Recent Entries

Entry tags:

baseball,
news

Wichita Lineman

After far, far too long, I got myself out to a baseball game Thursday evening. The Bats are not doing well this season (again), so I wasn't expecting much beyond just having a good night at the park. Low expectations paid off, I guess, because I had an absolute blast. Norfolk put up four runs pretty quickly - four solo homers in the first two innings; the Bats fought back, tying the game, but lost 5-6. Disappointing, a little, but the experience was good for the soul. Slugger Field is a great park, the small crowd was enthused, and the hot dogs were delicious. I gotta do this more often.

In other Louisville baseball news, the UofL Cardinals are going to the College World Series! They won the Super Regional this afternoon against Miami, getting hot when it mattered most. They ended the regular season badly and were knocked out of the ACC tournament in the first round. Swept the Regional, beating host and top-seed Vanderbilt, got the host slot for the Super, and went 2-1 over Miami.

Things aren't all sunshine and rainbows. Protests against ICE's bullshit out in LA have been declared "unrest" by that orange bastard and federalized National Guard troops were deployed early this morning. LAPD and LCSD declined to escort ICE operatives out of their raid in Paramount and that caused some drama - but, really, if LAPD is declining the opportunity to beat up on people, things are definitely off.

And at the moment, I'm watching the last few episodes of The Handmaid's Tale, so, yeah.

Entry tags:

Picture Window

It's been a decent long weekend. Saturday and today were spectacularly lazy - didn't get out of the apartment or my pajamas, even. Ran a decent CP Red game Friday night and a banger of a D6 Star Wars game last night at SYR.

I made myself sleep in, or at least lie in, this morning. Kept playing a new podcast episode every time I woke up and went back under the covers, and it felt fantastic. Finally got up and made breakfast and had some brief thoughts about finding something to do. Decided, nah, let's do some more reading, and that was a good course of action for the day.

Entry tags:

weather

Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings

Friday saw a heck of a storm system roll through. Louisville got some strong storms but nothing really bad. Down in Somerset and London, though - tornadoes hit and tore things up something fierce. About 20 deaths across the state, dozens of homes and other buildings badly damaged or destroyed. I don't really have anyone down there anymore, but seeing videos and photos of the aftermath is unsettling.

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Catch These Fists

Jesus, April was a heck of a year.

Finished watching Daredevil: Born Again this week. Mostly satisfying, and Vincent D'Onofrio was just amazing as the Kingpin, but it didn't stick the landing. It felt like more of a mid-season soft cliffhanger than a real finale, and I guess that's appropriate since there are another nine episodes coming next year.

I'm rewatching the first season of Andor before diving into the second, and damn, this is still some terrific work. If I can pull a quarter of this tension in my games for Slur I'll be pretty happy.

Entry tags:

Good Vibrations

April's been a rough month, and I stopped fighting it for a while and took a sick day on Friday. It helped a lot - I've slept so well the last three nights and managed to do some other things for self-care. My shoulders are relaxed, I haven't had anxiety skirmishes, I've painted minis and written little things, and I feel good.

Finally bought a table for the Bambu printer. Setting it up and calibrating and testing and everything else is the order of the afternoon. I'm hopeful that I can get enough of a handle on it to print something useful for May's first CP Red game session.

I feel like I've headed off some burnout by just putting in work instead of reading about someone else's work or endlessly diving into Wikipedia or whatever else caught my attention for the immediate sixteen seconds. I outlined the Star Wars games for May-July, sketched out a few more session ideas for CP Red, and just about settled on Symbaroum for my Charcon games.

Entry tags:

Think of What You've Done

A couple of decent, almost good, days this past week. Friday was garbage, but at least I ended it a little early and tried to take care of myself. The weekend hasn't been anything to get excited about - a lot of sleep and a little bit of game writing and prep.

Still haven't gotten around to buying a table for the printer. Yesterday would have been a good day for that, but, well, didn't happen.

It's Easter Sunday. Mom loved Easter. No matter how old I was, she always got me a chocolate bunny. I'd kill for one of those sweet little gestures today.

Entry tags:

life,
work

If Trouble was Money, Second Entry

This was one of those weeks. Anxiety started hitting hard and that let a whole stew of brain chemicals run wild for a few days. I found some small comfort in knowing it wasn't just me. Co-workers, clients, friends - we all had some kind of something playing havoc with our minds and emotions.

I had planned to make today a self-care day, and it succeeded. Slept in, ran a short errand, read, slept more. Feeling pretty good this evening.

