Pirates! On the Cheap

(Kudos to Tony for finding this)

If you're somebody who wanted to play Sid Meier's Pirates but were unwilling to shell out the $50 to buy a new copy . . . well for the most part you're a goddamn cheapskate and you'd better not work in the industry or I'll mock the shit out of you. If you can't be bothered to buy the good stuff then I don't want to hear the complaints when you're stuck working on Movie-Tie-In 3 or Sequel-To-Random-Sucess-In-The-Past 17, or Derivative-Just-Like-Last-Year's-Surprise-Hit-But-Rushed-Crapfest. But in my case I had bought the PC version, so buying the Xbox version a few months later seemed a bit steep.

Amazon now has the Xbox SKU for $12. I don't know why, don't know how long the price will last, etc. etc. But if you want a copy of Pirates for crazy-cheap click the link. If you're into the PC thang, it's $20 - but that's still a great buy. Check it here.

I've only played a bit of the Xbox version, but it seems to be almost identical. Load times are more noticeable, but that's to be expected. The only substantial difference I've seen so far is that they seem to have cut out the "explore on land" game. When you hit land it just tells you "you searched for days" and either gives you the treasure (if you were close enough I guess) or tells you that you found nothing.

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That was weird

So I woke up this morning, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Made my way downstairs and . . . hang on that's a Beatles lyric. Let's try again.

This morning I fired up my browser and it said it couldn't find www.hiddenjester.com. Rubbish! The cat is sitting on it - I can kick the box from here. The machine itself was still online, so I went in and tried to restart the server - seg faults. Reboot the machine - still seg faults on startup. Look at the logs, not much there. at 4:03 AM it says "Graceful restart request, doing restart" (I think this was for log rotation maybe?), then it says [error] (9)Bad file description: apr_socket_accept: (client socket) - which is a great error message, very informative to the average user (rolls eyes).

So I dunno. Ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the web server. Seems to be fine now. I did compile some new stuff yesterday, but it was all GUI thing-a-ma-bobs - nothing that should have impacted the web server. Let me know if anybody has an issues with the server and apologies for the outage.

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More pics

Some more pics up at Flickr - these are of the Japanese Garden in Portland. Not as happy with my picture work there today - the lighting was a bit tricky and I was using my older camera as opposed to Karin's new tiny camera. Also the flash kept turning on for my camera - even though we were outdoors. (grumble). It's utterly ridiculous that this huge, dense garden exists smack in the middle of the city like this.

I really need to learn what I'm doing with Photoshop Elements. I wonder if I couldn't fix up more pictures if I had more skill . . . .

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On Vacation

I'm on vacation, so by rights I don't have to post at all. Suck it! But I will post, at least once. :-) Karin and I road-tripped to Portland, OR. This morning we drove around Crater Lake. It was quite gorgeous. For what it's worth, I have a Flickr account now, and I uploaded some pics. In other interesting news I posted the pics and this blog entry using the latest Flock build. Maybe I'll post more pics later, we'll see how time runs.

I created a thumbnail for one Crater Lake pic, but apparently I can just drag and drop from the Flickr page, so let's try this out, shall we?

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Serial Finale - What's Next?

So I finished up the first Captain Arcolier story and posted the final installment yesterday. What does that mean for fiction on this site moving forward? A few observations would be in order. I enjoyed writing it, and I'm sure I'll write more like it in the future but not everything came out as planned. 1) The serial format shaped the piece. This is sort of a "well duh" point, but it is worth pointing. At the end I don't have a ten thousand word short story, I have a nine piece web serial which only works well in the serial format. I don't see this as a particularly good or bad point, just that it is it's own format - and one that is pretty non-commercial at that. 2) I shouldn't post any parts of a serial until I have the whole freakin' thing written. I thought starting the "post every Tuesday" rule would give me a deadline and help trigger creativity. In fact it did the opposite. I found that weekly deadline oppressive - there are episodes that I'm not happy with that got posted anyway. There were days where I was scowling at the screen at 11 PM on Tuesday and hating what I was trying to do. There were weeks where I missed having a post, and that really backfired as I had to break past the guilt and self-recriminations before I could get back to writing. (If you look back I think I never missed just one week. Once I missed a week it snowballed and even cut down on my volume of other blog posting.) 3) I think Captain Arcolier was specifically created as a "this is a creative break from other writing", and I enjoyed writing those earlier pieces and I think they read better. Once we got into a territory of having an even part-time "day job" and a mode where I had to write Captain Arcolier to meet a deadline, she lost some of the magic. I need to get another writing project rolling and then see about occasionally visiting a silly web serial as a way to relax and stretch some writing muscles. So short term, I have no promises about more fiction appearing here. In the super short-term I'm going on a vacation soonish, so the site will probably seem a little fallow for a couple of weeks here. (Yes, yes I hear you in the peanut gallery saying "How will we tell the difference?" A jovial "go screw yourself" in return :-) ) But I'm sure fiction will appear here in the future.
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