Previously, in Trip's Life...
31 May 2011 - Tuesday
Work: After having no Internets for most of the
weekend, I got to work to relieve my datastarve... and the entire server
room lost power. Bah!
My, the Internet really is full of things: Lioness
steals camera; makes her own film.
Textual Entertainments: I got
Cortez on Jupiter (Ernest Hogan) from the library because
someone recommended it, but it failed to impress me. Maybe I'm just
suppressing the writing of non-honkeys, but I think it would have been
sufficiently novel in the 60s or 70s. By 1990, though, it was all pretty
old hat.
Visual Entertainments:
- Death Note 22-23: Misa-Misa looked so proud of herself
when she dragged the disemboweled clue back and dropped it at Light's
feet.
- Clannad 16: Aw, he gave in and told them. I bet he
could have kept them going a lot longer.
- Durarara!! 10-11: We totally were not expecting that!
- Umineko 15: We were not expecting that either, but it's
such a random show we weren't that surprised.
Food: This time Marith cleverly brought her own
gorgonzola to add to the Manresa.
Cats:
Miau miau miau!
Make a comment!
30 May 2011 - Monday
Work National Holiday: Check!
Internets: I braved the wilds of Palo Alto to buy a
new AirPort, and a disk to plug into it to fake a Time Capsule because I
really should keep backups of some kind, but I still have no Internets
because the information the Aerio support guy gave me still doesn't
work.
Bookstore Accidents: Did you know that Borders is
right across from the Palo Alto Apple store?
Gaming: I spent most of my travel time thinking
about D&D, but it's three weeks until the next session. Long-period
gaming may be inevitable at this stage in the life of people who don't
suck, but that doesn't mean I like it.
Textual Educations: Isaac Newton, economist and
detective! No, it's not Carl's latest con game, it's
Newton and the Counterfeiter, by Thomas Levenson.
In the 1690s, England's economy was suffering a serious lack of money.
Due to an insufficiently adaptable exchange rate between silver and
gold, it was profitable to melt down English silver coins, take the
metal to France and trade it for gold, come back to England able to
buy more coins, etc. Boom times for counterfeiters!
When the famous and well-connected Newton was appointed Warden
of the Royal Mint, that all became his problem. In particular, the
extremely ambitious and clever coiner William Chaloner because his
problem, particularly once Chaloner started trying to discredit the
officers of the Mint so he could get some scam in place. (I
said he was ambitious.)
Newton didn't invent the methods of police work and detection, but he
had to pick them up on the fly, before Chaloner could convince Parliament
to give him the boot, and he had to fulfill his duties at the Mint (and
some of his useless colleague's) well enough that Parliament didn't kick
him out themselves. But he was Isaac F Newton.
17th-century economics and crime FTW!
Visual Entertainments: More Moribito.
That's some psycho doom.
Food: Since I was in Palo Alto anyway, I stopped by
Thai City for lunch. Nom!
Cats:
The new kit is a little interesting, but not that interesting. Perhaps
Aspen doesn't want to be a network admin after all. Or maybe she doesn't
want to help me share cat recipes with the other monsters.
Make a comment!
29 May 2011 - Sunday
Gaming: It was okay that I hadn't prepared any new
encounters for this week, because the only fight scene was between the PCs and
some ostensibly allied gnolls that I already had written up and who they
outclassed by about five levels. However, they did carouse, buy a slave,
obtain secret knowledge, form several plans, fail to bargain with a
kobold commander, rip more secret knowledge from the kobold commander's
mind, and set out on a 120-mile nonstop magic horse ride.
I really don't know what the PCs have against the Henyador. Wouldn't you
trade wimpy and uncooperative slaves for nerve-stapled demons if you had
the chance?
Visual Entertainments: Started Moribito
disc 4. Go, heroic old lady!
Food: Ayse demanded KFC to console her for Ken's
absence/raise morale in the face of sleep deprivation/revel in while Ken's
not here to make fun of her food choices, so Marith and I helped her. I
think that was my entire allotment of grease and salt for the next five
years.
Silly Computer Games: Check.
Cats:
Paws: still twelve!
Make a comment!
28 May 2011 - Saturday
Internets: FAIL. This afternoon, my AirPort keeled over
dead (not that surprising, I guess, since it had been running continuously
for something like six years) and took all the configuration I need for
Aerio's PPPoE system with it. I called their support line, but the guy on
call over the holiday weekend was not very useful. I'll have to try again
on Tuesday, I guess.
