New look for dave.mooville.net. Figured it was high time.

Didn't notice on the monitor at work, but here at home I can tell the background of the images got dithered badly. Sigh. I'll get around to fixing that sometime.

I also set up links to my DR-inspired MP3s (except for the intro track which I have never been happy with) and fixed the ID3 tags so they no longer say "Unknown Artist." Even if that's what I am. :)

One of these days I'll get around to putting together "Separator Unavailable." <cackle>

Last night we rolled up our characters for Mike's D&D campaign. This is my first real D&D experience, beyond the computer games and a half-assed storytelling campaign we tried to run in the "Gifted Program" back in middle school. (They wouldn't let us use dice because "games of chance" were against school policy. Ironically, during the summer camp for gifted students, we studied probability.)

For that matter it'll be my first tabletop RPG campaign of any kind. Playing at cons isn't the same, and the one attempt I tried to conduct my character's role in a Shadowrun campaign via email (I was a "decker" of course) failed -- it took way too long to resolve dice rolls and such, and the GM couldn't afford to pay by the hour for real-time chat on GEnie. My character was so cool though... ah well.

So it's with some excitement and some trepidation that I'm going into this.

My character is Livia Brightbuckle, female (I left it up to a die roll) chaotic good halfling rogue. Stats are nothing to write home about, but at least I didn't get stuck with a 4 in charisma. :) I'm still considering her background, but I figure she's going on this campaign to get away from some noble that she got on the bad side of. Or maybe some other rogues she got on the bad side of. Hm.

Meanwhile in GemStone, Steph and Jeff and I are all playing young characters and not doing badly at all. Things are different and I'm a sharper player than I was back in Eillie's early days. I think she died about 4 times the first day and at least twice a week while she was hunting, plus a couple from overhealing during big chaotic events. My warrior-priest hasn't gotten himself killed once yet. Considering his attitude toward the various death-related deities in the game, he's not going to like it when he does. :)

I now understand the value of paying someone else $12 to cut my hair. "How hard can this be?" I thought as they'd run the clippers over my head. If it was styling or some kind of scissor-related artistry I would understand, but when it's just a thing that goes "bzzzz" and shortens your hair... it looks easy.

So I set my clippers to the maximum height and went to town. And stared in shock as the hair was sliced off right to the skull, almost. I was immediately reminded of the PowerPuff Girls episode where Bubbles and Buttercup ruin Blossom's hair and everyone can't help but laugh. Guh. Well, nothing for it but to boldly shave ahead.

More extreme a change than I wanted, but it's not that bad... in the front. Elsewhere it's a pretty obvious amateur hack. I think I'm going to have to reinstate my interest in hats.

A certain quasi-contraversial message in DragonRealms that Rakash get when howling in "human form" is probably going to go away soon. Ever since the beginning there have been people who just haven't understood it -- not necessarily the Aliens reference, but what I was getting at. In that form, a Rakash might as well be a Human -- in fact the original plan was to make everyone think they were human, except for other Rakash who could smell the difference. So they'd be sorely disappointed in their ability to howl, compared to the stuff they can do in wolf form.

Oh well, not worth fighting over since I'm not in charge of it anymore. :)

There are a couple of great sites out there on Urban Exploration, or Infiltration, or whatever you want to call it. Exploring hidden, mysterious, dead places that we have abandoned. It's a sort of dark fascination with forbidden secrets, amateur investigation and preservation of history, just plain adventure, and artistic photography. The same appeal as spelunking, but with human artifacts and stories to discover and speculate about, rather than natural formations (which tend to be more beautiful, more delicate, and more miraculous but less poignant). I don't think I'd want to do it myself, but they have some great photos of ghost towns, steam tunnels, storm sewers, abandoned factories and hospitals, subway tunnels so I can experience vicariously.

Dark Passage -- possibly one of the most with-it organizations for this stuff.
Infiltration.org -- though I am a lot less interested in the idea of social-engineering one's way into a company's offices than in exploring abandoned spaces, they seem to do both. But they also have a webring with lots of interesting stuff :)
Zone-Tour
Visions from the Underworld

(Remember kids, "exploration" on private property is called "trespassing"; this stuff can be seriously dangerous; and tagging/vandalism is not only illegal but ruins the scene for other explorers.)

