DnD 2004 -- In the 40 years since the Thorgillian Wars, Sewert has expanded dramatically under the leadership of Ico the Impossible. From the decimated remains of Apocalypse Night, the city has grown to the largest land-locked city on the entire continent. Ico's encompasing anti-magic dome is largely responsible for restoring the citizens' faith in their urban home's safety. Thanks in no small part to the leadership and knowledge of the millenia-displaced Ico, Sewert leads the civilized world in technological advancement. Considered a marvel of the modern world, Sewert is a shining beacon for humanity.

IMPORTANT -- Homecoming returning characters should be level 21. New characters will start at level 15. Sidekick characters are to be level 12. IF you have questions, contact me. If I don't hear from you with your character by Monday, 12/22, I'll assume that you are not playing.

Keith asked for it, so here it is (and may I add, Watch this space):
DnD 2004 ''Homecoming'' teaser info -- About 40 years have passed since the event that has become known as Apocalypse Night in Sewert. The political landscape has changed in the Central Kingdom; and the rebuilt Sewert is the crown jewel of the land, an independent city-state as powerful as any of the other 11 kingdom/nations. A time-displaced warrior named Ico has risen to the rank of Governor of Sewert. Despite Ico's strong leadership and Sewert's rebuilt defenses (including an anti-magic dome around the city), strange, dark forces have begun plaguing the largest land-locked city on the continent of Arcland. One particularly odd event will soon force Ico to send a call out to his old companions to aid against an unseen force that even the reunited Heroes of Sewert may be unable to stop....

My memory extends backwards about a fortnight. So, no, I can't remember the last time I updated this site.

Working for a college can absolutely suck. Like any job, you get talked down to, you are forced to do menial labor, your workload swells violently three times a year, and you are paid very little. However, the near constant stream of very attractive young women more than makes up for most of the jobs shortcomings. Coeds are my job's perks.

The Empire Strikes Back is still the best sci-fi movie ever made. I know someone who thinks the effects look dated ("Who's scruffy looking?"), but after just watching it again, for the umpteen millionth time, I have to say that I think it looks damn good by any standard. You just can't improve on perfection.

I just discovered the game Freedom Force. How have I put off playing this? It's great! The entire Fantastic Four, together, in a great game! Almost wants me to Make Mine Marvel, but only until I pick up one of their books. (That's probably the best endorsement I can give a game: it makes me want to read Marvel Comics again.)

This morning in the car on the way to work, I thought of something I thought would make a good blurb here. But I forgot it. So this is all you get.

''Lost in Thought.'' What does that phrase mean? Thought isn't a place, like Albuquerque, where you should have made left turns. Do some people need a road map for thinking? If you get lost in deep thought, could you drown? Think about it.

Several times a day, I have a thought, and I think, "boy, that was a great thought. I should post that up at wriphe." And then I get distracted and forget. It makes me wonder if all the great thinkers in the world are not so much great thinkers, but great note takers.

I've been watching mold grow in one of the office coffee pots. My co-workers are slobs who forget to do things like, oh, clean the coffee pot (or even pour out four day old coffee). Yet another reason that I don't drink coffee. One thing I have noticed over the past few months: mold growing in coffee always starts white but turns green. I wonder if that is universally true or just a localized phenomenon? Check your local coffee pot and get back to me.

Sometimes someone has something important to say, and sometimes someone doesn't. There you have it.

If Kool-Aid Man is made out of a giant pitcher of Kool-Aid, when he drinks a refreshing glass of Kool-Aid, would that be considered cannibalism? Or is Kool-Aid Man a Christ-like figure whose faithful followers drink the blood of Kool-Aid Man? All I know is that I have some deep soul searching to do before I drink anymore Kool-Aid this summer. I'm not sure I'm ready for a beverage with this many issues yet. Oh, Yeah.

For the past few days, I have had absolutely no motivation. I sit, or more acurately I pace, around the house, wondering what to do next. I'm feeling a little stir crazy, like I have cabin fever in the summer. And it's putting me in a very bad mood. Maybe I'll go cliff diving. Or take a nap. Yeah, a nap; that's the ticket.

In my house, I have two computers, a TV and VCR, several games systems, a radio, and assorted other appliances and gadgets. If I can own all of these hi-tech devices, how come I can't lay my hands on one simple pencil?

Have you seen that Spiderman MTV show yet? It is damn sweet. Spidey looks perfect. It's pretty commercial heavy, I think; but Spidey in action makes all the commercial breaks worth waiting through.
By the way, Gerrard, if you read this, I'm out of town. I lost your contact info in the computer changeover, but I'm afraid that I'm busy on Sunday dogsitting my dear poodle. So I will be unable to play. Again.

Miss me? I've been busy. I've been upgrading my PC (which means that I have built a new, improved machine from spare parts). Took longer and was more expensive than I had predicted. And of course it meant that I lost all of my settings, bookmarks, and addresses. Recoverable, I admit, but I'd rather play games with my new processor and video card than sit around and gut my old machine.
More to come...later. I've got more otherworldly demons to kill first.