Food: Dave and I went with Ayse and Baby to the Palo Alto farmers' market and
admired the many food items available there. I bought some bread and
vegetables, although the odds are only so-so that I will get around to
eating them before they expire. Ayse swooned at The Chocolate Garage table.
Food, cont'd: When Marith became available, we all had
brunch at Country Gourmet.
There much fun with straws and forks and such.
Food, cont'd further: While I was downtown returning
library books and ordering stuff at the bookstore, Bangkok
Spoon lured me with pumpkin curry.
Gaming: No Thrace, because Ken is at KublaCon. Also, less preparation for
tomorrow than I would have liked, because my workflow involves grabbing
monsters off the Compendium, editing them, and converting them to PDF for
the iPad and that doesn't work so well with no Internets. (I suppose I
could have tried grabbing stuff from the Compendium from the iPad over 3G,
syncing it to the Mac, editing/converting it, and syncing it back, but I'm
trying to keep the 3G usage to a minimum and this doesn't really qualify as
an emergency.)
Silly Computer Games: With no Internets, I was
forced to play many games of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup,
very badly.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
27 May 2011 - Friday
Work: Check.
Textual Educations: Born To Run
(Christopher McDougall) is about humans and long-distance running, as
exemplified by an obscure tribe in the wilds of the Sierra Madres who are
locally famous for running incessantly over horrifying badly and being
extremely mellow. Also discussed: persistence hunting, running as the ideal
exercise for the human body and mind, loons who run a hundred kilometers or
more over mountains for fun, and the advantages of running as nearly
barefoot as possible.
I haven't looked up any of the studies, but it's at least
superficially plausible that fancy shoes defeat many of the human foot's
adaptations for running, and it's definitely plausible that
Nike et al would keep introducing fancier shoes that don't add any
actual performance or safety.
Sequential Entertainments: I finally reread/caught up
on Kagerou after foolishly
neglecting it for some time. It is still quite awesome.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
26 May 2011 - Thursday
Work: Check.
Visual Entertainments: Slayers Try
24-26: the finale! (SPOILER: the world is not completely destroyed.)
Next we have some OAVs, and then on to Slayers Revolution
and Slayers Evolution R (and then Volution RE,
Olution REV, ...).
Food: Chef
Liu takeout with crispy eggplant, yay!
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
25 May 2011 - Wednesday
Work: Big Customer X exploded in a horrible burst of
hard drive failures (boo moving parts), but we managed to save
almost all their data.
Gaming: I'm so bad at running combats that it's
totally fair to give the PCs twice the monsters for half the XP, right?
Textual Educations: I made the library lend me
Beyond Bullet Points (Cliff Atkinson) in hopes of escaping the
horrible read-the-bullet-points-aloud PowerPoint tradition, but I don't
know how much it will actually help. Atkinson's three-act-story-based
method seems like it would work much better for a policy presentation than
for training. I should check out some of the research he cites on how to
get people to absorb information, though.
Silly Computer Games: Check.
Cats:
Kitties!
Make a comment!
24 May 2011 - Tuesday
Modern Medicine: The CPAP headgear makes it hard for
Marmalade to sit on the headboard and groom my hair, at least without
clawing up the straps. This makes both of us sad.
Work: Check. I still think people should just give
me money for the privilege of having me on their planet.
Gaming: I really should figure out which of the many
potential kobold secret weapons is the one they actually have. Also how
the PCs could find this out before it's too late.
Sequential Entertainments: 7 Billion
Needles (Nobuaki Tadano) is based on a short story by the late Hal
Clement, but more resembles This Ugly Yet Beautiful World. Why
is there so much evolution fail? (Because humans can't imagine a universe
that doesn't revolve around them.)
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Dave
says the quest where you use the demons' own felcannons against them
just requires clicking on the key and then surviving until the cannon
turns around. In theory Zmorcia should be able to do this by zonking the
demon and then going invulnerable (hopefully the time it takes the
cannon to stop shooting her is not large compared to 8 seconds). But
there is no WoW tonight.
Visual Entertainments:
- Death Note 21: There is no way in which any of these
plans can possibly go wrong.
- Clannad 14-15: Kotomi: awww! Sunohara: WTF, dude?
Chillax!
- Durarara!! 9: That's messed up along several axes.
