Stick a fork in it

That's right, after months of work, just now coming up on six months, I've completely plotted and prepared my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Woo! It's been a long ride, and it's not over yet, but the end is nigh, and I will be happy to see it end if only because I get to bring this story to a hopefully epic conclusion. What's in my D&D future? Hopefully someone else running a D&D game so I can take a well deserved break and our previous DM can continue his break after running the previous three games.

I have plans for other games, perhaps shorter games, perhaps longer games, and always games that have better preparations and controls, but always something fun and interesting for a demanding crowd. I could be working on my 4.0 game, but a little break from this kind of writing, and a return to my novels, seems like what I should do for a while.

My scary room

I have a sleep disorder. What sleep disorder? Good question. Suffice it to say that whatever it is, it's a bitch and I wish I could hug it with bullets. It's probably some variety of insomnia exacerbated by my anxiety disorder. The short story is I can be tired, physically and mentally, put my head on my pillow, relax, try to sleep, and just kind of sit there waiting for hours. I assure you, the combination of being tired, irritable from being awake still, and the frustration of not getting to sleep all pile up till I'm a grouch monster. When I do eventually get to sleep, I then normally wake up long before my alarm and get unfit, doze for five mintues then wake back up "sleep" for an hour or more, and finally give up, wake up, and am a miserable wreck for the day.

As such, I have done many crazy things to "clean" my sleeping environment. I only use my bed for sleep. I avoid my bedroom for anything other than sleep, getting dressed, and the like. I make sure my bed is comfy as well as the temperature in my house. I try to make sure my room smells nice via candles. I have a white noise machine that soothes my brain in theory. My bedroom is a soundproofed and quiet as I can make it.

However, none of this is scary. One of the issues with where I live is that some of my neighbors think that their outside lighting should be as close to one million candle power as possible, so my house is very bright even at night. Light, as you might guess, is the opposite of helpful for someone with a sleep disorder. My shades, while reasonably light canceling, were insufficient, so I went on a mission to get room darkening shades.

Trials and tribulations followed but ultimately I set up my stupid shades and made my room very dark. Mission accomplished.

By very dark I mean VERY dark. So dark that if you've had lights on in the house, that's including just a TV or computer screen, when you walk into the room you are totally blind. It's also so dark that when, in the middle of the night I've been watching, say, a zombie movie or playing, say, Resident Evil 4, I walk up the stairs and past my room, glancing into my room is like staring into a black hole of evil. I'm really not afraid of the dark, but staring into the gaping maw that is the doorway to my room in which I cannot see a single thing is just enough creepy to make me shudder from time to time.

If, someday, I disappear, blame a Grue.

VEEP Joe Biden

Being from DE I am not immune to the "that's so cool" factor of having one of our senators being tapped to be Obama's VEEP. However I do have to mention why I never liked Biden in the first place. Here's a short list.

• Biden is Pro RIAA.


• Biden tried, twice, to get legislation to gut PGP and online encryption. TWICE.


• The man tried to come up with the Patriot Act first, then supported the Patriot Act.


• He's anti P2P.


• He's a skeptic of Net Neutrality.

Ok, he might be VEEP, that's neat, but I pray, for the good of the Internet and our privacy, that he never see the Presidency other than from the next desk over.

You could cut the irony with a knife

So due to an unsettling situation involving my car, that being that the clunking noise coming from my trunk was actually coming from my muffler that was busily and quite happily detaching itself from my car, I find myself at Saturn of Newark today waiting to find out just how screwed I am in terms of all my car repairs. I mean, the muffler, obviously, but also weird sensor issues, messed up cruise control, as well as the usual oil, lube (suggestive tone of voice optional), and tires malarkey.

As entertaining as all that nonsense is, that's not the irony. See, I took the day off work to make sure I would have enough time to take care of my car situation, and I brought my laptop to entertain myself with. However, the only place I've found to plug it in is in a tiny cubicle with a phone. So now I'm sitting in a tiny cubicle in an uncomfortable chair doing exactly what it is I would probably be doing at work right now, that being checking email, web comics, and blogging as you can see. Shortly I'll be working on my campaign. It's a normal work day! In a tiny cube. In an uncomfortable chair. At Saturn.

I'm going to go slice my irony and have a sandvich.

