For the last few days I’ve been researching the beginning of the Jamestown colony, because I’ve been tossing around the idea of basing a story around similar events. (I know, everyone else has done it — Disney, James Cameron — so why not me? It’s a freakin’ timeless story after all, even if you totally leave out the whole John Smith/Pocahontas angle.) Actually “researching” is probably not the right word. “Voraciously obsessed with reading about” is probably more accurate.

Just for posterity, here is a page of scribbling I did trying to block out what I thought would be the final 10,000 words or so of Airworld. What ended up happening is that I raised more questions than I answered, and all the answers started branching off into all these other fairly massive sub-plots. You may also notice there is a whole new, vitally important character in there that was introduced very late in the story.

Finished Brotherhood. Cool game - shorter than Assassin’s Creed II but I think more polished. (By the way, when I say I “finished” I mean I finished the story; I’m nowhere near 100% completion, because I’m not a completionist gamer. I think it was somewhere around 40% actually.) Another cliffhanger ending. Can’t really say anything without spoiling it, but I was a little bit suspicious of that person anyway. Started Revelations.

I was getting a bit tired of Assassin’s Creed Revelations, so I took a short break and finally played Tomb Raider, which I had gotten in a Steam sale. There’s no doubt it’s one of the best games of 2013. For the record, I’ve never been a fan of the Tomb Raider games. Originally, they were largely nothing more than jumping puzzles, but honestly I haven’t played any of the hundreds of TR games since the original few, so I’m not sure what they’ve evolved into.

Finished the main story in Assassin’s Creed Revelations the other day. Other than the horribly inaccurate face models of Ezio and Desmond which made them look like scarred zombies, I thought it was pretty good, as all Assassin’s Creed games are. The endings always give me a chill, when they bring together the past, present, and future. Well — the past, the past, the past, and the present would be more accurate I guess.

This book really grew on me. I almost stopped reading it at about 20%, but pressed onward, and I’m glad I did, because I feel like I learned something important about writing from this book. When I got to about 35% I was hooked, and when I got to about 40% I was riveted. I won’t spoil it but if you’ve read the book you probably know the events that caused the riveting.

I started Assassin’s Creed III unsure of what to expect. I had a general feeling that AC3 had not been well-received, but other than that I knew little about it, except that it was a departure from the previous versions. First thing’s first: The game’s new engine looks beautiful. I mean, drop-dead gorgeous. I’ve always thought Assassin’s Creed was one of the most realistic-looking games out there, even back to the first version, but this new version raises the bar higher than ever.

Being super drained after moving, I wanted something that I could sit and stare at for hours on end without thinking, so I started binge-watching this TV show that Netflix put into their Top 10 Shows We Know You Will Like. It’s called Revolution. After five minutes, I thought, “Oh God, seriously? Another post-apocalyptic, civilization-has-collapsed show? Like Jericho? Falling Skies? Under the Dome (kind of)? Um… all those other shows I can’t think of at this moment?

Don’t get me wrong, I like the show. I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic fiction I guess. And it has a lot of “heart.” But sometimes television writers are just really lazy about basic science. It’s why this country is like last place in math and science, I guess. 1. Pilot When electricity goes off, screens don’t blink and distort. They instantly go black. I’ve been through power outages. I know these things.

Now and then I listen to a podcast called The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, which is basically about debunking popular myths like UFOs and ghosts and homeopathy with scientific skepticism. Sometimes they also review the science in science fiction movies, and a while back they looked at Star Trek: Into Darkness. I skipped it because I hadn’t seen it yet, and I’ve been waiting for Amazon Prime to let me rent it ever since.

After I moved into a new house, I instantly became bored with all computer games. I still load up Assassin’s Creed III now and then, but I can only get through a mission or two before getting bored. I also tried to play Europa Universalis IV for a while, but I just can’t get into all the details of a Colonial Europe Simulator. Which is a shame because I think the game map looks very pretty.

Breaking Bad is over now. One of the best shows of all time ended after five years. And I think it was time. It’s extremely rare to see a really good show stay good after five seasons. After that, you just play along because you have fond memories of the first few years, on the off chance that a good episode comes along and brings back the magic. Honestly, most shows peak in two or three years.

With NaNoWriMo coming up in a month, I’m not sure what to work on. There’s a distinct possibility that I might free-write 50k words. That would probably be good for me. It will be an exercise in keeping-the-writing-fun and not-worrying-if-it-doesn’t-make-sense. First I need to come up with a character that I like, because I feel like that’s the main thing that keeps me writing. I’ve been having a lot of trouble getting started on any other writing projects, so I’ve been spending most of my writing time revising last year’s Sovereign of Tel.

