Busy, Busy

My last March guest just headed off. This one was a DU student (I was originally slated for two but the other guy found other lodging. He was cool, pretty much away all day, and gave me wine. Forget if I've said so, but the two linguist friends of Moti were also quite cool and gave me a nice tea pot. They were around a bit more and had more time to be touristy. So they actually used my kitchen but also helpd do both their and my dishes, a definite mark of excellent guests. (My only real lament about my apartment is the lack of a dishwasher, otherwise I'm all good).

Mom's birthday is coming up, she bought a digicam ahead of schedule so I'm now looking into some HD TV options for her. Anyone with experience is welcome to comment, although I think she's going for something smaller than arterich's beastie.

Monday's DnD went long, which I do occassionally but try to keep to a minimum. On the upside, we're about to get through the big fight that marks the half-way point of my campaign. I expect the later half will be a bit tighter since the group is now prominent enough that any quest they go on will impact the balance of power between the two big criminal gangs in that world.

Tuesday I went to a DU networking event, though I didn't really have any students looking to network. That was fine, I just hung out with Blair and Matt W (Apparently Matts are the Davids of my post-college years). After that, hit Andrews for a Hero-Clix/DnD minis game night. My first DnD minis game, and to my surprise I kicked some butt. Although some of that was luck on morale roll. Morale rolls are a mechanic where you need to make a saving throw+commander level d20 check and hit a 20. They kick in when a creature falls to half health. I do approve of the mechanic, it does speed things up.

This weekend, I watched El Hazard. It was insubstantial but a good deal of fun and very pretty. That and Makoto's prolonged cross-dressing was great. I can be overly amused by that sort of thing, as Starburst Crystal shows. Also, man, that series is not light on the fan service, including the entire end credit sequence. I also do rather like the way time travel was handled, it seemed pretty logical which is an accomplishment in its own right. Mostlly I liked it for the Fujisawa teacher and the Jinnai. As kamalloy noted the bugs really just were not good at the evil until he came along. That and while crazy he was consistently competant. Nanami had good character design, a sensible outfit imagine that, although her role was a little too second string for my tastes. Divination powers are a classical second string female power that doesn't tend to allow for taking the initiative. Fairly pointless, she didn't even get a chance to use it in a fight. Why the hell was she helping Makoto fight? He had the cat armor, but aside from that there's every reason to think she could handle the fight better than Makoto could. When Hitomi pulled a similar trick it made a lot of sense, her boy was in a mech! On the other hand, most of the local human fighters were female so it's balanced out.

Well that makes things nice and clear

Directly (I mean really directly) stolen from Sullivan.

"We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,"

Rudy Giuliani, March 1994.

[Edit: Link extended to make clear that I'm linking to the speech and not some campaign site.]