I’m melting

Other than melting into the ground from heat exhaustion, here’s what I’ve been up to so far this week…

Dungeons and Dragons

Picking up from where we left off last week, we have finally managed to get all the fighters back into their human forms and recap the events that had befallen Tom and Juliette’s characters, with much amusement. Fortunately the temple cleric is still in shock from having his hand bitten off, so David managed to escape the embarrassment of coming up with an excuse for the vicious, unprovoked attack.

After putting the fighters to bed we all managed to actually get a good night’s sleep without being attacked, which meant that everyone got healed slightly and I slept for long enough to recover my spells so I am no longer defenceless. A strange encounter with apparently violent large ferrets, which turned out to be harmless – despite David’s attempts to lop their heads off, left us a bit confused, but this session passed rather uneventually. This was probably just as well given the temperature in the room and the high humidity.

So, other than Kate and Lucy’s “paranoia notes” (bits of paper that get passed between two players but which the DM has the right to read), not a huge amount happened in this session. However, we have decided to storm off into the forests to hunt down and kill Orcs, so the action should heat up a bit next week. Of course Lucy and Kate have decided to stay in the town, which means that if the transformations start happening again there’s going to be three domestic animals standing around a rather pissed off elven sorceror in the middle of the woods.

Site work

As usual I’m working on a few of my web sites at the moment, although progress is a bit slower than I’d like. Font Planet has a new design, but I’m not entirely sure whether I’m happy with it or not. I’m going to keep uploading fonts for a while anyway, seeing as they can stay in the database even if I redesign or add features, and I’m hoping to get the total up to one hundred by the end of the week.

Rogue Students is also growing slowly, although at the moment it’s still the same small group of people making most of the posts so I might have to start promoting it a bit more than I have been in order to encourage new people to sign up. I’ve got a lot of ideas for the site though, some suggested by members and some which I’ve had in my mind for a while, so it should be interesting to see how they pan out.

I’m also working on Politics Watch, which I eventually hope to turn into a collaborative news site covering UK politics. So far I’ve got the basic design worked out, but I’m still wondering what content management system to use for the site or whether to write my own. At the moment I’m leaning towards WordPress, but the problem is that I want to add some features that it doesn’t have and I’m also not too sure how its templating system works.

The other aim of Politics Watch is to enable me to get a bit more practise in writing political commentaries covering current events, without sending regular readers of my blog to sleep. Let’s face it, politics is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially when I’d be posting several times a week. Anyway, the site won’t be available for a while yet as I’m still designing the backend features, but I will probably mention here when it is done.

Other stuff

Other than what I’ve already mentioned, I’ve not been up to an awful lot recently. It’s been far too hot to go out and do things, and at the moment all I’m doing is trying to keep cool, which isn’t easy when you’re sitting in a room with a server, router and wireless access point running 24/7. Even with the window wide open and the fan on full strength I still feel like I’m in a sauna. “I’m melting! I’m melting!”, as the Wicked Witch of the West would say (or rather wouldn’t, as she was killed by a bucket of water, but never mind).

Anyway, I’ve got a few things to look forward to in the next couple of weeks, although I’ve been instructed to spend at least one day painting the shed and fixing the front garden – which is only fair given that I’m living at home rent-free until August. I’m going down to “explore the delights of the south” (apparently) the weekend after next when I go down to see Lizzy. I’ve already booked my train tickets so hopefully everything in London will be back to normal because I have to go through London Euston and London Liverpool Street, although I can remember my journeys on the tube from last time I was down there so if there are any problems I should be able to find my way round them. I’ve also got nearly a week of peace and quiet when the rest of the household goes away on holiday. Hurrah.