Djinn

( Art! Bikini-clad pinup type thing. )

This is a marker-piece I started ... a long time ago. Eighteen months? I worked on it sporadically for a really long time, and eventually pronounced it done in October. "Done" here meaning "It's never getting any better and I'm sick of working on it". I tried to give the original to terrycloth as a birthday present, but failed. I will probably try again. Bringing a frame next time, so that I won't store it in my sketchbook for safekeeping after showing it to him and then taking it home with me by accident. Well, unframed artwork just gets destroyed anyway.

Resolution Update: Now in Quarterly version!

This is the update for September, October, and November. I started it back in September, didn't have it finished when October rolled around, so I started adding October, and then didn't have it done when November hit, and ... yeah. Better late than never?

Write:
September:

Wrote 8 LJ entries
Played in:
Bard's T'kresh Pyramid PBEM
Bradley's X-Men PBEM
Bradley's Babylon 5 PBEM
Started World Tree game on FurryMUCK
Bard and I also started exchanging emails in an impromptu 'let's play dragons!' roleplay-ish thing, where either neither of us is GMing, or we both are. Surprisingly, still going, three months later.

October:

9 LJ entries
Wrote a bit of fiction, which I didn't post anywhere.
All the PBEMs from September were still going in October, except the X-Men game, which went on hiatus and which the B5 game replaced.
Ran six sessions of the World Tree MUCK game

November:
10 LJ entries
I wrote about my trip to Raleigh for Halloween, but never got around to posting it.
Played in:
Bradley's Babylon 5 PBEM
Dragons PBEM
Ran four sessions of the World Tree MUCK game
1 entry in Unfinished Tales.

Draw:
September: did a portrait of Kijji, one of terrycloth's characters. Also did a full-color map of part of the Denetheia branch, which is where my World Tree campaign takes place. It is not that impressive as art or even maps go, but I was happy about it.

October: Finished a marker-picture I'd been working on, off and on, for over a year. Or at least, finally pronounced it 'done'. Oh yeah, I should post that. I tried to give it to Terrycloth as a birthday present, but it ended up in my luggage and went home with me. Oops.

November: I drew a small portraits of all the PCs in the World Tree Game, partly because I felt like it and partly to make little icons for the battlemaps I use.

Wow, I actually got art points all three months.

Play:
I've done a great job of playing the last few months! One of the main reasons I decided to do the World Tree game is that I was pretty bored of all my computer games and figured that I wouldn't mind devoting one night a week to doing roleplay instead.

The World Tree game has been surprisingly successful. I haven't missed a scheduled session yet, and in fact I scheduled an extra one to finish up a combat, and did some light RP unscheduled before the game's official launch. The game has six players, which is HUGE for a MUCK game, and the combats run slow in part because of that, which is a downside.

But the upside of the combats being slow is that, for the first time in literally years, I am running a game that I do not feel chronically under-prepared for. The sessions had been lagging consistently behind my prepared material, to the point that I could do silly non-essential things like "make little icons of all the characters to use on battlemaps that I'd upload". Alas, last week (well, 12/10; by the time I actually finish this it may not be last week any more), the PCs finally caught up to my preparations, and I'm starting to feel GMing anxiety again. Rats. We'll see how it goes. I love the players and the characters in this game, so I'm hoping to keep going with it for a while.

In addition to the MUCK and PBEM roleplaying games, I've been playing lots of boardgames, mostly over the Internet. Which technically means they're not board games, but they play exactly like the boardgames they're based on. Including:

* Race for the Galaxy at http://genie.game-host.org/ (hattip to circuit_four for letting me know it existed, a few months back).
* Toulouse (at http://games.asobrain.com/), or !Carcassonne
* Xplorers (also at http://games.asobrain.com/), or !Settlers of Catan

I also discovered that I do not love the Cities and Knights expansion for Settlers of Catan. I thought I did. I remember enjoying it when I played it in person the handful of times that I had a chance to. Then I played it several times on Asobrain and ZOMG THE PAIN. Possibly the game just does not play that well online. Online doesn't imitate the back-and-forth on negotiating trades that you get in person, and the online games I've played have generally involved much less trading than in person ones.

