Zombies & Trolls.
So my week was super busy, but at least we're in the final stretch now. At work, one of our clients moved up the schedule by a month, at the same time as all the regular monthly stuff is due, in a week where a really big book went on sale, so I've been really swamped. Then on Monday we hung out with some friends & went to a work party; Tuesday I went to the gym & had a good workout & came home for what, sitcoms & video games. Wednesday was Television Night; Jenny & I had our usual buddies over; fordmadoxfraud, ranai, fatbutts, James & their dog Archie. We watched Joe Schmo 2, which I had fond memories of. It holds up; it is very early in the reality television cycle, so there is plenty of room for the spoof to grow. They're making a new one, now, about bounty hunters, or something? Also, we talked a lot about tattoos-- Lilly's been getting a new big piece practically every week-- & queried ankledeepruins for her expertise.
Then Thursday! More positive fallout from drunken work parties. I had talked to some of the folks in editorial about playing roleplaying games-- a mix of "we've only tried Fourth edition" & "so is it like, a board game?"-- & we decided to have a social meetup to talk about the possibility of actually having a game. We met at Bar Reis-- where we had David's game-- & decided to try out the Pan-Asian Oubliette campaign I've been kicking around in my head. Also, along the way, we made characters, sort of as a way to illustrate how the rules of the World of Darkness work, & I decided to actually playtest character traits. We had been talking about the Radarless' Dead World campaign so we made modern characters. Nicole made an actress with a maternal streak & sort of randomly Mollie made an actress too; a pretty athletic one. Luke made a stoner, & don't laugh! His guy's weird drug addict issues actually came in pretty handy. I whipped up a one shot on the fly; totally seat of my pants, but pretty fun!
Zombie horror game, but I decided to base the infection on Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the parasitical fungus that effects ants. You know the one I mean; it makes ants "moon worshippers," making them climb to the highest point & then erupting from their head to spread their spores. Anyhow, I decided to invert a lot of the zombie tropes; rather than have zombies milling about on the street & people safe on rooftops, I had all the zombies constantly trying to get to the roof, or already up there, staring at the sun...burning their eyes out, giving me a neat "zombie face" thing, all just scorched out eyes & toadstoods sprouting. At one point they pushed a zombie-- the guy I had made as a sample character, actually-- & his head cracked, & I said it was like a fertilized but stillborn egg, left to rot. Just bloody, yolking, sulfuric goop. Anyhow, the characters made out & also all got infected with the plague, so that was that. I got to pass neat notes like "the sun, the Sun, THE SUN" or "WE ARE BECOMING" back & forth, too. Super fun!
Then last night was another Trollathon. It is fun to get together; like, at this point the people I know from Gothamist are just, like, friends. & very "Old Internet," which is also...well, super inaccurate, but also super accurate. A giant rolling email thread wouldn't have been possible without Gmail, but then again, it sort of reads like an old listserv or something. I guess the technical term for it-- I'm not even kidding, this is actually the term marketing people use-- is "dark social media." Like dark matter. It is hard to monetize or track "dark social media," because it is stuff like chats & emails, not click-throughs from some other incestuous site. Anyhow, we all got together with the Gothamist editors at Double Down & drank a zillion beers. Jenny met me there, but was late because she was fooling around with those Google Glass glasses...& then randomly at the bar there was a woman wearing a pair of the Google glasses! Welcome to the grim dystopian cyberpunk future, I guess.