The Game: Mage: The Ascension

The Players: pxr5, fengshui, ectophylla, zsquirrelboy, vimnelius, plus Mr. C.

The In Nomine game eventually started going south, so sometime in the middle of Spring Quarter that year I decided I would call it quits and then quietly start up a new Mage game with a slightly different player roster.  One disastrous e-mail later (which I never heard a peep from the unintended recipients), I had a new stable of players and started running Mage again.

I don't quite remember how long this campaign ran, but I'm thinking it was at least 8-9 months. 

ectophylla

zsquirrelboy

What I Remember Most: pxr5 kicked things off with a bang by destroying San Francisco in the 2nd session - her Euthanatos was played pitch-perfect all the way through, right up until she accepted her own fate and transformation into Death, Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse.  For one thing, it turned Loom of Fate into a far better published scenario than it has any right to be.

Unbenownst to my players, this game was very heavily influenced by a computer game I had completed recently called Realms of the Haunting.  It was a FMV-heavy first-person-adventure game at a time when both of those descriptors were on the wane.  Much of the acting and production values are laughable, but it had some evocative scenes and turns of phrase.  Outside aesthetics exploding all over the place would prove to be a recurring concept, as a fair number of games I ran later would have lots of things, ahem, "lifted" from movies/TV/video games I was going through at the time.

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Orlando was less fun my second time through, but still enjoyable.  Would have been more so if not for the head cold I got on my second day there.

The dry heat of Las Vegas the week after was an excellent remedy, though.  It was my first trip to Sin City and I only scratched the surface; I'd love to go back with 

gracefuleigh

Hey Reggie -

For the Nth time, your Friend Code system is retarded.  Know what my XBox Live friend code is?  My phone number, so my friends can call me and tell me to get the hell online.  Next time around, along with HD support, let's go for something that wasn't designed for 12 year olds (or at least, a way to opt out of the To Catch A Predator sandbox).

Wii Code - 3283 0653 9775 5419
Mario Kart - 0645 6158 5496

Here's the thing about Peter F. Hamilton - take any one aspect of his overall body of work (weighting the Commonwealth Saga ahead of the Night's Dawn stuff because I consider the latter to just be an earlier draft of the former) and there's probably someone in SF who can do it better.  Any number of military SF writers do better space battles.  Bruce Sterling handles near-singularity hyptertech better.  Vernor Vinge's mastery of sheer epic scope is better.  And I'm sure there is better porn.

And yet I find Hamilton's stuff incredibly readable.  I'm such a sucker for space opera, and tore through The Dreaming Void in about a week.  It looks like he's finally doing something other than an alien-invasion story (although there is plenty of time to bring that in) and all the usual tropes are there.  The technojargon is a little less impenetrable than normal, which is nice to see (although I have no problems being thrown into the deep end).  No honking big space battles, but instead there are a few really nice brawls between hyper-enhanced humans with a delightful amount of collateral damage.

Still, not without downsides.  First, he can't seem to kick a few of his old habits, notably a few-too-many callbacks to the Commonwealth Saga (including a cringe-inducing bit of exposition right near the end), and of course, lots of gratuitous sex.  Apparently one of the major benchmarks as to how posthuman you are is how much you get laid.  And the other demerit is that he's back to writing trilogies, meaning I have to wait at least 2-3 years to see how this all turns out.

However, Dance of Dragons will be out before long, so I can switch gears over to that.

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 It may be 42 degrees and miserable as hell here in the Windy City, but there is no cloud layer so thick it can obscure the Turning Of The Seasons  Yes, there was a game last night.  And some in Tokyo last week.  But as far as I'm concerned, a new season of The Great American Pasttime begins today!  163 games and everyone is tied for first.

It may not be the greatest year for Chicago's ballplayers.  Unless Lou has figured out a way to clone Carlos Zambrano (or otherwise allow him to open 2/3rds of all their games), the Cubs still don't have enough quality starters to be competitive.  And the White Sox....well, rebuilding can't last forever, can it?

Nonetheless, I'm going to be making an effort to see more games this season than last year.  I'll try and post my intentions in advance for those so inclined.

Yes, I haven't posted in a very long time (8 weeks, according to my LJ front page).  No good reason or excuse, except for the same miserable Chicago weather that has crushed the spirits of many.  I don't normally feel it as acutely as this year, but I've been feeling somewhat unmotivated and lackluster (really, not a bit of luster to be found) for the past few months.

However, March brings with it the promise of the turning of the seasons (promise not valid in all wards, please contact your alderman for details) and a fresh start for us all.  The very notion that right now, baseball players are in spring training adds a noticable bounce to my step.

Hello to all those I haven't seen or spoken to in a while, hopefully the silent period is over and I trust you are all well.

The always witty

gracefuleigh

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Saw The Golden Compass last night at River East with

gracefuleigh

gnosticpi

Every time I see a really, really good and accessible summary of the mortgage crisis/debacle, I feel compelled to make a note of it and pass it along.  In this case, Brad DeLong linked to a Steven Pearlstein article this morning which nails it.  I haven't found anything yet for the bailout plan, although Brad again provides this blog post which is very good, but not quite as accessible as it could be.  Nonetheless worth reading.

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Stolen from 

jovianconsensus

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Just finished Spook Country, for which I have a few initial thoughts:

First, not his best work, and inferior to Pattern Recognition.  This isn't to say it was bad, because it wasn't at all.  It was largely just too similar to Pattern Recognition in format and structure, right down to the vaguely-out-of-her-depth protagonist.  That said, I think Gibson is going somewhere interesting with his current line of reasoning and I suspect the third book in the trilogy, when he finally figures out what he wants to say about Hubertus Bigend, will be quite something.

Second, if you were the kind of person who hadsany curiousity about the notion of scripted video for the web (as opposed to the random filmed detrius that washes up on YouTube), Gibson's exceptionally short chapter style is worth thinking about.  Each chapter is a single story beat, maybe two or three but no more, almost like a real novel dehydrated down into brief flashes of narrative, description, exposition.  He tells a good story by stringing together 30 or 40 of these chapters, carrying along by that weird Gibson prose style that I find so engaging.

Third, reading Gibson takes me back to the mid-90s, what I like to think of as the WIRED years when all this Internet shit seemed so mysterious and hot.  Now it's conventional, known, no less exciting but profoundless less exotic, for many reasons including but not limited to we finally figured out ways to make money using the Series of Tubes.  But there was something stupidly romantic back then, and I hope I never lose a bit of that spark about the possibilites that exist between strings of ones and zeroes.

Finally, it's time to start Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.