momiji

Jesus Christ, guys, I'm twenty now. I don't really feel any different, but it's strange to think that I'm not a teenager any more. Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday here or on Facebook :D It was a low-key day - I skipped classes and slept in today because it's been a bad week, and I think I'm coming down with something. And then had cake and sushi and played Shadowrun. Jon gave me Burning Crusade and a pair of sweet mirrorshades, so it was all pretty good.

The depression and anxiety have definately been rearing their heads again, in part because I'm worried about elections (when I go for something, I get really competitive - it's why I don't do cosplay contests any more), and in part because I've really dropped the ball on biochem class - I failed the first midterm, missed one major assignment completely, and am worried about failing the course. So I really need to buckle down and get studying on it. It's giving me terrible insomnia, though, and a very short temper.

But soon spring and the end of classes will be here, and things will be better.

Gary Gygax passed away this morning. I know I'm not the biggest D&D fan, but I'm sad anyway - he really was one of the fathers of tabletop RPGs. RIP Gary, and thanks for all the games.

You know, I've done the big, burning, addictive sort of love. And in some ways it's wonderful, just the sheer force of it, but at the same time, that sort of feeling consumes you, and if there's no real outlet for it, it does become damaging after a while.

And when I stop to thing about it, there's something to be said for the sort of person who you can be around all the time, who always understands how you're feeling, who you can talk to about anything. It's not quite as forceful, but it's just so...comfortable. Like something that should be.

(By which I mean to say, love you, dearest ♥)

I wrote this a while ago, but forgot to post it...

I forgot to mention our tabletop misadventures for the week - on Tuesday, we discovered the one thing Earthdawn does really badly - mass combat. There aren't any mass combat rules which means when you have a hundred barbarians? Each acts individually. It was kind of painful (although luckily not literally so - everyone's character is still intact). Brief side note, while I'm too lazy to blather for a whole entry about how awesome Earthdawn is, if you like tabletop and high magic settings and don't mind a little bit of number-crunching, give it a try. It's got a wonderfully fleshed out world, and the mechanics are very solid. I know I talk about SR a lot (because I am cyberpunk's cheap whore), but mechanically, ED is waaay better.

And then last night's Mage game featured an Englishman (me) and a French-Canadian (Richard) posing first as paranormal investigators, and then as Jehovah's Witnesses. And then Nick and I did a highly unwise thing - we found the Hedge separating this part of our world from the faerie realm, and crossed it. We'll see how badly we get screwed over the fae, I guess.

Also, in SR news, Arsenal (the new gear book) is fucking awesome.

New blog layout - not my finest work, but I'm just happy to have something new and shiny up. I was originally going to port it to an LJ layout, too, but I started working on it and remember how much writing overrides suck, so yeah, not happening. Not much to say other than that. VNV Nation makes me happy. This is all.

Part the first - Ally in a 40s cocktail dress, dress and pose shamelessly stolen from Rita Hayworth (I don't claim to be anything but a hack). This comes from our SR4 game - Ally got invited by her Matrix buddy Bogart to a Matrix club called Play it Again, Sam (seeing a theme here?), which turned out to have a dress code. So she let the bouncer change her icon to match, and this was the result.

Part the second - the funniest mental image generated in Earthdawn last night: Isak (think cleaner-cut Trent Reznor in his long-haired days) and Sphal (a seveneight-foot tall rock man) running around flapping big capes like wings and making bat-squeak noises. And thus we learn yet another reason nobody invites Nethermancers to parties.

I'm sitting next to a phone jack in the Chem building, and out of the four labels on the unit, only one still reads the jack label number. The other three, in order read 'Suck it Trebeck', 'Q-town what', and 'It's always raining in my mind'. Also, ten am on six hours of sleep is a lousy time to try and figure out the British education system - I'm trying to write up Julian's backstory, and his education doesn't really matter that much for this game, but I hate being wildly inaccurate about things I can find on Wikipedia.

