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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Madman Across the Water" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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12:05 pm
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Cosmic Encounter
I recently discovered that there is Yet Another damn version of Cosmic Encounter out. My initial reaction, based on gut feeling and then on the small blurb on Fantasy Flight's website, was that it was going to be as awful as the Hasbro/Avalon Hill version. In fact, I was surprised they'd gotten the rights to it- wasn't Hasbro going to do an expansion or something? Well, I guess not.
But, I am a completist (aside from some of the Eon expansions so far) so I went and bought the FFG version. I hadn't played it yet, but I've read the rules, alien powers, and all the cards, and I'm ready to offer an opinion. And that is- this version might be as good as the old ones. It's hard for me to say that, because Mayfair was my addiction through and after college, so I want to be a "get offa my lawn, in my day it was better!" type, but really, this version looks pretty good. I'd say 80% of the rules are the same as Mayfair's, 10% go back to Eon, and the other 10% are new but follow the right spirit. So, I thought it was time for an in depth review and comparison with the older versions.
( This is really, really long, and only of interest to people who play Cosmic. By which I mean, mostly Jay. )
A PS: I've played my first game tonight. It really feels Cosmicy. Hasbro was missing so much, only 20 powers, no flares, no moons, etc... this has flares, has 50 powers, has techs... I think in Mayfair we tended to play overly offensive games combined with random moonshots. And we had rules timing questions, which of course felt very Cosmic. ;) So yeah, I recommend it, especially if you don't have a copy of either Eon or Mayfair.
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10:33 am
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It explains so much...
http://www.netjak.com/review.php/1199 - The Law of Inverse Ninja Strength.
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12:33 am
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I have gigged
Woo. I just got back from Santa Cruz, where I had my first real gig. I just played 25 songs in front of an audience that was at least half people I didn't know. And... it went really well. We sounded really good, even. I'm excited and I had a lot of fun.
Love's Been a Little Bit Hard On Me was a crowd pleaser, especially when we told the audience they should sing along. That being followed by the Beatles' "The Night Before" had a ton of people singing along to that, too, which was unexpected and cool. People who I did not know told me that Numb was really good. (For those playing at home, that's one of our originals.)
Next time, somewhere a little closer to home, hopefully.
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12:09 am
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Amateur
This may be the best thing ever. Well, not really, but I honestly wish it was longer. Thanks, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dolohov for pointing this out to me- I'd heard of it, but hadn't actually seen it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzqumbhfxRo&NR
(What is it? It's a guy who can't play drums or piano, who videoed himself making all the various noises and notes he was going to need, and then turned it into a song entirely by editing the video.)
Current Mood:  impressed
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01:54 pm
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Weird-ass dreams
This is copied out of an email I wrote earlier today, because I am lazy.
Anyway, other than that... overslept this morning, had a weird dream
where I was basically in a cross between a LARP and that Heroes TV
show. I was one of a bunch of people who had powers, there were like
12 or so of us total, but we were split into two 'teams' or groups,
and mine was the "good" team and the other one was the bad types. My
power was something telekinetic and was duplicated on my team, which
had us suspecting that one of us was going to figure out how to do
something different with it. We were in a room, like a hotel room or
something, and the other team was next door, and I guess we'd all been
friends when all this started. One of the evil kids who had spider-man
type powers knocked on our door, and I let him in because hey, we're
the good guys, we'll give him a chance, and he came in and did
something that caused water to start spewing from the sink, and then
he laughed and left, and I was pissed.
This is when it turned into a partial LARP, there was a GM or Referee
around at one point, I asked him if I could take a bunch of pencils
and write "sharp" on them so "in-game" they'd be treated as sharpened
pencils I could telekinetically send at people.
Both teams reached wherever we were going, and I talked to some girl
that wasn't in the "game", and complained about how for our side it
wasn't actually any _fun_ because we just kept being made miserable by
the things the evil kids could get away with (like drenching us by
making our sink explode, for instance).
