Friday the 13th Geek-Out

Welcome to the Friday edition, my little paraskavedekatriaphobes! Today is the annual chili cookoff here at work. Ed has a crock pot at his desk with his entry simmering. It's a bit too thin for his taste so he's mulling over thickening options. Where the hell do you find arrowroot around the Square? I would have concocted an entry for the cookoff myself but my chili is shite. It's just plain old garden-variety chili and nothing to write home about. A couple years ago I experimented with actually making a good chili which involved beer and mole sauce. I made some progress but abandoned the experiment in media res for reasons I can't recall.

I've started playing The Temple of Elemental Evil again and I'm at the point of making my full-frontal assault on Lareth's hideout in the moathouse dungeon. I did some reading on the game and found out something pretty neat.

This:




Is becoming this:





Yes, a group of geeks is making a Keep on the Borderlands mod for TOEE! Keep is a very early Dungeons & Dragons adventure that all D&D players around my age or older have gone through. It's a friggin' classic! I played it a few years ago with Marv, et al. We had his roommate Ben with us and it was his first time playing D&D. That boy had no common sense; he'd just barge into rooms willy nilly. And he'd drink from any phial that happened to by lying around. For instance, we went into a room and killed the koblads inside. Ben's character finds a potion. He looks at Marv (our DM) and declares, "I drink the potion." Marv looks at Ben. I look at Marv. Marv looks at me and says with an evil DM grin, "It tastes like bitter almonds..." I nearly fell on the floor laughing. (The taste of cyanide is said to be like bitter almonds.)

OK, enough dorkiness for the moment.