commanderteddog

I finally finished the last Umineko story, Twilight of the Golden Witch.

It's really more of a very extended epilogue. Requiem of the Golden Witch went into the most of the how's and who's of the Rokkenjima incident. Twilight was more about resolving dangling plot threads with Ange and Bernkastel that were left over after Requiem.

The general theme of the story can be summed up as "Get over yourself and move on" on several levels. I'm surprised that more fans didn't take offense over the author framing obsessively speculating and debating the same facts over and over again as a mindless, destroying mass of evil that corrupts all that it touches. It's framed as more of an attack on tabloids and online conspiracy culture in the story and, arguably, the author doesn't have a good answer to counter that nebulous antagonist. The one he presents is to deny a single answer to them and therefore force them to question why they care so much about something that really won't directly impact their lives.

By the same token, I know there's fan forums with people still fighting over the details of stories. Which is strange, because the author's point really was that the truth of Rokkenjima incident didn't matter.

The story was about the two siblings who were part of a eccentric family that gained power after WWII through secret Nazi gold, clearly suffered from functional levels of mental illness, left illegitimate kids all over the place and had odd fetishes for the occult and strange parts of Western culture. And for all the mistakes that family made (and there were many - these weren't really good people), they weren't evil, soulless people. They were just a very eccentric family who made really questionable choices. In the end the search for that eccentric familiarity is what drives the siblings after the incident, but takes them both in very personal and separate directions. When they find each other again, it's not as family but as peers - they're both authors who have moved on, built their own lives and accept that the familiarity that they were looking for isn't going to be found within each other.

And I'm okay with that.

I need to unwind, so allow me to hold a discussion on Marvel Heroic Roleplaying's (MHRP) Milestones and how to use them for fun and profit.

For those who aren't deeply familiar with MHRP, Milestone's are the game's main vector for XP. They're typically conflicts that aren't quite to the scale of the game's main plot, but ones that the character is dealing with on an ongoing basis. The game puts the direction of these in the player's hands and rewards them for bringing them up. Depending on what part of the Milestone you complete, you receive 1 xp (usually something minor), 3 xp (something slightly bigger and more important), or 10 xp (a watershed moment for the character that changes them in some way). Once you complete the 10xp part, the Milestone is replaced.

This doesn't mean that your character's inner conflict's resolution is set in stone. Milestones can be swapped out between sessions and during what are known as "Transition Scenes" (read: anything that's not combat/an "Action Scene"). I suppose one could game the system this way, but the intent is to change milestones that no longer make sense in the context of the story and characters.

The books have piles of milestones of varying degrees of quality. Which is fine, if you're using a premade character. If you aren't, like the fool I am, things become slightly harder. Milestones aren't as annoying to built as Powersets (I'll spare the terrible details of my adventures translating Icon's Possession power to MHRP), but are somewhat fiddly.

It's become something of a sport to convert characters into MHRP. The only problem is that a lot of the fan-made milestones suck. They're usually a combination of too vague, broad or short. This was something I wanted to avoid. Granted, some of the official milestones are terrible too. There are milestones which only grant their 1 xp level once, which makes no sense.

I ended up doing a lot of "serial number filing" with official milestones off at first. This had varying degrees of success. Since I seem to have opinions in everything, I feel to share them here. Maybe someone, somewhere will find some use for what I discovered.

( Let's discuss, shall we?Collapse )

I normally make a resolutions post for the new year on New Years day, recapping my goals for the past year and the ones for the new year.

Yeah, so, my last few days have been:

28th - Went to the maushold to watch movies, look at Christmas lights and sleep over.
29th - The last game of Piet's Star Wars campaign. Got back to Toronto late.
30th - Had people over to play Arkham Horror and eat pizza.
31st - Attempted to get my license. NYE party in the Hamiltons.
1st - NYD party at home with the Christmas dinner we didn't have the week before because Rob and I were both sick. This involved more Arkham Horror.
2nd - Filed out my Second Career contracts. Got the rest of my license. Got trapped in a government building elevator for 40 minutes.

And today, I head up for Orientation at school. 0_0

So, later.

Crossposted from Dial T For Teddog (http://teddog.com). Feel free to comment here or there!

