John Milton revisited
I’m curiously drawn to re-interpretations in modern fiction of the underpinnings of Christian theology, such as the one in the beginning of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. Since I’ve enjoyed Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos novels, I picked up To Reign In Hell at a con or bookstore, and gave it a read.
Well, I tried to. Twice. The first couple of times, for some reason I couldn’t get a sense of the characters or the premise. Last night, I took a deep breath, and tried a third time with much more focused attention, getting much farther into it. The attempt didn’t work out…
Ye Olde Abandonede Warehouse
Last night we had the complete gaming group together for the first time since the Shadowrun game started. Jesse’s razorgirl and Amy’s decker joined in as the group looked for a place to hide their rock singer. The group procured a rent-a-squat, obtained food and water, and decided to turtle up and wait out their contract.
Shrewlet Update
Cindy’s in Roanoke Memorial, room 906 West, phone (540) 266-5424. She has Internet access as well (no, not including WoW).
They tried to give her a steroid injection to improve the situation a bit, which she describes as “the most painful thing I have ever encountered. I’ve been fighting in the SCA for 20 years and have never taken blows that hurt that hard as that shot.”
They are going to see if the injection helps, but surgery is still an option. At last report, she didn’t have full sensation in either leg.
More as I know it.
Brief updates
- 09:31 @meiran Awesome! Very well done! Are you going to shoot for “Elder” in the last couple days you have left? #
- 09:44 A 32-degree morning seems much balmier compared to the 12-degree ones last week. #
- 10:05 Dangit, I have just accidentally spammed Starr’s work address with the invite to the Shadowrun tonight. Hurr, me use computer good. #
- 11:47 @meiran I picked up the coins for all of Kalimdor yesterday (not counting capital cities). The Horde outposts were a bit exciting 🙂 #
- 12:01 I think the guy two people ahead of me in the lunch line was trying to pay in Euros or something. #
- 13:15 Wish I could leave early. I still have dishes and laundry to put away before gaming. And the Xmas tree should come down someday too. #
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And she was moving very slowly… rising up above the earth
Could a techno-magical item in an online computer game be a sign of personal growth in real life?
At level 70 in WoW, players unlock the ability to ride flying critters (for a substantial training sum of 800 gold pieces). At this point, a player will usually spend an extra hundred gold to buy a flying mount, but engineer characters may build their own. (Unless one’s second profession is mining, one’s going to spend much more than a hundred gold on the necessary materials.)
There’s a single part to the flying machine that my miner/engineer didn’t know how to make on her own, and it’s only taught by one NPC – who would teach her the blueprint if she achieved “Revered” diplomatic status with his organization of dimension-hopping smugglers. The good news is that she could gain 250 reputation points every time she turned in 10 certain emblems that certain slain enemies would drop 33%-50% of the time. The bad news? She needed about 18,000 reputation points to reach Revered.
The good news is that in the process, my engineer looted enough gold to pay for the flying training. In fact, about 14,000 points in, she had enough to just go and buy the griffon flying mount. But, despite temptation, I didn’t do so. Enough of the enemy characters had died to populate a small village by this point, and the whole thing had become fairly tedious, but I’d started this job, and something inside me wouldn’t take the easy route. I dug in my heels, and little Mirandala collected another 160 emblems.
Now, Mir has her Gnomish Flying Machine (a magical steampunk rattletrap in which the engine misses a few cycles every five minutes or so). And, funnily enough, I’m proud of myself. Sure, it was only a game; but I find it easy to fall into the trap of procrastinating about things, taking shortcuts where offered, or being distracted by shiny things that catch my attention. Here, I chose a task and stuck to it, and now I have something different than the griffon buyers do. Not too shabby.
(Yes, I did much other cool stuff this weekend, including a good party and some general housecleaning. It really is still just a game.)
Disk Fragmentation
Cindy Arthur – shrewlet – is being transported to Roanoke Memorial Hospital because of a herniated disk.
Rhaps is coordinating her care from down there. He reports that surgery is very likely.
It’s all I know now. Stay tuned.
20 SF Movies
There’s a “25 Things About Me” meme going around Facebook. Rather than just re-post it here, I was inspired by John Scalzi’s column to write “20 Memories of Sci-Fi Movies of My Youth”. Agreed, it’s not quite a catchy a title, but I can live with that.
1) The first SF movie I saw in the theaters was “Star Wars”, when I was seven. I remember seeing the commercials and thinking, “Meh, might be okay.” Yeah, underestimated that one a bit. I do not remember “Episode 4” atop the opening crawl. The John Williams soundtrack spent long hours in the following months accompanying my pretending to blast TIE fighters from a laser gun turret.
2) The next one I recall seeing in the theaters was “Starcrash”. This would only have been a good movie had I been old enough to enjoy Caroline Munro’s outfit. I can’t remember too much about it now, which may be a good thing, but I’m tempted to find a copy and enjoy the badness from a whole new perspective.
3) “Close Encounters” confused and frightened me, especially the part where Richard Dreyfuss starts losing his sanity. I didn’t understand the ending at that age, either. In fact, to this day, there’s a lot of unexplained bits having to do with the aliens, which is just as well; I suspect that any explanation from Spielberg would have been far lamer than the mystery.
4) While we’re on such movies, I was mildly traumatized by the laser surgery and ‘cannibal’ robot in “Logan’s Run”, and I didn’t understand the whole “Carousel” thing at all. That’s another movie which is probably unwise to watch before puberty, especially in a midnight showing in a darkened house.
5) “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”: Wow, new Klingon ships. Whoa whoa, new Klingons! Triple whoa: I am in love with the new Enterprise model! Okay, excellent, what’s going to happen for the next ninety minutes? Oh. Not much. I’m glad I never took it in to my head to get myself one of that movie’s uniforms.
Brief updates
- 07:55 Spent the last two evening battling a virus and trojan on Starr’s Windows laptop. final score: Michael 2, Malware 0. #
- 10:06 Why is attempting to focus my brain into serious writing causing me panic attacks? Wondering if an incense and yoga investment would help. #
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Evil wares
I had plans for last night. Not especially ambitious ones, but I knew how I wanted to spend the evening. Unfortunately, it turns out that Starr’s computer picked up a couple of viruses from somewhere, causing WoW to crash on launch as well as blocking most malware removal sites and large swaths of microsoft.com. I spent about three hours fighting them, getting one virus off the machine and restoring her WoW function, but the “Backdoor” trojan is resisting all attempts to remove it. Grrr.
Slept pretty good last night, but traffic was heck this morning. We had a little light rain, which apparently caused everyone to panic, so I got in a little late. I have no desire to be grumpy all day, though, so I’m looking for some music to cheer me up a bit.
Along those lines, I enjoyed MarsCon’s Friday night performance by The Cassettes, so I picked up their latest album – on cassette, of course – which included a card for free digital download. No DRM, either. It’s pretty good stuff, and any band that includes a home-made theremin is worth some attention.
I just needed to look up a high voltage traveling arc for another reference. For some reason, this in itself has cheered me up a bit.
