Bright End of Nowhere

I survived a week in which I had three, count 'em three, major papers due. However, we actually have not yet reached the part of term where my diet becomes entirely "caffeine and ibuprofin". (This can't be healthy.) We will not talk about how much coffee/tea/caffine I am actually consuming daily. I also survived a week in which I spent Tuesday through Thursday evening running around and sending emails to various professors (most of which I don't even know) asking about a summer research position that I can turn into a thesis next spring. The most disappointing was trying the main AI lab on campus and finding out that they really want coders this summer. And since I'm so very much hardware, this is not so very good.

So imagine how happy I was when I got an email today saying that I need to get the paperwork in, as I've been accepted as a member of a particular group at the Media Lab, home of wacky projects. I'll get to hopefully work on lots of things, and the one that pans out best will hopefully become the thesis. I'm pretty stoked about it. (And, um, considering the group, I, er, might be building Skynet or something. Or something like that cell phone grid in The Dark Knight. WHO KNOWS?)

I also started poking at the rulebook again (instead of torturing characters for abyssinia4077's and my Fic of DOOM). I just realized I've put steampunk in the Pegasus Galaxy.

I think I won.

I'm not sure what, but I'm pretty sure I won something.

So, there's the porn battle going on, and there's lots of really neat prompts. (Said prompts span the range of "really intriguing" and "laugh out loud hysterical")

Of course, this means that all I can find myself being able to write is (really creepy) fuzzy snippets or amazing angst-fests of death and destruction (why am I writing this "The Last Man" tag? Why?). Clearly, I am not normal.

I'm not sure if this is an improvement over trying to figure out the relative speeds of a Puddlejumper, a Wraith Dart, and an F-302. And then comparing those to the speeds of an X-Wing or TIE Fighter. *headdesk* Why, yes, I AM a dork.

(I went to dinner with a bunch of friends on Sunday for Chinese New Year. We spent most of the dinner conversation on various gaming topics. The upside is that I finally found the drive to work on the d20 book again. And got some good suggestions on what people want from the campaign setting itself. I need to finish the book and hammer out some more details, but there is a chance I can actually run this thing online. If that's the case, I might be polling for interest at sometime in the near future.)

Note to Self: Must not design human-form replicator stats so that they are the equivalent of fighting a Tarrasque. That would be poor.

Also, must refrain from putting in the stats for a gazebo.


Maybe one day soon I will stop eating/breathing d20 so I can work on something else, dammit. The likelihood of that, however, is rapidly diminishing. (Oh god, someone tear my brain's attention away from this. I have HOMEWORK I need to do!)

So, this weekend, I managed to do not a lick of homework. However, considering I was working until roughly 8PM on Friday desperately trying to finish a 7-page paper and then sleeping for 12 hours straight, I think that's okay.

Also, I looked at my whiteboard and realized that I had set the goal of finishing the Atlantis d20 rulebook by IAP, and then promptly didn't touch it for over a month. So I started making progress on that this weekend. (It's...sort of like NaNoWriMo? But less words and more number crunching.) I'm glad I decided to do the hardest parts first, because even though it feels like I've barely done anything, once this is done, the rest will get done fast in comparison.

(When I mentioned to a friend today before our weekly gaming run that I was writing the rulebook, she told me she'd mock me for it, if she didn't already have her own crazy hobbies.)

Was also talking with shanghairain about it, because he's a great person to bounce ideas off of for background and mechanics. I can't tell him how I'm changing the plot entirely for the Project, since he's likely to be one of my players, but he can tell me when a mechanics thing isn't balanced right, or a background idea sounds stupid. Which is really important, because I'm very likely to do a few cast changes prior to what "Rising" would have been for the SGA redo campaign, and this totally changes the dynamic. (Which also has the added bonus of negating a lot of problems metagaming could cause.)

Also, this probably brings the number of times I've rewritten s8 of SG-1 and s1 of SGA or am working on rewriting it up to 2.