This coming sunday, October 6th, is Mad Hatter Day, at least in the US. (Mad Hatter day is June 10th in countries that use European-style dates. Or European-style raisins...)
By using this same logic, we have determined that those other countries celebrate St. Valentine's Day, Halloween, and Christmas only once every two to three years. (The second day of the fourteenth month, the 10th day of the 31st month, and the 12th day of every other december, respectively.)
Luckily for us, all countries celebrate President's Day on the same day, thanks to Nixon's foresight.
Everyone in the world celebrates New Year's Day on the same day (that being the first day of the new year), even those pesky Chinese and the wacky people on the other side of the International Relationship Line.
Which is not, despite rumors to the contrary, any more or less a "hot" line than any other imaginary boundary that happens to cross the equator (including the equator itself). Or Ecuador. So all those who keep calling should stop being so surprised when you don't get free phone sex.
Thank you. Please move along. Fnord. Nothing to see here.
Well, we had our Halloween party here Friday night. It went pretty well, although people didn't really start showing up until nearly an hour and a half after the stated time.
None of my friends from the old game group came, but that's OK because I never actually got around to sending formal invitations (informal invitations, however, were sent and recieved).
I picked up Games of Divinity, which has got me back in an Exalted frame of mind. The upcoming Lunar book is sure to make that worse.
Of course, I'm also floating back into an Amber frame of mind, which rereading Doyce Testerman's Things in Heaven and Earth doesn't help at all.
On the plus side, I think we are going to start a round-robin system for the Friday games to replace Huntington. That should let us get some of these other games out of our system (or at least give them a fair chance to build a following).
The system works thusly:
Every five sessions, we take a vote. One of the options on the list is to continue the current game (as long as the GM is willing to continue running).
Each person can, if desired, propose one game that they are willing to run. These are automatically eligible to be voted upon. They may also offer up one game that they are hoping that someone else will run. Those are only eligible for voting upon if someone else will claim them. (Thus, if you want to be sure a game gets a chance to be run, it's really best to offer running it yourself).
Once the list of options is complete, each person in the group ranks the candidates according to their order of preference. This is basically a popularity vote: you do not have to vote for EVERY option, just the ones you are actually interested in. So, if there are four games offered, but I only really care about two of them, I can prioritize only those two entries and leave my last two entries blank.
Then, you add up the votes using what amounts to a Borda Count system. (It looks complex, but it's really simple. In my example, if I ranked a certain game first place, it would get four points, and the game I ranked second would get three points. The other two games would get no points from me because I omitted them, but if I hadn't, they'd have gotten 2 points and 1 point for third and fourth place respectively.
The proposal that gets the most points, when all of the players votes are added up, wins.
Over the weekend I had two thanksgiving dinners.
The first was on Friday with my mom and my brother and sister and their assorted menageries, during which I basically watched parts of Star Wars Episode II three times (due to various interruptions and people arriving and such). We also worked out Randy's character for Exalted.
The second was Jenna's dinner hosted here at my place. Lots of people came, and since most of them brought food, we managed to actually exceed the amount of food that was at my family dinner. We definitely exceeded the amount of soft drink, because Ray and Stacy bought something like 50 billion 2-liters. Well, perhaps that's a slight exaggeration, but it was a large number. ^_^x
I wound up watching Mike's copy of Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust after we ate dinner -- beautiful animation, and inspiring for Exalted, but sadly it was the horrid English-dub only version -- and I got into some Lightwave discussion with Ray. Everyone seemed to have a good time.
Obsidian Requiem starts this Friday. I have (finally) started adding material to the campaign web page. I have lots of ideas, but nothing is completely coherent yet. I haven't got all of the PC's info yet.
My teefs hurt. I really need to find some dental insurance so I can go have my last two Wisdom teeth out. (Along with at least one other tooth.)
I got approximately 1 hour of sleep last night. My roommate woke me up to get a jump, which turned out to be most likely unnecessary. I then spent the next hour and a half trying to get back to sleep. Since I had only four hours to sleep in the first place, I wound up getting up and now I'm sitting here on the computer typing this and cooking some food. And I'll be at school until 5:30, with a game tonight. bleh.
Memo to self: extra minutes on your phone cost $0.35/min (or more), not $0.05/min. Two hour conversations during the week, which produce $70 phone bills, are a bad idea.
Memo to people I know: Avoid calling me on weekdays (except for emergencies), for the next two weeks.
Memo to T-Mobile: Your website sucks, and your voicemail system is only marginally passable. They were better under Voicestream.
So, I went to see Two Towers last night.
It was pretty cool. One of my friends is manager at one of the local cinemas, and the paper announced that they were holding a midnight preview showing of the film. (They hadn't been planning to, but they wound up holding it anyway.)
Since he was getting off around then, and since the theatre was going to be open anyway, myself, him, and his wife, plus two employees of the theatre, got to use a second screen to watch it by ourselves. No crowds of fanboys quoting incessantly in the rows around you.
I felt that the movie was very impressive. Since I'm presently running Exalted, I kept thinking how cool the imagery was for that setting.
The one thing that I was ambivalent about is Gollum's character design. Mostly, I didn't like his Pretty-boy-blue eyes. But then again, they probably make him more human (or hobbit-like). The Ents (specifically treebeard) weren't entirely convincing at times ... they moved too stiffly, even for Ents.
