I was up at a horrendously early hour yesterday, in order to meet up with Graham, one of the Thursday night roleplayers. Tom and Matt were picking us up from Meadowhall to drive down to Milton Keynes for a small roleplaying conference called Concrete Cow. [If you know nothing about roleplaying, or think it’s sad or boring, you might want to skip down to the very end, because I’m about to unleash my inner geek and most of it will probably be indecipherable to a non-roleplayer!]

I was really excited about going down there, because there were several games on I was hoping to play in. The Call of Cthulhu team, Kult of Keepers, of which my friend Rik is a member, would be there to run some games. In addition, there would be two writers for White Wolf (Stew Wilson and Wood Ingham) running Werewolf and Vampire games respectively. As game signups were on the day, I was keeping my fingers crossed that I’d get there before the game slots were fully booked. Despite Tom’s satnav initially leading us astray by several miles, we made it to Wolveton just before the official start of 10am. I made a beeline for the signup table, and to my delight managed to get a place in all three of the games I wanted to play in – Cthulhu in the morning slot, Werewolf in the afternoon, and Vampire in the evening.

The Cthulhu game was run by Paul Fricker, and was loosely based on Reservoir Dogs, although of course with a creeping horror twist. When we were handed the pre-generated character sheets and info on our characters, the first thing that jumped out at me was ‘You are an undercover cop’. That’s me dead, I told myself. Amazingly, no-one in the party figured out I was a cop. Instead, the poor guy who had been shot in the arm by a pursing police officer at the start of the adventure was strongly suspected of being the plant. I survived the game, if you can call dwelling as a torn soul for all eternity in Carcosa surviving. Honestly, that’s got to be some kind of win in Cthulhu, given the normal win is a descent into irreversible gibbering insanity!

Stew’s Werewolf game was my first experience of White Wolf’s World of Darkness since they’d reworked the whole game world after the Time of Gehenna stuff. I have to admit that the new system is very smooth – a lot more so than the old system could often be, which of course is the idea. I’d originally turned my nose up at what I’d thought was a cop-out reset, but I’ve definitely since revised my opinion. We played an adventure in which we were pitted against cultists and their ‘dirty work’ arsonists who wanted to raise the spirit of the Great Fire of London. Stew had pre-generated starter characters, but we either got really lucky, or he needs to revise the stats, because come the end game we completely ploughed through the bad guys, and then took down the great spirit in 2 rounds. Some great moments in the game, with my personal favourites being the roll that enabled me to catch and immediately defuse a Molotov cocktail as it was thrown through a window, and the rule of re-rolling 10s that, in a hideously lucky rolling of the dice, got me a 33 on initiative when the average is more like 10. Cue dropped jaws from the other players.

Wood’s Vampire game was actually a playtest. He’s writing for a new supplement called Requiem for Rome, based (unsurprisingly) in the time of the Roman Empire. He’s a very energetic storyteller, and it’s obvious he’s done a load of research in prep for the book. The game was set at the time of Constantine’s defeat of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312AD, and dealt with the aftermath and a supernatural twist. There are some new introductions in the supplement that I think the Vampire fans are going to like a lot, with a new sub-system, a new clan, and, I’m fairly sure, a lot of history on the Roman Empire, including lifestyle and beliefs and culture.
All but one of the players of the Vampire game had also played in the Werewolf game – a good group of guys. As playtesters, we’ll be credited when the adventure is published, although I don’t know whether that’ll be in the Requiem for Rome book or in the adventure as a standalone download from White Wolf.

I got chatting briefly to Wood after the game – he said he lived down in Swansea, and I mentioned I’d lived in South Wales for a time – Cardiff and Pontypridd. One of the players from the Vampire game, Alex, said, “University of Glamorgan?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” I replied, a little surprised.
“I thought I recognised you,” he said. “I was there when you were.”

I was flabbergasted. I’d thought during the game that he vaguely reminded me of someone, but I was thinking of a guy I’d known in Cardiff, not someone who’d gone to Glamorgan.

“Yeah,” Alex went on to say, “I remember a short lived Vampire game.”
Well, colour me amazed. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t remember him, so I don’t know if we had much interaction, but it’s one hell of a small world.

The sessions ended around 10.45pm, and Tom, Matt, Graham and I left by 11pm to drive back to Sheffield. Tom dropped me off at around 1am, and I flaked pretty soon after that.

If the forthcoming Furnace roleplaying conference up here in Sheffield goes as well, it’ll be a fantastic weekend.

I’ve noticed an odd musty smell that comes and goes in my spare bedroom and bathroom over the last couple of months. I’d chalked it up to drains or something like that, and poured goopy stuff down the plughole a couple of times. It was particularly frustrating when it kept happening, though, and when I noticed a couple of damp patches on my kitchen ceiling, I had the idea of pulling back the carpet in the spare bedroom. Good job I did, too. The seal on the bath has obviously been leaking, and the water has seeped into the floorboards, right through to the spare bedroom. That musty smell? That’d be the mould on the underside of the carpet, the underlay, and the floorboards. It’s not pretty. I’ve got the insurance company on the case, and an assessor’s coming round in a couple of days. It’ll mean a new carpet, possibly new floorboards, and I have a sneaking suspicion my bath will have to be pulled out in order to fix the problem in the bathroom too. Not going to be pretty. I’m just glad that all I’ll have to pay in the £50 excess on my home insurance!

