(At work this week I attended a class about writing directly and in plain language. I did not care for it, but I will try to apply the lessons from the class to this entry. See if you notice.)

This past Saturday was Halloween, and I would call the long-awaited Wolverine costume a success. In the end it cost me a little under $200, but if I had to do it all over again, I would try to find a cheaper alternative to the jacket. I suppose China doesn't have vanity sizing like America do because the jacket is a bit tight for day-to-day use, which is a shame because the it cost a hundred dollars. I have no absolutely regrets about the claws, as people enjoyed them everywhere I went this year. I also purchased a blue and yellow t-shirt patterned like Wolverine's Astonishing X-Men costume and custom made dog tags with the number from X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

So where did a crazy man dressed like Wolverine go this year? First, I went with Will to a party hosted by some of his friends. I only knew about half of the attendees yet it was a nice, if a bit uneventful, affair. The one thing that concerns me about Will's friends that their respective friends are getting increasingly younger as they're getting older to the point where they're becoming "The cool old guy who buys kids beer". Despite telling myself that I wasn't going to do it this year, the Thursday night before Halloween I had the nerve to shave my chin and mustache and go to work in a slightly modified version of the costume, with a red plaid shirt over a white t-shirt instead of the blue and yellow and no claws. Since he unfortunately wasn't going to be able to make it on Saturday, I wore my costume to Matt's house Friday night and had a mini-Halloween which involved us going to Taco Bell for dinner followed by Target to buy candy where we discovered some outrageously delicious dark chocolate Reese's mini peanut butter cups.

Saturday I went to the Tom's River Halloween Parade with Will, Niki, and crew. For a relatively small affair, the parade was awesome although my personal highlight was all the attention I was getting. For instance, Angie got excited that two people recognized her incredibly reverent Michael Jackson costume so it became a competition of sorts. I started waving to the kids in the parade with my claws out and they loved it.

Final score:

Wolverine 12

Michael Jackson 7

Now my hair is short again, and I kind of miss it. I have more to write about Halloween this year, but I wanted to get the facts out first. I'm finding that I have increasingly less energy to write blog entries and it frightens me.

Dear Brown and Pollitt of Transit Union 234,

I appreciate that the public does not have all the facts in a given situation, but the internet exists, Transit Union 234, and you have a functional website! If your position is at all sympathetic, you really need to publicize!

Everyone's cutting back right now, and you're getting reasonable cost of living increases. If the strike were about human rights issues, I would be right with you, but you make amazing money and have the best benefits that you can have without being independently wealthy.

In conclusion: I hope you're asthmatic and effected by the increase in carbon emissions over this past week. May your balls wither asymetrically, so that not only do you feel bad about it, you also walk funny.  I hope your children make life choices with which you are not comfortable. I hope you get restless leg disease, pimples inside your nostrils and priapism all at the same time, and that when you grow old you keep your mental faculty but lose all bowel control, so you're incontinent and embarassed.

Love,

Public Transit Smurf (who is incidentally looking at car prices, you fucks.)

So...how's this car shopping thing work? I mean, it's gonna have to wait until January or February, but it looks like the car is not an optional part of the adulthood checklist. Dammit. It's one of my goals to have a small carbon footprint and I can't do that when SEPTA's fucking up my lifestyle.

My list of writers to read more of, especially given my recent hard scifi mood:

-Alastair Reynalds
-Greg Egan
-Charles Stross
-The Killer Bs (Brin, Bear, Benford)

Other media:
-More Ghost in the Shell
-Perhaps watching the movie "Moon"
-"Eclipse Phase" RPG setting
-Diving into Orion's Arm (recently revised!) for some cool new ideas
-Dresden Codak webcomic
-A Miracle of Science webcomic

Of course, retro stuff is also good: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Olaf G. Stapledon. Gotta love the pulps. 

 

Hey Guys, thanks for all the comments and return questions!   If any of you live near Cleveland Ohio, please drop me a PM!

I thought some of you might like to know how things turned out.  I was quite surprised at how it turned out:
( Cut for those who are not interested )

I'm playing a cleric of Tyr in the underdark, she's a slave--which has been pretty harrowing, but she's doing her best to keep her alignment and whatever good she can.   Yeah, I know-- she's probably going to die horribly, but it's pretty cool right now.  At the moment she's alive, and unsurprisingly stuck with a moral challenge:

The cleric of Tyr has been traded to some slavers.

One of the slavers, a drow NPC who seems actually pretty decent, offered her to protect her from The Sisters.   Who I'm guessing are probably some kind of cleric of Lloth.   This would require sleeping with him, as the Sisters find those who have been 'tainted' by a lowly male unsuitable.    He would otherwise not be interested in sleeping with a human. 

So...what should she do? 

   She is a chaste (and currently celibate by perference) widow.   The cleric is by all standards rather chivalrous and a 'nice girl', sleeping with a stranger is something she would not do on her own.   It's not that she considers it evil, but perhaps a more respectful and honorable choice.

Of course she'd rather not be at the mercy of these Sisters, her death in these circumstances would probably not serve Tyr particularly well. 

  I don't think that Tyr would abandon her with either decision(1).

