I Am Not One For LJ Cuts...
Oct. 25th, 2006 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magicaddict...but documenting everything that's happened in the past week has just taken two and a half thousand words. I know I shouldn't, but...
Last Monday's Warhammer: It's amazing how much more fun a roleplay game is when no-one is so far in front of the rest of the party that they can do everything and leave the other people redundant. We currently have a damage machine, a mage who makes everyone goggle at them, a parrying machine and paired part-time healers. No single one of them can walk into an adventure and complete it themselves while telling others to shush and not get in the way.
The party currently finds itself investigating why the Empire's new signal towers are haunted with vampiric ghouls. Is this because of nasty chaos taint in the area? Cultists poisoning the drinking water? Need to hold us up while Jon decides which area of the Barren Hills to send us to?
Nope - they built it on top of a mad scientist's laboratory. Those pesky engineers.
Pieter is enjoying something of a mellowing in character. Insanity manifested as falling hopelessly in love with a party member he hated (now on sabbatical as Emma does the same thing) has driven him to be more accepting of people, as he tries to make himself better liked for when Alaina returns. Then, she might start accepting the flowers, love poems and compliments he pays her, rather than looking at him as though he's grown a second head. Either way, it makes him far more the fun-loving big guy I intending him to be, rather than the slightly up-himself hater of all things illegal he was on the way to becoming.
The Magic Circle: Tuesday evening saw Chris and I heading off to London with the Bristol University Convocation to an open evening at the House Of A Thousand Secrets - the headquarters of the Magic Circle. Chris, being something of a celebrated illusionist in his past, was particularly up for this, and had directed me at the email I'd missed recommending it. Unfortunately, it also was heeded by one Jenny Claughton, an unfortunate contemporary of mine and Chris' at Wills, who's leadership of the summer ball committee prompted me to write this in her honour. She was a pain in the ass all evening, asking Chris to explain how the illusions worked. We were here for the show, you dumb bint.
The evening started with several tables laid out and close-up magicians doing the rounds, performing simple, famous tricks very well. Excellent rope work and cup & balls routines abounded, and everyone got to help with something. The museum of magic was very interesting in its detailing of how famous illusions had evolved over time without actually revealing anything, the library was shut, bolted and barred and the inner sanctum had a guard on the door. These guys are serious about their intellectual property.
The stage show that followed managed to get Chris up on stage. Considering he was the major fan, being able to go and technically perform on the stage at the Magic Circle headquarters was something of a dream come true to him - the only pity being that his part in the trick involved falling for the same card force three times in twenty seconds, then being nailed further to the wall by having to search through a deck of cards for the one attached to the magician's head. He didn't seem to mind.
Mum's Show: An amateur society doing Oliver! was always pushing the boat out slightly. The Norbury Theatre Players trying it was like attaching a couple of rockets to the boat and aiming it directly away from land. Precisely what my mother continues to see in that society I will never realise - she and the guy who played Fagin were the only things on stage I wouldn't have very happily walked out upon being shown. The university societies put on things vastly, vastly superior to what was on display here, and charge the same amount for it. The sooner she realises it and sticks to the vastly superior WODS the better. Missed lines, patchy movement, overly loud and regularly incorrect music, no microphones, dodgy scenery and weak, weak acting made for a completely unsatisfying evening. She, I, and my money deserve better.
Messing Up The Unicorns: A parental lift up to Kibblestone made travel arrangements very easy indeed, and I had the tent pitched and the bed set up before I realised crash space had been arranged for me. As I was getting to do this event free, I hadn't expected nearly so much.
Lorr kicked off in very much the way I had hoped. After spending the first half of the weekend continuing his plan of telling anyone who asked about the history of the Manifest, the missing pieces of its Sceptre appeared and he retired to pray over them. An hour and a half later, once people had their act together, two of the pieces bonded themselves to players and the third got up and floated away of its own accord. Lorr followed, fascinated, while the players in question followed, appalled. The pieces underwent self-assembly outside - something Lorr thought would save him the trouble of doing it himself.
