Liralen's Adventures Through Life

Sometimes, I think that scientists, early on and at a very early age, get an tremendous education through classic Halloween horror stories on the pitfalls and error of disregarding the opinions or feelings or thoughts of the rest of the human race, especially if they're particularly brilliant. That just because you might think they're stupid or slow or whatever doesn't mean that what they think or feel doesn't matter or that they can't hurt you badly if you treat them badly. Everything from Frankenstein to Dracula to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea all tell the same sort of story. Don't put yourself above or beyond humanity, or the mobs with the pitchforks and torches will be coming for you. Not that we all *get* that lesson, but still... I got it pretty early, and I think my time at Caltech made me VERY aware that I'm not really that smart, and certainly not smart enough to act like some idiots with very high IQs. So I en

This year, as with every year, Carl and I started planning for the run up to BigBadCon and the convention itself months in advance. It's good to build upon the delicious bones of adventures past to create precise structures for the future with just enough room and juice in it to allow for the wonderful surprises of what's to come. We actually created a wiki for everything, including what we were doing each day, and details of the games and everything. And during BigBadCon's signups, I didn't get into several games I'd wanted to get into, including one of Carl's, and I was pretty disappointed at first, but then I realized that 1) I'd gotten into a lot of stuff I really truly wanted to get into and 2) I had room for something to surprise me in really good ways. There were other surprises, to start, that weren't all so good. One of which was having my temporary crown pop out the weekend before I left, so Monday morning found me in the dentist