atolnon

Sunday isn't even really begun, and I've really only been up for a few hours but I've still managed to go grocery shopping and put a bit of laundry in. Saturday was kind of cool because I got my banking stuff back, got to hang out with Vi a touch, watched Ringu 2 for the first time, as well as getting a small amount of frisbee in late in the day. It's all terribly miscellaneous, I know.

I started writing the Abyssal fic, and I was only a little happy with my first attempt. It's a little overwrought, which might fit Abyssals in kind of a baroque, overwrought way, but my character's very minimalist and so should the fiction be. I should be able to finish it up tonight and probably benefit from the bonus experience points it brings me, as well. As a bit of departure from the standard MO, I will not be awarding any bonus points for stories in the Changling game, which the players seem to be ok with. I'm going to be statting some of the NPCs up tonight, especially the old spook PC mentor.

All Playstation gaming is on indefinite hiatus until I can fix it. It won't read disks. I hope you weren't really interested in my analysis of Dead Space, or anything. I've not been getting way too in-depth here on the journal, but I'm a little bummed that I can't continue. We'll see how things come along. I might plug in the PS2 for a while and give those games a chance.

Turns out I was missing pieces of my futon all along and my dad just found 'em. I have a bed in my future, and I'm pleased out of proportion to the reward, to be sure.

I've been taking a little time to pen down my last few years in summary. It's actually ending up being pretty extensive on paper, leading me to realize that my life has been substantially more complicated then I had at first really assumed.

I am, oh so tentatively, putting parts together for my Changling campaign set around St. Louis. I like how my last game went, a Mage game centered around East St. Louis and its devastating history. It's a game that could have gone better, but is still probably my high-water mark as an ST. Some of my initial goals were basically unrelated. It's taking place in the near future, probably the Spring of 2010 as the area sees flooding similar to 1993.
The themes are shaping up to be paranoia in a sweltering, humid environment along with the competing drives between the desire for a mundane life versus being pulled into a life of the supernatural by a combination of curiosity, need, and the desire to act on the behalf of others. Also features spys, privateers, number stations, and local areas of interest.

I'm pretty deep into the research phase at this point.

I know you gals and guys don't post here for my benefit, but I just wanted to let you know that I read everyone on my friend's list, and you all please me marvelously. My job is dull, and I really appreciate you folks given' my something to read all day!

Exalted yesterday again. You'll recall there were certain problems with the previous games that really stressed our ST out, but since the timeline continues to move forward and the game moves into a more conventional direction, the whole issue seems to have leveled out somewhat. This game saw our forces assault a Solar stronghold - The Thin White Duke mobilized the majority of our forces in a direct assault while the rest of us focused on repelling reinforcements sent from Great Forks.

This isn't a recap, really it isn't. Anyway, it was my first Mass Combat action in 2nd Ed. and it worked fine. The Thin White Duke was cut down by Eight Line Poem* and our forces were stranded in Creation. It was the first game with really good dialogue and, for me, the first game that actually had involved my character as something other then a set piece. I think that one or two of our other players may have been cut in on the action in previous games, but if so, it was behind the scenes.

I don't have too much to take away from this. I can't begrudge my ST in trying some new things with running the game, and we're always debating running style of Exalted as a game, anyhow. These attempts didn't pan out 100%, but few things do. Anyway, last game was great. Our characters made a massive mistake, I botched a Whispers roll, and the Walker in Darkness pulled me Liege and is out to get me. Everything else was prologue; I just wish this is the game I could have started with because the difference is day and night.

In other news, I was reading rpg.net here at work on my lunch break, and there's another discussion on Lady GaGa. I like GaGa because her work is 100% intentional and because at first glance, she looks like a generic pop star but any further attention demonstrates there's a lot more at work then that. RPG.net is probably a better place for discussion then most places, but even there, you see a discussion on the validity of her appearance. This is something that I've been thinking about a lot, because her appearance is very meticulously crafted, but I have to wonder about the privilage that comes with feeling that you can make a value judgement on her appearance. There's this whole gaze thing that, when I try to put it into words, seems like a veritable minefield. It's so complicated, but from what I hear of GaGa's scholastic career, it's very likely that the whole 'thing' is intentional.

Should I put a Lady Gaga tag on my journal? 

* I don't know. Maybe you can see a trend in character names.

