Who uses it?

Just a reminder and an addition to the schedule - There will be a screening of 'The Crow' from about 7:30 while the final setting-up happens, for anyone who would like to turn up & help out :)

[x-posted all over the place]

From: marsden.marsden@gmail.com
Event: Gothic Vampire Mega Birthday Party of Doom
Starting: 2009-11-13, the Evening of Friday the 13th of November 2009
Ending: 2009-11-14, the Pre-dawn of Saturday the 14th of November 2009
Location: Christchurch, Gladson Ave
Contacts: Robert, Marsden, Chris ph 942 1585
Notes:

1. It's Friday the 13th!
2. It's about that time of year again!
3. It's the end of exams!
4. We haven't had a party here in ages!

What more do you need?

I guess you could say that Wellington were Slade.

Two interesting musical works: a RATM/Electric Six mashup and the Legend of Zelda theme played on Heineken bottles; both via Radio Free Hipster.

Hello all,

me and my fiancee are seriously considering moving to New Zealand. He is an electrical engeneer with a 12 year working experience. While searching the web on the employment situation in the hi-tech industry, we've found that the Canterbury region is often referred as a "Silicon Valley" of NZ, so obviously it would be our destination :-).

Now, we would like to find out more information about employment opportunities in his field: is there a demand for his experience and what are the salaries. He is a Logic Designer using VHDL, targeting mainly FPGA. Any information would be very helpful!

Thanks a lot and have a nice day,
Anna & Zac

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2477.html

Today's theme: Cliffhangers

My Noble Savages finally reached it's climax today after a long hiatus, and it was good to have the majority of my players back under the same roof for an final even that was as social as it was game related. It was also nice to see Lesley and Paul again, who brought their recently spawned orc Darwin along for his first roleplaying experience. I like to corrupt them early :D

The session was loose due to my work related stress keeping me from properly planning out the scenario, but people had fun as the hacked and laughed their way to saving the world one last time. It was a good feeling to give the game have resolution, even as scattershot as a lot of today was, and I actually feel slightly elated to have the game off my conscience. It's true, unfinished games haunt my soul. I think a lot of roleplayers can probably sympathize with that.

Anyway, time to try and sleep so I can be fully rested and relaxed before everything hits the fan on Monday (again.) It's been a while since I've felt this relaxed.

We got three bags of corn chips from the supermarket a few days back that were devoid of flavouring. While waiting for vouchers to turn up for new bags of corn chips, I did an experiment to see if I could salvage edibility out of some of the kilogramme or so of less-than-salsa-flavoured chips.

So, after using a bowl-and-mug due to lack of mortar-and-pestle, I remembered that I own a food processor. This allows me to turn large corn chips into small flakes quite quickly. Adding in pasta sauce and nuking it for a while to soften, this has left me with... well, something. It's kind of like couscous in texture, but corny. And going fairly well with the tomato and basil sausages I picked up down at the local butcher this morning.

Could probably use a little bit of something tart, like vinagrette and diced cucumber. Or the Chilean pebre I picked up from a place near Pasadena when I was visiting there. That stuff was damned good - kind of like a South American pesto.

Stomach calls. Ingestion ensues.

You know you're an adult when girls you went to high school with (and your ex) are having babies. The more I read through Facebook the more I feel I don't fit into the adult world. I mean, my life is (seemingly) all about TF2 right now while other people are having babies, finishing university (some getting honours), boozy Friday nights and grumbling about getting the shit horse in the work sweepstakes for the Melbourne Cup. I seem so utterly child-like in comparison. Which is fine because being an adult isn't all that spectacular anyway. Hm, I guess I just have different priorities in life, much to Mutti's dislike. I arse around too much (study-wise), I don't communicate or socialise (lacking friends in ChCh), spend every waking moment on my computer... What she doesn't know is that I drink Coke like water and haven't had a proper meat and three vege meal in since July. (I think it was July.)

Wooh! The joys of not living at home! Eating what you want! :D

And no, I'm not thinking of popping out a sprog just to make myself fit in. I'm gonna be a nanny anyway, if my niece stays true to her word about having her baby call me that. :D Nanny Kimmy - has a nice ring to it, eh? ;)

Summer semester starts on Monday, exam on Thursday, All Whites game on Saturday, and I still have 40k words to write by month's end. One of my family tree branches has abruptly ended due to my gggreat-grandfather having unknowns as parents, but I have his wife's maiden name when I can decipher the handwriting. One of these days I'm gonna have to contact my birth mother and ask about my birth father. Hopefully she's not a crabby old witch... Then again, she's who I got the quiet nature from, so maybe not. And my height. :P My birth father was a tall dude... which reminds me of a time when I was back in high school. My brother-in-law, Jamie, is a tall guy and he has reddish hair. (You can guess where this is going.) We were at the supermarket one night and I came across someone from my class. The next day they asked if he was my Dad. hehe. XD

Anyway. Life sucks - I managed to get sunburnt yesterday and it itches so. D: But hey, at least I have some colour on me - so now I'm pale, pale red and one shade above pale. We also have birds nesting in our gutters and they are very noisy. If Samara had wings they'd be cat food now.

Oh, hey! They fixed the location detector. :D

If you like 80s music or mashups, check out this mashup album full of 80s classics: 10000 Spoons - A Boot Up The Eighties. Track nine features an inspired blend of INXS and Survivor of which I'd love to hear a longer treatment.

