Breaking things

When going to camp with your scouts, all kinds of things can happen to you. You can fall and break something, you can end up in a ditch, you can become the target of some vicious pranks, or you can drop your phone and crack the screen.

A lot of smartphones, lately, seem to have a very weak screen. I see a lot of people walking around with a huge crack in their iPhone, scratches all around, and all that kind of things. When I got my phone, together with a contract with my provider, I immediately said I wanted to insure the phone in case something bad happens to it that wouldn’t be covered by the store guarantee. It seemed like a legit thing to do at the time.

So, when I went to scouting camp, I dropped my phone on a concrete floor. The result was a huge crack in the screen, which was very much made of glass, and which made handling the phone more than a little uncomfortable. Besides the fact that my fingers kept getting stuck behind the little ridges that were created, I was also very much afraid of cutting myself on the undoubtedly sharp edges that could get uncovered at any unlucky moment. The screen definitely had to be fixed.
Now, I wasn’t quite capable of returning to the store with the broken phone during the camp. I had some responsibilities there while walking around that required me to be available to know what time it is, and people would also need to be able to communicate with me over distance. The phone was one of the things I absolutely couldn’t miss.

So, I immediately went to the store the Monday after camp and went to the repair desk. I showed the guy the phone, the crack, told him the make, and awaited the verdict. He basically told me that they would have to order a new screen and then affix it, which I was fine with. The phone still worked, I was just afraid of a few cuts, so I was willing to wait a few days.

Then he told me that he wasn’t able to order a new screen and that he’d have to send it out to their (external) fixing service. I agreed, a little reluctantly, because he told me it’d take them ten business days to fix the phone, but it was either that or not fixing the broken phone, so I chose the lesser of two evils.

 

I was insured, after all…

The next day, I received a pricing from the company that was going to fix my phone. Still, I wasn’t expecting anything to go wrong, because I hadn’t paid off the own risk part of my insurance. I knew there were going to be some costs.
I hadn’t expected them to send me the pricing for the full repair, so I sent an e-mail to the contact address that was provided with the pricing mail, asking them to explain why my insurance wasn’t calculated into the price. I received an automated ‘we’ve got your mail, and answer it when we feel like it’ message and started the waiting game.

After four days, I figured I had waited for about long enough. I returned to the store, where the same guy as the last time was dealing with the repair booth. I asked my question to him, and he told me that I should have collected a claim number from my insurance before I let him send out the phone. He let me call the insurance from the store phone and I had the insurance generate a claim number, but they told me that they would have to validate my claim by human hands before I could get the number, which would take about two business days.
I found it a little strange that I had to do that before handing out the phone, considering the fact that having to wait two days for the insurance slows the service down considerably. What I was also wondering was why this wasn’t added automatically, because I had purchased the insurance from the provider itself. It would’ve been a lot more convenient, at least.

I actually received the claim number from the insurance the next day, Saturday, and I finally got an answer to my first question from the repair company that evening telling me what I had already learned from the store. I immediately replied the claim number towards them and expected them to react with a little haste.

So, fast-forward to Thursday.

I had been without a phone for nearly two weeks. A lot of things happen through my phone for me. All my Google accounts required verification in two steps, which made it impossible for me to log in to anything that belonged to Google. My finances were stopped dead, because I couldn’t transfer money without the codes that were sent to my mobile phone by my bank. Communication with my fellow scouting leaders had ground to a halt, because they preferred WhatsApp over e-mail.
Thankfully, I was able to disable the verification in two steps after a lengthy process with Google that required me to wait four days, so I could continue my school work more or less unhindered, but the financial and communication things were still a bit of an issue. I realized that I could go back to the store again and see if I could get a replacement phone, which would at least get me back in the communication again.

Well, no such luck. At the store, they told me that I didn’t have a replacement option in my plan, which would cost me an additional €2,50 per month. Also, I couldn’t get a replacement at that time, because it was only possible to have a replacement phone delivered to them by the same courier that would pick up the phone. The best they could do was give me a new SIM card and I would buy a new, cheap phone that would help me along until my phone was repaired.

