Somebody invent the frelling transporter!

Phew. Still a little tired from the accumulated 12 hours of driving this weekend. I had a great time in Riner, it was good to catch up with folks. Ironically, I had to drive back to the B-burg area to see some people who live here on the Virginia coast :p By the end of the evening, I was on the floor of the guest house with a bunch of buzzed people working out the “King James ending” of Space Rogues. Turns out that the cat is more important than you can imagine!

rattrap and rubinpdf helped me with my HeroClix issues, and that was much appreciated. Told several people about the portfolio review – hope they get in and get to draw a card or two!

Thanks again to calandra for a great afternoon and evening!

Technicon 21 report

The element of Technicon that has stayed with me most this morning is the great pain in my legs from dancing too much too quickly Saturday night. Oh, yes… and I think that next time raininva and I go to India Garden, we’re ordering just bland chicken “tanders” and the garlic “naan” (bread). Our stomachs aren’t international enough for much else.

Details of the con

Bowling for Chocobos

Dug out the sketchpad Wednesday night, and worked on that character some more.

There’s an Eddie Izzard joke where he drops into the role of the young Hitler in painting class, muttering to himself, “I can’t get this tree to look right… wait… dammit… fine! I’ll just have to kill everybody!

That gives you an idea of how well the drawing was going.

Saturday night was a birthday party at the bowling alley for one of Rain’s work friends. I knew a bunch of people there from her work, including the one guy who begged off and just played Final Fantasy Tactics all evening. I bowled well… which is not to say I got a high score, but that I actually hit pins most of the time and got the rare spare and strike. Next time we go for ourselves, I think we’re putting the bumpers up. We had them for one game because of a youngster’s presence, and the score sheet’s a lot less embarrassing when there’s no gutter balls.

Back to the gym today, finally. (The holidays played hell with our gym schedule.) I was hoping the new mini iPod would be a lot cheaper, because it’d make an excellent gym companion, but no joy.

In the last week, I’ve read Diane Duane, Frank Herbert, Tom Clancy, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, among others. That, and madwriter‘s posts have reawakened my writing urge. We’ll see if it goes anywhere… the nice thing about 15 years of abandoned projects is that I have a lot of source material to mine 🙂

Cleaning the attic of my brain

Two interesting tidbits of geek stuff crossed my desk this morning; first, there’s finally a really nice, configurable, Matrix code screensaver for Mac OS X. Too bad all my machines migrated to SETI@home some time ago. Second, it looks like the new AIM for Windows beta has early video chat support, and may soon be compatible with Apple’s iChat AV. That would be wonderful news, seeing as the video chat support in Yahoo! Messenger for OS X is… weak.

I’m now the navigator for kittykatya‘s pirate crew, yarrgh! I wonder if Tom Monaghan still has the letters of marque issued to the SS MacKeigh by the court of Riversmeet (I think)?

Christmas was very good, and in my case, spread over all of December. I got to see a lot of people who are important to me, and yes, I got a lot of neat stuff – to deny that I enjoy people giving me gifts would be hypocrisy of a high order. I know some people who feel that it’s better to spend the whole year being good to their fellow humans, rather than to concentrate it on a single season; I can’t argue with the sentiment, but I feel that we always need times of special celebration.

Still don’t know for sure what I’m doing New Year’s – we have several plans, but they all depend on things out of our control. I had hoped to finally meet subbes face-to-face this week, but I just don’t know right now.

Celebrate National Cosplay Day

In honor of the holiday, I’ve updated my past Halloweens page with another old pic I recently found. Given the excellent probability of digital cameras at VTSFFC Halloween this year, I expect to be able to add my 2003 costume to the page Sunday or Monday.

Oh, look, there I am.

Well, at least I made a televised appearance at the VTSFFC booth for Club Showcase day.

Yes, that’s me as Dallas Powers, with henchmen. Henchwomen. Henchpersons?

Now I’m just wondering what the heck is written across me on the screen…

First things first…

Happy belated birthday to meiran. My calendar said your birthday was on the 27th… on the other hand, it also said you were born in 2080, so it obviously needed a bit of correcting.

Thanks to vond, jdunson, corin_wolfkin, and the Carilion crowd for showing up at Rain’s party, and thanks to yubbie for the cake on Saturday 🙂

It was a heck of a weekend – I got a little personal time in after work Thursday, but Thursday evening I drove some stuff over to Rain’s gaming venue, and finished the evening with dinner at the Tanglewood Macado’s… Friday I went from work, to bill-paying, to home to pack for Rain’s party, to Anne-Marie’s for the actual party *puff-puff, whew*.

Saturday, over to VTSFFC click-base day, where I discovered (by running demos) that the Shadowrun Duels system is fast-paced and fun, and does lend itself to use in actual RPG situations. OTOH, Benny and jdunson both found out a click-base truism: though two sides may be even in points, the side with more figures has a noticeable advantage.

Saturday night was dinner at the Blacksburg Macado’s, where we plotted to make everyone at nius‘ high school reunion jumpy and confused, and we discussed the details of wirelessly networking sex toys.

Sunday, I had a little personal time, but it got divided between a long-distance phone call, laundry and dishes, and installing MacOS 6 on my G4. (Really – and I had a good reason.) After that, dinner with rattrap, corin_wolfkin, and Rockbender. Back home, to a couple hours of private time with the lovely raininva, and finally to bed.

And after all that – I couldn’t sleep last night!

Protected: Another triumph of planning

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Protected: Happy birthday to Rain

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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.

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