Busy November

As you saw I was totally inactive at last month. Lot of things happened with me and my family.

Lets start with the most important: my wife is pregnant. Again. The doctors predicted the "Third One" to the end of May. Our small flat will be really crowded. Not just only with baby cry, but with 3 children.

I finished my short short story for the contest, but I was not entirelly happy with it. I think I had a very good core idea, but the 22,000 characters were too less. Unfortunatelly I left the spice from it because of the thickening the story. I had too much expectation about it, but it was good for start. Maybe next time.

I don't statisfied with my other running projects as well. I won't finish the translation of Sacred 2 this year. My boardgame designing project also stranded. Borned new ideas, but nothing serious.

Last week I bought a boardgame, which was on my wishlist for a while: Tales of the Arabian Nights.

My colleauges invited me to a Basketball Business League, so I has been playing to basketball championship this year. Due to the late night match schedules it doesn't cause any problem to my family. (My daughter has 2-2 ballet-dancing and swimming course a week, which is also modified our family calendar.)

I hope December will be much untroubled and not so busy.

Projects

I have admit I quite lazy about doing things. Mostly I like spent my sparetime with passive thing with watching series/film or reading books. But I'm running some projects pararell in my active sparetime, and I'd like to tell some words about them in my blog. I put it them different categories.

Boardgame

Because my whole family is a gameboad geek nest, it's almost obvious I'll try to do something like that. In my previous post I wrote about the bedtime tales spiced with a small portion roll/role-playing. I came to the conclusion I'd like to improve it further, with creating a map, with random events and 'children-friendly monsters'. It's a little bit funny, because many bad, horrible thing happens in the tales. There you can find hereos and the enemies of the heroes (villains, monsters, other bad things). There are many confrontations which have to solve with force or use of the cunningness of the mind. I'd like to implements these items and factors to my boardgame. I'm in the very beginning of it, but I have many good ideas and concepts.

Translation

At the past I translated many computer games from English to Hungarian. Translating things to my native language is not so hard thing, it only depends on the understanding of the original texts, and write them on Hungarian. Usually I have freedom enough to from the things as I'd like. There were some non-official translation (I did them voluntary without any payment from anyone) where I didn't translate everything words by words, and I Hungarising the texts not translating.

My last official translation was the Sacred 2: Fallen Angel, which is an Diablo-clone. The creators of the game were German, which means the original texts were German too. First the developers translated the texts to English then sent them to the translators of many countries to modify the texts to their language such as French, Italian or Hungarian. It was interesting because we got the original German texts are well, and we saw there are many difference compared to the English. So we had some hard, cumbersome time with the translation of the game, but the final product was really great. At the end my colleauge and me translated nearly 1 million English words to Hungarian.

Unfortunatelly the Hungarian distributor didn't agreed the term of distributing of the expansion of the game, so you can't buy Sacred 2 Ice & Blood and Gold from the local shops. We didn't get any support from the developers of th troubled company. We had offered them to translated the texts of the expansion for free, if we got translation tools but they refused.

But a German team wanted to pimp the game for the fans. They added to the game new monsters, quests and texts which means they've got a translation tool. Fortunatelly I got it from them, so I can export and import the texts I like. Now I'm at the 2/3 of the texts of the expansion. I hope I'll finish it this year.

(Here you can find my 'translategraphy')

Novell

I deceided to participate a novell-writing contest. I have to write a short novell with 5000-20000 words in fantasy or sci-fi genre, but in western style (like Firefly). In the story itself must be a sheriff, a priest and a dynamite. I almost finished with it, but there lot things to do with it. BUT, I knowing myself well enough to rewrite the story every time, when I look into it.

Bedtime tales... in my own way

I usually tell bedtime tales to my children. I used to read something from a book, or projecting something from my childhood collection, I had many classic tales from famous writters as Grimm, Andersen or from the Hungarian folklore. We - my wife and me - projected them the slide show with my nearly 20-years-old Russian projektor. But found something new...

