(no subject)
Massive Mega Update
…or, “What has been going on in my life lately.”
As usual, we have been very busy lately. So my recent LJ posts have either been memes, pictures of miniatures or brief posts (complaints, usually). So, here’s a Big Roundup, Gospog-style. I’ll hide it behind an LJ Cut, as it promises to be somewhat long.
HEALTH
The end of last year saw the beginning of a discouraging domino effect in my health. Over the holidays I really let me eating slip. This led to my weight skyrocketing up in a very short time. My CPAP could not keep up, so my Sleep Apnea got really bad for months. This led to my brain getting all foggy; making it almost impossible to analyze what was going on. Meanwhile, my energy levels dropped to below 0, meaning that I stopped working out. And so I gained more weight turning this domino effect into a vicious cycle…
Well, I eventually saw the forest for the trees and figured it all out. Acting on a weird random memory of a conversation with a person whom I cannot remember, I went to Umass Medical in Worcester and met a good Sleep Doctor. I found out that my equipment that I was forced to buy was shabby, 2nd-rate and essentially crap. Sleep Health Center had been fucking me for years and allowing me to pay them for it.
So, I got an all-new pimped-out CPAP and mask and it’s working great! I started a new Cleanse last week and my weight is dropping at about a half a pound a day, steadily. I bought a new treadmill, one that actually works, and I use it daily. With my weight dropping and my sleep returned to “normal”, my head is cleared and “I feel like my old, bony self again.”
THE FLOOD
To accommodate the renovation of The Library (starting this Friday!), I packed up all the books and put them into cardboard boxes that found a home in the Minis Room. To make a long story boring, all the rain we’ve had overpowered the sump pump under my bulkhead, allowing a steady trickle of water into the basement. Like a book-seeking missile, it found my boxes and RUINED about 80 graphic novels and comic books. Completely fucking ruined. Some I managed to “save” in that they are mostly dried out and if pressed under a ton of weight for a few years, will be readable again. Ultimate Spiderman and X-Men took it the worst, each series almost being wiped out.
Yay.
QLMs
Late 2005/early 2006 saw a bit of a miniatures renaissance around here. I got back into Warhammer, albeit briefly, but was driven out by the required babysitting weighed against doing every damn thing myself for any players I hoped to play with. Fuck that noise.
Two good things that came with my renewed interest, and persist, are the Painting Pledge I joined in on over at MiniRealms and my renewed interest in No Limits. I’m sticking with both.
The Painting Pledge has really made me conscious of my mini buying habits (addiction, problem, etc…) and I think No limits is going to be the next minis game I run at BisbeeCon, as it is fast, slick and dead simple, but still fun. And it uses miniatures from any game, all mixed together, as you like. Good stuff.
My sculpting has picked up a little as well, but mostly as an assist to my painting. Painting is my focus for 2006, trying to reduce my Giant Pile of Lead.
RPGs
So, I pretty much took a break. I was frustrated with my Shadow Chasers group to the point where I didn’t see the point in running anymore. That kind of depressed me because I loved that game, and Jill does too. But if it’s going to be just Jill & I roleplaying, we’re not going to need the D20 Modern rulebook, get me?
I ran a game of Steampunk at AnonyCon that I’d promised to run and that was pretty much it for a while. I certainly kept busy with 40K and work, work, work, so it was all good.
But then I made another promise, to Chris. I promised to run D20 Steampunk. And he reminded me. Again and again, until I actually ran it! (2 days ago, actually) It went really well and I have to say that I am “back into” GMing mode, for what it’s worth.
Scarred Lands
Thanks to the efforts of the lovely and talented ”fluffaderm”, I’ve actually gotten the opportunity to PLAY a roleplaying game. Several of them, in fact! Ones that don’t suck!!! She is about to run her 7th contiguous Scarred Lands game and I am loving playing Tharag. Love it, love it, love it.
Getting to be a Player in so many games with the same character is really putting things into perspective for me as a GM as well. It’s cool.
Eberron
DaveLozzi is running Eberron this year, for our regular Winter Gaming event. I’m getting to play my Warforged Necromancer Carrion, and it is just a blast! It’s only a 3-part series, but the first two games were just bombad supah-awesome, and we have a fun group to boot!
BRIEF PRODUCT IMPRESSIONS
I have been buying fewer books, CDs and certainly miniatures, but I’ve gotten a few. Here are some brief reviews or impressions of what’s crossed my desk lately:
Gaunt’s Ghosts: This is a series of novels by Dan Abnett. It’s Warhammer 40 fiction. The first book (First and Only) was good. The second (Ghostmaker) was outstanding. I am 100 pages into the 3rd book (Necropolis)) and it is really slow. But Dan Abnett’s books frequently pick up in the last third of the book, so I’m sticking with it.
