this is ja.lj

How can this be?

I remember so much of it with this weird clarity that makes it all feel totally recent.

Didn't we just meet like last month?

Wasn't it last week that Midge tried to overdose on prescription painkillers?

Didn't Plan Biology begin yesterday afternoon?

I love our whirlwind, sweetie. Long may it whirl.

This is that "random 25 things" meme and I'm reposting it from the other place.

This is supposed to be about me, but I guess it came out to be more about other people.

( 1. The Colonel and I grew up together. We were world-weary even as teenagers, and we spent many nights reminiscing about the good old days, back when Spinal Tap was real and Iceland was fictional. )

Giftwise, my birthday party was ne plus sweet. I got a flask full of Irish moonshine and a Braille issue of Playboy, which will be a comfort to me when I drink myself blind. Also received some D&D figs -- the rare Voracious Ice Devil has already slotted himself into an upcoming encounter -- and a cute little box of wine, and a Poopa Troopa, who I am going to seal in Lucite for personal reasons.

Morgan and Scopp rocked the youtube some, as they are wont to do, and I saw
( this )
for (I think) the first time.

(actually, maybe not the first time -- because waiting on a hillside for a spaceship to drop off a sweetie does seem like an accurate forecast of my teenage years, so perhaps I assimilated this video young and was just acting it out in high school.)

Also, J. took a picture of me at the last party. It showcases my two three best features, so thanks man.

I love my friends. Getting older ain't so bad when you do it in good company.

I moved to Seattle in 1999, just a few months before the WTO meetings.

Since then, the sound of choppers overhead has always made me think of the night when the cops rampaged up into my neighborhood, firing off pepper spray in Exxon Valdez quantities.

Last night, when I got home from Seth's house at around 11:00 and heard choppers east of me, over Broadway, I knew they were good choppers, looking down on something special.

From now on, when I hear a helicopter, I will think of being packed in with varina8 and desolina and (hundreds? thousands?) of other lovely people at the intersection of Pike and Broadway, dancing to Don't Stop Believin' while total strangers pressed cheap beer into my hands and the police looked on peacefully.

I'll be down at APE, the Alternative Press Expo, this weekend, hawking Comfort Guides and Greeters. I'll have a couple brand-new non-Greeter non-CG things as well.

I'll share those here shortly, but right now I want to mention that I've donated all 2008 proceeds for the Matrimony Comfort Guide to the No On 8 campaign, and I encourage all you people out in friendsland to kick in as well.

There are people out there who think that the world will be better if they can destroy George Takei's marriage. These people need to be taught how to fucking behave. No On 8 is doing their last-minute ad blitz right now, and can definitely use some extra bucks.

Apocalyptica was completely awesomelyptica, exceeding my already sky-high expectations. Their covers were fierce, their originals seductive, their stage antics charming, and they gave us four encores.

And remember back when I asked what could be more metal than Priest's double album about Nostradamus? At the time, I thought it was a rhetorical question, but tonight I got my answer before Apo even took the stage. We spotted this one kid, standing alone in the middle of the madding pre-show throng, serenely reading a library copy of THE FOREVER WAR, which he held up at eye level to catch what little light there was in the room.

I'm sorry, but even if your parents named you Belial and you like to blow up hospitals while drinking a bitter mix of wine and ash from Jerry Falwell's purloined skull, you are less metal than that kid. That kid is pure.

Oh, here's a pic of the band from 2005:

Inspired by the Confurvatives, the Conservative Furries...

"We shared the dream again last night. As always, she comes at me like a Stuka, but this time, while the pack scatters, I am steady, my feet rooted in the muskeg. Her bullet, which like her is gentle and irresistible and absolutely real, takes me in the breast.

"Wings flashing, she soars overhead. In the slow-time of dream death I can see past the tip of her rifle barrel, behind its scope to her amber eyes -- canine eyes, so close to my own. We are so alike, she knows me so well. Especially, she knows what I need, in that moment, and she kindly grants it.

"In that one gesture, so brief and fleeting and yet so authentic, I learn I have no use for the material world anymore, except for my lungs and my throat and my lips, because they are howling grateful tribute at her, telling her that my Heaven is this moment, forever: my howl and her wink.

"She tosses a flare from the plane, to mark my place for when she comes for me. I breathe in its acrid smell deeply, trying to fix myself in the dream, but you cannot stay in a dream past your death. I must be content knowing that when she comes to find me, in our dream-Alaska, my paw will be raised for her."

(confurvatives found via Metafilter, and yeah, I posted this there too. No favorites yet, but the post was pretty stale by the time I got there.)

I spent a little bit of time at the Obama state HQ in Columbus yesterday. It was jaw dropping. They had taken over an old mega-church.

(I apologize, but this will make no sense to people who aren't huge dorks like me)

I am DMing Keep on the Shadowfell for our gang. D&D4E is a fun game in general, but Shadowfell is rather dry, with flat NPCs, a next-room-next-monster rhythm, and a general absence of wow.

Here's an example: (SPOILER WARNING) the module includes a spiffy poster-sized battlemap of a dragon tomb dig, complete with a skeletal dragon curled round some treasure. Very nice stuff. The associated encounter requires that the party prevent an Orcus cultist from ... retrieving a semi-magical hand mirror that was buried with the dragon?

Zzzzzz.

In my own private Shadowfell, the Big Bad Undead Daddy is digging that dragon skeleton out so he can frikken REASSEMBLE and ANIMATE it into a howling reptile death ghost. I decided to use this as my troubleshooting encounter, the one I would bust out if the party got into more trouble than it could handle.