Between working on the new website and reminiscing while writing a few posts at HJVault, I've decided to start up a character in GemStone again. I don't have much confidence that it'll be like "the old days" when I was really a player, but being on staff doesn't completely ruin the fun. I figure if I can last through the first few levels I'll probably keep at it for a while.

(BTW, the new version of play.net is much easier to navigate and find info on than the old one. Some of this may be due to the fact that I'm the one who organized it and I know where I put things... but some of it is just because it is organized for a change.)

No, I'm not giving out my character name, but I'll say that I'm playing a servant of Gosaena. When I read her description as I was setting up the GS3 gods pages, I felt sympathy or maybe even pity for her. An underdog goddess who's shunned by all the other gods but one because -- according to the current official GS3 history -- she knows when they're all going to die. That last bit sound a little familiar? :)

She's got a twist though that I found with a little digging. In the old ICE-age history, the Empress Kadaena (her old name) was about as evil as they come, and was responsible for unleashing the Unlife on the world and causing all sorts of local trouble. In the new history that role has gone over to the mysterious Despana, who may or may not be the same entity. So there are some players that regard Gosaena as evil, and some that don't.

At any rate, my character's belief is that Gosaena is terribly misunderstood and unfairly maligned. Gosaena refuses to cooperate with the evil pantheon, but is shunned and denounced by the "good." Luukos and Lorminstra are her rivals -- therefore her clerics (at least those of my character's sect) destroy the undead to release them from Luukos' grasp, and take vows to never resurrect the fallen. She wants the dead in her domain, not anyone else's. :) She was also betrayed by both Eorgina and Koar, and is pretty bitter toward most of the pantheon.

Anyway, even if I never get past level 1 because my Logic is pretty low and it takes f...o...r...e...v...e...r to absorb experience, I've at least had fun planning the character. Suppose I can always reroll if it gets too frustrating, though I'm first going to try simply RPing and being social... just like old times. :)

It is done.

Yesterday I dismantled the case more than usual to get the top off, and then lightly sanded the sides and top, just as the articles I read online advised. That had the effect of scratching it up horribly, but I figured the paint would take care of that. The first coat of gold on the metal parts looked really nice. Meanwhile I took the faceplate off the CD and zip drive (which isn't installed in the machine yet), covered up LED holes with that yellow tacky poster stuff, and sprayed all the plastic front parts in "antique blue" (close to navy, maybe less saturated and a tiny bit brighter). The first couple coats of blue looked weak with all that white behind it.

I set up the computer as I let successive coats dry. Celeron 300A @ 450MHz; 128MB RAM; a new 7200 RPM 30GB hard drive; CD-ROM and Riva TNT cannibalized from my two previous machines, SB 16 from the dark ages, and no floppy drive (didn't have the right cable). Not a giant among gaming rigs, but it'll do. Skipping over the various frustrations in setup though, I've found that the CD-ROM drive is flaky, sometimes giving "drive not ready" errors or not recognizing that I've just put in a CD. My internet connection seems slower, though whether that's a byproduct of everything else getting faster and that not, I'm not sure. Sound messes up badly in Rogue Spear, but I wanted to get an SB Live Value anyway. Diablo II jumps way over to the right on the monitor once it gets past the intro videos and hits the first menu screen (though luckily, my monitor is smart enough to independently keep track of tweaks depending on the mode it's in). And I'll need a mouse; my trackball is great for Windows and turn-based strategy games but not suitable for action.

Back to the case... this morning I discovered that the Compaq did in fact have an ATX case and not some weird proprietary thing as I assumed, so I could have saved myself some money and some trouble. Doh!

