The Thessaliad Redux

It would appear that two hospitals are fighting over me at the moment. Well, sort of, anyway. See, Lindsey at my primary agency has really been going to bat for me after the incident at my last place because she wants to guarantee me a job next week. I like her. Anyway, even though I have an interview today, she kept showing my CV to people. And a bunch at the Charing Cross Hospital oncology unit went "Ooh! Ooh! We want that one! Any chance we could get that one?" So she asked me if I'd consider Charing Cross as a fallback - it doesn't pay as much as the Brompton, but it's a guaranteed 11-month contract and it's good to have a fallback anyway, so I said yes.

Of course, despite the good news, I didn't sleep worth a damn last night, so I think the order of events today will be "get dressed, go to interview, have interview, come home, change into comfortable clothing, have nap". After all, stuff to do this evening. Whee!

Speaking of stuff to do, I've applied to another RP board. Turns out that there exists a London board (which means that I either need to reconsider what's going on with CoC or keep my concept so very, very different from this other one), and some of the bunch from CbN have moved there. Fine, it seems to involve getting into a cabal with Thestral and Corey, with whom I have occasionally had some serious problems (the former in particular), but courtcat is involved and I do like her as an RPer. (Yes, my character on CbN hated hers. These things happen. I thought Lizzie Robinson was interesting, if annoying, and liked how courtcat had the guts to take in-character consequences for unpopular and utterly bitchtastic in-character action ... and boy, was it in character...) Anyway, I've put in an app for a particularly musical Cultist of Ecstasy and am in discussion with Thestral about how she'd have got involved with their cabal. If we can't work something out, then I'll go it alone with the same character, I suppose. Cultists make friends easily, right? Particularly when their Charisma's at 3?

One thing that did freak me out, though, was checking out the Mage NPC list and seeing corone, picture and all, as one of the NPCs. Oh my gods, talk about your Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Of course, these are Brits running this board and the gaming scene in London in particular is fairly small and incestuous, particularly if you go to Dragonmeet, at which corone is a reasonably static fixture. Still, not something I was exactly prepared for. Still, if he's beginning to make a career for himself in writing RPGs in-game as well as in real life ... well, the only RPG company they ever mention in any of the WoD books I've read to date is 'Black Dog' ... a Pentex subsidiary. Not that I'm ascribing any deep meaning to this fact, mind you - I'm merely giggling at the idea of corone as a Fomor. Not going to happen, obviously (wrong system, and I don't think crossover is exactly encouraged on this board either) but still funny. Like imagining dodgyhoodoo or cholten99 or weaselbitch as a Fomor.

I suppose this is me just jonesing for some RP. Yes, it's nice we have the Doom back, and it'll be a couple of more sessions before we are adequately equipped to finish Restart in the manner it deserves - I mean, seriously, I've been doing this for, what, two and a half years now? I can't end this game on a note that's anything less than epic. And then, of course, I've got a few ideas as to what to do next - I do not exactly have GM fiat, but of the three of us, I am the one with the most ideas with the most potential for long-term gaming ... and, more to the point, the confidence to do something more with them than sit there and look at them until they die of embarrassment. New Mage is an option, but I need to do some more reading before I throw that one at anybody. Still, I have the time, what with Restart not finishing up right this second. Anyway, the point of this little ramble is that I would like, if at all possible, to actually just sit down and play a long-term game for once. It's been far, far, far too long.

I do miss the group sometimes - well, pretty much, anyway. I miss being able to play every once in awhile - and I mean something long-term, something where I get the chance to get attached to a character and play them properly. My current position in regards to that sucks; I know weaselbitch wants to run something this year, and I know dodgyhoodoo has a few ideas of things to do, but neither of them seem to do long-term. So I seek long-term character development RP elsewhere and stick to running, enjoying the one-offs or short-run games when they come my way in meatspace. It's a thing to do. Just so fed up with running the kind of long-running campaign I'd actually like to play.