Travelling the same tram route at the same time every Monday-Friday, you get to know many faces. There’s the conductors, of course, several of whom recognise me well enough to comment if they see me on the tram late at night, when I ’should be at home’! There’s the people who work at HSBC, lots of them with their name tags clipped to their waistbands - the short, dark haired one who reminds me of a primary school teacher I had, the younger girl with her hair always tied back impeccably, the tall, thin and freckled girl, the lad who looks five years too young for a suit and tie, and so on. I don’t know any of their names, and they don’t know mine, but we take the same journey every day, and have done for years.

I rarely get an insight into their personality. They’ll often chatter amongst themselves, but not about anything of significance. They could be married, single, with kids or without, still living at home, interested in football or tennis, secret alcoholics, party animals, dog lovers… you never know. Just occasionally, though, once in a while, I’ll pick something up. Sarah’s wedding is next weekend, Tom and Cath’s baby is a boy, Deb’s lost 10lbs on her diet. Little day to day things. And sometimes, very, very rarely, I see or hear something that really stands out.

Last night, one of the HSBC women took a seat next to me. She doesn’t tend to chat with the main group. Perhaps she doesn’t work in the same department as them. She’s always impeccably dressed, and wears the kind of high heels that would have me crippled within ten steps of the front door. She favours skirts rather than trousers, and her hair is never out of place. She also comes across as rather serious; straight faced, perhaps even a little aloof.

As we passed out of the city centre, her mobile phone bleeped. Incoming text message. The screen lit up as she opened the message, and out of the corner of my eye I saw, ‘I want to peel your clothes off‘. I immediately looked out of the window, fascinated by something, anything else. I managed to keep my eyes away until she’d stopped reading the message - only to find when I looked back that she’d started typing one of her own in reply, ‘You’re really getting me going‘. Oh yeah. Fascinating thing outside again. I wish I could have seen her face, but given she was sitting next to me, I couldn’t tell. I watched her carefully as she got off the tram. She has a fantastic poker face, but I bet she couldn’t wait to get home.

After all the on again - off again problems with the secondment I was offered back in May, I was finally able to start on 3rd September. I’m now in a different office within the University, in a job with more responsibility at a higher level than my previous job, dealing with postgraduate research student funding.

One week in, and I’m both thrilled and awed. The learning curve is incredibly steep, and the work is incredibly intense, and I don’t think I’ve been as busy in the past five months as I’ve been in the past five working days. I’m loving it. I don’t know whether it’s the ‘honeymoon period’, with the excitement of a different job, but I have a feeling it’s something I’m really going to enjoy, regardless.

I’m going to be in post for a full year, until 29th August 2008, and then back to my old job, unless events conspire to keep me there or I move on to a different post. Either would be good - I think I would be more satisfied with a continued challenge, and challenging it currently is!

Enough of the posts about rodents. Much more going on recently.

A couple of weeks ago, disillusioned by my PC laptop (which I have to admit had never been the same after it contracted a virus, even though I cleaned it off), I took advantage of an offer to buy myself a MacBook. I’d always kind of shunned Macs, for no real reason other than that I was coloured by preconceptions about incompatibility and memories of my Grandad’s boxy looking monochrome Mac from years ago. Having seen the new Macs in the Apple store recently though, I was sorely tempted.

I got the MacBook just over a week ago, and I’ve been enjoying it ever since. I never would have thought I’d say this about a Mac, but I really, really like it. It’s good looking, glossy and white. The keyboard is perfectly sized, which was one of the complaints I had with the PC laptop; it was too small for me, and my typing speed suffered as a result. No such flaw with the Mac – excellent.

I’ve installed everything I needed so far – Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype – with no problems at all. In fact, installation is a piece of cake. I like it a lot. I don’t have MS Office on the laptop, but what I have installed on the advice of a friend who uses Macs is Neo Office. It does all the things Excel, Word and Powerpoint do, which makes me very happy indeed.

The battery life is excellent compared to my PC laptop – around twice the amount of time between recharging.

The best thing so far I’ve found is the internet connection. Using my wireless broadband in the house (which it detected immediately), I got download speeds around 10 times faster than I ever did on the PC laptop. I could have drooled all over the keyboard if it wouldn’t have ruined the gloss and pristineness.

Start up time is much faster than the PC. I can also open applications immediately on startup, instead of waiting for the AV software and MSN and many other things to crank into gear as I do with the PC.

I wouldn’t say I’m a total Mac convert now – but after a week of getting used to it, I’m not going to shun Macs. The big question, of course, is whether my next desktop computer will be a Mac when the PC gives out…

Another year older! Thirty-two years ago, at around 8.20pm, I was born in a hospital in the midlands of England, first-born child of Julia and Brian, and first-born granddaughter to my maternal grandparents, Bill and Helen.