Tentacled Monkey

The dark God is spreading his younglings throughout the world! End times are near!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081124-giant-squid-magnapinna.html

Yesterday was my 30th birthday and my wife surprised me with a Sony PRS-505 E-Reader! This is just an amazingly awesome piece of hardware with a screen that just has to be seen to really be appreciated. This has already allowed me to merge my two great fetishes in life, tech and reading.

This thing is really well done, button presses are firm and the housing is of a very durable plastic. The dimensions 6.9" x 4.8" x 0.3" make it perfect for prolonged use and the weight of the reader, 9oz., gives you the feeling that this is not a flimsy piece of junk.

The e-ink display only uses power when a page is redrawn so the battery life is quite impressive at 7,500 page turns. It uses no power whatsoever to keep an image on the screen. Speaking of the screen, this puppy is absolutely gorgeous. The clarity and crispness of the text can only be compared to that of a freshly printed high quality laser printer. And the viewing angle is somewhere close to 180 degrees! Unlike other screens this thing looks the best in direct sunlight, really I swear!

I lost a whole lot of books in the storm surge from Hurricane Ike and this is the perfect replacement for them! My only reservation is not getting one sooner!

So I've been thinking for a number of years of running a game in which the players themselves are at first taking place in a normal game. Then after a bit things start to contradict themselves, causing them to question reality in general.

I got the idea while running a game of VtM a number of years ago with my good friend Terry. The game was one of those one-on-one sessions initiated because everyone else folded on us. About 2 hours in I realized that it was fucking boring, I mean bad, and I had to do something to save the game or we were both going to quit.

So I started contradicting some of the actions that his character was doing from the prior night. The more and more contacts he revisited from the night before the more and more certain he was that something really screwy was going on. His character later realizes that another vampire has Dominated him by creating some false memories to replace the Dominated acts that he actually performed the prior night.

Terry's character now has to deal with the fallout of his illegal actions and try and patch up the relationships that he ruined earlier. Not to mention that he needed to find out what he really did on that lost night.

Now that game is remembered by both Terry and I as being the best damn game we had ever played.

More Ideas

Not only had I rethought how to do a typical Dominate into something far more sinister for the characters. We also played around with some different styles of problem resolution. The problem really began because we were chain-smoking and hated having to get up every five minutes to go outside and smoke leaving the dice and sheets inside.

So I said screw it this is supposed to be fun and we were really into the characters, so why not try paper-rock-scissors. Now this was by no means revolutionary, but it made the game fun! And that's why we play after all right?

The New Game

OK, so now you know where I am coming from with this idea. Now I want to do this on a grander scale with more players. The only particular game system I have access to, since I lost them all in the hurricane, is Call of Cthulhu and Dark Heresy. Both of them would lend themselves well to a mass hallucination/mind control affect.

Call of Cthulhu Options

This wouldn't be that bad at all to do now that I think about it. There are a number of ways I could pull it off:

1. group mind control spell
2. vast conspiracy
3. characters transported to an alternate reality
4. characters transported to the Dreamlands

I think that the first option would be the most likely and simplest to pull off.

Dark Heresy Options

OK only one thing really comes to mind here, psykers. I am really digging this system and scenario, so this is likely to be the option I would choose regardless.

eyes hurting ...

TBC...

Sweeet little baby it is! A 100 count Toscani humidor with Spanish cedar inside and a tray, brass hinges and inset handles... 

yeah it's nice...  :)

Google released a set of custom themes for GMail today. In typical Google fashion the are being rolled out in stages, so if you can't see them yet, well just wait.

Personally, I happy about the themes and they couldn't have come at a better time for me, I was getting tired of the default GMail crap theme.

You can make the change by going to the Themes tab under Settings. I'm using Shiny for now, but I might go old school with the ASCII theme soon, I don't know.