The House That Silence Built

( Further in. )

I need this weekend. Too many things this week have stressed the shit out of me when they have no reason to do so.

Even if it was touted by a destructive anarchistic dissociated identity, I want "the ability to let that which does not matter truly slide."

I may have had a genuine anxiety attack today -- or at least, the first I've recognized as such.

There was a campus-wide end of year lunch thing. I abruptly changed my mind and decided to go at least check it out, see if I recognized anyone so I could say hello. There was old 70s rock playing and the courtyard was packed with hundreds of people, one of whom I recognized -- the college president, for the record. There may have been more people I knew, but I never noticed them. Something kicked into gear in my brain that said "FLEE." There were too many strangers and I was sure they were all staring at me, even if intellectually I recognized most of them hadn't even registered my presence in the vicinity.

Enough presence of mind remained not to abruptly spin on my heel and run back into the building -- although hindsight makes me wonder if that wouldn't have been the more expedient and less elaborate solution than wending my way through the crowd to the far side of the courtyard and then making a circuit of the campus to get back to my building.

That was the beginning of the downslide of the day, most of it due to my own paranoia and self-recrimination, except for showing up to a rescheduled meeting, which I'm pleased to blame Gmail for, as it hadn't retrieved an email from my school account in a timely fashion. Again, intellectually I recognize the self-recrimination and mental beating-up are baseless things, but that doesn't really take away any of their bite.

I have been taking for-freaking-ever to read The Drawing of the Dark. It's Tim Powers' prototypical secret history novel, written before even The Anubis Gates. I like it a lot, but I keep finding these other things to do that leave me reading it on the bus ride home, or on the odd log 'n capture day, like today. Perhaps I shall finish it.

I do not believe this one will be going back on Paperbackswap.com when I finish. I already kind of regret trading away Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather, even though I had tired of reading the first and think the second is a ham-fistedly composed crossover of the former with Last Call.

So I've decided what I'm going to run at OGC this summer: Marvel Heroes, the board game from Fantasy Flight Games; a BPRD adventure about the terra cotta soldiers of Emperor Qin Shi Huang (probably wrong; I keep having to look the name up to get it right) that uses Cinematic Unisystem; and a GURPS Discworld scenario about Ankh-Morpork's first amateur dramatics society.

The last I'm most concerned about, as Ben_McFarland over on RPGBomb.com was amazingly helpful in creating a plot structure for the BPRD game and a board game runs itself. I'll try to playtest it first, but it will probably be my first time running GURPS, and it'll be as an MIB demo guy, too.

I have an idea of interweaving the show, the Discworldian version of a musical/light opera, the characters are trying put on with the events they're going through -- mostly other people trying to stop them putting on the show for various reasons -- so I'm doing a little research for source material: an Opera Australia performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. It's not bad, but I keep thinking of the bites Sideshow Bob sang in that episode of The Simpsons.

I enjoyed that much more than last week's episode. ( Further in. )

I should add this was the first time I'd watched a new episode of new Who with other people, kazama and his charming girlfriend. It was nice having others to laugh with.

I really hate having to watch people watch something I've made. It's so mortifying.

It snowed for about ten minutes on my walk to work. Nothing stuck, but still: snow.

The rain pretty well soaked my shoes and socks on the way to work, but that's all right. Now I have a legitimate excuse to be barefoot. It was a little surprising when two mucky-mucks popped in unannounced, but no problem. I was too busy enjoying being barefoot.

The computer lab off of which my suite exists is now being kept in darkness because the students have left, except for when tour groups come through. It's a little odd to have darkness at my back, and then notice the lights flicker on in my peripheral vision.

This interview with the governor is almost in the can. I've got one last edit to make, a little bit more fooling around with Motion animations, and then I'll be done. Just in time for graduation activities to kick into gear. Oh boy.

So I went to Ubercon this weekend. It was immensely relaxing and a great getaway, whcih is what I needed. If you want to know what I did there -- like my seven hour Rock Band/Guitar Hero odyssey -- you can read about that here. It was generally a good weekend, although I don't know if it's a trip I want to keep making on my own. A six hour drive is long and far enough that I think Ubercon would be a tough sell to most gamers I know in my area. It was a tough sell to me, and I wanted to go.

I made several wrong turns on the way down, usually because I second-guessed my Google Maps directions. This is probably due to the fact I almost always know where I'm going in my daily life, so I'm not good at navigating new territories for the first time. I feel out of control when I can't find my way around, and it gets worse when one's moving through unknown lands, looking for markers that may or not be as noticeable as promised.

Also, a scene from Ubercon:

Weak sauce. ( Further in. )

Thanks to Pandora Radio, I know now the source of Stewie Griffin crying out "I've got blisters on these fingers!" after playing the banjo in Family Guy.

I've been signed up to Pandora for a while, but I've only begun listening regularly in the last two or so weeks. The usual MP3 playlist was becoming tedious. This seemed like a good way to break out of the same old songs and artists.

Of course, the station I've shaped plays an awful lot of Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Beatles and Who. So it's not too different, just lots of songs I hadn't previously heard. I'm slowly expanding though. Cake popped in there, somehow, and Widespread Panic.

My feet smell of fresh grass.

I can't even tell anyone how depressed I am because then they won't talk to me anymore.

Which is silly, because they won't talk to me anyway.

That's rather passive-aggressive of me. Fact is, I'm wicked depressed right and it seems like there's no one I can talk to about it.

( Further in for spoilers. )

LARCHWOOD: http://drtheta.livejournal.com/213389.html

I've been shooting interviews for these videos that will go on the college's new website this summer. This morning, the light kit I reserved hadn't been returned yet -- and still hasn't, I might add; bad patron! Given who checked it out, I had a feeling it wouldn't be returned on time, so I already had a backup plan in mind to cobble one together out of offlined resources. Everything worked fine in the office, but once I got over to the shoot location, one of the lights decided it didn't want to work. (Still doesn't, so I don't know what's going on there. I'll check it out before I go.) That, in conjunction with the fact I had to use a crappy camera and the location itself was flooded with sunlight I couldn't block out, made for a less than stellar interview in my view.

The second interview I did, which I just got back from, I had to pull out the big guns, a fancy three light kit that is nowhere near as portable as the one I've been using. I got my exercise for the day, at least.

I really hope that over the summer, we get the opportunity to revise some of the resource loaning procedures here. It's unlikely anything will ever really be done about overdue and missing equipment, but we should at least work to be sure of who's got what, and that they have what we think they have.

So the other day I finally finished off that singles profile on the local site I've been attempting for like a year now. I go to login to the account just now and it's gone. Like totally gone.

Doesn't recognize my login name or password and says neither of the email addresses I might have used are on record. Was it that terrible a profile? Does the site admin have a vendetta against me?

It was you, wasn't it?

The user of the suite next to mine appears to be laboring under the belief these things are sound-proofed. I shall explicate why this is a mistaken article of faith in a letter to be found during the investigation.

And as long as I'm grumbling, I got almost to the very end of a fifty minute tape before the Head Cleaning message and attendant video artifacting appeared. Now I get to capture it all over again. Back to Thieves World, then.