Monday, April 4, 2011

What Monster?


The muse has continued flitting about my head.  The muse is apparently the Muse of Kindergarten Refrigerator Art, but still, she is a muse, so you have to pay attention when she screams at you to draw something. :)

Enjoy.

- Ark

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Bee!

This has nothing to do with the A-Z Blogging Challenge, though it looks like Mother Nature wants me to participate anyway.  Mother Nature is crazy like that.

The Texas afternoon was nice, in the high 80s, and perfect for outside shenanigans.  The Boy was off with a friend having fun at the Legoland Discovery Center.  The Baby Momma was out sunning in her bikini, and I thought I'd get some sun on my pasty white nerd flesh as well.  So sitting in a plastic lawn chair sun-worshipping, I notice something.

There was a noise.  My first thoughts were that the wind had picked up and was rustling the leaves in the live oak behind me - a lot.  The rustle kept on getting louder.  I felt no wind on my skin, however.  I tilted my head back to look at the tree.

There were gnats in the air.

Now big clouds of gnats ain't a strange thing round these parts.  They happen.  If you have to walk through them, you just inhale and dash through the cloud so you don't suck a gnat up your nose.  No big deal.

The gnats were hovering above the back yard.  The cloud was getting bigger.  The gnats were getting bigger.  The rustling was accompanied by a buzz that was growing louder and louder by the second.

"Look!" I yelled at the Baby Momma and pointed above us.

"What?" she looked at me, then up.

It suddenly clicked in my head.  "Run!"

"What?" she looked back at me.

"Get inside!  It's a swarm!" I leaped out of my chair.

She looked back up.  "No . . ."  Her eyes widened and then we hauled ass inside.

With our noses pressed up against the sliding glass door, we watched the sky dim and the airspace above our house fill with bees.  Thousands of bees.  Perhaps tens of thousands of bees.  It's damn hard to count bees in situations like that, but to properly describe it takes a lot of expletives.

"Look on that branch," she pointed at the live oak.  Bees were . . . coagulating . . . on the branch, dangling in strings like some freaky form of bees-laden Christmas tinsel.  More and more bees created the bee chains until there was this massive, writhing blob of bees infesting the tree.

I'm still rather stunned by the whole thing.

Lots of internet searches and calls to bee wranglers gave us some information about what had happened.  These were perfectly normal Texas honey bees doing what they do.  A new queen left a nest, taking about 60% of the old hive's worker bees with her.  The swarm decided to use our backyard as a way-point in finding a suitable place to build their permanent hive.

Great.

Multiple experts said they will probably clear off the next day to their new home.  One slight problem would be if they discovered holes in our roof or eaves where they could set up shop.

Great.

We coated the eaves with Wasp poison and are hoping for the best.

Of course this lead me to thinking about such an event in game terms.  It was freaking scary!  But imagine if these were a couple of thousand D&D Giant Killer Bees.  Entire villages could be wiped out during a swarm.  Imagine a swarm decides that the capital city would be a good place to live.  The sewers would probably be an ideal home for the giant bees.

Okay, I think I've thought to much about this.  My skin is crawling and I need to go scratch my entire body. 

- Ark

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Dice Bonanza

Look what arrived in the mail today!


From top left to right bottom:
  1. A big-ass red d30.
  2. A big-ass d12 hit location die.
  3. A d30 alphabet die with 4 wildcard slots.
  4. A mythical rientsdie.
  5. A six-sided multiplier.
  6. An X/2X/3X d6.
  7. An eight-sided compass rose die.
Yeah!  I can officially join the Order of the d30 now!  I never realized, though, how freaking HUGE those d30s are.  And HEAVY.  You could put on of those in a sling and kill Goliath.  And they roll so strangely - like they can't make up their little minds.  It's a very odd beast.  But yeah!

Note:  Observers from across the house think that when I roll several d30s together on my desk, it sounds like loud farting.

- Ark

Friday, April 1, 2011

I've Seen the Future and I Repent!

It's official!

- Ark

A-Z Blogging Challenge!

Are you kidding?  No freaking way!  There is going to be too much good stuff to read that I'm not going to have time to write!

Time to set out the lawn chair, pop open a beer, and watch the eruditic correspondence pullulate.

- Ark

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Tik Zak Toe

I was playing Tik Zak Toe last night.  It's basically a way to look at relationships of things in a game.  Go read it.  I'll wait.

Okay.

While Zak initially aimed it at creating adventures, I began to think of another use (ed. or rather, I just checked and he mentioned this use too) - that of charting out relationships between entities in a campaign - kind of a record of adventures already gone by.  The things that go on between players and npcs can get messy and confusing in a long campaign, and the matrix is useful for examining those relationships.

Here is one I worked out last night for the Tales of the Razing Zone campaign I am running:



It's a fun exercise and got my head cleared up about some things, like how the Sorceress had never met Ferrit, but had put a price on his head.  That's good to remember when and if they finally meet.  I screw up things like that in campaigns.  Little details.  It's a neat tool.

- Ark

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Homeschooling

Sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men go awry and you end up with mouse pellets in your mashed potatoes.  We are home schooling the Boy now.  I had hoped things could be worked out at the public school, but despite a lot of effort, nothing changed and the bullying continued.  People can suck.

So the Baby Momma and I were discussing curriculum and teaching tools and got on the subject of math.  My eyes brightened.

"Do you know what they are selling as teaching aides?  It's a product called 'Math Dice.'  They come in all different sizes, like fours and sixes and eights and tens and twelves and twenties.  The student can roll up numbers and use them to create math problems on the fly.  The dice look remarkably like the Boy's D&D dice.  In fact, they are exactly like them!" I grinned and wiggled the empty fake Tupperware sandwich meat holder thingy that happened to be crammed packed with the Boy's dice on the kitchen table.

Baby Momma looked at me as if that was the most insane and nerdiest thing I had ever said.  Not even close.  The conversation moved on.

Later one morning I'm telecommuting at my desk while she and the Boy are in the middle of lessons at the kitchen table.

"It's math time," she said and pulled out a sheet of blank paper.  "I'm going to write down some problems and you can work them out."

She stared at the blank paper, as if taking in the complete and total blankness of it all.  It was very blank.  She looked up at the Boy.

"Go get your dice."

"Woohoo!" he ran off to get them.

I . . . yeah . . . hmm . . . never mind.

:)

- Ark