All Eyes on Me

Am now back from my lovely weekend of larping at SLAW. This was kind of my weekend of "games I am not sure about," since in an effort to expand my larping horizons I signed up for all games that were not to my typical inclining. By and large this tactic was a success, and I had a very good weekend overall.

Friday night Charlotte, April, and I all played in Martha Stewart's Guide to Interdimensional Summoning (and Basting a Turkey.) Fortunately Charlotte had reminded me just before the game that it actually took place at a party and not at a business conference like I originally assumed, so at the last minute I changed my costuming plan. I thought I looked quite nice, wearing my black asymmetric cocktail dress with my white gold anniversary necklace, the nearly-matching silver infinity earrings, silver pumps with the perfectly-matching silver bag, and my silver-gray pashmina over my shoulders. Though I had a good time in it, this game was not to my taste. It was a game purely about schmoozing, with most interactions conducted solely for their own sake, which is totally fine, I just tend to prefer a little bit more plot. I did end up bonding with the demon who had been my childhood imaginary friend, but I did it mostly as a favor to him-- he needed it and I didn't, which I think may have been a common thing about demons and humans in the game. Glad I tried the game, had a nice time, but it was not exactly what I was hoping for.

Saturday morning I drove Charlotte and Ryan in early so that they could play in their morning games. I had nothing in that slot, so I decided to go cruise a nearby thrift store. It was a very nice, well-organized Goodwill, and there were lots of stuff to choose from. Unfortunately most of the things that caught my eye weren't in my size, but I find it amusing how often even in the thrift stores my eye is drawn to items from Express. Very frequently I see something I like the cut and styling of among lots of random pieces on the rack, and when I check the tag, Express is the maker with surprising frequency. I ended up taking home a fantastic black sweater with a drapey fold-over collar, two dressy knee-length skirts, one with an orange and white cloudy pattern and the other with swirls in various shades of red, and the neatest thing of all, a low-sided oval pan with a copper bottom and a stainless steel interior. It needs polishing, but this pan that looks just like it is selling for hundreds of dollars, and I snagged this one for four. Score! I'm not sure what you would call such a thing-- it's oval kind of like a gratin pan but only has one long handle, and the sides are too low for a saute pan --but I look forward to shining it up and cooking with it, which will promptly require shining it again. :-) 

Pleased with my haul, I returned to WPI to grab lunch and get into costume for The Sound of Drums. I wasn't sure if it was going to be my cup of tea, and I was fairly certain I would like Two Hours in London, but natbudin had highly recommended it and I trust the man's judgment. So, in the spirit of the Try New Games weekend, I went for it. My costume wasn't terrible, but it was weaker than my usual standard. Despite playing a sixty-plus-year-old, I did end up wearing my brown tribal-looking bikini with my brown pashmina tied around my waist like a skirt, and Charlotte kindly lent me her huge patterned green scarf to wrap around my shoulders. This mostly concealed all the decidedly-not-sixty-year-old body in the bikini, and I made some attempt to paint age makeup on my face, but I didn't white my hair and overall looked pretty much like the vain twenty-something I am. Also, I think I lost my brown and white headband scarf at the gamespace afterward, which I am annoyed with myself about.

But the game itself was excellent. The world is very full and well-thought-out. I loved my character and was incredibly busy throughout the whole game. I also had great interactions with Susan, who was my brilliant-but-mad younger sister, and Ryan, who was the troubled outsider with the haunting in his soul. I even got to use my badass spiritual strength to beat up a fallen god! It was awesome. The culture they built, with its ways and its norms that were so different and unusual, was really well-made. There was one small instance of "Christianity as the great bogeyman of non-mainstream living" that irked me, but otherwise I thought they did a really nice job of establishing the foreign people. There was also lots of interesting story told, which pretty much makes any game for me. Overall, I think this was my favorite larp of the weekend, and the one I was most glad that I took a chance on. Congrats to Tory and Lily for making it!

Saturday night was Clarence. By this point I was really dragging, energy-wise. This weekend marks the third week in a row of little sleep and poor eating, and I think I am reaching my limit. Luckily for me, Clarence is a game that is impossible to screw up, and I was playing an AGM so I could afford to be reactive rather than active. Fortunately, others were doing a fantastic job of pushing the game along. This run was blackbagged and carried off over the shoulder by electric_d_monk, whose portrayal of the fanatically German-nationalist GM Bucher drove the events by sheer force of personality. By the end of the run, we had vampires passing on their nationalities as well as their vampirism, resulting in bronzite's General and rigel's Carmilla being determined to be genetically perfect Aryans who of course must then go on to spawn the Master Race. With the use of the time accelerator to hasten their growth, soon we had six little Ubermensches prancing about named after the Von Trapp children singing songs from The Sound of Music. And naturally, these unstoppable German supermen went on to take over the world and some surrounding planets, leaving Brewer as Kaiser of the Earth and Mars. It was a typically insane run, but the birth of the Master Race, I think, was a uniquely amusing touch.
 

"Allow me to explain zee rules of Der Kriegspiel."
 

