Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett

Personal Daily Horoscope of Thursday, 3 September 2009
http://www.astro.com

Sudden moves
Weak, transient effect: Today during the day you are likely to crave emotional excitement, something that departs from the routine of your daily life. You are likely to seek out people who are different from those you usually meet. You might spend the day in very different surroundings. And while you may feel a bit impulsive, these impulses make you feel more alive rather than inclined to act rashly or stupidly. On a more quiet level, you may use this energy to make needed changes in your immediate personal life or your domestic environment. While others may seem startled by your apparently sudden moves, these changes should be constructive, and the people in your life will accept them. If you have to deal with groups of people or with the general public, you will advocate change and new policies.

About 4 years at warpcon I won a best player prize for it’s a half orc life which was a wonderful D&D game in which I got to play a lawful neutral kobald orphan raised to believe she was human ‘child’.
It was an utter delight and I got to threaten to tell on the rest of my ‘family’ that I was going to tell Nanny and Nanny would not be please and we talked a giant into helping us and it was a blast.
I got the vampire the Masquerade source book as my prize and this pleased me no end.

Then a friend who had never rpgs or larped what so ever and didn’t get what any of it was about,was given a lend of it to open up the world of gaming to her. She started to come with me to conventions and to play games and found she enjoyed it which was cool, there have been a few people over the years that didn’t know what gaming was and ended up giving it a go due to being around me.

Unfortunately over a year a go we stopped being friends, she had her life get very complicated and it seemed that as her best friend I was the only one she could and did get angry with and nothing I could do was right and she went from seeing me as her best friend and mirror twin to being a threat of some kind and I am still confused as to why but people go through some crazy shit when they think they are dying of cancer.

And it was someone else who told me she wanted nothing to do with me or see me ever again and not to contact her which came as a shock and I honoured that, I kept my distance, I gave up some of the activities we had in common and events we had helped ran graciously and never spoke about why I stopped going I just stopped going, as the last thing that someone who is fighting cancer needs is more stress.

I did not stop going to gaming conventions, as hard as that was esp when it came apparent that she was happily assassinating my character to anyone who would listen and making people choose her over me and again I held my peace and said nothing even when I was frozen out and snubbed by people who I had considered friends, but clearly weren’t as they never spoke to me about what happened and that’s fine they made their choices.

I have been going to gaming conventions for over 13 years even when I was expecting my first born so that wasn’t ever going to change and I would never begrudge her going gods know conventions are big enough and I am still pleased I talked her into go to her first at gaelcon two years ago and play. I love the hobby and the more joy in brings into people’s lives the better, esp those who need it.

And as for the person who is no longer in my life and who’s friendship I still miss ( as it was before things went screwy ) I still don’t bear them any ill will or malice never have but I must admit seeing that they have written a game scenario to run at a convention using my source book which I won, I had conflicting emotions.

But it’s just a book, a thing and in the larger scale of things the more new people we have coming into the hobbie the better and more people we have starting to write games for people to play then that is a good thing and so is despite it all that she has lived to write it.

The best thing and the worst thing about going to the cinema has to be other people.

When it is the best you are part of a wondrous shared experience and the audience becomes one, reaching together, gasping, giggling, sighing and getting caught up in the movie and there is nothing quiet like it even the odd funny exclaimation from someone which the whole place breaks up laughing at. Some of the best movie going experiences I have ever had were those like that,the majority of them were in the Savoy 1 over the years and three of the most memorable were The Crow, Bram Stokers Dracula and Practical Magic.

These days I find such experiences are very very rare, even when we do go to see a kids movie, yes children will be children but that magic seems to be missing. It seems a lot of people don’t want to take part in the group experience which is going to see a movie with maybe 100 strangers and sharing a common experience, we get people having conversation, talking and texting on phones or even checking the time on them which still creates a bright glare which will ruin the night vision of those around them.

I have for the post part given up on going to see mainstream movies due to the lack of consideration of other people. I find I get more fun out of once off special screenings, like when Pravda were showing movies, watching 28 days later in there was a wonderful experience.

So if people are the best and worst thing about trying to watch a movie and as great as home entertainment systems are they can’t gve you the experience of 20 other people giggling or groaning spontaneous along with you how can you have that level of good interaction with out the bad and well with out having to leave the house and comfort of sprawling on the sofa?

