You know, I have no idea if anyone even uses the various live journal clones for anything other than RPGs. But I need a place to keep reminders to myself, and I still have this, so hooray.

So, yeah. Expect to see snippets of whatever creative I'm working on, or essays on fictional stuff. I don't know if I'll write about any non-science real ( Read more... )

Humans are silly (and I mean this in the best, possible way: I'm glad we are silly ( Read more... )

So, one of the notes about SF as genre is it explores humans' relationship to technology. I saw a post recently about how Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series has the effects of reproductive technology (especially the uterine replicator, an artificial womb) woven through most of her Vorkosigan Saga. With the exception of the early Miles books ( Read more... )

So, I've dome some reading. I finished the Memoirs of Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan, and got into The Alpennia series by Heather Rose Jones, and I'm rereading Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys. So, between them they pinpoint thing I like in fiction ( Read more... )

I dreamt I was in this fantasy world with two groups of people. Mine were having a spat of poor luck, and we discovered our neighbors had this ritual thing performed on a certain date at an unknown place, and we thought maybe if we did it instead we'd get better or something. So first we were sneaking through a university, but misjudged when ( Read more... )

So, someone posted a meme that involved a D&D party crossing a mountain pass in a blizzard, and the dwarf critically failed his climb check. When the GM asked the player what he was doing, the player responded 'my character is going to flap his arms and pray', and two critical successes later the GM was all '... you see your dwarf somehow staying ( Read more... )

So, yesterday we had both the award luncheon for students, and a faculty-only reception at the department chair's house. I actually attended both! (Well, for the former, my TA was getting an award that I nominated him for, and I was recognized as new faculty. Plus, lunch was delicious: enchiladas brought in from a Mexican restaurant in town.) ( Read more... )

So, I kickstarted a tabletop RPG book based on the Schlock Mercenary webcomic, a comedy space-opera about a group of mercenaries that has been running since 2000 (and it turns out you can do a lot of worldbuilding in 17 years, even with a newspaper-strip format and a goal to be funny). The book is written under the conceit that is was released in- ( Read more... )

My mother's cat, Geno, died today. He was about 2 months out from turning 21, and arthritic and had kidney problems, and quite possibly mostly blind and losing his hearing. But we'd had him since I was a teenager. (We got him in summer of 1996, right before I entered high school. Mom called him her 'divorce cat', since Dad didn't want more than ( Read more... )

Last Friday, we opened up the old observatory for an open house. Despite the clouds, we had a few busses of high school students to entertain. The physics undergrads did a large amount of entertaining. I gave one talk, then we went to see if anyone wanted a second round of it an hour later, and the physics students were showing some high ( Read more... )