I have started to tell them the classi bedtime stories in my own way, which means I spiced the tales with rolling dice. When I'm telling them the story of Little Red Ridding Hood, there is the possibility the little girl found another animal in the woods. And after a successful diceroll she miss the encounter, or it turns out the another animal is just a rabbit (not from the movie Monthy Python and the Holy Grail.) :)

The kids enjoy very much these kind of tales. They like rolling the colorful dice. I have many tiny 6-sided dice in many colors, as I have d4, d10, d12, d20 and d100 as well. So I have many opportunity to change the way of the tales. I think - in that way - the line is very thin between the roll-playing game and role-playing game. After I have finished a tale I mix the dice, and suggest to my daughter and son to collect together the same colors as Cinderella did in the tale. 

Unfortunately my wife doesn't like these kind of games, and kids are too young for a complex game yet, but maybe about 2-3 years later they will play with me. Maybe not Dungeons & Dragons or M.A.G.U.S, but something similar rpg.

A little bit strange, but my wife loves my stories which I tell the children. I'm trying to not put freaky or too bad things to the tales. But I think many tales of Grimm and the Hungarian folklore are simple horror stories. They can frighten the children.

What do you think about the horror content of the classic bedtime tales? What do you think about my 'new-style-bedtime-storytelling'?

My reading habits and opportunties

I love books and I love to reading books. But... But I also love many other things to do. So this is just one of the cause why I read less than 15 years ago.

It's started when I was 5 years old. I read the tales from the books to the other children at the kindergarten. I was very proud I can read before my primary school years. I have many story-book with numerous tales from Hungarian and foreign authors (Andersen, Grimm, La Fontaine, etc.)

In my primary years time I read many books and cartoons. The books from my parents collection, mostly are historycal fictions and non-fictions, books from Karl May, Jules Verne and what could I find the selves. But I never weary of tales...

I was nine when I read one of the most famoust Hungarian historical book of the brave deffenders of Castle of Eger. The Hungarian title of it 'Egri csillagok", but it get German (Sterne von Eger) and English (Eclipse of the Crescent Moon) traslation also. I found an English wikipedia link about this book. I loved it!

I spend the summers with reading my childhood. I couldn't do too much things at my village, and it was the main reason of I read 15-20 books every summer. But I played football with my friends when we have oportunity under the blue sky.

As I remember I got my first fantasy book at age 14. It was the Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman. These 3 books were amazing to me! I couldn't put them down, because of the strange races, mystical magic, sorcery, the fights and the great adventure.

And maybe that time discovered the "fighting-fantasy" books also. I was the hero of the story in dangerouos dungeons, fight against orks, goblins and other mosters rolling the dice. Many of my friends draw maps to these dungeons, because some of them are so hard to easy to lost the right way. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone made really great job this interactive stories. I have to admit sometimes I cheat a little bit...

After this golden era the computers spoiled my reading life, and stole many of my precious time from the books. But I was happy because I find many great computer games, like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, X-wing series and car racings. These games helped a lot to learn English (which is far from the perfect due to my laziness), and know better the beauty of fantasy worlds.

I read less, but due to my friends I found the books of John Caldwell (István Nemes) about the half-ork priest-warrior, Skandar Graun. These stories were quity funny and easy to read category.

I met the books of foreign authors too. R. A. Salvatore pulpfictions, the books about world of Forgotten Realms, and after I met the works the real, hi-fantasy authors...

George R. R. Martin opened a whole new chapter in my life with the A Song of Ice and Fire series at the beginning of 2001. I couldn't imagine before the real meaning of fantasy books. His thick tome of The game of thrones was a very big suprise to me. As I read GRRM's books I wanted read more from him, and this leads to read my first book in English. It was the A Feast for Crows, which wasn't as easy reading as I had expected.

It was the time when I widening my interest towards other great authors, like Steven Erikson, Robin Hobb, Stephen King and others.

Unfortunatelly my freetime drastically reduced. The work, the family (with two children), my translation activition, playing boardgames, watching movies and series... So, not easy to organize my life, but - I hope - with the growing up the young ones my sparetime will increase.