Month: July 2015

Last gasp

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My writing class is finally over as of yesterday. Due to a consistent lack of effort and interest, I suspect I’ll probably have to take it again in the future, and I haven’t decided yet when that might happen. The good news, at least, is that the final grade will be available next week, and for now I have about two weeks (technically, two weeks and a few days) before the fall semester begins.

Personally, I’m looking forward to being able to enjoy myself again. For the last several weeks, I was stressing and focused on the class, which usually resulted in procrastination and feeling bad about procrastination rather than anything resembling productivity. Since the class is over, I’ll be able to resume work on my various creative writing projects and ideas, as well as possibly finish a few books and play some computer games.

I’m planning on going home for a brief trip next week, so that will be nice. I’m sure being a full-time student again this fall will impact my free time, but I’ll have to see. I never had cause to develop study skills in high school, and after quickly learning that I didn’t like being a computer science major my freshman year of college could definitely have been better.

Anyway, on a lighter note, here’s a brief list of current writing project ideas.

  • Crusader Kings 2: After the End mod history and/or narrative
    • Tribe of the Mouse (central Florida)
    • Duke of Driftless (Dubuque/northeastern Iowa)
    • something in the Ozarks (southwest Missouri/northwest Arkansas)
  • Europa Universalis 4: Super States mod history and/or narrative
    • California
  • Crusader Kings 2 narrative
    • Byzantine Balearics – working title “Edge of Empire”
  • list of fantasy ideas to be made into a story

anniversaries and aggression

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As of July 16, I’ve been working for my current employer for three years, and as of July 19/20 I’ve been living in my current city for 2 years. After working every day from the 15th to the 19th, I had Monday off, which was nice after a busy weekend. Sleeping in and being frustrated about that was less nice, but skipping class Monday has thrown off my perception of time. Yesterday I kept thinking it didn’t seem like Tuesday, and I still think today doesn’t seem like Wednesday. The good news is that, after tonight, I have three days off.

In other news, yesterday I had an excellent start to my day due to developments in an online game I’ve been playing recently. One of the guys involved with the Game of Thrones Diplomacy game I’ve been playing via Facebook message (actually, now that I think about it, it may have been the moderator of said game) invited people to play this science fiction strategy game online, and I joined both the game that was just the Game of Thrones Diplomacy players (one friend of mine and several friends of his – people I may have played RISK against a few times, at most, during my freshman year of college or while visiting my first university) and another game that was supposed to be random Internet people as well as friends of my friend.

I started this game in the north-western part of the galaxy, in a decently dense star cluster, so my carriers didn’t have to travel too far in order to capture unoccupied stars. Over the course of the game, several players were taken over by the AI due to inactivity, and I had begun taking AI-occupied worlds from my northern AI-controlled neighbor. I noticed my eastern neighbor had begun to do the same thing, so I opened diplomatic communications by sending him a message asking if he would be interested in negotiating partition of the AI-controlled planets in order to avoid an unfortunate diplomatic incident.

He didn’t reply, but apparently hadn’t seen the message before launching an invasion fleet at my stars. I had a large fleet at a star next to the one he was heading toward, so I moved those ships into position in order to retain control of the star. His invasion was defeated, but a battle of some 400 ships total is slightly too large to be considered a “skirmish”, in my book. Anyway, I logged on to this game yesterday morning to learn that my eastern neighbor had conceded defeat (despite being only slightly weaker than me, and I think I was in 2nd place overall) and his empire had been taken over by the AI, which leaves 3 human players – the guy who has been in 1st place (if I remember correctly, for essentially the entire game) on the southern end of the galaxy, me, now a solid 2nd place on the northwestern edge of the galaxy, and the new 3rd place player roughly in the center of the galaxy. In order to win, a player has to control 85 (if I remember correctly) of 192 stars. The 1st place player has 37, while I have 31 (or something like that). I’ve thought about messaging both the 1st and 3rd place players and asking if they want to split the other stars between us, but doing both would probably be difficult, particularly since the 1st place player is on the opposite end of the galaxy. I would have to backstab someone eventually.

Long story short, diplomacy is much simpler when you only have 1 human neighbor. The AI may be aggressive if you attack it, but you can’t really negotiate with it (yet, anyway – maybe in a few years online games will have decent AI).

I thought I had more to write about, but I’m suddenly drawing a blank (and should probably get ready for work anyway). 600-odd words seems like a good length for now, and I can always write more later (while procrastinating instead of writing this stupid paper that’s due tomorrow, for example).

summer and strategy

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Apparently I haven’t written any posts here for almost two weeks. I suppose I should change that, shouldn’t I?

I don’t know that I can think of anything recently that’s particularly exciting, since I’m still working, taking a writing class, and corresponding with F (the young woman I’ve been texting since late February).