I'll cease my bitching. Have to, actually - job interview.

Quiz-thing ganked from beepbeep. I don't do these things very often, but this one spoke to me.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Well ... yeah.

Speaking of Beep (well, the other Beep), we have Mage today. Which is why I'm awake before sundown. Yay. Well, that and the cat's been on crack so the house has been full of dodgyhoodoo's bellows of "YUKI NO!" for the past hour or so. Makes a good alarm clock.

( I sympathise with [GM]Dave so much more now... )

In other news, it looks like my mother is taking me on a spa day next week. That should be nice; pampering would be a good thing. This weekend, though, it's just going to be watching The Secretary, eating whatever I can stomach (probably not much, but hey) and the whole FFXI thing. RP tends to be slow over the weekends - okay, RP tends to be slow all the time, but nonexistent on weekends when the guy I generally RP with isn't playing from work.

Oh, and of course, not Sunday! Sunday's when we go back to Restart for awhile. Endgame cometh and that right early! Then I can run something else. Yay!

[Edit: Oh, and boss says my sick leave certificate arrived today. Which means, huzzah, no more worrying about whether or not my pay's going to be suspended. So Monday is still payday. Oh, and note to self? Respond to mother's e-mail about the spa day thing saying that lunch sounds fine if it's late but shopping might be tiring for me, given.]

Well, yesterday involved a long chat with a guy off the CbN forums (WhitBloke, for those of you who know; he plays Sir Garvey of Orange-Text). It started off with him telling me why there's no House Thig in Mage Revised (I still don't get it, but at least I have the canon to work from), and ended up with a long and incredibly fun gab session in which we whinged about A-levels and traded horrific theatre stories. See, this guy's from Stevenage, which is two stops down the train line from where I took my A-levels, and it turns out that when he goes music shopping, he goes up to my old home town to browse the second-hand music shop that was my regular haunt between 1993-1996. And we both took theatre studies A-levels and did the drama thing at uni. Stevenage not being far from London at all, I have now decreed that I have to meet this guy. Remind me to nudge the man down to London for a drink or something someday.

I also have to stop staying up until about 2 am, but the conversations are worth it.

As far as MMORPGs go, I've decided on Final Fantasy. While I have friends who are into WoW, I decided to go for familiar territory and fewer bloody races. (Watch me wind up playing a TaruTaru.) I think they're selling the current package for £15 at GAME, so that at least saves me the trek on Amazon. It's still going to have to wait until next month because I'm pretty much skint at the minute. Bloody PSP. I'll admit I'm enjoying the ability to play games on the tube ride to work in the mornings, and never underestimate the therapeutic power of blowing the everliving fuck out of little pixellated worms, but I still blew way too much cash on that thing this month. Oh well.

I still have to sit down and do a proper Mage writeup at some point; I'm weeks behind. For column-writing purposes, though, this last one goes about as follows:

( Still in Horizon... )

Right. Now I need to start up a Council session thread, kick the assistant ST who actually thinks that my Hollow City character's deed name really is "Dances-Skyclad-for-Singles" and possibly, if there is any, do some work.

So Mage rocked. As usual.

( Storming Horizon )

Since we don't have Changeling next week, we're having an extra session of Mage instead. Which should be fun, since they're going to storm Horizon with an army and all...

Just talked to dodgyhoodoo to see if he remembered nadriel telling us about his missing this week's session when he was at that session last month. Actually, dodgyhoodoo was very, very sure that nadriel had said no such thing. I hadn't thought so either, because I'm usually pretty good at remembering these things. But neither dodgyhoodoo nor weaselbitch remember him saying that he wouldn't be there. He may think he mentioned it, but he really didn't so far as anyone can tell. I'm less pissed off than I was, but still...

Anyway. It's done now. We'll manage with two this session, as we have many sessions before. And we'll have a chat about the future of Mage over lunch tomorrow, too; we're shedding players like Yuki sheds fur and with the plot the way it is ... well, we'll see. No decisions will be taken without discussion including the two I can most rely on to show up and warn of possible complications.