Entry tags:

The Family Business

This weekend was the twice-or-so-yearly Hex family retreat. This time around we assembled at Lake Cumberland - and it may say something about our luck that we were at a lake on a weekend when the regional forecast called for six to twelve inches of rain along with the chance of tornadoes. We sure got the rain, and it was plenty stormy sometimes, but we had a good time playing games and eating and telling stories.

Saturday night had one of those great moments. After the second game of the day and before dinner, Josh and Leighton and I were standing on a covered deck looking over the lake. The most recent storm front had blown through, there was some light rain and wind, and just this energy. We were having a great talk, watching clouds and rain. It was unquantifiable, but it just was the best feeling.

I gave Shadowdark another shot, mostly because Josh is a heck of a GM. I'm still not sold on the game. I don't dislike it, but it's just adequate for me. DCC and OSE are better for what I want, except for OSE's Vancian spellcasting. Shadowdark's simple character classes are a selling point, but on the whole, I don't really get what the fuss is about.

I read Scalzi's When the Moon Hits Your Eye instead of playing Runequest, and damned if that wasn't a heck of a good novel. Scalzi presents an utterly ridiculous event - the Moon turning into cheese - and plays the results completely straight. I loved it.

Entry tags:

movies,
work

Brand New Life

Unsurprisingly the Gran Turismo movie is just chock full of beauty shots of Nissan GT-Rs tear-assing around race tracks. Kaz shows up in some shots. This is, so far, thoroughly enjoyable.

Had some excitement at work last week. A client had gone off his meds and showed up at the center. Started causing trouble with the front office staff. Made some threats, said he was coming back with a gun. Since I was the staffer lucky enough to have been there and with the willingness to do so, I got to swear out a MIW on him. Dude was arrested when he showed up the next morning.

Entry tags:

Highway 61 Revisited

More revisiting of long-idle projects on Sunday during a couple of races. Dug into some of the Mars stuff that I'd written for Shadow of the Beanstalk years ago. Cut some of the extraneous meandering ideas out, made it a tighter, leaner scenario.

Big day for Mars in gaming today. The crowdfunding campaign for the Terraforming Mars RPG launched today, and of course I went in on it. Reasonable pledge level, the core book and the campaign guide. There's a ton of digital content added on thanks to stretch goals and the like. I love the board game - and its iOS adaptation - and will at least get this on a table at some Nerd Louisville event or another.

Also launching today, the new edition of Cold City/Hot War. Tight, brilliant horror games set in postwar Berlin and post-nuclear London. I had the originals and sadly sold them off in one of my bookshelf purges, and I've regretted doing that for a long time. And now, future me gets a present!

There was even one more campaign that I'd been interested in - books of maps for modern/near-future games. I talked myself out of that one - I use maps and minis rarely enough, and I'm waiting for Loke to deliver on the set that I helped crowdfund last year.

Saw some interesting things today. A Rumpke garbage truck caught fire on 64 this morning - thankfully he was eastbound and it didn't affect my commute and the crew got out safely. In the afternoon, on my way back from a client visit, I saw an unusual locomotive on a bridge over 9th Street. More interesting were the cars it had in tow - a track inspection train! I got a decent short video of it and dug into railpictures.net and found a picture of the very same train during a run through Georgia.

Saw Captain America: Brave New World last night. Did not like it - there's some great talent on the screen with so very little material to work with.

Entry tags:

cooking,
life

Why my man Won't Treat me Right

I got around to breaking in the Instant Pot this week. Nothing fancy, sauteing and pressure cooking a couple of pork loins I got at Aldi last week. No problems, but the process seemed to cook a lot of the flavor out of the meat. I used the leftovers in a big pot of stew - using the trusty ol' Crock Pot - and that came out really well.

Last night's Cyberpunk game went well. Short adventure, one from Street Stories that I'd overlooked. As I was packing up, I realized that I had nothing on my agenda for the rest of the weekend. No demands on my time at all. I wasn't entirely sure how to process that. Today's been rather enjoyable and very relaxing and almost productive. I dug up some DCC writing that had been left idle for a while, tinkered with that. Not a bad afternoon.

Who Sang It First

I'm getting a small tax refund, assuming the IRS still exists after tomorrow. I've been looking at 3D printers, and the combined refund will just about pay for the one I've picked out. So, unless some expense pops up, I'm getting a Bambu A1 Mini.

Entry tags:

Mood Ring

Valentine's Day ate the CP Red game, and that was okay. Saturday saw heavy rain and thunderstorms and that was good for lying in bed and reading. Sunday's board meeting was blessedly moved online, and weather in Florida did a number on the Daytona 500, so, hey, more reading!

