[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Listening to  ]
Taking a quick break from working on a big paper. I’m in my office at Kyushu University, surrounded by piles of books and photocopied articles and notes. This is the big push to finish a paper I’ll be submitting in a couple of days, and presenting at a conference in about two weeks.

It’s nearing 9pm and I can tell I still have at least a half a dozen pages to go. I’m not finding the flow, that mode where it all comes fast and furious. This is largely because I haven’t prepped as thoroughly as I sometimes do. Specifically, I didn’t write out most of my quotes and paraphrases ahead of times, inserting them into an outline. I have to keep stopping to look stuff up.

So I know that six more pages means at least six more hours; no way I’m going to catch the last subway home. I’ll be here all night. Oh well, I have an old but decent sofa, plus a couple of pillows and a blanket that I brought from home months ago, for just such a situation. Called Junko a little while ago to let her know–she’s taking Lili for a walk now.

Right, must eat now. Then back to ferreting out utopian themes in Melville’s novel Mardi.

EDIT: Done! And 10 minutes before 3am! That’s actually really good for me–I usually finish a paper sometime around sunup. All that stuff I tell my writing students about pacing and preparation–hah! I’m such a hypocrite. I just read and think, read and think, make a few notes, read and think…and then write it the first draft in a non-stop white-hot flurry. Eh, it works for me.

[  Mood: Confused ]
I’ve dropped out of one of the two D&D campaigns I was in–in fact, they are playing without me right now.

There was a fundamental disagreement about gaming. I tried to write out a summary of it all, and the details just sounded so stupid and pointless that I deleted the explanation–so suffice it to say that I and another guy at the table simply fall on different ends of a spectrum of gamers. He’s really concerned with everybody knowing all the rules down to the last obscure exception to be found on page 197 of the Player’s Handbook, while I’m of the opinion that D&D has way too many rules as it is, and if we don’t get everything perfect all the time, so be it. He thinks all of us should choose what classes to take levels in so that we can make our party super-efficient and win fights fast, so we can have more fights per session; I think people should make choices like that based on what their characters, as they conceive them, would realistically choose. He thinks we should never split up in town, and go off and, you know, roleplay; I think that if my character can’t do a little interaction with some interesting NPCs, then what’s the point of playing? I mean, I have Halo on my PC–I could always play that.

Basically, he wants to play like it’s a tactical tabletop miniatures game with a little roleplaying smeared on top, and I think battles only slow things down and get in the way of the fun parts.

Now I don’t want to denigrate his way of doing things, because I was like that once too. It’s just another way of gaming, and I respect that as valid. But it’s not my thing. And it does irk me that I was already compromising a lot, playing as much his way as I could, and he didn’t even seem to see that there was any other valid way of playing. I think he just thought I was being lazy and selfish.

And since most of the other players are closer to his end of the spectrum than mine, I figured the best thing to do is just drop out and let them play the way they like to play. There was an earlier campaign that I was not in, but I heard about it, and the same thing happened, and once the emails started flying, it just all went to hell. People were amazingly stressed out. And from the outside, I was just telling them, "Guys, it’s just a game, come on!"

So I didn’t want that to happen again, and anyway, once the stress levels start to exceed the fun levels, it’s time to walk away from the table.

I can almost remember taking games so seriously that I’d get into a big fight over them…and I remember one day realizing that, by doing that, I wasn’t really enjoying them anymore. I’ll miss my character a bit, but he’s only about the three hundredth character I’ve played in my life, probably. And the gold was just imaginary gold, and the monsters slain weren’t real, and the magic items were never more than notes on a character sheet.

The only thing you really take away from a game is good memories, and I wonder how many of those you can have if you’re so focused on combat efficiency and who owns which imaginary magic item, that you can’t stop and flirt with the NPC barmaids.

To avoid the Wrath of Mom, here are some more family pictures from Sayumi’s visit a couple of days ago. Readers of this blog who are not related to me may want to skip this.

At a little over 3 months, Mei is smiling a lot now:

She’s focusing and responding to people’s expressions:

And once in awhile, looking in the direction you want her to look in for a picture:

Sayumi is smiling more, too. She’s always been so withdrawn, and we wondered if having a baby would change that. It has–she was cooing and talking to Mei the whole time, laughing at her faces–it was great.

And as long as I’m inundating the world with cuteness, here is Lili a few days after visiting the groomer’s. I think she wants that donut Sayumi was holding–she’s making her patented Attack of Cuteness!

She seems to have hurt her leg during a walk last night; if she’s not all better in a couple of days, I’ll take her to the vet. Today and tomorrow are going to be very rainy, so she would’ve had to rest inside anyway.

Cherry blossom season started here in Fukuoka less than a week ago. I put up some pictures last year, but my friend Jeff has put up some really good ones on his blog, so I figure it’s easier just to link to him. He’s a better photographer than I am anyway.

You might remember Jeff as the guy who went to Nepal to study Buddhist painting. He’s just arrived back in Fukuoka.