two things. Which lead to me getting to sleep the wrong side of six, which is what sees me in work with slightly over an hours sleep. Thankfully it’s basically all exam supervision this morning so I should be able to survive until I can get a taxi home and garner some proper rest (well a quick nap actually as I’ve stuff to do this afternoon). I’m unsure of the wisdom of playing in the wee hours in the morning. Well that’s not entirely true, depending on what you do you should be fine, more or less as long as you don’t do what I did. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 03 – Mining and Hauling and Pirates, Oh My!
Back in my first post about EVE I mentioned that I have a habit of indulging in theorycrafting, often tool assisted, when it comes to MMO. I thought I’d get a little further than four days in before I fell prey to it once more. I clearly thought wrong. EVE has a reputation for having a near vertical learning curve. I’d actually thought that reputation a little undeserved until I ran fight off the edge of that fucking cliff. So now I’m in freefall trying to figure out what to do. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 02 – The Final Frontier
Well much like 2 Live Crew popped that coochie I have popped my EVE cherry. I played for five hours or so yesterday and roughly the same today. I am in fact typing up this post in EVE’s in-game browser while (one of) my ship(s) mines away in the background. Which brings me to my first point, my goals may have been a tad too humble. Continue reading…
EVE and I – Part 01 – Into the great wide open
Being an account of one man’s virign experience with EVE Online. My first exposure to MMO’s was FFXI on its European release. I walked (like some kind of savage) from Glenwood down to PC World to pick it up after having a quick go of the copy my brother Patrick bought. I have to say it was pretty great at the time, an almost entirely novel multiplayer experience. But it was hardly flawless, the punishing xp loss on death and the hunt for random drops (fuck you second job quest) marred the exprience for me. Still it was either play that or attend class, so I did a semesters worth of assignments in a week or two (the first semester of the add-on BA in Humanities was a fucking joke, easy mode shit, sort of regret abandoning my stonking results to jump to a MSc) and settled in to explore Vana’diel. Continue reading…
A sign of things to come
Slipped up, meant to post this last night to retain my “at least one post per week” rule but ended up going to bed earlier (well later but earlier) than planned and totally forgot. What I need to do is queue up a “buffer” post at the beginning of each week to be posted automatically on Sunday if I forget. Oh well. Going to back date this bad boy, wrote it yesterday just forgot to post it, so it counts, right? Right?….Dont look at me like that Continue reading…
Writing that monkey off my back
Well I’m done. For the second time and not really. I re-wrote the mess of an ending I wrote yesterday in my rush to finish. So I’ve finished Nanowrimo in that I wrote over 50,000 words of a novel. I’m not finished in that that what I wrote is neither complete in itself (I skipped some harder scenes just to write easier ones and finish) nor is the overall narrative complete. This is much more of an Act 1 than a Book 1. It’s also not finished in that I have done exactly zero editing. I haven’t spell checked it, I havent split it into chapters. It’s just one giant long stream of text. Next week I intend to finish off the scenes I left out and do the very minimum level of editing it requires before it can be considered a first draft. As it is it’s basically a first-first-draft. Continue reading…
The tyranny of letters
This is going to be a very short entry. More because I don’t want to break my “One entry a week streak” than anything else. While I don’t think I could have avoided it starting Nanowrimo with ten days to go was certainly something I’m not in a hurry to try again. Five thousand words a day is onerous to say the least and I think the super accelerated pace is solidly impacting the quality of the writing. I’d prefer the text to be a lot more concise and “punchier”. Due to the fact that not a lot really happens for the first part of the novel the meandering, expansive, word heavy style that prioritising word count over all is forcing me to adopt is really hurting it I think. What was meant to be clever and mildly sardonic feels like it’s overly verbose and vaguely mean spirited.
I still like the basic idea but if this is going to be anything other than just something written for the event its going to need some serious editing/re-writing and I’m going to need to increase the technical quality of my writing. One area where I think I’m really shaky is dialogue, every time I write some it just feels odd and stilted. There’s nothing natural about it and everyone ends up sounding the same. Another problem area is female characters. I don’t think I have a good understanding of how women think so I fear all my female characters simply come across as male characters in drag.
One good thing about Nanowrimo is the element of competition or shared effort it creates. If I wasn’t spurred on by Dave and Adam posting their updated wordcounts I think, because I started so late, that I probably would have just said “Fuck it”, sat back and played all the fucking games that came out and I bought this month. As it is I’ve managed to stick to my five thousand a day target (well on average at this point as I took Friday off and just did 9K+ on Saturday instead). If I keep it up I’ll be done by Thursday. Well that’s not quite right. I’ll have the 50K words done by Thursday but it looks like the novel itself won’t be finished. Whether that means I’ll just finish “Book 1” on Friday or push on and write more afterwards I don’t yet now. But I really want to, and am looking forward to, hitting that 50K.
If a virtual tree falls in the forest and no one sees it is your development time wasted?
I just had the stupidest argument ever about Dishonored and by extension a certain approach to game design. Stupid because clearly neither party involved had any intention of being convinced one way or the other and because I genuinely believe towards the end simply failed to understand what was being talked about. Dishonored really isnt the point here though, it does serve as a useful jumping off point though so in brief heres the controversey. Continue reading…