tracker7 | Entries tagged with gaming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Busy week. In addition to the normal client visits and office work, our holiday party for the clients was on Thursday and that meant lots of extra work. I'm dangerously close to getting one of my folks intro transitional housing and if I can manage that I'll call the first half of the month a win.

Friday was good. Took a half-day as Clayton was in town and sat in on the evening's CP Red game. John C was unable to play, so that saved me from running out to Crescent Hill before and after the game.

Went to Liberty for a presentation at the library and to see Dad for a bit. My iPad suicided during some app updates and it couldn't be fixed, so I bought a new one this morning. Not cheap, but it's a hell of a good tool and I'm very accustomed to having one.

UofL football is going to the Sun Bowl, a New Year's Eve game. Win or lose, it'll be a good end to the season. Since it's on CBS instead of whatever cable network threw money at the NCAA, I'm going to take a half-day and watch the game from my couch before ...

Holy cow, I have plans for NYE! Almost a date, really. I don't quite know what to do with this. Casual plans, just hanging out and watching movies and quite possibly nodding off before midnight.

Turnout for early voting was fairly high over the weekend, for whatever that's worth. The Tuesday night group decided to play on Election Night and leave our phones in our cars. I'm not hopeful.

Got on the road Friday morning. Weather was good until I got south of Charleston, and that convinced me to head to Christiansburg instead of diverting to the New River Gorge. Checked in, went to C&C's new home, went to dinner, caught up. A good day on the road and a very good evening with friends.

Went to Roanoke Saturday morning. Lots of good stuff to see - the J looks like it's doing 70MPH just sitting there, the big A-class is almost as impressive as a C&O Allegheny, and I think I want to add an E-unit of some stripe to my collection. Checked out a couple of other places - Center on the Square had great aquariums and Mishap Gaming impressed with the amount of not-D&D5 on their shelves.

Today's weather was much better, and the drive to the Gorge was quite nice. The bridge is a damned impressive structure, and the Gorge is just beautiful. The sense of the age of the place is daunting - the Appalachians are incredibly old, and the New River predates the rise of that ancient mountain range.

Stopped off in Charleston to have lunch with Gena. Great pizza at Pies & Pints - Gena's vegetarian, and their white pizza was a good fit for both of us. Got home ... around 7, I think. Gonna watch part of the Sunday night NFL game, then take some sleep medicine and call it a night.

Back to the literal madness tomorrow.

The Dodgers are the 2024 World Series champs! They won Game 5 last night, a banger of a come-from-behind win, final score of 7-6 after spending four innings down 0-5. I would have liked to have seen the win at Dodgers Stadium, but winning at the opponent's park is just fine.

The Trail game was not good. Had two players more interested in their Noo Yawk accents than pursuing the investigation that others were there for. It happens, I guess. Sometimes even Han Solo got boarded, sometimes even I run a bad game. On to Eclipse Phase in a couple of weeks.

Tried to vote around 9:30 this morning. Traffic around my first choice of sites was quite heavy, backed up a quarter-mile. I opted to run a couple of errands and try again elsewhere and had better luck. In and out in about 15 minutes. Poll workers said the site had been busy all day.

The site was the hotel convention space that used to host Conglomeration. I hadn't been in there since the last Conglom in '19. The mind's eye saw the registration table in the main hallway and the vendors' tables in the room where I cast my ballot. Sic transit.

Got the books. The Buick started acting up around Bardstown - lost power, as the dashboard helpfully let me know. Towed it back to Liberty and drove the Frontier back to Louisville early Tuesday. Swapped it out for the backup Impala Wednesday after work. Impala is behaving and will hopefully continue to do so.

The Dodgers are up two games to zero in the World Series. Freddy Freeman hit a walk-off grand slam in the tenth to win the first game. Game Two wasn't as dramatic, but Shohei Ohtani injured his shoulder trying to steal second and that's concerning. Ice Cube performed a version of "Today was a Good Day" to open the game, paying respect to Fernando Valenzeula at the mound.

Running a Trail of Cthulhu game at Slur tonight. Got three players so far, and that's enough to make things work. If people bail, no worries, I'll just go home and watch the evening NFL game.

Taking Halloween and November 1 off. Voting on Halloween, hopefully not for the last time. Going to Virginia on Friday to see folks and a museum and other stuff. I think this is the first vacation trip I've taken since late 2020 - conventions are working vacations, so I'm not counting them. I'm looking forward to the trip, and very much looking forward to not seeing clients and not being at work for those two days.

Sent out a couple of resumes last night. I've given the job the best shot I can, and it's just not working out for me. Time to move on. Again.

Friday night's game only ran for a couple of hours, and I wound up leaving a couple bottles of soda and water at the shop. Not my best night.

Did a lot of nothing yesterday. Laid in without sleeping very much. Miami beat Louisville.

