(define (update-again)

Oh fer chrissake, ok.

I figure it's about time to update because I haven't lately. It turns out that you don't stop being busy just because you've stopped working for an employer that demands 20 overtime hour a week. You just get busy doing other stuff. I;m beginning to think that "busy" is either contagious or hereditary.

Mostly the stuff going on here is work on that clandestine project I mentioned a little while ago. Basically, I got to thinking that I really wanted to pick up D&D again. The really sad thing is that my group of friends is pretty geographically disparate, and we don't really feel like driving out for 6 hours to meet up for 8 hours of dice-rolling only to have to weather the drive back. That's not the type of ordeal you can undergo every two weeks.

My first thought was "ok, there has to be something that will let me and my friends play D&D online". I took a look around and found Virtual Tabletop (which has a pricing-system/website so bysantine that I rate their chances of putting together an intuitive in-game interface at very near zero), Open RPG (which has that typical open-source affliction of horrible UI, make-based installation and on top of that neglects OS X, which most of my friends use) and Web RPG (whose link doesn't go anywhere because the only evidence I could find of the project is a page talking about why, specifically, it sucks).

And that's the point at which I started hacking together my own little PLT Scheme app to let me play D&D with my friends. I've registered diecastgames.com (which currently goes to a godaddy parking page), and put together a development blog here in the meantime. It isn't at the point where I want anyone using it yet, but it should be up and running in beta form in the next little while. It'll be almost ugly as sin until I put the art together, at which point we're ready to go. Then I'll just have to convince one of my friends to DM.

Which shouldn't be hard, all things considered. If they get uppity about it, I can just point out that I built a friggin online D&D system from the ground up.)