And so it begins... again. Having officially ended my hiatus from gaming and also rekindled my interest in the game, I will be STing an Exalted game starting May 19th. This will be my first real use of the 2nd edition rules, my only other experience being an attempt to convert extremely high-powered PCs from a previous campaign. That didn't go as well as I'd have liked, but the attempt of conversion was probably a mistake to begin with. Now I'll be dealing with starting level characters and can deal exclusively with the new ruleset. I might be a little excited. And obsessed.

The game will begin in the Principalities of An-Teng, where the Royalty established by the Realm is losing their grip on power. Local lords and barons are asserting more independence, cults to the Golden Lord and the Pale Mistress are flourishing, and the First and Forsaken Lion has turned his eye to a land rife with conflicting interest and saturated with ancient manses and artifacts of the First Age.

The Circle will begin the game searching for a legacy left for them from the First Age. What they will find is the Valley of the Demonborn.

...whee!

Spring break week is upon me! Ah, the respite from classes, the road trips, the late nights... the full time job. Oops. The illusion of being back in college only extends so far. Still, the extra nights off give me a chance to make sure I'm prepared for the second exam next week, and it'll be nice to see Monica for more than just a couple hours on Tuesday and Thursday.

My MP3 player gets a pretty good workout at my job, as I regularly will have a few hours a day when I need something playing and a radio is ergonomically impossible. As such, I'm burning out on a lot of the songs I have on it, and I need to come up with some new playlists to swap in. My tastes tend to be fairly eclectic, so suggestions would be welcome.

Lastly, I normally shy away from people who love displaying endless photos of cats and other fuzzy things, but for some reason This just cracked me up.

Yes, it's that time, my first politically themed post on LJ. Hopefully this will be an exceptionally rare occurrence, given my distaste for politics in general. However, a topic that came up on the grabass morning show I listen to inspired me to vent at least a little. I expect my thoughts will piss off just about anyone who bothers to read them, which is par for the course for political talk in my experience. Since it's rather long, I'll cut-and-link for ease of reading.

( Long, very likely offensive political commentary )

I received my exam back on Tuesday and scored 137 out of a possible 135 points. It turns out tests are a lot easier when you follow a three step program: 1) Go to class, 2) Read the textbook, and 3) Do the homework. I wish I'd known about this ten years ago. Anyway, I missed a couple small things and picked up the difference with interest on bonus questions. It's honestly hard for me to even describe how I felt when I got my score, I'd wanted to believe I'd done well and that I'd learned the material, but seeing the result gave me such an overwhelming sense of relief. It also finally made me feel like I was doing the right thing... as I said in a previous post, it's a concrete, definitive and objective measurement of not just how I'm doing in a class, but how far I've come from the person I was in Rolla.

Now of course I'm going to press my luck, because after I reviewed the questions I missed, which were graded by TAs off an answer sheet, I'm pretty sure I should have actually gotten a higher score than I did. We'll see how that goes today in class.

I'm updating this post from work, and there was a brief but extremely violent thunderstorm this morning, so I'm wondering if my power is out at home. I guess I'll find out tonight, our local utility has had a pretty bad track record of major outages in the last year... twice in the last year over 500,000 homes in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area have lost power for days.

For fellow 'Lost' junkies, I really liked yesterday's Hurley episode. There seems to be one or two per season, and in spite of his "Curse" they always feel like some of the most optimistic episodes in the show.

Well, my exam is over, I'll find out how I did possibly as soon as Tuesday. I feel pretty good about it, there was one problem I know I messed up but otherwise I didn't feel like I was lost at any point. Of course, I also have zero confidence in my academic abilities anymore or my judgment of how I did, so anxiety remains to some extent.

On the other hand, I also just finished the final book in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I started reading them, having not seen the movie, more out of curiosity than any expectation of quality. At first they seemed to be a cute set of children’s stories by an inexperienced unpolished author with some questionable writing quirks. Later they seemed to be a cute set of children’s stories by an inexperienced unpolished author which hid a quaint little fairly obvious mystery. Then I decided they were a cute set of children’s stories hiding a quaint little fairly obvious mystery, hiding an incredibly involved and bewildering set of mysteries and conspiracies laid out by the character of the author and actually written by a madman/genius. Now, I'm going to put my reaction to the end, and as far as details go it will be spoiler free, but it's hard to write any kind of reaction without being slightly spoilerish. So, ( NON-SPOILER CONTAINING SPOILERISH REVIEW OF 'THE END'. )

Now I'm on to the next books I want to read. I've begun Otherland by Tad Williams, and Redwall. And at some point I'm going to get around to plowing through Monica's "Complete works of Charles Dickens" collection.

With all due respect,

Eric Smailys

Well, barring some summer classes at community colleges that weren't exactly mentally taxing, I'll be taking my first serious college exam in six years tonight. I'm a little stressed about it since my history of exams in college is somewhat spotty, and that's being generous. Still, I've been doing the homework, studying, haven't skipped a class, and I feel pretty comfortable with the material. Considering the almost unanimous horror stories I've heard about Organic Chem, I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been more intimidating. Then again, it's still early.

