MOUNTAIN FRUSTRATION

So, to add to a nice laundry list of fresh computer issues, my XP profile corrupted and wiped a bunch of my user settings, including my Poser UI and Photoshop settings.  Yay.  I created a new profile tonight, and we'll see how that works.  As it stands, I've just about had it with this computer recently.  The best system in the world does me no good if every time I log on I have to start fresh.  I had a friend who is also a computer guru, and he spent all day yesterday trying to track down what exactly the problem was, all to no avail.

At this point, we're leaning toward the major issue being either the motherboard or the processor.  He ran a buttload of tests last night to see if the problem would be the hard drives, but the problems continued cropping up even after he cloned the C: drive onto a 400G drive and switched it out as the master drive.  He flashed and updated the bios and chipsets, and that didn't work, either.  If the problem is, in fact, the processor/mobo, it'll be tax time before I can get a fix.  Until then, I'll continue nursing this system along, rendering with the affinity settings on, and running checkdisks anytime a blue screen flashes.

Of course that's immensely frustrating, but at least I still have my laptop.  (Knock on wood)

RANDOM THOUGHTAGE

Last weekened, I turned off the light on my big aquarium and started siphoning out the water to clean the tank.  I was repulsed when I suddenly noticed what I assumed was the largest freaking parasite I had ever seen in my life swimming around in the back plants, and nearly lost hold of my siphon.  But when I looked closer, I thought to myself, "That's odd, usually parasites are attached to other fish, not swimming free." And then I had a total WTF moment when I realized that it looked like a little fish!

See, I was under the impression that all the fish in my larger tank were male.  I had three male platies, a pair of cory cats, and Piddles-- a dwarf gourami.  Apparently, one of the platies I thought was male.... actually sorta wasn't, and what's more, (s)he had two babies.  So now there are two tiny little platies who look just like their mother swimming around and growing bit by bit in my 30-gallon tank.  And yes, I know livebearers like platies pretty much could breed in a vacuum, but I couldn't be more thrilled, as this is the first time I've had any fish have offspring.  

Maybe it's just me, but if you're tabletop gaming, you kinda owe it to your fellow players and GM (all of whom are taking time out of their own schedules to play) to actually focus a little on the game.  If you're going to sit around the table, tweet on Twitter with your laptop and just halfheartedly roll a die when it's your turn in combat, then don't bother coming.  If you've had a shat day at work and you're exhausted to the point of not being able to keep your eyes open, then don't come.  No one ever put a gun to someone's head and said that they have to play a game.  Except maybe the Aztecs.  And then it was a club, most likely.

At any rate, this sort of situation happened to me over the weekend, and while I wasn't going to make a big deal about it, the more the night went on, the more it pissed me off.  I'd rather run a game with three players who want to play and are into the game than eight players with two, three or four who are there for social networking.  It's not fair to the other players, it's not fair to the GM.

I recently got myself upgraded to a Blackberry cellwise, and have been ecstatic about it.  I don't text a whole lot, but on the occasions I do, I much prefer the keyboard I have with the BB than I did any cell I've tried using before... on top of that, I like the number of apps it runs; I listen to Pandora on it at work, use the GPS every so often, and have a couple other small things that are cool but not overblown.  It's kinda like having an iPhone without the ridiculous price tag, the constant fingerprints on the touch screen, and the overall stigma of having something with an Apple logo on it.

It's dark right now... at 6 pm.  I f**king hate winter coming.

To those of you whom I fairly regularly get those sordid petrificative commissions from, I cannot thank you enough for the awesome work you've done for me recently.  Thaaaaaank you!  You guys and gals rock like no one's business, and I have some of the best artists I know doing that weirdness for me and never once saying "You're a freak.  Go away now." I'll probably be looking into the lot of ya again once the Christmas rush is over, especially if my overtime schedule continues the way it has!

Also, to all of you who have faved my work, thank you very much.  I don't generally have the time to tell you singly, the way I try to respond to each response on my pics, but I really do appreciate it!

TOTAL GEEKDOM RANT ALERT The first flaw in the Pathfinder RPG came up when I got my new Bestiary, with one of my (naturally) fave creatures.  The Cockatrice entry has its special attack look pretty much as follows:

Petrification (Su) A cockatrice's bite causes flesh to calcify and harden -- multiple bites can cause a living creature to turn into stone.  Each time a creature is damaged by a cockatrice's bite, it must succeed on a DC 12 Fort save or take 1d4 points of Dexterity damage as its flesh and bones stiffen and harden.  A creature reduced to 0 Dex immediately turns completely to stone... BUT, every day a creature petrified in this manner can attempt a new DC 12 Fort save to recover from the petrification, which returns the character to 1 Dex (until healed).  If a petrified character fails three of these Fort saves in a row, the petrification is permanent.

Agreed, I'm totally biased.  I understand.  But WTF... how 4E/Gimpy/No-Child-Left-Behind is that!?  Let's look at that empirically.  The average character will have a 12 Dex... no one but an absolute moron uses Dex as a dump stat because it affects AC, and pretty much everyone uses point buy instead of a much more random die-roll creation matrix.  So they most likely will need to fail at least 6 saves, assuming that more than half of them are rolls of 3 or 4, before they're petrified, temporarily.

And then, on top of that, the DC of the Save is 12?!?  A first-level non-bard has a +2 to their Fort save out of the gate, and by the Cockatrice's CR (3), everyone should have at least a +1 to their Fort save regardless of race/class.  So for a cockatrice to be anything close to an effective deterrent, it will need to hit the same character enough for him or her to fail a more-or-less 50/50 save between 6 and 10 times, at which point, for three straight days, the character can then make a more-or-less 50/50 save for it not to be permanent.  What. The. F**k.

Hello, f**king houserule.  The people who went crying about Save or Die/Save or Suck ("Oh Noooooes, just make everything with any history of causing an instant effect to a PC mass damage, because when my character's out of the game for more than five minutes my little ADD brain can't handle it!") are totally responsible for this BS.  I have no problem with trying to make the game more accessible for the attention-impaired whiner rules lawyers, but taking classic creatures (the Gorgon, I believe, has a similar 'Save till Make' mechanic; I'm looking at others now.) and classic spells and giving them an effective vasectomy is ridiculous.

If a character dying/being put out of play for a while because you missed a roll is too traumatic, and your GM is so cutthroat that he won't allow any sort of workaround to bring the character back, then go play with a good imaginative GM... or just boot up your computer and run a MMO, where they get the large majority of their money from people with short attention spans. </rant>

STAMP PIMPING

[Reserved for Pathfinder RPG Stamp]

<sub>"So you were born, and that's a good thing,
So you will die, and that's a shame.
But somewhere in the between, is a life of which we all dream
and nothing and no one will ever take it away."
- Streetlight Manifesto, Somwhere In the Between</sub>