Hi, and welcome to my journal thingy! This journal is not friends-only.
If you like what I have to say, feel free to add me as a friend, but please let me know. :D I know LiveJournal introduced a notification system for that, but as of updating this (Nov 10, 2006) it's causing me frustration, as some people for some reason keep adding me as a friend for every single post I make. I'm disabling that until they refine the feature further.
If I find you interesting enough, I'll friend you back. It's almost a given, 85% of my friends are mutual.
That concludes this welcome message. Feel free to look around, ask questions, but please, no flash photography. Don't forget to visit our gift shop on the way out!
Soooooo, yeah. I've been doing stuff.
Got back on WoW. The expansion totally does nothing for me. I'm leaving my hunter at 70 for a while, and playing with a druid, who hit 32 today. I'll probably stay on a while longer, mainly because I've got a neat guild with friendly people on it. (I still won't do the raid or pvp stuff.)
Haven't worked much. Did some computer work for some friends-of-friends, and that's getting me some cash in.
My D&D group is dwindling. Two players are on hiatus for probably two months or so, one might be leaving in a month or two. One has no interest in keeping in contact and sometimes shows up, sometimes doesn't. That leaves one reliable player for the foreseeable future, not counting myself. I want to either get some fresh blood in, or merge with an existing group.
Been doing a whole lot of nothing lately.
Tomorrow is D&D Meetup Day, where I volunteered to run a quick one-shot 4e adventure.
I don't actually have an adventure to run. I committed to it three weeks ago, thinking I can just whip something up.
My original thought would be, storywise, to have a mage come into town, offering laboring golems for lease incredibly cheap. He says he creates them using a method he's invented. Other mages are puzzled, the amount of arcane energy required to create and maintain such constructs is more than he's charging. They want to know how, but the creator is really secretive. In addition, the local laborer's guild is pretty upset over this new cheap labor that's putting them all out of jobs. The local mages want to find out how the creator does it, maybe get themselves a piece of that action. Laborers and getting unruly and labor leaders are doing all they can to prevent an angry mob. (Or are they?) The PCs get involved somehow, and get to the bottom of it.
That's what I was thinking of doing. It's actually been bugging me how complicated it would be, and I'm still on the newbie side when it comes to DMing. I didn't think I'd be able to pull it off. I've been procrastinating on writing it up.
Until today! I was listening to the new D&D podcast about Eberron, and I decided to make it situated in Eberron, specifically Xen'drik. I pulled up an old idea I had for a 3e adventure, and start it off in media res, with the heroes just getting possession of the MacGuffin, and having to escape some ancient ruins before it crumbles and collapses on them. In 3e, I had thought of giving some fortitude saves, reflex saves, and stuff to represent running hard, dodging poison darts, and that sort of thing. Now in 4e, I just realized, that whole mechanic is part of the main rules as a skill challenge!
After making it out of the ruins alive (failure in the skill challenge would just mean a few more bruises in the form of healing surges), the adventurers make their way back to their camp. There they are ambushed by Emerald Claw agents, demanding they hand over the MacGuffin. Whether they do or not, of course fighting breaks out, and the adventurers win. I'm going to try to let the leader get away after the fight in typical cheesy dramatic fashion.
I'm not sure what to make the third encounter. Possibly a sahuagin raid on their sailing ship as they try to make it back to Stormreach. Maybe a fake "roadblock" of changelings impersonating officers and demanding to see their licenses and permits, from some unidentified faction, as a ruse to steal the MacGuffin. Maybe both.
338.8 miles on 10.481 gallons of gas
32.3 miles per gallon
Woo! Mileage much improved. I guess the brakes really made a difference.
Soooo this morning my brakes were reeeeally loose. Like I got little resistance until I floored it. I made it to work ok. (Working one day as a temp.) Called the place that I just spent $980 to fix my brakes, got a warranty appointment at 3:30. I'll get there at 2:15 and wait. I'm not gonna drive anywhere else but straight there, and hope my brakes last that long. I'll test them after work, see if I feel safe driving. If not, I hope the place offers towing under warranty.