Then we got to our "sponsor" or something, some guy that had a mask on
(or maybe it was his face?) that looked a lot like the V for Vendetta
mask, but green... he wanted to get some pictures of him as proud
sponsor with all 12 or so of us, and then he asked me about my
complaints earlier, and I made a "T" shape with my hands to say "this
is out of character" and said I fucking hated it when I told someone
something OOC and they went on to tell other characters (refering to
the girl I'd talked to earlier, who had evidently done so), but that
yes, I didn't see how it was supposed to be any fun to be playing on
this side. And actually around here was when I found a GM and asked
about the pencils, because soon we were going to have to start
fighting the other side. And around then I woke up.
Current Mood:  hungry
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03:02 pm
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Words, words, words...
Lately on occassion I've been doing something called "Word war". Group of people all start at the same time and, for a predetermined length of time, they all write. The winner is whoever wrote the most words.
In the group I've been doing it in, out of the 3 or 4 of us I've been consistantly winning. The few times ago (4 or 5), I had no preconceived ideas of what I'd work on, and then... something just started pouring out. After 4 or 5 wars, averaging 800 words for 20 minute spans or so, I've gotten this story up to 4000 words, and I have no idea where it came from, where it's going, and it continues to surprise me as I write it.
It's also probably the best thing I've ever written. I'm not really sure what this says. But damn. 4000 words. I feel simultaneously like it's moving too fast and too slow, which probably means it's doing ok- I'll see when I actually go back and draft. But this is what doing nawrinamo must be like- plowing forward, not letting myself edit or redraft, just keep going. At this point I'm deliberately not allowing myself to think too much about it when I'm not actively writing it- I've had really good luck just seeing what comes out so far, I don't want to spoil it. If I get stuck or it starts to suck, sure, I'll think about it, but for now... I have a vague sense of where it's going and how some of it will fit together. It still feels like it's at the beginning of the story, but it's about to get to the "middle", I think. (The last 20 minute span I had expected to be taken up with an involved Council meeting, but instead the main character had a weird dream, and then talked to a friend. So that killed that 20 minute war. 815 words, though. So the council meeting... I'm deliberately not planning it, but I know that however it goes, the next stage of the story will start soon afterwards.)
It also, for once, isn't nearly as totally Zelaznyan as a lot of my short stories tend to be. It still is a little, but it doesn't jump out and slap you around this time. (At least, I don't think so.)
4000 words of totally unplanned fiction, and I reread it and actually think it's cool. That's a strange feeling. Meanwhile a story with a plot and a ton of work on worldbuilding sits there and stagnates. There's a moral here, I'm sure. (Though I do still think the worldbuilding I've done is cool, and hopefully I'll use the setting eventually.)
I don't really write that much, so having something that I'm actually interested in working on and finishing is novel (pardon me) and intriguing. I'll stick it on a website somewhere when I get the time, so people can see it. (I suppose I'll password protect it or something, since while I don't actually intend to try to publish it, one never knows.)
Arg, I just thought of a direction I could take it... must... stop... thinking about it...
*sigh* Ok, back to tedious data entry.
Current Mood:  accomplished
Current Music: Either Way, Guster
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01:14 pm
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Music meme
Number of Songs: 8501
Sort by Song Title:
First: '85 Radio Special Thank You, They Might Be Giants
Last: Zydeko, Cirque du Soleil
Sort by Time:
Shortest: Fingertips 11 - They Might Be Giants (tie with "Lose Castle, Heroes of Might and Magic II")
Longest: Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op., Beethoven
Sort by Album:
First: Neil Young, 'Decade' disc 2
Last (not including songs without album information): John Beal, Zork: Grand Inquisitor (soundtrack)
Top Five Most Played Songs:
(This is kinda nonsensical, because this is a relatively fresh install of iTunes. As such all 5 most played songs are from the same album, so I'll just put that: Guster, Ganging Up on the Sun)
First song that comes up on shuffle:
We Are the Ones, Jack Blades
Search results:
Sex - 26
Death - 41
Life - 121
Love - 242
You - 608
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04:13 pm
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Urgh
Today was supposed to be the day to clean.
