up time: 33 minutes. like, woah.

Writing... it's this thing people say I'm good at. I always want to do it more, but fail at the motivation thing. "The Motivation Thing" -- sounds like a euphemism for a cattle prod. I've finally changed my minor from Journalism to Creative Writing. Together with my Linguistics major, I have a stranglehold on the language. "The Language" -- English. The other 5999 or so languages? Not so much.
Hopefully, though, being in actual writing classes with both the pressure to produce and the requirement to read the writing of others will be enough of a cattle prod to get me writing habitually again.

Then there will be content in this here space. Weird, right?

I was going to tell you about the story I read last night, but I have work to do instead. :|

(yes I have a blog; STFU)

So, um, a thing has happened in my life.

I bought the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Player's Handbook with a gift certificate over Christmas, just to get a look at the new game system. I didn't fall in love with it or anything, but I also didn't hate it. I've heard a lot of people moaning about how it makes the game more like a video game and discourages roleplaying, but I didn't get that feeling. To me, there's very little in the rules of any game that will affect whether your group roleplays or not. As I said to my brother the other day while discussing it, "People can roleplay without rules and they still can. Now, at least, the people who like hitting things and taking their stuff have more interesting ways of doing it."

Anywho, this is not a review of the game. This is a comment on an interesting facet of my life. I was looking for other board games to get and I talked with Kat about what kinds of board games she had liked playing, and she said she enjoyed the ones with strong story elements best. For us, that's Arkham Horror and Fury of Dracula. We haven't gotten enough out of Android to really make a decision there. She hinted (for about the fifth time) that she might enjoy a full-on RPG more than a board-game version of one, so I started thinking about running an RPG for the first time in ten years.

At first, I kinda wanted to run Call of Cthulhu, but we already have Arkham Horror and I was excited about exploring the new D&D stuff. I asked a couple of people who I knew had played before, but they both turned me down, saying they had just gotten into other games and wouldn't have the time. I thought the idea of running a game would die there, but then I got the idea to just do what I usually do: make gamers out of people I already enjoy hanging out with (instead of trying to find gamers who I can stand to hang out with). I sent out a bulk message on Facebook to everyone I thought might be geeky enough to enjoy it, and got all kinds of responses.

Here's the weird thing: I didn't get a single response from a guy. One guy jumped on-board after his wife had already signed on, and another one looks like he'll be joining under similar circumstances, but all the direct interest in the game was from women. One of the experienced RPGers at the first session even commented, "For not being a Vampire game, this group is very female."

So, yeah, I'm running D&D for the first time in over ten years and I'm having a blast so far. The biggest help I've found so far is a site for hosting a campaign wiki where we can keep track of everything that happens. Lots of fun now, and should be lots of fun to look back later at our old adventures.

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/scales-of-war-az

Comment to this post and I will give you five subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

from luinmir:
1. Games
Games, games, games. It sometimes seems like my life is dominated by games. If I'm not playing a game, I'm thinking about games, or talking about them, or researching them, or thinking up my own (hopefully) brilliant designs. Mostly, this involves non-video games. You know, like the ones with boards and/or cards and/or dice? I'm not sure why my fascination with games is so strong. Some of it probably stems from my childhood; my brother is definitely my strongest family tie, and we spent a lot of our time playing games: D&D, old Avalon Hill wargames, lots of sports simulations, even the Atari 2600. To me, the game has always been more about the social interaction than determining a winner or a loser. That being said, I love the puzzle presented by a new game. Learning the rules is one mental hurdle to clear (this is probably why I prefer more complex games -- mastering the ruleset is the first challenge). After that, putting an effective strategy into play on the table is the next challenge. I want my strategy to be effective and I want to win, but a win against poorly-matched foes is no victory, so I love to teach games. The more people I teach to love the games I love, and the better I teach them to play, the better chance I have of getting a fantastic game. It's like a constant quest for that defining game experience: that game you can tell people about for years, even if you lost, because the events were so exciting. Unfortunately, the desire to try new systems causes me to want new games way too much. In addition, I have a desire to find games that will specifically appeal to people I want to play with, which causes me to keep trying new things in an effort to find something they'll love as much as I do. I guess it's mostly about trying to share my own excitement with others.


2. Straight Ally Identity
People's pervasive stupidity astounds me. I really don't see what business it is of anyone's what other people are doing in their bedrooms. Unless you're directly involved, shut up and go do your own thing (or someone else's thing, as long as everyone involved is cool with that). After my divorce, I joined the Straight Spouse Support Network to talk to other people who had been in a similar situation (with a spouse who turned out to be non-straight), and I was flabbergasted by the amount of homophobic behavior. One person wronged you, so everyone who shares their sexuality has also wronged you? That's silliness. Most of them failed to see what I saw: that the pervasive heteronormative social pressure of American society led their ex-spouses to feel that they were "supposed" to enter into heterosexual relationships and marriages. People just want to be with who they want to be with, and there's nothing wrong with letting them. I feel equally sad when I see LGBT people complaining about how the straight folks are all the "enemy" or somehow unenlightened. As a straight ally who respects and supports your sexuality, I expect to have my own respected as well. As Kat would say, "Well, how does it feel?", and I understand that many other people go through that feeling, but it's most hurtful to have the people who should know better and who are seeking their own validation to treat me in a negative way as a result of the way others with my gender presentation and sexuality have treated them. It's the exact same dynamic, with a few adjectives moved around, and it's just as silly and stupid and depressing.

