Wow. That was a great game. It is somewhat disappointing that the Patriots weren’t able to attain the perfect season, but full credit has to go to the Giants, who played some phenomenal football, especially their defense, who kept the pressure on Tom Brady, keeping things close right up to the end.

It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that the Patriots were able to produce anything resembling the level of play they’d been maintaining all season. Kudos to the Giants, who pulled off what many thought was impossible — beating the 2007 New England Patriots.

As for the Patriots… there’s always next year. *grin*

Quick update. I went into work this afternoon, and received some good news.

I got the job in the customer service office upstairs. Training starts sometime in February.

This makes life easier. The pay is about double what I’m making now, and is a M-F 9-5 type of job. No more nights and weekends for me!

I need to vent a bit.

I have been a member of the Camarilla for many years. I have (mostly) enjoyed playing in the game. The two characters I have created and played in the game have been a lot of fun, and have drawn many compliments. My tenure as local Mage storyteller was well received.

On the other hand, I have often hated the stupid, petty, niggling administratrivia that cause no end of frustration when it comes to dealing with most of the larger aspects of the organization.

Case in point… I was the administrator for the Cam’s Northeast Regional e-mail list. It is a position that I as given back in 2004. It was a position that I had until yesterday.

It was a position that, in the end, I got no credit for.

History lesson… back in the first half of 2004, all of the Camarilla list moderation — national, regional, and domain level — was overseen by a national officer in the coordinator chain (one of the ANC-Techs), and the list moderators reported to that individual.

In the latter half of 2004, the List mod overseer changed how it all worked, consolidating the national lists among a smaller group of moderators and passing oversight of the regional and domain level lists to the appropriate coordinator levels: a domain-level list was overseen by the domain coordinator, etc.

I was given administrative control of the NE-Regional list in the first half of 2004. When the changeover happened, I contacted the NE Regional Coordinator at the time, explained the changes that were taking place, and asking what she wanted to see from me in terms of reports and the like. I got a response indicating that she had no problem with me continuing to moderate the list, and that I would continue to receive prestige (the Camarilla’s administrative ‘currency’) for the job.

That was the last successful contact I had with the RC staff for nearly four years. I sent multiple e-mails to the RC trying to get some kind of response, with no luck. I didn’t consider it a big deal — it was a pretty easy job, wasn’t worth much prestige, and I wasn’t in it for the prestige anyhow.

Then, at the tail end of last week, one of the current ARCs posted a message to the regional list asking for information about the active regional lists, who was in charge of them, and so forth. I contacted her, telling basically the same story I just related above, and got the following answer:

I spoke with… our current RC, and unfortunately he has no record of you as the list mod or your hiring. Therefore, he cannot validate your claim. I’m sorry.

This was the beginning of the end. Mildly annoyed, since anybody who had been paying any attention the past three and a half years would know I’m the list mod, and a simple check of the administrative info for the list (available to any member of the list) would show that I was the admin, I replied with several pieces of information that supported my claim, stating that the lack of administrative record on the RC’s part didn’t mean I wasn’t the mod, and hadn’t been doing the job since 2004.

To make a long story short, I was not only told that I was out of luck, but it was implied that I was making the whole thing up, and fabricating evidence (in the form of multiple emails I had on record) to support my claim that I had been trying to get this whole stupid mess sorted out with regional for the past four years.

It is precisely this kind of tin-hat emperor attitude that always bugged me about the Cam. The insular buddy-buddy nepotism that so often taints the relationships in the game, and drives otherwise rational people to react with such heightened emotion that everything gets blown way out of proportion to its actual importance (I mean, it’s a game, people).

So anyhow, this whole affair has soured me on the Cam (at least, for the foreseeable future). I haven’t been to a game since last April as it is, but my membership is set to expire in March, and I have no interest in renewing, because returning to game, ultimately, means having to deal with all the administrative crap and out-of-game interpersonal politics that I have no interest in.

