Trip's Life (Recent episodes)
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5 Most Recent Comments
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2012-02-16: "Re: way too much food" by Trip
2012-02-16: "way too much food" by marith
2012-02-01: "Now Marith is curious!" by Trip
2012-02-01: "Now I am curious! " by marith
2011-11-22: "Eclipse Phase" by Trip
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13 March 2012 - Tuesday
Cow Orker M is back, but he's been tapped for a surprise special
project so I can't make him do all the work.
We did not get the full pre-Columbian effect since Ken ran out of
masa tortillas, but black beans cooked in duck fat make pretty good
burritos. I wonder if they had cheese? Llamas are mammals, right?
Is someone's plan starting to break down? Or is this exactly how it's
supposed to go? It's only episode 13 of Lucifer, so there's plenty
of time for exploding.
Geez, reporter guy, that was pretty harsh.
When I get home at 935612905 o'clock, I cannot adore the cats as much
as they deserve! (Arguably, I never adore them as much as they
deserve.)
Make a comment!
12 March 2012 - Monday
Cow Orker M is still on vacation, and Cow Orker A is at training.
Fortunately the customers are not too rowdy, and Promised Cow Orker G
has finally arrived.
Killing Rites is the fourth and most recent book in M L N
Hanover's "Black Sun's Daughter" series, in which the heroine becomes even
more morally conflicted but levels up anyway. It's not as dark as the
previous book, but it does end on a cliff-hanger.
I cannot find information about when the fifth book will come out. This
series better not get truncated because readers suck like Connolly's
"Twenty Palaces" did!
I meant to do all sorts of useful things tonight, but ended up not
doing much of anything except brushing Ghirardelli within an inch of his
life.
Make a comment!
11 March 2012 - Sunday
The manga adaptation of Soulless (by the original author,
Gail Carriger, and a mysterious entity know only as Rem) is labelled volume
1, but it seems to cover the entire book and maybe some bits from other
books. This means it leaves out a lot, and I'm not sure anyone who hadn't
read the book would know what was going on, but maybe exposition is not
required. There are fabulous vampires, Scottish werewolves, and people
getting hit with umbrellas, and the main character shows 847 times as much
cleavage as anyone else in the book.
Not being on call fails to save me yet again.
Amazingly, everyone remembered the DST transition and arrived at
brunch and gaming at the same time! Except Earl, but he's not even in
the state, so he didn't arrive at gaming at all. His character was
sorely missed, not for her sparkling personality and unique approach to
morality but because a fight where the enemy gets bonuses based on their
position is a pain without a controller. However, it takes a whole lot
of monsters of similar level to threaten a PC group, and there just
weren't that many of them.
Fights with gimmicks seem to go over well. Monsters with -33%
hitpoints and +50% damage are also adding to the fun, since individual
attacks can now make a significant difference to the fight on either
side.
I'd like to think that an NPC having a silver demon-binding nail
driven through their heart is kind of creepy, but when the NPC is a
female minotaur in a low-cut kimono, there is no way to describe it that
does not lower the tone of the game.
Hello, very opaque cats! It's just not the same standing on the
computer desk when I'm away, is it?
Make a comment!
10 March 2012 - Saturday
Somehow, not being on call doesn't keep me from getting called.
Volume 3 of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) concludes the story of
the first female shogun and the transformation of the shogun's harem into
the state we see in the first volume, with only a few people along the way
murdered by Buddhist priests.
There are at least three more volumes, which
Link+ will deliver to me in due
course.
I spent most of the day doinking with D&D stats, to little effect.
Anything that doesn't get used tomorrow will probably get changed by next
fortnight anyway.
Poor Aspen! I was home to oppress her almost all day!
Make a comment!
9 March 2012 - Friday
The first two books of the series were pretty good, but
Vicious Grace (M L N Hanover) is where the doom starts
raining down on the PCs and washing out the underpinnings of their world.
The climax is pretty dark and harrowing, although it will obviously
haunt some characters longer than others.
I don't know if it will be addressed explicitly, but it seems to me that
in this universe, <rot13>gur uhzna fbhy vf whfg n fcrpvrf bs
e-fgengrtl evqre</rot13>.
Due to lack of organization, we only managed to watch one episode of the
live-action Sailor Moon tonight (go Sailor Jupiter!), but we
did have abundant sushi from Hanamaru.
