Thalen Speaks

I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a very long time.  After my best friend when I was a kid introduced me to it, I went on the hunt for books of my own.  This was in the late 80s, so there was actually a split between two separate sets of rules.  There was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and there was Dungeons & Dragons.  Two similar, but definitely different, sets of rules.  AD&D was the more complex of the two, and was where settings like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance lived, while D&D used the setting of Mystara and was closer in tone to the original game, to the point of making Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor setting an integral part of the history of the world.

I was originally going to get a copy of the AD&D player’s guide, which was what my friend had, but was directed to D&D by the bookseller at Waldenbooks.  I ended up purchasing the Basic Set and a copy of In Search of Adventure, which collected most of the existing low level adventures released for D&D at the time.  That was just the beginning of a long love affair with the Mystara setting and everything connected to it.  Over the years I hunted down every publication I could related to Mystara, first buying them new as they came out and later searching eBay for out of print adventure modules and Gazetteers to complete the collection.  There are still a very few adventures I don’t have copies of, and my copy of the Immortals boxed set is missing the box, but I’ve very nearly got it all.

With the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons having come out, and looking like a pretty decent set of rules; much more in the vein of 3rd Edition and, yes, classic Dungeons & Dragons than 4th Edition was, I’m feeling the urge to run a game again.  If I do, I think it’ll be time to revisit Mystara.  Maybe I’ll finally send a party to meet the cat-people who live on the moon.  Not the moon you can see. The invisible one.

Source: Thalen Speaks
Dungeons & Dragons

As it turns out, Best Buy had a pretty good deal on a Sharp 50″ TV for Labor Day, so we now have a brand new television to replace the sad old one that died last night.  I need to get another HDMI cable for my PS3, so that get the full benefit with that, and at some point I should order a (sadly proprietary) Wii HDMI cable, but otherwise it’s all hooked up and performing nicely.  We did have to search through the menus to figure out how to turn down the motion smoothing.  I had seen people talk about how it made movies look like soap operas, but I’d underestimated how extreme the result was.  I found Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom while flipping through the channels and was amazed at how much weirdly smooth and bright everything was.  It looked like I was watching a stage reenactment of the movie somehow.  Happily, turning the feature down a couple of notches seems to have fixed the problem.

My other main pastime today was, again, Final Fantasy XIV.  Yesterday I reached the point in the storyline where I needed to run the Stone Vigil dungeon to continue the main questline, so today Belghast, Ashgar, Tamrielo, and I ran that dungeon and two others.  That got me caught up on my Grand Company hunt log and opened up more quests.  Apparently the next big group fight I have to look forward to / dread is Garuda.  The way everyone talks about it, it’s way more difficult than previous stuff.  We’ll see if that remains true; I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it’s a bit easier a year later than it was when they all ran it originally.

And finally, Blaugust has come to a close.  It’s been a lot of fun, and amazingly enough I managed to post every day throughout.  I’m not sure yet whether I’ll try to maintain the pace going forward or not.  I definitely feel like I need to post on a regular schedule if I don’t want to end up procrastinating, falling behind, and ultimately letting the blog lie fallow.  But something like 3 days a week or the like might be more realistic for me to maintain.  We’ll see.

Source: Thalen Speaks
New Television Acquired

I was sitting and considering what I might want to write about when my wife walked in:

“We’re not busy tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah?”

“You like shopping for electronics, right?”

<suspicious look? “Yeah?”

“I think the TV is dying”

Apparently the TV made a pop-ping noise and went black, then came back with a very washed out picture.  When we turned it off, the ‘lamp’ light blinked for a quite a while, and attempting to turn it back on just didn’t work at all.  So it looks like we’ll be making a trip to Best Buy and/or Target tomorrow to see what our options are.  I can’t be too mad, the television is close to 20 years old at this point.  I’m a little sad though, since we can’t really justify spending what it would take to buy a new one at the same size.  It was originally my parents’ upstairs television but they gave it to me when I bought a house since they didn’t really use it anymore.

On the bright side, there ought to be some good Labor Day sales going on, so maybe we can find a decent deal there.  We’ve talked about a second TV for the bedroom, so we might buy a smaller one for now, then move it to the bedroom and get a larger unit come year-end.  Also, this means we can finally get a TV with modern inputs, like HDMI.  Maybe we can look into Chromecast now too.

Source: Thalen Speaks
My TV Asplode