Am I clean inside?

We’re back!

It took about a week after we got home to fully recover from the utter and complete madness that was Dragon*Con, but your staff here at ShrinkGeek has finally caught up on their sleep and gotten over whatever strain of Con Crud that was running around this year. Unfortunately, for me, there’s still a bit of lingering ick simply due to the fact that, despite my intention to do otherwise, I made some very poor dining choices while we were at the convention. In my defense I really didn’t have a heck of a lot of time to make sure the food I was eating was healthy, though. I was one of the Assistant Directors for the Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game track and I actually worked 55 hours over the course of the convention. It was fun, but hectic, and when I did have time to grab food I was more concerned with how quickly I could get it than how many calories I was consuming.

The upshot of all this is that I ate a lot of food over Labor Day weekend that I don’t normally eat and I ate way too much of it. I can definitely feel the impact of all that grease, salt, and fat. I’m sluggish, kinda bloated, and my mana bar is almost completely depleted. Now that my schedule is more or less normal again, I really need to buckle down and re-focus on taking care of my body.

Amusingly enough, I got an offer right before we left for the convention that may help me do just that.

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Works in progress (Dungeons & Dragons)

Picture taken by Krystalle during one of our recent games

Editor’s Note – The following 2000+ word post is not going to be of any interest to you at all unless you’re into tabletop role-playing games (and even then you may not care if you aren’t playing Dungeons and Dragons). I give this warning in advance to spare your precious time.

If you follow my Twitter or Facebook feeds you’re probably aware that, over the last few months, some friends of mine and I have been regularly playing Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It has been a great deal of fun on many levels. Not only am I gaming again on a regular basis (a pastime that has played an integral role in my life since I was in my early teens), but I’m doing so with my family. Finding activities that all of us enjoy can be a bit of a challenge, and the fact role-playing fell into this category just makes it all the more awesome.

The more time I spend gaming these days, the more I realize that during the years where I spent most of my free time playing games like City of Heroes and World of Warcraft I was really just trying to fill the tabletop RPG void in my life. Now that I am tabletop gaming again on a regular basis I realize that it was a less-than-fulfilling replacement. As much fun as I had playing MMORPG’s (and let’s be clear – I DID have a lot of fun), there just isn’t anything quite like making up your OWN stories and having adventures that aren’t pre-determined by a set of programmers. The exhilaration of defeating an epic monster in a scripted encounter is nothing compared to the joy of defeating a party of kobolds while sitting around a table with your friends making Monty Python jokes.

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