Previously, in Trip's Life...
31 May 2013 - Friday
Yesterday's problem was not resolved when I got in (despite, or possibly
because, all the managers involved stayed up all night), but we managed to
get the system back into the correct state and handed back to the customer
by the end of the day. I think they will be okay, but if they aren't, I'm
the one on call this weekend anyway.
I'm not sure I can give a better description of
Planarch
Codex: Dark Heart of the Dreamer than the introduction:
This is a planar supplement for Dungeon World,
World of Dungeons, and other games of dungeon
adventure. It is modular, so use the parts you like.
- FERAL ANTHROPOLOGIES provides new GM guidelines for
playing in settings where culture matters.
- CORSAIRS AND LOW BRIGANDS describes the pervasive
scourge of planar banditry and how to take part in it.
- THE RAVENOUS CITY introduces the monstrous planar
metropolis of Dis and its inhabitants.
It is swell.
Yike, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has suddenly gotten
dark!
Twelve paws!
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30 May 2013 - Thursday
At 8:00, I came in to a customer issue that cow orker D needed help on, and
was still working on it when I left for home at 19:30. Around 16:00, I
ran into my manager while looking for a developer to answer a simple
question, and he immediately escalated it into a huge deal, which as far
as I can tell did not result in anything other than what I was planning,
but did add a tangled web of management to all actions.
Seawitch (Kat Richardson) is the Nth in the series about a
Seattle private eye who gets astral travel powers by temporarily dying. The
first books had significant horror elements, but the series is shifting
more toward fantasy as the protagonist adapts to her new life.
After I got home, I had another two hours of work. It was successful,
and even went faster than I expected, but it was not really what I
wanted from my evening.
The cats tried to help, but I cruelly prevented them from leaping
onto the laptop.
Make a comment!
29 May 2013 - Wednesday
I guess I did work stuff today, but overall it was not a stunning
example of effectiveness.
Game design is hard, let's go watch anime.
Twelve paws!
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28 May 2013 - Tuesday
Virtual Monday is somehow not quite as bad as a real Monday, this
week.
The Queen is Dead (Kate Locke) is the sequel to
God Save the Queen, in which our heroine(?) accepts her
position as queen of the underground cannibals and kicks ass in an
alternate-historical London with hot werewolves and slimy vampires.
Nanoha's rival magical girl's minion is quite something for a kid's
show. Wum.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
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27 May 2013 - Monday
Memorial Day is actually a Teradata company-wide (well, US-wide)
holiday. There aren't many of those!
Sadly, someone forgot to tell the customers, and Cow Orker D, in
addition to having to be on call for an extra day, got an entire
busy weekend's worth of calls backed into today. :(
Instead of doing anything even slightly useful, I tried to create a Dungeon
World hack that better fits the current
alternate Sunday campaign. Fortunately now I have five example
characters to turn into playbooks, which helps a lot in conceptualizing
what kinds of moves I need to support. DW already has only a few combat
moves, so mostly I need to expand the selection of social moves, and add
mechanical consequences other than losing hit points. Also all the things I
haven't even thought of yet.
I am under no delusion that people will want to ditch the thoroughly
play-tested Fate
Accelerated for this gross kludge, but I'm not getting very far with
"Eclipse World" so perhaps this simpler problem will enlarge my brain.
I'm watching Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha (at some point I
put it in my Netflix queue, probably because I vaguely remembered someone
recommending it, and now it is arriving), and I'm not sure this rival
magical girl is redeemable. She zapped the kitty!
Fortunately none of my cats were watching to be traumatized.
Make a comment!
26 May 2013 - Sunday
Dave's enthusiasm for Dungeon
World is heartening, but everyone eventually agreed it wasn't right for
the campaign
we wanted, which is not so much with the dungeons and the looting. For lack
of a better suggestion, we went with Fate
Accelerated, although it was not anyone's ideal choice. We even made
characters and had them mugged in a bar (and then rescued by a handy NPC
when being outnumbered by better fighters with better gear seemed to be
going poorly).
