Audrey's Oubliette

So what’s in a number? It is used as a way to measure something. That way you can know how much more or less something is. In roller derby the WFTDA (Women’s Flat Track Derby Association) has a set of skills you must pass in order to be bout ready. One of those tests is to skate 25 laps on the derby track in 5 minutes or less, commonly called 25 in 5. I already passed my assessments back in Sept 2009, but every few weeks I try the 25 in 5 just to see where I am. It is one of the few things in roller derby in which you can easily measure your progress.

Now I am not saying that speed is the most important thing in derby, for I feel it isn’t. Speed helps but maneuverability, awareness, taking and giving hits, etc are far higher on my list of important skills in derby. Of course speed does help when you are a jammer, but a slower jammer that is better at the other skills can make it through the pack quicker than a fast jammer that is not as good at those other skills. Plus your pack blockers greatly determine how easy or difficult it is to get through a pack. But I am getting side tracked.

Anyhow, last night at practice I did the 25 in 5 in 3 minutes and 42 seconds or an average of 8.88 seconds per lap. That beat my previous best time of 3.47 which I set roughly a month ago. It was a nice surprise as I didn’t expect to get close to my 3.47. Maybe that is what helped. I wasn’t going into it trying to beat my time of 3.47, I was just skating. Well that and also trying to keep pace with one of our fastest skaters in the league, which she came in at 3.39. Though I think she can still skate faster than that. I remember 8 months ago when I was a newbie trying to skate in under 4.30 and hope to be able to one day make it in under 4.00. So this is my brief moment to go, “Hell Yeah!”. Now I set my next goal to skating the 25 in 5 in under 3.40 and striving for 3.35.

A little over a month ago I got my first derby injury that was more than a bruise. Our league was in Raleigh skating at the a scrimmage-a-thon put on by the Carolina Rollergirls. Well the day had been going well and I skated in two scrimmages earlier. So I was joining in some derby drills to learn something new and pass the afternoon waiting for my final scrimmage later that evening.

Of course a simple drill goes ends up going wrong. I took a hit and went down, falling on my knee and elbow pads like you normally would. Well after hitting the concrete my elbow pads ended up sliding out from under me and my chin decided to kiss the concrete…really hard. At first I thought I had just bruised it, but it did sting. That is when I noticed the blood, more than just a little scratch. So I sat on the concrete dripping blood from my chin as they called over the paramedics. The paramedics said I needed to get stitches. Off to urgent care I went. I ended up with 13 stitches, 6 internal and 7 external. This is the first time I have ever had stitches. I was told after I left they had to get something to clean up the blood and had little bio hazard signs posted around the spot. That made me laugh. I wasn’t able to skate in the late scrimmage, go figure, but we did kick butt and win it.

Well it has been a month later and here is a photo of what my chin looks like now. It healed rather well and over time it should fade more. I can still feel what I call a “bean” under the skin. I am guessing it is scar tissue and the internal stitches. Hopefully that will go down in size even more. Over the month is has gone down about 2/3 the size. All in all I consider myself lucky that I didn’t fracture or break my jaw. Hopefully this will be the worst derby injury I ever get.

So some of you have probably noticed that I have left my poor little blog abandoned for quite sometime. Well at the beginning of this year I finally got around to going to watch my local roller derby team, Charlotte Roller Girls. I really liked it. Then after watching a few bouts I got this crazy idea to go to one of their meet and greets at the end of April about joining the league. I figured I might like it and maybe I could be a ref or something. I had been a bit burnt out on gaming and wanted a little break. Figuring I could help out with derby once a week.

Fast forward roughly 6 months and here I am, consumed by the sport called roller derby. It took me by surprise that I would love it so much. So the once a week got upped to 2-3 times a week at practice, plus events. I did skate as a ref for a bit, but now I have passed assessments and I am skating on the B-dazzlers team for the Charlotte Roller Girls. As you can tell by my blog this has left me with very little time for anything else.

So unfortunately my various gaming projects are still on my desk waiting for me to return. I have no desire to quit gaming and have managed to play two games in six months. I do miss it and think about it. But for now the rush of adrenaline and desire for speed is winning out. But don’t lose hope. I will update the blog and continue on at some point. I just can’t say exactly when it will be.

Here is a picture of me jamming at a recent bout.

