Friends

So Richelle has already posted her pictures from Tuesday’s event, including a picture of me and Caitlin Kittredge “milking something for all it was worth.” In retrospect, I cannot recall what precisely we were pretending to milk, but it sure as hell made for a goofy picture. Drat you, Jay — and your stealth photography tactics!

Anyway, since I had no stealth minion to assist me, my shots are perhaps less titillating. But here they are regardless.

Behold, Kat Richardson and Richelle Mead — relaxed and happy before the readings/signings:

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In response to comments on a recent gaming hut post, I promised to provide an example of a directed scene. For the original description of this technique, check out Fear Itself.

For the session described earlier, I wanted to focus two of the PCs, choosing a pair that hadn’t yet had any significant defining moments or scenes. I had a starting question for each, but that was the extent of my advance prep.

First up was Alex’s (nottheterritory) human warlord. My goal here was simply to flesh him out. I asked Alex to describe the moment where he first decided he was a warlord. In describing this moment, Alex added detail to the setting, as players are empowered to do in this particular 4E game. He placed his character, Heller, as an early teen at an elite school. Heller demanded the right to run the school war games, sure that his extensive book knowledge of tactics would win the day. I assigned Jesse (jscoble11) the role of the older, tougher student from whom he was demanding control, giving him the goal of pushing back against Heller’s wishes. To balance the scene, I gave Justin (thebitterguy) the role of Heller’s buddy, giving him the goal of keeping Heller out of trouble. The three players jumped into the scene, developing the conflict. As Alex argued Heller’s case, we got to see his character in his youth, and understand a bit about him. Jesse, playing the older boy, challenged Heller to a circle combat, which would decide who was in charge. Since this was a flashback illuminating a character’s backstory, I didn’t use the rules to resolve the one-sided fight: I told Alex that the result of the fight was up to him. He decided to follow the scene’s logic, and have Heller soundly trounced. This then, he explained, taught Heller the valuable lesson that he had to learn to back up his tactical knowledge with real fighting capability. So with a few minutes of dialogue and description, Heller went from being a playing piece to a fictional person, one we’d been through a pivotal moment with.

Next up was Jesse’s elven cleric. This directed scene I wanted to tie into the likely theme for coming session—hard choices. So I asked Jesse to describe the time when his character, Xerxes, faced his toughest choice. He decided that this would be the time when he decided to follow an outlander god. I asked Rob (chryx) to play a countervailing character, and Chris (madmanofprague) to take on the role of a supportive character. Rob chose to be Xerxes’ father; Chris, his sister. Chris wound up being able to hang back and lob a few lines into the scene. It played as a strong conflict between the calm and sensible father, and the firebrand son who wanted to follow his calling now. Xerxes was tired of meditating on things for decades before taking action. (Because it suited the improvised scene and heightened the contrast, Rob decided to treat the elves as very long lived. Although this setting detail was more from old school D&D than the current version, it is now true in our game. The dramatic needs of the moment so dictated.) Sometimes during a directed scene I’ll step in to advance the drama. Here, for example, Rob and Jesse had begun to repeat their arguments. So I asked Rob to escalate the stakes in some manner. He did this by saying, in his oh-so-subtle elven father way, that Xerxes would be unwelcome in his community if he ran off and pledged himself to the Raven Queen. So once again the flashback sequence made Xerxes more of a character to us.

Yesterday I finished something I’d been putting off for weeks: I finally Fed-Exed a vial of my own pee to a laboratory in Chicago. You’d think, since pee is something most folks make every damn day, that it wouldn’t be such a big deal to collect half a cup and chuck it into the Fed-Ex box … but you’d be mistaken. Or perhaps you would not be dealing with the excruciatingly picky laboratory with which I’m dealing.

To back up and give you a little context for this TMI — as you may recall, a month or two ago I landed in the ER with what turned out to be kidney stones. A few days later I saw a specialist who told me (in effect) that I was a freak of nature because women almost never got the kind of kidney stones I boast; and therefore he wanted me to send a full “24-hour collection sample” to a specialty laboratory, on the off chance that I have gremlins working my kidneys like dwarves in a diamond mine. Before he sent me on my way he handed me a pamphlet with a phone number to call in order to request a kit, and added, “There’s no real rush on this. Do it sort of like, whenever.”

Eventually the kit arrived (in a screamingly suspicious plain brown box, the kind you’d expect to contain a blow-up sheep doll). And for the last few weeks this box had been staring me down from a corner in the living room, until I finally got tired of looking at it sitting there, like some daft reminder of embarrassing things that I was putting off.

So a couple of days ago, while my husband was briefly out of town, I opened the box to see what was inside. Within this plain brown box I found fully eight pages of forms and demands which were augmented with sporty little diagrams explaining what appeared to be a full episode of Mr. Wizard’s World using things that ought to be flushed down the pipes rather than stashed in a big red jug.

