Roadside Picnic

Kiss Your Face Forever

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 01:47:36 GMT

A few days ago, I finally reached my breaking point with RPG.net's moderation staff. I'm broadly aligned with the site's policies, and the user community is really good, but goddamn. The newer batch of mods are just fucking terrible - deliberately reading comments in the least charitable light, assuming bad faith, and assuming that their own take is the only possibly correct one.

So, I'm out. I remembered having an account at another site, and have found some good discussions there. It'll do.

In fact, one of those discussions led to breaking a logjam I've been fighting for a while. Stop trying to tell an Earth story on Mars, just because you want to play on Mars.

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The Way Things Go

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 23:53:26 GMT

I slept for a good eleven hours. Woke up still a little bit less than full-spec physically but just about stellar in the heart and mind. Cracked open some long-idled Google docs and did some work. Fits and starts, but it was wordcount and it felt good to do it.

Dad wanted to take the boat out this evening, but I still wasn't feeling up to anything like that. Maybe tomorrow, if I don't go somewhere to take that last chance to see Mission: Impossible.

I still have this hankering to paint something. I didn't go looking for minis at GenCon, blew past Miso's when I detoured in Louisville for lunch, and Derby was locked up when I stopped by there. So, if I do go up to Lexington for the movie, I'll try and find something suitable at a store there. I screwed around with HeroForge to design something suitable, and that's an option, but whew those aren't cheap.

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Tears Run Dry

Fri, 12 May 2023 15:43:53 GMT

I'm camped out at the Casey County library for a while today. Slow (OMG so fucking slow) Internet became no Internet Wednesday evening, and the earliest service window is this coming Monday - which is when Windstream is supposed to come out and complete the fiber-optic connection to the house, so I'm just dealing with it.

I still have the occasional cough, but I'm mostly better. Dad's taking another hit, unfortunately. He's pretty weak, sore throat, proper bad cold symptoms. I hope that we're not just trading viral ickiness back and forth.

Denny Crum died a couple of days ago. Super-classy guy, and will always be a part of UofL culture.

Goshdarn Noble Knight already got me to spend some store credit. There's a sale going, and some things I wanted were on the list, so I ordered stuff. Should be here Monday afternoon. I still have a lot of credit, and looking at the production schedules of the few companies that still keep my interest, that credit's going to last me quite a while.

The veracity of this prediction has yet to be determined, but, knowing me, I know how I'd bet.

Wow. There's a book by my favorite writing professor on the shelf in front of me. Allegiance, by the great Gurney Norman.

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One of These Mornings

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 01:46:39 GMT

This was one of the best weekends of NFL games I've ever seen. Favorites beaten at home by last-minute field goals in three of the games - Bengals over Titans, 49ers over Packers, and Rams over Buccaneers. The Chiefs won at home, sudden-death overtime against the Bills. Close games, great play on all sides. I'm having some trouble believing that the Bengals are going into the conference championship game this coming weekend.

Played in an Armada tournament for the first time in forever. Went 0-2, had a heck of a good afternoon with some friends. I'm going to play a lot more Armada when I quit X-Wing, I think. It's far more taxing, and a whole other kind of fun, and so far, I haven't seen any sign of AMG making the kinds of changes that are driving me away from the other game.

I'm making some small daily progress in writing. Hitting the 300 words/day mark more often than not. Goodman liked my genius loci pitch. Still doing more with game stuff than fiction, but right now, writing is writing.

I've landed an interview with my home county's health department. Academically, I'm way the hell overqualified for the job, and that may disqualify me. Don't care. It's worth sitting for the interview. If I get it, it's a forward step.

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Under the Gun

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 02:58:55 GMT

Serif put their Affinity software on sale again last week, so I sprang for a copy of Publisher. Well, a license, since the purchase allows me to put the app on every computer I own. I've mucked around with Scribus over the years, and it's good and pretty capable (and free!), but sometimes it can be described as user-surly. I started playing with Publisher tonight, and it's pretty slick. There's a good and knowledgeable and helpful user community, and while it's not the super app that Indesign is, the purchase price is less than a month's subscription to Adobe's products.

SpaceX tested another Starship prototype today, and it did not go as hoped for. Successful launch, flight up to about six miles, but it did not stick the landing. That's why these things get tested, and retested, and redesigned, of course.

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Sold me Down the River

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 14:17:12 GMT

I shouldn't be at this point, but I'm still regularly surprised at how good getting together with some friends to move little toy spaceships around a table is for my mental health. I went to Heroes with two Armada fleets and four X-Wing squadrons yesterday. Only got in a single match - an Epic X-Wing game. Lost, but managed not to bring shame to my ancestors. Did find that I need one more B-Wing maneuver dial, so an eBay seller is going get a few bucks out of me for that.

