Hilary Booth... of course!

So I've discovered Echo Bazaar twitter/facebook game due to havocthecat/butterflykiki's posts. It's an interesting dark Victorian/steampunk mish mash. It's a little tricky getting the hand of gameplay. I signed up under an alter ego, which may or may have been the wisest idea. You can't really invite friends if you don't follow anyone. If anyone is interested, please see selawall. If I was posting bits of my name, you'll recognize Cecilia (or "Sela" as she goes by) as my leading lady. Somehow I think I've developed a spy character... not intentional either. Oops. Fannish friends might recognize the user icon I'm using for this incarnation -- Rebecca Fogg might be more appropriate considering.

And Saturday it rained. Lord did it rain. All morning and nearly all afternoon. Fortunately dear Hanna wasn't quite as hard-hearted as her Savannah namesake and spared us some of her fury. The DC types worked pretty fast to catch bad draining streets/alleys. I stayed inside, having done my groceries on Friday, and watched the US Open's men's semi-finals. Federer managed to get in his match, but Nadal had his match switched to the smaller Armstrong stadium. They didn't finished until today. Murray just wouldn't let him get comfortable out there. Part of me is thrilled for Andy, but part of me wishes it had been Tim.

Then last night I went over to pinkpolarity's place for a belated birthday celebration. She introduced me to the magic of the Xbox. The last time I played video games was in the arcades or with the good old days of Coleco Vision. *wistful about cracking Zaxxon* And as I tried to explain to her, most arcade games have one controller and maybe two buttons, so the Xbox controller was really hard for me to master. The whole idea of "seeing and moving" (i.e. look around first and then move) was alien to me. She tried me out on the first KOTOR game which I enjoyed. It's a very forgiving game for beginners with nice reminders throughout. Then I hit a stumbling block called Battlefront. I just couldn't master it. We tried putting me through the first Halo's tutorial to see if it would help. The world was interesting, but it's not really my type of game.

I'm gearing up for another Avengers kick. Netflix brought me the extras disk off the Emma Peel Megaset. The "Case of the Missing Corpse" promo was delightful. The real revelation were the last remaining season one episodes with Ian Hendry as Dr. David Keel. Like Doctor Who, the Avengers is sadly missing some of its history because of the masters were taped over/lost/otherwise misplaced. Only the first act of "Hot Snow" remains and "Girl on a Trapeze" and "Frighteners" were complete. I actually quite liked "Girl on a Trapeze" more than "Frighteners", even though the former lacked Patrick Macnee as Steed. (I also liked Nurse Carol better than Keel's actual fiancee. She came off as smarter. Oh well.)

Somehow I've managed to get some reading done. I finished the latest Elizabeth Peters' mystery, Laughter of Dead Kings, the last Vicki Bliss mystery. I'll need to write up my thoughts on that one later, because some things bothered me about that book, especially compared to the earlier books in the series. I also finished the first Rogue Angel book Destiny, which is like Witchblade meets Relic Hunter, complete with Joan of Arc references. It's fluffy mindless entertainment with a fairly decent heroine. That she's nearly the only female character in the book is a little worrying. My mother must have sensed I needed a book to read. Either that or she magically senses my struggles with writing these days. She sent me Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.

Since confettiofstars was curious and I know there are other WoW players on my flist:

I don't play World of Warcraft, but even I knew enough about it to find this funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u15HmEMp2Qc

The weather is absolutely horrible today, gray, gloomy and rainy. I'll do groceries and errands tomorrow. But the spring cleaning continues. I've stacked the mysteries on their sides as well and now I've opened up all kinds of space on my poor bookshelves. I might actually see the shelves rather than the piles on them. I've also changed this LJ around a little with a new layout. I think the coloring goes quite well with Hilary. I'm also going back into the old entries and tagging them. I've left the tags list visible for now, but eventually I'll probably hide it.

I spent last night at a board games night playing Apples to Apples and Citadels. Citadels was a fun game where you're building districts and people take turns being King. It was good to get away for a Friday night.

My apartment application was approved yesterday, so I'll call the office on Monday to sign a lease.

havocthecat wrote a long interesting counterpoint to an article on RPG.net called Girls Don't Roleplay. She covered it more thoroughly than I could so my general reaction remains: WTF? I don't have to look any further than my writers' group for examples of female gamers and GMs. We even ran a fairly short-lived "all girls" super-hero RPG. The lions share of my online gaming experience have been female dominated. And god knows my friends list is filled by old school gamers.

TVShowsonDVD announced that the first two seasons of the 1980s cartoon JEM will be released on DVD in March.

One day of respite and we're back to the monsoon season. So much for April showers... not that I'll be wishing for the hot August nights anytime soon, but some sun might be nice. Work continues. The weird thing about working near Union Station is I keep having the urge to take that "Anywhere" train.

My social life will speed up this week with writing group, char-gen session for superhero game, and party in rapid succession. I've completely lost track of the books we're discussing for the writing group, after doing so well earlier on. I don't know whether I'll have time to check library for a copy. The all-girl RPG should be fun. I really need to sit down with a name book and find an alter-ego for my character. I spent some time with Hero Machine to create the costumes which turned out okay. I'm still not wild about the villain I drew up. (I do have the beta for HM which I've installed. I *have* to see if you can zoom in on the interface, because I can barely read the damn thing.)

Also want to spend some time with icons for WENN using gpsysngbrd's bases, if I can find some decent smaller fonts. Maybe this will spur me into action for the WENN bunnies, like the time travel story or even the "Private Lives" ripoff. My Scott muse clearly knew what he was talking about when he was insisting that *he* was married to Hilary. Do I *ever* write straight Hilary/Jeff stories?

My parents came back from a three day stay in Annapolis where they were in town at the same time as a major boat show. Everyone thought they were there for that event.

While my father stayed in my apartment watching football and eating sushi, we did one of the local indoor malls to do some shopping. Less said about the actual shopping the better. How is it that I always find something I *like* that goes out of style? How do I always find the shoe that fits perfectly only to have them change it just a little? (With me, that's a big deal. I have very narrow feet and suddenly a shoe that fit before may not anymore. Nordstroms was a having "hard to fit" sale for sizes 4 and sizes 9 plus. Length isn't the problem -- width is the problem! Find me shoes that aren't gunboats or don't cost a fortune! I could find shoes but they'd be expensive Italian numbers and usually highly impractical for being on my feet.)

Downstairs in the ground floor, a large display was set up of gaming venues. (My mother looked at the greenery and asked where do you set up the trains. They looked like something you'd wind up train tracks around.) At first I thought the local game store was having a tournament until I saw a "Lord of the Rings" banner. Games Workshop puts together a tabletop wargaming based on the LOTR universe, a game for each book/movie. They had set up the main battle sequence from the prologue of the "Fellowship of the Ring", showing Sauron's forces against the elves and humans. Other smaller battles were set up as well, including previews of the Two Towers game. The guy I talked to was quite nice and knowledgable and didn't seem at all fazed by a woman asking about the games. He continually tried to make the comparison with chess, but I saw it as a more freeform version of say the old Stratego game, except there weren't any squares. Apparently each little figure had different skill levels, so a Elven archer could shoot a certain range and a soldier move a certain distance. I thought the whole game looked quite well done. Although as I pointed out, you could wind up rewriting the book if you weren't a good enough gamer... or a skilled general could switch the outcome. Looks fun as hell, but not a lot of fun alone.