Helmsman in the Psychic Wars
I have an unfortunate history with apathy, and laziness. When I get frustrated with a situation, I have a habit of mentally abandoning it, which is a problem if the issue could have been corrected with a little more persistence. Like a junkie looking for another hit, I’ll start looking for stimulation anywhere else to kick my brain back into gear, but that never does anything much for the issue that kicked me into apathy in the first place.
For the first time in my memory, I’ve reached a point in my mental evolution where I can recognize the state early, and kick myself back into focus using a little determination. This is paying off in spades, as I’m getting more work done and facing more of my challenges head-on. My self-image is improving as well, which is having positive repercussions throughout my life. I’m noting this as yet another skill I wish I’d been able to put to use ten or twenty years ago.
It’s not foolproof, though, and requires constant attention, which may be the cause of the one downside; my energy levels seem to be a little lower, especially at the end of a day. We had friends over Friday night, and I was down for the count by 10:30. (I hear I made a cute figure conked out on the couch while they continued to converse.) I’m pretty careful about what I eat these days, and am on pretty much the healthiest diet my palate can stand, so it may be time to look into vitamins again.
(Actually, I backslid a bit this weekend with Cokes and a small box of chocolate-chip muffins. But I’m sitting here this morning with a bottle of water like a good boy.)
Writer’s Block: I May Be Crazy
… but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for!
I have been able to imagine here much of what other people have seen, but to me it’s the grinning face of a fox. (Admittedly, one with oddly bifurcated ears.)
The smile is a Trickster’s smile, the smile of Loki, or Coyote, or Q. That smile promises only a relief from boredom – it does not promise either way whether you’ll enjoy that relief.
I do still make Lego buildings
I feel like this xkcd cartoon all the time:
I’m so often afraid that at some point, someone will notice that I have absolutely no clue what’s going on and have just over the years gotten really good at pretending otherwise.
Eventually, I get over that and move on with my life. Sausage pizza or chocolate chip ice cream usually helps a lot.
Shiny!
The observant reader of this journal may have noticed that I didn’t mention exactly what outfits I wore as my hall costume or Costume Call garb. There’s a reason, and I think pictures are worth quite a few words, to begin with. So, my Technicon 26 hall costume and evening costumes:
It’s my take on the current ‘steampunk’ craze, in lace and black vinyl; and the anime character “Sailor Mars” in PVC fabric as well. I’ve actually had the second outfit for a while, but only found the nerve to wear it at the Technicon final blowout.
So I trust you to see these, as the folks at Technicon did, and understand that this is just a geek having some fun. These pictures are of a nerd who kept himself repressed and emotionally shut down for decades, and is making up for it now by going a little harmlessly wild, and collecting smiles and a few seriously startled looks in the process.
Unfortunately, I can’t trust everyone out there to understand these things. Call me a freak with a grin on your face, and I’ll laugh along with you, but say so with fear or anger in your eyes, and we’re going to have a problem. This is my LJ, and I like it that way. If anyone’s going to put that much effort into finding pictures of me in a dress, let ’em.
I had loads of fun over the weekend. My friends in fandom are some of the most awesome people I ever met: for all of Saturday and well into Sunday I was met with pleased laughter, friendly teasing, not a few admiring remarks, and jokes about who really ought to be bidding on the silk stockings in the White Elephant auction. I live for all of that, and the fen at Technicon were remarkably obliging.
As the years pass, I know more and more friends who are afraid society will punish them for being the perfectly decent, if offbeat, people they feel they are inside. My lifestyle panels and my costume choices comprise my own little rebellion against this prejudice. I love the folks in fandom who offer me the chance to misbehave.
Thanks again, guys. I hope to be amusing and mildly disturbing you at many events to come!
We have Main Engine Start
This is the first shuttle launch in decades that I’ve managed to watch live. The experience takes my breath away; so daring, so defiant, putting people atop all that high explosive and flinging them into the hostile vacuum above us. I’m not always thrilled with my species, but this sort of thing restores my faith in our future… at least briefly.
In a very small way, I contributed to this launch, which only adds to the thrill. I contributed indirectly, to be sure, just by doing my day job keeping the Macs of Langley humming; but I’m proud nevertheless.
Psychic guerilla warfare
I woke up this morning in an absolutely foul mood, worn-out and upset at the world. About half-way through my drive to work, I realized I had reached that all-too-common state where my irritability had become self-sustaining, and continually fed on its own black blood to maintain its power over me.
Mainly, that realization’s a good thing, because the moment I’m consciously aware of that situation is always the moment that 95% of the mood’s power evaporates. The down side is that I’ll be spending much of the morning, if not the day, having to stay alert against attempts by that remaining 5% to come back and take over again. It’s tiring, and still leaves a bitter aftertaste to the hours.
As usual, writing about it seems to help a bit.
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…
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.)
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.
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.
