Perhaps I need to get sis one of my recent toys for 2010, so she can be as on-the-ball as me in getting my weird references. Thanks to this, I’m on-the-ball every day, and it beats the hell out of my uber-squeaky old desk chair.

James asked me last night how I’d enjoyed getting back into gaming again, and I had to say I enjoyed it, even if I did remember how much I hated Cthulhu. I figured I ought to clarify a little. In D&D for example, you’re going to make some kind of adventurer whose life it likely is to seek fortune and glory, so getting you into a story isn’t too hard. But why are we going to sneak into wherever or fight this so-and-so? Because of the treasure/fame/reward/whatever. There you go. 

 In Cthulhu, you make pretty much regular people, who are supposed to start the game with zero knowledge of the existence of any supernatural mumbo-jumbo in their world. Thus, when the gamemaster conspires to put you in a situation where something is amiss, you’re probably pretty likely to accept reasonable explanations for things that you run across. That is to say, why should we go investigate why the train is stopped when the nice man just explained it’s only a temporary delay and they have it under control instead of going to wait in our cabins as instructed? 

Most of our party are just ordinary passengers, no special train expertise to be helpful to the effort, no reason to distrust the nice train employee, so why wouldn’t we go back to the cabin and wait the 20 minutes like we were told? Simple, because we’re all people who know we’re playing characters in the messed up world of Cthulhu and in all likelikhood something is about to eat/appear on/or dimensionally shift the train we’re on if we don’t check it out NOW! In 20 minutes, their “evil scheme” could be done, and since we don’t like to have to roll up new characters everytime we sit down to play, we take our “ordinary people” and make them do things that are really out of character.

You solve this problem, I think, by making only characters that have inherent reason to be curious/insane/paranoid/distrustful anyway, so even as ordinary Joe’s who may not think something cosmically bad is about to happen, are still curious enough to be wary when the nice train official says “nothing to see here! Move along!” so at least it makes sense why they might try to get their own look at the problem instead of taking somebody’s word for it.

Breaking in new characters is always the worst, though. Pretty much anybody, if you slap them in the face with some Cthulhu horror and they manage to not go completely insane or be eaten by it, will likely rethink their current course in life and start to be a little paranoid and curious, and thus become a perfectly good investigator type. More likely, though, your character will blindly go headfirst into the gaping maw of the beast because they simply don’t know yet that such a beast exists and might be hungry, because you as a player have to keep making your character rationalize things into the normal instead of the paranormal you know it is.

Thus, unless you are just danged lucky, despite your own personal knowledge of the world of the weird, your newbie is going to accept the drink from the stranger/let the weird doctor give them the injection/gladly hold the big ugly book for the nice man/go back to their sleeper cabin and relax like they were told, and next thing you know you’re rolling up another character.

My solution this time? A character based loosely on the eccentric Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe it or Not fame. An explorer/writer type in search of the weird, quick to want to investigate things that might seem out of the norm… which can be good to get us into adventures, but will likely result in me lingering too long to take photos of the weird tracks until the thing that made them comes back to eat me. Either way, I expect he’ll be fun once we get into it. I think I’m going to have to add “shrunken head” and “petrified monkey” to my inventory, though, just to add to the quirkiness of my guy. The actual Robert Ripley had the largest car collection of his day, but never learned how to drive, had a collection of weird pets, and enjoyed wearing outfits from other countries, so I think he may actually have been more insane than I can play for my character at this point. Dunno, though. If I survive this and get a few more sanity points down, we’ll see.

So, hey, it’s 2010 and stuff. Welcome. Yeah. Most of you knew that already. So far I’ve had more work to do for less pay than I can remember in a long time, put our household on a strict budget, and resolved to take the need for some personal changes more seriously than ever before. As for how all that’s working out for me, well, tonight it took two Tylenol and a Lynchburg lemonade to make the pain go away from hunching over the desk all day, so I could go hunch over a table with some friends and play Cthulhu for hours.

