Sparkplugs

My DSL went down yesterday. Speakeasy, Qwest and Covad are all at a loss as to /why/ my DSL is down, and are still looking into it. Also, apparently, sometime last night, Snafu went offline. I dialed in this morning, found that, and submitted a reboot request to ServerMatrix. The ServerMatrix folks rebooted snafu... which promptly locked up again. And since I'm stuck on dialup, I can't really do a lot to track this.

AAAAAAAAARGH!

So, now on top of being mopey and brooding over recent family events, I get to be frustrated by a seeming curse of all technology around me. I want my server back. I want my DSL back. I want connectivity, so that I can do my work and so that I can be distracted. Being distracted is very, very important right now, or else I sink back into brooding and moping around. I was in a pretty bad place at one point the night before last, and while I put a shiny veneer on it and distracted myself for a fair chunk of the day, it lasted through most of yesterday.

On the plus side, I've worked out more of the setting, culture, and story of Slipstream, a world I've started to design in hopes of running an online tabletop campaign in. What I've learned is that the worlds where I try to contrive them, make them balanced, make them feel 'crafted'... my players are bored, and disinterested. A world like the Basin from Othernight, where I took several elements, came up with a broad worldview and fleshed it out as the players went along, letting their interests and actions determine what I added more details to... those, the players get really into. And I think it's because they're more organic, more 'alive' somehow. And the world for Slipstream is one of those where, like Othernight, I tossed a few ideas together and have come up with this sort of organic not-quite-fully-formed world, which I think I'll flesh out and add detail to during the campaign.

I gave kieri a bit of a spoiler/teaser of what the situation in that world is, what the political setup is and so on, and she's pretty psyched for it all to be ready. Which is neat, because it's the first of my campaigns since Othernight she's been this enthusiastic about. So, I'm gonna work a little on writing for that this evening.

I've also decided this time, I'll have a package of media -- songs I've selected as a 'soundtrack', maps of the world and of cities, drawings and images of the world in general -- when the campaign's really going. I'll have the media accessible online, I think, and also as a big downloadable image that the players can just install locally.