tcinseattle

You know too much about US history via 'schoolhouse rock' and far, far too little about Canadian history.

Luckily, you can learn by playing Civ 3.
Grab Civ 3 for _$5_ here: http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-CIV3/civilization-iii-complete?aff=ggnews
and then get the Canadian govt-sponsored 'HistoriCanada' mod here: http://www.historycanadagame.com/page.php?sid=58

... and don't come back until you know why it's funny to call Louis Riel a pirate.

Sandra's surgeon came out to the waiting area and woke me up: everything went okay, he gave me a bunch of fiddly details about what they did that Sandra will know more about that I do. Something about oversewing and some various sizes of staples. Everything went okay.

She's in recovery now getting de-Borgified, once she looks less tubular and she's headed to the actual room I'll be able to go talk to her.  Further updates as events warrant.

Now I stayed home sick because I felt totally wiped, maybe this is just what normal BP feels like. After being wired and hypertense for years I wouldn't be surprised if normal felt faint to me.

Just finished ep 1. Took about 4 hours, we got stuck for a while on the boarding-the-ship puzzle.

More monkeys than the first act of ANY other Monkey Island game, loads of great jokes, absolutely NO hunt-the-pixel puzzles, and only a couple weird little bugs, which didn't affect gameplay, but were confusing (they allowed some actions to be performed before they should have been possible - but the effects of the actions didn't 'keep')

The maturity (or rather, euphemised obscenity) level of the jokes is nicely aged about 10 years, to keep pace with the audience. way more sex jokes, but still plenty of fart gags and slapstick. Loads of references to the previous games, and I even caught a Galaxy Quest reference "some sort of rudimentary lathe". Thankfully the villian isn't ultra-annoying, like the rainbow-spewing twat in the Sam'n'Max games.

It's great to have a new, awesome Monkey Island game : D

I don't exist until further notice.

My blood pressure has been steadily in the low 130s / 78-84 for the last week, with the only exception being the day after Canada day, when I last had booze (3 beer, kid stuff). This is _20 points_ lower than the normal for the last year. The mystery of 'why has my blood pressure been so high since graduation' has finally been solved. Now I just gotta exercise a little and I'll _totally_ make it to the singularity.

At work unbelievably early so that I can run off an soon as the TellTale Monkey Island episode drops. Today's a fun day at work, I get to grandstand and show off a cool graphical effect to a bunch of  ISVs. I get 3 minutes of big-screen time to talk about something that I actually find really interesting and fun. Yay job! \o/

Adventure gaming is not quite dead.
The first ep of Telltale's new Monkey Island episodic stuff drops tomorrow. I'm pre-ordered for the whole 'season', which means at some point in the working day I'll become 100% useless. 
The rest of the Lucasarts cleverness division seems to have made a comeback, as they're re-releasing a bunch of their classic adventure games on Steam. These are mostly point-n-click adventure stuff. Loom was one of the absolute highest points of adventure game writing, I'm looking forward to actually _paying_ for a copy of it : )  The Indy games were better than half of the Indy movies, huge epic story / comedy / action / wacky roleplaying.

I also nabbed Blood Bowl (warhammer fantasy combat + football, think Rugby with swords) and Fallout 3 over the past couple weeks, using money that I _normally_ would have spent on booze. Even if I hadn't gotten Fallout at half price, I'd still be way ahead of what I used to spend on beer and/or wine. These 3 games altogether total 50% of the former booze costs. Holy crap!

Got the mouse to a 'bird and exotic pet'  vet, and got a teeny tiny run of oral antibiotic fluid with teeny tiny little syringes to feed her with, and a little tube of steroids for her eye, to get her to stop scratching. She's wheezing and her eye's still swollen, now I gotta watch to see if it goes _cloudy_. 

Mouse care is like fish care. There's a lot less sympathy for the little guys, and much more blunt talk about tumors and infections.

I feel weird talking about the costs and details of health care for my pocket-sized pets when I know several _humans_ with no health insurance.

Redness behind eye is gone, and she's more energetic instead of less, so probably just fine. Her eyelids are still puffy, and she's scratching a bunch, but better instead of worse. Phew.

Thanks to everyone we called tonight in a panic, asking for mouse health care tips. Especially those of you who say that Lucy's swollen eyelids and behind-the-eyelid red crusty looking thing and sneezing isn't my fault. It totally IS, I didn't change their stinky litter for two weeks, but it's nice of you to say that it isn't.

