Survived vacation

Well, I’m back at work, after a (short) 2-week vacation. It’s nice and peaceful here, as opposed to the hectic (but very fun) vacation schedule. And the office has air conditioning, which is a win these days.

We spent the first weekend in Joensuu, at Isosaarirock. Very nice rock festival, and nice trip overall. The hotel was an “eco-hotel”, which proved to be bad on Friday when we arrived: “eco” meant no air conditioning and poor ventilation, resulting in a room temperature easily in the 30s (C). We finally managed to sleep without dying of overheating by (also) leaving the room door open to the corridor. The temps dropped a bit the next days so it wasn’t so bad, but… that place really wasn’t built to handle heat waves. Nice enough otherwise.

The festival itself was good. Nice selection of bands and a wide cross-section of genres. We listened to everything from big band jazz to heavy metal and (Finnish!) rap. I primarily went there to see Imogen Heap (she was good), but many other gigs were also very much worth seeing and listening to. My feet were killing me near the end; 12 hours or so of standing / bounding about in soleless shoes (Feelmax) starts to get to you. We got a bit of a sunburn, but nothing too bad… and the beach there was awesome. You could wade in the water or go for a swim, while seeing and hearing the band on stage at the same time.

Imogen Heap seemed happy about the very positive reception she got (she hasn’t been here before), so I’m hoping she’ll do a “proper” tour with a Finnish concert at some point. It would be great to see her in a more focused environment.

The following week our house started filling up with guests. A lot of EVE players were coming to Finland for Ropecon, and we housed some at our place. Actually, we still do, I think the last of them leaves tomorrow. We also got well-known VTES “celebrity” player over (I’ve met him before at ECs), who got crash space on the floor on a mattress since our guest bedroom and sofa were already occupied my others. Fun guys all, and it’s fun to have the house full of people. Well, now and then it is, anyway ;)

Last weekend was Ropecon, of course. I ran the big VTES tournament on Friday, and it went very well. Excellent turnout with 93 players, and we also had a record number of foreign players attending. The win went to Otso Saariluoma, with the final round ending around 3am. It was a good final round too, with lots of stuff happening all the time. I’ll write up a full tournament report during the next week or so, with details on all that.

On Saturday I played in the VTES draft (fun, but only got 1 VP total), then caught some random program events and finally stumbled home to sleep for an all-too-short while. Sunday back to the con area to listen to Guy Windsor’s traditional “Realities of Steel” thing, and then an 8-hour info desk shift. So the con went well, though this year most of it went towards VTES for me.

…and now it’s (slowly) back to normal routine. That’s not a bad thing, as such. The kittehs will miss having a million people around the house, though, they’ve grown used to always having a human around who has time to pet them. […]

Busy

It’s been a semi-hectic few weeks. Oh, fun, and almost all of the “hectic” part has been due to various hobbies and stuff like that. Still, I’m left feeling a slight bit frazzled and thankful that this week looks more sane. Maybe I’ll just get time to curl up with a book, or something..

The weekend before was spent mostly in the forest, at a paintball war weekend organized by a friend. Good fun and nice exercise, and some of the scenarios were especially cool (notably the VIP escort one, where I was gunned down by “terrorists” but the VIP survived by doing an very fast “duck and cover”). Extra thanks to the cooks on site, the food was delicious and there was tons of it.

This weekend was also full of stuff: on Saturday I ran the Battle Lines storyline VTES tournament in Otaniemi. We has 16 players and the win went to Aleksi Nuora with his True Brujah deck. Nice work. I’ll post a short tournament report about that in the newsgroup soonish. Yesterday I ran Exalted for most of the day, which is always fun but also pretty exhausting. The previous week went into a combo of game prep, toying with the new “Planetary Interaction” thingy in EVE, the Roxy Music concert on Thursday, and just… stuff.

I’m slowly gearing up to run a limited Dark Heresy campaign, based on the fairly interesting Haarlock’s Legacy pregen campaign series. Character generation is next week, after that we’ll see what happens to mutants, aliens and other Enemies of the Empire. It’s possible that all that happens is “they get nice things to snack on”. […]

10 trillion boxes of cards on the wall...

Though it was a pleasant weekend as such, I was feeling seriously under the weather with some lightweight-but-tiring flu strain… not properly sick, but tired, head-achey and generally “meh”. That meant that I also stayed in for most of the weekend.