Now, I still had my old SIM card, I had taken it out of my phone before I handed it in, but it was one of the new, smaller SIM cards, so it didn’t fit in my old smartphone, which still uses the old, larger SIM cards. This new card I was handed, though, was a large one that could be punched out to become a smaller one. I immediately pushed it into my old phone, which I had been using as a glorified MP3-player up until then, and it worked, so now I have my previous phone back while waiting for the repairs to complete.

When I got back, I wrote a complaint about the lack of information I had been receiving during the process that made me run around and get frustrated on the company’s facebook page, which garnered me a reaction from someone who knew someone who used to work for the repair company that my provider had sent my phone to and which took more than its time to answer my questions. That person linked me a forum that had customer reviews from the repair company, and basically, it scared the living shit out of me. A lot of complaints about machines disappearing, claims made by the company that the owner had given them permission to recycle their phone, and a lot of unbased claims of water damage.

 

It kind of makes me afraid of how my phone will be returned to me…

Playing Cards and D&D

While playing Dungeons and Dragons, my friends and I have found several reasons to use card games. I used it to get a kick out of my players freaking out, we’ve had several instances of our characters consulting a Tarot deck, and we even played poker to earn money at one point (I wasn’t very successful at that…). At one point, I even had a plan to invoke a system of drawing cards to add a couple of random effects to the game at times it would need a little spicing up, or to punish my players.
When thinking about it, playing cards are actually an excellent way to randomise effects. Different numbers and houses can yield different effects, or have different meanings for the players. Quite frankly, there can be as many different options as the person who designs the system really needs.
That’s what pulled me to one of the Kickstarter campaigns I decided to support. It was a combination of the many different options that could come out of a deck of cards, combined with another of my weaknesses: creating Non-Player Characters that are somewhat believable and have a personality, especially on the fly. This Kickstarter campaign was of the Character Cards, cards that laid out a basic person with four primary points:

“Their heart’s desire”, which was symbolized by the house of hearts. It basically tells you about the main goal of the person in life.

“Their occupation”, symbolized by spades. It tells you what they do all day or night.
“Their physical appearance”, symbolized by diamonds. Exactly what it says on the tin, really.
“Their social connections”, symbolized by clubs. Who they know, and who matters.

Every card has a name, a ‘big’ description based on the suit of the card, and several smaller descriptions for the other suits. A King of Hearts would have a large text telling about what that person wants in life, while three smaller texts tell about their occupation, appearance and connections. A Queen of Clubs would have a large text telling about the connections the character has in life, while three smaller texts tell about their heart’s desire, occupation and appearance.

What makes the cards extra interesting, though, is the secret all characters have. It is assumed that nobody is completely honest, or knows absolutely everything about themselves. They give people a twist, or a dark side, or maybe even a light side if it’s possible.

They even thanked all of us!

As you might notice, I separated the stack in two different stacks before I took the picture. That’s because there’s a full Major Arcana set next to the 54 cards that fill up a normal deck of playing cards. There’s also four ‘knights’ that have been added to the court cards of the four suits of which I’m not exactly sure if they are part of the arcana set, or if they were just a nice addition, but with the 22 Major Arcana cards and the four knights, it’s a total of 80 character cards.

My main motivation when pledging for this Kickstarter was to get myself enough names, characters and motivations to help myself build characters for RPG’s, tales and books. Especially the last two have always caused me trouble. Names are hard to me, especially believable names, and making ‘generic character #14’ again to bore even me at some point, so there should actually be some interesting, original names and characters in my stories in the future…
Can’t wait!

Reaper Bones

Quite a while ago, somewhere around July 2012, the one friend I always paint miniatures with pointed me out to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, which was basically a ‘we sell existing miniatures dirt cheap so we can get funds to design new miniatures’ drive. Some other friends and the two of us decided that it was well worth the money and, if we all chipped in, the costs could probably be overseen. We put our heads together, made our decisions, and pledged for the Bones.
The Kickstarter turned out to be a huge success, gathering 3,4 million dollars worth of pledges, and it was pretty clear that everyone was going to get a huge load of awesome miniatures. The estimated delivery time would be somewhere around march 2013, but with all of the add-ons and stretch goals that were met, we were pretty sure they were never going to make it in time for that date.
March came and went. April, May and June also passed, and we started joking about the time we had to wait. July and August also passed…
And then I received the confirmation mail. Our order had been processed and sent by airmail to my house. On the third of September, the mailman rang our doorbell, demanded we paid him for import tax (damn you, tax system!) and then handed me a box that was actually a little smaller than I had expected it to be. Giddy with excitement, I set up a camera on a tripod and started to record my very first unboxing video.

