:: The Marsh King's Daughter ::

:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::

Best. Boss. Ever.

Yesterday on the way back from a molecular-biology-intensive seminar my boss and I got to talking about Ramones songs. (He started it: he brought up "Gabba-gabba-hey," which was apparently inspired by the GABA receptors targeted by barbituates.) So I told him about the cicada song.

This morning when I got to work I found a mason jar half-full of live cicadas on my desk.

Hee hee hee!
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:: Karen | 1:52 PM | | [+] ::
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May Fortune Favor The Foolish

I've been discussing with a couple of Power of Threes players the way Fortune readings are used in House of Cards. Often, they happen in-game: a character will decide to cast cards, the GM will describe which cards come up, and the character will interpret them. (The GMs also do single card draws to resolve actions that don't have an obvious outcome.) But I prefer doing my own readings without GM intervention (well, except for that maniacal cackling that usually erupts when I show them the results), usually behind the scenes of the actual game rather than in-character.

Here's the most recent example (which the GMs wanted me to post anyway so that the other players could point and laugh): Just before Folly took Random's newly-created Pattern, she had a long talk with Random during which she finally confessed that she's fallen in love with his son. Random replied that he wouldn't stand in the way of their relationship, but that it would be Bad (in the Ghostbusters sense of the word -- like, metaphysically detrimental or something) for them to have a child together. When pressed for how he knew, and exactly how it would be bad, he said he "just knew" that he had to forbid it to "prevent tragedy".

When Folly passed this news on to Martin, Martin seemed pretty dubious. After all, Folly is Random's former lover.

So, some short time after Folly's Patternwalk, I did the following reading:

Question: Should Folly have Martin's baby?
Past: The Soldier (Duty)
Present: Winter (Maturity)
Future: The Smith reversed (Evil Effort)
Virtue: Nature (Life Energy)
Fault: The Lion (The Body Prevails)
Fate: The Fool (Freedom/Lack of Connection)

Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I look at this reading and I think, "Uh-oh." <grin>

Here's my take, though I'm open to other interpretations:

Past: Easy. Folly and Martin declared their love to each other years ago, while the Army was still away fighting the war in Chaos. But they agreed not to consummate the relationship 'til they'd cleared it with Random, who might have other ideas about whose bed Folly oughtta be sleeping in.

Present: Folly's Patternwalk was a huge turning-point for her. She has just come into her own not only as a member of the family and an heir to Oberon's legacy, but also as a key player in Random's newly-created realm of Xanadu. Her Patternwalk marked her symbolic transition from Maiden to Mother, made evident by one of the things she encountered as she approached the Fourth Veil: a child who addressed her as "Mama".

Future: Random is not lying. If Folly has Martin's baby, there will be terrible consequences. I find it chilling to note that the Smith Reversed has come up so frequently, always with the result that one of the Youngers injures another either accidentally or on purpose, that in this game it has been nicknamed the "stab your cousin card." This is bad.

But unfortunately....

Virtue and Fault: Does anyone else see what I see here? It scarcely matters what Folly decides: All the forces of the Universe, whether they're working for or against her, obviously really want that baby to be born. I practically peed my pants when I saw that pair of cards come up. But perhaps together they suggesting possible good as well as ill consequences for the nearly-inevitable event.

Fate: I can see a couple of interpretations for this. The one that makes the most sense is that choosing to go through with having a child ("freedom" from Random's strictures) will in some way disrupt Folly's connection to her loved ones or other things that are important to her. Perhaps she'll be forced away from Xanadu as a result. Another interpretation is that freeing herself from the threat of this tragedy can only be accomplished by breaking her connection to Martin.

All-in-all, very scary but very interesting. I like it so much I may hafta have Folly do this reading in-game, so she can freak out about it, too!