He wasn't expecting the mass repel of everyone except him, the magical poison that commenced to flow through his body, and the petrification of anyone who dared to get near him. They came as quite a surprise.
Cue three wraith-like entities arriving and chanting a geas that had anyone listened to the content of, would have given some clandestine clues as to what was going on. Big profs to Peter and co. for making it sound like the end of the world was just round the corner, even if very few people managed to catch it. Lorr's eventual petrification and the vanishing of the death dancers led to all kinds of attempts to keep him alive - potions, herbs, insufficient counterspells, healing, incantation and general haranguing (typically Molly told them they were getting it wrong and after he died spent the time saying "I told you so".) Eventually, any attempt would have been futile, for by the time they got enough people together to go somewhere and try to ritual the poison out of him, he was being kept alive by the sanctuary only, and that was fast running out. Teleporting anywhere kicked off another mass-except-Lorr repel, breaking the sanctuary and killing him on the spot. Tears, kisses on the cheek, honour guards, the whole nine yards. He got it all. *Pride*
The big revelation? The one that apparently three quarters of the players weren't aware of? Oh alright then.
Ylelorrinel was never a PC. He was a monster role.
He was designed to get the Manifest plot off and running properly, and managed to get enough people interested that by the time he died there was a fair grounding in what was going on among various members of the faction. I call that job done.
Monstering the rest of the event was notable for pixies and jelly-filled rat holes, archaeologists who thought they were sheep, rain, abyssal ghouls being royally caned about the place, a fantastic few moments spent dancing ambidex short weapons with Mike as Danak, Evenstar's chest causing fainting fits and Wolfgang getting to do a final turn as a revenant. It looks like the Dark Hunter plot is being wound up quickly due to complaints about it being unsolvable. I will go on record now, right now, and say that those people will fucking kick themselves when they realise precisely how easy it is to kill a hunter when you know how, and had they spent a nanosecond actually thinking about how to do it rather than unsuccessfully hitting it and running away to a ref when it called "no effect", I'm sure they'd have come up with the answer.
Anyway, rant over, to be picked up again and shook when the plot is over and I reveal the recipe.
Bat Out Of Hell III, Reviewed: Okay, so I got a copy of this slightly earlier than most, and not only down to Play's preordering strategy.
Bat III is every bit the return to tope form that Meat fans were hoping for. He and Jim have never seen eye to eye, but have managed to at least be professional about things for one last time and put together something of real quality. They are joined by new writers who demonstrate, more so than last time, that they have absolutely everything they need to write really good Meat songs, and continue the man's career if he wants to.
The Monster Is Loose, the leadoff track, is the only less than brilliant song on the album. It's very much out of place as an atypical track (along the lines of Do It from Couldn't Have Said It Better), and doesn't give a good account of the rest of the disc.
Keep listening, though.
From track two, we're right on it. Blind As A Bat, courtesy of Desmond Child making James Michael behave, is wonderful. No Jim in sight, and proof that while he guarantees it, you don't actually need him to make a really good Meat song.
It's All Coming Back To Me Now comes next, and while it's a good ten beats per minute slower than the Pandora's Box and Celine Dion versions, it lends it a little more gravitas and the arrangement is absolutely magical. Marion Raven actually holds her own, really quite handily - compare her voice on this to on M2M's Don't Say I Love You, found on the Pokemon soundtrack. Everyone said Patti Russo couldn't take over from Ellen Foley, and she managed it. I suppose there's no reason that the impossible couldn't happen for a second time.
Brian May's (yes, it is him) power chords on Red Special that mark the start of Bad For Good will have Queen fans nodding sagely in the background, and the rest of the song lives up to it. Whatever Jim says about working with Meat, it has to be said that they always sound good together.
Since Welcome To The Neighbourhood in 1995, and Diane Warren's entry into the in-crowd, no Meat album has been complete without a contribution from her, and Cry Over Me fills the bill nicely. She's a known quantity and turns out something that fits in perfectly.
