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Finally went to see it with our friends Jay and Lola. It was fun and the CGI special effects were amazing, but the plot was light and it was fairly cheesy. Interesting to see the fruition of the project that I'd been hearing about for the last three years, what with James Cameron being on the board at Multiverse.

Wii!

Yes, I got one for Christmas...a Wii. So far, it's pretty fun, but mostly seems like just a novelty due to its motion-sensitive joystick. Wii Sports, which came with the box, is OK, but I wasn't too impressed with the Star Wars Lightsabre duel game. Candice loves the 3D Pinball game, though.

I think I'll be more impressed when I find some truly interesting games.

D&D Online

Been playing this MMOG with old friends that I used to play D&D with, back in The Day, including John in Australia, Rod in Santa Barbara, and Mike & Tracy in San Jose. It's pretty fun, but I've kind of fallen behind the others because I never seem to be able to find the time to login.

Golf

Oddly enough, I'm attempting to pick it up, very late in life. Most people start playing at a much younger age. It's possible that I never was interested in it because of a painful accident when I was about eight years old:

My next door neighbor kid friend, who was a couple years older, was really into golf. He went on to be a "star" on the high school golf team, if there is such a thing. Anyway, one day I was watching him practice his driving, and he accidentally whacked me quite hard on the head, leading to a large goose-egg on my head and quite a bit of consternation on my part, as you might imagine.

Nevertheless, I decided in my dotage to try to play the game of my Scottish ancestors. I was told in no uncertain terms (by Candice, among others...she used to play a bit) that it's not a game you can just "pick up" like volleyball or ping pong. So, I've been taking lessons, and now I understand what they mean. It looks very easy, but isn't, and can be terribly frustrating.

But I've also found it strangely rewarding, and so far all I've done is practiced hitting the ball. So...we'll see how I take to it once I actually start playing.

Games

My love affair with boardgames began in the early 1970s with the Avalon Hill military strategy games. I think I got D-Day as a present, and quickly moved on to Blitzkrieg, France 1940, and SPI games. I remember being blown away by the complexity and novelty of SPI's StarForce, one of the earliest science fiction simulation boardgames.

Over the years, I played probably hundreds of different titles, and even got involved in miniatures gaming, including 7 years war, with my friend Jon Southard, and WWII micro-miniatures.

I also played various role-playing games, the progenitors of todays MMOGs. In a sense, they were the first virtual worlds, because they created rule sets to define the operation of an entirely fictional world. Later I gravitated to multiplayer games for their social aspects.

So, going to work for Multiverse, was sort of coming full circle for me.