Claincy

Baloo is a pet dog. Almost constantly happy, "bare necessities of life will come to you", generally lovable if a bit very silly. Pet dog

One of my favourite MMOs is coming back 0_o. (Gaia online's "zOMG!", never liked the title much but the game was a lot of fun.)

Slightly delayed but on Saturday I ran another homebrewed RPG one-shot, this time set in the world of Firefall and built from the foundation of 5th edition D&D rules. It went well enough that the next one-shot is going to be the part of this one we didn't get to and I'm currently fleshing out the rules to a more complete state to potentially run a campaign with them in the future

That was entertaining to watch. Well done all, especially with the RP. Oh and congrats to the spiked on continuing the grand tradition

Congrats!

Just walk under a few low-hanging objects. Nothing makes you appreciate being short quite like wandering under a large air conditioner and hearing your tall friend walk straight into it

Ok, so D&D tonight was kind of crazy. The short: An old player came back to play as a different character pretending to be his old PC. The session ended with him shooting a keg of gun powder (with a pistol) that another player was holding in the tail end of an intense fight. The next session will begin with a bang Without going into too much detail the players were going back to a cave they'd gone through at the end of the first campaign to take care of some unfinished business (for gold!) and some new business. Last time they were here 2 of the PCs ended up in a no-holds barred fight (the players had discussed the possibility in advance) which thanks to wild magic got rather crazy and involved an accidentally summoned unicorn. One of those characters disappeared on the horn of said unicorn and has since reappeared as a villain. The other character (Kar) ended up walking off deeper into the cave and hasn't been seen or heard from again...until now. Kar was a bard with a fondness for the bagpipes. I talked to the player a little while back to set this up, he lived near where we were playing so I just gave him a headsup when his character would be entering in ~10mins and he came round and waited out front. The PCs were fighting an evil giant in the entrance area to the cave and I rolled initiative for his character secretly. When his turn came up I described a sound coming from further back in the cave as a figure steps into view, turned off the music, and turned on a youtube video of bagpipes. Then he knocked on the front door. The second (and final) fight of the session was centred around a "Spellforge" and the creatures guarding it, who had been bathing in it and were now considerably stronger than when the party first met them 3-4 levels ago. The fight itself got kinda crazy and pretty early on in it a couple of the PCs stumbled on Kar's dead body in a side room. They weren't entirely sure what to make of it as they've run across duplicates of PCs before (long story) so they continued with the fight. The guy decided to burn an invisibility spell on the body to stop the rest of the party from seeing it which worked fine until the party's fighter sprinted through that room and tripped over it In the end the PCs had just about won the fight, though all of them were on perliously low health and one of the enemy creatures was still standing. The guy saw his chance and lit the fuse on the keg of gunpowder he had and dropped it into the spellforge, (destroying it was always his task). He then yelled at everyone to get out of the room quickly and ran out himself. Most of the other players decided that was the best course of action and booked it. But one decided to try and save the spellforge and climbed in, managed to grab the keg and start hurrying towards the nearest door, where "Kar" happened to be standing. Seeing his mission about to fail the guy decided the one option he had left was to shoot the keg before the other PC got too far away from the spellforge (not knowing that it would blow at the end of his turn anyway), he rolled and hit. And that is where we ended the session. I think it's safe to say that the next session will start with a bang! (I apologise for the (presumably) rubbishy grammar in that, I have a lot of sleep to catch up on.)

I actually managed to do a full day's work today Also, yesterday (well, it's past midnight so take the day measurements with a grain of salt) I ran a skype session for the PBP mistborn adventure game crew I've been running for years and it went pretty well

Heh, maybe. I actually associate myself with it considerably more than I did as a kid with the ones I used then

Oops I don't make any secret of my real name at this point but my circumstances are a bit different.

Heh, my online and offline personas are deliberately very similar and at this point I identify pretty clearly with either name...and yeah, I was tired. On a couple of occasions in the past I've come very close to signing off important work emails with Claincy instead of Colin. You just get so used to using the other name.

