Ok, i know my wireless router sucks, but come on.

I'm currently sitting in my living room on the lappy (because i didn't want to sit at my desk). From here I have access to two wireless networks: mine and one i presume to be a neighbor's.

It should be noted that the nearest neighbor's house is about 30ft away from ours, and the lady that lives there is in her 70's. I wouldn't figure on her being the most likely neighbor to have a wireless network. The next closest house is currently vacant and for sale. Our other neighbors are probably 70ft away or more... ...and yet here, in *my* living room, the strongest wifi signal is *not* the one coming from 20ft away in my office...

Maybe I should add a new wireless router to my christmas list...

~PS

So I've been told I should make a christmas list and post it here. Problem is, I've found i'm expensive - especially with respect to the budgets of people who are actually likely to see this. There just isn't a whole lot that I explicitly *want* that doesn't cost a lot :-(.

That said, i'm pretty easily amused. There's plenty of stuff *not* on this list that would keep me entertained for hours. You know, like bubblewrap. Yeah.

I don't expect to get a lot from this - it's mostly for ideas & posterity.

Anyway, here's my best attempt at a conglomerate (though by no means comprehensive) wish list:

Some Videos:
trigun box set *awesome* anime (aa)
cowboy bebop box set also awesome anime (aaa)
red vs blue box set :-D (ohpleaseohplease??)
little nemo (as opposed to *finding* nemo) - difficult to find
my fair lady i have this on vhs, but would really like the dvd
the pirates who don't do anything (if only because it has a veggie commentary)
stargate sg-1 seasons 4-10
star wars original trilogy box set
talespin, season 1 (yay for cartoons!)

Some Cd's
the decemberists: castaways and cutouts
the academy is...: almost here, santi
iron & wine: in the reins w/calexico, our endless numbered days
flogging molly: drunken lullabies, swagger
margot & the nuclear so and so's: the dust of retreat
my chemical romance: the black parade
the weakerthans: fallow, left & leaving
yellowcard: paper walls

Books:
animal life (american museum of natural history) (i saw this at books-a-million and it was *awesome*)

Wii Stuff:
wii points (as many as you can give me, guys...)
wii classic controller(s)
mario galaxy
metroid prime 3
other fun-looking wii games...

Camera Gear:
money for camera gear (flash, lenses)
camera battery
cf card (sandisk extreme III 4gb)
cable release

Misc:
golf practice balls (foam, textured)
legos (particularly Creator sets)
boss eq pedal
new apple keyboard (wired)
airport extreme base station (nice replacement for my sucky router)

I might add some stuff to this later, but that's about all i can think of... ...as if it weren't way too much already


~PS

Ever have a very specific and vivid memory of something that never happened? Specifically, ever remember doing something that you never actually did? I do. In fact, I *very clearly* remember doing something that circumstance indicates I never actually did.

See, I'd have bet anything that I both received new license tags for the jeep *and* put said license tag on. Despite these memories, it seems this didn't actually happen. On top of that, after a couple hours of searching, we were unable to find the renewed registration & tag, which we think we received(...?). Either we never did receive them, or they accidentally got thrown away at some point or something... ...and somewhere along the line, a memory of this situation being taken care of was fabricated from thin air.

The problem here is, the jeep is now two months expired...so we get to call the county clerk on monday and find out what we can do to get this taken care of asap....you know, so we can legally drive places. Ugh.

~PS

Photos from saturday's awesomeness are now up in Ginger's Birthday Party (Steampunk Mystery) gallery.

I thought it would be fun to convert this group shot to sepia such that it looks old in keeping with the steampunk/victorian/19th century theme. My original intent was to do this for individual photos, but i really don't have very many and i'm not even close to having a shot of everyone, so i decided to just do it to this one.

Anyway - enjoy. :-)

~PS

Despite (or perhaps because of) its obviously secular source, this is a great read and something those that claim to follow Christ can take something from.

Think about it.

God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule

~PS

Last night was Ginger's birthday party. I haven't mentioned much of anything about this on the blog because the details of the party were to be kept secret from Ging as long as possible.

