The Alexandrian is meant to be a place for sharing and promoting my creative work, reviews, and political thoughts, so I don’t generally do auto-biographical blogging. It’s not that I’m a necessarily private person — it’s just that this isn’t particularly the place for it.

But today I’m making an exception because, as life is often wont to do, I’m facing some hardships that are affecting my creative work.

To whit: I have Lyme disease.

I went symptomatic a couple of weeks ago and promptly went down to the local clinic. I’ve been getting dosed with amoxicillin (among other things) and I thought I would be able to kind of push my way through it.

But no such luck. My brain has been just slightly discombobulated enough to make writing difficult or impossible. Because I’ll have bad days and not-so-bad days, I’ve even had problems getting the Playtesting 4th Edition essays I had written before I went symptomatic posted on a consistent basis. (Although that’s at least partly because I’m still getting used to the new suite of software I’m using to update the website due to the computer crash I suffered near the beginning of the month.)

In short, July has been a pretty sucky month for me.

If I was a suspicious fellow, I’d say that Fate was punishing me for announcing a release date for Legends & Labyrinths. After having several products run into horrible development problems shortly after having release dates announced for them, when I started Dream Machine Productions I decided to never announce a project’s existence until it was completely finished and ready to be published.

I’ve broken that rule twice — once in a minor way and once in a major way (with L&L). Both times the project has ended up being delayed past the original release date (once because of factors completely external from myself and, now, because I haven’t finished the work).

Legends & Labyrinths will be released when it’s done (and done right). But I’m not going to make any promises about when that will be. Heck, until I’m actually feeling better I can’t even estimate when that will be.

Updates on the website are also likely to slow down once I get past the material I’ve already prepped. (Although I’m hoping fervently that I will actually be feeling better before that happens.)

Apparently my auto-updater isn’t working properly on the new computer, either. So I’ve had a couple of days worth of updates just sitting on my hard drive without actually updating the website. So if you’ve actually been watching the site, you’re going to see several days worth of updates all pop up at the same time.

And if you haven’t been watching the site, then this note is irrelevant… Move along.

Normal updates will (hopefully) continue tomorrow.

Urgh.

On Friday evening I came home from our final tech rehearsal for Richard II. Long story short, about fifteen minutes later my main computer had completely crapped out on me.

I still haven’t managed to actually figure out what went wrong. The initial symptoms were a severe system slow down — I would wiggle the mouse and, half a minute later, the cursor would move on the screen. Ditto for keyboard input. Eventually I was forced to power the computer down. When I tried to bring the computer back up, it wouldn’t boot up.

I futzed around for a bit and eventually the computer did boot up (although not as a result of anything I had actually done). However, two of my five hard drives had gone missing in action: The C, E, and G drives were showing up. The D and F drives were gone.

This was bad news. My D drive is where I keep all of my creative files. I do regular back-ups, but — predictably — the crash had happened only a couple days before my next scheduled backup (which meant the potential loss of data was about as bad as it could be and I was faced with the prospect of trying to reproduce about a hundred hours of work).

However, the fact that two hard drives had simultaneously disappeared — along with detection delays during the boot-up sequence — left me with some hope that the real culprit was a bad hard drive controller. (Althogh that would mean that my motherboard was fried and the computer was seriously screwed, that type of loss is just a matter of money. Lost creativity can never be regained.)

After a few more reboots, the F drive reappeared — although trying to read any data off of it proved almost impossible.

So I spent most of the weekend — when I wasn’t busy opening Richard II — backing up all the data I could off the hard drives I could still see. Then, last night, I began disassembling my main computer: Loading the hard drives into an external hard drive enclosure and trying to read them on my laptop.

That’s when things got weird. Of the five drives in my original computer, one was a SATA drive (which, if memory serves, is my original G drive). The external enclosure I was using wasn’t SATA compatible, so I wasn’t able to read that drive.

That’s not the weird part, the weird part is the other four drives: From the external enclosure I could read the C, D, and F drives. The fourth hard drive didn’t work — instead emitting a very disturbing noise and refusing to respond.

I can’t make any sense out of that: On my original box the C, E, and G drives worked. But not either the E or G drive was bad and the D and F drives (which had disappeared) were working just fine.

So my next step is to re-assemble the original computer with just the boot drive and then I’ll begin adding hard drives one by one to see what happens. (To make matters more complicated, my computer has two completely separate hard drive controllers — both on the motherboard.)

But the good news is that, with the D drive working in the external hard drive enclosure, I was able to backup all of my creative files. Nothing was lost that can’t be replaced.

The bad news is that the only computer I can currently work on is my laptop — which was previously only setup for word processing. So, in addition to trying to rebuild my original computer (which is probably going to end with the conclusion that, at the very least, I need a new motherboard), I also need to get my laptop setup with the wide variety of programs I need to continue doing my creative work.

For example, I didn’t have an HTML editor or an FTP program installed on the laptop… which made updating this website rather difficult. (Obviously, this has now been solved.)

My next goal is to get the suite of software I use for Dream Machine Productions installed — Adobe Photoshop, Dundjinni, and Quark. And I need to figure out how I’m going to hook the laptop up to a color-corrected monitor and mouse so that my work with some of those programs can be productive. This isn’t particularly onerous, but it is time-consuming. And until it happens, work on projects like Legends & Labyrinths and the next City Supplement have ground to a halt.

The good news is that, starting tomorrow, I’ll be able to start posting the last of the Keep on the Shadowfell remix material I was originally going to post over the weekend. I’m looking forward to finishing that up and then moving onto some playtest reports

I’m not very good at publicity.

I’d like to say that this is because I’m a humble man. But I suspect the truth is that I’m egotistical enough that I believe everyone should recognize my brilliance without me having to tell them about it. (I kid… or do I?)

Seriously, though, the reality is that I just don’t like dealing with bureaucracy, busywork, or paperwork. Publicity lies somewhere in the interstice between the three, and if I can figure out some way to procrastinate it, then I’ll end up procrastinating it.

This is why Hervé Jeune had to spend about 5 years trying to get me to send him a biography so that he could put it up on the Guide du roliste, a French roleplaying/gaming site. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that: Every 45 days he would send me an e-mail like clockwork, asking me very politely to send him a biography. And every time I got the e-mail I would dutifully think to myself, “Yup, I should definitely do that.”

And then it would sit in my Inbox until it would expire and disappear (Hervé had the AOL address I’ve had for a decade and a half). And then, a few days later, the new e-mail would pop up and I would think, “Yup, I should definitely do that.”

Well, several months ago I finally got around to doing it. A couple of weeks later, Hervé sent me an e-mail telling me that the whole thing had been translated and that it could be found here. I can’t read a word of it, but it looks pretty nifty. In fact, the whole site looks nifty.

Of course, Hervé sent me that e-mail more than two months ago and I’m only getting around to mentioning it here on the site now.

Which, I suppose, goes to show that I’m no better about publicity now than I’ve ever been.

Ah well…

Another minor update: With the announcement of 4th Edition, I’ve decided to set aside further development work on the advanced Diplomacy rules I was working on. I may, or may not, return to these when I pick up development on Rule Supplement 4: Advanced Skills. If I do, they’ll be posted here.

For the moment, however, I have gathered together the design notes and the final fix for the Diplomacy skill in the Advanced Rules section of the Creations page. As with my the other Advanced Rules, these rules have been placed under the OGL.

Enjoy!