Journal of an Emerald Magistrate

not that anyone cares that it is a late report.

First of all I should say I really have mixed feelings about Diecon. Sure it is the local con so I like to support it, but it's also thoroughly ghetto in my mind, I mean it is ran in Collinsville. Also I have a soft spot in my heart for it since Karon and I met there at a thousand years of darkness l5r game. I also though acknowledge that it really seems to have a sin curve to its quality. Well, ok, I can't prove that yet. Right now it is a bell curve, but I have hopes it will rebound. The first few years were a little dodgey before it built steam, then the middle years it was awesome, now though its kinda in the gutter again. I blame this on the year we didn't have the midwest Kotei for l5r.

Kotei are big regional events and they bring in a lot of people. This years Kotei at Diecon had almost 70 people in it, half a dozen of which were big name players, but that is even a pretty mediocre turnout. I vaguelly recall that my second Kotei at Diecon was pushing 130 people. Suffice to say though that okay even on an average year then that's 60-70 people that came to the convention for that and might also take in some other events and what not. That is a fair amount of money and people. So losing that for one year kinda killed the dealer room last year as not so many people wanted to come out after the Koteiless year, they were still recovering and even this year it was pretty sparse in there.

What was really kinda sad to me was how light the game selection was, I flipped through the rpg events and I'm kinda glad Karon decided she didn't feel up to coming along with me on saturday to play some games while I slung cardboard, there was seriously nothing going on. The only l5r rpg event was first of all ran buy a guy we hate and second on Friday night, and the Saturday events just looked thin and sorta sickly. I'm not sure what is going on there, I'm not sure if that is also an outgrowth of the lost Kotei year because you might have more l5r rpg events planned for instance if you knew you'd have people dropping out of the swiss early because they were doing crappy or later in the day for the people that just didn't make it into the finals.

Another thing that I think has hurt the convention was the death of the Dragonball Z ccg and a few others. The economic downturn has really hurt the gaming community a lot over the past few years and some companies that had sunk a lot of money into expensive product licenses have died. The DBZ tourney used to be as big if not bigger than the Kotei, the main difference being that the l5r crowd is older and has more money usually, but that still means a lot of people weren't there that might have been. Instead I saw a lot more war gamers there, people with armies for Warhammer, 40k and Iron Kingdoms, and while I'm glad to see miniatures coming back in a way, it also doesn't help the con as much in my mind because of several reasons. First the dealers usually don't pack in minis with them, they're heavy and expensive and most of these people buy this shit direct from the companies online because it is cheaper than dealing with store markups. Second it is just a shitton more expensive to get into. You can build a fun and competitive deck for most ccgs with a starter box(around $10) and maybe $60-80 of further investment. Alright I know that's $70, but I also said competitive. You can also take that starter and maybe $10-15 to throw something oddball together just for the hell of it and screw with some webdeck builders. Now why am I doing a price break down here, for comparison, While Iron Kingdoms is supposedly rather cheap compared to other mini games, you'll still probably spend more on it than for a ccg. For Warhammer or 40k though you can easily sink $200 just to get your army started, before painting it or getting some of the better units that you really want. When I considered playing 40k several years back and was looking at Dark Eldar I realized that infantry with Dark Lances was where it was at. They moved hella fast and did a shitton of damage. Now a unit of infantry is like 12 figs. Dark Lancers come in 2 packs for like $9 at the time. That's $56 for one unit, maybe a sixth of the army I would be fielding. Start to see how pricey things can get. So mini games are always a hard sale cause it is so much harder to get into. $10 starter deck or $100 base army...wait lemme think about that.

