dot dot dot

Beyond spending a great amount of time fixing up my livejournal to look similiar to the season one box set of The West Wing, there’s been quite a few other events going on recently that I’ve been dealing with, and maybe now’s as good a time as any other to disclose some details:

  • My great uncle John, who lives in Fresno and has not been able to drive up and see the rest of the family in the past couple of years, has been diagnosed with level four cancer (which is inoperable and terminal). The doctors have given him anywhere between weeks to a couple of months before the end, and many members of my family have been making a trek back and forth between the Bay Area and Fresno to visit with him one last time before the reunion centering around his wake and funeral. I will be heading down that way in the next week to sit and talk with him while he’s still alive. My aunt, also of advanced age, is too frail to really take care of him, so my mother and grandmother have been down there for the first half of every week to make sure he has what he needs. I’ve been feeling somewhat off about this, mostly because he’s always been very kind to me. I hate to say it, but I’ve been off-center about it because there are members of my family who had previously not been speaking to one another, suddenly talking… and it took the terminal illness of my uncle to put that together, and I think that just stinks. On a lighter note, though, uncle John’s been pretty stubborn about this whole thing, in spite of the pain he must be going through. He refused care, but my mom and cousin intervened. He’s been placed in a hospice to make things easier for him. They give him painkillers to ease the pain that is living for him… and the daunting part of it all is that he’s been living with it for a year or so, now. This fucking blows.
  • Speaking of Fresno, my stint with Japan-A-Radio as the new chief operations officer has gotten off to a good start. I implemented some new policies and codes to try and make sure people are on the same page with how they operate when dealing with the public. I’m sure that when I go down there to visit my uncle, I’ll stop in there and make an appearance.
  • The radio show is going pretty well; we finished recording our sixteenth episode Tuesday night, and we’re planning on a special two-hour episode after the twentieth episode. The special will be playing all the opening themes we played during the season, without us talking over it. This was one of the loudest requests we got all season, and it sounded like a cool thing to do for the holiday break. After all, it’s not reviews, it’s just brief chatter and announcing the next two or three songs. DJing is much easier than doing a radio talk show, beleive me. As we’re coming to the end of the first season, though, I think Unwound is a much cooler project to take part in than I had originally thought. I really enjoy being on-air and talking about something I’ve loved for such a long time, without the pretense of being anything resembling an authority on the subject.
  • Animerica Magazine has tapped me to write yet another video game review for them for January’s issue. I’ve been procrastinating on this one, because.. well.. it’s not due until tomorrow. Why put off tonight what you can put off tomorrow, right? For those interested, I’m reviewing Rumble Roses. Oh, and they finally paid me! 🙂 I almost framed the check, but I needed the money more than the sentiment.
  • Work on WNOHGB2 and Stargate: SG-X progresses… I’m working on code that’ll benefit both games, in the d20 utilities and the new request system. I’ve gotten some sneak previews on the space code for WNO2, and all I can say right now is, “Wow.” The next generation of engineering utilities just blows me away and will make WNO1 look like crap. I’m excited about both projects, though. SG-X has serious potential in drawing a more pure aspect of role-play than WNO2 could, especially with how low-tech we’re going with the code. Though, when the story progresses to the Prometheus arc, we might be asking Randal to visit and adapt some of the space code to accommodate.
  • At work, meanwhile, I’m on the precipice of taking on the project-level job I wanted a while back. We finally hired on a smart guy to handle the shift I’ll be departing and I’ll be working days from here on in. Yes, I’ll still be getting three to four days off per week, but I’ll be concentrating more on documentation/technical writing projects than babysitting the website operations stuff all the time. Technical writing is tons easier than creative writing.
  • Speaking of creative writing… My writing has lost a little focus, what with all the coding and task lists I’ve taken on, but I’m confident that I’ll make my writing goals before the end of the year is up. I still have to finish Knight Commander, and that’s actually been writing itself in the past week or two. The story was plotted out entirely, so I know exactly where I’m going and I’ve been really happy with the outcome so far. I just have to make sure I don’t start revisiting other older unfinished projects and lose track of what I set out to do. It’s the lack of focus that frustrates me the most some times, and recently, with the purchase of a couple of new games (EverQuest 2, Tribes: Vengeance, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3), sometimes it’s easy to see why I lose sight of the prize 😉

Anyway, that’s all the news that’s fit to print for now.

Related posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

%d bloggers like this: