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ralphmelton
Feb. 9th, 2004 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioProximate cause: it was on sale. :-)
I enjoyed listening to the hammer dulcimer, along with bunches of other folk instruments. (I liked harps, too. Still do.) I thought the hammer dulcimer was neat, and something I might be able to learn to play, but dulcimers started at about $350 and that was an awful lot of money to me at that time for something I wasn't sure I could actually play. (I was ok, but not good, at the mountain dulcimer I won in a raffle. I had tried other instruments, usually not successfully. The mountain dulcimer has little in common with the hammer dulcimer, though, so I didn't know how much to count that success.)
So there I was, walking through a local festival with a couple friends, and we came to the booth of an instrument-maker. One of my friends knew him, so we stopped to talk. He was targetting people just getting started -- these weren't the instruments you were going to eventually take onto a stage and he knew it, but they were competently made and would get you started.
His hammer dulcimers weren't much cheaper than Dusty Strings', so I looked them over but didn't buy. He commented that he was going to stop making hammer dulcimers because they just weren't selling; he really specialized in $50 mountain dulcimers, not more pricy instruments, and these were his last two hammer dulcimers. One of the people in our group -- who had not previously shown any interest that I knew of -- asked about close-out pricing.
The vendor looked at the two of us and said "I'll give you both of them for the price of one". So Steve and I looked at each other, shrugged, and pulled out our checkbooks. And that's how I got my first dulcimer.
It didn't take me long to realize that this was in fact an instrument I could play competently, and a few years later I upgraded. Steve lost interest after several months. Our two dulcimers went on to other people who weren't sure they wanted to take up the dulcimer; one has worked with it a fair bit and the other hasn't (that I know of). Par for the course. :-)
2. What foods, if any, do you particularly miss from your pre-kosher days?
Bacon (the fake stuff isn't the same). Eel, as instantiated at sushi bars. And Mexican food with meat in it; the fake meat, or tofu, just isn't a good substitute for beef or chicken. Those are the biggies.
I wasn't a big pork fan in general, so that was ok. I liked bacon a lot and thought ham was good, but didn't like pork chops or roasts. And while I liked shrimp, it wasn't a major need and it didn't extend to more general shellfish desires.
I also miss being able to order meat in restaurants, but that's not about specific dishes so much as general constraints on the menu options. Fortunately I like fish, so I'm not stuck with vegetable salads. (And even those are hard to find sometimes! I feel sorry for vegetarians trying to cope with typical restaurants.)
3. What's the scariest experience you're willing to talk about in this forum?
Let's see. I don't have any obvious "worst scare ever" moments, like crazy people running toward me waving AK-47s or the like. (That's not a complaint. :-) ) I've had some bad scares in a number of categories -- interpersonal relationships (which I don't think I'll talk about in a public entry), driving, doing risky things, etc -- but it's hard to compare from one category to another. So I'll talk about my biggest driving scare, which will probably sound pretty minor from the outside but was pretty freaking major to me.
Actually, now that I think about it, I've had this same experience twice, with different window dressing.
I was driving west on I-376 one summerish evening, headed toward Squirrel Hill. When I got about halfway through the tunnel, things suddenly got bright. Very bright. Painfully bright. Cannot-possibly-see bright. I briefly considered and rejected the idea that there was a large fire ahead in the tunnel; that wouldn't have been bright enough.
You see, the setting sun had hit that perfect angle to line up with the tunnel in such a way that sunlight was reflecting off the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, blinding me completely.
I was in a freaking tunnel, and getting out was only half the problem. (That same sunlight was still going to be hitting me in the eyes when I got out; I needed to get to the exit ramp.) I knew where surrounding traffic had been when last I could see. I didn't know how anyone else was reacting to this blinding light. Were people slowing down? Was I going to rear-end the guy in front of me? Should I slow down and risk being rear-ended? (There was no way I could reach sunglasses in time to do anything useful. I wasn't wearing them because I didn't anticipate anything like this at that time of day.)
I think I ended up slowing down slightly but not much. Things got a little better when I was out of the tunnel, and I recovered enough vision to get to the exit ramp. (And once I rounded that curve things were ok.) But I drove that stretch of probably less than half a mile that felt like forever with visions of fiery crashes dancing through my head.
The other instance of this kind of problem: same tunnel, daytime, light snow on the entry side, complete white-out on the other. Very freaky. The sunlight was worse, though.