40K Setting Books: This is a series of books that contain just background material for the universe the game is set in. The 13th Black Crusade was very good and inspired me to pick up the others. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade was outstanding, just excellent. I later picked up The Battle For Armageddon and was thoroughly disappointed. Reading through the book, I saw the back cover and saw why the book was so bad. They let a girl write it! Yuck! In her biography, it even says she plays with dolls and has cooties. Sheesh!
V For Vendetta: I borrowed this one from a friend and was glad I did. It’s a classic and is a good, solid comic by 1980s standards. But it is very political. The politics are not only from the 1980s but also the politics of Britain. It just didn’t have a lot of relevance with me. Still, not a bad read.
Eberron Sourcebooks: These were impulse buys, largely spurred by playing in the excellent Eberron game (see RPG section). Magic of Eberron, at first glance, does not look like much. It is light on spells for a book called “Magic of Eberron”, for example. The Eberron Explorers’ Guide looks great. It shows a bunch of Heroes on the cover, fighting bad guys and is obviously geared towards new and exciting options for Players and their Characters.
Both books are completely deceiving! Magic of Eberron, despite being light opn spells, has tons of fun and useful information in it! It has great PrC’s, new items, new equipment, just a lot of good stuff! The Explorers’ Guide, on the other hand, has very little, if anything, for a player Character. It is totally geared towards a DM, with encounter locations and adventure seeds. It has tables for lightning rail encounters, for example. This is good, solid fun stuff, but useless to a Player. Oh well, Magic of Eberron makes up for it, and when I run Eberron again, the Explorers Guide will doubtless be a lot more useful.
Melanie C - Beautiful Intentions: (music CD) Typical Melanie C. 2-4 really good songs surrounded by mindless crap for the rest of the CD. Still, the good songs were very good.
Jill Tracy - Diabolical Streak: (music CD) Amazon recommended this to me because I bought Dresden Dolls stuff from them. It’s ok. Jill Tracy can sing but she sings about death and killing so much that by the second song, it’s degenerated to the point of shtick. There are 2 or 3 really good songs on this CD, but they are best if taken and played out of context.
Ultimate Extinction: (comic books) The third and final part of the Ultimate Galactus series is just plain kicking ass. No surprise, as Warren Ellis wrote it. The interview with Warren Ellis in the back of issue #2 is just plain hilarious, with hints of cool comics to come (revisited New Universe, for example!).
THA’S IT
At least, I think that’s it. I mean, there’s always more, but that’s the high notes.
Back to my day of being sick and on vacation. Take care, my peeps.
…or, “What has been going on in my life lately.”
As usual, we have been very busy lately. So my recent LJ posts have either been memes, pictures of miniatures or brief posts (complaints, usually). So, here’s a Big Roundup, Gospog-style. I’ll hide it behind an LJ Cut, as it promises to be somewhat long.
HEALTH
The end of last year saw the beginning of a discouraging domino effect in my health. Over the holidays I really let me eating slip. This led to my weight skyrocketing up in a very short time. My CPAP could not keep up, so my Sleep Apnea got really bad for months. This led to my brain getting all foggy; making it almost impossible to analyze what was going on. Meanwhile, my energy levels dropped to below 0, meaning that I stopped working out. And so I gained more weight turning this domino effect into a vicious cycle…
Well, I eventually saw the forest for the trees and figured it all out. Acting on a weird random memory of a conversation with a person whom I cannot remember, I went to Umass Medical in Worcester and met a good Sleep Doctor. I found out that my equipment that I was forced to buy was shabby, 2nd-rate and essentially crap. Sleep Health Center had been fucking me for years and allowing me to pay them for it.
So, I got an all-new pimped-out CPAP and mask and it’s working great! I started a new Cleanse last week and my weight is dropping at about a half a pound a day, steadily. I bought a new treadmill, one that actually works, and I use it daily. With my weight dropping and my sleep returned to “normal”, my head is cleared and “I feel like my old, bony self again.”
THE FLOOD
To accommodate the renovation of The Library (starting this Friday!), I packed up all the books and put them into cardboard boxes that found a home in the Minis Room. To make a long story boring, all the rain we’ve had overpowered the sump pump under my bulkhead, allowing a steady trickle of water into the basement. Like a book-seeking missile, it found my boxes and RUINED about 80 graphic novels and comic books. Completely fucking ruined. Some I managed to “save” in that they are mostly dried out and if pressed under a ton of weight for a few years, will be readable again. Ultimate Spiderman and X-Men took it the worst, each series almost being wiped out.
Yay.
QLMs
Late 2005/early 2006 saw a bit of a miniatures renaissance around here. I got back into Warhammer, albeit briefly, but was driven out by the required babysitting weighed against doing every damn thing myself for any players I hoped to play with. Fuck that noise.
Two good things that came with my renewed interest, and persist, are the Painting Pledge I joined in on over at MiniRealms and my renewed interest in No Limits. I’m sticking with both.
