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Showing posts from August, 2013

I am definitely NOT back...

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...at least not the way that I want to be. Sally and my friend Ben and I ran this morning , and for as much as I want to feel like I'm running well--or at least better--this morning, it was rough . 6.5 miles at almost exactly a 9:00/mile pace.

On Intervention in Syria

I'm gonna go ahead and say this now just to get it on record before the war starts.  I don't want you guys to think I'm un-American in wartime, but now, before the war starts and while we're still debating the proper course of action, now is the proper time to express an opinion. This attack on Syria is a stupid, stupid idea. And I'm annoyed at our so-called liberal President for his apparent close-mindedness on the issue.

Friday Hair Metal: Right Here, Right Now

I'm in a Sammy Hagar kind of mood.  What does that say about me, exactly? And if that's not enough of a mind-trip for you, this video is from a year ago, which means that it has David Lee Roth fronting the band again, singing one of the Hagar-era hits. Eh.  I take it back.  YouTube, I posted this video because of false advertising!

The Cosmology of Wanderhaven

I started working on the Wanderhaven tab of the blog today and eventually decided to integrate the Cosmology I wrote as part of my personal notes back a few months ago.  But once I had it all laid out in one piece, I realized that the Cosmology was way too much for the general overview I'd had in mind for just that one tab, so I'm gonna drop the full Cosmology here and then link to it off of the other page. I confess that I probably wouldn't have done it this way if I'd had anything else written for the blog today.  But I don't, so there you have it.  I've no idea who'll be interested in this stuff--maybe nobody--but if you are interested, well, at least now you've got something to read today. And anyway, who doesn't need a refresher in ancient Roman spiritual beliefs?

Warlocks in D&D Next

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Last week I posted  a little  Swordmage  homebrew for  D&D Next , and people seemed to like it.  Got a goodly amount of feedback on it, some truly awesome folks followed a few of the Google Ads through to whatever sites they were advertising, and bottom line, I felt good about having put something out there that got people interested.  Plus, Swordmage seemed like kind of a logical homebrew considering that it doesn’t seem like  Wizards of the Coast  (WotC) plans to include an independent swordmage and/or bladesinger (gish) class in D&D Next—at least in their initial rules releases, anyway—which means that if you feel the need to have one in the game, you’re gonna have to homebrew it any which way you slice it.   That’s a shame because, as I noted last week, a fighter/mage and a swordmage are not exactly the same thing.  To me, a fighter/mage is like an engineer who boxed in college.  Yeah, he knows how to fight, and yeah, he may also know how to design a bridge or a buil

Better

I was tired yesterday. Between being busy at work and putting in a harder-than-I'd-intended run yesterday during lunch, by the time I got home, it kinda felt like I'd been hit by a truck. We had a late dinner, struggled to get the kids ready for bed--and for school today--and then sat down to watch TV. And then we (finally) went to bed, with me taking a couple of Advil and doing fifteen minutes or so of yoga before laying down to go to sleep. I should do that very night.  The Advil calmed the tendons around my right ankle, which have been sore since the beach run Sunday morning but really flared after yesterday's run, and the yoga loosened up my back, and for once, I fell straight into a dead sleep.  I won't say I felt great when I woke up this morning, but I felt okay, and for whatever reason, I looked  thinner in the mirror this morning, like I'd finally lost all the weight I put on while we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago.  Where I really noticed the dif

Wednesday Nonsense

Saw this in CM Punk 's Twitter feed this morning. For what it's worth, the WWE may not be the most forward thinking company in America, I don't know, but they make excellent and impressive use of social media.  So yeah.  The actual match, Natalya vs. Brie Bella , is totally unwatchable.  But then A.J. Lee comes on and cuts what has to be one of the better promos they've had on the show this year, and as tough as she is on those girls, I gotta agree with her.  Every word she says is true. All I'm saying is, since Summer Slam, the promotion has taken a step away from A.J., and with that, my girls and I have more or less stopped paying attention. *** While we're talking about the important issues in the world, let me just say, for what it's worth, that I personally do not think that the case for intervention in Syria is very strong.  Yes, I admit that Assad is asshole who has used poison gas on his own people--like Saadam Hussein before him.