- Umineko 13-14: Oh, that's who the chicks who show up in
Umineko cosplay pictures are.
Food: Marith had a sandwich, so instead of spending
money on pizza, I pillaged Dave's left-over red curry with peas and
chicken. Even with the coconut milk, it was probably still better for me than
pizza, plus: red coconut-milk curry!
Cats:
So very fuzzy!
Make a comment!
23 May 2011 - Monday
Work: Check.
My, the Internet really is full of things: Dance
of the pendulums.
Sequential Entertainments: I finally finished reading
Schlock Mercenary all the
way from the beginning to the current strip. It was pretty swell, but
boy is it long.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Zmorcia
went back to try to finish up the last bits of Nagrand, but there are no
instructions on using the key to take command of the felcannons! So she
beat up a bunch of demons to get diamond dust to trade for tokens to trade
for the jewelcrafting recipe in Halaa.
Cats:
Still opaque!
Make a comment!
22 May 2011 - Sunday
Gaming: I keep thinking minions should be good for
something, but they really aren't. There are too many powers that have a
huge area and don't require an attack roll. But maybe I could use
minions with ranged attacks, so they don't have to ever be near anyone?
Still probably wouldn't work.
Also I'm too stupid to have elites use their action points when they
are in position to do double attacks with a pile of bonus damage on each
one.
After the free XP handout at the beginning of the session, the PCs got
to admire a giant mechanical flying whale and visit the revival of the
great gnollish empire of days past (no really). Now they're being hired to
find out what the kobold's secret weapon is before it gets used on the
revived empire. Surely nothing can go wrong.
Bonus extra D&D next week, since people aren't available in two
weeks.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Zmorcia's
sempai Grainne (12 levels higher) helped her with a bunch of quests in
Shadowmoon Valley that she couldn't solo. Some of them she could probably
have done on her own if I didn't suck, but some I'm pretty sure no level 70
could solo.
Silly Computer Games: Check.
Cats:
Marmalade and Ghirardelli are both magnificently opaque.
Make a comment!
21 May 2011 - Saturday
Modern Medicine: I finally got around to fasting for
12+ hours so I could go in to the lab and get more samples taken. So hungry!
Food: Yay, Garden
Fresh has saved me!
My, the Internet really is full of things: CDC
Warning On Zombie Apocalypse. Be prepared! (Don't read the comments,
people on the Internets are dumb.)
Textual Educations: The Gun (C J Chivers)
is specifically about the AK-47 and its derivatives, but more generally
about automatic weapons and how they have changed warfare over the past
century and change. Apparently it took most armies a surprisingly long time
to clue in to the advantages of automatic weapons; Maxim and even Gatling
guns could be devastating when used correctly, but almost no one did
— until WWI when they found out the hard way that Germany
had been paying attention. (Hiram Maxim sounds like he was quite a
colorful character, pronounced "sociopathic asshole", but Gatling was of
only average sleaziness for a businessman in the Libertopia that was the
late 19th century.)
Russia was also an early adopter of automatic weapons, even before the
revolution, and by the end of WWII the Soviets were convinced that every
soldier needed one, so they started a project to develop an automatic rifle
that any random schmoe could pick up and use on the capitalist running dog
lackeys. How much Mikhail Kalashnikov contributed to that project is
unclear (Stalin-era Soviet records, not so useful in determining what
actually happened), but "Loyal and hardworking common man conjures new
weapon to defend Socialism through sheer dedication" fit too well with the
Communist mythology for it to be passed up, so he got the credit and the
fancy car and the promotions due to the inventor of the People's Automatic
Rifle.
For contrast, Chivers digresses into the screwed-up genesis of the M16
in the 1960s, in some detail. It was so astonishingly lame that it's not
at all surprising a belief in the complete incompetence of military
procurement persists fifty years later.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union produced and stockpiled huge
numbers of AK-47s, and both produced more to distribute as bribes and
helped set up factories in all the countries they wanted as allies. Since
the weapons (at least the original design) last for decades, there are
now huge numbers of all over the world, in all kinds of hands (mostly
ones that don't have access to a First World military-industrial
complex, ie scary brown people) and will be for decades to come. This is
bad, but being able to arm random schmoes with grudges is so useful that
there's no hope of anyone ever seriously doing anything about it.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Huh,
Shadowmoon Valley is a lot tougher than Nagrand/Terokkar Forest! Also,
not very scenic. I guess it is pretty close to Hellfire Peninsula.