Sunday lightgamer was nice enough to let me ride over with him and twilighttremolo. I was signed up for In the Jungle that day, the final game of the sort I wasn't sure what I'd think of. But I like the work of emp42ress and simplewordsmith, so I wanted to see what it was like. My costume was like most of my others this weekend was a little half-assed, since I tend not to keep worn-out clothes around, but I settled on an outfit that when my parents last saw me in it told me I looked like a bum. I figured that would work. It is a game about hobos, a pure conversation exercise where we do nothing more than talk to each other in character. The game was at bare minimum cast, but it was a good one, including myself, natbudin, rigel, nyren, beholdsa, and electric_d_monk. Being in it with such good larpers helped a lot, keeping the converstion interesting and helping ease some of the awkwardness I was feeling about just having to spitball. Not something I'm certain I want to do again any time soon, but I enjoyed the experiment in this instance and I'm glad I decided to give it a try.

Now I am exhausted. I have been going at a breakneck pace for the last three weeks and I simply can't go any more. I have been kind of hoping that if I have one day where I sleep really well and eat properly it will fix my weariness and the mess my digestive system has been in, but I think I need a more consistent effort to really fix things up. Wednesday I will be going home for Thanksgiving with my brother, and I'm hoping to reset myself over that break with healthy eating and enough rest. I have things I need to get done in the near future, such as writing more Resonance characters and getting out the casting questionnaire for The Stand, but as cool as my activites have been, I think my body needs a bit more of a break before it will feel back to normal again.

My goodness, this was quite a busy weekend for me. I spent most of Friday doing chores, cleaning and running errands. In the evening Jared and I attended the birthday party of the lovely rigel, which was one of the most pleasant social gatherings I've been at in quite some time. I had some really nice conversations, particularly those with natbudin and usernamenumber, people whose company I always enjoy but just haven't seemed to have a chance to chat with in a while. Jared and I hada really nice time, thanks to all the good company we hung out with. So, happy birthday to Rigel, and thanks to her for throwing a really great party.

Saturday was spent doing homework, and planning a dinner for the evening. I made chicken marbella, which is an elegant chicken dish that must marinate overnight in the fridge in a mixture of prunes, Spanish olives, garlic, redwine vinegar, olive oil, and capers, then is baked in white wine and brown sugar. I was very pleased with how it came out. I also mde a complicated, kind of sophisticated rice dish of wild rice, mint, orange, scallion, pecan, and sunshine raisins. I don't really eat rice so I've never cooked it before, and I overdid it so that it was mushier than it was supposed to be, but the flavor combination was still nice. At night we went out to Rocky Horror in Cambridge. I gotta say, I was kind of disappointed. It wasn't a fantastic show, even though it had the highest production values of any Rocky I'd ever been to, and the techies were obtrusive and obnoxious. We didn't get back till extremely late, and we ended up getting up extremely late the next today, which I wasn't terribly pleased about.

Today we spent doing homework. I finished the assignment I needed to for tomorrow, and now may relax a little. We're going to go to campus for dinner, and then Jared has some more stuff to try and get through. I believe I will take a shower and make a plan for handling things for the rest of the week. I've got a pretty decent amount of work to get through, and making a schedule helps me a lot.

Last night was the playtest of GM Space, and I am delighted to report that I had a blast. Jared and Sharone should be very proud.

I played Lily the GM, one of the cast characters, and I had a really fun time wracking my brain for ways to get players to keep playing even when they seemed determined to somehow break or ruin the game. Apparently rigel is signed up for this game at Intercon, and I would hazard guesses both that she would enjoy/is likely to get cast in this character. I believe that would be the second casting she and I will have shared. But as much as I liked my cast role, the horde had so many hilarious bits that I was starting to get jealous. There were lots of spot-on parodies of the weird things that happen in larps and the stupid things that players do that just cracked me up-- not to mention a lot of cool stuff taking off of the Lovecraft universe. All the horde players, particularly Nat, Susan, and Ryan, were just so funny and awesome. I really loved a lot of Mac's bits as well. I remember when Jared started getting concerned that certain important things hadn't come up yet, because the players weren't moving through the horde characters fast enough. Well, dear, that means you've written horde characters that are strong enough to actually stay in game for a while! Apparently they were written too well. :-) The game pretty much accomplished everything it was supposed to-- it has just enough plot to create a framework and a trajectory, with enough humor to really carry its true goal of being a humorous game. With some minor tweaks suggested by the playtesters I think could be completely polished and ready for Intercon. Should this game rerun in the near future (I want to bully Jared into bidding it for Festival) I highly reccomend it.

I extend my congratulations to Jared and Sharone, and I am immensely proud of both my love and my friend. Say nice things to them when you see them!

 My much-anticipated weekend with Jared has come and gone, and though I'm sorry it's over, I feel so good to have seen him and had a wonderful time. Bernie kindly drove me to the airport to pick him up, and I treated them to a seafood lunch at No Name. When we got home, I finally got to show Jared Elsinore, and we got him settled in, and then we got in some much-needed snuggling before dinner. God, I missed being in him arms. I wanted to make him one of his favorite meals from home in honor of his visit-- crusted pan-fried tilapia, sauted broccoli and cauliflower in pine nuts, mashed sweet potatoes, and red velvet cake for dessert. It was a big job, as I am a fairly novice cook and I had to make enough for ten people, but I had the various guests lending me their hands, so somehow I made it through. Everyone seemed to enjoy it-- to my delight, Jared included. The fish was unfortunately not what it was supposed to be, but it was still tasty, and I am determined to learn how to make it exactly as his mother does. :-) Yeah, I want to be that kind of girlfriend. After some lively after-dinner discussion, the guests retired happy, and I was blissfully reminded of how much I missed falling alseep in Jared's arms. Waking up beside him is definitely nice too. The next day we were supposed to have lunch with 

rigel

bleemoo