Plinky asked, “If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell? Food? Cloth­ing? Books?”

Book­store (IBC)

Books and needle­work items! My for­mer part­ner and I used to dream about open­ing a com­bi­na­tion book/stitching/gaming/coffee shop.

Of course, inde­pen­dent book­stores are near­ly dead, and even Bor­ders is dead now thanks to Ama­zon.

Lit­tle needle­work shops have almost total­ly dis­ap­peared, because they can’t com­pete with the prices Michael’s and Joann Crafts can offer, or pro­vide the same range of prod­ucts that inter­net shops can pro­vide.

I’d need a part­ner to run the gam­ing side, and I doubt there’s a whole lot of prof­it for that. The one gam­ing shop I ever vis­it­ed reg­u­lar­ly was The War­room in Nor­cross, and it is long gone. The peo­ple who ran that place cer­tain­ly seemed to know what they were doing.

Cof­fee shops have to com­pete with Star­bucks, but that part was less for itself than as an adjunct to the rest. They only seem to have any hope of suc­cess if they have some kind of spe­cial draw, like live music (which I love any­way)

We talked about com­bin­ing our pas­sions know­ing that any one of those things would­n’t stand alone, and think­ing that per­haps they could make it in com­bi­na­tion.

We knew it was a dream, though — just a dream, noth­ing more. It would take a lot of cap­i­tal to even start such a thing, much less keep it going. Then there was the lit­tle mat­ter of me being 1) dis­abled, and not up to work­ing even a part-time job, much less putting in the hours it takes to mak­ing a go of a small busi­ness; and 2) an intro­vert who does­n’t deal with a lot of peo­ple well.

It’s good to have dreams, though.

Plinky asks, “Would you ever take a cruise? Why or Why not? Where would you go?”

And Anoth­er Cruise Ship

Sure. I’d love to take a cruise. In fact, that seems like a love­ly way to trav­el to/through the Caribbean or the coast of Alas­ka. I know peo­ple who have done both who rec­om­mend both trips high­ly.

I think I’d enjoy a theme cruise more, though, like gam­ing (RPG gam­ing, not gam­bling gam­ing) or filk­ing or maybe even an entire SF Con on board a ship. I’m not par­tic­u­lar to any one fan­dom enough to get into any­thing like a Trek cruise, but a more gen­er­al fan cruise could be fun. Com­bine love­ly sur­round­ings and pam­per­ing with fun? Sure!

That was not pain­less at all. The import fea­ture is tetchy, at best. I had to go through the entire list of 1300+ books and fix their “book­shelf” assign­ments, and add some that just did­n’t import at all. I had over 1400 books in Now Read­ing, and I haven’t quite fig­ured out why there are few­er books in Good Reads. Oh well. It’s pret­ty much done!

The dates I’d read books, my rat­ings, and my reviews did NOT trans­fer to Good Reads, which is high­ly annoy­ing.

I was able to go through and update a bunch of books that I’ve read since NR stopped work­ing, and use the to-read cat­e­go­ry to request books from the library. As a result, there are 33 books await­ing pick­up now, and anoth­er 61 pend­ing (most­ly books that are real­ly new or not yet avail­able). That does­n’t include the inter-library loan items I request­ed.¹

Sam and I had bonus gam­ing time tonight. He’s stor­ing up brown­ie points before Dragon*Con. Katie, unfor­tu­nate­ly, could­n’t sleep last night, then slept all day until about 11:30. Now she’s re-hydrat­ing and get­ting some food now. I hope she can go back to sleep. She’s def­i­nite­ly hav­ing a fibro flare. 🙁

My one and only com­plaint about gam­ing with Sam is that I nev­er, ever get enough. He’s just so good, and the sto­ries are so fas­ci­nat­ing, that I always want more! I’m just greedy, I guess.

Yep, I flubbed my sav­ing throw against being a geek.

I have an SBQ to post, but it’ll have to wait. 🙂

I’m lov­ing hav­ing Hope here for a vis­it. She’s great com­pa­ny, and cer­tain­ly easy on the eyes. She’s been mar­velous­ly patient with my need to sleep so much and the fact that I’m dopey from fibro fogs and med­ica­tions.

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

My sweet­ie had to run a bunch of errands before he got home last night, which short­ened our date a bit. Gro­ceries were need­ful, though. We had some deli­cious deli-style sand­wich­es after he got home, so there was­n’t a kitchen mess to deal with, too.

I think we watched an episode of West Wing while eat­ing. We’re on the fifth sea­son, after Aaron Sorkin left the show, and it just does­n’t com­pare to the pre­vi­ous sea­sons at all. I haven’t even both­ered to watch all of them, although Sam has. He catch­es me up on any impor­tant plot details I’ve missed between episodes.

The girl went out for her reg­u­lar Wednes­day night fun, which was also nice. It’s eas­i­er to have “date night” at home when we know she’s also hav­ing fun.

Much of our game was tak­en up with polit­i­cal stuff, and a nice sur­prise of 32 new pro­to-demons that my char­ac­ter’s min­ions were able to shape into full demons of need­ful types. She has many min­ions, which is mar­velous. Oh, have I men­tioned that she’s the Demon Queen now? Inter­est­ing side­line for a high priest­ess of a good deity.

I would real­ly, real­ly hate to have to do a char­ac­ter sheet for Seau­claire any more. She’d be so mul­ti-classed that it makes my head hurt just to think about it. It’s nice not to deal with such things any more.

But tonight’s game was real­ly, real­ly good, and even though we ret­conned some­thing and most GMs would­n’t be as accom­mo­dat­ing as Sam, he man­aged to make a new thing damn near as dif­fi­cult (or more so than) the old thing, and how is it that he has so much sto­ry in there?

Oh! He also brought home cal­zones, and baked cook­ies! I’m so lucky!

I heard a rumor about this ear­li­er today but could­n’t find con­fir­ma­tion. Now, though, it’s on CNN and most of the oth­er major news sites: Gary Gygax, Dun­geons & Drag­ons cre­ator, dies. The Wired arti­cle is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the AP sto­ry every­body else is run­ning.

I took my project man­age­ment final tonight, so I’m done with the semes­ter! Now I’m try­ing to down­load the text­book files for next semes­ter, but the ebook serv­er is hav­ing Issues.

In the mean­time, I’m lis­ten­ing to some love­ly new music, free and legal, over at The­Six­ty­One. I don’t know how Sam found out about the place, but it’s neat.