Visual Entertainments: Disc 3 of
Moribito. That certainly looks like impending doom on a
national scale.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
20 May 2011 - Friday
Work: Almost the entire company was at an offsite
(bocce, I think), so in theory this should have been an excellent day to
get things done. However, I am not an excellent person to get things
done.
Cats:
I checked on Jinian and Aime, who are both very furry and also
appreciate gooshyfood.
Make a comment!
19 May 2011 - Thursday
Work: Check.
My, the Internet really is full of things: I think
people who are into history or pedantry or both would appreciate Fuck Yeah,
History Major Heraldic Beast.
Textual Entertainments: My Mother She Killed Me,
My Father He Ate me (edited by Kate Bernheimer) is a collection of
retellings of fairy tales, stories inspired by fairy tales, etc. I didn't
quite finish it before the library wanted it back, but I got about ¾
of the way through, and most of the stories, although they often did have a
fairy-tale feel to the language, were either hallucinatorily strange, or
mundane and depressing. (One exception: Neil Gaiman's story, which I found
both amusing and orange.) I am saddened, and will probably not bother to
check the book out again when the person who had a hold on it is
finished.
Visual Entertainments: No Slayers Try,
because Ken and Ayse must back frantically for their expedition to Ken's
sister's wedding.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
18 May 2011 - Wednesday
Work: Spent all day watching a person do a thing and
then doing the thing when he had to go to bed (what with it being 1am in
his time zone). But it did eventually work, mostly, after we got an
engineer to look at it.
Visual Entertainments: Finished the second disc of
Moribito. Why yes, divination magic does make it
hard to cover up your crimes.
Cats:
Adorably fuzzy, but probably not going to get any salsa!
Make a comment!
17 May 2011 - Tuesday
Work: Cow orker M is apparently doing quite well, at
least for someone who just had surgery.
Textual Educations: On Killing (David A
Grossman) primarily considers the psychological effects of killing/not
killing/learning to kill within a military context, possibly because the author
is career Army and a counselor (as of 1996, when the book was published).
In the first part of the book, the author establishes that humans are
innately very reluctant to kill other humans; when they do, the
psychological effects are severe and fall into distinct patterns and;
there are fairly obvious factors that can keep those effects from
turning into PTSD or similar (eg, experienced leadership and unit bonding
during the war, decompression time and social approval afterwards).
Grossman appears to support his points adequately, although I could have
done with less glorification of the military.
The second part: by the Vietnam war, the US military was very good at
overcoming the reluctance to kill with more realistic training, more
thorough desensitization, etc, but handling of the psychological
consequences was much worse than in WWII, and civilian society provided the
exact opposite of approval, leaving hundreds of thousands of
veterans severely and unnecessarily screwed up.
The final section is where I think he goes off the rails. That he can
tie his conservative OMG slasher movies video games decline of 1950s family
structure rising violent crime crack fiends BBQWTF into the earlier parts
of the book doesn't change the fact that the violent crime rate had passed
its peak by the time he was writing (based on these Uniform Crime Reporting
numbers I'm looking at right now).
In conclusion, I'm not sure I buy everything he says, but I can't
complain about telling people, "Killing messes you up, bad".
Visual Entertainments:
- Death Note 19-20: Matsuda, you idiot.
- Clannad 13: Aw, the gardening of friendship.
- Durarara!! 7-8: More character background, and MORE
DOOM.
- Umineko 12: Maybe that's a title, not a name.
Food: A Manresa plus
gorgonzola is tasty, but very thin and expensive. But tasty!
Cats:
Twelve paws that got no gorgonzola!
Make a comment!
16 May 2011 - Monday
Work: Check.
Silly Computer Games: Hm, new version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I'll have to play it more to decide if I like it better.
Cats:
Ghirardelli is sometimes making wheezy horky noises, but he seems fine
afterwards, and it's not like cats don't make horky noises all the time.
But I will worry.
Make a comment!
15 May 2011 - Sunday
Work: On-call calls: still 0! I am teh winz0r! With
a capital 0!
My, the Internet really is full of things:
If only
it really worked this way.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments:
Nagrand has been fully explored, and Zmorcia is level 70! Nagrand is
almost quest-free except for one elite she can't take (Durn the
Hungererer) and a quest chain that will probably lead back to that side
of the mountains and then peter out in a dungeon quest. Terokkar Forest
still has a few quests, but not very many.
