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

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?