Why does it have to get so ridiculous?

I think nadriel is going to be missing this week's Mage session. I have that feeling. I can hope I'm wrong, but given he has another LARP booked...

I understood last session. He didn't know Mage was still going. However, he did know about this session coming. He didn't tell me he'd be missing this one. But he seems to be booked. And I haven't had a reply to my text yet; the one where I ask him about whether he's coming. This bodes ill.

You realise, don't you, that Mage nearly torpedoed because of a lack of players who would, at the very least, give me warning that they weren't going to make it? You know, enough warning so that I wasn't making internal plotmap for characters who aren't going to be there, then have to start the whole thing up with maybe two days' warning? Or none at all? Is a little bit of warning too much to ask?

Screw 'em. To the rafters. If I can't get anyone but dodgyhoodoo and weaselbitch to turn up reliably, I'll just run with dodgyhoodoo and weaselbitch. But that all depends on what, if any, response I get from nadriel after this little rant.

It's times like this I miss Kuo-Li, though; nothing like a mage with Correspondence 3 for being easy to write out in a pinch.

Oh, and new icons. Shiny.

Things we are expecting from Amazon soon:

1) Firefly OST
2) Serenity OST
3) Carnivale OST
4) Movies in Fifteen Minutes, by the ever-talented cleolinda. Samples can be found on m15m

And I say *squee*!

Still not king. This is getting irritating. Though Windy/"Dodges Traffic" (OTP) just keeps getting funnier.

Also, I might have found a way to save Mage. Note I said "might". It will involve going back to the three-player setup, but it worked out well enough that way, I guess. But nothing firm, so ... yeah.

There's something I'm not understanding. Gross incompetence in the workplace, particularly where it affects people's safety, generally results in a grand old sacking. So why the hell is it that, when over 1000 foreign prisoners were being released from prison and not deported when they were supposed to be (and, in 16% of cases, were recommended for deportation on release), Clarke's not quitting because Blair told him not to? Good morning, Mr Blair! This is your alarm call! Gross negligence and incompetence calls for a sacking! 20% of those released and not deported were released into society after Clarke was aware of the problem, so he let all those people out on the street when they should have been deported by the government's own rules why? BECAUSE HE IS SCREWING UP. I understand that Blair needs loyal people by him right now, as he's basically hanging on to the last tattered vestiges of his credibility at the moment, but this? Not helping.

Oh, yeah, and his NHS 'reforms'. 'Deforms', more like. I remember a few years ago how I wanted to retrain to be a nurse. Any idea how glad I am I didn't do so now? Seriously; a few years ago, it was all, "We need more nurses. Desperately need more nurses. Let's give them free training and throw money at them because frankly, the Service doesn't run without them. At all." Now it's redundancies a-go-go and hiring freezes, so all these lovely, highly-trained people are now stuck stacking shelves at Tesco. What happened to, "The Service cannot run without the nurses"? News flash, people: it still can't run without the nurses. The only people more indispensible in hospitals are the admin staff, and it's a very narrow margin. The doctors? They barge in once in awhile, prod at people, make diagnoses and occasionally actual administer treatment. Then they go away. Nurses are there all the time. They monitor the patient, ensure their daily needs are met and administer a lot of basic treatment. More to the point, because they're there all the time, patients talk to them more readily than they will a doctor about the little things, and that information is indispensible to a doctor later on when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.

