Life Update -- vacation, Firan, gaming, Opie
I haven't posted anything in a while, let alone a life update. Here's what's going on in the world of Adam.
Vacation
I took two weeks of vacation over the holidays. I like to take two weeks in a row. It takes me a week to really unwind, then I get a week to relax. It's my annual "reboot." I didn't go anywhere or do anything huge. I relaxed. It was wonderful.
That's not to say that I was uselessly idle for two weeks. Steph and I hosted Christmas at our house for her family. That involved cleaning and decorating. We hadn't decorated for the holidays in many years, mostly because we've spent the last half dozen Christmasses in Ohio or New York with one of our families. We put up two small artificial trees, strew red and green garland, put up a wreath and window candle lights, and displayed Christmas miniatures passed down from our parents. We prepared a big traditional Italian dinner, served wine, and exchanged gifts. It was a very nice time, and one of the the best Christmasses Steph ever had, and that makes me exceedingly happy.
We also hosted a New Year's Eve party for the usual folks. It was a blast and I really enjoyed having it at our house, but I suspect we go back to Mike's next year. Mike throws a good party, but I liked sleeping in my own bed! bluekitsune spent some time at our house while she was back home for the holidays and it was great to reconnect with her.
In between parties, I mostly forgot all the plans I'd cooked up for spending the time. I was going to design games, play games, update a Firan web site, kick off Viridian Visions' web site, and so on. Not much of that happened. I did other stuff, though, and spent a lot of quality time with Steph, who also decided to take a vacation. It was lovely.
I miss my family a lot. Because Opie (our orange and white, 12 year-old cat) is dying from renal failure and needs our constant attention, I could not go home for Thanksgiving this year. Opie is stabilizing and is not in immediate danger (but he's still dying), so I plan to go back to Ohio for a long weekend in February, perhaps for my nephew Owen's fourth birthday. My brother Jason is interviewing for a foreign service job in D.C. on January 25, so I'll get to see him then.
Firan
Vacation helped me recharge my Firan batteries, too. I'd been burned out for quite a while. Creating a MUSH is like parenting. You have the child and then you can't just ignore it. I've been a remote parent for a few years. I did the bare minimum, found a niche where I could be useful yet didn't require my daily attention, and slowly drifted away from anything really connected to the game.
I started getting re-engaged when a bunch of players launched a conspiracy plot against the current in-character leadership. The leaders discovered the coup attempt and struck pre-emptively, rounding up all their suspects with morning raids and commensing interrogations. Because a number of the wizard staff of Firan were involved in the plot in one way or another, it logically fell to me to be the game master for the event. I enlisted the help of bluekitsune, since she was already at my house and I knew her characters weren't at all involved in the scheme. We ran a very tense plot late into the night for a couple days. Poor Steph, who sits back-to-back with me at her own desk, constantly freaked out when bluekitsune and I would exchange cryptic, verbal half-messages. "Oh no!" "Really?" "Do you think... no..." Occasionally, we'd toss in an "Oh my god!" just to mess with her. The current leadership had operated with exceeding cleverness and efficiency, though, so they foiled the coup and won the day. It could have gone either way, really.
In any case, I was remembering what I loved about Firan. Like we did in the old days, Steph and I had some late night brainstorming sessions about the game. We concocted ideas to spur certain flagging groups of characters. I decided to resurrect my design for upgrading the combat system so that I could finally code "mobs" -- mobile objects that player-characters can fight using the combat system. A lot of our brainstorming required the mobs. I revisited the specification with a large player group and designed and coded the underpinnings of the system. I hope to complete a basic system in the next few weeks and complete the entire thing with time to test it thoroughly before this summer's war season on the game.
I took a character off the roster, too. I've had an almost-never-played Level IV character for a while, but I don't like him. I saw a character I liked, suddenly realized I had an interest in online role-playing again, and stated playing him. It's odd. When I'm not in the midst of role-play, I don't miss it and often push it down on my priority list. When I'm engaged in role-play, I find I don't want to stop. It's a weird sort of momentum it has for me. In any case, I'm forcing myself to role-play at least once a week. It keeps me connected to the game and lets me understand the game at a different level than if I just watch it from afar. And I'm finding it doesn't take much "forcing" to get into my character these days. Excellent.
Firan passed its Ten Year Anniversary on Sunday, January 14, 2007. That's from the time I started building it, not how long we've been open to players. We built and coded for seven and a half months before really letting people role-play on Firan. We'll have to do something special at FiranCon this year.
