Lost and Found: Annex |
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Saturday, March 29, 2003
Gotta laugh at myself here - I'm sitting here with a bowl of Lucky Charms, picking out the marshmallows to eat first before I eat the other bits. I am such a little kid sometimes. I've also been known to pick all the green Applejacks out of a bowl and then just eat the orange ones (or pink or whatever color they are). And I like my Rice Crispies either as Rice Crispie treats or so soaked with milk that they become a sort of mushy mass. And chocolate cereal is always good. *grins* Yup. I'm in little kid mode. I'm also reminded of a story from our Changeling game. Specifically, the story of why the Duke gave us a bodyguard. It's... erm... well, mostly my Pooka's fault. See, we were trying to save this old guy from a Satyr and a bunch of Redcaps. Our Satyr takes on theirs. That's one down. The Nocker, meanwhile, decides to run for help. Okay, that's a good idea... but... umm... See, the problem is that my Pooka doesn't walk around armed, and she wasn't a fox at the time. She had a box of Lucky Charms, a paintbrush, and very little in the way of fighting skills. So she threw Lucky Charms at the Redcaps. And got the crap beaten out of her. *chuckles* As we were (and still are) supposed to be finding the Duke's heir apparent, he decided that it might be a good idea to provide us with a bodyguard once they extracted my Pooka and our Satyr from the hospital. I say "had very little in the way of fighting skills"... She still doesn't. And she still isn't usually armed. *grins* Although she did do a couple of health levels of damage by biting this one guy recently... That was an amusing moment, too. She managed to tackle this guy and knock him down. So she sat on him and told him, "If you try to get up, I'll bite you." Well, he tried to get up. So she bit him. Twice; the second one was a preventative bite, in case he decided to try that again. At this point I have to mention that our GM can't manage to soak damage for our opponents. This is why we've had one guy get pistol-whipped to death by our unassuming and weak Nocker - the GM couldn't soak. And that's why this guy my Pooka bit lost two health levels of damage. The guy didn't try and get up again, though. *chuckle* And the GM and I were both equally astounded that the Pooka had done that much damage... Maybe our bodyguard is starting to be a good influence on her? She already thinks he makes a good pillow... Friday, March 28, 2003
Okay... I still have a case of giggles from doing the one-on-one session with Dylana last night... Something about her getting more and more irritated that people weren't telling her why there were suddenly large numbers of patrols in Arden. Of course, it would have helped if she'd asked people who might know after a Ranger declined to talk about it, instead of calling her pirate half-brother Thorne, chatting with Florimel in the hallway, then calling Random to ask about it. Of course, given that Julian was profoundly unhelpful the last time she asked him for information (he was trying to give information, but I suspect he was being too subtle...), she might be justified in not asking him... But she could have asked his son Zane... Or just called Random in the first place... Why she thought a pirate son of Gerard with connections to the underworld in Amber might know what's going on in Arden, I have no idea. As he said in the game, "I don't go through Arden much." And as for Flora - one day, maybe one day soon, Dylana will figure out that wandering the halls randomly is not always the best way to find people who know what's going on... Oh, but until she does... *chuckle* Thursday, March 27, 2003
Well, we're working on another L&F session... That sounds so weird. But this particular session is a two- or three-parter, because one player could only play tonight, another can do it tomorrow night but not tonight, and the third... well, I have no idea when he's going to be able to do one. *shakes head* Anyway. We've got another round of quotes out of it. Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Sssslllllllooooooowwwwwwww day. *groans* I did get a little more work done on the character quiz for Oriana. But we appear to have stalled out on the auction again - GM must be busy. Being patient. Really. Very patient. See? Playing games, doing other things, not obsessing... I also had a character idea, involving a redhead that likes to have people paint on her... And the line, "riding sidesaddle on a horse of ill repute," has struck, lodged, and refused to go away. *chuckle* It has now been expressed; after all, when one's Muse bites, it is best to air the results. Musebites are much unlike snakebites, in that one should - indeed, must - show off the Musebite to people who will appreciate it, whereas no one appreciates a snakebite except the snake (and, if you are particularly unlucky, the doctor treating you). And one should not try and suck Musebites, since that