I applied a last couple of coats of paint and then glossy clear enamel... supposedly to seal it in, toughen it and make it really look nice. Unfortunately, at near-freezing temperatures it doesn't dry so well. If it had looked any good at that point, then I could say I ruined it by putting it together too soon. The gold was kind of stripey though -- probably marks from the sanding still showing through -- and the gloss just didn't look great on the lightly textured blue plastic. But now in addition to those flaws, there are a couple of chunks missing on the top right side, a couple of fingerprints and mars in the front bezel from where I pressed it on, and those tiny LED windows don't look so hot now that I've peeled away the masking goop. And when I replace the CD-ROM drive, it won't match unless I paint it too.

It could be worse, and if it was I think I'd just move the guts into the Compaq case. It could be a lot better though. If I had to do this again, I'd not sand the metal, wait for warmer weather, set up more light in the garage, paint the metal with a regular white or yellow first before applying the metallic gold (and/or use a better brand of paint), elevate the stuff off the floor to reduce dust/lint/hair falling in it, use a matte clear-coat rather than glossy, paint right over the LED windows rather than trying to mask them, and wait much longer for the finish to dry before assembling the case.

The blue and gold are complementary, but that stark vertical line between the plastic and the metal isn't cool. I'd probably choose a single color for the entire case. Or that fleck stone textured stuff, which is supposedly very tough and hides imperfections well. I was real close to buying green crackle texture stuff, but passed 'cause I didn't know if it'd work well with the plastic front.

Luckily I don't have to do this again...

I've finally decided that the St. John's Wort wasn't doing anything for me. Tuesday night, after a hard day of mostly tedious web page reformatting (there are a lot of gods in GSIII) and frustrating crashes and reboots, I went home to do some more web stuff. Voluntary this time; I was working on a page for netjer.org. But when I ran into one too many glitches in the strange combination of Apache SSI and JavaScript, I hit that scary point of frustration.

It's a bad feeling. Frustration and anger, feeding into a loop of more frustration and anger in knowing that it's not really the situation that's causing the overblown emotions, but the nervous system equivalent of a loose cable or bad RAM. After a few minutes it feels a bit like I got injected with some kind of poison, throat tightening up and muscles tensing and feeling worn out and sad.

But for all the dramatic description, it doesn't last long, especially once I realize that's what's happening -- and despite plenty of opportunity to set it off, this is the first time since October since it struck. I think just having recognized it has helped a lot.

So overall, I am doing okay.

Assembled the frame for my Seshat image yesterday. It came out looking pretty decent, though I wish the corners had lined up a little more smoothly. Wood frames are trickier to put together than metal ones, but metal would not have looked right. Anyway, it's a black suede mat, streaked gold rounded wooded frame, and conservation glass. No more worries about Key eating the papyrus or Dave spilling lamp oil on it.

I don't think I mentioned I bought another Tai Chi book. I'd link to it on Amazon but it's temporarily down... I don't remember the author's name, Master Lam Something Something, but it's a "landscape mode" book with detailed color pencil sketches of the various moves. It's the author's own Small Circle Form meant for apartment dwellers with limited space, with 3 other types of exercise routines outlined. It's easy to learn the moves from the book, though for reference while actually exercising the format could have used a few tweaks. You can't turn pages or read a book while you're standing with your arms resting at your sides. Ah well. :)

Still playing Mordor 2. Still having stupid and brutal things happen to my party -- Izquierda has lost so much stamina that she can't cast her cool Leprosy spell anymore -- but overall not doing badly. I'm gradually exploring dungeon level 4, but while I can deal a lot of damage, I still have to run back to town after a big battle or whenever I get poisoned or diseased. Thinking about starting up a new character and train him to cast some healing spells.

But I might be moving on to better things anyway. I bought a case to house Jeff's castoff mobo/CPU/RAM, and will buy a new hard drive tonight or this weekend and put that sucker together. It's only 450MHz, but that's 217 more MHz than I have now, and a slightly more expandable setup so I can improve on that number later. Enough to run Diablo or EQ or Rogue Spear, one hopes. Enough to stream music from myplay without glitches, maybe.