Tuesday Odds and Ends

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I've been trying to find the motivation to write something all day.  And failing.  Instead of that, here's a collage of crap that I've been thinking about today. Word came out over the weekend that Marvel's in talks with Bradley Cooper to be the voice of Rocket Raccoon .  By all logic, that shouldn't matter to much to me.  Seriously, though, I haven't been this excited about a movie in a while.  And the damn thing doesn't even come out for another year. Sally bought me a six pack of Weed Amber Ale today.  And as I'm drinking it--sober this time--I see now why they didn't call it an IPA.  Really, it tastes more like a super-hoppy pilsner.  I suppose you could call it the most   east coast IPA ever , but that would just confuse the market.  So Amber Ale is probably right. Two Roads put this picture of the Shore 2 Pour start today on Facebook.  If you look close, I'm right in the center--red hat, no short.

Tri Training Diary: 8/19 - 8/26 (Week 1)

Coming off of vacation and then last week's race, I'm not gonna lie--I've been struggling to stay focused.  We did a small tri last weekend and then we went to a beer festival, and that was great, but after that, I was ready to just kick back with a beer and let life come to me.  I don't know that that's a problem, per se, but it doesn't fuel the kind of training that keeps a guy's edge in the midst of a long season. But this is why you put yourself on a team or in a club.  Because even when you don't have your best stuff, even when you can't find your best bits of motivation, you at least still have to show up.  And when you show up, good things can still happen even when you don't have the best intentions.

Shore 2 Pour

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The race turned out to be 2.8-miles over lose sand at Short Beach in Stratford.  Ouch!  But the after-party was well worth it. My buddies, post-race. I know, right? Plus, I finally got to try Roadsmarry's Baby , Two Roads' pumpkin autumn seasonal.  Quite an awesome beer, and a good stand-in for lunch, post-race. If you're wondering, I went a shade under 23:00, finishing somewhere in the top third.  But I felt like I struggled, so frankly, that's a better finish than I probably deserved.

Beer Review: Shed Brewery IPA

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I was at my local liquor store a couple of weeks ago and saw Shed Brewery's India Pale Ale   (IPA), and decided to give it a try.  According to the bottle, Shed was born is Stowe, Vermont, way back in 1965, but these days it's brewed in Middlebury.  I don't remember offhand why I decided that I needed a Vermont IPA, but then again, it's not like a reason is actually needed, right?

Heard on Twitter

@AdamSchefter If he somehow wins a Superbowl with the Packers, Titans' nation will cry itself to sleep for the next ten years. — Dan Head (@Dan_T_Head) August 24, 2013

New Concept Art

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Rocket Raccoon! Amazing, right?

What kind of beer is Dwarven Ale?

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The foaming mug emblem of Clan Battlehammer, the dwarves of R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt novels. It's Friday; I just got home and poured myself a beer.   I spent part of the day today working on the campaign I'm hoping to run sometime soon--God willing that I have the time--and one of the major NPCs is a dwarf clan leader.  Campaign kind'a needs a macguffin.  Anyway, it occurred to me that this dwarf clan might brew beer, that dwarves are famous for their brewing, and that I have no idea what Dwarven Ale, famous as it is, actually looks or tastes like. Now, my first thought was that obviously dwarves must brew stouts, but as I'm thinking about it, I realized that doesn't work.  Dwarven ale is always described as being foamy, and there aren't a lot of stouts that have a lot of head.  Barrel-aged stout in particular is only gonna give you a tiny amount of head--half a finger if you're lucky--so, well, stout is out.  Meanwhile,  hefeweizen  can give

The Weed Beer Festival at Lake Quassy Amusement Park (Pt. 2)

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I started talking about the  Weed Beer Festival  at  Quassy Amusement Park  yesterday; that’s the one that Sally and I attended while our kids rode the Wooden Warrior over and over and over again.  As promised, here’s part two… After Sally and I left the actual Weed table, we started going down the rows, intent on sampling everything.  That turned out to be something of a challenge, but I wanted to give it the old college try, and if you ask me, it definitely  was  a thing that was worth trying.