…which meant that on Sunday I finally got around to doing some organizing on my tons and tons of VTES cards. Oh, they were more or less in general order to begin with, but I had 3 boxes of new(ish) cards waiting to be filed and my card storage space is/was running low so I needed to weed out extra cards. Started “work” sometime before noon, and I was still at it close to midnight (with some breaks in between). Did manage to sort most of the stuff, though, and now I have a huge pile of commmons (& some uncommons) I’ll probably just donate to someone. Some cards I have way too many of.

Now that the heavy lifting has been done, I can finally get around to building some new decks based on the new Heirs to the Blood cards. Lots of potentially fun stuff there.

Otherwise, I’m waiting for this white stuff to disappear from the ground. Winter is fine and all, but I’m really looking forward to actual spring and summer now. Our yard still has ridiculous amounts of snow, and the kittehs are quite annoyed at us since their yard is full of cold, wet crap. I also want to get a new set of summer tires for my car, but most shops are still only showing “prices will be up Real Soon Now” signs and anyway, I can’t switch tires before it’s reliably above zero at night (ice and summer tires mix badly).

Oh, and I caved in and bought Mass Effect 2. It took most of Sunday to load (via Steam), I had that going while I was doing card organizing. Only got around to playing it around midnight, played around an hour before going to bed. Looks pretty nice. The controls have changed a bit, but otherwise the gameplay seems similar and the initial plot twist is interesting. We’ll see how it develops. […]

Gaming weekend

Busy weekend.

On Saturday I ran a release tournament for the new Heirs to the Blood set. Went well; we had 19 players and these release tournament things are always fun. I had personally avoided reading spoilers much at all so for me the cards were largely new surprises, but even for people who had bought some the previous week (when it went on sale) it was probably the first chance to actually play with them.

The win went to Tuomas Vuokko, playing with Salubri Antitribu. Tuomas has been in torpor for almost a year now due to suffering a bunch of pretty horrific real-life events… but he decided to join this at the last minute and proceeded to win the whole thing. As an amusing side, all the players with game wins were playing Kiasyd/Lasombra, Tuomas was the only one able to get a game win with something else. Impressive.

Sunday I ran another segment of my ongoing Exalted game. I had done quite a bit of prep, due to having no real certainty of how the players would react to the things I threw at them… so even though I suspected they’d go for Plan A, I also had to have Plans B,C and D available in some form. Mostly things went as I had suspected (though there were a few surprises). The gang is now in the Northern Wyld Borderlands, planning an assault on a massive Pale Hunter fortification, all because a young Lunar managed to land on their lap.

I was pretty happy with the thing, especially since a major part of it had been written from scratch. […]

Back from the EC

So, the VTES 2009 European Championships are now over, and we’re back from Palma de Mallorca (Spain). Us Finns didn’t score too well this time around (with a couple of exceptions), but otherwise the trip was a blast. Flying from cold, dark and drizzly Finland to warm and sunny Mallorca was a nice beginning, and for once the hotel actually did live up to expectations and pictures. The rooms were nice (our apartment suite was close to the pools), the food was excellent, the staff friendly, and in general almost everything went smoothly. The games did have a tendency to start very much behind schedule, but since I could spend that time sipping sangrias on the sunny terrace I didn’t mind too much.

I was already qualified (thanks to running the Ropecon tournament), so on Friday I decided to play in the sideline “Friday the 13th” tournament, organized by Tiago and Teresa. Was a lot of fun, though my Akunanse deck wasn’t quite up to the challenge; managed to scrape together two half-VPs due to two timeouts. The storyline rules did slow the game down a bit, so we had more timeouts than normal. Still, had a lot of fun. I thought I was packing a lot of combat, but the first round stuck between Matt’s Potence rush deck and someone else’s celerity gun intercept deck taught me differently.

Saturday it was time for the EC day one tournament. I picked my Anarch Cry Wolf Khazar deck for this… it has a lot of bounce, some rush, and I thought it might have a chance. Well, it didn’t work out, the day ended with zero VPs. There were a few close calls where I almost got a VP, but “almost” doesn’t count. In the end, the deck (though decent) wasn’t quite resilient enough and it was simply too slow for this metagame. Lots of powerbleed, fast votes (Panders etc) and other fast, brutal decks. Oh well. The games were fun in any case, and everyone was very nice and sportsmanlike. After talking about it, I got some nice ideas from Janne and other people, and have since tweaked the deck to be more efficient – dropped it down to 80 cards, tightened up the combat module, etc.

