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lunasarielH, my BFF, is laying the groundwork for a new D&D campaign, and I'm excited, but also wary. It's been a while since our little (and, now, far-flung) group got together for a good game. It sounds like H is really trying to work with the players and craft a story with them, instead of forcing a story on them, which is great. I've been in games that basically boiled down to "BLAH BLAH BLAH SIT HERE FOR THREE HOURS AND LISTEN TO MY DRIZZT FANFIC BLAH BLAH BLAH," and worse, I've been in games where the DM did his level best to not let things like story or characters get in the way of killing everything in sight and then stealing whatever wasn't nailed down or could be pried loose.
On the other hand, H is not known for her consistency. She's definitely an "ideas" type of person: every so often she'll get these fantastic concepts into her head, start laying groundwork for an epic cross-country road trip/D&D campaign/birthday party/etc., and then it just sort of...peters out. She loses focus and moves on to the next great idea. But all of us are really fired up about this new campaign, so I'm hoping that ournagging support will be enough to carry her through.
Speaking of D&D, I've been finding myself getting really nostalgic for the game, and for my gaming group in particular. I can't say that I'm amazingly fond of all of them, but they all certainly knew how to keep things interesting. But more than that, I miss all the little traditions and rituals that we built up over the years. For example, we had an NPC fighter called Bear in our very first campaign, back in 2007 or so, but C misheard his name the first time and called him "Beer." The name stuck, and every time Beer, who wore heavy plate, avoided an attack, C would whack his chest and yell "BEER BOOONNNNGGG" (the "bong" is supposed to sound like a ringing bell), and it became a kind of tradition for any character whose armor deflected an enemy's blow to whack their chests and yell "BEER BOOONNNNGGG" as a sort of victory cry. There were little things, too, more along the lines of house rules than tradition: if you don't do anything with your turn within five minutes you forefit the turn, etc. On top of *that*, there were the in-jokes, the non-D&D related situations where random phrases like "Do boats count as improvised weapons?" "Jingles the War-Donkey" "The Adventures of Shakum and Minty" and "...and then I hit him with a Halfling" can be beyond funny. But then there were the real life things, too. The only reason I'm writing about this at all is that I was at the store picking up some Halloween candy today, and got all sniffly over a mixed bag of Hershey's Miniatures, our group's sugary treat of choice, where we'd all try to hoard as many Krackles as possible and give all the Mr. Goodbars to H and JK, because they were the only ones who liked them. The cheap pizza, the endless bottles of Pepsi, the peculiar hyper-clarity that comes after 14 hours of gameplay...I miss it. God help me, I miss it.
In other news, I'm really warming up to Mistborn. It's a big ol' hardcover, which means that I can't carry it around with me all that much, but I've been getting slowly but surely sucked into it. Like most first-time fantasy novels, it gets bogged down with world-building in the first quarter or so, but picks up after that. There seem to be two schools of thought here: the Tolkien style, which is to concentrate everything into a ginormous, dense infodump at the very beginning to get it out of the way, and the Rowling style, which is to release information about the fantasy world in smaller, controlled bursts throughout the book(s). Honestly, I like Tolkien's method. After powering through the first chapter or so, the author is free to just tell the story without trying to maneuver in more information that the characters would already know. Rowling's style is certainly easier for new and/or casual readers, but overall, I find that having to deal with repeated, if smaller, infodumps drags down the book overall.
Buuuut getting back on topic, Mistborn is shaping up very nicely! I like nearly all of the characters, and our leading lady has a very convincing voice. I get the feeling that normally I'd have gotten annoyed with her seemingly permanent paranoia and mistrust by now, but Mr. Sanderson really makes me believe that Vin is a real person, and a lifetime of abuse and extremely justified mistrust in others can't just be erased by six months with a quirky, Firefly-like crew. Speaking of which, one of the many things I'm a sucker for is a good team, and Mistborn delivers in full. Again, the relationships between the characters are (for the most part) very believable, and the author manages to create a good sense of community and constructed family. The banter (especially between Breeze and Ham) sounded a little forced at first, but as I get to know the characters, it seems a lot more natural.