Anyhow, there’s my first post for the year. How about those Patriots, huh?

New from Kelvin Crime…

ARRHYTHMIA
A fragrance to make your heart skip a beat

Well, a small degree of uncertainty has been lifted from the saga that is the pending closing of our call center. It’s still being closed, but I found an emergency exit.

They’ve opened 50-odd positions with customer service, and while many people in our office are not trying to move over, there are some that are — myself included (I can’t afford to be out of work, and I especially can’t afford to lose our health insurance).

Yesterday I took the qualifying test to see if… well… I qualified for the position.

I did.

There’s still a structured interview to get through, but I think that will go just fine. Training for the new job would start sometime in January, and the new job comes with a very nice pay increase.

There is still some uncertainty, of course. It looks like the sale of Verizon’s land line service in northern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) is going to go through, and it’s safe to say that a lot of folks are nervous about what this means for us, the employees — Fairpoint is required to honor Verizon’s current contract with the IBEW and CWA, but that contract expires in August of ’08 — less than a year off — and there is a lot of talk that Fairpoint will go to the negotiating table with the intent of cutting as much as they can from the next contract.

Much of this talk, to be honest, is coming from the union. While I don’t doubt that Fairpoint would try and negotiate the best deal possible for them, the rhetoric being presented to the employees by the union is heavily influenced by their agenda (because they have one, and it isn’t always ‘putting the workers first’). Scare tactics, while the reasoning behind them may have some merit, do not impress me.

I guess that I find life itself to be uncertain, and I have never harbored the idea of working for a company for 40 years and retiring with a pension (or something). I’ve held a bunch of different jobs over the past dozen years, and I’ve always approached it with the thought, “This is what I have now, it might be gone tomorrow.”

Certainly, it’s a bit tougher now, with a family to look after and bills to pay (gone are the days when I could be out of work for a couple of weeks and be fine), but worrying about something I have no control over… it doesn’t do anything but drain energy and focus from what I can control — getting up, going to work, and doing my job to the best of my ability.

I’d like to keep my job (and benefits), but if I don’t… well that would suck, but we would figure something out.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I have been working on an Excel-based spreadsheet for creation and tracking of Earthdawn characters.

After some tinkering, I have a new version (v2.1) available for download. This version corrects a number of problems that were in the previous version. This version also includes the long-planned User’s Guide with information about the sheet, and some guidelines on how you might modify it for your own use.

You can download it here. (275kb zip) The full-size spreadsheet is 1.03 Mb. Any comments or questions, please feel free to e-mail me.

I spent my November working on an article for RedBrick, looking at the Step System for Earthdawn and running a break-down analysis of the different parts of it.

This is an analysis that I originally did years ago, but I hadn’t ever put it into a coherent, well-written essay before (with accompanying graphs, because we all know graphs are cool).

You can find the full article at the Earthdawn website.

PS — RedBrick’s latest Earthdawn release, the adventure Burning Desires is available in electronic format from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. The print edition should be available early next year.

Stranger Things

If you like the trailer, be sure to visit StrangerThings.tv.

UnitedHollywood.com

Look at that! More than one update this month!

I’ve had an Excel spreadsheet that allowed the creation and tracking of characters for a few years now. The original sheet was developed for use with First Edition, and I did some debugging and data entry to add in material from some of the sourcebooks and expansions FASA released. When Second Edition came out, I worked on a conversion for that.

I have been pecking away at a conversion for RedBrick Ltd’s edition for a number of months now, and have decided to make it available for download so I can get feedback and assistance in finding the last few errors and whatnot that are no doubt hidden away.

You can download the file here. It is a Zip file that contains the 1.2Mb Excel sheet. There isn’t a user’s guide for this yet (it’s on my to-do list), and there are a few features that don’t work quite right (the list of available knacks does strange things as you hide/unhide talents on the build page), and these are on the list for debugging (if somebody can figure out a fix, let me know).

Any questions, comments, or feedback, let me know.