I sicced the Bs, flying in a wing, on a wing of TIE/lns early on, and while the B isn't a dogfighter, it does punch hard. The Bs also had the GR-75's point defense lasers providing cover, and that was good for a couple of shots most rounds. In hindsight, I should have used the Bs for their intended purpose and attacked my opponent's Gozanti instead, but I only had five fighters in my squadron, and needed some counter to my opponent's wings. All in all, a good match and good scenario, and we'll do it again in a couple of weeks.

I've gotten the idea to try and write some gaming stuff for publication again. I'm looking at FFG's Android setting for one of the products, and since I'm here for the immersion, I snapped up the five novels FFG published a while back. The first one, so far at least, is plenty enjoyable - we've got a murder mystery going on, going with the setting's theme of "The world changed. Crime (or people) did not." I don't expect that these are going to be life-changers, but so far, I'm having a good time in the world.

With luck, I'm going to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics game this afternoon. Would have done it last weekend, but car trouble and floods and everything else conspired to force the delay. This should be fun.

My trusty, but aging, iPhone is probably getting succeeded this afternoon, too. It's solidly into the obsolescent category, with the latest OS update being a couple years old, a slowly failing battery, and a couple of other issues.

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No Hope State

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 00:20:32 GMT

Thanks to YouTube, I've found another synthwave artist to follow - Lionface. A little heavier than Gunship, and way moreso than The Midnight, so they're a welcome addition to the list.

After too many delays and too much time spent overthinking minutia, I've gotten back on track with the PMC project that's been in my head for a while. Took a step back, rewrote the outline, and started looking at it in smaller chunks instead of one large(ish) whole. I still have no real idea what I'll do with it when its finished. That's maybe a conversation to have in a couple of weeks.

15 days until Indianapolis, and then hopefully a return to Night City.

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On and On

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 04:11:23 GMT

Got a painful lesson reminder of why I shouldn't trust Microsoft products a couple of nights ago. I've gotten into the habit of taking my iPad with me when I'm working at PNC in the evenings or on weekends, and using the ample downtime to keep some writing going. So, Sunday evening, I'm feeling pretty good about things and cranking out some good stuff, and figure, what the hell, lets put Word on the iPad and see how it works on that platform. It works pretty darn well ... unless you're using iCloud for online storage. Word refuses to recognize that option, and when I tried to use Google Drive, Word threw a fit and lost a big chunk of what I'd written. Not at all how I wanted things to go.

I'm just fickle as hell about my tools, I guess. I sent the Macbook Air dock back to Amazon last night, and returned the monitor to Walmart yesterday morning. I agonized a little bit about keeping them, with the logic of "Hey, I might have a need for them sometime," and then I thought about the garage and barn at the Farm, and realized whoa, dragon, that's where that line of thinking leads. So, no fuss, it's done. And now I'm looking at newer iPads, either a 6th generation 9.7" model or a 10.5" one. My existing Air is still working as well as the day I bought it, but it only has 16GB of storage, and the OS takes up nearly half of that, if not more.

Okay. I'm going to embrace the workflow and do all of the writing in Pages. It exports to .docx, and LibreOffice will work for any final edits before I dive into Scribus for any self-published gaming products. Admitted, I've made these noises countless times over the years, so there's every likelihood that none of it will come to pass, but I'm remembering how good writing feels when I fucking DO IT, and that mental and emotional energy seems to be flowing again, so I'd best make the most of it. Paring down the number of active (relatively speaking) projects has helped out. I feel like I'm going to really have something together before long.

Started watching Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina tonight. First episode isn't bad. Appropriately spooky, wasn't expecting naked witch-girl stepping out of the tub, and I think I'm going to stick with it.

Some Star Wars stuff - Jon Favreau cited spaghetti Westerns and Kurosawa samurai movies as strong influences on his The Mandalorian for Disney+, the Cassian Andor series is promising me some espionage stories, and I'm more interested in these TV projects than I am in the end of the Skywalker saga.

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New Song

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 00:40:19 GMT

Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the Earth. - Psalm 96:1

Way back in the late '80s, I was pretty active in my home church. I didn't especially want to be there, but decided that since I had to, might was well make the most of it. I was a youth group leader, gave a couple sermons, and was a delegate or representative or something to my denomination's state-level organization - the United Methodist Church, if you're interested in the details of mainstream American Protestantism. At the time, there were two UMC divisions - conferences - in Kentucky: the western half of the state was the Louisville Conference, and the eastern half was the Kentucky Conference. They've since merged. For whatever reason, the three congregations - a charge, in UMC parlance - that my church was a part of were affiliated with Louisville, and the others in the home county were Kentucky Conference. I don't think there was any significance outside of some record-keeping.

The conference owned - still does - a large campground/retreat center called Camp Loucon. It was, and probably still is, a very pretty place, sited on the edge of a small lake. I went to a few camps at Loucon - mostly to (a) get out of the house for a few days, and, (b) to meet girls. Loucon also hosted a good-sized Christian music festival called New Song. A couple of stages, some of the bigger names in the business, and several thousand people. I went to a couple of these festivals, for the same reasons I went to camps. They were long days, at least two hours on the road each way, leaving crazy-early the morning of the show and waiting out the departing traffic that night.

