Grey Matter Splatter

Duck to avoid the forthcoming braindump: I have no sense of cohesion today, so things could get squirrely.

• Doza read yesterday’s comments about my gaming projects. I think that may have been the first time he realized the full extent of my nerdness. Doza may work in IT, but he’s one of those atypical computer workers who manages to maintain a healthy distance from the typical trappings of geek life: SF, role-playing/war/video games, excessive hardware lust, gadget envy, anime attraction, etc. I may have frightened him a little. I’m not sure how one could miss that I’m at least as much of a geek as—say—Ryan, but somehow he seemed to either gloss it over or ignore the warning signs. In any case he suggested that I am a closet geek, which I don’t think is exactly true (ask any of my friends) but I suppose I do avoid going out of my way to broadcast my particular proclivities right off the bat.
• Of course ironSoap readers ought to have no such delusions. I’ve been geeking out here for almost five years now. Some of you have even suffered through just about all of it. Hey, thanks for that.
• Regarding yesterday’s post: A follow-up. It seems that Strahd’s attendence at the con is dubious at best so the Blood Bowl tournament is more likely to be a few scattered games, if anything. Also Lister and I decided that there would be no RTT-ing so the focus will be on a small force of 40K (maybe 1,000 points) for some Space Hulk-style business and extra effort put forth into Warmaster. You can scoot back from the edge of your seat now.
• Also on the agenda for DunDraCon is the Shadowrun game, which I think will be a simple one-shot and not part of the larger campaign (mostly so I get a chance to run a 4th edition session without having to maintain any kind of consistency). Interestingly enough I ran across a link today that shows William “Neuromancer” Gibson dissing Shadowrun. I’ll be honest for a minute here and say that while this has nothing to do with his opinion on Shadowrun, I don’t really see where Gibson is some amazingly gifted person. Other than Neuromancer which was pretty good, nothing else of his that I’ve picked up has caught my attention enough to even finish. I saw “No Maps For These Territories” and I though the film was good but Gibson’s perspectives didn’t exactly blow me away. At best I think he was a decently talented writer who had the right idea at the right time (don’t tell me it was some stretch to combine distopian future visions with ubiquitous computing). Anyway, the point is that his whole sense of ownership for the cyberpunk thing feels a lot like someone who’s been told they’re important for so long that they actually start to believe it. I think at this point enough other people have put their two cents into cyberpunk as a genre that he doesn’t get to declare what is or is not worthy any longer. And excuse me, but I personally think that the blend of fantasy (derisively dismissed with a pompous “*elves*” comment) and cyberpunk is quite remarkable and in fact the primary reason to play Shadowrun. Let’s face it, the game mechanics have never been phenomenal. The setting is the game, in my opinion.
• I’m tired. I have a hojillion things going on and the more I try to put them together and make some sense of them all, the less I feel like I’m in control. It’s frustrating because I really just want to settle into a comfortable winter routine like I usually do, but I’m confounded at every turn by a fresh injection of new chaos. I’m trying not to complain about it, because the things that are happening represent positive forward steps, but it’s like I was telling Nik the other day when we were discussing the future. All I really want is a lot of money and a lot of free time. Too much to ask? Anyone?
• My iPod freaked out yesterday. People have discussed the oddness bourne from doing a lot of randomized shuffling but I had a playlist of roughly 700 songs which included one album’s worth of Johnny Cash—maybe 16 songs. Out of the first seven songs I listened to, five of them were The Man in Black. I have nothing against some Cash, but that seemed excessive.
• Scott’s been griping lately about not having the sort of access he used to have to the server on eFaithFarm. On one hand I want to tell him I don’t care because the current method of doing things means less worry for me. On the other hand, I totally sympathize because I miss some stuff about the old server, too. Of course now the old server is so old that it is in danger of requiring hospice care and desperately needs an OS upgrade, a full house cleaning and some additional security measures set up, but I’ve been daydreaming lately about perhaps moving back were I to do something like that.
• By the by, Ryan offered up this remarkably useful extention for Firefox that does all sorts of nifty developer-y things. Useful for troubleshooting browser issues, too.
• Traffic this week has been excellent: My average drive time is 30 minutes both ways. It’s almost a little annoying because I know that starting next week it will be miserable, and it is like a cloud hanging over my scarcely-braking automobile as I drive carefree through the hills that separate the Central Valley from the Bay Area.
• We were going to make stew last night—or at least chop and prep the ingredients so they could be dumped into the crock pot this morning for a tasty treat when we got home. We got all set to do it and then Nik checked the package on the stew meat. It expired Tuesday.

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