I got my diploma in the mail a few days ago.  It's... smaller than I thought it would be.  Five years work comes down to an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of resume stationery in a manila envelope.  Huh.

Speaking of... need to update resume.  Want to... not so much....  Hard to convince myself to job hunt when I have a job, even though I'm frightfully underemployed.

I'm waking up about an hour before my alarm every morning.  My stomach is unsettled and my limbs are coming up with new ways to malfunction.  Apparently my warranty has expired and the factory won't take my calls. ;)

Is adulthood this exhausting for everyone, or am I just shaken by all that's ahead of me?

I just got email confirmation of my degree being awarded.  I now have a masters degree.

...

Now I have to decide what I want to be when I grow up.  (And for those of you already poised to reply, I've already heard 'librarian' a few times as a suggestion.... ;P )

Okay, so...

Magnetic East (Year 11 Ongoing) Saturday early slot:  Rewriting Regent Brand's brain, among other things... plus a war probably. ;)

Random Gambling: The Thrown Whore:  Latest episode!  Death!  Hijinks!  The opposite of a throne war, if such a thing can be pulled off!  Fewer actual exclamation marks in person! ;)

Three Kingdoms - year two of playtest for my 'new' diceless rules - Would folks rather see another Modern Urban Horror scenario, or try out the Classic (Warring States China martial arts and mystic action!) or Anime Future (Psionics, Cybernetics, and Mecha!) settings?

Something Sunday???

Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

Urgh.

Yes, that was all the energy I had left.

I was up until almost 5am last night, trying to complete a Task Force in City of Heroes. 

For the uninitiated, TFs are huge mission arcs with big challenges and big rewards.  You get a badge (sort of a suffix for your hero name, like 'Honorary Peacebringer'), tons of prestige (the game's money), and invention recipes (formulas and frameworks for special power upgrades - geek my builder side big time) that you can't get anywhere else.  They're supposed to take 3-4 hours to complete.

The hero who initiated the TF got eight heroes together (the max for any one team) and started things up... without waiting for us all to group up first.  Then he made fun of the people who fell in combat.  Jerksville.  He dropped out after the first two sub-missions - ironic, I thought, since this massive undertaking was his idea in the first place.

TF leadership isn't like team leadership, where you get to pick who calls the mission.  It goes in order down the list, which is established only by the semi-random factor of when you signed up to join the TF.  The next guy seemed okay, but his machine was slow / buggy / short of RAM, so we'd finish the mission and then have to wait for his computer to get rid of all the mission map stuff and load all the city map stuff.  He lasted two sub-missions before having to go do something family related.

The next 'leader' had never done a TF before.  It's possible that he never paid attention to all the shiny buttons and just mashed things on the streets of Paragon City.  It took 15-20 minutes for him to admit that he had no clue, and then he apparently refused to take instruction from anyone who did know what was going on.  He decided that it was somehow better to fly all the way to the mission contact, across a mile and a half of city map, rather than use the 'call' button on the contacts page and talk to them from where we were.  NEAR THE MISSIONS.

When he suggested that we do something else, I was glad he couldn't see my face, because all the things I chose not to say were writ large there.  By the time he quit, I had nearly six hours invested.   Who gives up after a six hour investment on a holiday weekend???  Thankfully, the two remaining heroes and I had paid attention in Superhero Kindergarten and got things moving.  (am I bitter?  do I sound bitter?  I might be bitter about this....) ;)  These were great people, a husband and wife who had been playing for four years - virtually since the CoH game had came out.

We fought side-by-side-by-side for three more hours, fighting creatures well above our power level... because these TFs are designed with large teams in mind.  It was hard, but it was amazing, and none of us were going to quit.  Until they got disconnected by their ISP.

So there I was, surrounded by creatures I was struggling with as part of a trio, now a solo act.  I kept fighting.  I'd like to pretend it was some noble, heroic, never-say-die spirit in me, but frankly, I think my fingers just kept going of their own accord while my brain spun madly in circles of utter amazement at what a total screw-job this entire mission had been.  The first one I'd done had been nightmare hard, but we'd finished in four hours or so, gotten amazing rewards, and gone on our merry way.  It was after 3am by this point, and while I had leveled up quite a bit, none of the rewards specific to this agony were within my grasp.  *cry*

Then the wife of the duo reappeared.  Ordinarily, if you quit a TF, you can't get back on.  They had been disconnected, though, and the computer gods smiled on us all and didn't let the game servers mistake that for a 'quit' signal.  I fought my way to a safe area, previously cleared, and we chatted about our mutual relief while she and her husband navigated their characters back to my position.

FIGHT ON!  I'll spare you the details... largely because they're all a blur in my head.  Overview; we discovered that the Freakshow (bad guy group) had stolen a Sonic Whatsit from the Council (another bad guy group) and were planning to level an entire neighborhood with it.  We beat the plan out of the bad guys, crushed their leadership, and then raced to disarm the three whatsits (nope, I no longer remember what it was actually called), hidden in three sewer labyrinths across two city zones.  It's almost 4am.  But, hey, I don't have to work until 3pm tomorrow, and who the heck will be in the library on Easter Sunday, right?

