Journal

A bit of an unusual weekend for me now that Moulsari’s out of the country, but I survived it with the poise, grace and super-suave style that everyone has come to expect of me.

Gaming yesterday went really well, despite Richard’s absence. I rather enjoyed playing his character a bit as a GM. A GM always has expectations and ideas about how a character should react and respond in certain types of situations, and sometimes those differ quite a bit from the player’s opinions. Richard’s character, Thomas, is a ranger, and he’s not…ferral enough in my opinion. Richard, like many players, puts a lot of his own ideals into each character he plays, and I don’t think they necessarily mesh well with the concept of a ranger as I hold it. Obviously our opinions differ.

Some time ago (actually quite some time ago) when we still played Shadowrun (can’t wait to do that again soon), I got to play Dennis’ character Proteus for a session or two while he couldn’t make it. Proteus was a verteran physical adept, but I felt Dennis didn’t give credit to the awesomeness of his own character. He downplayed his abilities a little bit, while he should’ve realised he was playing freakin’ superman. I had a lot of fun freaking the rest of the players out with some GM creativity, and they started to respect his character a little bit. Now, of course, it could well have been the case that Dennis intentionally downplayed his characters abilities, but I had fun with it anyway. :)

The rest of last night’s session went very well. There was quite some travelling involved, which is always hard to play, I think. It ends up being a bit of a monologue on the GM’s part, I find, which sucks. In this case they had to move into a massive swamp, in search of a temple that was supposed to be hidden there, somewhere. The mage managed to pull of a spell that was still well beyond his ability (Polymorph Self) and changed into a large crow and acted as a scout, which helped things along nicely, and the players found an old boat, half submerged, and probably once used for mudcrab fishing by the local population on the edge of the swamp. They cleared the boat, and managed to make some flotillas by tightly weaving reeds together. All in all, very clever. If you give players something to do, or a hurdle to overcome, like finding their way across crocodile and troll infested swamps, then traveling doesn’t have to suck so much. I tried to keep it as short as possible, though, and made sure they got to the temple (or close to it) by the end of the session. Next week, they can start there, afresh.

After putting Moulsari on a plane to India, I suddenly find myself without a social life.

I really like the I Am Legend premise. This is sure to be one of the films that I won’t be missing. :)

I just wrote an entire post about my frustrating evening yesterday, and I switched to another tab to download the Fallout 3 trailer, and my browser fucking crasht, so I lost the post. Let me see if I can recreate it…

I had a very frustrating evening yesterday, since I badly wanted to go to Kung Fu, since I haven’t been there with everything that’s been happening lately. I couldn’t reach my step-father, and therefore kind of took a gamble that he had left his car for me to use. He hasn’t been using it a lot lately, so I took the train to Hoorn, walked over to his house, only to find that his car wasn’t there. I ended up taking a taxi from my mother’s house to Kung Fu, and after Kung Fu one from there to my father’s house to pick up some things that had to be returned to the doctor (mophine pump, etc.) and then drove on to my mother for some food and a shower. It cost me 35 euro, which ticked me off, but I wasn’t going to let anything stand in my way of going to Kung Fu again.

At Kung Fu everyone was really glad to see me, which warmed my heart, and I got to train in the new gym we share with a kickboxing school. The space was a bit smaller than what we had before, but the mat was perfect, and it has a dedicated boxing ring, which was great, too. It also has very neatly attached hooks all along the wall, with a full-length kickboxing bag hung from them, which you can slide forward, away from the wall and lock in place; a really nice way of storing the kickboxing bags. The area is high, which is good so that it doesn’t run out of oxygen quickly, and it has windows and a door to the outside. It’s abit more spartan than what we had before, which I like, but good ventilation in the summer is a luxury you get used to really quickly.

The training went well. The push-ups I’ve been doing every morning have really helped out, because I didn’t get too winded when we did them during training, which normally does happen. My legs had become quite a bit weaker, though, but that’s just a matter of time. I was really happy when my sifu told me that we’d knock off the extra weight I had put on over the last few weeks in no time. :)

Karel, my Kung Fu brother, immediately challenged me to a sparring match in the ring, and when we started I immediate shot for a double-leg take-down, tried to put him in a kimura but pinning his arm instead and I went for a full-mount. It was all over from there. I got applause. Not really Kung Fu…but fun nonetheless. :)

I’ve decided that if I can find a BJJ school in Amsterdam I’m going to go and have a look at it. Kung Fu is really cool to do, but it’s a sport, not really combat.