So that was a lot about con mechanics I really didn't plan on going into, so onto the important part, the Kotei. Annoyingly, despite being told that all prize support for the event was supposed to be legal in the next arc of the game, it wasn't. God someone got an uncut sheet of cards from Diamond, which for people that don't know is 4 years old and 90% of the cards are not legal in tournaments anymore. Now some of what was handed out was from the last set of the arc which is indeed legal in the new arc that is coming out soon. But the real surprise here was that I bothered to play. I stopped playing l5r right after Samurai edition started, I was in my last year at SWIC, money was starting to get a bit tight, I couldn't afford $20 a month on tourney fees and $100 a year in product most of which I wouldn't get around to putting on ebay to clear out even though I didn't need what I got. So I stepped out and I've heard I missed a good arc. The deck I basically had always wanted to be able to run was finally given support and apparently it dominated. With the promise of free product legal for the next arc, having already registered for the con last year, and having a friend with the extra cards to build me the deck I wanted I went ahead and played. Played I say, I kicked some serious ass is what I did. That was quite possibly my best run at a tourney ever. I won 5 out of 8 games I played and at least one of the losses I could have won if I had actually known the gimmicks in the deck already, I hadn't played it till that morning so I was learning it as I went, and another I lost because I didn't really care. Time was called, we were both playing the same faction so in my mind a win for either of us was a win for the Dragon Clan so I just let him have it largely because I wasn't expecting to get anywhere at the tourney at that point. I came out 26th in the standings, so a bit above middle of the road and ya know what, I had fun. Will I get back into the game this set, I don't know, I still don't have much money to throw at the game, but I might show up for the odd game now and then at least.

I attempt to post at multiple places via the cross posting thing at dreamwidth.

So yeah Karon set me up with one of these things, its neat, I just haven't really had time to play with it yet.

Well we're back from our ten day vacation visiting the Darcy, fun seems to have been had by all. Got in some quality visiting time, played some quality tabletop rpgs online via skype, played with quality kittehs, and made some super awesome quality food. Apparently Nutella can be used in freaking everything, from some tasty cookies I made, to cheesecake, to crepes(we didn't make this but I saw it at IHOP this morning).

We also left Darcy with enough breakfast burritos to last a month so she should be ok for breakfast foods.

Man I want this radio station we picked up in Virginia this morning in St. Louis. It started off with a song by Rush, then some Disturbed, and the set finished out with some Wallflowers. I want that station so bad.

I swear, I must be getting old or something, this isn't my first time doing the Virginia drive, but down there and back this time really seemed to take it out of me. I'm starting to get why my parents would always be kinda tired and cranky when we'd stop for the night on vacations. And no it wasn't because we were horrible fighting kids, honestly we fought more when we stopped for the night than in the car, Mike and I were always nose deep in books and Jen would be doing crosswords or something.

I'm rambling what else was I gonna talk about?

Oh, so yay Ash didn't forget us! We got home and Dinah was all meowy and excited and rubby and so we stopped and petted her some and when we got to the library Ash was on the windowsill and looked shocked cause it had been so long since he'd seen his people and then he jumped down under the table. Karon was scared he'd gone feral again and we'd have to coax him out again, but we sat down on the floor and he came over and was also a happy rubby playful kitteh with his peoples. Hurray! Our kittys remembered us and still love us after ten days of being left with strange people comign to feed them.

Alright sleepytime now.

cause I need to get back to my paper actually. 8 pages so far by the by.

On the finals so far, omfg, what the hell Chinese. What the hell. I seriously bombed that test. How seriously you may ask? The 30 points of extra credit I did beforehand brought me up to a fucking 81 that's how bad. Somehow I pulled an A- for the semester though and I won't complain there.

And while I got an A in my St. Louis and the West class, I got it and even didn't have to take the final, I still want to go back and punch the instructor in the throat. See I lost 7 points on my term paper and there was a rubric included to tell me why. A point for style, a point for a few run on sentences, another point for I don't give a fuck, the point is he took off 4 points, so more than half of what he took off was because of the following: "Do not use Internet sources for serious research." Never mind that half of the government information out there is really only attainable from the net. Never mind that their are plenty of online scholarly sources, ran and maintained by historians or professionals of many fields. My Internet sources which are not to be used for serious research came from fucking scholarly journals that were located online in a database. So I was marked down for having the academic honesty to fucking properly cite my sources the way I was trained to rather than god damn leaving off the accessed from JSTOR/Ebsco lines. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you technobic, small dicked, asshat. If I had somehow not gotten an A on the fucking paper and that was why, I would have fucking gone to the dean and contested that. I also would have reported him for not using the fucking blackboard site which the school actually requires him to do rather than hand out printed copies of assignments and syllabi. And why do they require it? Primarily to cut paper costs, but also because they realize that students can't keep hold of things for three weeks let alone 4 months and rather than have professors provide four or five copies to some absent minded students they're putting the bill off on us. Which is great, I like having an online syllabus and class calendar I can go check when I can't remember when something is due, rather than spending an hour frantically searching for a fucking take home test prompt the day before it's due when I realize I forgot to do one of the questions the other day when I was working on it.

