short takes

Note to anonymous driver: if you're going to ignore your stop sign while coming so close to hitting a pedestrian that your car brushes clothing, you should at least have the decency not to glare at said pedestrian. It's times like this that I long for ammunition -- perhaps a paint gun in the coat pocket, since real projectiles would be problematic.

In the "people with too much time on their hands" department, Lego Rubik's Cube Solver (link from dyanearden).

What's with all the spam lately about cleaning one's colon? I didn't realize that our punctuation had become dirty. It's probably a secret plot by the commas.

"Take one pill every six hours". Right -- whom are they kidding? Try "take one pill when you get up and one at bedtime, and space the other two as proportionally as you can". I've got to believe that that level of flexibility exists for most things.

Now that it's cold, Erik has taken to sleeping on top of the bedroom radiator. I understand the appeal of direct heat, but I would have thought it would be more comfortable with a radiator cover. Less lumpy, for one thing. But he shuns the covered radiators, which make up the majority in the house, for that one -- even in the daytime, when there's no argument based on proximity of his people. (Well, person. They are unambiguously my cats, not our cats.) Embla, on the other hand, prefers the cushioned window seats over the radiators in the living room, and Baldur is probably too fat and lazy to try any of them.

The talmud says the Almighty wears t'fillin -- obviously metaphorically, though the discussion doesn't actually bring that out. The bulk of the discussion concerns the texts that are within them. The question of regular t'fillin vs. Rabbeinu Tam is not addressed. :-)

Giant Eagle normally uses blue plastic bags, which is helpful because the city mandates blue plastic bags for recycling and they're hard to find otherwise. During most of October Giant Eagle was using orange Halloween bags instead, and I depleted my stash of blue bags at the time. Now I find that they have switched to white "winter" bags, presumably for at least all of December. I have enough blue bags saved up, but I wish Giant Eagle hadn't abdicated its responsibility to the community. :-)

I've never tried soy milk before (is it supposed to be completely non-dairy?), but was attracted to the "Silk Nog" -- particularly by the implication of "eggnog", one of my vices, and the nutrition information (90 cal/serving vs 200-300 for the real thing). Verdict: inspired by eggnog, clearly different, will drink.

Current (baked) salmon optimization for simplicity times taste: put salmon filet on large piece of foil; mix equal parts sour cream and spicy brown mustard (the type of mustard is important) and spread over; seal salmon in foil and bake until done.

More food bits: matar paneer tonight because it's been too long; my turn to bake for the kiddush on Saturday (ginger cookies, maybe?); broccoli with garlic sauce for the choir dinner Monday. Maybe the veal-cranberry stew for Shabbat lunch? Don't know about Shabbat dinner yet; inspiration is invited to strike before tomorrow's trip to Kosher Mart.

RPGs and shared-world fiction

I enjoy playing in role-playing games like D&D. This is despite the fact that I am not a very good role-player, though I would like to get better. (I started out as a munchkin, back in the high-school days, and it took some years to learn that there was more to it than that.)

Ralph's game is the first I've played in for more than ten years. It's also the first game that clearly has a Story; the others have been collections of adventures, but if there was an overall theme it eluded me. (There was one other game where it looked like there could have been an overall story, but the campaign shut down relatively early so I never found out.)

Playing in a game with an overall story must be kind of like writing in a shared-world anthology. Everyone participates and affects the course of action, and everyone is responsible for sticking to the canon. It's different from writing in someone else's universe, though, like writing Star Trek novels or fan fiction, because the creator is right there with you in the shared world.

For reasons I no longer remember, I decided that my character in this game would keep a journal. (Ralph had just set up an LJ community for game stuff. I think I wrote the first entry on a whim and later decided to keep doing it, based in part on positive feedback from Ralph and a couple other players.)

Initially, that journal let me work out character background -- stuff that didn't really affect the story per se, but was part of the character. Over time, of course, I've been (trying to) record my character's take on the world around her, and sometimes as part of that I invent details that never happened in the game. Ralph has been cool with that, and he's been playing along by giving me extra non-game character moments.

This aspect of it has enhanced my enjoyment of the game more than I thought it would. Part of that is undoubtedly that I'm a much better writer than I am a speaker -- I can be slow to realize things, so the character journal gives me a chance to say things I didn't think of during the game session. Another part of it is that writing fiction is pretty unusual for me, so it's (if you'll pardon the expression) novel. And part of it is probably that Ralph trusts me with that small part of the world (and I know he's reacted to things I've written with tweaks to the game at times). All in all it's been pretty neat, and I think I'll be a little sad when the story (and thus the campaign) ends.

Now if I can just keep the character from getting killed by a vampire or something... :-)