Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jig

This one won't be long. My friends are waiting on me and, frankly, I don't have the inspirations I did last time. This particular post takes place from the comfort of my own home. Not the "home" I traditionally refer to, my dorm room, but my actual house wherein I grew into the fine, upstanding person I am now.

...What? I am a fine, upstanding...er...the thing about that is...

Dramatic license. Push off.

Anyway, I just arrived after a long and boring bus ride that was made much more pleasant by the fact that my girlfriend was riding with me. Even with her company, five hours is five hours, and the climate control on the bus seemed to fluctuate between Cryogenic Freezing Chamber and Surface of the Sun. So it was not without relief that I exited the vehicle and began the traditional "hobble because you've been sitting in an uncomfortable bus seat for hours" limp. And now I'm here. But I haven't done anything that interesting since I got here, so let's have a recap.

I run a gaming club at the university once a week, and our most recent meeting was piles of fun. I started by playing an obscure variation of Magic: the Gathering known as "Chaos Magic", invented by one of the guys who were there. It involves, at the beginning of each turn, rolling a 20-sided die and having the effect for the given number occur. It makes for crazy random games, it does. Nothing like trying to play a traditional game of Magic and having to randomly discard your hand, destroy all your creatures, deal out damage, and steal life from the other players on a freewheeling basis.

Then we went on and played crazy obscure games like Munchkin, Chrononauts, and Illuminati (all copyright their respective owners, it would be an honor to be sued but please don't.) Lots of fun all around, especially when you consider that we changed history to make it so Hitler was assassinated, there was a second Civil War in 1898, and John Lennon not only survived his shooting, but became a US Senator. And that was just the one game. Later, the Bavarian Illuminati (the ones you traditionally see, with the pyramid and a floating eye on top) lost hardcore to the Sons of Cthulhu, but they were ultimately unseated by the Discordian Society and the Gnomes of Zurich. Or something. I wasn't really paying attention, since I was too busy mourning my many, many losses.

I slept through my first-hour class this morning. All the notes are online and the book provides pretty much all the instruction I need. The professor teaches straight from the notes, and the grading scale is so weird that an 80 is an A. A 65 is a B. And so on. And the only grades are from tests, so no pop quizzes to ruin my day. Whether this represents that the class is going to be extremely easy to get an A in, or the professor realizes his class is so difficult that an 80 is just about the highest one could hope to achieve, I don't know. I'm hopin' for the first.

Several of the stories which vie for attention in my head have been flitting about as of late. The details are sketchy, but they range between...Well, here's one. A girl who is the ambassador from Earth to a galactic federation of planets is captured by an evil despot in the federation, who is actually controlling the rest of the planets with puppet leaders...but she is saved by her boyfriend, who happens to have fantastic super-strength and marvelous powers. A variety of space and ground battles ensue as the couple evade the attentions of the mad king and his super-powered bodyguard, stronger than the hero, but who actually cares about doing the right thing, enough to occasionally allow the two to escape from his liege's diabolical clutches.

...See, this is why I don't usually write these things down. Just looking at it, I can see why it won't ever make a good written story. Possibly an action movie or something, but I don't have the technical skill to pull such a thing off. Sigh. I suppose that a childhood of watching superhero cartoons and reading comic books is to blame for such oddities of my imagination. If you're not convinced, read my previous post to see my obsession with such subjects.

It's just as well. When I first heard the Black Sabbath song "Iron Man", I immediately devised in my head how exactly such a thing could be turned into a story. In my mind, a massive, space-based magnetic field threatened to tear the Earth apart, so one man went up in a space station to try and counteract it. He ended up dispersing the field, but the backlash turned him into a man made of living steel, using intense magnetic pressure to be able to move his iron body. He then, obviously, went to fight crime, as would any man who suddenly discovered he weighed sixteen tons and could throw a car to the moon. It's just common sense.

See? There I go again. More rambling. But then, that's the name of this online journal, isn't it? You knew what you were in for when you started reading. And most of what I think about is more of the same, so I generally don't dignify them by writing them out. They remain in my head, occasionally banging off the sides of my skull, bobbing up at the most inconvenient times ("Luke...I think I love you." "Aw, I...hmm, maybe the bodyguard actually has a heart of gold!") You can see how this might be disruptive to my day-to-day schedule. Maybe I should go ahead and write them down, just to get them out of my head. Even if I burn the paper they're on afterwards, it'll probably be good to give them release.

That's about all I got. As I said, this one would be somewhat shorter. So...great. Bye.