The Painting Pledge has really made me conscious of my mini buying habits (addiction, problem, etc…) and I think No limits is going to be the next minis game I run at BisbeeCon, as it is fast, slick and dead simple, but still fun. And it uses miniatures from any game, all mixed together, as you like. Good stuff.
My sculpting has picked up a little as well, but mostly as an assist to my painting. Painting is my focus for 2006, trying to reduce my Giant Pile of Lead.
RPGs
So, I pretty much took a break. I was frustrated with my Shadow Chasers group to the point where I didn’t see the point in running anymore. That kind of depressed me because I loved that game, and Jill does too. But if it’s going to be just Jill & I roleplaying, we’re not going to need the D20 Modern rulebook, get me?
I ran a game of Steampunk at AnonyCon that I’d promised to run and that was pretty much it for a while. I certainly kept busy with 40K and work, work, work, so it was all good.
But then I made another promise, to Chris. I promised to run D20 Steampunk. And he reminded me. Again and again, until I actually ran it! (2 days ago, actually) It went really well and I have to say that I am “back into” GMing mode, for what it’s worth.
Scarred Lands
Thanks to the efforts of the lovely and talented ”fluffaderm”, I’ve actually gotten the opportunity to PLAY a roleplaying game. Several of them, in fact! Ones that don’t suck!!! She is about to run her 7th contiguous Scarred Lands game and I am loving playing Tharag. Love it, love it, love it.
Getting to be a Player in so many games with the same character is really putting things into perspective for me as a GM as well. It’s cool.
Eberron
DaveLozzi is running Eberron this year, for our regular Winter Gaming event. I’m getting to play my Warforged Necromancer Carrion, and it is just a blast! It’s only a 3-part series, but the first two games were just bombad supah-awesome, and we have a fun group to boot!
BRIEF PRODUCT IMPRESSIONS
I have been buying fewer books, CDs and certainly miniatures, but I’ve gotten a few. Here are some brief reviews or impressions of what’s crossed my desk lately:
Gaunt’s Ghosts: This is a series of novels by Dan Abnett. It’s Warhammer 40 fiction. The first book (First and Only) was good. The second (Ghostmaker) was outstanding. I am 100 pages into the 3rd book (Necropolis)) and it is really slow. But Dan Abnett’s books frequently pick up in the last third of the book, so I’m sticking with it.
40K Setting Books: This is a series of books that contain just background material for the universe the game is set in. The 13th Black Crusade was very good and inspired me to pick up the others. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade was outstanding, just excellent. I later picked up The Battle For Armageddon and was thoroughly disappointed. Reading through the book, I saw the back cover and saw why the book was so bad. They let a girl write it! Yuck! In her biography, it even says she plays with dolls and has cooties. Sheesh!
V For Vendetta: I borrowed this one from a friend and was glad I did. It’s a classic and is a good, solid comic by 1980s standards. But it is very political. The politics are not only from the 1980s but also the politics of Britain. It just didn’t have a lot of relevance with me. Still, not a bad read.
Eberron Sourcebooks: These were impulse buys, largely spurred by playing in the excellent Eberron game (see RPG section). Magic of Eberron, at first glance, does not look like much. It is light on spells for a book called “Magic of Eberron”, for example. The Eberron Explorers’ Guide looks great. It shows a bunch of Heroes on the cover, fighting bad guys and is obviously geared towards new and exciting options for Players and their Characters.
Both books are completely deceiving! Magic of Eberron, despite being light opn spells, has tons of fun and useful information in it! It has great PrC’s, new items, new equipment, just a lot of good stuff! The Explorers’ Guide, on the other hand, has very little, if anything, for a player Character. It is totally geared towards a DM, with encounter locations and adventure seeds. It has tables for lightning rail encounters, for example. This is good, solid fun stuff, but useless to a Player. Oh well, Magic of Eberron makes up for it, and when I run Eberron again, the Explorers Guide will doubtless be a lot more useful.
Melanie C - Beautiful Intentions: (music CD) Typical Melanie C. 2-4 really good songs surrounded by mindless crap for the rest of the CD. Still, the good songs were very good.
Jill Tracy - Diabolical Streak: (music CD) Amazon recommended this to me because I bought Dresden Dolls stuff from them. It’s ok. Jill Tracy can sing but she sings about death and killing so much that by the second song, it’s degenerated to the point of shtick. There are 2 or 3 really good songs on this CD, but they are best if taken and played out of context.
Ultimate Extinction: (comic books) The third and final part of the Ultimate Galactus series is just plain kicking ass. No surprise, as Warren Ellis wrote it. The interview with Warren Ellis in the back of issue #2 is just plain hilarious, with hints of cool comics to come (revisited New Universe, for example!).
THA’S IT
At least, I think that’s it. I mean, there’s always more, but that’s the high notes.
Back to my day of being sick and on vacation. Take care, my peeps.