is a terrible waste of the Arts and may lead to viscious, unhappy Muses storming your creativity area. *nodnod* After all, Muses are fickle creatures. If you're not nice to them, they may decide you are crunchy and taste good with butter. Or chocolate, although I've never been that fond of crunchy chocolate. Not that I'm a Muse. *wrinkles nose* Being worshipped and begged for inspiration all the time would get boring. I'm not much for adoration. I wonder if there are little Muses. Muselets? Muselings? You know, a Muselet for every aspect of a Muse. Why not? I can so see a Muselet for dirty limericks... She'd be an aspect of Erato as the Muse of love and erotic poetry. Or maybe there's a Muselet for WW II history, as a sub-Muse of Clio, Muse of History. Hmm... Sub-Muse just sounds odd. And I guess I'm assuming that the Muselets would be female... There's no reason the Muses can't have an entourage of male Muselets... *cough* Riiiiiiiight. Sunday, March 23, 2003
I have in my head the image of my character Oriana, who I've mentioned before, using a pair of rollerblades in the Palace in Amber... Somewhat tall woman with long blonde hair and green eyes, dressed all in blue and gold... on a pair of rollerblades, using a hockey stick to bat one of those balls they use in rollerhockey up and down the hallways... terrorizing pages and servants... and probably getting uptight Family members' panties in a wad... "Oh, hello, Uncle. Don't mind me, just keeping in shape - watch your feet. Bye!" Of course, I am assuming the GM isn't going to tell me the Palace is carpeted... Then again, I happen to know that even my clumsy self can manage to work up a head of steam in a pair of skates on plush carpet... at least I did before I fell over. But I fall over on concrete when I try to skate, so that wasn't terribly surprising. *chuckle* Rambling, rambling. Anyway... Even if the halls are sufficiently covered with rugs to prevent rollerblading, she will simply move any rugs in a suitably large room and use that. Rough cobblestone might be an issue. But I don't imagine there will be rough cobblestone in the Palace. I think it would have made Oberon cranky to keep tripping over rock. *innocent grin* Saturday, March 22, 2003
Heh heh heh. Been working on a pre-game day-in-the-life story for my char Oriana (for the PBeM I joined). She is quite gung-ho... and quite obsessed with hockey. She comes from a Shadow where ice sports are pretty much the only sports. She will probably be quite unimpressed with the lack of ice in Amber - given that her Shadow freezes for a mile out to sea in the early Fall and thaws out again in the late Spring... Note to self: ask GM about rollerblades in Amber... because the center of the universe needs roller hockey. Shouldn't be a problem - but if necessary, we can always find another solution for the raging desire to play hockey. Batting pucks across hardwood floors might be fun, even if she has to do it without skates... And woe betide any ice sufficiently thick to hold her weight during the winter... Thursday, March 20, 2003
This post I wrote yesterday has been stuck in my mind for a little while today. Because there's one part of my brain telling me, "Hey, look, omens. Bright flag in sun, dark times ahead where the flag won't be bright any more. And the flag is an American flag... So it could represent the US... Dark times ahead... Well, let's see, does bombing another country count as something dark?" And the rest of my brain is shouting loudly, "Random occurances are not omens. Shut up, shut up, shut up. You don't believe in omens, remember?" I think I'm just creeped out. And angry still at my ex-boyfriend. The guy who, in HS, informed me that he was planning to run away to Tiajuana if the draft was instituted. The guy who ended up joining the Air Force to get out of California and then informed myself and my parents that as long as you didn't volunteer for anything, no one is going to shoot at you while you're in the Air Force. The guy who, Tuesday afternoon, started a conversation with me with (apparently) the intention of having a fierce argument with me over current politics. I didn't mind too much when he asked if I planned on "taking it out on the military," since I'm not. I was irritated when he referred to anti-war proponents as protestors and human shields, but I can survive that. But I took (and am still taking) real Issue with the fact that he informed me that conclusions I had drawn about Bush's reasons for this war were "misguided propaganda," and then continued on to say that I was spreading wrong statements - apparently opinions are okay, but not wrong statements. At that point I just stopped talking to him, since it was apparent that he intended to try and change my stance on this folly-in-action by bullying techniques and hints that he knows something that he can't talk about but that is really really bad and is the true reason for the war. *shakes head* As if he knows the real reason for the war. There are