Nick in Glasses Shock

Nick’s regular eye test revealed that he now needs glasses, so we bought some. Spectacle wearers now outnumber those with good eyesight in the house 3:2.

Wedding Poster, Trailer and Cake

Now that I have found this, I am hatching evil plots for Giulia’s wedding. Mwah hah hah!

Balloons, Giraffes and Birthday Hearts

My lady wife has been busy in the kitchen again; click here to see the latest baked-to-order cakes.

Giulia in Church

Giulia has now selected a church for her wedding. Huzzah! I’m told it’s very pretty.

I hadn’t realised how much work is involved in organising a wedding; as an only child, I haven’t seen brothers or sisters get married, and my own wedding was organised on my behalf in another country. (I highly recommend that as an approach, given the levels of work and stress I’m seeing at the moment.)

Meanwhile, the clergyman concerned initially told Giulia he couldn’t accommodate her preferred wedding day (some months hence) because he had a funeral booked. Either he has an interesting sense of humour, or he has a sideline best not pursued…

Windows 7 – A New Horror?

As it’s not long now until I can exterminate all traces of Vista from the family network, I am reading reviews of Windows 7.

I found one reviewer who praised its “large, lickable icons”. I do so hope that is a simple spelling mistake. However, having seen the other bonkers ideas coming out of Redmond, it could be true.

Can you imagine the support calls I’ll get if it is?

Insularity

It came to me last night, as in a dream, that my life has drifted into an undesirable pattern. What used to be leisure time, spent with friends, has turned into overtime and commuting. Apart from dinner with my family (most nights) and work, I only see real people for a few days each August; my personal life is on the Internet at odd hours of the night.

This is not acceptable. Time to move back into meatspace, so if posts become intermittent again, that’s why; I’ve decided to get a life.

Xbox Undead

It’s updates again. The bane of my life.

A while ago, we got an Xbox; this happened when I noticed that every time Nick got a new PC game as a present, we had to upgrade the PC. You need a new graphics card. And a new power supply for the new graphics card. And a new operating system (Vista, may it burn in hell forever). And so on.

Aha, I thought, a games console wouldn’t do that; it would just run the games, and it’s cheaper than the graphics card, let alone the other stuff. Job done.

And so it was, for a while. And we were at one with our Xbox. Then I decided to add a wireless link to the home LAN and try out Xbox Live.

First, of course, Xbox Live insisted I apply a series of updates, which completely changed the look and feel of the user interface. Then it insisted I change my profile name from something meaningful to something not. (Microsoft – there is more than one person called Andy in the world. Figure out a way to deal with it that doesn’t mean I have to be known forever online as “MeaninglessRubbishUserID8371235406-897.” That isn’t my real gamertag, but you get the picture.)

Then I couldn’t log on. It took about a day to figure out I needed to recover my gamertag – why is beyond me, since I didn’t have one as such, but there y’go – since the error code generated by login attempts wasn’t one their knowledgebase had an article for. Then it trashed all my save files. The saga continues, but I have to say I am not impressed.

Watch the Sky

I’ve been quiet for a few days, because my bride is back from Sicily! Yay!

And since then, our evenings have been spent in front of that worthy addition to our busy modern lifestyle, the Sky+ box. Even after I culled a load of stuff, and a determined assault on the remainder over the bank holiday weekend, we still have about 40 hours left to watch. So what has filled our box? I’m glad you asked.

• Chuck: A fish-out-of-water sitcom, featuring a guy who works in a discount warehouse who has bizarrely learned the bulk of the secrets held by the CIA and NSA, which they have then lost. An average guy trying to keep up with the superspies. This is territory that has been covered before in things like Jake 2.0 and (to an extent) Reaper, but it works well. Like Father Ted, in that I sit down each week thinking it will be awful, but find myself enjoying it.
• Dollhouse: Which I have enthused about before. A grown-up version of Joe 90, but none the worse for that.
• Life: Which I like for its bizarre plots and strange protagonist (a millionaire Zen Buddhist detective).
• The Mentalist: Another detective show with a strange protagonist, a fake psychic turning his powers to fight crime. Entertaining, but takes liberties with things like NLP for the sake of the plot.
• My Own Worst Enemy: An interesting premise, but it struggles to hold my interest after half a dozen episodes – it would have been better as a movie. The premise is that there is a group of secret agents who have deliberately induced split personalities; their cover is unbreakable because it is a separate personality completely, which knows nothing about the agent – except for the protagonist, who due to a technical fault switches randomly between the two. There’s only so much you can do with that.
• NCIS: One of the better detective shows. Perhaps because it is limited in scope (NCIS investigates crimes involving US Navy and Marine personnel only), it develops bizarre crimes for the team to unravel, and has a range of fully developed and unusual (not to say weird) characters. Probably the best of the bunch for us.
• True Blood: Was there for awhile, but we lost interest halfway through the pilot and erased the lot. Twilight meets Californication. Not our cup of tea.
• Ugly Betty: Which my better half watches while I’m playing with my toy soldiers, of which more anon, no doubt.