So tonight while chatting with a friend after our D&D session (irl) I kind of unintentionally referred to myself in third person..as Claincy. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.

D&D tonight was good This session was the first opportunity I've had to use my dwarven forge street terrain. Also, our dog really likes playing with the hose and sitting in his shell on hot days. ^That is one happy chappy.

Nobody is perfect or has it all sorted out. If someone appears that way there's always more that you don't know. Society strongly encourages us to present our strengths and hide our weaknesses so you tend to know little about other people's struggles aside from those of close friends and family. A consequence of this is that it's very easy to compare your own struggles and weaknesses to what you know about others and feel like you come up short and to feel like they are doing far better than you are when in reality they are struggling just the same, only with different problems. I'll use myself as an example here because I know myself well and I wouldn't be willing to break anyone else's trust by saying this much about their struggles without their consent anyway. So I'm one of those people who did really well throughout school, getting excellent grades pretty much throughout. During high school I was a music captain, I sung and played the trumpet and I was lead trumpet in 2 bands and sung in 2 of the choirs. In addition I completed my Queen Scout award (roughly equivalent to Eagle Scout in America I believe). I was quite capable at presenting and public speaking and had spent time kayaking, skiing, rafting, travelling etc with Scouts. I gained a solid amount of leadership experience and successfully lead a (initially highly dysfunctional) team in the model solar car challenge for multiple years, coming 3rd in the State and competing in the national competition in one of those years. I was in the accelerated program my high school ran and I was in the upper region of students for that and took on more top level units and took some of them earlier than most. I topped my Software Development class and graduated with an excellent final score. Following that I got into the Computer Science degree that I wanted and quickly found that I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would and also found it far easier than most others. During my degree I topped more than one unit and got a weight score of 100 for one of the harder first year units. Just before my final semester I got a casual position at the University working on a project and since then I have had several more as I gained a reputation for being skilled and good to work with. I am now a year and a half out of University and using my casual work at Monash to support myself as I pursue a career as an independent games developer. (Ick, just writing that in that manner makes me feel like I'm just trying to show off :(, but it's necessary for the point I'm trying to make, so please bear with me.) If all you knew about me was that I would sound like I lead this perfect life and was just breezing my way through and that I was just this amazing person in general. None of that is accurate. Here comes the ugly part. From a very young age I became a very shy, socially awkward individual who struggled hard with social encounters and making new friends. I once hid under a table at a party because I couldn't handle it if that gives you an idea. I was bullied multiple times throughout my younger life, early high school was particularly bad in this regard and these instances left a serious impact on me. It took me years and the friendship and support of many important people to get to a point to where I could really open up to people or engage well socially. Even with my friends in high school I spent so many lunchtimes just sitting there not saying much. Truth be told I still have strong social anxiety and the idea of a party or large social event terrifies. That leads to me making excuses and skipping things that I oughtn't to. For some time from late high school into early university I was developing serious ego problems as well as a strong need for approval and respect. I still need to keep a careful eye on myself to make sure I don't slip back that way. Adding to that in later high school I started to get lazier, schoolwork was losing my interest and I was starting to care less. This only got worse when I started my university degree and found that most of what I was learning came very easily and required very little study or effort on my part. So at that point in time I was on a path of becoming progressively more arrogant and lazy. Then halfway through my first year of Uni I got sick, it lasted most of the semester but I pushed through it and continued on without too much change. Then halfway through the next year it hit me again and it hasn't left since, though the severity has varied over time (this was over 3 and a half years ago now). I made the (wise) decision to drop one of my units and reduce my load for the remainder of my time at Uni and I became inconsistent or dropped from most of my commitments. The main positive from all this and from other experiences was that it torn down my ego and need to be among the best in a fairly dramatic manner. In consequence leading to me becoming a better person and in the end improving my faith. On the flipside it drastically decreased my productivity by giving me an easy out of being "too sick" to do whatever. I continued my Uni studies and continued to do well in them but the rest of my life was a mess and I was fighting off depression as well. While I generally did a good job of capitalising on job opportunities I got there is no question that I got very lucky on multiple occasions and have a number of people to thank for recommending me for positions. So this brings me more or less to who I am now. I try really hard to always treat everyone as well as I can and I do well at my jobs. But I still have to struggle to motivate myself to work every day and I still face the constant pain of my illness every waking moment, still grapple with social anxiety and intermittent mild depression and I still have to keep a careful watch on my ego. So that was a whole lot about me that you probably didn't particularly want to know, I'm not proud of all of it and that far from covers everything but I tried to be as honest as possible. The point I hope I made with all this is that people can appear on the outside like they're doing well and it can make you feel like you're doing badly in comparison. But you're just not seeing how they are struggling too. The worst part of all this is that it makes it harder for people to reach out and help eachother and for people to ask for help when they need it. Every single person in the world is immeasurably important. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, their triumphs and their struggles. Life is messy, convoluted and beautiful. I..hope that was of some help. (On a related note, I could maybe do with a hug.)