Jim then proceeds to shoot up and come out with In The Land Of The Pig, The Butcher Is King. Precisely what he was thinking when he wrote this, I'm not sure, but the sheer unsullied angst that it contains is enough to have you headbanging along and screaming "FIGHT THE POWER" at the top of your lungs.
Back to Child and hangers on, trying to do something Meat and conceptual with Monstro. This does very little other than prove he can when he tries, and to introduce Alive, which I could almost believe was a Jim song if I didn't know otherwise (the title's too simple). It has the Jim-like bouncy-yet-nasty edge that you find in songs like Everything Louder Than Everything Else, and lines things up nicely for the back end of the album.
Which, surprisingly enough, doesn't drop off in quality. Child does it again with If God Could Talk, one of the best on the album. The arrangement could have been slightly better, possibly, but it doesn't detract from an unashamedly angsty reflection on someone leaving when they shouldn't.
Back to Jim for If It Ain't Broke, Break It - which Emma has already adopted as Jayan's theme song - and another screaming missive to tear down the old order and replace it with Steinmanesque figurines, pet daemons and motorcycles. Phaer our hardcoreness.
Patti Russo makes a cameo appearance on the last Child contribution on the album, What About Love, probably the last time we'll hear her voice now Meat's fired her ass (maybe he thinks Marion's prettier, who knows), before Jim puts the series to bed with the final three. Seize The Night is a work of overt ego-wanking, borrowing the instrumental from Good Girls Go To Heaven, the verses from Holdin' Out For A Hero and the vocal bridges from The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, which incidentally follows on next. This is also slower, and shorter, than the original, and while it hits the mark, didn't quite do it as well as Pandora's Box did. Meh. Cry To Heaven finishes it off gently, like every other Bat album, and the viewer is left hugging themselves after seventy-seven minutes of genius on display from all sides. We like.
He's touring in the UK in May - show of hands if anyone's interested, please.
UberMadness & Missing Emma: Emma forcibly sat me down while she went to sleep and told me to write my UberMadness third-round entry. I'm glad she did, or I'd have never got it done and the idea I had would never have been written, as well as my forfeit costing me a place in all subsequent UMs. Two and a half hours later, it was done, but I really hate leaving her alone to write it. I love competing, and I enjoy writing. I just don't see why I should have to sacrifice Emma time to do it. Even if she tells me to.
And finally...
BP's application form has some open-ended questions on it, designed to allow people to display their personal abilities in their own way. One of these questions was thus:
"Please tell us about a time when you had to solve a complex problem. What was the problem? What steps did you take to identify a solution? What was the outcome?"
I reprint my answer here, because I had a realisation while considering what to write, and what I eventually came out with is worthy of a post all to itself:
"In answering this question, I have been caused to look back over my life, and consider what I have done. Various problems have suggested themselves, and been discounted on accounts of lack of gravitas or having not been solved only by myself.
I have considered my postgraduate career at Bath, and how I had to balance professional work with taking a part in University society and letting neither suffer as a result. I have considered my undergraduate career at Bristol, with all the trials and tribulations of creating new friendships and dealing with being away from home for the first time. I have also considered my school career, and enduring the problems of growing up alongside those who measured achievement on lesser or greater scales than myself, in different areas.
As a result of taking these steps, I have managed to come to the conclusion that there have been no problems of note in my life that I have had to solve entirely by myself. I have always had access to someone, or something, that I have been able to work with to achieve an outcome that was successful.
As a result of this conclusion, I feel considerably less alone than I have been drawn to feel at times in my life, and will find happiness in such a thought for quite some time to come. For this, I thank you."
And I thank you, too.
Last Monday's Warhammer: It's amazing how much more fun a roleplay game is when no-one is so far in front of the rest of the party that they can do everything and leave the other people redundant. We currently have a damage machine, a mage who makes everyone goggle at them, a parrying machine and paired part-time healers. No single one of them can walk into an adventure and complete it themselves while telling others to shush and not get in the way.