Today's WordDot
results: "iridescent homework", "resonant feather", and "brackish
violence".
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
8 March 2012 - Thursday
Volume 2 of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) is backstory, about the
early days of the conditions in volume 1, and the first female shogun
and her extremely annoying old lady.
I figured out the twist in Darker Angels (second of the
"Black Sun's Daughter" books, by M L N Hanover) pretty early on, but I
don't blame the characters for not getting it, since I had the advantage of
not being beaten up by possibly-not-evil extradimensional parasites.
House of Ashes is allegedly a novella that accompanies the
Mistborn
Adventure Game, but is more like a bunch of vignettes. None of the
people who wrote it (Shivam Bhatt, Logan Bonner, David Hill, Will
Hindmarch, Jeremy Keller, Filamena Young) is Brandon Sanderson, but it's
okay anyway, and possibly even like what PCs will do..
Gnomes ate the Red Garden disc. Maybe they'll cough it
up by next week.
Marith tried to adventurously order something new from
First Wok, but it turned out
to be full of bell peppers. I picked out some of the veggies but then I
encountered a stratum that was pure shredded pork, so we gave it to
Dave.
- Penguindrum 3-4: "Ringo" is Japanese for "apple". This
may be significant.
- Madoka Magica 6-7: I think the phrase they're looking
for is "rendered into a more durable form". And now we know what
Kyubei eats, but it's not very reassuring. <rot13>Zber guna
unysjnl guebhtu gur frevrf naq Znqbxn vf fgvyy abg n zntvpny
tvey!</rot13>
- Katanagatari 3: That was very sad, but also very
samurai-like, and I'm pretty sure that's what she was looking for
anyway. Also, is it more virtuous to serve a good lord, or one with a
crazy alien eye?
Cat Report: Miau! Miau! Miau!
Make a comment!
7 March 2012 - Wednesday
I triumphed at foosball again. Muahahahahaha.
Today, I read games on my iPad.
Lately (by which I mean this century) there have been several games that
try to do old-school swords-and-sorcery fantasy rather than the new-fangled
high fantasy of D&D. Barbarians
of Lemuria does not strike me as a particularly distinguished example
of the genre, but I suppose it might hit someone's nostalgia buttons.
Especially if he were nostalgic for a time when fantasy was not written by,
for, or about women.
Escape
from Tentacle City is a small RPG by Willow Palecek (the same person
who did Awesome
Adventures). Like Fiasco, it is not a game
that rewards trying to nurture and protect your character. At most 1/N of
the characters are going to survive, so you might as well go out
entertainingly. Bonus points for insisting that all characters not be rich
white people, but I'm not sure about the advice to enthusiastically embrace
stereotypes.
EABAlite is
an appetizer for EABA,
Greg Porter's generic system. It looks pretty generic (a little like D6), but
the interesting part, the powers system, is only barely alluded to
here.
I think I read EABA a long time ago, but found it
much more confusing than I find this. Possibly because the powers system
isn't involved here.
Look at the bounty of gooshyfood I have brought to you, my cats! You
will feast upon it for weeks! ("What's a week? Why is the gooshyfood in
these hard things where we can't get to it? Can we borrow your opposable
thumb? We'll give it back, honest!")
Make a comment!
6 March 2012 - Tuesday
according to the Big List of Books, I've
read the first volume of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) before, but I
didn't remember anything except the setup, which is that a plague with a
fatality rate of 75% or more among young men breaks out in Edo-era Japan,
which leads in due course to the country being run by women while men are
valued primarily for their reproductive capacity. This volume is a story of
intrigue in the (female) shogun's harem (of cute guys), but seems to be
pretty much over by the end. Maybe it will be one short story per
volume?
Today, Aquarium Expedition with
Ayse and Ja Baby!
On the way up, many Ja Baby tunes! On the way down, many repititions
of a few Ja Baby tunes! In between, fish! And more fish! And giant white
alligator! Also, starfish and sea urchins to pet, giraffe statues, tiny
eels that pop up from the ground, dancing amphibian,
small octopus,
African noises, projected elephants, Jungle Sphere with parrots and
butterflies and humidity, sharks and stingrays, a glass-roofed tunnel
beneath the flooded bottom of the Jungle Sphere with assorted large fish
swimming over it, disco jellyfish, upside-down photosymbiothetic
jellyfish, electric eels, and vegetarian spring rolls!
