Zarni's ramblings

[Zarniwoop]

I have noticed that 2013 seems to have been a very quiet year, it seems that a lot of my regular interweb haunts have slowed down in banter and activity.
BGG, meetup here and other sites all seem to have slowed down in the amount of posts or maybe I am just getting more discerning in what I read so skip or miss out on some messages.

BGG certainly has had a lot of banter most recently over Essen but even I find myself strangely disinterested in this years event, partly due I guess to the fact I am buying less games as I near filling my allocated gaming space and the ones I am left with are getting harder to part with. That is not to say I do not want to play more new games, as I still enjoy this immensely, it's just my desire to buy new shiny is being tempered by thinking is this any better than other games I already own or does it introduce something new and innovative.

I think the hard truth is that the economic situation is starting to really bite, especially with the basic needs going up in cost without any matching cost of living pay rises for most. I know myself I am finding that I no longer enjoy my work as much as I used to, there have been a lot of changes in the last few years, not many for the better. The sad truth is that given the way things are, moving on poses more risks than making do which is a sad reflection on life.

On the positive side we have adopted a new member of the family in the form of a completely lovable dog, though he is certainly a handful with a long way to go in the discipline stakes. That said he is bringing some much needed joy and love into our lives.

Evilginger has been doing a grand job of posting interesting articles to this forum, for which I thank him immensely, I have also been enjoying the game posts from Tiki as these have been well crafted for the game.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed this year, be it large or small, it is always appreciated and welcomed.

For my part I know I have dropped the ball on my own site and failed to contribute as much as I have in previous years and for that I can only apologies. Whilst I have worked behind the scenes in updating, maintaining and monitoring both this site and Raiders, it is not an excuse to not speak to people. I think as a whole the project to bring back my old Amiga BBS as an internet forum has not quite been the success I would have hoped for. That being said, we have grown as a community and we have had some good fun along the way, which I can only hope will continue for the foreseeable future.

Whilst I hope we all continue to keep chatting here about our games and events, I also hope we can just chew the fat sometimes about life the universe and everything.

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

I'm not sure I can properly emphasise how surprised I was to see your dog that first time, nor how much willpower it required to walk past without just cancelling the game and playing with him for a while instead.

[EvilGinger]

He is amazingly cute and very well behaved at least when I saw him last please bring him down to game again as he will love the walk & I think he is a bit of a people dog.

 Ginger

[Zarniwoop]

Success!!

We have been discovered  one of my long lost BBS users has stumbled across our little bit of the internerd..... (Welcome aboard again Graham), I had hoped people from the good 'ole would stumble across us and it has finally happened. Words can not express how pleased this makes me feel as I made some good friends back then and lost hours upon hours of time just chatting and sharing details about our various interests.

We even managed a good few face-to-face meets in the form of Pub-Meets which was also great fun. I have to say I still long for the old BBS days as way back then there was definitely more of a sense of community amongst the various BBS's as well as their users. There does not seem to be anywhere near the same sense of that on the interweb.

Still we do have the beginnings of a great little community here in our little corner and hopefully we can continue to grow it throughout 2014 and beyond.

Right, latest ramble over... chat soon

[EvilGinger]

Pub meets are always very good & we know some very good pubs to meet in too

 Ginger

[Graham]

Thanks for the welcome Zarni 

I always wondered what may have happened to us all from those exciting times back when BBS's were all the rage and the Amiga was the computer almost everyone had.

Then I watched a video on YouTube about the Amiga and got me thinking, and I put in Big Bang burger Bar and see you had this web site up and thought I have to pop by and say hi to a good friend from those fun days

I even went up into my loft and was surprised in the corner to see a boxed Amiga 500 and a Commodore A590 was still up there!
I honestly thought I had trashed all that stuff many years back, but for some reason I hung onto those couple of bits of the past.
I have however trashed most of what I used to have, did have a Amiga 4000 stored away, but think that got trashed when the battery leaked and ruined the motherboard.
I guessed being as I was a electronics engineer , I could have repaired it, but I did not see the point at the time and it went into the skip ;-)

Wondering if yourself or any others actually kept on to there ole miggy stuff or like most of us it was either sold or trashed? I guess at the time none of us ever thought all these years later, would have been nice to hang onto it all.

