Late, but here it is.

I got the Universal Boon sheets done and posted today. I had a couple more things I wanted to do, but with only five hours left before I have to get up and work with Sue on her meds, well, just not going to happen.

I have two more sheets I need to get converted for Tim. Those I will get done with spot work during the day. Should have done them already. Oh well, do what you can.

Next up I want to go through the comments on the Universal Betas, divide them into "P" and temporary cards. Should be 2-4 sheets. I would like to get them up Sunday night.

With those in hand we can go over a number of sets for players races, shifters, special abilities and professions and make them work with, enhance and expand the Universal cards.

I also want to get back to some GM cards. The last I checked almost every DS game has a GM. They appear to be very important, as any player without a game to play will tell you. I guess that is why, as players, we treat the GM's with respect and chocolate. (How do you give your Skype GM chocolate? I need to check into our selling Gift Certificates..)

Mark

Getting ready for PentaCon and other thoughts

We are slowly getting a good system down for manufacturing the cards. Neal is coming over once a week now and doing the actual card cutting and packaging. If you look through your cards you will see some art by Neal Morrisey, yes, same guy. That means he has an idea of what we are doing, so he can make good judgement calls. Anyway, the card quality is getting better every week now.

I have printed and laminated a batch of cards for him to do tonight. The laminating takes a good deal of time in this process as getting the sheets into the laminate and placed correctly takes time. By getting them laminated Neal can keep up with weekly cutting.

November is going to be an interesting month. We have shows of one type or another every weekend this month. That pretty much takes out dedicating time to a longer project like another shifter or magic school series. I still have a bit of tweaking to do on the Witchcraft cards, the Get to Know pages need updating and there are a lot of other little projects I have let slide. So, for this month I am going to do a lot of little things that no one will notice. To try to help people keep up I will be posting the links to new stuff on my twitter account. You can either sign up for it direct or check on the right hand side of this blog for my twitter feed.

I am discovering all sorts of new tech going on around me, and I have to say that it fascinates me. When the time comes to get the direct to the brain computer hookup I am going to be right there in line using my cane to drive back the kids. I want my direct connection to the Internet NOW!

At the moment I need to do some tweaking on the backgrounds, get the orders packed to ship in the morning, and make some labels. Sue is upstairs painting, so I am using a jury rigged computer set up down on the gaming table. That makes everything slower, I really like my big screen so I can see everything I am working on.

Daily Thoughts, on a monthly schedule

It appears that I do not have daily thoughts. A disturbing concept, but there you have it.

My mother has been having trouble with her legs recently. Basically everything below the waist decides that moving is not in the cards. She has been in two hospitals for it and they are not finding a reason. Each time she gets back a little function and off home she goes. Surprisingly, at the age of 87, she is in a positive mood, she is sure she can overcome this one too. Gotta love the spirit.

I have been keeping half an eye on the OWS type protests. Not being a youngster I remember the protests of the 60's, I was there.

Declaration of Independence opening:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I love what they did here. First, they used the word Creator to include all beliefs. You can believe the Creator is Evolution or God, and it still works. They say all men are equal. Children of the poor, middle class, rich or oligarchs are equal, none are greater. And everyone of us has the born right to Life, Liberty and to try to be Happy.

Are the leaders in Washington trying to guide our country with these words in their minds? You decide. Go look, do your own research, examine their deeds, not the words.

OK, enough thinking, it wears me out.

More Experimenting

I do not know what happens when I turn on Facebook in this app, but I will know soon.



-- Post From My iPad

Yes, we have ipads

We are still exploring the devices, but I can tell you that they are better than I expected. Artwork, accounting, writing and easy to handle anywhere, (So far).

There is so much in this little package that it is going to take a while to learn what it can really do.

I got more done on the new game with this in the first day than I had dreamed possible.

More latter.

A New Week, and another nap.

I'm not sure why, but I seem to be in need of a nap every few hours here this spring. I can't put my finger on it, but I keep getting drowsy, when I should be working.

My mother is doing well back at home after her hospital visit. Sue's mom is experiencing a good deal of swelling and has gained a rash on the hip. She is going to the doctor tomorrow for further information.

I am continuing to put together potential DS cards sets as PDF's. The printer is getting slower and slower on delivery and they are starting to make me nervous.

Sue is starting on the art for the Elemental sets. Most of the art is done for the AROC sponsored cards.

I am having to dig into some of our old card ideas and into the new card ideas to fill out the nine card sets. Luckily we have a lot of unprinted simple cards we use.

Saturday Off, mothers in hospitals, and so on.

OK, taking today off from work, but I think I will make a blog post. WOW! Here it is!

My mom is improving rapidly, her blood clot has disolved and she s in rehab getting her strength back. She needs it because she really needs to be able to take care of herself. She is one of those people who need to be able to tend to her own needs.