 

 

It was pretty bad, considering the fact that the camera’s battery died about halfway through the unboxing and missed about all the important things, but it was fun, so I uploaded it anyway. After sorting everything out so my friends and I could get all the miniatures we had called dibbs on, I decided that it was a great idea to immediately start painting one of the mini’s the first chance I got.
I planned to wait with this blog post until I had finished that mini, so I could get a good comparison picture of what an unpainted miniature looks like, next to a (rather poorly, knowing me) painted miniature. The Bones material was specially designed for painting, after all. Unfortunately, the friend I paint with, and the friend whose paint I use, is currently moving and isn’t really able to paint with me. So I can’t paint. Life’s hard like that.
What I can say is that, quite frankly, the promotional pictures didn’t prepare me for the actual quality of the Bones miniatures. The first image of the material I had seen was this one:

 

As you might see, there are a couple of places where the detail appears to suffer because of the material. However, when you place it next to a miniature that was photographed slightly better (maybe without the use of flash photography…), you can see that the details are actually nicely preserved by the material:

 

It’s actually pretty fun to work with the material. As it’s got some limited ability to bend, it’s suddenly very possible to reach points on the miniature that would otherwise be covered by different parts. Though this same attribute means that some of the more spiky things, like spears and staves, can be stuck in a bent position thanks to the moulding process, it is more of a boon than a curse. The bent pieces can be fixed with some boiling water, and there will be no more axes breaking because the rigid resin decided it didn’t like the minimal pressure that was placed on it! (yes, there’s a story behind that one, too…)

With all of the Bones miniatures I’ve got lined up now, it’s quite probable that I’ll be set for quite some time. One of them is planned for my Declipse Savage Worlds game, if that ever gets started, and several others are planned characters or little surprises for my friends…

I really look forward to painting these things…

Coffee II

And yes, I did get a second one...

Coffee

I never really drank coffee, mostly because I couldn't see the appeal to the bitter drink that was supposed to keep me awake. I always figured that I could deal with that using energy drink, which indeed worked for me for a long time.
I managed to keep that up, until I went to Switzerland with scouting. It took one groggy morning for me to decide that, yes, it was time for me to learn drinking coffee. Coffee was readily available, energy drink wasn't.
After that, I started drinking a lot more coffee. I realized it was a great boon for both my home life and my college life. My university has quite a few options for getting my hands on a cup, so as I'm staring at the (by now empty) cup on my desk, I think I'll need to relocate soon to get a chance at some more...

Games and Books

I recall that, a long time ago (around 2005, to be exact), we had a house computer that we all shared on the ground floor. It was the computer that everyone used and which was often a test machine for my father’s new acquisitions.
As such, both my brother and I spent most of the time on that computer, playing new games as they came along and enjoying them or telling my father to get rid of them. It was a good time, which brought me in contact with several video game franchises and learned me to enjoy them.
In 2005, I suddenly found a new Star Wars game on the computer. Star Wars: Republic Commando, to be exact. It was a game that was praised for its excellent AI, interesting storyline and fast gameplay, three things that I couldn’t agree more with. It basically followed a single commando squad, comprised of four different individuals, that was fighting its way through the well-known Clone Wars that made up the second and third movies of the prequel trilogy.
I recall highly enjoying the first of three large levels, which brought the player through several environments on Geonosis, where the player and his squad were constantly being harassed by the flying, insect-like Geonosian hunters and the droids that made up the meat of the separatist army. It had its ups, it had its downs, its busy moments and its calm moments, and it formed an excellent introduction to the game.
Then… came the second chapter, which took me a very long time to complete. Not because it was very hard, because it wasn’t. It was your typical ghost ship mission with a lot of dark corners, shadows and speedy enemies that tended to jump out of dark corners and approach you rapidly.
And, I was a wimp. That same chapter brought you the shotgun-like slug thrower, which was basically an instant kill button in that chapter (its use diminished in the third and last chapter, though…), and suddenly made all those scary enemies a laughing stock that was taken care of with the push of a button.

