This may be the understatement of the month, but the Sydney skies haven’t half been nasty lately, have they? We already had to miss out on the Noodle Markets with Boots last week, and it hasn’t been an evening at home in the past ten days without at least a little thunder.

Vickie and I have been up to stuff, as usual. I’d like to point you at Vickie’s website, where she has some nifty new pieces of jewellery up for your browsing pleasure. And if one (or more) of them take your fancy, why not drop her an e-mail and ask how much she’s willing to part with them for?

I’m still working on Vickie’s PC. I’ve noticed that it’s not restarting properly; when Windows shuts down, the PC sits there rather than rebooting. Also, it seems to be not quite performing right when I connect up the front USB and audio ports with the new hard drive in. I have the feeling it may be power related, so I’ve bought a 400-Watt power supply unit which will go into Vickie’s PC tonight.

There may be some movement on the Black Talon front soon. I don’t want to say any more for fear of jinxing things, but I thought I’d give you a heads-up. On the topic of Heavy Gear, I’m also thinking about assembling musical playlists, much as I did for octaNe. Of course, the music’ll be quite different from the playlists for octaNe, which are assorted rock ‘n’ roll. Tracks from the Heavy Gear computer game CDs ought to give it a failry good orchestral, martial action backbone, but it’s tempting to aim for a non-English, almost tribal motif. Some of the tracks from Halo and Homeworld2 leap readily to mind, but I don’t think Sierra have published a soundtrack album for Homeworld2, and I’m worried about recognition with Halo.

As a lot of the action in the first few sessions will probably take place in the Badlands, something written for deserts would be nice – the soundtracks for the movie and the SciFi Channel miniseries incarnations of Dune come to mind. I’m less worried about the North or South, as I have the feeling the players won’t be spending too long in either. Future playlists are for the Caprician highlands (again, desert, but darker, with a tribal theme for the Liberati) and Gomorrah (something fast-paced and urban).

With all this thought about playlists, I’m working on an article for RPGnet about using them. I’m hoping to address some of the usual issues I’ve seen people take with the idea and execution of music in gaming, rather than the almost-ubiquitous "tracks for genres" list. I have a fair few notes together, and they’re taking shape into an article, but they need some more hashing out first. I ought to e-mail Sandy and ask whether he’d be interested in it.

Well, I’ve watched the Red Vs. Blue Season 1 DVD through, and it’s interesting to see the changes they’ve made. The basic series material is largely intact, although they’ve done away with most of Sarge’s impromptu rambles at the end of some episodes. The Microsoft PDC public service announcement is also absent, which is a bugger – I suppose it was either left out due to space constraints, or they couldn’t get away with charging money for something with footage from a Microsoft presentation in it. On the other hand, it has some pretty funny line recording session out-takes, and it’s interesting to see the number of times they tried to get certain stunts right.

Gav’s dropping over this evening to pick his DVD up, and if I’m lucky, I might be able to get some more Battlefield 1942 action in. Gav, Dan and I tried to hook up last night, but it ended in disaster – Dan needed the v1.5 patch, which was taking ages to download at his end, and I was SMSing Gav until his mobile reception suddenly cut off. I wound up playing a couple of games on the OzForces server.

Here’s hoping the lightning doesn’t move in again…