FRIDAY
Fairly pleasant day, as I recall now. The original evening plan had been for Jackie’s Necropolis game, which would be the giant “We’re all going to die” battle. Instead, we ended up playing Wit & Wisdom, which is essentially Fictionary/Balderdash for aphorisms and sayings from other cultures. Some of us had great fun, others not so much. Since I collect that sort of thing, it was certainly my cuppa. Not surprisingly, I’m the one that bought it for Jackie for her birthday …
SATURDAY
Margie took Katherine off to dance class. Haven’t mentioned dance class yet, have I. Down at the rec center, Saturdays at 9. Since one of us always up by then (with Kitten), it’s not a big schedule issue. And there’s nigh on nothing quite as cute as a gaggle (say 16 or so) 3-4-year-olds in pink/purple/black leotards and tutus, whirling about the room like giggling leaves.
As for me? My sleep-in day, o blessed sleep-in day …
… interrupted by a phone call at 9 a.m. from Doyce (not his fault, and 9 is not an unreasonable number, though I tend to wait until 10 to call folks on weekends, even if I know they’re early risers). Did we want to do the Necropolis thang today? Sure.
So that’s what we did, cunningly scheduling two hours before the scheduled Chrysalis get-together (which nearly all the same folk). Of course, we dawdled around for close to an hour. Then, of course, the Huge Melee took more like four hours.
After it was over, with nobody on our side quite dead (but with significant collateral damage to stuff in the room), Doyce decided to bag the Nobilis game. He headed home, and Stan (who’d come over for that, and instead gotten to watch a couple of hours of D&D melee) and Randy and Margie and I watched some episodes of Blackadder III.
SUNDAY
We skipped church, since Margie was bone tired (still getting over her bug), and Kitten was down with the sniffles. That didn’t net me any extra sleep-in, since Kitten was up at 5:30a, crawling in bed with us, which lasted about 25 minutes before I went downstairs with her.
The Chrysalis game was moved to Sunday afternoon, and, ultimately, started. Tremendous entertainment, as Margie and I both assumed NPC roles for goodly chunks of time (Stan’s daughter and mysterious fiancee).
That broke up in time for folks to head home for Alias, and we had a relatively quiet evening, until I noticed that it was 10:30p already and I still had some cleaning to do.
And, of course, Katherine — who had been bouncy hyper-girl all day (when she wasn’t dissolving into dissapointed sobs that someone had said “No” or “Later” to her) was hit by more buggage during the night, waking up around 2:30a with a fever and general not-feel-goods. Which meant we got to wake up then, too, to indictments of “You and Mommy gave me your germs!”
So I’m home with Kitten today, working from here. Amazingly enough, all of a sudden my IPSec VPN connection is working, which is a lot handier than the all-or-nothing PPTP VPN connection I’ve been having to use. Good stuff.
Other items of interest for the coming week are traveling out to Faerie for brief vacation time and long business meetings, and work on the Nobilis Lexicon of the Lost 500 Years project, which, so far (one entry) has been a blast — and which has renewed in me a desire to play with Wiki stuff even more.
You know, I’ve somehow missed Wikis in my 15 years online, and the use of them for these Lexicons is fascinating.
I don’t know how to put a Wiki together, but the hyperlinked document is an idea I’m going to use for myself, sort of a NaNoWriMo for my gaming world, with an entry a night…
I would strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to find some Wiki software to do that in. Wiki is designed around the whole idea of heavily hyperlinked intertwined documents, and does a hell of a lot of the work itself.
So, for example, as you’re writing a page on topic A, you can create cross-references to topic B on the fly. If B is already in there, the link is live and ready to rock. If B hasn’t been written yet, it shows up as a phantom entry; as soon as you create that B entry, all the previously listed ones become live links to it. Plus, you can easily see a list of all the pages that reference B. Sweetness.
I did an extensive set of pages (since taken down) for my supers campaign a few years back, using Front Page. Lists of all the known (for campaign purposes) metahumans, groups, history, etc., all heavily hyperlinked. A lot easier in FP than it would have been in raw HTML, but in a Wiki it would have been little more effort than the actual writing of the material. If I weren’t mostly using modules, I’d use it in a heartbeat for my Spycraft campaign (and may still do so, as an experiment).
There are some (I’m told — Doyce can point you in their direction) that run self-contained on a PC, then spew out HTML when you need it, so you don’t have to actually install the Wiki software online. I’m looking at trying one out as a game aid, Wiki-ing a particular module to let me easily cross-reference the info there.
It’s worth taking a few days to dig into this. The result will more than justify it, I think.
Poor Kitten.
There is only so much fever that grapes can compensate for (zoom, zoom, zoom). Is the fever up as much as it was that afternoon, or did the uckiness part just kick in last night?
At least she knew who was at fault for her sudden sickness.
It read a little lower than in the afternoon. Still higher than I’d like to see, of course.
I direct you to the Easiest Installable Wiki Contest on Wikipedia (one of the largest and best-supported public wiki’s).
In particular:
Eddie’s Wiki is nice and simple: A WikiClone written in C++ – available for download as free “postcardware” (with source) here. IT’s completely self-contained – and even includes its own HTTP server so it doesn’t require CGI support, Perl, or even a separate Web server such as Apache or IIS — it just… runs. It doesn’t use a database to store the Wiki pages, but instead uses a separate file for each page (which is simply a text file containing the content of the page). Good stuff, really meant to be a single-person wiki — heck, you could run it from a memory stick. All it requires is a Win32 OS.
Also, in my defense of Saturday’s phone call: the wakee is usually sitting somewhere in the house with a phone at the ready to field calls. 🙂
Ive downloaded Eddie’s Wiki. The interface isn’t as robust as, say, the PHPWiki I’m used to, but for note-taking-on-the-computer kind of thing, it’s pretty sweet. And the price is free and the installation is pretty simple.