a very small handful that know that: Bush, Colin Powell, Cheney, and maybe a couple of other people on the cabinet; Hussein; and maybe Tony Blair if Bush is playing nicely with his toys. A techie in the Air Force with some low-level security clearance does not; he might, indeed, know more than I do, but he isn't having to filter all the propaganda, either. Okay, so I'm still seething. I'm also remembering my freshman year in HS (about 8 years ago now... ugh.), when we had to watch Channel One News every morning. Well, we had to (or were supposed to) watch Channel One every morning from the time I hit eighth grade. But I'm remembering 9th specifically. They kept sending these 28-somethings out to places like Kosovo to report, in the middle of highly armed situations. I'm wondering now if Channel One has someone out in the Middle East now. *pause* Lisa Ling! That was her name! I've been trying to remember the name of the girl they were sending out to Kosovo. It was Lisa Ling. ...I think...? She got hired off by some major news company the next year; I think she's still floating around, but I can't remember who hired her, and I don't care enough to go find out. I don't know where I was going with this. I think I'm just complaining again. Shutting up now. So, Spring begins tonight. I had to turn on the heater this morning. Hello, Texas, glad you decided to change the bloody weather on us again... *rolls eyes* Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Wow. Just... wow. Okay, before I describe this, I feel like I have to make one thing clear: this was not one of those patriotic-spiritualistic kinds of moments. When I talk about a flag - even an American flag - it is simply as a rectangular piece of cloth with some stuff on it that hangs from flagpoles and flies around in the wind. Clear? Cool. Anyway. Driving home just now from a dentist appointment, I passed this one American flag by the mall, one that I've passed far, far too many times to count. This particular flag is planted inside a small strip center boasting two restaurants and three tiny stores. Behind this is a stand of tall, dark-leaved trees. A storm is approaching, but the flag and I are still just outside the approaching line of clouds. The sun is shining, somehow backlighting this flag so that its colors glow and still shining on the front of it; behind the flag is a storm-filled sky, all grey and steel-blue and blended and bordered with a fragile trim of white just above me, and blue behind me studded with puffy white clouds. Absolutely beautiful. If I'd had a camera, I'd have taken a picture. (And probably wrecked my car.) There are a million things on my mind now, after extensive cruising of various webpages... but it is two in the morning and I don't think I could form and keep to a logical train of thought to save my life. My boyfriend and I came up with a term a while back: "skanky-yeti tired." Basically, this stems from a conversation held at around 4 or 5 in the morning, the point at which I begin to truly ramble. Somehow we came to the determination that the various types of bigfoot/yeti/sasquatch have various levels of grossness. I think - and don't quote me on this one, because I was phenomenally tired and I'm getting there now - that the skanky yeti were at the top of the food chain. At some point I realized the absurdity of what I was saying (I'm pretty sure Dust had already seen it, since he was laughing the whole time...). So, skanky-yeti tired is that point at which your brain is wonderfully unhinged due to the natural process of sleep deprivation, the point at which it is perfectly reasonable to contend that Bigfoot has ingrown toenails, the land where word slurring leads to statements that won't be nearly so funny after you've caught up on sleep... It's the place just this side of complete exhaustion, where you can just go to sleep and know that you won't be bone-tired still when you get up, where the hair-trimmer-with-vacuum-attachment on the infomercial both horrifies and amuses you... Where you can be eloquent about the fact that you should have gone to bed some time ago... Saturday, March 15, 2003
From an IM conversation a little while ago: Me: "Yeah, the fans at the Red Wings game earlier weren't happy... Don't remember who they were playing. They kept booing and changing negatively." Dust: "Ew." Me: "Changing... should be chanting." Dust: "I figured. Although shapeshifting fans would be able to do "the wave" with remarkable fluidity." Friday, March 14, 2003