Read a good chunk of When Gravity Fails this morning. Worked on more material for Cyberpunk.

Back to work tomorrow, and I'm making a fast trip to Liberty and back to pick up a couple of books from Noble Knight and some documents from Dad. Thought about spending the night and coming back up here early Tuesday morning, but I don't think I will. I'll sleep a little late and attend the morning meeting's via Zoom.

Short workweeks are always appreciated. I like them better when the day off is a Friday - when the week ends sooner rather than starting later - but I'm not going to complain. This one was busy, with the normal 150-mile drive on Thursday, so at least it didn't seem to drag on. So, here I am on a Sunday afternoon, watching the Colts-Texans game and doing laundry. Getting in some reading, too.

Today is the third anniversary of Mom's death. The pain is gone, and has been for a while, if I'm being honest. It's an emptiness now. An empty space. I miss her.

Friday was Dad's birthday, and I took him to lunch yesterday to celebrate. Heck of a good meal and Copper & Oak in Danville. We had a little other business to take care of, and that was handled easily enough. He's singing with his gospel group this afternoon, and that will hopefully keep him from dwelling on the date too much. They're singing about thirty miles south of Indy next weekend, and I may go up there and see about going early enough to go up to Patachou for one of their fantastic omelets.

I'm diving back into Eclipse Phase, prepping for a SYR game in a couple of weeks. I remember the broad strokes of the game, but so many details are coming back to me on the reread.

Some real glamour shots of Lucas Oil Stadium and Indianapolis in general during the game. I was just there five weeks ago, and I find myself missing it already. My GenCon family isn't what it used to be, but they do still mean something to me.

Some jerk decided to shoot up I-75 yesterday afternoon. Dude bought an AR of some stripe and 2000 rounds for it yesterday morning, then found a spot on an overpass and ... just started shooting. Still at large as of this afternoon.

Work wasn't great last week, and my normal sources of recharging didn't happen, so I was very glad when Friday afternoon rolled around and I rolled into a three-day weekend. Got home, turned off the work phone, and decided that the most important thing I could do this weekend was to take care of me.

I did a lot of reading this weekend. Not a lot relative to me in my 30s, but quite a bit relative to me in the past couple of years. A middling sci-fantasy novel from my GoodReads list. Some of the RPG titles I picked up before and at GenCon. Some articles and blogs on video games.

Got in my daily GT7 workouts and completed the weekly challenges. The Aston Martin Group 4 was a nice reward for the latter. Played OSE yesterday - low on action, high on roleplay and building up our little settlement, and logorrhea player was absent. Good times. UofL football started the season with a big win - the opponent wasn't great, but a 62-point win is a statement, no matter what.

So, this evening, I'm feeling good. I'm updating my resume later tonight, with the intent of applying for another position, one more suited to my skills and interests. Dinner turned out well, and I'm enjoying Netflix's Terminator anime. I needed this weekend, and I have very much enjoyed it.

Our DCC GM is in the process of moving, so the game's on hold for a couple of weeks. So, this past weekend, after Friday night's get-together, I had no demands on my time. That felt really good. I slept late Saturday, spent most of the day on the couch listening to music and reading. It was glorious.

Got up Sunday morning for an early showing of Alien: Romulus, which I didn't like very much. It's gorgeous, has the proper cassette futurism look that I love, but the movie just didn't work for me.

Fallout's pretty good, though, two episodes in.

Not much of an entry. Nothing really on my mind, nothing worth recording, at least.

After the very good Charcon weekend, the workweek was rough. One of the more troublesome clients brought a ton of trouble on herself, and she went off on me and my team, and I kinda-sorta don't much care what happens to her now. On the other hand, we fired another client after his last round of bullshit. And in hopeful-for-me news, a couple of positions that line up well with my skills and interests are opening up, and darn right I'm applying for them.

Enough about work.

DCC Day went pretty well. Fewer games than I had wanted, but we had a smaller crowd this year, so it worked out. Got some good time in with friends this weekend. Finally got another bookcase assembled and made further way overdue progress in getting some boxes put away.

Something else I liked about Civil War - seeing a big ol' Ford Excursion doing what it was built for. Carrying a number of people and their gear on a lengthy trip through sometimes rough country.

Catching up with Donna was good. Don't know when we'll get to see each other again - the rest of May is busy for me, and June and July are going to be busy for us both. She's working towards a move to New Orleans in about a year and a half, and has extracted promises from me that I'll come see her when she's settled in down there.

GenCon badges got sorted out, and I have a three-event wish list ready for tomorrow's registration. Listen closely, friends, around noon Eastern, and you just might hear the servers groan. I've GMed all of the games on my list - Trail of Cthulhu, Shadow of the Beanstalk, and Old Gods of Appalachia - and I'm looking forward to being on the other side of the screen.