I spent part of today working on my plants; today felt like the first day of the weekend after a busy weekend and Monday. Everything planted back in April today is in some stage of spouting other than my peppers, chives and coriander. I’m not too worried right now, since those can all have long germinations. I suspect that I didn’t properly handle the coriander, but we’ll see what happens in a few weeks. My beans reacted especially well and are outside already. We have a large wire pyramid from a previous tenant, so I’m going to attempt to train them to climb that.

I thinned my tomatoes out today since their true leaves are starting to appear. We’re now down to 12 plants, which is still a lot. The lettuce and basil should also be done at some point, but they seem to be less along. I’ll probably get around to them by later in the week.

I also picked up some swiss chard seeds, mostly because I found some bright lights seeds and decided that I needed ORANGE in my garden; some spearmint seeds, as I wanted an young spearmint plant and they were out; and an young lavender plant, because I wanted to leave with something well underway. While the process of raising a plant from seed has been interesting and compelling, I felt the need to have a plant that’s already producing returns, as it were.

The only preventable problem that’s occurred is that some of my thyme dampened off. It seems to have been a side effect of too much water for a plant that needs comparably little.

Crossposted from Dial T For Teddog (http://teddog.com). Feel free to comment here or there!

Let it be known that I will go insane without projects. I’ve been attempting to hone various household skills over the last few years. I wouldn’t call them “homemaking skills” but they look like it from the outside. These include learning to knit in 2010 and learning to crochet in 2011. Gardening is the one I want to work on in 2012. In particular, the art of container gardening.

One of the on-going frustrations I had with the old apartment was the lack of outdoor space. I had lots of windows, but this never the same as having my own outside space. It’s one of those things you don’t consider until it’s not there. On the plus side, I have a back deck now and it’s fantastic. The plans for the deck involved me using some of the space for gardening.

The last time I could really have a garden was in the summer of 2006; I claimed the back garden space and attempted to start a vegetable garden on a whim. I had good luck with tomatoes, mixed results with peppers and the raccoons ate my cucumbers. Cucumbers are heart-breakers, let me tell you. Plants tend to like me, so I wanted to given gardening another go. My spare time over later part of this week was studying various blogs and websites on container gardening.

It turns out that I live walking distance from the East End Garden Centre. It’s an awesome little place that’s bigger than it looks on the outside; a maze of plants and equipment that winds around and through the store building and in fromt of the house next door. The staff were all friendly and helpful and I suspect the place will see me as a repeat customer. I picked up some seeds and some gear I needed and trotted off back home. The centre had a wide collection of young plants that looked appealing, but we’re right now in the awkward phase where there’s still a risk of frost. I didn’t want to get a plant and kill it on accident, despite our unusually warm spring., but this also means there’s time to start seeds!

In the outside planters I currently have planted lettuce (a cooler weather crop I can rotate out in the worst of the summer), coriander and chives (greens that I can have on hand and not need to get from the grocery store), along with some mixed flower seeds in single pot. If we hit a late frost, I should be able to pull those back in. In my little indoor seed starters I have thyme (I might have envy of Erin’s thyme in her front garden), basil (one of more twitchy plants that I got), sweet peppers (I expect these to be labor intensive, but I wish for a successive go at these), green beans (I wanted a climber) and a mix of heirloom tomatoes (PRETTY COLOURS!). I might be looking to expand later in the season depending on my success rate and how the summer shakes out.

I’ve named the whole concept “The Victory Lap Garden” because it amuses me.

There will hopefully be pictures down the line. I’m attempting to grow these from seed, so there’s nothing exciting to show yet. I need to get some fertilizer early this week.

Figured this might be of interest for some people. Several people I know are from Saskatchewan and as such, Toronto pizza doesn't really do it for them. I suspect it's like how I sometimes get cravings for Finnish pancakes (speaking of which, I know what breakfast is tomorrow...). After some research and legwork, we've put together a recipe for a passable Saskatchewan Style pizza with food you can get anywhere.

The end result is a very heavy and dense pizza that you need to eat with a fork. It'll fall apart otherwise. It may also be heavy enough to kill a man with enough calories to also kill a second person and cost as much as a delivery pizza. Here's how to build it!

