I’ve not been blogging much recently, which is a pity as, rather unusually, stuff’s actually been happening.

I went to the National Student Roleplaying and Wargaming Championships, held just up the road at Edinburgh. Apart from the New Year, this was pretty much the only face-to-face roleplaying I’ve done in about two years – which is a fair while, I think you’ll agree. It was astounding fun, and I placed second in the “Supers” category – which means that I’ve placed in every Nationals that I’ve attended (and not GM’d).

Of course, the best bit was meeting up with everyone again, including Hobbit, Muffin, and Dr. Sordid, amongst others. The good Doctor ran day one of Supers for me (and others, obviously), and it was fantastic fun. Muffin set up shop, and appeared to do quite well.

The Nationals were really on marred by one thing – my glasses conspired to break on Friday, leaving me peering short-sightedly at everything, or using the lens that fell out as a monocle. I’ve since arranged for new glasses, but they won’t be available until Wednesday (there’s a chance for Saturday, but we’ll see what happens).

In the meantime, I’ve also decided to experiment with contact lenses – I’ve had the surprisingly complicated lessons in putting them in and taking them out, and I’ve now got a few days worth of test lenses to with which to acclimatise myself. It was extremely weird being able to see properly without my glasses on. I had them on for three hours today, and it was basically okay, apart from a brief “oh dear God there’s something in my eye!” incident right before take-them-out-time (that went away as mysteriously as it appeared), and then it took about ten minutes pawing at my eyes to get them out again. One decided it wanted to see what the other side of my eyeball looked like, but I managed to retrieve it.

I’ve got a bit of a headache; I don’t know if it’s lens-related. It could be that it was quite sunny when I was walking home, and didn’t have any sunglasses (normally I use these slip-on shades, but they need glasses to slip on) – that often can trigger a headache. I’ll see what happens tomorrow, where I’m scheduled to have them on (in? at?) for 6 hours.

I tested the lenses out on the new Doctor Who on Virgin Media’s TV-on-demand service (although my box still says it’s Telewest’s Teleport TV – poor thing’s clinging to the past). Very good, nice stuff, with not too much of the RTD flaws that are so prominent on Torchwood. I would agree with Dr. Sordid’s analysis that we could od with leaving the family dynamics at home – we need a break from that, now that Rose is gone. I’d also add that I’m sure they’re trying to be subtle about “Saxon”, but… not so much.

I also discovered that Teleport TV has old Babylon 5 episodes on offer. Schweet! I’m going to have to watch “Signs and Portents”, if only to rewatch Vir’s answer to the question “What do you want?”.

At this precise moment, however, I’ve got Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven’s Door on Sci-Fi – and I pity the poor parent who was channel-hopping and thought this might be a nice cartoon for the kids – quite a bit of blood-and-gore for just past two in the afternoon!

Oh…kay. That’s quite the venting. In the words of Austin Powers… I’m spent.