Today I got my latest reference book in the mail -- Game Character Modeling and Animation with 3DS Max -- and I can now begin churning out assets for my game. I've been working through a whole stack of books in the last few weeks (just under 3000 pages worth) and making a to-do list and a rough schedule of what I need to accomplish before the late-September deadline. It's going to be tough to pull off, but even if I don't make the contest deadline I'll still have a portfolio to shop around. I'll give more details about the game later on once I have it set in stone, since I have to keep revising it to keep my goals realistic within my timeframe.

Been grinding away at WoW some more -- yesterday was getting my mining and engineering up to 300. Exciting!

Back pain is still here, so that's two full months now of near-constant discomfort. I go to physical therapy twice a week, and that serves to make my back worse for the rest of the day. Altogether it's been a fun summer so far.

Also, Giant Bomb's video review styIe looks kind of familiar...

My /played for the character was 10 days 16 hours though at least a day of that was grinding honor in AV. At this point I'm shifting my time away from playing WoW to working on my XNA project, but I still need to get rep for the two Shattrath factions (Lower City and The Sha'tar) for honor gear. I briefly considered rolling another character, but I came to my senses at the last instant.

As I've mentioned before, I am currently working on my own game while job hunting, and I've also decided to enter my game into Microsoft's Dream Build Play contest later this year. I'm building it in XNA, so there's no real reason why I shouldn't enter the final build into the competition. By registering as a contestant, I also got a free year of XNA creator's club access, which means that I can debug my code on the 360 instead of on a Windows machine exclusively. I'm developing for the 360 anyways, so I needed to get access regardless.

I'll be making periodic demos of my game in the coming months, and the only way to play it will be through the creator's club service, so if you want to be able to try out my work (and other's) for free, then sign up for the contest!

Also picked up Metal Gear Solid 4 a few days ago (my 2nd actual PS3 game purchase since I got mine just under a year ago, my first game being Warhawk) and I can say without a doubt that it was the most powerful gaming experience I've ever had. Everything about this game is top-cIass and I played through the whole game in one sitting, which is something I try not to do, especially since it took 16 hours and change to complete! The story wrapped everything up beautifully, and the real-time graphics occasionally cross the uncanny valley (in my eyes) and deliver something that, by all rights, should have Hollywood collectively crapping itself.

Been playing WoW pretty much all day for the last week or so, and I've got my character fairly well-levelled. I would be higher, but this weekend is double honor in AV, so I've gotta grind that for some nice PVP gear farther down the line. It's gonna be a long grind to 70!

Started physical therapy earlier in the week, and the exercises make my back hurt more! Hooray progress! My muscles in my lower back pretty much gave up on holding up my upper body, so my ab muscles had to kinda take over and that was extremely painful, and I'm lucky I didn't get a hernia.

I'll make a post about my XNA tech demo / game sometime in the near future, but I've run into some snags in learning to program: I'm getting to points in the book where the author assumes you know where to put code and just throws example code out with no context whatsoever. Looks like it's time to get some more books!

New video blog! Yay!

Check out the Pandora too -- it's pretty much a PSP, a DS, and a laptop smashed together into a case a little bit larger than a DS Lite. It's coming out in about two months and it looks AWESOME.

My back pain has come back again with a vengeance, and just in time for when I need to move out of my apartment! It hurt so bad last night that I had to crawl the 20 feet from my room to the bathroom since it hurt too bad to stand up. For some reason my legs would kinda give up as well and I would come crashing down. Adding insult to injury, I couldn't block my door, so one of my cats kept coming in and jumping on my face in the middle of the night.

Went to the urgent care clinic this afternoon to get it looked at while still symptomatic, and they ruled out arthritis and bone disorders so that's something at least. They also gave me two gigantic pills of Vicodin, but as usual they had no effect on the pain and just made me dizzy. I did get a sweet cane out of it, though, since I had to use my microphone stand as a makeshift cane to make it to the hospital.

Right now I'm just resting in bed and making some checklists of all the things I need to get done this weekend, since I won't be able to go up to LA on my own and clear my apartment out early. I need to cancel my internet and phone line, but that's something that can be easily accomplished in bed at least. I'd like to give a shout-out to DSL Extreme for their awesome internet service in my place for these last few years. I've only been offline for about 48 hours in the three years I've been a customer with them, and the personalized service and tech support has been top-notch.

Zero callbacks for interviews so far in the job hunt, so that's been rather depressing. I am still working on some projects in the meantime, but I'll leave those for another blog post. Friday will also mark the 6-year anniversary for me as a registered GameSpot user -- hopefully some day I can get the coveted "Admin" tag under my name! Totally willing to make the move to the Bay Area...