Technological goodness

I'm all for the wisdom that comes with age, but when you want to know what tech stuff is cool, you can do worse than to ask a teenager. I've been using an old, creaky keyboard from an e-machines PC I owned many moons ago for years now and it was time for an upgrade. A 16-year old kid off some forums I frequent recommended the Razer Lycosa.

After having bought one, I now recommend it, too. The feedback is snappy, clicky, and beyond comfortable and it's PRETTY and feature-rich. Not a bad deal for what I paid for it.

Well, that was frustrating.

I lost a perfectly good opportunity to game yesterday due to time constraints, lack of communication, and homework. Grrr.

Some improvements.

When I built my computer back in January, I was on a limited budget, so I cut some corner on PSU and case. Back then, I bought a Powerup Case and 450W power supply for $50, but I knew that I shouldn't keep using that forever. As an aditional cooling measure, I pulled all the drive bay covers off the front of the case and aimed a standing fan in there to help keep things cool, but my HDDs still got pretty warm. Furthermore, I knew that using a cheap, off-brand PSU in a rig that routinely sees gaming probably isn't smart over the long run, so this weekend I took some saved cash and birthday money and upgraded both my case and PSU. My new case is a nice CM 690 mid-tower. It's got the red LED fan from my old case in the behind-the CPU spot and the one aftermarket CPU fan I bought for the old case on top as an exhaust fan. I'm eventually going to add some more fans (at the moment I'm thinking of using AeroCool Silver Lightning fans) but it still keeps things much, MUCH cooler than the old case did and has a bunch of very nice features the old case didn't. (Cable management clips, tool-less drive bays, and the "front panel" plugs are located on the top of the case, just to name a few.)

For a PSU, I really lucked out. Tigerdirect, my favorite computer store, period, had a very nice sale on a 650W power supply built by Ultra this weekend, so I put that in the new case, too. It's not a PC Power & Cooling Silencer, but it's a huge step up from what I had and should be more than sufficient for my fairly modest rig. I can finally stop worrying and just enjoy the system now.

New Blog

I'm currently taking a couple of computer courses and am trying to find my way into the IT field. One of those courses, a network essentials class, requires us to blog about the chapters as we work our way through the book. I've decided to take it up a notch from what's required by the class.

If you'd like to learn a bit about computer networking with me as I learn, check it out.

How did I ever do it...

...before I had my wife?

My wife is off at her parents' house tonight, helping her dad get started on his home business. (Apparently the entrepreneurial spirit is hereditary). It follows, then, that she's not here.

Nothing like her absence to make our cozy little apartment feel cavernously empty and deafeningly quiet. I don't hear the hum of the sewing machine, and if I wander into her craft room, she's not there. I didn't get a hug when I came home today, and the cat is wandering around looking kind of melancholy.

As they say, "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

I'm glad she'll be back tomorrow.

Side Benefits of gaming

A conversation with a friend tonight reminded me of one of the biggest reasons why it is that I like being a gamer. One can meet some of the coolest people that way. My current gaming group was completely unknown to me only about a year ago. In that time, I have done some of the best gaming of my life and made a couple of really awesome friends.

I like being a geek.

Podcast

A while ago, I teamed up with some other guys over on the Fear the Boot forums to start a podcast of our own. We're still hashing out the specifics, but here's what we've tentatively decided on so far:

1. We're going to review media from a gamer's perspective. Tentatively, our first topic is going to be Warehouse 13 and I've got some others I'd really like to talk my cohosts into.
2. In order to avoid podcaster burnout, we're going to be doing 4 10-week seasons per year with a 3 week break in between. One of the breaks is going to fall around Christmas, because two of us are Christians and celebrate the holiday, with all the family implications that entails.
3. We're probably going to pull a bunch of guest hosts from the Fear the Boot boards, so if you're a regular on there, be aware that we might be looking for you to come on at some point if you're interested.
   

Games I'd like to play in, games I'd like to run

Based on this post over on Deconstructing Infinity (the blog of my current GM) I figured I'd put together a list of my own.

Run and/or play

Burning Wheel: I've been curious about this game since I heard about it on the Sons of Kryos back in the day, and I'm even more anxious to try it out now that I have the books. I have a couple of settings I really like in mind, and I love the lifepath character creation system.

