In one of the last sessions, our players managed to get safely past a flash flood I had on the random events. Living in WNC, I've seen the real devastation flooding can cause. I had to listen to the winds blow, huge trees cracking then snapping and falling to the ground, taking out anything under them. If this event in the game happens again I may have to to better at picturing the sheer chaos, noise and horror this actually is. I am very lucky - no trees fell on my house, and everyone I knew I thought was safe. It took over a week before I had power, and as I have a well, used buckets for flushing. I still have no internet, and I am working at my mother-in-law's house where she has it all working. I'll probably go into the office Friday.
The day the hurricane blew through after I heard a chainsaw - someone was going down the street and clearing at least one lane to allow traffic through. There were trees and lines all over the road. I helped out, and more people showed up with chain saws. Some neighbors even had tractors and helped haul off trees, and even stood in the bucket of a front loader, to cut down trees higher up. It was really nice to see people helping one another. And that has been mostly what has been happening: people helping each other. Except for the idiots in the gas line who shot someone. So disasters also bring out the worse in some people. But overall, there is more good than bad that happens when these disasters occur.
I've been in an odd, existential state of mind because of all this. Sadly, I am a person of deep habits, and being unable to live on my routines really throws me off. I did read several books, and with a camp stove I had hot meals and my coffee. My wife even had a camp shower so I could at least rinse off. So I was not living in the wilds. Though I was getting concerned as I was running low on cat food, and sometimes those cats would be looking at me...
And an old friend I've not seen in a long time got in contact with me: friends we played volleyball with back in the day were killed when their house collapsed on them. I've not talked with them in probably close to 20 years, but still it is sad to hear and know. And sadly, in Traveller terms, more people I know are struggling with their aging rolls, including me. There was a posting that a long-time Traveller fan, Shawn Driscoll has passed as well. Which is why the gym is so important to me - need to hopefully at least keep those physical stats up! Guess writing new software helps with the INT score.
Sorry that this is a bit of a bummer of a post. Sometimes the real world comes calling. Which is one of the reasons I play RPGs, to get out and explore the cosmos, or the fantasy worlds we play in. But we do live in the real world. And while I try to stay optimistic, there are some people who just play these disasters for personal power and gain. Fortunately, most people try to help others.
Hopefully a better blog post next time. I'll probably continue with the Traveller 5.10 overview as I would actually like to complete that. And I may go over some of the .NET stuff I'd like to do for Traveller that would allow people to do things on their computer. Actually - the code I wrote for the UWP explainer is here on GitHub. You can always download it and run it. At least on a PC - I may do yet another version and make it a web application so that it could then be run on a Mac as well. Let me know if I need to post directions. The goal of that project was to see if I could get it to run on a PC & Android. And while I tried I never figured out how to get it signed for the Android app store, and Google recently dropped my dev license as I had not done anything with it.
