I cast “Cone of Politeness”
On another subject, I played a few hours of WoW last night. World of Warcraft has a few different kinds of game servers: PvE, where you only battle other players if you and the other players choose; PvP, where if you enter certain areas, you can be attacked at any time; and Role-Play, where in-game conversations are expected to remain in the persona of your chosen character.
The point of all this is that I’ve begun yearning for a new kind of WoW server: RolePlay-21, where players don’t have to stay in character, but they all have to converse in-game with maturity, manners, and otherwise like people with fulfilling lives outside the Internet.
I’ll move all my characters over there like a shot.
Short fiction for today
This morning I read When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, by Cory Doctorow, linked to me by wilwheaton‘s syndicated LJ feed.
The last two paragraphs hit me hard, and I honestly needed a few minutes to recover. ‘Cause geez, I’ve suspected for some time that the secret to life, the universe, and everything is hiding right there.
Strong stuff.
Relax! Don’t Do It!
Taking a nice, quiet weekend this week. There are bunches of really cool people to hang out with down here, which is great… but on the other hand, one can get a little over-socialized. So last night, we watched Deadliest Catch and Good Eats, while today we shopped for scrubs for Starr, made a short trip to Barnes and Noble, and took a leisurely walk around the playgrounds and swimming pools near the apartment. The rest of the day will probably be WoW, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or something else as quiet.
Did you know that there are officially-licensed M*A*S*H and Grey’s Anatomy scrubs available to nurses? Now I want to dig for patterns and fabric to duplicate the ones Dr. McCoy would wear during surgery.
Getting two people to DragonCon and finding them places to stay is turning into an expensive proposition. 🙁 I haven’t given up yet!
Still having one Hades of a time finishing Terran Mission 9 in Starcraft. The cheat codes are calling my name, but I have stood firm this long!!
Are You Sure This Is the Atlanta Exit?
Cthulhu on a crutch. I am gobsmacked.
Keith “southernsinger” Brinegar, of White Plectrum, has been asked to be the Filk Guest Of Honor at DragonCon!
This may well be my first and only SQUEEEE! in my LiveJournal.
Now I HAVE to go down there. I gotta research hotel rooms tonight!!
This is wonderful!
Zombie HORROR!!
Yesterday, of course, was ‘blog like it’s the end of the world’ day. Several people I know were caught a bit off guard, especially when reading the better-written entries. I’m interested that most of the zombiepocalypse bloggers posted as if they expected to survive all this, and with convincing feeling rather than easy melodrama. Frankly, this was more fun than NaNoWriMo as far as I’m concerned.
But I wrote in mine about ‘going mad’ with the shock of what’s happening. I tried to imagine the other day a horrific event that would ‘drive me mad’. There’s not a lot I can imagine – I mean, I can imagine being terrified, sickened, appalled, but not driven insane by an event. The very sight of Cthulhu was supposed to do this, or the reading of his forbidden books; but I suspect that had more to do with the awful realization that such things could exist in a universe of which we’d pridefully assumed we were the supreme center.
Last week I read about a story involving a 100-foot-long house with a 110-foot-long hallway inside!!! For a while, i thought that might be my road – how would my scientific, skeptical mind embrace this physical impossibility? It might DRIVE ME MAD!
But maybe not. I have a built-in error-protection routine for these situations, which is to simply say “There’s something going on here that I don’t understand.” If I “know” that you can’t fit 110 feet of corridor in 100 feet of domicile, but I am forced by the evidence of my own measuring tape to concede that that’s what seems to be happening, I don’t need to shriek “That’s IMPOSSIBLE!” and run from the building, I need only admit that I can’t explain this, and start looking for answers.
A zombie can scare me, might consume me, but can’t make me admit there isn’t an explanation somewhere 🙂
The End of the World
I’ve got to write something about the Uprising. I’ve got to keep my head or it’s all lost. Everything may be lost anyway, but if I freak out, then everything’s definitely over for me.
I’ve never been able to get into a zombie movie… I know too much biology. Well, I’m in one now, and I’ve got to keep my mind occupied. How are their muscles moving without a blood supply? How can they have a blood supply with an unbeating heart? Their tissues are rotting, their bones are crumbling – how can they move at all?
Okay… their bones are holding them up, and their muscles are producing force. Something has repaired them at least that well. Niven suggested a strange symbiotic plague in “Night on Mispec Moor”, but why would they rise from the grave all at once if there were various plague infections?
Evil spirits? The Devil’s work? Angry ancient voodoo houngans? As near as I can find out – the cable channels aren’t much use right now – the risen are impartial in their attacks. If this is an act of revenge, it’s on all humanity.
This is what I know. This is coordinated by someone or something with the power to make rotten human tissue functional again.
—–
I may go mad, but I’m physically okay right now. They moved us all from the NASA side to the Air Force side as soon as possible, and well-armed soldiers are proving effective for the moment. I can’t contact anyone else… land lines are clogged, cell lines are clogged, and e-mails / IMs to my friends and family seem to be going to /dev/null. I will check my Friends page again shortly to see if anyone’s blogged about this.
Feeling a little like Dr. Clayton Forrester right now – trapped in the research lab while the destroyers of humanity knock on the door, and the refugee hordes demand what few resources we have. Perhaps the common cold will save us as well. I’m not sure what else will.
What the hell could be behind this?
Not deja vu, thankfully
At least this time, when the tire went flat on the interstate, I maintained control; babied it to a gas station; discovered that the gas station had an attached tire center; found that the tire folks could see me immediately; and learned that the only problem was a bad valve stem, which cost me less than $20 to replace.
This one worked out a LOT better than getting a hip replacement. I’m still rattling from the adrenaline, though.
