Here’s my Making, Enjoying, Reading, Playing entry for the week ending April 3rd, 2009. Use the comments to share your own MERP, if you’re of a mind.

Making:
I’ve got several little client projects going, and I continue to work intermittently on tutorials from the Painter X Wow! Book, trying to turn myself into a decent digital artiste. In that department I haven’t completed anything shareworthy this week, though. I did create a fun (and I think rather clever) entry for the S7S Logo Remix contest, and that felt good.

I’m also working bit-by-bit on the Vegas After Midnight writing assignment that David Moore and I agreed to each complete by next Thursday – which is to choose our picks for the ten most essential flavor characters and also the ten most essential locations or objects to go into the VAM book, and to support our choices by writing our rationale for them. I’ve got the elements chosen and some sketchy notes on most of them, now it’s a matter of fleshing out the rationale. It’s interesting, because I’m discovering that I find certain things essential that I once didn’t really care much about, and a couple of things that were once linchpins of the setting are now really not all that significant in terms of creating a framework for play groups to build situations upon. It’ll be interesting to see what David comes up with, too. I’m hoping this is going to re-ignite our drive to get this thing hammered out, and I have a feeling it will.

Enjoying:
I enjoyed this past week’s offerings of The Mentalist and Castle (2 new eps of that, actually). They have a similar premise, with the cops being helped by a non-cop with peculiar insight into the nature of people, and the interesting sexual tension between the male non-cop and the female cop lead characters. But although both shows offer similar popcorn-escapism fun, I still like each of them for their subtle differences in approach.

I also loved Friday Night Lights, and I though last week’s new eps of The Office and 30 Rock were very enjoyable, but the truth is, those shows please me so consistently that it sort of becomes moot to highlight them.

So I’ll close with what I though was the most surprising entertainment gem of the week, which was last Thursday’s episode of Smallville. I have been watching Smallville for nearly its whole run, but I won’t pretend to suggest that I actually think it is a consistently good show. However, the one that aired last Thursday (though I didn’t watch it until Sunday) was simply one of the best episodes that I’ve seen in a long long time. Lots of good Chloe Sullivan content – and I happen to think she’s the heart of the show – along with some great stuff in the Lois and Clark department, another cool appearance by the always-enjoyable Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, and a really satisfying payoff at the end that gives Chloe a whole new direction and purpose that I really liked.

Reading:
Last night I finished Mainspring by Jay Lake. At this point it is too fresh in my brain for me to give a full review, but I think in the end I’m going to be able to sum it up by saying that I think I just wasted the last two weeks of my fiction-reading life. It really was just never as good as I wanted it to be. But for some reason I kept reading it, even though I can say without reservation that I felt even less engaged by its characters or its setting than I did China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station – and that was a book I chose not to finish. So why did I stick with Mainspring? Right now, I really don’t know. Thus all I can say is, I’ll share my thoughts when I have them more well-formed.

Playing:
I’m still involved in a play-by-email adventure of Witchunter with Daniel Perez, Josh Hoade, and Chris Engler. There are moments of brilliance and awesomeness. I love the characters, I’m intrigued by where Daniel seems to be taking the story, and the setting and premise are fairly engaging. In fact I have no doubt that if I were regularly playing this game at a table with these guys, I’d consider it one of the best rpg experiences of my life. As it stands, it is still pretty enjoyable when we get rolling – but real-life seems to be very consistently getting in the way of our ability to keep it rolling.

On the other hand, the Witchunter game is a model of consistency when compared to the vacuous void of non-play that has been plaguing the Canoneers for the past several weeks. Our PDQ Argonauts game play-window has passed us by, so we’ve gotta move on to our next game: Primetime Adventures with Erin and David Moore. I’m crossing my fingers and looking forward to this big-time, hopin that the ducks all get into a row and we can actually bang out four or five episodes of whatever we decide to do for our TV series. It’s looking like space-opera of some sort at this point, but I’ll let you know next week what the more specific premise is, assuming we are able to gather on Tuesday night as scheduled.

I was also supposed to run Spirit of the Century for the Gutter Skypes this past Wednesday, but I had a very sick WildLion on my hands and Anim5 had real estate to sell – although I’m not entirely sure that wasn’t a joke on his part. In any case, we’re postponing that.

So, when it comes down to it, my “play” for the past week has consisted mostly of the campaign of Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies that I’m playing all by myself in my mind.

So, that’s my MERP week. How ’bout you?

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