Yea, yea, I didn't post nuffin' yesterday, but the day was packed and I was beat, so gimme a break. Today, I'm just awfully, awfully sleepy. Fifteen minutes ago, I almost fell asleep with my head on the keyboard. Scary.

At least there's little reason to miss California right now. Oslo's hotter than L.A., the sun's beating down, and it's a real nightmare trying to work without air-conditioning. The window's wide open, but it's not helping: The heat is tyrannical. Phew. (Of course, Californian girls are hard to beat, the food's cheaper, people are nicer, shopping is a lot more fun, and the cinemas sport subzero temperatures, so, to be honest, L.A.'s got the upper hand by a good margin.)

Coupla things going on right now. I just started working on the non-player characters (i.e. the people you meet on Rubi-Ka who aren't controlled by other players) in Anarchy Online. We're rewriting most of the dialogue, and adding a lot of information about the planet and its history and current events - partly to move more of the story into the game, partly to compensate for the fact that a lot of the NPCs currently in the game are just dull. Deadly dull. And dumb. The plan is also to update the NPCs on a regular basis, to include recent events and changes in the game-world. It's an ambitious project - headed by the multi-talented Bjørn Arve Lagim, also responsible for the kick-ass music in both The Longest Journey and AO - which ties into an upcoming interface-modification related to NPC chat. It'll be a while before these changes take effect, but keep posted; there's much more to come.

Aside from that, we're also approaching an important deadline in regards to what's next for Funcom. A lot of people keep asking me what's up with Midgard, an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game we started working on a good while back. In fact, that question popped up during several Shadowlands presentations at this year's E3. Midgard was put on hold back in September, so that we could focus our attentions exclusively on AO (and it's a good thing we did, because AO was in desperate need of some good lovin'). Things have changed and settled down, however, and with the huge AO team now split between the expansion pack and patches, it's time to think about the future. Like I told journalists at E3, by the end of the summer we'll hopefully be able to make a decision about Midgard. Don't worry, though: Anarchy Online, the expansion pack, and the live updates will remain our number one focus for the conceivable future, no matter what happens.

Oh, and it's finally looking as though the revised and updated TLJ site will go live soon. Yay us. I'll post a notice when that happens.

...and there's more. But it'll have to wait. There's pressing business to be done. And I still plan to post an account of my oh-so-exciting trip to SoCal later this week. With pictures! Crazy!  ¶ 15:42