Kitkowskiland!

Cats are taken care of, housesitter is sitting, we’re getting the last of our stuff together to the roadtrip to Gatlinburg.

At last count, I’m bringing 28 books (that’s including a notebook for writing and a Japanese Kanji dictionary), we’ll see how many I get through.

Also, I’m giving myself a challenge: By the time I return the following Sunday, I’ll have the framework (that is, it’ll be playable) for not one, not two, but three fully playable games.
I’m not bringing a computer, so it’s going to be all written up on paper and in my head, but still.  I’m thinking that the Ghost Killers will see full playable draft status, plus possibly a tactical game, plus something else.

I’m kinda waffling on bringing the Playstation, though: I’d only be bringing it so that we could do our Yoga DVDs, but it seems like a pretty big item just for three DVDs (they’re awesome DVDs, though).

Unfortunately, I won’t be at GenCon this year, but my proxies are going and buying me wonderful loot, so I’ll have to live the experience vicariously through them.
So, here I go, packing the last of my gear, see y’all in a week.

http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html

It’s both pretty simple and really awesome. it actually reminds me a lot of the classic and fast strategy game “Lords of Conquest”.

Here are other games by the same guy, “Gamedesign”:

http://www.gamedesign.jp/index_en.html

So I’m going on vacation soon for a week, and decided a few weeks ago to pick up some books and CDs that had been sitting in my Amazon.com wishlist for a long time. My good, real vacations tend to be me getting out of the house for about a week and going somewhere relaxing to relax and read. Japan isn’t so much a vacation anymore as it’s usually filled with stuff I gotta do (family, friends, activities) so I’m almost as tired coming back as before I left.

This time, I’m going to the mountains, where I plan on doing a lot of hiking, swimming, reading and resting.

So I went to Amazon, and started sifting through the items: I only brought items out of my wishlist into my shopping cart if it said they could be shipped “within 24 hours” (passing on the “5-7 days” items and the like). I figure with that, plus the super saver shipping, will have most of the books at my house before I leave. Maybe one of the items will be split off from the rest to be shipped seperately.

So, thinking that my logic was perfect, I made my order. It said that it should arrive by August 1st-3rd: Rock.

…a few days pass, and I get an email saying there’s a delay. Sure enough, I look at the items I chose, and some of them (that were “will ship within 24 hours”) are pushed back to “5-7 days”. Crap. On top of that, it looks like the order will not be split: Only one item (a small book) was split from that order, and that arrived on Saturday. The rest are all lumped together in this tight, unbreakable ball. Estimated time of delivery is between a few days and up to one week after we get back.

Oh well. I planned pretty well, but that took me off-guard. No one’s fault but my own and all that, but it still kinda sucks: All these awesome books will arrive just after I get back from vacation, so I’ll have to sit on them for months until another “non-work related reading window” opens up.

I’ll be a little more wary of this next time: Maybe do two orders; one of CDs and one of Books. Or divide them into smaller sub-orders of 5 books each or something.

-Andy

Here’s something I thought about recently, and if it wasn’t so time-consuming to learn how to build and set tracks in Stepmania, I’d totally do it.

Basically, there’s Stepmania, which is kinda like Dance Dance Revolution for the PC. Some songs that people posted have video accompanyments.

My idea is to maybe take a few 2-3 minute kung-fu videos from classic Shaw Brothers kung fu movies, like Ghostface Killer or Disciples, Executioners from Shaolin, etc. Then, instead of “dancing” with the “music”, the arrows come up and you take the role of one of the combatants, moving and stepping kung fu style. I was thinking of having the upleft and upright arrows in play, and stepping there (or forward) would accentuate attacks.

Maybe this year I’ll put a small clip together and see how it turns out…