Sigh. There was more to this damn blog until earlier today, when I wasted it. I'll try to recover it later. (I think I have a backup around here somewhere.)
All the updates I attempted for the .swf files -- you know, finally fixing the links, bio, etc. -- failed miserably this afternoon. Why? I have no idea. I do know that my attempted ''fixes'' only made shit worse, so I've returned to my backup files to restore to the old files.
Now I say ''Fuck you, Flash,'' and I walk away. I'll go play some video game where I get to kill people. Lots of people. That will make me feel better: killing. It's the American Way.

Thorgillian War story is now complete. That's 2 campaigns online. Who cares? I care. I care a lot!
Now I can work on more important things, like more pictures of ME! The world can never have enough of me! (Unlike that nasty Prince William. What a camera hog! Give it up, already, Will!)

So do I have anything to say tonight? No, not really. More updates to Thorgils and Kurse... blah, blah, blah.
In fact, I've overhauled most of the site this evening, though the changes are minor. Very minor.
I'm just anal.

The Reign of Kurse has ended. (This time, Kurse lost, to his disappointment.) All the chapters are online.
Randy Fike, a friend of mine from High School, is needling me because his name does not appear anywhere on this site. Well, now it does.

Thorgillian site progressing in leaps and bounds. It will be complete soon. Then I'll be able to finish the Kurse pages... or move on to the next campaign, maybe.

I'm getting to bed wa-a-ay too late. I think it is killing me slowly. Wait, that could be the booze or the drugs.... Nevermind.
Lots of changes at the Thorgils site. Changes all over the place. Some new pages. Some modified old pages. I fixed some bad grammar (I'm sure there's a lot left). I added some links. I even decided to post some info I was going to keep to myself. Like Doc Brown, I figure, ''what the hell?''

This little prick came into my office today, and the little bastard wouldn't stop fucking cursing. Now there's nothing I hate more than some piece of shit who curses pointlessly all the goddamned time. Hell, Fuck that little puke.
Thorgils chapter 11 is up. 12 is well in the works; though I've gotten distracted by a timeline. I decided that a nice, chronological listing of events would help everyone, so it's coming. I just have to collect all the dates first. It'll link off the ''When'' button that is currently duplicating the ''Where'' button. 2 buttons for 1 thing; that's efficiency.

Thorgils book 2 is at long last all online. I'm hoping to get through the end of book 3 (it's relevent to the Kurse campaign) up by Friday, but I know that's not really going to happen. My desires are so rarely in line with reality.

Well, I said it would never happen, but I was wrong. Although I said that I would never watch the evening news again, I find myself drawn to the TV at 11PM each night to watch the Atlanta CBS 46 news. Every night Stephany Fisher looks me straight in the eyes and tells me who has been murdered today. Damn, she is hot.

The Kurse Campaign is almost over. It will be complete in a matter of hours, possibly one week of play. I still hope that this campaign will end better than the last (no one is a walking time bomb this time around, anyway), but we shall see what we shall see. It should be noted that I am pulling for Kurse.

Memorial Day Weekend is over. Back to work. Sigh.

I am so late. I should have left an hour or two ago for my father's house (I'm dogsitting and grooming the most wonderful dog in the world this holiday weekend), but I had to update the Kurse storyline first. 11 chapters down, now. How many to go, I wonder?

I was so looking forward to returning from Ohio to get to work on a shockwave animation I've been working on in addition to updating the D and D pages. But instead I've caught a cold -- did I mention the 5 hour line in frigid wind for the Top Thrill Dragster? -- and all I'm looking forward to now is sleep. NyQuil is my friend.

Back from Ohio. The Top Thrill Dragster is all it's cracked up to be. Damn. If you get a chance, go for it; it's quite a rush. (Once you get past the recurring technical ''reasons'' and LONG lines, I mean.)

And the Matrix was excellent. I've said it before and I'll say it again: keep your expectations low and you won't be disappointed. It was the best action film ever. (In fact, we decided that it's the best JLA film ever made.)

I'm off to Cedar Point in Ohio. Top Thrill Dragster beckons me.

I started to write something really sappy here, but on careful cross-examination, I decided it was too sappy. Since sap is for trees, I deleted it. Curious about Walter's sensitive side? Well you'll just have to stay that way, punk; I'm not telling.

I just saw X2 again. It's worse the second time than the first. My major argument is still that it just isn't a very good movie: pacing is slow, characters are 2D, climax is drawn-out and unfulfilling. Once they get past the new special effects (which all seem to be in the first 45 minutes), there's not much left. And the ending? I finally saw it with some non-fanboys and they were completely lost and frustrated by the ending -- not to mention much of the rest of the action. (Jean can destroy missles but not lift the jet from inside? Sure, there may be a comic explination, Foster, but they left it off-screen.) X2 is just disappointing.
The one bit of good news from the second viewing: Franklin Richards.

Sometimes, when I'm driving alone, I like to talk to myself. But I pretend that its not me talking; I pretend that my car is really K.I.T.T.

Yep, it sucked. It was better than the 1st, but it is not nearly as good as most of my friends claim (tasteless punks).
Now I have to try to stay skeptical about the Matrix Reloaded. Is that even possible? I know, I'll just think about baseball. That always seems to work.