Maybe I'll skip Shadowmoon Valley and the Mountains of Spiky Spikes,
check Netherstorm (which has a recommendation), and then go to Northrend.
(And then Zmorcia will die horribly upon encounting content that's actually
of her level and go back to Outlands.)
Visual Entertainments: Now Marith knows about the
Black Rider too.
Food: After Vegan Black Metal Pad
Thai, I had a great desire for pad thai, so I dragged some books
back to the library as an excuse to go downtown and then crawled over to Bangkok
Spoon and nommed. I dunno, it's just not the same without the
growling and the spiky fantasy knives.
Silly Computer Games: I have what seems like a good
character in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup,
but I still die all the bloody time. Cheat files for the (invalid) win.
Cats:
Marmalade wanted so badly to trim Marith's hair! But she already has a
hairdresser!
Make a comment!
14 May 2011 - Saturday
Work: On-call calls: 0!
Food: Toad-in-the-hole does not involve actual toads
(although it does involve actual holes). It is yummy and terribly
unhealthy.
Gaming: We actually played Thrace for a couple of
hours! The goblins were so lame we felt bad about beating them up, but
anyone who brings a jar of centipedes to a thunderwave fight is pretty
much asking for it.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Bah,
nobody bought Zmorcia's netherweave cloth. Apparently 12 gold per stack of
20 really is the price. And now she has more, because almost every quest
involves beating up humanoids who drop it.
Visual Entertainments: I started the next disc of
Moribito. That's a pretty freaky way to check someone for
magic. Also, impending DOOOOOOM.
Cats:
Still twelve paws!
Make a comment!
13 May 2011 - Friday
Work: Cow orker M apparently had his knee operated
on, but we don't know the results yet.
My, the Internet really is full of things: Ornithopter!
Textual Educations: Possibly I have read too many
popular books on books on paleontology/evolutionary biology to appreciate
Written in Stone as much as I did Brian Switek's blog,
but it is still pretty good. The examples used to illustrate the
principles include the evolution of whales, horses, elephants, birds, and
some primates that think they're all that.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
12 May 2011 - Thursday
Work: Bleah, customers.
My, the Internet really is full of things: Vegan Black Metal Pad
Thai (via Ken).
Visual Entertainments: Slayers Try
22-23: the gold dragons are kind of goofy-looking, but they still didn't
deserve that. (Also, Erulogos and Sirius remind me of the devil
girls from Sinfest.)
Food: We had pasta and salad, not vegan black metal
pad thai. Maybe next week!
Cats:
Twelve adorable paws!
Make a comment!
11 May 2011 - Wednesday
Work: Now cow orker S has gone on vaction. I sure
hope no customers explode until next week.
My, the Internet really is full of things:
These myths retold made
me laugh until I choked, so if you want to know what it takes to choke a
space parasite, here you go. (Warning: not for people who object to
cussing or vulgarity. But what are those people doing on the Internets?)
My, the Internet really is full of things:
Cyberneko-chan
is go! (via Not Exactly
Rocket Science)
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
10 May 2011 - Tuesday
Work: It turns out cow orker M's knee is so horked
up it needs surgery. :( At this time, we have no idea how long
he'll be out of comission.
My, the Internet really is full of things:
Textual Entertainments: My knowledge of literature from
outside the US is almost nil (kind of like my knowledge of any literature
whatsoever), but Metropole (Ferenc Karinthy) feels very
Eastern-European. I think it's what people who haven't read Kafka call
Kafka-esque. This may have something to do with having been written by a
Hungarian dude.
Anyway, it's got failure to communicate, alienation from humanity,
incomprehensible yet brutal social structures, hot elevator attendants,
events that sweep up even those that don't understand them, and tanks in
the streets — everything you want from a serious European novel, right?
The ending is at least ambiguous, though, rather than outright doomed,
so it's not necessary to sink into a slough of despond after reading it.
Visual Entertainments:
- Death Note 18: We're almost halfway done, and hardly
any named characters have died horrible gruesome deaths. What's up with
that?
- Clannad 11-12: SPOILER: the main character is dense
about romance, and the cute girl has a tragic past.
- Durarara!! 6: Now we know more about both the guys in
the van and the Dollars.
- Umineko 10-11: That round goes to Beatrice.
