Merry Christmas.

Hanging with my family. Reading Shogun. Watching movies about monkeys. Listening to a rottweiler snore. It's a nice one.

Heading back to Ithaca tonight or tomorrow. Just gotta see my pops yet. Now, to draft up some New Year's resolutions.

More weird stuff getting posted on the internet...

Tags: dust
Location: My Parent's House

I just talked to Human Resources, so I am on the path to living full time presenting female. Next up is to submit my name change documents to court early next year. It's going to take a few months for everything to come to pass, but I'm glad that the last changes are now in motion. Things are getting serious! I hope my timing is right.

Tags: job, transgendered, work
Mood: anxious

We were down a player for D&D last night so I ran In a Wicked Age for Tom, Jere, and Alan instead. I am batting 1.000 with that game. Every single session of it has been great. Last night's may have been the best one yet. Afterwards I was like, "Man... this is why I game." At the end of it we had a story that was smarter and cooler than anything I could have come up with on my own. A sea of corpses, a dying sage, a knowledge-hungry necromancer, a wizard who would kill an entire town for his master, a bird god. I came home and was prepared to beg Judd to let me sit down and talk about it. I was so excited.

It's also got me thinking about what I like about games, all games, and it gave me a eureka moment. I need to mull it over more. It might be the start of me working For Real Serious on some "lonely fun" games a la Tony Dowler's How to Host a Dungeon.

Ha, the first month I manage to keep a completely accurate record of my purchases it's going to be all screw because of the gift-giving.

I picked up a book to read on the recumbent bike in the gym. I feel like reading and exercising should necessarily not be possible at the same time, but unfortunately I can no longer run for half an hour straight so hopping onto the bike is a nice way to keep working and not die. So I've been reading Clavell's Shogun. What a brutal book. The prologue in which we get to see the seafaring life at its worst were awful. Being that we're land-based monkeys, I can't imagine sailing in a time when you crewed a ship taking into account the number of people you figured would die so that you had enough crew to make it back. Why would you ever board a ship? I'm also curious how the exotification of the Japanese is going to be handled. It could go either way being a book of the 70s. So far it's not bad, though.

I finished the 4th season of Dr. Who. I am officially a Major Fan and have been since the end of season 3. It's a fun series, both campy and creepy, with a rich lore but at the same time not taking itself so seriously that nerds can wage war over it across the Wikipedia discussion pages like they do for Star Trek and Star Wars. Jennifer showed me a trailer for the new Christmas special and I am pumped up because my favorite villain in the series is coming back. Also, I think it is hilarious how serious the Doctor says that so-and-so are "the last of the daleks" when the daleks have come back about four or five times already. Doctor if you're such a genius you should have a clue at this point.

I've been playing the heck out of Armageddon Empires which is one of those tactically rich and obsessive turn-based games that Cryptic Comet has put out. There is this type of game that I can only describe as narratively evocative. The game itself might not have a story, but the events of the game are so rich that the player can fill in the blanks and even relate the stories to other people. Getting a group of people to talk about Dwarf Fortress is like this. For example, my tale of a fortress that ended up being taken over by a giant spider and all of its inhabitants slain. A later party of dwarves tried to retake the fortress and half of them died in its webs before cutting it down. The surviving dwarves' first act was set about creating a vast network of tombs for those who died. See? See how I could do that? You can't do that for a lot of games. Anyway, Armageddon Empires is one of those nerdy games that makes me want to write stories about what's happening. A recon party seeing a massive horde of mutants descending on my human city. Lacking any major garrison, a team of commandos is sent out to assassinate the leader in the hopes that the mutant army will crumble without leadership. The mutant, an enormous but clever beast, is tracked for days across the wastes and survives multiple attempts on its life, but is unable to capture the commandos who slip away every time though the occasional member is caught. Finally, just on the other side of a ridge away from the capital, the commandos succeed and a sniper's bullet drops the mutant commander. The army, leaderless and confused turns to return. Unfortunately for them, a group of power-armored marines were waiting for this opportunity and drop out of the sky on jump packs, decimating the leaderless army who try to fight back but lack the coordination to do anything about it. Now, I have a bit of an overactive imagination but I enjoy games that allow me to make neat tactical decisions but also create a narrative to run along with it. That's probably another reason that I like Warhammer 40,000.

So I was doing some Googling, trying to figure out how exactly the 30 minute workout at Planet Fitness works and found this review of the place, which is the sort of review you'd write after going to one workout there and then spinning up all sorts of judgments about the place so you can go home and write a hilarious review. I signed up for the place last Saturday or Friday. The big draw was the fact that membership is $10 a month. I was paying five times that at the Y.