Gaming
I'm not a gamer. I like to think that I am, but I don't play enough to fit the bill. I am struggling to remember the last time I sat down and played a tabletop role-playing game. Was it GenCon? That's sad. I miss it fiercely and, beyond that, I don't want to be a game designer who doesn't play games. Even more, I don't want to be a game designer who doesn't play his own games. I have a version of Verge, my post-cyberpunk RPG, ready for playtest. I've had three or four groups playtest it independently, but I haven't played this version myself. I cannot finish the manuscript until I've playtested Verge sufficiently. Not one-shot playtests, but a series of multi-session storylines. I won't release it till it's been properly playtested.
One of my goals for this year is to get a weeknight playtest group together. It's difficult enough finding a group of people who can attend monthly weekend games of D&D or some other popular game. It's harder when I try to make make it biweekly or even weekly, and look for people who can play at my house on a weeknight. Rush-hour traffic makes travel to my house difficult for anyone not in the area. Most of my "local" friends live 45+ minutes away, when traffic is behaving. It's much harder when I am asking people to play a game that might not be fun. That's the nature of playtesting. Sometimes the rules don't produce the fun and I go back to the drawing board and tinker a bit. If the rules were consistently fun, I would be done playtesting. Add the fact that I have a game that is a sort of niche genre (cyberpunk isn't as big as it was in the late 80's and early 90's) and it's nearly impossible to put together a dependable playtest group. Still, I shall try. My local friends are my first choice, because I love them and want to play with them. I'll recruit for the remaining spots by posting flyers at the handful of local colleges (Villa Julie, CCBC, ITT Technical Institute, and Strayer University) and hope for the best. I only need three or four dependable players. I will sweeten the deal by promising occasional forays into other games, like Primitive, Perfect, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, and whatever else I have on hand. If a playtest session goes sour, we can stop early and play a backup game.
I'll still try to get in a single weekend game session once a month. As long as I'm getting biweekly playtests, I don't care what my monthly game is. It could be D&D or Primetime Adventures or whatever we can agree is fun. So my goal is to play 2-3 times a month. Additionally, I want to attend three conventions this year (Dreamation this month, GenCon-Indy in August, and MACE in November). These would probably replace my monthly game. I just can't give up that many weekends.
I got a lot of new games for Christmas. Mostly, I'll just read and study them as a game designer. It'd be nice though if I could actually, you know, play some of them. I got Primitive, Shock:, Legends of Alyria, Spirit of the Century, Breaking the Ice, and one other I can't recall right now. I also got a handful of books about postmodernism and cyberpunk. These will help me write the rest of the Verge manuscript. I need to make Verge into an engine for post-cyberpunk play, not just a skeleton of a game.
I didn't finish my contest game, Deadline. I just got too busy before New Years and didn't put the time in. It was close to done, too, and I think it'll be a cool game some day. Without the two-page limit, I have freedom to make it into something really special. I will eventually strip the elements I was just shoehorning in for the contest and make a really fun game about software development under pressure, with a nod to movies like Office Space. I have designed a cool little card mechanic for laying out Gantt charts...
Opie
Because I mentioned it earlier, I thought I'd post an update about my kitty. Opie is dying of renal failure. Our vet, Dr. Siegel, estimates he has about 25% kidney function. When we got our younger cat, Mercury, he brought with him ringworm and he infected Opie. We gave them both oral antifungals to combat it, and Dr. Siegel even used a much safer drug than vets usually choose, because antifungals kill cats. Well, it damaged Opie's liver and kidneys. He's been getting monthly blood tests and a battery of treatments for the last two years to fight the problems caused by the drug.
Nonetheless, his kidneys are not going to repair themselves. He's on his way out and I've made a sort of peace with that. He isn't in pain though he'll experience discomfort and nausea. He will lose his appetite and eat less and less till he becomes malnutritioned, anemic, and inactive. One day, our vet said, we'll know it's time and we'll bring him in and euthanize him. It's hard doing that mental calculus with the life of a beloved friend but we do it for him, not for us. If it were up to us, we'd keep him alive as long as possible, but his quality of life is at stake and is more important than our need to have him with us. Opie has months, not years.