Packed my duffel and took off Monday morning. Drove down to the Corvette Museum, a long-overdue visit. The very fast machines are the focus of the museum, of course, and there is plenty of space given over to the people who designed and engineered and promoted them. I found myself taken with the story of Zora and Elfi Arkus-Duntov - they were a heck of a couple, Elfi was the first Corvette Girl, and she would spell out Zora's name on her body with adhesive medical tape and go sunbathing so his name would be on her. It was a good visit.

Drove to Dad's after the museum. Spent the night with him, then lit out for Dayton early Tuesday morning. I hadn't been to the Air Force museum in several years, and while it was nice to see some of the new exhibits (a Titan 4 stack and a Su-27), I found myself kinda bored. Beautiful machines and stories, but I've seen most of them, you know? And the Presidential aircraft gallery just kept reminding me of that orange bastard, and ... ugh. Hotel was nice.

Wednesday morning, up and off to Point Pleasant for the Mothman Museum. US35 is a heck of a fast road, and would have been even faster without the winter storm I drove through. Fun visit to Point Pleasant, then headed back to Louisville. WV2 was an easy drive down to Huntington, and I-64 brought me home one more time.

Ran an errand with a friend this morning. Going to take care of some business this afternoon - taxes and car licenses and REAL ID documents. No plans for tomorrow, maybe back to BG for a train show on Saturday, then the first ALIEN session at Slur on Sunday evening. Back to work on Monday. Can't wait to see what nonsense went down while I've been gone.

That's a lie. I just don't care all that much.

Entry tags:

politics,
work

Red Rooster

Today marks my one-year anniversary at the job that brought me back to Louisville. I still don't love the gig, but sometimes I kinda like it. I'm looking for something else, because of the dissatisfaction, but also because who knows if the position will even exist in a year. We're a non-profit that relies heavily on Federal funding, and the stupid bastard in the White House is destroying Federal agencies right and left.

I'm on vacation next week - some time to myself to celebrate a birthday. Not entirely sure where I'm going, but I have some candidate destinations in mind. I really just want to get away for a while. Going to get the Impala's oil changed this weekend and throw my duffel bag in the back seat and point the nose in whatever direction.

Entry tags:

reading

Soothing

I read Burning Chrome over the last week. The Sprawl stories are the backbone of the collection, and why I bought the book so many years ago. The other stories are good work, too, of course, and a passage from "The Winter Market" stuck in my head this time around. Lise, the brilliant and broken braindance artist, asks the narrator, Casey, if he wants to have sex with her. Lise has some neurological disorder that requires her to use an exoskeleton for mobility, and she can't feel anything. Casey asks her, after her offer, that very question - "Could you feel it, if I did?" Lise responds, "No, but sometimes I like to watch." There is so much bitterness and hatred in that brief exchange. It's so fucked up.

Entry tags:

gaming,
health

If Trouble was Money

Still dealing with this latest sickness. Congested, repeating headache, coughing and sneezing. DayQuil is helping, and having nothing requiring me to leave the apartment this weekend has been nice. Resting, reading, just trying to heal up.

Started last night's CP Red session by asking the players what they wanted to do. I hadn't been able to come up with anything on my own, and the scenario I was going to default to needed a lot of rewriting to bring it up to snuff, so I had the players do some of the lifting. And they went for a fetch quest, and this was a pleasant surprise. It was a short, fun session, doing some favors for contacts. To my surprise, they all said that they were fine with quests like this, and I'm okay with it. There are two fetch quest scenarios in TotR: Street Stories, and they're well written - and I'd written them off because I didn't think the players would go for them. Joke's on me, I guess! The book gets more value late in the game.

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Army of Dreamers

Had a very good time at RiverCityCon. Games went well - my DCC sessions, the Castles & Crusades game I played in, and some board games with a couple of Louisville friends I should have spent some time with long before now. DCC at fifth level is just bonkers - characters getting multiple action dice, huge bonuses and big dice for warriors and dwarves and thieves. I stopped reminding players of the second dice after about an hour - I had enough to manage on my side of the screen.

The Tuesday night group wrapped up the Dragonbane campaign last night. I was sick - more in a moment - and sat out the session. They opted for another Dragonbane campaign, and I'm going to sit it out, at least for a while. The monthly OSE game is great. The Tuesday night group is fantastic. But, like things were a few months ago, I'm playing enough fantasy.

Probably unrelated, I've had the hardest time writing a scenario for my Cyberpunk Red game. Players gave me some great ideas; I just haven't been able to do anything with them. I'm experiencing some kind of burnout or more likely a creative logjam. My players deserve good games, darnit.