I didn't watch the whole address. It was 70 minutes long, and I had to get up to refill my drink from time to time; that's how it goes.
For the record, I thought it was a fine speech. I enjoyed it, and taken by itself, it's probably really inspirational. My reservations are severe though. Obama has a, if we're being charitable, lackluster record for GLBT rights. He can't seem to energize his side of the aisle in Congress despite having had a supermajority. It's depressing.

I expected the Republicans to dig their feet in. The Democrats swept the House and Senate, and everyone left are from states so Red that planes stop in mid-air over them waiting for favorably traffic signals. The only thing I can assume, and I understand that assumptions can cause problems, is that Democrats feel they have something to gain by not pushing bills through.

The reasons are varied but not unusual. Pathetic, but not weird. It's not entirely a matter of corruption, or anything like that, though we are kinda, sorta in the pocked of our mighty corporate and banking overlords; it's more an issue of a typically low turnover rate in Congress. Instead of being civil servants, Congress-critters are career politicians. In a year where there were record turnovers, Democrats don't want to lose their seats by shaking the boat. This seems counter-intuitive, since a desire for change sent record Democrats to their seats in the first place, but politicians are nothing if not reactionary.

I guess the other issue are the Blue Dogs and the Liebermans. This is an example of people who feel they have something to gain by waffling on their vote. They're playing politics because they know that the Democratic majority will do almost anything to ensure that they're on board. They get to look moderate and bipartisan while hitting the Dems up for everything they've got. They have a disproportionate degree of pull in national matters because of it, and it doesn't matter that we can't really get anything done. 

So, here's a small part of the problem as I see it. The Democrats had a super majority and wouldn't act on it. They lost a single seat to a Republican in Mass. and decided that it wasn't going to be possible to push legistlation through because they won't act in concert. One seat short of unprecendented, and they throw in the towel. There's got to be a reason for that, but it's a spineless and craven one.

Frank asked me what the odds of me running Changeling where. I assumed they were 100%, given enough time.
baronsamedi introduced me to numbers stations in a roundabout way, first through rpg.net, then through LJ itself. He may be disappointed to realize that, more then any other game, it provided me with inspiration for Mage: the Awakening, but it doesn't have to be that way. Instead, I'm readjusting my focus.

www.youtube.com/watch I can easily map to a Changeling headspace.
www.youtube.com/watch makes me think of nothing except the sweet, sweet Abyss, ala Mage. Clicking those is up to you. They pressed several of my creepy buttons at once, so it's up to you. There's no shock or surprise. Nothing terrible happens. If you don't like it, you can close the browser, and they probably won't follow you out.

My apartment is coming together well. Futon is still broke. As soon as the dumpster is emptied, I can get rid of a lot of childhood stuff that I was never really a big fan of, but were gifts. I was hard to shop for as a kid, too.

Productive weekend, this time. Saturday was a flurry of stuff which, while basically boring, was full of stuff I really needed to do. New bank account, moving a whole host of things from my dads to my apartment, ect. It was good to get it taken care of, but I still haven't been able to figure out how to assemble my futon. Seriously, it shouldn't be so difficult, but I wasn't the only one stymied; at one point, myself and three of my friends were staring at it, trying to figure out just what we were supposed to bolt where. No such luck. Over two days, I was never able to reassemble it.

Other then that, I'm not feeling especially great this morning. A trip to the Chicago-style burger joint down the road for lunch will probably solve that problem.

Last Thursday was our latest Abyssal game, and I learned afterwards that it was supposed to be horror themed. Horror, as I've noticed, is especially difficult for rpgs, and Abyssals doubly so, since we're supposed to be the monsters in the first place. The normal things I'd expect to go wrong, then, did so - difficulty communicating created a misinterpretation of events between the ST and the assistant ST we brought in and the AST came down hard on the wrong side of the enabled/helpless line. The last is the razor thin margin of agency and helplessness that you need to be able to straddle to run that genre. I guess the best example is when we were asked to roll for mental defense, and I burned a willpower to succeed versus an uncertain enemy.
When the next round came, I was asked to do so again, and as I picked up the dice, the AST said something like "This scene really isn't important, and you'll just keep defending until the effect generates 9 successes against you, so do  you want to just skip the rolls?" My response to that was admittedly pissy, but that's easily the thing that makes me the most unhappy in a game. The rest of the game was actually pretty solid, but if you want to run, there's an example of what not to do.

