Crimson Crux

Whatever my friends might tell you, consider me a thrifty person. Most of my freelancing salaries end up in the bank (which then almost always get spent for family/household bills), for I rarely dish out more than 20% of my income on personal ‘luxuries’. If I do splurge, it will be on books, and lots of it.

But of course, there’s always an exception to the rule.

Last Monday, a package literally greeted me at my room/home office’s doorstep. It had arrived from Paizo Publishing in Bellevue, Washington, and inside were about $160 worth of Dungeons & Dragons goodies.

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While aimlessly wandering around YouTube, I came across this three-minute gem from Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. It plays to the tune of Electric Six’s Danger! High Voltage, which has suddenly found its way into my playlist.

Funny video + funky song = a great way to kill your time. Enjoy!

Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell! Oops, couldn’t resist…! In any case: Electric Six Danger! High Voltage lyrics.

While writing some posts for a Dungeons and Dragons Online site a few weeks back, I chanced upon a highly entertaining webcomics by the name of DDO1Liners. Highly entertaining, that is, if you:

• Are a fantasy geek,
• Have played D&D or any similar RPG systems,
• Have played the DDO MMORPG or any similar online games, or
• Have a sibling whose endless ‘dice rolls’ and ‘dungeon delvings’ with his/her friends at your house have somehow ingrained the terminology and lingo into your otherwise innocent brain.

Needless to say, those items can overlap! Anyway, I found myself going through every strip in their archives, which I don’t usually do with other webcomics. (more…)

I think my year is off to a bad start, with regard to clearing my backlog for everything — books, web projects, lit works, even cleaning the house (the glory of being an only child with no mom). Two salient queues I have right now consist of 1) my blog posts, and 2) my magazines.

First, I have at least 35 outstanding blog drafts, 19 of which are for this blog alone! The stillborn remnants of would-be posts are scattered among my desktop Stickies, text files, cellphone notes, and my “mol-eh-skin-ah“. Oh, and don’t remind me about my 60+ remaining problogging assignments for the month.

Second, I’ve got five magazines left to devour — three Dragon issues, a single Dungeon, and a single Communications of the ACM. These mags are supposed to be a break from all the carpal tunnel syndrome-inducing blogging, but more and more reading them has become a task. (Especially with the ACM mag — computer science stuff!)

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Okay, I know this post has absolutely nothing in connection with tech stuff, but hey, it still screams “Geeky”.

Yours truly is a Dungeon & Dragons (or let’s just say “role-playing”) fan, and while not a hardcore gamer or even a one-time Dungeon Master, I can say that I’ve my own ways of expressing my loyalty. I regularly read issues of the Dragon and Dungeon magazines, not to mention having a pile of D&D-related novels (mostly on the Forgotten Realms setting). I was addicted to several D&D-related PC games, too, such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale.

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