The D&D game I play in has a definite story, and while the GM has sometimes been frustrated by unpredictable players not going in the directions he envisioned, it's a very cooperative game. We all want to tell a good story. Recently, we had every expectation of reaching a local climax with lots of drama and exposition -- and then the dice interfered.

( Read more... )

Saturday was the wedding of two friends, Krista and Ben. The short ceremony was nicely done; I hadn't realized that the groom is a preacher's kid until I saw that his father was conducting the service. Krista got a laugh by looking around the room with a glare when they got to the "if anyone has any objections..." part.

The reception had a higher ratio of SCA people to relatives than I expected. Boy, is it weird seeing SCA people in formal (non-SCA) dress. There was also the challenge of remembering people's real-world names in conversation. :-)

Just in case we didn't get enough food at the reception, there was a post-revel for some of the guests. This group seemed to include the SCA crowd and assorted friends of the bride's family who hadn't all been at the reception. (This party was hosted by the bride's mother.)

Over the weekend Dani's computer died. It had been sending up warning flares for a while, so this was not a complete surprise. So Sunday and Monday he went shopping, and to my surprise actually came home with a machine. Usually we have to special-order computers. (He had started by browsing Dell's site, but they wouldn't even ship until this coming Friday, so he decided to shop locally.) Amidst all this we learned that a party we'd been invited to on Monday, that had then been cancelled, was un-cancelled, but we found out too late to do anything about it. Oh well -- some other time.

Sunday afternoon I got a call from someone at VW who, after confirming that I've bought a car this year, asked if she could pay me $15 to take a customer survey about my experiencies. I told her I'd be delighted to do so. :-) Alas, the survey was more concerned about features than service, but that's ok too.

I began to catch up on the D&D log. (Ralph, I hope to have something posted in the next several days. Sorry for the delay.) I've commented before about how I enjoy the shared-world-fiction aspect of this.

I also pulled together some notes for tomorrow night's Worship meeting, where I'm going to give a summary of this summer's Sh'liach K'hilah program. Half the members of the committee have asked me about this individually, so I don't think people will mind spending meeting time on it. :-) Meanwhile, I've learned that the winter weekend session will be in LA and that it appears it won't actually cost an arm and a leg to get there.

We've been watching DVDs of Babylon 5 and West Wing alternately. We're nearing the ends of seasons 4 and 3 respectively. We have the first season of 24 to watch yet, and season 4 of West Wing ships at the end of the month. At the rate we watch TV, this'll hold us for a while.

The "decompression" from HUC continues, but hasn't spawned more entries yet. There's more stuff in the pipeline, eventually. I met with my rabbi Monday morning and we took a very haphazard tour through the curriculum. He'd read my journal entries, but just sitting down and talking about it was helpful, particularly in thinking about how some of these ideas apply to our own congregation. We talked in vague terms this time; I'll be more organized next time.

Tonight I met with the pianist at our synagogue to go over music for next Friday's service. We had already talked about which pieces, but we hadn't worked out keys. Unfortunately, he's having to transpose for almost everything; fortunately, he's very good at that, and is able to spend a little time polishing. As I predicted, on average I'm comfortable about a fourth below our cantorial soloist. If it were just a step or two I'd fake it. Paul (the pianist) was really nice about it, though.

Tonight I made whitefish (it was sole this time) poached in beer, a trusty favorite. Note to future self: stout doesn't work as well as ale, but is passable. (You want a beer with some umpf for this; pilsners et al need not apply. That's ok; they're good to drink instead.)

Last night's D&D game went well, though I attribute everyone's survival to GM benevolence. We had some fun role-playing that I suspect the GM was forced to wing, and he did a good job with it. Many members of our group believe that taverns are inherently dangerous places to go, but we visited one anyway because, in character, we'd been wandering around in the wilderness for a while, there were dangerous things out there, and Turok was out of beer. :-) This gave opportunities for some very funny role-playing. (While Larissa was trying to be innocuous, Turok was fire-breathing to light his drinks before consuming them. Stuff like that.)

1. What do you like best about the city where you live now? What do you like least? ( Read more... )

2. What is your impression of Orthodox Judaism "from the outside", as it were? ( Read more... )

3. How did you choose the synagogue you go to?( Read more... )

4. How did you get into RPG and what's your favorite game? ( Read more... )

5. If you could have any job in the world, what would it be? ( Read more... )

This came as a complete surprise to me, but my sister would like to attend a Star Trek convention with at least one of her teenage kids. (None of them have ever been to any con.) If anyone has suggestions for ones not too far from Pittsburgh that might appeal to newcomers and not be too expensive, I'll pass the suggestions along. Shore Leave in Baltimore could work, except if I recall correctly the hotel is something well over $100/night, which might be a problem.