Anyway, it was a bit of a bummer. One of our players refused to be placated, and our ST was visibly deflated after the game. It's hard to put a lot of effort into something and then feel like you failed. I'm sure the next game will be a lot more solid, since this one would have been just fine without that lapse in communication between the ST and the AST, but that's one of the problems with bringing in a seperate person to run scenes in a game.

I wanted to write something after I've had so many new friend requests from the rpg.net thread, but the only thing worth noting from yesterday is that I drank a good amount of gin & tonic, then went to bed after watching Snatch and finally introducing my roommate to Cowboy Bebop like I've been threatening to do for so long. Also, a bit of Dead Space. It's not terribly original, but it's a whole lot of fun, and I'm really enjoying it.

Aaaanyway. Brantai asked how I was handling some problems with the Changeling mechanics re: upcoming game. If you're new, then you may not realize that our irritation regarding Contracts is profound. I think you could follow the Changeling tag to run into one of those rants, if it suits you. The difficulty of making the character I wanted to play for the venue stopped me from going to the Cam games, actually, since the character was totally non-feasable.
There's also the 'no technology' rule that seems to keep cropping up. The Gentry don't do computers, I guess, and there arn't any Contracts that work with technology in any real way. In some respects, I understand this, but mostly it just aggrivates me. I can't imagine why the Gentry wouldn't have been as interested in technology and how it defines us as we are. It just seems like such a rich vein to tap, but no dice. This isn't really accurate, but it feels like a nagging remnant of the 'science is banal' that turned me off of Changeling : the Dreaming.

Despite that, it's not really an issue for this particular group. I  mean, it's either a non-issue in that the players take the power set at face value or the players disagree with my particular stance. Which is just fine for me as an ST, because it stops it from being a problem at the table.

So, in conclusion, if you're new - welcome. This is the part where I'm bored at work in between calls and read your stuff.

It's still winter, but I feel a little spoiled with weather between 30 and 45 lately. It spent over a week being so cold, it froze any available moisture on my body between my apartment and my car, so at this point it practically feels like spring. I'm no fan of the winter months but I'll
 take what I can get, thanks.

Over here, there's a lot I keep saying I'll do, and I'm running a little behind. Saturday was supposed to be a big day for that, and I ended up going out a little last-moment to meet friends I hadn't seen regularly and together since high school. I ended up getting home around 2 AM, and going to bed at about 3 after a bit of a conversation with a friend who's been having a hard time.

Today, the plan looks to be swinging by my dads pretty quickly to drop off some of his stuff and try to fill my car with crap I should have brought over some time ago. I still have shelves and a futon over there that I'm derelict in re-acquiring, and it's frustrating because I just haven't had the opportunity yet. Once I get the futon, at least, I feel like my apartment room is going to really come together. Maybe I'll even take some pictures.

Also, I mentioned that I might want to run a Changeling game in passing, leading to an almost immediate purchase of the core book from Frank. The group became major enthusiasts almost as soon as the game was out, and the new favorite of at least one Wormtongue player. So I need to plan a story and finish up my Abyssal fic; those are my two activities for my spare time that I'm a bit obligated to perform. After that, there are a few logistical issues that really need to be hammered out. When you put all those things together, you get a busy week.

I ran an idea by Vi re: the intro to the Changeling game I wanted to work with, but everyone's seemed a little meh on it, so it's back to the drawing board. 

Edit : And Frank's already writing stories for his character.

Primary issue on the table : Exalted follow-up.
We played Exalted from 7 to about 11:30, and we ended up running into some serious problems like I feared. Even though I know the game is being setup to favor a sense of delayed gratification, which I appreciate even as I continue to anticipate it, so far our Abyssals have been stymed at every single thing we've accomplished. We've been played for dupes, stomped on by province gods, and shown up by existing power bases, and yelled at by our superiors.

Frankly, we're being played for chumps. So, I'm going to have to say that I know what are ST is doing, and I respect that but it's pretty frustrating to actually have to play it out. We're a pretty disfunctional group that isn't fully sure of what our strengths are yet, to boot, so we don't work very well together yet. Anyway, we didn't make the assault on the Golden Throne of our previous, more-powerful Solar characters, so we've got at least one more epic failure that we can't avoid before we can expect any success in our endeavors. So, ok, I'm not a big fan of this game at the moment; it feels like the only one so far where we've been setup to fail. I guess we'll see as time goes on.

