House of Ainsley: Out-of-Character Discussion

currently living in a camper in the back yard... in winter...

Yeesh. Your contractor really dropped the ball on this one. Start spreading the word so that no one in your social circle ever hires them, and look for lawsuit-worthy breaches of contract if you're so inclined. Western Montana is no place to stay in a camper, not with the wind chills hitting the deep negatives.

Also, I see that Karnoz is back with a reply! One more post out of me before I go to bed. Peachy keen?

The House of Ainsley wrote:

Yeesh.  Your contractor really dropped the ball on this one.  Start spreading the word so that no one in your social circle ever hires them, and look for lawsuit-worthy breaches of contract if you're so inclined.  Western Montana is no place to stay in a camper, not with the wind chills hitting the deep negatives.

Don't get me started.... we have been telling them, even begging them, to get a move on before winter set in because once it did, all the wind and snow would be coming non stop. But...what do we know, we just live here.... so delay, postpone, excuse, excuse, delay....and now we have snow storms.... damnit.

Quote :

Also, I see that Karnoz is back with a reply!  One more post out of me before I go to bed.  Peachy keen?  

Let er rip! Iv'e been chomping at the bit for years to kill something....

GoldenDrakon wrote:

Don't get me started.... we have been telling them, even begging them, to get a move on before winter set in because once it did, all the wind and snow would be coming non stop. But...what do we know, we just live here.... so delay, postpone, excuse, excuse, delay....and now we have snow storms.... damnit.

That's pretty shiftless and irresponsible of them. Know any good attorneys around Great Falls? A simple letter of intent from an attorney ("Honor your contract or I'm getting involved!") might be enough to light a fire under them.

GoldenDrakon wrote:

Let er rip! Iv'e been chomping at the bit for years to kill something....

I have my drawing pencils and sketch paper laid out. No particular reason. Really.

Good night, amigos!

Strength:
Being able to crush a can of tomatoes.

Dexterity:
Being able to dodge a thrown tomato.

Constitution:
Being able to eat a rotten tomato.

Intelligence:
Knowing that a tomato is really a fruit.

Wisdom:
Knowing that you shouldn't put tomatoes in a fruit salad.

Charisma:
Being able to sell fruit salads with tomatoes in them.


Carry on, tomato lovers.

Omg..... it's so simple. How have I not seen this before?

Wraith wrote:

Omg..... it's so simple. How have I not seen this before?

I know, right?  It's like a cosmic truth: Right in front of your eyes the whole time, but you still have to wake up one day and realize it.  Like where the little light goes when you close the refrigerator door, right?  

Little known fact: Being able to pelt people with your own tomatoes is another sign of a good Dexterity.  

(...just as being able to shrug off a barrage of thrown tomatoes is the mark of a high Constitution. Usually this happens when you exhibit a very poor Charisma in front of a live audience.    )


In other news, I'm finally quitting my Correctional Officer job at the prison!  I should be a lot happier after this.  That job was eating me alive!  

Never become a prison guard.  There's no joy in it.  

Whoo hoo!! Congrats man! Does this mean you found a replacement job?

Well, not yet.  But I'm on the Selection Lists for two of our local Post Offices (the ones right here in Canton and just west from here, in Kaufman), meaning that, as soon as the Postmaster General in Dallas tells the Postmaster of either branch to go ahead and hire someone, I'm in.  

In the meantime, I'm going back to driving for Uber in Tyler.  Here's hoping that Uber has become more popular in Tyler over the past year.  My father works at the Trinity Mother Francis hospital in North Central Tyler, and he says that people are always asking for taxis and Uber cars to drive them home, so I might try haunting North Central Tyler for a change.  

I still need to get back on here and update everyone.  So how are you today?  

I'm ok. Just got back from vacation. I have a few days left before I head back to work. I planned this because I knew I would need a vacation from my vacation! Trust me, taking a five year old on a trip, especially to theme parks - its a lot of work. I averaged around 20000 steps a day for last week.... ugh. And don't even mention Rollercoasters.....

Its good news about the postal service hopefully you wont be with Uber for too long

I got hired! *happy dance*

So I can finally stop job-hunting 24/7, but I'll still have to drive for Uber until the Postal Service emails me a date, time and place to begin my training and orientation. And I turned in my Correctional Officer uniforms and other State-issued gear last Thursday, so I'm ready to close the book on that unpleasant chapter of my life.

