Gabriel tried his hand at running an update of a classic D&D adventure for a group of players for whom 4th Edition is God's edition, with grim results. They aren't familiar with the casual obliterations that characterize the old ways. They know that earlier systems were byzantine, because I have shown them fairly standard tables that used to be completely ordinary player knowledge and seen them recoil as though from a serpent. But older modules of the "meat grinder" variety, modules designed to punish the most devious players, represent something far outside their experience.
At home, the strange season continues.
Brenna is going to house-sit with a friend of hers this weekend, and she wants to know how hard it would be to bring the Kinect over there to play Dance Central. You and I know that decoupling an entertainment appliance from the mothership is annoying, occasionally dangerous, but not impossible. The point is that she has never asked, once, in the golden decade of our impervious union, if she could take anything of any kind any-fucking-where.
She takes an animist view of technology as a rule. She thinks that generally speaking we are bombarded by rays, that the modern world is the equivalent of an electromagnetic iron maiden and that our genetics are being perforated at all times by gnawing "serrator waves" from sources known and (even more troublingly) unknown.
I used to be more into Dance Dance Revolution than I was ever entirely comfortable telling you, I had a modded pad and my playlist was Nori Nori Nori, Butterfly, and Sandstorm. I tried for years to get Brenna to try it, and she would occasionally shuffle around on the pad in accordance with some imagined duty, but she never gave a shit and I couldn't fully blame her. They had merely taken a controller and made it flat; she was not fooled. It was, to her, profoundly unlike dancing, with its southern chaos and its immobile Irish torsos.
Now she's helping me move the couch so we can dance in the living room. She goes to bed at 9:30 on the dot, the dot, and we were up until almost eleven. She cranked the ever-loving shit out of that soldier. She's going to buy DLC for it one of these days, I swear it, just by moving her hand around in space, and I'm going to wonder what fucking planet I'm on.
(CW)TB