4. What technological advance do you most look forward to in the next ten to twenty years?
Better portable computing. For me this has two aspects, display and entry. (I think we'll get "always connected to the net" anyway, which is also important.)
Display: my problem is that a display that fits in a pocket is too small for me with my substandard vision. Yes, you can use large fonts -- but that results in just a few words on-screen at a time, so I would never use it to, say, read email. I'd like to have options like a fold-out screen to double or quadruple the real estate, or special "glasses" that could in theory support a virtual display comparable in rsolution to a standard monitor. Broadly, I want to be able to see enough stuff on-screen at a time to make a PDA more than a phonebook and shopping-list maintainer.
Entry: I don't want to learn a special alphabet or tap slowly on a tiny keyboard display. And while I know you can plug fold-out keyboards in for conventional typing, that's only convenient if you have a table available. Bottom line, then, I want it to recognize my own printing. Bonus points if I can buy an add-on parser to also recognize another alphabet (Hebrew).
The latter issue could easily be solved very soon given a vendor who wanted to go for that market. (If I understand correctly, the Newton did this.) I don't know if there's enough demand. I suspect there's more demand for better display solutions, but that they're harder technologically. So I don't know if this fits within the constraints of the question. (I figure direct neural implants are more than 20 years away. :-) )
5. I'll return the question, but more broadly: what would you like to get in your next RPG experience? This might include whether you'd be a player or GM, ruleset, genre, tone, character type, whatever.
I would definitely like to be a player rather than a GM. I'd possibly like to be a GM again eventually, but I don't think I have sufficient skills yet to make it interesting. Specifically, I don't think I'm good enough at world-building.
I like the fantasy millieu (sword & sorcery). Yeah, it's common and overdone and all that, but it's familiar in a way that, say, playing in Victorian England is not. I have good baseline instincts for fantasy worlds, making it easier to add on the customizations of a particular world or rule system without overloading. Alternatively, playing in a specific historical (medievalish) setting (as tweaked by magic) can work; I once played in a Norse-themed campaign that was shaping up to be great fun before things fell apart, and having a ready-made culture made the GM's life easier.
I don't really care all that much about rule set; anything that all the players (including the GM) are on board with is fine. I don't like the ultra-overly-specific-record-keeping games (like SFB, though that's not an RPG), because I think mechanics should take a back seat to story. The level of detail-tracking that was built into RuneQuest! is probably about the most I'd want to do. (You tracked usage of each skill -- bitwise, not tallying -- and your character's body was divided into regions that took individual damage and might be armored differently.)
I like story. I like having a character I can get into the head of who lives in a world I can imagine. There doesn't necessarily have to be a single Big Story that the PCs are central in, though that's nice when it works. So long as the world feels like a world, with continuity and real NPCs and legends and interesting places and so on, there's ample room to develop characters. (For example, once the Big Story of our current campaign is told, I would still be interested in side adventures in that world from time to time, because there's a lot there that we haven't explored.)
I enjoy being able to develop a character, including the sorts of extra-curricular activities I've been doing in your current game. I don't want to do exactly the same thing in the next game, because there's a risk of all my characters being basically the same. I don't know what I do want to do, though. I could see, perhaps, chronicling my character's adventures from the point of view of a third-person narrator, like a henchman who follows the character around. (Or a familiar, except I probably shouldn't play another mage right away.) So the writing would be more "observation" and less "reflection", but would still provide ways to throw in lots of little character moments.
As for what kind of character to play, I'm not really sure. I think I would have trouble playing someone whose morals are radically different from my own (e.g. an assassin) for an extended campaign, though one-shots (or few-shots) would be different. On the other hand, I want my character to be different from both me and my current character. Playing a non-human might be an interesting way to explore a different piece of a world (a different culture and background). Kevin has been doing something like that by playing a foreigner without needing to play a different race. So that could work too.
As for character class, I could easily see some sort of cleric or some sort of fighter, and I would be happy to play a different kind of mage if I could figure out something that would be very non-Larissa. Sneaky sorts, martial artists (monks), and druids don't resonate for me so much. I think once you've got a theme/world and a general set of party goals, though, the specifics of who plays which classes to balance a party have to be a group decision anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-10 01:26 pm (UTC)I've had good results using meat and tofu-based fake sour cream. It tastes pretty good. I don't know how well the fake cheese would go along with it, though -- it's one of those things I've never been able to bring myself to try.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-10 01:36 pm (UTC)