I took some pictures, but most of the exhibits had no-camera signs
(probably they really meant no flashes, but...) and the pictures I did
take didn't turn out very well, so you're probably better off going to
the website to see what these things look like.
All the excitement was over by the time I got in to work, so I felt
very clever. Also, I triumphed at foosball.
Unclean Spirits (M L N Hanover, who is secretly Daniel
Abraham) is pretty good urban fantasy. It has a coherent explanation for
horrible monsters, plans that don't actually succeed, and a heroine who
gets dropped into things without having a clue.
Lucifer episode 12
tightens the nooses
on many of the characters, but only one major character actually gets
done in. It's really not clear how that could have been set up, though.
Make a comment!
5 March 2012 - Monday
Today I noticed some graffiti on the bench at the bus stop:
"HΔ5TΣR". This is the very definition of a bad sign.
Make a comment!
4 March 2012 - Sunday
Bokurano vol 5 does in fact have even more doom. I'm not
sure what the motivation behind the doom is, but we have only a finite
number of volumes to find out.
Surprise bonus socialization! Mike's family is off doing something, so
he brought board games to Ken and Ayse's place and taught Ken how to crush
us at Settlers
of America[*] while Ja Baby failed utterly to nap. It's a strange
variant of Settlers, with a fixed map, semi-fixed production numbers, and
designated build sites. All the starting sites are east of the Mississippi,
but some of the hexes there have (randomly-drawn) number chits that get
moved to empty hexes out west when someone builds there, leaving the
eastern hexes productionless. In the production phase, everyone who gets no
resources gets one gold (except on 7s, naturally), which is half of any
resource and also necessary during the endgame. Settling requires only
building a settler unit and spending grain to move it to a city site, but
you still have to build railroads so that you can deliver tokens to other
people's cities and thus win. We let Ken suddenly leap into the rail phase
and deliver 6 of his 9 tokens in one turn, but clearly everyone should be
building trains and delivering tokens as they become available (you start
with one token and another one is released into the pool every time you
build a city, and all of them have to be delivered to win).
[*] Yes, I know it should actually be called "Invaders of America",
but it would be harder to look up if I referred to it that way.
Then Ken crushed us at Dominion again, this
time while holding Ja Baby on his lap.
Useful things I did: grocery shopping, laundry, replacing the toilet
seat.
Not so useful things I did: losing a Netflix envelope. Perhaps this
is a sign that I really do need to throw away everything.
The tummy of a cat who has been lounging on fresh laundry all evening
is exceptionally warm and fluffy.
Make a comment!
3 March 2012 - Saturday
I've finished rereading Bokurano (Mohiro Kitoh, also known
for Shadow Star) up through volume 4, so that I can read
volume 5. I often say that manga is full of doom, but compared to this,
most doom is a paltry inconvenience.
I guess technically I didn't social all day, but it was like
eleven hours, which is a lot of socialling. Activities included flinging Ja
Baby into the air, eating brunch, finishing up characters for Dave's
Academy of Science game, taking Ja Baby to the library, eating (proper
Midwest-style) chili, and playing Dominion.
I am somewhat enthused to play Academy of Science, which makes it sad
that we will only get to play for a couple of hours every fortnight.
I should move my cat pictures to my iPad, so Julia can admire them on
a grander scale!
Make a comment!
2 March 2012 - Friday
Polly and the Pirates vol 2 (Ted Naifeh, Robbi Rodriguez)
is not as swell as volume 1 because it is not as new. But it has
piratical action and derring-do.
Chthonian
Stars is somewhere between Eclipse Phase and
CthulhuTech, but
really not as well done as either. Traveller TL 8 is no
longer a plausible near future (even leaving out the attempt to make all
interplanetary travel take one week), the writing is not very good, and the
monsters and cultists are not evocative enough.
If done better, it could be a perfectly fine game of SF horror, but as
it is, I'd go with Eclipse Phase.
(What do you mean, "Not Cthulhoid enough"? Are you trying to claim the
Pandora Gates are NOT manifestations of Yog-Sothoth?)
A History of the World in 100 Objects is by Neil MacGregor,
director of the British Museum, so it has many excellent historical
objects, from hand axes and cuneiform tablets through suffragette-defaced
pennies and credit cards. One can argue about whether it's truly
representative of the whole world, but it certainly does a better job than
most.
