All Eyes on Me

My first game of the weekend was Saturday morning, Midsummer Mischief run by captainecchi and electric_monk.

I had a lot of fun in this game. I played Constance Keeble, the horrible sister of Lord Emsworth, and it was a perfect cast. I am by nature a mean, nasty person, and I was carrying a lot of rage and frustration from the previous week, so the opportunity to be the bad guy who was awful to everyone was very welcome. I wore a slightly outdated costume that was more of a look for the teens rather than the twenties, with a big hat and a horrible mink stole I found in a thrift store.

I had goals and things—mostly about controlling my unruly, embarrassing family so that they wouldn’t marry poor people — but I was much more interested in simply being this character. So I stomped around ranting at people, criticizing their behavior, and loudly bemoaning the distinct vein of idiocy that ran inexorably through the Threepwoods. I’ve been reading the Blandings books quite a bit lately, so I knew the tone, and was particularly pleased to see people nailing the portrayals of their characters. Favorite people to interact with included were oakenguy as my dear brother Clarence Threewood, ninth earl of Emsworth, who got his Lordship’s pleasant vagueness exactly; witticaster’s hilarious nailing of the Honorable Freddie’s unique speaking cadence; Hyde’s perfect and slightly creepy Efficient Baxter; zapf’s mix of loyal devotion and acid bitterness in Beach; lightgamer’s getting Galahad Threepwood’s accent and biting wit dead-on. Favorite moments: detailing the fate that awaited Beefy Bingham if he married my niece; to wit, that he would forever commingle his bloodline with the Threepwood font of idiocy. Telling Gally that his monocle gave his face the nastiest expression, to hear in return that he preferred it to my hat with the aspect of a runaway fruit stand. Backhanded sniping with my sisters played by in_water_writ and ninja_report. Forgetting the names of the nobodies my blasted nieces and nephews were marrying, and so referring to them as Shiftless Peasant and Backalley Slattern. I also enjoyed instructing Huxley, the horrible little boy hilariously played by Nick, to find the air gun and shoot one of my irritating relatives, I didn’t care which.

I had a lovely, light, silly, frothy time, and it helped raise my mood from the exhaustion and frustration brought on by all the work to get Brockhurst ready to go for its first run. Thanks to Lise and Matt for being so good as to run it for us!

Again a lovely weekend with Jared comes to a close, and again I try to dwell on the positive-- that I'm seeing him on a regular basis, that he may be back for good soon, that we are doing well despite the distance and every time we do see each other is great. Again, I try to be happy that our time together was so nice rather than sad that now he's gone. It feels good to be doing everyday things with him like dinners and seeing friends and watching movies. Positivity and hopefulness are not natural to me, but I'm beginning to see that in this situation they may be truly necessary.

laurion

It occurs to me that I haven't done any cooking in weeks now. I hope I still remember how, because I've got quite a bit to do for this coming weekend. During the weekend of Labor Wars, natbudin and I made a series of bets about what would happen during the game, with the understanding that the winner would make dinner for the loser. Nat won a fair number more of the bets than I did, so I have the happy task of hosting him this Friday evening. And, because I've been meaning to have them over for ages, I am having captainecchi and electric_d_monk over that night as well. I don't believe I've ever cooked for any of them before, so I am looking forward to taking this as an opportunity to show off. I haven't decided on the menu yet; I will do that today between work and rehearsal.

For the picnic on Sunday there doesn't really seem to be any kind of "main dish" being brought, so I think I'm going to step up and put one together. The guest list is around fifteen people at this point, so I need to figure out a dish I can make in large quantities that isn't excessively expensive. My first thought was chicken marbella, mostly because it is very delicious and requires nothing more complicated than marinating it in a bag the night before, laying it out in a pan, and baking it in the oven. Still, it requires some kind of fancy ingredients, which could push up the cost. Maybe if I can get someone to go in on it with me, it'll be a little bit more workable.

Might anyone be interested in taking a size eight teal long-sleeved button-up blouse from Banana Republic off my hands? It's really nice and I like the color so I've been trying to make it work, but it's just too big and it looks weird on me because of it. It's in good condition and free to a good home.

So the Burn Notice game will not be running tomorrow. I heard from Marissa that it turns out she has a conflict she'd forgotten about on Saturday night, and since the plan was for the episode to be Riker-centric, I really don't feel like coming up with a different plotline OR cutting her out of another game. So the group is just going to have dinner together instead, which will be easier on my brain and we'll still get to enjoy each other's company. I'm not sure when the next session will be, given that I'm going out of town next weekend, but maybe we'll be able to get together on a weeknight sometime, since we'll all be in Waltham for the month of July.

Made some small progress on line memorization; I got through one and a half scenes yesterday. If I can keep that rate up, I should definitely be off-book by the deadline. I have the next three days off, so I'd better use them. Tomorrow I'm going to a much-anticipated Fourth of July party, and I want to make some dish or other to bring. Maybe a nice side dish I can make easily in large quantities.

