End of the Work Week Wisdom!

K: "Dawn, I have a question for you."
Me: "I'm sure I know the answer."
K: "Why are there a bunch of people walking around around downtown dressed up all weird?"

It's like my co-workers know me or something. :) It's SakuraCon this weekend (and NorWesCon as well, but that's near the airport).

The sekrit revealed!

Okay, so now that my friends are married and their big reveal has happened, I can share with you the sekrit project that I talked about a bit. They asked me to make a blue shell from Mario Kart for them to toss in lieu of a garter at their wedding reception. And, as you can see, I did.

Of course, when they first asked me to make this, I had no idea what a blue shell from Mario Kart was. Console video games are not part of my geek universe. But they were able to find pictures, and I just guessed on the parts I couldn't see in said pictures. :)

The finished plushie is pretty sizable. The body is probably around the same size as a football. (When I asked the bride how big to make it, her point of reference was a standard size Quaffle. Geek girls rule. :) ) I don't have any pictures of me holding it for scale, but the wings alone are far bigger than my hands.

The wings also took the longest to design and put together. Each wing had eleven individual tubes of varying sizes, which I then stitched together in clusters to make up the wing shape. I only ended up stuffing the body portion, in an attempt to keep it from being too top heavy. The wings are heavy enough just with yarn content, so they didn't need any more weight!

I wrote down most of the pattern for this as I went, but I haven't typed it up to make it pretty yet. I've got some folks who have offered to beta test it for me, but I'm anxious about figuring out how to describe exactly how I did those wings. It makes sense to me, and I could reproduce them. I just don't know if my explanation will be clear or not.

Anyway, voila! Marvel in the awesome. (And as a shameless plug, when I say I can crochet pretty much anything, I mean it. Please feel free to contact me about weird crochet projects. I like the challenge!)

The secret project, revealed

A while back, I bought a pattern for a crocheted d20 from Needle Noodles, thinking that I'd make one to amuse my D&D group. (For the non-geeks reading this, a d20 is a 20-sided die. Which may be more apparent than I think, but it confused my mom.)

But then when Wil Wheaton was getting ready to go to GenCon, he posted on his blog or Twitter or something that he wanted to see how many dice he could collect during the weekend, and asked people to give him one die when they saw him.

Well, I wasn't going to go to GenCon. It's in Indiana or something. :) (I want to go eventually, but it costs a LOT to get out there, stay at the hotel, etc.) But I was going to PAX, and Wil Wheaton was going to be there...

So I concocted a scheme in my head. I'd make the d20, and stand in line for one of Wil Wheaton's signings, so that I could give it to him. This was an excellent plan, except that I am NOT good at following patterns, and so I ended up improvising certain parts. :) There was also the issue that I had the die PARTLY constructed, and MOST of the numbers stitched on by the time we got to PAX on Friday. My plan was to get it done Friday night, to give to Wil on Saturday. Then I got drunk on Friday night instead, and went straight to bed when I got home. :) (Instead, I woke up WAY early on Saturday and finished it.)



And then more chaos ensued. Jeremy read on Twitter that Wil had moved back the time of his signing. There was much confusion and mayhem in getting to the appropriate place for the line at the appropriate time. (Never mind the fact that I had a three-hour game to run, and four games I still wanted to play.) But we did it. We were about 15th in line. We ended up talking to a guy from Nottingham who saw my Rat City Roller Girls sticker, and asked about where he could get merch. He's training to ref for the Nottingham team, the Hellfire Harlots.

Finally Wil arrived and sat down to start signing. The guy in front of us was a big guy, so I was pretty much hidden behind him with the bright red die in my hand. This meant that when we finally walked up and I explained it to him, he was TOTALLY surprised. And he loved it. He literally pulled his phone from his pocket, took a photo, and posted it to Twitter, WITH my Twitter name included. :) And then he talked to Jeremy for a good minute, signed his book, and agreed to pose with us for a picture.