In the meantime, we treat the symptoms to improve his quality of life and perhaps extend his life. Every morning, I cut the ends off four pieces of his cat treats and stuff 1/8 of an antihistamine pill into the soft part of each one and hide it well. Steph and I give these to him in the morning, mixed in with non-medicated treats to fool him. He sometimes tilts his head and crunches on the chalky pill, occasionally glares at us, sometimes walks away in disgust with the full knowledge that we've tricked him. We try again and again because this is less stressful for him than cranking his head back and forcing him to swallow a half pill.
Because it is important to get him to eat as much as possible, we feed him treats whenever he wants them. We feed him small cans of the best cat food (gourmet Fancy Feast of the chicken florentine variety looks and smells good enough to spread on toast and eat myself, I swear) whenever we can. For a while he was losing weight. His maximum lifetime weight was around 20 pounds and he was down to 13. We've gotten him back up to around 14. Gaining weight is a major sign that he's feeling better. We also give him something like a liquid antacid to settle his tummy.
Every night an hour before bedtime, I go upstairs and put a giant bag of fluids (a "lactated ringer") inside a small heating pad. At bedtime, we grab Opie, take him up to the spare room where we've set up a conference table with a towel on it (we call this the "pain room"), and administer 100 ccs of subcutaneous fluids. This involves me playing with a very large needle and stabbing my cat in the back, literally. He doesn't mind this so much, believe it or not. The room gets cold so we let him lay on the hot heating pad. Before we warmed the fluids, the coldness would make him tremble and sometimes vomit. Before I learned to properly insert the needle, we would have to pin him down with all our might as he cried. It was a process of trial-and-error learning and I regret not learning faster, as doing things right isn't that traumatic for him at all. He just lays there with half-lidded eyes and relaxes until we finish the fluids and try to give him the antacid, which he hates with the searing heat of a thousand suns. He gets a can of food after that, though, as a reward and to wash the yucky taste out of his mouth. He's also more likely to eat more and keep it down if he's just had the antacid.
Our vet told us to make each day count, so we do. When Opie isn't feeling well, he spends the night on the bed with us, often between our pillows. He knows he is dying. He has good days and bad days. On good days, he stays in the bedroom and sleeps much of the day. When he's feeling better, but not great, he spends the day in the corner of the living room behind a stool and a potted ficus tree but will come down to beg for treats occasionally. On good days, he camps out in the basement with us and follows us around. We hope for more good days than bad and give him as much love and attention as he'll permit.
Vacation
I took two weeks of vacation over the holidays. I like to take two weeks in a row. It takes me a week to really unwind, then I get a week to relax. It's my annual "reboot." I didn't go anywhere or do anything huge. I relaxed. It was wonderful.
That's not to say that I was uselessly idle for two weeks. Steph and I hosted Christmas at our house for her family. That involved cleaning and decorating. We hadn't decorated for the holidays in many years, mostly because we've spent the last half dozen Christmasses in Ohio or New York with one of our families. We put up two small artificial trees, strew red and green garland, put up a wreath and window candle lights, and displayed Christmas miniatures passed down from our parents. We prepared a big traditional Italian dinner, served wine, and exchanged gifts. It was a very nice time, and one of the the best Christmasses Steph ever had, and that makes me exceedingly happy.
We also hosted a New Year's Eve party for the usual folks. It was a blast and I really enjoyed having it at our house, but I suspect we go back to Mike's next year. Mike throws a good party, but I liked sleeping in my own bed! bluekitsune spent some time at our house while she was back home for the holidays and it was great to reconnect with her.
In between parties, I mostly forgot all the plans I'd cooked up for spending the time. I was going to design games, play games, update a Firan web site, kick off Viridian Visions' web site, and so on. Not much of that happened. I did other stuff, though, and spent a lot of quality time with Steph, who also decided to take a vacation. It was lovely.
I miss my family a lot. Because Opie (our orange and white, 12 year-old cat) is dying from renal failure and needs our constant attention, I could not go home for Thanksgiving this year. Opie is stabilizing and is not in immediate danger (but he's still dying), so I plan to go back to Ohio for a long weekend in February, perhaps for my nephew Owen's fourth birthday. My brother Jason is interviewing for a foreign service job in D.C. on January 25, so I'll get to see him then.
Firan
Vacation helped me recharge my Firan batteries, too. I'd been burned out for quite a while. Creating a MUSH is like parenting. You have the child and then you can't just ignore it. I've been a remote parent for a few years. I did the bare minimum, found a niche where I could be useful yet didn't require my daily attention, and slowly drifted away from anything really connected to the game.
