Monthly Archives: January 2010

Status Report

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My Grandmother's glasses

Image by Earl – What I Saw 2.0 via Flickr

Things have calmed down a bit, so I have time to write a status report of what’s up with me.

Grandmom
The weekend sorting out Grandmom’s house and going to her funeral was emotionally difficulty, but socially and logistically fine. There was no drama, and only very minor snags in getting things sorted out. We’ll probably have to make a few trips back and forth to TN to resolve some more stuff, but it’s just a matter of getting it all done.

It hit me hard partially because it was so sudden — just a few weeks ago we were at her house over Christmas break, and we had no idea that there was any problem. The other part is because, in many ways, Grandmom had become much like a mother to Michelle (and by extension, me and David) over the past few years, so it was more like losing a parent than a grandparent.

But life moves on, and so do we.

Work
Work has been its usual blend of awesome, exciting, challenging, stressful, and systemically chaotic. For every time I have to toss documents onto my netbook to make sure I can work over the weekend to get things done, there are the times when I get to play Assassin’s Creed 2 and Mass Effect 2 as research for work.

I admit I was reluctant to get back to work on Tuesday after the emotional rollercoaster, but I also know that if I don’t force myself to be social, I’ll become a hermit and withdraw from people even further. Luckily, I have a lot of friends that I’m privledged to call co-workers, and between the camaraderie and the personal feeling of accomplishment I get when I can check items off of my list, I was able to feel more myself by the end of the day.

Social Life
Weirdly, the past few months have seen a resurgance in my social life. I’m going out to dinner more often than I ever used to, and it seems that it’s a rare weekend where we don’t have something going on. (For example, this weekend is our monthly Requiem LARP, and then we have tickets to see the WWE Royal Rumble here in Atlanta.) I’m in a few different games, and we often go out to concerts, shows, and events.

I’m often not a very social person, usually happy to sit at home, but I have to admit that it’s been really nice going out and being with other human creatures. Of course, sometimes I’ve had to bow out of a social obligation to get work or writing done, but it’s been nice to have the option to hang out with a diverse group of people with varying interests. Plus, it’s good for me to get out of my head for a while and not burn out on the endless projects I can end up giving myself to do.

Writing
Right now I’m working on side projects like Whitechapel and my podcasts and my anthology fiction when I have bits of time. For a while I was able to juggle it all, but with Grandmom passing I’m having to prioritize everything on my plate. Still, Whitechapel is getting some good buzz, and I have some notes for the ghost story I want to write in the next couple of months. Like Justin, I’ve got a lot of scraps that I want to stitch together, so I might as well keep driving that into stuff that sees the light of day. I’m also continuing to learn from my peers and trying new things all the time about my craft.

The Camarilla
Honestly, I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention to it. I understand some stuff is going on, and some people are excited by some stuff and angry at other stuff, but after nearly 13 years of regular club participation, it seems like people are always excited by some stuff and angry at other stuff.

Mass Effect 2
Did I mention that I’m playing Mass Effect 2? Because I am. (Well, not at the moment. Right now I’m getting ready to go play D&D.)

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Family Emergency

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As I expect people will be concerned, I wanted to give a heads-up before I fall off the radar for a bit.

Long story short, Michelle’s grandmother passed away suddenly this morning. There has been a police investigation, and Michelle is working with them as the next of kin. (Before people get worried about that, the investigation is routine and nothing appears to be out of the ordinary — it was only due to the suddenness of the incident that required an investigation). We’ll be driving up to Tennessee tomorrow evening, and probably spending the weekend there to handle the arrangements.

I’m sure any good thoughts or well wishes will be appreciated (she’s at  here and on Twitter, and Michelle Webb on Facebook), but understand if we’re unresponsive for a few days. Any time not spent on work will be used to help my family out, so I’m going to be out of the loop for a time as well (which means another postponement of Whitechapel, sadly). I or Michelle will post updates as we’re able, I’m sure. I appreciate that many of you are kind-hearted souls who would be happy to help, and we’ll contact you if such help is needed.

Thank you in advance for your support over the next few days.

Two More Anthology Opportunities

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I’ve just been informed that two blog posts I worked on for FlamesRising.com have been nominated for inclusion in the next volume of Open Game Table.

Finding Horror in the Eighties

City in the Sand Interview

Here’s a link to the original announcement.

Also, I’ve been formally invited to participate in another fiction anthology this year, and I have leads on up to three more. More information as soon as I’m allowed to spill it!