Woke up at about 10am with the worst headache I've had in years. Made me miss living with people, as it took me about an hour to get to the point where I could get myself a drink to take ibuprofin. Took 2, tried to read for a bit. That lasted about 10 minutes before I decided it hurt too much. So I took a third ibuprofin and went back to bed. Lay there for a while, finally falling back asleep I think. Woke up, decided a hot bath might help, as the pain seemed to be mostly coming from very, very upset neck and shoulder muscles. Took a hot bath. Took another ibuprofin.
Went to the couch, read for a bit, fell asleep again. Woke up at about 3pm. Still have a headache, but now I can tolerate looking at a computer screen- earlier it hurt too much. Gonna take more ibuprofin in a bit. Not sure how much cleaning I'll get done today.
Hope some of y'all are having better weekends.
Current Mood: Headachy
Current Music: none
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12:13 am
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The day
So yeah, I was awakened by my property manager telling me my car had been broken into, and yeah, I'm almost definitely out $250 for the stolen amp.
But the night is clear and bright (as bright as it gets this close to cities, anyway) and I saw a shooting star. How can any day where this is true be all bad?
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Walk on the Ocean
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06:06 pm
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A gig.
I had my first gig in something like 8 years last night. Not counting doing a few songs at Dean's birthday parties at Bocce's Cellar in Santa Cruz each of the last few years. It was very, very small- really kinda a practice gig. Tiny venue, no audience to speak of, mostly people who had heard all the rehearsals.
I rented another amp and mic from the local Starving Musician and headed south, and traffic was totally fouled up from the weather. Just awful. So by the time we were all there and set up it was about an hour after our estimated start time. So we cut the set down from 20 songs to 12, and we did 'em. They went well and I had fun- took a few songs to really get into the groove, which was unfortunate given that there weren't that many songs left once we were in the groove, but so it goes. We wrapped up late, made the long drive home, stayed up too late listening to more songs to see if we could find some more to do to expand our set, and called it a night.
Then my rental car got broken into and the rented amp got stolen. So this morning was a fun collection of police reports and paperwork at the car rental place and the music rental place- which I am still expecting a phone call from about the amp. Ah well, I guess it's a rite of passage for musicians, eh?
The playing itself was a lot of fun, though, and I am looking forward to doing it again. I find that if I know a song really well, but have a cheat sheet in front of me "just in case", I'm more likely to screw up by staring at the cheat sheet. Gonna have to figure out what to do about that. The songs that I think made the biggest impression were the two with the most interesting harmonies with me and Becca: Guster's "Eden" and Brother's "The Next Time." Our versions of "Love's Been a Little Bit Hard On Me" and "Lawyers, Guns, and Money" are crowd pleasers. And our originals went over well with the people who hadn't heard them before.
Maybe I need a "musical" userpic. But then I start considering needing a paid account. :P
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11:48 am
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And while we're at it...
For those of you who read Narbonic...
( Spoilery speculation follows )
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11:26 pm
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Girl Genius
Ok. Those of you who read Girl Genius, I just feel the need to say...
What. The. Fuck??
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12:37 pm
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The best thing I've ever seen:
This is the best thing I have ever seen.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/1004061iggypop1.html
Iggy Pop's concert rider.
There are not words for how funny it is.
Also, I finished uploading my Ireland trip pictures- see previous post for URL.
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11:52 pm
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Ireland Pictures
I am finally managing to get some of these online.
http://picasaweb.google.com/madmanatw/
There will be more here as I go through them- up so far are the first two days.
Current Location: Going to bed
Current Mood:  aggravated
Current Music: Midnight Sun- Brother (internal)
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11:04 pm
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I cry with sad
I've been trying to figure out where to upload my trip pictures to. Flickr is no good, they have a bandwidth limit for uploads unless you pay for a pro account, and I just don't do enough of this to do that. I had Photobucket recommended to me, checked it out, it looks fine. But you can only upload one image at a time, and I have 496.
