Star Crossed Musing

Si says hello. So, for those who would like to find me at GenCon, I'll be working at the IGDN booth most of the time, which is Booth #1539. Come by and say hello! In addition, I'll be on two panels: How to Learn RPG Design: Friday August 15th at 4PM-5PM, Crowne Plaza Union Station in room Pennsylvania Station C. Looking to get into designing RPGs? Curious about what you need to know? This panel will help you get started! Join Jason Pitre and other Independent Game Design Network members to talk about learning what you need to know to work on RPGs! GMing as Women: Saturday August 16, 10am-11am, in the Crowne Plaza Union Station in room Pennsylvania Station C. Are you a woman? Do you GM or are you thinking about doing so? This panel of women GMs will answer your questions and help you get a handle on how to deal with GMing challenges, large and small. Come on down! Please note that both panels are currently sold out, so that means that standing room/sitting on the...

So, I am not a big comic book goob, unless you're talking about the 90s run of Vertigo, and even then not nearly so much as some. I knew vaguely of the Guardians, but much in the same way I knew of the Inhumans, which is to say names and not much more. I went into this movie neither knowing nor caring about it, for the most part -- but it looked fun and my friends and husband were excited, so here we go. This movie is awesome. Now, I'm a big adherent to the maxim of "It's okay to like problematic things" because, being a geeky woman who specializes in Gothic and 18th-century British Literature, from a 21st-century and personal perspective, nearly everything is problematic. It's not a question of "if," but "how much" and whether whatever it is exceeds its problematic content by enough for me to put it aside. There were some problematic issues in GotG, I can't lie. Every now and then, I'd be going along and totally into it, and th...

One of the odd things about working with thing theory is how all-encompassing and yet oddly specific the words "thing," "object," and "stuff" suddenly become. Well, maybe not stuff, at least not for formal discussion. And what's worse, everyone who uses them means something slightly different by them, which only makes sense as we're all just sorta making this up as we go. We know there's something there worth talking about, but the vocabulary to talk about it isn't fully formed yet. Latour gets around this by discussing human and non-human actors, but that makes some people squirrelly about evening the playing field between people and objects (even though I like it). The difficulty, then, in writing about the ways we interact with the things we make (and what effect those things have on us in turn) is that sometimes we can be specific (i.e., what effect does a soccer ball have on the people who interact with it) but sometimes we have to...

I know there's a thing where you post something that doesn't have to be much at all, and at least it's there on the blog, without having to be a multi-hundred word entry. I used to be able to do that on LJ -- the stakes were lower somehow. But now I feel like I need to have a substantial entry of note for each thing I post, as though it were a real publication that I need to justify the existence of. After all, if it's not interesting, why publish it? Which means that there's a lot of weight in that word, "publish," as opposed to just writing something. I'm not just writing (which is an inherently self-directed/absorbed activity), I'm publishing, which means I'm doing this for someone else. I'm not just diarizing, I'm blogging. I'm courting an audience, sort of. I'm creating something outward-facing. It needs to be impressive, thoughtful, funny, meaningful, or somehow otherwise worth the time of random people who might stop...

Song: One Less Problem (Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azalea) The play session started with everyone meeting back at Moe's for lunch after disbursing to their homes for the evening. There was no luck tracking the third ghoul or finding out for sure if the second had been eliminated, though there's no reason to assume it wasn't -- it was a pretty effective method they used, overall. The problem came when they tried to figure out what to do. Uno was adamant about not contacting Adelphia, but he wasn't sure who he should be talking to either. Dylan was fascinated by that glimpse of something in the deeps of the bay and felt the ghoul attacks were linked to it, and wanted to investigate further. Zeke wanted to make sure the ghoul wasn't heading around hungry. After discussion, Dylan reveals that he wants to make a diving bell go to down and see what's down there in the Bay. The rest of the group is somewhat skeptical, but it's a plan, at least. They decide to sp...

Song: Hallelu , Devil Makes Three Following the goblin battle, the group is filled with the pressing need to find out what exactly is going on. They've got a dinner to keep with Mickey (who looks something like the image to the right) but first they want to have a bit more info. In order to do that, they call on their contacts. Uno, Adia, Eldi, and Zeke head off to Duff's place in the hope that he knows something about what's going on. Dylan and Viktor stay behind to see what they can figure out as well. Duff withstands Adia's offers of marriage as a sugar-high induced lapse of judgement and pawns her off with a cupcake while he talks business with Uno and Zeke. Duff points out that Adelphia, Uno's intended, has a lover already and isn't perhaps best thrilled to be engaged, given that it sort of means the end of her relationship with her lover, her being the heir to the throne and all. He also mentions that there are a lot of people who stand to gain and...

So I'm two weeks into my six week class over the summer, and I'm really liking what I see in the students and the class. I had to reach down deep to find my happy place in the course after some changes we made to the curriculum, but now that I'm in it, I really like what I'm seeing and how everything is coming together. One of the things I'm happiest about, honestly, is how far my teaching has come. I've found out that I'm likely to co-teach a class I've taught before in a previous semester. It was one of my first teaching experiences where I took on a lot of the responsibility, and although there were areas in which I was very happy with how things went, there were a number of things I could have done better. One of the things I realized today, though, is that in thinking about that upcoming course assignment... I know what to do to fix it. I've already got plans. I've learned so much since my first time through and I know how to address t...