RPG Friday: Exalted Game Update and RPG Links

So today is RPG Friday and I have a couple of things to share. First, I discovered from reading RPG Blog II an RPG forum which I've joined and has been kind of fun. It's called The RPG Haven.

Second, I had another game day of my Exalted table-top RPG. The person running the game (the 'storyteller' or 'ST' in Exalted terminology) is unfortunately going to stop so we'll be switching to a different ST. I hope the game survives the transition as it has been a lot of fun.

Last time we had just saved a newly Exalted Solar from dual threats of a rival barbarian island and a Wyld Hunt team. This time we managed to convince the Wyld Hunt team to join us. (We made them an offer they couldn't refuse... namely sinking their ship if they didn't cooperate.) And all of us together went into the volcano to fight the Raksha (a chaos entity) inside and cleanse the volcano of the chaos-taint. My character very nearly died (should have actually, but the ST was nice) though he did manage to hit the Raksha with an Arrow of Reason before he went down, which allowed the rest of the group to actually damage the Raksha. (yay!) Unluckily for us, cleansing the chaos from the volcano triggered a violent eruption and we just barely were able to evacuate the island in time.

So all in all, it was a fun session.

On a regular life note, I've been dealing with having my door repaired for the last two days and have been busy trying to get research finished so I have missed some posts. I didn't cook anything this week so no "What's Cookin Wednesday" anyway. :( I'll probably make pesto and chicken again tonight, like I did for St. Patrick's Day since it was so yummy, maybe I'll get a better picture this time.

Well, my equipment has probably finished sterilizing in the autoclave so I should probably go check on it, so that's all for now. Take care!

Of visits, games and that which is flat.

So I'm done with winter quarter. Yay! I haven't gotten back all my grades yet, but I think my GPA should stay around the same. This coming week I have to get as much research done as I can so I have "conclusive data" with which I can write my thesis. My parents came up and visited today. We went out and had a nice brunch and then went to the park. I had homeworks to grade but they went surprisingly fast.

I went bowling yesterday, which was fun, though I'm not as good as I used to be when I was on a league (169 average then, bowled around a 120 last night). Also, I played "Go" for the first time yesterday. It didn't go very well though (pun intended). My attacks were too slow for my opponent and I forfeited the game after several major captures on his part. It seems like an interesting game though. Easy to learn the basics but tough to master the strategy.

The other day I picked up a book called Flatland from the bookstore and I've been reading that some today. It's about a 2D world, where shapes have a society. All of the women are lines and the men are shapes of varying sidedness. The higher number of sides the more respected. The book seems very harsh towards women which I found to be strange since I was expecting basically a playful mathematical sort of story.

Well, that's about all for my weekend update for today. See ya!

RPG Friday - A new Exalt

So my Exalted role-playing game day got moved to Tuesday this week (not sure why) but it was a fun session. Our group got a hot tip from the fate planners in Heaven that a new Solar Exaltation was going happen soon on a particular island and our group was sent to investigate. Turns out the island is inhabited by crazy barbarians who worship the volcano on their island and sacrifice captured enemies to it. They are also cannibals and got highly offended when one of our group members refused to dine at their feast (my character).

As if that wasn’t enough to worry about apparently the hot tip we got from Heaven got spread around a bit and a Wyld Hunt team was also alerted to the coming Exaltation and was dispatched to the island. (The Wyld Hunt are Dragon-blooded Exalts who hunt down Solar exalts and kill them. Most Dragon-blooded think that Solars are demons and threaten the stability of creation.) The Wyld Hunt team began circling the island in their ship, presumably waiting for the exaltation to occur. We debated having our Solar flare his anima to trick the Wyld Hunt team into thinking that the exaltation was happening and then ambush them but ultimately decided that the essence expenditure of the battle that would inevitably ensue could tangle fate to the point that the exaltation prediction might end up not coming to pass.

In the end a rival island came and attacked, led by powerful fire elementals (from the volcanoes on the nearby islands). The chieftain’s wife Exalted protecting the village’s children from the elementals, and the Wyld Hunt team sprang into action. Their sorceress casted a tracking spell that summoned a wind hound to hunt down the new Exalt, and our sorcerer responded by bringing a meteor down from the sky into their ship… twice… ha! They had a water aspected Dragon-Blooded on board that put out the fires and shored up the damage and when we stopped the game they were in a panicked retreat. We have yet to decide if we are going to pursue or just let them go and hope that we can convince the newly Exalted Solar to come with us before the Wyld Hunt team comes back with reinforcements.

Weekend Update - Fun with Fluid Dynamics

So in the scheme of my blog themes, I've decided that at least one weekend day will be "Weekend Update" where I give a look at what has been keeping me busy.

The last few days I've been trying to get projects finished for my classes and have thus missed a few days of posts. (I had planned to post about my role-playing game, but that got canceled anyway due to my workload, so I'm not sure what I would have posted anyway.)

I still don't really have time to blog, I have one more report to do and it's a day late already. But I wanted a break and I thought I'd share some neat looking images from my computational fluid dynamics report. I had to model two jets of water coming in from the sides of the tank seen here, and coming out the top.

The velocity contours the program makes, like the one below are pretty cool looking.

This one shows that my flow is coming out the wrong end for one my simulations... epic fluid dynamics fail!

This is a picture of the static pressure profile, I thought it kind of looked like wings or something.

These last two show the velocity looking like what it's actually supposed to. Yay!


So yeah, I'm not sure if these are actually interesting or if I've just been staring at this stuff for WAY too long. You decide. :)

Well, back to work on the other report. Wish me luck.

Where to go from here...

So I only have one week left of classes and then finals week. I am really looking forward to this quarter being over. Though next quarter is going to be worse. I have to write my master's thesis then. I really hope I get my research done. If I have to stay another quarter then that's going to create all sorts of craziness.

I was grading stuff this past thursday which is my usual Exalted role-playing game day, so I missed a session. :( I'm working on a write-up of what my character did and perhaps I'll post that here when I'm done.

I'm kind of unsure of the direction I want to go with this blog. That's part of the reason I haven't posted in a while (the other part being that it's crunch time at school). I could go the RPG route and talk more generally about random ideas that I think would be fun in a game or just neat concepts in general. I could post more of the poetry I've done, and perhaps new stuff if I write anymore. There's random life updates. Philosophical musings. More about my research or other science-y things I find interesting. More about cooking (which means I'd need to cook a little more, I've kind of slacked off this past week.) *shrug* I dunno. If anyone has thoughts on what they would/would not like to see more of, I'm all ears.

Well, I'm off to take a data point (growth kinetics experiment, yay!) and then head to class.