(no subject)

[eurydicebound]

Today's checklist:

1) Finished EAK's edit. Boom, baby!
2) Laughed my ass off over adamjury's work on the "SR D20" site.
3) Successfully fought off a nasty headache.

I've finished the redlines I have for the Super Sekrit Project, though I'm still statting characters endlessly. I'm also trying to wrap up a few more issues. Luckily, the weather is gorgeous here right now, so the kids can play outside, I can open a window to keep an eye on them, and other than that I can keep working without too much worry.

I thought I had a buyer for my house, which I was very excited about, but it turns out that my mortgage company doesn't have a loan assumption program any more and the buyer can't get a loan right now. She really wants to move in, though, so we're going to do a rent-to-own arrangement. In a couple of years when her credit is better, she'll get a loan and can finish paying for the house. Which reminds me, I need to get a contract together that I can send to her.

I heard today that my kiddos have been accepted into the charter school, so I'm very pleased about that. I feel sorta guilty for moving them away, as Alisdair's teacher has worked so hard with him. I'm concerned that the new school will have a lot of good things for him, but won't have the level of occupational therapy type stuff that he could use. Of course, I don't know if that really helps him in the long run or not. Sigh. So much is just a leap of faith over a very dark chasm; you just have to close your eyes and hope you don't land really badly.

Tonight, I'm doing questions from mercuryeric and Gareth-Michael Skarka. I think this puts an end to the questions I have backed up. If you asked me some and I missed them, let me know and I'll do my best to find them again. I'm not reposting the rules, as I think everyone and their dog knows them by now.



First, mercuryeric.

1. Right back at you: If you could have carte blanche to rebuild/reconstruct/retool/reboot an entire game line (and assuming that you will not suffer the slings and arrows of the game's diehard grognards), what line would it be, and how would you retool it?

Gah. I honestly don't know. For all that I've been playing for a while now, there've been very few games where I just looked at it and felt a desperate need to fix it. And most of the ones I felt that way about have been redone by now, largely in ways I agree with. I honestly think Crimson Skies tops my list, because it really needed to be an RPG. I would have kept the board game, but expanded it out using some vague semblance of Mechwarrior stats and made it a full-fledged RPG. A board game with expansion books was just not something anyone knew how to market or sell, and in some ways, that was one of the things that doomed the line. (yes, there were tons of others, but that's one of the few I can pinpoint for this discussion.)

2. You've said you'd want to work with me more in future. For the love of God, why? I'm mean.

Well, you've not been mean to me. And I hear good things about you. Why wouldn't I want to work with you? If nothing else, I'd have a good, "so no shit, there I was, just me against Trautmann... only a pack of smokes, two half-written emails and the blood of an undersize chicken lay between us, and all hell was about to break loose..." sort of story. :)

3. If there was one public figure, currently alive and still in the public eye, that you could (with total immunity from prosecution, imprisonment, or other bad stuff) punch right in the mouth on national television, who would it be (and why would you deck 'em)?

Hmmm. I think it would have to be Bush Jr. I know exactly what he did to gain power, I watched him do it, and it just pisses me off, both then and now. I've watched a hundred other politicians do the same thing, and it never fails to just irritate the shit out of me. He fooled an entire nation into thinking he was genial, stupid, harmless, and just like them in whatever way counted. Luckily, this is a really hard act to keep up over time. Not impossible by any stretch, but every time his hand gets forced, it's a little harder to pick it back up again. If we're lucky, Kerry will make him prove that he's not just a good ol' boy in order to keep up with things.

4. Top five marooned-on-an-island (yet still have battery power and CD player) CDs?

Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Toward Ecstasy
Glasnots, Brave Spirits
Sting, Dream of Blue Turtles
Soundtrack, Return of the King
Chopin, Favorite Piano Works

Gah. That's really sickeningly laid back. And it's not that this is all I'll listen to, either. It's just that every one of those albums have proved themselves to be something I can listen to over and over again without becoming sick of it. I don't have to be in the right mood for it or anything. Ah well. Such is life.

5. What book do you own that you consider your guiltiest pleasure to read?

That's easy. My paperback collection of three Barbara Cartland historical novels, rolled up into one. My God, those things are terrible. TERR-I-BLE. If I ever had to edit them, I think I'd commit seppuku. But I used to read them in the high school library back in the day, because I'd read everything else they had and I could get through one entire book over my lunch break, and they required no brain power whatsoever. They're light and fluffy and would kill you if you had to be on a steady diet of them, but the hero gets to rescue the girl and they deal with at least one decent obstacle and there are usually two kisses in the book as a whole. Not too bad for an hour's light reading.

And now, Gareth.

1) What is your most niche-y interest? Something that even other geeks go "meh?" about....

Wow. I think it's a tie between 19th-century gothic literature and Elizabethan drama. I adore both things, and I have absolutely no one to geek at about them. Everyone just nods politely while their eyes glaze over. Pity me.

2) What historical period, other than this one, would you like to live in, and why?

I'm actually terribly fond of the 1700's, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of myself. Far more so in Europe than the US, though. I think I have to chalk it up to too many period novels in my youth. :)

3) What was your favorite television program when you were growing up?

Hmm. My first favorite was The Tomorrow People, a moderately short-lived series on Nickelodeon way back in the 70's that I first saw just before it was cancelled. I was pretty big on reruns of The Man from U.N.C.L.E too. In the 80's, I'd have to say that it was a three-way-tie between Max Headroom, Beauty and the Beast, and Remington Steele. And I think that between those, I've hit nearly every bit of genre show out there. :)

4) (borrowed from Bernard Pivot, via James Lipton) What is your favorite curse word? (and, just to make it more interesting, why?)

I think my favorite curse word would have to be "fuck." Not actually because it's sexual, but because it just encapsulates so much meaning into such a short word. One syllable, almost one sound. I don't use it often (not the least of which is because I have kids), but that only makes it carry that much more weight when I do. It was also one of the last curse words I adopted into my vocabulary. (I didn't actually start using real curse words until after I left for college. No reason to, as it would only have really made my mom mad, and there was very little in my life to curse about, one way or the other.)

5) What is your all-time favorite RPG and why?

It's sort of funny and sad, how the ones that are my favorites are ones I've never actually played -- no one to run them for or who would want to run them for me. I can play D20 any time I want to, but these others were a much harder sell. Changeling, Hunter, and Nobilis 2nd ed. are all right in there for favorite. All of them appeal to me greatly, and the Storyteller system was the first one I could run without killing myself trying to remember how all the time. Nobilis just blew me away when I saw it; I immediately fell in love not only with the book itself, but with the whole idea. I wanted to badly to play it or run it, I didn't care which. Unfortunately, nobody else I had handy got it in the same way I did. Alas.

Castle Falkenstein is up there too, but I have both played and run it, so that doesn't really count. :)

Comments

[mercuryeric.livejournal.com]

Well, you've not been mean to me. And I hear good things about you. Why wouldn't I want to work with you? If nothing else, I'd have a good, "so no shit, there I was, just me against Trautmann... only a pack of smokes, two half-written emails and the blood of an undersize chicken lay between us, and all hell was about to break loose..." sort of story.

Heh.

My rep seems a little inflated these days.

These days it'd be, "A pack of smokes, which I can't have, because I quite, two fairly tame e-mails, and a freshly baked garlic chicken dish. Yum."

;)

-E

[anaka.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Well, I was going for the whole hyperbole thing, since I don't smoke either, but you get the idea. :)

I'm up for the garlic chicken, though.