It seems that twitter may be the answer. It has the abilty for people to share and react together in a connected way with out having to endure the less plesant aspects of people’s proximity. Tomorrow evening just such an experiment is taking place. Damien Mulley has been organising a watching of the princess bride ( which is one of my favourates ) to take place at 8pm tomorrow evening and people from all over the country are going to watch it in unison and twitter as they watch. If you don’t do the twitter thing and you want to read the comments you will find them here and here also is the facebook event page. There is even the option to pop into Spy bar who are having a screening of it run by SoundCheck with free popcorn.

I am really interested in how this will work out and how many people take part,
as a collective shared experience is something so many of us just don’t do these days and it is part of the glue which sticks people together as a community.

http://www.youtube.com/v/B-m6JDYRFvk

Yup still having issues with trying to embed you tube, have to say running the posts parallel on blogspot has me liking the ease of functionality over there more and more.
http://thaedydal.blogspot.com/

Strength and Courage

(Copyright David L. Griffith 1998)

It takes strength to be certain,
It takes courage to have doubts.

It takes strength to fit in,
It takes courage to stand out.

It takes strength to share a friend’s pain,
It takes courage to feel your own pain.

It takes strength to hide your own pain,
It takes courage to show it and deal with it.

It takes strength to stand guard,
It takes courage to let down your guard.

It takes strength to conquer,
It takes courage to surrender.

It takes strength to endure abuses,
It takes courage to stop them.

It takes strength to stand alone,
It takes courage to lean on a friend.

It takes strength to love,
It takes courage to be loved.

It takes strength to survive,
It takes courage to live.

Yes I am back,there are many things which I simply want to write about either to share or scrapbook or make a record of or just to write to get it out of my brain. Mind you the last few weeks have been more like being an psychonaut then an astronaut but with out the drugs but big with the head and heart fuckery, but I want to scrawl stuff here, which is good rather then feeling that I should or have to. Which reminds me I must get around to playing Psychonauts again.

It’s still been a busy few weeks with the kids of school we have been busy working our way through a list we compiled of things we want to do and see. One of these was the exhibition called ‘the dead zoo at large‘ which is a selection from the still closed natural history museum hosted in the Collins barrack’s museum. It is nice to see the nick name for the natural history museum being used, it is certainly how 3 generations of my family have referred to it.

The exhibit is a pretty good selection even if it does seem rather small compared to what we are used to seeing in the natural history museum but most of our favourites were there from the skeletons of the giant irish deer, the wolf, the otters and the snake eating a frog. There are new exhibits as well, a touch table which is great for the kids, to have a section of things they are allowed touch, a replica raptor skeleton which went down really well and a thylacine.
As I started to explain to my own two brats about what a thylacine was and what a marsupial was and how it was an apex predator I ended up with about 9 other kids all listening and asking questions. I have always thought thylacines were pretty cool and it was fun to share that.
The dead zoo at large will be in place until the 29th of august.

Another exhibit which was deemed pretty cool by the kids was the “Planet Earth: our place in space” it has souvenirs of Apollo Missions, from patches to signed photos, a model of the rockets used, a listing of all the meteors that have hit Ireland and a rather nice touch exhibit of a chunk of a meteorite which is bigger then a rugby ball and carbon dating has it tagged at hitting the earth 5,000 years ago in Argentina.

We then went for pancakes in Chachacha in cow’s lane, where my kids despite having only been there once before declared they would have their usual which pretty much means they want to go back there a lot, which means they will behave for fear of me not bringing them again which is a good thing.

Then it was on to the Bubble exhibit at the sceince gallery. We spent over two hours in there, from the Bubble garden looking at all the different shapes and types of bubbles and having a go at making lots of our own to being in a bubble tube and then chilling out on bean bags talking about everything we saw and got to play with in the 10,000 peacock feathers display room,
which harks back to the early displays of such work/art done with light and lasers refracted through foam and then projected on the walls of the likes of the Fillmore in the 60s.

Which was a good way to come down from all the excitement of the day before we faced the bus journey home and it was the type of day out that the weather didn’t impact on which is a good thing, give how the summer has been.