In the end, I replayed that chapter for fun, countless times, because it was an excellent chapter, but the story was a bit lacklustre. It was the third chapter, which ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger, that really piqued my interest in the game.
(obviously, spoilers coming up for the ending of an eight-year-old game that you should’ve played already)
The final challenge is an enemy battleship hanging above the location that your squad is currently residing in. You’re told that the best way to deal with this battleship is to take the four anti-air cannons that are set up in a circle directly underneath said battleship, so you go out and find said cannons. You leave the sniper at the first cannon, the demolitions expert at the second, fight your way through hordes of droids with your tech expert and leave him at the third cannon (really the hardest fight of that part, if I recall correctly…) and finally take a seat yourself in the fourth one. Your team takes care of the battleship, it explodes, and you get picked up in your gunship to deal with the next assignment.

However, as you go to pick up your sniper, you hear that he’s being overrun by enemies and his communication stops. You’re told to leave him behind by Yoda, the door of the gunship closes, and the game ends.

There are a lot of people who wanted to find out what had happened with Sev (the sniper), but unfortunately, the sequel, called ‘Imperial Commando’, never left the planning stage and the fans were left hanging.
That included me.
I figured that I would probably never find out and was actually quite happy with that, but I kept returning to my drifting Republic Cruiser and the monstrosities that inhabited it. It was a happy little memory that was sitting in the back of my mind and something I could return to if I wanted to have some fun.

Then, one day, as I was browsing the internet, I stumbled across a series of novels written by a women called Karen Traviss. They were based on the same universe as the fantastic game I had played, though it followed a different squad on obviously different adventures. How else could it be.
I bought the first book online, to see how it was, and I was impressed. The story was well written, detailed, and gave me insights in the actual culture of the commandos outside of combat. What they were like without their armour and while dealing with other commandos, soldiers and civilians.
After a little more research, I found out that Traviss had been involved in the production of Republic Commando and had had a say in writing the banter between the squad of the game and had actually built a complete language to write a song with. It was pretty impressive, so I decided to keep reading on.
I enjoyed the book series as relationships were built and characters were introduced. The characters of the game were actually introduced in the books, the books detailing the things that happened between the different missions in the game and, of course, by the time the mission on Kashyyyk had rolled around and Sev had been lost, the way they coped with the loss.

Unfortunately, the series ended abruptly after the series had received a name change. Originally, it had always been called ‘Republic Commando [subtitle]’, but as time went on and Order 66 had passed (Star Wars fans will know what that means), it started to be called ‘Imperial Commando’, of which only the book called ‘Order 66’ had been written.
After that, Lucasarts decided to make some… radical changes to the Mandalorean culture to make it more suitable for the Clone Wars animated series that was running at the time. The change could basically be explained as the nomadic warrior culture that had been the undertone of all of the books being turned into a treehugging hippy culture that would make it virtually impossible to write the next books without rebooting the whole story. Because of the contract with Lucasarts, considering the use of their IP, Traviss couldn’t keep writing on in her own continuity, and she logically decided to abandon the Republic Commando series, leaving the last book with cliff-hangers, characters lost and scattered all across the Star Wars universe.
Though she posted spoilers about the book that would have closed it all off, which she had planned in a rush as she got the idea her books wouldn’t fall in good grace anymore before being forced to cancel it all together, I never really felt like it was good enough. A list of spoilers and planned notes never has and never will beat reading the actual book, but I had managed to push the feelings of loss and lack of closure to the back of my mind for a while.
I found other books written by Traviss that I enjoyed. She wrote a couple of books in the Gears of War universe, bridging the gaps between the games, but unfortunately, they started to get tedious and I started seeing the critique that other readers had about her. Idolizing tribal cultures to the point of extremism, making sure they were told of as legendary warriors and that they came out like that in the books. Extremely detailed combat scenario’s that, quite frankly, coloured my own way of writing combat and went on for many pages at a time. Witty banter that probably wasn’t as funny to me as it was to her. The list doesn’t go on and on, but there’s multiple points that I couldn’t ignore as I read on.
I ultimately opted to stop reading her books, because they turned out to be long and tedious, with the excitement of the story gone. I didn’t like it, because I had a lot of fun moments with her stories, and I could almost compare it to ending a long and intimate relationship, but I couldn’t keep up with the irritations anymore.

