School, Among Other Things

Hi.

Sorry for the prolonged silence. My fall classes started a couple weeks ago so I've been pretty busy with those. I'm taking creative writing and that has sort of been sapping up all my will to write anything.

I haven't been playing much either, just two games. Although, I have been greatly enjoying just those two, so that's all that matters. The first one is a browser based mmo called Ikariam. Beau over at MMO Voices organized it as the current site-wide game, so (mostly) because there was no download I decided to be social and give it a shot. It has definitely reawakened my inner colonial and town builder. Back in the sixth grade my junior high had drawings every Friday during lunch for random prizes. It was mostly stupid stuff like pencils and knick knack-y things, but every once in a while they would have fun stuff like an (original) Xbox or stereo or something. On a particular Friday one of the lesser prizes was a little game called 1602 A.D. I put all of my tickets, which was like five, in to this one drawing and ended up winning. I get the feeling no one else actually entered. It was their loss; this game was awesome. To sum it up simply - and it was a pretty simple game - you colonized islands. There were certain mission goals you could achieve, or you could just play until the game stopped finding crap to throw at your settlers, or all your settlers died. I mostly played the later kind of game. I love these kind of "sit and knit" games where you throw out some instructions every once in a while and watch what happens. This is pretty much what Ikariam is only it's in a Greek setting and even slower paced. If you want to find me I'm on the U.S Iota server (there are Brit and U.S. servers and they don't tell you there's a difference) at the coordinates 63:61, my town's name is Solarium.

The other game I've been playing is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I've had this game forever - and yes I know there's a sequel out now - but I've never bothered beating it. So, I thought I'd just start over and see how far I could get on this long weekend. So far I have killed tens...of hundreds of rats, ha.

Anyway, I hope all is well and I will probably be back sometime in the near future, hopefully to finish up one of those two-part articles I started a while back.

-Max