Another test another facial wound

Last night I took the eighth test I've taken at my kungfu school. Barring something that went horribly wrong that I don't know about, I passed. My weakest part of the test, as always, was my endurance, despite the fact that endurance was all I concentrated on for the better part of the last two months in my fu clases. Regardless, I worked through it, tired myself to the brink of nausea, and made it through. I got hit in the face about five times (and somehow in the elbow), but I soldiered on and gave as much as I got. All in all, it was about as enjoyable as a root canal, but at least it's over.

Post test I limped over to a friend's house where he had some magical elixir that promised to make my muscles hurt less the next day, which I drank (it tasted like milky Tang). I'll be damned if the only things on me that actually hurt aren't where I got punched/kicked. Everything else is a little sore, but really not that bad at all. Hooray for magic elixir!

All told, I did not have fun. I hate these tests. I don't get a sense of accomplishment from them, just a sense of "thank god that's over." This is of course leading me to the obvious conclusion that I'm not going to take another one of these tests. I'm gonna have to ruminate on this one for a while, but due to my extreme distaste of this style of testing and total lack of interest in getting new belts if this torture is what I have to put myself through, I think my time at this school may be coming to its end. Much to think about and discuss, but the result may be inevitable. Meh, we'll see if talking makes any changes, but that hasn't worked for me in the past so I really doubt it'll help now. But there's always the chance I suppose. Better to consider the hopeful than to ignore it. Weird for me to say, but true nonetheless.

EDIT: Oh yeah, facial wound. My sparring partner and I were, you know, sparring, and I got tired of being punched in my tired face, so I went for grappling. I successfully knocked him down only to watch him escape and stand again. Frustrated, I tried again and this time when I pulled him off his feet I dropped his head on my head. Dizziness and moment of "wtf just happened" followed, and I have a much less impressive than I'd hoped bruise/dent on my face. There you go, facial wound.

It's time to complain about Niwano Hana

"What?" you gasped, shocked at the title you just read. "Complain about Niwano Hana? Are you mad?"

Yes, yes I am, but not for that reason. The complaint I have about (nearly) everyone's favorite sushi bar is that it sets the bar so goddamn high it makes going to other sushi restaurants something of a problem. I have been to most of the other sushi places in DE and, frankly, I've never had better sushi than I have at Niwano Hana (or NH) as I shall refer to it from now on.

Now many restaurants (Kyoto, Utage, Mikimotos, etc) are prettier and have better bars. Kyoto especially is a gorgeous very Japanese styled building. NH is a cheap carpet, cheap chairs and tables, cheap Japanese-like styled place. But as unimpressive as the ambiance in NH is (I've heard music from FFX there for Christ's sake), the important part, that being the food, is fucking awesome.

This isn't to say that Kyoto's food is bad. In fact I can't say I've had a bad sushi meal at any other sushi place (other than Jasmine, but that's "Asian Fusion" or whatever the fuck). In fact at most sushi restaurants I get that same glazed-eye beatific look on my face as I savor every last bite of my sushi. The problem is that no matter where I go, I look at the price of what I want, wince, and then think to myself, "Wow, I could have gotten this exact meal for like $7-10 less at NH."

And it doesn't end at food! Green tea at NH is free, and the real drinks (e.g. beer) are surprisingly reasonably priced as well. They don't have a particularly impressive bar, but their beer is decent, their plumb wine palatable, and their sake isn't the radioactive draino that sake often is.

So basically my complaint is that, sans the atmosphere, Niwano Hana is the perfect sushi place! I've occasionally had bad service there, but I've had FAR worse service at other places. NH is just so chill, cheap, and flavorific that it makes it hard for me to want to go to other sushi bars! Curse me for finding the best sushi bar ever.

Trinity Blood: a disappointment

Trinity Blood is a series rife with drama and frustrations, and that started before I even started to watch the fucking series. I bought the series from my favorite bookstore and went home to watch it, and just as I was getting into it I got a lovely disk read error. I sighed and prepared to clean the disk to get whatever fingerprint or smudge was on my disk, but was shocked to find that brand new, out of the wrapping, there was a MASSIVE scratch on the damnable disk.

I went back to my bookstore and found out that, because the particular series release that I had purchased was no longer in stock, that meant that it was no easy task for the disks to be replaced and that my bookstore buddy would have to eat the cost of it. Fuck that. So I contacted the company directly and asked them to replace their shitty disks, and they responded saying that the place I bought it from would replace the disks, which I already know wasn't true. I started to worry that I really would have to let my bookstore buddy eat the cost of.

