Next Immediate Opportunity for Ass-Kicking

On May 7th, a Thursday, Clutch is playing at The Cellar in Struthers, Ohio. It's not listed, but I'm guessing it's a 21+ show. Anyone interested? I've wanted to see Clutch live forever. Even though I have a final the next day, I don't care. It's only an hour away, and it should be astonishingly awesome.

You know you want to

This a repost from Facebook:

I want to see Mindless Self Indulgence in Worcester, MA on March 13. It is, as far as I know, an All Ages show, so that shouldn't deter anyone (like my brother, cough cough). The tickets are 19 a piece, and I'm going to want to buy them before the end of this weekend. So, does anyone want to come with me? Please let me know. I will drive, we will all rock out.

It has begun...

I just scheduled my second job interview. It's with Booz Allen Hamilton on the 6th of October.
Next Wednesday, I'll be told if I get two more. The true storm is really beginning.

Starting Yet Again

Leaving for Pittsburgh this afternoon. Hope to see you all there.

In other news, I saw Pineapple Express last night. It was pretty funny. I think James Franco is my hero.

Weekend

Spent a few days in Cape Cod.
The ocean is pretty sick.

Going back on Saturday... going to be a long week. Not much to do, and a very very one-track mind.

I'm pretty much packed. Going to ship my trunks tomorrow, if all goes according to plan.

Oh yeah, that little detail

So, my internet access has been cut off for this week because of my incessant love of bandwidth. So, if you want to get in touch with me, my phone would be the best way. I don't think people who don't have my number would want to get in touch with me, but if this is the case, ask one of our mutual friends who does have my number. It's the best suggestion I have, honestly. If they get weirded out and think you're stalking me, show them this blog page. I'm sure they'll understand.

Oh man

First things first, I finally have internet in my room in Chicago. This means I will now resume wasting time.
Things have really picked up this week. We're about done with training now, and starting to get our assignments (starting, I'm still unsure exactly what I'm doing). Tomorrow, we get our PPE (personal protective equipment) and tour the plant. It's going to be pretty cool, and it'll probably give a better idea of what we're going to be expected to do. After our physicals on Monday or Tuesday, we're essentially doing our thing for the rest of the summer. Should be pretty cool.

I've had some opportunities to get out and explore, but now that I'm waking up around 5:30 to get to work on time, that's not going down during the week. I'll figure out what my weekends will be like come Saturday, but my expectation is that it'll be pretty cool.

Well, I'll be online now, and probably IMing a lot of people between the hours of 8 and 10 EST, since that's when I'll be in my room, not doing much.

Shutdown

OK, so here's the deal:

Now that I'm essentially done with finals, I need to start packing my room more seriously. My desk and dresser are going to be gone on Wednesday, so both need to be emptied. Additionally, anything I want stored over the summer has to go by Tuesday. So, tomorrow I will finish cleaning out both my desk and my dresser. This means my computer will go away, and come back out maybe Tuesday, maybe Wednesday depending on how long it takes me to clean everything else out. So, I won't be getting emails or anything else for at least all of tomorrow. I'm kind of excited. Kind of still hoping my bike lock key is buried somewhere on this desk.

So yeah. If you need me for something important, call the cell or text message me. If you don't have my number...well, you have until tomorrow morning. Have fun.

I'm excited now. I'm going home soon, and I'll be in Chicago soon after that. Summer will begin.

IT'S ALIVE!

Yes, my computer is up and running again, now with a 120GB hard drive and a lot less crap on it. I'm in the process of running a data recovery on my old HD (using a nifty USB-t0-pATA converter), and should get back all of my important files. This ordeal has taught me much on the value of backups. Though, for better or worse, all of my files that were actually important (resume, school files, etc.) were already backed up on school or email servers. Now, I can back up all of my unimportant files too. Woo!

The Unthinkable

Today, the unthinkable happened. Yeah, my computer died. It sucks. I ordered a new hard drive from Newegg, as well as a nifty adapter thingy to get all the data off of my old drive. Hopefully, I'll be up and running by the middle of next week. Until then, I'm confined to the clusters. In the meanwhile, I can practice living without a computer. It'll probably be pretty eye-opening, considering how much of a hermit I can be at times.

Evil Plan Redux, Redux

So, yeah. Forget VTT. I'm running this fucker in person.
I'm going to send out the basic info in a few days. We'll probably start playing some time after the 11th of June, because by then we'll have 4 people back here in Pittsburgh. The campaign starts very small, but I have some interesting things planned. Should be fun.

And I have an idea. I've tried to write summaries of sessions, transcribe sessions, and all that, with minimal success. Thanks to Audacity and a few gigs of hard drive space, I'm going to try and record the sessions. This should work fairly well here, as this will not be a campaign involving a lot of side conversations with the GM. The recordings will probably be very random, knowing how gaming goes down, but I think it's worth a shot, especially if we plan on playing more sessions this summer. Not sure what it will gain me, but I want to try it.

I'm getting jumpy...waiting for things makes me jumpy...