SQUEE! :)

A bit of recap

So I sort of forgot to keep posting last week while in Laguna Niguel. I'd say the sun fried my brain, but I really didn't see that much sun while I was there. The sun was setting around 5 p.m. daily, and we left the Archives around 4:15 or so every day. By the time we drove back to the hotel, it was pretty much beginning to get dark out, and by the time we went to eat, it was always dark.

We did head out to Laguna Beach on Thursday after work, though, to see the sunset and get right up next to the ocean. We all ran and touched the surf after a rather high rush of water forced us to run. If it weren't for not having any good way to get the sand off of my feet when I was done, I would have ditched my shoes and socks and rolled up my capris to play in the water. :) I'm so much like those little kids who like play in the mud or whatever, and then are like "ewww, icky, get it off of me!" :)

Got back Friday and saw my first snowfall of this winter as the cab drove me away from the airport. It didn't start back up again until Saturday night, while I was at my office Christmas party. I kept eyeballing the snow, making sure it wasn't sticking, and even texted Jerome to find out if it was snowing on our side of the lake. He said it wasn't, but by the time Ann and I left, it was snowing heavier at the apartment than it had been in Kirkland!

Woke up Sunday to everything still covered in snow. For those of you who don't live in Seattle, this doesn't happen much here. I was a little concerned because even the parking lot still had snow on it, and the temperatures were staying below freezing. I braved the ice and ickiness though, so I could go meet up with Jeremy for coffee. I insisted that we were WALKING to the coffee shop, however. :)

After that, Jeremy ran his one shot of Army of Darkness rules (though set during the French Revolution), and I literally laughed until my face hurt. We had a particularly wacky cast of characters, and so much geekiness in the room that it probably should have exploded or something. Multi-genre geekiness, in fact. Good times, and I think I'm going to be playing in other one shots with the same crowd. I'm sure this means I'll be persuaded to run eventually, so I've gotta dust off one of the systems I've bought and never touched... leaning heavily towards All Flesh Must Be Eaten, because who doesn't like zombies?

The. End.

More geekiness

So we've been cruising through the Doctor Who DVDs, and as I was busily crocheting while watching last night, I had a fabulous idea strike me. I rummaged through my incredible stash of yarn, and discovered that said idea was almost 100% a go. Why is that I ALWAYS am missing one color of yarn that I NEED? (Anyone know if Jo Ann's is open on turkey day?)

A couple of years ago, my friend John commissioned me to make him a Doctor Who scarf. For those of you unfamiliar with this object, it is approximately 12 inches wide, 12 FEET long, and involves 7 colors of yarn. I made it for him. I cursed a lot. But I got it done. I sadly have no good pictures of this creation, as it was the money I made from this commission that went towards my new digital camera, and DEAR GOD did the one before that suck. Suffice it to say, it was quite the undertaking.

And I've occasionally pondered making another, and then I've remembered what I'd need to charge for it, and how much of my life it would consume, and then moved on. But my brain flash last night has made it possible to once again make something like that scarf, only a much quicker version.

I'm making Doctor Who ice cream and coffee scarves... :)

Technically, they're the same cozies I've been making, just in those specific 7 colors. I'm thinking of doing a Doctor Who fan pack, that involves a Dalek and one of each cozy, but that's getting a tiny bit ahead of myself. I still need to find the gold/yellow yarn in cotton, which is proving trickier than I'd hoped. But I will figure it out, one way or another, even if it involves doing one stripe in acrylic. :)

And yes, this absolutely proves nothing more than the fact that I'm a big geek. But I'm okay with that. :)

Random recap

In slightly geeky news (but I'm getting better!), we went through all of my White Wolf books last night and picked out a bunch to put up on Amazon, and others which will go on eBay later. If you're interested in this sort of stuff, drop me a comment or a line and I'll let you know where you can find this stuff.

In sports news (what?!), I'm a little disappointed that the Packers lost last night. This is, however, mainly because I like the color combination of the Packers, and thus had made one thing and am working on another thing for my shop that are in green and gold. Now that they're not going to the Superbowl, will people still want Packers stuff?