Dad's surgery went very well. He texted me yesterday, marveling at how nice it was to have clear vision back in his left eye. The right is getting another evaluation next month - it has some cataracts as well, but that eye's retina has some damage, and the docs are concerned that cataract surgery may further damage the retina.

The repainted mini came out well. The colors aren't quite what I had in mind, but they're good, and I have no desire to strip and paint it again. Next up is one for my Old School Essentials character - a skull-splitting herb-gathering barbarian.

Mucked around with my client schedule this afternoon to finally catch Civil War. It is, as the kids say, a banger of a movie. Kirsten Dunst is very good, and her supporting cast is, too. It's a damned intense movie, and uncomfortable in turns. Alex Garland hasn't yet let me down - on the directorial side, Ex Machina and Annihilation are gorgeous movies, and he's written some great stuff, too - 28 Days Later and Dredd, among others. And A24's made some good stuff, so this was just a good work all around.

Surprisingly, we got a red-band trailer for Maxxxine, another A24 release and the sequel to the pretty darn good X.

Found a little gem while looking for something to eat before the movie. Was going to get something from Raising Cane's, but their dining room was closed for repairs and I have a nearly pathological hate of drive-thrus, and something told me to try the grocery store in the little mall housing the theater. Found out that they have a very good deli, and very good prices there. So, since I'm trying to see more movies at Baxter Avenue, I think I'll patronize Valu Market as well.

In the words of Reg Blank, next up, more of the same.

Pinch-hit for our regular GM Tuesday night. He had to bail for a last-minute thing, and I had the unused DCC stuff from Sunday's aborted game, so that's what we played. Honestly, I almost wish that I'd opted for a discount movie instead, but whatever.

So. I have this client. She's really pretty great. She is schizoaffective like anything, but she has fantastic ADL skills and her delusions don't really present a threat to herself or others. It's almost textbook conspiracy - her memories have been swapped with another woman's, the government has put implants in her body to control her, that sort of thing. The biggest complication - up until today - is, according to her therapist's notes, her voices tell her that she and I are supposed to have a non-professional relationship. Therapist and supervisors are convinced that this won't happen, so, we press on. Heck, I spent two hours helping her with errands yesterday, and all was well. Anyway, today. During the morning Zoom meeting, her therapist messages me, asking about a batch of messages client had sent to her and other team members - but not me. Client repeated "they're telling me not to breathe help me." Therapist was near client's home and visited her; client wasn't in danger and told therapist that she had just had a bad morning. This is the first time that client's shown any kind of real expression of harm from her voices, and it's got us concerned. Client is now on our daily visit list.

Life in the big city's mental health care field.

Lexicon is coming up this weekend. I'm scheduled to GM three Coriolis sessions, and as of right now, I have players for two of them. Got some friends I want to see, both at the con and outside it. Should be a good weekend.

At some point, I'll spend the weekend in the new apartment.

Easter weekend was nice enough. Spent most of it in Liberty. Watched the UFL opening games on Saturday. Nice lunch with the family on Sunday. Got back to Louisville Sunday evening, very tired. Watched the first episode of season four of For All Mankind.

So, that's a nice if unintentional perk of the job - company phones are iPhones, so I have to have an app store account with the work e-mail account. And Apple likes to give away trial memberships of their various services, and I'm not too proud to accept three free months of Apple+. Put the reminder to cancel the subscription in my calendar already, of course.

Mess of an entry. I'm still getting my feet back under me.

The move is done. Setup is ongoing. The commute in isn't bad, but going home sometimes tests me.

The apartment is pretty quiet. A Norfolk Southern line runs alongside the property, and the diesels and their horns are not exactly loud, but there's no escaping them. And, well, I am a railfan, so hearing the thoroughbreds do their thing is sometimes soothing.

The job. I'm working for the right agency, but I'm in the wrong position. I can ride it out until mid-August, when I'm eligible to apply for something else within the agency. There are some significant perks to working for a non-profit - student loan repayment and public service loan forgiveness are way up on the list. Of course, LMPHW offers those, too, and there's a part of me that would rather work for a municipal/county/state-level public health organization than a private agency. But that's a question for near-future me.

The Tuesday evening game group is growing, enough that there's talk of adding a second weekly game night. Haven't had that opportunity for a while! I ran a DCC game at the nerd bar last night, and that went really well, so if we do add a second night, I'll throw my hat in the ring.

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Roadside Picnic

Bright Ideas, Dark Futures

Picture Window

Good Vibrations

Mood Ring

If Trouble was Money

Addictive

Philodendron

Mountain Fever

How Could I Love Her so Much

Ghost of a Texas Ladies Man

Get Back

Little Prince

Violet

And the Bottom Drops Out

Birds of a Feather

Trying to be Cool

Down to Memphis

Reasons Leading to a Flameout

No More No Less

Chaos Angel

Jupiter

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June 2025

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