Ok, so HFBB to Weezie as well. Sorry about that - the databases in question have been scolded and corrected. Today was all about the Magic Online - and the release of the new set (Magic: The Gathering - now with Ninjas!(tm)). And before anybody gets all sassy on me I've "worked" the last weekend, and I'm "working" this weekend (at that Potlatch thingie) so spending a Thursday playing Magic is kosher. (Monday is likely to ALSO be all about the MTGO - the release events continue through next Tuesday. I know everybody already tuned out by now, so I can prattle to my hearts content. Magic continues to fascinate me as a game, and especially when I take a short break from it and come back. The block concept is sheer brilliance. It amazes me that Kamigawa block is even considered the same game as Mirrodin block - it plays so different. From a game design perspective it's just poetry to watch them evolve and change the game. It's also interesting to watch the meta-choices they make. I'd say Kamigawa is probably less friendly to the new player than Mirrodin was - it's much more complicated to play. As an experienced player I really like it - I hadn't realized how straightforward and "vanilla" Mirrodin was until Kamigawa released. The combat is so much richer. Mirrodin was an interesting experiment in Magic design but Kamigawa is brilliant. I might even like it better than Invasion block which is generally considered the high water mark of recent Magic sets. In theory Magic should have sequelitis worse than any other game on the planet - after all there's a "sequel" every four months. But they manage to shake up the game enough that it always feels very different. I don't know what kind of updates will see over the next few days (How is that different Timmeh? you ask. Shut up I respond!) as I'm tooling around in da city. OH - random bonus iTunes suggestions. For a while now, I've had a playlist called "Actual Music" which keeps my podcasts separate. Basically it's a Smart Playlist that excludes the following genres: Podcast, Speech, Books & Spoken Word. A few podcasts don't come in on those genres but iPodderX lets you override the genre for a feed. So I set the "Party Shuffle" to play from "Actual Music" instead of Library and now I can shuffle that forever without getting some nattering about tech all of a sudden in my listening. BUT! I found a even better thing to do. I now have a Playlist called "Unloved Tunes" which has the same restrictions but adds a restriction saying "Last Played is not in the last 30 days". Set it to "Limit to 25 songs selected randomly" and Live updating. This will pick out 25 random tracks that I haven't played in the last month. Every time I finish a track it gets replaced with a "new" unplayed track. I have iTunes on Repeat Playlist and it will just cycle like that forever - randomly picking tunes I haven't heard recently. And it will sync that with the iPod as well.

So the most popular Timmeh! question these days is "How's the writing going?" Answer is: slowly. Actually there's been a boatload of stuff afoot. These days I have a "Big Board" in my office - it's a big 6 page spreadsheet table (3x2 grid) with the plot outline for my NaNoWriMo novel. The plot got complicated enough that I was having trouble making sure everything got introduced before it was needed and so forth, so this is my answer. There was a big flurry of work because I actually submitted the first three chapters to an open call for novels - that went out yesterday. So I spent most of the weekend thrashing them into shape, along with the Big Board so I could write a chapter outline. In other novelling news I'm going to Potlatch 14 this weekend. I guess if there's a Bay Area SF writing community I should look into it. Also of note March is National Novel Editing Month - yang to NaNoWriMo's yin. So I'm committed to doing 50 hours of editting on the book this month. Yay writing! I've also been spending a lot of time on non-writing tasks. I'm gradually coming to the realization that if I hadn't quit I was going to eventually have to take a week's vacation to just finish up dangling moving issues - like balancing the checkbook, finish the last bits of unpacking and so forth. I have hopes of getting my office finally clean before my birthday - I've got about a week and a half :-)

Because I'm a terrible slacker I forgot to post and wish Chuji a birthday on the proper day. So Happy Fuckin' Belated Birthday Jeff!

They are running the Project Snowblind (note to Marketing - I'm not hyperlinking that because Flash sites with sound effects are ANNOYING yo!) TV spot during The Daily Show, which is kickass. The commercial itself . . . well it's a lead contender for the Rory Award for the Most Gratuitous Usage of the word "Unit" in a TV Commercial*. I guess it's OK but of course there's little to no actual gameplay. On the other hand, it's a TV ad! For a game I worked on! On an actual show that I watch! *Note to JP - this is a riff from Life, The Universe and Everything. Someday you should read those books.