In sewing machine news, the Hello Kitty machine is slowly earning my ire. However, this may be because I'm trying to make it use quilting thread. This is apparently a bad idea. :)

And finally, in other craft related news, I really am having a lot of fun making ACEOs. They're just so cute, and not so complex as to make me lose my attention span. :)

Gamer geek post ahead!

(So for the non-gamer geeks, while you are welcome to read today's post, you may not understand much of it. :) Don't worry, I try to keep these posts to a minimum!)

So the Scion game came to a glorious end on Saturday night, as planned. Next on the agenda is my Exalted game, and I'm getting more and more excited for it! :)

I played Exalted 5 years ago, not too long after it came out. We only played for a month or two, and then the game ended due to real life stuff happening. I got rid of my books, and didn't look back. But it was sort of always sitting in the back of my brain, especially once we started in the Scion game. The ST and the other players were all Exalted fans, and Scion incoporated some of the parts of Exalted that I really liked into the system.

So when the Scion ST announced that the game would be concluding in January, and asked what we wanted to do next, I volunteered to run Exalted, to much excitement from the rest of the game. So we started collecting up books from eBay and used game stores (all of them are LONG out of print), and I started putting together ideas.

Last night, I figured out the bulk of my plot while driving to pick up Jerome from work. I sat down and scribbled out a few pages of notes as soon as I got there. Finally, it looks like my game is getting somewhere!

I still need to squeeze in several days worth of reading of course, to get caught up on all of the stuff that's relevant to me as an ST, that I could ignore as a player. I don't know where I'm going to find several days to read, of course, so I may just have to wing it a bit... :) That, and ask a lot of questions of the folks who know the game better than me. :)

Super awesome game

Excuse me while I geek out for a little while. If you're not into gaming, or Scion in particular, this post will probably be a bunch of nonsense. Just come back tomorrow, and I promise there will be a less geeky post. :)

So Saturday night was Scion, and though we ended up getting there late, it was a really wonderful game. We hadn't played for about a month, so it took a little bit for me to get back into the swing of things, but once I did, it was fabulous.

My character in that game, Kendall, is the daughter of Tyr, and she is in somewhat regular communication with her father. When she talked to him during this game, she found out that a good chunk of the Norse pantheon was going to come to see her band, Gleipnir, perform. Of course, this had both Kendall and me freaking out, because she wanted to be sure to impress them! :) While some of the other characters were doing things, I was flipping through the book, and I pointed out Loki to Jerome, and said "well, at least he's not showing up."

Of course, Loki DID show up, and pretty much all hell broke loose. Baldur ended up getting gored by a roller derby girl wearing wooden horns, and, as we rapidly discovered, it was all Loki's fault. Well, Jerome's character followed him out as he was leaving (Loki was disguised as Odin at this point), and all of the sudden, "Odin" got attacked. A few seconds later, we realized that it was Coyote attacking Loki, and Coyote is a regular ally of ours. So all of the sudden, the majority of the rest of the Scions that Kendall runs with are attacking Loki. All I could do was say "you guys, he's on our side!"

At any rate, they managed to take him down (hurrah for going diceless for the night, and this being a major plot point!), and Coyote ended up using one of Kendall's Relics to bind Loki... which just happens to be a scrap of Gleipnir, also known as the stuff that was used to bind the Fenriswulf. Yeah. (Luckily, Tyr came back and effectively embedded my "relic" into Kendall's hand, so that she can't lose it... unless she gets her hand cut off... oh.)

Short version: we averted the first sign of Ragnarok a month or so ago. Now Loki is bound, and one of my Scion pals asked "what happens to him now?" Me: "Oh, he gets to go have a snake drip venom on him for all eternity." And, of course, I was totally right. So now the second sign of Ragnarok has come. Yay!

