Reviewer to Battloid mode

Four years after the OAV series concluded in Japan, I have finally found time to sit and watch through Macross Zero. For my part, I was disappointed in the show.

The CGI effects of the Valkyrie fighters made up a high point – the opening chapter demonstrates a drawn-out Fighter-to-Battloid transformation sequence that nearly made me drool. Sadly, the actual plot and characters brought me right back down. The series suffered from prequel-itis: I knew the Earth wouldn’t be destroyed, because that job would fall to the Zentraedi in four years. For the same reason, I knew that Roy Focker wouldn’t be killed in combat, making his dogfight duels mildly tedious.

A repeated subplot is the preservation of the ancient ways of the island people, which again felt moot with the coming holocaust; and the bad guys only received the personalities of one-dimensional psychopaths. I expect better than that in anime. One of them had the nerve to try a sympathy ploy on the audience minutes after napalming a village of non-combatant islanders. I just wanted them to hurry up and get killed in combat so we could get back to the real plot.

Oh, and late in the series, there’s the standard anime “I have taken it upon myself to decide that humanity has reached a dead end so I shall cause their destruction in order to pave the way for the next rulers of the Earth” scientist. Isn’t that one on TV Tropes yet? Boring. Lame. Move on.

Still, I feel more “caught up” on the Macross mythology now, so I’m ready to hit Macross Frontier next. As always, your mileage may vary.

Digital dysfunction

Due to the red tape of services transfer, I will not have Internet at the house tonight or tomorrow. Not the end of the world, but nevertheless an annoyance.

Also in the FAIL department: instead of the nap I’d intended, I spent 30 minutes finding the old TeeFive character sheet, another 60 locating and installing the legacy software on an emulated OS 9 machine to open said sheet, and then another 30 looking for and failing to find the ACTUAL document, which I’m beginning to fear I no longer have.

Feh.

Back into the shadows

We began prep on the new 2nd Ed. Shadowrun campaign last night. Looks like we’ll have a core group of a detective, a freelance bodyguard, an ex-corporate enforcer, an Amerindian shaman, and a street mage; with decker and shaman ‘guest stars’. This is subject to change as the characters all get fleshed out, but it looks good. The decker’s player is moving in two weeks, and will only be able to attend by webcam, which I think is amusingly appropriate.

Two elves and three humans make up the racial mix, which is fairly standard for a new group; I don’t know yet if the guest stars will be metahuman or not. We’re off to a good start, though. I encourage weirdness in my campaigns, because I think it adds to roleplaying and tone; Jesse and Dwight have already surprised me with their character ideas. I love it.

I’m already planning to have old friends make a cameo or two. “Skid” Dersitaliantis and Mister Zeta will pop up, though I don’t yet know if I want to get the GSSC involved. Hey, TeeFive players: did you know that next year is the game’s 20th anniversary? Some of our original ‘runners should be in their forties or fifties by now.

I’m sure we’ll need at least one more character creation session, then we can get to adventuring. One thing I want to do this week is extract the old TeeFive custom character sheets from the OS 9-era PageMaker and make PDFs for the group. I have to say, from a design standpoint, that I love that I could lay out the core game mechanic in about 10 minutes last night! Naturally, I also recommended Blade Runner to everyone who hadn’t yet seen it.

We’re going to hold the game sessions at my new place. This will make my GM duties much easier, as I won’t have to haul the library back and forth. I’m also considering making the game a bit meta: for example, setting up gmail accounts for the characters to use during downtime. I wonder if the players would get into that. The decker ought to get one, right?

Thank goodness this will only be twice a month, as I could really submerge myself into this if given a chance. 🙂

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How to Motivate Your Cleaning

Now, it may seem like a bad idea to have a party only a week after getting the last boxes out of the apartment. As we continued to clean and stack and sort and discard it became clear that indeed, it really really was a bad idea.

Our favorite lifestyle group decided not to hold a December party this year – a month off was the group’s gift to the folk who usually host it. Well, we jumped into the gap, and by Friday, we’d begun to wonder if we’d remembered to don parachutes first. Friends came over Friday evening to move large furniture, but by the time we’d exhausted ourselves that night, the place still wasn’t ready.

Somehow – I have no idea how – we got the house ready by Saturday evening, and if one bedroom was full of re-packed boxes and odd pieces of furniture, well, we were willing to pay that price. The actual party went smooth as silk; we had about 20 people or so, and several of them decided independently to bring housewarming gifts. Conversation was geeky, food was yummy, and the company was awesome. Starr spent much of the evening looking slightly dazed, as if still thinking “Did we really pull this off? I mean, really?” Or maybe that was me.

I had decided earlier that, around 1:30 or 2, we’d politely show people the door; somehow, this didn’t happen, and we still had about six or eight people in the middle of an intense discussion at 5:30, when I collapsed entirely. Starr had to wave the white flag as well; we picked a friend who we could trust not to steal the silverware, and asked him to make sure that everyone got home okay.

