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Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
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3:59 pm - O Rlly?
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Apparently they're redoing Tomb of Horrors for 4E.
Coming out in July.
It's possible that my group will be tenth level by then...
current mood:  contemplative
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(14 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, December 7th, 2009
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9:21 am - Oh, Wiki
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| Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
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10:14 pm - D'oh
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For some reason, my computer isn't taking my morning "no, seriously, shut down while I run out the door and try to make the bus" instructions seriously.
Sorry to those of you who IMed me today. Wasn't ignoring you, I promise!
current mood: sheepish
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| Monday, November 30th, 2009
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5:33 pm - How Does That Heinlein Quote Go Again?
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Talking about book-buying habits over on Slacktivist, and my own preference for libraries or PDFs over actual hard-copy purchases, has made me realize that I generally prefer to own as little stuff as possible. Not out of any enlightened disdain for material goods, mind--I'm as fond of thigh-high boots and video games as the next sybaritic twenty-first century party girl--but because, well, between fourteen and twenty-six I moved, conservatively, fourteen times.
Part of me--the same part of me, I suspect, that likes knowing I could, without premeditation or warning, leave my house and be somewhere in Virginia before anyone knew I was gone--gets really twitchy about Having Stuff. Because, well, the more stuff you have, the more time and effort it takes to pack it, and packing sucks, and do we really need furniture? Really? Especially furniture that's too valuable to leave behind? Couldn't we just get a bunch of beanbags and milk crates? I mean, it does look nice, and so do the paintings and stuff, but...we might have to move! Any moment! Eventually! And it will take foreeeeever!
I should've been a desert nomad.
Except, I admit, for the clothes. But clothes pack down easily!
current mood:  amused
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| Thursday, November 26th, 2009
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10:29 pm - Facts
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* I am in Maine.
* We damn near missed the train. Note to self: even if you're absolutely sure you're leaving at 11:30, double-check.
* I have a new cell phone! It's blue and shiny! And they migrated all my contacts on it, so I don't have to ask you guys for your numbers.
* My dad has bought a new stove and a giant TV. He's put the latter in our serious, not-a-den, white-carpets-and-furniture living room, and now we have dinner there. Either I'm disconcertingly grown up or the man's getting fairly cavalier as retirement approaches.
* Cold Case is not bad. I like the concept, and the way they morph the people from who they were when the case was fresh to their current appearance. On the other hand, seeing a cold case from 1997 is disconcerting to me.
* We went out for Thanksgiving dinner. As a result, this is the first Thanksgiving where I haven't fallen into a carbs-and-turkey-induced coma as soon as I leave the table.
* I'm full of floon for a whole bunch of things: writing steadily on the novel, working on 7V background, and poking at D&D campaign. (Which may include lava sharks.) Also really really want a copy of Dragon Age: Origins. Things to do with my Christmas money.
* "Night at the Museum" is good trashy fun. At least, once they got past the first ten minutes of Ben Stiller having a Generic Irresponsible Guy Troubled Homelife. Dude, I am not here for your personal journey; I'm here to see T-Rex skeletons walking around. At least movies seem to be getting away from reuniting divorced couples.
* You can suspend someone completely parallel to the ground via duct tape. Thanks, MythBusters.
current mood:  full
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| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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11:36 am - Pimping: Partly out of Personal Agenda
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...but also because they're awesome.
GUD Magazine. Award-winning sf, reviews, and general niftiness. All available in either PDF or print form. And right now, you can pay whatever you want--minimum one cent--for all five previous issues.
I plan to buy mine once I get home to Qbert.
current mood:  cheerful
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| Friday, November 20th, 2009
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9:29 am - PSA
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For those who know me RL: my cell phone is a brick. The battery's stopped charging, and Radio Shack says the thing's old enough that getting a new phone would cost less than a new battery, depending on my plan...which I need to go back to Maine to check.
So, until after Thanksgiving, email or IM is totally the way to go if you want to get in touch with me. If you want to meet up...well, I'll loiter by something landmark-y, and wear bright clothes.
