Derik Badman's Journal

We had our sort of monthly game yesterday, and I started running The Cursed Chateau. We tried no character generation ahead of time (though some people did have non-rule-based concepts for their characters). The book offers no clues onto what level characters should be, but I found an indication online for the previous edition, so I decided everyone could be 4th to 6th level. As sometimes (especially lately) happens, we ended up getting very off track having other discussions about our lives. The adventure itself only got through the opening hedge maze and then into the first room of the chateau, at which point they still had met none of the house's inhabitants. The random events table in the book, so far provided little of interest, especially since much of it is irrelevant in the hedge maze. We'll try continuing next session and hope things get a little more interesting in the adventure. Sometimes I think we'd be better off just playing board games, as then we could probably both play and talk without the talk becoming a distraction to the play. The important part for us is the social aspect, so maybe that'd be a better way to go. Though that would cut off our 1 virtual player (who did not make it yesterday), as they would not be able to play a board game with us virtually. I guess I've just learned to go with the flow of getting distracted and talking about other things. It's not like I was prepping all month making maps and creating NPCs and such. I basically just reread the adventure and printed out a couple reference sheets.

Somehow hit a lull in what I'm reading right now. I paused on Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Short Sun and haven't gotten back to it. Maybe I was reading it too close the Long Sun or maybe this one just isn't grabbing me as much. I think it's partially that I don't care for the narrator/protagonist as much as the other series. Browsed a few samples I had in my Kindle (I tend to accumulate too many samples) and ended up ordering a few things from the library to try out. We'll see if they are worth talking about.

Ended up doing a little work yesterday and today. Friday afternoon our development database was down, so I ended up pretty much finished with my work for the week since I couldn't test my last changes. I started refactoring some code (there is always more refactoring to do), but didn't get it done before happy hour started. As it wasn't really part of my work for next week, I didn't want to end up starting the week even more behind (since I still have to test my final code from last week), I hacked away at it a bit yesterday and this morning. Oddly I find the refactoring work relaxing. It's cleaning up and straightening the code, and making it look nicer and etc etc which is all aspects I like.