Sue's mom had hip replacement surgery yesterday. It went well. Sue is up there right now. She is in a better hospital. Sue and I have no breathing troubles there. The rehab is also much better organized and than my Mother's hospital. *sigh* Some hospitals are better than others.

I am not managing to keep a regular work schedule, but I am lining up projects and completeing them one at a time. The DS website is reworked. The Travels of Kit are up to date. Basic work on Sue's new comic (Familiar Place) is underway.

Our "Food Plan" has been difficult to maintain, but both Sue and I are dropping weight slowly. It is about time.

Enough for today.

Mother's, work and plans

My mother is in rehab to get ready to adjust for returning home. We have a "family" doctor visit scheduled for tuesday morning. We shall see. Sue's mom goes in at the end of the week for hip replacement surgery and then some recovery time. So we are in for more time consumption. What can you do. They are mothers.

As far as work, we have more to do than we can do. Therefore some work must end. Tomorrow I will be replacing the Dragon Storm site. It is shrinking and we are pulling the Deluxe cards entirely. I am also going to start dropping blogs and folding them together. The first blog to go will be the DS Beta blog. It takes too much time to track etc. I will be looking around for a place to make a combined game blog. Maybe "Game News from the Clanhold".

Plans, we making them. Step one is to assemble a complete core rules set for the new games.

OK, laundry is calling, must go.

Mom, Webpage and other thoughts

Since Friday I have been spending the first few hours of my day visiting my mother in the hospital. She has a blood Clot in her lung, and pneumonia. She is doing better, but the process has weakened her, she may be staying for rehab.

I keep finding "things" that I feel I have to have in the new DS website before I can delete the old site and put up the new site. Very soon I am going to say that is enough and put it up. I can then add a page a day for a couple of months and be set.

I need to spend some time on the phone to the printer today arranging and making sure the sets I have in will be here soon. I also need to prep the next batch of sets and get them posted.

I have been visiting the hospital my mother is in for several years now at different times. Maybe because I just see "slices" in time I can see the slow degeneration of the hospitals efficiency. Little things, getting the diabetic diet wrong, and having to boost insulin to compensate. Not being able to find anyone trained to do my mom's type of dialysis, apparently it is too new, even though she has been on it for three years (through another local hospital). After the kidney doctor was in and heard some thoughts about the care I found him outside at the empty nurses station on the phone. He was upset. He found the fact that he was phoning from an empty nurses station unsettling, to say the least. Yesterday my mother said "I can't understand what has happened to this place, it used to be so good." So even she has seen the changes. Not good, but we are not living in the middle of the slow decline, maybe we can see it better than if you are in the middle of the chaos. To be fair we encountered several efficient, friendly staff members and they deserve applause for continuing to do good in a declining system.

Sometimes seeing these incidents makes me look around to see if I can see a decline in other organizations around me. I believe I see it. I think our general standards are declining around us, but it is best if I shut up and get back to work. My paranoia is high today.

Yes, weight goes down and change is coming

The new "food Plan" is working so far. Sue and I have stuck on it three whole days. Both of us are on edge a little, but overall it is not bad. Dropping a pound a day, probably too fast, but it may be the only way. I have 10 pounds to lose to get down to average BMI.

With all of the changes in Dragon Storm brought on by converting to the Standard cards it will require a complete change to the website. I might just as well take the jump and replace the whole thing. For the past several years I have just hung more on the old framework. It is now so jumbled that I can not even find stuff. Time for a change. The plan is to start with just a few pages and then rebuild a page or two a day until it is all back. I am going to go ahead and pull all of the deluxe cards except for the few we will be keeping. I am also going to size the pages for the coming of the Ipad, and all of the tablets which will follow it. They will still run on computers just fine, so that will work as well.

I think the idea that a table top rpg gamer can get to the full web will have some very interesting results. It should be possible to create entire scenarios that can be played off of the pad with just dice and paper to track damage, cast attitudes etc. I am not sure how that will work, but I am looking at it very seriously. Being able to sit down and dial up a game for the night would be interesting. All you would have to do is modify it for your style on the fly and play.

Tomorrow work begins on reworking the kitchen. The kitchen sink water pipes blew in early january. They go out of the house to the sink. Rather than repair a system that will just blow again, we are moving the sink to the other end. Plumbing, counters and some electrical work is coming my way. I am certain that once it starts coming apart that I will find way more problems than I expect. It is always like that.

A time for a new "food plan"

Both Sue and I have been stalled in our weight loss. Therefore we are trying a new "food plan". We shall see if it works and if we can maintain it. We are eating small amounts of good food several times a day. If it works I will tell how we did it.

WOW! first player for tonights game is here, time to go.