Crust: We used this. Any crust will work, in theory.

Sauce: I THINK we used normal, canned pizza sauce. Comments from my housemates imply that the sauce is a touch spicier than average. This is somewhat up to the maker.

Toppings: This is where the differences in the style of pizza become clear. Forget just a pack of pepperoni. What you're going to what to do is stock up on deli meats. We used one of those variety packs of cold cuts meant for subs, plus pepperoni plus some salami. Now that you have a pile of meat, stack it on the pizza until it's about a centimeter thick. You'll be putting this on top of the sauce, holding back on the cheese for now.

Cheese: We used a mix of cheese we made of about 45% asiago, 45% mozzarella, and 10% cheddar. The secret ingredient is the asiago - I don't recall how I found this out, but it makes a big difference in the taste and smell. Put this on last, covering all of the meat. Imagine it as being the top crust of a pizza pie.

Bake as you would a normal pizza. Don't eat the whole thing in one go, as you'll be sick as a dog.

Once of my goals for 2012 was to use up all of my stashed sock yarn. The main goal being use up at least one ball of yarn a month. I'm making better than expected progress. Thus far, I've finished 4 socks (and therefore 4 balls). Sadly, only two of those is a complete pair. The other two are waiting on a mate.

My current sock is a partner to the first Gush sock I made about three months ago. That pattern is a pain - the results are lovely, but it's lacework without the appearance of lace (it makes sense when you see it...) and requires extra attention. I'm done the body of the foot and working on the heel now, but I'm ready to be done with them. My tolerance for such fine work is improving, but it's still kinda icky in large amounts.

Thankfully, one of the "waiting in the wings" patterns is brainless enough that I don't need my head in a pattern every two seconds.

But! I'm babysitting/cooking/helping my sister Jenn, who is recovering from gallbladder surgery. The rest of my family is in the US helping my other sister moved into the her new place and Jen has a history of bad painkiller reactions, so someone needs to be there for support.

Which means that I can potentially have people over, but I can't really GO anywhere or DO anything other than hang out at the homestead. Maybe I can get Jen to go out to breakfast on Saturday. But I like visitors! PLEASE TEXT ME AND COME OVER TO VISIT US. :O

In closing, I leave you this:

For those not familiar with the book, the title of Bimbos of the Death Sun refers to an real-in-the-novel's-universe hard science fiction novel that an engineering professor character wrote, only to have the book published with an explicit cover and an eyebrow raising title. While the example of the book is a little extreme, it's funny when you find similar examples come up in the real world.

I was looking for a show to watch from the winter anime season line up (I'm making it a point to watch at least one show a season) and at first over looked a series called Bodacious Space Pirates because... the title sounded terrible. I heard a couple of decent reviews for it and I decided to finally give it a watch...

And it turns out that despite the sketchy title, it's actually pretty fantastic. It's a slow paced, somewhat hard science fiction series. The "hard" is in the loose sense of the concept, as most reviews I've seen point out that the science presented is fairly solid and the technological advances are well-thought out. For example, there's a fun little bit in the first episode where the main character finds out about her mother's secret past via a futuristic Google Image search. The science and tech are contrasted against an extremely broad colour palette, a storyline that involves pirates that are technically privateers (I think that this might be a language barrier issue, since the term the show uses is "legal pirates") and high school girls.

The flavour of the story is quite, quite odd, but I think I like it. I like the idea of mixing hardish science fiction and traditional high adventure stories. At least, I think that's the path the show is going to take. Right now the focus seems to be on the main character's privateer training, with very thoughtful discussions on topics like cyberwarfare and the nature of firearms in ship-to-ship combat.

As for the Bimbos of the Death Sun connection? Some further research reveals that the anime is based on a pulp novel/light novel series written by a Japanese author who was otherwise known for his non-fiction science writing. The books were called "Miniskirt Space Pirates" and featured teenaged girls as a marketing ploy, since the general opinion was that a straight, hardish sci-fi, privateer-themed series wouldn't sell.

The show is being simulcast over here with a week delay on the episodes for free users. I deeply suspect that the novel series won't be released over here, given that market for that sort of thing is very soft.