Cats:
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
9 May 2011 - Monday
Work: Cow orker M took a spill on his motorcycle
over the weekend and is now laid up with a broken knee, a broken toe,
and road rash. His wife only got the road rash. Fortunately we're
massively overstaffed so it's no big deal when life happen— no,
wait, that's Earth-937c I'm thinking of.
Personally, I can't imagine riding a motorcyle without adequate
armor, but that may be because I've heard the phrase, "human
crayon".
Cats:
Cats don't have Mondays. Is that fair?
Make a comment!
8 May 2011 - Sunday
Work: No work today.
Gaming: Goodreader has failed me! It works, but
switching from one document to another, even in the same directory, takes
four correctly-placed taps where iAnnotate
PDF with its tabbed UI takes only one. Sorry, Goodreader.
The combat encounter was lame because the monsters were too unified
in concept and could be shut down by a single application of Mass
Resistance. Maybe I shouldn't have given out full XP for it.
Level UP! 13 is the level where PCs stop getting more powers and just
upgrade the ones they have, which may or may not have any effect on what
kind of horrifying monstrosities they become.
At least there was something to talk to this session, even if a kobold
nailed upside-down to a tree by her tail isn't a scintillating
conversationalist.
If I were clever, I would make a wiki to store things like what kinds
of names different races have and, you know, everything. Then I could
browse it from my iPad.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Did a
few more of the quests in Terokkar Forest. Soon, back to Nagrand, I
guess.
Visual Entertainments: More Moribito.
Oh the doom.
Cats:
Marmalade investigated my breakfast cereal, but then discovered that it
was cunning bait for a CARNIVOROUS HEAD-EATING CRUNKLEBAG! OH NO! FLEE
FLEE!
Make a comment!
7 May 2011 - Saturday
Work: I did a little work because boss G, who is on
call, got flooded with people complaining they were doomed, but it
wasn't too bad.
Gaming: Those seem slimy and horrible, I'll put
some in tomorrow's adventure!
Textual Educations: In A Professional's Guide to
Ending Violence Quickly, Marc "Animal" MacYoung expands on
the basic principle that every second you spend fighting is a chance for
Murphy to hit you upside the head with his law. (Obviously, zero seconds is
the best duration for a fight, and there's some discussion of what
approaches to take with different kind of drunken idiots, but mostly this
book is about what to do when the troublemaker is already hitting the
fan.)
The author is a big proponent of knowing basic principles over specific
techniques. When you know that the three basic ways of making someone
fall down are to push them, pull them, or take their support out from
under them, you can probably do something reasonable even if your
opponent hasn't obligingly assumed the correct position for any of the
specific moves you've practiced (but here are some examples).
I don't buy much of his macho evolutionary psychology (or maybe it's
still sociobiology) but whatever.
MacYoung is writing to people in violence-prone professions (police,
security/bouncers, ER orderlies, etc), as one of them, so this book was of
only academic interest to me, but maybe I can write infinitesimally better
fight scenes now.
Food: I ate at both Chef Chu and Thai City today, but for some reason I
did not get a fancy box at the bottom of my field of view congratulating me
on my accomplishment.
Silly Computer Games: I stayed up until 87342569125
o'clock playing Bookworm, but I got a
score of 560560 and the coveted title Thesaurus Rex. I think that's enough
Bookworm for a while.
Make a comment!
6 May 2011 - Friday
Work: Check.
Textual Entertainments: Middlesex (Jeffrey
Eugenides) is the story of a family of Greek immigrants, from their escape
from Turkey in 1922 to the messed-up life of the product of their poor
genetic planning two generations later. (Funny how being a teenager doesn't
get any better when you subvert the gender binary.) That makes it sound
dismal, but I don't think it really is. No more dismal than most people's
lives, anyway although possibly more dramatic.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Zmorcia
has now explored all of Terokkar Forest! The number of new quests is
finally below replacement, too. And, she made it to Jewelcrafting 350, so
she was able to get like thirty new recipes, which all use stuff she's
never seen.
Visual Entertainments: Watched another bit of
Moribito. Cue the ninjas!
Cats:
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
5 May 2011 - Thursday
Work: Apparently the script I wrote to fix the
problem at the customer almost worked. So I almost helped someone
today. Almost yay!
My, the Internet really is full of things:
One generation, new species.
Gaming: I know some stuff about where the PCs are going
next, but I have no idea what they will do for XP when they get there. If
it were WoW, there would be lots of people going, "Hi! I have a giant
yellow exclamation mark over my head, and although I have no idea who you
are, I'd like you to run all sorts of important errands for me!" but that's
dumb.
