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[deja vu]

"It's that time of year again.
Is anybody going to be attempting it this year?

For anybody who doesn't know NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and is held from November 1st - 30th and the idea is for participants to try to write a novel (well 50,000 words) in that space of time.

It's a great creative exercise though and I reckon we should all have a go and talk about it in this thread.

http://www.nanowrimo.org"

[/deja vu]

Some of you may remember back in 2007 I went to Japan and stayed in Tokyo for 5 months.
Some of you might even remember my rather rubbish Blog.

Well, in 10 days time I'm going back to Japan on an exchange programme to study Japanese for a year.  This time in Akita (in the North).  And this time I intend to keep a less rubbish blog.

The address is the same and all the old posts are still there if anyone fancies reliving my first Japanese adventure.  I've just given it a slight makeover using a snazzy template.

http://stujapan.blogspot.com/

I hope some of you lovely people will find the time to check in every once in a while and see what I have to say.

Cheers guys.

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Since I've started a whole new thread for this shameless advertisement, why not make the official topic 'Travel Blogs'.
Have you ever kept a travel blog?  Are you following any travel blogs at the moment?
If so, link us up.

[The Diary]

Okay, I'm pleased to announce this fortnight's FWC theme:

The Diary

Write an entry for a journal or diary, and write it in the words of a famous person of your choice.

It could be someone from current pop-culture, or a famous historical figure, an author, or sports personality.
Anyone, basically.

Word Count: whatever.
Deadline:  July 25th.

For a bit of extra fun, don't announce who your famous person is just yet.  We can turn it into a fun guessing game aswell.  But at the end of the day it is the quality of your writing that will earn you the votes.

Have fun!

I've never been much of a reader or a writer of FanFiction, but I recently decided to write a story based on some of my ideas regarding Lost.  I feel that there are still a lot of stories to be told and questions to be answered.

Not only that, but it's a jolly good writing exercise and saves having to come up with my own set of mundane and stereotypical characters, so I can concentrate on the craft of actually writing scenes and forming a plot.

Have any of you guys tried your hand at Fanfiction?  Do you care to share it with us?

And do you read other people's work on sites like www.fanfiction.net ?

Conversation's dried up a bit, so I hope you don't mind this contrived little attempt at getting a discussion going, but...

What's everyone reading at the moment?

I've got two books on the go at the moment.  The first is The Secret Agent by Conrad.  Right at th beginning of this, but so far so good.  And the second is The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.  The story hasn't really taken off yet, but I really loved her other book, The Secret History so I decided to give this one a go.

Has anyone read any of these books?  What did you think?

Also, how many of you usually have more than one book on the go at any one time?  The ony reason I have at the moment is because TLF is a dirty great hardback and I can't be arsed to carry it around with me when I go out, so I read TLF at home and the pocket-sized TSA when I'm out of the house.

Discuss.

[*Best Mystery Chain Entry for story A - *Best Ending for Story A - *Best Mystery Chain Entry for story B - *Best Ending for Story B -]

Right-o!
Thanks to everyone for humouring me and taking part in the Mystery Chain Story.
(and a special thanks to Vince.  Without his advice early on I probably would have made a right balls-up of this.)

All entries are in and Voting begins now, and will end this time next week.

Here are the Stories:
Chain Story A
Endings for Story A

Chain Story B
Endings for Story B

Story B is a bit short on endings due to a couple of last-minute drop-outs, but neverless, theres some really excellent stuff in here for your reading pleasure, so take your time and enjoy the stories.

There are Four categories to vote in:

*Best Mystery Chain Entry for story A -
*Best Ending for Story A -
*Best Mystery Chain Entry for story B -
*Best Ending for Story B -

For each category there is a bronze, silver and gold 'Chain-pen' trophy up for grabs, kindly supplied by the awesome Andail (thanks mate):


On top of all that, I'd also like to invite everyone to suggest titles for each story, just as a bit of fun.

Enjoy the stories

[200-250]

Welcome to the Mystery Chain story.  Thanks to all those who signed up.

This is how things are going to work:

Each author will be placed into one of two teams of 6 or 7 people â€" Team A and Team B.
There are two phases.  Phase 1 is the ‘chain’ phase and phase 2 is the ‘endings’ phase.  Each author will take part in both phases.

Phase 1 â€" The Chain
Each team will create a chain story in the usual way.  I will supply the first author in each team with a selection of starting sentences taken from a range of well-known novels.  He or she must write 200-250 words on top of that and each subsequent author must write 200-250 words on top of what has already been written.  There is, however, one requirement â€" in your entry you must introduce one prominent new question or mystery, without attempting to answer any of the previous authors’ mysteries.  Use your imagination.  The final author will also be asked to leave the story unfinished and pose one final mystery to be solved...