(1) http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0490.html

On that note, Rocky Horror was awesome. I have glitter all over me, got Rice in my hair and ended up with a piece of toast on my head. It was loud, it was kinda nuts and it made me happy.

Trick or Treating tonight up at TCNJ.

Slept off Rocky Horror so now I'm getting ready to go.

For those who had voiced interest in my trying to get my RPG published, here's a little update.
( Behind the Cut )

I find grad school is captured very well in this hilarious webcomic: PhD comics by Jorge Cham. http://www.phdcomics.com/

I've been trying to find a bibliography for all the world of darkness books, specficially it would be great to have a list of the novels and short story collections by date they were published. I haven't found any online. The Whitewolf website, unless i'm very inept, seems quite lacking. The wiki page doesn't have what i need and google hasn't helped. I want a list of the books as far back as when they first started publishing fiction(not the gaming books).

Any help?

So, I'm in a M&M campaign, and I don't think our playing group is having much fun with it.  The game master, I feel is trying too hard to 'control' the game.  It isn't exactly rail-roading, but more that he gets upset if things aren't going in the direction he wants.

Our first session, we're in the super hero base, and this guy we don't know reaches out to grab the Time Traveller PC to give a prophesy.  We don't know the guy from Adam, but strange insane people trying to grab you is usually a bad thing, so our Brick decided to interpose to protect the Time Traveller.  The GM got really upset about this, and the session was stalled for about ten minutes as he argued with the player.

Later on, we're dealing with someone having summoned a thing from another dimension.  Our Time Traveller tried to look into the past to identify who did it.  So, the bad guy seems to have noticed this, and set up a spell to stymie it.  (The bad guy actually looked at the Time Traveller, through time).  Not to be outdone, we dropped my character into the past to watch from a distance and get a good look at the bad guy.

In the same session, we encountered the 'thing', who while we 'stood and watched', picked up a bear cub, and sucked the essence out of it.  Any of us had the means to stop this, but he made the presumption we'd stand and watch.  The Brick's player was fairly upset about having his actions decided for him, so when the GM called for Init, he asked 'so what do I do?'  Fortunately (though I had stepped out briefly at this point), the GM decided to rewind and let us actually do the heroic thing.

So, tonight, we're facing a ghost.  The Fae has a sword which can hit intangible (and extra-dimensional) targets.  For some reason it has been decided the sword is a 'danger' to creation because of this.  Anyway, the Fae also has True Sight, and the GM apparently wasn't pleased with that, and when the Fae decided to intercept the ghost's escape with the sword, the GM used fiat to have the ghost get by anyway.

We encountered the Necromancer who summoned the ghost (the bad guy for this encounter), and stymied him.  I tried to read his mind to learn what he knew and what he's done, and the GM had him passing every Will roll to resist.  Fortunately, the PCs knocked him out, and with that it wasn't a problem, but the GM wound up being ticked that I persisted and got the information I wanted from him after he was KO'd.

At the wind-down, my character, a Vigilante, was having a discussion with the characters about whether or not it is right to kill an enemy who would use lethal force.  This was mostly a discussion of philosophy, as my character sees nothing wrong with killing the 'enemy', but the PCs are against it.  It was a pretty deep discussion, involving honour, what is 'right' versus what is 'easy', and so forth, but the GM had an NPC step in and 'lay down the law', effectively ending the discussion.

---

Now, don't get me wrong.  The GM is fairly creative, and I've had a number of fun sessions, but I really think he's got some control issues here.  In essence, it seems 'don't use your powers except for how I want you to', and even more so I think he's against information-gathering powers.  This is only going to escalate -- my character has a combination of psychic abilities and martial arts, but since almost all of our encounters are against supernaturals, and those my character can't just fight, I've had to put my character's points into his telepathic abilities, making him even better at information gathering.  (Postcognition + Mind Reading + Telepresence -- he can look into the past, and sense who was there, and get their surface thoughts).

Is there a point to this?  Well, not entirely.  I wanted to get this off my chest, but I'm also curious about what other people think.  How much control should a game master have over the use of a person's powers -- especially if the game master cleared their being taken?  Should a game master decide (perhaps arbitrarily) to impose restrictions on a power that the player hadn't given it?  (Like the faerie sword, or in the case of our Time Traveller).

Thoughts?

So here we are, early in the morning. Unable to sleep because I'm a girl.


And I'm thinking about things I miss from college or just about being primarily around people in my own age range.

And so, Here is a question for anybody that reads this.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever missed?

From your childhood, from your family, from someone or somewhere. Anything. Just something you find it odd that you miss but that you miss anyway.

in Honor of Halloween coming up this weekend I thought I'd share something nifty I found on the internet.
Man, I love the internet.


So I'm being a pretty classy vampire for Halloween. And before I wonder off with my 22 year old self to go Trick or Treating up near my Alma Mater with my other silly friends... I'm going to Rocky Horror with my family.

GO FAMILY! (there will be pictures of the aftermath

but this is a Cool Costume and make-up job. I mean if you're going to be a comic book character and you want to go all out, this is pretty much the best you can do here.