Chronovore'd!

...that friggin' hypocritical over-reacting gamer-friend.

Any campaign - heck, any given session - where he gets too bored, he has no qualms with acting out, distracting everyone with all manner of in-character nonsense, from disrupting the events at hand all the way up to screwing over the campaign or the setting. This includes his own campaigns if it's a dual-GM thing and he's not actively GMing at the time. (He usually finds a way for things to continue for a while, unless it was at the end of what he had planned anyway.)

But if anyone else so much as points out to him ways that someone might be able to do something he doesn't like the idea of in his game that he's running, he gets angry and demands proof you can do it. And if you actually find any, he blows his top because he doesn't like rules not working the way he thinks they should.

He does this even if the person brought it up to suggest a fix for it or restrict or ban the problem rules. And if someone actually meant to cause trouble in his campaign? Best hope the game isn't going on at his place, or that he's your ride home.

I got lucky, I got to point out four different things in Pathfinder he had no idea were dangerously broken.

I wonder if I'll be gaming there ever again.

My mother asked me to get her some new oven knobs, as the writing on the ones she has has worn down enough to be effectively invisible. I took one with me so I'd get one that would fit, not having checked first (and thus would have known that most of the available ones would fit.)

Two stores have some. Store one has a complete set for $25. Store 2 has a set for $18, and also sells individual knobs for $6.

This isn't high-impact fancy plastic, it's cheap knobs for an oven.

I take another look at the one I've got with me. Other than being nasty with years of caked-on oils/grease/yechhy stuff on it (seriously? Does no one wash these things?) it's in fine condition.

So I buy a silver-colored sharpie marker, wash and clean the things, spend about fifteen minutes with a magnifying glass to see where the numbers and "off" markings had been, and write the info back on.

Total costs: I probably spent $6 in gas driving around, and another dollar on the marker. So, saved about $11...unless we start accounting for time, with which I'm not going to bother for this one.

I'm trying to write a story.

I figured I have all this time anyway, so maybe I should study, read and game a bit less while I'm not out looking for work, and try writing instead, because hey, it might go somewhere. I haven't tried story-writing for years, and I know a bit more now, it could work.

Well, I've been at this all month, and it has not. I've got just under 5000 words "done" which is somewhere between half a chapter and the entire first chapter. Technically, I've written about 35k - not including the outline - but it's all rewrites as my ideas for how the details work out keep changing. Also, somewhere along the way I've lost the ending from my outline.

Worst part is it's not even original, it's a fan fiction. The ghost of my self-esteem is displeased with my inability to successfully finish even a single chapter to my own satisfaction.

I think I've stumbled into an alternate reason I don't tell people about my birthday unless they ask.*
I've been so irritated and bothered about previous birthday experience that I don't want to tell people.
If it's the thought that counts, I appreciate it. But I do not do well at also accepting the thoughtlessness that typically accompanies it, in my experience.
Turning my birthday into a day to disrupt my plans and making me feel worse than I was trying to avoid making myself feel is not a good use of anyone's time. I hope.

If it is the thought that counts, but you cannot remember to include why the thought is important...I'd rather be forgotten.

Today's pessimistic thought:
Humans evolved as a worldwide pandemic that is here to shake up the evolution of every other form of life on the planet before knocking humanity itself back into a low-end survivalist niche or wiping itself out.

Note: Today's pessimistic thought, now that it is written out, will be ejected from my head and no longer be considered seriously. If it does show up again, it will be treated as a plot point in an as-yet unfinished story.

In the Dresden Files version of reality, magic disrupts modern technology. This is something wizards take for understood, but none of them seem to know why this is the case. It just is. Older technology works better with magic to a large degree, and when you get a century or so back, things are just fine.

Why?

The books work with physics when it can, so why is magic incompatible with tech? Electrochemical batteries (of a slightly less refined sort) have been around for centuries, and hydrodynamically-powered doors (of a quite remarkable size) work. Wizards can use lightning just fine, if they're careful.

I only see (at the moment) a couple possibilities as to why tech is so allergic to magic.
The first is that magic around a wizard can only handle reality that the wizard understands, and tends to break the rest of it. This would explain why few wizards would bother to try and get an electrical engineering degree: it wouldn't work for them until they already understood it correctly, and their experimenting with it would be fruitless until they knew it already.

I don't see the first case working very well, otherwise more young or uneducated magic-using types in the modern world would be flying around or playing out roles from superhero comic books.

The other possibility I see: some power or group that deals with the world has influenced or designed the last century or so's worth of mortal advances so that it will break down in the face of magic. As mankind becomes more dependant on the modern technology, and the more advanced it is, the sooner it will break into uselessness when some magical predator from the Nevernever comes to play with the nonmagic humans. "We're not scared of you, we've got some new toys to shoot you monsters with! ...why is none of this working? These batteries can't be dead, they're new! At least the automated turrets are working, right? It can't BSOD, it was running Linux!"

From fairly-defended humans back to snacks-in-a-can in a century or two.

Jim, for humans of your world to have any hope, better get some of your magic practitioners some science books and get them working on tech that'll still work in the face of magic. It's that or all the nonmagic humans will get killed off and eventually slowly replenished with a full race of magically-enabled humans. You know, if there's any left, since they seem to be being targeted first.

Warning to people who might do this stuff: Remember to get a [expletive] dust mask when working with still-powdery cement mix in close proximity, whether the other people are or not. Forming tiny chunks of cement-snot is irritating and painful.

(Also, new HS notes.)

8ye, Vriska. ::::(

( L8ter, fellow dice-tosser. )

Just heard "Word Disassociation" for the first time in months. When the phrase "Spidery concubine" came up, I thought of Vriska and had to start bashing my skull against rocks.

Recently read "In The Company of Ogres" by A. Lee Martinez. The last few lines in one of the chapters really hit home with me. "...he did what what men without hope who have not quite given up yet have done since the dawn of time. He waited."

I realized that's what I'd been doing the last few years.* But it's not like I can just decide to have a purpose, gain hope for the future (my own or in general) and move on and have a happy life.** I can't honestly say I'm having a bad life, either. Pathetic makes for the best one-word description.



*Later I figured out how normal that is, which I found depressing.
**Some people - for all I know, all of them - might be able to do this. But it's not in me to be able to do such a thing.