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No Justice, so peace

A few weeks back, I cancelled my supers RPG campaign, The Justice Squad. A day or two later, I wrote a very long, detailed, intricate, gut-spewing post about why I…

A few weeks back, I cancelled my supers RPG campaign, The Justice Squad.

A day or two later, I wrote a very long, detailed, intricate, gut-spewing post about why I had done it, how bad I felt, etc., etc., etc.

I didn’t actually publish it, and I’m sort of glad, because I’d already done the intro to that riff in my note to the players, and even that was a bit melodramatic. Games get cancelled. Campaigns get cancelled. Life goes on.

I will GM again. And now, with a few weeks of Not Worrying About It under my belt, I’m in a better position to write down what I’ll do differently next time so that I don’t get into the same bind. Learning from the past — what a concept.

Continue reading “No Justice, so peace”

DLL of Judgment

Ian has a hitherto-unrecorded conversation regarding drawing a new Pattern in Zelazny’s original Amber series: Dworkin: Okay, Obie, if you listen to only one thing your father says, listen to…

Ian has a hitherto-unrecorded conversation regarding drawing a new Pattern in Zelazny’s original Amber series:

Dworkin: Okay, Obie, if you listen to only one thing your father says, listen to this. If you ever have to reinstall the Pattern, make sure you uninstall the old Pattern first.
Oberon: You can’t just install the new one over the old one?
Dworkin: No. I tried that with the screwed up installs I did before I got this one. It gets really messed up. Don’t believe that uninstall thing in the Jewel, either. All it does is remove the icons.

It gets better.

(Apologies to all of my readers who have no idea what this is about. On the other hand, you should be getting used to that here.)

Pattern recognition

One of the illegitimate offspring of King Oberon. Her mother, wife to Prime Minister Orkuz of Begma, had an affair with Amber’s king during a diplomatic visit. Coral is…

coral.gif
One of the illegitimate offspring of King Oberon. Her mother, wife to Prime Minister Orkuz of Begma, had an affair with Amber’s king during a diplomatic visit. Coral is taller than her sister Nayda and the Prime Minister, slender with reddish brown hair. In The Blood of Amber by Roger Zelazny, Coral decides that instead of telling the Pattern where to send her, she would go ahead and let it decide to send her wherever it wanted to. Her curiosity unwittingly opened her up to becoming a pawn between the forces of Order and Chaos.
Which Amberite are you?

Yeah, that’s probably about right. Makes more sense than Oberon, which is the first thing that popped out.

(via Being Frank)

Squirrels

You know how, if you’re lying there in bed, basking in the warmth under the covers, slowly drifting into the arms of Morpheus, your mind can start batting at all…

You know how, if you’re lying there in bed, basking in the warmth under the covers, slowly drifting into the arms of Morpheus, your mind can start batting at all the things you have to do? Slowly at first, like a single mosquito buzzing around your head, then building up in numbers?

Gotta pick up those sprinkler parts this morning after brunch. Huh. Maybe instead of using using that flexi pipe there, I should leave that head intact on that side of the fence, and simply do another split off the line to that side of the fence further on. That would add structural integrity, but it would reduce line pressure, but I could turn each one down, but how far down the line would the new one be, but that would cover that area behind the fence I’m worried about …

Gotta remember to send in that RSVP to the Harvest Auction. Any other bills need doing …?

Damn, didn’t get that prescription refilled yet. Maybe do that this morning after Kitten gets up. Hell, the breakfast table is a mess. Gotta clean that up today. But gotta work on the sprinklers, too. Wonder how long it will take for the PVC pipe fix I’m going to do to cure? Can’t test it until then, don’t want to fill in the hole, so I don’t want to start putting up planks …

Wait, before I put up planks, I should really trim off the top of the fence posts. Glad I found those cheap post caps. Worried about how things are creeping out of true by the retaining wall. Don’t want that to happen to the new fence. What do I do if this gate pulls out of true, too. Like the landscaping ideas Margie and I talked about yesterday. Damn, gotta figure out where to put the retaining wall stones by the driveway. Use that fill dirt from the auger holes. Will that be enough? How long will that take. Gotta borrow Doyce’s truck to get the stones. How costly will that be? Is it going to look okay? Margie’s right, we should convert those sprinklers to a drip system. That’s not going to be easy. Will they really handle being blown out each year? That’s going to be a mess …