My week has been wicked busy since Wednesday night. I don't expect it to slow down until Saturday night when my primary goal'd be relaxation. I guess I'm only posting because I was doing some speculation on ST styles, and the results seem to have made themselves quickly manifest.

The weather warmed up and, endless gray and salt-encrusted landscape not withstanding, I feel like I can actually function again. I got air in my tires and a terrible haircut, so I'm making progress again where before I just kind of came home and wished for the cold to go. I can deal with bleak, but cold is miserable.

I'm a little cranky about my haircut, because the hairdresser obviously phoned it in. Some regulars came in, and you could actually see her lose interest in cutting my hair. I just let her quit, really, with the caveat that I'm not likely to go back anytime soon. I'll try the place Vi recommended, instead, or something. Maybe I should have done that in the first place, but it looked like a nice place and I was a tired dude with unwashed hair. Yeah, I was basically too embarrassed to get a good hair cut.

Exalted game tonight. Am I excited? Of course I am. Here's a weird dynamic that I brought this up to mention, though. We're basically playing in 'the past' in a game we're already run. We're playing the antagonists to an early Solar game. Our opponents tonight? Our Solar characters from the very first campaign. We can't possibly succeed because we already succeeded before, but I guess we can change the past by doing well in areas that weren't in our purview in the Solar game. This is something that Frank is doing, and it's interesting, but it's a move I would never pull. I don't really like to throw around the term 'de-protagonising', and it's true that it doesn't quite fit, but it's going to take a deft hand to not feel like we're stepping on our own game a little like this. I don't know if you're interested in this, but I kinda am.

Assassin's Creed is over. It was a few subsystems that turned into a game. It feels for all the world like a testing of mechanics that are later to become standard and there were enough that the design team felt that they made a game when a weak plot was layered over them. It sounds like a condemnation, but I didn't even buy it, so I don't really care. I've moved on to Dead Space, which I've heard a lot of strong reviews for. This is another game I didn't buy, but probably would have and so far, my guess is that it's going to turn into something that might be well described as 'Resident Evil, played straight, in space.'

Basically, your bog-standard jump-out-of-nowhere space horrors comprised of the torn and amalgamated flesh of the former crew. You've seen it before, I've seen it before, and it's a fan favorite but after the first few times of being ambushed by pointy flesh-bags, it kind of loses the sparkle. When almost every unattended corpse rises again to perforate your sweet, sweet skull, you just learn to plug everything you see with hot plasma then step on what remains of their face.

It's shaping up to be a good game, let's see if it can keep experiences fresh through the whole thing.

I'm at work, and I don't really have anything better to do over my lunch break then post something and, besides, I want to go ahead and get this post out of the way for later. I don't feel like I'm missing anything real substantial by skipping ahead, anyhow.

Assassin's Creed does have a plot, you know? It's just one that's patently obvious and mediocrely executed. You play a guy who murders people constantly and that nobody likes because he's a colossal jerk, and you're directed at important targets on both sides of the Crusades. Except it's kind of a double blind, because the actual game takes place in the mysterious future, where evil scientists have kidnapped a bartender and strapped him into a machine to extract memories from his DNA without being clear as to why.

This is stupid. Not just from a science perspective, since I wanted to yell "SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT!" ala Morbo. I mean that they've kidnapped an innocent guy off the street which is,  I think, probably still illegal, and strapped him into a machine where he plays his ancestor; a man who, for all intents and purposes is a murderous psycopath. 

I mean, I screwed up a job and probably depopulated an entire neighborhood in Jerusalem by myself. I'm a lousy assassin but it seems that I'm a terrific something.

Anyway, I don't know what they're thinking. Explaining the situation and offering to pay the protagonist a ton of money probably would have worked. If you can build a special lab building that reads magic DNA memory, you can probably afford to give this guy 100k in return for your earth-shatterin' McGuffin. Or you can simultaniously enrage him and teach him how to be the world's best secret murderer.

Your call, Doc.