X-Men 2: is it going to suck? It has to be better than the last one. (Although, who didn't like Wolverine's ''You're a Dick,'' line? Anytime anyone gets addressed as a Dick, my ears are sure to perk up. Wait, no, that came out wrong. Nevermind.) Call me a pessimist, but nothing ever lives up to the hype, including movies, sex, and potato chips.

The end of April already? Damn, I'm a slacker.
Work has been a nightmare the last few days, so I have done little more than fall asleep or zone out in front of the PS2 in the evenings recently. I'm spending most of my remaing time working on a new animation for a friend's upcoming website. More details later (i.e., once I have something to show).
Otherwise, I'm fine, thank you. How are you?

Somehow it came up at work that I have not yet spawned because I don't like children. Of course I like children; who else is going to make my clothes?
Thorgils chapter 9 is up at long last. (Sorry that took so long. I've been REALLY busy at work.) My mouse is broken, though, so its a mixed bag.

A quote from work:
''This is an art school; they should know the difference between a work of art and wallpaper.''
-Dr. Shelley Zuraw, Associate Director and Area Chair of Art History, Lamar Dodd School of Art

Somehow I've got to find a way to shoehorn 6 more hours into each day. I think 30 hour days would be so much more productive. Maybe then I could make progress in the things that I want to do.
Sigh.
Kurse Chapter 8 is finally up. Thorgils 9 will be following once I can find where I hid the file.

Well, everything is up and running again. Mostly. Good enough for now, anyway. New chapters on the Thorgils page. No update on Kurse recently, but I can't do everything at once, now can I? (The answer is "no, no I can't.") Besides, the next chapter of the Kurse saga is just going on and on and on. Much like this blog.

I am preparing to move. Since the computer will likely be coming down for a few days, this could very well be the last update for awile. Can you live with that? I can.

I really must fix the buttons on this page so that you can scroll up and down faster. Seems slow when I want to review something I though last month.
Thorgils chapters 2 and 3 are up now. The old campaign pages are taking longer to write up than I expected. I know the happenings are foggier, but I think the events may have been a bit more dense as well. In that campaign, a chapter could take weeks of play. Now I try to keep a chapter down to a one night event. (Which doesn't always work. I mean, the currect Kurse chapter is in its third week of play. I ought to start typing it up or it'll take me a full week to type when I get around to it.)

Has it really been 5 days since I posted here last? Damn, time flies. (Been a bit under the weather, I suppose)
Anyway, I've found a few MORE flaws in the overall site (which I haven't fixed yet) and I finally got the Thorgils characters online. More to come....

Happy St. Patty's. I've worn my green robe all day. No one pinched me. Which is a good thing. Unless a cute girl had decided to pinch me playfully but chose not to because of the green robe. Then it is a bad thing.
Thorgils site should be running from the DnD page at long last. Like the Kurse page it is incomplete, but since it is not growing like the Kurse page, I should be able to get all the content online in the next few weeks, schedule permiting.

Late for my haircut, (gotta keep the flattop flat, you know), but I took the time to post the new charactersheet to the dnd page. We'll see how it works this weekend.

Spring Break starts today for the University of Georgia. I tell you, nothing makes you miss college quite so much as realizing that you aren't able to drop everything that you were doing to rush to the beach to get drunk and laid for a week.
Real life sucks.

FedEx is either a terribly damaged company, spiraling into the ignored wasteland of giant corporations who bloated to an unsustainable size, or they just have the most incompetent people working for them (see previous possibility). For 10 days now, I have been waiting for someone to come take a package that FedEx damaged in shipping (it happens, but they must have been trying with this one; it looks like it was used for a wheel stop for one of their jets) out of my office so that we can make a claim against the damage. 10 days. We've called them no fewer than 5 times. Where's that guy from those FedEx commercials so that I can tell him how well his "global integration" is going.

About to get the Thorgills site up and running. Also almost ready to put a .pdf character sheet online for use.
And now that I have said those two things, it will take me weeks to get around to them.

It is 9AM. Do you know where your children are?

All the items are up to date on the DnD page. Except for the magic bean. Which is Chaotic itself, so I'm really not surprised that it decided to not show up yet. It's around here somewhere.

I took some Sudafed today that knocked me on my ass. I can only describe the feeling as that sensation that you get after an especially good adrenaline rush (you know: where your body is fatigued but satisfied, and you are blissfully aware that your pain has faded and you are completely relaxed), but it lasted for hours. I immediately took more.

Saw the replay of the Tyson/Etienne fight on Showtime last night. Tyson looked as good as he ever has. And I like the new tattoo. Now, Etienne looked about as fit as a pork chop, but you don't get to fight 'A' list stars when you get your ass handed to you when you are a 36 year old sociopath who claims that you are boxing with a broken back, I suppose. Still, an enjoyable 49-second bout. Glad I didn't pay to see it live.

For some reason, my computer constantly disassociates icon files. It is not in the least bit uncommon for me to discover that the icon for Neverwinter Nights has replaced the icon for all of my jpeg files. That's not really relevant to anything; I just thought that I'd point it out.