Chatter #24 - July 25, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

Fun & Games

...continue. Well, only in an ironic sense. This morning I was driving in to work when I was pulled over along with three other cars and given a speeding ticket—my first ever. I will refrain from giving my full opinion of the police. However, in the past I've given several donations to police charities. That will never happen again. In the past they've called, told me they know where I live, described my house, and damned well intimidated me into giving them more money than I can afford. If they want my money from now on, they'd better have a ticket or a gun. Because I won't be intimidated by these thugs again.

There are some good cops, of course. I've met a few. But a lot of them are corrupt bullies, not much more than a gang with guns and the law on their side. I'll never trust them, nor respect them.

Let's see...what else is going on? We've discovered that you should not put blue stuff in your toilet. Our toilet at home is quite good; lots of power, without being too loud. But over the past few weeks it has been getting stopped up for no reason at all. Teri bought a large blue tablet to color the water and supposedly help clean the toilet (although it's pretty clean; she's a bit of a neat freak), and the problem became much worse. Our landlord called a plumber, who explained that the blue stuff clogs up the small holes around the inner rim. That restricts the incoming flow of water, and as a result the toilet often fails to successfully flush. So we live and learn, and no longer use the blue stuff. Although personally, I never liked that stuff.

Progress continues on reading of The Lord of the Rings. We've just met Aragorn. I'm not sure how to describe his voice, but I'll think about it. In any case, both Teri and I have noticed that I've been getting better at reading aloud as I get more practice. I'm varying the cadences more, and using more drama. I only hope I'm not making a fool out of myself.

It has been quite a while since I put up any large new projects on the site. In part, that's because I haven't GMed for, what, something like two years? It feels like more. I wonder if I'll lose my touch? Contrariwise, maybe some time off was what I needed.

I don't entirely have a good excuse for not putting up new material (although I suppose the marriage, pregnancy, surgery, & car might sort of be reasons). You see although I haven't run anything recently, I did run one adventure which I never finished writing up. In fact, I mentioned it in my first Chatter entry! It was called A Breath of Evil then, but I later changed the name to Fear The Night.

Today I looked through my hard drive a bit and found some preliminary work I'd done on the writeup. There's a lot more to do, but more was done than I'd remembered. Writing up is SUCH a pain! Particularly if I want to do a nice job, as I did (if I say so myself) on To Kill A Monster.

But FTN is much more complicated than TKAM. For one thing, I need to create several maps for it—and I can't just take an Irony Games map and modify it. These have to be created specifically for this game.

Problem: I suck at maps. Problem #2: I don't know anyone who'll help me with them. Heck, I don't know anyone who'll help me with any of this stuff! Sigh.

But I have a little quiet time, so I installed the latest version of AutoREALM and started working on a map of the general region. It's not exactly finished (for one thing, I need to add labels—and I suck with AutoREALM), but here's a sneak preview! I've sized it down to a third of its original size for easy viewing here. When the scenario is complete, I expect to post both full-size JPEGs and native AutoREALM versions of all the maps. In the meantime, if anyone wants to try to guess what the map is showing I'd love to hear what you think!