The game itself is ok. It's fun. It's about 30% perching on ledges, 20% parkour, and 50% relentlessly murdering gaurds because they hate 1. parkour, 2. when you bump into them and 3. when you kill everyone they've every loved. That's about the summation. And here's my guess : you're working for the big bad guy the whole time, and turn against him in the end. I'm talking about Altair McKillguy, not Capt. Bartender le Will-inevitably-rebel-against-his-captors. Who are also probably the big bads. How poetic!

Bartender has a long name. His parents must have hated him.

For the life of me, there really isn't anywhere else to go with this. At this point, I want to wrap it up to bask in my inevitable correctness.

Edit : Yeah, the title isn't a typo. I was initially baffled that the protagonist, such as he is, can be considered the group's best grand master when I'm constantly leaving piles of highly visible corpses in my wake while wearing my assassin's uniform, practically draped in knifes. Subtle, he ain't.

I wanted to post something yesterday, but I felt shitty and it felt like a mistake. They say 'save it for livejournal', but unless I have a concreate idea on what's going on, it's better not to for me. Ces't ca la vive. And things are better after a sleep and shower.

Anyway, so what? I am back on my feet again, and pretty recovered from the whole holiday/moving thing. That means I'm actually getting my show on the road, from getting back to writing to putting off writing. And because there's someone reading this that specifically cares, I'm doing this school thing now, it's cool. This is the best part, actually; the whole reason d'etre of this process. It's so great that I am keeping my mouth shut, because I believe in hexing the process. I'll let you know.

I have been playing this Exalted thing, and it's pretty rad. This game has been a series of campaigns, and as Abyssals, we're actually running into characters from previous games at this point. Since I'm playing Evil Buddah, I'm not really getting too far in to the theme of becoming more like a corpse as listed in the Charmset (and conversations on rpg.net, though I'm fairly certain that this is a small subset, since Abyssals really don't seem to be a fan favorite), and I think that I basically am going in maybe the wrong direction, but I'm working on it. We've got time.

I'm also playing a lot of Assassin's Creed, which is fun, but basically the same 5 things over and over again. It's likely that I'll talk about it when I finish it, which should be pretty soon and is the only point when saying anything will be worthwhile. I'll be able to wrap up the whole thing in one post, if that's within your scope of interest.

There's a lot of Exalted going around at the apartment, so I'm thinking of running a nWoD game. Changeling is very tempting, but Mage is what I'm best at. I'd like just plain nWoD, but the group will want powers. Geeze, man, I don't know.

I feel like I ought to wrap the holiday business up a bit. I've been going out way more then I'm accustomed to, and my number one impulse is mostly just to set the dial to 'recharge' and stay out of everyone's way. I've gotten some invites that meant enough to me that I couldn't possible turn them down, and I didn't regret going but when I break my concentration, I have to call it a night. But, yeah, so that wraps the year up, and that's fine by me.

Actually, I've talked about this before, but 2009 kind of sucked. Actually, 2009 was ok for me, but 08 sucked, and 07 sucked and so on right down to 2000 and that ridiculous Y2K scare that so many people had their shit in a twist about. I thought, fuck it; I can't be sorry about this decade passing at all. But, you know, even though I've heard that thought mirrored by others, it didn't suck because of things we don't understand, it sucked because of things we ought to understand. I guess what I'm supposing is that it may be that we can keep working and make this a better series of years. I remember in 2000, watching the ball drop on TV, by myself at my grandparents house thinking that it was kind of a shitty New Year then, too. But this time, I watched two good friends get married and I thought that any decade where they could come together and solidify that bond can't be too bad.

That's your Shakespearian comedy ending, right there, anyhow.

When it comes to me, I can't take things a decade at a time. I really can't speak for anyone else, but anything that rolls up part of high school, my whole college experience, a few years of trouble and contains a move to and from Seattle while getting a job just contains too much. This decade has seen so much change for me that I've changed monumentally since its inception, but I'm still not a new person; just the continuation of what it means to have been that kid 10 years ago. I guess I'm an adult now, so this is what you get for not putting me down early when you had the chance, existance.

Maybe this is the beginning of a bit of a slow down for me, and that'd be ok, but I've got an awful lot to do this year and I wouldn't bet against me if I were you.

Sure. I posted one a while ago and took it down because I wasn't satisfied with it, but it's kind of a work in progress.