No, not the game. I don’t know anything about Red Alert the game. I’m talking about Final Fantasy XIV, A Realm Reborn. It’s a relic of the past: A new subscription-based MMO. Although it’s apparently been out since 2010, it’s just that they recently re-released a version that actually works and that people might actually want to play. Anyroad, it’s cheap so I got it and have been playing it, and it’s actually kind of fun and not terrible and most importantly, not boring.

So I’ve been sucked into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s all the fault of Gamers With Jobs, just so you know. They generally liked it, and I usually like things that they like, so I had to try it. Especially since it was only $30 for the first month. They’ve stolen one idea from me. In the MMO that I want to design and write but of course I never will, you could advance in three different areas: PvE, PvP, and crafting.

I’ve played quite a few MMOs in my time, including a few that I thought were sort of JRPG-ish in nature (Aion and Tera come to mind), but I have to say, FFXIV in some ways is a brand new world to me. It is freakishly weird how quiet the general chat is in this game. I can’t recall the last time I played in an MMO where the general chat wasn’t filled with a constant stream of random subhuman noise.

I stumbled onto this thing called the Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI). I found it by reading a post on a blog called Inventory Full, which is an awesome blog name, by the way. That post, which referenced a bunch of other blogs, got me thinking that I didn’t have enough MMORPG gaming blogs in my feed reader, so I went and added a bunch. Then, when I looked over the recent posts on all of those different blogs, they all had one thing in common (besides MMORPGs): The Newbie Blogger Initiative.

Since Breaking Bad is gone, I guess The Walking Dead moves up to become the best drama on television, now starting its fourth season. This is traditionally the point in a show’s lifecycle when it starts to die out. Maybe not in TWD’s case, though, because the show didn’t really get going (imo) until its third season. The first episode of Season 4 didn’t do much but set the stage for what’s to come in the rest of the season.

TAGN wrote* that the Happy Time for Rift is over. Meaning that its resurgence in popularity after it went F2P is over, and now it has nowhere to go but down. It’s hard to disagree since when I last logged into Hailol up in the Dendrome, it was a ghost town. He also had a fair number of negative things to say about Rift going F2P, saying that he immediately unsubscribed when he heard about it.

I have my story idea for NaNoWriMo this year. I’m kind of excited about it. At least I was when I thought of it. It’s a bit of a meta-story, a pure fantasy that could not in any way happen in real life, or even alternate world life, and I would be lying if I said it did not in some way resemble John Scalzi’s inexplicably-Hugo-award-winning Redshirts­. I would say it has some elements of Redshirts and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One mixed up together.

I read on Inventory Full (still an awesome blog name) about this thing coming out called EQLandmark. I do not know what it is, but it sounds like some kind of new game in the EQ universe. Bhagpuss then mentioned something about making a Heroic character in EQ2, and I got sidetracked. Because I have some EQ2 characters too, and I figured I’d better log in and make my own Heroic characters, too.

I had to stick a link to this movie in my blog. I think it’s the best opening sequence for an MMORPG I can recall seeing, and also a really fantastic computer-generated short film in its own right. Even if you have no clue what an MMORPG is, you might like this. Updated the link.

I usually stick to one MMORPG at a time, play it until I get bored, then move to the next one. This week though I’ve been firing up a different one every night. The latest one was Guild Wars 2. I got sucked into this session right away. I had last logged out in Sparkfly Fen on the beach where Tequatl attacks. I went there to see the new-and-improved Tequatl event I keep hearing so much about, but it wasn’t running when I got there, so I just logged out.

I found out from all the gaming blogs that WarHammer Online is shutting down in December. WAR ran for five years, which seems like a pretty decent run for any game. I was there at launch, struggling through the bugs and lack of content with everyone else. The biggest problem I remember was not being able to play for several days because my pre-ordered copy of the game was late and I couldn’t put in my game code.

From what I can tell, the two most anticipated MMOs “coming soon” are WildStar and Elder Scrolls Online. WildStar I can only assume because it’s made by some former WoW developers, and ESO because, well, it’s Elder Scrolls, man, come on. Anyway, a video was recently posted showing ESO character creation options, and wow, it looks pretty awesome. I’m not sure why I thought this but I figured ESO would be a lot more graphically simplified than Skyrim, but it actually looks pretty similar.