Pathfinder RPG: 3e was my introduction to D&D, and this seems like what I've had a huge amount of fun with over the years with even more options tossed in. It's even more complicated in some ways, and the power level has definitely gone up, but it seems like tremendous fun.

Spirit of the Century: I borrowed a copy of this from my GM a while back, and I must say, I'm impressed with the FATE system. It looks like it's fast, slick, and tremendous fun.

Dogs in the Vineyard: I love the idea of teenage witch hunter gunslingers. The Situation of the game seems so cool. I got bitten by the mechanics in a previous Vincent Baker game I played, though. Good and careful planning, it seems, is no match for the fickle hand of fate in In a Wicked Age.

Play Only

Mouse Guard: I have no confidence as a GM in someone else's precreated setting, but this seems like such enormous fun. Plus I love how noble and courageous the little mice are.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Sounds fun, but I am not buying it, at least not until I reach a higher income level. My 3.0/3.5/d20 collection fills an entire bookcase.

Run Only

Mutands & Masterminds: Now that I've played it, I'd love to give running it a try.

First play through of a story game.

So one of my friends from my current gaming group and I went to Forge Midwest today, and I finally got a chance to play a story game - in this case Vincent Baker's In a Wicked Age.

It was fun - in fact, it was great fun, but I can appreciate the pros and cons of both traditional and story games with respect to each other a bit more now. I played through a set of actions that, in a traditional RPG would have gone very smoothly, but in a this game got me killed because of a bad die roll.

Still, it was fun and I enjoyed it, and the game moved FAST. Also, this was the first time I ever did a straight PvP game, and I found I liked it okay. I'm not going to stop playing traditional RPGs by any stretch, but I know now from practical experience that I can enjoy a story game, too.

Supers game, sessions 4 and 5

I posted about the first two sessions of the supers game I'm playing in over on the Sons of Kryos board a while back. However, since they seem to have podfaded (though Judd Karlman has been on the last two episodes of Canon Puncture), the traffic there is non-existant and I'm going to move my AP posts over here going forward.

The most recent session was last week. We found about half the hostages kidnapped as leverage by the vampires that were attempting to blackmail us into being their puppets dead in the previous one. The GM has driven home in no uncertain terms that his world is cold, hard, gritty and brutal, which makes for an interesting play experience, but also means that my PC has to play a lot rougher than I was originally planning for him to. Upon finding the leader of the vampires, he killed him in what could be called an "efficiently brutal" manner, utilizing his teleportation, flight, and super strength powers to drop him from great heights and then hang onto him and keep him exposed to the sun. It was a much dirtier and more visceral fight than I was expecting him to engage in, quite frankly. I created a PC who is very comfortable with violence, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's becoming ever so slightly unhinged at this point. Having innocents killed by terrorists (be they mundane or undead) in an attempt to manipulate you is not an easy thing for someone to deal with, especially when they have a background in uniform.

The players continue to get along well, and a couple of us have advanced our characters with group expediency at least partially in mind, which I think is fantastic. Our focus has been improving somewhat, and we've been learning to play off of each others' strengths and cover each others' weaknesses a bit, which I love.
We still tangent a lot, but I'd be lying if I told you that was a horrible thing. I have the fortune of being able to game with a pleasant group of actual adults, which, from what I gather around various gaming communities on the internet, is a rare and precious thing I should not take for granted.

The plot has gotten thicker. Apparently our flying brick's powers originate from a valuable piece of alien technology that the creators want back. Badly. Not good. After some very tense negotiations and the showing of rather too much force on my PC's part, we seem to have at least gotten the first group of people sent to retrieve the artifact embedded in her to leave us alone. For now. Ultra-tech alien mercenaries are no good, though.

A further note: waiting this long to post leaves me fuzzy on things I should be remembering. I'll have to get back to my old habit of posting in the first day or two after a game with the next one.

Supers game, so far.

