It’s drizzling out this morning, but I really had my heart set on a cup of coffee so braved the dampness and walked the short walk down the street to the local Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s funny living in a place where I can walk to a Dunkin Donuts, the Plymouth Meeting area is certainly a big change for me. This week without a car has made me appreciate my job, my friends and this location a great deal. I’ve been able to have friends swing by and pick me up fairly easily – in fact am living closer to many of them than I was before. I miss the house a great deal, and while on the phone with a friend of mine late last night, I was able to positively reflect upon the whole Life I have up there in Schwenksville, it’s good to have non-judgemental friends. My time here has been very good for reflecting and I’m slowly finding myself emerge from this knot of tangled emotions and starting to regain perspective. Some days I really wish life had an instruction manual.
Being here hasn’t all been quiet reflection in my room though. Working, sleeping and essentially living in this room for the past two weeks hasn’t come close to driving me insane yet, but I have had to afford myself some luxuries to make it work. This week I dropped $25 on a DVDRW from NewEgg so I could start making my way through Nita’s large movie collection from the comfort of my room. I’ve wanted a DVD reader for my desktop for ages, and when the sale on this one came up I figured I should just go for it. It was delivered yesterday and I popped it into my machine shortly after work. The installation was a breeze, and it only took me about a half hour to get all the stuff properly installed in Ubuntu to get DVDs playing (a half hour might seem excessive and you are probably laughing at me, but I have never used a dvdrom with Linux before, and had no experience with the various Linux DVD playing applications. Plus I had to set the region encoding on it! Give me a break :P). I do have to admit, while I love mplayer still, I think VLC has gained another convert for DVD playback – DVD menus! Intuitive graphical controls! Be still, my heart.
Last weekend was a good one, I went to D&D Experience in Arlington, VA! We all met up Friday night at one friend’s apartment, crashed for the night and were up before the sun to get on the road down to DC. The ride down was a breeze down 95 and we arrived shortly after 9AM. We hit the press room and were able to meet up with the press liaison and got our schedule for the day. We had interviews with 4 Wizards of the Coast employees and an 11AM press-only preview game of 4th Edition. So we spent the day wandering around the Con, going to our engagements and having a blast. I totally chickened out on the press game though. See, I haven’t played D&D in about 7 years, and that was when 3rd Edition had just come out – in short? We were playing 2nd Edition. I skipped 3rd and 3.5 entirely! I really didn’t want to embarrass myself by sitting down at the table with a bunch of gaming site press folks who have played intently for years… and make a fool of myself in front of our DM, who was none other than James Wyatt. OK – maybe I missed out on a fantastic opportunity, the guys I was with were downright giddy to have played under such circumstances. And I sorta feel like I let my gender down too – just being a chick that came along or whatever. I did have an official “job” though, and that was Staff Photographer for AllRPG, so I made myself useful and snapped over 150 photos while the guys played for an hour and a half, normal people only got half hour games! The AllRPG folks are still sorting through photos, hopefully I’ll have some to post next week. We ended up leaving the Con around 4:30 after interviewing one of the gaming developers who was working on the online version of 4th. What a day! Sunday was not nearly as nerdy, but we did hit a comic book store and then came down to a gaming store here in Plymouth Meeting before I was dropped off at home.
..so wait, what were my impressions of 4th? Will I play it? Based on the feedback of the people I went with, and lots of others attending the Con, the attention paid to speeding up the game and fixing a lot of overly complex/time-consuming mechanics of the game will be greatly beneficial to both the learning curve (which apparently got quite steep with 3.5) and general fun in gameplay. From what I understand it’s still possible to get as detailed as you want, but you have the option to hit the ground running much more quickly than with past releases. Cool. I’ve been invited to two campaigns in the recent past, and might end up joining one once they adopt 4th, no sense in learning 3.5 edition rules at this point.
Today I’m heading out to King of Prussia with a friend. Will probably spend the day wandering around the mall, grabbing some food. I’m looking at the movies playing, I’m not terribly keen on seeing any of them, but might end up seeing Juno – which has a description that doesn’t interest me in the slightest, but everyone is saying it’s a must see. Plus, it’s either than or The Other Boleyn Girl, which I fear might be too much of a chick flick… haha!
*yawn* Should probably attempt to join the land of the living now.