Marscon and stuff
Got back from Marscon Sunday. It was an interesting weekend – all the rooms were taken over by a military group preparing for special training, so all the attendees had to drive back and forth to their hotels. Put a damper on things, that’s for sure. I wish I’d remembered that there would be a Rocky Horror show on Saturday night – maybe they’ll do it again next year.
Caught up with kittykatya, impink, tzel, Tom & Donna, Jesse, Suzanne, Dave & Jodi, Dwight, Helen, and a bunch of other folk. I got some cheap Discworld paperbacks, and another Steve Jackson card game; for $1, I also bought a memory – the two books of the 1978 D&D Basic set (4th or 5th printing). We also got some Deadlands modules, and raininva won an auction for a signed uncut sheet of WARS: Nowhere to Hide!
Screen-capture trivia: the men’s miniskirt Starfleet uniform from the early Season One episodes of TNG. Strange that this didn’t catch on. I mean, can’t you just see Worf running around in it?
There was something else on my mind, but it’s gone now.
Continuing the saga of the books I’ve read this year – just finished a re-read of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I have to give Asimov credit for, in the space of a few short stories, giving me the feel of observing the fall of a Galactic Empire.
“Microhumans? Microhumans!”
So after an evening of trying to guess other people’s movie quotes, I’ve tossed in ten of mine in no special order.
Borg Booklist #1
Following snidegrrl and jsciv, I’m going to keep track of the books I’ve read this year.
So far: The DaVinci Code, The Maltese Falcon (re-read). and the Robotech novel series (re-read). Of the three, I’d have to rate The Maltese Falcon the highest – it makes more sense than the movie (good though the movie is), and is steeped with the mundane details of life in San Francisco in the 1930s.
I still have some of the books from the Rising Star sale in that bag, including some Terry Pratchett, Peter David, and Diane Duane.
Water, fire, and radiation
Monday morning, our oil heater (which handles water and house heating) conked out on us. We had a cold Monday and Tuesday, and a shower with 40-degree water’s not much fun at all.
After discovering that a repair call would cost around $350, we decided to get out the tools and see if we could break anything else get it working again. Last night around 9, we re-discovered fire, and I can add a die or two of “oil heater repair” to the skill list on my character sheet. Hot water is so wonderful when you’ve gone without for 36 hours or so.
My parking garage has switched from magnetic-stripe access cards to RFID cards. I no longer swipe the card through a reader, I just wave the card in the reader’s general direction. Makes me feel like a VIP with a special pass or something.
“Merovingian” is hard to say
I finished The DaVinci Code this weekend. To the point: I’m glad it was a library book. I’d have been okay paying paperback price for it, but it wasn’t worth hardcover cost to me. The actual “These are coded messages in DaVinci’s works” part was interesting enough that I plan to look some of them up when I have the time, but some of them appear to depend heavily on the bias of the researcher. On the other hand, the supposed content of the secret messages startled me not at all: I’d already read about it in GURPS Warehouse 23 (yes, a role-playing game sourcebook). The remaining plot was basic thriller stuff, adequate but not fascinating. The movie will probably do quite well.
I’m happy my cell phone is working again! It got wet last week, and appeared dead as a doornail; but once it dried out completely and the battery recharged, it went back to beeping happily. So that’s a surprise expense I don’t have to worry about.
raininva has a huge article in the new issue of Undefeated magazine talking about Mechwarrior: Age of Destruction, with color CGI ‘Mech illustrations and everything. Kelly Bonilla’s design notes are kind of fun too. According to the website, it will be on shelves Jan 18th.
That’s all for now. The clock just struck 9, so time to get to work.