So I wound up creating a slightly less-edgy character for the supers game. My PC is a former cop, airman, and spy who now works for homeland security, has low-level flight, durability, and super strength and not-so-low-level spatial manipulation powers. The rest of the team consists of a National Geographic photographer with a powerful alien space suit (embedded crystalline stuff that generates forcefields and allows her to fly, etc.) an alien with invisibility, appearance changing, durability, plasma manipulation, and flight, and a darkness controlling veteran superhero from another dimension. The team is working well together so far, and we've gotten good at setting each other up for combo attacks, etc. The game is fairly gritty for a superhero world, but still utilizes "comic book science" a lot. For good examples of the feel, take a look at the recent writing of Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis.

We've played through four sessions thus far, and it's going quite well. A very entertaining game with a good variety of foes. So far we've tangled with mercenaries (both mundane and power-armored), vampires (I hate those jerks, by the way...), a huge Godzilla-like creature, and some weird, shadowy people who want to kidnap at least some of us for God only knows what purpose.

More to come as the campaign develops.

And here we go.

My annual performance review was today, and went well, so my wife and I are going to start moving on some of the "move up in the world" type stuff we've been looking at. Hopefully this sees us out of the apartment and into a house by the end of the year.

Playing in a superhero game for the first time

My gaming group got together and did a pitch session last week. We wound up settling on a superhero game using Mutants & Masterminds. I decided to play a character not unlike a combination of Mr. Bennett from Heroes and Jack Bauer from 24, with a smidgen of magic. I've been toying with the idea of rebuilding the character to be a neutralizer, though. Shut down a hostile super's powers and then take 'em down cop/soldier style. The rest of the party is a darkness manipulator, a woman in an alien space suit, and an actual alien, all of which seem like they'll be great fits for the players playing them. The Situation is that all the "A-List" super heroes and one very important "A-List" have vanished, along with the city of Chicago, which has been replaced with Something Else - a new, weird city. The PCs are all young or lower-tier (B or C list) heroes that now need to step up and deal with things. Reminds me a little bit of the 52 storyline on a superficial level. Should be fun. I've never played in a supers game before. As a side note, I really like this group.

Thank you.

I voted for you twice. You were an unpopular president, but you genuinely tried to do the right thing. Usually, you succeeded, and got vilified and demonized for it. You came to office in peace, and less than 8 months later had war thrust upon you. I only pray that the historians will be kinder to you than your modern critics. God knows you deserve it. You gave us seven years of domestic safety and may have successfully created another sane country in the middle east. You weren't the most articulate president we ever had, but you meant what you said. You created the most diverse cabinet in American history. You did untold good for AIDS in Africa. Mr. President, I salute you and thank you.


Job well done.

Witch Hunt!

Ever since I read the excellent The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard, I've had a soft spot for the virtuous witch hunter archetype, but I didn't really know of any other fiction that had that sort of protagonist. Most people are more than a little unnerved by the idea of witch hunters, and the puritans aren't one of the more popular historical groups among modern Americans. (A pity, that. If you're not quite sure what I'm talking about, read about Francis Walsingham and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and see if your mind doesn't change some; Her Majesty's Spymaster and The Wordy Shipmates should get the point across pretty well and both are very enjoyable reads.)

Anyway, I stumbled across Matthias Thulmann: Witch Hunter while I was receiving some books the other day and have been reading it. It's fun. The hero is grim and ruthless, but definitely on the side of good (at least so far; I'm not through reading) the villains are suitably vile, and the Warhammer setting is a very cool one to have stories set in. I never got much into Games Workshop's tabletop games, but their licensed computer games are a blast and this isn't the first piece of fiction I've enjoyed from one of their worlds.

Resolutions for 2009

Life:
1. Move up in the world, or at least position myself to. More money and a house would be great.
2. Improve my relationship with my wife. This isn't so much a resolution as an ongoing goal. We're pretty happy, but it can always be better.
3. Get back into shape. I was doing really well for a while, but I've got 30 excess pounds to drop.

Work:
1. Work harder and more efficiently. I wouldn't call my work ethic a liability by any stretch of the imagination, but I can always do better.
2. See if I can advance within B&N.

Gaming:
1. Play more. Of anything. D&D, Indie games, whatever. 2008 was a very lean gaming year.
2. Run either Burning Wheel or Sorcerer for a group.

I'm glad THAT'S over.

2008 was not such a nice year. $4.00 gas was just the tip of the economic iceberg, and it kinda went downhill from there. Here's hoping '09 turns out a little better.