Ok that rant took a lot longer than I wanted to spend on this entire post, so yeah, so far not to bad, more as it comes in.

I hate not knowing where my syllabus is

I think I heard someone say we needed to have a lot more sources than I actually had.

panic panic panic

Ash has had a really hard weekend. Karon's mom has been over the past two days so he spent most of the weekend in hiding from teh scary new person, and has really only gotten up the nerve to come out really late after shes gone and for the few hours of the morning before she showed up. So here I am, up at an odd hour and Bitten has brought me an assortment of his toys and is proceeding to play by himself and make cute noises at me to show how much fun his toys are and how I would surely feel better after playing with him for a while. Tricksy lil kitty.

and ya know what? out of all the all nighters I've pulled since my glorious return to real college I have to say this one has somehow been the least painful.

Considering it came after having spent ten hours today working on a term paper that really seems shocking.

status update: 1 question and change remaining, home stretch.

and I did the middle school portion of the test which involved my drawing a map of the Oregon Trail.

Seriously.

So far I have completed my two sets of bibliographies, most of the articles therein are likely spurious as I didn't read most of them just the abstracts and they looked at least kinda valid, a map of the Oregon Trail, and a one page description of one of the aforementioned spurious articles. I somehow took an article about the economic impact of steamboats on the Mississippi River system and made it sound interesting. I don't know how, I'm gonna blame fatigue. I didn't even embellish it much.

give or take 25 minutes. I'm just now finishing up my brain cleansing pause before I dive into the take home test of doom.

More updates as I have them.

So I'm looking at my future and while I sorta have an idea about what I might do I'm throwing out some ideas and curious about what other people think.

So we're talking degree programs today. Right now I'm in a BA+BS program that will have me graduating in 2011 with my certificate to teach high school history. This is fact and will only be changed by me failing chinese at some point and having to retake a semester of that which will kill my soul.

Now by state law in Missouri if I don't have 15 credit hours towards my Master's in 5 years I get my license to teach yanked. So I have multiple options to get my MA and that is what we're really talking about.

OPTION 1-The don't sweat it option-As presented to me today by Dr. Tsieh, head of the UMSL College of History's Graduate Studies-Finish my BA+BS then after I'm working take one, one graduate level class per semester. One class Spring, Summer, and Fall Semester will have me complete a research MA in 4 years. This works good while teaching because it isn't a big load of classes distracting you from your work and then you're finished with the MA rather than only the required half complete. Upside two is that I'm working which means I won't be so dirt poor.

Option 2-The classic MA program-As presented by Dr. Westhoff, coordinating advisor for students in the BA+BS program specializing in History/Social Science-Don't sweat rushing on your MA. Either enter the normal MA program straight after the BA+BS or work a few years then do so and still complete the MA in the window of time allowed to get it half done. The downside here is I'm taking 32-36 hours of classes that won't be under a Pell Grant as you get cut off from that once you have your first BA/BS level degree completed, although that is why colleges still have slave labor, I mean GAs.

Option 3-The Suicide Death March AKA the 2+3 Program-As figured out by Dr. Westhoff and I beating our heads against the crappy website that explained it for 45 minutes-So how this works is I have my 100 level history classes, I take all my other electives(done), my education classes, and my language requirements(almost done). Instead of any junior or senior level history classes, of which I have 9 credit hours completed at the moment, I take 36 hours of graduate level classes and then graduate with a BA, BS and MA. Problem 1-even at best speed I will need multiple summer sessions to finish this by 2012. Problem 2-I will typically have to take two grad level history classes and two other classes in a semester. Problem 3-The kicker- I will likely have to take at least one, possibly two semesters at full time that are ALL graduate level history courses. Thats 12-15 hours of graduate courses in a semester, pretty sure it is actually more often 15 than 12 to get everything done by 2012. The financial upside here is that Since you finish all three degrees at once you get your Pell Grant the entire ride.