Over the last couple of years I've been losing a lot of interest in roleplaying. I'm a guy that talks about what he's doing and thinking: you've only got to look at the drop-off in my contributions to this group-blog to see that I've been at a low ebb.

But I've been feeling a resurgence in interest over the past couple of months, and in keeping with my characters, I'm going to tell you about how much gaming has sucked, and how a I'm starting to turn it around.

Last year I was involved in two of the least-enjoyable games I've ever had. They were Ivan's Elizabethan SF and my own Space Western II. I want to just chuck a disclaimer at the start here to say that there's really no good reason these games were awful: I've had top fun with almost everyone at both of those games before and since. I'd broken my ankle and was laid up for weeks, and was pretty depressed about it, and to an extent, I'd been chasing the Lace and Steel dragon: the domestic-scale game that changed my life.

For me alone Elizabethan SF was a game where I felt that the GM was insensible of my character's story potentials and motivators. Which was because I'd designed an Iconic rather than Dramatic hero in terms used by Robin Laws, whereas I think dramatic characters are his forte as GM. Combined with a totally different gaming paradigm from at least one of the other players and I found myself alternately bored and frustrated, with a constant undercurrent of confusion as to what the whole thing was about.

The Space Western II was a sand-box where I'd given the players no real toys, and precious little by way of story seeds. I blundered at every turn trying to figure out what was interesting and relevant. It was without any doubt my worst outing as GM ever.

Both of these games wrapped with my spirits at a very low ebb; particularly Space Western II. I think that if I could realistically have written off the play-group of either game as untenable or deeply flawed, that I would have felt better about both games. As stated, nothing could be further from the case, with all players in both games having better than solid reputations around Wellington, and all but two having demonstrated their excellence to me previously. I felt at the time that I had been the kryptonite of both games - sucking the life from them.

Ivan's current game then started up "Big Honkin' Spaceship" - imagined by me as a larger-than life tale of diplomacy and intrigue... where the first three sessions were dominated by one player's commercial wranglings and the focus of another on minutiae of no interest to me. I should have seen my inability to click with any of the other players' character ideas and head-butting with the GM as the critical warning signs they were. I crashed and burned out of the game, which has gone on with other players to be an enduring success.

Coming from the thoroughly enjoyable romp that had been Dale's Warhammer Fantasy game, I couldn't reconcile this image of myself as the destroyer of gaming fun and went into substantive hibernation. I emerged for Fright Night, Post-box Con and KapCon, but my heart just wasn't in it.

To be continued...

So, another week has swept past without much to show for it, I'm not sure where the hell the days go, since I'm hardly doing much at the moment.  They just disappear.   I'm now running out of time to finish the main part of my costume for the vampire party (I started the dratted thing a month ago to avoid exactly this *sigh*) Which seems to sum up my life at the moment pretty well.  How do "normal" people manage to do everything? I can't wrap my head around it.  The concept of doing things like dishes every day, and vacuuming twice a week and all that mundane stuff that people just DO.  It's like I'm missing that gene or something.

Not sure where I'm going with this ramble :)  I guess I'm just feeling a bit directionless at the moment. Not very sure about uni next year, not sure what the point of it is even if I cope with it, since it's not going to lead to anything I can do as a career. Don't even know what I would want to do for a "career" anymore (not sure I ever have really).  But there's nothing else for me to try.  To borrow the lego theme from XKCD and Bunny comic (:p), I feel like I've been building a tower all my life, and there are all sorts of extensions, sticking out in every direction but leading nowhere, and now I've run out of blocks to go higher...  Heh, it worked in my head anyway.

I guess the point here is that I need to find more blocks somewhere. 

In other news, I need your opinions.  I've got the urge to dye my hair somehow, am wondering if I should just go blonde, since that would be pretty extreme for me.  But I'm not sure if it makes me look like a crazy person rather than, y'know, just unusual hair.  Here's a photo of me last time I was blonde (this was the middle step before I dyed it bright red that time, it took 2 packs of bleach to get it that shade, otherwise it just goes gold-ish yellow/ginger like this)  Thoughts?   Suggestions?  Should I maybe go for purple or bright red again instead?  Can only really afford supermarket dyes, so the awesome manic panic type colours are out unfortunately.

The problem with talks at the Getty Villa is that they're always aimed (necessarily) at what we might call patrons of the classics; interested parties with disposable income, but not necessarily the interest in hearing an actual academic paper. As an academic listening to an academic this is problematic, as I'm often unsure whether they're simplifying and embellishing liberally (and in my view excessively), or whether they actually support the account that they're espousing.

Which is to say that I can't recommend this book, but I do want to read it myself. She has accumulated some fascinating information about the reception of Mithridates' legend down to the modern period, and she certainly tells a good story.

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À propos my last post, LJ is a lot more manageable with a trimmed list!

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2476.html

Today's theme: Mythbusters

Me arsing around during a song break on the show last night. Much profanity, cover you eyes and ears if they're delicate ;)

Saturday: Vino Fino tasting. They're now saying there'll be over 90 wines. I aim to be arriving around 2:30-3:00pm and staying for a couple of hours-ish. Hope to see several of you there!

Sunday: Games day here from 1pm.