I think I can come up with problems for each PC (except mine, because
my characters are always lame — maybe I should make her a secret
cultist or something), and sufficiently insoluble problems are like plot
hooks, right?
Apparently Marith and Ayse experienced Ja Baby Drama instead of an
additional day of Baycon. Perhaps
the con in Sacramento on Independence Day weekend will be less plagued by
drama.
Cow Orker D, who is on call this weekend, was oppressed and abused by
customers until he had to get me to take some of the heat off. As far as
I can tell, the answer to the customer's problem is, "Don't do things to
specifically make the cluster not work correctly", but of course that's
not acceptable.
Twelve fuzzy paws of fuzziness!
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25 May 2013 - Saturday
Marith came over today, and Aspen permitted pettins! The Box of
Coziness is truly powerful!
Marith, Ayse, Ja Baby (and Ta Baby, although he is still not in a
position to express much volition) stopped by
Baycon for a little while.
We spent most of the time stalking the remote-controlled robots which
both fascinated and alarmed Ja Baby, but Marith registered so she could
check out the dealer's room. They plan to go back tomorrow, but I am
already scheduled so I will not be there.
Ja Baby has a badge name now. Ayse was so proud!
Then we ate sushi until
it came out our ears.
- Persona4 5: Wow, she's obnoxious.
- Hanasaku Iroha 21: Does that count as a cliffhanger?
Probably.
- Steins;Gate 7-8: I'm not sure I've ever seen time
travel used for that before.
- Cross Game 8: That is one downside of encouraging
competitiveness, yes.
Despite the lack of Sherlock, we only watched five
episodes because that was the auspicious alignment with the train
schedule. Maybe we should have pushed on to seven or eight episodes,
though, even though I would have been crushed beneath the sleepies.
Adventures
on Dungeon Planet is a Dungeon
World hack for what the author calls "science fantasy" — the
genre in which the phrase "alien wizard" would not be out of place. The
adaptation isn't very difficult, since both genres are fantasy adventure in
which exotic scenery and novel dangers are key. But now, you can face those
dangers as a robot!
Make a comment!
24 May 2013 - Friday
I interviewed a potential future cow orker in India. I dunno. I can
only point to one thing that worries me, but that some of my existing
cow orkers got hired makes me nervous.
Cow Orker M is out sick today, again. Fortunately the natives are not
too restless.
Twelve fuzzy paws of fuzziness!
Make a comment!
23 May 2013 - Thursday
When I got in this morning, one customer was exploding and both the
ones from yesterday were reporting that they were not fixed. But,
eventually, we got all of them calmed down, or at least put off until
tomorrow.
I guess I sort of feel like I accomplished something today, but most
of it should have been accomplished yesterday.
Make a comment!
22 May 2013 - Wednesday
I meant to help Customer X, but then Customer Y called and took up all
the time until my scheduled meeting with Customer Z, and then some.
Stars
Without Number is almost exactly Basic D&D
plus Classic
Traveller. The world generation is more story-oriented than
Traveller's, and there is a system for organizations (which the PCs can get
involved in at 9th level), but overall it's pretty old-school.
Some Apocalypse
World hacks are just diffs from AW, meaning you have to have it to
play, but Monster of the
Week is a full-fledged indepedent game, and a pretty good one. It seems
like it should work fine for any Buffy- or
Supernatural-style game, although it would need some tinkering
to work for Shadow Unit. The major
change (aside from new playbooks and moves) is Luck, which lets you
auto-succeed or negate one hit, but never comes back once it's used up,
ensuring that characters have finite arcs. I
was going to mention the open-ended magic rules, but they're actually not
too dissimilar to the wizard move in Dungeon
World.
