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Slayers Revolution is the newest installment of this series that is dear to me, and I am working on getting Susan caught up on it in its entirety. We are almost done with the first disc of the box set of the first season. A couple more discs in and I am going to pick up the box set of Slayers NEXT.

Hajime Kanzaka, through Slayers, was my first exposure to the idea of the light novel. It is my kind of medium for writing, and I feel the urge to go through my various note books and piece together a story.

I am tired. My lifestyle of empty sustenance and project-juggling has cast me into a depression. I can function, but I don’t want to. I just want to sleep, and turn off the world.

I am not trying to linger on it, but I keep thinking about how this is a pattern in my life. I am okay with feeling blue, but this thing I am doing now is from decisions to take on too much knowing full well that I will pay for it like this.

Time to change something. Time to change everything.

Background

I found a gaming group that asks some questions about a person’s gaming background to screen them for joining their games. It feels like an RP resume, so I offer you here a glimpse into a side of me that would not surprise anyone who knows me. ^_^

My favorite experience as a GM

My single favorite experience as a GM came when I was playing with just three friends. The setting was a space opera sprawling multiple planets. To get their characters in sync I gave them a mentor that would train them and teach them to use their powers together as a team.

There was the small white-haired psychic kid, the nightmare-ridden geisha assassin, and the animalistic sword-person. They were a good team, and became fond of the mentor, a small kung-fu artist type person who taught them in a bamboo forest/garden atop a megastructure on a futuristic planet.

The geisha’s backstory was that she was under a geas that revealed her targets in her dreams, and if she didn’t take them out in a timely manner her full body tattoo would begin crawling and overtaking her skin, causing tremendous pain. Near the end of their training it was revealed to her that her next target was the man that had been training them.

Quite an epic battle ensued, with the players switching sides multiple times trying to discern the correct course of action, really delving into their character’s background and personality to RP their response.

The moment that I remember fondly is the point in which they banded together and overcame the old man, defeating him, while in the his death fall the old man forgave them for their actions. My friends sat in stunned silence before wiping tears from their eyes. I felt like a shaman passing on our ancestral memory to a group of responsive village children. It was amazing.

My favorite experience as a PC

This is a toss up between two moments, but I will go with the one where I role-played well.

The Legend of the Five Rings setting is based on asian mythology and has a heavy emphasis on a samurai caste system, which always filled me with anxiety when I played my character. I chose to pick a difficult role of having an ancestor who had dishonored himself and refused to commit suicide. He was eventually hunted down, and came to haunt his descendants in an attempt to restore his honor. My character was somewhat unique in that I was a ronin shugenja, that is to say a wizard with absolutely no ties to anyone (my ancestor taught me the single healing spell in the game, allowing me to be useful). In fact, any of the other players (a massive 11 players) could have their characters kill mine without any repercussion. A lovely challenge.

The part I fondly remember is when the Scorpion Clan geisha informant is gathering all the PCs together for a mission to go into a restricted part of the world to investigate something. She is either seducing or paying everyone in the game to do this. When it came to my character I am promised restoration of my family’s honor, power, access to magic, all kinds of things. I am refusing all of them, in character, and I can see that the GM is running out of things to promise me. My character looks the women in the eye and says he will help her, but not for power, wealth, or honor. He reaches down and sips his miso.

“I will go because the soup is delicious.”

My favorite character

All of them.

Honestly, I don’t get to play very often (I GM), so my characters don’t feel very complete. I played a wizard that I liked. I am partial to the wizard that overcomes challenges without using magic, but rather through role-playing that high intelligence mages are so proud of.

Four questions and I got an incomplete.

My GM experience that led players to revolt and my game books to be sealed away…

I am a pretty relaxed person when it comes to mistakes. I enjoy communicating, and making mistakes is a great ice-breaker!

The things that I screw-up are normally being in the moment during certain games. I enjoy world-building on a near obsessive level, and will go into details about something and e-mail it to all my players and completely forget to look up a rule or make a decision for something that a player asked me. Also, while I am pretty good making impromptu decisions in-game sometimes I don’t stand my ground with twinks who are meta-gaming. I used to think that I wanted to make the game enjoyable for everyone, but now I just want the rules to make the game smooth and focus on RP.

I have a profile on Brightkite. It is an interesting service, though I am hesitant to use it for anything besides check-ins. They let you post notes there, but that seems like it belongs on my weblog, not a social mapping site.

The thing I am playing with today is how it interacts with Twitter. I have been conscious of how I use Twitter since Fanime, secretly hoping my personal restraint would somehow alleviate the load while they figured it out. I’m over it. Time to plugin another social site!

Something that I found hilarious/frustrating over the last week was my relationship with my Blackberry. In Brightkite you can have check-ins and posts be sent to either your phone (SMS), your e-mail, or both. So someone I knew would check-in and I would receive it as a text message, then Twitter would send it (they had their account post that). Then Twitter would send it again, because it was broken, and then I would receive the e-mail notification.

I was not able to get to a computer to change this, and had info overload. At this point it doesn’t really make much sense to have a service send a message to my phone if it can also send me e-mail. It got me thinking about accessing text messages the same way as e-mail, with similar client functionalities. I like the idea of “push” e-mail, and if I could save and sort my SMS messages (almost redundant, that) I would be a particular kind of happy. I have a techno-messaging fetish.

All said, I am going to play with Brightkite this week. I will have it post updates to Twitter, so that is the only place you need to follow, if you are interested.

Oh, are you interested? I have some invites. Direct message maiki.

The conductress punched the train ticket, leaving behind the hole of a squared bell shape. I attributed the thrills that go down my spine to her movement, her body leaning close to mine. There was something about the shape of her uniform that appealed to me, and for a brief moment I wondered what she sees when she looks in the morning mirror.

I put the ticket stub in my coat pocket and slid the headphones over my ears, bracing for the imminent aural assault of a bass-ridden club anthem. Instead of the boom and thump for which I was prepared, the voice of some angel continued her task of expounding on the virtues of her love, and the various levels of trueness she lends it. I wasn’t in the mood to continue such trite ideology, and instead opted to find the next track.

At this point a car came to a screeching halt in my head, figuratively and somewhat literally. Gabber has a way to begin with a bang, and this track was no different. With a head of broken china I swayed forward and backward a millimeter. At 280 BPM one does not head bang as much as vibrate.

I closed my eyes, imagining the nervous energy that fast music calls forth from me. I visualized it like a thumping and swirling flower of multi-colored light in my chest, its roots spread out to my extremities, pulling them inward.

I opened my eyes and saw a familiar graphitti giraffe on the side of a building going pass. It was going to be a long trip.

Written as part of a 5 word challenge. The words were: headphone, thrills, flower, china, and mirror.