Well, feh.

Had a perfectly good Valkyrie going yesterday. A little luck and some hunting gave me speed boots, gauntlets of power, and a cloak of protection before I even hit the Gnonish Mines. Then things went sour.

• Evidently, it was Rust Monster Con.


• With a special appearance by fire-breathing monsters


• Which meant that all my armor was either rusted or burnt.


• There was exactly one altar in the entire dungeon. That was the Minetown Temple. At least that was co-aligned.


• There were no general stores or used bookshops. So I had to identify scrolls the hard way.


• The Wand of Wishing had one charge. Used that to get 2 scrolls of charging, then had to burn a wish to get scrolls of enchant armor!

After all this, I was heading back up stairs to do the Quest when I was jumped by a mind flayer. Despite having the +5 Mojo, the damn thing still ate my brain. OK, see what I've forgotten.. how to write identify scrolls.

I gave up. I crawled back up to level 6, took off everything, stuffed it my bag of holding, dropped that, then used my bag of tricks to summon some monsters. The idea was to leave a Christmas present bones file, but sure enough, no bones.

Frustrating game. Going to play some more now.

The Year in Review meme

Post the first couple of lines from the first entry each month of 2008.

January: I crapped out early last night after watching the NYC Times Square ball drop.

February: The City of Berkeley has gone too fucking far. A USMC Recruiting office opened on Shattuck Avenue in December 2006. It's mission is to attract recent college graduates to serve as officers.

March: The judge who ordered Wikileaks shut down now concedes that his ruling "might not have been constitutional." When you get groups from the ACLU to the Hearst Corp screaming in outrage, it's a good clue that there's a problem, dude. My favorite quote from the story comes from one of the plaintiff's lawyers whinging about an imagined "abdication of authority over the Internet" by the judicial system. "That means it's a frontier that's wide open." said William Briggs. Damn right!

April: Men on 2nd and 3rd with NO FREAKING OUTS and we DON'T SCORE!?!?!

May: An Antarctic fur seal has been observed trying to have sex with a king penguin.

June: Machine Head, a local Thrash/Groove Metal band out of Oakland, has a small but devoted following in the Bay Area Metal scene.

July: I'd love this for my birthday. The web is a great tool for research, but nothing, nothing, replaces the joy of paging through a good encyclopedia or atlas.

August: To: Lower intestinal tract. From: HHC, Doug's Body.

September: Just got home from one of the better shows I've seen in ages. It was the last show of the tour, so we got some on stage pranks (I'd love to know why Testament was gifted with a horse ridden by a blue-haired young lady - there's a story there) and all the bands seemed determined to go out with a bang.

October: One of the links over there to the left is to Fundies Say The Darndest Things, a collection of the insane rantings of people who have OD' on religion. One of the major sources for quotes is a site known as Rapture Ready.

November: As has been reported by a few other gaming blogs and news sites, the Charity Auction at this year's GenCon Indianapolis was held to benefit Gary Gygax's favorite charity, which I will not name here for reasons that will soon become obvious.

December: I’ve heard of gay penguins before, but I hadn’t heard of this. A couple of gay gentoos at Polar Land in Harbin, China, had attempted to snatch eggs from the feet of other penguins. Devious little guys, aren’t they? What’s more devious is that they would actually replace the egg with stones in hopes the parents would not notice. However, the other penguins in the zoo have indeed noticed and have ostricized the gay couple from their group.