I probably shouldn't be obsessing quite as much about this test as I am, but I can't help but feel like it's going to be the first concrete indicator of if I've actually matured at all since my previous stint in Rolla or if I'm just fooling myself. I've slipped into married life without much of a hitch thus far and found it to be extremely comfortable, my career remains stable, things are pretty good right now but the exam feels like a benchmark for where I am in life. Probably too much pressure to put on questions about naming carbon chains.

Actually, that reminds me of a really bizarre and probably very silly analogy I made to Monica about people's relationships and covalent bonding. I'll see if I can flesh it out a bit and put it in another post when I'm not quite so preoccupied. I promise you'll either find it extremely boring or positively nausea inducing. Par for the course.

Well, a friend of mine posted his list of comics-to-film in order of quality, so I'm being a proper lemming and doing likewise. Starting from what I consider the highest quality films and moving down to the worst...


Batman Begins
Spider-Man 2
X-Men 2
Spider-Man
Superman (The original with Christopher Reeve)
X-Men 1
Superman 2
Hellboy
Superman Returns
Batman
Constantine
The Blade Trilogy
Batman Returns
--------The Line of Decency---------
Fantastic Four
Daredevil
Spawn
Judge Dredd
The Punisher (I can only speak for the first, I never saw the more recent one)
X-Men 3
Catwoman
The Joel Schumacher Batman movies


All in all, comics-to-film seem to be doing pretty well in terms of quality lately. Videogames-to-film are an entirely different story, a story about a desolate and blasted wasteland littered with dessicated corpses which once resembled proud videogame franchises.

Formal announcement time...

At 2:00 P.M. on February 3rd, 2007, Monica Ganim and Eric Smailys were joined in marriage. The ceremony took place at Emerson Unitarian Chapel in Ellisville, Missouri. In attendance were Eric’s parents and sister, Monica’s parents and grandfather, and their friends Rich and Erika.

Bwahaha! They said it would never happen. But we showed them!

<_< Yeah, so.

I am also an extremely tired nerd. I haven't stayed up until 3 AM in a long time, but I was up that late last night. For those who might not be aware, yesterday night was the launch of Windows Vista and I joined about a hundred other people at a Best Buy launch party. There was a tailgate-style grill going and everything. It was actually a good time, while we waited for the doors to open I and other people in line passed the time and stayed warm by making fun of ourselves for being outside in January at night to wait for an operating system to launch. I stayed at the store until 12:45 because of a drawing for a free laptop. Didn't win, no real surprise. Did get some free stuff with my purchase though, a free 512MB stick of RAM, free tax software, and a free copy of Microsoft's new security/antivirus software with a year subscription. Now I just have to decide if I really trust Microsoft to be in charge of all my PC security...

Then it was back home to spend a couple hours getting the new OS started. Hard as it may be to believe it wasn't a flawless transition. I know, a new Windows installation having bugs is hard to wrap your brain around, but try and suspend your disbelief. I did get it working eventually though, but I did a fresh install so now I've got to try to hunt down all my software to reinstall. Plus I'm going to be a mess all day today. It's a nice interface anyway... the Flip 3D feature is extremely nice looking, straight out of a near future science fiction movie, even if I can't concieve of a single instance where it wouldn't be simpler to just use Alt-Tab.

In an unrelated note, about the show "24", I'm suspending disbelief for the moment about Jack's complete change of attitude between hours 4 and 5, but before the day is over I'm going to need some kind of better explanation as to why he was willing to use such brutal interrogation tactics on his brother. He clearly isn't aware of his brother's involvement with President Logan, so there must be something else there, and a vague family conflict doesn't quite cut it with me. Still, not a terrible episode, and I am enjoying watching the Washington D.C. half of the story this year.

See? Nerd. Total.

Okay, so I've had some pretty weird dreams. But I don't get this one at all. Last night, I dreamt I was at a tennis match watching Roger Federer beating some nobody, and there may have been some kind of metaphysical doomsday hanging on the outcome. It was somewhat unclear. Also, the game appeared to be in WiiSports graphics instead of real people.

Yeah. That's pretty much all I got. Coffee time.

The title is fair warning. Since I found a community dedicated to the now vanished place I hung out the most in college, I've had a sense of nostalgia. Combined with my upcoming nuptials, it's put me in a retrospective frame of mind overall. That said, I decided to write down a recap of what's happened in my life since leaving college in Rolla. It's not really anything meant to be of real interest to anyone, I certainly hold no illusions that it's riveting material, but what the hell.

Edit. Now I know how to use the cut feature and can attempt to undo my unintended spam of any friends pages I'm on. Sorry for any inconvenience. Clikie Linky to read my recent history autobiography.