Now, back to the campaign! Sorry for going offline for a while there.

I liked the SUBBY subforum. It was cute, in a certain way.

But I finally decided to repurpose it towards something useful. So behold, The Far Corners of the World!

Now I just have to get to work filling it up...after I grab some lunch. I'm famished!

OKay, getting back into the groove here. I'll see you all after I get home from work tomorrow! Hurray for days off! Yay!

The House of Ainsley wrote:

OKay, getting back into the groove here.  I'll see you all after I get home from work tomorrow!  Hurray for days off!  Yay!  

You're toying with my emotions again, aren't you...  

Yahoo's being a royal pain in the ass again.  Apparently, Karnoz's map was too big to upload.  So I finally broke down and upgraded my web hosting plan, and I split Karnoz's map into two pieces for good measure.  I'm up to paying $119 for a whole year now, but at least I can use Filezilla for file uploads to my website again; it's been a very long two or three years of being limited to Yahoo's clunky-as-hell File Manager for my uploading.  

There.  I finally got Filezilla to work!  It turns out that the map in three parts wasn't necessary after all; even though the full map is well over 1 megabyte in size, Filezilla just got it across.

I told you the map was big.  And it's big enough to break the page boundaries, so remember to click Spoiler again if you need to return the page to normal size.  

Too bad I forgot to add numbers to the Corbies as well as the other combatants, but I get the feeling that Karnoz might not be engaging the Taxmen, the Bingers or the Watch anyway; as per the plan, the Corbies are just there to keep the heat off of Karnoz and Arno while they make a run for Yorgo (who's still a little bit somewhere to the Northwest, off the map).

And I never did finish the Gametable markers for height and depth! So for now, I've used the altitude markers (which I designed for use with flying characters and creatures), to designate any surfaces which are 5 or 10 feet above ground level. Those tidbits may or may not become important soon....

Unfortunately, I have to get ready for work now.  It's Amazon Sunday at the Post Office, and the lovely thing about being a substitute carrier is that I get all the scuzzy shifts.  I have to run Amazon deliveries tomorrow, too.  Ah, well.  As long as the holiday pay is good....

I'll try to finish Karnoz and Sylvea when I get home after work today.  See ya then!  

So happy you got hired!!! Congrats!

How is the new job going? Are you still with Uber? Let us know, man! Hope all is going peachy!!!

Thank you!  I've been working several weeks where I only got one day off that week, but at least I'm getting paid well.  My paycheck last Friday was $1,947.13.  For two weeks!  Working for the Federal Government is great!  Unless you're in the Armed Forces, that is.  Those military guys get screwed, as Drakon, Tiger and myself know well.

I just got home from a shift that was roughly ten or eleven hours (7 AM to 5:40 PM), and I was too busy to take a lunch break, so I'm ready for dinner and bed already.  It's Circular Tuesday, the day when all the advertisers in town get together and mail out scads of Shopping Guides, at least one for each household.  It's junk mail, but you might be surprised by how many people will call our Postmaster to complain if they don't get their weekly ads.  How empty does your life have to be before you look forward to getting a mailbox stuffed with enough ads to paper a Rottweiler's kennel?  So naturally, I had to stop at every!  Mailbox!  On my entire!  58-mile mail route!  No wonder I'm plumb knackered.  

But since you asked, it was about three weeks ago when I went ahead and cancelled my Uber account.  Far too often, I'd be waiting around Tyler for six or eight hours, and I'd only take home around $30 for that day (and that's the profit, after getting back to Canton and refueling my car).  So don't buy the hype; driving for Uber just isn't worth the time, effort, costs and occasional bad rider.  

I have returned!  And as I was just explaining to GD on Facebook, I've had a very recent epiphany that changes a few things about my lifestyle:

So after getting home from work, it was typically my habit to get a quick, late lunch, then relax by hopping onto Facebook, Neverwinter Nights or Age of Conan — or, possibly, two or all three of those in a single evening — and before I knew it, it was time to get ready for work the next day and go to bed.  But  after taking pics and editing pics and creating a thoughtful whopper of a post on one of Facebook's many Game of Thrones groups only for that post to be completely buried and forgotten by the next evening, it finally hit me: the joys of Facebook groups are very fleeting.  Have I been wasting too much time on them?

