Well, that went surprisingly well ...
Dec. 9th, 2011 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prunesquallormd+ I was off work today, and will be for ever Friday until next year. Yay \o/.
Of course, I didn't do much with it except dragging myself into town and spending too much time pootling around Lush smelling all the pretties (I really, really love Lush :)) and Forbidden Planet looking at the gaming books (mmmm Call of Cthulhu XD). I also had a sudden overwhelming desire to get one of the Slytherin scarfs (oh god. I'm far too old to wear a Harry Potter scarf!) but it turned out that there were Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff ones but no Slytherin, so I was saved from myself :D
+ I've replaced Battlestar Galactica in my viewing schedule with Dawson's Creek. NO SHAME. Well maybe just a bit :/ . Total guilty pleasure, and I do love a bit of ridiculously self-indulgent angst.
+ On the subject of Harry Potter, a guy at work has a £5 note on his PC that, if you look more closely, is actually an Assassin's Creed tie-in thingy. So I mentioned that, cos it's set in medieval Italy (I guess? Don't really know, not played it) the currency almost certainly shouldn't be pounds sterling, so we were trying to figure out what it should be. So someone suggested shekels, cos they're mentioned in Merchant of Venice right? But I really don't think Shakespeare's reliable for such things, and I know that the shekel as a name for a unit of weight comes from Akkadian and is at least 4000 years old, which got me to thinking out loud about sickles, and what country they were used in. To which, after a brief moment of confusion, Phil responded "Simon, they're from Harry Potter."
Erm. Whoops. I can totally tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Honest ...
I guess it's to be expected though. My love of history is in large part based on my love of stories and mythology, so.
+ We managed to finish the little Call of Cthulhu one-shot that I was running for my gaming group in two sessions, so only twice as long as planned! Which is good, actually, cos one thing I have a problem with when I'm running games is keeping them tight and concise. And yeah, it's nice to let things just go where they will on occasion, but that's fatal for something that's supposed to be short and sharp. There comes a point when you just lose all momentum and interest if you don't keep your players on a fairly short leash sometimes.
It went well, I think! I certainly got the impression that people were having fun, and it seemed to be by turns spooky and ridiculous - which is pretty much what Call of Cthulhu ends up being, and that's kind of why I like it - so all in all I'm feeling far more positive about it than I was.
Next week we start Masks of Nyarlathotep. 250 pages, more characters and plot threads than you can shake a stick at, the biggest, most complicated thing I've ever run. WHAT HAVE I DONE?
+ I'd never heard of Phil Tippett, dinosaur supervisor extraordinaire but that post is one of my favourite ever things on tumblr. He was responsible for the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park, and his abject failure resulted in this dressing down by a certain 'allonsy':-
"Phil, this wasn’t fucking amateur hour.
PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF YOUR LACK OF SUPERVISION. THERE WERE RAPTORS ALL UP IN THE KITCHEN PHIL. IN THE GOD DAMN KITCHEN.
YOU HAD ONE JOB PHIL. ONE JOB.
DAMN IT, PHIL."
Hee. It still makes me cackle, and I've read it loads of times now.
+ Some time soon, there'll be fiction, just to make me feel like I haven't written nothing the entire. Almost 10000 words of it, actually. Probably mostly unreadable, but whatevs :/
Before then though, Tanith Lee posted a very cute little story called 'The Origin of Snow' on her website a few years ago as a Christmas present for her fans. Her site's currently down and probably will be for a while (not sure what happened. Hosting company problems maybe? All I know is that, right now, http://www.tanithlee.com is a Finnish financial services company of some kind :/). The story doesn't exist anywhere else (it was never published) so I can't link to it, so I figured I'd type up my paper copy and shove it up here for anyone to read who wants to. Not sure of the copyright implications of that, but I guess it's fine so long as I don't claim that I wrote it, right?
+ In just over two weeks I'll have to spend 48 hours with my entire family. Oh god :(
+ I hope everyone's having a lovely December, and that whatever holidays you celebrate round about now are all sorts of fabulous :)
xoxo
Of course, I didn't do much with it except dragging myself into town and spending too much time pootling around Lush smelling all the pretties (I really, really love Lush :)) and Forbidden Planet looking at the gaming books (mmmm Call of Cthulhu XD). I also had a sudden overwhelming desire to get one of the Slytherin scarfs (oh god. I'm far too old to wear a Harry Potter scarf!) but it turned out that there were Gryffindor, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff ones but no Slytherin, so I was saved from myself :D
+ I've replaced Battlestar Galactica in my viewing schedule with Dawson's Creek. NO SHAME. Well maybe just a bit :/ . Total guilty pleasure, and I do love a bit of ridiculously self-indulgent angst.
