My Tea Plant Flowers

So, yesterday I noticed that my tea plant (a kind of camelia) has put out its yearly flower. I'd just planted some pansies, which along with some violets (which if they flowered this year I missed it) make up my modest little flowers-in-pots minigarden for this year.

Possiblee adjustments include replacing the capnip, which died out at some point over the last few months. I'm also pleased to note the flourishing of the Italian shell beans' leafy greens so beloved of Hastur. Neither of our current cats show much interest, but Tyburn has taken some of some grass growing out of the side of one of the pots, so we'll let that stand for cat greens for now.

--John R

 

--JDR

P. S.: Thanks to JC for the photol

I Am Podded

 So, thanks to Ben Riggs, author of SLAYING THE DRAGON 

(a highly entertaining account of the fall of TSR)

and Gareth Hanrahan, whose work I'm not familiar with

 (his work on The One Ring rpg sounds particularly interesting), I got to enjoy an hour's online discussion of LotR. Ben has since posted the discussion in both audio/video form, complete with close captions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sOa8nrmVxQ

I can see that I need to learn more about the One Ring rpg and see what the current license holders have done with the newest in a long line of Tolkien rpg. Sounds like the Shire starter set is a good place to start, if I can find it.  More on this somewhere back the road.

--John R.*

*bonus points: Ben knows how to pronounce my name

New Fish Long Ago

So, it's October 7th, which I always celebrate as the day I was hired at TSR as an editor in their rpg department. Over the next five years I got to work on a lot of adventures and sourcebooks and boxed sets, most of them for core AD&D / D&D but also at one time or another on just about every game world they were publishing at the time. 

 I got to work on a lot of great game modules (didn't keep count, but at a guess, about three dozen releases) and with a lot of amazing people. That same week I was one of four new hires (whom Jim Ward, our boss who's hired us all, called 'new fish') that same month on sequential Mondays. 

I arrived first on October 7th, followed by Rich Baker (designer) and Thomas Reid (editor), both on the 14th, with Wolfgang Baur (as part of the DRAGON / DUNGEON magazine team) on the 21st.

It was a great place to work, from the point of view of GETTING TO BE THE ONES WHO WORKED  ON D&D (how cool is that?) and a terrible place to work from the point of working conditions and the cluelessness of management carried to a high degree. 

Later there was coming and going, and coming, and going, for a total of ten years at three iterations of TSR / WotC / Hasbro and a lot more releases I worked on --events some of which I commemorate in turn. But that's the subject for another time.

--John R.

Jimmy Carter Day

So, Jimmy Carter has just turned a hundred years old -- something no other President has achieved. 

No one has ever done a better job of being Ex-President. An interesting legacy, and one that I doubt will be matched.

I met him at a book signing once (he was famous for his epic book-signing sessions), and I wonder if he might hold some king of record there as well. 

He's also the first person I voted for in a presidential election.

He didn't cure river blindness but he helped a lot of people over the years --from the roll-up-yr-sleeves and pitch in of Habitats for Humanity to election monitoring and off-the radar unofficial diplomacy. 

I hear they're planting a hundred trees in his honor. I wonder what kind, and where?

Well done, Mr. Carter.

--John R.