3. Vegetarianism
See above, re: sexuality. I made a choice for my own reasons and for my own body. It's not affecting you in any way, so why do I have to explain and defend my choice to every other person who finds out, and then have to endure their teasing over and over again? I really don't need another 300-pound person telling me I don't know what I'm missing or that I'm unhealthy. What am I missing out on? Heart disease? Diabetes? Erectile Dysfunction? I'm doing just fine, thanks. There are plenty of ways to get the nutrients I need without killing animals. Modern technology is a wonderful thing. You can get to the store without sitting on any animals these days, so why not use similar technological advances while you're there to get your amino acids without killing any of them?

4. Broadcast Journalism
I dunno. I love shoot events with a video camera. I'd be perfectly happy collecting video from an assortment of sporting events every day and then editing it for broadcast. But I also like writing, and seeing other people doing things poorly when I can show them better techniques always bothers me. This combines to make me want to have my fingers in many different pies, (mmm.. pie...) which is what has me where I am today. I don't know if I feel any particular urge to make the world a better and more-informed place, or to make any brilliant pieces of journalistic art... I just like taking video, and getting paid to do it would be nice.

5. Falling in Love
I feel like I never really learned how to fall in love until these past few years. Each time I've fallen in love has been better than the time before. I'm really not sure what to do with this paragraph right now, though. I feel more open and honest and myself in my current relationship than I ever have before. My first serious relationship was one of convenience and availability, and its momentum kept it going for an incredibly long time without any real love involved. Unfortunately, I have difficulty talking about love effectively except when the muse strikes me out of the blue. When prompted, I tend to go, "uh, well, there's stuff and it's neat..." Sigh. Nothing's coming right now, but I don't want to stare at this LJ entry any longer, so I'll have to let this one go only half-answered. If something comes, I'll add...

so, uh, yeah... respond and I'll give you a writing project, too.. :)

Today marks the feast of Saint Valentine (and Cyril). Tomorrow marks the birthday of Kat (and also Galileo and Matt Groening). Yesterday was Friday the 13th. The whole weekend is Lupercalia. To celebrate, I have rented a car so that we could go and do things, especially outside-of-the-city-up-in-the-mountains kinds of things.

We will be doing those things tomorrow, however. Today was reserved for homebuilding activities that were made much easier through having a car available to us, such as buying paint and shopping for a mattress.

Mattress shopping is a very nice Valentine's Day activity. You walk into a store full of beds and some guy tells you to go lie down for a while. Then he asks you a few questions and moves you to somewhere else even more comfortable based on your answers. I think more shopping should involve lying down on comfortable things that you can then have delivered.

Now, if you'll excuse me, we've got to hit a vegan restaurant for dinner...

um... this feels strangely like a comic-book version of some part(s) of my life... maybe I'm not reading "straight" the way it's intended..

Rules: It's harder than it looks! Copy to your own note, erase my answers, enter yours, and tag 10 people. Use the first letter of your name to answer each of the following questions. They have to be real... nothing made up! If the person before you had the same first initial, you must use different answers. You cannot use any word twice and you can't use your name for the boy/girl name question.

1. What is your name: Scott
2. A four letter word: Shit
3. A boy's name: Steven
4. A girl's name: Samantha
5. An occupation: Squid Wrangler
6. A color:
7. Something you wear: Shirt
9. A food: Spaghetti
10. Something found in the bathroom: Soap
11. A place: Store
12. A reason for being late: Sleeping
13. Something you shout: Score!
14. A movie title: Seven
15. Something you drink: Soda
16. A musical group: Smiths
17. An animal: Seahorse
18. A street name: Sixth
19. A type of car: Saturn
20. The title of a song: Something

It's a thing...

( Who comments the most on this journal? )

(aka The Dog Days of Arkham)

So, last night luinmir and I were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves for New Year's Eve. We checked out various things going on about town and weighed our options. After much deliberation, Kat told me she wasn't feeling that great, and could we just stay in? I said, sure, we can stay in and play games. We went to the store and got some festive food and drink, picked out Arkham Horror, and settled in for what may be the perfect New Year's setup:



( lots more pics n stuff )

I am about 50 pages away from finishing reading Watchmen. I'm doing what I so often do with books I really like, though: I get about 75% of the way through and then I start to read slowly because i don't want to leave the world of the book behind.

It's a deep read for a comic book ("graphic novel" to the snobs out there). I can see why it won so many awards. It should be noted that I really don't read superhero comics. The "plotlines" have just never done it for me. That, and the highly improbable physics involved most of the portrayals of women really bugs me.

