Hot on the heels of my last revelation, this morning I figured out that Gnip Gnop’s name is Ping Pong spelled backwards. It only took 30 years to come to that realization. Another step closer to enlightenment, I guess.

Didn’t go outside at all today. Just cleaned the house, played a little Animal Crossing on the Wii and watched the kids play Webkinz. And I watched Stardust with the boys while Mariko is out with friends. A surpise birthday party for her actually!

Went down to New Braunfels to meet my uncle and cousin to do a little fishing. We caught only one trout and three perch, but it was lots of fun. Must do it again soon! Fishing is so fun.

Kia’s “The Power to Surprise” has got to be the worst tagline, especially for a car company. Are the cars surprisingly good? Do Kia’s surprise pedestrians or bicyclists more than other vehicles when you pull out in front of them? Are we supposed to be surprised that Kia’s haven’t gone the way of the Yugo already? I would think you’d want your car to be thought of as reliable, stable, consistent, and predictable. You want to know exactly what your car is going to do when you step on the gas, or push hard on the brakes. That’s not a time when you want to be surprised.

The past few days, I have been so thirsty. I try to drink lots of water, but sometimes I am just too busy. Eventually I end up in front of the fridge, filling a glass with water. That is when my thirst is unbearable, and I can’t even wait for the glass to be filled. I end up quickly drinking a quarter glass-full, then continue filling up the glass again. That feeling of thirst is so awful and peculiar. Not only do I feel parched in my mouth, but my whole body feels like it is just drained. I can deal with hunger a whole lot better than thirst. Whenever I am standing at the fridge in this situation, I can’t help but think that dying from thirst would be the most terrible way to go.

Thirst link at Wikipedia

Water requirements for adults

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons died this week at the age of 69. I’ve read a few obits and tributes, and I thought I would reminisce a bit about my D&D experiences. Probably won’t be very interesting to anyone, but whatever… you’ve been warned.

Probably around 6th grade, my friend C’s mom got the D&D Basic game, and we all played at their house one afternoon. I believe the module was “Keep on the Borderlands”. It was pretty awesome. The whole experience was new. The cool dice, the character sheets, the little figurines. And of course C’s mom was a great DM (Dungeon Master). I think I had a magic-user back then. I remember I only had 4 HP, which was just crazy! Magic-users were such wimps! But magic missile and sleep were such great spells. There was something else, something like a floating torch. A spell like that can only be fun when playing a real table-top game. I can’t imagine how it would be fun on a computer screen. One thing I remember about that adventure was that our group was exploring some caves, and there was an ogre living in one part of it and he had a big hunk of cheese. I found that peculiar.

Later on, my friends and I really got into D&D. We had most of the books, and started playing on weekends. Our regular group included P, D, my bro, BL and I think TB. We’d go over to one of our houses on Friday nights and sit around the table drinking sodas and eating popcorn, and have a blast playing! P was the DM for most all of the sessions, and he was great. I really liked the games at BL’s house, because we would ride bikes across the neighborhood which was fun, and the popcorn at BL’s house was so tasty. It was the first time I had popcorn that was NOT Jiffy-pop, and it tasted so much better!

Besides playing the game, I was into the books. Not novels or anything, but the actual rule books. I’d pore over the Players Handbook and study all the races, classes, spells, alignments, etc. The Monster Manual was excellent as well. So many neat creatures in there. Most of them were really cool, like ochre jelly, gelatinous cube, rust monster, mind flayer, etc. But there were some lame ones too. Like dinosaurs. There should not be dinos in D&D. The Demon section was particularly interesting because of the boss monsters Orcus and Demogorgon. Those looked so bad-ass, and they had massive amounts of HP. And I have to mention that the drawing of the succubus was so hot, especially for adolescent boys like us. Speaking of that, when Deities & Demigods came out, it was like a Playboy magazine! Wowza.

One aspect which was fun was collecting the little lead figures. I had so many of them, and they were really fun to play with and paint. We didn’t really use them so much in-game, but they were still fun to collect. I remember going to the Paul Freiler’s Hobby Shop in Old Towne Mall (Torrance) and looking at all the D&D loot, and then later to the new Paul Freiler’s location farther down on Hawthorne Blvd. to read some Dragon magazine. The adventure modules were also a lot of fun, not only to play thru, but read on your own. My favorite module to play through was White Plume Mountain. That was so cool because it had a frictionless floor at one point, then the “Inverted ziggurat” and a vampire at the end. There were also some manticores and phat lewt as well! I believe it was a trident of some sort. Anyways, that was a great module to play through. The next module in the series was kind of futuristic: “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”, in which you find a spaceship in the mountains and explore. My bro and I had a couple modules that we would just read thru: he had something about Hill Giants, and I had the other one, “Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl” or something like that. They had fun maps and traps etc etc.

