Fanboy ranting ahead… you’ve been warned.

My first real disk-based computer gaming experience was on the Apple IIc – playing such as Neuromancer, Infocom classics… and Wasteland. I played those games for hours – I loved the open world of Wasteland, and the ability to replay the games over and over again.

I squeed as only a pushing-40 man can when I heard about the possibility of Wasteland 2. Brian Fargo, head of inXile Entertainment software and man behind Interplay during such games as Wasteland, Bard’s Tale, Baldur’s Gate, etc, is acquired the rights to the Wasteland name some years back and was pushing a sequel to various publishing companies – but was getting turned down. He finally took it to the people, in the form of a Kickstarter Project – seeking funding from the masses for the game. If he could raise a cool million dollars, he could create the game from the ground up with his team. He even offered to fund the last hundred thousand himself, if they only raised nine hundred thousand.

He put the project out on Kickstarter, offered various perks for differing levels of donations and let it fly. It was posted on March 13, with a funding cut off date of April 17. They reached their initial goal of funding in less than 48 hours.

Less than 48 hours.

They then started to think big. Suddenly, the sky was opening for them. If they could reach another donation ceiling, they could release Mac and Linux versions of the game. Another ceiling, and they could bring in Chris Avellone and Obsidian Entertainment. If they could hit the impossibly high ceiling of 3 mil, they could feasibly release a mod kit, allowing for fan additions to the game, along the lines of the GECK for Fallout 3.

They hit 3 mil by the end of the Kickstarter project.

I poinged as only a pushing-40 man can.

Boo.

I know, I know, It’s been a while. Real Life (TM) caught up with me, and while I know it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated last, the site is lowest on my priority on the “get things done” list.

HOWEVER – the following has been accomplished, just not announced, with further details to come.

• Home server upgraded… and I fell back to Windows for the Server OS
• MP3 player replaced. Sick of the Connect, I found some old e200 Sansas for sale. Shiney!
• Divorce final. Don’t know if I’ll make more comment on that or not.
• House Purchased! Beautiful place, unfinished basement. WIRES GOING EVERYWHERE!!1!
• Mini Computer running as a media center. Pretty slick, actually.
• SITE UPDATE(S): I’ve gone through and re-tweaked some CSS when bored, corrected coloring on some links that no one has ever visited, and officially set up a Disclaimer for the usage of the site. Found out that the WordPress backend is NOT bulletproof -or idiotproof. Whoops. Thankfully, I have a very good hosting company who still has amazing care for the “little guy” clients.
• Currently playing Mass Effect. Again. Going to start Mass Effect 2 in mid-April. Then, maybe Mass Effect 3, if it drops a bit in price.

It’s alive. ALIVE!

DD-WRT successfully flashed to the WRT54GL, and it is happily purring under my desk, with a few changes and tweaks from the default configuration. QoS is turned on for P2P traffic (I help seed Ubuntu, among others) and VPN is turned on and configuring for my tunneling to my network. I’m using the mini build – smallest build that will work on the router, leaving some free memory space… needed for the ports that I have open for the P2P stuff. Runs amazingly better than the WRT54G v5 on the build that I had before. Crippled hardware left me only able to run the micro build of DD-WRT, and VPN was left off of there entirely. (but they left the programming in for an optional paid hotspot… i don’t get it.)