August 6th, 2025:

Still here, still around. It's been a busy six months since my

last update, and politics notwithstanding, a lot has happened.

RPG-wise, both of our two long-running GURPS Autoduel campaigns have

concluded. Our Striker Courier campaign ended abruptly when Striker (the

players' NPC employer) and her girlfriend Claire-de-Lune were killed by a

sniper. The PCs went their separate ways after that. Our Autoduel/Urban

Fantasy campaign ended when the two PCs avenged Striker and Claire, using

magic to trick the sniper into shooting his handler, then compelling him

to walk off the eight-storey building he was shooting from. SPLAT!

Our RPG group is taking August off before reconvening in September.

We're evenly divided over which campaign we'll be playing: continuing in

Post-Apocalyptic Mongolia, picking up our Dungeon Fantasy RPG campaign, or

starting something new. Guess we have a month to decide, although frankly

I'm hoping to continue on in Mongolia...

Computer-wise, I finally bit the bullet and bought an MSX Turbo R

computer. I've wanted one for a long time (20+ years) and one came along

at a price I couldn't ignore. I haven't done much with it yet (too busy

fooling with my new Mac Mini) but am hoping to get to grips with it this

weekend.

The Turbo R has been a bit of a headache out of the box. My Sunrise

CF-IDE cart didn't work (some BIOS error I'm too lazy to fix), but

thankfully my MegaFlashRom SCC SD++ etc cart did, so I was able to use my

apps and play most of my games (the ones that didn't need patching to run

on the faster CPU). I had similar issues when I bought my MSX 2+ computer

a couple of years ago, games had to be patched etc etc so I knew what to

expect. I'll sort it all out at some point. If I can't figure it out,

there are plenty of friendly folks at msx.org who can help.

On another note, I tried tofu again for the first time in a couple of

decades. I had it in a breakfast scramble at one of Rachel and mine's

haunts, and actually liked it this time. The tofu had the consistency of

scrambled eggs, which I liked, and wasn't mushy. I'm going to try a

couple more tofu dishes next time we're at that restaurant, and have added

firm tofu to our grocery list so I can get used to cooking it myself.

'Cause ya gotta try new things.