It's been a while since I've updated, mostly due to laziness. Here's a bit of what has been going on...
I planned to write an update early in February, after the loss of Columbia, but the feelings were just too raw. Once I got those emotions squared away, I never got around to doing it.
An ice storm rolled through here on February 15th-16th. I had just gone to the grocery to pick up a few things to eat, as well as Unreal 2 and Unreal Tourney 2003. I was awake at 6 am when the power went out due to a blown transformer. The next day, I woke up to find out that our utility pole had also been snapped when a tree fell on the high tension wires.
School was closed for two days, and on a delay for another day. Since it took 8 days to restore power and cable TV to our house (Sunday 6 am to Sunday 10 pm), I more or less wrote that week off as far as school was concerned, and hung out at mom's for a few days. It took an additional week and a half to get our internet access back. It took until last Friday to get the phone line put back up (we don't use the land line here, so Alltel didn't seem to be in any hurry to do it). The broken utility pole was still in our yard until this past Tuesday. There are still large piles of branches on the curb of a our street, at this house and others.
The war started. I support the soldiers, but not the war. I certainly have no love or respect for Bush, who seems determined to pick a fight in the wrong way for all the wrong reasons, and am anxiously awaiting my chance to vote him the hell out of office. I think a lot of American adults are behaving like children ("Freedom Fries"? Grow the hell up.) I am steadfastly avoiding war news as much as possible, because it just pisses me off.
Aside from that, I'm pretty much going to school and stuff.
Obsidian Requiem is currently on temporary hiatus. We reached the end of Act I, and Chris wanted to run his Mutants and Masterminds game for a few consecutive sessions so that people will get into it before we start alternating, which gave me a chance to delay my game until Abyssals was released. The game should get rolling again around April 18th. Act II will introduce a second layer of the story taking place in the Underworld concurrently with the first part of the story, with completely new characters (Abyssals, heroic ghosts, etc.) ... I'm shooting for "the story from another angle".
Apparently, the reason that our internet access is out is because Insight "detected a signal leak or ingress in violation of FCC regulations" at the house during their recent maintenance, so in order to prevent interference from aircraft and other such, they installed a filter on the line.
So we've been offline for nearly a week, not because of the upgrades, but because they decided to simply cut our access. Which is fine and all (assuming that this isn't "excuse #19"), but they told us about this by mail, so it took us DAYS to find out about it. And they apparently can't schedule someone to fix the problem until Friday.
Personally, I think they should have put the filter on, walked over to the house, told someone what they had done and why, then immediately asked when it would be convenient for us to have them fix the problem (right then being a valid choice). If nobody was there (unlikely) then they should have left a note.
I would like to reiterate how much I hate and despise cable internet access. Never had anywhere near this many outages, nor this level of customer non-service with DSL. And it was pretty much the same speed to boot, and had less issues with security. If Pete hadn't insisted on keeping his present cable modem account when we moved in, and if we had an actual need for a land phone line (or DSL didn't require a land account), then I'd be on DSL right now.
In other news, I saw Matrix Reloaded last night. Didn't have the problems with it that some people did. Also didn't really think it was Gods Gift to Hollywood. It was entertaining and had some interesting points to make. The anime influence on the plot (and action) was more apparent here than in the first movie.
Just pointing out that the Obsidian Requiem and Delphinium lists are recieiving most of the updates at the moment.
And that I'm up way too late, considering that I have to work tomorr- err, this afternoon. Well, that's what happens when most of my day gets sucked up by fixing the problems caused by making a Movable Type upgrade. Or more accurately, by WS_FTPle's b0rked ASCII/binary transfer modes.
I downloaded the extremely cool Matrix Reloaded 3d screensaver. I'll post a link later; too tired right now to bother to look it up.
Friday we had a 4th of July cookout/viewing of Tron and B5, in lieu of the regular friday game. A fun time was had by all that attended.
(Mutants and Masterminds will return next week, then the final session of Exalted — for now — the week after. Then another M&M, and finally the chargen session for Delphinium and Larkspur on August 1st.)
Then last night I attended the annual cookout for my old game group. Had a good time with that, as always. There were some truly huge fireworks at that one (an entire 1×1x2 box that was one firework, for example).
Not much going on right now. Getting reading to start the Delphinium game Friday after next, and Lurking in Shadows next Monday.
The latter page is getting most of the updates right now.
Nifty new feature in Second Life.
OK, technically it's not IN SL, per se…
When I'm bored and happen to remember to do it, I read webcomics. I'd read them more often (since I'm bored fairly easily) but I'm forgetful. So, for the most part, I only actually remember to read webcomics that happen to have RSS feeds that work unless I've just recently started reading them.
Some stuff that I read fairly regularly:
Gunnerkrigg Court - Spacemonauts!
Wapsi Square - My favorite character is Katherine Gilchrist
Some comics I read more occasionally:
Penny Arcade - Often funny, but often too crass for my tastes.
Short Packed - Similar to PA.
El Goonish Shive - I prefer warped over crass, yup.
Dresden Codak - Just discovered this one. It has Tiny Carl Jung as a character, and Nikola Tesla turns up, so those are plusses.
And some I haven't read in awhile:
Avalon High - Largely defunct
RPG World - Defunct?
Nekobox - Essentially finished?
Eversummer Eve - It was updated so slowly that it was hard to remember, and now the archives appear to be subscription only
