Merry Christmas everyone, may the holiday season be full of happiness and joy!

And a little rambling, my inner science geek is showing through.  What is it about the new Coke commercials that irritates me?  Is it the fact that young polar bears are being encouraged to drink Coke?  Nope.  For some reason I’m okay with that, but the fact that penguins are found only at the South Pole and polar bears are only found at the North Pole yet the commercial shows them living in the same area irritates the hell out of me.  A random thought to ponder this holiday season, enjoy!

I find that I am more and more enjoying some of the older Sci Fi/Fantasy stories simply because they tell a good tale and don’t require volumes and volumes of pages to do it. I just finished reading “The Tombs of Atuan” by Ursula K. LeGuin, which is the second book in the Earthsea Trilogy. This book is only 146 pages long and I picked it up this afternoon and finished it by bedtime. Compare that to “Memories of Ice” by Steven Erikson, which I also recently started. It weighs in at 1180 pages and chances are by the time I get to the end, I won’t even remember the beginning. So, I’ve put that one aside and I’m going to start reading “The Farthest Shore” which is the third book in the Earthsea Trilogy and it has 197 pages.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy some of the larger books, it just seems that I have less time to devote to reading them and in many cases I feel the stories could just as easily be told in a much shorter span. I’m sure this has as much to do with the demands of the book publishing industry as it is does with the authors. If the Earthsea Trilogy were to be brought for publishing today, would Ursula K. LeGuin be told that there was only enough material for one book, not three, and would she be forced to pad the stories with scads of additional chapters describing in excruciating detail all the aspects of each characters early life, clothing choices and relationships with each other which really needed to tell the tale?

Although things have been pretty quiet on the ICE Webring, the summer has actually been quite busy. There were three weddings in three months, two of which I was in the Bridal party for. That also meant that my newly married brother moved out of our basement and my wife and I now have the whole house for the first time since we bought it two years ago. That meant a trip to IKEA to buy almost 20 bookcases and the unboxing and shelving of all my games and novels which haven’t seen daylight in ages. That was followed by a week of work in the backyard demolishing our existing fence and a very solidly build stand alone shed that we referred to as “The Timeout Room”. Now we are waiting for the builders to show up to put up the new fence. We’ve got the Canmore Folk Fest to take in this weekend and then things start to wind down.
Other than playing around with Facebook a little, I haven’t done much in the way of computer related projects. The weather has been exceptionally nice this year and that means very little computer time. I did find time to read the last Harry Potter book though. Pretty good, I thought it dragged a little in the middle and there were a few things at the end that I thought could have been a bit better, but I’m not going to say much about that now as several people I know haven’t finished reading it yet and I don’t want to spoil it for them.
Still waiting for Guild Companion 2 to get published, hopefully that will be out before the end of August.
I did start playing in an online Metamorphosis Alpha campaign being run by none other than James Ward, the creator of the game. It’s only been going for about two weeks, but it’s been fun so far.
That’s about it, no new projects in the works but still have several existing ones to get back to, and I hoping near the end of Sept to run a face to face campaign of some sort. Now that I have access to my books again, I’m anxious to do some playing

Took a neat little quiz related to “The Golden Compass” to determine what my deamon was, here’s the results and an opportunity for some feedback and adjustments:

My wife and I throw a Halloween party every year, and one of the things she likes to do is to come up with some “seasonal” snacks.
One of the items that she has acquired in previous years is this mold of a life size brain:

The new thing she picked up this year is a Zombie candy dish, a lovely green fellow that appears to have had the top part of his head removed and his brains removed to make room for storage space for candy. He is sound and motion activated, when ever anyone comes near, his eyes flick open and light up and he makes a smart ass comment.

You can probably see where this is going… She’s also got a recipe for a really good shrimp dip that just happens to turn out in a nice pinkish color. So… fill up the bowl portion of Zombie dude with dip, fill in part of the Brain Mold with dip, flip the Brain Mold over on top of Zombie dude and you get:

For some reason, nobody wanted to be the first to dip their cracker in…
Here is another shot that includes some of the other items on the snack table

I actually noticed this way back when this book first came out, it’s “Ghost Ship” by Diane Carey and was the first original story published for Star Trek The Next Generation. To be honest, I can’t even remember if the story was any good or not, but I’ve never forgotten one interesting aspect of the cover. Take a close look at the ship that is orbiting the planet. Turn the book upside down. Look a little familiar? “Hey Starbuck, why is the Galactica flying upside down?”
I also posted another photo in a comment attached to this post of my Galactica model taken from roughly the same angle as the book cover.

Well, it’s vacation time for me, have a couple of weeks off work and I’m only leaving town for part of one week, so it’s a chance to plan to get more done than I’ll actually have time for

There’s a couple of projects to work on, I’ve got a project for ICE that I spent a good part of today working on, need to do somw more work on that tomorrow too (don’t ask, I can’t tell), but I think the main focus tomorrow will be getting some things done on my HARP Sci Fi Playtest game over at RPGResources. I need to post a summary of the players involved, a summary of the story so far. I definitely need to work on creating the “Psychic Pack Rat” race so I can do up a character sheet for Gustav the rat.
Also need to start a couple new threads for the next part of the story, and come up with a basic map.

The other thing for that site will be to update my character Jordon in the Kraken World game to third level.

Some of my other vacation plans, Thursday will likely be spent at the Calgary Stampede, then take off to Fernie for an extended weekend, leaving Friday and coming back sometime Tuesday. While I’m out there I’d like to finish reading “Deadhouse Gates” by Steven Erikson, then start (and probably finish) reading “The Traveler” by John Twelve Hawks. The problem with “Deadhouse Gates” is that I read the first half of it about a month ago, and haven’t read much of it since, so I’ve sort of lost track of a few things, I might have to back up a couple chapters to refresh my memory. I enjoyed the first book in the series quite abit, and I’m enjoying this one too, but I think he writes the sort of novel that you really need to be able to devote the time to read them from start to finish without too many breaks.

When we are out in Fernie we’ll probably play a couple games of “Killer Bunnies” and hopefully try out the “Zombies” game too, as well as doing a few hikes and maybe some day trips to do some of the mine tours or something similiar. Might do a little work on some parts of my HARP Sci Fi campaign as well.

Once I’m back in town, it will be time for my annual tour of the local used book stores. I like spend a day at least once a year and hit as many of them as I can, looking for interesting novels and of course good finds for gaming items.

Some of the other things I want to get done are to get some of the extra copies of gaming items that I’ve accumulated over the years listed on ebay and see how the selling end of things goes for me. I’d also like to do a little more playing around with WordPress and experimenting with Php and MySQL to see what the best method of converting the product lists to be database driven might be. That will be a really long term project and I don’t really expect to get any real changes going right away. Right now I just need to learn more about using customized fields and Page templates in WordPress and compare doing things that way to doing it as a seperate Database. Since I don’t know alot about WordPress, PHP or MySQL, some reading and playing around will definitely be required.

I’d also like to work on doing up the Aquatic Elf as a race for HARP as a Guild Companion article, as well as doing somemore work on Dolphins as a character (or at leas NPC) race for HARP, complete with spell use and creating several spells unique to the underwater environment. Really part of a larger project for dealing with Underwater in HARP, and possibly Rolemaster as well. Again, something I don’t expect to work alot on on the vacation, but would like to get at least something done on it, even if it’s just collecting the various notes I have scattered all over into one area.

And, mixed in with all of that, there’s some yardwork that I’d like to get done and a garage that is sorely in need of some rearranging and cleaning out.