Time and Space

WHAT HAPPENED?

Everything's gone all wibbly and wobbly!

I feel like things have... changed. My place in the universe has changed.

Now, I can be found at my new home! The URL is the same, and it looks pretty similar, but everything is different behind the veil. I've moved the blog to Wordpress, and have now transitioned to self-hosting. I'm still working out things like the front page and what sort of things to do with it, but now, it is all different.

So go over and check it out. And make sure to change to the new RSS feed (I made it easy to find, again)!

Reborn?!

AAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!

Please excuse me while I flail around a little bit. While others certainly are not as thrilled as me, I have recently found out that Heroes is coming back. If you've known me for a while, you probably get why I am reacting like this! :D


That's the only part that I'm a little down about, to be honest. I found out about this while I was on break at work, didn't see the video's length, and spent a couple hours building up anticipation. So, a 15-second video with some space-y shots and then "HEROES REBORN Coming 2015" emblazoned on? Not nearly a match for the mental build-up, which is probably mostly my fault.
Still, I've been hearing a bit behind-the-scenes, because this was always the one fandom where I knew someone with an in. It's a very SMALL bit behind-the-scenes, pretty much with what Tim Kring hopes can be done with it, but it still has me excited.
New Doctor this fall, possible Flash series this year, and Heroes comes back next year?
Oh, 2014, I take back at least half most all of the bad things I said to/about you.

EMERALD CITY!

I'M (probably) GOING TO EMERALD CITY COMIC CON THIS YEAR!

I'M (almost definitely) DRESSING UP AS THE DEFENESTRATOR!

I'M (absolutely) GOING TO FINALLY MEET ONE OF MY LONGTIME FRIENDS IN THE REALLY REAL WORLD INSTEAD OF THE INTERNET!

...

ahem...

Excuse me, I got a bit excited.

To clarify a bit, Emerald City Comic Con is a convention in Seattle that I have wanted to go to for years now. And, with a good friend or two, I am most likely fling to attend this year, and will be cosplaying as well!

After D&D the other night, Steev and I were talking about the idea of him cosplaying as Dogwelder for ECCC, and I expressed my excitement and desire to join in as his Section 8 teammate, The Defenestrator. A little while later, and we decided to approach another D&D friend to be Jean de Baton-Baton, and are talking about how easy most of these costumes will be to get together.

In my excitement, I put out a tweet asking if any of my friends would be attending ECCC. "Maxii", from the 9thWonders days said that she would be, and she's one of the 9thers that I still talk to and haven't met in person.  So, on top of my understandable excitement over everything else, getting to finally meet someone I've known for years makes it even better!

2014, you might turn out alright after all. I was iffy after that crappy showing in your first week, but you're getting better.

Whispering Forest, part one: The Recruits

If you read last week's post, you might be wondering how D&D went this week. The real test would be to ask my friends that had to deal with my first attempt at DMing, but from the sounds of things, it went all right!

So far, I've successfully thrown in obvious Welcome to Night Vale references -- one of them being the theme of the first overall adventure (The Whispering Forest) -- and have plans to reference other things as well. It's fun learning to think on your feet when you're making things up as you go along with the input of crazy people.

Speaking of crazy, it has been brought to my attention that I didn't mention ALL OF THE THINGS of gray importance about Steev's character. Not only is he a minotaur named Dave, but he's a minotaur BARD named Dave... and he really loves killing Fey creatures.

It's beyond awesome having someone who actually plays music playing a bard character, because at one point, Steev was playing and singing "Lolth, I lift your name on high". Lolth is his character's goddess, who loves killing elves.

On top of that, we've got a Gnoll fighter (Gnoll are 7' tall and eat flesh), an Elf assassin with a mysterious secret, and a Warforged Swordmage (Warforged are sort of like constructs with a personality) just looking at them all like they're crazy.

I didn't even go the old route of having them all be friends. I just had them all recruited, so... maybe they'll go player-vs-player, and I'll get to moderate the Ultimate Showdown of D&D Destiny. :P

Anyway, less nerdy stuff is coming soon... Maybe.

I have become Death, destroyer of worlds

Greetings, adventurers! Welcome to another post of the Keeping The Bar Low blog.

Hopefully the folks over at Geekly Inc won't mind me blatantly ripping off the intro of their Drunks and Dragons podcast (which is awesome, as far as I'm concerned. You should really give it a listen), but it felt right! Yes, folks, it is finally happening... I'm about to become a Dungeon Master!

(Source)

I've got the start of a set-up going, for my first night behind the Dungeon Master screen: borrowing Steev's DM screen, and I've got a notebook with Super Secret stuff, as well as less Super Secret reference material (level goals, treasure parcel recommendations, etc). It's truly time to step in to a new level of geek... and that's coming from someone who listens to podcasts about Doctor Who and D&D, and writes a blog about an obscure comic book character from the 80s.

Monday night is going to be "kick-off" for my campaign, which is going to have all kinds of fun references for my players to figure out. Sounds like we'll be playing two days in a row, since Tony is leaving the state later this month. My hours after work until Monday are going to be spent working on new ideas, and prepping myself to be completely thrown off if my friends go completely off-the-rails on my story -- which would not be surprising, since most DMs seem to have that happen.

Still, if all else fails, this could happen....

(Source)

What will happen? Will I be an utter failure as a DM? Will the players follow the storyline? Will DAVE THE MINOTAUR start a bandcamp page? Find out next time on KEEPING THE BAR LOW!

Avoidance

I'm taking a day off from the internet. Today (RIGHT NOW!) is the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who. And I don't get to watch it until after work (at the soonest).

So, no Twitter, Facebook or Reddit until I've watched it. Possibly no rss feeds, because I don't know who will post about it before I've seen it. Aaaargh!

For now, I leave you with a picture of David Tennant wearing a fez. Perhaps geeking out on here will happen afterwards. Allons-y!