It looks like the original radio programs, everything in the book, and a
bunch more, is on the BBC website.
Paw Count: Twelve!
Make a comment!
1 March 2012 - Thursday
I expect it would take many more nights of going to bed not late to
have any effect, and that doesn't seem likely to happen any time
soon.
I don't seem to be able to pull off my one good foosball move any more.
I'm not sure if I'm overthinking it, or if defenses are just getting
better.
- Red Garden 8: That seems to have been a smart move on
Lula's part, regardless of whether it was true. Perhaps the girls'
morale will even improve to the point where they realize that Claire
doesn't need to worry about poverty because Rachel could fund her
entire life out of her lipstick budget.
- Penguindrum 1-2: Huh. That's almost FLCL
levels of weirdness. But definitely Ikuhara. And clever use of silly
supernatural powers!
- Madoka Magica 5: So... what does Kyubei eat?
<rot13>Nyzbfg unysjnl guebhtu gur fubj, naq Znqbxn fgvyy vfa'g n
zntvpny tvey.</rot13>
- Katanagatari 2: Despite Togame's self-aggrandizement,
Shichika may still be the smart one. Or maybe it just seems that way
because of the high ratio of talking to fighting.
Today, the cats get Old Cat food, since Marmalade and Ghirardelli are
like ten, and even Aspen is probably about five. I am pretty sure it
won't make any detectable difference, but if it helps them continue to
grow older, I won't complain.
Make a comment!
29 February 2012 - Wednesday
Should I leave my code uncommented and without docstrings to fit in
with the other code, or make it incongruous but somewhat documented?
Piracy Report: It turns out the cheesy GUI
ebook-liberator just calls a script that can be run from the command
line, so that's okay. I can even hack the second script to extract the
title so it doesn't matter that the original files have gibberish
names.
However, I can't find an ebook version of the O'Neill Essential
Kanji. One site said that it had a PDF, but the file was a lie. I can't
complain too much, since it would have had to have been scanned
illegally, but physical objects are a huge pain.
Aspen still hates and fears me. Sniff.
Hey, look! I'm going to bed not late! I wonder if it will make the
slightest bit of difference?
Make a comment!
28 February 2012 - Tuesday
I finished vol 6 of Sakura Hime (Arina Tanemura) this
morning. I only like it okay, but manga is totally more important than
shaving, right?
Maybe if I read enough shoujo manga, I won't need to shave any more.
It's not like I count as a guy to begin with.
You know, most of this stuff would be easier, better, or both if I used
the existing command-line framework.
Apparently I only eat meat socially, or something.
Lucifer 11 is full
of drama and doom and twists and doom! Someone has figured out a
character's dark secret, but it doesn't look like it's going to slow him
down any.
Yay Marmasnuggles!
Make a comment!
27 February 2012 - Monday
Cow Orker A recommends Zeni
for Ethiopian nomming. Southern San Jose is pretty inconvenient, but maybe
people will be up for an expedition sometime.
Apparently I inadvertantly exploded a customer on Friday by using the
wrong option. Fortunately we were able to find all the pieces, but I
guess I see the utility of GNU_style options: you have to look at
the man page every time you use the command, to find out what the long
option is called and where it has hypens.
Despite the title, Naked City (ed Ellen Datlow) is not an
anthology of smut, but of urban fantasy. Some of the pieces are in the
genre commonly known as "urban fantasy", like the Dresden Files story; some
are fantasy about cities; some are fantasy in proximity to cities (C19
mining is pretty synonymous with "delving too deep"); and some are only
arguably fantasy. None of the stories was amazing, but I don't demand
those hours of my life back.
Cat Report: Apparently the front library has gotten
boring (or maybe it's just too popular with towering grabby monsters),
because Aspen has taken to lurking in the back library.
Why do I have so many books? I wonder if it's worth buying some of
them again in order to cut down on physical objects.
Make a comment!
26 February 2012 - Sunday
Negima! (Ken Akamatsu) is clearly getting toward the end (I
think we now know the origin of every girl in the class), but there could
easily be another couple of volumes of twists in the final battle, and then
some denouement. My guess is that it will end somewhere between volume 35
and volume 40.
In volume 8 of Tegami Bachi (Hiroyuki Asada), the
anti-government conspiracy has finally revealed its goal, so hopefully
soon we will find out why that's their goal. Or maybe everyone
(except Niche) will be eaten by giant hollow metal bugs.