Even fired up the Amiga OS on a emulator and looked at it and thought, now how the hell do I use this again. lol
After all the years or messing with the system, I thought geez how soon I forgot all this and how it used to work and where all the files are etc.
Guess that's getting old 

Even though computers are now so powerful and cheap compared to the days of the Amiga and the games look so amazing, there is still a lot to be said for the days when back in the 80's and early 90's when computing was so new and exciting and when the BBS's like yours and a few others joined so many of us together via the late night chats and meets and all the fun we all had.

Definitely have to meet up again for sure mate.

Take care all

[Zarniwoop]

Still have the old Amiga stuff, in fact I have them set up in my computer room though they need some TLC in order to get back to normal operations. I even have the original BBS computer, though sadly one of the HD partions has failed and I have long forgotten the old skills to coax it all back into life.  Not even sure I can get a compatible SCSI hd to make a disk to disk.

I wanted to power it all up so I could grab some screens from the 'ole BBS to incorporate on this website to preserve all the old ANSI screens I worked so hard on back in the day. I also wanted to try and find the old BBS-PC disk to grabs shots of that to.

I have my a4000 and a broken a500 with a590 hd I also have a friends a4000 in the loft I also still have all the old software disks and disks of the stuff never got rid of any of it. Maybe in my retirement I will get round to setting all this stuff up properly. Somehwhere I also have lots of spare Amiga chips and parts, I also have my old dragon 64 with all the gear. I do tend to collect stuff, much to the missus constentation.

At the time I shut down the BBS I really wish that I had had more foresight to grab the regulars contact details and tried to stay in touch but real life has a tendency together in the way for a lot of things.

In the end I expanded the hobbies I was interested in and got more involved in RPGs and boardgamee and certainlŷ since moving to burton my social circle in that regard has increased a lot. There are also a lot of really nice pubs here so that is also pretty good. I also got this forum started and though it has yet to set the world on fire I still have some great regulars. We have the beginning a of a great community here we just need to get a few more bodies popping by for a chat.

Still if I only have the loyal few, like with the old BBS, we can still make a good go of it.

It's really good to get these long rambling chats going again it feels just like the good old days.

[Graham]

Very impressive you kept all your old Amiga stuff mate
Although the Amiga 500's and 1200's are pretty easy and cheap to get hold of these days, the 4000's and especially ones which still work are kinda rare to find around now.
I think thats down to partly a lot of them being destroyed by leaking batteries, so for anyone who still has one stashed away someplace, might be worth opening it and removing the battery as its probably started to leak or has already done so, I think some of the later ones used a different kind of battery like the backup ones in a normal pc and so they should be okay, just dead flat.

I am sure that old hard disk is fixable one way or another and I think you can also hook it up to a pc and read from it via running WinUAE emulator thesedays.

Was kinda toying with the idea of either picking up a amiga 4000 again or picking up a old apple mac power pc thats supported in MorphOS and giving that a spin.

The biggest problem these days seems to be all the different versions of the amiga is they are pretty limited as regards to the web and no development from the big players for the power pc platform anymore, more so since Apple went over to intel some years back.

Maybe a idea for when we are all old and retired, but think you can also get something like a serial to telnet adapter to bring a old bbs back online in place of the ole dialup modems 

I dont think any of us actually thought that like almost 30 years after the Amiga was launched some of us are still taking about it or even still have them lying about.

One thing for sure, the machines kept there age better than I look now I am a old fart 

Have fun matey 

[Zarniwoop]

Ahh another year goes by and we're already a significant chunk into another....

Well the Dog has at least learned to play now, though that has been a blessing and curse all rolled into one. He can be quite the pest when he decides he wants to play but still he has become an invaluable member of our little family.

The forum has become a little more quiet than I would like but I have to resign myself to the fact I can only provide the space, if no-one wants to use it that's there prerogative.
It would be nice if DM's / players posted game notes or in-character ramblings for the rest of us to enjoy and more importantly for the Players/DM to have a repository of the on-going story arcs, I used to find them invaluable in the old Lefthandrule days. My memory was never great but as I get older it is not going to get any better so I will have to try and do the same for my games.

Well the switch away from from SKY has been fantastic really, I am watching a lot less and actually waiting for full box-sets on the streaming sites. This means I am avoiding (mostly) the one-season wonders which helps alleviate the frustration of US TV. It also means that I have a bit more free time then I had before, filled with a bit more gaming and other more sociable pursuits which is good.

