The End is Nigh, Graduate Studies, Weekend Plans

[tcpip]

Tomorrow I am giving an address at 11 am the Melbourne Unitarian Church entitled The End is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth. Putting it together has been an interesting exercise, ranging from an investigation into various (failed) predictions of earth's apparent demise from religious prophecy to a somewhat more secular investigation into the effects of global warming and the various forms of environmental destruction and the existential threat that poses to human and non-human species. The address correlates quite nicely (and without any pre-planning) with strikes and protests by school students who are understandably frustrated with political inaction. "Protest and survive" was a rallying slogan when I was their age in the early-mid 1980s and the issue was the possibility of nuclear war; it remains just as important and realistic now.

The past few days have also seen significant progress in my MSc in Information Systems studies and having finally received the relevant course material (lost in the post), I'm making some headway in the GradDip in Economics. My weakest point in the latter will be econometrics, an area which I have managed to avoid in most of my life as a student, but a comment by Tim R., in a different context suggests that the best way to learn it will be to program it, which will work nicely as I have planned to write a training course for high-performance computing usage for economists.

A rather full weekend is planned with ser_pounce and hathhalla coming around in about ten minutes for our regular cheesequest followed by a session of D&D which, as is my want, is based on a historical fantasy version of the era of Charlemagne. For this scenario of retrofitted the classic Moldvay scenario The Lost City, placing it in North Africa as they search for the lost Eagle of the XIXth. Tomorrow nephew Luke and his housemate Nick are coming over for dinner; I am considering firing up a game of RuneQuest for them, having given Luke a copy of the game for his birthday a few years back (and he is yet to play).

Comments

[hfzdreams]

Hope you guys have a good time! Enjoy RuneQuest!

[tcpip]

No RuneQuest, but ended up doing some fencing instead. So swords are the common denominator.

[kingtycoon]

The Lost City really stands up as one of the better adventures TSR ever put out. I've run it in different iterations at least twice, adapting it to my needs at the time & it's the third adventure I ever played in. Good, Good Stuff. Though my favorite thing about it is that it was created by a group at Kent State, where I went to school & where I played too.

[tcpip]

It certainly has a lot going for it, and rather like The Keep on the Borderlands and even more so The Isle of Dread, it can easily be elaborated to a mini-campaign in its own right, something which some TSR modules were not always great at. Comparing for example, Journey to the Rock with The Lost City, the former offers very little and a GM would need to elaborate on what's provided to run it even on a single session.

I don't suppose any of the original group were at Kent State when you were there?

[kingtycoon]

No, it was a new breed - college-based groups are brief associations I think.

Because I live near a NASA facility I ended up gaming with a lot of rocket scientists and a couple of the older ones are 1st generation players from Lake Geneva who claim affiliation to the Ur-Table of Gygax/Arneson, though I tend to only believe them when I'm feeling romantic.

[tcpip]

It is true about college groups being relatively brief associations.

I easily forget this because I worked my way through my undergraduate degree and as a result it took me eight years. In addition I've been a bit of a 'perpetual student' for the last decade or so.

Would your gaming with rocket scientists include Barry Nakazono, the author of Living Steel and Phoenix Command?

[kingtycoon]

Ah, no - that's JPL stuff. I'm at the Glenn research center. (Strictly speaking my associates are mainly metallurgists).

[tcpip]

Ah, understood. So the rocket scientists in question are more materials and material testing.

Still pretty damn awesome, you know?

[sklei4]

Congrats on the progress made and the protest said.

[tcpip]

Thank you for the kind words!