All posts tagged Marty

Vacation: Over

Martin · 15 years

The inevitable end of my holiday vacation has arrived. Actually, it arrived yesterday, since that was my first day back at work after a New Year's four-day weekend, but I was feeling too lazy to post anything. Technically, I guess my brain was still in holiday mode, so maybe it is right to say that my vacation ended today. In any case, it's the new year, I'm back on the blog, and I've got a lot of gameage to talk about.

I had a great Christmas at home - it was nice to spend an extended amount of time with my family, play (and lose horribly) at Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, and other non-electronic games. We watched movies and sat around talking and joking with each other. I had a lot of fun hanging out with my mom, dad, and brother. And later on, after Christmas was over, I had another fun holiday weekend spent with my girlfriend. This included an awesome birthday (I'm 27 now, yikes!) with a nice dinner with my parents, a lunch the next day with just my girlfriend, a trip to the theater to see Yes Man (which was hilarious), and lots of cake and presents. So maybe you can understand why I've neglected the blog lately!

Like many people out there, I've also been sucked into playing a lot of games lately, since I got a few of them for Christmas. My mom and dad got me Fallout 3 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and my brother got me Prince of Persia, so I've had my hands full. Of the three, I think my favorite is Banjo-Kazooie, since you can build just about any kind of vehicle you want, and thus, play the game just about any way you want, but I am enjoying all three for their own merits. Fallout 3 is proving to be the time sink that is par the course for Bethesda games, and Prince of Persia has been a surprisingly fresh and fun experience, akin to the Sands of Time game, though with less frustration (so far).I'll write more about each game individually in the coming week as I continue to play through them, but for now I just wanted to drop a note to let everyone know how things are going for me. Thanks for reading, and I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season!

Oh, and I'll be raffling off the copy of Half-Life 2 + HL2: Episode 1 again soon - so stay tuned!

Marty Moved

Martin · 16 years

Over the last week I was busy boxing up all my stuff and trying to coordinate all my services (cable, internet, electricity, etc.) to have things ready for my move, and this weekend I got everything moved over - I am now officially moved out of my old apartment, and living with my girlfriend at the new one. There are still a lot of boxes to sort through, but the computer is set up, the Xbox is up and running, and... I've got no internet yet!

You see, me being the master planner that I am, only called up AT&T to transfer my existing phone and internet service on friday of last week. This translates into my landline being moved today and my internet being reconnected on Wednesday. Not an entirely raw deal, as I can go about most of my business without it - I've got plenty of games that need playing, and the aforementioned boxes to unpack. Still, it has been an inconvenience when I've needed to get phone numbers and other information which I normally collect from the internet in about 5 seconds, but now have to obtain either by searching the phone book or calling up 411, both of which are expensive prospects in time and money respectively.

At first, I was tempted to activate my cell phone's limited internet capabilities (by adding a $5-a-month charge to my plan) but being through the bulk my time without the internet now, I think I'll just wait it out.

Being without the worldwide time sink that is the internet, I've also had some time (between games and unpacking, of course) to think about some of the GM content I want to release here on my site in the near future, particularly of the example and tutorial flavor. I still want to put together a simple tutorial about how to make that animated water texture I introduced in my 3D example, as well as an example for the fire particles I used in Sun Sun Der, and a few other small things. I should have plenty of time to work on a couple of these over the next few days, so we'll see what I can come up with. If anyone has any ideas about what they'd want to see, please let me know in the comments below.

Anyway, I just wanted to write a little about where I am with my GM work and offer an explanation as to why you might not have seen me on AIM/MSN/XBL/GMC/etc. over the weekend. Thanks for reading, and again, please let me know of any examples/tutorials you might want to see, preferably graphics oriented.