On the other hand, one thing I don't really like is the nicknames. (I know, I know. Luna quibbling about linguistics in a fantasy novel? Shock!) Giving someone a nickname by just shortening their name to the first syllable (i.e. Kelsier becomes Kell, Dockson becomes Dox, etc.) works once or twice, but the purpose of a nickname is to give its bearer individuality, a name that suits their personality better than their given one. In Mistborn, *everybody* does the name-shortening thing. Everybody. Nobody gets nicknames based on personality quirks, physical attributes, or past events, it's all Kell, Dox, Ham, Saze, etc. There are nicknames for *job descriptions*, yes, but if you were to yell "Hey, Tineye!" or "Oi! Smoker!" in a crowded room, it'd be like hollering "Hey, plumber!" or "Oi! Engineer!"
In RL news, I got the first of my midterms, this one from my English Lit class, back, and I did better than I thought (an A-). I mentioned before how I like tough professors, because when I get a good grade from them I really feel like I earned it, and this is definitely the case here. I went to talk to Prof. Nolan about my paper while I was writing it, and she pointed out a couple of thoughts I had that would lead me to interesting places, but she also didn't hesitate to tell me which of my ideas were incorrect and why. I should be getting the rest of them back next week or the week after. Until then, I'll just sit here quietly and try to not obsess over my future grades.
In other, and much more exciting, RL news, I took the plunge and braved both MUNI and BART into San Francisco to meet![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hamsterwoman the day before yesterday. Anna was incredibly helpful with transportation tips; as always, I'm glad to have a native guide to the dense undergrowth of public transportation. Although I was rather later than I'd like, due to A) my drastically under-estimating travel times and B) the not one, but two earthquakes we'd had earlier that day, we met at a very nice little pub that's a frequent haunt of hers. I'd forgotten how much I missed pub food! Bangers & mash are just the thing for a cold night, no matter what continent you're on. She brought her two kids with her, and her oldest reminds me amazingly of my little sister, who oddly enough, is also called Anna. They're both very canny, sharp kids, they both seem to love reading, and apparently L (Anna's daughter) can do the same exact Spock eyebrow thing as A. Seriously, aside from hair color, the resemblance is uncanny! Both L and her brother spoke Russian to Anna (they speak Russian, Hebrew, and English fluently. Whew!), and I tried to remember some of the Hebrew I learned while dating J, but somewhat to my shame, the only thing that I came up with was the Shabbat song, which somehow I didn't think would be terribly useful in conversation. XD
This was the first time I'd met an LJ person IRL, and it was very cool to get to know the woman behind the username, as it were. We spent a lot of the time geeking out about Firefly, A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien, the Dresden Files, and related nerdiness, but she also gave me some great tips on neat little places to eat in Berkeley, as well as some ideas of where to get buttons/pins/badges to add to my ever-growing collection.
Anna and Co. led me to the appropriate bus stop (which, without them, I'd never have found; it's basically a painted stripe on a lamppost), and wended my weary way back home. Oddly enough, the inbound journey was actually more complicated than the outbound, as I, in my infinite wisdom, forgot to account for the fact that the BART line I took to get into San Francisco doesn't run in the evening, which necessitated planning a more roundabout route. It, along with the aforementioned bangers & mash, really took me back to my London days, where I spent a good deal of time hunched over various maps, trying to get from Point A to Point B when this line was out of service, that line stopped running half an hour ago, and the other line was "experiencing extended delays" (the kiss of death). But it's still supremely awesome to have a fellow LJ buddy living so close, and I hope that we can get together again sometime soon!