Aha, though: you can download Flock (a firefox based browser) and do multiple uploads through it. Great. So I download it, tell it to pick up the 496 pics, and then spend ALL DAY slowly labelling the pictures before uploading.
Then I hit upload. "There was an error retrieving your albums!" Ok... try to upload anyway. "There was an error processing your request."
No hint of what went wrong at all. No information whatsoever with which I can troubleshoot. And if I close the upload window I lose all the labels I slowly and deliberately entered in all day. If I have to do that again from scratch they will not be nearly so interesting.
So. Fuck.
I could always upload them one at a time and copy each one's label from the uploader...
*sigh*
Current Mood:  tired
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08:28 am
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Ugh, sleep
I'm not sure I can blame this on jet lag anymore, I'm just not sleeping well. :P This morning, with alarm set for 7:30, I woke up at 5 and couldn't get back to sleep at first, then there was a car alarm for a while (not actually going off, but doing the reset "beepbeepbeep" sound once ever 10 seconds or so), and then when I did fall asleep I had a series of dreams wherein I woke up and had to deal with weird stuff. In one of them I was trying to get to an email myrathi had sent me about coming to visit, but gmail was giving me badly formatted crap instead of the message; in another, leora was over and I was trying to figure out what was up with a box that we found on my desk. Finally I had a dream where I kept failing to be able to communicate with people I needed or wanted to talk to- there were two cars near me, and a redheaded woman in one of them (not sure who she was) was talking to me but I could only see her mouth the words, and then I could see in the back seat of the other car a mop of hair that I was pretty sure was lutin's, and I wanted to talk to her, but then the cars drove off.
Then my alarm finally went off and I hit snooze until 8.
Blah.
Current Location: Home.
Current Mood:  anxious
Current Music: Oh No, the Radio - Owsley
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01:43 am
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Found it!
A few weeks before the move, I bought my mom a book. I'm leaving for Nashville in the morning and wouldn't you know it, I couldn't find the book. (Also, the cats have rendered both of my suitcases unusable, which is making packing an interesting job.)
Within the past 5 minutes, I have found both the missing book AND the power cord to my computer speakers.
I am very excited about this. Able to hear my computer through something other than headphones... rapture.
I need to be awake in about 6 hours and while I've now found everything I need to pack, I haven't actually packed yet. Sleep may or may not happen.
Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Here, Luce
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02:07 am
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Sword class and afterwards
Today in sword class, Will (our teacher) was having us run through a standard drill and he wanted us to count it in 3s, like a waltz. Then he got an idea and wandered off while we swung our sticks, and he returned... with an accordian.
For the next 20 minutes we'd be swinging in time with his playing except when we were just laughing too much to do so.
Afterwards I went out with some friends and we spent waaaaay too much time modifying lines from various books, plays, and songs (the first hour was entirely the Bible, but then we branched out) replacing suitable nouns with the word "goldfish."
"Suffer not a goldfish to live."
The miracle of the loaves and the goldfish.
On the first day, God created goldfish, and he looked upon it and saw that it was good. On the second day, he divided the goldfish from the goldfish...
it was remarkably silly, and cheered me up a good bit.
Current Mood: sleepy
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01:43 pm
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A very strange dream
Ok, my dreams may not be as strange as ursalav's, but still, this one was pretty good.
( My dream, cut for spoilers for the Lucifer graphic novels. Really. I told you they were weird. )
Current Location: Work.
Current Mood: headachy
Current Music: Awaken (demo)
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10:54 pm
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There's a Dragonlance Movie in the works?
That makes my brain hurt. Worst of all because I'll probably end up seeing it.
Keifer Sutherland as Raistlin??
At least it's animated.
Current Location: Home
Current Mood: anti-social
Current Music: Cake - Nugget
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