Time and Space Bridal Shower & Contest!

Thanks for the good wishes about my bad news post yesterday. I think it was important for me to get that off my chest and get back into blogging with an honest start.

Yesterday turned out to be an awesome day as a gaming friend of mine held a bridal shower. My friend Beth arrived at my house looking pretty and glam to drive us to north to the event. I completely forgot that people dress up for stuff like this and was wearing a Victorian Tron shirt to try to fit the theme of the upcoming wedding.

Once there it was an awesome time of sitting around a table talking about gaming and anime with a bunch of other ladies. I'd never had the experience of just hanging out with a group of girl gamers without a dude present and while not super different than any other gamer conversation it was a positive experience. We were surrounded by movie themed decorations and by a very supportive family.
As the afternoon progressed we filled out a 2-page document that would be used to generate a custom RPG about the bride and groom. When the presents were open your sheet was used to fill out an ongoing story about the bride fighting her way across the world. At one point she defeated a book club and a mad-scientist surrounded by enchanted bunk beds! When it got to my answers...
My sheet was a little all over the board and once my present was open she had to face...ENCHANTED PROSTITUTES! (Hey, it said profession and that was the first that came to mind since I'd already used lawyer for a job title in a previous question).

Now on to my present. While I did get the Bride something for her house (ok Dragonfly decorative lights...) I also gave her a dice bag with a space print and an IronDie. What is that you ask?
Oh look there's my antique Tron shirt! Ok, and what's that I'm holding? That's an IronDie. It's an all metal D6 that retails for $5-$6 and can be used to replace your typical D6s or can be used as part of the IronDie Game. I included a different more steampunk looking one with the bride's gifts, but this lovely purple one is what I'm giving away!

To win the D6 leave a comment about what you would hope to see GO WRONG during a wedding that involved actual time travel. The contest is open until Sunday July 16th at 11:59 PM CST. The winner will be randomly chosen (using dice of course!) and announced on Monday July 17th.

Good luck! I leave you with the awesome cookie jar someone gave the bride. It makes the Tardis brake noise when you open it!

Pulsar Arcade Refurb

As part of my experience in the IT department I've joined an organization that does everything from learning game design to working on arcade machines. This is a machine kindly donated to us by our Advisor. It's a 1981 Pulsar and this is the condition it was in when we all gathered one lovely Saturday to work on it. Our advisor has an awesome house with pinball and arcade machines everywhere. Paradise!

After some fun playing the LOTR and X-Files pinball machines and playing some guitar we got down to work!

First we took everything we could off of the cabinet. There were some surprises in how things were bolted in, but we got it taken apart fairly quickly.

Most of the electrical components are in fairly good shape and the monitor needed some tweaking to get it looking sharper. Many of the other pieces like the plastic components were incredibly filthy and scratched. They needed a lot of cleaning and polishing to remove as many surface scratches as possible.

Even the marquee was somewhat banged up and really dirty before I got to work on it. I soon discovered that the back needed as much work as the front. You can see how much improved it is from the first picture. I like the image on there. It reminds me of Tron!

Here's the front of the machine stripped down. The control panel needed cleaning and some work. Although the game was running it was not running very smoothly. The joystick had some issues and ultimately needs to be rebuilt.

You might be surprised to see how simple the parts are on the bottom of the control panel. They are even mounted on wooden blocks. Once the parts were clean and the control panel had been worked on we began to reassemble the pieces.

Look at that monitor! It's really in wonderful shape after it's been adjusted. So, what happened to Pulsar? Well, now it's in a temporary home in one of the computer labs. It looks shiny!


You can see more photos including the ORIGINAL manual with specs at my Photobucket.

T-Shirt Tuesday: GaMeRS

After a long weekend of travel and starting a new IT job I am happy to be back on campus working on projects. Sometime soon I have a new Pathfinder game that I'll be in as a swashbuckler and this weekend I will be in a very beautiful piratey/steampunky type wedding as a bridesmaid!

As for today I am sporting a shirt for the Game Mechanics Research Studio, a group that I will now represent as treasurer. Tomorrow we have a meeting about MMO's at 1 pm.

I like to kick it by the pinball machines in our small campus arcade on breaks. If you would like to check out our logo and help us raise funds to travel to game studios then check out our store. As treasurer this request is my first official act. Hehe.

Stay tuned for more! I hope to have a contest up and running next week.

100th Post: Fought and Won by Gamers

I spied this on Geekologie.



This is my 100th post on this blog and it celebrates the brave gamers who have had to fight to keep their portables out of the hands of violent thieves. It also goes to show that one should not attack people who have consumed in their lifetimes thousands of gallons of mind-altering caffeine and have good hand/eye coordination.