Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Roll For Ballot Initiative
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Yesterday around 1:30pm I thought, "Oh, I'm already in Manhattan and have some free time. I should stop by Midtown Comics and catch up on my trades."
(New DMZ and Ex Machina, new MAD and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and some new things to try: something about a Russian WWII aviatrix & Laurie Sandell's The Impostor's Daughter (kinda like Fun Home, starts out in Stockton so I have some hometown interest). I'd brought the Vinge with me.)
One thing led to another, and I ended up spending the afternoon and evening playing AD&D (2nd Ed.) in a conference room at Google.
Lessons learned, postmortem, & takeaway:
As I'd suspected from an Amar Chitra Katha fable, dweep is indeed Tamil for "island."
Until yesterday, I think I hadn't used "circumference = 2πr" for three to ten years. (I had a bag of sand, about thirteen pinches' worth, and could direct each pinch of sand to transform into 20 square feet of quarter-inch-thick wall. I used this to spring up a wall around the circumference of the towertop, a space ten feet in diameter, so that our enemies had a harder time directing magical attacks at us from other towers. How high was the wall? Left as an exercise for the reader!) (Turns out it was moot; if you have teleported in to the top of a tower to rescue some hostages, your enemies may just decide to topple said tower while you're in it.)
When you're in the middle of fighting a giant monster, and someone calls you on the phone, just tell them "I'm in the middle of a D&D session and we're fighting a giant monster." Either the caller gets it, and will leave you alone, or they don't get it, and they'll really leave you alone.