Textual Availability: The Mountain View Public Library
and Link+ are too efficient at granting
my requests! Today I had no fewer than seven books to pick up, three of
them Link+ books that I have a strictly limited amount of time to read.
Maybe I should play fewer computer games. Or read while walking.
Visual Entertainments: Marith couldn't make it, so
instead of watching Slayers Try without her, the rest of us
chillaxed and looked for the lost art of conversation.
Food: For lunch I only had a pile of snap peas and a
small amount of leftover Chinese food, but then Ayse and I pillaged the
BBQ Kalbi truck on our way back from
the library. I tried the bibimbap burrito with beef, which was pretty
good.
Silly Computer Games: Apparently I never get so
sleepy that going to bed seems like a better idea than playing another
few minutes of Bookworm.
Cats:
Aspen chased the Red Dot, but she is far too cautious to let it lead her
near the cat-eating monster.
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4 May 2011 - Wednesday
Work: Argh, customers. Argh, new version.
Gaming: Stayed up too late coming up with treasure
for last week's PAD&D session. I guess sometime I should work on this
coming week's session.
Sequential Entertainments: I'm now all caught up on Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic (Rich Morris).
Like many webcomics that start off silly, it has become more serious
over time, and I think I liked the earlier stuff with the monsters
better, but that is because I am shallow. Anyway, it's still pretty
swell. Maybe PAD&D should be more like that.
Cats:
Still twelve paws, still fuzzy!
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3 May 2011 - Tuesday
Work: I finally did the Environmental, Health, &
Safety and Code of Conduct online trainings for the new corporate
overlords. I missed one question in the EHS course, which I think was
legitimately ambiguous in the manual and isn't relevant to me anyway,
and Windows 7 activated its "click on a random button if the mouse
pointer stops moving" feature during the Code of Conduct training, but I
knew what the actual right answer was, so I'm declaring success anyway.
Visual Entertainments:
- Clannad 10: New plot arc! Er, maybe. A different (but
also excessively cute) girl is getting center stage, anyway.
- Durarara!! 4-5: Now we know all about the Black Rider!
And some about Kida.
- Umineko 9: What, is Battler giving up already?
- Death Note 16-7: And now, the voluntary mindwipe part
of the story.
Cats:
So fuzzy!
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2 May 2011 - Monday
Work: Check.
My, the Internet really is full of things:
Textual Educations: Round in Circles (Jim
Schnabel) is an account of the crop circle phenomenon in England, from the
late 70s to the early 90s. There were a lot of wacky, petty, vindictive,
and self-aggrandizing people involved, and many of them believed in very
silly things. In the end, of course, it was revealed that the circles were
all made by perfectly ordinary humans and the people who believed very
silly things looked even more foolish. The guy who was sure they were
produced by meteorology also looked foolish, but at least he was just
misled, not actually crazy.
Cats:
Sometimes, cats are disgusting. But the rest of the time they are fuzzy.
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1 May 2011 - Sunday
Work: Still glad I'm not on call.
Gaming: I still suck as a GM, but the iPad works
pretty well for keeping notes (monster writeups, etc). Cutting and
pasting from the Compendium
into TextEdit on my desktop keeps the formatting pretty well, so I can
edit the monsters into more horrible forms and have a record of what I
did, and then export them as PDFs to the iPad. I've been using iAnnotate
PDF, but Jeremy recommended Goodreader. I'll have to try it out and see
if it makes it easier to be organized.
(The Compendium
app is a little faster to use, but it doesn't let you filter by
level, so I don't use it much.)
I still used paper for tracking of monster hit points, statuses, and
power recharges, because I can't write small enough or type fast enough on
the iPad with my big fat tentacles, and index cards for tracking
initiative, but that's okay.
What kind of loot should dead fire giants have? Besides an illegal
frog-popper and a perpetually burning rock, I mean.
Sequential Entertainments: I think Tenken
(by Yumiko Shirai) was good, but the visual style was different enough
from what I'm used to that I had a hard time following it. People who
are not lame and uncultured like me will probably like it.
Massively-Multiplayer Online Entertainments: Zmorcia
trundled around Nagrand for a while, but meh.
Just a little more prospecting and she can make it to the next tier
of Jewelcrafting!
Cats:
Twelve adorable paws!
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