I’m 26 today and it is with a sense of regret that I look back at my life and the things I didn’t do when I was younger - Such as buy a railcard yesterday so that I could travel at reasonable reduced rates for another year. Instead I get to pay the price for my forgetfulness quite literally.
Obviously as I get older, my memory has been the first casualty - I would have said looks except I never really had any to lose, or if I did I don’t remember…
Still there is hope for me if I really want a railcard, I could go back to uni.
Working as I do in a job where I deal with numerous people on a daily basis, every once in a while the tears of pain caused by talking to idiots are broken by occasional rays of sunshine and today was one such day.
Sometimes it is the customers that make me smile, such as the lady whose sob story featured the line, “because we were at our holiday home in the south of France”. I pointed out such a line hardly makes me sympathetic to her cause* and she riposted by saying “She didn’t care”. It was refreshing to meet someone with such a sense of humour and bluntness.
Today though it was nothing a caller said that made me laugh it was their name, now for obvious reasons I cannot give their name here. The surname was the comedy point, being as it was a homophone for the word phallic - Although I would like to state at this point that the person wasn’t a cock, they were actually quite nice. B’dumtish.
For some reason or other (probably boredom) however I then decided to see if I could make the name any more comical than it was already. Sadly it only took about 30 seconds for me to think of the perfect Christian name to go with the surname, thus leaving me with the rest of the afternoon stretching out endlessly in front of me.
But I hear you cry, what is the name I came up with? The name is (and any future progeny of mine can be glad I do not have a name similar to the word phallic, for this is wha I would call them) Richard Falic.**
*Because not only was it her fault she has a house in the south of France and so obviously afford the cost she was trying to avoid incurring.
**And once again this is not the name of the caller, it isn’t even the surname as I picked yet another homophone of the word phallic.
I died last night…
Luckily for me however it was roleplay night and so it wasn’t fatal to me – For my character though the robot foot that was placed with deliberate pressure upon my skull it was somewhat more terminal.
Like many deaths it was needless and could have been avoided. Unfortunately not all the players stuck to the plan and instead of being heroic, they decided to bail out of a window at the first sign of trouble.
Allow me to set the scene…
In a galaxy far, far away and in a time far removed from our own is the Spear of Destiny with her crew of misfits trying to survive in a hostile galaxy after having managed to piss off space pirates and alien creatures with gribbly mind control powers. A la Star Trek, the command crew are the heroes and abandon ship at every opportunity to go on adventures. At the moment thanks in part to a space battle going badly wrong (and the Captain thinking he knew how to fly and crashing the ship into the attacking vessel instead of giving it a broadside) the Spear is grounded and being repaired. The repairs are costly and so the party have undertaken some freelance work to help fund the repairs.
The party have been investigating what appeared to be a missing persons case. Through our investigations quickly led us to conclude it was a kidnapping and following leads we have uncovered a witness, who having overheard the kidnappers speaking allowed us to identify the kidnappers as space pirates.
As the missing person was the son of a starship repair company it wasn’t too hard to figure out a motive, take hostages and return them in exchange for parts for the ship – Going back to the company who had hired us, we presented them with an update on what we had found. They informed us that, “The case is closed. Oh, and by the way could you tell us who your witness is?”
Not being completely stupid, we decided not to hand over the details of our witness and instead set up a sting. The plan was simple, give them a false target and then tail them back to their source. The false target was to be one of our team, with the rest of us on hand in case it all went wrong and turned into a gunfight.
So we sat and waited and sure enough as evening came, so did a kidnapper. Sticking out like a proverbial sore thumb I saw the droid from where I was watching the front of the building and gave the alert. He then entered the building and went up the stairs. It was at this point I noticed something wrong with the scene, a sole droid had walked up to the building. This suggested to me that perhaps they weren’t going for a kidnapping and were just going to silence the witness, a not unplanned for circumstance as everyone had guns handy.
The droid being polite knocked on the door instead of just barging it in, at least until he figured he’d been rumbled. He tried saying he was police and that he was raising awareness of attacks in the area, so could he come in and advise her. When asked for ID, he decided a fist shoving the door aside was ID enough. Again this was not entirely unexpected.
What was unexpected was the response of the player acting as the bait – Instead of playing the helpless woman role as planned, or even grabbing her gun and initiating plan b – Susan decided to head out of the flat by the nearest exit. A first floor window, head first.
Figuring that the gig was up and it was time for a gunfight, as another player was still in the flat concealed in a cupboard, I ran into the building and started heading up the stairs. Olsen, instead of staying in the cupboard come out into the flat and engaged the hostile droid briefly in hand to hand (not that he choose to do that) and shortly after followed Susan out the window and to the ground. This happened just as I reached the door to the flat, with Susan having dusted herself off following a few seconds behind me.
I took a couple of shots at the back of the droid and did little more than get his attention, and then things started going badly wrong. Metagame wise I rolled four 1s on the trot, which on a 20 sided die has a chance of occurring once every 160,000 times when four 20 sided dice are rolled. In short, not something that happens everyday.
Now in roleplay terms, 1s are bad, very bad. So 4 on the trot is catastrophic and the following sequence of events reflected that. Now 4 1s is unlikely, but that doesn’t really tell you what happened. Roleplay isn’t called rollplay, so whilst getting 4 1s is exciting*, the really excitement is the interpretation of the rolls and here is what happened in game.