Things have been rather quiet on my blog lately. Yes I have left it untouched for almost a month. I just have not had time to post. But stuff is going on behind the scenes. I have been busy getting ready for the games I am running at Cold Wars; painting up some new figures, making some new terrain, plus designing some weapon cards for Forsaken. So things may look quiet but they aren’t.

Cold Wars seems like it is still as ways away. But I know I need to get my butt in gear so it does not catch me by surprise. I already submitted my two Forsaken games I am running that weekend for the convention. One is a zombie scenario the other is a scenario with vampires, werewolves and humans. Due to the dead line of the online PEL (Dec 14th 2007) I ended up submitting the vampire and werewolf game with only knowing that I wanted to run one and the general outline of what I wanted to do. So since that time I have fleshed the scenario out more and already created the characters for the 3 groups involved.

Chuck and I ran a play test of the werewolf and vampire scenario the other weekend and it went rather well. The werewolves were very tough, as I had planned for them to be. I hope to be play testing it again soon and plan on taking some pictures this time. The basic rules for Forsaken certainly feel like they have come together and are running smoothly. I have some writing revisions I need to sit down and do. Plus I need to start putting together the website with information for playtesters. I believe opening the rules up to a larger group of playtesters will certainly get things moving faster. Oh so much to do.

So while writing the Forsaken rules I have had to make some decisions on the rulebook layout. I know the rules are going to be in black and white. I looked at a number of rulesets that are print in B&W to see how they did their examples. The two choices are illustrations or photos. I found that the photos can be difficult to make out even in the rule books by the bigger game companies printed on coated paper. I decide to go with illustrations. But even with that decision I needed to choose how I want the illustrations to look. For me it is easier to create them in illustrator over drawing them by hand and scanning them in. Plus they will look more polished over hand drawn images. Below are two test examples I created to see what looks nice and will still print legibly. I think they turned out pretty good and should work nicely in the rules. Now I just have to put together all the visual examples I need.

Things have been quiet over the past few weeks and here is why… To give myself a swift kick in the butt on my rules and further along to be ready for demo games I signed up to run some games at Southern Front in Raleigh, NC. I had about 6 weeks or so to come up with 2 scenarios, finish a number of terrain pieces, get the rules in solid shape, as well as paint 42 figures. For me that was a pretty big task. I would say I am a rather slow painter, plus genreal life and work have been rather busy of the past few months.

Well the kick in the butt worked. I did put on two different scenarios. Both games went well and I had fun running them. But there sure were a few times when I wasn’t sure if I would get it all finished for the con. I was still putting things together, adding finishing touches, etc on up until 10 minutes before we left for Raleigh. But I wouldn’t have been able to get all this done without the help of Cecelia, who helped cut out paper terrain and was my personal inspirational coach and Jerry who helped out by painting 25 zombies for me. Thanks to you both.

Now that the convention is over I am glad I did it. I am hapy with what I got finished and the quality of the games that I put on. Plus the games provided some nice feedback for the rules. It helped show how quickly players were able to pickup on the rules after a brief introduction and any problems areas there may be with the rules.

I am already making plans to run more demo games at local game stores as well as a number of conventions in the number of months. At least things should be easier for these upcoming conventions as I will have more time plus not quite as much work will be needed in a short time.

I will be showing photos of the figures and games that I ran at Southern Front over the next few entries. I hope you like what you see.

So it is time for me to go on about some music I have been listening to recently. Last week I got the new album by The Birthday Massacre,Walking With Strangers. I am quite pleased with it and have been listening to it quite often. I have their other two albums (Nothing and Nowhere and Violet) and with this one they do not disappoint. Walking With Strangers continues with the soft flowing vocals of Chibi and their darkish electronic, guitars and 80’s influenced sound but with better production quality than the first two. I love how the songs go from something that could be straight from the 80’s to heavy guitar riffs like in the song Red Stars. Chibi’s vocals flow quite nicely whether it is a softer song or something heavy. It is worth a listen.

MP3 samples
Red Stars
Science

When I get some time I am planning on converting over the epic projects I have on my old site. Plus I am going to dust off some unpublished photos of epic stuff as well. Hopefully within the month. Just things are rather busy right now for me.

So I finally decided to give in and create a blog about my various miniature projects and what not. My intent is for this to replace my old website, Audrey’s Oubliette. We shall see.