Stupid fucking short-sighted middle management arseholes who don't understand that cuts cannot be made in the perceived "lower rungs" of the NHS because frankly, they're the only people who know what the fuck they're doing! Cut nurses, and you lose a valuable source of information and patient treatment options. Cut admin, and the entire place falls apart in a flurry of missed appointments, unpaid invoices and patient complaint forms. Here's another wake-up call for Tony Blair. If you want to save the NHS some money, and thus save the NHS? Cut the middle management! Or at least make sure it works properly! Let's have fewer of these white-collar arseholes who do little more than run around doing disruptive inspections of staff practice and then setting all kinds of targets that no one can meet because the money they need to meet the targets is being sucked up by this white-collar arsehole's salary. Let's have Health and Safety departments that, rather than flagging up piddling health problems in the staff and hand out bitty pamphlets about how to deal with them in the workplace, ensures that the working environment is safe for everyone. No sitting temps or newbies at ergonomic nightmare desks next to photocopiers, no making secretaries do their typing shtick in darkened rooms for more than an hour at a stretch just because the department got caught off-guard by the long-planned building works in the admin office, no persecuting staff for having previously suffered psychiatric problems. And please, please let's have Human Resources departments who provide for their staff rather than ignoring them until they feel the need to persecute, demote or outright sack them. Honestly, with everything I've seen in the last five years or so, I am not in the least surprised that the NHS is tanking, and I could probably solve the problem a lot better than these government bods. Of course, that's assuming that Blair's not running the NHS into the ground so that private becomes not only the better option but the only option.

Did I mention I want to live in a sane country again?

Sims 2 Family Fun Stuff apparently counts as a game expansion in its own right, rather than just a bunch of installable package files like the Holiday one did. Which means I apparently play it off the Family Fun Stuff disc rather than the OFB one. Okaaaaaaaaay...

So I installed it not knowing it counted as a game expansion (which means I removed / backed up squat bloody all, though it doesn't seem to have hurt my downloads thus far), and then tried to load it. Not responding. Tried a second time and that worked but, since it was an EP in its own right, which means that it defaulted to "disable custom content", which I changed but then had to restart to put those changes into effect. After yet again unsuccessfully loading, I got it to work, then started playing it. I designed a test family (to see what clothes were available with my new pack) and then decorated their house, the kids' rooms with the semi-nifty stuff that I got with the new pack. And then the house was done and all I had to do was put on roof and outside wall cover and see how my Sims liked it.

And then the game crashed. Before I saved or anything. Argh. I really need new memory for that fucking mobo.

So now I need to get dressed and go to lunch and then torture my Mage players. Need to have a private word with lokean at some point before we begin. Beyond that, though, eeeeeeeevil! And that's exempting the fact that the Oliphaunt is doing a St George's Day party and it will be fancy dress and karaoke from 2 pm.

Oh, yeah. Happy St George's Day, all.

Ooh! Ooh! And they're now releasing something called "The Silent Hill Collection", which to me means Silent Hill games collected and maybe even special features. Please for the PC. Please for the PC. Please for the PC.

Something I've been working on recently: additions to the Skank Fetish Lexicon.

‘Mum’, n: Refers to Lucille McBride, most decidedly NOT his mother but his Head of House.
‘Explodo’, v: To blow something up, generally using Forces (see “foom”). n: a specific act of detonation
‘Palpatine’, v: to throw Prime-Forces bolts from the fingertips, as Emperor Palpatine (ref: Star Wars)
‘Head-meat’, n: brain matter.
‘The Creature’, n: Rodney Delevan, a former cabalmate.
‘Technocrack’, n: Technocracy in general
‘Agent Smith’, n: Technocracy agents, generally Progenitors or Iteration X (also ref: Black Hats and Mirrorshades, general Mage lexicon)
‘Emily’s Pants-Wetting Driving Mojo’, n: Adept level Correspondence effect; transporting numerous people across vast distances with dangerous driving as a focus
‘Moo Hoo Ha Ha’, n: Evil. Alternatively, a noise indicating that he is about to commit some act of chaos through physical or magical (ref: ‘dodgy hoodoo’) means.
‘dead-guy hoodoo’, n: Thaumaturgy
‘Steamboy’: male steampunk type. Specifically referred to Professor Smith. (also ref: ‘Professor von Steam’)