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Sunday, September 21Back at school. As of...almost a month ago. Some fun classes, some not so fun. Almost all my teachers are perfectly fluent with English. Unfortunately, one isn't, and whatever good Professor West is as a mathematician, his skills do not extend to writing. Argh. Still, I can understand most of it. And fortunately, things aren't bad on the homework front. As long as I keep ahead of it, it's never too bad. Writing...yes...the ostensible point of this website, and I never do it. Well, this thing is more of an outlet for all of my creative foci, but writing is the one that gets the most result. Still, I haven't gotten much accomplished there, either. Although I DO have a somewhat reasonable explanation for the Io University/IoCorp stories. And--this is the best part--with suspension of disbelief, somewhat believable is all it takes! The submarine story is NOT progressing. Shock. Nor has the game front: I've pretty much given up on .3ds, it's just too cumbersome. I decided to start with graphics from the ground up. There is hope, however, that I may not have to do it alone: I'm in GameBuilders, an ACM SIG (www.acm.uiuc.edu) which, oddly enough, is devoted to building games. I've expressed interest in working on a "graphics and scripting engine," and with any luck, we might be discussing it at the meeting on Tuesday. I've finished rewatching Noir. I'm probably not going to delete them this time. Well, the reason I did it last time was because I almost stopped watching it at the end of the series. I now have two out of the five DVDs, and at some point I'm going to get the other three. Which, discounting games, makes Noir the first anime I have ever owned in my entire life. Ever. Now for something completely different. I checked a lot of books out from the library recently (Urbana Free Library is only a few blocks away--YAY \o/). Some I haven't been able to read, at least more than a few chapters. Others have been really, really interesting. I re-read The Waterborn, by J Gregory Keyes, because the sequel (which I haven't read) was sitting right next to it. Also read Assassin's Apprentice, and I'm looking forward to the sequel to that as soon as the **** who checked it out before I could returns it. I read my first book in the Generals series (David Drake, this time with Eric Flint), The Tyrant. I also checked out The Tide of Victory by the same pair, but I get the feeling it's supposed to take place at the end of a series. Annoying: there was nothing to indicate that when I decided to get it... David Weber's The Excalibur Alternative was good and pretty much marks the last book of his I hadn't read. Larry Niven's Protector--interesting to think that genius could be a mental handicap. Also interesting to see Niven's "Known World" from a different perspective than the Ringworld. Bio of a Space Tyrant 4: Executive is an interesting take on how to radically reform a world. I read book 2 a long time ago, book 3 about a week ago. Maybe two. I don't really remember much about Mercenary, except that he wasn't one and that it was highly fictionalized. Politician, however, is pretty much a straight rip from modern America (okay, maybe not quite so modern). Which makes Executive even more interesting, because it's fairly easy to see how the reforms Hope Hubris uses could be applied to the modern world. Um. My roommate's going to sleep, so I think I will, too. See you next month. Saturday, August 23Here is a reason for my lack of updates: I have been packing for my move to school. Now that that is complete, there is a strong possibility that I will go back to writing and post another update. However, as the first page of the submarine story is on it's fourth revision, it may take a while. One the game front, I haven't been doing very much either, again due to the move, and not, of course, because I'm rewatching Noir. I've been considering copy-pasting the .3ds file loader and animator code. The only reason I haven't is because, as the file says, copy-pasting code hurts children in Nigeria. Not as much as (s)hell does, I think, but bad enough. Tuesday, August 12Got my new hard drive today, now all I have to do is install it. That should be fun. I also realized earlier that I was thinking too much. For my RPG, I am using .3DS files for statics: levels and such. I found a tutorial on-line that includes information on how to load the model, but not the animation. I thought I would have to figure out how to load the animation myself, but it occurred to me earlier that I don't have to. The stuff that is going to be done with .3DS files isn't animated. >.< DOING! as Periklis would say. Monday, August 11Wow. So much time has passed... And without ANY progress on the site at all. I don't even have a website e-mail address until I decide where to put it. Hotmail closed my account due to lack of activity, and I don't feel like reactivating it. For now, I guess you should IM me. My AIM name is DFN Agent, I'm almost always on. I mentioned umpteen many months ago that "the world has changed," referring to my dropping of the Third Dracos Civil War in favor of a new war between Sigma and Delta, between the DFN and Americorp, which would give me a huge amount of scope for various stories. As I said, it was in three parts. But I haven't done anything with those three parts. Instead, I've been working a bit with Io Pass, which is a fantasy story about a mage. I've also been working on a much more near-future story, about the captain of a submarine. Most of my efforts have been devoted to my RPG, which I promised my parents I would finish by the end of the school year. It doesn't have Peter Dracos in it (except maybe as a secret character), instead featuring Jen Dracos in a village loosely based on Danville. Very loosely, I might add. Right now, I'm also working on the basic programming structure, which will be shared between my RPG and the one I'm working on with Andres Ramirez. Apparently, UIUC won't let me put my sidebars up, so I've had to change that. But that's alright. I'm using tables now, which I have been assured are the way to go. By the way, I posted a picture of Lymaran's cats, if anyone is interested. She sent it to me, and now I have cruelly taken it and placed it where the whole world can see. Even further by the way, don't bother checking for reflections of her. One the one hand, I already did and they aren't there, and on the other hand, it was taken by her mom anyway. Another note: I believe she has another cat now. I think I asked her to take a pic of it With any luck, she'll do it in a room with a mirror... I also have my entry for the spaceship contest in Akira Hasegawa's Drawing Contest. They're Pleiadean destroyers, two cannon destroyers and a missile destroyer. They're attacking (and losing to) a DFN Cruiser, but that's not on the screen. And one other thing: I decided a page of links might be worthwhile. A few will be friends' sites, quite a bunch will be webcomics I like. Tuesday, March 18Welcome to the domain of Peter Dracos. Spread out around you, you can see the world as it exists today: rolling grasslands, primordial forests, and vast oceans. Wait--what's that? Oh, no! Oh, yes! The world has changed! I have gone on a vast quest the likes of which none of you can imagine. With me, I have brought the fruit of that quest: AN ENEMY! Yes, I now have a titanic force, the equal and possibly superior of the Dracos Free Navy! Which is especially ironic, because my hard drive crashed and I lost all of the stories I had written. Do you remember how I was going to put up those two stories from the Founding? Sorry, all gone. There is hope yet, if I can find the CD that I had the originals on. But as for the forty pages of Choices that was going so well... Ah, yes. The enemy. You are curious, yes? Well, the enemy is none other than....Americorp! But, wait! you cry. Wasn't Americorp destroyed at the Founding? No, not really. It just lost all space access. It was destroyed less than fifteen years later, when it launched into a fatal conflict with Asian Technologies. So they were destroyed! How can they fight the DFN now? That's in the story....which is currently in three unconnected pieces. Sorry, they'll have to wait. I have a research paper to write. Maybe I'll post you that. Maybe. Still, the operative point is that I don't have much right now: just...um...this page. And the Io Prelude. And the Io Corporation main page. But that's it. As that one chick says in Shenmue (it's the ONLY thing she says), "Bye for now."
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