Anyway, I would probably play it, or even run it, if I had gamers.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
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21 May 2013 - Tuesday
If I were clever I would try to arrange to get more brain inflation,
in hopes of being less tired. But I am not clever.
Curiosity drove me to download the D&D Next playtest packet
(plus it was free). Unfortunately, I think it should be called "D&D
Previous".
3rd
ed and 4th
ed both brought something new to D&D, but 5th ed not so much. It
adopted some ideas from 4th ed, but otherwise the system is pretty
comparable to a somewhat streamlined 3rd ed. Actually, it might be even
less new than that, since the rules gave me a definite OSR vibe (although
that could be from them not being finished), and two of the adventures in
the playtest packet are ones I remember from my Red
Box/Blue
Box days. If D&D is trying to cash in on the OSR, maybe it's
time to dub it "D&D Last" and move on to Dungeon
World or Fate.
Twelve paws!
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20 May 2013 - Monday
But I was only useless for two days! How can I be expected to go back
to work already?!
The Six-Gun Tarot (RS Belcher) is pretty entertaining
horror/Western, but I object in principle to mixing the Cthulhu mythos
with Christian mythology.
I'm only up to volume 6 in my reread of Negima! (Ken
Akamatsu) and the Kyoto story arc, which seemed so major at the time, is
already done! There really is going to be a huge amount of magical world
arc later.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
19 May 2013 - Sunday
More uselessness! Yay!
I have run out of El Cazador de la Bruja to watch.
Sadness. Woe.
Twelve paws!
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18 May 2013 - Saturday
Today I was also pretty much useless, but it's a weekend so it's less
of a problem.
Traveller World is just
what it sounds like: Traveller + Apocalypse World.
I'm not sure the two halves of it really fit together in the current
version — the Traveller parts need to be loosened up, I think. But,
it's better than any AW hack I've ever done!
The second season finale of Sherlock (if a season with
only three episodes can be said to have a finale) was pretty swell. There
was much discussion about how he got away with it, but in fact it all
seemed eminently doable.
But the third season is only in production now! It will be
ages until it is available streaming on Netflix!
- Cross Game 7: The master villain is super-ratbastardastic!
I hope he is wrong about Aoba having no future, though.
- Persona4 4: It seems somewhat backwards to have people
become PCs after facing down their inner demons.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
17 May 2013 - Friday
Yay! Friday! And a good thing, too, since I don't think I had a
single useful thought all day.
Maybe not even any useless thoughts, either.
I bought The Human Division (John Scalzi) as the 13
installments released as ebooks, but never got around to reading it
until just now. It does work both as individual shorts and as part of a
plot arc, but it needs several more installments to display the full
doom.
Redshirts, also by John Scalzi, is so explicitly meta that
it's not really meta at all. Or something like that.
Novellist God is not your friend.
The Apocalypse Ocean (Tobias S Buckell) is a shortish novel in
the same setting as Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin,
and Sly Mongoose. Since the earlier books inexplicably
failed to sell well, it had to be Kickstartered, but finally is in
existence. Finally, much is explained! In fact, enough is explained that
it could be a conclusion to the series.
Graveyard Child (MLN Hanover) is the fifth book in the
"Black Sun's Daughter" series and resolves the mystery that the PCs have
been struggling with since book two. It even addresses some of the problems
they caused in book one when they had no idea what was going on. It could
therefore be the conclusion, but there is plenty more trouble already on
the mantelpiece so the series could reasonably continue. I hope it
does!
I wasn't able to find a copy of World of
Dungeons, but I did find The
Streets of Marienburg, which allegedly contains all the same material
plus some stuff to set it in the Warhammer
FRP world. Sure enough, it looks like a remote, unpolished ancestor of
Dungeon
World Roleplaying Game, which is what WoD was supposed to be. I'm not
sure why this is a worthwhile thing, but I admire it for its
crazedness.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
16 May 2013 - Thursday
Hey, maybe that horrible thing will finally get fixed! But I'm not
holding my breath.