The party currently finds itself investigating why the Empire's new signal towers are haunted with vampiric ghouls. Is this because of nasty chaos taint in the area? Cultists poisoning the drinking water? Need to hold us up while Jon decides which area of the Barren Hills to send us to?
Nope - they built it on top of a mad scientist's laboratory. Those pesky engineers.
Pieter is enjoying something of a mellowing in character. Insanity manifested as falling hopelessly in love with a party member he hated (now on sabbatical as Emma does the same thing) has driven him to be more accepting of people, as he tries to make himself better liked for when Alaina returns. Then, she might start accepting the flowers, love poems and compliments he pays her, rather than looking at him as though he's grown a second head. Either way, it makes him far more the fun-loving big guy I intending him to be, rather than the slightly up-himself hater of all things illegal he was on the way to becoming.
The Magic Circle: Tuesday evening saw Chris and I heading off to London with the Bristol University Convocation to an open evening at the House Of A Thousand Secrets - the headquarters of the Magic Circle. Chris, being something of a celebrated illusionist in his past, was particularly up for this, and had directed me at the email I'd missed recommending it. Unfortunately, it also was heeded by one Jenny Claughton, an unfortunate contemporary of mine and Chris' at Wills, who's leadership of the summer ball committee prompted me to write this in her honour. She was a pain in the ass all evening, asking Chris to explain how the illusions worked. We were here for the show, you dumb bint.
The evening started with several tables laid out and close-up magicians doing the rounds, performing simple, famous tricks very well. Excellent rope work and cup & balls routines abounded, and everyone got to help with something. The museum of magic was very interesting in its detailing of how famous illusions had evolved over time without actually revealing anything, the library was shut, bolted and barred and the inner sanctum had a guard on the door. These guys are serious about their intellectual property.
The stage show that followed managed to get Chris up on stage. Considering he was the major fan, being able to go and technically perform on the stage at the Magic Circle headquarters was something of a dream come true to him - the only pity being that his part in the trick involved falling for the same card force three times in twenty seconds, then being nailed further to the wall by having to search through a deck of cards for the one attached to the magician's head. He didn't seem to mind.
Mum's Show: An amateur society doing Oliver! was always pushing the boat out slightly. The Norbury Theatre Players trying it was like attaching a couple of rockets to the boat and aiming it directly away from land. Precisely what my mother continues to see in that society I will never realise - she and the guy who played Fagin were the only things on stage I wouldn't have very happily walked out upon being shown. The university societies put on things vastly, vastly superior to what was on display here, and charge the same amount for it. The sooner she realises it and sticks to the vastly superior WODS the better. Missed lines, patchy movement, overly loud and regularly incorrect music, no microphones, dodgy scenery and weak, weak acting made for a completely unsatisfying evening. She, I, and my money deserve better.
Messing Up The Unicorns: A parental lift up to Kibblestone made travel arrangements very easy indeed, and I had the tent pitched and the bed set up before I realised crash space had been arranged for me. As I was getting to do this event free, I hadn't expected nearly so much.
Lorr kicked off in very much the way I had hoped. After spending the first half of the weekend continuing his plan of telling anyone who asked about the history of the Manifest, the missing pieces of its Sceptre appeared and he retired to pray over them. An hour and a half later, once people had their act together, two of the pieces bonded themselves to players and the third got up and floated away of its own accord. Lorr followed, fascinated, while the players in question followed, appalled. The pieces underwent self-assembly outside - something Lorr thought would save him the trouble of doing it himself.
He wasn't expecting the mass repel of everyone except him, the magical poison that commenced to flow through his body, and the petrification of anyone who dared to get near him. They came as quite a surprise.
