I've got the sound, but do I have the fury?

I feel like there are about a hundred different things I'd like to talk about, and no way that I'm going to fit them all in. So let me mention a few things in passing with the (probably in vain) idea of addressing at least some of them in more detail in a later post (it could actually happen).

I finished off Sky Girls last week. I found it to be a solid, enjoyable mecha series. While nothing about it really grabbed me, made me want to run out, wrestle people to the ground, and shout "WATCH THIS" at them, I still have no problem encouraging people to give it a try. "Refreshingly straightforward" probably sums up my thoughts on Sky Girls more than anything else. There are no genre altering plot twists, no surprise villains, no secret organizations pulling the strings - just enjoyable mecha action. The fact these mecha were piloted by cute girls instead of angst-filed boys probably didn't hurt my opinion of it either.

I'm through the first story arc of Spice and Wolf. This series certainly started off slowly, but as the first arc progressed things did pick up nicely. Craft and Horo are very interesting characters in their own right, and watching their relationship develop has been quite enjoyable. My impression of Craft is he's a skilled merchant who is just a touch too cautious for his own good, but his dealings with Horo seem to be putting just the right amount of daring in him. As for Horo, she is a wonderful character. For a wolf spirit/harvest deity she is surprisingly human - very wise yes but also very fallible, confident and powerful but also emotionally vulnerable and even painfully lonely.

This is not your typical fantasy story, as stated Craft is not some stock fantasy archetype like a warrior, but rather a simple merchant; his big dream is to amass enough money to buy a shop in a city so he can settle down and stop being a traveling peddler. Outside of Horo's existence magic has been nowhere to be found, and even with Horo the flashiest bit of magic we've seen is her transformation into her wolf form - and that has only happened twice or perhaps more accurately once and a half since the first time we only got to see Craft's reaction to the transformation (it scared him witless). The main story arc revolves around economics with nobles, kingdoms, and rival merchant houses plotting and scheming to make money off a pending alteration to the purity of one kingdom's silver coins. For an anime the depiction of the economics gets pretty in depth maybe not quite "Moby-Dick's descriptions of 19th Century whaling" level in depth, but still I feel at times like I should be taking notes.

Oh what else: I've started in on Oh! Edo Rocket and it is ridiculously fun. When I try and think of a way to describe it I keep coming back to the fact it reminds me of Excel Saga, but only coherent with an actual plot. I'm not entirely happy with that comparison as I am at best ambivalent towards Excel Saga, while I am loving Oh! Edo Rocket. I would have to say that in every way that being silly is a good thing - Oh! Edo Rocket is just as silly as Excel Saga, and in every way that I found being silly a detriment to Excel Saga - Oh! Edo Rocket is actually logical and serious. The setting is Edo in 1842 (as the anime is quick to tell you Edo in 1842 was in the midst of numerous onerous restrictions on things deemed frivolous - like say fireworks), and the basic premise is a woman asks a fireworks maker to make some fireworks capable of reaching the moon for her. Anyone familiar with the anime will understand the magnitude of the understatement I’m about to engage in - there is more going on in this anime than I’ve just mentioned. I doubt I could do it justice were I to try and describe everything going on there, I think this is clearly a case of experiencing it for oneself as being the best policy.

I’m still watching Rosario+Vampire, I’m not sure I could even explain why. I know I haven’t made it through an episode yet where I haven’t thought, “now that is an excessive amount of fan service.” For some reason it actually makes me think of History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi. There are some similarities: Kenichi is the last anime I watched to feature a truly noteworthy amount of fan service (although nowhere near the level of Rosario+Vampire), many of the defeated foes in both go on to become staunch allies of the main characters, the female leads in both could kick the male leads’ collective asses, and while I wouldn’t really call Kenichi a harem anime the main character does pick up more than one female admirer over the course of the series. Where Kenichi differs from Rosario+Vampire (and most harem anime/manga I’m familiar with) is Kenichi (the character) actual grows and becomes more competent and mature (and since it is a martial arts comedy I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention stronger and more skilled). I doubt Tsukune is going to be much different at the end of Rosario+Vampire from how he was at the beginning.

Clannad and Shion no Ou both continue to be among my favorite anime I’m watching. I’ve been periodically pestering Dan to start watching Shion no Ou so I’d have somebody to talk about it with. Dan if you are reading this be warned I’m going to add Oh! Edo Rocket, and Spice and Wolf to the list of things I periodically pester you to start watching. I continue to make my way through Pretty Cure Max Heart, and I have only a few episodes left of Lucky Star. Sadly I haven’t gotten back to Dennou Coil yet. On that front I think it is actually an attempt by me to be responsible. I have a strong feeling that once I start watching it again I won’t stop until I’ve finished it, and because I’m only through 14 of the 26 episodes I’ve been hesitant to start watching it again since I haven’t had a window were I could comfortably devote the nearly five hours it will take to finish the series off.

