Its that time of year again! No, not that time, its Halloween! That of course means pumpkin carving. After last year’s marathon session on October 30th, we decided to get an earlier start this year. Got them on last weekend’s shopping trip and planned our Sunday around carving the unsuspecting cucurbita pepos. We must be getting better at it. We started at about 5:30pm and were both finished by 8:00pm. We even took a couple of breaks.
They turned out great:
But of course seeing them with the lights on doesn’t do them justice. Lights off:
Jessica also did one more, but I don’t have the picture handy. I’ll add it later. Oh, and for the curious, mine is on the left, hers on the right.
marc Ego
That last post about Gothic II, model trains and Al Lowe’s new game I started back in May. It took me almost 5 months to get back to it. Talk about being in a long term time warp.
There have been a lot of things happening at my company, most of which I can’t talk about publicly because of trade secrets and such, but suffice to say I’ve been working even more than I normally did since early this summer. By the time I get home from work each day, I don’t really feel like spending too much time on the computer at home, so not a lot of posts here. Its good though, there are many exciting projects that I’m working on right now and with good people. The office has gone from three of us to ten of us since July. We’ve brought in racks of new servers for these projects and will be launching new services hopefully in November. Once we launch some of them, I’ll be able to talk a bit more about them.
Jessica and I have also been trying to start a family. The timing may seem a bit strange, but after so many years of saying that “its not time yet”, we find ourselves in our mid-30’s. In order to have a family, though, we need to go through IVF. Jessica talks more about it on her blog. We started in April and have had two unsuccessful attempts. We’ll probably start our third attempt in January. We’re trying very rapidly to keep her from going on and off of her MS medication since the on-again-off-again could be very bad for her and we don’t want her to have another exacerbation.
marc Ego
Talk about out of character for me. A few weeks ago at E3, Al Lowe, one of the greatest video game makers of all time announced that he has created a new company called iBase Entertainment and was creating a new game called Sam Suede in Undercover Exposure. I’ve been a big fan of Al’s since the Leisure Suit Larry 1 days that I played with stunning 16-Color EGA graphics back in the late 80’s. I met Al about a year ago and had him autograph my copy of the Larry I, II, & II collection.
Of course the good picture of Al and I shaking hands was lost, so this one will have to do. Hopefully Al won’t mind me putting this picture up. We met because I knew he was an avid model railroad hobbyist. I’d been carting around the model trains I got for Christmas from Uncle David when I was 5 or 6, and I thought Al would like them or be able to use them. I believe Al gave them to a children’s hospital, which is great.
At any rate, shortly after Jessica and I met, we started playing games like Kings Quest (which Al also had a hand in creating) and Liesure Suite Larry together. Many many hours were spent on those games and we really had a good time playing them.
So after hearing the announcement, I had to play a game. Wasn’t an option, I had to do it. I wanted to play another adventure game that we could play together. Nothing like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, both of which I’ve played, but not extensively. I played Castle Wolfenstein and both of the original Doom games, but haven’t really played much in the last 10 years or so. After Sierra started changing their company around they just didn’t produce many games that appealed to me.
Then we stumbled on Gothic II. Its a couple years old, but was re-released in December of last year. We’ve pretty much played it every night for more than a month. It is a very good game and reminds me a lot of the King’s Quest games, but more adult oriented. There is a lot of exploring, quests that you pick up from other characters in the game that you complete for experience points or gold, skills to learn and puzzles to solve. We’ve really been enjoying it. Oh, the adult parts consist of some drug use (swampweed) and our character has sex in a brothell. Of course, this being a German game, the original was uncensored. Since Atari distributed it in the US, they censored it for some reason. I guess we American’s can’t handle seeing nude computer generated women after we finish slaughtering Orc’s, wolve’s, giant rats and other human characters in the game. I mean the line has to be drawn somewhere.
Of course, I started this entry about two months ago. Since then Gothic III has been announced and I’m sure there will be another time warp at the end of November when its released in the US.
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