Middle of Nowhere

Some mornings, when she woke up, she felt like she was the dumbest person on the planet.

Being the only person on the planet didn't make it any better. In fact, that just reminded her why she so often felt like the dumbest person on the planet lately. Then again, "planet" may be too strong a word for it. She could walk from one end to the other in just under two hours, even if she counted time for suiting up and stripping down.


She sighed. That was about as exciting as it got anymore. The monthly supply ship had been automated, the live crew victims of the same budget cuts that left her stranded on this miniature rock in Triton's L5, and the Triton lander had developed a fuel leak, leaving her without even the option of wandering the abandoned colony on the moon's surface.


Then again, with the solar collector starting to look like well-aged swiss cheese, she could hardly even run the air reprocessors down there, much less lights enough to see where she was walking and with the sun four and a half billion kilometers away, even the daylight didn't help much.


She sighed again and wondered for the thousandth time why she had volunteered for this. True, the idea of leading the way for the re-establishment of the farthest colony from Earth once the recession was over had seemed quite heroic at the time, and the promise of at least monthly contact with other people had made the loneliness into a bearable future challenge, AND being the only one with the necessary technical experience who didn't have a family at home or here with her had made her the most logical choice...


But five years had come and gone, and the only things that had changed were the crayon drawings on every available wall and ceiling space and the removal of any living people from her monthly contact with the rest of humanity. If only they'd left one of the standard, speed of light vid-comms! But the company's infinite wisdom (and massive cost cutting in every possible way while the minority struggled to leave open the option for resettlement) had stripped her of even an eight hour back and forth with friends back home, leaving her instead with the dry comfort of slow-scrolling text over the TangleTalk. And who's genius idea was that name anyway?


Bah. Maybe she could sabotage something vital and finally get shipped home. But every time she did the math on that, it turned out to be about ten times cheaper to ship spare parts on the resupply flight than it did to send a capsule with supplies enough to get her home.


She glanced at the status panel, then rolled back over to contemplate the other side of the pillow and look at the dismal prospect of another five years as the dumbest person on the planet.


(Opening line courtesy of Mandy and her fantastic Writing Creatively Every Day blog! Thanks Mandy!)

"Yes... yes. This is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it... This Land." - Wash

Night Train

I really need to stop staying up until 3 or later am to read a novel.

Devil in the Details

What is it with people who are against role-playing games? Well, ok. I guess I haven't heard of too many people who are against role-playing games in general, but I think that's probably because DnD was the first and is still the most generally popular for whatever reason.

Anyway, for any of you that may be wondering, there is nothing occult about DnD, or, at least, nothing occult about it that isn't occult about the Lord of the Rings movies. If you have no objection to them, I can't see any reason that you could object to one of my DnD games.

And there's the caveat. More so than any other brand of media, role-playing games are as fun or weird or whatever as the people who are playing in that specific game. This means, more than any other type of media, the acceptability of role-playing games to one who is enjoying them is up to the person enjoying that particular game. You can leave out things that offend you, put in things that don't, change things you don't like, and no one will come along and shut you down because you're messing with their 'artistic vision'. Which, to me, is the greatest appeal of the whole thing. I get to be the hero. (Or in my case, since I'm usually the gamemaster, I get to be all the bad-guys that beat the crap out of the heroes until they finally win in the end by the skin of their teeth. It's a fantastic job. I love it!) I, with my group of friends or family, get to determine how things turn out. We get to decide on the family friendliness of our 'movie' and we get to take the things that make us most go 'ooh' and 'aah' and make our own story!

And who knows? Maybe one day one of these stories will turn out so great that one of my players will turn it into a novel or a movie and make millions! And I can watch it and say, "Man, those were good times."

"While these rules do not address [constantly powered] flights, players are encouraged to independently investigate the rewarding and interesting problem of suborbital and orbital flights at supra-orbital velocities under constantly varying acceleration vectors." - Battletech: Strategic Operations (See? These games even encourage learning!)

Mind Wander

Good heavens, it's been supremely harder to get on here than I possibly anticipated. Life is indeed crazy.


You know, I've actually started a list of thoughts on things I can blog about each day, and I've got three or four things on there so far. But to be honest, they're all a little more than I think I want to write this evening. I've had a very relaxing day, and I feel pretty chill at the moment, and I'm not sure I want to get myself worked up blabbing about my particular annoyances.


Which, to be honest, is something I need to watch out for. Some of the things I anticipate blogging about will probably be considered by most people to be a bit controversial. I don't really want to create argument. That doesn't seem to really solve anything. What I'd like to do with some of the things I think about is make people think themselves. The only thing worse than someone with a wrong conviction is someone with a wrong conviction that actually knows next to nothing about what they're supporting or against. I have no problem with someone having a differing opinion from me. In fact, it's actually more likely that I'll learn something discussing a differing opinion than a similar opinion. Unless the person with the differing opinion knows next to nothing about why they feel the way that they do.

This is why people who vote straight party without even considering things really bother me. Or rather, they kind of scare me. Then again, I am a little bit of a control freak. I don't really like turning over any more power over my life than I have to to someone else, particularly someone that I know next to nothing about. This makes voting quite a challenge, particularly on the national level. Still, learning a little about each candidate for a position before voting for one is better than hoping that whoever is in competition toes the party line that you're voting for. Especially since the "party line" on both sides of the red blue divide scares me just a bit.

And whatever happened to unbiased news? Is it still even out there?

But this is turning into an overview of a whole bunch of thoughts that could probably each fill a blog in and of themselves. Probably I should wrap this up before I stop rambling.

Too late.

"Yet a variable but always present percentage of the human race ignores rules of conduct at all times. They are the handicap, the burden, the main hindrance to the maintenance or the progress of civilization. They are not consciously evil. They simply do not bother to act otherwise than as rational animals." - Leinster, Murray Operation: Outer Space, 1957, emphasis added.