getting ready for a trip, and my journal of the past day or three

[dr4b]

Leaving for Austin in a few hours. dvarin and I are going there tonight, and we'll be coming back Tuesday evening. I debated posting my flight numbers, but eub will know them, in case anything happens to us. Our friend Oren is flying to TX from south California, and Roman is already in town since he went to Houston on Wednesday, and all. And we have tons of friends who we are supposed to visit, and play DDR with, and eat Texas BBQ with and mexican food, and maybe go dancing with, and clubbing on Sixth Street, and play board games, and do whatever. I hope it's an exciting and fun weekend. I liked Austin a lot the last time I was there... now if only I could get over flight paranoia.

Anyway... as for myself for journal-entry's sake, last night there was no Kiltie rehearsal, so I went and played D&D for most of the evening instead. We went to dinner at Union Grill first. Unlike most people who are CMU-affiliated but not ugrads, I don't mind Union Grill. I had a good salad. There were 5 of us though, and we had a cramped table and service was kind of slow. Then we met Colin (the 6th guy in our group) back at Drew's house, and watched some Muppets special on TV for like 15 minutes while cleaning up the table and all. So we got a really late start, and our session was really plot-heavy and very combat-light. It was, as Deryck put it, "one of those unavoidable plot scenes in the game where you just keep hitting the scroll button". Since Colin's character decided to go off and be "back in a minute" and get ambushed or something, we have no idea what, there was a lot of dead time, too, where we would be waiting for Drew to get back or something. We spent most of that time talking about video games. I was happy to realize that I am not the only person in the world who feels Gunstar Heroes is by far one of the few really worthy and memorable games that came out for the Sega Genesis, but I was also unhappy to realize I couldn't even remember most of the cool gun combos in it, even though at some point I played more of that game than I care to admit. Oh well. The game ran so late that I forgot to stop by Django's house and get my Sword and Fist book back, which I will need soon upon imminent levelling, but I guess I'll go back some other time.

I have this interesting thing going on this year wherein I'm playing lawful good characters in all of my campaigns, whereas last year I was playing true neutral characters. Actually, I almost always play true neutral characters. It is weird, because upon thinking about it, some of my actions were not entirely consistent with the alignment. We're currently in a city under occupation where it is against the rules of the occupying army to carry around weapons. Well, I'm a fighter - if I don't have weapons, what will I be? So I went and bought a cloak and strapped my longsword to my back to hide it, put my sling in my backpack, and put a shirt over my chain shirt... and after a LOT of prodding finally decided to hide my longbow and shield on a rooftop of a quieter part of the town. It occurs to me that my actions were sort of okay because being a good character means I should oppose evil, and the occupation is evil. However, being a lawful character means I should follow the rules, and deceptively carrying around weapons and armor that have been outlawed isn't exactly following the rules. Hmmm..

Anyway, that was D&D. Wednesday after work I went to the Church Brew Works for zephyr dinner with like ten people and had a really fun and pleasant dinner where I ate way too much food and even drank a beer (it's Octoberfest season, I'm allowed). I convinced my friend Alex to go to dinner, which is cool because I don't really see him in person all that often, though I find him to be a really funny and interesting guy in general. And since we have this whole "dinner dictator" thing with Wednesday dinners, and generally appoint someone to be dictator who hasn't been dictator very often, we appointed Alex to be dictator, which means he has to come back next week, too! Yay!

Work has been ok. I like my project and worked a lot on it Tuesday, but since then I've been sort of distracted. Wednesday all day on zephyr people discussed bioweapons and made me really paranoid, so I couldn't concentrate. Blah. At least I have Circuitry up to a decent level - from here on in everything is a feature, rather than a part of the game. Next week I plan to start writing a Dr. Mario-like game in Java...

I've been trying to play a little DDR this week to get geared up for Austin. I practiced a bunch of Maniac songs. I'm getting pretty good at "Young Forever", so now that makes like 7 or 8 maniac songs now that I can really nail down pretty well. (It's always an ego boost to be able to do that in the arcades in front of a crowd, even if I can't play every song on maniac)

I've been so lazy that I think I will just wear my Emi costume for Halloween. I was debating making another costume, but it'd take too much effort and I have no weekends before the parties I'm invited to next weekend. I do want to scour Halloween stores for stuff, though...

And there you have it. Maybe I'll be checking LJ from Austin, maybe not. Depends on who I'm staying with...

Comments

[madmadammim.livejournal.com]

I used to always play neutral good or chaotic good characters, which is boring and lame because that is closest to what I think I would be classified if I were a D&D character. True neutral has arroused some massive controversies and dissent among former playing parties of mine. Only because the kid who was playing the neutral character was a complete fuck nut and he played the character more like he was mad chaotic and we were all like 'hello?' so then we would get into these discussions about 'what is true neutral?' which was really fucking lame because they were often circutious and reached little to no conclusions, and even if we all had agreed that he was not playing the character fairly, what the hell are you gonna do about it? That's probably one of the reasons why I stopped playing D&D--lame ass bullshit among the players. But then I realize that most of the shit that ever sucked about it was just due to the people involved. I had plots last summer to try and get together an actual cool playing group (I figured at CMU this would be easy) but I never ended up doing it. I never did find anyone cool enough to DM. I didn't look very hard either though. Oh well, heh. This post was random and semi-pointless, but who the hell cares. ;) HAVE FUN IN TEXAS!

[ssaiscps.livejournal.com]

yeah, the alignment stuff always brings out the jackass in some people. one kid i knew insisted that chaotic neutral meant that he could just play the character however he wanted, whereas i said that if they wanted the alignment system to be optional, they would have. and then other people would play it like they were just crazy, which was annoying. and then you realize you've just had an emotional debate about alignments in a game, and you feel like a giant dork. at least i did.