I started a forum for our zombie RPG game. You have to be registered with the forum to view the forum, and you must be approved before you can post. This will allow the participants (who will all be playing remotely) a chance to hash out details and discuss the campaign. I don’t expect it to be terribly active, but if anyone is on the fence about joining or just wants to peek through a hole in the fence, you are welcome to drop by.

Eleven years ago, my friend Alexa took in a shivering, starving puppy in the middle of a Texas thunderstorm. She named him Othello, and he grew to become one of the most gentle, loving dogs I have ever known. Othello followed Alexa throughout a marriage, moving from Texas to Virginia, a divorce, moving from Virginia to Oregon, back to Virginia, up to Maryland (and then another move within), and finally back to Texas. He’s seen Alexa through eight different jobs, and two domestic partners. He’s probably been through more states in this country than my neighbors. His feet smelled like popcorn, and his ears like grapes.

The first thing I noticed about him was his crazy eyebrows. I nicknamed him Samuel Clemens, and it stuck. He loved to run around the couch in my house in Oregon, we’d all throw our hands up and shrill, “VICTORY LAP!” and he’d tear off another one. He tolerated everyone: fellow rescuee Kodi the Great Pyranees, who peed on everything and tried to blame it on Othello; Fucker McCloud (my naming), the shitbag cocker spaniel we fostered; Higginsbottom, the rash-begotten French Bulldog; and even Porter and Rosie.

About three years ago he had a grapefruit-sized cancerous tumor taken out of his abdominal wall. It was an expensive and scary procedure, and thanks to the love and generosity of a good friend and Alexa’s partner of the time, O Monster pulled through. However, I think the combo of his bad start as a puppy and the cancer aged Othello rapidly. Alexa said that he’s been even more stiffly-jointed than normal, to the point of wincing and complaining when getting up or lying down. Things took a worse yesterday, and Othello had lost some of his muscle control and was disoriented and in pain. He was unable to walk reliably on his own, and had no power over his bowels. Alexa was afraid the cancer was back.

It might seem odd that I’m writing a eulogy for my ex’s dog. My close friends and I have one thing in common: we don’t fit in amongst people. We are an outfit of misfits. We count few friendships, and fewer still have survived the turbulent lives that we lead. Othello and I would lie on the floor and watch Dexter’s Lab while I rubbed his feet. He didn’t care that I’d just lost my job after buying a house I could barely afford, panicking on the inside. He’d give me that lazy half-wink, like there were better things to think about than foreclosure. He sat next to me for over a year, while I worked from home and scrambled to make ends meet. When I was sick, he would cuddle me in bed. When I was sad, he’d fly about with his victory laps. I’d smile at him, and he’d smile back, his mouth stretched back so far you could see every one of his gentle teeth. I loved him, and he was a good friend to me.

I’m going to miss you, O Monster. It’s not fair that we love our animal companions so much, yet have to see them suffer. You brought a lot of joy to a lot of people.

Technical note before my entry: I’m almost to a metric mile! 58 lengths in 34:47 yesterday. 64 lengths next week!

Part of the joy of swimming in a gym pool instead of a “real” facility like the one I used to go to in NoVA is that they tend to be empty. Even when there’s someone in the pool with me, they are normally walking. On most days, I get to feel like the fastest man in the water.

Every once and awhile there will be challengers to my crown. Most often it’s a weight lifter who watches me from the adjacent whirlpool. They get in, swim 50 or 100m, and get out, exhausted. Sometimes I’ll get someone who either used to swim or is learning how to swim for a triathlon. They’re fun — they might be a little bit faster, or a little bit slower than I am, and so we get to race. It’s hard to let go of my competitive streak.

By and large, however, I share my pool time with either the elderly, or Asian ladies who smell of White Diamonds and make it hard to breathe. They might do the breaststroke, or the backstroke. Sometimes, very rarely, they’ll do the crawl, because it’s tougher. Regardless, I’m considerably faster than they are. At least they are swimming instead of walking back and forth when they should be in the laneless “open” pool instead.

My pool companion yesterday was an old man. No big deal, except he was using a snorkel. He was trudging along, at about a third of my speed. “Who swims with a snorkel in the pool?” I thought, as I lapped him time and again.

I finished a 200m circuit and was resting to do another set, when I noticed that he was only using his right arm. He didn’t seem to kick very much either, mostly from the right side. I watched him finish a 25, wondering if he was trying to train one side on each length down the pool. Nope, here he came, slowly but steadily, using only his right side. After watching him complete another 25, I decided that he was recovering from a stroke, or other form of paralysis. In an instant, I went from making fun of the guy who swam with a snorkel to feeling totally humbled. This guy kept swimming, his left arm hanging motionless beneath the water, lap after lap.