Perhaps it's not so much a revelation as it is the forceful death of denial.  I have seen the same thing happen with various Neverwinter Nights servers; all the time and effort I spent on Pirate Isles of the Forgotten Realms now means little to nothing; the server ceased to exist roughly seven years ago, and nothing lasting has come from all that game time, save for some doodles of Serrica Thallys, a Chaotic Evil Cleric of Umberlee (and my flagship character in that formerly persistent world).


Every other person who was on that server seems to have fallen off the face of the planet, and I can never go back to Pirate Isles.  No one's left for me to chat with about any of the adventuring parties we formed, any of the story arcs we saw through to their ends, any legendary relics that we found, any defeats we suffered...now, it's like we never played at all.  Same with the Andrune game world.  Same with Ravenloft: Prisoners of the Mist.  Same with Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss.  Same with Masks of Venice.  Same with Legacy of the North.  Same with Thay.  Same with Savage Eden.  Even Kissmet and Savage Frontier are falling by the wayside.  And those are Neverwinter Nights servers, and NWN communities are less numerous and more tightly woven than those of the more popular massively multiplayer games, such as Age of Conan.  Everything that I've ever done and accomplished in AoC has rarely mattered for longer than one week, let alone a year.

Should I continue to invest any more time, effort and passion on something which won't matter at all in another five years, or two years, or perhaps less than one?  I no longer see why I should.  At some point in everyone's life, we have to cast aside all the dross and distraction and ask ourselves, "What do I love?"  Perhaps I should invest my joy in something a bit more lasting.  And time has demonstrated that worlds formed from paper and pencils are far more enduring than ones formed from electrons and pixels.  I can no longer chat with anyone about the time when Serrica the Cleric descended into the underwater lair of Podarge the Hag Queen and returned with her head, but two decades later, GD, Tiger and I still bring up the time when Wolflen the Fighter stymied Willard the Thief's big plan to steal Duke Eowuld's suit of golden full plate armor by entering the jousting tournament and legitimately winning it by unhorsing all comers, including Duke Eowuld himself.  The right choice has become perfectly clear...too clear for me to ignore or forget anymore.

So I started cleaning up my house and gathering all of my gaming materials, sculpted miniatures (some which I finished painting, others which beg for completion) and art materials into what I've dubbed my Creativity Corner.  In the doing, I finally finished organizing my World of Darkness collection and realizing that it was a bit larger than I had thought...


...as well as the fact that, in my numerous book-acquiring visits to eBay, I somehow accidentally bought two copies of Isle of the Mighty for Changeling: The Dreaming.  So it looks like I'll have to try my hand at selling something on eBay again; I really only need one copy of the book.

And to my elation, I found my old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles character from when my friend Ben ran a short but sweet TMNT campaign about twelve or fourteen years back.  And here I was, already resigned to the idea that this character had been lost forever, as other characters have become casualties in the ongoing war against time before.  And now Donna Diggs returns, in all her typo-ridden glory!  (...not my typos, of course; I'm a former regional Spelling Bee champion, and I certainly know how to spell "original" and "weapon".)   When our party had to track down a bunch of mole/human hybrid mutants who had tunneled into a bank vault and made off with a buttload of gold, my human/badger mutant was the only one who could dig tunnels.  Moles trump badgers when it comes to digging around underground; mutant badgers have Tunneling, while mutant moles have Excavation, and those moles had made the most of Excavation.  They had dug themselves an underground fortress!  But we didn't need Excavation to dig a tunnel into the back of their hidey hole and catch them by surprise; Tunneling would do the job quite nicely.  So Donna Diggs dug a big damned tunnel right down into Mole City (with the other players' characters — a mutant German Shepherd, a mutant housecat and a mutant grizzly bear — right behind my mutant badger) and we kicked a lot of mutant mole ass and brought the gold back, along with five tied-up, chained-up mutant moles in the back of my badger/human's truck.  And for as long as that campaign lasted, there wasn't a single friggin' mutant turtle — ninja or otherwise — in it!  Good times.)

And to complete my Creativity Corner, I ordered this drafting table from Michaels yesterday afternoon.  As soon as it's ready for me to pick up from the Tyler location, they'll send an email my way, and I'll head out to Tyler and bring it home.  I can't wait!  Let the doodles begin in earnest!  

