After buying the DnD starter set a few weekends ago - which is, oddly enough, one of the quickest ways of getting your hands on official(tm) game tokens, official(tm) boards and the all-important dice - I counted out the discount coupons, borrowed a friend's customer privileges card and went out to buy the hefty, murky and all-powerful "4th Edition Core Rulebook Collection". It rests now on my table, glowing softly under white tubelight.
Had a quick flip through the Monster Manual (which is OMG fantastic! Every page with something you'd like to see in an adventure!), and then got as far as the classes in the Player's Handbook. Which is - quite frankly - scary. The thought of keeping all those numbers and calculations in my head while playing. Since I don't know anybody who DMs, I might have to grab friends and run my own adventure, in which case I'll have to know those rules back to front. Brr, etc.
On the other hand, the level of detail, the race descriptions, the places where they fill in the blanks ("elves are light-hearted but quick to anger") and the places where they draw back and leave it to the roleplayers and the DM to figure out the details. I also love that - besides the Three Books Themselves - it's extraordinarily light on the pocket. You can knock up the locations, dungeons, props, PCs et al with a bit of imagination and a lot of cardboard.
Next steps: keep going with the books, ask around to see if I can find the DnD community in Singapore, and check with friends if they'd like a chance to roll a character. And then see where it goes from there.
]]>I love comedy with a passion unequalled by any of my other interests (and if you have any idea how many "interests" I have, this will have astounded you). I enjoy a lovely belly laugh as much as the next person, basically rely on the BBC's Friday Night Comedy podcast to get my through overlong days and stressful times, and read webcomics I like with vengences. I'll dissect comedy to get at the bones of the thing, with meat still hanging loosely on. I'll revere people I consider to be comedy geniuses, such as Messrs Milligan, Hamilton and Hardy, as well as brilliant comedic performers, including Peter "Bluebottle" Sellers, Mark "Mr. Cul-de-sac" Steel, Jon "Brian Perkins and The Doctor" Culshaw, Fred "It's Fred" MacAulay and the entire cast of I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue and The Now Show. And what an uncomfortably long list that is already. Check them out on Wikipedia - or even better, YouTube. They really are incredibly brilliant.
Reminiscing (to say nothing of mass Wikipedia-ing) aside, here's the links I really wanted to share on this blog post: some of the funniest gags I've seen on the interwebs recently.
Well, that took longer than I thought, but my list of things-to-blog-about is now a whole lot smaller. Hooray, etc! I'll see you tomorrow.
]]>The Diary of Samuel Pepys. In case you're not familiar with the gentleman I refer to in the title of this post, he was a naval administrator and MP in his time who rubbed shoulders with Newton (him of gravity and mechanics), was an early president of the Royal Society, but remains best known for the detailed diary he maintained for nine years from 1660 to 1669 (he was also played by Neddie Seagoon in a Goon Show episode entitled The Flea, but that's quite another thing entirely).
I'm fascinated by the potential historical significance of blogs - I don't suppose I'll ever be famous, but it'll be fantastic to tell my family, "Hey, want to know what I was doing from 2003 to 2009? It's all on the Internet!". How cool is that? That's a lot of writing from a fast-growing-much-grousing part of my life, so it'll be quite interesting to myself eventually, sitting somewhere in the twilight of my years looking back on myself (I reflect so much I feel like a opposing pair of mirrors sometimes). Reading my old blog posts is already a pleasure I indulge occasionally. My Twitter feed is also accumulating the nail-clipper-droppings of my daily life - nothing of any use to me now, or even in the near future, but wouldn't it be awesome to look back on my life in, say, October 2009, with the kind of almost creepy near-hourly perspective that Twitter allows for? And remember how much I enjoyed just being able to find a double-decker bus to or from work?
Samuel Pepys is, to my mind, that principle stretched to its ultimate conclusion. He was a skilled writer and journalist, and was in the centre of the tumult of his times - if you'd been reading blog since September, you'd have read his wonderful description of his experience of the Great Fire of London, 1666. The blog is true-to-date, too: entries are put up exactly 343 years after they occured. Too busy to follow the complete journal? Snippets of his life are of course available on Mr. Pepys' Twitter feed.
Another reason this website dazzles and astounds me is how well this potentially bland, text-only information is organized. I haven't had a chance to read the encyclopedic articles (I only believe in one encyclopedia, anyway), but the in-text annotations, the Also on this day summaries of local weather conditions and other journals, and fantastically cross-referenced names (such as Mr. Thomas Hayter) really bring the text to life. My current unformed impression of information science is that it consists entirely of people sitting around figuring out the best way of presenting, say, a large amount of text-only content, in a way that would be fun to look at and work with, attractive to new readers, and clean and useful to existing readers. Information like this deserves to be made available in a form like this website, which does justice to what I like to think (romantically, I know) would have been a goal of its writer.
Doing something like that for a living would be completely awesome.
]]>The whole violence-in-Australia thing is a lot easier to deal with when you look at the broader and the closer perspective. A good example is from that last link:
Simon Overland wrote that "Victoria Police has been concerned about the rise in assaults and robberies involving Indian students",[30][31] and said that "racism was clearly a factor in some of the attacks."[32] New South Wales Police said that Indians are not over represented in Australian crime statistics.[33] Sydney-based United India Association president Dr Prabhat Sinha takes the view that the attacks are not necessarily racially motivated. He said: "They become soft targets by groups of four to six drug users, for example, who just want cash."[34]
So, yes, sure, race is a factor, but as long as you stay away from the "bad parts" of town, keep your eyes open for suspicious groups of people, and make sure you are in significant groups, you should be fine, right? Maybe not, and that's the bit that scares me.
It's really not as bleak as I paint it, though. According to ABC news, the people who would later be "seriously assaulted" were verbally abused in the bar, at which point the abuser was thrown out. And check out this story from Epping, Essex: how safe can you be when people jump you and beat you for possibly no reason? (Oh hey, while we're on the subject of assault without any clear reason at all ...)
There is such a thing as inadequate law and order enforcement; but then again there's plain old-fashioned "being at the wrong place at the wrong time". I think I'm going to chalk this up as an example of the latter, but don't think you're off the hook, Australia. If these kinds of incidents continue, there will be fewer foreign students heading off to study in Australia, and I might end up one of those staying away.
]]>A funny story, I think, although I wish the media wouldn't assume that someone arrested (not even tried, as I write this!) for disorderly behavior was actually planning on robbing a bar. Luckily, wiser heads are prevailing: according to a local paper, Eau Claire Police Chief Jerry Matysik is planning to "look at that to determine if they acted professionally and properly". So I guess we can all laugh a little easier.
(Do I overanalyse things? I guess I do, but for me a joke has to be perfect. Not good, not great - perfect. High standards, I guess.)
]]>Next up ought to be a room cleanup, and for once this might actually happen. I also need to get my dates in order, so I can schedule my GRE as soon as possible. And I would like to start making application checklists - I think I've got everything together to apply to my first grad school by the end of this week!
Gosh, just imagine - applying to grad school! At long last! The mind boggles.
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