I'm sitting here on the last night of my nice little mid-summer vacation from Ann Arbor, classes, and the like. For spring I was technically only taking a single class, but the class was an intensive second-year Spanish course, designed to take thirty weeks of normal-semester classes and shrink it down into seven weeks. It actually didn't end up being nearly as bad as I went in expecting, but that isn't to say it was easy. For the most part, though, I'm very glad I did it; I made a few friends, had some really good times, and got one of the last of my graduation requirements finished. Now, although I'm heading back down to campus, I'm a little over halfway done with my mid-summer vacation between spring and summer terms, and I can safely say that the latter half of the summer looks like it'll be a damn good time.

Now, over the next week and a half, I really only have two or three days of class (the term doesn't start until Wednesday and then there's the Fourth of July next week), so I plan to be enjoying a whole lot of stuff. First, there's my current obsession with Battlefield 2. Second, Titan's Quest comes out and there really is absolutely no such thing as a bad action/RPG in my mind. And due to the continual ravings by a friend, I think I'm actually going to give The West Wing a shot. It was something that piqued my interest here and there before, but I had never heard any really strong recommendations from my friends before now... And, other than House, that's really the only way I ever get interested in TV shows.

Unfortunately, amidst these sea of great games -- my rekindled interest in Battlefield 2, Titan's Quest, and the potential awesomeness of Prey (a demo I won't be able to try until I return to Ann Arbor, as I lack anything other than a modem here) -- I don't believe I'll be enjoying Rise of Legends much more, though. I finally finished up the single-player campaign this afternoon and I had a damn good time with it. The missions are repetitive, the story-telling is absolutely abysmal (this is no exaggeration; it's really horrible), and the inability to ever utilize a race's full army/upgrades in campaign missions is annoying, but it was still a very enjoyable time. I just don't, however, see myself enjoying a multiplayer game with the game's mechanics. It's a fun single-player game, but that's about the extent of my enjoyment with it (and the AI skirmishes are neat, but are simply endless in length). This shouldn't be seen as a very strong statement, though, as the only RTS I've ever enjoyed online lately is Warcraft III (and Starcraft before that).

I think I'm actually going to finish up Chapter 5 of Paradise at some point during the week as well. The chapter is currently sitting large at about seventeen-some pages, but I'm completely incapable of writing the darn thing's flashback. This is the first real case of writer's block of the "idea" variety that I've had, but given that this is primarily just a relaxing hobby for me and I'm on no deadlines, I'm okay with it. I've written a solid hundred pages for the thing by now, and if the first real issue I have on progressing forward with the book has taken this long to come about then I think I'm pretty well off.

It looks like the two part little miniseries on episodic gaming was a mild-to-fair success. It's not the kind of traffic-drawer that, say, the Half-Life 2 and Battlefield 2 articles drew on... But this is a bit more of an abstract concept over a subject which doesn't divide gaming lines nearly as much as those two examples did. I also have been, other than in IRC and the like, been far less active in publicizing these two articles than I normally am. There are still some chances that the pair will get picked up by some of the gaming news sites within the next few days, though, so if the site feels a bit sluggish at any point this week, then blame it all on that.

Speaking of that, there is the potential that there may be some downtime anytime this week as well. I finally got around to transferring the domain name to my webhost from the previous off-host solution I was using before. I was getting charged more than ten times the amount I should have been just to keep the domain renewed yearly, so I finally got over my innate laziness to transfer the thing. Anyhoo, long story short, there's a possibility that there may be a bit of lag in the switch, so if for some asinine reason that you require this site for your daily lives, then I do apologize in advance. For both the downtime and the fact that your life is sad to the point where this site provides joy.

I think that's about all the energy I can muster to stay up tonight or else I could continue rambling about the unusually high amount of things on my mind at the moment, so that's about it. Since this is pretty much the midway point of my summer, I might as well make some general prediction for the sake of making a general prediction. As my friends and readers of the site (which are one-in-the-same -- isn't that right?) know, there was a whole lot of completely crazy and unnecessary drama that occupied May. I swear, June feels like it's gone by at an exponentially faster rate and as I looked at the date to figure out when the domain transfer for the site would occur (see previous paragraph), I was completely floored to realize just how close the Fourth of July was -- it's a week from Tuesday, for the calendarphobic amongst us. I do believe that there is absolutely no fathomable way in which the latter of half of this summer could be anything other than spectacular. And I make this as a prediction for all of you as well.

Awfully presumptuous of me.

let's talk about someone else