So, yesterday. Woke up not feeling well - body aches, headache, fever, sore throat. Took a shower, wobbled my way back to bed and emailed the boss to tell her I was taking a sick day. Crawled under the blanket and went right back to sleep. Fever went away mid-afternoon, and many hours of sleep helped. Still had a headache when I got up this morning, but it wasn't enough to keep me home for another day.

Entry tags:

Addictive

I can't seem to get over being tired most of the time. I'm not sleeping as well as I'd like. I feel like I'm just staggering forward at work, succeeding in spite of myself. Last week was bad. I think part of it was the first five-day week in a while, what with holidays and weather. By Friday afternoon, I was moving mostly by the power of spite. I just wanted to have enough energy to get home.

An early bedtime helped. I went to Dad's to pick up a pressure cooker that I'd had shipped there. We had a good low-key afternoon together, a late lunch and some football. Got back to Louisville around midnight, stayed up for an hour or so, went to bed.

Sunday. The Ravens lost a heartbreaker to the Bills, who will play the Chiefs - again - for the AFC championship. I put my trusty printer to work on material for this weekend's convention during commercial breaks, tearing through a couple of ink cartridges and lots of paper - 4th- and 5th-level DCC spellcasters can easily have 15-page grimoires!

MLK Day was a holiday for us. It's still nice and a little bit novel having holidays off like civilized people. I took it as easy as I could, doing more convention prep. I had some vague plans of finding some volunteering to do, but the cold and my own weakness wiped those plans out. And I sure as hell wasn't going to watch that orange bastard's inauguration.

I'm looking forward to the con - seeing friends and playing some games and all that. Unfortunately, I'm expecting some drama with a bad actor. I tag my games as ages 13+, and this dude signs up himself and his kid. A couple of years ago, I let this slide in a Blade Runner game, and it was a mistake - the kid was disruptive and took away from the experience of other players, and I'm not going to let it happen again. I've already talked with the con organizers, and they told me I have final say on who gets seated at my table. So, in the parlance of our times, fuck dem kids.

Entry tags:

Rambling Man

Two-and-a-half days at work last week. Didn't see my rural clients because of road conditions, and we got another snowstorm on Friday. I wasn't feeling great Friday morning and went in with the plan of sorting one client's apartment concerns out, then either WFH or taking a half-day and watching the weather from the comfort of my couch.

That didn't happen. When the weather started hitting, the powers-that-be made the sensible decision to close our offices and clinics at 1PM. All good - that fit into my plans. About 12:40 the client mentioned above called, told me he was a couple of blocks from the center and needed a way home. I told him to get to the center and I'd get him home. What should have been a 20-minute drive took a little over an hour. Okay, great, I'm only burning three hours of PTO. I headed for home.

That's when the second call of the day came in. Another client needing help. I judged that the roads weren't too dangerous yet, offered up a prayer to Max Rockatansky, and headed back out. Got him to the grocery and back, and then got my own precious self home.

And that's where I stayed for the weekend, save for a quick trip to pick up a pizza on Sunday afternoon. The second wave of snow wasn't bad, and warmer temps today melted a lot of the snow off.

Today should have been better, but it started off with putting out more of someone else's fires and progressed to wrangling one of my own and then a couple more. Tomorrow,I need to put my people (and myself) first and take care of us.

Let's see how that works out.

Ravens beat the Steelers, and that was the best thing about a good NFL Wild Card weekend. The final game of the weekend is going on right now. It was supposed to be played in LA, but some horrific fires forced a move to Phoenix, to be played in a stadium whose naming rights belong to an insurance company that canceled a load of homeowners' policies in the wildfire area last year. I guess the universe does have a sense of the absurd.

Whatever. We're doomed.

Entry tags:

gaming,
weather

Philodendron

The storm hit just about as forecast. Snow started around 8 yesterday morning and switched over to freezing rain in the late afternoon. Our clinics and offices were closed, and I opted to work from home - knocked out a handful of training modules. Another three inches or so of snow today, with some very cold weather coming in the next few days, and maybe more snow on Friday.

No Dragonbane tomorrow night. I'm a bit relieved, to tell the truth. The game's fun, but this final act has gone on for far too long, and the host has invited more players than the game or venue can comfortably handle - last session, there were eight players plus the GM, and while Dragonbane's pretty light and fast-moving, that many players bog things down.

Friday night's CP Red session went pretty well, and the after-action chat was great. Polled some of the players as to future plotlines, and they delivered. The Netrunner gave me the sort of thing that I can spin into a proper '70s-style political thriller, and the competent Solo told me that the person responsible for the bad reputation is her twin. The Nomad sketched out some more details on her interest in street racing stories, too. This gives me tons of material for future sessions.