Congratulations, Mr. Snorkel, you’re the top dog of the day. And I’m just a little fish in a little pond.

After not bombing the shit out of North Korea, can it be any shock that Iran has restarted their nuke program? I think my theory about the next large terrorist attack on the US is going to happen in a year or less.

This is what happens when you have a weak world government who can’t police their own laws. It reminds me of the mothers in King Farm, where we used to live. They looked the part of new-thinking mothers, all right — yoga pants, strollers with full suspensions, a half-caff iced caramel latte in one hand and a cell phone in the other. The dialog goes something like this:

Child #4: “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaawm! I want some COFFEE!”
Mom: “No snookums, it’s too close to bedtime, and you’re already on your meds.”
Child #4: “It’s my BIRTHDAY!”
Mom: “…”
:Child #4 throws a bag of coffee on the ground.:
:Child #7 begins to cry in its Eddie Bauer edition hyper-stroller with knobby tires, kicking triplet Child #9 in the face.:
:Child #9 begins to cry.:
Mom: “Oh, okay sugarpop. Anything you want …. (Now just stop making a scene)”

Here’s an idea, UN. If your children get out of line, do what we did in Oklahoma. Beat them in the face with a belt buckle until they stopped. Some people react better to violence than consession. Ask France.

Okay, I got some good feedback in the zombie rpg v2.0 thread, and I am willing to try a remote game via the Internet. Thanks to some research and playtesting, we’ve decided on using the Fantasy Grounds virtual table top gaming software platform. It allows for all sorts of neat stuff, and comes with the AD&D 3.5 D20 ruleset. Registered users can download the D20 Modern rules for free. I’m leaning towards using D20M for the zombie campaign, mostly because my Year of the Zombie source material is also D20M.

Fantasy Grounds allows a lot of flexibility. Not fond of the D20 rules? You can import other rulesets, or write your own. You can also import any image in JPG or PNG format as a map, create custom “tokens” that represent characters, monsters, or items. It is possible (and expected) to write backstory and item descriptions that can be shared with the players.

And speaking of sharing source material: any ruleset material that is part of the module (say the D20M sourcebook) is shared with the entire gaming party. No more having to tote around fifty pounds of RPG books, or having to buy them in the first place. The GM makes sure the appropriate source material is in the module before starting, and the content is downloaded to the players before the gaming session starts.

Fantasy Grounds runs $35 for the GM license, and $19.95 for a player license. However, you can get a discount for multiple copies. The GM client and four player clients is $79, or a savings of $36 on single-unit pricing. If we get five folks together, we can split it to $16 each, which is pretty damn cheap considering that some people drive from Maryland to play now. There is a free demo you can download, but the demo is limited to two clients in a networked game, the AD&D ruleset, and an non-editable starter adventure.

We plan on using Skype to do voice chatting, leaving the built-in Fantasy Grounds text chat interface for player-to-GM conversations.

The reason I bring this all up is that we already have two people who want to play, with two more possibles. I’d like to buy a stack of licenses so I can start building the campaign with the GM tools. I’d like the limit the game to six people maximum, including me. I would like to play at least once every two weeks to start. I’m not sure how long the gaming sessions would last, but I reckon four hours or less. We can work out more details once we have an idea of who wants to play.

Interested? Send me an email or drop a comment in below.

Here’s a fun little experiment, courtesy of the BBC: tell who’s really smiling, and who’s faking it. There are twenty short video clips of people going from a straight face to a smile, then back again. You can only play each video once, so pay attention! I scored a sixteen out of twenty. After looking at the results at the end I talked myself out of three of my incorrect answers. I rated myself as a near-total pessimist, but I gave three of my errors the benefit of the doubt and listed them as “real” instead of the correct “fake.”

There’s no sound on the videos, and I probably finished all twenty of them in about eight minutes.

How’d you score?

Thanks to pToast for posting this in the Ars Technica Lounge.

I can’t get away from it: the idea of running a zombie role-playing game. I gave it a shot over a year ago, and the group fizzled out. Admittedly, I was rusty on running a game, but I also think the zombie/apocalypse genre is pretty fucking bleak and is best matched with experienced role-players. Many things have re-ignited my interest in running a zombie game in the last six months. Dead Rising on the Xbox 360, the new World War Z book by Max Brooks, and re-reading the entire Year of the Zombie source book in preparation for a possible NANOWRIMO topic this year.

