So much goin on!

So I’ll throw out a shiny link of excellence:  D&D Camp? Apparantly so… !

Hold everything…

What’s this?  Strange teaser footage that shows some cool things?  Identifyable cool things?  (*cough* Jenner! *cough*)  A press conference/interview tommorow with Jordan Weisman?  The above is supposedly in game footage?  A new Mechwarrior game?

Sign me up!  !! !!!!  (That high-power beast of a computer may well get it’s legs worked out after all!)

What I Love: Vol 9

I love Role Playing Games.

I love the rules, the simulation.

I love crafting rules.  Tweaking rules.  Writing supplements.

I love creating characters.

I love getting into character.

I love the surprising events that grab everyone and make the table cheer or jeer.

I love the storytelling.

I love the imagination and the creation.

I love how gaming can be evaluated on several axis, and it’s best when all are in balance.

I love being editor of a gaming magazine.

Full of fullness

Ah, another catch-up post.

Went climbing last Saturday with Dave at the Belmont PG, had a great time, did some footwork I haven’t done in many years, and just played around the whole time.  Good Kung Fu practice on Sunday, we’ve now learned Dragon, Tiger, Monkey, Horse, Turtle, Rooster, Hawk and Swallow (what, African or European?).  Also practiced much Hung Gar with Rev.  The evening saw a very fun DnD session, with evil ethereal calls to watery doom, locked doors, tapestries with hidden images, crazed fanatics attacking and a rain that would not cease.  Not necessarily in that order…

Monday I awoke to my legs feeling as though someone had dung several xacto blades into them.  Very weird, a sharp-ish pain that was close to the surface, rather than the more usual deep-down muscle pain.   Lasted all the way until and through class on Tuesday, then went away overnight as suddenly as it came.  Hmm.  Also did my first Iron Palm practice of the year (yay!) and had a great practice today with Evan.

Much of my other time has been filled with studying, studying and more studying.  The date fast approaches!  Prep, prep, prep!

With great fanfare I have released my first 4e game material/rules/stuff!  I also got interviewed!  Woo for Aurora!

For a break, I present for you two videos, the first very nifty (sheep + LEDs + time = amusing), the second is guaranteed to asplode your head if you have a low tolerance for ky00teness, and guaranteed to get stuck in your head.  Which is precisely why I share it… so that I’m not the only one with it going on, and on, and on, and on…. enjoy!

Insert Title!

Wow, I’ve been very binaryish these past couple of weeks.  Either I’m fully being a possibility with all the ease and grace that comes with it, or I’ve been dealing with myself and what’s coming up seemingly out of the blue.  I know something’s afoot and about to reveal itself, which’ll be great.  And it’s great that I can just be in this realm without stress or losing myself.

I started watching Macross Frontier and dang, I’m hooked.  Very close to the end now, and I’ll write more when it’s all over, right now it’s all very wow.   No plans for thanksgiving yet, but the thought of maple-glazed duck caught my fancy today.  Writing a new article for the next issue Aurora that has me very excited (and working with someone on for the art).  We’ve been working intently on the first line of Xing Yi, which is proving to be one serious deep trip, after three or so weeks I think I’m finally starting to get it.  It certainly feels different!  And feeling the linkage when it comes is exhilarating.

This is made of all kinds of awesome.

Also I have passed the last written ARE exam… next stop, the verbal supplementary!

Shorter yet again?

First the CN Tower, now this! Toronto is losing all of its “tallest” monikers… (still, I can’t help but admire the tower that usurped the LEGO throne, that’s pretty amusing, and still x2, I’ll point out that this tower isn’t freestanding, so nieh!)

Forgot to mention in my last post that I took the seeds from the squash, roasted them up quick-like in the toaster oven and munched very happily on them, nice and tasty.

Patch 3.0.2 is out for WoW, got it all installed on Tuesday and logged in for the first time tonight… to find Ajathka falling underneath the world. Down, down, down until he hit the death plane. Hmm, odd. Found out later why. I ‘adopted’ a house in Ironforge for Ajathka and Khyborr (cousins, they share it). A great little place, near the bank, with great décor and accoutrements, very adventurer-esque. Whenever I’d log them off in Ironforge, that’s where they’d be, at home. Imagine my shock and surprise when I run Ajathka to his home only to find out… he’d been evicted for the new barbershop! Agaah!

That would explain the world falling, I guess. In altering the geometry there, the server/code gacked on his saved location and pushed him into the netherworld of falling. Now I need to look at the other houses in Ironforge for a new place to hang my… axes.

To wrap up this post, here is a bunneh!