Then the brilliance of "what about the Internet, you sodding git," hit me. I have friends. They have DVD burners. I legally own the series. Asking a friend to give me a "backup"/replacement disk as downloaded from the internet was much smarter. In fact, when I did get my replacements, from a lovely friend indeed, the quality of those disks was higher than the unscratched normal disks in the series. Huzzah!

Now, a proper review of the anime. It starts slow. The general world is that after Armageddon, a proper end of the world with nukes and everything, the world goes on with the only notable difference from before being that there is now a vampire society for some reason that is at odds with the Vatican, the hope and the light of the human existence.

The main character, Father Able Nightroad, is a sort of helpless whiny twit who is still somehow endearing even as he's annoying. He attempts to help people without a huge amount of success, and there are other Vatican agents who are cool but more or less there to fill out the character list without ever actually getting any decent story about any of them. Oh, and for some reason Father Able is also a Crusnik, which is called the next step up from vampires, but has something to do with nanomachines and... Frankly it doesn't make a lot of goddamn sense, but he looks cool and kicks ass, so that should make up for some of the other details of the series.

Or not. This anmie suffers from a slew of over used anime mainstays. For instance, there is a beautiful female agent of the Vatican who looks like she's smuggling watermelons most of the time. There is a section with an incredibly irritating young girl with a mysterious past, woooo. All of the important characters are rather that being one dimensional are we'll say 1.1 dimensional; there's a pretense of characterization but in reality they remain the face with recognizable hair and a weapon that they were and that they always will be. Every weapon that is ever fired has a twenty second power up time and looks like it's becoming a sucking void of doom rather than a giant beam weapon. And, of course, the Father Able, the Crusnik, only uses his powers at a certain level for a while, but then after he updates, he only uses the second power; it all just feels tacked on and useless.

However, even for all my prattling on about the downsides, there are good things to this anmie. It is beautiful, and I mean really beautiful. They mix standard animation and computer generated animation very skillfully, and the one dimensional character are always drawn very well and the animation itself is smooth and elegant in its simplicity. The voice acting, though VERY annoying at times, is generally superb with interesting and talented actors for almost every character. And the music is sublime. My only complaint with the music is that it often feels out of place for the scene the music is in, but it is almost always beautiful and pleasant to listen to.

Ultimately, without giving too much away, the end of the series is VERY unsatisfying, even for an anime. I enjoyed the series generally, but too much was left wide open with not even a vague attempt to tie up loose ends. The series ends on a loose end. After having watched Samurai 7, a particularly good anime, this was lacking. So borrow it from me if you're interested, but I'd skip it if I were you.

Razzin' frazzin' Wall of Force

Something which I still have not quite learned correctly about my D&D groups is: Never underestimate their ability to take a carefully planned encounter and kick it to the curb and then curb stomp it in ways I didn't plan for. This evening, for instance, had one of those exact scenarios. Bear with me now...

The enemies: Juggernauts, huge living stone constructs with six arms that would punch the shit out of anything in reach before running it over and potentially killing it right then and there.

The scenario: I admit I was stealing shamelessly from a Final Fantasy game, but there was a narrow passageway totally blocked off by the two huge monsters and they were going to slowly roll down the passage way and the players would be encouraged to fight balls almost literally to the wall trying to kill the creatures before they inevitably reached the players and started raping them with giant stone dildos (not literally, but you get the idea).

How they fucked it up: I totally forgot some of the spells that my players had access to, and of course that was the first spell that appeared, the Wall of Force. It was large enough that the Juggernauts couldn't get around it, over it, under it, and because the wall is largely unbalancing to the game, they couldn't destroy it either. So what was going to be a quick but nerve wracking game of "can we kill them fast enough" turned into an annoying game of, "we're killing them slowly at a distance while they're slowly killing us back." Wars of attrition, while effective, are sadly boring.

What I could have done differently: To be fair, nothing. I could have given the Juggernauts the disintegrate spell, but that's a one shot kill spell that would have made the creatures that much more dangerous. I could have given them short distance teleport spells, but that's really defeating the purpose of the monsters and really stretching what they're supposed to be able to do. If they weren't on Mechanus (the Clockwork Paradise, basically a plane of existence entirely composed of gears and cogs) I could have just had someone dispel the damn wall, but they're stuck on Mechanus for the time being and I'm just boned.