It's not what anyone would think of as a cool case. In fact, it's a $39 case identical to the one my machine at work is in. I'll at least have to get some spray paint and bumper stickers, or something. Make that sucker ugly!

My favorite time sink lately is Mordor II. Not its later versions, Infinite Worlds (when Interplay was going to publish it) or Demise (now that Artifact is publishing it), but back in the days of the now-defunct VB Designs. It runs fine on my slow computer (which may be replaced soon by one of Jeff's, if I get around to buying a case), unlike the current Demise. Though it's buggy it's not fatally so, and though the graphics aren't as sharp as Demise, the gameplay seems a bit better.

The game's main drawback is its attitude: "I'm the electronic DM and if I want to make your life hell, there's nothing you can do to stop me." I'd tell my tales of woe but they're probably meaningless and boring unless you play the game yourself, and if you do, you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I now have Izqueirda the sorceress who is too clumsy to cast vision spells, Rei the hopelessly illiterate ninja, and Xamm the barbarian who can't wear armor.

One of my favorite things though is the item identification system. When I see "'Rei' just found a 'Head Protection'!", I know I'll have to fork over some cash to positively identify it as a helmet (as opposed to a head-protecting artichoke?) and then more cash to tell whether it's made from copper or iron. And my one character who actually can read still has to have books identified by the shopkeeper to figure out the title. Heh.

At least the game is fun enough to complain about, and I've happily (and sometimes frustratedly) whiled away the hours with it.

My other new addiction is Bejeweled. Some prefer the timed modes, but I like the basic version — it's one of those Zen-like puzzle games that you can just sit and play for hours while contemplating things.

And what have I been contemplating? Where I am now and where I want to go next in my life.

Career-wise, I've never really known where I want to go ultimately, but I have some idea of the sorts of things I want to do. The OSGM position has always been about flexibility, doing everything from babysitting misbehaving servers at 4 AM to writing music for CS2. I know that in the future I want to have an active hand in HJ world building, design of certain subsystems, and music. I miss the challenges of programming, and was hoping to get into that from the get-go. Thankfully I've been interviewed for just that, and it seemed to go well, although understandably, whatever happens won't happen until after play.net 2.0 is done.

I want to get those credit cards paid off and make some attempt to pay back my parents so I don't have to worry about it anymore. SqueakyCar is paid off in April, and while I would like to replace it with something cuter that goes vroom, I'll either run it into the ground, or wait several months and then trade for another used (but considerably less used) car.

But what I've mostly been thinking about is my spiritual life. It may surprise some people (or even the "me" of a year ago) to know that I don't want to be a priest, not right now, not doing what they do now. Living with one, as well as doing some scribe duties, has given me a very clear idea of the skills they have and the work they do. If I'm a square peg, the priesthood is a round hole and scribehood is a square hole. :)

I do want to do more in that square hole, but do I first have to figure out where the corners are? The things I do for the House are mildly helpful, but one of these days I'd like to be able to put as much into it in my own way as the priests do in theirs. But I feel like I have a lot more to learn and understand about myself, my Mother, and what makes me Hers.

I was wondering recently, is everything really as simple as it seems, and if so, what do I do about it? My musing went back to the "not just about writing" thought and hit a kind of synthesis: Seshat is about building bridges across time. That's what the written word is for (with a few mostly recent exceptions): a supplement to memory, which is less reliable and far less enduring.

I have more pondering to do on that. Does it affect what I should be doing? Am I just overinterpreting? Just because it's a theory that seems to fit the facts doesn't make it necessarily significant.

I know that in general, I am not far off; I just feel that sometimes, there must be a lot I'm not seeing. Imakhu Ini told me a while back that I am closer to my Mother than I think — well then, I want to think I'm as close as I am. :)

That's the main thing I want. More understanding, more feeling like I understand, and more application of that understanding to everything in my life.

Had some thoughts I wanted to write down in the form of another article or two on the other side of my site, but they're either not coming together or they're so simple and obvious that it's hard to make a page out of it. I think what this really means is I need to mull it over for a while first.