I just ran a D&D session that ended up revolving almost exclusively around contests at a festival, and it went really well. The storytelling contest in particular is now one of the highlights of the campaign for me. Sitting back and occasionally narrating audience reaction while each of them told a story (as their character) was so good and they all did it well.

I tend to fidget a bit, I rarely hold a pen still if I'm not writing with it which naturally results in getting a lot of ink on my hand. Or I'd fiddle with an eraser or metal pencil sharpener. Most of that isn't terribly satisfying though, so partly for that reason I taught myself to roll a coin across my knuckles. It took a lot of practice but it's immensely satisfying, I keep a coin sitting on my desk specifically for doing that. (The other main reason I learned it was for when my Mistborn RPG players run into a coinshot )

I appreciate the sentiment, (and I like to think I gave as good as I got in the early games) but returning to SE just isn't on my radar at the moment.

Just popping in to say happy anniversary (And to wish the spiked good luck in continuing the tradition of killing everyone in anniversary games )

Hmmm, INFP this time. I know that's wrong though, close, but not right. A far better description would be a mixture of INFP and INTP. It's not that I'm fairly neutral on T/F it's more that I am generally strongly one way or the other but which way varies heavily between the different aspects of it. *shrug* In an extreme simplification I have that really strong need to create and imagine but I also have a very technical side to my thinking that makes programming and the like perfectly natural and immensely satisfying. I think for a job to really satisfy me it has to fill both of those sides. Fortunately, Indie games dev does exactly that!

Perhaps not my actual favourites, but for something a bit different how about "Everyone's a hero" from Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog. (Or "Slipping" depending which you think is more the villain's song :P)

*googles the books* hmm no, I don't think I ever read them. Though the way things have been going lately you may be surprised by how many people who aren't overtly nerdy would be willing to try D&D or other rpgs ifgiven a chance.

I try to be fairly consistent across different situations and mediums (aiming to be the best I can in each, not just "as I am" or whatever). In any case I'm certainly a little more refined online than in person, having lots of time to think about what you're saying makes it easier. Other than that I think I act more confidently online than I do in some irl situations (mostly parties and events) but no different to others. *Shrug* Oh, and less puns and silly jokes online They tend to work better in the moment.

It's from a limited series of gargantuan / colossal minis from the D&D miniatures games back from 2006/2007. They're all still possible to get, but not super easy (some are harder to get than others). There are generally some on sale through Amazon or Ebay but often they're either expensive or in poor condition. I got this one off Ebay for just under 170 AUD (including postage, inside Australia). I've been keeping an eye out for a little while as there are a couple of extremely powerful blue dragons in my campaign that will come up eventually....aaaand because of how cool it looks. There's also a white dragon, black dragon, enormous red dragon and an Orcus mini in the series but I think the blue is the coolest. If you search D&D gargantuan [colour] dragon you'll find them pretty easily (colossal instead of gargantuan for the red).

Got a little package today:

Thanks Took the dog for a walk and worked on a new game for a bit. Doesn't stop the pain but it definitely helps in dealing with it.