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… and that’s about it. When I was in middle and high school I was in band and played everything from the trombone to the baritone and tuba but my musical aspirations sorta died there. So it’s not that I don’t have skill, or that I can’t learn — I just haven’t. I know many folks that are completely tone deaf, I’m not one of those. I just haven’t had the time/inclination to invest into learning a musical instrument.

My lack of musical skills came gallingly apparent one year at Halloween when everyone in the company showed up playing some instrument or another — and I had nothing of the sort. One of the co-workers asked with complete honesty and earnest, “What instrument do you play?” as if it were a foregone conclusion that I had to play something..

My response was, “I can play the radio..” Which got a chuckle from everyone who heard it, but it left me a little hollow inside. I really do want to learn something I just am not sure what. Or rather, I wasn’t.

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So I find I have been playing quite a few web based games of late. And just about all of them has brought to the fore of my mind the glaring fact that there is nothing they have done that I can’t do. Seriously. More over, I think I can do it better in just about every way.

One of the games I find myself playing is a space game which, to be fair, isn’t very good — in fact it’s bad. It’s just not a very good game, yet for some reason I find myself continuing to play it — as does a lot of other folks. It’s strangely popular. While playing at just about every turn I see things that could not only be done a little better, but done WAY better. Not just game play wise, but technically as well. Their HTML is bad, they clearly don’t understand CSS and their PHP is poorly written (from what I can tell.) So, this of course always lead me to the line of thinking that, why shouldn’t I try to make my own?

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Well, I’m back at it. After a pretty lengthy pause, I’m back and making my game. I have come up with a final name for it I think. I’m going to be calling it “The Periphery”, a name that has meaning in the game lore itself.

I have been working on a lot of back story, history and game lore this time. I find it’s a lot easier to create game play ideas when you have some back story to work off of.

This marks the 5th implementation of this project. The others didnt’ fail, but rather taught me quite a lot and lead me to here. Every time I get a little closer and I’m starting to get excited. Formerly called “Galaxy Incorporated”, The Periphery will adopt most of the game play ideas I had down previously but with lore changes. I have finally answered the “WHY” question, and got some pretty neat ideas as to the history.

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085196970.0 – Humanity becomes anatomically “modern”

111859672.0 – Humanity becomes dominate life form on planet

118068795.0 – Humanity defines it’s dominant religion

121721219.0 – Humanity starts Gregorian calendar

122378655.0 – Humanity has an industrial revolution

122436115.0 – Humanity begins space exploration

122454626.0 – Humanity receives first confirmed signals from the Lagoon Nebula

122464854.0 – Humanity has first contact with advanced alien race

122464854.3 – Humanity dies.
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For christmas I got some home depot gift cards.. I was very excited because it meant that I would be able to get a bandsaw, something I have been wanting for a while.  The bandsaw was going to basically be free as the giftcards I got would cover it completely, including tax.

Off to home depot I went and I got the Ryobi 9″ bandsaw.  I was happy as a clam — or as happy as clams can be when they are forced to use Ryobi, but thats for another post..

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Something I used to do years ago, and have started to do again was making pens. Wood turning is a lot of fun and you can create some very pretty pens if you take the time. Here is an example of one I made – click for full image;

It’s a fun hobby and I enjoy it – it allows me to be creative on a completely different level than anything a computer could ever give me (Unless I managed to turn one out of wood).
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