Endlessly Mining for Fish

This morning Chesapeake got its first real frost of the season. Combine that with a very light fog, and the drive to work was just generally washed out a bit. Just a little bit dim and faint, as though the world was fading in around me and had gotten stuck at 98% complete.

On the other hand, at least I got to make the entire drive with the sun up. This has nothing to do yet with the longer days, but with the fact that the new kitten fall asleep on my chest this morning as I read the night’s email. I can’t blame it on the kitten – she weighs substantially less than a pound – but she was certainly a contributing factor.

Did you know you can program your computer to play World of Warcraft for you while you’re not there? Pretty pointless of course, and Blizzard and the rest of we players would like it to stop because it messes up questing and the economy, but it can be done. I decry the practice – decry, decry – but the one place I’d consider it is the Fishing hobby.

You can level up your character’s Cooking skill by standing in front of a stove for a few minutes with all those critter parts you’ve been collecting while you killed everything. You can do the same for your First Aid skill by spending five minutes making bandages from all the cloth the bad guys dropped. But leveling up Fishing takes hours and hours and hours and hours of staring at the little float on your fishing line. The higher Fishing level you reach, the larger number of hours you’ll be spending for the next 25-point gain.

WoW fishing is fairly useful in the game, and I wish I had a higher level in it, but this is just too much realism for me.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I will repeat that using the autoplay programs will get a player banned from the game, and myself I agree with Blizzard’s reasoning on the matter. On top of all that, it’s also lame. You don’t want to be lame, do you?

Brief updates

  • 10:43 @lisbet Actually, I found that reading books from the Baen Free Library on an Apple Newton was fairly pleasant. Don’t know about the Kindle. #

Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter

Moar Interviewing

Had a chance to sit down and think about my answers to gryphynkit, and so here they are:

(Rules thing first: to be interviewed, reply to my post asking me to interview you. I then reply to your post with five questions. You should post your answers and this meme on your LJ, because thinking up these questions is hard, daggonit.)

1. What is your favorite episode of anything?
I choose to parse that as “Pick something you really like, and talk about your favorite episode of it.” My favorite episode of Classic Trek would have to be “The Doomsday Machine”; I loved episodes where we got to see other Starfleet vessels, making it seem less like Earth had only the one ship. There’s some (very one-sided) space battle stuff, excellent lines from Kirk and Scotty in places, and that cool pounding ‘space-predator’ soundtrack. Absolutely grade-A stuff. The digital revision isn’t bad at all, either.

2. Given the chance to meet *anyone*, real, unreal, living or not, who would your top 5 be?
1. If there’s a Creator(s) of the Universe, with a form that I can perceive and understand, then I have quite a list of questions.
2. If there are friendly, advanced alien civilizations somewhere out there, than I’d like to meet a member: I have a list of questions.
3. I would like to meet a book publisher who thinks my science-fiction novel is awesome, and wants to give me a six-figure advance on the sales. (The fact that the novel doesn’t yet exist in any coherent form is immaterial.)
4. I would very much like to have met Douglas Adams. We could talk about music and Mac stuff all day.
5. I want to meet the people on my Friends List that I never have in person. I generally friend people because I find them interesting, and most of the time, people turn out to be more so face-to-face.

3. What is the Question?
Who are you, and how do you plan to evolve into who you want to be?

4. What person/char/entity would you most like to be like?
Fictionally, I think I’d like to be somewhere between Buckaroo Banzai and the Doctor I mention below. Realistically, I’m pretty happy with who I am at base level, though there are a few qualities – mainly, ambition and drive – that I’d like to have more of.

5. Who is your favorite Doctor?
Oh, I’ve had my brief flings with Nine and Seven, but there’s really no contest: the Fourth Doctor will always be tops in my book. Never afraid to take a stand, never at a loss, fiercely loyal to his companions, unafraid to take the most disastrous situations lightly. Some might say that he’s less complex and ambiguous than his later incarnations, but that in itself is pretty interesting when one takes in his background and position.

Protected: Continuing Education

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Back to the Seattle Sprawl

Tonight I GMed my first Shadowrun game since leaving Salem. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed doing that! Using second edition worked well, I was able to make several correct rules calls without touching the rulebook. I did find out that I need another little box of six-siders – they go fast in SR, where a combat roll can easily take 8-12 dice at once.

Session details

Power and Con Crud

I appear to have recovered from the sinus infection I had before MarsCon only to walk right into a full-blown bout with the influenza. This is an especially impressive achievement considering that I had the flu shot back in November. Go Me. So now I’m into the negatives again with my sick days at work – thank goodness that they’re pretty flexible – and sitting in bed taking Tamiflu twice a day and remembering what food and drink were like when my sense of taste was functional. Whine whine carp carp bleh.