The idea we had was for a murder mystery party with a steampunk flair. We all made steampunk-ish costumes and Rucht customized a murder mystery party kit to be a little more in this vein.

In case some of you don't know the general idea behind a 'murder mystery party' game, it's something like this: The host invites a group of guests who are all given a character role for the evening. One of them is the murderer. Through the course of the evening, the participants interact in character and will discover various details and secrets pertaining to the other characters which may make them seem more or less likely to be the culprit. At the end of the night, all the evidence is compiled, speculations are made, and the truth is revealed.

Ours was great fun. For the most part we were all roleplayers, but i don't think many of us have done much resembling larp (live action role playing). The costumes people made/assembled for this thing were great and i thought everyone did a awesome job of acting in character throughout the evening (granted there were digressions, but they were all amusing and didn't detract from the experience too much in my mind). This is definitely something I want to do again. The GM in me has decided it would be a fun thing to actually create one (though it would be a lot of work) and i've begun kicking around a few random ideas along this line.

I did break character from time to time to take some pictures. I think i got a few good ones - perhaps not as many as i would have liked, but I didn't want to devote a lot of time to that for this particular event. We did a nice group shot. As of the time of this blogging, i haven't gone through them all and I'm currently in erwin so i can't be working on that now. They should be up in a new gallery in a day or so. I'll update this post when they are.

~PS

I'm currently sitting in our church's sanctuary while Sheri directs here choir practice. I had to get up at 8:30 on a saturday. Blah. Also, my left leg hurts for some unknown reason. Yeah, yeah. Complain, complain.

Anyway, gas is down to $1.99/gal here in Erwin. As I've previously declared, I stop complaining about it when it drops below $2.


One of the reasons I so disliked getting up at 8:30 this morning so much is because we had a rather late gaming session last night (not that i would have wanted to get up that early on a saturday *anyway*). The party wound up in a rather large and somewhat pivotal combat and we didn't want to break off in the middle of that. It was worth staying up for though.

As it turned out, we only had 4/6 of our players last night. We *thought* we were going to have 5/6, but another player had a minor crisis to attend to and had to bow out at the last minute. Since the rest of us were there already and wanted to game, and since 4 is a decent number, we decided to play anyway. I generally don't like to play with more than one player absent, but the way scheduling gets with a 6-player game, I'm starting to think the options are accept some absences when necessary, or just don't play - and the lower the acceptable number of players, the more likely it'll happen. I'm completely open to suggestions from the player on this (as always), but i may lower my 'gaming threshold' to 4 players in the interest of actually playing. When there's a month between sessions, i tend to get out of 'the groove' and it usually takes me an hour or so into the session just to get back in tune with the world & what's going on...and when you're only meeting once a month(ish) for a few hours, you don't get very far when your gm is constantly 'loading'...

Despite the fact that we missed a couple of players (and we *did* miss them), I think it was a good session. The party accomplished something important, we laughed at a lot of in-game jokes, and all the players seemed to be enjoying the game. Even Nick commented that the last, monumental encounter had been particularly interesting & fun - and that meant a lot to me. I have a lot of fun coming up with interesting/intricate/bizarre scenarios for the players to encounter & deal with, but my biggest goal is always to make sure the players enjoy the game. When they really seem to be having fun in a session, it's a success. I consider myself to be a good gm, and i think my game and the world is interesting, believable, and fun to play in - and i do take some amount of pride in it - but some of the players are harder to read than others and I can't always tell if they're really into it. Sessions like last night's are good ones. :-)


As for today - we have some errands to run after this choir practice wraps up, and then we're heading over to Nick's where he's going to make us all some burgers for *his* birthday. Apparently, he insisted on this. I'm not gonna complain. I think the plan is to spend the evening playing board games. :-)

We've now officially entered the Season of Celebrations - we have a ton of birthdays interspersed with the upcoming holidays. Very busy time of year, but in a good way overall.


~PS

I couldn't not post this...



