Not better yet.

Okie, I need to go drop myself in a lake or something. I'm still irritable at work today, and it has to stop. Admittedly, I just spent over an hour in a phone queue because I kept running into phone operator blunders, when the conversation I was trying to get to was all of a minute long: "I have a bad hard drive. Model number X, for this thing. Yeah, just ship it, thanks."

I'm much less bitter and irritable when things go my way. On the flipside, wtf am I being irritable for?

In other news, the Webcomic Telethon's going on today, drumming up donations to Katrina vics. New comic every 20 mins. Not bad.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to drown my brain in music with a beat, hopefully improving my mood, and at the very least stifling the impulse to verbalize my trivial frustrations. Next, going downstairs and seeing if I can get a Netra to take a video card.

The trick is to keep breathing...

spycraft, apartment buildings.

First, Spycraft. I mounted an assault on the book this evening, trying to get a solid overview of wtf these maniacs were attempting. It _is_ a unique creation, I think, in gaming. Over the last decade or so, I've seen game systems go from the relatively limited and straightforward Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition system, where combat had few possible actions, and relatively simple rules, to systems like D20 and the contemporary White Wolf systems, where any action is possible, and the poor DM/GM/GC/storyteller is stuck trying to determine how to make a complex action fit into the damn rules, and what dice to roll and stats to add up to give it meaning.

Small wonder RP-heavy types are throwing their hands up and retreating to the simplicity of a GM-fiat system: It's not worth the trouble if the dice seem arbitrary anyway, despite all the efforts of the authors.

( Spycraft rantage )

um... okay, the stuff under the cut is terrbly verbose. The apartment buildings part of the above topic referred to when I _started_ writing this post, wherein I was being vaguely irked by the person _somewhere_ in this complex who's using AIM with all the sound effects on and his/her volume wwaaaaay up. I heard every time a message came in and went out for an extended exchange. Both people were either fast typists or exchanging one word at a time. Why was the sound still on? It wasn't like they were leaving the computer, or even forgetting the other was there for a moment. Mmmnh. Nevermind, I probably don't want to know.