Haven't posted many pictures since the first one. Been busy with a lot of imaging elsewhere. Anyway, this could be better, but, like everything, I consider it a work-in-progress.

Next on the agenda, with all my copious time (=little), is a 24th century motorbike that was suggested over on the engineering guild forum. It peaked my interest and it's coming along nicely.

Wow, I just realized it's been an entire YEAR since I last posted. Unbelievable how much time has passed. It's like New Year's Eve, when we're supposed to reflect on what's happened.

In some ways, things are pretty much status quo. Job's the same (still a drag). The sim's doing well enough, though I wish posting would stay consistent.

And Sci Fi shows seem to be flagging a bit. Stargate SG-1 is long done. Sob. SG: Atlantis and supernatural are on hiatus until the next season. And, I'm waiting for Eureka to start up again. Occasionally, I watch Dr. Who (which I traditionally don't care for, but this one's not so bad---maybe I'm starved). For some reason, I just haven't maintained any interest in Battlestar Galactica. Which means I'm back to watching 1 hour of t.v. a week.

Some of my friends are still heavily into BG. There's rampant speculation on who the last cylon is. Instead, I'm more curious about them finding Earth.

Now, I can speculate here. No worries. My predictions are often wrong.

I doubt they'd put the show down in contemporary times; it's been done (ugh) but it seens that it could work. Imagine having a show where we're fighting off cylons---we just don't have the technology to fight them, if they did a quick strike.

Putting the show into our future is also unlikely. Any speculation on our future world would be hokey, I guess. And, perhaps a too-clean ending to the dark world they've created.

Instead, I thought they'd move to our distant past. I know the show has shown that they've landed on Earth. We see remnants of what was the last colony. I didn't expect that.

So, I postulate, they'll split from the cylons and begin rebuilding our world. We will become their descendents. Think about it. Apollo, god of learning and the sun. Apollo, leader of the newest colony, coming down from the shies on a chariot/shuttle. It rather works.

In the old series, we had Athena, his sister, but anyone in the fleet could take that spot. And there is Baltar, setting up a later resurgence of monotheism. The rest would become our legends and mythologies. Perhaps splitting off, due to inherent philosophical differences, founding all our cultures. Now we know where the zodiac came from.

This is likely not at all original, nor surprising. But I thought I'd share.

Well, it's been a long, long while since I've posted here. Most of my time has been working to get Firefly up and running. Which it has, and superbly, thanks largely to a fantastic crew that has been extraordinarily active, intensely true to the genre, and all-around great people. I feel as if I hardly did a darn thing.

It's been a long haul since I joined up, but it hardly feels like much time has passed. I guess that's why I let this blog go for so long...the time just slipped past before I knew it.

And while I'm not any less busy, I do think things are becoming a little more steady, so I'll have time again to annoy all you good folks. LOL.

It's the hardest thing in the world to create and the easiest to destroy, especially in a sim. Take my game, for example, Firefly. My computer died, and I should have it up and running tonight (fingers and toes crossed---ouch!). I set up a scene, well enough to perhaps carry them through, or so I thought.

I came back today to see a page and a half of postings. They took it and ran with it and I didn't have to do a thing. And boy, did they have fun. That's a great team.

But, it's when you don't have it and everything is that much more difficult. When a rythym is going and characters are playing off each other, life is good. But, when that one person insists on ignoring a post or, worse, sits in stony silence, refusing to respond. That's hard.

So how do we keep it going? How far does a GM or host go to carry the team through? Hm...have to go back to work...more later.

I had no idea how mych my obsessive nature would take over. Really and truly, I didn't.

First, I created the website, putting some basics down. Every time I turned around, I found more things to add to it. I still am. I have four additional pages to add and ideas for more.

Then came the begging and pleading(well, only a little), to get people to join, so the emailing back and forth, refining characters and such took more than a little time. It was well worth the effort, though.

Then came the sim. Within a week, we'd more than 100 posts collectively. Thankfully it slowed down some, and I expect it to disappear for the holidays. But we have some right clever players with some truly awesome roleplaying abilities. After the new year, I expect to be swinging right along.

Now I'm keeping them all rolling and bouncing and having a blast doing it. I wonder if I should pick up learning Chinese again...?

Well, it's about that time. I've gotten things set up for a firefly sim. Web pages pretty much done, I got the structure in my head, plots formed and fermenting. Now, all I need is players. So, I'm using the blog for my advertising needs. Frankly, I'm just putting the word out everywhere I can. 8-10 people shouldn't be hard to get, right? We'll see.

And with a little luck added to the hard work, and we might be seeing each other around the Rim sometime.

Here's an odd thought. Remember that old show "V"? Oy, I'm feeling my age. It was big in its time. You can chuckle now, but everyone ooo'd and aaaahh'd over the "realistic" makeup job that allowed some facial expression (very limited expressions, but still). My, how sophisticated our eyes have gotten.

