Well, last night I went to Anime Club. I think I will go back. It was much much fun and all the people there were very nice.

Anyway, we saw a couple different anime's including Black Lagoon, Lovely Complex and another one with school girls AND mechs AND people dressed up like Penguins! Go Figure, eh? Last but not least we watched Sushi Oji... which was funny... LOL ROFL... It is a live action Japanese show where there is this guy who was like a sushi protegy. He quits making sushi after his father (and some other guy) get jointly skewered on the end of the nose of a GIGANTIC swordfish (lol... that was a funny shot). Ever since then he has this "fish-eye phobia" which makes him go totally nuts every time he sees a fish-eye. Meanwhile he's been raised by this crazy old lady who is teaching him the art of... some sort of martial arts, but the secret of this martial art is that it is based off of the techniques of sushi making and Sushi Oji is supposed to inherit the tradition! Oh my! So she goes off and drowns herself and he has to inherit it, but the sushi chef guy doesn't think he's worthy and makes a tuna roll out of a leaf and poo... generally it is TOTALLY CRAZY! Which is what makes it TOTALLY FUN! So yeah, Anime Club may or may not be showing stuff on Monday and won't on Friday because of NDK, Which I may or may not go to. Regardless, much fun and very exciting ^_^

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I called it, it's mine. I figure I deserve the title since I've had to live through it. Blegh... So, seeing as my system has been ladened with cold medicine (mmm, grape) I have drearily catching up. I finally saw John again. Apparently he has Fridays off, too. He of course also has Monday's off. I also saw Rebecca, who's Werewolf I've been attacked mercilously on facebook, but I haven't seen recently. She also seems, well. After that I went and worked on my chair for a while which will be a halfsized model of the real thing. It fits in a bread box. It will be cool. Overall things have been well. I am hoping to join up with the Anime club later tonight. I will write about how that goes later.

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My dad has been telling me about declaring a victory. Declaring a victory is when you look back on your life and you say, "Okay, I'm good enough. I don't have anything left to prove". I would now like to declare a victory.

It's a lot like my goal to have a 30 inch waist by the end of the summer. You may be glad to hear that I completed it, but then again, it was sort of by error. I was working on my weight, exercising, doing the right things: I was looking a lot better and my 39 inch waist was decreasing a little. However, it was frustrating and I wasn't quite sure it if would ever actually happen so, one day while bemoaning this fact, I ask, "Where DO you measure your waist." It turned out that I was measuring at the wrong place on my torso and I was already at my goal. Neat trick, hunh?

Well, tonight I went to Navigators, a christian group on campus. There is a verse in the bible: Matthew 22:37-40 "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." I always thought, "Okay, so I love my neighbors as much as I can, I can handle that, but the loving God with your whole heart? I don't love God like that, I don't know if I'll ever love God like that." So, for a time I despaired... a long time. It just seemed ridiculous that my heart would tremor at the sight of Him, that my face would flush and my words get caught in my mouth. It seemed absurd that all I would want in life is to hold Him, more than anything else in the world... Well it turns out that I could have been right, but the fact is THAT is not what God was talking about. As they explained at Navs tonight, there are two different kinds of love: the romantic, kissy face, 'I melt when I see you' love and then the unconditional, reliable, dutiful love. The second kind of love is what God commanded of us and the one that we should be striving for. A wash of relief fell over me. I could DO that. I WAS DOING that. So it was that I declared a victory over vocabulary, or as the christians say "a victory over death."

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I am back from the gaming convention. All said and done, it was really a lot of fun. I saw a lot of people that I hadn't seen in a full convention cycle, so that was pretty interesting. Conventions are a really strange thing, I guess it's kind of like a great big family reunion without the awkwardness. It's none of this, "Hell, I haven't seen you in a year why don't you call me." It's more like, "Wow! Have you grown? It's so nice to see you." Not to mention you all like the same thing so you can either game or talk about gaming, the only time you get lost is when the army vets start talking weapons.

I think I liked my last slot the best, which is ironic since it was the only one I DMed. I found that I really like DMing. It's good to have a break here and there, but frankly, I like being in charge and I like using my own worlds. This slot is actually a special game where the players show up and a DM is chosen out of those players. Then the DM has to throw together a module while the players throw together their characters and they are in two different rooms so there is a chance for delightful miscommunications. I think it was the last time I played it, the players decided they were all snails, unfortunately the DM got that information halfway through his planning period. We heard his screams of frustration from three rooms away. Since then they have put in measures to prevent such things.

