lederhosen

Staying at chez notasquirrel for the next couple of days :-) Will do longer update later, but a few bites for now.

Snakes petted recently: 1
Hats bought for squirrels: 3 (4 counting his space helmet)
Times shaved yesterday: 0
Museums visited yesterday: 1
Times "ma'am" ed yesterday by sharp-eyed DC security guards: 2

...no comment. Anyway, the National Air & Space Museum is full of shinies. Among many others, we saw Endeavor, a Blackbird, a moon rock, a Concorde, and the Enola Gay; I hadn't been expecting that last, and it threw me a little.

Meanwhile, lust. (If the page isn't loading, well, the product is called 'Limited Edition Den of Evil', which is all you really need to know.)

freyaw came to visit on her way back home, staying Friday night - we went shopping at Tin Soldier on Saturday and invested in gaming-related shinies before she flew out. Then I painted up a beastie for the evening game, which was ( rather fun. )

Looks like we're actually going to manage three or four games on consecutive weekends, which is practically unheard of.

Have been playing Knights of the Old Republic, after grabbing it from a bargain bin. On the whole, pretty enjoyable, but with some major frustrations. Quests that break when you do things in an order they hadn't expected, a lot of "trudge across three maps you've already explored to talk to somebody again" (doubly frustrating because the same company had solved that problem five years earlier, and triply with the number of people who seem to think 'somewhere in a vast featureless desert' is a good place to arrange a meeting). And the damn swoop racing... okay, minigames good for providing variety, but after the first couple of races these were just infuriating. If I want racing games that difficult I'll buy a racing game, not a turn-based CRPG, 'k? And having multiple NPCs talk about "upgrading your swoop bike", but not actually providing any way to do so, was just rubbing salt into the wound. Unskippable cutscenes also grate, especially when attached to things that are going to happen over and over.

But it had the things I really like in a CRPG. Decent characters, reasonable storyline, and some real choices, some of them quite complex. (What do you do when a court's assigned you to defend a man you know to be guilty?) Good enough that I'll probably track down KOTOR 2 one of these days, but it could've done with a bit more polish.

Had a good Friday. After about a week of not enough sleep, I finally got a proper night's sleep before that - had forgotten just how much better I feel for sleeping. Debugged code to the point where all known bugs were solved and stopped there so I could go home feeling good about it :-) Was also reminded that it is a long weekend, which I'd totally forgotten, so I have an unexpected day off work. Being forgetful has its advantages.

Painting figures. Last time I was in Melbourne I bought one that was marketed as an 'ice elemental', but I've decided it works better as some sort of mineral-crystal thingy. By dint of coating it with gloss black, a deliberately slapdash coat of red metallic, and then another slapdash coat of slightly watered-down gloss black again, I got a rather nice look, a bit like some forms of obsidian I've seen.

And then, because we're headed off to the Plane of Water, I got to work painting up some water beasties for reynardo to menace us with. I've just finished painting a big dragon turtle that's been sitting in the cupboard for years, during which I rediscovered why painting heavy spiky figures is uncomfortable. But he looks very pretty now, with the help of the satin paints I've enthused about before - brushing lightly with them gives a wonderful iridescent sheen to his shell and scales. Next up: a sea serpent, a were-shark, and maybe a water elemental if I get around to it.

I also have a Great Cthulhu figure, but I think I might leave painting that until *after* we leave the Plane of Water...