Now, there are a few issues blocking me from running another campaign. Well, besides the whole “it’s-been-awhile” GM issue. We also have a bi-weekly AD&D gaming session that takes place at my house, with a fairly stable and competent group of people. I know that The Accountant™ wouldn’t mind acting as a player sometimes, but I’m not sure if the rest of the group would be up for my genre — like I said, it’s pretty dark, and most of the group is looking for an escape, not an end-of-the-world simulation. Assuming the AD&D group doesn’t want to get in on the action (and that the group stays together beyond November), there’s the issue of scheduling. I could alternate weekends with the zombie campaign, but that runs completely afoul of Lady Jaye’s work schedule. She’s normally home on the weekends, and it’s just too much to ask her to accommodate a houseful of gamers every weekend of every month. I could run the game during the week, but that puts the kibosh on my out of town players, most notably The Accountant™, who lives up north.

All of that being said, I’d be really interested in getting a second-chance game together. If anyone’s interested, put in a comment or send me an email.

Maybe it’s my natural state of paranoia. Maybe it’s growing up on blood and guts novels and movies. Maybe it’s my fascination with zombies. Maybe it’s my belief that the world is pretty much fucked and someone needs to push a giant reset button. It’s probably a combination of all of that plus some stuff I’m not going to submit to public record. Regardless, I’m kicking off a new category on Gibberish today: GIMPS. It’s my make-light-of-a-probably-bad-situation acronym for Geeks In Moderate Preparedness.

It’s going to address disaster preparedness. Generally, any incident that might result in a disruption of local, state, and/or national resources for up to seven days. I figure that should cover any natural disaster in my area, plus some man-made disasters. Anything that results in a longer disruption and it’s either the end of the world as we know it or I would evacuate to another part of the country.

I had originally polled some of my Gibberish readers to see if they’d like to participate in some workshops and brainstorming sessions in person. This might happen in the future, but for now I think it’s best to christen the GIMPS forum at the newly-created forum.drfaulken.com.

You will have to register to read or post anything. Registration is free (duh) and you’ll have to verify your email address when signing up. I am going to manually give folks permission to view the GIMPS forum for the time being.

The GIMPS tag on Gibberish will mostly likely be used in conjunction with product reviews. I might make announcements here, too, like a meatspace seminar on orienteering and knot tying. However, most of the actual discussion (I hope) will be on the board.

Brace yourselves. I’m about to say something you won’t hear from me very often. The wedding was incredible. It was one of the best weddings I’ve ever attended, if not the best. The reception was wonderful, and there weren’t any major family feuds or disruptions. I had a great time.

I took about two hundred pictures at the reception, and had to use my flash. The quality of my shots went up, but unfortunately I had tons of red eye to contend with. I think the built-in flash on my camera is a big weakness. The light it puts out is very harsh, and the orientation of the flash on the camera pretty much guarantees red eye. I was able to patch up most of the photos using Google’s Picasa2, but even then some of the photos looked “off.” Folks with light colored eyes were particularly tricky to deal with.

I put some of my favorite shots up in the Gallery; you can browse through them here or go through the slide show. There are sixty seven items, so if you keep the default slide show settings you’re looking at almost seventeen minutes of wedding pictures. :)

I had a great time taking candids of everyone. I learned a lot about photography this week, just by making a lot of mistakes (and doing a few things right, too). Luckily the wedding party was so easy on the eyes; I enjoyed taking pictures of everyone’s expressive faces. It’s hard to tell from the shots I put up in the Gallery, but I probably shot six or so people more than anyone else. Some people are naturally more photogenic than others. You definitely won’t see pictures of some folks. I know that some people tense up when a camera is around, which is why I used my zoom lens so much. I was able to take almost all of these without my subjects noticing. Even when I was in sniper mode, however, some people just didn’t photograph well.

No matter how hard I tried, some people would have their eyes closed, or mouth agape, or whatever, and I’d get a bad shot. There were two different couples that I tried to capture all night. I wound up getting one decent picture of them, and even then it was from a weird “from the hip” type of snap.

A big congrats to Lady Jaye’s cousin Special K and her new husband El Jota! Thanks for letting the riff-raff take so many pictures of you! ;)

Tonight was the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner. I took over a hundred pictures, but I had to sacrifice so much for the low light of the church and the restaurant that all of my pictures came out yellow. I hate using the flash for candids, as the very first shot alerts people that I’m taking their picture. Out of all the shots I took, I could probably really use about ten or less. Bummer — but at least I learned something.

I had a great time, and I got to eat this one pound bacon cheeseburger (dear Yoda, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry).

Wedding’s tomorrow, with the weather cool but sunny. Hopefully the lighting will be more in my favor.