WISH 38: FavoritismDo you (or your GM) "play favourites?" Do you feel you have to justify your answer? Do you have a horror story to share? Hmm... Well, I know the first time I played, I saw a sort of anti-favoritism. Maybe that's not the word I want. Anyway, the player had this ability to be more irritating the longer you know him - I barely knew him at the time. Within the first five minutes of this one-shot, the (NPC bartender/GM's character) and the (GM's best friend/guy who wrote the scenario)'s PC had thrown this other player's character into this bathroom and lit it on fire. And killed the character. For no apparent reason. Said GM then gave the player an NPC to play. Who lasted fifteen minutes, this time, before dying in an even worse way at the hands of another NPC. In terms of the long-term chronicles I'm involved in... There was potential for favoritism in the D&D game, but I never noticed it, so as far as I know, it didn't happen. Changeling and Amber... Well, here I have to describe my gaming group for the Changeling game and the majority of the Amber game. Basically, we were two proactive players, a player who keeps playing variations on herself, and one really really irritating player. And the two proactive players were myself and my boyfriend; he GM'ed the Changeling game and I GM'ed the Amber game. The most interesting, most active, and easiest to mess with characters are each other's characters. That being said, Dustin (my bf) has been very consistent about not playing favorites. I did recieve a few extra experience points, but it was for an interaction that deserved the points (hey, when you can relax all the tension in a court where the High King is visiting...). He's managed to get our play-herself player to develop her character to be at least a little different from herself. And he managed to keep our irritating player from taking over the game and keep his attention channeled where it needed to be. And that, I think, is where I've failed in the whole favoritism thing. I had real issues with GMing this player, since no matter how much I tried, every single session he managed to back me into a corner (and because I was trying to handle this, his character spent a great deal of time in assorted imprisonment situations where I could restrict the weird shit he could do by simply telling him, "that won't work."). I was inadequately prepared on certain fronts he insisted on delving into, and those areas were not ones I could simply give him a few vague facts on the spot for and then finish in detail later - he wanted it then. I forget the number of times he asked me to tell him exactly which parts of a random Pattern theory book from Amber's library that his character understood. Or how about the time he expected me to have a ready answer for Fiona on the subject of "the fundamental trigrams of sorcery." When he'd never asked me about sorcery and, in fact, I don't think Amber sorcery would be so mathematical as to require "fundamental trigrams" - whatever those are. He made assumptions about how Amber worked in my game according to his logic and didn't bother to ask me about them before springing them on me in-game, and then expected something useful from my response. Okay, so I'm still a little upset with this player. He did none of this out of malice, I know - he didn't have a malicious bone in his body. He was just clueless. (When he left the game, it was because we hadn't played for a while and he'd simply forgotten and scheduled himself out of game time, as far as I know.) Dustin (who gamed with this guy long before we met) tells me I did fine trying to contain the insanity this guy generates; he finds this guy's gaming style (and indeed his personality) as irritating as I do. And I guess that's why I can't totally trust Dustin's estimation of how I did. I feel awful about it, and I fully intend to never get into that kind of situation again. This is also the first game I've ever GM'ed, so it is a learning experience. Because a) Dustin's character and the other character spend a lot of time together, and b) we've been playing over IM, where I like to answer things as soon as they're posted to the chat room, it's harder to tell if I'm favoring Dust's character over Darcie's. I don't think I am. In-game, they're equal. In terms of experience points, they're pretty much equal. The only real difference between the two comes in the fact that Dustin and I will sit down and run through hypothetical situations and commentary on the game from his character outside of the game; we have done so with my Changeling character as well. I would be willing to do so with Darcie if she showed any inclination; she seems to think I'm obsessed with gaming and only wants to talk gaming when we're playing or discussing when the next session will be. At best, the conversations with Dust result in contributions (diary-wise or plot-point-wise) for the game; usually they amount to nothing more than hot air. Hmm... okay, I think I'm justifying... Monday, March 10, 2003
