Moving?

Ok, so with the hit to the economy and the soon to be paycut at work I'm looking to cut expenses. What this also means is that I'll probably be moving the page. I'm going to work at re-posting the art and stuff at my deviant art account: jallen327.deviantart.com. That's the first step. If that sucks too much then perhaps I'll re-evaluate. The Yahoo account that powers the down-time.org page costs me $20/month. Not a ton, but not free either. Moving the site to deviant art will probably be for the best. Traffic has fallen off at down-time.org given how seldom I update. Hopefully a community like Deviant Art will be better for exposure and my wallet.

This blog will stick around, mainly 'cause it's free. I may look into changing the name, to get away from the whole Down-time thing.

I'll post some generic redirection page once I've got things up on Deviant Art and I'm ready to make the move.

Seemed like a good idea

I'm trying to cut down on my xbox usage, and do good things like exercise, blog, write and draw. So far it's only kind of working.

So the other day I thought it would be cool to combine activities. So this afternoon I setup my xbox at the end of my treadmill. Now I can play while I walk. The downside is: this is really (dangerously) disorienting. Hopefully I'll get used to running in the game and walking in real life soon. Because it's either that or I'm going to develop a serious balance disorder or I'll fall and hurt myself, maybe both. After the dizziness subsides I'm sure I'll decide that falling wouldn't be so bad after all.

There are some minor tweaks to the experience that I'm working on. First, I keep zapping the controller while I walk. I can't imagine the static electricity is good for the xbox. I'm switching to the wireless controller, which I presume will solve the static problem. Secondly the headphones I started using leave a lot to be desired. Now I have a different pair of headphones with built in volume adjustment. So now the experience is as good as it's going to get. If all else fails I can always put in a DVD and just watch a movie instead of trying to control a video game character while I'm exercising.

My Personality

Ok, so I did the whole personality test thing and added a gadget/widget to the bottom of the blog. I always score way out to the INFP extreme on these things. I've read the INFP profile they have on the Personality site. It's pretty spot on, except for when I'm driven to get something done. Then I'm all up with the go-get-it attitude and outgoing etc. I suppose it's part of the whole 'values' thing kicking in that the profile talks about. Not like the profile is an authority or anything, it just calls out a few personality characteristics that I think are relatively accurate.

DnD and a blog update

Allright! I finally remembered my Blogger.com password. It'd been so long I'd kinda forgotten what it was. Hard to believe it's been five months since I've published.

Got a group of 5 other players together and played 4th edition DnD this afternoon. We spent about four and a half hours doing it. It was fun, but it takes a long time to play, and so we only got through two encounters after all the initial introductory stuff. And since we're all pretending to be grown ups (I'm deeply suspicious of those who might not just be pretending) we don't have much time in our regular lives to get together and do this kind of thing. So, the plan is to meet next month and play again.

I ran this particular game, and frankly I'm exhausted right about now. It feels like I spent a ton of prep time getting ready for this afternoon, only to have it be over way too fast. I would gladly do all that prep again, but my hope is that things will go more smoothly next time and not take as long. It seemed like everyone had a blast. Once we get the hang of the rules I'm sure things will move along faster and we'll be able to focus more on harassing the various elves and dwarves in the party.

I was hoping to get some story inspiration from our play experience, and I suspect I may have. It'll just take some time to percolate through my brain. I don't know how much of it will be usable, because all I can remember right now are the funny bits:

I now have newfound respect for dwarven holy water. 'though the jury is still out on what the 'proof' of that particular drink would be, and exactly how fast it would put you under the table.

The Gnome in the picture is from a screen grab of the DnD 4th edition introduction cartoon that Wizards of the Coast put out, edited to be usable as a paper miniature.

What's the fun in that

I've messed around with various XBox Live avatars and finally settled on Loraina, one of the characters from my comic.

The trend, judging by what NonCharon and my Brother are doing, is to do up an avatar that looks exactly like you, or as close as possible.  There's nothing wrong with that, but where's the adventure in doing something so mundane?  When I play a video game, or read a book, the main character looks nothing like me.  When given the choice in a video game I usually pick a character that's easier on the eyes.  My rationale, not that I think I should need one but everybody comments on it, is that  if I'm going to stare a the back of some character for 10-80 hours I'd prefer to stare at a girl.