Dragon Age: Origins

Tonight I finished the game Dragon Age: Origins. It was an epic scale and engaging to play. According to the game's tally I spent over 70 hours playing it, though it counts time left paused, which doesn't quite seem right to me. The combat style pretty much requires you to pause it a lot, and that time should count, but if I paused it to go have dinner, it still might rack up an hour. It's a minor quibble. Anyway, it's weird to think of how many hours I've spent playing one game, and I'm sure this one doesn't hold the record.

Games have progressed so far since the era of 8 bit graphics it's unreal. What Bioware was able to do with Dragon Age combined some of the best aspects of books- character depth and development, and an immersion into a complex and detailed world- with the drama and visual impact of a movie. Honestly (and I'm sure this is blasphemy to some folks) the style of back story Tolkien did in Lord of the Rings bored me to tears. Bioware managed to flesh out a world which was just as rich without it getting so dry and irrelevant. They did a great job creating styles for the different cultures in the game, and different environments to explore- the woods the elves lived in, the tunnels of the dwarven kingdom, the dream-like plane of the fade- it was all pretty neat. I would say a lot of the load times were pretty extreme, though a faster computer would have helped some. A lot of it was hard drive access time which is unavoidable with all the data they're trying to stream at you. Hopefully they leaned heavily on SIMD.

Over all, it was a pretty cool game.

Christmas pictures

Family door hanging

My dad and brother are both engineers too, and they seem happiest when their hands are busy. So I put them to work while they were here for Christmas turning around one of our doors. The door leads into one of the smallest laundry rooms I've ever seen, which is also home to the illustrious Beer Fridge. With the door swinging into the laundry room it hits the door of the washing machines, which is a roaring pain, and there's not enough room for a laundry basket. In short, it was a poor design decision that I've just been slow to rectify. So we did.

Here you can see my brother ironing something out with the bottom hinge while dad holds the door in place. I helped more than just taking pictures, honest. I mortised out patches for the new hinges and spackled over the old holes.

So now the door swings out! Thanks again for the help, guys!
I didn't grab any pictures of the deed, but part of our fence blew down while they were down here. The posts had rotted off at the bases. Ryan was a whiz with getting the old concrete plugs, and it gave me an excuse to buy a giant wrecking bar. We got the holes dug, the concrete poured, the poles set up and the dirt tamped down pretty quickly. All that is left is to screw the bits of fence back onto them.

Attic progress

I got the flooring you see below nailed in. It's never going to be gorgeous- this is just a quiet space to store some junk. This is only about half the space in this attic area, and there's still more flooring to fill in, but it's gotten pretty cozy already.
The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.

The flooring boards ended up being too big to fit though the hole for the stairs after the stair frame was in place, so I had to cut them up. They ended up being much easier to manage that way.