Now, Sally Jupiter here? She's a bit more my style... :)

Saw these posters today on flickr. They're copies of old promotional posters for the book from 1986 or so. Good stuff. Makes great Xmas presents, too!

Okay, so I have this kind of unhealthy obsession with certain types of boardgames. I really like the kind of game that brings friends together and creates a story. I'm talking about the sort of pseudo-roleplaying games like Fury of Dracula or Arkham Horror or even that funky co-op Lord of the Rings game.

All of them combine team-play with storytelling game elements. Lord of the Rings is fairly abstract, but the fans can picture what's going in in their heads, and having a group of friends working the puzzle together helps you to collaborate in interpreting what the latest turn of cardplay means. All of these games are published by Fantasy Flight Games and two of them were designed by a guy named Kevin Wilson, while the other was designed by the master of elegant game design, Reiner Knizia.

Fantasy Flight apparently knows my weakness and has a new game hitting the market this week which seems to be built out of a perfect storm of Scott-ensnaring features. It's called Android, and it's my current boardgame obsession.

It's a murder-mystery adventure game designed by Kevin Wilson and set in a dystopian sort of Blade Runner/Caves of Steel future. There are five playable characters and each of them has not only different abilities, but entire branching storylines hidden amongst the cards of the game. You have the twin "surface" goals of trying to discover the murderer and trying to uncover the conspiracy surrounding the crime, but you also have to deal with your character's personal struggles. As one reviewer put it: "Character development means a lot more than getting +1 magic die or a new sword. Each character has a branching subplot with positive and negative outcomes that develop over the course of the game."

The one negative I've been seeing from people is that you don't so much figure out a pre-planned mystery but instead you put the evidence on the suspect whose card you got secretly assigned as a "hunch" at the beginning of the game (or help exonerate someone you have a hunch is innocent). I'm going to steal from someone on Boardgamegeek.com and quote Keyser Soze here: "To a cop the explanation's always simple. There's no mystery to the street, no arch criminal behind it all. If you find a body and you think his brother did it, you're gonna find out you're right."

The marketing for this game has been fairly unprecedented, in my experience:

Here's the trailer and here's what amounts to the Special Edition DVD Behind the Scenes video.

Yeah, I could be fascinated with this thing for some time to come... if I ever get around to acquiring it. Christmas-present-buying-type folks, it's on top of the Amazon list... :)

Seems like all I do with this space these days is link stuff and churn out memes and such... feh.

on that note... a year in review meme:

Go through your journal for this year and post the first sentence of each month.



January: "May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. (me quoting someone else)

February: Pop the cork once again, '72 Dolphins.

March: At least now I know what to charge.

April: Gmail now lets you backdate an email up to four years!

May: This was just in that one lyrics meme thingy, but today it's actually topical.

June: Let's hope he turns up in the dumpster... :(

July: If you're not already, you should be watching these things.

August: Now all of my treasured G. I. Joe memories have turned into this:

September: Greenskins and Humies and Elfs, oh my!

October: A simple picture of a man in front of a green-domed building?

November: Sure, it's four years old or so, but *I* just discovered it...

December: Seems like all I do with this space these days is link stuff and churn out memes and such...

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.


My lips are shaking. My nails are bit off.
Her breath began to speak as she stood right in front of me.
This is the end.

Like a bird on the wire
I don't eat. I just devour.
Never was a cornflake girl.

Kansas city, gonna get my baby back home.
In the last decade of the 20th century,
L.A. Lakers, fast break makers,
Enjoy what ya's got, not what you have not.

Somebody tell me when all this insanity ends.
Wake up!
Uh huh, this is my shit.
Okay, guess who's back.

You know that it would be untrue.
I'm gonna write a little letter:

You jump in front of my car
I died.
Would I lie to you?

Summer has come and passed.

-- "Something in the Way She Moves"

Sure, it's four years old or so, but *I* just discovered it... Neil Gaiman's Hugo Award winning short story, "A Study in Emerald," which mashes up Sherlock Holmes and some, er, other mythos that I enjoy...

http://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf

A simple picture of a man in front of a green-domed building? Not quite. See, that's the old St. Louis courthouse in the background. The very building in which Dred Scott sued to become a free man... and failed.

On Saturday, Obama appeared before his largest audience yet, as 100,000 gathered to see him in St. Louis. Did I mention that Missouri has voted for the winner in every presidential election since the end of WWII?

1. Go to http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, this is your band name.
2. Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3, the last 4 words of the last quote are your album name.
3. Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/, the last picture in the first row is your album art.
4. Post the results.

On some computers, this icon shows up as the EvilWillow in the Book Cage "This World's No Fun" thingy that it's supposed to be.

On some other computers, it shows up as some blonde chick dancing on a rooftop. same icon, different results.

a) what did you get?
b) wtf?

but just as important, regardless of the date...

I have to tell a personal story in acting class tomorrow morning. I have chosen the, uh, "Big Story."

Lord, beer me strength...