Day: December 8, 2006

And one more note for today…

This morning we had a strange, beautiful light effect on the horizon. Although the cloud cover was hanging like a lid over our heads, its edges unravelled just over the horizon on all sides, leaving a clear view to both the Cascade range on the eastern horizon and the Olympics in the west, all snow-capped. Mt. Rainer stood out like vision of glory. To add to the wonder, a strange pastel pink-orange light remained, like the bounce light you get around sunrise or sunset. In fact, even though the Olympics are now partly obstructed by haze now, shreds of that pink glow linger. Yes, I know it’s probably from something heinous like pollution or rogue nuclear testing or alien parasite bugs from outer space (well, maybe not) but I still found it gorgeous.

RPGs as Holiday Presents

I’m re-posting this here; I first posted it on RPG.net but didn’t get many responses; however, it might still be useful to somebody else.

In the spirit of giving and the Holidays, I thought I’d share my RPG-related Christmas list ideas. I figure there are several flavours of gifts and giving for the players or GMs in your life:

Most obvious is that brand new or more expensive game that your gamer has not yet treated her/himself to. I’m thinking of such games as:

At the other end of the monetary spectrum are some very affordable,very neat standalone games you can buy as PDF or print for under $20,and very often even free. I think compiling and nicely packaging a CD of free or affordable downloads makes a nice present. Some personal favourites:

Then there’s the books that are out of print, hard to find, etc. A trip to eBay, Half Price Books or the used section of your FLGS can get you inexpensive and really neat presents. Good games to get that way:

  • As a shameful example, since I actually purchased it for myself, I just got Prince Valiant for $8 (Chaosium)
  • Everway (WotC/Rubicon Games/Gaslight Press)
  • Star Wars d6 (West End Games) and assorted sourcebooks (get the 2nd edition revised if you can)
  • Greg Stolze’s Usagi Yojimbo, and the one sourcebook for it, Monsters (Gold Rush Games)
  • Toon (Steve Jackson Games)
  • Marvel Super Heroes (TSR)

Then there are gaming accessories such as dice, erasable maps,miniatures, etc. I also like sound effect or soundtrack CDs — perhaps even a home compilation of such, including downloaded or ripped soundtracks from some computer games that have particularly good music.

And even better, consider offering a game for your loved ones and friends! Run a holiday game for them, introduce their/your children or teens to role-playing, organize a Christmas-themed LARP or a murder mystery so everyone can dress up, etc.

How about you? Any RPG gift suggestions for the holidays?

Short rant: Doing the homework

Gawd, but I get tired of people who never ever bother to read for themselves. Last night I was reading the excellent “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” after misuba pointed it out on the Story Games board. But I was thinking, when this bit in the intro about how “[t]he Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way”, that it seems some people’s speciality is to create noise to drown out the signal in what is supposed to be many-to-many two-way communications.

Specifically, I’m talking about the jokers who never bother to read what is already posted on a discussion and then fires off e-mails to ask everyone to repeat what they just posted. Or the lazy bums who keep asking “Where can I find info on Topic X?” when merely entering “Topic X” in the Google search window, no other keywords, no fancy advanced searches, provides you with the necessary info within the first three results. Between them and bona fide spammers, there seems to be fewer and fewer messages of any value in my in-box. I think of those people as the Noise-to-Signal crowd; their interventions on a forum, a mailing list, a group blog, a message board just confuse everything and never add new information.

Yes, you can guess that I’ve been facing a number of these people on various boards lately.

Better this morning/Ca va mieux

Edmund responded well to the meds, has been much better since last night. He cancelled his follow-up appointment at the clinic (the doctor said he should only come back if there was no improvement) so I decided to go to the office.

Edmund va beaucoup mieux ce matin et n’aura pas besoin de retourner voir le docteur, alors je me suis pointée au bureau. Je commençais à être pas mal inquiète!