My dreaming has been way over-active these last two weeks. among other things, I dreamed last night that I went to see a movie and caught the trailer for a new Buckaroo Banzai movie… also, that someone saw me in the lobby and shouted, “Hey, I know you, you’re ‘Ambercritter’!” And I seemed to agree with them. I wonder if this is a premonition that I’m going to be playing in a furry Amber RPG where I use my Jet Car to Hellride?
Or not.
A major Thank You
I plan to post about Rising Star shortly, I really do. One of the first things I’ve noticed is that rubinpdf thinks raininva is much more photogenic than I am. Guess I can’t fault him for that. 🙂
In the mean time, the purpose of this post is to thank tzel for the absolutely incredible Masquerade prize she made for us, and on very little notice, as well. I can confirm that it was already being put to good use before the evening was done – rainbowsaber was using it to take of her Zannah makeup in the staff suite! Thank you tnhank you so much, wonderful job! Now we just have to get some money to you!
The Distributed Proofreading project aims to speed up the proofreading of Project Gutenberg E-texts by having computer users all over the world proof a page each. Good idea, contributes to the literary legacy of the world.
A reader on macslash.org suggested that the next sensible evolution of this idea would be for “Enterprise” writers to post parts of unfilmed scripts, and then we could all point out the glaring holes and inconsistencies.
Actually… I sorta like that last idea.
“The Mighty Stephen Hawking is a Freaking’ Quake Master!”
Got my snickering in for the evening:
“So many people know of Stephen Hawking’s contributions to science, but so few of his career as a rap artist and his l33t skillz as a Quake player. Now, we can learn the truth, at E=MC Hawking’s music site!”
Actually, a decent tune… not for the tender of ear. Probably says something about my sense of humor that I find that track so funny.
Must… control… fist of death…
“I know that was supposed to be camera-ready, but I don’t know how to do that right, so I sent you something you could fix. Oh, I didn’t tell you that before you went to press? Well from now on, just fix all my ‘camera-ready’ ads before you print them, and it’ll be fine. And call me if you have any other graphics problems, I have years of experience in this field.”
Uuuurgh
Finally woke up about 10:30 this morning… bad enough, except I’d already been at work for 2 hours by that time. I slept very badly Saturday and Sunday nights; considering that I was very busy both days, that means that by yesterday afternoon, I was pretty dead. The dreams have been many and interesting, as well; one of Sunday’s involved, myself, raininva, jdunson, and other local fen being chased from Hogwarts by bad guys. Eventually, when they couldn’t find us in the room in which we’d holed up, they just stole the whole room.
One good thing happened to me on Sunday; I reluctantly entered November’s first MechWarrior: Dark Age sanctioned scenario, and walked off with second prize. (Rain and I were supposed to compete for first and second, but I got hit with a clue round, and offered her first place before we began, thus saving a lot of useless bloodshed. *grin*)
Rising Star 11 starts in three days. Am I ready? (Insert maniacal laughter here…)
Two Warps to Neptune
The classical station at Virginia Tech is playing Halloween-themed music this morning (though they are stretching the definition in places). Unsurprisingly, they played “Tocatta and Fugue in Dm”… but do I free-associate anything involving Halloween? No, not me. I immediately start thinking of Gyruss.
Mmm… think I need to fire up MacMAME when I get home… play some nice emulated old-school games. “Red Five, standing by!”
More Tales from the Ad Biz
A local firearms dealer is advertising his new stock of Bushmaster .233 rifles this week. When questioned about the taste level, he shrugged and and said, “I can’t help it if I’m suddenly getting 15 calls a day for the things…”
One of my co-workers suggested darkly that everyone could make even more money if Bushmaster re-issued them in a special “Sniper Edition.”
Scary clothes day
Was an interesting weekend… it was fun Friday night, standing in Wal-Mart with limited funds and wondering what in the heck raininva and I were going to wear to VTSFFC Halloween the next night. Not sure whether it was loopiness or creativity, but we ended up building props and going as ‘click-system’ figures that had broken off their bases. You can see us in some of the party pictures that yubbie has already posted. (If you’re not quite sure what a ‘click-system’ figure is, you can see them at the Wiz Kids Games website. There were enough gamers at the party to get the gag.)
The party itself was good fun… nius did an excellent job arranging everything. plenty of munchies, good music, some fun costumes, and all sorts of gaming downstairs. Rain introduced meiran and markush to click-system MechWarrior, and I got to see Kingdom Hearts, Frequency, and Armored Core 3 on the PlayStation 2. (They’re all on my wish list now.) We stayed late and had a good time.
Sunday, we forced ourselves out of bed to play more click-system MechWarrior for prizes at a local venue. That wasn’t quite as pleasant an experience; while the players were skilled and sportsmanlike (which isn’t always the case), the scenario was horribly skewed; a smart player could easily win by making sure to play the ‘weaker’ of the two sides. The house rule we created to try to fix that favored the other side automatically, and it just didn’t work well. On top of that, each prize comes in two parts, a figure and an enamel pin in a collectors’ box… well, the venue had removed the pins from the boxes for some reason and had to be reminded to give them to the winners. Not cool.
Still, the weekend was good… if a bit tiring. Also, Rain and I need to remember that going 24 hours without food is bad. Very bad.