I panicked. I failed chemistry in high school, and I had no faith whatsoever in my ability to combine preservatives and pee in the correct ratio in order to preserve a yellow puddle for four days. And God help me if I were to fail; any number of ridiculous little things could cause the laboratory to reject the “sample.” If I happened to be sick and didn’t know it, they’d bounce the sample and call it unsatisfactory. If I were on an unapproved medication — of which they provided only a partial list — then the sample could be refused. If the preservative mixture failed, or if the stars did not align, or if I didn’t light the correct incense and chant the right prayers to the gods of the golden rivers, then the whole thing would be a bust.

No pressure or anything.

The big brown box also included a handy-dandy white bib-shaped tray for “people who might find it difficult to urinate directly into the jug.” A pair of parentheses at the end of the sentence announced (women) as if I might otherwise assume that it’s typically dudes who have a hard time directing pee into a slot the size of a sippy cup.

I held the bib in one hand and the jug in the other, and stared down at my coffee table, where the directions were laid out in graphic, insulting, vaguely frightening detail. Repeatedly it warned that once I’d begun the test, I did not dare skip a dribble OR ELSE THEY WOULD TOTALLY KNOW, and that would be yet another reason for them to reject the sample. Even if I GET UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I must make a point to save every drop regardless of mental acuity or wee morning hour; and if I happen to be out on the town then I’d DAMNED WELL BETTER HAVE A STERILE ZIPLOCK BAGGIE OR SOMETHING HANDY, because any missed potty opportunity meant REJECTION.

Fantastic. Well, since Aric was out of town and I had the bathroom to myself, I figured there was no one to laugh at me except the cat. And my cat, like so many others, is one of those cats who assumes that she must monitor all bathroom activities at all times. She found this whole thing fascinating.

I found it somewhat less fascinating — though not, I must confess, as wholly impossible as I feared. I spent half an hour filling out the paperwork and making print copies of my insurance card, and then I used the magical bib tray. It made me feel like a toddler on a plastic trainer pot; and then, of course, I had to unscrew the jug lid and dump everything down inside. I obsessively followed all eight pages of directions; but rather than take sterile Ziplock baggies around town, I just stayed home for the full 24-hour stretch. I don’t have any innate objection to toting sterile Ziplock baggies — don’t get me wrong. I object instead to the thought of carrying a Ziplock baggie full of my own pee around in my purse. Call me crazy.

When my 24 hours were finally up and I’d stored all the pee I was going to make during that time span, I shook the jug to mix the preservatives [:: shudder ::] and used the contents to fill a smallish vial up to the indicated marker line.

The end result was surprisingly anticlimactic, like flat ginger ale that’s been left in a warm car.

I sealed the vial into a baggie with a huge BIOHAZARD symbol stamped across the front and stuck it down into the convenient Fed-Ex postage paid return box with all my paperwork and a fervent prayer that I would NOT be hearing from them again anytime soon. I did everything right, as closely and perfectly as I possibly could — and I’d very much like to consider this awkward event completed. Maybe I’ll learn something new and exciting, and maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll pass more kidney stones one day, and maybe I won’t.

But I know this much for certain: If they don’t accept my sample, I’ll be … well, I’ll be pissed.

View series to date here.

Go here to find out what your zombie apocalypse survival odds might be. Then, at the end of this peculiarly thoughtful quiz, click through to read the answers, with explanations.

Dr. Bizmoe says that my knowledge, strength, and will to survive are unstoppable. It would take a nuclear holocaust to remove me from the face of the earth. The zombies don’t stand a chance.

That’s a bit of a surprise, really. The first few questions are easy and obvious, but they become progressively more nuanced and complex as the quiz unfolds, and I found myself guessing, second-guessing, and overthinking quite a few of them. But my score was ultimately inflated because I have a solid handle on basic first aid and disaster readiness, as well as an intellectual knowledge of guns.*

And … erm … well, you know.
I watch a lot of zombie movies.

Anyway, that was an honestly entertaining quiz — which is not something you’ll hear me say every day. Good stuff.

I dug the first of the Christopher Nolan bat-flicks, but with reservations. First off, you had the usual structural clunkiness inherent in a superhero origin story: the writer is telling two stories, the origin and the battle with the antagonist. Even when there’s an attempt to weave the two together, they never quite integrate. This is because the origin part is laying pipe that doesn’t pay off in the movie at hand, but in a later installment.

More specifically, there was the overuse of callback catchphrases. You get one big showy dialogue callback per movie, people. Also, I felt the characters spent two much time discussing the theme of the movie with one another. Theme should be expressed through what happens, not through what the characters say to one another. Over-explainy dialogue is a curse of the revitalized studio system, countless execs are required to prove their indispensability to the process by bombarding the filmmakers with notes. So now stuff gets hammered home in the dialogue to make character arcs obvious to the note-issuers.

The Dark Knight I enjoyed without reservations. (In large part for the reasons everyone else loved it, from Ledger’s performance on down.) Parallels and mirrors exist throughout the script, but this time the film sticks to its quota of one dialogue callback. And it’s tossed off as a character moment between Bruce Wayne and Alfred. With the origin story out of the way, the story simply starts and then doesn’t let up.

For most of its length, I was also happy to see that the character’s weren’t talking the theme at each other. Then they started. And it works this time. Here the theme is an overt engine of the plot, one the characters are aware of.

( Last paragraph mildly spoilery. )