The Weed Beer Festival at Lake Quassy Amusement Park (Pt. 1)

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Last weekend was busy.  So busy, in fact, that I’m only now getting around to writing about Sunday, which was by far the more exciting of the two days.  But I didn’t want to start writing about Sunday until I had time to sit down and do it all justice, so…   Well, sorry for the delay; hopefully it’ll be worth it. So.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, Sally and I ran a race on Saturday.  After that, we kind of just laid around, not really doing a bunch.  Then we got up Sunday and did a little housework before taking the kids to  Lake Quassy Amusement Park .  They were having the first (hopefully) annual  Weed Beer Festival , and we’d bought  tickets in advance with the idea of riding some rides and then drinking some beer.  And that is just what we did.

Updated Weekly Schedule

I updated the Weekly Schedule page for the blog yesterday because, bottom line, I haven't been following the schedule lately.  Here's the latest and greatest, and if you have some thoughts on it, believe me when I tell you that I'd love to hear them.  The blog is kind of an open-ended project, but I know folks are reading, and I'd really like to get some feedback to hear what those readers think of what's going on here.

D&D Next Homebrew Swordmage (Aug. 2013 Playtest Packet)

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I’ve made it no secret on this blog that my favorite class in  D&D’s Fourth Edition  (4e) was the  Swordmage .  I liked the class because it was versatile, and because as a 4e player, versatility was the thing I prized the most.   But I also liked it because it was evocative.  I liked the book  Swordmage  and liked the whole concept of a close combat wizard—a guy who could get in close to bad guys and then explode with power to lay them out.  I even liked the idea that to be a swordmage, you had to be both smart  and  tough.  Smart because smarts are what it takes to learn spells; tough because only tough guys go hand-to-hand with monsters.  Bottom line, the whole concept spoke to me, and ever since  Wizards of the Coast  (WotC) announced  D&D Next , I’ve made it a recurring project to try to reimagine the swordmage class through the lens of the various versions of the playtest rules.

Race Report: 2013 Charles Island Sprint

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Coming off of our vacation to Maine a week ago, Sally and I raced the (hopefully) first annual  Charles Island Sprint  triathlon this past weekend.  This race was the second in what is becoming an annual series put on by  F.I.R.M. Racing  and the  Woodruff Family YMCA  in Milford, CT.   The tri scene in coastal Connecticut has been growing rapidly in the last few years, to the point where local Y’s have become competitive with each other.  Not so much in terms of their putting together teams and racing to crown a local YMCA Champion--although that would be an awesome idea, so maybe we should look into that--but more in terms of just trying to offer the best, most comprehensive mix of athletic services and community.  Part of Woodruff’s plan, then, is hosting these races and providing a triathlon club to help get new people involved in the sport and to give experienced racers a community of support on which to draw during the long training season.  I coordinate and coach the Triath

If I was a D&D Character

I never get tired of these... I Am A: True Neutral Human Wizard (6th Level) Ability Scores: Strength- 14 Dexterity- 13 Constitution- 15 Intelligence- 19 Wisdom- 13 Charisma- 13 Alignment: True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment y

Friday Hair Metal: Damn Yankees

Heard these guys on the radio a bunch while we were on vacation for some reason.  Not this song, their other one.  But I like this one better, so...

Lazy Race Week

I’ve got a race this weekend, and if I can tell you something in confidence, it’s that I’m not as fired up for it as I could be.  Truth is, vacation was great, but it hasn’t been real good for my sense of purpose.  I’ve been back a few days now, but physically, I feel like I left a good part of my soul sitting on the dock up by Green Lake, and it’s taking a toll on my focus.  Plus, I gained six pounds while we were gone, and it makes me feel like a fucking beached whale.  I’m sluggish in the water, sluggish when I run, and downright torpid when I try to stretch or do yoga.  I feel okay on the bike, sure, but that’s only because I’ve been riding easy, and because it pays to ride easy when you commute.  Biking in a hurry on New York City streets is a good way to get killed. *sigh* I know what you’re thinking, but the truth is that I’m not really thin like that anymore.  Back in high school, yeah, I weighed about 155 lbs, and by the time I was in Beast Barracks, the upper classme

You decide...

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...aggressive fashion choice, or social faux pas? And does it make me look fat?