However, all in all, this doesn't bother me. One encounter doesn't go well? Not a huge deal. They've been through two now, and I have about a dozen left for them. Some aren't nearly as impressively planned out, others are even more planned out, but none of that matters. I had a blast tonight! Everyone, even if they were irritating the shit out of me by making my well planned combat backfire in my face, really seemed to enjoy the whole night. Even the messed up fight provided plenty of the other best part of the game: comedy. They hate Mechanus, but it gives me free reign to do weird and amusing things to them, and they definitely appreciate the new landscape in which to struggle and fight. And, much like the Hokey Pokey, that's what it's all about.

Also, making puns while in a plane entirely composed of gears cogs, is really easy! "Come on guys, let's get it in gear!" "That is a giant cog." "These cogs are making me testy!" Can you think of worse gear and cog puns than my tired ass? Do let me know!

I wish my hobbies paid more

Unless I somehow actually get my book published, all my writing has thus far netted me precisely $0.00 profit. I've written hundreds of thousands of words, many of them in a row, some even in stories and books, and gotten nothing but a warm sense of satisfaction for my efforts. Dungeons and dragons is worse. Considering that I'm running a game wherein we play maybe five hours a week, I'm putting probably ten to twenty hours of work into the game almost every week. This week alone, totally while not at work, ahem, I've spent about ten hours designing a single encounter that my players will probably blow through in an hour or so. My only consolation is that there's a pretty good chance that I'll total party kill them at least once. Kung Fu? All told, I probably only spend four or five hours a week on Kung Fu, but I actually pay money to do that! My hobbies aren't money making.

The truly sad part is that I probably work harder at my hobbies than I do at my job. When I do have work, I work hard and get it done. But frankly, I almost definitely have more hobby work time a week than real work time these days. I've been complaining about not having enough work for, oh, years now, and while it's getting slightly better with my latest boss, I'm still idle a lot.

My ideas for making money, like publishing my books or freelancing for D&D, keep getting shot down. Book? Publishing is very bad right now (economy) and the actual publisher I want to work with is trying not to go out of business to boot. Freelance articles for D&D? Licensing issues since if I came up with an idea that they bought, they'd own it and I'd never be allowed to use it on my own ever again. Writing for 3rd party D&D people? That's all up in the air since D&D 4.0 came out and mucked everything up. Everything I'd like to do that could actually theoretically make me money? Bang, thud, dead.

Sometimes I really hate how life goes. At least my campaign rules.

Metal ladies

I am on a mission. I need bands, fronted by women, that rock. Evanesence, Flyleaf, Lacuna Coil, etc. Unfortunately they also have to be vaguely popular as I'm trying to plug them into my personal radio stations and the one I'm using that I won't name for fear of it also being blocked by the douchebags who work here only really knows somewhat popular bands. So if you have ideas comment or email me.

Hypermilling

Another cool word for a decidedly less cool concept. Anyway, hypermilling is a fancy word to describe "driving in a manner to get the maximum amount of gas mileage out of your vehicle". I've been trying some, and only some, of the techniques, and I've found they actually can be very effective. My car theoretically gets 26/34 mpg city/highway. I'm currently averaging around 32 mpg total. That's nuts. With gas a $4 a gallon, that saves me close to $20 a month, which is small but statistically significant. Assuming your car doesn't do 26/34 (hahahahahahaha suckers), if you can improve your mpg then you're really doing yourself a favor.

So how does one hypermill? Well, firstly, you need a manual transmission car or a true hybrid to do it. These techniques work best for the hybrids, but aren't bad for manuals. There are a few things you can do in an automatic, but I don't think you'll see the impressive mpg boost I have. So anyway, here's the techniques I use based on how useful I find them:

• Accelerate gently. Yes, drive like you're old. This is probably the biggest improvement you'll see in any car, including automatics. The reason is totally physics. If you jam on the accelerator from a total stop, you're bring potentially tons of weight to a speed quickly thus using more gas to get to the speed limit. If you accelerate more slowly you're using far less gas and still getting to the speed limit (eventually anyway). Don't be a total douche and drive über slow if there's people behind you, but you don't have to try to do a 0-60 in 5 seconds every time you take off.


