Instructor: (talking about the OSI model) "So, the presentation layer. It has... encryption..."
(explains what encryption is for 3 minutes using examples from ancient Rome)
Instructor: "And... this is used with web browsers..."
(minute-and-a-half silence while he stares at his notes)
Instructor: (just starts speaking as if he's been doing so all along) "...and that's what that layer's all about."
(2 minutes of staring at notes, then flips a couple pages on his legal pad)
Instructor: "Okay, the application layer."
Student: "What about the presentation layer?"
(30 second pause)
Instructor: "Oh, I didn't put it on the board. Here."
(10 seconds of drawing yields a box with the word "Presentation" in it)
Instructor: "So the application layer is the highest one. It uses APIs..."

Well, we ended up playing Hanwool's China campaign, then my Weird campaign (that Black Ops/ Warehouse 23 sorta thing). The China game was a little dry, but my character managed to accomplish one of his goals (learning some earth-college spells). Also, he's meeting some of the higher-ups in the kingdom of Ke, though he's only allowed one month at the emperor's palace. Justin's character seems to have stopped trying to kill him, though Akira did tell the authorities Bao (my character) had murdered a sword-fighter. Fortunately, Bao had been working 10 hour days as an apprentice to a wood carver while the rest of them hid from the soldiers, so he had a good alibi.

The Weird campaign was pretty good, though I think a couple characters were kind of overlooked in all the action. The session pretty much consisted of Jack's (Justin's) team meeting up with Gregor's team (a vampire, witch, sentient virus, Egyptian scarab spirit, and a talking briefcase), dealing with Fred's (Drew's) shapeshifting and killing Hanwool's former character, Bob (the mass of spirit-bees), who was possessed by the Terra Grimoire. The whole shapeshifting ordeal was caused by the discovery of a bottle of "Vitamals - Chewable Vitamins" (an item from Warehouse 23). The results were rather random; Fred ended up transforming into a skink (lizard), then a blue whale. The blue whale transformation caught Jack and Gregor unawares; they took something like 4dx4 concussion damage since they were basically at "ground zero." Gregor died. Fred started dying as he was crushed under his own weight (taking 1d-3 damage per second). Jack, thinking quickly (but not mercifully), jumped onto the whale's back, crushed all the vitamins in his hands (ST 40 vampire) and dropped them down the whale's blowhole.

Meanwhile, Morty (Ryan) and Bob the sentient virus (possessing, at the time, the body of some Ohioan farmer) drove back to Chino and encountered a police roadblock. Bob possessed one of the cops and shot the other (narrowly missing Morty). Morty stole a cop car and drove back to what remained of the teams. Of course, this whole time a huge shield volcano is forming in the middle of a Nevada highway. The simultaneous ingestion of every shapeshifting pill in the vitamin bottle caused Drew's character to change into a sequoia. Unfortunately, he also has Instant Regeneration and Regrowth. The result? A tree that grows at the rate of 1 inch per second.

Anyway, long story short, Drew's made a total of 17 death-checks, turned into a small grove (after collapsing from a height of 900 feet), and Morty, Fred, and Scab (Hanwool's scarab spirit) managed to work together to incinerate the swarm (though Fred just kinda had to stand there while Morty climbed him). Fred changed back to normal sometime around 6:00 am. The group was then recalled to Warehouse 23, somewhere in Colorado.

This week, I think we're doing Weird on Friday night and China Sunday afternoon. My new fridge is working really well. I cleaned up the kitchen area and vacuumed. Got some peanut butter and jelly, another loaf of white bread, and some Honey Bunches of Oats cereal. Had linguini in meat sauce with mozzarella for dinner and sour cream-lemon pie for dessert.


New fridge.

Bastendorf beach at about 2:00 pm on Wednesday.	The wharf at Charleston, as seen from a bridge over the sound.
Me standing in an odd little cave in the side of a 60 foot cliff at Bastendorf.	The Euroclydon, a trawler, offloading cargo.

Finally went to the Bookworm and got some new reading material. Starswarm by Pournelle, A World Out of Time by Niven, Trinity and Other Stories by Kress, and The Undersea Trilogy by Pohl and Jack Williamson. I wouldn't have bought the last one except the cover looked vaguely familiar and I realized I'd read the second book in the series a long time ago (it was really good). They had this really cool illustrated version of A Brief History of Time, but it was $40 so I didn't get it.

Had Carl's Jr. for lunch. Hanwool's China campaign should be starting soon. My character, Bao Hong Xiao, is a famous Chinese artist/ calligrapher living in Yokohama, Japan. Hope it'll be fun.


Hooray, new books!

Had two GURPS games this weekend. Amazingly, no one killed anyone else on Saturday (well, no PCs died, anyway). Sunday was another story. Justin killed Hanwool and Beefy killed Justin. If we play GURPS again next weekend, I might change genres. Or get Hanwool to GM. It's beginning to look like the only way to stop party infighting is to say "a wizard put a spell on all of you and now you can't hurt each other or you'll all die," or something. I hate using major fiats like that.

Sunday night we had a little LAN party. JD, Kevin, and Drew came. Everyone else basically whined and gave excuses like "I'm too tired to bring a computer," even though the next day was labor day. Anyway, we played Warcraft III: TFT and some Co-op BF1942 (see image below) using the Vaio as a ded. server. Kevin introduced me to Freelancer, which is an older game kind of like a cutesy-fied version of Freespace 2 with "role-playing." Still, it's fairly fun (except for this minor bug that makes certain text disappear).

I installed UT2003 to see how it'd look with my Radeon 9800 Pro... very pretty. I run everything at 4x anti-aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering (no one seems to know exactly what AF is, so here's a link) for best performance/ quality. Why not higher? Mainly because of Desert Combat. I don't know what they did, but that game seems to suck up resources like a twenty ton sponge. On my ti4600, it actually lagged a little at certain points.

Kevin urged me to download the Half Life 2 gameplay video. Now, 587 megs later, I can say the game really looks amazing. Supposed to be out September 30. Oy. Another game I'm looking forward to, Homeworld 2, comes out on the 16th. I just glanced at some gameplay vids though and they weren't too impressive. Oh well, the demo comes out tomorrow and I can see if I really like it or not.


I pwned them.