Society for Aesthetic Deletions

Okay, time to get back to starting the blog. Three weeks after the disaster. It seems so long ago, but also so recent.

I'd been meaning to restart my blog, and the WTC, Pentagon, and Pennsylvania distasters gave me reason, but I kept putting it off. No more. I will write, drivel it will be, but I will write.

Or at least I will try.

So why is this entitled the Society for Aesthetic Deletions, especially in light of the National Tragedy? Well, that's what sfad stands for. My husband used that as a "company name" every time he installed software. Says it's from Heinlein, and maybe I'll eventually read some Heinlein some day. Or maybe not. Anyway, it was something he came up with, and I gave him this domain name for our anniversary. What a great wife I am!

lunchtime. Later.

A friend and co-worker just came back from a business trip to New York City. He took some photos of the buildings and the skyline with our digital camera, and I downloaded them and saved them as Photoshop jpgs for him. They couldn't get close; they didn't live in the area. But they took some good pictures. I'm going to see if I can put some of them up here.

Found a transcript of James Marsters' Q&A from GenCon. One of the questions is mine (it's pretty far down, look for it summarized as: DOES HE WATCH MUCH TV OR MOVIES OR READ ANY BOOKS? I had that and another in mind, but when the Passions question came up, I had to ask what else he did if he didn't watch Passions.

Buffy was really good Tuesday night. I can now say I am pleased at how they brought her back.

I'm starting a game on DreamLyrics. I hope I can keep the game going. I get in moods, where I am all excited about running something, and then the excitement fades. So far, it hasn't faded much yet, but it's only been a couple days. See me in a month when it's actually work, and then ask me again. I'll have WEF, ATF, and this new game going. But I do feel a need to have another creative outlet, at least right now.

New York City - Changed

Here are the promised photos taken by a co-worker.

Hobbit Name Generator. Just call me Ruby Hardbottle.

I just found out that Wil Wheaton has an account on /., and posts comments often. Even intelligent ones!

How cool is that? His site is slashdotted now, since they're going to be doing an interview with him.

Finally updated portions of my website, so you won't get the directory listing. I still need to do that for the rpgs section of my site, but that'll come eventually.

Been reading about other weblog possibilities, like greymatter. But for now, I think I'm fine with blogger. It does what I need it to do, and with running three (yipe!!) games, I don't have time to fiddle, or something will suffer.

I also added some navigation buttons to most of the subdirectory pages. The Mall of Julia page and the 2nd Floor rpg page won't get those, but the rest should. Color will be difficult, because most of the other pages have odd colors. But I've gone with a red icon/text, which will cause problems only on my Aberrant page (which was also a blog), which hasn't been updated in forever. It doesn't matter now, that game will be ending soon. It may start again at a future date, but who knows?

Right now, I'm also getting ready for a new game on Monday nights. Pat's going to be running a Forgotten Realms D&D 3e game. Lou will be starting up an Aberrant game of his own once the Thursday game ends, but this one will be every other Tuesday. Got a concept already, and I'm very glad we talked him out of his original concept for how the game will begin. That started at ACN, and continued on the way home.

Lou's mom asked him yesterday if we'd be willing to use up some of our vacation next year doing something. We go to the Cape with them every year for a weekend in February/March, as part of a Christmas present. This past year they hinted at possibly going somewhere else. I'm willing to burn a few more days of vaca, especially since we're not going to ACN next year (Lou doesn't need to go as Nine Princes in Hong Kong ended this year). I was hoping to maybe make ACUS, but if we go somewhere else that's cool, I'll deal.

Enough blathering.

Watched West Wing last night. Lou got hooked last year, I'm sorta sucked in.

But I was cheesed last night at the end, the whole apology thing. It was mentioned earlier, but unless I missed something, I never saw anyone mention it to Bartlett, so for him to pick that out of thin air and apologize at the end just made me so pissed. It was perfectly scripted, at just the right time to pull everyone together -- it was just too staged. Ah well, maybe it's just the cynic in me coming to the fore.

I much prefer Buffy anyway, and what they're doing this year is just fantastic. I could have dealt with the first two episodes being squished into one; it felt too drawn out to me. But they're still a lot better than a lot of dreck that's on these days.

I have only had three character concepts for my new game, and I'm bummed. I was hoping for more. I still have a few more days until my deadline, but there was such original overwhelming interest, I'm thinking I just suck. My teasers must have been too confusing. I didn't want to give out a lot of details, but if I don't get any more responses, I may have to give out more.

Make that two character concepts for TBE. One of my potential players hadn't joined DreamLyrics, and since he found out you had to pay for DL, declined to join. Ah well. Two is good. I can handle two.

Well, I got all the character concepts in that I wanted. 13 all totalled, not counting the one guy who bailed. So I decided to expand my group from 6 to 8 players. But making that one last cut was a killer. So I decided to set a deadline, of October 31, for character sheets to be in. And if I don't have all the sheets in, I go to my waitlist. I have at least one person I'd love to have in, maybe two more. That'd make three college students in the game (not the players, the characters), which was one of the reasons I was hesitant on one of the characters.

So now I have four character sheets in, and four remaining. I also have the sheet of the first guy on the waitlist. He's very anxious to play. I'm going to start at least three of the people in threads this weekend; more if I get other character sheets in by then.

But tonight, it's time to run my D&D 3E game, so I've got to think about what evil I want to befall them. I came up with some good ideas yesterday on what's happening right now, so we'll see how it goes. I'm going to be missing at least two players tonight, alas. Ah well, c'est la vie.

I'm working on a new section for ATF as well, one with the answers to the quiz questions on it. So a page for each character, with some of the vital bits they might want up and will let me publish. And I need to redesign the graphics for the navigation. I added one in later (the game summary one), and you can tell. So I have to redesign them all using the same program. I'm sure the original ones were in Paint Shop Pro from home, and the later one was from Photoshop at work. But that'll be up hopefully within a few days.

I also need to get back to working on my WEF page. I guess I'm going to go with an all black background. I may play around with the logo text not on black, to see if I can find a non-black background the shadow works on. But we'll see.

Ian got adopted! By two adorable kittens.

Hack (ne Herbie) and Velvet (neé Peaches) are teaching Ian what it means to be owned by cats. Well, that's another one down. Jack got adopted just over two years ago.

Wil Wheaton's interview on /. Egads, this guy is just so cooool...

I'm hoping to get it for a Christmas present this year. If not, I may pool Christmas and birthday money to get one after Christmas. We have too many shows to tape, and since we upgraded to digital cable, we can't program our box to automatically switch channels to another one to tape the next show.

Which means our annual trip to North Carolina for Thanksgiving is going to be a time of little or no recording. Which is a MAJOR bummer, but we'll just have to deal.

Or set up a tape schedule with friends, to get them to tape some shows while we tape others. Hmm...

When is The Tick supposed to start, anyway? Oh, thank $diety, November 8th. About frelling time!