Once again I look to Suz for inspiration. Quirks, eh? :)

Things touching my face don't bother me -- things touching the front of my neck do. I tend to stretch out the necks of my shirts to give me that extra space. Is it related to another of my quirks, a major gag reflex?

I'm the opposite way about stairs usually: confident going down and nervous about going up, particularly if I'm carrying things. I'm starting to get used to it since the new place is split-level, but mostly I just have to force my way up. I have little doubt that the fear of losing my balance and falling backwards makes my balance that much worse, as I try to lean forward and support myself with the stairs above me.

I'm also paranoid about walking on ice, though I've not yet fallen on either type of hazard. It's uneven sidewalks that seem to throw me.

I understand about the car window. I like to always have air moving around. It bugs me sometimes to sit in the back of Jeff's truck while Steph keeps the front window closed. I have a fan in my bedroom and one at my desk at work, and whenever I'm there, they're running, unless I'm really cold. In fact I've been known to sleep with the window open (if it's not freezing), the fan going, and if I get chilly I'll reach for a blanket.

Darkened rooms are good for computers or TV, to get the best contrast. I don't like having a night light or too much light coming through my window when I sleep. But otherwise I prefer moderate light :)

I think most people don't like sitting with their back to a door. It was mentioned in the Feng Shui book that Johnny gave me, and was probably the only obvious thing in there. On the other hand, my desk at home is sitting opposite the entrance to the den, with Steph's on the opposite wall facing the entrance, and it doesn't bother me much. Probably because the floor is creaky enough that I know nobody will sneak up without my noticing :)

I'm with Suz on the glass issue. My personal favorites are a big glass drinking jar from the St. Louis Ren Fest a couple years ago, those curvy Guinness and Coca-Cola glasses, and a Tervis mug tumbler. I also have a big ceramic mug from an SCA artisan I knew, but for some reason I don't like drinking water from opaque vessels. Least favorite are the plastic things that Steph bought (sorry).

Speaking of glasses... a pet peeve of mine that my roommates have learned is someone putting my current drinking glass in the sink. For me, "current" means the one I used last and still plan to use until I personally deem it time to wash, which depending on what I'm drinking might be a couple of weeks. Now if they were collecting stray dishes just before putting them in the washer, that'd be one thing, but I really don't get the point of just picking it up and putting it in the sink where it collects other foreign substances, so I can't use it anymore until it's washed.

Is bad road navigation a quirk? I don't have a sense of where places are in relation to each other without a map or without thinking hard about it. I get around by habit, and by correction from my passengers. It's not uncommon for me to ask after leaving a store we've been to three times that week, which way I have to turn to go home -- especially if I wasn't the one driving each time.

The papyrus painting of Seshat that Imkahu Ini gave me is being held hostage by Frame Factory. "One-Day Service" the yellow pages ad says. "It'll be ready for you to assemble after the 17th," the lady says. Doh! But it's going to look good, and more importantly it's going to have that extra protection it needs. It was starting to curl up, and I've been paranoid I'd get it wet or spill ink on it (eek!).

Reading Avatars of the Word: from Papyrus to Cyberspace, I encountered a chapter about "the classics" — meaning Greek and Latin literature — and their role in education. I thought at first that I'd be bored right through to the next chapter and might even skip it, but I'm glad I hung in there.

The selection of literature I was fed in school was pretty arbitrary, and it repeated practically every year: Greek myths, Norse myths, Beowulf, Homer, Shakespeare. I read more of Shakespeare's plays than African and Asian tales combined, and huge sections of Europe and periods of history were simply unrepresented.

No wonder I was so amazed when I first encountered Celtic literature, on my own, years later. Here was a whole set of wild and exciting stories that were not even mentioned in school, and yet they had more to do with my ancestors and more to do with the reality of Western culture as the Greeks did.

Same with our study of history. Every year in school we are taught the same thing: a couple of weeks to cover a few ancient civilizations, then classical Greece, the Roman empire, medieval Western Europe, the Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, 20th century. Africa is forgotten once Greece enters the scene (and even in those ancient studies nobody really wants to say "Africa"), China is a big blank between Marco Polo and Communism, Russia and Japan are irrelevant until WWII, we never learn anything at all about the Celts or Islam or the Pacific or Carribean islands.

