malkav11

Not all that much new with me in the last several months. I'm enjoying my apartment's location and design a lot, although I wish the building weren't quite so hot. I can counteract that now that my A/C unit has been unsealed, but of course that costs money. I've taken advantage of the extra space to host a small group of friends for what in theory will someday become biweekly tabletop roleplaying sessions, although at this point we're at one abortive campaign that never got off the ground, two improvisational one shots (using the nifty indie RPGs Fiasco and In a Wicked Age, respectively), a lot of goofing around, and characters created for a Call of Cthulhu run through the classic campaign Horror on the Orient Express. Alas, while we did accomplish that, last week was meant to be the start and instead UPS fucked up delivery of my spiffy new monitor, I took advantage of friends with cars to try and pick it up and they fucked that up too, and so we wound up eating at Obento-Ya in the back patio garden instead. Turned a lousy evening into a pretty decent one (I even managed to eat with chopsticks), and after a spritz of rain we had the patio to ourselves. But it didn't get Call of Cthulhu going. This week I had the monitor salted away (23" IPS LED, 1080p res, speakers and HDMI and the whole nine yards) but because it was a shift to our schedule, only one of the three players remembered to show up (naturally the one that lives over an hour out of town). Hopefully two weeks from now, we'll actually get things going. (BTW, we do have room for one or two more people - I can't imagine too many people here know me well enough to be comfortable gaming at my apartment, but hey, y'never know.)

I also picked up an ipad 2, which is a far more convincing argument for the usefulness of a tablet than my Android device. It's light years ahead in both hardware design and engineering, and app selection. I have some definite quibbles with how they handle files and purchasing apps (to wit, it's insane for every app to have its own walled garden for the same files a dozen other apps could potentially read if they were using a sensible file structure; and it's silly for every app to be a final purchase with no method for trying the app out ahead of time, especially for utility apps), but it's ultimately a significantly better experience. I break it out almost every day to play games, read comics, brush up on RPG rules, or watch Netflix. It does have a Kindle app, which I've poked at a little for magazines, but the Kindle is still king for most reading - lighter, better battery life, and a screen that's readable in normal sunlight.

Speaking of which, a couple months ago I managed to overload my Kindle to the point where it was crashing and freezing on me quite regularly. It seems that having 1000+ titles all at once with no collections or anything breaks things. So after a hard wipe, I decided to at least temporarily stick to stuff I've actually acquired directly from the Kindle store instead of, um... "other sources". The result has been finding out about some honestly pretty amazing independent books. A few recommendations include: Hugh Howey's The Wool Omnibus (5 books worth of post-apocalyptic goodness); B. Justin Shier's Zero Sight and Zero Sum (supernatural academy tales in a post-peak oil America); Zachary Rawlins' The Academy and The Anathema (also supernatural school, but with heavy Lovecraft, cyberpunk and anime influences, and a bleak worldview); and Scott Fitzgerald Gray's We Can Be Heroes (exciting and emotionally resonant thriller about high school students inadvertently stealing an experimental former Soviet tank from an arms dealer). Please ignore possibly questionable covers and a certain amount of lack of polish. The meat's good.