In this game the players chose the genre and the time period. It was the "Heist" genre in the near future, so, at least for me, it was easy to hammer out a Ocean's Eleven-like plotline in a couple of minutes. I drew diagrams out of the ying-yang, wrote little scripts, looked up page numbers, pulled out my dice and stole heavily from things I had already done. End result? Everyone seemed to have fun. Ironic since more than half of them died. There was one trigger happy guard that generally wasted everything in sight (including my own guards at the end of the hallway) which gave us three dead people right near the end. The only two people who weren't dead were the techies in the getaway car below. One of the techies came up to save the one guy who was just mostly dead. He FINALLY killed the last guard failed some checks to stablize the mostly dead guy and made a critical failure when trying to safely getting him into the harness. It didn't confirm though, so the guy just took a little bit of damage before they all repelled down the building to the waiting car. Looking back, it did have all the essential elements:

Easily accessible character stereotypes - to make roleplaying easier (They chose these)

An strong motive for following the plot - If you're really roleplaying your character and they have no reason to be somewhere... then you're screwed. You have to just think, "Okay, as a player I know my DM wants me to go here. Now, if I could just convince my character..." (The characters were all part of a mob family. The Boss asked them to steal something for her. The Boss gives you amazing goodies if you succeed, you die if you don't! Simple enough?)

A real threat of danger - You can't just WIN! That's no fun. If there was no struggle then the ending would mean nothing! (This one... I suceeded a little too well. There was such a real threat that everyone DIED!)

So yeah, I'm pleased. In other news, I am feeling more and more confident about Graphic Design... or maybe it's just my listening abilities. As it seems, I am the only person who sucessfully followed the project guidelines. Not only that, but I was one of the few people whose AD was actually PG. Yeeeeaaah. Of course I got a toy plane... other people got like... twisty ties and telephone chords, cups, plasitic gloves... I got lu-cky! Our next project is a group project. I hope we turn out with something classy. I know art doesn't have to be classy, in fact it is becoming less and less classy every single day, but when I do art, I want class, so that's what I'm hoping for.

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A poem that I wrote...

 
You know I love you more than the all stars and moon and trees.

And were it not for living, you would be all that I need

But since I am still living, I must be so far away

So it is that while I'm living, here is where I'll stay

But know no kind of distance can keep my heart from you

Because though I am living, life alone will never do.

-------------

Auralie- an old poem I wrote

A wind blew southward one day,

but he was well upon his way

And though she had wished him gone

She knew then that she was wrong

In her lair, slow still air, trapped sorrow and doubt

And though she searched through and through, there was no way out

"Let me die," her final cry and we never will forget

The way her eyes did cry the way the sun did set

Sleeping in a nighttime eye came a light from long ago

And now she's in a better place, at least for all we know

Sorrow, anger, fear and hate, we do not want you near

And as the deathbell now is rung, may our ears not hear.

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Well, I had a 2/3 crappy day at the convention today. I want to be entirely accurate. One of my slots really was a lot of fun. The first Cthulhu slot I played a 63 year old woman who is a whole lot more that what she seems. You know, the surfing, boxing kind of grandma. The next slot was a really really long RP about this group of US army guys who go down in this cave and start encounter fantasy stuff. Three of the six people playing had a heavy amount of military experience and it wasn't long before the entire thing dissolved into a discussion of jargon and acronyms that I had no hope of knowing. That and my brain creaking to remember 3.5 D&D rules after having run WoD for the past couple of years, made the whole experience very painful. Not only that, but the combats eeked on like a minatures game and I had to get home to bring my dog in and feed her so that she wouldn't be stranded until the wee hours of the morning like now... when I'm writing. So I got home, got my dog game back and then there was slot 3.

Slot three is the player competition one, so you want to do good character roleplay. The thing was that I really didn't have much to do. Maybe I'm not creative enough, maybe I'm not a good enough roleplayer, but my character sheet basically said that things were bad in this place here and that I was ordered by the elders of my race to help out. It also specified that I didn't really care. Well shoot, that's great. I am a lizardperson with hella psionic skills and absolutely no reason to be there. Well damn. The best thing about all that is that was how most of the character were: completely divorced from context or motivation. I admit, many players made valiant attempts to make the game happen, but in the end I spent a lot of time just staring at the faces of the two people who actually did have any plot relevance and seraching frantically for a hook or at very least something to do. Squat. Absolutely squat. Even when the DM occasional turned his head around to recognize that I existed, there still wasn't much there. At the end my character got an up close and personal view of the mind of the "Wise One" who we were supposed to kill and I realized that the "Wise One" seems like the good guy and we seem like the bad guys. I was right. I tried to thwart the party. The DM thwarted me by killing me off. Deus Ex Machina. W007. Okay, so it turns out that part two relies on the fact that the "Wise One" has been obliterated by the idiot party of Part 1 and the fact that my character came to this realization was terribly inconvenient, but still, killing me off just because like that? That's a little low. So, going home today I felt really rotten. Not about what I did at the end because it was the only original thing I was able to do all night. I felt rotten because for the past 6 hours or so I felt like all I was doing was being ordered around and minimized by bad flipping DMing. GAHHHRLGGG

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