Moonshifted (Cassie Alexander) is the sequel to
Nightshifted, following the further adventures of a hapless
nurse dragooned into working the supernatural ward and the trouble that
follows her home.
Marith pointed out that John
Scalzi would be at Books
Inc. tonight, so I stopped by to check it out. I dunno, I think I might
be insufficiently fanboyish. However, the secret 14th installment of
The Human Division was pretty funny, and now I know that
churros are the new bacon.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
15 May 2013 - Wednesday
Cow Orker M being on vacation sucks. He better be enjoying himself.
Brown Girl in the Ring was Nalo Hopkinson's first published
novel, and apparently got all kinds of awards. It is a perfectly fine book,
but probably most notable for being voodoo (I don't know the generic term
for religions in that space, sorry)-based urban fantasy written in
Caribbean dialect. I suppose that sounds like I'm saying it got awards on
novelty value, but doing new things is actually good and should be
rewarded.
Supers
is a very rudimentary streamlined RPG, which basically
consists of allocating a bunch of d6s to various skills, defenses, and
powers, and then rolling them against each other. I suppose it would work,
but it doesn't seem very satisfying.
The
Dying Earth Revivification Folio is an update of the system of the
original Dying
Earth Role Playing Game to a somewhat streamlined (but essentially
similar) version, adding random character generation based on assembling
cards specific to the scenario. It also includes three scenarios, not
particularly related except in that the character cards by default
represent the same characters.
Technically you could play with just this, although it does not have
nearly as much setting/atmosphere information as the original DERPG so you
would have to already know what you were getting into.
Points deducted for making all the characters male and putting a
somewhat vapid female lust object in every adventure. It's true that the
original stories were written back before women were legally considered
human, but we need not wallow in those times today.
The final volume of Negima! (Ken Akamatsu) is out, so I am
rereading the entire series from the beginning to put it in proper context.
One down, thirty-seven to go!
Wow, the translation was a lot slangier early on. And Negi was a
lot more of a nebbish.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
14 May 2013 - Tuesday
My brain doesn't want to think about databases. It wants to think about
gaming. But, if I don't think about databases, I cannot maintain my cats in
the style to which they have become accustomed. And, thinking about gaming
is mostly pointless, because I have almost no one to game with (and even
fewer who want to play anything other than D&D or Champions).
Hello, databases. Tell me where the mean customer hurt you.
Episode 10 or so of El Cazador de la Brujna and we
finally have Illuminati and ninjas!
Kindly observe how I continue to keep you in gooshyfood, toys, and
heated beds, cats!
dbRPG by Jeremy (Sat May 18 09:55:37 2013)
There's got to be a way to combine databases and gaming. And multiple good reasons we shouldn't.
Re: dbRPG by Trip (Sat May 18 14:56:27 2013)
I believe database + RPG = WoW.
dbRPG by Jeremy (Sun May 19 13:06:34 2013)
At third level, necrocoders get one optimizer hint per day. It must be preselected after 36 hours of no rest and the consumption of 1200 mg caffeine.
Re: dbRPG by Trip (Mon May 20 09:44:43 2013)
That's "potion of eternal alertness" to you!
At 20th level, you can optimize the optimizer.
Make a comment!
13 May 2013 - Monday
Oh no, it's Monday the 13th! Fortunately, I have it on excellent
authority that petting cats and giving them offerings of gooshyfood
neutralizes bad luck.
Shattered Pillars (Elizabeth Bear) is the sequel to
Range of Ghosts, or perhaps I should say second book in the
n-ology, since it does not resolve much. It does move the plot along
quite nicely, though, and Erem is even creepier than originally
supposed.
I found a PDF of an old playtest for a game that is to Azumanga
Daioh what Clover is to
Yotsuba&!, but it doesn't look like it ever went anywhere.