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| Thursday, November 19th, 2009
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11:55 am - Methadone Post
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I'm ardently avoiding getting into a discussion of gender essentialism over on Slacktivist, because it will end with me writing three-page rants including the phrase "wanton fuckwittery" and pacing the floor, and, while fun, this is not something I can do at work.
Therefore, I will note the following:
* I've recently realized that all the angsty songs I like are the ones where the singer isn't at all surprised by the angst, but rather either saw the suckage coming or thinks they should have. And, indeed, most of the romantic songs I like are the ones where the singer is well aware that this will probably end up sucking, but thinks it's worth it anyhow, or similar. I guess "stoic resignation" is the dominant emotion I look for in romantic music. Heh.
* The place where I ran dancing sessions in the summer is being all annoying and full now. If anyone knows somewhere moderately cheap (like $30-$50 for a four-hour weekend session) to hold ballroom dancing in the Metro Boston area, please let me know. I could also go out to Waltham or whatever, as long as it's on the T.
* I feel a need to start DDR again. And maybe have a DDR-based party at some point, if I can get my apartment set up for it.
* The picture on today's calendar at work is of a cat on a rooftop. It's staring at me. I think it wants to eat my soul.
In other news: would Aquaman's "control marine life" power work on Cthulhu? Discuss.
current mood:  bored
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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12:57 pm - Grr, Argh
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You know, there are better times to think "I should have killed more people off in the first half of this book" than WELL INTO THE SECOND HALF. I hate you, brain.
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| Friday, November 13th, 2009
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9:01 am - Pandora, What's Your Deal?
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So when I create a Les Miserables based channel, the majority of the music on it is...Disney?
Seriously?
I mean, it's not necessarily bad, but these are not things I'd put together. Especially when the other, happier musical channel I have contains no such songs. Apparently your AI equates "songs about prostitution, uprisings, and death" with "The Little Mermaid."
Your AI kind of scares me now.
current mood: amused
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| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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1:48 pm - The Chicken Scratches
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Tomatonation did an entry on Obsolete , a book I really want to read: all the stuff that was common twenty-odd years ago and will shortly be all but unheard of. Including cursive writing.
I do think that cursive is, like sewing, a kind of cool but not at all essential skill these days. Which I started to argue from my own experience, trying to think of times when I've handwritten something of any length that someone else was supposed to read, as opposed to notes I take on the T. I email thank-you notes--they get there faster--I can't remember the last time I wrote a check rather than e-transferring money, and I can't think of...well, except game logs. Sorry, GMly people. Guess maybe I should've actually practiced in those third-grade workbooks. ;)
Okay, game logs and sometimes the written version of thank-you notes, if it's a job interview. But even there, we're talking neat printing, at best. I don't think I'm going to lose XP, or that I would have lost a job offer, for the lack of a proper capital Q. And I think that, as laptops and so forth get more commonplace, and as people do damn near everything electronically--I don't have a print copy of my latest offer of employment, or of the contract for the latest story I sold, and that's fine--cursive will fall out of common usage. Maybe it'll be a specialist skill that we hire for fancy occasions: the return of the scribe class?
current mood:  curious
current music: "Take These Broken Wings". Ugh.
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| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
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4:50 pm - Heteronormativity and Charisma Goons. No, Really.
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This started out as a book review of The Wizard Lord , by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Not a bad book. Interesting premise: a sort of Ill-Winds-like world (each town has a different guardian spirit, and has to do different things to placate it, which influences the town's character) but this one's governed by a Wizard Lord. In case he goes batshit, there are eight Chosen who will kill him: Swordsman, Leader, Thief, Scholar, Seer, Speaker, Archer, and Beauty. So far, so good.
Except why is the Beauty automatically a woman? Because women don't get distracted by attractive men? Mr. Watt-Evans, my sixteen-year-old self would like to laugh bitterly at you. Oh, hell, my twenty-seven-year-old self would like to join in. And the Beauty's power is that...all men want her, all the time, and all women envy and kind of distrust her. Really? All of them? World without lesbians, I take it? Or gay dudes?
