My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

What do you want to see in Armagetron soon? Any new feature ideas? Let's ponder these ground breaking ideas...
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Lucifer
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My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Lucifer »

Ok, now that I've been out of rehab three weeks and looking honestly at my todo list, I thought I'd take a few minutes to post it here. A few words, though. :)

All of my todo list is currently dedicated to establishing solid good mental health and staying sober. That doesn't move Armagetron to a back burner, but it does put it in competition for priorities with some other things.

My non-arma todo list:
* Go to regular recovery meetings (looking at SMART Recovery and Refuge Recovery, and possibly founding my own if I don't find a meeting format that I really like)
* Establish an income with Postmates, my new(ish) job. (I've got a cute little scooter for this)
* Finish A Ghost in Time, the book I started and got up to about 90k words while I was in rehab. After that, Fastburger! is next.
* Alarm Clock/stock analyst. I found the most recent code for my stupid alarm clock, during the pytqt3 to pyqt4 port that got aborted because drunk. I need it running on my phone. :) The stock analyst program is exploratory, to see if I can use data mining techniques to find good stock investments. You know, take what you know and apply it somewhere and see if it works.
* Write next book, currently called Placeholder title. I already know what it's about, though, don't worry.

My arma todo list:
* Davecms, not surprisingly. Actually, this item is "update all themes for arma web properties and get ArmaUnified deployed to all". Davecms will help both my website and the arma main site, which I intend will be updated in the future using a bzr repository on launchpad, so that updates can come more frequently.
* 0.4 work. I'll probably go ahead and rewrite the existing sound engine to use OpenAL and add that dependency. The amount of work it'll take to make SDL_Mixer make the cycle engine sound correctly is roughly equivalent to the amount of work needed to port to openAL, so I need to quit making excuses and just do it. Also: Player Police and Official Servers, and Acme, which I stumbled across on sourceforge.
* Start a rewrite for the 0.5 series. We're talking in irc about this one, but it's pretty low priority.

Now, the way these two lists interact has to do with how practical the need is for some things (like the alarm clock) and how useful for my mental health things are (like working on armagetron stuff, pretty useful and important). The first three items on my non-arma todo list are the most important (I realize it amounts to five items, because of the two that are paired). But when I find the right balance between the two lists, I expect to see some more useful work out of me. Six years of daily drinking following a difficult period caused directly by a divorce has put me in a place where I really need to focus on the identity stuff again, and like it or not, arma has become something I strongly identify with.
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by sinewav »

You also need to write a book about Armagetron!

Guess what? I've also decided to write a book. It's going to take a couple years, and I don't think I'll have time to start it until after next year, but it's a story idea I've been working on since 2003.
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by compguygene »

I am glad to hear that you are trying to achieve a healthy balance in your life. Of course, I am looking forward to your contributions. Slowly, there are small but significant numbers of us coming back to the game and noobs starting to play. The player base may have shrunk, but there are still active players and the occasional tournament. I wish you the best and as a Christian, will pray for you.
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Word »

haha, i thought about writing a semi-autobiographical young adult novel some day about a loser in his teenage years who one day discovers armagetron and little by little, it - or more specifically, the people he encounters there - helps him make sense of the misery around him and get his act together. feel free to incorporate the concept :-P
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Lucifer »

Word wrote:haha, i thought about writing a semi-autobiographical young adult novel some day about a loser in his teenage years who one day discovers armagetron and little by little, it - or more specifically, the people he encounters there - helps him make sense of the misery around him and get his act together. feel free to incorporate the concept :-P
Nice thing about a YA novel is that you only need to hit the range of 60k-80k words, so go for it! Or wait until November and do it as a NaNo novel.

As for me, if I were going to write a video-game-oriented story, I think I'd have to incorporate the game into real life danger and saving lives and stuff. I'm a sucker for heroic stories. :) Video game books aren't off the table for me, but I've got the next three or four I want to write already planned. Here's a quick view of that:

* A Ghost in Time - Rehab murder mystery. The murder itself is solved about half way through. It's a sci-fi novel, of course. Takes place in the same time period as Fastburger!, which is in the near future. Currently 100k words.
* Fastburger! - Fast food place gets teleported to an alien world. Your basic Robinson Crusoe story in more of a steampunk setting, actually. Near future setting, moon has been colonized. That's not real important, though. Currently 80k words.

After those two (rough drafts completed on both of them), the next four options, most unnamed: (Also, all of my stories take place in the same universe)

* Unnamed Travel Story - A sci-fi telling of how my first wife and I got married. It'll be weird to write, because at it's core, it's a love story about my ex-wife, but there's plenty of adventure to go along with it. I'll set it either partly in the inner solar system, or asteroid belt -> Saturn (probably Titan). It'll take place after The Fool's Tale, and will probably include a brief jaunt on the Sweet Dreams. (This is the most likely next book after the above two)

* Zarnat of the Dead - Boy raised by zombies. Direct parody of Tarzan the Ape Man. (currently around 4k words, I believe, but also the one most likely to get dropped if I can't finish it in time for a Halloween release)

* The Martian Candidate - Trump parody, body-swapping. It'll answer this question: What would happen if, in the middle of the election, Donald Trump woke up one morning and was trapped in the body he hates most: middle-aged plus-sized Mexican woman? Also, it's a higher priority with the primaries starting up again, and if I can't have it out before the primary season kicks off (basically the end of this year), then I'll scrap it forever. I don't remember the word count on this one.

* Space Pirate Chronicles: Untitled (current working title sucks) - The actual first volume in this 7-10 book series. Centers on Captain Vallejo, third-person limited narrator. Currently only about 1500 words, but it's the only one on this list that predates The Fool's Tale.

* Fastburger, Too! - Obvious sequel to the first one. :) Currently around 3k words from story spillage from the first book during the rough draft writing.

* Unnamed Spaceship Story - This one is a lot like Star Trek: Voyager, so I may never write it, but it's a horror story. Early in the above-mentioned SPC novel, there's an encounter with a highly experimental USN ship and a staged battle. This book tells what happens to that ship in the aftermath of that fake battle, and involves getting tossed across the galaxy with a broken interstellar drive (an element obviously ripped from Robotech, or the Macross Saga, depending on which one you saw). (Also, no spoilers, but I'm considering throwing them to the other side of the alien species that invades during the SPC, or one of the species' that that species is at war with, so the story can interact with SPC but still stand alone)

So, yeah, I've got work to do. :)
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Word »

I think you should offer the Fastburger story to Netflix. :-)
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Lucifer »

Word wrote:I think you should offer the Fastburger story to Netflix. :-)
I don't think they'd do it right, to be honest. But if they come a'knockin', I'll tell them what I want out of it. :)

Hulu might do it right.
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Word »

give hulu a try then!
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Lucifer »

Geez, lemme get it published first. ;)

On a related note, though, if anybody here knows how/where I can submit a script to Black Mirror, I've got a killer story in mind that's right up their alley. I don't know if they take spec scripts, though, but it's a cool story.
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Word »

There's an e-mail for Charlie Brooker's screenwriting management: http://www.jounwin.co.uk/portfolio/charlie-brooker/
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Re: My todo list and how it interacts with Armagetron

Post by Lucifer »

Ah, they only represent him for his books and journalistic writing. ;)

But there's an email to someone else connected with Black Mirror and Charlie Brooker, so I'll see what comes from that.

Thanks a lot, Word!
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