Far too much going on in my mind

I seem to have too many thoughts floating through the old brain bucket. I find myself following one string after another across my mindscape. Unfortunately my attention wanders and I become entranced by another fleeting thought. Well, the result is several dozen unfinished ideas. Far more than I can actually follow.

I will see what I can do about exposing a few of the ideas.

A subject I spent far too much time mulling over is: does one play a character in an alien world or are they playing the rules with a characterization? In one case a person is immersed in the world and they stretch themselves to see from a new viewpoint. In the second the player is surfing the world on top of the rules. Both are valid and fun. In reality the acting community acknowledges these styles as Method Acting and Classic Acting. There are, in both role-playing and acting, a blend of these in every session.

Why, you ask, do you consider such questions? I wandered into this one while I was working on a campaign background for the new game. The players and GM's need different information for different styles. If a player's character is played as if it was a real world, then specific rules references may interfere with there game. At the other end a person riding the rules with glee finds extensive descriptions and emotions a pain, they need the rule to go by. They question for us is how do we balance these demands in setting up everything from a single encounter to a campaign region. To be able to balance our output we need to understand the ways people are using that output.

So, there you go. If I had any sense I would actually review and rewrite these pieces, but I think I will just go on spitting out rough gems rather than carefully polishing them.

Updating the system

I am checking out all my regular programs here. I finally upgraded to Snow Leopard. So far it is looking really good.

I reworked the DS Sets page to include PDF sample pages of all the cards. It will give people a chance to try them all out and see what they think.

OK, off to check more.

Prop eyes open, poke head up, look around, back to sleep

I seem to be able to do exactly half of what I schedule for each days work. I either have to work more or just admit that I can not do it all.

I have the elemental cards and a set of Mighty Madspawn to finish cleaning up for DS. Then I need to get something else done, I just can't recall what it is now.

It looks like we have about a dozen prints and commission characters to get done. That should just about finish off my night.

Back to work.

OH! I had a great birthday!

Happy Birthday to Me!

One year older and not a bit wiser. Oh well, maybe next year.

Reading too much may not be so good

First I should let everyone know that Sue had a great convention in CA. However, she is one tired lady. I will be picking her up in Detroit at about 10:30 tonight.

I have been reading a lot of news with Sue gone and it has made me think about subtle changes in the world over the last 50 years. When I was a kid the news was local and short. I would not find out about pollution in Brooklyn, Cannabalism in liberia, that sitting shuts down your metabolism, cutting calorie use severely, that workers today have a lower standard of living than in the past, and on and on.

Today we are bombarded with bad news. That is not the problem, the problem is how we deal with it. Of course people are not as happy today, they know too much and seem unable to do anything about it. What we are missing is training in how to keep that news seperate from our emotional world. All of this information is just facts. I need to be able to deal with them without being angry, scared and even terrified. It wastes time and energy. I may well be able to acquire the knowledge and do something with it, not just sit (slowing my metabolism) and whine.

Strangely enough it helps my mood just writing about this. I am not going to spend time trying to "craft" a discussion, I have a lot of work facing me, so this ramble will have to do.

To do what I want, or what I must?

Every day we face that question. Do we do the things we want to or do we do these things we must.

Life is a compromise, and it always has been. Right now there is a pile of work in front of me that I have to do. I could fill my days with work that must be done, but is that really living? Is the difference between an intelligent being and a rock that the rock always does what it must and the being does at least some of what it wants?

I am not going to be a rock, but there are some duties that I must get done before I can be myself.

Stuck in Pheonix

Sue is stuck in Phoenix Arizona. Due to heavy winds etc. they have shut the airport down with Sue in it. She is checking to see what her options are...

At the Airport

I set out to take Sue to the airport at 5:30 this morning. I have done so. Now it is 9:40, Mocha Dog has been walked and reassured, now I will lie down and get some more sleep.

I hope the weather will be good out there in San Jose, or, I should hope so, since I am back here in Michigan...

Working Steadily, it is still all uphill.

The only thing I dislike about pushing rocks up hill is that a few always roll right back down the hill. The positive part is that most of the rocks stay on top of the hill. I like to remember the positives.

Sue and I made progress on our internal organization and our ambitious plans for the future. Prioritizing tasks is not straight forward. It has to be balanced between the tasks with immediate results, those with long term value and those that are risky/uncertain.

We are going to arrange for two week periods of seclusion about four times a year so we can consider what has happened, is happening and will happen. It also gives us a chance to enjoy each other. What can I say, I really like my "Sue" time. I think t is the single most important thing in my life.

Here at the Clanhold our kitchen water pipes have finally burst. They have been freezing off and on for 20 years. It was just a matter of time. Right now I am running pans of water downstairs to do cooking etc. We are going to reconsider the kitchen carefully. The pipes go through an unheated, unprotected area currently. We would have to move the sinks to change that, but it is not a simple decision, so we will not be rushed into a bad choice.