In addition, still playing Dominion-by-phone sometimes. And I still have a City of Heroes account, though I really should cancel it because I'm down to playing maybe once every two weeks.

Eat: Still eating. While melon was in season, I was eating a lot of melon instead of junk food. Now that melon is not in season, and Thanksgiving leftovers, Christmas cookies, and Christmas chocolates are, I am eating a lot of junk food again. My weight is around 155, which is where it's been most of this year. At least I'm not losing ground again like I was last year.

Exercise:

September: 22 workouts (out of 22)
October: 17 workouts (out of 22)
November: 21 workouts (out of 20)

Which is pretty good! Especially since I had two separate trips in October, and the schedule disruption from that resulted in all the missed workouts for that month.

Visit:

September: I actually visited my parents. For my birthday. My mother baked me a cake. It was awesome. :9

October: Two visits! I went to visit terrycloth and jurann (who very kindly let us stay at his apartment because evil evil bedbugs had just invaded Terry's) in mid-October, and then for Halloween I visited sophrani and kagetsume, along with boingdragon who'd also come down for the occasion.

November: I didn't go out of town in November, but I did spend a day at a local convention.

Live:

I don't think I've gotten anything new off of the List of Doom in the last few months. :( On the other hand, I have been keeping up with the yardwork, and -- more importantly! -- I have not been grimly depressed or even particularly aggravated about doing it. Even ten hours of blowing, vaccuuming, and bagging leaves didn't get me down. Since one of the items on the List of Doom is "hire someone to deal with yardwork because I hate it", having me not hate yardwork any more is close enough to getting that item off the list.

Be happy:

:)

It has been a good few months, really.

Scummy

I've been thinking a little more about the post I did yesterday (thanks to everyone for your comments, by the way!) and I wanted to elaborate a bit more about what I think of as "scum".

To start out, I realize that I'm not that happy with the word in noun-form as applied to people. As several people noted, almost everyone does scummy things now and again. In general I'd rather categorize the deed than the person who did it.

A lot of scummy things aren't illegal. Not everything that's illegal is scummy. Some examples:

Just a few things which are illegal in certain areas, but which are not necessarily scummy:

• Drug possession


• Drug dealing


• Gun ownership


• Gambling

Some of that may have a significant correlation with doing things which are scummy (see the drug trade in Colombia, or Afghanistan), but I don't think they are inherently and necessarily bad things.

For contrast, things which are not illegal but which are scummy:

• Lying maliciously


• Spreading nasty rumors


• Custody battles over your kids to spite your spouse


• Walking out on your kids.


• Bullying


• Spiteful insults


• Harrassment


• Racism


• Sexism


• Taking credit for someone else's work


• Blaming another for your mistakes

Some of those are technically illegal -- bullying is a crime if it involves assault, harrassment can be crimal -- but in practice perpetrators are rarely arrested, much less convicted. In most cases, there's no benefit to prosecuting these as crimes: too hard to prove, too little obvious damage, whatever. But they're still scummy.

I said at the outset that I wanted to make a distinction between "doing scummy things" and "being scum", because pretty much everyone does unpleasant things now and again.

Still, if a woman told me that her ex-husband regularly broke promises to his kids, hardly ever got in touch with them, had lied to her boss in an effort to get her fired, often coerced her into having sex with him while they were married, tried to turn their friends against her, and deliberately paid child support late even though he had plenty of money -- and then she summed up with "He's scum", I wouldn't argue the point with her. Maybe he has reasons for all that, maybe in his mind it all makes sense and he's the injured party, but ... yeah. You can hate the sin and love the sinner, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a sinner, and probably unrepentant.

One of the facets to this, which I think does raise the number of scummy things going on in the world at large beyond what we tend to think of, is that many things that I consider completely unacceptable are normal, and even encouraged, in other parts of the world. Just because female genital mutilation is routine in a given country doesn't make it okay. It is, perhaps, harder to condemn the perpetrators of such acts when the bulk of their society is telling them "it's fine! Don't worry about it." Yet it's still wrong.