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The missing deck turned up! Hooray!! I don't know why it took so long -- air mail is supposed to take 5 to 7 days -- but at least it finally arrived.

I'm looking for a copy of the role playing game Castle Falkenstein. It's part of this "steam punk" thing, and it uses cards instead of dice. So I think it would be really fun to play with VRT & I bet it wouldn't be difficult to adapt the rules to Tarot cards.

On Friday after work I went by the comics shop in Chapel Hill to see if they had a copy. Now, I have to confess that comics shops make me nervous. I find them highly intimidating. It's that whole "Comic Book Guy" thing. Of course, that's just a fictional character. But the guys who run the comics shop in Durham, the only one I ever went to on a semi-frequent basis, were always uniformly rude to me. To make matters worse, my friends who were into comics always insisted that those guys were nice and cool and friendly. Which made me feel like the mean comic store guys would have been nicer to me if I'd had better taste in comics, or if I'd spent more money there, or if I'd had a Y chromosome, or something.

This is all by way of explaining that, although I'm sure that the vast majority of people who work in comics shops or sf bookstores are very nice and friendly and helpful, I still find it a somewhat stressful experience to go into one. Especially if I need to ask the clerk a question. I imagine them snickering at the stupidity of my request, which makes me wonder why that would even bother me. If it were, say, a video store, I wouldn't care whether the clerk was a snobby jerk or not. Because I could tell myself that I probably know more about movies than they do, and it might even be true.

But anyway, I went to the sf/comics store in Chapel Hill, because I used to be good friends with someone who worked there a long time ago. Who knows, maybe the long-past connection would somehow render me part of "the in crowd." I nosed around a bit, didn't see anything about gaming, then finally broke down and asked the clerk. Who was, in fact, a very nice helpful guy. He didn't even snicker at my asking where were the Tarot decks, which they stopped selling 5 years ago.

They also don't sell gaming supplies, because there's apparently a gaming store a couple of blocks away. In fact it's been there for about 10 years. You can tell I buy a lot of gaming supplies. Now, if comics shops make me nervous, gaming stores make me really nervous. Because they're always full of gamers, who seem to be even more insular and cliquish than comics guys. Plus I found this website which proves that the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons is a real person and he owns a gaming store.

Anyway, I walked over to the gaming store. It's in a tiny space just off the main street, in the basement level. It's called "Cerebral Hobbies," and through the window I could see that it was jammed with people. Kids playing on computers, sitting around a table, standing by the counter. I didn't even see any shelves of product, just people. Walking in there felt like barging in on someone's clubhouse.

So I didn't. I turned tail and fled. I'm sure I can find a copy of Castle Falkenstein on the Internet somewhere.