On the other hand, H is not known for her consistency. She's definitely an "ideas" type of person: every so often she'll get these fantastic concepts into her head, start laying groundwork for an epic cross-country road trip/D&D campaign/birthday party/etc., and then it just sort of...peters out. She loses focus and moves on to the next great idea. But all of us are really fired up about this new campaign, so I'm hoping that our
Speaking of D&D, I've been finding myself getting really nostalgic for the game, and for my gaming group in particular. I can't say that I'm amazingly fond of all of them, but they all certainly knew how to keep things interesting. But more than that, I miss all the little traditions and rituals that we built up over the years. For example, we had an NPC fighter called Bear in our very first campaign, back in 2007 or so, but C misheard his name the first time and called him "Beer." The name stuck, and every time Beer, who wore heavy plate, avoided an attack, C would whack his chest and yell "BEER BOOONNNNGGG" (the "bong" is supposed to sound like a ringing bell), and it became a kind of tradition for any character whose armor deflected an enemy's blow to whack their chests and yell "BEER BOOONNNNGGG" as a sort of victory cry. There were little things, too, more along the lines of house rules than tradition: if you don't do anything with your turn within five minutes you forefit the turn, etc. On top of *that*, there were the in-jokes, the non-D&D related situations where random phrases like "Do boats count as improvised weapons?" "Jingles the War-Donkey" "The Adventures of Shakum and Minty" and "...and then I hit him with a Halfling" can be beyond funny. But then there were the real life things, too. The only reason I'm writing about this at all is that I was at the store picking up some Halloween candy today, and got all sniffly over a mixed bag of Hershey's Miniatures, our group's sugary treat of choice, where we'd all try to hoard as many Krackles as possible and give all the Mr. Goodbars to H and JK, because they were the only ones who liked them. The cheap pizza, the endless bottles of Pepsi, the peculiar hyper-clarity that comes after 14 hours of gameplay...I miss it. God help me, I miss it.
In other news, I'm really warming up to Mistborn. It's a big ol' hardcover, which means that I can't carry it around with me all that much, but I've been getting slowly but surely sucked into it. Like most first-time fantasy novels, it gets bogged down with world-building in the first quarter or so, but picks up after that. There seem to be two schools of thought here: the Tolkien style, which is to concentrate everything into a ginormous, dense infodump at the very beginning to get it out of the way, and the Rowling style, which is to release information about the fantasy world in smaller, controlled bursts throughout the book(s). Honestly, I like Tolkien's method. After powering through the first chapter or so, the author is free to just tell the story without trying to maneuver in more information that the characters would already know. Rowling's style is certainly easier for new and/or casual readers, but overall, I find that having to deal with repeated, if smaller, infodumps drags down the book overall.
Buuuut getting back on topic, Mistborn is shaping up very nicely! I like nearly all of the characters, and our leading lady has a very convincing voice. I get the feeling that normally I'd have gotten annoyed with her seemingly permanent paranoia and mistrust by now, but Mr. Sanderson really makes me believe that Vin is a real person, and a lifetime of abuse and extremely justified mistrust in others can't just be erased by six months with a quirky, Firefly-like crew. Speaking of which, one of the many things I'm a sucker for is a good team, and Mistborn delivers in full. Again, the relationships between the characters are (for the most part) very believable, and the author manages to create a good sense of community and constructed family. The banter (especially between Breeze and Ham) sounded a little forced at first, but as I get to know the characters, it seems a lot more natural.
On the other hand, one thing I don't really like is the nicknames. (I know, I know. Luna quibbling about linguistics in a fantasy novel? Shock!) Giving someone a nickname by just shortening their name to the first syllable (i.e. Kelsier becomes Kell, Dockson becomes Dox, etc.) works once or twice, but the purpose of a nickname is to give its bearer individuality, a name that suits their personality better than their given one. In Mistborn, *everybody* does the name-shortening thing. Everybody. Nobody gets nicknames based on personality quirks, physical attributes, or past events, it's all Kell, Dox, Ham, Saze, etc. There are nicknames for *job descriptions*, yes, but if you were to yell "Hey, Tineye!" or "Oi! Smoker!" in a crowded room, it'd be like hollering "Hey, plumber!" or "Oi! Engineer!"