So I've been looking at 2008 con schedules, and I've come to the conclusion that life hates me. There are four cons I'd really like to go to this year - Norwescon, Sakuracon, Gencon, and Anime Evolution (Y-con is so up in the air, I'm not thinking about it right now). Norwescon is one weekend in March, Sakuracon is the next. Gencon is one weekend in August, AE is the next. The breakdown in terms of deciding factors goes something like this:

-Norwescon: On Easter weekend, so I have Friday and Monday off. Cheap hotel rates ($105 a night for a double), but it's at the airport, which means either paying more for the bus from Van, or attempting to navigate public transport from downtown Seattle to the con. I do really want to go to a sci-fi/fantasy con again, though.

-Sakuracon: Pricier hotel, would have to skip classes on Friday probably. More people I know going, though. Downtown = cheaper bus fare. Hard to justify going to Seattle two weekends in a row without my own car.

-Gencon: Most epic awesome gaming con ever. Unfortunately in Indiana, which means $300+ airfare, as it's a little too far for Epic Road Trip. Dunno what hotel prices are like yet. Someday?

-Anime Evolution: Probably the only 'for sure' con on this list, provided I ask for it off early enough (I forgot this year). I can commute, so it's like $35 plus whatever I feel like spending at the dealer's room.

AX I'm not interested enough in to justify the cost (if I had the money, I'd use it on Gencon >.>), Yaoicon...depends hugely on what my summer job is and how I feel about the fandom.

Game and memory card have been located, which is a relief. On the other hand, Air Canada can't even tell me if they've found my bags, which officially gives them the status of worst customer service I've had from an airline, ever. This is probably the fifth or sixth time I've lost luggage, and the first time I haven't had it back in under ten hours. There were also about thirty or forty other people on my flight from Toronto with lost luggage - I don't even know how the hell this happens.

I'm so angry, and seriously worried I'm not going to see any of it again.

So, in between working on a Mage character (got an idea and I've been running with it) and looking up info on the White Wolf website for ordering purposes, I have spent a lot of time lately looking through WW products.

I feel like I should say, first and foremost, that I want to hug whoever they hired to do graphic design for the new World of Darkness line. RPG books really only need to be readable and relatively easy to find necessary info in - most present a certain aesthetic appropriate to the game, but in most cases it's pretty basic - Earthdawn has some great art, and a nice header font, but that's about it. White Wolf went all-out with the new series, though - they are absolutely gorgeous, and I love how they styled each of the lines within nWoD to match the feel of that particular setting - the Mage books, for instance, have a faux ribbon-binding printed on the spine side of pages, lovely gold script headers, and little gold flecks on the pages, which really conveys to me the sense of elegant, ancient power that Mage is supposed to be about.

And all of these has led me to discover that there is a White Wolf development LJ, which is very cool - I've been getting a bit of an insight into the background work of game development via Dumpshock, as most of the main SR team are members (or in some cases, admins), but this has a lot more detail, and some really interesting discussions. Chief among this is the handling of metaplot in nWoD, compared to oWoD (for non-WoD players - a few years back, they basically totally rebooted the entire World of Darkness setting, giving the old one - oWoD - and new - nWoD). I didn't have much experience with oWoD - Vampire, pretty much exclusively, and I never got around to actually playing it, but the general sense I get is that oWoD had a massive, looming metaplot that people either loved, because they thought it was really cool, or hated, because they didn't want to have to buy tons of books to use on aspect of the metaplot. nWoD, on the other hand, seems to largely have no metplot, just history. As much as I do like metaplot (I love the Shadowrun metaplot, for instance), I realized, thinking about it, that I don't mind the nWoD lack of metaplot - it's got serious atmosphere, irrelavent of any metaplot.


...And I just got seriously derailed by the internet there, so I don't know where I was going with that. Possibly into a deep examination of WoD versus DnD, or why I don't like d20, but that'll have to wait for another day, I think.