I'd promise that I'll get the House of Ainsley campaign thundering back down the road, and I do wholly intend to do that.  But history has proven that I haven't been the best at keeping my word in that regard.  So all I can really do is try.  I'll do what I can to post more regularly, and if the campaign does start speeding along, excellent!  But if life insists on getting in the way, all I can do is try to surmount those obstacles when I can.  All I ask is that all y'all do the same.  I like to think that I've started something good here; the least I can do is cast aside the fleeting distractions that ultimately don't matter in the least, and see the House of Ainsley to their fateful fruition.  I'll do it if you do it.

Deal?  

(Okay, bed time again.  I'll be back tomorrow.  Peace!)

Okay, before I hit the sack (again), I got into Hero Machine 3 and hammered together seven portraits: four of our protagonists and three of their companions/henchmen/lackeys.  I'm sure that I overlooked someone's descriptive details and gave someone green eyes where he/she should have had brown eyes or whatever, but that's why I opted for Hero Machine at this stage: It's better to screw something up about a character's looks here and now — and to easily correct the flaws via Hero Machine — than to commit myself to sketching pencils and mar the paper with a million eraser marks after I screw up there.  Consider these portraits something of a set of rough drafts; if I boogered up something about them and their looks, now's the time to mention it.  

After these portraits are finalized, I'll be including them in my next efforts to spruce up The Party topic, firstly by promoting The Party from a mere Sticky to one of the threads in the top section of the House of Ainsley mother page.  After that, I may be adding headers and footers, and I may also arrange them in sections, per Blooded Ainsleys (like Gustov), Ainsley Bastards (like Keitha) and Outsiders (like Karnoz and Sylvea).  Ideas on sprucing up The Party and other topics in other ways are welcome, as always.

Begin your cheering, jeering and constructive criticism...now.  



(Wait till I get home from work tomorrow, Tiger, and I'll throw in Kämpfer's portrait too.   )

Okay, suggestions and requests for improvement.  Let me hear them!

So everything's perfect with my depictions of your characters?  Cool.  

Okay, so now that I've taken a moment to hide the spoilerific doodles, here's that drafting table that I've been yammering on about:

Spoiler:

The drawing surface can be angled up and down, as you might expect, and the whole table itself can be raised or lowered to suit artsy people from a variety of sizes and proportions.  The little pencil cup there hangs on a couple of pivots, so that no matter how you angle the drafting surface, the cup will remain upright.  

Spoiler:

There are two sturdy little canvas drawers under the drawing surface.  You can store whatever you want in them; I myself have drawing tools (like straight edges and elliptical stencils) in the left drawer and a bunch of photos, books and magazines for references in the other; over the years, I've gathered a pretty decent selection of references to help me with foreshortening, anatomical proportions and other tricky details about sketching and drawing.

Spoiler:

My doodles are badly in need of some organization.  I'm still working on it.  Maybe some stackable desk organizers would help.  



Part of the drafting table includes this little surface that slides in and out, so you have a place to put extra art implements and whatnot.  But even when it's all the way retracted, it still sticks out about four inches or so, which would cause my drafting table to jut out into the opening to my bedroom.  So I took that little surface out and set it aside (so it'll be around if I ever move my drafting table somewhere else).  It's not like I need that little surface anyway; I have a big, white table next to the drafting table to hold all my art media and keep it handy for me.  

Spoiler:

Some decent lighting helps, of course.  Thanks for putting in the track lights, Dad!  I can angle those lamps right down wherever I need some extra light.  

So anyway, that's my drafting table.  Might you have room in your house for one?  

*races Wraith back to the OOC topic*

*wins*

*Instantly loses race*

Okay, just a little post to get us moving. I'm going to look up the spells she has stocked a bit better now that I've refreshed my memory and can actually play D&D much better now. You said the spell list was from 3rd Edition?

It's a combination of spells from 3rd Edition and 3.5 Edition; most of them are from 3rd, but the Libris Mortis spells as well as the spells from the various splatbooks and supplements (like 'Stormwracked' and 'Song and Silence') are a mixed bag of 3rd and 3.5.  The two editions are perfectly compatible, though, just with minor differences in the details (ie. Rangers and their Favored Enemies bonuses).

I also see that the jibber-jabber posts from Sylvea's thread have vanished into the ether.  Did we decide to delete them after all?