Isle de Mont Deserette: A Homebrew Campaign Setting for D&D Next

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L'Isle de Mont Deserette sits off the extreme northeast coast of the Great Western Isles, approximately four hundred miles north of the city of Wanderhaven , capital of the Kingdom of the Western Isles. L'Isle lies about two-thirds of the way up the interior coastline of the Charlesford Gulf. It is by far the largest in a chain of volcanic formations that together make the area both an excellent natural port and, potentially, a rock-filled horror for unwary sailors. Just a few hundred yards of coastal tidelands and swamp flats are all the separate L'Isle from the larger portion of the Western Isles’ mainland on the island's northern side. Renowned Frankosian explorer Jacques de Charleford discovered the isle some three hundred fifty years ago, during his now infamous expedition to catalogue the land masses of the Western Isles’ extreme northeastern territories.  He named the island after his sometime paramour, the courtesan Desiree Boline de Deserette—a slight for

Bar Harbor's Thunder Hole Ale

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Alright. So if you've been to Acadia National Park , then you probably already know that Thunder Hole is a natural rock formation on the southeast coast of Mount Desert Isle and at booms like thunder when the waves come in at about half-tide.  What you may not know, however, is that there is also a ivery fine brown ale from the Bar Harbor Brewing Company  by that same name. I brought some home with me, of course, and this is it. 

D&D Trailer: The Sundering

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I Miss Vacation Already

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You have to get away when you go on vacation because sometimes that's the only way to really escape the everyday stresses of your life. I mean, yeah, it was a long drive home last night, but I swear, as soon as we walked in the door, my kids fell into a funk, and Sally and I started sniping at each other about meaningless bullshit.  Being stuck in the car all day probably had something to do with it, but even more, it was just about the fact that, hey, we're back, and oh look!  All the floors in the house need to be mopped, and some of the tomatoes that we left out on the counter exploded, and oh by the way, who's unloading the car, and how much did that vacation cost? I took this picture of Sally out on our front deck yesterday morning before we left.  Then I touched it up using  Instagram , my new favorite toy.

Back to Reality

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Our vacation is coming to an end, and it makes me sad.  We had eight days up here on the lake, living pretty much off he grid, and it was nice.  But now we've got to pack up and drive back--seven hours south and west to Coastal Connecticut.  Don't get me wrong. Connecticut is not a bad place to live. In fact, after something like thirty-five moves that have taken me all over the country, our adoptive hometown of Stratford is easily one of my favorites. I don't know that it quite beats out Fallbrook, California, but I like it better than I liked either Washington, DC, or Tampa, Florida, and I was very happy in both places. Besides, the one thing that Stratford has that's much more accessible than it is in those other places is the beach. We live all of two miles from Short Beach in Stratford--so close that most of my favorite run routes go down along the water. Those other places have beaches, too, of course, but in every case you have to load up the car and drive at lea

D&D Playtest Feedback (Ver. 8/1/13)

As I've mentioned in some previous posts, my daughters are both big D&D fans. We're on vacation in Maine this week, and since we're staying in a cabin without TV or Internet access, we brought quite a few board games to pass the evenings. We started our week playing Dungeon , worked up to The Legend of Drizzt , and by mid-week started a campaign using the latest D&D Next Playtest Rules , the version released late last week (8/1/2013).  The good thing about the latest version of the ruleset is that it's stripped down. My daughters are smart little girls, but they're 8 and 9 respectively, and the intricacies of the game in its full glory are a little much for them. Likewise, I've been trying to get my wife to play along with us for quite a while, but as she noted at the start, she's more than happy to engage in a game of "Let's make believe" with her family, but she has little to no interest in learning the actual rules for Dungeons and D

Ice Cream, Mini-Golf, & a Laundromat

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We had a less physically demanding day yesterday. We'd decided on Wednesday that we were gonna hang around the cabin and take it easy in the morning, and that's what we did.  Wound up being good timing for a day like that because we had our first day of rain yesterday, and yeah, it sucks that we had rain during our vacation, reality is that by yesterday, we were all pretty tired.  The situation cried out for a day of rest.  Eventually we showered and had some of the world's ugliest pancakes, made by me of course, and then headed out--a little after noon. We stopped by our favorite little hippy Rock Art place, the girls got some souvenirs, and I took a few pics.  For some reason, the tiny little Hindu Gods, $5 each, really spoke to me.  After Rock Art, we dropped clothes at the local laundromat, went by Cadillac Mountain Sports and bought Hannah a new helmet and some new riding glasses, put our clothes in the drier, and then headed for Mount Desert Island and a round of Pira