Sunday was the First Chance tournament, where I tried out my !Toreador/Daughters tap&bleed deck. Still not all that much luck, but things went a bit better: got 1 VP on the third round, and both of the first games had me with my prey at one pool. One is unfortunately a lot more than zero, but still… I’m pretty happy with how the deck performed in general. In hindsight, I probably would have gotten another VP if I had played my hand (a combo of tap cards, Freak Drive, and Siren’s Lure) a bit differently. I’ve since also modified this deck, also paring it down to 80 cards and hopefully making it run a bit more tightly. Will need more playtesting.

Janne had better luck, he was playing his deadly Fortitude weenie horror all weekend. He almost made it to EC day 2, which is very well done. On the other hand, lots of normally high-scoring Finns ended up at around my number of VPs (i.e. zero-to-one). Weird.

As traditional, I didn’t get all that much sleep. Usually went to bed around 2am after playing all day and night and drinking quite a bit on the side…. and then it’s up before 8am, in time to register for the next day’s games and eat breakfast. Still, those 6 hours proved to be enough, I wasn’t totally zoned out or anything. We played quite a few games with Team Denmark (great guys), with some of the games held at out apartment suite – we had a fridge, lots of salmiakkivodka & beer, and two game-worthy tables. Luxury.

So. Great trip, really felt like a vacation (despite lack of sleep and little real “rest” at any point). If was great to meet and play with lots of fun people once again (LSJ&Oscar, we demand that Imbued toilet paper!). Huge thanks to Ginés for organizing this, and to everyone else who helped. Meeting the Portugese guys was great, thanks Tiago and others! Likewise for the Italians, thanks Paolo and everyone for great company and fun games. Even though not everyone could speak all that much English (hey, my Italian is worse!), things worked out.

This was probably the best EC so far, for me. The sunshine and sangria helped.

Extrala brings us some VTES EC essential vocabulary, along with results and some pictures.

Oh, and Scott is a Cylon. Duh. […]

Leaving normal, once again

Now I’m leaving normal and I’m heading for who knows where

–Cowboy Junkies, “Leaving Normal”

More or less dropping off the grid now. Flight leaves in… all too few hours, I should already be trying to grab a few hours of sleep. Maybe I will.

Tomorrow Iceland, then in a few weeks Black Rock City. I can already smell the playa dust.

P.S. The Ropecon VTES tournament report is now up. Enjoy. […]

No sleep 'til Monday

Well, another Ropecon is now over (except for the after-party). While once again it was an exercise in seeing how far you can push yourself in the sleep deprivation department, it also went very well and was a lot of fun.

I had already done some “con stuff” on Wednesday and Thursday, with some pub time with LSJ (Guest of Honor), Juki, Janne and the others, but things really started off for me on Friday with the big VTES tournament. I was at work until 4pm or so, and after that drove over to Dipoli and set up the registration desk. Things proceeded smoothly even though there were a lot of players (we got a grand total of 85 this year), and I managed to get the tournament running by 18:15 – not bad. LSJ was also playing in this one, something he doesn’t get to do all that much. He did threaten to ask nasty rules questions from the judge (which would be me), but in reality he behaved. Perhaps it was the threats of violence…

Anyway, the tournament was a success. Nobody skipped out suddenly and everyone who signed up was actually there more or less on time – the few latecomers kept me well informed via the phone. There were some rules questions as always, but only one which I wasn’t 100% sure about right off… and this time, I could actually go find LSJ and ask him for confirmation. Awesome. Even though the playing space was cramped for this number of players and the lack of fresh air and ridiculous air humidity became real factors, everyone dealt with it and seemed to have a good time. So a huge thanks to the players for this one: once again, you made this possible and a fun thing to run.

The preliminary rounds finished a bit before 1am, after which I dealt out the EC qualifier t-shirts to the 21 players who got a qualification. After that, the finalists took a short break and then gathered up to play the final round (which got going around 1:25am). The final round had 2 Swedish players and 3 Finns. Pauli (one of the Finns) was ousted quite soon by Michael (a Swede), which left four Dominate-heavy decks on the table. After a long tense stretch of a game, the win finally went to Adam Esbjörnsson (from Sweden) with about 5 minutes left on the game clock. Congrats! Adam was playing a very nasty-looking deck based around Gabrielle di Righetti, the new Tremere Justicar. I’ll write up a full tournament report over the next couple of weeks, hopefully with full finalist deck lists and some pictures.

