Welcome to 1998, jmac

[prog]

I may spend the first few days of my vacation not on travel & adventure but on stay-at-home fecal consolidation, as the lack of immediate work deadlines grants a mighty boost do my domestic Tuit balance. Viz: after rolling out of bed today, I finally tied down my WiFi, which has been flapping embarrassingly in the breeze for all to see since I moved here a year ago. I then proceeded to figure out how to get port forwarding and DynDNS to work with my trusty old Netgear router; I only today discovered that it can automatically inform DynDNS when it's handed a new IP address from the ISP's DHCP server.

This transforms Stilton the Underused G5 into an Internet-visible server, more or less. RCN blocks ports 25 and 80 (blah), but Internet Wisdom (cough) suggests that they don't actively care about services run by customers on other ports, so long as they're done with a modicum of subtlety. (And perhaps I could do something clever with my jmac.org domain, to get around that port-80 issue.)

One immediate outcome of this is that I can host Neverwinter Nights modules from my home, which is pretty neat. Anyone interested in a session or three of the ol' hackenslash? There are a few interesting-looking modules I'd like to try in the company of friends.

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On that note, had a splendid session of Cthulhu yesterday with The Pope et al. Especially splendid since I successfully applied my most recent theory about the central maxim behind his RPGs, which is basically: creative risktaking will be rewarded.

In the past, I would keep all my characters out of anything remotely dangerous, because I was treating the game like a CRPG with no save-game function, apparently forgetting that we enjoyed the presence of a sentient GM who wants us to have fun. Last night, the turning point came when ol' Fr. Smith (my d00d) made a leap of faith fueled by a burst of insight, and this became the turning point of the evening. I actually feel like we "won" the session, as opposed to the last two or three we did, which always ended up in a shambles. (The non-entertaining kind.)