Hey, we got those chains yesterday, so we can finish building Katherine’s easel. Before or after sprinklers? Hmmmm. Oh, damn, I remember the other day thinking about redoing my non-blog web pages, been going on two years since I did, oh, hell …

And gotta follow up with Rey about those character concepts. Gotta talk to Randy about that SAS thing. What’s going on next weekend? Oh, yeah, the convention. Huh, what’s going on the rest of this week? Oh, hell, boss-man coming into town …

And then you realize you’re wide awake even before the kid would have gotten you up?

Yeah, I hate that, too.

GMs and Players

This week’s RPG WISH question: What is your idea of the relationship between GM and player? Is the GM a host, an adversary, an enabler…?…

This week’s RPG WISH question:

What is your idea of the relationship between GM and player? Is the GM a host, an adversary, an enabler…?

Continue reading “GMs and Players”

The name’s the thing

Visit the Medieval Names Archive. Good stuff, especially for RPG characters and creative writing. (via Quiddity)…

Visit the Medieval Names Archive. Good stuff, especially for RPG characters and creative writing.

(via Quiddity)

The Big Book of Plots

Here’s a nice little compendium of plot lines you can turn to in a game when you’re stuck for what to do this episode. Of course, sometimes the problem isn’t…

Here’s a nice little compendium of plot lines you can turn to in a game when you’re stuck for what to do this episode.

Of course, sometimes the problem isn’t a shortage of plots.

(via ToaFD)

Word of the Day

PINNACE: \Pin”nace\ n. [F. pinasse; cf. It. pinassa, pinazza, Sp. pinaza; all from L. pinus a pine tree, anything made of pine, e.g., a ship.] 1. (Naut.) (a) A small…

PINNACE: \Pin”nace\ n.
[F. pinasse; cf. It. pinassa, pinazza, Sp. pinaza; all from L. pinus a pine tree, anything made of pine, e.g., a ship.]
1. (Naut.) (a) A small vessel propelled by sails or oars, formerly employed as a tender, or for coast defence; — called originally, spynace or spyne. (b) A man-of-war’s boat.
2. A procuress; a pimp. [Obs.]

And now you know … the rest of the story

Things for the weekend: Friday Borrow Doyce’s truck (and Doyce) to buy the fencing supplies listed below. Consult with him on fencing stuff (he being a fencing expert and all)….

Things for the weekend:

Friday

  • Borrow Doyce’s truck (and Doyce) to buy the fencing supplies listed below. Consult with him on fencing stuff (he being a fencing expert and all). Maybe even do some bit o’ layout of the fence thing.
  • Star Wars RPG tonight. Everyone leveled last time, woo-hoo! And Doyce is going to try some new techniques to try to keep us all on task (as we used to say in the Ed Biz).
  • Figure out when we’re going to watch Firefly.

    Saturday

  • Pre-gathering for delegates to the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado convention coming up next month. Learn the rules, learn the agenda, learn a bit about church politics and the search for the new bishop (that gets decided next spring).
  • Come home and build a fence. Or two. Pictures will (eventually) be posted.
  • Wish Justin a happy birthday.

    Sunday

  • Hey, more morning churchy stuff. Go fig.
  • Since I’ve dropped my Justice Squad game and campaign (more about which some other time, with distance), there’s been talk about some other sort of gaming thang in the afternoon. Either that, or more fence building.

    So, just about as usual. How domestic.

  • Cross-dressing

    This week’s RPG WISH: What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs? UPDATE: Doyce,…

    This week’s RPG WISH:

    What do you think about cross-gender characters (i.e., men playing female characters and women playing male characters)? What about GMs playing them as NPCs?

    UPDATE: Doyce, not surprisingly, does a great job looking at different styles of doing this, including Yours Truly and Wife. Everything else he says about folks there is true.

