I forgot to mention our tabletop misadventures for the week - on Tuesday, we discovered the one thing Earthdawn does really badly - mass combat. There aren't any mass combat rules which means when you have a hundred barbarians? Each acts individually. It was kind of painful (although luckily not literally so - everyone's character is still intact). Brief side note, while I'm too lazy to blather for a whole entry about how awesome Earthdawn is, if you like tabletop and high magic settings and don't mind a little bit of number-crunching, give it a try. It's got a wonderfully fleshed out world, and the mechanics are very solid. I know I talk about SR a lot (because I am cyberpunk's cheap whore), but mechanically, ED is waaay better.

And then last night's Mage game featured an Englishman (me) and a French-Canadian (Richard) posing first as paranormal investigators, and then as Jehovah's Witnesses. And then Nick and I did a highly unwise thing - we found the Hedge separating this part of our world from the faerie realm, and crossed it. We'll see how badly we get screwed over the fae, I guess.

Also, in SR news, Arsenal (the new gear book) is fucking awesome.

New blog layout - not my finest work, but I'm just happy to have something new and shiny up. I was originally going to port it to an LJ layout, too, but I started working on it and remember how much writing overrides suck, so yeah, not happening. Not much to say other than that. VNV Nation makes me happy. This is all.

Part the first - Ally in a 40s cocktail dress, dress and pose shamelessly stolen from Rita Hayworth (I don't claim to be anything but a hack). This comes from our SR4 game - Ally got invited by her Matrix buddy Bogart to a Matrix club called Play it Again, Sam (seeing a theme here?), which turned out to have a dress code. So she let the bouncer change her icon to match, and this was the result.

Part the second - the funniest mental image generated in Earthdawn last night: Isak (think cleaner-cut Trent Reznor in his long-haired days) and Sphal (a seveneight-foot tall rock man) running around flapping big capes like wings and making bat-squeak noises. And thus we learn yet another reason nobody invites Nethermancers to parties.

I'm sitting next to a phone jack in the Chem building, and out of the four labels on the unit, only one still reads the jack label number. The other three, in order read 'Suck it Trebeck', 'Q-town what', and 'It's always raining in my mind'. Also, ten am on six hours of sleep is a lousy time to try and figure out the British education system - I'm trying to write up Julian's backstory, and his education doesn't really matter that much for this game, but I hate being wildly inaccurate about things I can find on Wikipedia.

So I've been looking at 2008 con schedules, and I've come to the conclusion that life hates me. There are four cons I'd really like to go to this year - Norwescon, Sakuracon, Gencon, and Anime Evolution (Y-con is so up in the air, I'm not thinking about it right now). Norwescon is one weekend in March, Sakuracon is the next. Gencon is one weekend in August, AE is the next. The breakdown in terms of deciding factors goes something like this:

-Norwescon: On Easter weekend, so I have Friday and Monday off. Cheap hotel rates ($105 a night for a double), but it's at the airport, which means either paying more for the bus from Van, or attempting to navigate public transport from downtown Seattle to the con. I do really want to go to a sci-fi/fantasy con again, though.

-Sakuracon: Pricier hotel, would have to skip classes on Friday probably. More people I know going, though. Downtown = cheaper bus fare. Hard to justify going to Seattle two weekends in a row without my own car.

-Gencon: Most epic awesome gaming con ever. Unfortunately in Indiana, which means $300+ airfare, as it's a little too far for Epic Road Trip. Dunno what hotel prices are like yet. Someday?

-Anime Evolution: Probably the only 'for sure' con on this list, provided I ask for it off early enough (I forgot this year). I can commute, so it's like $35 plus whatever I feel like spending at the dealer's room.

AX I'm not interested enough in to justify the cost (if I had the money, I'd use it on Gencon >.>), Yaoicon...depends hugely on what my summer job is and how I feel about the fandom.

Game and memory card have been located, which is a relief. On the other hand, Air Canada can't even tell me if they've found my bags, which officially gives them the status of worst customer service I've had from an airline, ever. This is probably the fifth or sixth time I've lost luggage, and the first time I haven't had it back in under ten hours. There were also about thirty or forty other people on my flight from Toronto with lost luggage - I don't even know how the hell this happens.

I'm so angry, and seriously worried I'm not going to see any of it again.

So, in between working on a Mage character (got an idea and I've been running with it) and looking up info on the White Wolf website for ordering purposes, I have spent a lot of time lately looking through WW products.

