Beyond the Void.

Warning Survivor Spoilers Below.

Every Thursday I get together with the boys and we game. However Thursdays is also the only time the show one of my favorite TV shows, which is Survivor. So I tape it every week and watch it during the weekend, being careful not to spoil the outcome of each show.

So I am sitting here, working and I get an instant message that reads…

:RiCHARd is GONE!
:voted offzors
:wooo

I replied with…

WTF?

I have not added up what was going on yet. Thoughts of Survivor had not even crossed my mind. Then a head pops up over the cube wall and proceeds to tell me that Richard was kicked off and they disbanded a tribe.

ARGH!

My only defense at the time was to reply with ( and I warn you if you don’t like spoilers don’t read this)
“Ok fine Kaiser Sose is Kevin Spacey, Bruce Willis is really a ghost in that ghost movie he did with that kid, and Samuel Jackson is the bad guy in unbreakable.”

It wasn’t pretty, and it took him a few seconds to realize what I had just done, but the damage was done, my deed was complete. I fought spoilers with spoilers, and we both lost.

I realize he didn’t have anyway of knowing that I taped the show and that I didn’t want to know the outcome… but I do KNOW that he knew I had not watched it. He games with us on Thursdays most of the time. He didn’t last night however, but he KNEW I did. Now I don’t know how all gaming groups work, and maybe some are like this, but we do not stop play for an hour to watch a reality TV show in the middle of a session.

Yes J.E. I know.. I know… I am a bastard ;) All I have to say is … GROOOONK!

I am running an art contest for Exalted Fans. One of the guys (Phaide) over on WW’s Exalted message board suggested I run this contest, so here I am. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. It will be interesting to see how many version I get of this same guy. I am even offering a prize, a copy of Aspect Book:Earth. I have all the details for the contest on my exalted site.

After looking at the The Geek Hierarchy, and finding myself in 7 different categories in it… I have to admit… I am a geek! I might have to make something like this for my trip to Origins. James and I had fun last origins classifying all the different types of nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks… and there were plenty of them. Oddly enough you could figure out some pretty distinct nerd templates that almost everyone fit into.

World of Warcraft is the next big game that is being pushed in my online gaming guild. I need to dive into it and see if we cant get some hype going about it inside the guild, and also see if we can do some recruiting from people that want to play to join us prior to launch so that we go into the game strong right off the bat.

:) Just call me Don King, Game Promoter ;)

I just went through the RPG books I have here at the house. I have three full shelves up now. I wonder how many shelves I could fill if I…

1.) Had more shelves.
2.) Unboxed all of my books, and pulled them from my wives book shelves.
3.) Rescued my books from James house.

Well someday I might even know. In the mean time, I just have a lot of books to look at. Hmm the shelves seem to be bowing… Maybe I need to shift some things around.

Argh!

This is like some sort of evil medieval torture! I am fairly sick of all the ups and downs of home buying. Its very on again, off again. Right now we are “off again”, but wait 30 seconds…

The worst part is I am held hostage by the decision process, as it seems I have no say in it. I bet I am writing the exact same thing in a month, in 3 months and in 6 months.

Korean Maddness!

So wrong, so disturbing! And I guess its worse if you speak Korean.

...enjoy!

The house stuff is still brewing. I’m not sure if we are going to go for it or not. I have been trying to remain unattached on this house hunt, so far its working. I hope it all works out but I will be fine if it doesn’t.

I have been doing some writing for an Exalted Fan site. I am having a lot of fun and I get to practice my writing skills. Maybe at some point I will get polished enough and creative enough to get a free lance gig with White Wolf. Who knows anything is possible.
Here is what I have been writing.
The Fugazi Jihad
Grassblade
The City of Hirruet

On the gaming front, I just found out that one of the games I signed up for at Origins is going to be run by Black Hat Matt, who is a White Wolf developer. Its always nice when people at the gaming company run the games. And I have heard from people that have played in his games that he is a pretty good ST. You who I would really like to see run an Exalted game? Michael Goodwin, who is one of the writers White Wolf writers and someone I consider a friend. However being as he lives in GA, and is not likely to come to Origins or Gencon, I don’t think I will get to play in a game he is running anytime soon.

Here is the Game that I am most excited to play at Origins, this is also the one BHM is running.

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Vampire The Requiem? Exclusive Preview: Round 1

Event Number: 6544
Age Restriction None
Date Thursday, June 24 - 02:00 PM
Length 1 hour 45 minutes
Location TBD
Game System Vampire The Requiem Current Edition
XP None
Cost $6.00
Description: Be the first to play in White Wolf's all-new World of Darkness®3 round game-an Origins exclusive! It's a whole new world, but the darkness remains. Rd 2 Fri 10A,6P,Sat 10A 4hours Rd 3 Sat 3P 4 Hours

Materials and characters will be provided.
Sponsored by White Wolf.

Organizer/GM is .

This event is limited to only 6 players. There are 3 seats left.
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Just a quick note, I learned to play craps tonight, at Church!

Thats all. I will let you think what you like about that.

-Ryan

Looking over the events available at Origins, it looks like there will be some really cool things going on there this year. I am signing up to play in a game of Exalted ran by the Developer of the game line, Geoffrey C. Grabowski. Also they are going to run some games of Vampire The Requiem the new Vamp game.

Here is the description of the event.