El Cazador de la Bruja continues to entertain, although
it is not nearly as tightly plotted and tense as Noir or
Madlax. Sadly, Netflix does not seem to have more than the
first two discs, so I may never find out what happens.
Make a comment!
12 May 2013 - Sunday
Today I was pretty useless. Mostly I played WoW and got a panda monk
up to the point where she could choose Alliance and join Adam's
guild.
Trying to use the WoW interface still drives me crazy.
Volume two of Knights of Sidonia (Tsutomu Nihei) continues
to be entertaining, although I still have trouble telling the characters
apart.
If someone says he got everything he has by his own efforts but his
bio begins with the word "scion", you know he's going to turn out to be
a rat bastard.
I'm sorry I was too lame to sit on the couch and pet you, cats!
Make a comment!
11 May 2013 - Saturday
Suppressed Transmission: The Second Broadcast is more of
Kenneth Hite's conspiracy, secret history, ultraterrestrials, and general
weirdness, this time including the Voynich Manuscript.
I failed at shopping, so we didn't have eggs Benedict, but we had
poached eggs with hollandaise sauce and arugula on rolls, which is
probably second-ranked in Warfare.
Ken crushed us brutally in Dominion, with great
brutality, because he is a brutal brute.
Chinese-style noodles with shiitake mushrooms, bok choy, and spicy bean
paste FtEW!
Ayse wins for figuring out what the gimmick in Sherlock 2.2
was, although I demand partial credit for figuring out the tie-in. Also,
Dr Watson, if you comment on another man's cheekbones, you are
automatically imperilling your heterosexuality.
Apparently the peer grading did not overcome the self-grading, since
I ended up with a grade substantially higher than the one that was
described in the exercises as "pretty good". In fact, I appear to have
cheated some actual learner out of a Certificate of Completion with
Distinction. :(
- Hanasaku Iroha 19-20: Obligatory school festival
episode! Nakochi and Minchi both missed their chances.
- Steins;Gate 6: I guess that's one way to ensure
information stays inside the conspiracy, although it has no ending
condition. Hax0r Guy will be glad when it expands to the next obvious
suspect, I'm sure. Maybe she'll stab him.
Make a comment!
10 May 2013 - Friday
Yay, it's Friday!
I made up a bunch of stuff for the Immortal
Empire, but then it was all vetoed, even the suggestion of using Fate
Accelerated (a simplified version of FATE Core which inexplicably
has no RPGGeek page). Bah!
Oh, not only are all the peer-review exercises due by tomorrow
afternoon, but so are all the peer reviews and the self review. I guess
I better do them now, then, since I will be at Monkeycat Towers all day
tomorrow!
[time passes]
I probably marked my own final too high, since I could follow the
logic, but presumably the peer reviews will take care of that.
Eight paws that want to help me sleep! Four paws that will be over
here not paying any attention!
Make a comment!
9 May 2013 - Thursday
Workingu, workingu, la la la.
No Return (Zachary Jernigan) is the sort of fantasy that
could almost be Suficiently Advanced Technology on a different planet in
the far future, but I think it's really magic, with an unusually grisly
non-renewable resource. The characters in at least one plot thread
needed to be shanked and left in a ditch somewhere, but another plot
thread had ones who were at least trying. Anyway, high marks for
imagination.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
8 May 2013 - Wednesday
Working on the peer review exercises so that I can be judged fit to
grade the exams of other students as well as my own. I went up from 2/10
to 6/10, so clearly the third one will be 10/10, right?
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
7 May 2013 - Tuesday
The office is full of high muckitymucks from the giant corporate
pyramid that towers over Neo-Dayton. I wouldn't care, except that they
are consuming all the diet beverages. Bah.
Apparently my ability to grade proofs is severely lacking. Alas, the
video explaining the nature of my failure is on vimeo.com, which seems
to kind of suck. Maybe it will finish loading by tomorrow.