Hiking on Great Head

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Hannah bounced back beautifully from her fall Tuesday, and we were able to have another great day yesterday.  It started out kind of lazy at the cabin. I went for a long swim, up and around the peninsula on which we're staying and then out into the open water of the lake. I set my watch and planned to be gone for around twenty minutes, but I ended up pushing a little further, so that by the time I got back, I'd been gone a bit more than twenty-six. Call that a mile exactly with the occasional stop to stretch and get my bearings out on the lake.  I got back, took a shower, and saw that Sally was making pancakes. That gave the girls and me time to finish the game of The Legend of Drizzt  that we'd started on Monday. We started with Dungeon on Sunday, then played Legend of Drizzt Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and then planned to play the full version of Dungeons and Dragons  after Legend of Drizzt was done using the latest version of the  D&D Next Playtest Rules that c

On Pushing Your Kids

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One of the challenges of being a parent is knowing how far and how hard to push your kids. Well, that's one of my big challenges anyway.  Our daughter Hannah has been a little slow picking up her bike riding. I've gotten her out a couple of times back home in Stratford, but we've done most of our family riding with her on a Trail-a-Bike attachment, and as a result, she hasn't been real confident balancing on her own, and she hasn't had to worry about learning to brake or climb out of the saddle.  Still, she made some progress earlier in the summer, so we brought the bikes--hers included--out on vacation. And we took those bikes into Acadia yesterday.  The problem is, Acadia's not really very flat. And Hannah's little bike doesn't have any gears, and she's not very comfortable using either the little hand brake that it has or the coaster brakes. So going down the first long descent yesterday was a real challenge, and after that, poor Hannah had to slo

Some Pics from Cadillac Mtn

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Sally and the girls and I hiked up Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park yesterday. The mountain is, I believe, the highest peak on the Eastern Seaboard, although at 1500 ft, it's not in the league of some of the summits out west.  We picked up the Northwest Ridge Trail off the northern part of Acadia's Loop Road--itself at a height of about 350 ft--and climbed about 1150 ft over the course of a little more than two miles.  I confess that I'd have preferred to do the climb on my road bike using the road that runs parallel to the trail, but alas, the girls just aren't ready for that yet. So we hiked up the trail, and they did great, even our puppy Faith.  I took a couple of really cool panorama shots, too, but I don't think they're worth showing until I can drop them onto Photobucket and link them here. Because, bottom line, you need the full resolution for to really do those pictures justice.  

Green Lake

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It took some doing, but we're finally up at Green Lake in Maine. It's vacation time!   Our cabin is maybe seven hours north of Stratford, out on a little peninsula that juts down into the heart of the lake itself, accessible by a single dirt road with water on either side for a hundred feet. The peninsula itself is covered in pine and cedar trees and great granite boulders that have been here since the glaciers retreated a million  of years ago. It took us a good nine hours to get here yesterday, but that's because we stopped in Freeport for a couple of hours at the big L.L. Bean campus that's there. The Bean family hails from Freeport, and our little tour through town yesterday seemed to confirm that the success of their little camping and fishing retailer has allowed the family to pretty much purchase the place wholesale. Fortunately, they seem like benevolent overlords--an argument in favor of modern day American despotism. All the people we saw working in Freeport w

Help Wanted: Writers!

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If you're a writer, there are a lot of places you can go if all you care about is seeing your name on a byline.  But I personally don't understand why anyone would go to most of those places.  I mean, if you're looking for a writer, but you're not offering any money, how is that actually an offer?  What is it that you're offering?

Friday Hair Metal: Subdivisions, Live In Holland

Every Friday should start with Rush.

New Thor Poster

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I got this from Newsrama .  Really speaks to what the movie's gonna be if you ask me. And folks wonder why I think a D&D movie could work.  It's a matter of execution, guys.