Enemy of Entropy

TotD: Robin Laws on Roleplaying Games

10 April 2008, 11:22 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under RPGs, Thought of the Day.

I hadn’t ever thought of it this way, but I think the man is on to something.

“One of my pet the­o­ries about the pop­u­lar­ity of role­play­ing games goes like this. Role­play­ing is fan­tasy shop­ping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more inter­ested in shop­ping if a) it meant never hav­ing to leave the house and b) they were shop­ping for super-​​powers. In that case, the typ­i­cal role­play­ing rule­book is like a Nieman-​​Marcus cat­a­log for super-​​powers. Depend­ing on the game sys­tem and char­ac­ter type, these extra­or­di­nary abil­i­ties might be called feats, spells, schticks, dis­ci­plines, skills, high tech gear, psion­ics, or what­ever. For lack of a a bet­ter all-​​encompassing term, I refer to these things as crunchy bits.“
Robin D. Laws, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering

Secrets of Good Game Mastering cover

Book Joy! And Stuff

29 March 2008, 10:32 pm. 1 Comment. Filed under Art, Health, Reading.

I’m so tick­led! In the last two weeks, I’ve found not one, but two books that Sam and I have wanted for ages at good prices on eBay!

Seeing Red
First, I’ve been look­ing for
See­ing Red: The Rap­ture of Red­heads by Howard Schatz for years and years. Seri­ously, it has to be at least five years since Sam first men­tioned that he’d love to have it. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s out of print, and the only thing I found for the longest time were used copies for $150 or more. It’s a gor­geous book, but that’s far more than I could pay for it.

I had the book on my wish list at Half​.com, which is part of eBay, but for some rea­son I also set up an eBay search a few months back, and finally got found a copy going for $35.1 I didn’t hap­pen to see the email until a day later, and by then the seller had dropped the price fur­ther for some rea­son. It was more than I pay for most books, but after five years, it was more than worth it. We received it in the mail ear­lier this week, and it is just a beau­ti­ful as any new copy.

Your Guide to Metabolic Health
That gave me an idea, so I set up a search for another book I’ve wanted for a while, but couldn’t afford. John C. Lowe’s tome Your Guide to Meta­bolic Health came out in 2003, and I haven’t ever found it in stock any­where. It must have gone out of stock quickly, because Ama­zon has only ever had used copies that I’ve seen. And again, they were always pricey — $180 was the price I’d seen most recently.2

Today, eBay came through again! The “buy it now” price was very rea­son­able, so Sam encour­aged me to go ahead and get it instead of chanc­ing the auc­tion route.

Dr. Lowe has also writ­ten another book that’s specif­i­cally about the meta­bolic treat­ment of fibromyal­gia, but it runs over $500. Appar­ently, that one is intended for physi­cians, rather than laypeo­ple. I have an eBay search going, but I’m fairly cer­tain the book I bought today has the infor­ma­tion I need in it. From what I’ve heard, it’s mainly about fibromyal­gia and chronic fatigue syn­drome.3

Keep Working Girlfriend
I’m busily read­ing my ARC of Women, Work and Autoim­mune Dis­ease: Keep Work­ing, Girl­friend! It’s good stuff.

1 For what it’s worth, Half​.com still shows only the higher prices. Weird.

2 It’s avail­able more cheaply now, but I still got a deal.

3 Aha — the pub­lisher actu­ally sells the lat­est ver­sion of that one for $99.95. Why would any­body pay the used price? Why do the used sell­ers think they can demand so much?

Laptop Research & Shopping

21 February 2008, 4:01 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Geekery.

Sam and I spent most of our date time look­ing at lap­tops. Yes, we’re finally replac­ing the one that died last sum­mer. Yay!

I find it eas­ier to put what I find online in con­text after hav­ing actu­ally played with a bunch of machines tonight, so I’ll be doing a lot of research online.

Any­body have any strong rec­om­men­da­tions or good/​bad expe­ri­ences to share? Knowl­edge of any places that give “edu­ca­tional dis­counts” that aren’t just “steer your stu­dents to us and we’ll give you a lit­tle lower price on your own machines” deals? Sure expe­ri­ence exor­cis­ing Vista from a “Vista-​​compatible” PC? Please speak up!
Read on…

It Was a Lovely Day

12 November 2007, 10:30 pm. 7 Comments. Filed under Family, Home, Reading.

Please note: Yes, I am refer­ring to today, the 12th, which is my birth­day. Those close to me know that I gen­er­ally hate my birth­day, as it’s a reminder of mul­ti­ple mis­car­riages and other nasty things hap­pen­ing around this time sev­eral years in a row.

Sam and Katie man­aged to make #41 very nice, though.

