The Diary of A Simple Man

I've neglected both my RuneQuest site and my commuter rail site for months. I'm planning on doing something for the RQ site (maybe that article on charms; if anyone wants to help me on it, please let me know), but in the last few days the good old MBTA/MBCR gave me the inspiration for a couple of posts on the Charlie on the Commuter Rail blog.

Remember those stairs at Ruggles? The ones that were crumbling last December? They're worse. MUCH worse. Photos over on the Charlie blog.

Zines
I almost forgot: I don't know if anyone is tracking it, but I've annotated and posted a shitload of zines on my RQ site lately. Twenty-three of them since late June. Just in case you're desperate for something to read. I haven't given up on the sheetless roleplaying article, but it's basically gone into slow-motion for a while. I'll definitely finish it within a month or so, though.

LJ Backup
I've been manually backing up my LJ. Did all of 2003 (it was only half a year anyway), and am up to October 2004. It's a bit tedious, particularly since none of those old posts are tagged at all. I've been adding tags to them before backing them up, which definitely slows the process down. On the other hand, this means that there are a lot more posts that have been tagged; politics and Sebastian in particular have expanded a lot.

Shogun
I don't know if anyone here is a fan of Shogun (the novel by James Clavell), but if you are, or if you're interested in Japanese history, you might find this interesting: Learning from Shogun - Japanese History and Western Fantasy. It's a PDF with a number of academic essays about the novel and how it relates to the actual Japanese culture of the time. It's a bit disillusioning, in places, but that's inevitable. There's also an essay by one asshole of a professor who made up a clever little bit of wordplay to insult fans of the novel and ignorant Japanophile Westerners in general; he's so pleased with himself over his little coinage that he uses it about five hundred times in his essay, filling me with a powerful urge to kick him in the balls, hard. Still, the rest of the essays are pretty interesting.

I just annotated and posted Rack & Rune #13 to my site. This includes a writeup of what was probably my most memorable Arisia; it includes the time that Lois and I ran backstage at the Masquerade to get our video announced. It also has a description of how we made the video itself, and the story of the gripe session at the end of Arisia '93 when a moderator tried to take the microphone away from Lois. :D

Advice: I've been going a bit insane with the advice column; it's really kind of addictive (obligatory joke: "Now I know how George W. Bush feels about wine and cocaine". Updated version: "Now I know how George W. Bush feels about wine, cocaine, lying in order to send poor young people off to die in Iraq, and shredding the Bill of Rights^* )".

Anyway, I've answered 44 questions so far. My current average rating is 5 (which is perfect, of course), and I have 70 feedback points. Of course, I'll probably be crushed by the first less-than-perfect rating I get. :/

HAH! I walked away from my computer before posting this, came back, and sure enough, someone just gave me my first "4". Most unfairly, too. I was the only person to even TRY to answer her question! Oh well.

RuneQuest: Something strange: I was just added to the Mongoose RQ playtest group after all. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Greg Stafford's remarkable rudeness, though, so right now I'm not very excited. Still, I'll check the rules out soon.

Dreams: Another funny thing: The night before last I dreamed a neat and funny idea for a roleplaying scenario. I even dreamed that I was writing a snatch of poetry for it. When I woke up, I ran to the computer and noted it all down. The couplet wasn't bad, I guess (it sounds a little familiar, though), but it doesn't actually fit into the scenario at all:

I could not save him, although I tried;
I rode to live, he lived to ride.

Health: It was a sinus infection. I'm 99% sure. Steady pain in the lower sinuses, and random pain EVERYWHERE. Every little movement hurt. Every bump hurt 10x more than it should have. So I took a lot of Tylenol over three days, and used saline on my sinuses just before bed for two nights in a row.

But man, the saline hurt. Even WITH Tylenol, the sheer pain kept me up for more than an hour each night. Agony. On the plus side, I didn't have to use the saline or the Tylenol last night. I'm mostly better.

Apology: Apologies to Kat for kinda stealing her subtopic style. But come to think of it, I used to the the same style back when I was writing for The Wild Hunt and Interregnum.

So maybe she stole it from me.

---
^* Except the Second Amendment, of course.

Lots to tell, not much time to tell it right now. I've been busy fighting the new RQ wars.

Sidenote: London. What the hell? Why do these things only happen when I'm out of touch? On 9/11/2001 I was unconscious and going under the knife as the first plane hit; I was heavily drugged for the following days. For the London thing, I was on vacation in Maine and completely out of touch with the media. What can I say?

I'll try to slap some photos up...let's see.
( Read more... )

I also got a chance to hit the Boothbay Harbor library porch. I love that porch; they put out a bunch of books, and you can pick them up for a dime each. Awesome! This time I picked up the following:

• War Beneath The Sea (paperback) - Bonham, Frank


• The Spirit of Dorsai (large trade paperback) - Dickson, Gordon R.


• To Your Scattered Bodies Go (paperback) - Farmer, Philip Jose


• Tales of a Korean Grandmother (hardcover) - Frances Carpenter


• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Stay Awake By (hardcover) - Hitchcock, Alfred (ed.)


• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Terror Time (paperback) - Hitchcock, Alfred (ed.)


• North and South (paperback) - Jakes, John


• The Princes of Earth (hardcover) - Kurland, Michael


• Tiger By The Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories (hardcover) - Nourse, Alan E.


• the HORSE in the CAMEL suit (hardcover) - Pene du Bois, William


• Henry Reed, Inc. (paperback) - Robertson, Keith


• The Book of the Dun Cow (harcover) - Wangerin Jr., Walter

And all for $1.25. Amazing!

Some company called Mongoose Publishing has announced that they'll be putting out a new version of RuneQuest - "a completely new system that will look and smell like the original", a phrase which does NOT fill me with confidence. If it's a new system, it's not RuneQuest!

There has been a lot of discussion on a thread over at the RPGnet forums. And I, of course, couldn't resist putting in my own two cents.

And now I'm REALLY gone on vacation...

If anyone out there feels that my RQ site is worth it, a vote of "5" would be kind of nice here: http://www.rpggateway.com/cgi-bin/wyrm/rate.cgi?ID=3611

Now this is an exotic experience.

I'd heard that the Chinese government was redirecting attempts to reach Google to their own censored, government-controlled search engines; this is one of them. I thought I'd see what the Chinese would find if they searched for RuneQuest.

To my surprise, there's nothing at all. I didn't think that RuneQuest was controversial! Of course, it's more likely that it's just not important enough for the Chinese government to bother with.

Can you imagine if the Chinese got into RuneQuest?

The spammers have been relentlessly attacking the RuneQuest Wiki on my site. Non-stop. Day after day. Sometimes they deleted the legitimate entries, sometimes they just spewed their crap above or below the real entry.

Some of them wrote "if this bothers you just delete" and then instantly re-posted their shit when I deleted it. Others posted "Im Sorry" above their drug-and-sex site links for no sane reason. One threatened to delete my whole site.

So screw it. I backed everything up a while ago, and I've killed the wiki. I'll find a decent, secure alternative and use that from now on. It'll be up on the site ASAP.

I'm thinking of running an online RQ game. It would be play-by-post in a forum; there might be some chat sessions involved.

The setting would be Glorantha, although extensive knowledge of Glorantha would NOT be required. And...how shall I put this? As GM, my interpretation of Glorantha would be final. That interpretation is essentially the RQ2/early RQ3 version, before Greg got too into Gregging.

The scenario is large, and pretty dark; a mixed mystery/adventure, with film noir overtones.

Let me know if you're interested.