So, at around 3.20am, things were wrapped up, and I could… go downstairs to do an Info desk shift until 7am! Whee! To be fair, I had requested night shifts, so I can only blame myself. The night shift went fine, though it was a bit boring. Come on Troubleshooters, your job is to keep Info (and yourselves) awake, keeping peace and order is secondary to that! There was cakes and whipped cream, though, so can’t complain too much.

When 7am rolled around I hopped in the car and drove home. In own bed and asleep before 8am… so got to sleep curled up next to wife for a hour or so until she had to get up and do her own Info desk shift. The cats were quite confused about human timetables at this point. I slept until noon(ish), then headed back to the con. Hung around, saw some lectures, did the normal con routine until something like 9pm, when Janka & I decided to do the smart thing and go home and sleep for at least some hours before the next night shift (which we both shared). Unfortunately she had gotten a slight case of food poisoning (probably from a packet of bacon she had as breakfast), and we actually only got a few hours of real sleep, if that. At 2:30am or so, we headed back to the con after a quick wake-you-up shower. Janka wasn’t feeling too good, but decided to see how it would go.

Once we got there, night shift was fun and not at all boring, since we decided to do something about it: Janka hooked up one of the laptops to the projector (usually used for projecting con schedules) and some kind person lent us their portable speaker set – we forgot ours at home. After this, it was Info Deck Night Radio&Video, courtesy of YouTube. We played everything we could think off, as long as it was reasonably short, funny, and if possible slightly insane. Janka wrote about the playlist in her blog.

… so, we managed to keep ourselves (and any victims nearby) awake and semi-coherent. Morning rolled in, and we didn’t have much else to do yet so we stayed for a few more hours at the Info desk to help out. After that I headed off to make sure that the “VTES Brunch” with LSJ and some of the tournament finalists and high scorers was ok (it was, Katri & others had organized an awesome breakfast buffet at a roof-terrace sauna). Grabbed some breakfast there while talking VTES with the guys, then headed off to organize a few small things and find Janka.

The rest of the con for us consisted of sitting in Keltsu (the pub) and talking with Guy, Kristel and others, winding down. At around 3pm, instead of doing what our bodies were claiming to be the sane thing (go home asap and fall into a coma), we headed off to Korso for Ankkarock, to see Eppu Normaali, PMMP, Volbeat and The National. Sanity is overrated, anyway.

More about the rock festival visit in another post (it merits one).

[…]

DNS blackout

Seems my registrar’s DNS servers (nameresolve.com, via Dotster) were on the blink yesterday – they had to do an IP switch, and due to DNS cache propagation orava.org was unresolvable for a while. It seems to be working again now for me, but of course that depends on where you are and what nameserver you’re using.

Bit of bad timing there, the huge Ropecon VTES tournament is on Friday and I have a lot of prep (pre-registrations etc) to take care of. Here’s hoping things will be stable now. […]

Keepers of Tradition

Well, the new VTES set Keepers of Tradition is out, and it’s looking very good. It’s a new “core set” for the Camarilla – and it’s been a while since the Cam got any new toys. The vampires are all new, and the library consists of part new cards, part reprints. The best value of all this is, of course, for new players: this is a chance to get some cards that have been quite difficult to find for a while now. For the older players, the value here is the new set of vampires, the new cards, and the reprints (which feature some very much in-demand cards). Some weird choices among the reprints, but generally there’s a lot of good stuff there.

The new cards and vampires are interesting, and some open up some very cool new tactics. Too early to tell yet what will work in the long run and what won’t, of course. The set includes a weenie hoser Event, an anarch + ally hoser Event, and off-clan stuff like a (poor) combat end for Obfuscate. Oh, and the promos include a card that will probably become quite significant: Two Wrongs, an OOT Master which hoses bleed bounce. Honestly, it should have been part of the core set, not a promo… but thankfully VTES promos aren’t all that hard to get, in the long run.

We had a “post-release” tournament for this set on Sunday, braving the snowstorm. 19 players, and the Malkavian starter proved to be far and away the most powerful: the top 4 rankings were all Malkavian. Not that the other starters were bad, strictly, but there was nothing there that could really stand up to the stealth bleed power of the Malks.

Very happy with this set, myself. Oh, and it also contains (nice) new art for a lot of old “staple” cards. […]