jarandhel

Today's haul: 4 banker boxes full of books, retrieved via metro using an old hand truck.  Got a flat halfway to the metro station, and another wheel kept threatening to fall off, but that's still a major step in the right direction.  Also, i found the missing book that was driving me crazy!

Does anyone in the greater dc/baltimore area on my friends list have need of a television? We have a spare one, and I'd kind of like to get rid of it, as we have no real use for it. It's in good working condition, it does not have a remote but it is remote-capable and a cheap universal remote will work with it just fine. For people on my friends list, it is free and I would even transport it to your place if you needed me to (again, in the greater dc/baltimore area only. No, arhuaine and casteylan, you cannot get me to fly to england by saying you want it. ;-)). If nobody wants it in a week or so, the thing is going on craigslist and I'll see if I can get some cash for it there.

Well, for those who haven't heard yet, Dusk and I found a place to live on Saturday. A nice townhouse in Arlington which we're sharing with a very nice lesbian couple. :) Our half of the rent is 850 a month, plus half of the utilities, which is well within our budget. And the place is absolutely amazing... two stories, hardwood floors, a great big kitchen, a fireplace, a good sized yard with a small garden that already has tomato and basil growing in it... Our room has a walk-in closet, plus another small closet that's supposedly a shoe closet, but also has space for hanging more stuff up. It's perfect for the two of us. :) And the room itself is a good size too. :) I can't wait to get all the furniture for it set up. :)

We still have a lot of stuff to move, but things are looking good. I'm currently stealing one of the many wireless signals from our neighbors to make this post, but we have internet here and will soon be setting up our own wireless network and my connection will be a little more stable at that point, currently I have to hunker down in the corner of the room and stay very still to stay online. ;-)

Ah well, back to unpacking. :) Just wanted everyone to know the good news. :) My new address has been posted under a friends-only filter, so if people need to get in touch with me by snail mail you shouldn't have a problem. I intend to switch my phone number over to a VA number soon too, but I'll let people know when that happens. One of the MANY things I have to change thanks to the move. :)

I found something else neat I inherited from my grandmother while packing. Corningware... I guess they can be called pots and pans... they all have glass lids and are made out of some sort of ceramic, but on the bottom they say they can be used in both the microwave and on the range. I've never seen that combination before, usually it's microwave and oven. I've also never seen ceramic stuff for the range before. I kinda like that... might have to try them out sometime. I don't believe I've ever used them before. They're kinda small, though. The largest pot is one and a half pints, the smaller pot is one pint, and the pan is six and a half inches. Might be useful for some things, though. Little worried about how hot the handles might get, since they're all one piece, but I use pot holders anyway usually.

... there's no kind of health concerns related to ceramic cookware like with the teflon and aluminum stuff, are there?

Oooh, and I just found some sort of glass, Corning deep-dish thingy with glass lid that I THOUGHT was a cake-holder but whose bottom says it can be used in the microwave, in the oven, on a rangetop, and in a freezer! That doesn't sound like just a cake-tray to me! Even if I'm pretty sure that's all my grandmother ever used it for....

I never really gamed a lot, outside of computer games. Got into Magic the Gathering long before I ever got into Dungeons and Dragons. But for a while, D&D was fun. One of my favorite things about it was being able to use my own mind and think up solutions beyond what a computer could be programmed to respond to. Weaponless in a dungeon? What about that handy tapestry on the wall, something's got to be holding it there... a pole you say? What do you know, an effective net and a quarterstaff with hardly any work, just using a little ingenuity.

Today, though, I've chosen to get rid of my D&D materials. All of them. I had a hard time quantifying why I felt it was time to do this, but in the end it came down to something about the Dungeons and Dragons mindset that had always somewhat bothered me: Game masters are not really supposed to let their players read the Dungeon Master's Guide. Me being the kind of person I am, I immediately bought this book the very first time I was invited to play a game of D&D with someone.

I don't like the attitude this represents. I don't like the idea that the Game Master has to have some kind of secret knowledge of the rules and methods by which the game works in order to make the game enjoyable for the players. It seems to work from the premise that the Game Master will never him or herself be a player at someone else's table, it relies on secrecy to keep the players from disbelieving the illusion of the Game. After all, it wouldn't do for players to know that sometimes the DM is just rolling dice for appearances sake, and is making up the results for the sake of the story. I don't like that attitude. I don't like the rift it creates between players and DM.

On the other hand, I look at the book for Shadowrun (2nd Edition) and am pleasantly surprised to note that it makes no attempt to separate itself into material for the DM alone and material for the players. It seems to start with the assumption that the players will sometimes DM and the DM will sometimes play. It draws no distinction between the two more permanent than the context of a single game.

Needless to say, I'm keeping that book, despite never EVER having gotten around to playing a game of Shadowrun with anyone.

I notice that the new gaming system Deleria that Ri has been talking about also seems to have a singular core volume, and not a text for players and another text for game masters and another text as source for monsters/npcs.... I like this trend.

This may become one of my criterion for becoming involved with a gaming system, from this point forward... the transparency/open-sourceness of it.