I've spiked their water with Vita-Drops, which is a liquid multivitamin, and put bene-bac on their food. I also changed their old paper litter out for corn cob stuff, which I sifted and blew the dust off of. I gave them some torn-in-quarters paper towels on top of the corn cobs bits, in case the stuff was too pokey, and to give them something fun to do.
I _gently_ washed Lucy's eye area with a saline-solution-soaked q-tip, and fed her a couple of the strawberry yogourt treats she likes. She's not super lethargic, so she's probably Just Fine, but her tiny life is entirely my responsibility.

To put this in a different perspective:
Vita-drops: $10
Benebac powder:  $12
corncob litter: $9
zipcar: $9
probable vet fees to look at her and give us antibiotics: $50-$100 (the emerg vet hospitals quoted us $100 just to look at her)

cost of a new mouse: $2.50

Things would be much easier if I didn't care.

So I'm pursuing less wristy hobbies. The least wristy of all is tabletop gaming - I'm going to get out and do my wargaming thing at the local games workshop places, but in addition to that, I'm running a Mage the Awakening campaign with S and R. 
I started to chart out the Big Plot concepts and baddies and maps and things that they'd be up against, and did the quickest of google searches for some resources, maybe some tips. And holy crap - there are a lot more resources around now than there were when I was last DMing, in high school, pre-internet.

I remember biking across town and  scrounging through stores for modules that didn't suck. Now there are campaign-building and organizing sites like Obsidian Portal where people write up and share their whole campaign. A week ago I was just discovering the idea of organizing my NPC character sheets, maps, and plot hooks in a binder. Now I'm using a wiki to cross reference everything. Here's an example of a mage campaign:
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/mage402 

Mine is still mostly planning, and much of it is hidden, but it's here:
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaign/iron-soul
You can see the log of the first session, and you -can't- see my npc baddies that I'm writing up. 
(edit - haha, actually it's all private, you can't see anything) 

Other than that I've found acres of advice on DMing, whole sites with regular issues of zines on just that topic, from simple things like 'have a big enough table' to esoteric stuff like pre-rolled npc die spreadsheets. 

The most fun thing I found was this: http://www.roleplayingtips.com/tools/one_sentence_npc_generator.php it's a slot machine for NPCs, here are a few: 
Scarred, leather-clad fighter with a penchant for testing sharp objects with his thumb, and who smells faintly of roses.

Instincts have you glancing up in time to see the ugly frontiersman smash his chair on a table before screaming at the dragonborn seated calmly before him: 'yu no say bad thing bout mai mammy.'

A space-faring merchant holds a monopoly on super-fast travel, but hates clutter and only carries one item at a time.

This seemingly clueless young person is actually the guardian for an item of great importance and power.

An old, attractive, retired healer, the real father of dozens of townspeople, including the current duke.

Hilarious.

 When your back is juuuust recovered enough to the point where it doesn't hurt all the time, it's not strong enough to handle more than 2 of the following:
1 deep tissue massage
2 carpentry
3 re-jiggering the sheet onto the hard corner of the bed to reach

so being hypomanic is like having more _energy_. I can get more complex work done, and faster.
being anxious is like having more _entropy_. I'm scattered at best and seize up (overheat) at worst
I have a feeling mood stabilizers would reduce my _enthalpy_, my potential total amount of work (heat txfer) I can get done.

I'm wiped and useless today after getting a little manic last night. That lasted until about 11am. I got a whole layer of boxes unpacked, a squad of  wh40k models glued onto their bases, and some terrain put together, and this morning I had a ton of great demo ideas and energy on the bus, but I just fizzled.

I think if I had more enthalpy, my moods would take longer to oscillate, which might not actually be any better. In fact I remember that being quite a bit worse.

Let's have some mandelbrots, then! The first one is 3800x2400, which makes it smooth out a bit on even the highest rez screens.

In the picture in this article (and in the movie) :
http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2009/06/18/news/local/news05.txt

Is Custer riding an Indian motorcycle? It would be too hilarious if he were.

Today is the day that I start regularly excesising outside of my physiotherapist's office. Cardio and back /neck exercises. Further uninteresting updates to follow as events warrant, mostly for me to keep track.

Ah, dasher is about a million times faster with a tablet. Ithink I might have a new way to enter text .
This isn't anything new, but I'm just trying it out for the first time.


It's a little like taking photographs with film instead of digital, and a little like zooming into mandelbrot fractals .

(memetic heritage: ravenworks)

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001486.html

Asolutely hilarious if you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book (or interplanetary spy, my favorite, or those crazy Steve Jackson books, etc).