We are in the third and final sewer.  Only the final mastermind remains between us and victory.  We tried to lure off her minions to defeat in detail before facing her, but she 'heard the commotion' and came with them.  Oh well.  We are HEROES!  We will FIGHT ON!

Essentially, we took turns dying until all the minions were wiped out.  No problem.  That's what heroes do.

Then we squared off against the master villain.  We were all at the maximum level allowed by the mission by this point.  We should be able to do this....

She kicked all three of our butts.  Twice.

We cooled our heels and licked our wounds in an approach tunnel and thought long and hard about what we were facing.  If her life bar was 2cm long, we'd maybe chewed up the first two millimeters with all three of us wailing on her before she electrocuted / poisoned / ate us with that pixelated grin on her face.  There weren't enough of us left.  We couldn't do it.

Heavy hearts were lifted a bit as we joked about the ineptitude of the 'heroes' that had started this grand undertaking with us.  We added each other to our online friends lists.  I watched them log off (it takes about thirty seconds).

Then I went to bed.  Janet clearly loves me, because she actually halfway woke up to listen to me bitch briefly, even though it was 5am.

I woke up this morning, actually looking forward to playing my character again, and seeing how cool the powers I'd learned on the mission were and what new acts of heroism I could undertake with them.

I'm clearly nuts.

</rant>

I also got to run some Ultraviolet Amber yesterday.  It wasn't nearly as brutal as the above.  Watch simonepdx's sites for log postings, and maybe you'll get to share in the amazing.  There's also new stuff in a_belletrist's Special Crimes-Detroit wiki, shared with yours truly.

These are not afterthoughts.  I'm very proud of the great stories we tell together.

Now if only I could get them to play City of Heroes.... *eg*

This won't be much of a post, as I am at work, but I am back.  Maybe not as manic as last summer, but healing if not healed.

Live and email games have ebbed and resurged.  More to come on that... or just check out the mayhem at endlessstarlight.pbwiki.com  It's not as cool as Gazsi's tale, but it's pretty darn good.

My health is not fabulous, but it is improving.  Amazing how resolving some stress issues can do that for you. ;)

Ambercon US.  I will be there.  I will run there.  I will play there.  I will even playtest my new-ish diceless game system there.

Actual relevant postys will follow eventually.  Consider yourself warned. :)

Okay, if there was ever any doubt to my sanity, I believe yesterday answered it.

All tolled, I ran twenty-one hours of online game yesterday, (most of it with two players on at once, naturally, since time compression is not among my powers, thank goddess), PLUS had an IM heart-to-heart with another gaming friend of mine for three hours or so in the midst of that.

If anyone wonders why I took today off from online stuff, it's because I'm planning to game F2F all afternoon and evening... and I still posted to Book of Myths anyway.

Is there a medication available for this sort of compulsive behavior?  Maybe I should look into that....

Nah.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone who saved my morning, afternoon, and evening yesterday.  Janet is doing better, but not yet best; greatly aided, no doubt, by my not waking her up every hour on the hour yesterday to see if she needed anything when what she needed most was sleep. :)

Eddie's player and I are very proud of SC-DIA.  It has been great fun to run and play.

For those of you who haven't seen it;

http://endlessstarlight.pbwiki.com/DIA-Logs

We're throwing the floor open to questions.  Part of it is because we want to share, and part of it is me, as GM, mining for more evil.

Just sayin' ;-)

Let us know what you think, and what questions you burn to have answered!

This will be easy.

Transformers = AWESOME

See, easy.

Now go see it.

The first arc of Ultraviolet Amber is complete.  I won't spoil the ending for y'all.  Amazing, gut-wrenching... so intense we were asking each other for permission to do things, lest some line be crossed.  It was my world, and I didn't see half of it coming.  I had to pause to clean the house, eat, and take a nap in the middle of our Saturday marathon for fear of injury, it was so good.

*steam rising from my bald head*

Now I am patiently waiting to see if there will be a second arc, or if the first was Helena begun and ended well.  Make no mistake, there is plenty left to do... but I have to see if Simone wants to continue, or begin again elsewhere.  Will anything we do after this seem like mere anticlimax in comparison?  This Amber is a rotten fruit, ripe so long ago, hollow victors of a brutal war only hinted at in Corwin's ballads.  Defeated Chaos shines like a jewel beneath her boot.  ...Gods, I'm going poetical....

Done or Onwards, Thank You Simone.  Thank you so much.... *hugz*

... but I do have six of them - Pebbles, Sisko, Spooky, Spike, Possum, and Pocky - so it could be if I had any photographic skill at all.  Or a camera.  Or the patience to follow them around until they do something cute.

Man, having cats is hard work!