I started getting re-engaged when a bunch of players launched a conspiracy plot against the current in-character leadership. The leaders discovered the coup attempt and struck pre-emptively, rounding up all their suspects with morning raids and commensing interrogations. Because a number of the wizard staff of Firan were involved in the plot in one way or another, it logically fell to me to be the game master for the event. I enlisted the help of bluekitsune, since she was already at my house and I knew her characters weren't at all involved in the scheme. We ran a very tense plot late into the night for a couple days. Poor Steph, who sits back-to-back with me at her own desk, constantly freaked out when bluekitsune and I would exchange cryptic, verbal half-messages. "Oh no!" "Really?" "Do you think... no..." Occasionally, we'd toss in an "Oh my god!" just to mess with her. The current leadership had operated with exceeding cleverness and efficiency, though, so they foiled the coup and won the day. It could have gone either way, really.
In any case, I was remembering what I loved about Firan. Like we did in the old days, Steph and I had some late night brainstorming sessions about the game. We concocted ideas to spur certain flagging groups of characters. I decided to resurrect my design for upgrading the combat system so that I could finally code "mobs" -- mobile objects that player-characters can fight using the combat system. A lot of our brainstorming required the mobs. I revisited the specification with a large player group and designed and coded the underpinnings of the system. I hope to complete a basic system in the next few weeks and complete the entire thing with time to test it thoroughly before this summer's war season on the game.
I took a character off the roster, too. I've had an almost-never-played Level IV character for a while, but I don't like him. I saw a character I liked, suddenly realized I had an interest in online role-playing again, and stated playing him. It's odd. When I'm not in the midst of role-play, I don't miss it and often push it down on my priority list. When I'm engaged in role-play, I find I don't want to stop. It's a weird sort of momentum it has for me. In any case, I'm forcing myself to role-play at least once a week. It keeps me connected to the game and lets me understand the game at a different level than if I just watch it from afar. And I'm finding it doesn't take much "forcing" to get into my character these days. Excellent.
Firan passed its Ten Year Anniversary on Sunday, January 14, 2007. That's from the time I started building it, not how long we've been open to players. We built and coded for seven and a half months before really letting people role-play on Firan. We'll have to do something special at FiranCon this year.
Gaming
I'm not a gamer. I like to think that I am, but I don't play enough to fit the bill. I am struggling to remember the last time I sat down and played a tabletop role-playing game. Was it GenCon? That's sad. I miss it fiercely and, beyond that, I don't want to be a game designer who doesn't play games. Even more, I don't want to be a game designer who doesn't play his own games. I have a version of Verge, my post-cyberpunk RPG, ready for playtest. I've had three or four groups playtest it independently, but I haven't played this version myself. I cannot finish the manuscript until I've playtested Verge sufficiently. Not one-shot playtests, but a series of multi-session storylines. I won't release it till it's been properly playtested.
One of my goals for this year is to get a weeknight playtest group together. It's difficult enough finding a group of people who can attend monthly weekend games of D&D or some other popular game. It's harder when I try to make make it biweekly or even weekly, and look for people who can play at my house on a weeknight. Rush-hour traffic makes travel to my house difficult for anyone not in the area. Most of my "local" friends live 45+ minutes away, when traffic is behaving. It's much harder when I am asking people to play a game that might not be fun. That's the nature of playtesting. Sometimes the rules don't produce the fun and I go back to the drawing board and tinker a bit. If the rules were consistently fun, I would be done playtesting. Add the fact that I have a game that is a sort of niche genre (cyberpunk isn't as big as it was in the late 80's and early 90's) and it's nearly impossible to put together a dependable playtest group. Still, I shall try. My local friends are my first choice, because I love them and want to play with them. I'll recruit for the remaining spots by posting flyers at the handful of local colleges (Villa Julie, CCBC, ITT Technical Institute, and Strayer University) and hope for the best. I only need three or four dependable players. I will sweeten the deal by promising occasional forays into other games, like Primitive, Perfect, Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, and whatever else I have on hand. If a playtest session goes sour, we can stop early and play a backup game.
I'll still try to get in a single weekend game session once a month. As long as I'm getting biweekly playtests, I don't care what my monthly game is. It could be D&D or Primetime Adventures or whatever we can agree is fun. So my goal is to play 2-3 times a month. Additionally, I want to attend three conventions this year (Dreamation this month, GenCon-Indy in August, and MACE in November). These would probably replace my monthly game. I just can't give up that many weekends.