A few weeks ago, I heard a radio ad for summer camps at Loucon, and it was a real blast-from-the-past. It had been years since I'd even thought about the place, and a whole lot of memories came bubbling up. The camp is still there, but New Song has come to an end - 2011 was the last one. For the last few years, or so New Song's Facebook page tells me, the festival was affiliated with another, bigger festival called Ichthus. Ichthus has gone tits-up, too, and probably won't return despite the claims of the IP's new owners.

Holy cow, almost 400 words and that's on top of a 840-word in-character writeup of today's Armada match. I should be able to do this far more regularly.

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This is Where you can Reach me Now

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:57:38 GMT

Since starting the rewatch of Battlestar Galactica (2004 edition) and catching a few episodes of the original on one of the local digital side-channels, I've been thinking about the role of religion and/or faith in my gaming and related writing.

I'm, for sake of labeling, a post-Christian atheist. I grew up in a pretty mainstream rural Methodist church, and was somewhat involved in youth groups and things like that, but never really wanted to be warming a pew on Sunday mornings (evenings, at Wednesday night prayer meetings, revivals, you see where I'm going). To be honest, I think I learned more about being good and doing right from episodes of Star Trek on WAVE-3 than I did from most of the preaching I was exposed to - I sure enjoyed them more and loved Sunday mornings when I didn't have to go to church.

I remember a Palladium Fantasy game in high school, where the PCs were crusader-missionaries, spreading their faith by example and at the point of the sword. There was a World of Darkness game in the mid-90s, with the PCs caught up, indirectly, in angelic and demonic machinations. My D&D 3 historian/lawman/wizard was devoted to his goddess, if occasionally angry with her, and cared little for the beliefs of others. Currently, my Pulp Cthulhu investigator was raised a Quaker, left that belief for something between non-specific Protestantism and agnosticism, saw some weird shit while part of the occupation of Haiti, and is now confronting Yig's cultists. My CP2020 solo was a lapsed Catholic, more so in stories I wrote about him than in play. In my current Star Wars game, there's no real discussion of religion, outside of the Force.

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Tale for Someone

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 17:04:52 GMT

Met some new-to-Louisville folks at Colin's shop on Friday, and found myself in the role of ad hoc tournament organizer for the X-Wing players there. Everyone got plenty of loot, including some Armada goodies for us fleet commanders. Then, most of us decamped for more gaming at Heroes, and holy cow, did I get a surprise. I'd pitched it as a night for Epic play, and got some interest. Wound up with three 4-player games going. Pretty terrific!

Harvey's remains came through, dropping a lot of rain and cooling the air quite a bit. I didn't hear of any flooding or any other serious issues. There's another hurricane in the eastern Atlantic, probably hitting the East Coast in a week or so.

Last night saw North Korea's most powerful nuclear test yet, something in the 50-120 kiloton range, if seismic information is to be believed. NK claims to have developed a thermonuclear device, and they've progressed to test-launching ballistic missiles over Japanese airspace instead of into open ocean. I hate feeling alarmist, but I keep hearing Admiral Painter's words - "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control, and we'll be lucky to live through it."

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I don't know where the information came from, and today it doesn't really matter. We'd observed Imperial patrols ranging further and further out from the Onderon depot, and Sector Command decided to hit one of them. A target presented itself - a Raider rendezvousing with a Gozanti carrying the sort of material we can make better use of than Moff Vancyon's forces can. Sector assembled an appropriate force, a couple of CR90s, a GR75, a couple of refitted freighters, and all the fighters we could round up.

For a few blessed minutes, it was perfect. We dropped out of hyperspace a stone's throw from the Imperial ships and it seemed we caught them completely unaware. Less than a squadron's worth of TIEs showed on our scopes; we had more than twenty fighters. The Raider was caught between our corvettes, taking more broadside fire than it knew what to do with. We had 'em.

Then the sensors started screaming. Realspace reversions all around us, and coming in fast. The Empire had set its own trap, and we'd fallen for it. If only that had been the case.

It was a pirate force. Three of those damned C-ROCs, faster meaner versions of the Gozanti, and enough fighters and transports to give both sides pause. And they were spoiling for a fight. They came roaring right into the fight between us and the Empire, throwing both sides into chaos. We wanted that Gozanti's cargo, but the pirates must have wanted it more. What had been a straightforward engagement became a brawl, damned near three separate battles. I hate saying this, but the Imperials handled themselves better than our divided force. We lost over a dozen fighters before our own ships disengaged and ran for safety - we did manage to destroy one of the C-ROCs, at least. The one that made the mistake of tangling with the Raider didn't last long. The corvette and its fighter escort cut the thing to pieces.

We're licking our wounds now, and listening.

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