Intermittence

Donnell and I dined today at Schoepf’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que, and I have some good news for everybody:

You can stop searching. I have located the best pork chop in the world, and you can have one (along with two sides) for just $8.95. It’s tender, flavorful, encased in a marvelously smoky crust, and run through with the most flavorful pork fat I’ve ever had the good fortune to shovel into my greedy mouth. It must be experienced warm—I accidentally let mine cool a bit while sampling Schoepf’s brisket (good, but under-seasoned), sausage (decent), and ribs (yowza! almost as good as Smitty’s), and it just wasn’t the same afterwards. Dig into one straight from the pit, however, and you’ll never look at pork chops the same way again.

I ordered some “CONN SOCKET SIP 40POS TIN” from my favorite electronics supplier, thinking that they were exactly what I needed to get over my fear of soldering components directly to perfboard. I would, I figured, determine where various bits and pieces fit onto the board, solder the sockets into place, make the appropriate connections, and then plug in the bits and pieces, thereby ensuring that I could remove them if anything went awry and a component failed. (One thing I’ve already learned is that desoldering is a pain in the butt, and particularly so if the component you’re trying to remove has thirty or so pins….)

To make a long story short, these are not the sockets I was looking for.

These are fantastic sockets. They’re sleek, connect with each other firmly and with conviction, and are low-profile. The holes, however, are not large enough to accept a standard rectangular .100”-spaced male header pin. So, I’m now at an impasse. My one local electronics supplier (I’m not counting Radio Shack, though I checked there as well) doesn’t carry the female headers I need, and neither does Fry’s. Digikey does, but I’d have to spend $25 to avoid a $5 handling charge, and I can’t help but think that it’s a little silly to spend as much to ship something as the object itself costs.

So…no robot yet. I have everything I strictly need, but until I have a surplus of cash I’m going to stick to my guns and resist soldering expensive electronics directly to the circuit board. Maybe I’ll find a supplier in San Antonio…

I’ve been fumbling my way through a D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) campaign for a while now, trying to keep a small group of friends interested and, more importantly, invested in what was happening next. Along the way, I realized that the next big thing (in this case, a game world called Eberron) might not be the best thing for me (no, really!), and the unfortunate result is that I totally lost my muse. I can’t create scenarios within this environment that are convincing to me, I worry that I’m losing my audience, and I know that I’m not doing the setting justice.

Fortunately, however, the end is in sight. The adventurers have dealt a major blow to a powerful adversary (though they did not learn until recently that he was a villain—the reveal produced probably the most gratifying aha! moment in my storytelling career), have obtained a weapon of tremendous destructive potential, and will soon be making decisions which could affect large swaths of their world. This is a crucial moment, and will determine how the names of El, Kael, Flux, Phae, Vex, and Rube are recorded in the history books. Will they be revered by generations to come as heroes, or maligned as villains? The choice, fortunately, is not mine to make.

It will, however, influence what follows. I’m already drafting plans for a game to follow, which is set in a world influenced by, if not directly descended from, the Eberron that we’ve been gaming in for so long. Without revealing too much (because I know that one particularly lovely player reads this blog from time to time), I can say that names are powerful things, and that certain events cause ripples through history which converge from time to time and are amplified, much like the constructive interference of massive ocean waves.

The introduction of this new environment will be coincidental with the adoption of the 4th edition of the D&D rules. What I’ve read of them has me fairly excited—the rules for character development are refreshingly new, and provide a clear path for characters to grow from heroes to exemplars and then on to figures of mythological power and abilities. It reduces the drudgery of adventure preparation, and allows a DM (the person who runs the game and tells the story in which the players participate) to focus more on storytelling than mechanics. It also introduces ways to get players more involved in character development, and streamlines combat. All good, good news.