Random RPG bits

What have I been doing recently? Not very much, it seems like. Work got busy when the term started, but has calmed down a bit now (apparently not for the walkins folks, but I guess most of the people who were going to forget their password over the summer have realized that by now). Mostly role-playing games, I guess, which is not that surprising. :)

We finally discovered in 4400 that the fact that we were being thwarted at every turn was due to conspiracies instead of general ambiance, but it's not yet clear what to do about that. In Conflux we let Bartleby and Loki get away (hopefully to where Loki decide that Bartleby has gone off the deep end and changes sides); the Dogma plot is one where my character's loopiness-about-Fiction clashes badly with her disapproval of mass murderers. Astronomer still not dead yet. The Comet Kor'n'Kern run has been cancelled/rescheduled for something like the fifteenth time; I wonder if the 4400 lesson about Conspiracies is one to consider applying, and, if so, who to smack.

In Tourmaline (my puttering-only game for Mad Puttery Empire Builders, that Jelom describes as "the most horrible-sounding-thing ever!"), I've managed to stuff the whole group (now with bonus Mirris!) into a party with an Urbanity Mechanic, but enough of them don't yet want anything that they may not bother using the mechanic for much.

Security

So, under ilhander's guidance, I got harrock a suit for his birthday, which was not at all recently, but I have been lame and scheduling the three of us for a shopping trip has been kind of slow. Anyway, they lured me into applying for a credit card with Large Discounts for the suit, which was kind of worth it. The card arrived in the mail, and I went to pay the bill on line. Creating my account with them involved:

1) Verifying my identity, with all the standard types of questions.
2) Choosing a password, with a different set of character restrictions than the usual password restrictions
3) Selecting three different Security Questions, each chosen from a different population of six (what street did my grandmother live on? I don't know!)
4) Choosing a personalized caption for the Security Image that they chose for me. I'm really confused by this one. It looks like when I log into their site again in the future, they will display this image and caption to me. For... reassurance? Really, I'm not reassured by them showing me an image they picked for me and a caption that I chose when I didn't know what it was for. Am I supposed to keep this image a Secret? Do I have to remember what it is?

Baffling.