ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (roll your diplomacy check)
2009-04-18 12:05 am

How I Spend My Vacation

I, uh, might have just spent the entire day hacking on mechanics. My head hurts, and I'm arguing with LyX to stop throwing TeX errors randomly when compiling things that worked fine 30 seconds ago, dammit.

BUT BUT BUT! It's getting closer to completion! My friend whom I've roped into statting out the canon character NPCs is chewing through stats and showing me things and both of us are amazingly happy when we can make Teyla into the scariest damn faceman in the history of ever.

And I'm grinning like a loon because I'm hoping it doesn't suck. And I've been playing with CSS and have the website to host the silly thing almost done (like 95%). And oh god, it's 74 pages already and I'm not done yet.

(And I have to be honest that some of the news coming out about SGU is making me cackle, because I seem to have statted out an NPC who is a female, Chinese-American Navy sniper and I don't know anything about her and I already love her madly.)
ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (need caffeine; this is unacceptable)
2009-04-10 05:37 pm

Yay, weekend!

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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (roll your diplomacy check)
2009-02-04 11:37 am

Oh, you have got to be kidding me

...you know, the more I keep staring at the official Stargate d20 book, the more I'm getting really, really irritated. I'm starting to get extremely pleased with myself for writing both an Atlantis supplement AND a separate document for the specific campaign setting.

Fatigue and Exhaustion rules don't exist. Seriously? I have to write THOSE?!

At least the d20 SRD hasn't failed me yet.

But...*facepalm* My god. Playtesting is going to be a bitch, unless I was awesome.

[Bonus Content for those who care:
Current Status of Supplement Book: roughly 75% of alpha draft. Once finished, we move to beta/playtesting. Depending on what broke, after rewrites, a second round of playtesting might be required. Then we'll have the official release of v1.0 of the Atlantis Sourcebook.

Current Status of Campaign Setting: roughly 30%. As long as I stop finding things I need to add/fix to make it all work. Let me tell you, internets, it's really fun to write something to fix the book (the Atlantis setting), then a document to invalidate stuff I said in the earlier fix.]
ultranos: Actual MIT hack of roadsign. "MASS AVE BRIDGE CLOSED / SUNDAY 04/22/07 6AM-3PM / TO APPEASE GODZILLA" (have you appeased godzilla today?)
2009-01-27 01:17 pm

And yet, I feel like this is normal

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.)
ultranos: ibuki maya sitting at laptop in shorts and a t-shirt, eating a cookie, with prompt \\ "Rocks fall; everybody dies." (this would be much simpler)
2008-11-13 01:06 am

At least it looks nice

So, writing this rulebook has totally eaten my brain. At the very least, all higher brain functions. (I hope I can wrestle something away for the circuits test I have in 18 hours.)

Signs I May Be Thinking About This Too Hard (partial list):
-I spend hours wracking my brain for equipment and tech used on Atlantis on a regular basis or of significant importance...and completely forget about the bloody ZPM.

It's amazing I haven't drowned in my own cereal bowl yet. *facepalm*

To save me from either my own obsessive-compulsive behavior and/or stupidity, anyone want to share their list of Useful Technologies and/or Equipment in the Pegasus? (Sublist: That I Wish We'd See More Often, Dammit also extremely welcome.)
ultranos: kino standing, staring ahead (need caffeine; this is unacceptable)
2008-11-10 05:19 pm

This is going to become a common theme, I'm afraid

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!)
ultranos: ibuki maya sitting at laptop in shorts and a t-shirt, eating a cookie, with prompt \\ "Rocks fall; everybody dies." (this would be much simpler)
2008-11-08 12:54 am

*pulls head out of d20 sourcebooks*

Geeking Out Moment:

The utter glee I felt when I just realized that I get to give Elizabeth Weir a feat called "I See What You Did There".

Hi, the d20 suppliement is going swimmingly. As long as I don't remember any more things that I need to add, because other people didn't. (Current source of frustration: no one wrote a rogue-type. No one wrote even a vaguely rogue-type for non-Tau'ri. Dude, I can't even stat out Vala to satisfaction using their materials. This Is Unacceptable.)

(We won't even THINK about Link's suggestion of Asurians. Actually...DAMMIT, I don't think stats for even general human-form replicators exist! *grumbles*)
ultranos: ibuki maya sitting at laptop in shorts and a t-shirt, eating a cookie, with prompt \\ "Rocks fall; everybody dies." (this would be much simpler)
2008-11-02 11:43 pm

My hobbies are odd

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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.