robotech_master

Just to note: I have the ability to dispense free 10-day trials to City of Heroes. (Full disclosure: if someone on one of my trials goes ahead and buys in, I get a free month of gameplay.)

This coming weekend is one of City of Heroes' periodical Double XP Weekends, where everything in the game dispenses twice the usual amount of experience, Influence (money), and Prestige (base-building money). It's a great time to give the game a shot and see more of it because you progress twice as fast.

Anyway, if anyone wants a 10-day trial overlapping with that weekend, drop me a line. Note that you will need to be able to download a couple of gigabytes worth of game client in a reasonable period of time to be able to make use of it.

Well, about to go to bed for my last night of sleep in my own bed until Monday night. Wow, I'm psyched. In 24 hours, I'll be sitting on board a big grey doggie just about ready to pull out of the doggie-station, and nervously wondering if I'll be able to get any sleep at all on the trip. I'm still undecided as to whether I should take a blanket to go with my travel pillow (on the one hand, it'll just be one more bulky thing to keep track of, I don't know for sure whether I'll need it on the way in, and I definitely won't need it on the way back; on the other hand, it might help me sleep better on the bus). What if I've packed too much stuff? Which bag should I check?

What's more, I have to worry about the Linksys router I'm getting in tomorrow. I need to set it up as soon as I get home, so it will be fully-functional for the trip when I won't be home to reset it, and I'm concerned that the couple of hours I'll have for the task might not be enough. Ah, pre-trip jitters…

At least I've got the latest version of Xjournal on my Wallstreet (well, the latest that will work on OS X 10.2.8, anyway) so I can livejournal from the event if I find a place to plug in and set up. But more likely I'll be using the LJ phone-blogging feature to drop in some audio chats. If I do, it would be nice if someone would transcribe them for me, but I won't hold my breath too hard.

Got a call from a City of Heroes friend (well, actually a pair of them) a couple hours ago, we talked for ten minutes. They're already at the con, were disappointed I wasn't. Oh well. The important stuff from my perspective doesn't happen 'til Friday anyhow. I'll be seeing them then.

Well, time to go get in bed, and dream about forgetting important things on my trip.

Hello, it's me again.

Falling out of the habit of writing in this thing is always a bother. I feel like there's no point in trying to begin chronicling my life again because I've missed out on chronicling so much of it over the last few months. And then I feel like it's going to be some kind of an obligation to write about my life every day when I don't even know for sure that anybody's going to want to read about it. But what the heck, figured I should give it another try. Not even sure where to begin.

The LJ isn't the only writing project that's been kind of neglected by me lately. I haven't written all that much in my essay journal lately, either. Or at least I hadn't up to about a week or so ago. Lately I've posted written versions of some of the segments I've done for a podcast.

But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself there. What have I been doing with myself lately? Well, in my spare time it's been largely City of Heroes/Villains, on and off. Though in the past few weeks it's been more off than on, as I got bored with CoH a bit and sought other things to do with my time. And I found them, in the form of the Robotech Remastered DVD set I got earlier this year, and the Genesis Climber Mospeada DVD set I bought lately. RightStuf.com had it (and Super Dimensional Cavalry Southern Cross) for sale for $25 each—and bearing in mind that the list price of each of those sets is $80, needless to say I snapped them right up. (Even sent Mospeada sets as birthday gifts to my brothers, at that price.) So I watched episodes of Robotech and episodes of Mospeada in tandem, comparing the changes. It was an interesting experience, and it led to me getting back into Robotech fandom a bit more. Part of it I'd done already, of course, when I got together with Peter Walker and some other folks to do new revised material for the Robotech Reference Guide (I rewrote a lot of the personal weapons section, including coming up with expanded histories for the Owens (Wolff) SMG and Gallant rifle).

But I'd also happened upon a fellow Robotech fan who was doing his own podcast, RDF Underground. Originally I'd been moved to record a brief audio feedback to one of his editorials, about an inane fandom issue involving an Internet poll. Then I got to thinking: given my audio production experience in college and in putting together the Cagliostro commentary, I might be able to put together some actual interesting review segments for the thing. It would be a way of getting into podcasting without the obligation of putting a show together myself, or feeling bad about stopping if I got tired of it, since it isn't "my" podcast—and it would be a way of giving the podcaster some more content to cover given the dearth of Robotech news lately. (In fact, RDF Underground has, for as long as I've been listening to it, been a combined Robotech and Doctor Who podcast, featuring reviews of the new Doctor Who as it has. Lately he decided to make it a de facto combination topic podcast and started covering Doctor Who news as well.)

So I've done a few review segments for that, mostly of Mospeada stuff but also segments on Kamen Rider Faiz and Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Much of the stuff has or will make its way to my essay journal in one form or another, but only after it airs on the podcast. I didn't have anything in this week's episode, but I should have both an editorial and a Mospeada-vs-Robotech music review in next week's, assuming I get the latter finished on time.

Lately there's actually been some rather big news out of Robotech fandom, as the long-awaited Shadow Chronicles has, after a whole year of nothing, finally found a distributor. Funimation will be distributing it, and there's talk of DVD, TV, and theatrical releases. Maybe we'll even see it by the end of the year. I'm pretty excited, though this isn't really the venue to talk about that.

Speaking of my Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro mp3 commentary track, in the last few months I got bitten by the update bug and went back through it and rerecorded a bunch of segments and added a bunch of new stuff, too, filling up a lot of the "dead air" where I'd previously not had anything to say. Along the way I discovered that there's a new Windows DVD player app called Sharecrow that will automatically synchronize commentaries to episodes. Pretty slick. There's also a new site called Commentary Central where people can host or link their commentaries.

As for City of Heroes, like I said I've been kind of blasé about it lately. The funny thing is that part of it was that the character I was mainly playing at the time had gotten some nifty temporary powers that would expire in a certain amount of game time, and I wanted to save that game time along until I could do something special with it. As it happens, something special came along; this last weekend was a "double XP" weekend, where we were granted twice the normal amount of XP and the like on our characters. I took advantage of this to put a couple more levels on my level 41 Energy/Energy Brute; by then they just don't come all that fast anymore.

Though this was a bit complicated by the fact that I was also doing another Biokinetics study this weekend. Thankfully, the food was better than the last go-round; apparently they'd switched to a new caterer. It was the last weekend of a three-week study, and for the latter two of that I got to stay in the pristine new just-opened study facility. It was very nice, they had new widescreen HDTVs set up. Oddly enough, the DVD players that hooked to them were in a staff-only room, so the staff had to load or unload them, but the remote control would actually control them via the TV set. Wireless Internet, too, with a very very good connection. I'm definitely going to look forward to future studies there.

I guess that's about all I have to say for now. Future updates will hopefully be a bit shorter.