Convention prep

Now that there are conventions on my schedule, I need to actually get ready for them. First up: PaizoCon is being held on a variety of virtual tabletop systems. For RPGs like Pathfinder, there are two main ones, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Roll20 is faster to learn and set up, but you have to do a lot of things manually. Fantasy Grounds gives you a ton of help executing things according to the rules, but the tradeoff is a longer setup time.

The high-level game I've signed up for is on Fantasy Grounds, which is how I wound up spending two hours this morning entering the details of my level 10 wizard including all 156 spells in her spellbook.

I have my second-edition wizard signed up for a couple of 2-hour quests, one of which is listed for Roll20 and the other on the popular new entrant, "Unknown virtual tabletop product".

For AmazingCon (and later Worldcon) I need to find an appropriate Zoom background and either locate my standalone webcam (my laptop doesn't have one built in) or get a new one. Which I'd better do soon, given how slow delivery is these days.

There's nothing specific I absolutely have to do ahead of Origins Online other than to register, but I have a reminder set for when registration opens a few days hence because I've decided to sign up at the limited edition T-shirt level.

Week 9

This week all the roses around the neighborhood bloomed at once. This would be awkward in a normal year where the Portland Rose Festival is held at its usual time, which starts at the end of May.

It has been sunny this week, and rainy and dark, and pretty much everything in between. Yesterday I succumbed to the urge to not go outside at all except for a brief trip to the mailbox, and found that it was not as restful as I had hoped. Today I went out and pulled a bunch of weeds in the afternoon and felt much better for it.

Most of Oregon is starting to take the first tentative steps toward un-distancing, except for the counties of the Portland metro area. Portland itself has had relatively few cases of covid-19, but the suburbs are another story. The particular area where I live has the dubious honor of having been the original epicenter of Oregon's outbreak, and is still registering one of the highest numbers of cases in the state (though that's within the context of a statewide total of known cases and deaths for the whole pandemic that's smaller than what some states are currently experiencing on a daily basis).

Some of us may of course never go back to the pre-pandemic normal. More and more companies, having discovered that most of its workforce can still work without being in the office, are reportedly considering work-from-home forever. I'm sure some people welcome this. Me, I miss having an excuse to go out and be around people.