It seems a little, I don't know, unnerving that the "eye for an eye" part of the Torah (in Mishpatim) rolls trippingly off the tongue, both musically and textually. It's so smooth and graceful... but hey, at least it's easy to learn. :-)

They gave me an aliya this morning at services. Before reciting the blessings, it is customary for a man to touch the Torah scroll with a corner of his tallit. For a woman, they have you use the sash that's used to tie the scroll shut. But this morning they had temporarily lost track of that sash when it was my turn, and while they were looking for it one of the guys told me to "just wear a tallit already, ok?". This is the first evidence I've seen in ~5 years of going there that it would be considered socially acceptable in that congregation for a woman to wear a tallit. Heh -- learn something new every day.

Tonight's D&D game was fun. We had several combats in rapid succession, and we know there will be more before the characters have time to rest, which lends excitement to the game in excess of the sum of the excitement levels of the individual fights. And we did some fun things in the fights; I was particularly happy when something (probably called a cloaker or the like) enveloped someone and my sorceror -- polymorphed as a troll and flying -- attempted to out-grapple it and pull it off. This rightly failed, as my character is not a warrior, but it was entirely appropriate for her to try. (Similarly, it was entirely appropriate for her to charge into combat with the undead whatever-they-weres and smack them with her undead-hating sword.) I like the fact that the level of paladin gives me flexibility in interesting ways without in any way competing with the party's half-dragon fighter.

This has been a pleasant weekend, for the most part. We've been learning some fun new music at Shabbat evening services lately. Next week's celebration of Shabbat Shira is going to be a big deal musically; this is the parsha where we read about the song at the sea, and we're going to have a more music-focused service than usual. It's also starting an hour earlier so that families with young children can come without hassle. Should be fun.

Saturday morning went well. My rabbi had just come back from a retreat where, among things, they apparently focused on doing more with less. So we skipped some songs and some of the English repetitions and stuff and tried to really focus on the parts we did do. I liked it. I don't like rushing, especially if the rushing is in pursuit of something arguably pointless. (If you've just said the prayer in Hebrew, repeating it in English is pointless to me. If the point is to be friendly to those who can't read Hebrew even with transliteration, then the answer IMO is to sometimes skip the Hebrew. But don't do things twice.)

lefkowitzga joined us for Shabbat lunch, which was very nice. And she found fresh, tasty strawberries in Giant Eagle! I didn't know that was possible this time of year. We had no leftovers. :-)

Gail and I spent some time looking through the collection of Salamone Rossi's liturgical music to choose candidates for the choir. We both like his kedusha (for four voices), so we're going to suggest that. It took me a little while to figure out where the text came from, as I didn't recognize parts of it; it's from Shabbat Musaf, which Reform doesn't do. (Artscroll to the rescue.) Ah, ok. I knew there were differences, but I didn't know they were as significant as they are.

The edition of the Rossi music I have is bad in a couple ways. Some of the transliterations are just plain wrong; the text is also difficult to read in places. This is also someone's attempt to transliterate for French speakers, so it's not the usual mappings. For the last two pieces I retypeset the whole thing, but both times, despite serious proofreading, I managed to make some mistakes. I'm wondering if I should just hand it out as-is this time, hand everyone a pencil, and start reading off the text the way it's supposed to be. Or maybe someone else in the choir is better at transcription than I apparently am. We'll see, I guess. The first step is to get approval for the piece.

Saturday night was our long-awaited D&D game (it's been several weeks), where we rescued the two party members who had been captured by the vampires. It went very well, I thought, and Ralph was able to give us an adventure hook that got us some money and a specific task to pursue. The fight with the vampires, and subsequent rescue, cost a lot of money, so this is a welcome development. (Side note: the character who is largely responsible for this mess in the first place, the wizard, was both ungrateful for the rescue (we didn't get his spellbooks) and presumptuous about the spending of the money. (He got a lot of it for restarting his spellbooks.) He's a pretty ornery character, and in-game we probably would have dumped him long ago. But the player-level dynamics make that hard. I have no idea how much of this the player realizes.)

Sunday dinner was pleasant, except that Dani's been fighting a persistent cough for a couple days and it got worse tonight so we had to bail early. We stopped at a store on the way home to explore alternatives in cough syrup. I hope that whatever he picked out is more effective than what he was using.