Giving all the monsters two-thirds the hit points and half again the
damage seemed to work pretty well. Against an equal number of slightly
lower-level opponents, you'd expect the defenders to get beaten up some
but the PCs to win handily over, and that's what happened, but in less
time.
It looks like for an actual formula that scales smoothly with level,
it should be something like subtracting 2.5, 3, or 4 times the
monster's level from its book hit points depending on whether it's a
low-, medium-, or high-hit point opponent. Damage is more complicated,
especially if you want to increase both average and crit damage by the
same factor, but I can probably put together some kind of table or
something. Right after I put together the one for converting from MM1
damage levels to MM3 damage levels.
Maybe I should just add plusses to bring the average damage up, rather
than changing the dice, and then give more plusses on a crit to bring
that damage up to the desired multiple. PCs do extra damage (above just
the maximum roll) on crits, so there's no reason monsters can't as well,
especially if it would make things easier on the GM.
Minions don't get fewer hit points, so strictly speaking they shouldn't
get their damage increased, but as it stands, even in MM3 they're pretty
ignorable, which is no fun. Maybe add level to the book damage, and give
50% extra damage on crit? The average minion only gets to make one attack
anyway, so it should be worth the trouble of placing it on the
battlefield.
Ghirardelli liked the small bit of salmon I gave him, but although
Marmalade sniffed his, he did not deign to eat it.
Make a comment!
25 February 2012 - Saturday
Dawn of the Arcana vol 2 (Rei Toma) is at least as
shoujo as Blue Exorcist is shounen: Traumatic pasts! Forced
relationships that threaten to turn into love! Conflicts between
hot childhood friends and hot new love interests! Superpowers that cause
even more trouble!
In volume 11 of Natsume's Book of Friends (Yuki
Midorikawa), the main character is finally starting to seriously confront
his past. But he is too nice to say "neener" to people who did not
understand how cute he was going to grow up to be.
Apparently there is going to be[*] a third season of the anime, and an
anime of one of the manga-ka's other works, Hotarubi no Mori
e.
[*]Future tense at the time volume 11 was released in Japan,
anyway.
Cat Report: Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
24 February 2012 - Friday
Yay Friday!
Blue Exorcist vol 6 (Kazue Kato) is still so completely
shounen I was surprised to find out the manga-ka is a woman.
Cats are so fuzzy!
Make a comment!
23 February 2012 - Thursday
Cow Orker A is out with the brain explodings, so no foosball.
The Folded World (Catherynne M Valente) is definitely
a middle book, in which the doom piles higher and higher. I can't
believe I didn't figure out who X were, though. Sometimes I think I'm
not a very good reader.
- Red Garden 7: The girls must be adapting to their new
lifestyle: this time they all brought sticks!
- Rocket Girls 11-12 (end): Apparently magic is a vital
component of a successful space program.
- Madoka Magica 4: The only place the phrase "breeding
ground" is not a bad sign is in an actual biology paper.
- Katanagatari 1: The art style seems wacky, but I think
it's actually not unlike American cartoons. The characters are
unquestionably wacky, but cute.
Cat Report: Fuzzy! Also, fuzzy!
Make a comment!
22 February 2012 - Wednesday
Cats are so fuzzy! But Marmalade seems disgruntled. I should probably
stop reading this terrible stuff on the web and play with him. Right after
the next page.
Make a comment!
21 February 2012 - Tuesday
Surprisingly, my new level shows the foosball table isn't out of
whack! It seems better than it did last week, though, so maybe all the
dragging has evened out for the moment. But maybe also my level is
pretty cheap.
Random Encounter: JHart and his (ex-?) wife and their
small kid, on Castro, going to Ephesus for birthday
celebration. (I think the (ex-?) wife's name is Sasha, but I've only met
her like three times total. Anyway, it was her birthday.)
No Lucifer this week,
as Ayse and Ken are feeling under the weather and Marith is being oppressed
by work. I could do something productive with my suddenly-available
evening, but probably won't.
The Habitation of the Blessed (Catherynne M Valente) is
the first book of the "A Dirge for Prester John" trilogy(?). It is very
much in the same line as the "Orphan's Tales" books, but this time
drawing on the medieval stories of Prester John and his magical kingdom
full of bizarre creatures. THotB only has three stories
inside one frame story, but they do intertwine suitably. The prose is
still opulent and poetic, and the world full of loss and misery but also
love and occasional triumph.
