Category: Gaming

camping, family, Gaming, Life, RPGs, teardrop

Summer seems to finally be here

| deadtom

We had the first actual BBQ of the summer yesterday. We invited some friends over, several cakes were baked. Chicken, salmon, bratwurst, burgers, various types of rice, and some excellent pasta salad were prepared. Later on, Catan, and Cards Against Humanity were played. Pandora was being a real bitch, so Spotify provided the music.

We finally called it quits about 11:30 at night, on account of three of the friends having to drive an hour to get home. We offered to put them up in the spare bedroom but they were intent on sleeping in their own bed.

One of the attendees is from Australia, she was an absolute sweet heart, and I’m a little sad that we’ll likely never see her again, except perhaps on Facebook. Never the less, we made a friend. 🙂

The sprinkler company that I paid to supposedly winterize our sprinkler system last fall, fucked something up, and when I cranked on the water to the yard a few weeks ago, the pipe that feeds the yard is burst in at least two places.

The van needs a new radiator fan assembly which took some troubleshooting to narrow down. They’re ridiculously expensive, and you can’t simply replace one of the fans, you can only buy the set. Which is a load of horse shit. I keep forgetting to call the local scrap yards to see if they’ve got anything that’ll work.

I got the nerd cave all moved, which took nearly an entire weekend, but the new space downstairs is really great. I broke it in officially early yesterday afternoon, with a our third session of a game of Beyond The Supernatural. You can check that game out, and find the playlist for that series, below.

 

I’m also getting ready to resume our D&D game, which has been stalled since last summer. We decided that it would be easier to play on Roll20 for most of our sessions, and then meet in person every so often. It took some notes review, but I remembered where we were in Lost Mine Of Phandelver, and I’ve about got the game ready to play. We’ll be nailing down a date soon.

We’re also working out a camping trip with our good friends up in Kalispell, which I assume is fairly imminent.

Needless to say, I’ve been pretty busy, so there hasn’t been any movement on the Teardrop in a few weeks. I’m hoping to resume that project this week.

Busy, busy, busy, but nice.

family, Gaming, Holidays, Life, Photos, politics

May is a busy month for us

| deadtom

I’ve been pretty preoccupied with politics lately. It’s taken over my twitter feed, and it’s made me more active on Facebook than I have been in a long time. I’ve been signing petitions like a mad man lately, and making phone calls, and emailing representatives. I’m trying to find a balance between staying informed and letting it keep me perpetually pissed off all day long

Still working on that one. It might be time to do a politics purge again.

On a related note, my game time has taken a serious hit. Between the politicsing and working on the teardrop, there hasn’t been much time for gaming. I fired up Steam and played a few hours of DOD last night. Still a really kick ass game. A few weeks ago, one of my RPG groups verified that Roll20.net finally has their A/V issues sorted out, so last night I reinstated my account and I’m hoping to start playing at least one game a week. I’d really like to run some one shot games, on various systems, but the time just isn’t there. That may be more of a winter activity. I do have three active games right now and I’m playing about every other weekend.

The teardrop is coming along. It is progressing much slower than I hoped but I’m making slow, steady progress, and I still expect to have it done in plenty of time to be able to camp it this summer. I’ll give a proper update on that this weekend.

Heather is moving back in with us. Her teaching job did not pan out like she’d hoped, and the experience has been… unpleasant for her. So she’s in the process of selling her house and will be moving back in with us, probably some time in June. This means I’ll be moving the nerd cave, again. Fortunately, not into the garage. We’re playing a game of musical bedrooms in the house right now. CJ moved out when he went off to college, so Evan moved into his room. Shortly after that, Heather moved away, so I moved my nerd cave out of the garage and into her old room, which was originally the nerd cave. So now, Heather will be moving back into that room, and I’ll be moving the nerd cave downstairs, into Evan’s old room.

Make sense?