So, the holiday season is kind of a thing, and I guess we're working our way up to Holiday Part Two : New Year's Boogaloo. This is the part where I talk about my Christmas and how I'm effected by it, but honestly, it was not a big deal. I drank with my dad on Christmas Eve and had a good time. He had his roommates there, my mom and brother eventually came in, and it was probably more laid back and generally fun then almost any Christmas Eve in memory. There was so much going on every year before this and the last, and now all the shoes have dropped, so instead of drama or angst, we just got drunk and ate a lot of food. I've got a fine bottle of port to share some time, a gift card to Best Buy for an undetermined sum of money, and some PS3 games out of the whole thing. The wines I brought back and the gifts I gave out seemed to be well-received.

There isn't too much more to get out of that situation.

I'm working on a fiction bit for my Abyssal, I'm pretty settled in, and I've thrown out most of what needs to go. Everything else is pretty much in place. I've gotten to clean some, today, so the apartment hasn't changed shape so much as become a little bit better-scrubbed. There's no sanitation hazards here, it's mostly a matter of the water being so hard that it crunches. It's frustrating, but I'm making progress.

I was invited to a birthday get together from an unlikely source some time ago, and that's my agenda for this evening. Tomorrow, it's dinner with Viski to celebrate her own birthday, and after that, probably rest and tracking down some other good friends I've not seen at all, yet. In the next few weeks, I'm looking into Cam stuff again. Right now, I've been so busy, it's hard to tell.

It's been a busy week, and now it's Sunday. Nothing's really scheduled for today, so it's kind of the R&R day be default. A good day to settle in a bit, maybe pick up some things I need, get a little writing done. Later I'll swing by my dads place and pick up some of my stuff.

I was weirded out by how it's not really weird to be back, but it is different. It's the same place I left, except I'm not miserable anymore, and that's a big deal. As a friend put it, 'Well, now you're back except you're not living in abject poverty and you've got a place to stay.' I always had somewhere to stay, but the first part was definitely correct. On Thursday, I got to play in the Exalted game, so I'll definitely be talking about that in the near future. My character's the Abyssal known as Son of A Silent Age, so I still get to use David Bowie references as character names.

Compassion 5 Abyssal goodness. It's going to get a little macabre, I suppose.

Last night was the celebration of Frank and The J-Man's Dual Resplendent Birthday, so we did that and I'm pretty sure most of us survived. I haven't seen Frank this morning and The J-Man hasn't moved in a while, so I'm not totally sure, though.

So, busy or not, I feel like I've gotten into a bit of a groove and things are ok. That means I can focus on the important tasks of getting into regular communication with previous professors, save a little money, and whatnot. The first is my chief goal. I've been focused on doing on thing at a time, so for a while I put it out of my head so that I could do what I needed without being overwhelmed. I'm excited to be on the new task.

I feel ashamed that David Bowie didn't get his own tag until now.

I made it in ok, and I'd really like nothing more then to just take another day off, say I'm sick or something, but it's better not to push my luck. I feel like what I really need is to get on schedule so that things'll develop an even keel. It's going to be my first day at the new location, and it's an easy drive. It's a Boeing plant, though, so I get to get on site and try to find the correct building for a while. My actual job is literally exactly the same, so I don't worry about that at all, though.

Basically, I just have to find out where I sit and set up my workstation.

Otherwise, I find that I'm pretty situated. It's nice to unpack after a long time on the road. People ask about the drive, and it was a drag, but it was surprisingly easy to get in to the right mindset. I wasn't quite zoned out and I wasn't quite rigidly alert, nor was I really ever all that bored. I made ok time, but I never really took too much time to sit and eat or anything. I did allow the luxury of 8 hours rest wherever I stopped, figuring that I'd be better off well-rested. Anyway, it's not a trip I'm apt to make again any time soon.

I did hate driving through Utah, which I've mentioned if you've talked to me. Salt Lake City was under construction and the landscape was primarily characterized by what I'd probably call a periwinkle blue. Leaving the city, the distance was characterized by the same color; powdery snow had been kicked up by high winds so as to make the ground and sky one undifferentiated haze.

Anyway, my schedule hasn't changed except that I'm pushed ahead two hours because of time zone differences which is just fine, really. I just wanted to write in and let everyone know I was alive, having not died anywhere in a gulch somewhere in Idaho or something.