I could continue on about anime for awhile yet, but time for a new topic instead. Despite what it must look like given the above paragraphs, my assessment last month that I’m making a transition away from WoW towards anime may have been premature. I’m starting to get the hang of being a level 70 character with Chipple. I’ve got my flying mount (sorry still no pictures), and I’m making slow, but measurable progress towards better gear. Assuming I keep up with the necessary farming of elemental motes, I should be making myself some Frozen Shadoweave Shoulders this weekend. I still need to get Chipple into some level 70 instances, and get her keyed for Karazhan (although given my current work schedule I just don’t see myself becoming a regular raider), but the tasks before me seem slightly less daunting.

I’ve also been spending some time working on a Tauren druid named Berenek on the server Zuluhed, because that is where my friend Erik plays (I’m sure I’m not spending nearly enough time there in Erik’s estimation). Speaking of Erik, I continue to wait patiently for move number three in our latest e-mail chess match.

Matt’s BESM campaign continues to go well. He’s seems quite happy to sit back and see where we (the players) take it, and speaking for myself I’m quite happy to see where we can get it to go. In my last post I mentioned that my character Cynthia had managed to retrieve a surprising amount of data from the memory banks/brain of our apparent main foe. It turns out this info is more memories and personality and less raw data, so Cynthia threw together a small robot to attach this personality to so we’d have something to interact with while obtaining what we’d like to know. Matt has portrayed the partial copy of our foe’s memories as being a bit morose, and more than a little bitter over the loss of its magical abilities. Its complaints on the latter topic lead Cynthia to retort something to the effect of (and I mention this mainly because Matt found it amusing), “I just grabbed the information we needed, it’s not my fault you don’t keep your magic in your brain.”

My character Kell continues to survive Ellery’s Eberron campaign, although after our last session, mostly by the grace of some amazing dice rolling. D&D has long had the idea of the “natural 20," meaning you roll a 20 on a 20 sided die, as being the best thing to hope for during combat. This has been true regardless of the version of D&D you happen to be playing (and outside of a few skill systems in the pre 3.x /d20 era rolling high on a d20 in any situation has generally been a good thing). I picked a very opportune time to get one during our recent combat with a mind flayer (technically a vampiric mind flayer but whose keeping score). Had I not rolled that 20 on my grapple check, my character was about 99% likely to have his brain eaten (just a little something mind flayers like to do). Near character death experiences notwithstanding I continue to have fun with Kell.

With that I think I've touched on most things I’ve been kicking around. So it is now time for me to go knock out a few dailies and farm some motes of water.

Once More unto the Breach

To say I've thought of nothing else but singing monkeys since Saturday would be hyperbole, but it has been in the back of my mind. Yesterday I heard the radio advertisement for a second time. I listened to it with palpable anticipation. My original recollection was slightly inaccurate, the commercial ended, ". . . order your flowers by the 10th, and receive a free CD of romantic piano music, and a chance to win a singing monkey."

At least I think that is what it said, it's not like I had any trouble understanding anything else this lady on the radio was saying, but I just cannot completely wrap my mind around the idea of winning a singing monkey. Some part of me just refuses to believe that is what she said, despite having twice heard her say it. That said, I find myself a little sad I don't currently have a significant other, because I think I'd like to present her with a singing monkey (whatever that is) on Valentine's Day. I fully realize such an act would likely result in my hypothetical lover becoming my hypothetical ex-lover, but damn would the bar story be worth it.

In addition to pondering silly advertisements, I devoted most of my free time this last weekend to role playing. On Saturday Matt ran his BESM campaign. Cynthia very nearly went down the dark path of torturing a prisoner, thankfully Paul's Jedi stopped her. That aside, Cynthia did have a few moments I was pretty proud of: hacking a 24th century military grade computer system on an abandoned moon base was rather awesome, as was the invention of a shrink ray to facilitate the transportation back to their home world of the numerous D&D monsters we kept finding in stasis as we explored the interdimensional portal network our enemies seem to be using.