Anyway. This book pointed out something interesting, which is that "western civilization" as we know it, and as it's taught in schools, is a myth. Not that most of the things being taught are untrue, but that it gives the impression that our culture is based on Greece and Rome, and that the Renaissance brought us out of the "dark ages" by reviving classical thought.

Heh. The word "renaissance" wasn't used until the 19th century.

Realizing how much of our idea of history and culture is skewed and arbitrary, I now have a slightly different opinion of Afrocentrists who push the idea that our culture is based on African ideas and that Egypt was the mother culture that ours sprang from. It makes about as much sense.

Frankly, the world is being brought closer and closer together. It's dangerous to focus on one culture as the sole source of our ideas lest we get too inflexible, and lest we be tempted to distort the facts to fit the view of that culture as we see it. It would benefit us far more to study a whole diverse range of history and cultures. Whether or not they contributed to the way things were in America or Britain 100 years ago is irrelevant; they are contributing now and will contribute more and more in the future.

Though Steph beat me to the punch, I might win with quantity. ;) Here's some PLAY dot NET 2.0 goodness:

     

Just for comparison, here's 1.0...

...not that I'm implying anything.

Suz had some fascinating thoughts in her entry today:

This is one of the beauties of keeping a journal. In a few months, years, or decades, we can go back and see what we were like. See how we've evolved and measure our progress as human beings. Pretty cool, eh?

Cool and scary both. As I go back through this journal I can see a few changes and discoveries, but it's when I go back to my pre-Mooville, pre-Kemet days that things get really odd. And the person who wrote my journal ten years ago is very different from the one I know today.

How much and how deep that change is, it's hard to say. We don't have a way to measure personalities. Knowledge, wisdom, beliefs, viewpoints, interests, and friends come and go over time, so much that we can look back at the way things were and hardly believe the difference — and yet a core part of us has never changed since birth and never will.

But I don't think that core part is the answer to Suz's question:

What is your essence? What gives you substance?

Certainly, things like airsoft, web design, and gaming are not my essence; they are accretions. External. They don't define me and I can live without them, no matter how much I might like them.

But other things have always been part of me. Some of those things were like seeds — I didn't know they're there until the conditions are right from them to sprout and grow. I wonder how many more seeds are lying around, how many will sprout and how many will always be dormant.

Of course if I really wanted to answer the question I'd say what those "things" are. I'd rather just contemplate that for myself though. :)

One other thing that Suz's post brings to mind: I'm surrounded by brilliant people, at work and in the House. It's easy to start thinking of myself as not really all that creative, perceptive, intelligent, etc. when many of the people I associate with can run mental circles around me. So I take pride in those associations. :)

Happy new millenium! I had to post an entry today just because the MMDDYY is so cool. Won't be another one like this for 1 year, 1 month and 1 day, and not another "binary" one for 9 years, 9 months and 9 days... so I had to take advantage. ;)

And speaking of the passage of time, take a look at yugop.com. The Industorious Clock is a must see, and the other goodies are also, uh, good.

Though Best Buy was out of stock on a lot of things, I still put the gift cards to good use. New PSX controller and memory card, Mr. Driller, the latest from Front Line Assembly, the Crouching Tiger soundtrack, and William Ørbit's Pieces in a Modern Style (I'd link to him, but his site rudely takes over your machine).

All the music is worthy, save for the cheesy bonus CD that came with Pieces and the single vocal song on Crouching. And Mr. Driller is top notch. A fast action puzzle game that's simple but not easy, cute but not intended to appeal only to kids. This is not a game in which sound is important, and yet it has one of the best soundtracks I've encountered for a console game. Unfortunately there's no option to turn it down or off, so I played with no sound at all while listening to those new CDs. Heh.

The forecast calls for a few above-freezing days this week. I'm ready. The snow's pretty dirty and could use a change.

forever
whenever
tommorow may never come