Two mechanical annoyances struck this weekend. The first involves the washing machine; I went downstairs to move the laundry to the dryer only to find sudsy water on the floor and (I would later discover) still in the machine. The tub into which the machine drains was almost but not entirely full (and not draining), but I couldn't tell if the water on the floor was overflow or a separate problem. (What would cause the machine to stop, after all? It doesn't know that the tub is full...) So I applied a plunger to the tub and eventually picked out a lot of gunk from the drain; I could tell there was more that I couldn't reach. (What the heck is that and what's it doing in our drain? Eww...) This looked like a job for Liquid Plumber. :-) I rinsed off the clothes from the washer by hand so I could move them to the dryer and started the next load with some trepidation. Nothing went wrong there, so I still don't know what stopped the washer. I do not like this kind of mystery.

The other problem is that either my monitor (CRT) or my graphics card is failing, but I haven't shlepped heavy monitors around yet to test which. (Well, I suppose it could also be a cable. Hmm.) Every now and then my screen flickers and takes on rather more yellow than is normal. My computer has jaundice. Whee. Maybe tomorrow I will investigate further.

Saturday's D&D game was a lot of fun. It was a sub-group (two characters are currently elsewhere), and we got to do a lot of role-playing and story, and some nice little character bits came out. It was quite nifty. I think being (largely) unconstrained by time helped, too -- most sessions are on weeknights and people have to worry about getting to bed at a reasonable hour. Here, we could just play until a natural stopping point. (We're at the point where we need the other two players now.)

I talked with my parents yesterday. I enthused about some of the recent loot, particularly the scanner. They said that my nephew, who had seemed utterly indifferent to the DVD we bought him, went home, watched it, and was happy. That's good to hear. The kid still needs to learn some basic manners, though, like "thank you" and at least feigning interest in gifts.

I was surprised to learn that my parents knew basically nothing about the show 1776, either stage or movie. (I said this to a friend last night who said he didn't know it either, but he didn't grow up in a musicals-intensive house in one of the 13 colonies, so that's not surprising.) I remember seeing the movie as a kid; I mistakingly thought my parents had taken me. (We also saw it on a school outing.) The CLO is doing it this summer, which is what brought this up, and now I'm thinking that Dani and I, and maybe some friends, should go. I've never seen the stage version. I worry a bit about having my illusions shattered -- some other things I remember fondly didn't work out so well on more recent viewing, and maybe I should leave well enough alone. But it's probably safe.

Study with my rabbi today was very good, in a hard-to-summarize way. Maybe there'll be a separate entry later. (Aside: according to the talmud, God prays. This prompted me to say "what and to whom?" before my rabbi could continue. We've looked at "what", and then had to stop. In a sense, that's the less-interesting question.)

Most people were back at work today. Naturally, the single person who understands the part of the software that is currently getting in my way is out for a few more days. Oops. Tomorrow I begin plaintively asking not-so-random developers "do you know anything about [module]?". :-) (It's got to be pilot error; no one gets this right on the first try near as I can tell. If I figure out what that error is, then not only can I move past it but I can also improve the documentation.)

More snow! Whee! It's not unpleasant, though I do wonder what the state of things will be tomorrow morning. It's Sunday, so nothing nearby seems to have been plowed. (Haven't gone far.)

This afternoon we watched the first few episodes of an anime series called "Infinite Ryvius". Dani picked it up recently after seeing a couple episodes at a con. It looks like it will be good. I'm not all that familiar with anime. (This edition has an English dialogue track, which I consider to be a requirement. I think Dani's content with subtitles, which is good for him because I think most anime comes that way.)

Yesterday we had some folks over for gaming. We played History of the World in the afternoon; I think this was my first game with a full six players. If my die-rolling on the final turn hadn't absolutely sucked, I might have been able to win. (I spent most of the game in the vicinity of third place.) Britain in its 19th/early-20th-century colonial phase, with "naval supremacy" to boot, is not supposed to get whumped everywhere it tries to invade. Not that I'm bitter. :-)

After dinner one person had to leave and we had one new arrival, but I was feeling gamed out and didn't want to play more. That left five people, the optimal number for most Rio Grande games, so they broke out Puerto Rico and had fun.

Thursday night was the D&D game. ( Read more... )

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... :-)

Holiday amnesty season (link from browngirl).

siderea on consideration, and a followup posted since I started to compile this entry.

Lou Berryman likes the additions On the Mark has made to "A Chat With Your Mother". She says they might start doing them. Neat! (We haven't made lyrics changes -- more like "commentary".) I'm tickled when authors (1) hear our treatments of their material and (2) like what they hear.

Our D&D campaign has entered the free-form, characters-might-do-anything final arc. This is causing our GM to have to work extra hard to anticipate us. I hope we can all get onto the same wavelength so that we do the things he's prepared for us to do without anyone feeling railroaded. (Personally, I don't mind railroading in pursuit of a good story, but I don't think that's true of everyone in the game.)