I haven't finished Fairy Tail (Hiro Mashima), but I've
read as far as I can find hardcopy in the library (volume 12) so I might
as well say something about it now.
Fairy Tail is very shounen, even though the main
character is a girl, and not the one actually overcoming her tragic past
through sheer guts. (Arguably, one of the guys she hangs out with is the
main character, and she's only the viewpoint character.) There are lots
of fight scenes, a fair number of tragic pasts, and plenty of cleavage.
Lucy does contract with and summon constellation spirits to do magic,
but everyone has pretty much one magic power and few if any books are
involved, so it's of limited applicability to Dave's game. :)
Hello, cats! Hello! Hello! I am glad to see you too! And all your
opaque tails!
Make a comment!
20 February 2012 - Monday
Everyone else gets a holiday, but I get to work. I even get a
different train schedule to confuse me.
Okay, at least one of our customers also doesn't get a holiday. Instead,
they get a major outage, albeit one that we can't reasonably be blamed
for.
Cats are so opaque! And full of purrs! And helpful with browsing the
web!
Make a comment!
19 February 2012 - Sunday
Marmalade was so happy with his laundry throne!
Make a comment!
18 February 2012 - Saturday
Brunch! English muffins, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and kimchee
(except for Marith), leftover curry, avocado, boursin cheese, salad, and
bacon!
Ja Baby is friends with all of the stuffed animals. She even asked to
have Lucky Fourteen visit, despite having met him only once at
Pettersonland, and can reliably distinguish him from Horseshoe. (Lucky
Fourteen is popular with all the girls!)
While Ja Baby recharged, Dave made us make characters for his fantasy
game. We are using some subset or variant of
Legends of
Anglerre, with fiddly bits removed. Apparently I have been cast as the
Adult Supervision. But I will have antimagic powers to keep the other
PCs in line!
iPad PDF viewers render so slowly it is a pain to use them for looking
stuff up. GoodReader lets you set bookmarks, at least.
Ayse and Ken were able to get a monitor-sitter for Ja Baby, so they
zoomed to Tobang
and drank soju at us. But we fed upon the foods of Korea, and the other
foods of Korea, and the side dishes of Korea, and then we were sated.
Fortunately, Dave has driving powers.
I did not see the kitties until a million o'clock at night, but they
had not pawned my manga.
Make a comment!
17 February 2012 - Friday
It's Friday! And I'm not on call! I may even really not be on
call!
The Bride Wore Black Leather is the eleventeenth
installment in Simon R Green's "Nightside" series, in which the
fortunes of former magic private John Taylor continue to shift
alarmingly. Sometimes, very alarmingly.
Cat Report: Twelve paws of extensive fuzzability!
Make a comment!
16 February 2012 - Thursday
It seems obvious to me that language, like other biological faculties, is
cobbled together from pre-existing abilities. Apparently it hasn't
always been obvious to everyone, though, even fairly recently.
The First Word (Christine Kenneally) covers both the
progress of the idea that it's possible to learn about the origins of
language, from the 19th-century ban on discussing it in the French
linguistics society, through the 20th century when Chomsky dragged all
of linguistics into a search for pure mathematical beauty and denied
that language could have been selected for, up to the recent decade or
two when people are finally addressing the question.
The second part of the book examines what's been found out (as of 2007
or so), which is by no means conclusive on any major point, but pretty
interesting nonetheless. Now that the view of language as a single
monolithic structure unsullied by brute flesh is falling apart, people are
more willing to see aspects and components of language in other species,
and consider how evolution could expand on those. In the wild there are
animals that mean different things when they put sounds in a different
order, which is like pre-protosyntax, and apes do pretty well with gesture
and body language. At least one dog has a vocabulary of a couple of hundred
words, and can figure out that when he's asked to get a $new_noun from the
other room, it means the thing he doesn't already know the name of. Even
the teaching of human language to apes and parrots is looking more legit
now that the notion is no longer viewed as an affront to God and
Chomsky.
Definite bonus points for making it clear that no brain, animal or
human, is a general-purpose learning machine. More points for mentioning
in the end notes where findings are in dispute.
New Caledonian crows don't seem to have a lot of language, but they
continue to rock.
