A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I had an especially fun game night at rikchik-n-Mary's last Tuesday, but I accidentally messed up magid's awesome hand at Gang of Four by not making an obvious move when I shoulda (I was enchanted watching people play Toppo in the other room and absentmindedly passed my turn), and allowing queue to go out a round or five earlier than he really shoulda, and sticking magid with 100,000 cards, making the game end earlier than it shoulda too. (Not to say queue didn't have his victory coming to him, but I kind of carved it up nice and served to him with garnish, which is not optimally fun.)

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I enjoyed an especially fun brunch that cthulhia hosted in honor of zyxwvut's visit to the east coast. Lots of Rabbits/Arisia peeps in attendance and lots of good food that they broughted and I eated it. I volunteered to help with coffee, but through miscommunication I ended up leaving my own coffee equipment at home. I used Cth's equipment as if it were mine, even though it wasn't, and long story short ended up spilling scalding water all over my sous-barista classicaljunkie's right hand. I feel awful about this and have put myself at her beck and call while she convalesces. I would write more but she just told me to go fold laundry, so OK.

But for now I am only 100000. (Last year I was 11111.)

Delightful things:

* The Hunt was fun but short, ending less than an hour after Saturday did. I personally performed about as well as I did last year, and I think our team kept up with its own record too. We had one painful bottleneck about 12 hours in that locked us out of the leader-pack, but still ended up placing about two-thirds of the way up, if I read the graph correctly. I liked the theme and how it was run.

* Chicken Heart suffered from some technical flubs and missed cues (grr), but otherwise beat its way into the hearts of a full-house crowd at Arisia yesterday. Afterwards I received, along with everyone else involved with Chicken Heart, an email from Kibo containing a Kibo-penned one-minute summary of the show in radio play format. It's been years since I regularly read a.r.k but I couldn't help but thrill at this. You can take the jmac out of the fanboy, but you can't wait that's terrible.

* Received a delightful gift from jadelennox. Monkeys were involved.

* I was happy that I got to celebrate the last day of my 2000 Maine driver's license's validity by renting a Zipcar to help shuttle hunters and their stuff around after we struck the set. But now I can't drive at all anymore, and will have to go subject myself to the Mass RMV system once again, despite my no longer owning an MV to R.

Zarf ponders pyramids

Taking break to listen to tim powers.

It was okay. Gaming is always A Good Thing, but I disappointed myself -- I thought I'd want to take more advantage of the con, doing the many things and meeting the many people available there, but this turned out not to be the case. I actually became fairly cranky on Saturday, and spent much of the afternoon and evening alone in our hotel room, reading and doing Book work.

Leah, my very own LJ Anonymous Coward, wrote me a nice letter before the weekend which opened with the observation that I, in her eyes, share an attribute with another favorite blogger, The Gus, in that I move through all these distinct circles of people, but seem happiest when alone, or with the computer and writing. My first impulse was to object, especially in light of the burst of sociability I've experienced since the year started, but I can object only up to a point. I can't deny the pattern I stick to of making forays into the wild now and then, but always retreating back home alone when I've used up all my mana points or whatever, so that I can recover and reflect. I might be making more sorties now, but the strategy's never changed, and it doesn't change when I go to a con, either.

It's true that I hung out with many interesting and fun people, but they're the same interesting and fun people I see several times a week nowadays, and in much less expensive venues, such as In Someone's House, In The Cafe, or Out Side. (Note that this is, in fact, a nice reminder that my life is beautiful right now.) Notable exceptions were other Lab Rabbits who aren't a staple of the local circles I'm in, and Zarf.

Zarf is so cool, mannnn, even if I was too grumpy to go party-wandering with him, and he didn't have any comments about Currents other than "Ahh, too many rules -- sorry, I am having a Kory moment." I wonder if cthulhia tried pressuring him into LJ. Well, at any rate, I'll see a lot more of him and everyone else I really ought to meet, game-design-wise, this summer at Origins.

But, for now, boy, I feel burned out on gaming. Redlining my leisure time is, in fact, not all that fun, especially not right now, as I feel the lukewarm breath of The Deadline on the back of my neck ever-so-slowly heating up. I will need to get a lot of work done before I'm again filled with the real desire to game -- gaming tastes sweetest, to me, when it's a mix of the given mental challenge and sociabily with the feeling that I've earned the chance to do this utterly unproductive thing for a while. With luck, I will meet this requirement before it's time for Vericon, this coming weekend.