( As Promised, Self Indulgence at its Finest )

Two days posting in a row. I rule.

Well, I was pretty sure I was happy with the direction my life has been going lately so of course something came along to potentially shake it up. A friend let me know off the record that his work is going to be looking for someone to take his place when they put him on a new project, and offered to back me if I wanted the job. The offer has a number of negatives and only one positive as far as I can tell, but the positive is a salary that's around 12-15k more per year than what I make now, and that's a pretty serious jump.

The negatives. First, it's a business desk type job, doing paperwork for resources and purchasing. One of the things I regretted after I left college was spending so long working outside the scientific field, which is what I went to school for and what I wanted to do with my life. Of course part of that regret was that I ended up not making as much money as I could have, but still it feels like I'd be moving back away from what I want to be doing and into something I have no real interest in. Second, I just started taking classes to work on my Masters degree, and if I jumped ship I would have to wait a year before getting tuition reimbursement at the new job and I'd have to pay back what I got from this one. Third, some benefits don't kick in until a certain time passes, 401k, etc. I've got two years now where I am, I'd be starting again from scratch if I took a new job. And last... well, I like my job right now. It's relatively low pressure, I work with other people with similar backgrounds and interests, I work in a lab, and the atmosphere is exceptionally casual. Most places have Casual Friday to wear jeans, we have Casual Everyday. I'm sitting at work wearing jeans and a Cardinals World Series T-Shirt. Can't beat that.

So, a big long paragraph of negatives... and an extra $12,000 worth of positives. So I guess the question is what's my price? If it were just me it'd be an easy choice, I can live relatively well on what I make now, but I'm about to have a wife who's trying to get published and in the meantime we'll be living on what I can make. The extra money would make our lives a lot easier.

Just when I thought I had it all figured out. Hm.

Ha, I've actually bothered to customize the layout and theme of my LJ! Only took me three years or so.

Let's see, since I last posted. Um, a lot happened. I completed the last required credit hours at a local community college to officially recieve my Physics degree from UMR, got a series of temporary jobs working in Chemistry labs around town, landed a permanent position as an analytical chemist with a research department in a local company about a year ago, and am finally climbing out of the credit hell I'd gotten myself into while slumming for call centers.

Last week I started classes again at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. My job offers tuition reimbursement, so I've decided to take my physics degree and ignore it almost entirely by going after a Masters of Chemistry. I'm taking one evening class this semester to start, Organic Chemistry I, to fill in the undergraduate gap between what Chemistry I took as a student before and what I'll need to actually be in the Graduate program. I have to say, maybe it's age or the perspective of having been in the workforce proper for six years, but being in class is a lot more interesting now. I find myself losing track of time, even wishing the class could keep going after the quit time. Some of it is probably the novelty, but I think I'll be able to stick with it. Plus the professor is extremely funny, and extremely Sicilian. So no one wants to get on his bad side.

Meanwhile, I'm getting married in a week and a half. Ironically I'm posting it here for... well, for very few people to see, but most of my family is completely unaware. I've been engaged to my sweetie for an extremely long time, and neither of us want to have a big complicated wedding at this point, so it'll be just a short small ceremony with our immediate families and a couple of friends. The rest of the relations will find out in a nice mass email. So much for wedding registries. Still, I'm a mass of emotions about the whole thing, mostly excited and happy, with a bit of anxiety thrown in. I have been living alone for the better part of the last decade, so I'm going to have to learn how to have someone in the same space as me 24/7 again. Luckilly it's someone I want there, not just a random roommate.

Okay, I'll try to post here again sooner than three years from now. Promise.

Wow. Just... wow. I lack the ability to describe yesterday's movie coolness. Just, everyone should leave see the Return of the King. If you haven't already, go now. Whatever you're doing can wait. It was, in the words of my sister, "the most emotionally exhausting three hours and twenty minutes of my life."

Of course, seeing everything back to back made it an even bigger deal... I don't think there's ever been anything with the scope of this trilogy of epics in Cinema before, and won't be again for who knows how long. And as I've seen and heard a lot of people expressing... now it's over. It's almost disappointing, just in the feeling that there's not another one to look forward to. Oh! Well, there's the extended cut of RotK on DVD still... *G*

Of course, I now have a severe case of laryngitis, probably due to a combination of flu and yelling and cheering and talking nonstop the three hours before the shows started and during the intermissions. Hey, it means I'm not taking phone calls at work today. Silver linings and so on.

Blargh. Okay, my first post in my LJ, and it sucks, but hey, I'm sick, so I defer stunning witicisms and deep philosophy to a later date. Maybe 2010.

Hm. Honestly not sure what to put here. In spite of flu-like symptoms, I'll still be in the lineup for tomorrow's theater showing of all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back, the first two in their extended format, with my sister. The kind of amusing thing is, I haven't actually seen the extended version of The Two Towers on DVD yet, so it'll be like one and one-third new movies. After going to a job interview for a second job. Again, blargh.