Laure and I spent a Saturday afternoon taping up and priming the nerd-cave-to-be, then a few days later I got two of the walls painted. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll finish painting down there, and then start relocating all of my crap.

Evan’s birthday is next week, but we’re celebrating it this weekend, since the following weekend is Memorial day weekend, which is always spent at a lake about an hour north of here, with lots of family, food, music, board games, and napping.

It’s a busy month for us in general, right now.

Laure, in one of the cabins where we stay every Memorial day weekend.
Gaming, Life, Photos, politics, RPGs

Red Velvet Cake

| deadtom

I woke up exhausted today. It took a good twenty minutes to talk myself out of bed. I managed to get to work and be relatively productive until about an hour ago. I’m completely drained and pretty much checked out for the day.

Must get to bed early tonight.

Saturday, Laure made red velvet cake. She’s been working on a dairy free (for me), gluten free (for her) recipe for quite a while now and nearly has it perfect. We all loved the cake but she insists that “it was too eggy”, and needs work.

Here’s the thing about red velvet cake. Red velvet is a flavor, a unique flavor all it’s own. Most of what you buy at bakeries and grocery stores is not red velvet cake, it’s chocolate cake that has simply been dyed red and called “Red velvet cake”. That is some serious horse shit right there, and I think it needs to be made illegal.

She also made some cream cheese danishes, which I can’t eat but they certainly smelled good. Something went wrong with the dough, and they didn’t turn out very well. She’s going to try again this coming weekend.

My brother’s birthday is today but he dropped by the house yesterday and we celebrated then, with red velvet cake of course.

Speaking of this weekend, I have a Rifts game on Saturday afternoon, which we’ll be broadcasting on Youtube. I’m going to tinker with OBS and see if I can broadcast multiple streams with it. I’d like to stream to Twitch and to Youtube. I may try opening two instances of it and see if that works. I have a Twitch account that I keep meaning to make use of, but just haven’t made it happen.

Along that same vein, I’ve been getting more familiar with Roll20.net, from the GM’s perspective. I plan on running some one shot games for a variety of systems, and started putting together an album of images for back grounds, since I’m not a big map user in my RPGs. I think maps tend to turn it into more of a board game, rather than an RPG. I generally only employ them when necessary, and avoid them when I can.

What else… My twitter feed has become quite political in the last few weeks. I’m aware of that. I need to back off and try to ignore it all for a while but there is so much going on. Trump is digging away at his hole with unparalleled exuberance, the GOP wants to sell off our public lands, the illegal muslim ban, boobs… there are a lot of boobs on twitter.

I got the results back on the biopsies from the two moles they shaved off of me a few weeks ago. The one on my abdomen was completely benign. The one on my head did have some atypical cells though, which is nothing new for me. I’m to keep an eye on it and set up an appointment if another mole starts to grow back in it’s place. Regardless though, I have an appointment in six months to get checked out again, and see if they need to remove more skin from the area where that mole was, or hopefully confirm that they got it all.

That’s about it. I don’t have much of anything interesting to write about today. I really am seriously fucking tired and I wanted to get something posted today.

 

Here’s Laure, working up a recipe for red velvet cake.
Gaming, Life, Photos, RPGs

Shit to do

| deadtom

I have shit to do.

* Keep up with my exercise. I’ve been slacking the last week or so because of the temperature outside. It’s warming. Time to get back on it.

* Quit eating so much, and quit eating so much shit. Already doing better with this I think.

* Take more photographs. Hence, the photo accompanying this post, which I took specifically for this post, about fifteen minutes ago.

* Play more pen and paper RPGs. It looks like to accomplish this one, I’ll have to run some games on some systems I’ve never played before. It went well with D&D 5e. I’m sure I can pull it off with some others.

* Get to bed earlier. Been sucking at this lately.

* Finally get started building our teardrop. Haven’t been able to do this because money has been tight. Taxes refunds are nearly upon us.

I think that about does it. Small, simple.