It’s kinda funny to watch some people acting like Obama has already completely ruined his presidency based on a few choices that I admit I don’t agree with either. It’s even funnier, in a completely pathetic kind of way, to watch “Rapture Ready” Christians glancing impatiently at the sky while wondering why Jesus hasn’t come to rid them of this Antichrist. Y’know, he’s just a man, albeit an intelligent, articulate one with some ideas that, if they work out the way he says, could leave this country in markedly better shape when he leaves power. Which he will do, in no more than eight years tops, because that’s what the laws of the country say. But he’s still just a dude. He’s got four more years minimum to try to impress as many of us as he can, and we really ought to give a fair fraction of that to him before we declare him a failure.

(P.S. He’s also not the dictator of America. Whether the country is any better in four years has as much if not more to do with what its collected citizens do, than with any orders he gives. The most he can do is inspire, positively or negatively. It’s hypocritical to throw our responsibilities as citizens on the President’s shoulders and then be angry him if we don’t like the way things go.)

Okay, enough politics. Sort of. I had an excellent time at MarsCon, it offered me everything I could want from a weekend fan con and I indulged to the practical limit. I’m already in line for next year’s, and I think I may even have contributed to the next chosen theme. I’ve heard a little bit of whining in places, though for the most part I’ve put it down to folks with entitlement issues.

But I’ve also heard quiet murmurs of staff drama. These may be overblown, and already handled, in which case I’m a happy fan. However, as I look at some of the difficulties my favorite cons have hit over the years, I’m seeing a certain cycle. Since it always seems to hit sometime between the con’s tenth and fifteenth year, I’m calling it Con Puberty; after years of success, suddenly the con is hit with massive crises of staffing, programming, funding, and or general personality – an identity crisis, if you will. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they don’t – often the event will fragment and reassemble as a new con with echoes of its predecessor. But either way, unlike normal puberty, in another 10-15 years, it’ll hit again.

RoVaCon survived it once, and was killed the second time; it looks as though Technicon is going to follow the same path. Rising Star rose from the ashes of RoVaCon, then years later survived its own puberty by evolving into a different con with the same name. Sci-Con evolved into a completely different event with a new identity; and now, as I count back, MarsCon has been around under that name for, what – ten-fifteen years?

MarsCon’s a great con. To get all circularly Frankensteinian with my metaphors, if the con’s indeed having any issues, I’m hoping it’s not Con Puberty, but simply a minor, quickly remedied staff infection.

Time-shifting change

For those of us at work who can’t have streaming video running, is anyone on my flist ‘taping’ the inauguration?

Geek magic

Harry Potter and the Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack

Hermione: Hey, I was thinking…

Ron: Not again!

Hermione: (ignoring him) None of us want to say You-Know-Who’s name because he knows when you do it, right?

Harry: Yes, he’s magically linked to the sound, it automatically draws his attention to you so he knows what you’re saying about him. Why?

Hermione: Well, back home this summer I was reading about a website called Slashdot…

Ron: What’s a ‘web site’? Not more spiders, ugh!!

Harry & Hermione: (Ignoring him)

One week later…

“Daily Prophet” barker: EXTRA! EXTRA! Harry Potter gets entire wizarding world to say Voldemort’s name at once! Dark Wizard found dead in lair with brain cells leaking out of his ears! Read All About It!

(inspired in part by the Luna-C performance at MarsCon of all seven books in 45 minutes, and by Starr)

Protected: Dressing Successfuly

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Order of Battle

I’ve been sick for the last two days – sinus congestion, stabbing stomach pain, sore throat, fever… same old same old midwinter bug. Reluctantly, I took Tuesday off, which I think cut a couple days’ duration off this bug; it’s fading away as I sit here, leaving me with a scratchy throat and headache. I should be fine for the weekend; good thing too, as I had to do a bit of finagling to make MarsCon.

On the other hand, it means I’m woefully behind on my prep. I managed to get some studying in for the panels in which I’m involved, but my costuming took the hit, and I don’t know if I’ll have anything ready for the weekend. Since I’ll be leaving directly from work tomorrow, I have to get packed and otherwise ready tonight. Good thing I managed some laundry.

Sometime Friday afternoon, I will have to find time to take a nap if I want to do late night stuff. This is unaviodalbe, as my internal clock these days is currently set to a 5:30am – 10:30pm waking shift, and cons don’t run on that time. Considering that my Saturday panels hover around 10pm and midnight, I’ll probably need to do the same that day as well.

I need to do some restructuring of my life schedule anyway. One reason for my dryness of prose output in 2008 was that I had not made much time to sit, off by myself, and actually write something – the most I’ve gotten done in that regard is hiding in people’s offices scribbling on the Newton while monitoring their OS X Leopard installs. (Up to three hours of glorious undisturbed concentration!) It’s easy to journal in 5-minute increments at work, but I have not yet mastered the art of focusing on plot and character in those tiny chunks.

On the other hand, I’m slightly pleased with my attitude towards the problem. I’m doing better these days with creating plans of attack for my roadblocks instead of just whining about them and using them for excuses. I’m decades overdue on developing this skill.

Next Page »