Seems to me that there are a couple ways to portray a character who's magically delicious attractive:
1. Everyone wants him. No, really, everyone. Kinsey-six lesbians. Kinsey-zero dudes. Total asexuals. Three-headed aliens. Everyone, ever. What the hell, it's magic.
2. Everyone who's normally into dudes at all wants him. People who *aren't* normally into dudes still might well find themselves curious, really like hanging out with him, whatever. Add "or dudes of his type" to that last sentence and this is about as far as it seems reasonable to go with non-supernatural charisma: sorry, even Angelina Jolie can't get everyone hot.
3. Everyone of the gender or type he's attracted to is attracted to him. There's some element of will here, even if it's subconscious.
4. The heterosexual gender binary applies explicitly because the person who cast the original spell believes in that sort of thing. You can run into some problems here: portray said original spellcaster too sympathetically, and people wonder if you agree. (q.v. the Pern novels for a related example.)
So you have a pretty wide range of stuff you can do. But just introducing the hotness *without* one of the above, all "la la la, women want him, men hate him"...well, you could get away with that stuff in the fifties. Not so much in a book you wrote in 2006. It just makes you look like you're either totally unaware of the modern spectrum of sexuality or ignoring it because it bugs you, neither of which reflects well.
Edited for self-incriminating honesty. ;)
current mood: bored
current music: "I Want to Rock"
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(21 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, November 2nd, 2009
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11:05 am - Memeish
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Actually, I think most people know me pretty well: not many unexplored depths here, y'all.
Still, it's Monday--after an awesome weekend of Rock Band, pancakes, singing, dancing, and dim sum--and I'm bored. So if there's anything you want to ask me, especially stuff you're surprised you don't already know, go ahead. If it's a sensitive subject, email me--I will not publicly answer questions about the Latveria Incident of 1998.
current mood: amused
current music: "Wonderwall", courtesy of Internet Radio
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| Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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2:27 pm - One For the Money
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| Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
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1:53 pm - Gray Day, Shiny Things
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(I would like gmail to start working for me. How about...now? No? Damn.)
* Grooveshark. Pandora recently told me I'd mooched off it long enough--by which I mean for 40 hours--and kicked my ass to the curb. Because there's no way I can survive this job without a soundtrack, I found Grooveshark. All the awesomeness of Pandora, plus you get to hear the song as soon as you request it. The shark is love, guys.
* Relatedly, Pink. "U and Ur Hand" won me over despite the spelling, and was my pre-clubbing anthem back when I was single. (Because: seriously.) Have recently discovered "So What," and holy shit that's catchy. Still a rock star!
* The Friendly Toast, a cafe/restaurant/thing near where I work that a) serves breakfast all day, b) has kickass hamburgers, c) has amaretto goddamn hot chocolate with more marshmallows than the human mind can safely comprehend, and d) is wallpapered in 1950s ads and paperback covers.
* Books! On the non-trashy end, Sharon Shinn's Thirteen Houses books are really good, character-focused novels with an interesting world and good plots, and I'm vaguely surling at my library for not having Reader and Raelynx , dammit. Charles De Lint's work is also damn impressive: sometimes he gets A Bit Much with his enthusiasm for weird pagan/bohemian/generally wacky circles, but still great, lyrical stuff. I read a lot of his books in high school, but don't think I appreciated them enough then.
On the totally fucking trashy end...okay, so I started reading the Upper Class series--prep school Drama, thinly disguised Choate--because I'm writing Hickey of the Beast and wanted to see what similar stuff is out there. By and large, Teen Drama doesn't have that much appeal to me, but this is...surprisingly good, surprisingly addictive, and, at least for me, very accurate . I'm not caring so much about who ends up with who--it's high school, for fuck's sake--but the descriptions of student life are practically time travel. Nostalgia in a totally non-sappy way, the sort of thing you never get from alumni magazines.
* QBert has a new monitor, courtesy of my birthday and Adam being nice. It's big, flat-screen and shiny!
current mood: cheerful
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| Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
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11:45 am - Domesticity Fail
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Over the past couple years, I've learned to do very minor sewing things: attach buttons, mend rips, hem skirts if they're not complicated and nobody will notice.
