It also doesn't seem quite worth mentioning. Somehow.

It figures. This site has effectively been some sort of blogue for nine years now, predating the term and, for the most part, the concept. And, today, I've got nothing much to report in general.

You'd think there'd be something to mention: I've gone two weeks without adding anything. I guess things have just been a bit boring lately. Partly by design.

I got the book done. That's old news. So far, its different formats are at http://wastedinc.com and http://WastedDiscourse.com. But that was October. Since then, I've pretty much been Not Writing the Book. Having spent close to two years working on it since the end of 2003. The last eight or ten weeks have been little more than sitting around, not doing anything of interest.

Which isn't entirely true, of course. It seems like it, since I'm not really actively writing a novel at the moment [I'm kinda in the preproduction phase of the next one; but I'm not actually thinking about it every minute of the night], but I have been playing around with other things to some small degree.

I went out and got a new game a week or two ago. Activision finally got The Movies released. Apparently, they released it in October or November. The last I'd heard about it had been in the summer of 2004 when GameInformer [I think] had an article about this new SimTycoon filmmaking game set for release about a year later. Then it disappeared and I pretty well forgot about it until I saw something about it on the 'net the other night. Which prompted me to run over [technically, I walked over] to EBGames and pick it up.

The game's a slight letdown, since it's really more of a SimTycoon thing than any sort of filmmaking tool. But I was able to produce Teatime of the Living Dead [kinda] after playing the game for a day or two. I went ahead and stashed the result at http://TeatimeoftheLivingDead.com for the moment. In the event that, someday, I do what I'd originally intended as a film, I guess I'll update that to something more useful.

Loosely on the subject, I scrapped Deadache entirely and started rethinking it. The whole idea with that was to start up a sort of cartoon meant to look roughly like the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill and other games from the end of the century. The problem all along has been my history of CG: I got used to having far more polygons in a given object long before the games were released; I've never really worked out a practical way to build, rig, and animate characters comprised of less than a thousand triangles. So that's been an issue for a couple years now.

Looking at the newer games in the genre, the polygon counts are up. Res4 and MetalGear and so on are still using less facets than I'm used to; but the antialiasing and surfacing are getting good enough that I could fake most of those elements even with more complex objects. So, the objects I'd got built [overbuilt, really] are all gone, and I'm starting over from the first proverbial brick. In this case, that was actually the front doors of Witherford Manor, which so far bears some resemblance to Spencer Mansion.

Ultimately, the house will have some differences, of course. I'll probably mimic some of the main rooms, like the foyer and dining hall; but--especially as time goes on--there'll be elements of other houses from other games, and a few things not really seen in games yet.

Beyond the house itself, which'll be important in the first episode, there'll be the whole town. Probably, I'll build it all as a single level, allowing the camera to go from one corner to the other, like with Grand Theft Auto. It'll be millions [possibly billions] of polygons; but, given the nature of the 'game', I'll be able to add enough environmental fog in LightWave to hide whatever's not actively being shot per scene. Also like GTA, really; just somewhat darker, in the end.

Furthermore, given the evolution of games in the last few years, it'll likely move beyond survival horror into other genres. Both older and newer than its primary focus. Not that there'd really be a way to factor in QBert and Tetris; but it might not be impossible to bring in Space Invaders and Yar's Revenge. As examples. We'll see.

Meanwhile, we're also starting on the soundtrack. We being Deophagy. Because, with everything I'm supposed to be doing, what I really needed was another band. On the other hand, Deophagy are currently doing more than MetWar, so it's almost a replacement, until I can get back to my standalone thing. In any case, we're working on the music for the cartoon. The main opening theme, and various character themes; hopefully, the timing and keys will all match up allowing for transitions between elements in the end result. So far, everything's pretty much in A and C, so it's almost compatable. Not that chord progressions can't be done; but I'm used to working with pianos, and the black keys seem to be there only to fuck everything up; on guitars, there's no real problem, apparently.

Almost related to that, I got some new software the other day. Some simple freeware for podcasting. It's on the tower, not the laptop, so it hasn't been real useful yet. It would work if I could get the RFD cast into my office, I suppose. But I'm the only organism apart from the iguana who can stand the temperature in here. So MondoHebe et al need to like the heat, or I've got to put this on the laptop and do shows at restaurants, or I've got to become interesting enough to do the show alone. The laptop thing seems most likely, so far. Another good idea might be finding out what's going on in the world, which I've been avoiding lately. Like, for the last twenty years or so. There's a problem when the entire world is actually more boring than my general lack of progress in adding anything more interesting to it.

And that's pretty much the news. At least, that's the potentially interesting news. I'm not quite boring enough to add thirty blogue entries per day. Maybe I'll look into that sometime, just to see if it can be made interesting. 16.49. Opened a soda. Heater came on. Iguana climbed to top of cage. Cat wandered in, remembered that it's hot in here, and left again. Short mammals outside window loudly illterate again. Stay tuned for news as it occurs....

Sadly, that would probably be almost interesting.

Maybe after I get the pillars all finished on the house. They're kinda bland, at the moment.