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An Afternoon in the Mutant Future

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Yesterday afternoon I finally got a chance to run a session of Mutant Future. Mutant Future CoverFive of my friends from work got together over lunch with their randomly-created characters to sit down and play.

First, a brief description of the game. The splash text says “Mutant Future is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy RPG, in the same flavor of similar genre games from the late 70s and early 80s. Enter a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland filled with mutants, ruins, and radiation! You can take the role of an android, mutant human, mutant animal, pure human, and even a mutant plant! Seek wealth and ancient technological artifacts. Enter vast underground complexes, and avoid killer robots!” Essentially, that boils down to the writers taking the OGL, turning it into a very close replica of an early edition of Dungeons & Dragons (Labyrinth Lord), and taking that game and turning it into a not-entirely-accurate version of Gamma World.

I was planning to run a session of this during our Thanksgiving gaming night (which ended up being a test run of D&D 4e instead), so I decided to run it at work. The idea is to run it as a series of loosely-connected encounters that people could jump into and out of as time permitted. While some of my desire to run this was to enjoy some nostalgic old-school gaming, some of it was also to try and find the enjoyment in what are often considered to be drawbacks to older system designs — random character creation, level-based increases, and a complete disregard for game balance. Since Gamma World is often run on a sliding scale between “utterly gonzo” and “completely straight-faced,” I decided to shoot for somewhere in the middle, and see what happened.

The game ended up being slightly more gonzo than I envisioned, but in retrospect that’s probably the best place to hold it. The story was very simple, and based on a modified version of the “War Never Ends” encounter from The Savage AfterWorld blog. I was a bit nervous about the game, but it ended up being a lot of fun, and I’m certainly looking forward to next week. A few things I learned:

  • “Hopeless” characters can still be a lot of fun. Justin rolled a character that was completely deaf, utterly stupid, and heavily armored. I think we all anticipated that he would dive into a conflict and gloriously parish, but it turned out that the miscommunication between the characters was part of the fun.
  • Powerful monsters can be taken down with creativity and the right circumstances. But blindly diving into combat has advantages, too.
  • Rulings over rolls makes things move a lot faster.
  • Sometimes, junk merchants have warp-field swords hidden away. Just because.
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Arsene Lupin

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Maurice Leblanc.

Image via Wikipedia

For a while now (okay, many years), I’ve been meaning to read Maurice Leblanc‘s stories of Arsene Lupin. A couple of years ago, I noticed that a half dozen or so of his books are now in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg, so I downloaded them, but never got around to reading them. Over vacation I’ve been toying with my new netbook, but mainly trying to get some decent ebook software on it. After a lot of testing, I’m using FBReader — it’s not ideal or all that pretty, but it works the best for me.

Yesterday, we had a conversation at work about old properties that have been turned into movies decades after they were popular, and the movie versions being more inspirational than the fiction to even later adaptations (Sherlock Holmes, of course, but Conan and Tarzan were also mentioned). Based on that, I remembered that Maurice Leblanc wrote a number of unauthorized crossovers between Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, and I was vaguely curious to much his presentation of Holmes diverged from Doyle’s vision. Plus, I read on Wikipedia that Lupin himself spawned a number of movies and TV spinoffs. Since I was mostly[1] unfamiliar with Lupin, I decided to sit down with the first set of short stories and read up on him a bit. I expected to read one story and then maybe get some more work done that night.

By the time I went to bed, I had downloaded the same book to my iPhone so I could finish the last story, because I was not going to be able to sleep without knowing what happened.

For those who don’t know, Arsene Lupin is one of the original "gentleman thief" characters that inspired many similar characters (most notably, The Saint). He is a master of disguise, incredibly intelligent (sounds familiar?), and possessing of a certain sense of humor and nobility that puts him into bad situations, but also gives him a flair that makes him engaging. The first nine stories generally follow a kind of timeline, although there’s some jumping back and forth in Lupin’s career — it’s somewhere between an anthology and a novel. I read the English translation provided by Project Gutenberg, which has some errors and redundancies, but the stories are still quite engaging and easy to read despite that. I mean, this guy manages to steal from someone’s locked and guarded manor while he’s still in jail.

If you’ve finished up the Sherlockian canon and are looking for some new turn-of-the-20th-century action/crime stories, you can’t go wrong with Lupin.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar

All of Leblanc’s work on Project Gutenberg

Footnote 1: I did actually listen to an audiobook reading of the first story, "The Arrest of Arsène Lupin," so I wasn’t going in totally blind.

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