Speaking of maps, one of the coolest things about playing the game was mapping out the dungeon on graph paper. It was neat to go back and look at the map and recount the adventure. I also used to make my own dungeons using graph paper. I was crazy about putting pits everywhere, for some reason. I also enjoyed taking it a bit further, and drawing out world maps. I used to have this huge world imagined, with capital cities, rivers, mountains, deserts. All that kind of thing!

Eventually, we lost interest in D&D. High School and other activities (girls!) were at the top of the list, and we stopped playing. But my interest in the Fantasy genre never died, and I continued to read Fantasy books, like the Thieves’ World series and Elric series. To this day, I still enjoy playing RPG’s on the computer and will occasionally pick up a Fantasy novel.

It’s sad that Gary Gygax is gone, but he leaves us with a huge legacy in the gaming and Fantasy world. RIP, Gary Gygax.

The other night when I went out for a run, I had a few things going thru my head. The first was that my face was kind of burning. It felt like I had a bad sunburn or something. I guess my skin was so dry, and the perspiration was burning my cheeks.

Then later I started thinking about my new meatless diet. I’ve been reading some vegetarianism forums the past few days, and I’ve been surprised at how aggressive vegetarians and non-vegetarians are towards each other, at least on these message boards. It’s so surprising to me that people would get so confrontational about one’s lifestyle choice. Especially about food. I guess I can understand when someone is passionate about not eating meat, but the meat-eaters who come to these forums and start flaming the vegetarians are just amazing. I guess I just don’t agree with forcing your lifestyle choices on others. It’s okay to explain why you made the choices you made, but it’s too much to demand that others follow the same path.

My regular running route takes me to the neighborhood high school, at which point I turn around and head back home. This particular part of the route is a long, straight street, with a speed limit of 35mph. I have often seen people get ticketed for speeding here, and I always keep my speed down. But, since it is near the high school, I see lots of new drivers hauling ass down this stretch. This night, I saw the opposite, although it was still a bit of stupid driving. One car was driving extra-slow, and another car behind it (I presume they were friends) was tailgating. Brake lights would flash, and they would slow down even more. Then they would speed up. Then slow down. I tried to remember back to when I was in high school, and I guess we did silly stuff like that too. What these kids were doing was not too dangerous given the slow speed and lack of traffic, but still, I couldn’t help but shake my head.

Towards the end of my run, I again noticed that my face was totally burning. It only hurt when I touched my cheeks, so I just tried to ignore it. It must have worked since the next time I thought about it was when I was falling asleep, and my cheeks were back to normal.

These past few years, I’ve been reading lots of blogs and participating in forums in which the posts are being contributed from around the world. It’s interesting to hear about all the cultural differences (and surprising similarities) among the countries. One particular thing that has struck me in the past couple months is that I have seen the word ”Jap” come up in normal conversations/threads. In the States, this term’s usage is rare and pretty much confined to racist remarks towards people of Japanese ancestry.  It goes back to WWII, and the propaganda used to depict the Japanese enemy. But, you know, in some parts of the world, it is a common, generic term to describe something Japanese. So, even though I cringe a little when I see the word, I realize that no ill intent is meant. Just a cultural difference, I tell myself.

Here are a few things about Japan that I just don’t get:

Crowding into an elevator when there is an escalator just over there

Sure, we are 6 floors up, but I’d rather take an escalator, where I can relax and maybe see interesting things rather than pack into an elevator with 12 other people, have to try to push my way in and out, stop at each floor and get out of the elevator to let people out, then squish back in. All the while, trying to avoid uncomfortable eye contact, and also not touch anyone lest they think I am chikan. Oh, and repeat for each floor til we reach the bottom.

Plain Mochi

Mochi is rice that has been pounded into a dough. Although you can eat it year round, it’s often served at New Years in a soup. I was watching a show on tv, and one of the hosts had a big bite of mochi, and of course exclaimed"Oishii!!!" (delicious). I was thinking “No way, how can you say that big lump of tastless dough is delicious.” There’s a lot of delicious Japanese food I’d rather fill my belly with than mochi. However, one of them is not…

Dango

Similar to mochi, dango are balls of usually rice flour, and put on skewer. I remember being at a festival and getting handed a skewer of three mitarashi dango. They looked delicious, these little balls covered with a golden brown sweet shoyu sauce. Only after I bit into it and found out that I was eating another tastless lump of dough, did I realize that it was not nearly as delicious as it looked.