The Great Fiction Move of 2007

The library where I work is remodeling and rearranging the departments. There are at least half a dozen of us working on the move. We're going to be doing nothing but moving books for the next month. This is not fun. Compound this with the fact that my roommate abandoned me early yesterday morning and my childhood cat had to be put to sleep on the same day. Suffice it to say that I am not having a good day/week/whatever.

Regards,
-Benjamin

Post Secret Video

Google Reader Shared Items

I've added a list here of my recent shared items on Google Reader. I really like Google Reader, especially now that I can read off line. Although, this is less important in light of my recent laptop's complete hardware failure. It's been over heating for month and I guess that something inside just wore out. There's a fair bit of components there that are still good but I don't know what is what and the damn thing seems impossible to open without breaking anything. I have salvaged the hard drive and when I get the right hardware I can recover my data. Now, I have to figure out why the items are not showing up right now, maybe it only catalogs new shared stuff or it only checks periodically.

Regards,
-Benjamin

Tibia, I'm really bad at it.

Tibia is a 2d MMO RPG with SNES quality graphics. Pastor Pat introduced me to it a couple years ago but I didn't have internet access at home until recently. It's got a game client which runs natively under Linux so I can play. I've been trying to play Tibia recently and I keep dying. People keep bringing high level monsters into the lover level area that I'm trying to fight in. I've died to a Wevryn and a trio of Dwarf Warriors some one rope-a-doped up from a lower level. (Rope-a-Dope, do bring a monster up a ladder. Normally monsters are not able to climb ladders, however players can drop them a rope which they can climb) I haven't been able to buy anything yet, I keep dying before I return with enough money to get anything.

Regards,
-Benjamin

Kode Blog Begins Again

I want to blog.

I don't know what to say.

I'm a techie, a nerd, a gamer, and a geek.

Last night I was playing dungeons and dragons at me friend Pastor Pat's house, yes he's a pastor and he plays D&D more on this later. It's a big group, there's 7 of us, although we're usually missing at least one person per session. We're exploring the ancient forgotten passages of a library deep underground. There are lots of rats down here, lots, and lots, and lots. We've found rat swarms, dire rats, fiendish dire rats, fiendish rats, and a fiendish rat swarm. There have been tons of traps, at least a dozen. These books are well protected, and for good reason. We've found a bunch of books which are extremely valuable and contain powerful information.

And then there's the books swarms. Hundreds of animated tiny books fly off the shelves and attempt to bludgeon our group to death. They're immune to weapon damage and deal a good amount of damage to us. When we entered the library several members of the group were a little lower in level than the rest (level 2 vs the group's level of 3) and those missing hit points really made the book swarm a much more difficult opponent.

Our GM is doing a good job of incorporating the back stories of most of the characters. It is a little difficult for my character to do some things, I'm the only sneaky type character, everyone else is lawful good or as close as their class will allow (the bard, and the barbarian are chaotic good). I've maxed out my ranks in Sleight of Hand so I can hide some things from them.

The ranger, played by Pastor Pat's wife Katrina, and I are developing a good relation ship, I've got her trained to stay right behind me and we go off sneaking around together. She stays exactly 5' away from me to reduce her chances of being included in any traps I may trigger.

So, I'll end this with a description of the final fight, this was supposed to b3e the big fight at the end but we took a left instead of a right and it was second to last, right before a Larger Monstrous Scorpion which grabbed my frail roguish body and squished me into submission, one round before the rest of the party got there and smashed it, we even harvested the poison from it's stinger.

THE BIG FIGHT AT THE END.
I head down another set of stone stairs and see rats, lots of rats. I retreat and get the big dwarf and tell him. He asks how many and I tell him that this is the biggest room we've seen thus far so there could be lots. Our GM laughs slightly. I say, well they didn't jump me so maybe we can make some preparations and battle plans. I begin fashioning makeshift molontov-cocktails out of pints of oil and pass them around. I tell thr group every one get inside the room fast and spread out, if we bunch up here it'll be easy for the swarms to hit multiple of us at once.

So, we rush into the room, dwarf first. Well, there's not just rat swarms down here but there's 16 fiendish rats, a rat swarm and a book swarm. The bard is singing and we're blessed so the fight is a bit more fair than under other circumstances. The bard and the sorceress go down when the books and rats overlap on them, but only them everyone else is out of the way, thanks to good planning. The sorceress did get one good burning hands off against both swarms and some of the fiendish rats. Then comes the molontov-cocktail barrage right where the swarms overlap. We eliminate the book swarm with that, it's exceptionally vulnerable to fire, and the rats disperse shortly after. Our cleric sweeps in and revives the down party members and we mop up the fiendish rats pretty easily, as they're more of a distraction and a nuisance than a danger, like the swarms.

Regards,
-Benjamin