So yeah, there’s that. I’m gaming again, but I’m still off the electronic stuff, I swear. It’s only the good clean paper and dice gaming for me, man. It occurs to me it was only Tuesday I heard Ben was still playing WoW like an addict, and I actually kinda felt sorry for him. After tonight’s few minutes of gaming interlaced with hours of bad puns and tangents, I’m actually thinking the computer games might be a little more immediately satisfying. I forgot how much I dislike “cliffhanger” gaming sessions, unless I’m running them, of course. Let’s just say tonight’s session was a real train wreck and leave it at that. *wink*

A new year always seems like a good excuse for attempting some changes, so why not follow that crowd. The job scare didn’t hurt either. So, I’ve recently brushed up on some PHP basics with the notion of looking into Facebook app programing, and then gotten merrily sidetracked with the phenomenon of social media’s influence on modern advertising, and sort of haphazardly found myself reading up on SEO instead. Heck, today — I wish I could say for fun — I made some photo slideshows with flash, another set of skills I probably ought to have and really just don’t. Essentially so far 2010′s been all about “back to school” for me. Apparently after you go to your 20 year high school reunion you start to wonder if all your knowledge is really 20 years old, and start to seek out new skills. Or it could be just me.

Haven’t forgotten how to write, though. Well, not literally at least, see I’m doing it right now! Grammar is a little out of left-field these days, but I do like to capture what I’m thinking and worry less about what grade I might get. Felt good to stretch the mental muscle a bit to write up the first in my SEO tutorial series, where I’m essentially taking the general concepts I’ve picked up, focusing them for real estate agents, and even further focusing them based on what can actually be done with our websites. I’m actually looking forward to writing up hopefully the next two lessons over this weekend, so I can get ahead in case things get insanely busy again.

I meant when. I’ve put in more hours for work this month than in ages, and it’s nuts when I’m supposed to be cut back to a 24-hour work week. There have been some interesting challenges for sure, and honestly it’s been coming at me from so many sides it’s been hard to decide where to focus. Just when I get the plan in place to use all my idle time to study, somebody goes and takes away my idle time. I guess that’s why I have to resort to making time to journal again at 1AM, when I’m supposed to be on a 10PM bedtime schedule. Shyeah.

So, before the uber-budget hit, I plopped down the dough to sign on for another 6-months of ass-kicking bootcamp, this time at an indoor location. I got three days in, then the snow-ice hit. Then I got kinda sickly. Then I just got really off my schedule, which brings us to now. Tomorrow… er… later today is the last day of January and I’ve been to bootcamp three times! Woohoo! Month one down, right!?

It’s the timeslot. I cannot do getting up at 4:30 daily, fancy new-fangled light-therapy alarm clock aside, I have not been able to do it. Just knowing I’m going to TRY to get up the next morning causes me to have the worse time getting to sleep that when the light wakes me up, I just want to smash the light. I’m seriously considering swapping to the evening class back at Stone Mountain Park, which would be outdoors, but at least would be 6:30 in the evening instead. I have decided to decide this weekend, and make a fresh go at whatever come Monday. Of course, I could just go to the Saturday bootcamp at Stone Mountain park and tell them in person, but that’d mean I’m running come Saturday and I can already feel the notion-of-exercise-induced-insomnia coming on.

In what seems like an unrelated note to the reader, yet is clearly only a tangent in my brain, I’ve also decided to actually do the little photography project I’d considered doing a couple years ago, wherein I take goofy pictures of my favorite things and try to capture their story. Figure out, essentially, what makes them my favorite. Stupid, likely, but either all this crap sitting around on shelves are just toys and junk I’m hoarding, or they actually are “special” and deserve a little consideration.

Alright. I think I can walk away and consider that a big meaty journal entry for 2010 to sink it’s teeth into. Take that 2009! 2010 journal entries are going to kick your ass, and this is just the first one!