Last night, I received some RAM I had ordered to speed up my old Frankenstein PC. On Tuesdays, some friends of mine who have been spread out across the country have been playing City of Heroes as an excuse to drink beer and shoot the shit online. My computer has been notably slower than the others, so I thought a little more RAM would be a cheap boost to the experience, particularly since it seemed to be Skype that was causing the issues.

I thought I had ordered the correct stuff, but having been out of the loop on hardware for some time now, I actually forced 240-pin RAM into a 168-pin slot. Sounds stupid, and it is, but the RAM does look remarkably similar physically.

As the machine booted, Clare’s sensitive nose picked up a problem before my pride allowed me to believe anything was wrong. “Smoke!” she cried in an alarmed tone, and I rushed to turn the now-ruined machine off. So, no game-playing on that machine for a while. I’m looking into the option of creating a Hackintosh, an Intel-based machine that will run Mac OS X, with a dual boot into Windows for gaming. I can’t afford Apple’s hardware, but I prefer their software, so hopefully I can pull that off.

I thought that I would have a lot of time once my shows were over, but my days have filled up so rapidly that I end up rushing around just as much. It’s almost better when I have a show going, because I treasure the time I get to spend with my friends when it’s at such a premium. But when I’m “free,” I somehow get overcommitted to social engagements, and feel guilty when I have to attend three or more in a day, leaving one for the other.

Combine that with a number of opportunities for work all around the area, and you have me ith barely enough brainspace or time to get my driver’s license renewed, even if I can manage the motivation to attend to such bureaucratic bullshit. Of course what will happen is the day I intend to go get it done finally, I will be pulled over and have some unseemly amount of penalty for someone who simply does not get into real trouble. (Some) Laws are dumb.

The six pounds I mysteriously gained yesterday have equally mysteriously disappeared. Maybe I was actually carrying an invisible brick or handbag or parrot. Or my scale is just unreliable.

I have been listening to the Dungeons and Dragons official podcasts, having been turned onto them by the Penny Arcade sessions with one of the line developers. While they are interesting to someone who is engaged in the hobby, I do feel like I have to hide them from some of my co-workers.

Strange that a hobby should have so much of a stigma. Now that video games are rapidly becoming a medium rather than a pasttime, and since their mainstream appeal has become so great, I can discuss them with less ingominy. But role-playing games, while infinitely more creative and social still wear a scarlet A for some reason. And I partially agree with that viewpoint, which is stranger still.

While I see no harm in cosplay or LARPing, a part of me considers it the refuge of the Deep Nerds, a community that I must avoid. Many people, my girlfriend included, who enjoy those hobbies are fully adjusted, valuable members of society, but my brain has received training to shun them. I have to fight against it.

Granted, these hobbies do draw their share of … undesirables, but certainly no more so than sports or some other more socially acceptable recreation. Mitchell and Webb did a wonderful satirical sketch of this very subject which I would love to post, but I have difficulty extracting it.

On a similar note, I was amused to find that one of my “cool” colleagues, who clearly had never been told to turn her nose up at such things, is positively and unironically fascinated with Renaissance Faires. The Rennie stereotype is well-known in my circles and often well-deserved, but this woman, bears no such prejudices and delighted to hear some of my inside information on the subject. It was refreshing. Maybe all of these biases exist only in me, and I somehow am projecting them onto the world. Still, I’ll probably keep mum on the whole D&D thing for now.