Also when I heard about the 30 Minute Workout area, I was really interested. I played around with it last time. I'm not sure I did it right and will probably have to break down and ask one of the Planet Fitness people how the hell you use it, but it's a good system. There's a bunch of stations, a green light that tells you to START PUMPING, and a red light that tells you to move to the next station. When you've done the whole circuit it's been a half hour and you've worked your major muscle groups.

But back to the article, it's a bit of bullshit to see what Planet Fitness is about and say it's the culture of laziness and that it's about going to the gym without actually doing anything. So far the membership seems rather small, and there are people in all states of fitness. I've seen some guys there who I would categorize as bulky meatheads, that super fit girl who is always on the treadmill, and people in states of out-of-shape who are doing a variety of workouts on different machines. I'm in that last category. But here's the thing that bugs me about the article. It's making this statement that not going super-gung ho exercising is as bad as not exercising at all. And it's fucking not. So people don't want to go to a super-screamer gym. So people don't want to lift a shit ton of weight. Super screaming and lifting large amounts of weight are not necessary to be fit. You can tone your muscles and slim down without lifting weights to failure. It's all about your goals. And the article is about disparaging a gym that works for some people just because it has different goals than the author. I think he makes some good points, and I do worry about a culture where we constantly seek shelter from other people who have different philosophies or points of view from ourselves, but at this point I'm like fuck it. As long as people are going to the gym and getting some exercise who cares?

Edit: Some of the defensiveness I see about Planet Fitness seems to be something that I have seen come up in gaming and Buddhist circles. You belong to a group that you feel is superior to people outside the group, and get defensive and/or dismissive when people are pursuing it in a way that doesn't match your philosophy. So people who go to exercise at a place where there's no grunting or dropping weights aren't really exercising.

Other weekend things:

- Video games
- Workouts
- Christmas shopping
- Root beer floats
- Hangouts with Christine

It was a satisfying one.

So I played some Mouseguard yestered with Judd and Andy. Judd was GMing, I was the too-serious patrol guard (Acton), and Andy was the fat young mouse who'd just been promoted past tenderpaw (Baxter). Our mission was to sow good will in Barkstone with a delivery of toys for the children. Very holidays!

The short summary of What Went Down: The two guardmice got their orders from Gwendolyn. Then hit the trail just in time for some freezing rain and snow. Acton who is Tough pushed the junior guardmouse a little too hard leaving Acton tired and Baxter sick. From there they connected with a ferry taking us to Port Sumac, Acton's hometown and where the toys were being delivered. The ferry was tugged along by a frog and along the way down the creek we were attacked by a kestrel. It made off with the frog, but luckily a boat headed for Fort Sumac heard the commotion and towed the ferry the rest of the way. It was the same boat that had the toys in it! After that they rested at Acton's parents' who, being brewers, gave the sick and tired mice some mulled cider and some warm beds. To be continued!

System Notes:

Mouseguard makes some improvements over previous Burning games.

Traits are the things that stand out to me as far superior to the way they worked mechanically in previous games, though I wish the system had some sort of mechanics for advancing traits a la trait votes.

Advancement is so much simpler now, and way better. Tallying successes or failures rather than having to look at a chart is so much slicker.

The GM's turn/player's turn thing is interesting. I think I like the scene economy of Burning Empires better but that wouldn't work for Mouseguard and the GM's turn and Player's turn is a nice setup. It's one of those things that's a GM technique that's been done in campaigns but never formalized. You know, you push plot for awhile, and then lean back and let them pursue their own stuff. I noticed it most in Shadowrun games I ran where there would be a shadowrun that was GM's turn, and then between shadowruns was the player's turn to help out their gang, do some decking on the side for cash, etc.

I feel like I spend a lot of time failing die rolls, but at the end of the game when I tallied up advancement rolls I had more successes than failures. Why did I feel like I got beat down the whole game? I think it's because I feel like our mice are really fragile. I mean, they're not any more fragile than any other game, but I feel really protective of them and want only good things to happen to them. I mean, they're little mice with swords.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to more sessions. I also hope that if there ever is a new Burning Wheel edition that the Trait and Advancement rules in Mouseguard make their way into that.

Mice with swords!

You know, it is a good day to be me.

Hey so I made a mix that is basically just the songs I have listened to the most this year. If you want it let me know. It's a strange mix and is basically a collection of the songs I put on repeat.