Bagheera

I've almost certainly decided on a topic for my ZULA/master's thesis - after a long time waffling about fanfic, Marlowe, fairy tales and Vikings, I've decided to give role-playing games a try. There's just enough of a body of works on them to start from, and they offer many interesting areas of research, plus I think there are some interesting things to be said about RPGs as a form of literary adaptation and transformative fiction (how to make your thesis about nerd stuff nerdier: compare it to other nerd stuff).

Also, there is a Game of Thrones cookbook! I'm not sure whether I should buy it, because I'm not a very experienced cook, but quasi-medieval cooking sounds very tempting, plus it's based on this really cool blog here:

Inn at the Crossroads

I will definitely try some of these recipes for our weekly rpg-group star trek watching/cooking together nights. The Dornish stuff sounds delicious, although I couldn't bring myself to buy a dead python (poor thing!) even if it was available.

Tonight our Ars Magica campaign of more than half a year came to its grand finale. And I survived! But we won't be playing these characters anymore, so it's RIP Fahid, evil conjuror, crazyperson and overlord of Ancient Egypt(It was a pseudo historical campaign).

It began so well - we conquered Tell El Amarna with our army, stormed into the temple and prevented the evil pharao Echnaton from conjuring Aton by running him through with the magic sword. Rejoice!

Problem: my character Fahid is kinda on Aton's side and carrying the evil magic artefact of terrible power in his purse. Ooops. And while everyone else is grabbing Echnaton's magic staff and money, Fahid goes to the altar, puts the magic artefact to use and conjures Aton. The dices fell badly, and no one could kill Fahid in time! Three of my fellow players went crazy from the horrors, and the one survivor joined the resistance against Aton and Fahid, new overlord of Egypt.

Luckily, my friends didn't lynch me afterwards because the GM revealed that Fahid was a)crazy as crazy can be b) Okir, the guy Fahid got his info from was actually a second personality Fahid invented because of the stress of being evil and sacrificing virgins all the time c) he was constantly hallucinating stuff. ( Me: Okay... I knew I was evil, but I didn't know I was crazy! Rest of the group: Yeah... we knew he was evil and sacrificed people... but we couldn't execute him just for that!) In my defence, I actually thought conjuring Aton might be a good thing. At the time. Fahid was a tragic character, don't you see? He meant well!

This is what I like about roleplaying. Sometimes the bad guys win. *evil laughter*

That fic which was actually supposed to be a short, slashy episode tag to "Frontier in Space" has now turned into a plotty (for certain definitions of plotty... I'm not sure bastardizing the plot of "Planet of the Daleks" counts), not terribly exiting gen piece of 13000 + words - but at least it's getting written. And there's lots of touching and psychic hi-jinks, so it counts as subtexty. However, the fic consists of 90% dialogue. Jo, Three and the Master are talky people. (The rest is them getting locked up. And arrested. And kidnapped. And locked up.)

My RPG meetup tried out the Star Trek RPG for the first time this week. It could be pretty fun, but we spent about five hours creating our characters, so by the time we started actually playing, we were all a bit tired. Nevertheless, true to Trek, we immediately got into ethical arguments while fighting those Breen. (Should we set our phasers to stun? Should we set them to stun even if we're firing at a spaceship? Are holograms people? Do holograms have feelings? Do people have feelings? Is it ethical to hope that there'll be Breen bodies left over to learn more about their biology?) I played a modified EMH.

The first lesson at a real school thing went well - it was actually more fun to teach a class of thirty "normal" students than to teach four or five remedial ones. And I was really surprised that when we played the "The Streets of London" the kids actually started to sing along. That was a really sweet moment.

Next week is exam time, so I'll be busy until Feb 7, but then Spring break is going to be pretty relaxing, and hopefully I'll find the time and inspiration to write. I've been sort of ineffectually dabbling at Who-fic, but nothing quite works yet.

I'm also selecting courses and lectures for next semester, and so far I'm rather underwhelmed - nothing looks really fun.

On the non-uni front, my RPG wizard is now definitely evil. The rest of the party (all but one) died at yesterday's adventure, but thanks to a mixture of lucky dice and cowardice, my character survived. I've now: sacrificed two virgins, conjured at least four demons (one of whom ate the virgin without obeying me!), narrowly avoided burning at the stake (my own party would have done it if they hadn't died!), desecrated a former church (by accident. A scheme went wrong.) and converted the surviving fellow player character to my evil ways (power corrupts). :D Then we got lots of XP, which I'll use to learn how to control minds (to avoid future burnings at the stake. Eventually, I guess, I should try to attain immortality.) However, my Achilles heel seems to be the inability to stay quiet about my evilness: I now know exactly why villains always brag and break out into evil laughter. Evil = wicked fun.

I'm back at home. I had a nice couple of days, but I think I caught the flu or something. Well, it's just a sore throat. I've started a RPG campaign (RuneQuest) as game master, which I'm excited and a little nervous about. (The horrible thing about our RPG group is that we've played together for years and have developed certain... bad habits. Me: "The baroness offers to pay you a thousand pennies if you join her explorer party." Group:"Okay, let's pretend to take the mission, rob the baroness, burn down her castle and pillage the village." Me:"...")

theclexfactor is awesome and made me a cover for Elseworlds! It's cool, because it's a mix of manip and sketch, which really fits the way my fic straddles the fence between comics and SV, and also it has Lex as Charles Xavier and Clark as quite a magnificent Magneto (sans helmet, which is great because he has the coolest facial expression!)
The awesome cover! Thanks so much :D

I signed up for svmadelyn's Kink/Cliché challenge. You get to suggest four kink or cliché prompts for yourself and then get one of these four. I suggested "genderswitch", "journey/quest", "character as prize/spoils of war" and "something with handcuffs". I got "handcuffs" and actually the plot idea (two fugitives must escape while cuffed together) I had for handcuffs was for JLU, but then I realized that toon!Lex wouldn't stay cuffed for longer than ten seconds unless he were unconscious, so it'll be SV fic.

Also, I read most of the fics over at CLFF wave 20 and harlequin_sv. Overall, I liked the Harlequin fics a lot better (the CLFF theme was "Pets", which mostly led to fluffy fics and I'm not a big fan of fluff). I loved the fics produced in the SGA Harlequin challenge two years ago, but I wish the SV challenge had given the writers more prompts. Like this, it got a little repetetive. But my absolute favourite of all the fics of both challenges is drakeofdross's fic for the CLFF. I can't wait for the story link to be made official to be able to rec it :D (And I can wait even less for the fic to be continued!!!)