she’s come undone

Back to Civ

I’ve begun playing Civilization again after about a month long break. Siuan Sanche is scary. Need to tone that chick down just a tad. Or, maybe, I need to learn to take her out early. But then again, in one recent game, before those across the ocean and I had met, the Cairhienin civilization had gotten destroyed. By Siuan it turns out.

I suck at the Warlord difficulty setting, by the way. I really need to learn to build up military units. The higher in difficulty you go up, the more war hungry other nations become…. I suppose I could always play with the always at war/peace options, but that feels a bit like cheating. (And I am trying to cut back on my temptation to cheat)

One thing I am interested in is making my own map. A WOT based map, obviously. But I think it might better to wait until I have some more nations done (and I’m not editing/adding anything until I win some games on Warlord level!). Also making custom scenarios.

I’d also like Civ Rev to come out on Wii, but I don’t think I should hold my breath.

Writing Workshop

Bleh, so Niklas and I have agreed to try and write at least 2-3k words per a week, because he doesn’t like to write alone and I work best with deadlines. I didn’t really want to edit Nik’s first submission-being that it was a freakin’ mini-novel-but I figured I might as well use my degree for something.

I’ll give Niklas some links he can read over if he wants.
Punctuating Dialogue
Writing Dialogue
Writing Dialogue..Again
Writing Good Dialogue
And More Writing Dialogue
Dialogue Tips…ooh fancy
Incomplete sentences (he makes mention of dialogue here too)
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July?!

I honest to god don’t mean to update only once a month. The months just go by so fast.

I haven’t been working on my Civilization mod for awhile, mostly because I’m trying to become better at the Warlords difficulty setting. Not that I have been playing all too much either recently.

I have begun my WOT reread. It’s not going too fast, or as fast as usual, but that might be because a) I’m not reading every day and b) when I do read I’m doing a more close-reading a là college cramming. The other problem might be out of the whole series New Spring and Eye of the World are books I’ve read more than the others.

Changed hosts. My new host uses DirectAdmin instead of cPanel, which might take some getting used to, but so far it is fine. One thing I really like is that each domain gets its own folder. With cPanel you needed WHM to do that, which usually cost more than regular cPanel. Even so, I still need to have a moiraine.meandraine.net subdomain for now, otherwise my redirect rule via .htaccess won’t work: it’ll just show an error page.

For some reason my vBulletin database is larger on this host than the last one. Don’t know why. Also, my disk usage meter has close to 40mb of data I can’t account for. I’ve waited a couple of days before sending in a ticket to ask about that. My other tickets (one for sales, others for transfer) have gotten answered nice and fast, so hopefully the same will be true here. So far, I am very happy with new host.

Also, MW forums aren’t down every 30 minutes. This is a nice change.

I’m kind of rambling here….

I need to find boxers for Elnore for two reasons: 1) It’s a part of her character, and 2) They’ll help keep her pants up. Caraline needs a new wig, and there is one girl who makes fur wigs that I like, but of course she is closed!

I want to go to Europe.

Civilization IV

For the past few weeks I’ve been sucked into the world of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I must thank Niklas for this latest love affair. Although I’m sure by now he wishes he hadn’t mentioned the game at all.

At any rate, it didn’t take long for me to want to create a custom civilization; and thus was Moiraine and the nation of Cairhien born.

Learning how to make Cairhien wasn’t easy: a lot of the tutiorals about custom civs were based on the vanilla install, not any of the expansion packs. And then some of the more clear ones were never finished. Basically the best way was to simply find a custom civ that worked, and see what they did.

I eventually got confident enough to go ahead and make another civ to counterbalance Moiraine and her empire.

Upon completing my second civ I realized I needed to breakdown and learn how to add civs the modular way, because the XML files were becoming a bit long and ridiculous. The modular method would allow me to keep adding more civs as I saw fit, with less hassle.

So far I have Cairhien, Amadicia, and Andor. I’m thinking of adding a Borderlands civ and maybe Seanchan. (why yes Niklas, I am a WOT nerd!) I haven’t delved to the level of creating custom meshes for units and all that jazz, but maybe one day. Maybe.

Verb meme

The idea is to fill in everything after the bold part.

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