Primate Engineering
Slept reasonably well last night, but for some reason I am sluggish and foggy this morning. I remember bits and pieces of the dream I had… something about gorillas loping calmly out of the old General Electric plant back in Salem. In my dream, it was 3am, and rattrap and I had been tasked to do something about the gorilla situation, which I protested because I’d been up all night and had work tomorrow.
These are my dreams, folks. They don’t get any more coherent.
Despite, or because of, my mental fog this morning, my brain was quite creative on the drive to work. I fleshed out some more concepts for the webcomic I’m never going to have time or skill to do. I really miss plotting out Artificial Intelligence with Tom Monaghan. If I ever fix or replace my scanner, those old comics really ought to go on the web while I can still find the old print collection.
Midori-kitty has been a lot more affectionate to us the last few weeks, but she’s been quite hostile to visitors at the same time. We’re thinking it’s a territory issue, but she really needs to quit it. This remains our place, not hers, until she’s willing to pay rent for it. And she doesn’t make much money.
Must. Clear. Head. And. Get Work Done.
Just One More Turn
Starr is feeling much better today – it appears to have been nothing more than a vicious virus. She’s at home playing the copy of Civilisation II I gave her. (OMG, that game is crack just to watch. How addictive must it be to play? WoW has nothing on Civ!)
I had a sockfull of good intentions for chores and games and stuff last night, but that turned into Civ-watching, dinner, half of Master Blasters, and an early bedtime. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll like MB based on the little I just saw, but it does have building stuff and rocketry going for it.
It’s about time for another haircut. I’m wondering how the short hair from my Next Gen icon would look.
Three decades of playing roles
I’m pretty sure I began playing Dungeons & Dragons around 1978 – after Star Wars but before Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I vaguely recall hearing about it from school friends, but have a clear memory of sitting in a sickbed opening the box my mom had purchased for me. The game came with cardboard chits you were supposed to shake in a cup for random rolls, but there was a dice accessory available that she got me soon after: 5 Platonic solids of very very cheap plastic. The 20-sided die was marked 1-10 (0, really) twice: you had to mark half the faces with a colored Sharpie to know which ones were 11-20.
And thus began a minor addiction…
Anyone for a swim?
Bad night last night to leave your car windows open.
The wind was so violent that you frequently couldn’t hear the thunder. The rain lashed the roof of my apartment building so heavily that it woke up more than once, and Midori, unsurprisingly, stayed pretty close the whole evening. (She didn’t like it either that Starr was spending a night with her mom last night.) I peeked out the front of the building during a laundry run to see visible waves and sheets in the torrent. The fresh mulch that the groundskeepers had spread Monday was all over the sidewalk and parking lot this morning.
It was the sort of night where I was utterly grateful for 21st-century shelter. It was also a good night to finish two more levels of my “yes I will beat the Terran Starcraft missions before Starcraft II comes out” campaign. I started fresh a few days ago, to get back into the rhythms, and I won Mission 8 last night – two more to go. The funny things is that I have a strategy guide, but always end up doing it my own way. This is, by the way, part of the awesomeness of Starcraft – it can support multiple play styles.
The sky is crystal clear this morning. Shame we’re losing those soothing high-60s temperatures.
RIP Gary Gygax
It’s going around the Internet that E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, has passed away at age 69.
The man’s work certainly made a major impact in my life. I spent hours of my early teenaged years rolling odd dice at the kitchen table with my friends, and designing ridiculously labyrinthine dungeons for our overpowered characters to run through. I moved on in the 90s to more story-based RPG systems, but my First Edition Advanced D&D books remain on my game shelves, just in case.
Certainly, the World of Warcraft owes a great deal to the man, as does the Munchkin card game. Because of his work, many game stores have seen a fine profit from me over the years.
I think I should dig out an old module or two of his, and see about hosting a run in memoriam. I’ve always wanted to try “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” again in a setting such as Earthdawn, Hercules & Xena, or perhaps even Deadlands (where it would fit awfully nicely, with certain tweaks. Hmm…)
Thanks for many lovely evenings, Mr. Gygax.
Maybe it’s just hibernation…
I haven’t really slept well the last couple of nights. For the last week, Starr’s been constantly lightheaded and exhausted, napping through large chunks of the day. Sunday, she was running a pulse of 130. (What am I doing taking a pulse? I’m a Mac geek, not a doctor!)
She’s been to the doctor; nobody’s yet figured out what the problem is. It doesn’t seem to be immediately life-threatening, but at the same time, it’s really curtailing her activities. I believe she’d like her life back. Me, I’m just worried that we’ll find the problem and it will turn out to be life-threatening.
So, yeah. Not sleeping so well.
Killing the Radio Star
Okay, I think I’m totally turning into a Daft Punk fan. I saw this video on someone’s blog, and now the tune is firmly lodged in my head.
Sluggy Doctor
I’m amused that, in my opinion, that caricature doesn’t look much like Tennant, yet I knew immediately who it was supposed to be before reading the dialogue 🙂
Because it was hard, you fools
By an odd coincidence, I’ve had to deal with the “No, we didn’t land on the Moon!” claim three times in the last few days. My views on it ought to be pretty obvious: if you really want a conspiracy theory, there are far more plausible ones than that.
My current favorite argument against the Hoax: There were thousands, if not millions, of Very Very Smart people involved in the Apollo program. Either they were in on the secret or they weren’t; if they were in on the secret, then it wasn’t much of a secret, really. It’s like the “we test unusual stuff at Groom Lake” secret – the details may be foggy, but the whole world knows that it’s a government testing base.
If they weren’t on the secret, then you have all these Smart People being well paid to develop what they honestly believe will be a moon rocket – to the tune of several billion dollars. These people all think they succeeded, and they aren’t idiots – they would have noticed things like “Hey, there’s not enough radiation shielding in our design.” So, since all these people think we have a moon rocket, and we spent the money to make it, why just go ahead and make the landing? Hmmm?
As an aside – the Soviet Union at the time definitely had the technological ability to detect whether we really went or not – they were quite close to managing it themselves. If we didn’t really go, the Russians of the late 1960’s really didn’t have much motivation to help us cover it up. Unless you believe that the One World Government was already up and running by then, and the Soviet space establishment was also ordered to lie; in which case, I will choose to bow out of the discussion at this point and move on to another World of Warcraft post of some kind. Circy’s level 60 now! Woo!
The essential Moon Hoax links:
Quick and simple: http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html
In-depth and pretty: http://www.clavius.org/
Start Me Up
Sometimes, people post things on the Internet that just plain make me feel glad to be living in a world where someone spent the time to make them up.
The “Lions In Kenya” and “Shirley Bassey Getting the Party Started” videos are two examples. Here’s another:
I successfully stayed up all night on Saturday night. We decided that our level 56-ers needed to hit 58 This Weekend, which we reached about 6 am. It was nice to know that I can still do that… a year of 10pm bedtimes had left me doubtful. Still, I had to down several Tums, as one of the tricks my body uses to try to get me to go to bed is surges of stomach acid. Also, I was kind of out of it the next day; so, I’ve learned from this that I can do it, but not easily.
Found a website that generates an automatically updated stat block I can use for my characters, like so…
Too bad that the servers are now far too overloaded with requests to actually function properly. (This one won’t update, it’s static.)
Local TV re-ran the Special Edition “Trouble With Tribbles” this weekend, so last night I dug out the “Trials And Tribble-ations” DS9 episode for Starr, who’d never seen it. Great fun! And then it hit me… there’s no way in heck that J.J. Abrams’ Lt. Uhura will be running around in that red minidress. Not in a 2008 feature film. I weep.