If I didn't expect that this journal would eventually descend in to my own labyrinthine insecurities, I wouldn't have one in the first place. I do, so it does, but not to worry; my balking and caveats are done tongue in cheek.

Tomorrow I have to send in my modem, and I maybe should have done it tonight, but I wanted to check some updates and chat online. Comcast is making me take the modem in and I don't have time to mail it, so I'm driving to fucking Redmond and back in order to lose the internet. I don't have a modem, everyone. I'm tempted just to keep it and let them bill me, but I want to do this right. Anyway, I'll do all of my updates, map-printing and last-minute checks before I leave work. I don't know if I'll eventually end up going through Colorado or Wyoming. Both are mountains and both are basically empty. I'll probably try to check the weather the day before, because it's unlikely I'll last past Ogdon before Salt Lake City.

Either way, I go east for a thousand miles at that point, give or take 60.

I was anxious a few days ago, and I appreciate the well wishes! I've got a goal in mind, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this like I am, but it's more stressful because I've never done anything like it. So, basically, I'm going to take it one step at a time, and I'm pretty sure it'll be manageable like that. Once I'm on the road, my MO is pretty damned straightforward.

So, yeah, I'll let you know when I'm back. If you've got my number, you might be able to call me if you're interested in where I'm at. I'll just put you on speaker phone for a while. It's going to be hard to waste my time in any kind of conventional sense. XD

Thurday was Thanksgiving, and I think that's a gimmie; yep, we're all thankful for stuff - unless we're not, and then the holiday makes a cruel mockery of us. This year and the last, I may have been shaky at points, but I've got obvious stuff to be thankful for. Nobody needs to feel obligated to play that game where we go around the table and try to one-up the last person for the most corny, feel-good thing we're thankful for. We'll leave it at 'let's dig into these leftovers', because that's what it amounts to before we succumb to stuffing-induced drowsiness.

I got yesterday and today off of work, which I like. We don't get paid for Black Friday and neither do we automatically get to work it; we're obligated to request a normal shift, so I left it up to people who wanted it a lot more. I feel like holidays off of weekends should come in sets of two anyhow.

On Black Friday, I do not engage in that rush. I'm opposed to it, having had to work it and being against consumerism in the first place. I absolutely don't support it, and I feel negatively inclined when people do but, obviously, they do. I can't meaningfully hold it against the people that try to take advantage of these sales so I hold it against people meaninglessly instead. So, here's what I'm thankful for; I don't work in retail anymore. After today, I don't bring it up again, so if you went out, don't worry. I'm not carrying some kind of terrible anti-torch for you.

Actually, we had a potluck thing yesterday. I'm making my third meal of various leftovers, right now, actually. I'm not usually a stuffing *or* dumplings guy, but I'll make an exception for these, because they're pretty damned tasty. Tomorrow's my birthday thing. I bet that goes really well, too.

Yuh. Made it through to the break. Thursday and Friday off, Friday's unpaid.

When I did finally make it home, I wasn't in much condition to do anything. Hung out for a little while and played some casual Magic before heading back to the apartment to dick around on my computer.

Created a separate space elsewhere to blag about FFXI, which is primarily used just to note what quests I'm working on and what I need to do in-game. So that's probably not going to clog this journal much at any point in the near future.

Tomorrow's Thanksgiving, so I'm heading over to Braintai's earlier on in the day/afternoon then, if I'm not feeling totally wiped, may be heading over to Chris' for an event. It sounds like fun, and normally I'd pass, but I said I'd try quite a while ago so I'll make an effort and probably have an ok time. That is, if I can avoid drinking too much and passing out. Yep. I am filing it under 'things to avoid' right now.

I chatted with Viski last night about games to play and she suggested Shin Megami Tensei : Nocturne. Persona 4 is also high on my list. I wasn't able to guess just from hearing it why she'd select SMT : Nocturne when she had trouble with the grind in Persona 3, but the way she stated it, she felt so familiar with the type of story P3 was trying to produce that it didn't resonate with her enough to deal with the repetitive mechanical aspect. She was never a fan of the dating sim system, either. Looking at the game, I can see how this would happen. I'm basically building a list now.

If you have games or books to suggest, knock yourself out. Of course, if I pick your suggestion, you have to read about it off and on for a while.