Star Crossed Musing

So! It's the end of the year! That means it's time for a yearly wrap-up, along with everyone else's blog. :) Things I did: Got started getting tested for autism Coordinated convention stuff for IGDN Helped make the case for a quiet room at GenCon Taught engineers why communication is important Taught music students how writing fits into what they do Finished Chill and delivered it to the world Got my dissertation prospectus approved and outlined key parts of it Got my first publication acceptance as an academic  Got my first "revise and resubmit" as an academic Developed my first material for Onyx Path Met my oldest's girlfriend via Facebook (!) Discovered Hamilton Knitted some major projects, including the Pac-Man blanket, finishing Will's color stripe rainbow blanket, and a whole bunch of fingerless gloves Discovered that corn, milk, and nuts really are not my friends at all any more. :( Luckily cheese and yogurt are still on good ter...

My apologies for the long delay in posting; I have a few things I want to wrap up on the last day of 2015. First of all, I want to post the end of Season 2 of the Rising Waters game, and then I want to comment a bit on the Dresden Files Accelerated playtest. When last we left our intrepid crew, they had gone to the librarian to get some word on their gifts. Jeffrey, said librarian, was impressed and rather horrified at the same time. He pointed out that these were some of the weirdest things he'd ever seen because of their combination of fae and demonic magics. These are not two great tastes that taste great together, and while it explained how fae magic could take on ghosts, for example, it did not in the least reassure him about what's going on. The group was equally chastened, realizing this just got a lot stranger than they'd bargained for. They had to get back to the tea shop, though, since Hui had made Dylan promise to have Eldi back before dark. Nobody wants t...

While we had the official McFarland holiday feast of Thanks yesterday, today I have the blog post of thanks! I am officially thankful for the following! Matthew McFarland, as he manages through his wizardry to let me have a semi-normal life with food and friends and gaming and kids and a house and dogs and family and love.  His kiddos, Teagan and Cael, who very patiently stand in with me for my own kids sometimes, despite being awesome kids on their own.  His mom, Suzanne, who is a pretty darn good mother-in-law and who is one of my primary sources of higher ed encouragement. His ex, Heather, who is sane and smart and patient and good-humored. And a cake wizard. My dogs, who remind me that as long as we have petting and food and water and a nice place to sleep, nothing is all that bad.  Alisdair, my eldest son, who is 18 and trying to find his way in the world.  William, my youngest son, who is 16 and cutting a swathe with his humor and dapper choices....

I was out with my husband last night shopping and doing errands and getting dinner when we started talking about the new Deadpool movie that will be coming out next year. He's excited about it -- likes the acknowledgement by the studios that the former appearance of Deadpool was just dumb, likes that they're being true to the comics with it. I have thus said that, although I can also appreciate these things, I will not be going to see it with him. He wondered why that was, and so I told him, and he suggested I post about it, which I am now. *For the record, I do not yet have a diagnosis of autism. I have been referred to start the process of getting one, though, and my son is on the Spectrum, and my speech-language pathologist husband is convinced of it, so take that for whatever it's worth. I have a large hole in my ability to get humor. I know that it's there, I know what triggers it, and I know what thus to avoid. I can tell when other people will find things ...

So everything happened yesterday. Earthquakes, floods, bombings, shootings, all over the world. Paris, Beirut, Kenya, Japan, Mexico. Probably some other things I've forgotten about as well, or else didn't hear of -- I was traveling all day, so my connectivity was spotty, and by that I mean perfectly reasonable. I try not to be online 24/7, and it's probably not a good thing for anyone to be online that much. Facebook, in the wake of what seemed an unreal series of terrorist attacks in France, did the seemingly nice thing of doing check-ins for French users and a French flag overlay for profile pics to offer support. And really, it let a lot of people -- and by people, here, I largely mean American people --  have a way to vent their feelings and try to be supportive in some small way to the aftermath of the French bombings.  It was not long, however, before it was pointed out that no such care was given to the bombings at a funeral in Beirut, or to the ongoing issues i...

My dear readers, I am greatly happy to be able to post again. I was paddling my little boat along when suddenly a great wave of Grad School and Work came along and swamped me, and I've been bailing furiously ever since. I've just now gotten my head above water again. The final effort was a recitation from Cicero's First Catalinian Oration, lines 4-17, for my Latin 201 class yesterday. I am happy to say that I have survived it and now in some circles can be considered a real student of Latin. Apparently this is a traditional torture inflicted on Latin students once they get far enough in their studies. You can see you tube videos of it if you look. One person in my class even wore a toga-ish garment. I was not that dedicated. Of course, naturally once one finishes a great work, one gets sick. I have no voice today, so my talking has been curtailed and instead I am using my online voice to write a post! I hope to actually write a couple of posts today -- I'm dreadfully ...

Mock-up cover, courtesy Evil Hat Productions Woo hoo! So my group and I were fortunate enough to get into the Dresden Files Accelerated Beta Playtest , which has been a complete blast. Rather than making characters from scratch, we converted the characters from our ongoing game into DFA characters last session.  Before I go into what we ended doing this evening, though, I want to talk a bit about the playtest and the effects the change in system have had. So, to no one's surprise, DFA is based on FAE ( Fate Accelerated Edition ). For those who've played the Dresden Files RPG , you'll know that it's FATE plus some clunkier bits as it tries to encompass the magic and setting and variety of critter abilities within one game. I love the game, don't get me wrong, but it's definitely not the most streamlined system in existence. The magic system in particular was far more complicated in practice than was convenient, and using it always slowed the game down f...