    Continue reading “Cross-dressing”

    Head bonks

    Not a good morning. Not ‘tall. I go in this morning, after a late, rather stressful evening before, pull up my web page, and … Blank. Nada. Zilch. No content….

    Not a good morning. Not ‘tall.

    I go in this morning, after a late, rather stressful evening before, pull up my web page, and …

    Blank. Nada. Zilch. No content.

    Whiteness loads when you visit.
    The web page is zero length.
    Winter snow has come.

    Quick seach via FTP shows the index, and some of the recent post files, are size=0. Huh?

    I try to copy a file up there. Disk quota exceeded. Wha–?

    I check my e-mail. Nothing comes through. Okay, now I’m suspicious.

    Back in August, I had a similar problem when I was moved at Hosting Matters from the Kronos to the Calliope server. Calliope had an error, reporting back false disk space utilization, and the very helpful HM techies bumped up my quota to double what I was paying for in order to diagnose the problem.

    Well, I’ve kept an eye on things, and I’ve had a reasonable margin of free space since then. I quickly dialed up, hit the control panel — and I showed at 6 Mb over my limit. Damn.

    Hit the HM support page, reopen the old ticket.

    Wait.

    Wait.

    Wait.

    HM has been so good about getting back to me within an hour that when it doesn’t happen, the wait feels interminable. So finally, around 11, I opened a new ticket, thinking that their system might be not highlighting the one I’d opened.

    So, of course, a few seconds later, as soon as I go back and check the old ticket again, there’s been an answer to it.

    HM upgraded their system software in various ways last night, on my server, and one of the results was that a bunch of files that hadn’t been included in the disk quota previously, now suddenly were. Eep!

    So I’ve upgraded my hosting plan (again), and thing are beginning to flow smoothly. (The HM techie who addressed my problem actually bumped up my quota slightly so that mail would stop being interrupted, bless her, and the sales folks got my quota increased in the new plan from the time I left work to the time I got home.)

    I’d wrote a bunch of stuff offline this morning, between phone calls and e-mail and this-n-that. For example, I did a nice little bit about Katherine dropping her pacifier into the washing machine (“Binkie!”), a biting note about the custody battle between two lesbians who adopted a child (conservatives, by denying marriage and adoption by couples to gays throw both adults and kids in this situation into a legal twilight zone, where none of the laws apply, and no precedents have been set; they then bitch about judicial activism and the need for new concepts like “psychological parent”), a stinging rebuke about the Bushies’ unwillingness to cooperate with the congressional intel committees looking at failures pre-9/11 (claiming that folks are too busy fighting the War on Terrorism does no good if you’re trying to find out if people are competent to fight it in the first place) and a few other things.

    And then I managed to close the window I was doing it in, losing the frelling posts.

    Not that today wasn’t already tense enough, both with a big presentation to upper IT management being done by my boss (written by me) on what my department does, and with the prospect of fall-out from a blog post/e-mail I sent out late last night to some folks about a difficult decision I’d been struggling with for a while (which decision was causing me sleepless nights, etc.).

    Of course, that blog post and the MT-generated notification e-mail never went out. So I got the opportunity to send it out again. Which, I suppose, is an adequate start at penance for something.

    Character study

    It’s this week’s Game WISH. How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or…

    It’s this week’s Game WISH.

    How do you like to build character backgrounds? Do you think they are important or not? Do you prefer to write an elaborate background, or fill in later? Do you find character quizzes like the one in the ADRPG or related exercises like the round of questions in Everway character development to be useful?

    Continue reading “Character study”

    Mood music

    This week’s WISH Question for RPGs: How do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?…

    This week’s WISH Question for RPGs:

    How do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

    Continue reading “Mood music”

    Lazy Frickin’ Slug

    There are two things I should do this evening. First, I should work on my Justice Squad game in two weeks, in particular thrashing out the SAS D20 rules. Really,…

    There are two things I should do this evening.

    First, I should work on my Justice Squad game in two weeks, in particular thrashing out the SAS D20 rules. Really, I should. This has been on my list for a while, not to mention all weekend.