Some days ago, I returned to Traviss’ website and took a look at the Republic Commando section. Maybe I was hoping things had changed and that the Imperial Commando story would keep going, or maybe I just wanted to remind myself what had happened and what belonged to the past. I don’t know, but I do know it inspired me to write this piece and that it reminded me of an excellent time. I actually downloaded the game again, though I’ll have to see if I get it running again. I really hope so…

Responsibilities, books, and Kickstarters.

With my vacation ending soon, I find the recent developments quite interesting to observe, as well as participate in said developments.
My thesis, which has been in the works since January, is finally starting to near its epic conclusion. The last words are being typed, the last screenshots are being captured and I’m waiting for the last e-mails to arrive. I hope to be able to end the whole deal before university starts, in September, or at least finish it off within the first few weeks, so I don’t have to deal with the responsibilities of the thesis for the duration of my first class this year. That would be inconvenient.

At the same time, I’m also being reminded about November coming closer and closer, which means that NaNoWriMo is also nearing at an equally vast speed. My first NaNoWriMo was quickly followed by my first published book, even though it was with a print-on-demand publisher, and I enjoyed writing the year after that and the year after that, always succeeding in reaching the 50.000 word goal easily. So easily, in fact, that I usually already met the word goal on day ten and went on from there, writing at a steady pace of 5.000 to 7.000 words per day. Maybe more, if I had to make up for a lost day, but the average would be around 5.000 words per day.
What you generally don’t see while looking at the statistics of my userpage, though, is the amount of preparation that comes with writing a story. I like to write out the general outline of a story, which can differ from highly detailed (when I actually envision a certain scene) to terribly general (when I just want to make a point come across) and see where I end up. I recall my second NaNoWriMo being about five pages of notes, but the ideas started to pile up as I was writing and I started adding subplots and making changes as I went along, never really failing to keep up with these undocumented changes. The result was Physokinetic, a universe in which breaking the rules of physics was, for some people, not all that weird.
The year after that, I decided to write a sequel to Physokinetic, called Tamer. It followed a (in my mind) logical consequence to the reality-shaking climax of Physokinetic and how it caused several different kinds of creatures to invade Earth. It ended with (spoilers) only the dragons being left on Earth thanks to plot-related reasons, and I planned to end it with that.
Unfortunately, a couple of months ago, I started finding reasons to revisit this universe, with its dragons, its physics-denying humanoids, and its nearly indestructible creatures. With this story, I plan on ending it, though, which may or may not work, because I’ve already started editing and changing the notes I had been making to better suit a change of mind I’ve been having.
All things considered, though, I’m thoroughly enjoying this. Knowing that I’m willing and able to think about these things and start the creative engine that’s necessary to think about the changes I want to make and the repercussions they’ll have in my little universe means that I’ll probably be able to write with my usual style, making it up as I go along.

Thirdly, the Kickstarters. I continue to enjoy following and actually funding Kickstarter projects. Recently, I finally received a message about the Reaper Bones Kickstarter being sent out to me, almost a year after the actual funding ended and almost five months after the actually estimated time of delivery. I’ve been excited about this Kickstarter since the very start, especially since it basically introduced me to the basic concept of the system, and it was a huge rush to see the stretch goals passing by as time went on.
Another project was the Character Cards Kickstarter, which is basically an 80-card deck of personalities and basic ideas about NPC’s that I plan to use extensively if necessary. They also sent out the message that they had started to send out their rewards, which means that I’ll be able to start writing about these rewards very soon.

Finally, in a bit of an addendum, my dice collection has been expanded quite a bit since the last post about the dice. I guess I’ll spend a minute or two to take another picture and document that, in the near future…