However, I cannot in good conscience put Avatar anywhere near my top sci fi movies. I hate exposition being forced down my throat. Of course the [disabled] guy is gonna be the hero. Of course the idealistic and shapely tree hugging creatures are gonna win. Of course big business is apparently the devil and burns trees to make money. Of course the [%#&$!] scientist is gonna turn out to have a devil-may-care attitude and a hidden heart of gold. I fucking get it. The entire time the movie just said to me “HERE’S HOW YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO FEEL NOW, DIPSHIT!”

Avatar was a fucking high school play of Fern Gully as far as I was concerned.

The initial date I gave for putting out Empyrean material was a bit ambitious, despite the fact that most of the setting material is already written. Empyrean is a game that Derek Swirsky & I developed six or seven years ago for a home campaign. It started out as a setting for Traveller; later we wrote rules. As luck would have it, we used a percentile system — making converting a lot of the material to EP extremely easy.

However, we got a bit ahead of ourselves and underestimated the amount of time we’d be spending on other projects. I’ve been spending a huge amount of time on Eclipse Phase, so getting to the task of editing Empyrean has been rough. That said, Derek & I remain committed to releasing Empyrean material, and we still plan to port it to the EP system. At this time we don’t have any set release dates, but I do hope that we’ll be able to put something out by the end of 2010.

Thanks for all of your interest and encouragement.