Description: Be the first to play in White Wolf's all-new World of Darkness®3 round game-an Origins exclusive! It's a whole new world, but the darkness remains. Rd 2 Fri 10A,6P,Sat 10A 4hours Rd 3 Sat 3P 4 Hours

Its Wednesday! Just one more day until we play Dark Age Vamp again! I am looking forward to this session. Time for me to loose some excess baggage and going in a new direction. Although I am unsure how it will all work out.

I am still working on game material for my Exalted game. The players last session got them to a big turning point in the game and things will stop being mere “postal missions” and be more about building alliances, gathering resources and defeating the Realm. I’ll post about it as I finish sections of what I am working on.

As I said before I am going to Origins this year. I have my hotel room, now I need to sign up for the convention, and I need to sign up for some games. Origins tends to be a lot of war gaming. And while I find that sort of stuff fun I really only like doing it with my friends. The nerd herd at origins is filled with petty little men, the type that would love to prove their own superiority by beating you at a game they have mastered and you have never played before. This time before I go I think I am going to talk things over with James to see if we can map out the “Nerd Index” before we go so we can classify all the oddities that we see. I admit that I am a geek, but damn there are some freaky people at these things.

Houses we are looking at to build in CRAINS RUN


THE VIRGINIA
THE SYCAMORE
THE ELM

The house hunt has started anew. This time we are looking at a builder called Gold Key Homes and we are looking at an area that is very close we where we live now. There are two designs that we like and both are in a price range we can work with. There are other builders to look at that are building that area, but I doubt think that any will have homes I like as much as these. It doesn’t hurt to look though, so we are going to check them all out before we move forward at all.

You have no idea at just how excited I am that this whole house mania is starting over. Weee!

I found this color blind test on-line. Its something I have wondered about for some time now. Anyway here's the link so you can get tested too.

Color Blindness Test

Tim thinks I need to write about more interesting things on the blog.

He basically wanted a running account of my sex life. I can understand why he would want me to talk about such things, not having a sex life of his own. Poor guy… tsk tsk.

I played a game of blood bowl last night. It was not a very good time. Jeff played a good game and all. I just rolled like crap. After looked back on the season, I found that about 40% of the games were not really fun to play. Not because I lost, heck loosing can be fun too in a good game. But factors like environment, temperament of the players and whether or not it’s a blow out all come in to play. I’m not sure I will play another season.

My thumb is numb. I don’t know what this means. But ever since I started looking for medical reasons for this I have been freaked out thinking its some sort of heart attack sign. I am so psychosomatic its not funny. Argh. The only feeling I know is real at this point is the numb thumb (and alittle of my hand and arm), the rest could just be my imagination.

I have my room for Origins (2004) all booked up. James and I are sharing the cost and the room. There are people that have said they are going to crash in our room, I don’t mind that, as long as I get the bed I paid for, they are not assholes about it, and they don’t try to stay in our room the whole time we are there. There is no reason they cant get their own room. People coming down for one night I can understand, longer then that an its going to be a problem. Oh and if they are going to stay they are going to pay.

Quote of the day
“I didn’t even punch a wall”
“Congratulations your acting like a human”

Super short review of the new book Exalted: The Outcaste

The Lookshy section was great. The Lost Eggs section (which I wish they would have made a lot bigger) was really good also.

I have not read the pirates section yet.

The Forest Witch section... is overly complex. I think RSB left to many things left up to the ST, but very few things came out and said "this is left up to the ST". The 2 or 3 forces at work there (The Sea, The Mist and The Thing without a name) are fine to have as mysteries, but the way they were presented left me feeling like I had just watched a Hitchcock film. You know that moment at the end of "The Birds" where they just drive away and you find yourself thinking... "Ok, next scene... what? Credits? WFT?" You have no idea why any of it happened, or even what the point of it all was.

The big problem here is that there is no moment that comes where you are thinking on the film and you realize that it really is a classic film and part of what made it that way is its ending. Here we have chapter in a role playing game that gives you lots of mysteries, and lots of hooks to play with, but the manner in which they are given to you is so "odd" that its hard to connect all the dots sometimes. When you do connect all the dots you find that the dots you have connected don’t make one picture but two pictures (maybe 3). Are these pictures related? Could be, might not be, it’s up to you. It’s just wonky. And I know RSB is supposed to be a brilliant writer and all, and she is, but damn sometimes it would be better to write in a way that is both brilliant and coherent.

I was left feeling that either this just doesn’t make sense, or its lacking the clues (box text) to tell us “this is up to you” or I am just too stupid to understand it.

Over all it was an A-, with the good parts over shadowing the part I took issue with.

Not to sound paranoid, but I think my cat Thor is trying to kill me. For example he has this habit of knocking the lamp on the dresser, off the dresser in the morning. The lamp never hits me, but always comes close. It normally hits my pillow, lucky for me in the morning I am normally not sleeping on that side of the pillow. Another example is from just this last weekend, I was using the oven and Thor crawled up on to the cabinets above me. While I was fishing my food out of the oven he knocked a picture off of the top of the cabinets and the picture came crashing down toward my head. It missed thank goodness, but my head might not have been his real target, because while it missed me it went directly into the oven and slid under the burners. So was he trying to take me head off, or was he trying to burn the place down? It’s hard to tell what his real target was but I have stayed on my toes for any other possible attacks. In the past he would curl up on my and try to sleep under my chin and around my neck… I think I will have to put a stop to that also, I do not think strangulation is beneath him at this point.

There is more to tell about this house thing… but I lack the emotional and mental fortitude to do so.