ugh, a week and a half already
Oct. 17th, 2012 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishLet's see. Went down to Seattle the weekend before last with uilos for a tea festival. Met up with Ed (who graciously provided crashspace and native-guiding despite being both extremely busy and mildly ill) and a couple of other Jeffersonites. I did not buy any tea, although I tasted a great deal of it. Admission was 'pay what you want' but if what you want was at least $10 they gave you a nice ceramic cup that you could use for tastings at various booths. Notable teas included one intense green that involved the stems as well as the leaves, a strong yerba maté, and a blend called "Prince Vladimir" that has perhaps more citrus than I really like but was tasty anyway.
We took the Bolt Bus down instead of the train or renting a car. The bus is less than half the price of the train trip but much less comfortable: better than Greyhound or the Virginia Tech Home Ride buses, but not by much. Most annoying, the seats were too small for me to use the laptop on, so that was six hours of email or other writing time I didn't get to use. Oh well.
Dinner Satyrday night consisted of a small handful of ex-Jeffersonites and others. And somehow it just kind of clicked, in an easy relaxed way that hanging out with other people doesn't always, but seems to be more the norm than the exception among ex-Jeffersonites. High school was good for something, I guess: providing me with a bit of a pre-built worldwide social network. (Ed, incidentally, officiated at the wedding/cake party, and is among the people I've known a little for years now and am always happy to spend time with. I can think of worse people to have three hours south of me.)
Then for Canucksgiving we had people over for dinner, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. Guests were the Thursday night roleplayers, plus M--'s wife, which is six, which is just as many as we have good chairs and table space for, so it must be the right number. We made impostors (they look like fudge on top but they're delicious peanut-buttery goodness underneath) and E baked an awful lot of salmon, and other food was supplied and mostly eaten, and conversations were conversated, and Dixit was played.
In gaming "news" my Wednesday night Legend of the Five Rings game has ended, which I'm okay with: pseudo-Japanese culture is Not My Thing and the system's not so hot either. In its place I convinced them to run Night's Black Agents. NBA exists at the intersection of "international espionage thriller" and "vampire hunter." You play hypercompetent ex-secret-agents who've stumbled onto a vampire conspiracy that you have to take down.
NBA is built on the Gumshoe system. Gumshoe's big selling point is the obvious-in-retrospect logical leap that the important part of an investigative isn't finding clues, it's putting them all together. In-game attempts to find clues are automatically successful provided the character has the skill to find them. Nothing worse than a game that stalls out because everyone blew a Search check and now the GM has to figure out how to get that clue to them. As someone who cut his GMing teeth on Amber Diceless, I am all in favor of fewer skill checks.
Good thing too, because the Thursday night AGON game wound down due to lack of interest on my part. They got to beat up a bunch of mythological monsters, and generally stop the Norse gods from coming down and restarting the Titanomachy, and it seems to have gone well... but I'm only good for so much mindless beat'em'up action. So now I'm running Ashen Stars, which describes itself as "a gritty reboot of your favorite SF tv show." Also Gumshoe-powered. Only one session so far (last week's was cancelled in favor ofuilos sleeping with electrodes on her head, so we watched Domino) but it looks quite promising.
(Ha, and my RPG tag of "funny-sided dice" is no longer relevant, since Gumshoe uses a d6 for all non-investigative skill checks.)
Other things that happened: doubling my movies seen at Vancouver International Film Festival over last year, a Garbage concert, finally watching Sita Sings the Blues, getting through season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Alsouilos came home with another tree this afternoon. Three more years and the porch will resemble a very small jungle.
uilos for a tea festival. Met up with Ed (who graciously provided crashspace and native-guiding despite being both extremely busy and mildly ill) and a couple of other Jeffersonites. I did not buy any tea, although I tasted a great deal of it. Admission was 'pay what you want' but if what you want was at least $10 they gave you a nice ceramic cup that you could use for tastings at various booths. Notable teas included one intense green that involved the stems as well as the leaves, a strong yerba maté, and a blend called "Prince Vladimir" that has perhaps more citrus than I really like but was tasty anyway.We took the Bolt Bus down instead of the train or renting a car. The bus is less than half the price of the train trip but much less comfortable: better than Greyhound or the Virginia Tech Home Ride buses, but not by much. Most annoying, the seats were too small for me to use the laptop on, so that was six hours of email or other writing time I didn't get to use. Oh well.
Dinner Satyrday night consisted of a small handful of ex-Jeffersonites and others. And somehow it just kind of clicked, in an easy relaxed way that hanging out with other people doesn't always, but seems to be more the norm than the exception among ex-Jeffersonites. High school was good for something, I guess: providing me with a bit of a pre-built worldwide social network. (Ed, incidentally, officiated at the wedding/cake party, and is among the people I've known a little for years now and am always happy to spend time with. I can think of worse people to have three hours south of me.)
Then for Canucksgiving we had people over for dinner, which turned out to be a very good thing indeed. Guests were the Thursday night roleplayers, plus M--'s wife, which is six, which is just as many as we have good chairs and table space for, so it must be the right number. We made impostors (they look like fudge on top but they're delicious peanut-buttery goodness underneath) and E baked an awful lot of salmon, and other food was supplied and mostly eaten, and conversations were conversated, and Dixit was played.
In gaming "news" my Wednesday night Legend of the Five Rings game has ended, which I'm okay with: pseudo-Japanese culture is Not My Thing and the system's not so hot either. In its place I convinced them to run Night's Black Agents. NBA exists at the intersection of "international espionage thriller" and "vampire hunter." You play hypercompetent ex-secret-agents who've stumbled onto a vampire conspiracy that you have to take down.
NBA is built on the Gumshoe system. Gumshoe's big selling point is the obvious-in-retrospect logical leap that the important part of an investigative isn't finding clues, it's putting them all together. In-game attempts to find clues are automatically successful provided the character has the skill to find them. Nothing worse than a game that stalls out because everyone blew a Search check and now the GM has to figure out how to get that clue to them. As someone who cut his GMing teeth on Amber Diceless, I am all in favor of fewer skill checks.
Good thing too, because the Thursday night AGON game wound down due to lack of interest on my part. They got to beat up a bunch of mythological monsters, and generally stop the Norse gods from coming down and restarting the Titanomachy, and it seems to have gone well... but I'm only good for so much mindless beat'em'up action. So now I'm running Ashen Stars, which describes itself as "a gritty reboot of your favorite SF tv show." Also Gumshoe-powered. Only one session so far (last week's was cancelled in favor of
uilos sleeping with electrodes on her head, so we watched Domino) but it looks quite promising.(Ha, and my RPG tag of "funny-sided dice" is no longer relevant, since Gumshoe uses a d6 for all non-investigative skill checks.)
Other things that happened: doubling my movies seen at Vancouver International Film Festival over last year, a Garbage concert, finally watching Sita Sings the Blues, getting through season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Also
uilos came home with another tree this afternoon. Three more years and the porch will resemble a very small jungle.
no subject
Date: 2012-10-19 10:21 pm (UTC)And I am / we are always happy to see you if and when you feel like non-hermiting!
(Also, should you have a surfeit of time and money, I think you might enjoy Night's Black Agents. It's an interesting read, at least if one is interested in reading RPG books.)