The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

The Perfect Drug

Or it comes pretty damn close, anyway.

Lotta gaming lately. Lotta studying, too, but lotta gaming. I feel like I'm taking that whole work hard/play hard thing to heart now.

Other night, Thursday I want to say, Whir introduced me to Vampire: The Masquerade. That there, and pardon my French, is some fucked up shit. But it's fun. Being as how I didn't even know the rules or anything, I just made a character up something or another like me. We start in Corvallis. Walk out of my dorm room, get, uh, recruited by a vampire to be his, um, archivist. I get a nice gory death scene. This is good. There's a nifty scene in which he's like "Well, you can either join us, or you can die." "Since you put it THAT way..."

Yeah. So I go back to loot my dorm room, run into some girl in the hallway, and, uh, lose control. Feeding time! Which I do, until I suddenly realize, er, bad plan. But I take her with me anyway. Because if you're going to be amoral, go the whole nine yards, man. The whole nine yards including a nice gunfight with some hunters on the outskirts of Corvallis. About when we ended. Fun times. It's...interesting, playing a game where you can visualize where you are with deep clarity.

Anyway. Played some MWDA campaign this morning. Ledgerwarrior, really. It's a lot of bookkeeping running an interstellar empire, but we're getting better at it. Without going into too much detail, it's a lot of fun.

Played some D&D tonight with Rema and Mel and the gang. Despite my totally zoning during half the game, it was a lot of fun. Our mission to go investigate the evil demons for the Temple and Save the Day(tm) got reasonably far, getting sidetracked by a grey render which almost killed Mel's cleric, not to mention Matt's barbarian. It also got sidetracked by a particularly odd joke involving a 40 foot long giant centipede dead in the road, ravens, and a mythical giant sparrow, which we blathered about for quite a while until somebody (Mel, I think), said something or another that sent us all over the edge for a few minutes. I actually laughed until I cried. I haven't laughed that hard in years, as they say, and it's true.

Whatever it was, it was pretty damn funny.

Also, I watched the Matrix Reloaded Friday with Tali and Laurent. It's better the second time around. It seemed shorter. The fight scenes seemed better, though the freeway scene wasn't THAT exciting. I have an idea what I think is going on, but Revolutions comes out on the 5th, so I will say nothing, and look brilliant later.

Also played some Serpent Isle. The Fawn plotline, we note, is very annoying, in that it's on a timer, which in this particular iteration of the game runs REALLY FREAKING SLOW, which meant hours of aimless wandering. Bad times. But now I'm past that, and I'm into the Serpent part of the game, which reminds me why I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen in 1993, and is STILL a damn cool game. The whole atmosphere of the thing just blows me away.

While we're on that subject, it's interesting how I can, 10 years later, see both U7 and SI as allegories, or metaphors maybe. They are not so much anti-religion games as they are anti-organized religion. The Fellowship is essentially a weakly disguised Catholic/Christian which leads it's followers to evil by unswerving obedience. SI continues that trend by introducing the Ophidians, who destroy themselves by swerving too far from balance, crushing their emotions and tolerance by becoming disciplined, unfeeling machines. I of course understood none of this when I was 12. But it's kind of cool, now.

Also, watching kittens do their thing rocks.

Posted by Dwip at October 27, 2003 12:28 AM