Quotable Mug With Osho QuoteSam and I went out Sat­ur­day evening to Barnes & Noble, but I just couldn’t make a deci­sion. So many choices! We went over to Out­Write, too, which is always fun. I saw lots of adorable trin­kets there, and plenty of inter­est­ing read­ing and lis­ten­ing mate­r­ial, but still couldn’t make a choice. I really liked this mug, and it felt great in my hand, but I couldn’t find out if it’s microwave safe. (My favorite cof­fee cup was bro­ken recently, vic­tim of my unre­li­able grip. Thank you, fibro/​arthritis/​CMP!) Have any of you tried a Quotable mug? How did it hold up?

Oh! On the way home, we started to drive past Krispy Kreme and Sam had a sud­den need for donuts, so we popped in there to sat­isfy that. I’ve never done the drive-​​through there before, but things were really crowded in the store. The car line was long, too, but we had the advan­tage of pri­vacy and good com­pany while wait­ing in it.

We enjoyed being out, but I came home with­out hav­ing cho­sen any­thing but donut fill­ings. Sam threat­ened to pick for me if I didn’t make a choice on Sun­day. I have a lot of trou­ble spend­ing any money on myself, or ask­ing for presents, and he thought that’s why I hadn’t cho­sen anything.

So we went out again on Sun­day — leav­ing the house two days in a row is very unusual for me any more! I had finally decided on exactly what I wanted, and we tried to go get it, but found the place closed for Veteran’s Day. My man insisted on tak­ing me to Bor­ders and buy­ing Kim Harrison’s A Few Demons More, promis­ing that we’d also go to The Place again on Mon­day. Then he took me to Steak & Shake for din­ner, because when I saw the sign I had a seri­ous crav­ing for their mushroom-​​swiss burger. (Don’t bother with the new Por­to­bello mush­room burger, as you get far fewer mush­rooms that way!)

Katie and I (she’s home from school, sick) had a very nice, low-​​key day Mon­day, and Sam and I set out again after he got home. This time, success!

I asked for some­thing that prob­a­bly seems odd to most peo­ple — a non-​​resident library card so I can access the best library sys­tem in Geor­gia, Gwin­nett County Pub­lic Libraries. But I’d checked, and they have 95% of the books I’m really want­ing to read, and past expe­ri­ence says they’ll con­tinue to carry the fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion I love. They have a far bet­ter selec­tion of every­thing than Dekalb, where we live. (Okay, Gwin­nett has stopped car­ry­ing music CDs, because so many went miss­ing. Big deal.)

I wanted the card instead of a few books, because this way I can read all of them! And, in fact, we came home with nine books that have all been on my wish list for some time, and two or three graphic nov­els for Sam.

Now I have a whole pile of new-​​to-​​me books, and A Few Demons More! They’re all way too tempt­ing to a girl who still has home­work to do, includ­ing a SWOT analy­sis that’s due for my man­age­ment class this week.

Thanks to all of you for the birth­day wishes via Face­book, email, Twit­ter, LJ, etc. :-)

A Day in the van

8 May 2006, 10:59 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Education, Family, Homeschooling.

And it was, truly. Which is why this looks much the same as it did last night.

Katie and I drove all over metro Atlanta, test­ing out the new wheels in the process. A med­ical appoint­ment, a trip to the bank, the post office, our mail drop, a craft store, a school sup­ply place, a cou­ple of book stores, Phoenix & Dragon, and some­thing I know that I’m forgetting.

You wouldn’t believe how much “home­school­ing” gets done on the road. Had the dealer had a van in stock with a DVD player installed, I could eas­ily have jus­ti­fied it for purely edu­ca­tional pur­poses. As it is, I’m glad my lap­top has a DVD player, as we find var­i­ous BBC and PBS series pretty good sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als at times.

No AV mate­ri­als today, though — just books, paper, cal­cu­la­tor, and a lot of dis­cus­sion. Sci­ence, alge­bra, world his­tory, crit­i­cal think­ing, Eng­lish, vocab­u­lary, cur­rent events…

Oh! We got our Latin texts! Katie and I have decided to start study­ing Latin together this sum­mer. I’ve always regret­ted not hav­ing had a chance to study it, and it can only help her. So here we go!

The girl got some knit­ting done in the car while we talked, too. As she gets more con­fi­dence in dri­ving, I look for­ward to get­ting some stitch­ing done while she dri­ves. On the other hand, she’d get fewer lessons done. Hmmm.

I need to study to try to keep a lit­tle bit ahead of her. We’re going to have another blog where she, Sam and I post about our learn­ing adven­tures. It isn’t quite up yet, unfortunately.

Namaste,

Cyn

 

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