EDIT: I made it to the car shop ok. Brakes can still stop me fully, but they do now totally hit the floor. I'll wait for them to look at it.
EDIT2: According to them, it was just some air in the lines. They bled them under warranty, and now my brakes totally feel like they just got worked on. Before they felt about the same, post-pad/rotor/caliper replacement. Now I can skid to a stop almost instantly. (Almost because my tires are totally shot, need to replace them asap, 3 of them have degraded one step in only two weeks.)
There's some awesome stuff happening recently in video games, and that makes me wish I had a Wii. (And a TV to hook it up to.)
( Several game embeds, including Mario and Guybrush Threepwood )
I just spent a little bit of time with a couple old friends...
It's amazing how well a modern PC can emulate a Playstation.
I'll probably wait to play further until I can get a gamepad. You have to hold down a button to run, and it's not very comfortable to do that on a keyboard.
Did you know that adventurers have parties? I love parties!
I've got an axe. See my axe? My mom made it for me.
Watch On The Set of 4th Edition: The Demogorgon and the Gnome
Worldwide D&D game day is tomorrow! It's celebrating the release of the Monster Manual 2. All over the world*, you can stop by your friendly local gaming store and play in a short adventure! You don't need to even know how to play, they'll teach you, and you get to keep the character sheet you play with and the mini too! I'm going to be a DM at one of these things.
301.3 miles on 10.069 gallons of gas
29.92 miles per gallon
I've got new rear brakes now, no more scraping, so maybe my mileage will go up.
Also need new tires and see to my Check Engine light.
This is an actual product that's really for sale, or at least coming out in September. For $43 plus shipping you can get a 2gb Ravage or ... Tigatron? (Nobody cares about you, Steeljaw.) But seriously, is anyone going to get one of these and get some not-G1 old fart rather than the classic and awesomely cool Ravage?
Now the nerds need to mod up a Soundwave as an mp3 player that'll accept usb flash drives for input. Though I wouldn't be surprised if it happened already.
Edit: I just noticed the capacity listed is two gigabits. I fired off an email to the store, and they've stated it's a typo, and it should in fact be two gigabytes.
So I just beat this awesome game called Plants vs. Zombies. At least, beat the main Adventure mode. There's still lots and lots of minigames and side things to do. It's a real-time strategy game, actually a take on the tower defense sub-genre. It's nicely fun. SPUDOW!
Well, I just went to try donating blood plasma, and was turned down, because I'm a fag. They hate fags, and don't want any homo blood gaying up people while their lives are being saved. There's rainbow triangles floating around in there, and the FDA has decided that people would rather die than be infected with THE GAY.
Slashdot's useless.
For being "for nerds" it's frustratingly unusable on my mobile device. Also, I can only view the front page; if I try to go back it requires javascript to view previous entries.
It's been in decline for a long while, and I've stopped visiting it mostly unless I'm really bored. I now declare it useless.
Anything interesting has already been covered on BoingBoing anyway.
Star Trek comes out tomorrow. I was hoping to see it after work, but before D&D, but showtimes don't start until 7pm. Whaaaaaaat?
I get off work at 2. I'll check the torrent sites to see if there's a screener then.
Productive day.
Work's exhausting.
Don't have enough time to say everything I want, reply to all the things I want, read all the things I want.
337.1 miles on 12.114 gallons of gas
27.83 miles per gallon
Bleh, need to reinflate my tires. Also ran the AC for about an hour straight.
I has Windows 7! At least I've got the key, and left the download at 3% at home.
I installed my replacement cpu retention bracket yesterday, and after a few fits and starts, got my computer booted up again. Yay!
When I get home today, I've got a phone interview for a field tech position. Hope that goes ok.
After that, going to see if my scanner still works, and if so, install Windows 7 on a spare hard drive. If not, I'm throwing it on the main.
For now, another eight hours of work.
Navigate: (Previous 20 Entries)