The Diesel gambit paid off; I wrote for two hours, and the chapter has enough momentum to roll itself home. There's just the matter of time. I have decided that I can't write well when I'm sleepy... I can't start things at 10 p.m. I found myself doing this after I got home and settled in to continue, but then Carla's GURPS group started to drag itself in, and then they started taking turns coming upstairs and begging me to play. Oops: I forgot I was one of them. I relented on beggar #3, bringing the iBook with me, but of course that was no environment for doing technical writing. I bailed on them politely as I could, after 90 minutes or so. But by then, feh. I email Linda, asking her when the drop-dead date is. I am still silly enough to think I can have this wrapped up by tomorrow. I hope that, certainly.

Meanwhile, life is just barreling along. Beyond the ever-growing queue of when-the-book-is-done activities (which by now probably has "pick up a musical instrument" in it, rendering everything after it irrelevently unattainable -- this is my own personal Godwin's Law of activity queues), the world around me and the people in it continue to change, maybe accelerated by holiday fervor, I dunno, cuz I can't touch any of it while I'm locked into this mode, totally stationary in regard to planetary rotation, and hence SHOOTING OFF INTO DARKEST SPACE from your point of view. I owe people some juicy choice nummy-num letters, letters I start to write many many times, with which I'll try to reconnect myself to stuff. They're not easy letters to write in the first place, and the fact that I can't keep my mind on them right now doesn't help. I know they'll get out eventually, and my beautiful friends will joyfully reel me back in, but only when the you-know-what is you-know-what, and until then brrr it's cold out here between the stars.

On the more practical side, I am worried about my nonmotion with regards to getting an Arisia room (last I heard this was sorta being done by committee -- bad idea), and any number of bills I keep suddenly remembering I haven't paid since I moved. And a parking ticket I got a long, long time ago in Waterville. Crap. But who has time to think about that stuff?!

I have mentioned I feel like I'm right back with the UMaine newspaper again, right? I'm locked into this absurd, hallucinatorily untouchable meta-state, where I pretend to be not a member of your MERE HOO-MAN SOCIETY while I sit on my perch and look down at you wee people as I chronicle your wee-people lives. And your XML. Foo.

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I do not think I will risk the LotR showing. Poop. Even if the chapter's done, it would give me zero time to prepare for the meeting, and this I do not wish to do. However, I'll be seeing Maine Crowd #2 (which has crossover with the first one) this weekend, and maybe we can see the movie then. Shrug? It's also likely I'll get a chance to watch it with some locals, maybe even before then. We'll see what happens.

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Joining Carla's group was a mistake, a decision made on my first full day in this house, right at the start of the honeymoon. I am having zero fun roleplaying, and Carla... is no Josh. This is not to say that she is a bad GM, but I have grown to like the style of the other GM in my life (heh), who is, simply put, a master storyteller, able to handle player action and player inaction with equal finesse. Josh does not say "I will stick dice up your nose unless you roleplay" at me. (For that matter, no player in the Josh-group has ever complained to the other players about themselves being the only one bothering to roleplay.) Carla's games are also very linear, or at least this one is. We started out in point A, and one of our PCs was told that he got the idea that there's a guy we could talk to at point B. OK. At point B we talked to a guy, who told us to perform action C, which taught us about location D. La la la. The Josh-led campaign, on the other hand, is a sprawling epic, and nobody knows what the hell's going on, though we each (both as players and characters) have individual ideas, and we know when we're following a right trail.

It's funny I write like that about Josh's game, because during the campaign's former half, I was constantly debating whether or not to drop out... I liked Josh's style then too, but I didn't like my character so much. It's grown a lot on me since then, though my character is still the same.

Tonight I was telling a remote friend (who is about three times more introverted and nonconfrontational than I am(!)) to break the bad news to a woman (with whom I am also acquainted, though she is remote to both of us -- all hail the Internet) who has been more-or-less stalking him for years (as in inviting herself over to his house every few months, a process that involves flying from North Carolina to San Diego) that he was not interested in further romantic relationship with her. He does not want to do this because it would shatter her (she breaks easily), but I advised that not telling her would just let her stew in drawn-out, unrequited longing, while he'd continue to feel guilty: far worse for both of them.

And here I have trouble giving myself the same advice when it's just a bloody RPG group that I've been with for a month?