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Mataxes' Journal  No updates for August... oy have I been slacking. If there is anybody out there who still follows this, here's the latest news from planet H. I broke down at the beginning of August and bought myself a new computer. I have made the switch, and I am loving it. I had the faithful old Dell for almost as long as we've been living in our current home (about 6 years) and it was really showing its age. RedBrick didn't win the Ennie, which isn't really a surprise, since the voting is fan-driven and we don't have anywhere near the number of fans companies like White Wolf, Paizo, or Wizards of the Coast have. One of the bigger announcements from RedBrick is the planned development and release of Age of Legend, a Barsaive-based campaign setting for D&D Fourth Edition. I'm consulting on some of the development for this. Speaking of D&D4, I've been reading the core books and it looks like a pretty decent game -- certainly more up my alley than what 3.x eventually became. I haven't had much of a chance to play it at all... for that matter, I haven't had much of a chance to play much of anything when it comes to traditional RPGs. Even my long-running ED campaign has been on a pseudo hiatus for the past few months. We manage to get together every three weeks or so, but because of the two toddlers we don't end up getting much of anything done. So, I've been getting my gaming fix by playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft. I play on the Sentinels realm, where I have three characters: Varulus, Mestoph, and Urthdawne (all Alliance side). I'm usually on in the evenings (Eastern time). Pop on over and say hi if you want. If you head over to my personal website (http://www.lore-merchant.org), you can see that I'm giving Twitter a try. It's a kind of mini-blog news update thing, and has really caught on in the podcasting community. One of the interesting things about it is that each update is limited to 140 characters. It really makes you get to the point. I've also been itching to get back into writing. I've opened the files that have my stories-in-progress a couple times now, trying to get back into the writing groove. Overtime at work has started to fall off, so I'm thinking about taking some of that morning time I didn't have before and get an hour or so of writing in. As numerous writers have talked about, you need to actually write regularly if you want to finish anything, and get better while you do it. Of course, managing that with a 17-month old toddler and a wife who's starting her final semester of school is tough. It's not just a matter of setting priorities, it's managing time as well. The job situation is starting to settle into a routine, though, so perhaps I'll be able to keep more balls in the air at once. I had a vacation the first week of August (it was my first real vacation in a long time) and it helped recharge my batteries a bit. That's all for now, I guess. I know I say this every time, but I really do plan on updating a little more often than I have been lately. Your best bet to follow what's going on with me is to visit my website, since that's where I will post most anything... livejournal, facebook, and the like might see updates, but probably not as often. Wow. That was a great game. It is somewhat disappointing that the Patriots weren't able to attain the perfect season, but full credit has to go to the Giants, who played some phenomenal football, especially their defense, who kept the pressure on Tom Brady, keeping things close right up to the end. It wasn't until the fourth quarter that the Patriots were able to produce anything resembling the level of play they'd been maintaining all season. Kudos to the Giants, who pulled off what many thought was impossible -- beating the 2007 New England Patriots. As for the Patriots... there's always next year. *grin* Quick update. I went into work this afternoon, and received some good news. I got the job in the customer service office upstairs. Training starts sometime in February. This makes life easier. The pay is about double what I'm making now, and is a M-F 9-5 type of job. No more nights and weekends for me! Current mood:  relieved.
I need to vent a bit. I have been a member of the Camarilla for many years. I have (mostly) enjoyed playing in the game. The two characters I have created and played in the game have been a lot of fun, and have drawn many compliments. My tenure as local Mage storyteller was well received. On the other hand, I have often hated the stupid, petty, niggling administratrivia that cause no end of frustration when it comes to dealing with most of the larger aspects of the organization. Case in point... I was the administrator for the Cam's Northeast Regional e-mail list. It is a position that I as given back in 2004. It was a position that I had until yesterday. It was a position that, in the end, I got no credit for. History lesson... back in the first half of 2004, all of the Camarilla list moderation -- national, regional, and domain level -- was overseen by a national officer in the coordinator chain (one of the ANC-Techs), and the list moderators reported to that individual. In the latter half of 2004, the List mod overseer changed how it all worked, consolidating the national lists among a smaller group of moderators and passing oversight of the regional and domain level lists to the appropriate coordinator levels: a domain-level list was overseen by the domain coordinator, etc. I was given administrative control of the NE-Regional list in the first half of 2004. When the changeover happened, I contacted the NE Regional Coordinator at the time, explained the changes that were taking place, and asking what she wanted to see from me in terms of reports and the like. I got a response indicating that she had no problem with me continuing to moderate the list, and that I would continue to receive prestige (the Camarilla's administrative 'currency') for the job. That was the last successful contact I had with the RC staff for nearly four years. I sent multiple e-mails to the RC trying to get some kind of response, with no luck. I didn't consider it a big deal -- it was a pretty easy job, wasn't