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Many people like the approaching end-of-year, "it's good to wind-down, there are holidays" etc. I inevitably find myself a little manic as I want to get more of my unending list of things completed by the end of the year. Busy people never have enough time. Just as in the last post I'd produced around ten thousand words of content in a few days, this post also sees several thousand words completed in the past few days mainly in various gaming subjects again, such as Papers & Paychecks and RPG Review 41, but also for Exalted China and Eclipse Phase based on two game sessions this week. The Exalted China episode, entitled The Hanging Garden, was very much in the classic mythic Chinese style with a tragic romance, a hungry ghost, and a jealous warlord. Today's Eclipse Phase game evolved escaping from the clutches of the malicious Chinese supercomputer, 'Mogwai', from Vostok base in Antarctica, thus the scenario title, The Devil in the Icehouse, which also involved planned Dyson Spheres and a future Shkadov thruster.

Apropos caught up with Yaoping G., for lunch this week. We shared a conference session earlier this year on the philosophy of technology in the Netherlands, and we have a mutual interest in science fiction (her paper on The Man in the High Castle is a worthy read). Apart from such intellectual meeting of minds, the other major social event of the past few days was the annual Willsmere Christmas party. We did catch up with a few locals and took some time hanging out in what was supposed to be children's petting zoo. Of course being big kids we stayed for quite some time with visiting sheep, goat, rabbits etc. Finally, despite my own protests to the contrary, it looks like I will finish yet another Golden Owl before the year ends - specifically Spanish to Esperanto. It turns out that I have several three-quarter finished trees in my cross-language efforts and many of these are coming to an end, which contributes to what will be a very productive 2018.
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It appears that I have moved into end-of-year meeting mode. Just yesterday arranged for professor Clinton Fernandes, to the guest speaker at the Isocracy Network Annual General Meeting, slated for October 20 at the Kensington Town Hall (probably clashes with a LUV meeting, but timetables are tight). Clinton will be speaking on Australian foreign policy with a focus on East Timor and Witness K (not to be confused with Agent K from the film Men In Black, although correlations could be noted). For my own part I have just completed some 1700 words on an article Isocracy Profiles: Martin Luther King Jnr, which the second in this sporadic series (following Albert Einstein.

RuneQuest Gloranthan Con has had a couple of updates recently mainly behind the scenes. After a bit of poking around for my own alternative I discovered the joy of Drupal Webform and Webform Report, which has allowed me to put together a couple of pages for the auction. I can't believe that I'm selling my first print of White Bear and Red Moon form 1975, the game which launched Chaosium. Further, it will make an ideal template for the RPG Review store which has been offline since Quicksales closed its operations. I'm planning to have that at least partially in place by the end of October, as per the RPG Review Newsletter which I released yesterday.

In other gaming news went to see [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla for our irregular day of cheeesequest and Mice & Mystics. After a year or so of play we actually finished the basic scenario, Sorrow and Remembrance, and did so with relative ease courtesy of a succession of very beneficial die rolls and the availability of some handy magics. The night previous ran a game of Exalted Journey to the Far West where the travelling band discovered that a local village had been taken over by shapeshifting demons of seduction and gluttony. Credit to [profile] funduntheupfield for recognising a key theme from the original Journey to the West. Tomorrow will be Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels have found themselves trapped in a medical facility on Earth with various robots banging on the door that want to cut their stacks out.

Courtesy of a neighbour relieving themselves of a particularly large bookcase I've spent a few hours re-arranging a good deal of the furninsings around the house in an effort to save space. Somehow, despite the fact there is an additional item in play, I've actually managed to create more space and better space, with our sizeable liquour cabinet now in the lounge room along with a display cabinet holding the fish tank and turtle tank and various indoor pot plants. The bookcase itself will be gobbling up a stack of "do not sell" RPG books which will allow some of those which are currently in boxes to join a real shelving unit. I suppose it's spring (of sorts) so the idea of a spring clean does come to mind, but it also reminds me that my love of RPGs has resulted in a collection larger than most specialist game stores.
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Currently at Linux Users of Victoria about to deliver my presentation on Being An Acrobat: Linux and PDFs, mostly inspired by having to work with them rather than any great love for the format and standard. Knowing how to create, edit, manipulate, extract, search etc, such documents is, of course, absolutely essential in the contemporary environment, often encouraged claims that they are more secure. It's not true of course, and indeed in many ways they are one of the worst file formats. But they have a degree of ubiquity, and knowing how to work with them is the purpose of the presentation.

Thursday night we had a great session of Exalted China, with the mighty characters having defeated a bandit attack the session previous, and then followed on with actually making their way to the tomb objective of their story, meeting a sapient giant salamander on the way. There was a hilarious moment when one of the PCs was convinced (courtesy of a botched roll) that the tomb was cursed and the best character to fix this failed to do so. A nice example of an emergent narrative effectively.

Apart from that the rush to prepare for the 2018 European trip is beginning to take hold. We leave later this week, first to Frankfurt, then to Heidelburg, Stuttgart, north to Luxembourg, then Brussels, Ghent, The Hague, Amsterdam, Enschede, Oldenburg, Berlin, and then back to Frankfurt. There are at least three conferences that I want to attend on the way, and a good number of friends that I will make the effort to catch up - including some Isocracy people whom I have known for years but never met in person.

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