High Gibson - noun, genre - Science fiction in the cyberpunk genre that makes no bones about being inspired by William Gibson's classic works. Stylistic influences, tropes, and character archetypes are easily recognized as being inspired by the Sprawl Trilogy and the Burning Chrome short stories. Compare with high fantasy.
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Tomorrow is Free RPG Day once again, a day to let your nerd flag fly by paying your friendly local gaming store a visit to see what they have in stock. If they're worth the Cheetos and Mountain Dew on their gaming tables they'll have some nifty new games for you to take home for the asking (it is Free RPG Day, after all). If you're lucky you'll be able to try them in the store with your closest friends (or people you don't even know, which can be just as fun). Or maybe you heard about tomorrow well in …
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System: Eclipse Phase
Character name: Paul - El Pulpo Magnifico!
Apparent age: 3
Character concept: Psychic octopus, professional sportscaster
Prior to the Fall of transhumanity people always said that there was something a little.. off.. about an uplifted giant Pacific octopus whom the Somatek geneticists decanted. Given the name Paul, he soon distinguished himself from his broodmates by becoming something of a historian. It's widely agreed that the first thing Paul saw after awakening to sentience was probably a sportscast of some kind; maybe it was microgravity rugby, maybe it was superconducting hockey, it might even have been centripital soccer. One …
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It's been a really busy week or two so I haven't had time to write much. I realize that it's only common sense, but I still find it amusing that I have the least time to write about what's going on when the most is happening. Funny, how that happens. Anyway, once the opportunity presents itself I like sitting down to make an attempt at describing everything that's been happening. I've mostly been posting hit and run messages to Twitter lately (like everybody else on the planet these days) because I can do that without looking up from everything else …
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Lyssa and I are really married now - we've combined our collections of gaming books into a single bookcase.
Here's the end result:
In descending order, the most represented gaming systems in our library are Mage: the Ascension, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: the Masquerade, and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. The two shelves of miscellaneous games stand unto themselves.
I'm not counting these in the duplicates category because it really does help to have multiple copies of the core book for a game you're running. Nevermind the fact that we have four copies of second edition and two of third.
These are …
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Word has come down from the state of New Jersey that Saloncon, the first known neo-victorian convention in the United States, is no more. Following the tribulations of 2009, including the economy floating upside down in its fishbowl, the organizers are not able to set the wheels in motion for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the organizers have branched out in new directions in their personal lives and do not have the time or energy right now to put on a convention as a result. saloncon will certainly be missed; I know I shall miss the yearly trek to …
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While I try to figure out what to write about, here are two press releases which will probably be of interest.
First of all, 2600 Magazine has has announced that pre-registration for The Next HOPE has opened. Held every two years at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, the Hackers On Planet Earth conference draws hackers, crackers, cypherpunks, makers feds, and as many other sorts of people as you care to mention to present, attend presentations, get in trouble, and bounce ideas off of one another. The cost to attend HOPE is $75us in advance (paid through Yahoo's online store …
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Let's try this again, without the "Oops, I just lost everything you wrote."
Another Samhain has come and gone, which means that we have yet another chance to make things turn out for the best. Lyssa is still recovering from surgery a couple of weeks ago. Her cast was swapped out for a one-piece fitted fibreglass cast which means that her achilles tendon is healing up nicely. Neither of us had realized just how much energy repairing soft tissue damage takes out of you; Lyssa's able to move around in short bursts only so she's been spending most of her …
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For the past week or so, a new tabletop role-playing game called Eclipse Phase has been eating most of my spare time. If you're not familiar with it, it is best described as transhumanist hard science fiction combined with a style of horror which is almost Lovecraftian in nature. I find that the best way to learn a system is to sit down and generate a character for it, so I decided to build a couple of NPCs for other gamers to use if they wish and release them onto the Net under the same license as the game: Creative …
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Disclaimer: I got three hours of sleep last night because my sleep schedule is screwed. This post will probably not make a whole lot of sense.
Lyssa and I organized craft night at our place on Friday evening and put the word out for folks to come over and work on stuff. There isn’t much else that you can say about that, really – I’ve been experimenting with Arch Linux on my netbook to get a sense for whether or not it will work for my purposes. I would eventually like to use my EeePC as a wearable computer …
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