worth much prestige, and I wasn't in it for the prestige anyhow. Then, at the tail end of last week, one of the current ARCs posted a message to the regional list asking for information about the active regional lists, who was in charge of them, and so forth. I contacted her, telling basically the same story I just related above, and got the following answer: I spoke with... our current RC, and unfortunately he has no record of you as the list mod or your hiring. Therefore, he cannot validate your claim. I'm sorry. This was the beginning of the end. Mildly annoyed, since anybody who had been paying any attention the past three and a half years would know I'm the list mod, and a simple check of the administrative info for the list (available to any member of the list) would show that I was the admin, I replied with several pieces of information that supported my claim, stating that the lack of administrative record on the RC's part didn't mean I wasn't the mod, and hadn't been doing the job since 2004. To make a long story short, I was not only told that I was out of luck, but it was implied that I was making the whole thing up, and fabricating evidence (in the form of multiple emails I had on record) to support my claim that I had been trying to get this whole stupid mess sorted out with regional for the past four years. It is precisely this kind of tin-hat emperor attitude that always bugged me about the Cam. The insular buddy-buddy nepotism that so often taints the relationships in the game, and drives otherwise rational people to react with such heightened emotion that everything gets blown way out of proportion to its actual importance (I mean, it's a game, people). So anyhow, this whole affair has soured me on the Cam (at least, for the foreseeable future). I haven't been to a game since last April as it is, but my membership is set to expire in March, and I have no interest in renewing, because returning to game, ultimately, means having to deal with all the administrative crap and out-of-game interpersonal politics that I have no interest in. Anyhow, there's my first post for the year. How about those Patriots, huh? Current mood:  frustrated.
I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Wizard (5th Level) Ability Scores: Strength-11 Dexterity-13 Constitution-13 Intelligence-16 Wisdom-12 Charisma-14 Alignment: Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable. Race: Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful. Class: Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells. Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus</a></b> (e-mail) New from Kelvin Crime...  ARRHYTHMIA A fragrance to make your heart skip a beat Well, a small degree of uncertainty has been lifted from the saga that is the pending closing of our call center. It's still being closed, but I found an emergency exit. They've opened 50-odd positions with customer service, and while many people in our office are not trying to move over, there are some that are -- myself included (I can't afford to be out of work, and I especially can't afford to lose our health insurance). Yesterday I took the qualifying test to see if... well... I qualified for the position. I did. There's still a structured interview to get through, but I think that will go just fine. Training for the new job would start sometime in January, and the new job comes with a very nice pay increase. There is still some uncertainty, of course. It looks like the sale of Verizon's land line service in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) is going to go through, and it's safe to say that a lot of folks are nervous about what this means for us, the employees -- Fairpoint is required to honor Verizon's current contract with the IBEW and CWA, but that contract expires in August of '08 -- less than a year off -- and there is a lot of talk that Fairpoint will go to the negotiating table with the intent of cutting as much as they can from the next contract. Much of this talk, to be honest, is coming from the union. While I don't doubt that Fairpoint would try and negotiate the best deal possible for them, the rhetoric being presented to the employees by the union is heavily influenced by their agenda (because they have one, and it isn't always 'putting the workers first'). Scare tactics, while the reasoning behind them may have some merit, do not impress me. I guess that I find life itself to be uncertain, and I have never harbored the idea of working for a company for 40 years and retiring with a pension (or something). I've held a bunch of different jobs over the past dozen years, and I've always approached it with the thought, "This is what I have now, it might be gone tomorrow." Certainly, it's a bit tougher now, with a family to look after and bills to pay (gone are the days when I could be out of work for a couple of weeks and be fine), but worrying about something I have no control over... it doesn't do anything but drain energy and focus from what I can control -- getting up, going to work, and doing my job to the best of my ability. I'd like to keep my job (and benefits), but if I don't... well that would suck, but we would figure something out. I spent my November working on an article for RedBrick, looking at the Step System for Earthdawn and running a break-down analysis of the different parts of it. This is an analysis that I originally did years ago, but I hadn't ever put it into a coherent, well-written essay before (with accompanying graphs, because we all know graphs are cool). You can find the full article at the Earthdawn website. PS -- RedBrick's latest Earthdawn release, the adventure Burning Desires is available in electronic format from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. The print edition should be available early next year. Just a quick update before I head off to bed. RedBrick Ltd has been posting a series of Writer's Spolights, an interview (of sorts) that highlights the people who work on the Earthdawn game. Mine was recently posted, and you can read it here. I'll try to have more updates soon, but I've been really busy with work and everything. Until next update! Your results: You are Dr. Doom
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