I have created a quiz on sporcle for no reason!

Can you name the D&D 4e races?

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was bologna, but she was a tuna can!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was civilian, but she was Lieutenant Dan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was in NASCAR, but she drove a minivan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she cared for Holly, but she shipped Michael with Jan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was albino, but she had a wicked tan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she played remotely, but she played over a LAN!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was quite lucid, but into the woods she ran!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a werewolf, but she was a Twilight fan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she liked raspberries, but she drank some Apple-Cran!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a young boy, but she's really Dr. Tran!
Sweet Leia Organa said she'd kiss a Wookiee, but she had a thing for Han!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a mammal, but she was Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan!
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a custard, but she was only a flan!

I need a new icon, I haven't even logged into WoW since like October, and before that, since like July. Poor Sevrea. She will be missed. I kind of feel bad about it since when I left the game I'd say I'd be hanging around "on the bench" so to speak, to fill in spots when needed and such, but I never really ended up doing much hanging around.

Maybe I should use a pic of the Chimera D&D mini I got a couple weeks ago. hmm. I'll be DMing for our group in two or three months, when our current DM wraps up his game. It's been a long time, and I have no idea how good I'll be at it. It's a space-fantasy setting--weird for D&D--but pretty standard in most other respects. A couple days ago I sent out a mail detailing a couple minor house rules and asking the players if they were interested in any other house rules--no responses yet. I guess I'll assume, until I hear otherwise, that they want to play by the books.

One of the guys wants to play a Drow. I'm not sure how I feel about Drow. I don't want to bar him from playing it by any means--it is essentially a core race now, after all--but I haven't figured out at all how to work the Drow into my setting. I dislike how, as printed, they are basically almost entirely defined by their stance toward Lolth. The normal ones worship her, the "redeemed" ones hate her. What would Drow society be like in the absence of Lolth? What would Drow society be like in space, rather than on a planet which has a nice little Underdark? Are they still, as a race, "evil"? It's tempting to say that they've lost their "evil" connotation, but the further I stray from standard D&D, the more I worry about the players feel like they're "not really playing D&D" anymore. And, maybe the guy specifically wants to play a 'good' member of a 'mostly evil' society, so rendering the society good would ruin his premise. I'll have to talk to him about it.

My hobby:

When watching roles played by Kurtwood Smith other than Red Forman, adding "Dumbass." onto at least one of his lines.

I posted this poem (without the extra pipe characters) a long time ago, and no one said anything, so I thought I would explain it.

Slant

Our perception | serves to distract.
This sentence | is influenced by expectation.

The pipe characters signify where the reader is supposed to switch lines while reading. I guess it was pretty subtle. My thinking at the time was that I sort of wanted to call into question the basic assumptions in reading--in our language, anyway--about simple things like what direction words flow, and the fact that sentences don't jump around in lines, and such.

I.. don't do poems, much. Someone said, and I am too lazy to look up who it was, that while prose was "words in the right order," poetry was somehow greater, being "the right words in the right order." I don't know about that. I think that poetry has a place, especially as part of music, but that prose is perhaps more effective for most of the things I value, because of its concentration on communicating the message, rather than making the message more 'artful.' If the rhythm and rhyme, or whatever one decided makes a poem a poem, distracts the reader from the actual meaning of the words themselves, then I'm not sure they are the "right words."

I'm playing Freerice for country-identification, and I have discovered that there are, like, twice as many Guineas as I thought.

- Guinea
- French Guinea
- Papua New Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Equatorial Guinea
- Guyana (not technically guinea but pretty close in spelling so I am arbitrarily counting it, too)

I think I knew about 3 of those--Guyana, French Guinea, and Papua New Guinea. I remember learning countries in elementary school and deliberately looking for plain ol' Guinea and not being able to find it at the time, at which point I assumed it must be something that's not a real country, like a remnant territory of one of those European empires or something. I guess either I didn't look hard enough, or the elementary school maps didn't go into enough detail in West Africa. Or, maybe it wasn't a country at the time. Africa does change what its countries from time to time, after all. No more Zaire now, for example.

Also, I keep getting Nicaragua and Honduras confused. I second-guess myself too much. I look at one, and think it's Nicaragua, then I think, "wait, I know I get these confused so it is probably Honduras" but it turns out it's really Nicaragua. I seem to do ok with the rest of North and South America. I had a bit of trouble with some of the new-ish European countries (i.e. post-Yugoslavia and post-USSR), but now I've got those pretty well. Croatia is a "C"! And it is eating Bosnia and Herzegovina! Which incidentally, in my opinion, should just make a cool composite name like Czechoslovakia used to have, because countries with "and" in them are kind of silly. Bosnegovina! See, there, you've got it sorted! Also: Trinibago.

Africa is definitely the hardest overall, though. I hope whoever delivers the rice does better than me at this.

Edit, 5 minutes later: I just googled "Also, I keep getting Nicaragua and Honduras confused." to see if anyone else may have had this problem and my journal was the second result. What?

I am no longer a cube. But now, apparently, I'm perfect.

Wendy's used to do simple chicken wraps. They had, uh, Spicy Chicken Go-Wrap, Grilled Chicken Go-Wrap, and one other. Homestyle, maybe? "Go-wrap" was kind of a dumb name but as cheap as they were, they were pretty good. My favorite was the Spicy. They started out at like $1.39, then at some point they were $1.49, and then $1.59 each, which was still perfectly reasonable.

They don't do them anymore. Instead they are doing new wraps with slightly more contents but like almost 3 times the price. Seriously, $4.29 for a wrap-without-meal? What is the deal, Wendy's. I am disappoint.

Poll #1464350
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 15

Which?

I more or less quit my WoW raid about a month ago. I actually only relegated myself to alternate status, but given how little I've logged in since then and the grand total of zero times I've been asked as an alt to sub in for missing mains, it's pretty much tantamount to quitting at this point. I don't miss it that much. I guess I miss the vent banter sometimes, but I certainly don't miss the certain feeling of obligation to spend 3-4 hours 3-4 weekday evenings per week doing fights I've already done to see the occasional gear upgrade that's barely even an upgrade. (Woo, I have 1650 in some random stat instead of 1643!)

They've announced the next expansion, Cataclysm. They say it'll shake up the core world, changing a lot of the levelling zones--and adding in two new races. Maybe I'll pick it up and play one of the new races, or a new race/class combo with an existing race. I doubt I'll go back to full-time raiding again, though.

I like the extra free time I've had, but I don't feel like I'm doing much with it. Mostly, Sara and I are just watching a bunch of old TV shows. We're making our way through Voyager for some reason, among other things. I've thought about doing some volunteering, but I'm not sure what group I'd like to volunteer for. The Texas Advocacy Project is certainly worthy of my time, but unfortunately, their time largely overlaps when I have to go to work.

Heheh, "worthy of my time"--as if my time is such a great thing, which organizations must be worthy of. It's a bit self-centered, but then on the other hand, if I'm gonna be giving away time and stuff, I think I'm allowed a bit of self-centeredness in choosing who to give it to!

Margaret Cho's book, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, has a bit on how anyone who isn't a feminist should just die. I'd quote it more directly, but the form I have it in is audiobook, and I left the CDs at work. I'm taking it for granted that Cho doesn't wish death on all men (it'd be unlikely she'd marry one if she did), so I'd say it's clear she falls on the "yes" side of this question. I agree.