I got a lot of new games for Christmas. Mostly, I'll just read and study them as a game designer. It'd be nice though if I could actually, you know, play some of them. I got Primitive, Shock:, Legends of Alyria, Spirit of the Century, Breaking the Ice, and one other I can't recall right now. I also got a handful of books about postmodernism and cyberpunk. These will help me write the rest of the Verge manuscript. I need to make Verge into an engine for post-cyberpunk play, not just a skeleton of a game.
I didn't finish my contest game, Deadline. I just got too busy before New Years and didn't put the time in. It was close to done, too, and I think it'll be a cool game some day. Without the two-page limit, I have freedom to make it into something really special. I will eventually strip the elements I was just shoehorning in for the contest and make a really fun game about software development under pressure, with a nod to movies like Office Space. I have designed a cool little card mechanic for laying out Gantt charts...
Opie
Because I mentioned it earlier, I thought I'd post an update about my kitty. Opie is dying of renal failure. Our vet, Dr. Siegel, estimates he has about 25% kidney function. When we got our younger cat, Mercury, he brought with him ringworm and he infected Opie. We gave them both oral antifungals to combat it, and Dr. Siegel even used a much safer drug than vets usually choose, because antifungals kill cats. Well, it damaged Opie's liver and kidneys. He's been getting monthly blood tests and a battery of treatments for the last two years to fight the problems caused by the drug.
Nonetheless, his kidneys are not going to repair themselves. He's on his way out and I've made a sort of peace with that. He isn't in pain though he'll experience discomfort and nausea. He will lose his appetite and eat less and less till he becomes malnutritioned, anemic, and inactive. One day, our vet said, we'll know it's time and we'll bring him in and euthanize him. It's hard doing that mental calculus with the life of a beloved friend but we do it for him, not for us. If it were up to us, we'd keep him alive as long as possible, but his quality of life is at stake and is more important than our need to have him with us. Opie has months, not years.
In the meantime, we treat the symptoms to improve his quality of life and perhaps extend his life. Every morning, I cut the ends off four pieces of his cat treats and stuff 1/8 of an antihistamine pill into the soft part of each one and hide it well. Steph and I give these to him in the morning, mixed in with non-medicated treats to fool him. He sometimes tilts his head and crunches on the chalky pill, occasionally glares at us, sometimes walks away in disgust with the full knowledge that we've tricked him. We try again and again because this is less stressful for him than cranking his head back and forcing him to swallow a half pill.
Because it is important to get him to eat as much as possible, we feed him treats whenever he wants them. We feed him small cans of the best cat food (gourmet Fancy Feast of the chicken florentine variety looks and smells good enough to spread on toast and eat myself, I swear) whenever we can. For a while he was losing weight. His maximum lifetime weight was around 20 pounds and he was down to 13. We've gotten him back up to around 14. Gaining weight is a major sign that he's feeling better. We also give him something like a liquid antacid to settle his tummy.
Every night an hour before bedtime, I go upstairs and put a giant bag of fluids (a "lactated ringer") inside a small heating pad. At bedtime, we grab Opie, take him up to the spare room where we've set up a conference table with a towel on it (we call this the "pain room"), and administer 100 ccs of subcutaneous fluids. This involves me playing with a very large needle and stabbing my cat in the back, literally. He doesn't mind this so much, believe it or not. The room gets cold so we let him lay on the hot heating pad. Before we warmed the fluids, the coldness would make him tremble and sometimes vomit. Before I learned to properly insert the needle, we would have to pin him down with all our might as he cried. It was a process of trial-and-error learning and I regret not learning faster, as doing things right isn't that traumatic for him at all. He just lays there with half-lidded eyes and relaxes until we finish the fluids and try to give him the antacid, which he hates with the searing heat of a thousand suns. He gets a can of food after that, though, as a reward and to wash the yucky taste out of his mouth. He's also more likely to eat more and keep it down if he's just had the antacid.
Our vet told us to make each day count, so we do. When Opie isn't feeling well, he spends the night on the bed with us, often between our pillows. He knows he is dying. He has good days and bad days. On good days, he stays in the bedroom and sleeps much of the day. When he's feeling better, but not great, he spends the day in the corner of the living room behind a stool and a potted ficus tree but will come down to beg for treats occasionally. On good days, he camps out in the basement with us and follows us around. We hope for more good days than bad and give him as much love and attention as he'll permit.