You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Boing, boing...

Just had a brilliant idea! If you're worried about cellphone radiation, mount the transmitter/receiver away from your body - say, on a set springs on top of your head! That's right, deelie-bopper phones! Stylish and practical, you betcha!

***

Just recently, I've had a craving to play a proper computer game, like Civ3 or XCom. I managed to get XCom: Apocalypse to mostly run on my XP box (by searching the mighty interweb for suggestions), but there's a definite emphasis on "mostly" - the mouse doesn't work quite right, for example. I've thought about buying one of these new-fangled "recently released" games, but since I'm not managing to play anything I currently own, I'm unconvinced that it'd be a useful investment.

It looks like I'm semi-officially back at 50-hour weeks. It's really not worth leaving work around five - the traffic is awful and stressful, and the amount of extra time at home that I gain is trivial. And if I leave at six, then at least I get paid for another hour. The only problem is, the longer I wait, the better the chances that I get called up ten minutes before I go with a problem that the caller thinks is super-urgent and should only take a moment to fix, that ends up keeping me at work for another four hours...

Actually, worse is the problem that comes in just after I've fixed the above problem, and have started packing to finally go home. But that hasn't happened more than a handful of times - and it's better than being called back into work. :)

Work is slightly more stressful recently; I'm sure it'll settle down in a month or two.

***

Hix is running Sorcerer at the moment. We did the character creation this week, which was interesting. He has pitched a setting that's something like a hybrid betwen LA Confidential/Chinatown and Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, with toons filling the role of demons in the Sorcerer system - toons need to be bound to a human to enter the "real world". It's promising to be a pretty cool game.

One of the problems that I have with a game that I'm interested in is that I want to explore it more - draw maps, think about the politics and history, write dialogues between minor characters, and so on. It's not entirely helpful, especially when the games we're doing at the moment tend to run an average of three or four sessions. I mean, it takes a while to write out this sort of thing, even if it's only for my own entertainment - and it's time I could spend doing something other people would enjoy, too. :) Also, there's the problem of giving too much to the person who's actually running the game - they probably don't want to have to wade through ten pages of notes on locations in a fictional city that they've foolishly given me a map of. (Sorry, other Matt!)

It's a pity that I have some idea of how hard it is to break into writing; otherwise, I might actually try to do it seriously. :)

***

Saw Jack and Heather last night, and had a chat with them, Michael R., Maire & Roger, and the elusive Stu. It was really nice to chat with them, even if I didn't get a chance to see their small kid (who they were touchingly worried about, and was apparently very well behaved for her grandmother). They want to come back to NZ, but mentioned that they had to wait until the area their house was in gentrified, so they could afford to move back. ;)

I promised to babysit if they came back - a promise I'll be happy to fufil. Very cute baby.

And when I got home, delicious chicken goodness cooked by the lovely Puggle. Yay!!

***

Not too long to the weekend. Thank goodness.

Posted by svend at October 28, 2004 11:13 AM