+ On the subject of Harry Potter, a guy at work has a £5 note on his PC that, if you look more closely, is actually an Assassin's Creed tie-in thingy. So I mentioned that, cos it's set in medieval Italy (I guess? Don't really know, not played it) the currency almost certainly shouldn't be pounds sterling, so we were trying to figure out what it should be. So someone suggested shekels, cos they're mentioned in Merchant of Venice right? But I really don't think Shakespeare's reliable for such things, and I know that the shekel as a name for a unit of weight comes from Akkadian and is at least 4000 years old, which got me to thinking out loud about sickles, and what country they were used in. To which, after a brief moment of confusion, Phil responded "Simon, they're from Harry Potter."
Erm. Whoops. I can totally tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Honest ...
I guess it's to be expected though. My love of history is in large part based on my love of stories and mythology, so.
+ We managed to finish the little Call of Cthulhu one-shot that I was running for my gaming group in two sessions, so only twice as long as planned! Which is good, actually, cos one thing I have a problem with when I'm running games is keeping them tight and concise. And yeah, it's nice to let things just go where they will on occasion, but that's fatal for something that's supposed to be short and sharp. There comes a point when you just lose all momentum and interest if you don't keep your players on a fairly short leash sometimes.
It went well, I think! I certainly got the impression that people were having fun, and it seemed to be by turns spooky and ridiculous - which is pretty much what Call of Cthulhu ends up being, and that's kind of why I like it - so all in all I'm feeling far more positive about it than I was.
Next week we start Masks of Nyarlathotep. 250 pages, more characters and plot threads than you can shake a stick at, the biggest, most complicated thing I've ever run. WHAT HAVE I DONE?
+ I'd never heard of Phil Tippett, dinosaur supervisor extraordinaire but that post is one of my favourite ever things on tumblr. He was responsible for the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park, and his abject failure resulted in this dressing down by a certain 'allonsy':-
"Phil, this wasn’t fucking amateur hour.
PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE OF YOUR LACK OF SUPERVISION. THERE WERE RAPTORS ALL UP IN THE KITCHEN PHIL. IN THE GOD DAMN KITCHEN.
YOU HAD ONE JOB PHIL. ONE JOB.
DAMN IT, PHIL."
Hee. It still makes me cackle, and I've read it loads of times now.
+ Some time soon, there'll be fiction, just to make me feel like I haven't written nothing the entire. Almost 10000 words of it, actually. Probably mostly unreadable, but whatevs :/
Before then though, Tanith Lee posted a very cute little story called 'The Origin of Snow' on her website a few years ago as a Christmas present for her fans. Her site's currently down and probably will be for a while (not sure what happened. Hosting company problems maybe? All I know is that, right now, http://www.tanithlee.com is a Finnish financial services company of some kind :/). The story doesn't exist anywhere else (it was never published) so I can't link to it, so I figured I'd type up my paper copy and shove it up here for anyone to read who wants to. Not sure of the copyright implications of that, but I guess it's fine so long as I don't claim that I wrote it, right?
+ In just over two weeks I'll have to spend 48 hours with my entire family. Oh god :(
+ I hope everyone's having a lovely December, and that whatever holidays you celebrate round about now are all sorts of fabulous :)
xoxo
no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 01:59 am (UTC)A sickle is a real thing, by the way!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle
It's funny how Pratchett fans often don't realise that Pratchett uses real life things most of the time and parodies them!!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 09:11 pm (UTC)I once succumbed to the temptation to lick a vanilla body cream on the basis that if it smelled that good, it must at least taste kind of nice. WRONG! It was absolutely disgusting. Hey ho. Chalk that one up to experience XD
A sickle is a real thing, by the way!!
Hee, I know :)
I was a fan of Asterix more or less before I liked anything else, and Getafix was never without his sickle!
The Sickles I was talking about here are one of the units of currency in Harry Potter:
Galleons (which are gold, if I remember rightly)
Sickles (silver)
Knuts (bronze)
I take it you're not a Harry Potter fan :)
I just rewatched the TV version of Hogfather today, which is actually really good. I must catch up with my Pratchett, I haven't read a new Discworld book since The Last Hero, which is ages ago. So behind!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-12 12:18 pm (UTC)Shopkeeper: "That'll be 3 knuts please".
LOL forever.
I liked the Harry Potter film, I just don't get the obsession with it. The only film I have ever been really obsessed with is Rocky Horror and even then I prefer to see it live.
I have not seen any Pratchett films, I have read most of the books, a lot of his humour would go right over kid's heads so I see him as more of a writer for adults really.
I like that we are having different conversations on both LJ and DW, it's like having a pan dimentional conversation hee hee!!!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-13 09:35 pm (UTC)Terry Pratchett is one of those writers who crosses the generation boundary rather well, I think. I read him for whenever The Colour of Magic was first released (Wikipedia says it was 1983, so I would have been 11. I still remember the cover of the hardback I got from the library. It had Graeat A'tuin on :D ) and I loved him as much then as I do now. Mind you, I think his writing has improved and matured a lot over the last 30 odd years!
Hee :) I do like DW. It's just a shame I don't know more people who use it regularly :/
no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 06:03 pm (UTC)I would not go to Rocky Horror dressed as Riff Raff or Frank any more, I could not pull it off haha!! I bet I could have convinced to you dress as Magenta in the past??