Step 1: friend announces imminent arrival of his new M1911A1.

Step 2: J remembers how to open the safe, verifies operational status of contents.

Step 3: J searches the house for “supplies”, finds a surprising amount of the stuff squirreled away.

Step 4: J re-reads friend’s email, realizes he won’t have the damn thing for another day (California).

Step 5: J contemplates the revolutionary concept of multiple range trips in one week (just like the good old days…).

Apparently the competition was just too fierce in the adoring-little-sister cafe market, so Nagomi has gotten tough: it’s now a tsundere cafe.

(once the pretty-girl commercial is over, skip to about the 50-second mark)

While flipping through my “couldn’t possibly ever be non-spam” folder (which occasionally reveals what real companies try to discover email addresses for their customers by correlating with spammer databases, and I mean you, Calumet Photo, Lexus, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond), I found a message that wasn’t offering viagra, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, free downloads that would add me to a botnet, or the opportunity to help some nice Nigerian take over my identity.

No, today’s offer is “help some Russians launder money stolen from other suckers”, as a Transactions Group Specialist.

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In the Yumeria anime, Mone, the #1 Strange Cute Girl, has a very expressive one-word vocabulary. It never occurred to me, however, what a pain in the ass that would be in the associated adventure game.

[Update: added amusing machine translation of the lyrics, along with commentary]

Okay, so a link to a link to a link to a Youtube video got me started on this, and now I have six videos of the song セーラー服を脱がさないで.

Apparently, it all started back in 1985, when someone formed the idol group おニャン子クラブ (literally “kitten club”). The title of their debut single was “Please don’t strip off my sailor suit” (school uniform, that is), and their first album included songs like “Teacher, stop that!” and “Oh, no! Molester”. They lasted long enough to grow to over 50 members, and inspire future generations, including Morning Musume.

Videos and lyrics below the fold.

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[Update: character sheet updated after playtesting; also added extended powers page for wizards and high-level characters]

I’m still tinkering with these, and I haven’t even started on the creation/leveling worksheet, but I think they’re a solid version 1.

The official character sheet has a lot of problems: first, it’s cluttered with ugly header boxes; second, a lot of the space is devoted to calculating values; third, a lot of information that you need during play is either on page 2 or just plain missing.

My goal was simple: put everything you need during combat on the top half of the first page. That leaves half a page for recording all other useful information, and frees up the second page to be a coherent worksheet for character creation and leveling.

The half-page rule also gives you a clean design for a combat-tracking card that can be used for monsters as well as players. This is always useful, and critical for large con events (we run 20-30 players, and the finale is always a massive player-versus-player battle). I actually started with the 4x6 combat card, and then expanded the design into an 7.5x10 layout that can be printed on both US Letter and A4 paper.

Here are the PDFs: character sheet, combat card.

Sometime this weekend, I’ll adapt my character-creation document into a proper worksheet that can be used to maintain the other two.

[side note: I’m working in Adobe Illustrator CS2, and the best way to get a small PDF file is to “save a copy” as EPS, then open it in Mac OS X’s Preview app and save. The only semi-downside is that it clips the bounding box to the objects rather than generating a full-sized page.]

Now that the Supreme Court has unambiguously ruled on the only “right of the people” ever to be considered “the right of state governments”, the Chicago Tribune has come out of the closet: “repeal it!”, say the guardians of freedom.

We’re just not sure whose freedom they’re guarding.

It’s cute that you like Morning Musume so much that you want to sing and dance like them in public, but may I offer you a bit of cautionary advice?

1. Your performance was uploaded to Youtube with the title "Shock! 10-year-old lolita in a sailor suit". You may not understand why this is a problem, but you should make sure you've got a trustworthy adult with you when you go out singing.
2. Please, however much you admire Morning Musume and wish to emulate them, ignore their fashion sense. You'll thank me later.

[Her role models perform the song here]