The
Legends of Anglerre Companion is pretty much just random extra stuff
that didn't make it into the already-huge Legends of
Anglerre main book. It includes detailed writeups and stat blocks for
several cities in the default setting, two complete adventures, items
ranging from magic poison to sailing ships, some monsters, rules for
playing with only aspects, and the all-important Random Adventure
Generator.
It turns out the place we ordered Chinese from on last Mystery Sailor
Moon Theater 3000 night,
First Wok, delivers to
Mountain View, so for almost the first time since Neil stopped liking us
we got something that wasn't pizza! (Dave-provided food is in a
different category.) The $30 minimum order for delivery is way too much
food, though, so we should probably find someplace else.
- Rocket Girls 10: Poor American astronauts, they don't
realize what genre they're in.
- Baccano! 16: I had completely forgotten about that! But
no one else recognized that guy either, and usually at least one of
Marith or Dave knows who any random character is.
- Baccano! 1: Now we recognize almost all of those
people!
- Madoka Magica 3: Well, they said it was dangerous!
- Red Garden 5-6: Everyone who thinks she's telling the
truth, raise a tentacle. Yah, that's what I thought.
Cat Report: Twelve fliffy paws!
way too much food by marith (Fri Feb 17 20:44:40 2012)
I dunno, actually I ate the leftovers for once, and they were tasty!
Re: way too much food by Trip (Mon Feb 20 16:37:34 2012)
Okay, if we really are ordering three or four person-meals of food instead of two, that's not so bad.
You should tell me what you will eat besides cashew chicken and garlic string beans and egg rolls, so that we do not order the same thing every time!
Also we can order pizza sometimes. Or I could look at the getquik.com website Ayse pointed me to see if there is anything else good that delivers.
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15 February 2012 - Wednesday
Cat Report: Marmalade is Mighty Vs Little Colorful
Fuzzies! Of all the cats I've had, he is the most playful with inanimate
objects. And, if I had cat treats he liked, I could probably have gotten
him to fetch the little colorful fuzzy
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14 February 2012 - Tuesday
I guess I see why this guy opened an internal incident with Support,
but I'm pretty sure we have no knowledge whatsoever about that.
Although Dave's Very Clever Strategy of Gardens + extra buys + all the
Copper you can eat was very clever, Ayse crushed him beneath the sheer
weight of her Colonies. Dave didn't say, "No winning while my winning!"
but he could have!
Cat Report: Miau! Miau! Miau!
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13 February 2012 - Monday
Big Customer X's thing in fact finished last night. This did not
appear to make them much happier.
Awesome
Adventures (Willow Palecek) is another FATE implementation,
similar to Spirit of the
Century but more streamlined: no stunts, just invocations of aspects to
do extraordinary things, and no stress track, just straight to
consequences. I would be okay with using aspects in place of SotC-type
stunts, which mostly just give you bonuses or let you use one skill in
place of another, or otherwise get more plusses, but I'm not so sure about
using it for magic or cyberware or what-have-you, and various flavors of
fantasy and space fantasy are explicitly in the list of possible
settings.
I am also dubious about telling GMs that they should go for whatever
is flashiest and not worry about whether it makes sense, but that
probably just means I should have stopped gaming by 1990.
Broken Time (Maggy Thomas) was published in 2000, but it
feels very much like an 80s not-too-hard-SF novel, maybe near the subgenre
of early Lois McMaster Bujold. The protagonist gets into a lot of trouble,
but she is very not action-oriented. She spends the first half of the book
working as a janitor, and not as an undercover operation!
Cat Report: Twelve paws!
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12 February 2012 - Sunday
The inevitable problems have occurred and now the customer is
spazzing out.
I'm pretty sure that "it is almost done on Sunday evening" does not
logically lead to "it will not be finished by Monday morning", but what do
I know?
Gaming was only moderately terrible. The fight with the forced movement
and the steel maw trap was deemed interesting, although it might have gone
better if Earl's character hadn't dropped a web spell on everyone while
they were clustered around the trapped squares. (It seemed like a good idea
at the time!) The old ladies having a tea party in the city that had been
buried for a thousand years were insufficiently creepy, though.
Level 14 monsters have about five times the hit points of level 1
monsters, maybe more, but I don't think level 14 PCs do more than about
twice or three times the damage of firsties. This implies that I should
always be halving the hit points of monsters, but leaving their damage
as-is (or maybe even increasing it).
Next session: living opponents for sure!
Cat Report: Twelve paws!
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