I still watch TV but now with streaming and recording I watch it when I'm ready to not when the broadcasters think I should watch it.

Looking at my collections of RPG's I wonder if I'll ever get to play all of the systems and adventures I have bought over the years. I must have years and years worth of the stuff but I sometimes wonder if my heart is still in it. Don't get me wrong I still get enjoyment out of the social side of RPG's and I do enjoy the games but I don't have that same 'buzz' I had when I first started. Not sure when it went away or if I can grasp some or all of it back somehow but that burning desire to put together a game or take part just doesn't seem to be there anymore.

Maybe its the fact my job is getting sucky again or my getting older who knows but here is hoping it is just a phase and that I get that mojo back again in some form.

I think the fact that this site is floundering, despite my best efforts, is not helping my mood. It was a very hard decision in the past to pull the plug on the BBS and it took a long time to take the plunge to try and resurrect that community spirit here. Things started well but over time all the great activity has just waned until it's barely ticking over. I could post more myself, but it already feels too much like a self-indulgent blog but maybe that is ok and I'm over thinking it? I've put too much personal time into this to abandon it, so whilst I can afford to keep paying the hosting costs I'll let it sit here as a repository.

I'm rambling a lot know so I should probably go and get some sleep. If you are reading this then thank you for stopping by and taking interest in the site you are most welcome.

See you around I'm off for some 

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

Yeah, I watch very little tv these days, at least properly speaking. Enjoying following Gotham very much, usually make the effort for Dr Who and...that's most of it, really? There's a few things I'm theoretically watching box sets of and others I intend to catch back up with later (Agents of Shield and the other marvel series shows particularly), but generally I've long since reclaimed that time and brain space.

Honestly, it sounds like you're just going through a little bit of a funk at the moment. It's worth meditating on what it was you were getting from Rpg's and seeing if there's a way to refocus on that angle. Maybe that means taking the plunge and risking running some more games, maybe that means relocating Andy's game to the pub, or simply hanging out with people outside of the context of gaming more often? Or maybe it's the novelty and newness, and what's needed is to launch into strange new games with strange new people, shake up the context and the assumptions that come with a group. Who knows. The principle is to understand what you want, and then get it.

If there's anything I can do to help with that, just say the word.

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

It's easier to get people talking if you respond to stuff and get conversations going, to be fair.

[Zarniwoop]

Well, if and when I had anything meaningful to add to the conversation I would reply  but seeing most of your reply was rhetorical in nature there was not much room there for a response. Things to mull over and think about but no direct questions as such 

Still, I don't think Andie's game would suit a pub environment to be honest, when we move onto another game which is likely to be me running 5e then it may be my turn to host. So I will get a taste of running a game again, one that is both familiar and new at the same time. Should be interesting as the first session is mostly going to be character generation so we can all get a handle on the system better rather than using the pre-gens. Not a big fan of pre-gens outside of convention play as they detract from learning the game somewhat.

[Snakes in the Tiki Lounge]

The trick with the internet, I've always found, is that it isn't really important for your post to add anything particularly meaningful to the conversation.

I think we've had some good games in the past using pre-gens, but usually in the context of games like Andy's B5, where the fact they are pre-genned means the GM has had the chance to weave them into the backstory and more importantly give them all dark secrets and conflicting agendas. Can you imagine how uneventful that game might have been if half of us hadn't been sneaking around trying to kill and/or frame the other half?

[Zarniwoop]

True, but how much better if those same traits had been worked into the characters during a creation session where you have invested time and thought into building your character. You can then have one-to-one sessions during that process for the DM to introduce the links or additional background. Also the players then help to form those relationships which can often be better roleplayed because they have taken part in the process rather than read a cheat sheet..

There is good argument for both but on balance I prefer the creation process because then everyone has much more of a buy in to the story and backgrounds that way. Though not all people or systems enable that to be easy. The other benefit is again it helps people understand the system better as character creation makes you work though a lot of things so you get much more familiar with how they all interact.

[slug]

Well, I have several years worth of gaming write ups I can post.
I am also planning on coming back for a two week holiday and really hoping to get a gaming weekend in if poss.
I will bring back some sugar loaded candy if that helps, or for those of you who remember you can ask me not to!