On your turn I will send you the story so far and you have 48 hours to send me your entry.  Please acknowledge your receipt of this email within 24 hours to help me keep track of things.

Phase 2 â€" The Endings
Once all entries of Phase 1 are returned to me, I will send Team A’s story to each member of Team B and I’ll send Team B’s story to each member of team A.  Each author’s task is to come up with an ending to the story (anything up to 1000 words) which solves all of the mysteries (or as many as you can) posed by the previous authors in Phase 1.

You will have one week to get your entries back to me.

Voting
Once all of the entries are in, the stories will be made public and voting will commence.
Prizes of bronze, silver and gold will be given to the three entries voted ‘best mystery’ for each story in Phase 1.
Prizes of bronze, silver and gold will be given to the three entries voted ‘best ending’ for each story in Phase 2.

Thanks again for participating.
Enjoy the game :-)

-Stu


Progress

Phase 1
Team A - 6/6
Team B - 7/7

Phase 2
Team B (Story A) - 0/7
Team A (Story B) - 0/6

Hi all.
The last Chain Story was so fun, I wanted to do another one and I had a cool idea so have taken it upon myself to host a new one.  The dust has barely settled from the last game so I hope you're all still in the mood.  I was going to wait a while, but I'm going to start getting busy from July, so now's really the only chance I've got to host it.  Vince has given me some great advice on how to go about this and I would love this game to be as successful as his was.

I'll give more detailed instructions after sign-up, but the basic concept is this:  In each author's part of the story they must introduce a mystery or pose a question of some kind.  After that, each author is tasked with writing a conclusion to one of the stories (there will be teams) which cleverly solves all of the mysteries while bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion.  The authors who manage to wrap the stories most ingeniously up will win the booty.

It's a fairly simple concept and I think there will be some interesting results.

If you'd like to be part of it please let me know here.  I'll need your Email address, which you can leave here, or by PM or by email (stupot815@gmail.com)

I'll give it about a week, and if we have enough people the game should start on about the 13th of June

Cheers :-)

[EDIT]

Andail has kindly offered to design some trophies.
-Thanks, dude.

Signed up so far: (13)
DanielH
Tzachs
Ascovel
Bulbapack
Vince Twelve
Wyz
Privateer Puddin'
Darius Poyer
Discordance
TheJBurger
Macay
Fsi
Wonkyth

Does anybody here have any experience designing board games?
What kind of game was it?  How complex did you go?

What are the best home-made board games you've ever played?

-------------

The reason I'm asking this is because I'm in the middle of designing a board game based on an idea I had about 4 years ago but never got around to doing anything about it.  Now, I've written a preliminary set of rules and will have a preliminary game board mapped out very soon, and I was wondering if anyone is interested in helping me 'beta test' it.  I'll send you a copy of the board and the rules and let you play it with some friends and family for a while, then you can get back to me with comments and suggestions.

I was also wondering if anyone who is good at art would like to take a break from AGS and help me out by drawing the game board and making it look sexy, once the design specifications are set in stone (which won't be for a couple of weeks or months yet).

Please PM me about these things, because I want this thread to be reserved for discussion about home-made board games in general.

http://www.indiegamethemovie.com/film/

This looks like it's going to be really fascinating.

I'm stuck...

Spoiler

...in the dolls house.
I've found the magnetic boy, and I've used him on every magnet, to no avail. And I've used Kelvin on the broken wire to light up the Hugo and Paul board, but I can't do anything else... I'm obviously missing something.  Ibi can't tow the cabinet under the water, none of them can move the wardrobe, so I can't get to the exit behind it, and none of them can open the trapdoor so I can't go upstairs.

[close]

Cheers

How do people feel about releasing the source code of their AGS games for others to learn from?
I'm slowly but surely learning the basics of AGS with the help of Densming's amazing Youtube videos, but I'd like to be able to open up other people's games and see what's under the bonnet, not to rip off bits of code directly, but for learning and troubleshooting purposes.

How about it?

An idea for the new website: there could be a link on each game page to 'view script', and it would be entirely up to the game's author whether or not they wanted to share that information or not.

Has anyone come across Mitsuku or anything similar?

I finally got around to playing TheJBuger's Chatroom yesterday, and when I finished it, I decided to do a seach for similar stuff...  Basically, Mitsuku has some incredible AI, and she learns more based on the conversations you have with her.  It's really fun teaching her stuff and sometimes the conversation is startlingly natural (other times it's totally rubbish).  I got banned yesterday for swearing at her 5 times, haha.

