Sysadmin Tasks, Gaming, Japanese, New Rats

I would like to say that working 9+ hours a day with 3+ hours of travel time is wearing thin, especially with the increasing darkness of Melbourne wintersm but the reality is that I'm really enjoying the work. Have accumulated a great deal of knowledge about Xen, to the point where I half-jokingly suggested updating Robert Pirsig's famous book with a new and obvious name, and with more utility on the title subject.

This weekend started with calisi's Covenant game, which played out like a Quentin Taratino film and almost went nuclear but ended happily. Also over the weekend attended Retrocon, where I ran two sessions of DuckQuest, one of Apple Lane and played in a ver interesting mirror-universe of FASA's Star Trek RPG.

Have had a few moments of Japanese culture recently; attended a Japanes festival in Box Hill with ser_pounce and hathhalla. It was largely contemporary and mainstream, whereas I prefer the traditional and alternative, but nevertheless an enjoyable day. On topic, saw the Ghibli Studio's Tales from Earthsea with imajica_lj and caseopaya; it was fairly disappointing from a studio which otherwise has done very good work. Earthsea's author, Ursula K. Le Guin, expresses her mixed feelings.

Now, apropros the previous two paragraphs, and with my prior extremely minimal knowledge of (and even interest in) Japanese culture, I've been given further consideration to running RuneQuest's Land of Ninja (terrible title) but mixing it with Legend of the Five Rings Way of the Ratling and probably Lee Gold's GURPS Japan. All this leads to the news that the rodent Rogue has two new friends, a rather scruffy 1 year old named Ragamuffin and a cheeky six month old named Scoundrel; have we detected a theme yet? They're getting along quite well, although Rogue is claiming top-rat status on the basis of seniority.