Evil Plan Redux

Well, my plan is being updated. I still plan on running a VTT game, but my format is going to be different. Currently, the plan is Skype + Gametable. Gametable is very simple, Java (so it should be compatible for everyone), and just enough to do dice rolls and basic map arrangement. The main thing should not be in the interface, it should be via voice. I am curious to know if anyone has done this before, and how it worked.
Also, my campaign choice is not as clear-cut as before. I still have my AQ sci-fi campaign, but with my recent and unexpected acquisition of GURPS Magic, I have considered doing a slightly different campaign, using some material I wrote in high school, which would be adjusted for GURPS and for my setting. Both have potential to be really cool campaigns, but the more fantasy-oriented one, the players would have more of an opportunity to make cool characters. Also, my AQ campaign would work decently well with a large group (the summer group will be smaller), so I'm tempted to keep it until the school year. I don't yet know what we'll do next year...if we finish the current Cyberpunk campaign, then I'll be tempted to hold over the AQ campaign. Otherwise, it's a toss-up.
Well, I'll figure it out. Luther and I are running Cyberpunk tomorrow, so I'll test the waters for my summer ideas.

Almost Carnival

I just finished my last assignment for the week. After that is Carnival, and then the final wrapup of classes.
I will be staying in Pittsburgh for the summer, and working various clerical jobs to make money. It should be fun.
At the very least, I will be given many chances to chill out, and I most likely won't bring any work home with me. Ah, relaxation.
Yes...my definition of relaxation is a 40 hour work week. Woo.

My evil plan

All right, here it is, the one you've all been waiting for:

I am now declaring, officially, that I will run a VTT RPG this summer, using the GURPS ruleset and the OpenRPG software package.

The game will use a setting of my own devising, that is being fleshed out into a big ole' galaxy o' chaos as we speak.

The setting is sci-fi, and involves a nice mix of realism (star systems modeled after actual accretion disk models! My attempt to give scientific justification to everything!), and not so much (every solar system has inhabitable planets in it! Vague promises of psychic aliens! Faster-than-light travel!). I don't want just space fantasy, but I want it to be fun, too. I have a campaign set up, it's a combination of low-impact and moderate power that should make for a very interesting introduction to the setting. If things go well, the setting may be used to run another game in the next school year. For now, the plan is to test it out, tweak stuff, and play a game that I have not ever played: one that combines the exploration and adventuring of D&D with the realism and character focus of other systems.
As far as players go, nothing is set in stone, but I will extend invitations in terms of gaming familiarity. First, the members of Pony!, my current group, and one that has had me as a GM recently. Then, I'll see if anyone else I know is interested. From past experience, I don't think that many people I've gamed with before college will be interested.

Well, if anyone wants to get a leg up, I'll put out the links now:
openrpg.digitalxero.net: A wiki with OpenRPG info. Has links for the development version of OpenRPG, OpenRPG+. I prefer OpenRPG+ because it has a GURPS dice roller written for it.
openrpg.wrathof.com: A site with OpenRPG character sheets for many different systems (hint: click on GURPS).
openrpg.com: The main site, with links, and an installation guide.
mayhemgaming.net: This site has great tutorials for using OpenRPG and creating content for it.

Just in case someone didn't realize this already

I'm currently home in MA. I will be until Sunday.
So far, it's been pretty productive. I did my taxes and all my B4E work for a while. Tomorrow, I plan on both doing a solid chunk of my proposal project for my writing class, and going shopping. All the while, the Celica is up and running, and I'm having a jolly old time. I've also managed to squeeze in over 15 hours of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Damn good game. And the Wii is great. My brother never fails to get nifty gadgets in my absence.

Me, update? Nah...

These are getting more and more sporadic, both because I'm neither writing nor running an RP right now, and because up until Tuesday, I was in the death throes of fall semester. But now, I am prepared for greatness.

That's right. I'm leaving this podunk East Coast to go to Utah, for skiing!
It'll be ridiculous. A week of skiing in better conditions than I could imagine in the East.

Oh man. So good.

In the meanwhile, I'm looking for a good project to carry into next semester. I'm stuck about it, and want ideas. Hmmm...give me ideas. I like writing, and just so you know, by project I imply something to write. Just throw ideas out there. Because of course so many people read this...ah well.

I'm going to condense this

Pretty much everything in the world going on right now that I am at least peripherally aware of can be boiled down to one simple syllable:

Oy.

In other news, we did manage to meet for a bit yesterday, and now it appears that we're ready to start playing. Whether I'll have the time to either meet or write in preparation for a meeting this weekend is a bit questionable. Ah well.

I also have a job interview on Tuesday. How cool is that.

For those in the know...

My address this year will be:

Aaron Marks
1091 Morewood Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA. 15213

Anything you send there will get to me, I promise. And please don't send things to my SMC, I will never check it.

Pittsburgh, I have returned

Yup, I'm back.
My stuff is still in chaos, but I'm almost set up completely. Now, just to rock out. And maybe buy some textbooks or something.

For you people not here yet, here's a teaser (you guys know who you are):
Headhunter - Front 242
I want those sunglasses.

T-minus...

So, I'm in a hotel room in bumfuck-nowhere, Pennsylvania (New Columbia? yeah...). But this means I'm in Pittsburgh at CMU, tomorrow. Tomorrow.
This is pretty exciting, at least in my opinion. I mean, seriously...

I wrote way back in May that I was worried I'd just want to get back to school, and worried about floating through summer. I guess in that respect, Becket was a blessing. It always is, somehow. I think though, after this year, the magic has, for the most part, dissolved. I suppose 19 is an appropriate age for that to occur...but still...that's 6 summers. Quite a little chunk of time there.
There was a lot left on some hiatus at the end of last year...things that need to be resolved.

I still have a definite place to say I have no idea what the hell is going on. Hooray.

But tomorrow, that may indeed change. Or, if not tomorrow, at least by the time classes start.

Welcome to sophomore year. Counseling is to your left. The 20th story patio, on the right. Straight ahead, who the hell knows. Huzzah.