As Olsen flew out of the window, Failes drew a bead and unleashed a couple of rapid lasblasts from his pistols into the turned back of the droid. More pissed off than damaged the droid turned around and ran through the corridor towards Failes and colliding with him and throwing Failes bodily though the window he had carelessly stood in front of. (Metagame – The droid bullrushed me and on out opposed strength checks I rolled a 1 and he rolled closer to 20 and had lots of bonuses as well).
Relatively undamaged, but severely unhappy about this Failes rolled over and raised his gun to shoot up at the droid. (Metagame – For my attack roll I rolled a natural 1, which usually means something like a weapon jam or something else that means you can do nothing else that turn whilst you sort it out). However his aim was thrown off wildly, as he noticed that a) he was lying in a road and b)that he was directly in front of an oncoming car and decided too late that getting out of the way of the car was more important than taking the shot. (Metagame – I was given a reflex save to notice the car and rolled the third 1).
Failing to get out of the way of the car in time, Failes was hit by the car and left stunned lying in the road by the force of the impact. (Metagame – The fourth, but not fatal 1 is rolled. Incidentally when the gamemaster rolled for how long I was stunned he managed to roll the maximum).
Seeing me thrown out of the window, Susan decides to run away again whereas Olsen getting back up to the window he had been thrown out of earlier opens fire on the droid scoring a telling hit. Figuring discretion is the better part of valour the droid jumps to the ground through the hole he had made using me and walks over to Failes’ prostrate body and raises a stompy metal foot.
As he does this Susan, the coward is just across the street trying to get into our getaway car in plain view of my body. Heroic Olsen on the other hand is in pursuit and gunning for the droid. The droid then tells Olsen, “Give me the girl, or your friend gets it.” Slightly less heroically Olsen points at Susan and then shoots the droid in the back as it turns to face Susan.
Susan however had earlier been wearing a wig when the droid saw her, a wig that she had removed after jumping out of the window and so the droid didn’t recognise her. At this point the boot came down and it was time for Failes Wildly; one of my favourite characters, to die.
The plus side for me though is that whilst things had gone badly for me, they continued to get worse for the rest of the party after this, with them almost dying, destroying a chunk of a spaceport and one of our spacecraft (one destroyed the other), having our mothership stolen and looted by pirates before being given the choice of joining a pirate crew or being ‘cut loose’.
Of course for next week, I’ll have a new character and it’ll be time to somehow turn the situation around.
*Well I am a mathematican, so I am allowed to get excited over numbers.
I saw the above notice a couple of weeks ago in the Times on the 21st October, at the time I tore it out as it left me asking if you could massacre a person - I though massacres could be committed by one person, but had to happen to a group of people.
A quick check of every dictionary I have to hand and a couple of online ones for a total of three dictionaries checked gave the consensus that a massacre can be either:
1. The act or an instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly.
2. The slaughter of a large number of animals.
3. Informal A severe defeat, as in a sports event.
This would suggest that I and not the Times, knows more about the use of the words massacre - I won’t ask you to dwell on why this might be the case, I can assure you there are no pending war crime trials for me in the near future (or even in my past).*
My interest piqued I decided to look into St Ursula a little further and found out that she may have been massacred, but if she indeed was, then she wasn’t the only one. According to sources she could have been one of 11 or 11,000 virgins who were massacred in Cologne in the 4th Century (or 3rd of 5th according to whom you believe. i’ve opted for the middle ground). - Or she could have been someone by the “name of Undecimilla, which by some blundering monk was changed into eleven thousand” in the 9th Century.**
Now 11,000 virgins would in my book constitute a massacre, but I don’t know if 11 constitutes a massacre. An unfortunate circumstance certainly, almost certainly butchery but it doesn’t quite seem quite enough to really be considered a massacre, or am I setting the bar too high?
*The astute will notice I have not ruled out the distant future. After all I might well find myself usurped if I am successful in my plans to take over the world.
The following putdown is based on a comment I mistakenly made at work today in a training session with some female colleagues.
“Look love, I’d sooner multiply with numbers than you. Even the number 8 has a better figure.”
Needless to say I was not exactly the most popular man in the room.
Recently people have been making a lot of comments on my age and referring to me as being in my thirties, which I am not.
I am a mere 25, although I will concede that I turn 26 next month.
I am not unused to this particular misconception of me. When I was at school people thought I was over 18 and when was 18 I recall one memorable occasion where on a date I wound up arging over my age - For some reason the girl thought I was 26 and wouldn’t believe me when I told her otherwise.
When the mistake is made I always joke that it’s been a hard life, whilst they apologise and say something about how it’s not how I look, it’s how I speak and act in a more mature manner than they would expect of someone my age. I then accuse them of calling me a fuddy-duddy* and watch them apologise further.
I realised today though that they may have a point, as I discovered that I was a Radio 4 listener without realising it. Whilst I don’t really listen to the radio these days. This is thanks to a combination of it not being very good at the times of day I might listen to it and the fact I have an iPod. Having the iPod though means I can listen to podcasts and whilst not all of them are from Radio 4 all of the radio related ones are.
On my subscription list you’ll find In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg, Thinking Allowed and the Friday Night Comedy Podcast from Radio 4 (The Now Show and The News Quiz according to season) - It’s not all Radio 4 though as I have also recently been listening to: The Math Factor, Philosophy: The Classics and the Word Nerds.
It’s no wonder that I find Russell Brand about as funny as syphilis.
*Hark at me showing my age with that expression.