In RL news, I got the first of my midterms, this one from my English Lit class, back, and I did better than I thought (an A-). I mentioned before how I like tough professors, because when I get a good grade from them I really feel like I earned it, and this is definitely the case here. I went to talk to Prof. Nolan about my paper while I was writing it, and she pointed out a couple of thoughts I had that would lead me to interesting places, but she also didn't hesitate to tell me which of my ideas were incorrect and why. I should be getting the rest of them back next week or the week after. Until then, I'll just sit here quietly and try to not obsess over my future grades.
In other, and much more exciting, RL news, I took the plunge and braved both MUNI and BART into San Francisco to meet
hamsterwoman the day before yesterday. Anna was incredibly helpful with transportation tips; as always, I'm glad to have a native guide to the dense undergrowth of public transportation. Although I was rather later than I'd like, due to A) my drastically under-estimating travel times and B) the not one, but two earthquakes we'd had earlier that day, we met at a very nice little pub that's a frequent haunt of hers. I'd forgotten how much I missed pub food! Bangers & mash are just the thing for a cold night, no matter what continent you're on. She brought her two kids with her, and her oldest reminds me amazingly of my little sister, who oddly enough, is also called Anna. They're both very canny, sharp kids, they both seem to love reading, and apparently L (Anna's daughter) can do the same exact Spock eyebrow thing as A. Seriously, aside from hair color, the resemblance is uncanny! Both L and her brother spoke Russian to Anna (they speak Russian, Hebrew, and English fluently. Whew!), and I tried to remember some of the Hebrew I learned while dating J, but somewhat to my shame, the only thing that I came up with was the Shabbat song, which somehow I didn't think would be terribly useful in conversation. XDThis was the first time I'd met an LJ person IRL, and it was very cool to get to know the woman behind the username, as it were. We spent a lot of the time geeking out about Firefly, A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien, the Dresden Files, and related nerdiness, but she also gave me some great tips on neat little places to eat in Berkeley, as well as some ideas of where to get buttons/pins/badges to add to my ever-growing collection.
Anna and Co. led me to the appropriate bus stop (which, without them, I'd never have found; it's basically a painted stripe on a lamppost), and wended my weary way back home. Oddly enough, the inbound journey was actually more complicated than the outbound, as I, in my infinite wisdom, forgot to account for the fact that the BART line I took to get into San Francisco doesn't run in the evening, which necessitated planning a more roundabout route. It, along with the aforementioned bangers & mash, really took me back to my London days, where I spent a good deal of time hunched over various maps, trying to get from Point A to Point B when this line was out of service, that line stopped running half an hour ago, and the other line was "experiencing extended delays" (the kiss of death). But it's still supremely awesome to have a fellow LJ buddy living so close, and I hope that we can get together again sometime soon!
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 03:47 am (UTC)And now I want to read it even more! :)
aside from hair color, the resemblance is uncanny!
Very curious! L is very much her father's daughter in a lot of respects, and the Spock eyebrow thing (which O can do too, and I can't, to my dismay, because it always looks so cool) is something she got from my husband. She is a definite Slytherin/Lannister ("canny" and "sharp" are a nice way to put it :P). We are blessed in that both rodents love reading, but L definitely engages with the stories more.
I wish my information about Berkeley wasn't 11 years out of date... anyway, I hope the pin/stationary/tchotchkes place on that block between Euclid and the BART station is still there!
Sorry to hear the return journey wasn't better than the one to SF. I couldn't remember when the Richmond line stopped running directly from SF. MacArthur is still the transfer point, right? I remember I used to have to do that after the late finals, but, when BART is running OK (which it sounds like it wasn't Thursday night :/) at least the transfers tend to be really well times.
It was great to meet up and I definitely hope we can take advantage of being pretty close to do this somewhat regularly! :)
no subject
Date: 2011-10-23 07:38 pm (UTC)MacArthur is still the transfer point, right?
Yup! Although I gather it's undergone some reorganization, so pretty much anywhere in Oakland will do, MacArthur still seems to be the big one.
We are blessed in that both rodents love reading
I don't want to sound like some grumpy old person and be all "TV ROTS KIDS BRAINS HARUMPH", but it's always great to see kids reading and using their imaginations, in any contest. XD