I feel like I should say, first and foremost, that I want to hug whoever they hired to do graphic design for the new World of Darkness line. RPG books really only need to be readable and relatively easy to find necessary info in - most present a certain aesthetic appropriate to the game, but in most cases it's pretty basic - Earthdawn has some great art, and a nice header font, but that's about it. White Wolf went all-out with the new series, though - they are absolutely gorgeous, and I love how they styled each of the lines within nWoD to match the feel of that particular setting - the Mage books, for instance, have a faux ribbon-binding printed on the spine side of pages, lovely gold script headers, and little gold flecks on the pages, which really conveys to me the sense of elegant, ancient power that Mage is supposed to be about.

And all of these has led me to discover that there is a White Wolf development LJ, which is very cool - I've been getting a bit of an insight into the background work of game development via Dumpshock, as most of the main SR team are members (or in some cases, admins), but this has a lot more detail, and some really interesting discussions. Chief among this is the handling of metaplot in nWoD, compared to oWoD (for non-WoD players - a few years back, they basically totally rebooted the entire World of Darkness setting, giving the old one - oWoD - and new - nWoD). I didn't have much experience with oWoD - Vampire, pretty much exclusively, and I never got around to actually playing it, but the general sense I get is that oWoD had a massive, looming metaplot that people either loved, because they thought it was really cool, or hated, because they didn't want to have to buy tons of books to use on aspect of the metaplot. nWoD, on the other hand, seems to largely have no metplot, just history. As much as I do like metaplot (I love the Shadowrun metaplot, for instance), I realized, thinking about it, that I don't mind the nWoD lack of metaplot - it's got serious atmosphere, irrelavent of any metaplot.


...And I just got seriously derailed by the internet there, so I don't know where I was going with that. Possibly into a deep examination of WoD versus DnD, or why I don't like d20, but that'll have to wait for another day, I think.

Just renewed T-T.org for another year - this year makes five years I've had it registered - I can't believe it's been that long. I really haven't been doing much with it lately - just my blog and photos, mostly. I've come to the realization that none of my fansite projects are ever going to be done, although I still would like to put together a cosplay website. I've become a bit disillusioned of fandom as of late, but I'm still interested in costuming (although I've had no time to actually work on it). I'm thinking of doing some sci-fi/fantasy stuff for NorWesCon in the spring - either something Earthdawn (because I really like the art style and clothing designs used in a lot of the books), or a set of Vulcan robes, after the discovery that Enterprise actually has lots of Vulcan bits in it, as opposed to the five minutes of those two guys in First Contact.

Also, I am going to kill the roofers next door, who started pounding (and I mean pounding; it sounded like someone was hammering on _our_ wall) at 9:30 this morning. I'm on vacation damnit, I want to sleep.

Back in MA for the next week and a half. My car hasn't been re-registered, so I've only got the minivan in the afternoon, which is kind of a damper on plans. House is largely same old, although my bedroom is half-entertainment center now, which is somewhat awkward. Makes me feel better about my place in Van, though, because man, I forgot how messy and cluttered this house is.

Flights yesterday were okay - somehow my bag ended up getting routed through LA, so after forty-five minutes waiting at the baggage claim for it, I went to the desk and got told it would be showing up in about six hours. They delivered it to the house this morning, but it seems like it got left in a puddle somewhere - a bunch of the clothes at the bottom were all wet.

I feel like I should be doing something productive or creative, but I'm just not in the right mindset right now...

Whiny shallow post time! Because this is my blog, and I can do it if I want. I noticed last week that some of my jeans were feeling uncomfortably tight. So today I dragged out the tape measure to see if I was growing, or my pants were shrinking. The verdict? It is most definitely me. My hips are almost four inches bigger than the last time I measured them, in early June. I know I'm not fat, and I feel shallow for saying this, but damnit, I want my favorite pants to fit again. I can't even get the zipper on my suit pants up anymore. I don't have money to buy more pants D:

I know what it is, too, honestly. I stopped working out over the summer because I was busy and never around, and didn't pick it up again in the fall. And I've finally really hit the end of puberty, which means my metabolism has started to slow down.

I need to start working out again in January - my course-load is a lot lighter, so I actually have time. And I also need to remember that while I can prove that I can eat that whole pot of pasta by myself, I really shouldn't.