Liralen's Adventures Through Life

So every year, I make the pilgrimage to the Bay Area to visit Carl, do a round of visits with old friends from Caltech, the old usenet, and from Carl's games from the 1990's. We catch up, eat great food, and then we end the week at BigBadCon, which is now in Walnut Creek at the Walnut Creek Marriott.  It's been there a few years, now, and we've started to really get to know the venue and all the things that are offered around the hotel, which is nice. Part of the reason why this is pretty much the only convention I go to anymore is because we always start with a round of visiting people or catching up with them during a dinner or something. Half the fun is that a lot of the things we do have become something of a Tradition. I flew out on the 8th of October, and met up for Peking Duck and all the good things at Chef Chu's with the old Mountain View crew, who mostly don't live there anymore, and only make it to this part of the area once a year.  It was a sm...

I was feeling so sad yesterday and I didn't really figure out why until the evening and seeing all the memorials and pictures people were posting about remembering on all the social media things. Gradually coming to the realization that emotions don't always have to reasons, and it's just something that happens.  Feelings just come and go, and they aren't any particular kind of truth and they don't define me.  I feel sad, it's not that I am  sad, which is a newish distinction for me to make and was made all the more obvious by the language used to deride each other in first person shooters. It's interesting realizing that I learn more from the contrast. John's now off on the road, having to leave early in order to actually meet up with us in California. With the extra day he'll have plenty of time to stop and hike and enjoy himself along the way, while we're touring a studio he'll probably be hiking in Reno. *laughs*  Jet, John and I ar...

My trips for BigBadCon are always filled with feasts: feasts of the body, mind, and creative spirit. The Chef Chu's feast was one of those, with friends that I haven't seen for a long time, with food that I cannot get in the Boulder County area. The dishes were of Peking duck, sea bass steamed with ginger and scallions, dry cooked string beans, pea sprouts with garlic, and tangerine beef along with the favorites of snow white chicken, pot stickers, and cream cheese crab wontons fried deep and crisp. But best of all it was with people I haven't seen for a year, and have talked to just about a often, people I used to game with all the time and whom really feed my creative juices: Trip, Earl, Cat, Carl, Chrisber, Christy, and their Teo. It was fun to tell them stories of Jet, who is now taller than I am and driving. *laughs* They'd last seen him when he was tiny, still holdable in arms, stealing glasses, and crawling about playing with tableclothes that hung over the ...

There were actually two parts to this last adventure, too. One was actually from the sign up phase, the other was the game itself....

So John and I now have a tradition, where I take a week off for the Big Bad gaming convention and then he takes a week off to go to Seattle and be with his mom for a week. Poor Jet has to do the school thing, but since there was talk at BigBadCon of allowing 13+ to play and run in a kiddie pool, he's said that he'd like to come for the weekend and not skip any school to do it, but still come and play. That would be fantastic. As it is, though, we each get our week to do what it is that we really want to do, and it turns out very well for both of us. Jet seems to get into the spirit of the whole thing, too, and is extra helpful for both of us while the other is gone. This is really long, and on livejournal, it allows you to open and collapse sections as you please .

It seems that I am a band mom. *laughs* And not just a band mom, but a marching band mom, which seems a different breed of sorts. And it seems that John and I have done our usual thing, which is just dive in and do stuff. Jet has had marching band competitions both last weekend and this weekend. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, last year, his high school's marching band placed dead last in the standings, so there really was only room for improvement. And they have improved. The band director is really fun, and really wants his kids to have fun and grow with the experience, so it's been good watching the kids figure out what it is that they can do. Mr. Legg was really great about setting up the program with the base music, moves and teaching the kids how to march through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. The color guard pretty much came up with their own moves throughout the piece, and figured out how much they really wan...

Title : A Butterfly's Dream of Freedom Game System : Tenra Bansho Zero - a game system that does a fine job of emulating Japanese Manga/Anime story elements. Where Played : Big Bad Con 2013 The Players : GM - Carl Rigney, Genosuke - Kevan Forbes, Masagoro - Shaun Hayworth, Kansuke - Thomas Fraser, Winter's Blessing - myself. Author's Notes : This is a story that was inspired by the game we played last October. All of the dreams of memory were actually each character's Zero Act, all played as part of the character setup. I've interspersed them where they impact the story, but you can see how the Zero Act really does a lot to develop each character in individual play. Carl has gone over this once with his memories of the game and some telling points as to Goichi's motivations. Shuan gave me some very specific knowledge as to Masagoro's feelings at the very end, which I needed to clarify. Thank you both for your help!! And other than that it's writte...

I need to do a quick write up of BigBadCon before it escapes me. I've been so busy since I got back that I haven't really had the time to sit down and write down anything, though I intend to write up two of the games I played, maybe three, but definitely two. But I want to capture the days before they get too far away from me, and it's already been a week. Carl and I had fun by planning a lot of this months and months in advance. It's just one of those things that we've been doing, since I go to visit him at least once a year, on the most part, and we have a habit of putting together a wiki page and putting down everything that we're doing to do, everyone we're doing to see, and everywhere we're going to eat. Especially the eating. In fact, one of the things we figured out, early, was that we were going to go to Pican instead of going to Berkeley and eating at Chez Panisse. Thing is that Carl has a gang in Oakland who make a tradition of going to Pica...

I slept in until 9 and just skipped breakfast in order to talk with Kelly for a while. I had no desire to pay for breakfast either. A cup of bad coffee and a cup of really excellent tea (Carl lent me his tea kettle, and I had my gaiwan and Flit's tea from Thursday. The Phoenix oolong proved to be astonishingly good) was plenty to get me into my really excellent Atomic Robo game with Morgan Ellis. Carl had recommended that particular game to me, and I was really really happy that I was able to get into it!

There was one small side trip we had to do on the way to Big Bad Con , although it was really way out of our way, because the convention was by the Oakland airport and Chez Panisse exists in Berkeley. I made the reservations for the café upstairs exactly one month before. They don't open up reservations until then, and last year we were unable to get reservations because we started too late. I made sure that this year. I also got an interesting surprise on the way there. If you want to just read about the con, click here.