I've been waffling on option 3 there since I first heard about it, but after what Dr. Westhoff and I figured out combined with what Dr. Tsieh told me, Option 3 is sounding worse and worse. There is something about the idea of taking 3 500 level classes at once while taking anything else that makes my stomach churn, I'm managing to not think about the semesters I'll be taking 5 of them. So I know what I'm thinking at the moment, I'm curious what other people have to say at the moment. I have lots of people that either are or have been in grad school as readers, and others that just are good sources of advice. Sound off everybody, I'm interested in your thoughts. I go back and register for classes Tuesday next week.

Interesting thing I learned last semester, the y in ye does not get pronounced as y but it is a shorthand for th, ye is actually the. Fun with learning about the middle ages.

So spring break was actually pretty good. Lots of running around and doing stuff. As maybe half my reading public are aware Econ was supposed to be two weekends ago, but it wasn't so much with the happening. So since Karon's sister already had the time off we had our impromptu Darcycon when she was up to visit. There was hanging out in Carbondale and Fairview Heights. Lots of tasty food, we went with the other Josh to see Watchmen even though the rest of us had all seen it already. It honestly wasn't too bad the second go through, had more of an opportunity to notice little details you miss on the first watch through. There was also a rousing game of Apples to Apples and much fun was had by all.

First few days were sort of a blur, there was a failed attempt to pick up Karon's glasses and then her councilor was going to be out of town on Friday so we had to go down Wednesday. At some point in those first few days we went to this new Chinese place in Collinsville over by the new Gamespot and I think it wins for best Chinese food in a short distance. Now I mean, the place in Fairview that we used to go to had a hibachi and sushi chef but the normal food you expect at a Chinese restaurant here is just tastier, the fried rice looks like fresh fried rice rather than that yellow stuff you normally see places. It's just damn tasty.

Thursday was gaming, I think we were a little dense, or else the adventure is a little obtuse about giving clues between lots of hey werewolves and then a red herring about vampires, assuming that is the red herring, who knows? Everyone had fun though even if we weren't sure what we were supposed to be investigating. Also it snowed in game so my gator Giselle didn't get much field time, though I did have a fun time rigging up snowshoes for myself and the party as well as going and buying wolfsbane to poison the militia head with when we had ample reason to suspect he was a werewolf.

Friday we succeeded in getting Karon's new glasses and then we had our fun outing to the city museum. Katie had been trying to organize this for about a month and taken constant set backs due to Watchmen, midterms, the beginning of spring break, but Friday it finally happened and I'm glad it did. If you haven't been it is hard to explain it all but to sum up it is a giant jungle gym for adults. Don't get me wrong, lots of kids running about too, until around 10ish or so, but there are lots of neat things to go crawling around in and climbing through tubes and fake caves. There is also a really cool steam punky area with a giant slide in it. All it needed was an empty diving suit and a sign reading "Welcome to Rapture." It was a grand adventure and weather permitting it might get added to the itinerary for my next birthday.

Saturday was a nice lazy day around the house, it was cold and rainy so we kibashed our original trip to the art museum as modot was not able to generate me a map to the art museum around the construction. I didn't think it would be good for our health to have to walk from the metrolink stop across Forest Park to Art Hill. By Sunday though I had managed to finagle a map out of modot and we were off and able to park at the bottom of the hill and only had to walk up to the museum. The reason for our outing? There was a really interesting exhibit of Ming Dynasty items at the art museum. It was a really interesting exhibit and you could rent out an ipod that came preloaded with tracks that explained a goodly number of the items on display. The downside was that the items were somewhat oddly organize so you were left sometimes hunting to find what the next track on the ipod was talking about. All in all it was a really fun trip, we came back and hit the Chinese place again because it seemed good and thematic for our day.

So all in all, short of the time I drove to Virginia then Chicago and back home I think it might have been one of my most active spring breaks, all in all too short though as my only paperwork accomplishment was finishing Karon and my own taxes.

insert maniacal laughter

so I was right I won't achieve step 7 in point of fact apparently someone else is

I got home and found a bill for $371 for something I'm pretty sure I already fucking paid last month which had not stipulated anywhere that it was not a bill for the total amount.

So I've been melting my brain with a vast quantity of Spectral Force 3 since I got home.