The night of the 4th of July wasn’t as busy as I had expected it to be, but of course the next day, when I had the kitchen to myself, was the day that more people decided they wanted pizza. I managed, and I’ve heard that my hard work is appreciated, so that’s always good to hear. Days off are always nice, particularly this week – I had last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off work, worked Friday and Saturday night, and then I have three days off this week, which I just realized are about half over, since I had Sunday (for once), Monday, and Tuesday night off.

Last Tuesday I drove to campus and sat outside the classroom for several minutes before one of my classmates pointed out, as he was leaving, that there was a sign posted that class had been canceled. I had received a wake-up call from my mother that morning, which meant I was awake 45 minutes to an hour earlier than usual, and I later saw that the teacher had sent the e-mail canceling class around 8:30 that morning. Driving to campus only to find out that class was canceled was slightly frustrating, but it was nice having class canceled on a day off (even if I had trouble imagining being ill in July, as the teacher apparently was).

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned Europa Universalis 4 or the Super States mod here before, but I’ve been thinking about it lately. Europa Universalis 4 is a game from Paradox Interactive (the company that makes Crusader Kings 2) that allows one to play as any country between roughly 1444 and 1820. About a year ago, I discovered that someone had made a mod (the Super States mod) that allows you to play as a US, Mexican, or Australian state or Canadian province that somehow wound up in 1444. Now, of course, there are a few additional scenarios, but playing as a US state thrown back in time has appealed to me. I’ve thought before that it would be interesting to play a game with that mod and then write a history from “the beginning” (1444) to European contact in the late 1400s/early 1500s. European interaction with the new world would be very different if there are equally advanced states of European descent occupying the New World.

Previous ideas for writing this “history” have included Missouri (because I’m a life-long native of Missouri) and California (because it offers more interesting opportunities, like the possibility of having a navy and Pacific colonization and exploration). The creator of the mod, however, has been busy with vague “real life” issues, and has not been able to keep the mod updated for the current version of EU4, since several expansions had been released since the last mod update. However, an update for the mod was released on July 4, which unfortunately wasn’t working but did get me thinking about the interesting possibilty of a strategy game, like RISK or Diplomacy, set in the United States. Or perhaps I should say the Divided States.

Initially I thought it would be interesting to have the players playing as different states, and that led to the idea of having the players start by fighting over a particular state, uniting it, and then moving on to try uniting the States in their image. I drew a few rough maps of Midwestern states (Missouri by hand, Iowa and Nebraska on the computer) for this game, but it’s somewhat hard to do that when you’re not familiar with an area of a state and there’s not much in a region. It’s fairly easy to designate a metropolitan area as a “territory”, or to draw a shape around a town that’s obviously going to dominate an area due to having the largest population in a particular area, but beyond a certain point I feel like it would be difficult for aspiring governments to hold on to territory beyond a certain distance if they’re limited to pre-modern technology.

I’ve also been thinking about the After the End mod for Crusader Kings 2, probably because thinking about the Divided States and pre-modern technology reminded me of it. Lately, for some reason, I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to play in the southern US – I’ve never been east of Chicago, but lately I’ve been thinking Florida, the Carolinas, or Virginia (among other places) might be interesting to play because of the possibility of naval combat. Who doesn’t like ships, right? At the moment I’m considering a project, similar to my Chariton after-action report, for somewhere in Florida, but I don’t think I’ll start that until some time after the Horse Lords expansion is released tomorrow and the After the End mod is updated with whatever new mechanics they decide to integrate.

Summer mix

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Finally renewing my domain for this blog (less than a day before it was due to expire) reminded me that I haven’t written here for a while.

Procrastination and stress continue in my summer writing class, but I met for an individual conference with my teacher today. After arriving 5 minutes before I had signed up for the conference, we talked for a few minutes before we were done, which was still a few minutes in advance of 11 AM, which was the time I had signed up for my conference. We didn’t have class today, and don’t have class tomorrow, so a couple extra days of being able to sleep in slightly will be nice. Long story short, my grade is better than I had expected, but since there’s now just under a month left I need to step it up so I haven’t completely wasted my time and money and have to re-take this stupid class yet again.

As for the non-academic parts of my life at the moment, work has kind of been dominating my “free” time. For whatever reason (sleep deprivation?), I don’t think I’ve done much of late as far as playing computer games or otherwise entertaining myself, but I’m still probably spending too much time on social media. On the other hand, as much as I may dislike my current job, I do have to pay rent, tuition, and other bills somehow.

Other recent amusements have included online versions of the board game Diplomacy, continuing conversation with the young woman I’ve been texting since late February, and last week’s quick trip home. Continue reading →