    Second, we bought a keyboard today. As in a “little electronic piano” keyboard. (Amazingly inexpensive, I note parenthetically.) We bought a keyboard for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that we’re leading the music at an Evensong Service on 11 September evening, and we desperately need something to learn the music. We should work on that, too.

    But y’know what? I cleaned the frickin’ garage this afternoon, throwing stuff out, rearranging stuff, organizing stuff, sweeping stuff, and generally making the place 99.9% ready to park my frickin’ car inside it for the first time in a year, the only thing remaining being donating some stuff to a Good Cause on Tuesday.

    So I’m tired. And a little sore. And tired. And, dammit, I deserve to just blow off the evening reading. Or playing Quake II. Or even (bwah-ha-ha) both!

    So there.

    The Organization Man I

    Over the weekend, Margie and I both did some reorganizing of our various RPG character sheets, notes, etc….

    Over the weekend, Margie and I both did some reorganizing of our various RPG character sheets, notes, etc.

    Continue reading “The Organization Man I”

    Whoosh!

    This weekend has turned out to be a huge RPG fest for us. Friday night was Doyce’s normal Star Wars campaign. Today we play Oriental Adventures. And yesterday ……

    This weekend has turned out to be a huge RPG fest for us. Friday night was Doyce’s normal Star Wars campaign. Today we play Oriental Adventures. And yesterday …

    Continue reading “Whoosh!”

    This is also probably meaningful

    Once upon a time, RPG meetings I was in were noteworthy for three things. First, good gaming. Second, good times with friends. Third, good God, the amount of chips and…

    Once upon a time, RPG meetings I was in were noteworthy for three things.

    First, good gaming.

    Second, good times with friends.

    Third, good God, the amount of chips and beer we consumed.

    Lots of Doritos. Lots of Nacho Cheese Doritos. A goodly number of regular potato chips. Dip and salsa. And, for special treats, cookies and brownies. Oh, and bowls of M&Ms.

    Folks would arrive with chips, as well as a sixpack — sometimes of soda, usually of beer. And most of it would be consumed by the end of the day/evening. Lots of dead soldiers, watching over the dead orcs.

    Last night, at Doyce’s Star Wars RPG …

    I drank one beer. And drank ice water the rest of the night.

    Everyone else drank soda, or water, or (in one case) a (shudder) Red Bull (on the rocks).

    We had a yummy relatively healthful dinner up front, courtesy of Doyce (at the grill) and Jackie (at the store and propane place). And that was it. One lonely bag of chips came out, late in the game, was nibbled on sans salsa, by some of the players. The ones who weren’t on various diets, or just full.

    Not a complaint, mind you, certainly not at the hospitality or the provender provided. Just sort of an interesting observation about how … well, how we’re all, er, getting, ah, more mature. That’s it. More mature.

    Well I think it’s interesting.

    This is probably meaningful

    I got home a little after Midnight from Doyce’s D20 Star Wars game (at which much fun was, as usual, had). Margie had not really slept much since the winds…

    I got home a little after Midnight from Doyce’s D20 Star Wars game (at which much fun was, as usual, had).

    Margie had not really slept much since the winds had been keeping her awake.

    Nonetheless, even after some long weeks and a post-Midnight sleep time, we both ended up waking up more or less spontaneously around 6:30 a.m.

    For Margie, it was just sort of force of habit from waking up then fairly regularly with Kitten, concerns about the day, etc.

    With me it was a continuation of pondering over D20 Silver Age Sentinals character conversion for my supers campaign.

    Take that for what you will.

    Significant Others

    Some others I know have been doing the Gaming WISH questions, and, being ever the trend-following in such things, I’m going to slowly play catch-up on them, starting with this…

    Some others I know have been doing the Gaming WISH questions, and, being ever the trend-following in such things, I’m going to slowly play catch-up on them, starting with this one, No. 9. For those who don’t do RPGs, move along, nothing to see here …

    Continue reading “Significant Others”

    Tholiday Thursday

    It’s time for The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler….

    It’s time for The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler.

    Continue reading “Tholiday Thursday”