So yeah, things look dire, but we're heading to Greenland next, to hang out with a group of Vikings who have apparently been cut off from civilization for a thousand years. :) Bizarre, yes, but that's the fun of a quasi-fantasy game! :)

I totally love this game, particularly in the style that it's being run. It's very dramatic, while at the same time, being really laid back in terms of the rules and the dice rolls. The ST very much wants the story to be about the heroes being heroic, so when the dice have the potential to get in the way, we just don't use them! So far, this seems to be working really well, and I like it! (It may also have something to do with the fact that I would LOVE for my games to run just like this. :) )

This is wrong... Macke made a page for his bot... Bottle 56's Funny Conversation Log. Well, I'll probably be mentioned there sooner or later, seeing as the damn thing always HITS ON ME... it's an AI... created by my sister's boyfriend... and it HITS ON ME!

So wrong...

Not much going on today... it's still hot in my office, which makes me very disinclined to do much work. I've spent most of the morning so far digging through old computer manuals in one of our carrels. My great find of the morning: some ANCIENT diskettes, measuring about 6 in. x 6 in., that were used in this thing called a Displaywriter. It was apparently a dedicated word processor from the late 70s or early 80s (my boss said we got ours in 1981... and we don't have it any more). Well, these things are true relics, and would make stunning wall decorations (for those who are inclined to decorate with old computer stuff... kinda like my optical mouse that I found in the Old Man's building...). So I asked my boss if I could keep them to give to my friends...

Guess who's getting presents this weekend? ;) w00t!

Megan and Macke came down for dinner last night, and we sorta talked about me starting my new game this fall, when Megan moves in with us. Unfortunately, we never got beyond the "here are my ideas" phase... the important question of "what kind of game do you guys want me to run?" never got answered... so guys, E-mail me soon! :)

The options, at the moment, are: (so that I can think and write about them a little bit more)

• All-Tremere game, set shortly after the clan's formation (Dark Ages / Renaissance game). As I said, this would mean you would get to be a pretty potent generation, but you're still neonates. Over time, you would have the potential for some high level disciplines, but they cost a LOT of XP! :) Oh, and yes, there is a weird twist to this game, but I'm not telling you what it is just yet... ;)
  
• Political Camarilla game set in Chicago. This is an alternate Chicago (i.e. not the one in Chicago by Night), based on the idea that the events of Under a Blood Red Moon, where the Camarilla, Sabbat, and Garou had a war, turned out in a different way--in this case, mutual extinction. So the hierarchy is all new, and all that good stuff. Like I said, this is related to the one-shot that I ran at my mom's house (around Christmas).
  
• Some sort of Sabbat game set in Miami. I forgot to mention that this is in contested Miami. There are Camarilla and Sabbat, but if I run this game, I want to do Sabbat... I just don't know what exactly...
  
• The "woojy" Camarilla game set in New Orleans. Lots of emphasis on investigation and research and, well, wooj. :)
  

And maybe my Changeling game is going to start again... Rafe, if you're reading this, I'll talk to you on Friday at game... :)

I found a World of Darkness test. I turned up with equal scores (12) in Mage and Changeling. This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, honestly. :) The funny part was that I had a 6 for my Wraith score, a 1 for my Werewolf score, and a -3 for my Vampire score. I guess it is true that I live in the Shiny Happy World of Darkness... :)

Well, the X-Men test says that I'm Jubilee. I suppose this would be more valuable to me if I actually knew who this character was. She wasn't in the movie, so I'm kinda clueless... :)

I went back and looked at my "to-do" list that I posted here... here's the update...

• Morgan story - nothing doing, here. The way that I anticipated the story going is absolutely nothing like the way the game is going. So I've written an introduction, that I may post, but the story probably won't get finished... :(
  
• Garou stories 1 through 3 - ummm... right, I was working on Garou stories? Oh, I did start on the first one. Spent about 15 minutes on it. Stopped writing, and started playing the Sims. Damn, there's the problem! :)
  
• Beyond stuff - not worrying about that any more, because that game ended.
  

So I'm down to 4 stories to work on... w00t! :)

All kinds of crazy busy today, but of course I take time out to read other people's blogs, and write in mine... that's cuz I'm just psycho like that... :)

Jess had a blogger code on her page, so I went to get one for mine too.

B1 d t k- s-- u-- f i- o+ x-- e- l c

Decode it here.

That is all for today. More when I have time to stop to breathe, let alone think. :)