Anyway, I was unpacking one of the several thousand boxes I still have to go through from the move. It was a box of stuff from long ago. To make a long story short, I found a beloved book and inside was a piece of paper I had written on.

It was a note that the aliens in "V" came to Earth to steal its resources. As a result of their expansionistic tendencys (that led to the extinction of a number of races) they encountered a powerful enemy that was destroying them on the other side of their empire. The enemy apparently was all/part machine.

At the end, I had written: could the aliens have been running from the Cylons?

Does anyone remember anything like that? Reading the note did jog my memory...enough to think I remember the vague comment...I think Charles said it. None of the sites with the history mention this, so I was wondering if anyone else recalled such a thing?

I thought the last two episodes were the best thus far in the season. Unlike others that I've heard talking, I wasn't surprised that Adama let the issue with Helo go.

First, he can't afford to lose another good soldier.
Two, he doesn't want to damage the relationship with Sharon...who knows how much use she'll have in the future.
Third, I think that while Adama supports the president, he is philosophic enough to understand what Helo was saying--- how much of the soul do you give up to the fight? Where do you start becoming like Admiral Cain? Do you want/need to step closer to her to win?

Like a lot of conflicts in our world, each side just talks about the atrocities done against them...and each side sounds disturbingly similar. Something along the lines of "They've killed my people for the last thousand years..." which, of course, justifies more killing.

The cylons are a bit more "safe" to hate. We created them and they started waging war. They lost, retreated, pouted, and then came back to do it again. In face, I really don't recall any character explicitly stating that there were protests, or any civil claims of racial abuse. Not that anyone would have listened, but in being retrospective, I'd expect someone to remark on it by now.

I did like the face that something in the probe can kill the cylons, so we have something that might protect us when the fleet appears dragging a bizillion enemy fighters after them.

Lot's of thought-provoking stuff here, which is what I liked about the show in the first place. It gives you enough to get into, but doesn't let you mire yourself in the standard knee-jerk reaction of "we are always morally superior and therefore They are always evil mentality."

This is becomming my rant page...so feel free to bypass to happier pastures. At least for today.

Why? I'm feeling pretty frustrated. My life is pretty hectic. I work full-time. I pay exorbitant amounts in student loans each month, in addition to paying for a basic life. I do freelance graphic design on the side for the occasional dollar or two.

In addition, I'm trying to break into the animation/media art field. So, I'm designing games, creating shorts and generally doing what I can.

With all this, plus personal demands on my time at home, I still manage to take the 15 minutes or more a day to check my sim. When I joined, there was the implicit and explicit agreement in trying to keep up my end of things, which I took seriously.

I had assumed it would be the same for the hosts. But, lately, the MB posts have dragged. I mean, like a dead elephant. One thread started in September! It started out like my others, lots of posting and responses. Two pages later, we're creeping. It's been over a month and a half, or so, we're on page six, I'm guessing we're only halfway through the plot, no end is in sight and we haven't seen a post in days. And now the same has happened to my second one.

We've all set up our characters and we're just waiting for the host to respond. And waiting. And waiting. We can't do anything, because then we could ruin the plot line and get a slap on the wrist.

It's not like it's a difficult problem to fix. If you know you might be hung up, or just on general principal, get someone to tag-team the plot. If one goes down, the other picks it up and runs with the ball. If it's now needed, you've got someone to help add spice and keep people on track.

You don't even have to pick the same person each time, if you don't want to. Let everyone have a chance to shine.

What makes it frustrating, really is much more personal (and probably less legitimate for me to rant about). These hosts (of course, not all of them), are consistently leaving the games hanging. I post at least 100-150 per month. And I can't even get a response when I'm just asking about the possibility of running a test game. Irony at its worst.

Man, I shudder to think what it'll be like during the holidays.

Ok folks. Just what is it that makes us like to sim? The anonyminity of it all? The opportunity to do what we can't in RL? It's all good and there's no harm in that. But, sometimes, there are those who take there issues too far. Overcompensation? Yep.

It's like in Second Life. You have your avatar and you can pretty much do whatever you want. For example, one guy (or gal, hard to say for sure) went about to all the new folks and beat the crap out of them. This person eventually got banned...well, that character did. They just came back as another avatar and did it again.

It's easy to say it's "those people" but it happens here, too. The difference is, those characters stick around. Then comes the dilemma. What do we do about them?

One recent example was where a character acted violently with an NPC who was a) an ally and b) unconscious. Do we say something? How should character's react? We run the risk of driving people away or alienating them, which is no fun for anyone.

Personally, I had my character address it. Not surprisingly, there was no response at all. And there probably will never be one. But it makes for a difficult time to enjoy the game, wondering if it'll happen again.

Where do we draw the line?