How-the-hell-ever, I'm now faced with a couple more serious alterations, and am pretty sure that, if I try to do them, the results will look less like actual clothes civilized people wear and more like something from the post-apocalyptic hellscape where we all make our own clothes out of leather and Baby Ruth wrappers. And at least a couple of them are costumey enough that I'm wary of going to a regular tailor. So, does anyone who lives nearish me and considers themselves Good At This want to make some cash?
I would also totally be willing to do the actual sewing-things-together bit, as long as someone else can make sure the things are shaped roughly like they're supposed to be.
current mood:  cold
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| Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
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8:48 am - Snowralis
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First of all, many, many thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) hilariarex, noradannan, eclecticgypsy and others for making sure I didn't freeze to death. I brought five layers, ten spare layers, and two blankets in addition to my sleeping bag; they weren't quite enough, because New England wants to kill me or something. So yay helpful friends!
The session itself was a lot of fun. At times fun in a ZOMGDOOM way, but that was...not unexpected. ;) I got to have a lot of conversations: some significant, some deeply amusing, and many both. Wasn't involved in a lot of fights, or at least not up close (since Certain People are sliiiiightly protective these days) but the ones I was in seemed, to my not-terribly-combatty-eye, to go well. And being Body Check Girl with Fathom was a good time.
Other cool moments included late-night philosophy with a couple different people, *really* late night discussions of accessories, hiding out from "horrible ice monsters" on Sunday, drinking in the temple of Laisha, facilitating Phoenix's AWESOME ideas, snarky banter with a couple of the new Garandi, attempting to comfort weeping undead (with very little idea what they were weeping about, exactly), the Day of Memory speeches, helping with rituals, and my mom. Oh my God, my mom.
So. Doomed. Oh well: at least it's a doom that involves pretty dresses. That's the best kind of doom.
ETA: Also? Cutest chainface *ever*. I want one!
current mood: amused
current music: "Heart of Glass"
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| Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
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12:33 pm - YOU ARE HAVING FUN. SMILE.
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Here is a vaguely freaky way to spend a morning.
I haven't gotten very far yet--ran into the perpetual issue I have with games that depend on reflexes, which is that I don't have any--but the messages and the music so far are...entertaining, in their own way.
current mood:  awake
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| Sunday, October 11th, 2009
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9:57 am - Things I Hate: The Hatening
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Yeaaah.
So, aside from the massive racefail, and the complete missing of the point, and the non-apology apology, you know what bugs me about this guy?
The inability to understand that a discussion is not a car.
See, for those of you who somehow missed Social Interaction 101, the thing about talking to people is this: you say something, they respond, other people respond to them, etc. You can chime in at any point, but the only thing you get to control is what *you* say. And sometimes--sit down and catch your breath--the thing that people find interesting about what you say isn't the thing you started talking about. Sometimes this is because, again, this is how conversation works: I'll start talking about Stephen King with someone and fifteen minutes later we'll be discussing Onion Rings We Have Known. Sometimes this is because the thing you actually wanted to talk about was pretty boring, but in talking about it, you've managed to show your ass in about fifty ways.
Either way? People will talk about what they want to talk about. Posting all "oh my God, guys, my post isn't about that, get back on topic!" is like walking into a conversation about Star Trek and demanding that the people involved talk about Star Wars now, just because you're here: um, no. In RL, you can either find something interesting about the subject under discussion, nod and smile along until there's a *natural* opportunity to change the subject, or pull the "oh, gotta go grab a deviled egg" maneuver. On forums, you can suck it up and discuss whatever the conversation's morphed into, or you can, you know, not look at the posts. Posting "quit with the bullshit and get back to the real issue"...well, it *would* make you look like an entitled asshat...
...but OH WAIT, you ALREADY DO.
current mood:  annoyed
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| Saturday, October 10th, 2009
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1:09 pm - Could Also Be A Decent Superhero Name
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It says something about the SciFi--excuse me, "SyFy"--channel that the movie they're showing today is "Atomic Twister."
It...says something about me that I've already seen it.
current mood: amused
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giggly
dorky