Cue three wraith-like entities arriving and chanting a geas that had anyone listened to the content of, would have given some clandestine clues as to what was going on. Big profs to Peter and co. for making it sound like the end of the world was just round the corner, even if very few people managed to catch it. Lorr's eventual petrification and the vanishing of the death dancers led to all kinds of attempts to keep him alive - potions, herbs, insufficient counterspells, healing, incantation and general haranguing (typically Molly told them they were getting it wrong and after he died spent the time saying "I told you so".) Eventually, any attempt would have been futile, for by the time they got enough people together to go somewhere and try to ritual the poison out of him, he was being kept alive by the sanctuary only, and that was fast running out. Teleporting anywhere kicked off another mass-except-Lorr repel, breaking the sanctuary and killing him on the spot. Tears, kisses on the cheek, honour guards, the whole nine yards. He got it all. *Pride*
The big revelation? The one that apparently three quarters of the players weren't aware of? Oh alright then.
Ylelorrinel was never a PC. He was a monster role.
He was designed to get the Manifest plot off and running properly, and managed to get enough people interested that by the time he died there was a fair grounding in what was going on among various members of the faction. I call that job done.
Monstering the rest of the event was notable for pixies and jelly-filled rat holes, archaeologists who thought they were sheep, rain, abyssal ghouls being royally caned about the place, a fantastic few moments spent dancing ambidex short weapons with Mike as Danak, Evenstar's chest causing fainting fits and Wolfgang getting to do a final turn as a revenant. It looks like the Dark Hunter plot is being wound up quickly due to complaints about it being unsolvable. I will go on record now, right now, and say that those people will fucking kick themselves when they realise precisely how easy it is to kill a hunter when you know how, and had they spent a nanosecond actually thinking about how to do it rather than unsuccessfully hitting it and running away to a ref when it called "no effect", I'm sure they'd have come up with the answer.
Anyway, rant over, to be picked up again and shook when the plot is over and I reveal the recipe.
Bat Out Of Hell III, Reviewed: Okay, so I got a copy of this slightly earlier than most, and not only down to Play's preordering strategy.
Bat III is every bit the return to tope form that Meat fans were hoping for. He and Jim have never seen eye to eye, but have managed to at least be professional about things for one last time and put together something of real quality. They are joined by new writers who demonstrate, more so than last time, that they have absolutely everything they need to write really good Meat songs, and continue the man's career if he wants to.
The Monster Is Loose, the leadoff track, is the only less than brilliant song on the album. It's very much out of place as an atypical track (along the lines of Do It from Couldn't Have Said It Better), and doesn't give a good account of the rest of the disc.
Keep listening, though.
From track two, we're right on it. Blind As A Bat, courtesy of Desmond Child making James Michael behave, is wonderful. No Jim in sight, and proof that while he guarantees it, you don't actually need him to make a really good Meat song.
It's All Coming Back To Me Now comes next, and while it's a good ten beats per minute slower than the Pandora's Box and Celine Dion versions, it lends it a little more gravitas and the arrangement is absolutely magical. Marion Raven actually holds her own, really quite handily - compare her voice on this to on M2M's Don't Say I Love You, found on the Pokemon soundtrack. Everyone said Patti Russo couldn't take over from Ellen Foley, and she managed it. I suppose there's no reason that the impossible couldn't happen for a second time.
Brian May's (yes, it is him) power chords on Red Special that mark the start of Bad For Good will have Queen fans nodding sagely in the background, and the rest of the song lives up to it. Whatever Jim says about working with Meat, it has to be said that they always sound good together.
Since Welcome To The Neighbourhood in 1995, and Diane Warren's entry into the in-crowd, no Meat album has been complete without a contribution from her, and Cry Over Me fills the bill nicely. She's a known quantity and turns out something that fits in perfectly.
Jim then proceeds to shoot up and come out with In The Land Of The Pig, The Butcher Is King. Precisely what he was thinking when he wrote this, I'm not sure, but the sheer unsullied angst that it contains is enough to have you headbanging along and screaming "FIGHT THE POWER" at the top of your lungs.
