I am thinking of running an RPG, and I’m gathering info to see who might be interested in playing. Please take the survey if you might be interested in playing at some point (and if you think you would actually come to a game run by me). (If you don’t know me, but we have some friends in common, feel free to answer, and you may be invited to a game if/when it materializes)
Let’s see this poll of yours
Created a script to back up my journal (current month) onto my shell account, in case Live Journal should tank at some future point. In its default state it downloads the current month, and is suitable for running every night. If you uncomment the foreach loops it will back up those months you plug in.
The strategy is to back up the current month every night right before midnight. The risk here is that if I backdate some entries to before the current month, they wouldn’t be backed up, and I would need to run those months again manually. Hmm.
I added a couple of folks to my friends page, and color-coded my friends into a couple groups for easy skimming.
I also added a couple of communities to the friends list, so I can read them easily, but more importantly, to give the appearance of having a lot more friends :) The community entries will show up in salmon-pink, and have two names, the community name first, and the actual user’s name in square brackets below that.
Sourcery by Terry Pratchett
It’s a pretty good book, though I didn’t enjoy it as much as Mort. It was pretty Action-Packed™ but it seemed a bit more scattered, probably because the action was scattered around various locations, and also because there were multiple “point of view” characters, so I didn’t really identify fully with all of them.
I heard some feedback from a friend of a friend that the Discworld books get tired and rehashed after about 10 of them. I’m starting to see some of that, though I am still thrilled with them, it’s not new and unexplored territory all the time. I think the expectation that they might be read out of order leads to the author repeating himself sometimes, because whenever we see a familiar element, he takes time to explain it rather than assuming we know it from the previous books.
Still quite a nice read, I recommend it, and any of the others I have reviewed here.
Medieval fantasy (typical D&D setting)
Modern fantasy, light (Magic, think Harry Potter)
Modern fantasy, mixed (superheroes, psychic powers)
Modern fantasy, dark (vampires, etc)
Modern spy story (think Mission Impossible, etc)
70’s spy story (think Bond, Avengers, etc)
Older spy story (mob, gumshoe, etc)
Victorian, Western, etc
Future, space colony/exploration
Future, dark/cyberpunk
Future, light (Paranoia)
Made-up fantasy worlds (Pern, etc)
Fariy tales (Grimm, Prince Charming, etc)
Anything I’m missing? What types of settings can you think of from your favorite stories?
Dentist appointment: Went and got dented.
Taxes: Prepared the paperwork I will need to take to the preparer.
Cars: Made appointment to take both cars in for services.
Doctor: Made doctor appointment for next week.
Gave C a ride downtown. Went with M and C to dinner at Red Lobster.
Mort by Terry Pratchett
Read this book over a two-day period. I have read about 5 others in the Discworld series, a bit out of order, but we have most of them now, so I will read the rest in order.
Mort is a young boy who finds himself hired as Death’s apprentice. Hilarity ensues when he fumbles a job his first day out, and then tries to cover his slip-up. Meanwhile, Death has some time on his hands while Mort is making the rounds, and tries his hand at some more human pursuits.
In general, this book takes a very light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek approach to Death, which makes it like everything else on Discworld (a bit tongue-in-cheek). Not as serious or in-depth as the Incarnation of Death portrayed in On A Pale Horse (one of my all-time favorites by Anthony). But it seems appropriate that the Death patrolling Discworld should be a bit weird (such as riding a pale horse named Binky).
Anyway, the book is not really about Death, it is about Mort, the apprentice. (For story-analysis students, this is very much a character-based story, tracking Mort’s change in character over time).
True to form, Pratchett gives us a very light-hearted story, and the humor is quite intellectual. The writing style, as with the other books in the series, pokes fun at everything, including itself. Good stuff.