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Susan and I went down to Games & Stuff the day after Christmas to play Ripples in the Stream of Souls with Faral and Reed. Jimmy ran; Mark B., Jason B., Amanda, and Terrence were our fellow players. I liked the moral choices in this module a lot. There was a lot to mull over, there was stuff to investigate without the risk of getting stuck without enough clues, and so on. For the last adventure of the year, I’d say this was pretty good. It was also pleasantly apt that we’d meet a fun new local player in the last game of the year, since that’s always been a big part of the LFR experience for me.

I ran this down at Games & Stuff for Alan, Hudson, Mark B., Jason B., and Evil Tony. Like most Akanul region mods, it’s a straightforward linear mission. The story is a bit weak for paragon tier PCs, but the opposition is fun and it’s a very tunable module. You can make it deadly dangerous or you can dial down the difficulty as appropriate. It’s also got some interesting monsters. ...

The second game we played on 12/18 was A Stab in the Dark, which was one of the few H3 modules nobody had ever played. I dragged Alesk out of the folder, since Amanda was GMing and Susan didn’t want to play two games. Jimmy and the Bradleys were the other three players, of course. This is pretty much your usual Dragon Coast Westgate module. (Previous versions of this post may have been confused, ahem.) I liked the terrain even though it was not at all rewarding to melee – but playing Alesk as a polearm battle cleric was tons of fun anyhow. Plus I’m a sucker for Westgate.

We played a couple of games at the house on 12/18. The first one, which Susan ran, was Tyranny’s Bitter Frost: a bunch of the local peeps who’d played Tyranny’s Bleak Depth’s at Gencon wanted to play the sequel. I happened to have Collin sitting comfortably at the beginning of P2, so that worked out well. (This made his fourth SPEC module in a row, and he’ll be playing the BI later in January. No mundane mods for him.) ...

I tried it out; it does what you’d expect. But here’s the ridiculous news, which is best summarized by the following graph. Since the Mac App Store launch, more than half of Evernote’s new users have come from the Mac, compared to a minuscule percentage before the launch. I mean, it’s the first weekend, and I’m sure it’ll level out. But man.

I have no idea if this is anything like Car Wars, but it has a turning key and the preview scenario (original) says something about customizing jets, so in my brain it’s Car Wars in the sky. I may be doing an injustice to someone by this. Either way: 3D papercraft jet models! (original)

The Boston sports world is a weird place. Intense, fanatical, whiny, hopeful – it’s the kind of place that can support two sports radio stations without any problem whatsoever. Very macho world, of course. Sports. So the cool thing of the morning is this: Steve Buckley, who’s one of the reasonably big names in Boston sports journalism, came out (original). He writes for the (conservative) Boston Herald, and he has a frequent guest spot on (fairly conservative) WEEI, so that makes his environment just a little bit more unwelcoming than if he wrote for the Globe. Big kudos to him. ...

We recently cut the cable cord. It turns out that you can get an HD antennae that feeds a Tivo well enough, and that covers anything on Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CW. AMC is the big exception, but it’s cheaper to buy the episodes on iTunes than it would be to maintain the cable bill. I was gonna get HBO in the spring to watch Game of Thrones, and HBO does not do downloads for non-subscribers, but c’est la vie. Also I lose a lot of the NBA playoffs. Thankfully there are sports bars. Anyway, for the sake of the decision-making process I thought hard about what I actually watch.

Two interesting ebook questions: when will publishers get around to releasing the backlist as ebooks, and who will be the quality gatekeepers in a world of self-publishing? You may think the second question is a moot point, and can be answered by some form of collective criticism, aka Metafilter, but I’m going to throw out some relevant news anyhow. As I understand it, part of the problem with the first question is that publishers don’t own the ebook rights to their backlist. It wasn’t part of the standard contract back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. This means authors can do it themselves, if they like. Please take a moment to read this post from John Scalzi before continuing. ...

Year’s just about done! I will do a retrospective post at some point in January, although I will not bother with stats. I will also finish up the last four or so games I played and ran in December. I might do a post for DDXP if I feel moved. I will not be cataloging all my 2011 LFR games, because I don’t think I’ll be playing as much LFR in the new year. More on that in the retrospective, or possibly in its own post, depending on how I feel.