(no subject)

Oh joy and rapture! They fixed the ice machine!

I heart ice a lot. If you hand me a drink that doesn't have ice in it, I am overcome with sadness. I can't drink cans of soda without getting a glass of ice. I put ice in every drink that's not supposed to be hot (like hot chocolate), including wine and milk. Well, okay, not milkshakes- I knew there was an exception in there somewhere.

Anyway, I try to drink a lot of water at work. This does a couple of things. It makes me pee a lot, which makes me get out of my damn chair, and I go to the furthest bathroom from here that's still in this building (that I know of). It also does all the usual nice things that drinking a lot of water does. But the damn ice machine has been broken for over a week, and so I haven't been drinking so much water. I swear it has negatively affected my complexion already. But huzzah! I now have a giant cup nearby.

In other weird Mielikki eating habit news, I have a leg rule. Most people I've hung out with know about this. I don't eat anything that has less than 2 legs (clams, fish, snakes, Thalidomide babies) or more than 4 legs (shrimp, lobsters, crabs, those frogs in that polluted lake in Michigan or wherever it is). That basically means no seafood; the only exception to this is that I'll eat crab rangoons, but despite the name I've never eaten crab rangoon that actually appeared or tasted like it had any crab in it. If it did, I wouldn't eat it. Oh, I also eat caesar dressing and stuff with Worcestershire sauce, both of which have anchovies in them, but not so I can tell. I also hate celery.

I'm in a talkative mood. Ask me a question, query me about my interests or give me a topic to discuss and I will come up with something to say about it. It might not be a rant, but it absolutely is guaranteed to be amusing to me in some way.

questions for Mielikki!

"what does the DnD game you're in center around? Is it hacknslash or DoGooders, Inc.? Any prevailing theme?"

There's no grand quests or overarching theme. The DM just strings together adventures out of Dungeon magazine, which are often along the line of 'get the thing or rescue the person or kill the bad guy'. Usually we'll do some deed, go to get paid or thanked (or paid and thanked) by someone who was somehow affected, and he'll send us to a friend of his who'll go "say, could you take care of this thing for me?" and off we go. We've had one that was a contest and involved a lot of puzzle-solving, and that was fun too.

We're not a do-gooder party by definition, but we are heavily-weighted towards the good-doing just because most of us are good-aligned. Our official party name (because we had to have one to enter the contest) is 'Happy Juggernaut of Doom', which is the name that me and some other friends entered (and won a door prize for) at a gaming convention over 10 years ago. HJOD lives on!

For what it's worth, I play a vain elven druid named Maugyn who refers to half-elves pityingly (or contemptuously, depending on the context) as 'half-humans' and has a beefed-up lynx named Dalton who follows him around and sometimes does more killing than Maugyn does. I basically play him as a cat personality (thus the name) in an elven body.

Now, hub is getting ready to start a campaign and it looks like the adventures will be a lot more connected to each other, since he's going to be making up all the adventures himself, near as I can tell.

What I want to know is, is there some regional or personality trait that determines whether you refer to it as 'DnD' or 'D&D'? Hub uses the former, I use the latter.

more questions for Mielikki!

"How long have you been playing D&D?"

I had a crush on a fellow in 4th grade with the virtually untraceable name of John Clark (and I have thought about trying to find him). He was my first nerd crush. So if I was in 4th grade I was probably 9 or 10 which would have made it around 1977. He and I were in the gifted program which bussed a handful of us once a week to a much nicer school than the one we normally went to, where we played break-out on Apple computers and learned about the difference between analysis and synthesis, and other nerdy fun.

Anyway, John often talked about this game he'd been playing called Dungeons and Dragons, and partially in an effort to have more reason to talk to him, I convinced my parents to buy me the game. At the time it came in a box and had 2 stapled soft-cover books, and a set of brightly-colored dice (which I still have to this day, and always associate the shapes with those colors- d4=yellow, d6=orange, d8=green, d12=blue, d20=white. No d10, there's no such thing as a damn d10, you just use the d20 which isn't marked 1-20 anyway, it's marked 0-9 twice, and I bought a silver paint pen to color half the numbers so it would be a functioning d20). I remember calling John so I could ask him to explain how to read a d4 to me in a blatantly transparent attempt to get more attention from him. Oh, those were the days.

Of course, shortly after we got the game we moved to another city and I never saw John again. I didn't play because you can't play D&D by yourself, but I read all the books countless times. I finally got my brother into it when I was in 9th grade or so, and being too broke to afford modules we often made up adventures to run each other's characters through. By then we were able to get our hands on what are now considered 1st Edition books (the hardcovers, now Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, oooh), which we bought off some friend. We played around with it through high school. I got in my first actual campaign in college in 1986-7 or so, where I met the guy I almost married. That was second edition. After he and I broke up I didn't played for years until hub and I started playing in Mike's group (third and 3.5 editions) in 2003 or so.

Short answer- 27 years, more or less.

(no subject)

Okay, I don't have a filter for 'only people who've met me in person' but this is for y'all.

You've seen me, you know what I look like, as do I. But I have a, um, shall we say eclectic sense of fashion, and I've been told on one occasion that I am wearing something that looks awful on me, and been rather surprised. So after hearing several friends rave about this particular brand of make-up, I am thinking that it might be time to purchase a few things- especially considering that nothing I have is less than a year old, and some of the things I have I purchased when my husband was in elementary school.

But the hard part is deciding exactly what to get. Which means knowing what looks good on me. So, if you would, please check out this chart and definitions and tell me...

[Poll #430819]

(P.S. If you chose the last option, you oughter leave some kind of helpful comment, dang nabit. And don't say clown paint; homie don't go there.)

Late night discussion

Books that will never be written:

Harry Potter and the Sticky Ballsack