When I finally got up yesterday, not only was the place locked up and shutdown nicely, they’d even cleaned both the kitchen and the table where we’d stacked the party food. Talk about a bunch of twisted perverts…

We’ve got to do this again sometime. But not soon.

Brief updates

  • 11:13 Experiencing a blast from the past: I have Eve Tokimatsuri songs running through my head now. #
  • 11:45 @snidegrrl “The spiders launched to the space station a supply of tasty fruit flies for food” – spiders with orbital capability? Uh-oh. #
  • 12:07 Noting that the “post Twitter entries to LJ” script is doing so at wildly varying times of day for some reason. #

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An old message for Operator 7G

I just found the Megazone 23 3-disc DVD set on Barnes and Noble. These movies influenced my imagination strongly, and I set one of the strongest pieces of fanfic I’ve written aboard a similar Megazone.

I got to tell you, though, this Christmas my reptilian “want” reflex is a little muted by the recent move. I can’t forget that everything I might buy, or receive as a gift, is something I may have to pack up and move in a box someday. Right now, I’m not thrilled at the prospect; who knows, perhaps my distaste will fade over coming months.

On the other hand, I still do have a B&N card from my birthday… and a couple hardcovers or a DVD set don’t take up all that much space… right? Right?

Yeah. I think I’ll wait until after the holidays and see if I still want it then 🙂

Dongle is fun to say

The other day, I found the serial port dongle for the Newton, which I figured I’d keep around just in case one of the special keyboards popped up cheap on eBay. Then today, while unpacking… I discovered that I already HAD one of those keyboards, and somehow never even knew it.

trenn and I used to joke that the federal government had hidden the Ark of the Covenant in a cardboard box in his living room, it being less likely to be found there than in Warehouse 23. But now I’m actually finding undiscovered technology in my stuff. Any chance that there’s a brand-new desktop Mac stashed anywhere in there?

(Oh, and of course after I discovered the keyboard, it took me another 45 minutes to re-find the serial port dongle. Working great, though!)

Moving forward, but glancing back

Sunday, I locked the door to the Portsmouth apartment for the last time, and turned the keys in to the main office. It’s weird, looking at the place all empty and echoey. That apartment was home for 18 months; having spent most of the first 30 years of my life in one dwelling, I always find it strange to leave.

We’re having folks over on Saturday night, so the new place has to be presentable. That’s an interesting task, as our five rooms of this ‘n’ that have to be shuffled into a house which still has plenty of Starr’s parents’ stuff in it. Of course, since some of that stuff includes objects such as big flat-panel TVs, I can accept the challenge, but it’s still a lot like trying to work the new expansion cards into your favorite CCG deck without going over the card count.

In other words, I’m still exhausted. There’s a bright side when I pass my old exit every day and remember that I don’t have to stop at the apartment for anything, but with the work we still have before us, I predict that Sunday will be chock full of slacking.

Anyway, let me tell you about the awesome computer I set up in the study this week. 8 MHz processor – 4 megs of RAM – 20 meg hard drive! The 9″ screen will display images in a palette of two colors (black or white), and the entire operating system fits neatly on an 800K floppy.

I love that old Macintosh SE; it was a much-appreciated gift from rattrap back in (I think) 1991 or so, and I got a lot of Starfleet paperwork, creative writing, and Hypercard gaming done on it. Eventually, my dad bought me a Mac LC III which introduced me to the amazing world of color graphics; the LC III is long gone, but the SE booted up happily on my shelf and is right now running MacWrite II, A Mess O’ Trouble, and the Dark Side of the Mac screensaver. Very decorative and retro. (The clock battery inside is long dead, and I’m not sure it’s worth cracking the case just so I don’t have to fix the time on every reboot. Otherwise, it’s humming along nicely.)

And may I also wish a Happy Birthday to shrewlet, who may well have found the Answer to the Ultimate Question…

Feasting quietly

As I am most years, I’m thankful that I didn’t get up at oh-god-hundred to stand in line for a discount on a piece of merchandise that will be out of stock by the time I get in the door. As it is, I did leave the house before sunrise, but on the other hand, I was treated to quite the spectacle as the sun came up over the Bay. So, hardly all bad.

Last night, I managed to cook a 3-pound turkey breast perfectly, without doing anything but defrosting it in cold water for two hours and then tossing it into the oven on a roasting pan for ninety minutes. The homemade mashed potatoes came out exactly as I wanted them, and even the brown-and-serve rolls browned properly for once. “Unexpected Thanksgiving dinner” went over quite well to a weary R.N. last night 🙂

Sadly, I’m reading that some of my LiveJournal friends have had to return briefly ‘to the closet’ just so they could spend the holiday with family and loved ones. This makes me angry and sad simultaneously. We still live in a world where I still have to filter certain harmless posts to my own journal; but far worse than that, these awesome people have to filter their own lives. I don’t dare to hope that I’ll live to see this burden fade away… I only hope that maybe the next generation will.

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