I finished readng through the four Eclipse Phase
adventures I could easily find, A Bump in the
Night, Continuity, Glory, and Ego Hunter. RPGGeek lists several other adventures, so
maybe I just need to try harder to get them, but so far it seems like
the major activity PCs are expected to engage in is research, with lesser
amounts of burglary and fighting. Maybe
GUMSHOE
would be a better base than
AW.
Could AW support something like GUMSHOE's "use of investigation
skills always succeeds" paradigm? I guess all you'd need to do is
specify that on a miss for an investigative move, you still get the
basic information even though the GM gets to make a move. ("Reveal an
unwelcome truth" is always appropriate for an investigative move: "Yes,
you found a match for that alien DNA in your database -- your personal
medical database...".)
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
6 May 2013 - Monday
Argh, Monday.
Now I want to do stuff with the setting we came up with yesterday,
but everyone else is much too busy and important to think about gaming
except for a couple of hours every other week. :(
(Except sometimes Dave.)
I have no brain, but the apartment is full of paws!
Make a comment!
5 May 2013 - Sunday
For reasons that are unclear, instead of doing anything with the superhero campaign we
generated the other month, we played Microscope again and
generated a fantasy
campaign.
I don't know if you were aware, but we are extremely silly
people.
El Cazador de la Bruja continues to be more
light-hearted than Noir or Madlax, although
not necessarily less violent or doomed.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
4 May 2013 - Saturday
I finished the remaining questions for the final, although perhaps
not well, and produced a vaguely readable output to submit. Whee.
Sherlock 2.1 had a lot of plot! Not surprising, I guess,
since each episode is movie-length. Also, naked dominatrix,
almost-naked Sherlock, and Sherlock and Watson being gits in a variety
of ways. But it was agreed that Irene Adler counted as a strong female
character and not awful (except IC).
The last time we watched Sherlock, I think I had not
yet read Shadow Unit, but Sherlock
is so completely a beta. (There is probably already plenty of fanfic
about this.)
- Cross Game 5-6: The oppression under which the heroes
suffer is becoming more clear!
- Persona4 3: Now Chie has a persona too, so the
monster-crushing can really get under way!
The cats are back to normal levels of affection.
Make a comment!
3 May 2013 - Friday
Friday at last! For some definition of "at last", but no matter how
much unstructured time I had in San Diego, it wasn't like being a free
agent.
I have become infected by Ascension,
which is sort of a cross between MtG
and Dominion. It
costs money, which may save other people, but it is too late for me.
I planned to have at least 5/10 of the problems in the mathematical
thinking final done tonight, but I was on a roll and got up to 7/10, so
I may pass out with a clear conscience.
Tonight it is Ghirardelli who needs all the affection in the
world. Fortunately, he is So Fluffy.
ascension by marith (Thu May 9 23:35:44 2013)
You are an evil, evil brain-destroying space parasite.
Re: ascension by Trip (Fri May 10 08:42:33 2013)
Ha hah!
Jeremy, you know you want to!
Make a comment!
2 May 2013 - Thursday
Here I am back at work again. This week seems poorly thought-out.
Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson) is not as epic as I
expected, but despite the unconventional (by honkey standards) language, it
was totally legitimate SF.
Also, humans suck, even if they aren't white.
Super-Affection Beast Marma-Marma is here to protect you from
the dangers of sleep!
Make a comment!
1 May 2013 - Wednesday
Only half a day of training today, and back in with the Sales crowd
to hear about competition. The number of conversions from those Other
Databases Products to Teradata is heartening, but I have to wonder what
new hires at Oracle et al get told.
Travelling back worked out better than travelling forth, with much less
waiting for scheduled transportation to show up, but was otherwise pretty
similar. No vehicle I was on exploded or even ignited.
Hello, cats! Hello! Hello! I am glad that you are not dead! Are you
glad that I am not dead? What about cats that are not Aspen? Okay then!
Make a comment!
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