:-D

~PS

Last night was the much-anticipated birthday/costume party for our friend McKenna. It was *lots* of fun. There were quite a few people there, and a lot of good costumes. Ginger's steampunk outfit was awesome, and Patrick's nobleman/wizard(?) costume was most impressive. Finn, of course, looked adorable in his King Arthur costume, and I had a good deal of fun taking pictures of him. I got a lot of compliments on my Vash the Stampede costume as well, which was nice. I don't think more than a handful of people actually recognized the character, but a lot of people liked the coat. :-)

The evening consisted of some most enjoyable socializing, some tasty, tasty fondue, and some other fun & games including Apples to Apples (always a favorite) and Rock Band (note: I can *not* play that game).

Near the end of the evening, we played a rousing game of Taboo. It should be noted that some of the participants were somewhat more tipsy than others - which, of course, added to its amusing nature. Also, there were at least two instances that words must have been guessed via telepathy or some other form of ESP. The first was Rucht's "Uhm...you might see this in a zoo..." to which Sheri quickly shouted "A zebra!" which, remarkably, was correct... ...but even more astounding than that was Nick's clue which began "So, there's this guy-" and was never actually finished because McKenna immediately yelled "Houdini!!" before he could finish coming up with the rest of the clue. Yes, the answer *was* Houdini. No, we still can't believe it either.

At one point during the game, there was a brief intermission caused by the eruption of an exceptionally brief sabre duel between Queen McKenna and the Pirate-Captain Nick. I wish I could have gotten a few pictures of this, but it literally lasted about 3 seconds, and by the time i got my camera back out, I had time for only a few poorly-composed shots before Captain Nick's weapon was sundered at the hilt and the blade ricocheted off a nearby lamp and "impaled" poor William, who had been napping on the floor nearby. After his defeat, Nick commented that clearly McKenna's blade was superior in its forging, and it was postulated that perhaps it was created by a Spaniard. Heh.

It was a great time. We need excuses to do stuff like that more often. I put up some of the best pictures i took at the party when we got home last night. They're in the McKenna's Birthday Party gallery.

~PS

So yesterday was Halloween, and as of about noon, we had no plans at all. See, we have a costume party for a friend's birthday *tonight*, so dressing up might have seemed a little redundant (plus, I would have wanted to save my costume anyway). There were several things we could have done, but not really grabbed our interest.

Still, it didn't seem right not to hang out with one's friends on the 'Ween, so we decided we'd get together & do...something. It ended up like quite a few of our weekends, but that's not a bad thing. We went out to eat at Cootie Browns, headed over to Mr. K's to see if anything looked interesting, and then went back to Nick's place to watch a movie.

Our cinematic choices for the evening were a horror movie called The Descent and an anime called Steamboy. Despite the fact that it *was* Halloween and one can make a strong case for the watching of scary movies on Halloween, we decided to watch Steamboy. Ginger & Sheri aren't overly fond of scary movies on the whole, and decided I'd rather watch the anime as well, so, despite some attempts to count a vote for Abby, I think it was decided our way 3-2.

I think I give Steamboy about 3.5 stars. It was quite beautifully drawn, and the camera-effects emulation (sweeps & pans, etc) looked really cool. The story was interesting (if not overly deep) and I liked the fact that most of the movie kept you unclear as to who were the 'good guys' and who were the 'bad guys'. Also, it was about the most steampunk anime I've ever seen, and we've been conversing a fair bit out steampunk recently.

Still, it had some typical anime flaws. Character development was a little shallow (not surprising as it usually takes a series about 12 episodes to established a character). Also as Nick pointed out, a couple of the characters had more than their fair share of monologues - often in their own static timestreams (ala "hurry up get out of here! - but let me give a 15 minute soliloquy first!"). A couple of the more villainous characters seemed to pop in and out - seeming very important in some short scenes, but completely insignificant (and absent) for the bulk of the movie. And, perhaps the most typical aspect: exceptionally bizarre and wildly inaccurate interpretations of thermodynamics. But those are *fun* and hey, it's a movie.

So while we did enjoy poking fun at it, I still enjoyed the movie for what it was.

~PS