Last night I finished up our itinerary for Dragon*Con. Everything’s booked and paid for and the roadmap laid out. I found this great website called TripHub that I’m trying out to see if it makes the vacation any easier. So far it’s pretty basic, but allows you to aggregate your flight info, hotel info, and trip itinerary all into an easy to use Web 2.0 interface. Friday’s D&D session went really well. We started late because of some errands I had to run that evening, so we only played from 9:00pm to 11:00pm or so. There wasn’t much action, but it was still pretty fun. I need to start being a bit more assertive on getting the players out of “dead-end” scenarios – I need to force the story line along. Well, I’m sure I’ll get better about this over time as this was only our 4th session. Anyway, I...
Author: Chewbode
Hot dogs!
Dragons, Sluts, and Spaceships
Friday night’s session went well. We all had more fun, I think, since I adjusted the rules. Shauna wasn’t up to playing due to a rough week at work, so her character, Aydan, stayed at the tavern while the rest of the party ventured back to the silver mines. All-in-all, the players kicked some ass. The rules are a bit more balanced now that I’ve adjusted the encumbrance limits, the encounter possibility frequency between Silverton and the mines, and the fact that I added a magic shop in town. This allowed them to buy some healing items that would otherwise have made it really difficult to go back into the mines without a healer. Saturday night Shauna and I both enjoyed several red-headed sluts. I met with Millard Monday and we went over the remaining tasks for the DVD feature. I was able to put together a CD with some...
Catching Up
It’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged. Mostly, that’s because I’ve been lazy, but some of that is because there hasn’t been much to talk about… I’ve been doing some editing on the feature and have delivered a second rough cut to Millard. I’m also working on another part of the DVD now and expect to have the first rough cut of that done this weekend. The script’s been finalized as well. I have a big stack of stills to scan in to bring me up to date too. I really plan on stepping up this next week to really start hammering out this project, as it’s starting to slip too much and drag on. Speaking of “drag on”, I booked the hotel and flight for Dragon*Con the last couple of weeks. Shauna and I will be heading up there on August 31st and will coming back September 5th....
Balls and the Closet
Last night Brad, Millard and I went bowling with some friends of Brad’s down at Sarasota Lanes. We had two lanes for about two hours and around fifteen minutes into the first game, Cosmic Bowling began. That’s where they turn off the normal lights, turn on the black lights and lasers, and fire up the smoke machine all while playing some great rock music. Very 70’s. Very fun. It’s been a while since I’ve bowled (I was on a league about 9 years ago, and have only played a handful of times since), but I was a pretty good 180 bowler. My high was 225 or thereabouts. I had no delusions of being that good last night, and my games proved it. Game one was a 120, game two was a 99, and game three was 89 after the 8th frame (the time ran out so I didn’t finish). My...
July 4th
Yesterday Shauna, Melisa and I went to Busch Gardens. It was hot as hell (~91 degrees), but we had a bunch of fun. Shauna’s not a big rollercoaster rider, so Melisa and I rode the Kumba and SheiKra. I rode Kumba several years ago, but SeiKra is new. And that coaster is crazy. It pretty much drops straight down… twice… It was a pretty good ride – it was one of the few coasters that didn’t upset my stomach after I got off. So, we rode those rides and also watched a couple of pretty good musical shows and then went to see Pirates 4D, which is one of those 3D movies where they spray water at you and so on. It starred Leslie Neilson and was actually pretty fun. We drank a lot of lemonade slushies and ate some good sandwiches (I think Shauna had some popcorn and chicken fingers too)....
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Another week (more!) has gone by and another update is due… This past week has been pretty rough on me. I’ve been more tired than usual. I think that I need to sit down and really regiment my working out (it’s been slipping a lot lately) and the whole “eating habits” thing. I wolfed down shitloads of Taco Bell last night. Not good. I mean, it was GOOD, but it’s not good for me. On top of all this I’ve been sleeping lightly (read: poorly). I think some of my problem is that I’m starting to get more involved with projects I normally wouldn’t. I’m in the process of developing a web portal with some people I know, I’ve got the feature to work on with Millard and then there’s the little side projects like updating chewbode.com and such. I think I need to re-organize my free time to allow...
Week In Review
Man, am I ever a lazy mutha. I haven’t posted up here in over a week. A week! Sick. Well, this post should make up for it… The last time I posted I mentioned that the editing began on the feature Millard and I am working on. Well, the first rough cut of it is now done. I toiled away at the keyboard for quite some time (about 35 hours or so – it’s like another full-time job!) and produced a 65GB AVI file. All day today I’ve spent converting it to a 500MB MOV file and am currently uploading it for Millard so he can see it. I imaging he’ll look it over for the next couple of days and send me his thoughts on the edits. There’s still a lot to do: hire the voice talent, create the commercial bumpers, and create the teaser. Of course the final...
Editing Begins
I officially began editing the feature tonight. It took a while to set the project up in the NLE software, as the system needed to conform the audio from all the video clips, which took a couple hours. After that was all squared away, it took about an hour to get a good rhythm down on the editing. I’m going off a shot log that Millard put together in a spreadsheet and am applying those in and out markers to the actual footage. So, I’m bouncing back and forth between Premiere and Excel, which takes some getting used to. Anyway, at this point I’m about 15 minutes into the feature. If I can keep up the pace, I should be done with the first rough cut by then end of the night on Thursday. Tropical Depression 1 upgraded to Tropical Storm Alberto today. The most recent advisory says that it...
Oh How The Time Flies
I haven’t posted in awhile. Shame on me. I’m a fuckin’ jerk. This past week has been a whirlwind of activity. Millard, Shauna, Diana, Brad and I all decided it was time to dust off the manuals, open our bags of dice, and sharpen our pencils and play some Dungeons & Dragons. I know, I know. Totally geeking out, but some of the most “gaming” fun I’ve ever had was playing D&D when I was a teenager. It brings back some fond memories of creativity and was one of the reasons I wrote The Yellow Emerald and now am into films. So, late last week we all decided to start playing on Friday nights. While Millard finished up his adjustments on the script for the feature, I began combing through my DM’s Guide and Player’s Handbook trying to convert my Second Edition rules over to the newer 3.5 rules. And...
X3
Well… What’s been up lately? Hmm… Lemme see… Oh yeah! I forgot to say that Shauna, Millard and I all went to see X-Men: The Last Stand last Friday night. I really liked the movie a lot. I’m a bit of a fanboy in general, but I never really got much into the X-Men. I dig them and all, but it really just wasn’t my thing. So, going into the movie I really didn’t have any strong convictions about what was happening in the plot, etc. I kinda figured that the actors would perform well and that the script would be decent, since everyone has had a couple of movies to get things right. Brett Ratner, however, was my biggest concern. I’ll say that he did a pretty damned good job, however the movie was a bit lacking on the personal elements with the characters that Bryan Singer was so adamant...