SG-13 Episode 3

In which our heroes finally recover what’s left of SG-26, and meet a new friend…

While the survivors of SG-13 were recovering from their Wounds, SGC was not idle. On their return to duty, they were advised that UAV reconnaissance had found something looking like a giant termite mound, made out of debris and ichor (or “bug snot”, as Anna charmingly described it), wherein the giant cockroaches (which you and I know as kafers, though the team does not) lurked.

Tactical sense kicked in, and the team hoofed it through the forest (so that the noise of the quadbikes wouldn’t give them away) to lie in wait outside the mound and gather intelligence. Their patience was rewarded when the bugs emerged, bringing forth prisoners for exercise: One SGC survivor, and a feline humanoid (Giulia’s PC). Grenades and burst fire dealt with most of the bugs, leaving two for Giulia (who has put almost all her skill points into Fighting, took the Two-Fisted edge, and is therefore quite brutal in hand to hand). With no more ado, they retired through the stargate and sent back a bomb-laden UAV to deal with the mound.

Giulia’s PC, which is essentially a Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirl, then persuaded SGC to let her join the team, on the basis that her race is powerful and advanced, and would look more kindly on Earth if she were not dissected in Area 51. Who knows, this may even be true.

The scenario went much more quickly than expected, since based on their past approach I thought they would enter the mound in person. (Can you say dungeon crawl? I knew you could.)

Quote of the mission: Giulia, who introduced her character by saying: “I’m a pirate monster! Rarrgh! Arrrgh!” (To see why this reduced us to hysterics, you need to see The Tiefling and the Gnome.)

SG-13: The Next Generation

A couple of days after the last D&D trip, Nick decided he wanted to roleplay “something futuristic”. Since the late 1970s I’ve felt that the main challenge in running SF games is that players lack the instinctive grasp of the setting which they soak up at the mothers’ knees for the mediaeval period thanks to fairy tales; so the first question was, what was the SF setting we jointly knew best? That turned out to be Stargate SG-1, so out came my Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition rulebook (never travel without it) and some dice.

This, you see, is the thing I like best about Savage Worlds; you can run it with almost no preparation at all. While Anna created Dr Benjamin Brightman, archaeologist with the Jack Of All Trades and McGyver edges (and that turns out to be a scarily effective combination), and Nick created The Captain (team leader, ace driver and pilot, who may someday get a name as well as a rank), I was musing on two things: The recurring enemy and the immediate plot.

Every SGC team needs their own unique recurring enemy. After a few minutes thought I settled on the Kafers, from the 2300AD RPG. These will give Nick something to shoot at, as they are implacable foes of humanity, and Anna something to puzzle over, namely why are they implacable foes of someone they’ve only just met? It was the work of seconds to file the serial numbers off Orcs, give them laser rifles and Barrett .50 rifles (described differently, of course), and determine that to mimic the well-known stupidity of Kafers at the start of each encounter, they should begin each combat Shaken until they recover. Job done.

As for a plot, well, 95% of all SF episodes begin with a response to a distress call. So I decided that SG-26 had gone missing some while back, but that now the village where they were last seen on a mediaeval-level world had been burned down and the inhabitants massacred.

Not just the first few sessions, you notice, but a complete campaign and characters created in less than half an hour. I love this game.

A quick Persuasion roll allowed them to take quadbikes through the stargate, to a planet looking like a stretch of Canadian forest (because they all do). A certain amount of thrashing around and significant casualties on both sides ensued. Nick quickly learned that Kafers are a problem easily solved with grenades and automatic weapons, so long as you lay the groundwork early; Anna is still puzzling over how they speak English and why they hate her so much.

Surprisingly, I found that giving the NPC team members a tag characteristic and a couple of edges, and placing them under the players’ control, gave them an almost instant, but genuine, emotional bond to said NPCs – there was genuine regret when the first couple died.

Dr Brightman also has the Arcane Background (Weird Science) edge, which Anna decided represents the half-understood Ancient devices he tinkers with; and that since he doesn’t really know what they do, we should determine their powers randomly when they’re first used. Surrounded by Kafers at the end of the second trip through the gate, she pressed the button, and a quick die roll gave us the Stun power in her first device, which was probably the best one for the job, as it set them up nicely for the NPC team members to shoot.

The party are now resting up while they recover from their wounds, as they still haven’t recovered the missing team (although they suspect that the Kafers have something to do with it). In the next session they should meet Giulia’s character – she has of course created a “furry”, which gives the team what I consider to be the optimum genre trope for its membership: One warrior/team leader, one scientist, one honourable good-guy alien and one expendable red shirt to show them how the monster works.