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:: Karen | 4:42 PM | | [+] ::
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Groovy Gaming News, Part 2

Got a phone call last night from some out-of-town gaming buddies who are planning to come up for GenCon! Yaaaay! <happy dance>

Now is the time on Sprockets where we figure out how many people are coming, and how many we can comfortably (or, heck, not-so-comfortably) house at once....
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:: Karen | 4:23 PM | | [+] ::
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Groovy Gaming News, Part 1

My face-to-face Amber GM has set up a nifty new website for our "Power of Threes" game. Yay! It's still in the protoplasmic stages of development; but eventually it should house info on characters, important locations in Amber and Shadow(I'm already halfway into a floorplan of Flora's house in Westchester), metaphysics, and game mechanics as they differ from (or expand upon) ADRPG rules. Shiny!


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:: Karen | 4:09 PM | | [+] ::
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Brood X

Twenty-twenty-twenty-four days to go
I wanna see cicadas!
Nothin' to do, nowhere to go
I wanna see cicadas!

Just eating-peeing-mating
You think it's kind of rude
But don't be deprecating --
It's just their nature, dude!
It's time for celebrating
Emergence of the brood
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!

Bap bap bap-bap ba bap bap bap-bap
I wanna see cicadas!
Bap bap bap-bap ba bap bap bap-bap
I wanna see cicadas!

Really, if you'd ever seen my sister's jarfly imitation, it would all make sense. Wheeeee!

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:: Karen | 9:48 AM | | [+] ::
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Next Year In The Holy Land! Next Year In Reykjavik!

Dani, one of my favorite college housemates, was a psychology major who didn't especially like math herself, but she really liked that I liked math. So we talked about math a lot.

During my senior year, I took an extremely entertaining class in non-Euclidean geometry. And so in due time I ended up discussing with Dani the concept of drawing "straight" lines on a sphere.

Looking for a concrete example, I said, "You know how when you fly from here to Europe --" (she'd spent a semester in Spain the year before) "-- it might seem intuitive that you'd go 'straight' across at a constant latitude. But instead, you head north over Iceland, and not just because Reykjavik is a convenient refuelling stop. And that's because on a sphere, the shortest path between two points --"

Dani's whole face lit up as she interjected excitedly, "...goes through Reykjavik?!"

Ever since then, I've desperately wanted to live in the topology where that's the case, where directions from here to Chicago necessarily detour to Iceland. I mean, wouldn't that just be cooler than cool? (And whiter than white and cleaner than clean....)

And ever since then, "Go to Reykjavik" has been on the list of things I hope I get 'round to before I die.

The guy I was dating at the time collected Hard Rock Café sweatshirts, but somehow I never managed to convince him that we should just pop over to Reykjavik for the weekend to add to his collection....

I woke up this morning with Iceland on the brain. I searched for a couple of Icelandic words in online dictionaries (because, erm, it might become important later?) and in the process found a description of the vagaries of the Icelandic language, its complex (and sometimes arbitrary-seeming, according to that author) case structure, its rules for swapping out vowels even in proper names.... And I thought, hey, studying Icelandic might be fun. I've studied Chinese, which is very entertaining to speak and write but not very grammatically complex. I've studied German, but I only kept it up through two years of high school, not really long enough to get down-and-dirty with the grammar. Maybe, I thought, I should try to learn a little Icelandic, and then next summer -- which is an "off" year for my spouse's family's biannual family vacation -- I should go to Reykjavic for a few days.

I even went so far as to check airfares from here to Reykjavik.

But of course I'm far too busy to ever follow through with such a plan, particularly if I actually intend to learn enough Icelandic to get by before I go. (If Reykjavik is anything like Vienna, I won't need much -- but I should at least learn how to say, "My husband is allergic to your pillows"....)

Then this afternoon I walked out of my office and down the hall on the way to a late lunch. I noticed that the Geology Department, just around the corner from us, had updated the big research posters in the glass cases outside the department office. Before, they showed data on local seismic activity.

The new poster? "Undergraduate Research In Iceland, 2003."

I'm tellin' ya, it's a sign -- literally and figuratively.

So, who wants to go to Iceland?

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:: Karen | 9:42 PM | | [+] ::
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