• Maintain steady speed.I thought this sounded like a load of hooey (or bullshit if you don't like my 50's cursing), but according to Edmunds.com (car review people) if you can maintain a single speed it will markedly improve your milage. Even better, if you have cruise control a computer will control a single speed, taking your foot out of the equation. Having tested it myself, I have to say I'm pretty damn sure this works.


• Drifting in neutral. Now we're in slightly dangerous territory, especially if you're stupid enough to try this in an automatic, but this works wonders. If you're on a hill, and you're going down said hill with your foot on the gas the whole way, or using your engine to control your speed, you're using gas. If you drop your car into neutral and control speed with your brakes then you're using considerably less gas. You can test this by just looking at your engine's rpms. One thing worth noting is that some hypermillers say you should turn off your car when going down a hill and then kick start your car at the bottom. While this is a way to save even more gas, it's VERY DANGEROUS since most modern cars have power steering/brakes/etc which could easily get you killed if there's any kind of situation you need steering or braking for, like, oh, the bottom of a hill with a kid crossing the street. Got it?


• Sitting still? Turn off your car.While this makes some sense, there is the valid question of how much gas you're actually saving considering that, depending on the car, it can take a considerable amount of gas to start your car. The best answer I have is that if your car starts really easily, twenty seconds or more means you should turn off your car, otherwise just skip this one.


• Drafting larger vehicles, especially tractor trailors. This definitely works really, really well. It's just illegal to follow a truck really close. Though you literally can drive within six to twelve inches of a big rig and turn off your car and drift in neutral behind it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T DO THAT. So dangerous. However, following a truck at two to three seconds is still enough to get remarkably better gas mileage. So don't be a dick, but following trucks will help even if you're following at an appropriate distance. Neat.


• Lighten the load. Take every unnecessary item out of your car. Seriously. A lighter car gets better gas mileage. Granted taking ten CDs out of your car won't do shit, but if you've got extra shit you don't need in your boot (trunk), get rid of it. Some hypermillers say you should take out your spare tire and jack, as they're heavy, and rely on AAA to save you. PLEASE DON'T BE THAT STUPID. The emergency wheel is there for a very fucking good reason, leave it alone.

The only other nonsense I have tried is, as far as I can tell, either just nonsense, fucking dangerous, or gives such an imperceptible improvement, if any, that they're not worth the effort. As far as I'm concerned hypermilling should be about bang for the buck. What I've listed are the easy and relatively safe things that I do that I have found to be effective. If you're looking to save some coin, try 'em out and let me know how you do!

When it rains...

What the fuck? Isn't one enough? Do I really have to have two fucking women messing with my head? Can't it be one at a time?

Time to get drunk.

Neat sand sculpture.

Super neat sculpture.

So I enjoy sand violence. So what?

The coolest name for the lamest profession

vexillology \vek-sil-AHL-uh-jee\, noun:

The study of flags.

What the fuck? That's the single coolest sounding word of the day I've received ever. Ever! And it's the study of flags? That makes no goddamn sense. This word deserves to be about something cooler than this! Seriously.

I got the blues.... radio station

Ok, I may not actually have the blues. Yes, I am a tiny bit depressed that I'm not having much in the way of luck finding the right girl for me, and yes my whole work situation is stressing me out, and yes my book publishing situation is irritating me... Ok, so maybe I do have the blues. And I love listening to the blues. How does that make sense?

See the blues don't help people who are depressed. As much as I've paid attention, the blues songs I've listened to so far today include a man begging a woman to treat him fairly, a man complaining that the woman he loved left him for another man, a man promising that he's ready to do anything the woman he loves wants while she shuns him, a man considering suicide after ninety days of hoping his woman would come back, and a long description of what the man's night was like when his woman left him (cold and dark apparently). None of these things make me feel better about anything.

So why the hell do I listen to this music? Because I love it. My favorite kind of blues is an old black guy playing a guitar crooning about his crappy life. Why? Well, I suppose you could call me a racist fucker who enjoys the misery of black people, but really I love how much skill, how much passion is put into these songs. They may not be the best guitar players in terms of technical skill, but they make guitars sing. Combine that with a truly heartfelt story of a man having a bad day/week/month/life, and you get some really amazing music. As a person who loves death metal, punk rock, and other fast music, I guess the blues balances that shit out.