Lexin

It’s been a year since legionseagle died.

The anniversary was yesterday. I thought of her all day – how much I miss her kindness and her stories. So much happened during the year that I would have liked to email her. She left such a big hole in my life.

I just got online to discover that the Queen has died.

I was out at lunch with some friends and fell asleep, waking up to message from some friends saying 'we're playing D&D where are you?' and I checked with the BBC and she'd gone while I'd been asleep following lunch.

RIP Queen Elizabeth.

I'll miss her, but I won't be wearing a black armband, being a lifelong republican.

legionseagle died today. I am in pieces.

Edited to add: I haven't replied to all the comments below, I'm still too upset by the news.

As I write this (I'm posting it much later as I don't have DW access at work) I’m snacking on a biscuit kindly brought in by a colleague. Unfortunately, it tastes vaguely of fish. But I don’t like to stop eating it as I don’t want to upset my colleague.

Sad news

A gaming friend of mine, Patrick, died recently. Not this weekend just gone, but (probably) the weekend before. We found out on Friday.

What happened was that a couple of people had emailed Patrick and given that he usually responded within a couple of hours, the longest a day, they wondered why they didn’t get a reply. They started ringing him up. Still no reply. On Friday, my mate Nick rang and finally got Patrick’s sister who was at his house and who told him that Patrick had been found slumped over his computer on Wednesday, after she’d worried about the lack of response to her messages and had the police break in to do a welfare check.

We are all shocked and saddened. Patrick was only 60.

Patrick was one of those people I was kind of fond of, even while he drove me up the wall. He mansplained, but in the kindest way. He sometimes treated me as if I were a particularly hard of understanding ten-year-old, and yes, that made me mad. On the other hand, he totally meant well and once I’d taken him on one side and explained that both mansplaining and patronising me were unwelcome, he largely knocked it off. Plus, he did it to my male friends, too, though I left them to paddle their own canoes with him.

He was a good gamer. Somewhat more of a rules lawyer than I was completely happy with, but again he meant well. Usually he was right about the things he pointed out, and I made use of his lawyerly witterings by making him do things like keep the initiative list which is so important when in combat in D&D5e. He wasn’t right about Paladins being resistant to necrotic damage, though. They’re not. I checked.

I will have trouble with his characters when it comes to playing D&D5e next weekend. He ran the Paladin and the Magic User. I will need two of the other players to take those on for the session, but the Magic User only until we get to the end of this section of the campaign then she’s out. That MU drove me mad, not least because his background and picture for her hit every one of the Mary Sue tropes going, including the violet eyes and the sad backstory of abuse by Drow.

He also used to send me long emails about his characters and about how I could improve my campaign. I won’t miss those. But as I say, he meant well.

He liked his characters to have an advantage. Not just an ‘advantage’ in D&D terms, but in knowledge and equipment and he sometimes struggled with the difference between player and character knowledge. You as a player may know that a hairy monster with big teeth will leap out of the wainscoting and try to bite your head off. Your character (depending on the game) does not know this and should prepare and behave appropriately.

Example: once when we were at Bangor, he played Call of Cthulhu with my friend Paul as Keeper. We were playing strangers who’d signed up to go on holiday down the Nile on a ship in the 1920s. Patrick was determined that his character should be armed with an elephant gun and took up an entire hour of gaming time trying to persuade Paul to let him. Paul, very reasonably, was not having it given that everyone’s character was on holiday, not gribbly hunting. The rest of us filed our nails, read our character sheets or books and stared into the middle distance while they argued it out. Dear Patrick, how we loved him. A whole hour of gaming time we’ll never get back.

On the other hand, he left instructions that he will not have a funeral. Waste of time and money he called them. He will probably have a post-mortem, given that this was a sudden and unexplained death, but he will then be privately cremated (or so we understand) and his remains given to his sister, to do with as she pleases.

He was a daft bugger, but I’ll miss him.

I discovered today that my Aunt Irene died on the 1st of November – I got a letter from her son who lives in Australia. She didn’t have a note of my phone number, but had my address. Odd, because I put my phone number (and email address) into all my Christmas cards, and I always sent her one.

She was a dear. Straight spoken, always, but someone you could rely on in a pinch. She was amazing when my father died in 1997. She came down to our place from Doncaster and helped me and my then sister in law nurse my father until he died. For eight weeks, she was there, talking to him, fetching drugs (and his doctors were always updating his pain meds), cooking, whatever needed doing. She and I did most of it, because my sister in law’s children were toddlers meaning she couldn’t stay for long and my mother was no help because she’d disappeared into a weird 1941 world of rations and blackout. I’d always loved Auntie Irene for her wit and her kindness, but after that she could do no wrong in my eyes.

I probably won’t be able to go to her funeral, what with the cat’s teeth and new glasses, but I will raise a glass to her on the day.

International news

Trump won? TRUMP won?! What madness is this?

He’s a lying liar who lies like a cheap rug. I could not forgive him that impersonation he did of that disabled journalist, let alone his attitude to women. What a scuzz-bucket the man is.

Another of the greats gone: RIP Alan Rickman.

2016 seems to be starting where 2015 left off.

Not impressed.

Very sad to see that Christopher Lee has died. He was 93, which is a good age, but I had somehow imagined he must be immortal.

RIP, a very sad loss.



In other news

I am almost ready to write up my reviews of the Hugo novel nominations. It's been a hard slog...

RIP Leonard Nimoy. He was one of the icons of my childhood and I'm saddened by his passing.

Very saddened by the death first of Bob Crow on Tuesday and secondly of Tony Benn today.

For those of you who have never heard of either, both were leaders of the left wing of British politics. Tony was 88, and the signs had not been good for some time, but Bob was only 52 – scary because I’m the same age, and probably in worse health.

Tony has been an inspiration to me practically since I was old enough to say his name. It was something my parents thought rather amusing that I should venerate someone simply because I’d heard him speak at meetings. When he spoke – something he and Bob shared - he was a mixture of amusing, angry and inspiring. I never missed a chance to hear either of them.

True leaders of the left, now lost to us. A very sad week for progressive politics in the UK.

The twitterverse says Eisabeth Sladen has died, but the BBC isn't confirming that - does anyone have the true situation?

ETA: fox confirms that the BBC has it. Bugger, I was hoping it was a mare's nest.