Like most most role players I love those rare instances where I roll the best possible result on my dice, just when I need to do so the most. Cynthia had one of those joyous occasions on Saturday. Our aforementioned prisoner was more mechanical than biological so Cynthia designed a machine to forcibly download the information stored in his memory. As it was being hooked up, he countered by activating his hitherto unknown self-destruct and total memory wipe ability. I held little hope that Cynthia would be able to use/modify on the fly her invention fast enough to get any information from him. I rolled a twelve (as good as it gets on 2d6) on the electronics test, after applying Cynthia's insanely high mind score and excellent electronics skill the test result added up to 24 (even after the penalty Matt applied to the roll) which is the target number BESM assigns for improbable tasks (BESM's highest difficulty class) . All of this means we got the information we were looking for, and while Cynthia may be a 14 year old girl she is clearly technology's daddy.

Sunday saw the resumption after a nearly year long hiatus of Ellery's Eberron campaign. I'm still trying to remember exactly what character goals I had for my changeling Kell. Still it was a fun session, although it served to really reinforce my preference for point based role playing systems. After two years of BESM (plus some random GURPS and Hero action) I find the game mechanics of character creation and advancement in d20 (and really any level based system) to be incredibly restrictive. Sorting through the seemingly endless number of D&D's core and prestige classes for that magic combination that will approximate the admittedly nebulous character concept I have has been an exercise in extreme frustration. My advice for anyone playing D&D (or any other class based system) is look over the classes, and find one that makes you go, "ooooo," and build your character concept around that. Don't create a character concept, and then try and find a class that fits it.

New month, new post

I don’t imagine it will surprise anyone to learn that I found BloodRayne to be a truly awful movie. It was painfully bad. While I cannot say I’ll never watch another Uwe Boll film, it is going to be a very long time before I do, and even then I’ll have to be in a really odd mood before I’d willingly submit to that particular activity.

The last two weeks have been pretty good. No one event really defines just what was so good about them, but all in all I’ve had a good two weeks. I’ve slowed down a little in my anime watching. I did watch another seven episodes of Hunter × Hunter. The series continues to be really entertaining, but with so much of it left I still don’t have too much more to say about it. I also watched another four episodes of The Twelve Kingdoms. The current story arc was rapped up resulting in Yōko taking her thrown as the Queen of Kei, and Sugimoto being returned home to Japan. I’ve also been keeping current more or less with Bleach (through episode 113) and Busou Renkin (through episode 17).

I’ve done a fair amount of role-playing during the last two weeks. I’ve joined a D&D Eberron campaign being played entirely over the Internet. For those who care about such things I’m playing a changeling named Kell (he’s currently a 2nd level character Rogue 1/Fighter 1). It has been really nice being a player again (I only rarely get to be one). Playing over the Internet is interesting. For our first session we used Skype to provide a voice chat client. It worked alright, but we had periodic problems with voice quality, and we needed to restart our conference call several times over the course of the evening. For our second session we tried out Ventrilo. Ventrilo wasn’t as user friendly to set up as Skype, but we had far fewer problems with voice quality. We’ve also tried two different mapping programs. For our first session we used Gametable; a very solid program that I have no problem recommending to people for use in remote gaming. For our second session we tried out MapTool. Using MapTool isn’t anywhere as intuitive as Gametable, but it has a lot more features. I don’t really have any problem recommending MapTool for use in remote gaming either (just read the manual).

Also I got to run my BESM campaign this weekend. As an added treat Dan joined us in person for this session instead of remotely (usually via iChat) as he usually does. Once again we started the evening off with some Wii action (Excite Truck, and Rayman Raving Rabbids mainly). I continue to find this BESM campaign to be highly satisfactory. What started out as a short little 2 maybe 3 month campaign where the players were supposed to track down four pieces of a magic item, and then use that to defeat the bad guy has taken on a life of its own. The characters have developed in interesting ways, and a number of very entertaining side stories have developed. The next session should be on 2/24.



In related BESM news I got both my PDF, and dead-tree version of BESM 3rd Edition during the last two weeks. It looks really good. I haven’t had a chance to really tear into it yet, but from what I have looked at I’m pretty happy. It is definitely changed from the 2nd edition. The basic resolution mechanic has changed from rolling a stat score or less on 2d6, to rolling a target number or higher on 2d6 (in both cases often modified by skills). The cost of everything has been rebalanced, and characters are now built on a lot more character points. For example under BESM 2nd Edition 25-45 points was a pretty common range for starting characters (and those characters would be pretty powerful), under 3rd Edition basic normal humans are built on 100 character points (I imagine I’ll likely be starting characters in the 250 – 350 point range).

As a little side note one of my players in the BESM campaign (and also a fellow gamer in the Eberron campaign) has started a blog.

I leave you with another picture that amuses me. This particular screen capture comes from The Twelve Kingdoms. I laughed really hard when I watched this scene, and I laughed even harder when I made this screen capture. Yes Rakushun is naked in this picture, but nothing sexual is going on. I swear to you, The Twelve Kingdoms isn't hentai.