All caught up

A great week at work, veryverybusywithlotstodo andohwehaveanewhireandIneedtotrainherwithbrandnewmaterial andbythewaywehavetomeetwithalltheseusersanddolayoutsanddesignthemandrunthembythePMatStanfordtoo andohdon’tforgetthoseothertrheeprojects andyouneedtosetyourselfupatyournewstationafteryourmove. Feels good to be in action.

And speaking of action, getting back into Kung Fu after a week ‘off’ is always amusing — the ancient Chinese addage of “miss one day, lose three days” certainly applies… it takes me a few days to get back up to speed. But back up to speed I am now, after a week and a half of class, teaching, working on the new sooper-seekret set and a good chunk of climbing (more on this in the next paragraph). On friday for our practice, Evan and I went to the volleyball sand pit where he works and practiced Tai Chi on the sand. Two things: one, sun in the late afternoon is H O T ! ! (we ended up wearing our socks) and secondly, it is a very interesting experience. It really was great to work on the spins in sand, there’s much to be gained when you can spiral into the depths if done non-optimally. As I practiced this morning I could tell I got something from that practice, and I think I’ll suggest we do that again sometime soon.

For climbing we visited the Sunnyvale gym — my last outing there left me none to impressed.  The owner of Coyote’s in Ottawa made me wonder if it was due to the fact the gym at that time had just opened (so in a flurry of rapidly putting up routes the routes were somewhat bland).  While the geometry certainly will never be back up to par with their old Santa Clara location, the climbs were pretty good this time round.  Certainly good enough for my forearms to feel it for the next week — something about 60′ high climbs, I think.

I also has me a 4e core book set, and have been reading through those, we played in Eberron last week for the first time in a while, haven’t seen Kung Fu Panda yet (and have heard it is worth seeing), been playing in new-found freedoms, thinking I’d like to seek out some new music (any suggestions anyone?), starting to work on the Northern Shaolin book again, got some car repairs/maintenance done, waiting for my camera back from a repair under warranty, and I could use to schedule some time to do a bit of cleaning up in my apartment.

Paraphrase of the Day to end this post:

“It’s like those fish at the bottom of the ocean — you bring them up and pow, they would explode.  But they never notice the pressure, they’re born into it.  We’re born into some things, and some other things and pressures end up being constant as well, so much so that we don’t even notice we have it.  When they’re removed, all of a sudden we have this experience of ‘wow’, we didn’t even realize what we were under or that there was some other way to be.  I guess that’s similar to the expression ‘weight lifted from one’s shoulders’, suddenly there’s an expansive feeling.”  — Unknown

Meandering

This is the type of research that one professor I’m designing lab space for at Stanford is currently working on:  Spontaneous Generation of Chirped Time-Energy Entangled Photons.  He works with lasers.  I get to work with lasers by proxy!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but I passed my eighth Architectural Registration Exam — one left to go!

This is a nifty design for a helicopter, and amusing, as it basically is a similar idea to what Airwolf was to do…

This is a great site, it is amassing funds and making recordings of classical music (which is in the public domain) and then releasing the recordings into the public domain (as most recordings of said music are NOT in the public domain).  Ditto with the sheet music for a lot of these pieces.

In my post about Prince Caspian I spoke thusly:  “not so fine as an epic fantasy tale.”  In thinking about it later, I realized I misspoke.  One of the things about Narnia is that it is not really ‘epic.’  That’s key really, it’s a much more intimate scale, more of a yarn or a tale than an epic.  And perhaps that’s where the film took a wrong turn, in going for the epic LotR-type treatment rather than a more modest tone.  That might have guided them towards filling in those gaps and capturing the missing feel.

Aurora 2.3 is out!  And let the two week countdown begin.

QotD:  “What is that resistance?  You resist it when you think about it.  You resist when you prepare for it.  You resist as you go to it.  You resist as you start it.  Then you do it, and you’re always glad you did it.  What is that resistance?”  — Unknown

Oldskool dreaming

Had a most interesting dream last night that involved elevators, pistols and fabulous spycraftian action.  Could my dreamworld have been channeling this old game:  Elevator Action?  I loved this game back when it was in arcades… hmmmm.  However it arose, it was certainly an exciting dream.  Before it morphed into something truly odd… (as dreams are wont to do, eh?).

LotD

A double feature today!

One, this video here for an upcoming machinima film is mildly amusing and technically pretty well done… really though I’m linking it for the title sequence which I think is just great.

In a different vein, here is the Foreward to AD&D 1st Edition, way back in 1978. Great read, for nostalgia and with chunks that still inform (and are great reminders).