Well, that was my last roleplaying session for a while. As of Wednesday, I’m on a permanent 3-11 shift. So I’m not going to be doing any weekday roleplaying for the forseeable future.

There a couple of upsides to this – or at least, some mitigation of the downsides. I do like the 3-11 shift, as a shift. For one, I don’t need an alarm clock, and it’s usually very, very quiet after a certain point.

For two, I find I’m still getting up at about the same time as I normally would (so long as I keep my head and don’t do stupid things like stay up until 4am), which means I get all the morning time to do my own thing. I find it’s about the only shift I get any meaningful creative work done on. So I’m actually looking forward to that bit.

Thirdly, there is roleplaying on the weekends. That may sound more than a little sad, but as someone who doesn’t do pubs or clubs, roleplaying is my social outlet. Quite frankly, if I didn’t roleplay, I’d probably not see anyone outside work. And despite what I said in the opening sentence, I’ve already got into a game for Sundays, which looks like it could be a lot of fun.

And fourthly, it turns out that there are a few other people who are available during mornings, so I won’t necessarily become a complete hermit.

Meanwhile, life marches on. I’ve started some painting tests of my plastic plumbing lightsabers, seeing if silver automotive paint can make them look less like plastic plumbing and more like metal. Here’s a sample:

There’s more here, kind of in reverse order of painting.

Also, I’ve undergone my periodic rediscovery of some previous project that I’d abandoned. This is usually a sign that I should be doing something else, and I’ve found some cunning way to distract myself. The goal in this case is to resume converting the original Doom levels into Quake format, so that I can view them in the snazzy Tenebrae engine. Part of me is gazing at myself in amazed horror. I mean, what am I doing? Okay, I’ve found a way to massively speed up my workrate (using an image of the original Doom level as a background in the Quake Editor I’m using), but I’ve got a lot of work to do on the textures if it’s to use the lighting features of Tenebrae (bumpmaps, glossmaps, and luminosity maps, plus making fake resized textures for the editor to use while Tenebrae uses the gnarly redone textures from the Doom Retexturing Project). And this is for the amazing project of converting the game levels of one outdated engine into levels for the updated version of a slightly less outdated engine. Gah.

What I should really do if I want to do anything in this vein is convert the original Doom levels to Doom3. Heh. That would be amusing. Pity the editor that comes with looks basically impenetrable.

Anyway, what I should definitely be doing now is going to bed. G’night.