Back to Child and hangers on, trying to do something Meat and conceptual with Monstro. This does very little other than prove he can when he tries, and to introduce Alive, which I could almost believe was a Jim song if I didn't know otherwise (the title's too simple). It has the Jim-like bouncy-yet-nasty edge that you find in songs like Everything Louder Than Everything Else, and lines things up nicely for the back end of the album.
Which, surprisingly enough, doesn't drop off in quality. Child does it again with If God Could Talk, one of the best on the album. The arrangement could have been slightly better, possibly, but it doesn't detract from an unashamedly angsty reflection on someone leaving when they shouldn't.
Back to Jim for If It Ain't Broke, Break It - which Emma has already adopted as Jayan's theme song - and another screaming missive to tear down the old order and replace it with Steinmanesque figurines, pet daemons and motorcycles. Phaer our hardcoreness.
Patti Russo makes a cameo appearance on the last Child contribution on the album, What About Love, probably the last time we'll hear her voice now Meat's fired her ass (maybe he thinks Marion's prettier, who knows), before Jim puts the series to bed with the final three. Seize The Night is a work of overt ego-wanking, borrowing the instrumental from Good Girls Go To Heaven, the verses from Holdin' Out For A Hero and the vocal bridges from The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, which incidentally follows on next. This is also slower, and shorter, than the original, and while it hits the mark, didn't quite do it as well as Pandora's Box did. Meh. Cry To Heaven finishes it off gently, like every other Bat album, and the viewer is left hugging themselves after seventy-seven minutes of genius on display from all sides. We like.
He's touring in the UK in May - show of hands if anyone's interested, please.
UberMadness & Missing Emma: Emma forcibly sat me down while she went to sleep and told me to write my UberMadness third-round entry. I'm glad she did, or I'd have never got it done and the idea I had would never have been written, as well as my forfeit costing me a place in all subsequent UMs. Two and a half hours later, it was done, but I really hate leaving her alone to write it. I love competing, and I enjoy writing. I just don't see why I should have to sacrifice Emma time to do it. Even if she tells me to.
And finally...
BP's application form has some open-ended questions on it, designed to allow people to display their personal abilities in their own way. One of these questions was thus:
"Please tell us about a time when you had to solve a complex problem. What was the problem? What steps did you take to identify a solution? What was the outcome?"
I reprint my answer here, because I had a realisation while considering what to write, and what I eventually came out with is worthy of a post all to itself:
"In answering this question, I have been caused to look back over my life, and consider what I have done. Various problems have suggested themselves, and been discounted on accounts of lack of gravitas or having not been solved only by myself.
I have considered my postgraduate career at Bath, and how I had to balance professional work with taking a part in University society and letting neither suffer as a result. I have considered my undergraduate career at Bristol, with all the trials and tribulations of creating new friendships and dealing with being away from home for the first time. I have also considered my school career, and enduring the problems of growing up alongside those who measured achievement on lesser or greater scales than myself, in different areas.
As a result of taking these steps, I have managed to come to the conclusion that there have been no problems of note in my life that I have had to solve entirely by myself. I have always had access to someone, or something, that I have been able to work with to achieve an outcome that was successful.
As a result of this conclusion, I feel considerably less alone than I have been drawn to feel at times in my life, and will find happiness in such a thought for quite some time to come. For this, I thank you."
And I thank you, too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-25 05:05 pm (UTC)And I'm curious about the Dark Hunters, and I don't even play LT!
no subject
Date: 2006-10-27 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 11:21 am (UTC)I'm blaming you for that Doug! :P
Pesky Darkhunters.... & I don't doubt I'll be kicking myself...
no subject
Date: 2006-10-27 12:42 pm (UTC)And yes, you will - unless you figure it out.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-27 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-26 07:22 pm (UTC)dark hunters yarg, brain hurt over them i know its so simple yet cannie figure it. know its not hitting em at all lol
no subject
Date: 2006-10-27 12:45 pm (UTC)I was picking Antarios to be the one who worked it out before he died - who knows, someone might before the plot finishes...
no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 10:07 pm (UTC)