Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I hope you’re having as fun a holiday as I turned out to have.  I spent the day with my family, who decided to join me in Beantown for the holiday, and we were invited by my sister-in-law’s family to join them for dinner, and so spent the day with them and seeing my sister-in-law’s alma matter.  I really don’t have much to say except that it’s been a fun and strange day, so I’ll leave you with some quotes:

“Look!  Someone’s left their underwear to dry.” – Me, upon seeing strange strips of white cloth (or paper) hanging from strings on campus.

“Your brother made the same joke.” – My sister-in-law, less than a second after the previous statement.  (Proof positive my brother and I are both the same brand of idiot.)

“…and there’s this one game, well it’s a demo, that you play McDonald’s and you grow these cows and feed them soy and you hire people and if they don’t work right they fire people but then if you fire people you can get sued, oh and if you don’t feed the cows they die or if they get sick you can shoot them with a gun and they disintegrate.  And you can destroy the rainforest but if you do you get sued by environmentalists.”
“What’s this game called?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sure it’s not Grand Theft Fast Food?”
-My sister-in-law’s (SIL, for brevity) cousin(s), my brother, cousin again, and myself, discussing what they’re currently playing.

“So what’s the point of the game?”
“You don’t really do anything.  You just hire people and fire people.  You can’t really even affect their performance.”
“Ah.  It’s a CEO simulator.”
-Me and the cousins, continuing the discussion above.

“I really think you’d like this game called SimCity.” – Me, after the discussion on the games the SIL’s cousins are playing.

“You know, they really would like SimCity.” – My brother, after he finished his discussion on the games the SIL’s cousins are playing.

“We’ve solved almost every problem in the world – politics, global warming, communism.  Now there’s just the matter of finding your brother a job.”
“Well, if you’ve solved global warming…”
-My SIL’s uncle to my brother, and my response.

So the latest episode of Heroes just ended.  And when they finally revealed the identity of Adam, I jumped out of my chair and yelled “I knew it!” in a loud and excited voice, pointing the screen and clapping my hands raw.

I was alone at the time.

This is how much this show gets to affect me.

No spoilers though.  I’m real fucking pissed now that there’s a writer’s strike in the entertainment industry.  It means the season’s going to be cut in half (if things progress for long, which there’s no reason to think they won’t.)  But… yeah.  Wow.  That was a great huge pay off.

Anyhow – I’ll try to keep this spoiler free.

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Another project that’s been taking up my time has been planning.   And, I must admit, I’m extremely excited about the dungeon I have planned for the Planescape campaign coming up.  (Sadly I’m finding that no matter how many good ideas I have for Mystara, I really can’t bring myself to get excited about it.  I’ve been enjoying planning for Harbinger, and I’ve been enjoying planning for what’ll come after, but the experience of the last year I think pretty conclusively sullied that group and game for me.)  But anyhow, back to the idea.

It’ll be my first truly interactive, in-depth dungeon.  For those of you still reading who don’t know (which, are there any of you?) what I’m referring to when I write “dungeon”, I don’t mean the kinky basement kind with the latex and the bondage.  (Although, hey!)  What I mean by a dungeon I mean a D&D dungeon, a controlled locale which offers limited options to the players and provides contained environment for their encounters to take place in.

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NaNoWriMo has officially begun, and I’ve written my 1600 odd words of Really Bad Prose(tm).  Actually, it was pretty horrendous, mostly because I kept pushing forward, trying to exorcise the “go back and edit, dammit!” demons that constantly plague me in writing.  (See, I hate the post-draft editing process.  I like my first drafts to be as close to final as absolutely possible.  When I have time to work on a project, I can usually get away with this.  But since I must write 50,000 words by the end of November, I decided early on to just get rid of that impulse right away.)

I’m up to 1,900 and change, too, so I’m starting to build up a buffer. I realized that at this “just type” schedule, I can crank out 1,000 words of bad prose an hour, which means I can – should work cause me to lag behind – typically (maybe) catch up in a weekend.  Hopefully, I’ll get to write another close to 2,000 words tomorrow, and thus have a good manageable buffer in case whatever crops up.