Last night, they totally got owned by Irontooth. But instead of TPKing them, I drugged the four survivors up and sent them to join the involuntary labor force at the bone dig. Then I told them they had to individually choose between rolling on an escape skill challenge or a sabotage-the-ritual skill challenge. And they couldn't dither about it, because all the while, the dread cold-lightning radiance of the surrounding abyssal thickets would be leeching away their souls.

(Thanks to John Harper for his cool continuing-damage skill challenge rules)

I think the guys were a bit rattled by Irontooth, because only one of them was tempted to be a hero and try to screw up the ritual. The rest organized a fast escape into the wilderness. That night, while they huddled against the spring chill, they saw a blaze of light from the direction of the tomb and heard the unholy shriek of something ancient and terrible being reborn...

Damn, this is fun. I just hope that no one feels abused. The Irontooth encounter was rough, and the undead dragon might have looked like me doing a victory lap. So yeah, next session, puppies.

They are using goats to tidy up the grassy freeway-abutting areas near our apartment.

( pix )

It was odd seeing the disaffected city people clustered up against the fence and cooing over the goats. Normally people in this neighborhood only behave that way around a serious car accident.

( Midge wanted to go visit with the goats and perhaps put them in a formation. )

Normally one should treat a youtube page titled "D&D Fan Film" like an animal striped with yellow and black. But this is an exception:



The moment at 1:54 is pretty damn choice.

Following up on my last post, regarding Judas Priest's Nostradamus...

HOW COULD THIS BE MORE METAL? HOW COULD IT??

itsmrwilson asserts that this is a rhetorical question. But it is not. Because I just discovered that Rob Halford sings the chorus to "Pestilence and Plague" in LATIN. Latin is how you make something more metal.

[edit, long after the fact: uh, it's Italian, not Latin. but it's still pretty metal.]

Judas Priest's newest release is a double-disc concept album about Nostradamus.

HOW COULD THIS BE MORE METAL? HOW COULD IT??

Hellboy was all scattered but I approve of it nonetheless because I automatically approve of any movie where Elric gets beaten up.

holy crap. It's been a decade since I went to Clarion.

Headphones on this morning, so I can ignore the cluster of twenty or so PMs who are fussing loudly over a new iPhone in the next cube over.

Apparently supplies are tight and the guy who got one is a bit of a hero. Are they not making any more after today?

First, the General Interest part of the post: If you google imagesearch for 'haeckel plates' you will see the crazy beautiful.

The context, which is less general interest: Wil and I are gearing up to play a mini-campaign of Starmada. I love Starmada. It's simple but tactically rich and has a very nice light set of campaign rules. And it doesn't come with a setting, so you can field ships from whatever race you can imagine. Last time out, my guys were the Machine Socialists, and they named their ship classes after experimental musicians. So I had Sun Ra class missile cruisers and Beefheart class escorts and Super Zappa smart missiles and Link Wray fast carriers. Like I said, fun.

My new guys are the Weaponized Migrators. Their original Migrator ancestors were peaceful, long-lived spacedwelling megafauna ( Cut for not wanting to appear like that mouthbreather in the gaming store who always overshares with you )

So if I'm gonna play tabletop with these guys, I need some counters. I love making game tokens out of found art on the Internet. After a few hours' poking around jellyfish images, I asked V if she could recommend some funky looking animals to use for spaceship art. Thus, Haeckel. How can that stuff *not* be in space. I'm going to have trouble picking which images to use....

EDIT: Looks like wikipedia has a huge collection of Haeckel plates

Oly was the exact opposite of Emerald City. Instead of a big, frenetic room soaked in howling 60Hz florescents, we got a nice, intimate nightclub with big windows and mostly natural light. It was very chill and I had more opportunities to visit with readers and fans than I usually do.

On the way down, I thought, "hey, I'm going to Olympia, I wonder if I'll run into Jackson Tegu from story-games.com?" And blam, there he was, on stage as the bass half of a drum-and-bass duo that did a short set to start off the con. Very sophisticated, and a nice touch. Had a good visit with Jackson after the set and sent him away with some goodies.

Aside from Mr. Tegu, the highlight of the show was meeting Terrence Nowicki, a fiercely goddamn talented political cartoonist -- he's sharp, funny, and his line art is badass. ( Check his stuff out )

There are more Nowicki cartoons at MCT Campus Syndicate.

My own sales were bigger than I anticipated -- 33 CGs and 7 Greeters, which is not bad at all for a $14 table. I don't know how many attendees there were, but I'd put it somewhere between 100 and 200, including exhibitors.

I wore the Maiden t-shirt from Monday's show and made at least a couple sales when people came over to talk to me about it. Lesson: dress in something that will start conversations.

Thanks to Chelsea and her team for a great show -- I'll definitely drop by again next year.

Some goodhearted Canadian shot some pretty decent-sounding footage of my Maiden show and posted it on youtube. The future is fucking awesome!

At every great show, a song will leap forward. I'll be meh about it before the show, but after the show it'll be a new favorite. The Mountain Goats' Letters from Belgium is like that; so are Nick Cave's Hallelujah and Concrete Blonde's Happy Birthday. The Iron Maiden version is Revelations:



The little dig at the Osbournes is funny. Bruce hasn't moved on from Ozzfest, I guess.

I wore my Maiden t-shirt to work today; two people on the street threw me horns. Bruce is right to call it a family.

Congratulations to George Takei and his fiancé!

Tim Hardaway must be heartbroken.

(via jeliza)