WISH 37: Schedules and CircumstancesHow do you prioritize gaming in your life to make sure it happens on an ongoing basis? Are there circumstances or scheduling issues that make it more or less likely for you to participate in a gaming session or a campaign? How do you work around these issues, or can you? You'd think 4 college undergrads each taking less than 17 hours could manage to find gaming time in common. You'd think. It was easier in the dorms; we kind of had a captive thing going. The people I gamed with all went to the same mostly-edible cafeteria together for supper, and after that, unless you had work to do that didn't get done earlier in the day, evenings were either gaming, or TV, or network computer games, or sitting there talking. Sessions averaged about three hours a night, due to external things and silly people who thought 8 am classes were a good idea. Then one guy flunked out, and we started having to bring him up here for Changeling (He had no driver's license, but that was a good thing. We didn't want him driving.) or get him online to do Amber. And his brain went scattering to the four winds, as usual, so that we often had to call off a session because the forgetful boy had scheduled something that he could have postponed on Amber night. Then another player started having issues where he couldn't be online - and he was the Changeling GM, so both games went out the window for a while... There's a whole longer sob story to go with this, which I'll keep in the interests of not turning this into Days of Our Lives, but I felt like I had to take a hands-off approach and not pester him about gaming at the time. The upshot is, after essentially a two-year hiatus and exchanging our forgetful gamer for one whose odds for remembering things doesn't require using a random number generator (numbers 10,000 to 10 billion or so) to figure out, we're just now getting back into gaming regularly. And even then, I have to IM reminders the day before. But we're going to have a regular schedule if I have go tie all three of them down in front of a computer with internet access (although at that point, I could just haul them back here and do it FtF again...). Unfortunately, the other option I have - gaming with another group on campus - is a little iffy. They start about 10 pm and go until they get bored or too tired. This doesn't work for me because I hate all classes before 9 am and after about 2 pm and avoid them like the plague they are, and I don't do naps. Four hours of sleep is a Bad Thing for me. I start babbling nonsense (both verbally and occasionally in written form) and revealing that yes, indeed, my parents are from South Louisiana and had an accent when I was a small child. I am not going to rearrange my academic life to some horribly inconvenient afternoon-and-evening thing in order to go play with these guys. Gaming is important, but so is being able to go to the 24 hour Walmart while there are more than 10 customers who don't make me feel unsafe and uncomfortable. The ideal gaming time for me with my current schedule is MWF afternoons and Tuesday evening (as long as it's not too late). Weekends are taken up by horseback riding, mooching supper off my parents Saturday night, and occasionally picking up my boyfriend Saturday afternoon and bringing him home Sunday evening, so although I will play on the weekend, I'd rather not. I just joined a brand-new PBeM (my first), but I miss FtF gaming. I think I need to find more local gamers that don't completely distrub me the first time I meet them... That's about the only circumstance that will put me off of a chronicle. When the guy in all black clothing and a black trenchcoat, with hair that has obviously been dyed black, and who hails from a dorm infamous for being the home-away-from-home for every sex-starved/crazed Music and Art student on campus (the place where the only people who don't go to the goth club Sundays for one reason or another are the RAs that have to mind the desk and the three freshmen who were stuck in there by mistake) asks if you want to play Ravenloft... the answer is N O. In terms of sessions - it would have to be an emergency; I feel like I have to be there every time. I will rearrange things to fit if I can possibly do so. The ironic thing is, my normal group is so small that if one of us can't be there, we might as well call off the game... and the other game I played in, the GM was guaranteed to be so bloody late that I could fudge by anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and still beat him there. Friday, March 07, 2003
We talked about kinship systems in my Sociocultural Anth class today. And now my brain, which sometimes goes off on tangents like this, is trying desparately to classify the kinship system of Amber. I think, however, that I don't have a large enough sample to make a conclusive finding. The elders are basically patrilineal - descent is traced through the father, with mothers being more of a genological footnote than anything else. But the younger generation tends to break that. Duh. Wait. Ambilineal kinship - choose the line that is most advantageous. *shakes head* Why didn't I think of that before? That means the sample is fine, because it allows for younger generations... Too much anthropology, not enough sleep, obviously. [Edit] Yeah. Too little sleep... else I would have caught this sooner. Ambilineal, Amber... oh maaaaaan, how did I miss that? *laughs* |