Give it a go.

I had a really scary dream last night.  And by scary I mean real life-or-death fear... at some point I was in a lift (elevator to you crazy Americans) and I was supposed to be going to a pub I used to frequent, but when I reached the top of the lift I came out into this open, rocky space hanging over a masive chasm.

The only way to get to the pub was to move along this really narrow ledge, while holding onto posters and other things that were merely blu-tacked to the wall and could eaily be pulled off... below the ledge was a drop so deep I couldn't even see the bottom.  Thing is I was sure I'd been there before and that I knew what I was doing, but I didn't remember ever having to try and move along this ledge before.  However, I carried on because I needed a pint.

But for that 10 minutes or so that I was gradually shifting along the ledge, I was genuinely fearing for my life.  I was holding onto the posters and using peices of blu-tac like suckers to keep me close to the wall.  About halfway through I actually began to accept my inevitable death... there was no way I'd make it to the end... and I seriously considered just giving up and falling back into the Abyss.

But actually, I did make it... and got to the entrance of the pub, and it turned out the place had shut down long ago, and I'd have to go all the way back across the ledge to get to the new location of the pub.  But thankfully, like a well-edited movie, my dream didn't show me that sequence, and I found myself having a snowball fight in a bar, laughing and smiling.

I thought that dream was sufficiently fucked-up enough for me to re-tell it, and spark another long-overdue conversation about dreams, but the main point was the sheer, genuine fear I felt going across that ledge... It was horrific.

Does anyone else have any examples of genuine primal fear from dreams that they can share?

[EDIT - My English is terrible ... so I've just gone through that again and corrected nearly 10 mistakes and typos]

In the run-up to Season 6 of Lost I've started a little countdown blog, which I'm going to update daily with various Lost-related things and stuff (mainly videos).

If anyone fancies having a look, you'll find it here:
http://countdownlost.blogspot.com/

I'm struggling a bit for hits, so if you fancy linking me up or speading the word I'd be grateful.

Cheers guys, hope you enjoy :-)

The other day, I was playing about with the 'Ease of Access' features, on my laptop (using Vista).  I playd about with the magnifying glass option and the trippy 'High Contrast' option... then I turned them off again...

But ever since that, all the text seems different... the text on my Desktop, in my windows, even the text on websites (including this very text I'm typing now).  I don't like it.  Some of it seems kind of blurry, and some seem overly pixelly, like Windows 98 text or something.  Does anyone know what I need to do to get it back to how it was before?

The snowclouds looming over the UK the past two weeks have finally opened fire, and as I speak, my village is the experiencing something of a blizzard akin to the Blitz.

You may remember Creed's thread last year, encouraging people to build Snow Cats.

I was going to just post in there, but it's a bit old now, and didn't want to risk it getting locked (How old does a thread have to be before posting in it offends the moderators?  : )

So anyway, yeh... build Cats!!!  Or anything else cute, interesting or AGS-related.  Then Post your photos of it here.

I was thinking of making a program on AGS for practising Kanji and vocab for Japanese.  If that goes well I could even try and implement some grammar games.  It would help me to revise as well as giving beginners something to play with to learn some basics.  And as I learn more I could add more content.  And If I wanted to be REALLY ambitious I could include listening practice and sound files for all the different words and oh Jeez the project is already too big for me and I haven't finished coming up with the idea yet.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, advice etc?

-Stu

[Update - Dec 1st]
Here's a basic plan of what I want to achieve:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARi4Vvjmz7BqZGM4ajIzY2ZfMGNkeGYzaGNz&hl=en

I'll just save myself and Akatosh some time and quote his post from last year, which quoted my post from the year before that:

"It's that time of year again.
Is anybody going to be attempting it this year?

For anybody who doesn't know NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and is held from November 1st - 30th and the idea is for participants to try to write a novel (well 50,000 words) in that space of time.

It's a great creative exercise though and I reckon we should all have a go and talk about it in this thread.

http://www.nanowrimo.org"

I haven't got time this year, but I'll probably still start something and see what happens

Nothing is going right for me lately.
Now My Norton 360 is being a tosser.
I only renewed my subscription 3 days ago at a cost nearly £70.
Now it tells me it wont load because of some error and recommends that I run the removal tool and reinstall the program.
So I do that, follow the intstructions, and then it immediately uninstalls itself again and tells me to restart the computer and try again.

Any ideas what's causing this?