Also, captainecchi recently approached me with a really cool idea. I'm not going to say anything about it yet before I've got anything substantial, but look for it soon...
 

On Friday night I helped captainecchi and electric_d_monk run the fantastic League of Extraordinary Hogwarts Students. I loved playing this game, and I only wish I'd had time to study everything more carefully. I read all the character sheets and the rules, but  I still wasn't quite familiar with the inner workings of the game to be all that useful as a GM. I mostly got answers from Matt and Lise and then passed them on to players. I was particularly proud of katiescarlett29, who stepped in as Irene Adler even though she wasn't totally confident about the improv part of larping, and of nennivian, who I always thought was a larper waiting to happen. By and large the run went very well, with lots of activity and engaged players, but I wish I'd been intimate enough with the game to be able to give better suggestions to the couple of (usually new) players that got stuck. I wanted to talk to them after the game, but I was so blasted by gamewrap that I had to drag myself home and sleep. I have been sleeping badly lately, and I had to get up for a 9AM game the next day.

Saturday morning that 9AM game was the fifth run of Oz. It was an excellent run, one of the best, with the capable assistance of Jared and Bernie as my fellow GMs. We were a little nervous about the casting in places, but it turned out that everyone had a part they enjoyed. Standout players include the awesome natbudin, who we initially wanted for EVERY ROLE IN THE GAME, but we finally settled into a part because he wanted to see him portray the personality-- which he did amazingly. Again, Charlotte was fantastic, showing so much talent for getting into and becoming characters. I was incredibly impressed with wired_lizard, who played the character the way I had always imagined it to be, and gave me a few new ideas on top of that. Zachariah came up with some fantastically clever stratagies for executing his fairly difficult plotline. Hell, pretty much everyone in the game did an excellent job. I should probably stop casting bronzite as my big bad, because I think people expect him to be the villain all the time, and so no one is inclined to trust him. In the previous run of Oz, Marc Blumberg as the villain did very well and in fact managed to achieve his goal of cataclysmic destruction, but it was more because the characters he was in opposition to made a fatal error that they could not fix. John actually pushed things farther along the doom track than anyone so far, but his opposition managed to repair it properly. I was immensely pleased with this run.

Saturday afternoon, I went home to sleep. I think it helped a little, but I was still pretty draggy for the rest of the weekend.

Saturday night was the fifth run of Alice, again assisted by Jared and Bernie. I think it went well in that players had a good time, but this was the WEIRDEST RUN EVER. Though of course there have been variations, the previous four runs tended to follow some pretty clear trends. Basically, there is a pattern of connections that is supposed to get made, and with some variance in the order in previous runs they all came together, leading to an endgame scenario where two large groups are polarized against each other. A lot of those connections did not click this time around, and I'm not sure where the broken link was. The villain was vanquished again, but not by the person who is supposed to and always has in the past. In all the previous runs, either the core villain group acted so covertly that nobody knew who they were until the end of the game, or they formed a tight-knit group so cohesive that they just overwhelmed and crushed all opposition. I feel like they were more scattered and freewheeling this time around, which made them more obvious and less able to protect themselves should someone decide they were a target. There were still some fantastic performances-- I loved Lise's analytical approach to her character and she made amazing process putting together the pieces of her challenge. And April was excellent, not to mention wearing a fantastic costume. I guess any game where the players have fun is a success, but I was really shocked at how weirdly this run went.

Then I went home to sleep. Again, my sleep has not been terribly restful these days, so still. So. Draggy. Blah.

Sunday was Diamond Geezers, the only thing I played. I had a blast. I was playing an ex-military demolitions expert whose rough, ruthless, but not terribly malicious outlook I enjoyed. It was an interestingly set-up game, basically us in a confined space with a few story hooks built in but a plot that was more or less on rails. I wasn't exactly expecting that, but it was a really fun character game, involving yelling in Cockney accents and waving guns around. We experienced an odd phenomenon that I think was troubling Brad as GM that the only ones who were talking much, at least at first, were bleemoo, Charlotte, and myself, and everyone else was fairly quiet. I wonder if it was because the three of us were comfortable doing the accent and they felt slightly intimindated to speak if they couldn't. It's not like mine was any good at all, though Josh's and Charlotte's actually were. Josh was so much fun to play off of, and Charlotte continued to prove my theory that she has always been a larper, whether she knew it or not. Definitely recommend this game as a fun silly character experience.

Oh, as a side note, I was amused at usernamenumber pointing how at Brandeis, of course there was going to be less shooting and killing and more hand-holding and agreeing to work things out. :-) I have noticed this trend myself.

Next year I shall be con chair. I am looking forward to it. I am in the process of pondering a few thing to help optimize, which I will record when I have a better handle on my thoughts. Until then, thanks to everyone for making our very own con a fantastic experience again!