Category: Uncategorized

Ok, one more post for the night:

I just got back from a trip over to WalWorld to get the X:2 DVD for my evening entertainment and this struck me as funny:

Highway 6, between Dowd Junction and Eagle, has to be the only stretch of Highway in the US with a minimum IQ to drive. Seriously.

First there are the rotaries to negotiate which always succeed in confusing the out-of-towners and causing then to orbit some bronze horse statue for up to ten minutes. See, the locals don’t even slow down for the things having planned their merge timing, speed, and direction they want to go 30 seconds before they got there. Also, locals *never* use the inside lane which is unofficially reserved for the aforementioned orbiting flatlanders.

Second are the chaotic speed changes on the road. You get off the highway in Dowd Junction to a 45 mph speed limit around a few decent s-turns along the Eagle River and though the store row of Eagle-Vail. Then the speed limit suddenly drops to 30 for no apparent reason right as you cross under I-70 and back up to 45 about a mile later. Roughly 500 yards after the 45 zone it drops to 20 right before the 15 mph roundabout for WalWorld, then back to 45 through a school zone that might be set at 20 random times of the day for about 100 yards right in the middle. Then it’s 35 as you enter Avon, 15 around the Avon roundabout, back to 45 to Arrowhead where it goes up to 55 for about a half mile then back to 45 as you enter Edwards where its 35… This all happens in about 8 miles and is guaranteed to give out-of-towners a seizure as they try to get to Beaver Creek or Arrowhead to ski.

As you folks out there know; I’m not much of a media person: I don’t do TV, the news papers that Larry has delivered here go straight into the trash can when he’s not here and I find the radio to be, at best, annoying.

Well I stopped today and turned on CNN for a bit, just to make sure the world was still out there (and that I still found it, at best, annoying) and was simply shocked to see how popular my little neck of the woods has become.

In the 20 or so minutes I had the TV in the kitchen on whilst making dinner I heard about how great the snow is on Vail Mountain, how a local fireman and his to-be wife will be married in primetime and how they are the biggest thing since sliced cheese, an interview with Tom Hanks while he’s here at Beaver Creek, yet more about Kobe Bryant over in Eagle, and a story about the little debacle over at the Vail post office…

The thing at the Vail post office is actually kind of funny. See, a local group put recycling bins in the lobby over there and the junk mail people got all bent out of shape about it. Amazing how something so seemingly simple as a recycling bin in a post office lobby can turn into an issue of endless complication requiring a congressman to help straighten things out.

This became a “policy” issue recently when regional bureaucrats decided convenient recycling at the post office was all too messy and needed to be trashed. So the edict came down, and the bins were tossed.

Apparently the connection between recycling and junk mail was a mite close for comfort, though an awful lot of us would gladly sign up for the plan that sends junk mail automatically there and saves us and the Postal Service the trouble of sorting.

But all’s well now, thanks to U.S. Rep. Mark Udall having a chat or exchanging messages – presumably by mail – with the “everything must have a rule” group running the Postal Service.

Now they have a “pilot” program for similar bins across Colorado; maybe they’ll even win an award.

Sheesh.

Maybe Santa Barbara could take it from here? We’re tired of being little California…

Well, the turkey-day weekend is now behind us. Whew… Next stop, Christmas Chaos!

As usual I didn’t do much with the time off besides relax and unwind, which is what most people should do given time off. This penchant people have these days for using the time off to work on other things besides work is going to kill them.

I didn’t make it anywhere for the feasting though I was invited to several events. Wolf and Lyon invited me down to Denver but with the USS Lincoln still out of action they would have had to come get me which is a four hour round trip. Besides, the roads, highway, and passes were all but impassable Wednesday night and Thursday due to inclement weather that caused several car/semi altercations and stopped traffic for hours. I was also invited over to Tina and Rick’s place to have T-Day with themselves and Jack, but I’m just not a big holiday kind of guy and declined by saying I was going to Denver.

So T-Day dinner for me was “Festive Nachos”, made with ground turkey rather than ground beef. We’ve got to stay in the spirit of things after all. 🙂

All in all I probably had a better weekend than most due to the lack of huge amounts of tryptophan in my diet.

I spent some time reading, writing, and doodling… Nothing earth-shaking to report, but it was nice to let the old imagination wander for a few hours here and there. I also spent some time in Shadowbane with the high level thief I play in a guild of cut-throats called “Nemesis”. We did some guild warring and whatnot and if that wasn’t going on I was robbing entire cities blind then running from the inhabitants of said city… A fun game, really.

Playing what amounts to a non-combat character in a game based on Player vs. Player combat is a challenge in of itself; playing that character well is doubly difficult. Fortunately Nemesis is not only a very powerful guild, but also very good role players with an excellent grasp of the game’s back story. There are a lot of racial tensions built into the game and it all centers on the “Game of Thrones”, so even the “Quake-ers” (players from FPS games who wouldn’t know RPing if it fell out of the sky, landed on their face, and began to wiggle) eventually get into it.

One thing that keeps Nemesis running is that the ruling class right now is a troupe of Minotaur warlords; virtually unstoppable 15 foot tall bull-men wearing full plate and wielding massive two handed axes. They can tear apart buildings with their bare hands, but are slow and not very bright being created by the Elves for labor and shock troops… Well, since the Minotaurs broke free of the Elven Empire there’s been a bit of a feud going on between them so we are at war with several Elven cities.

Right now I’m playing an Irekei thief. The Irekei are kind of an unknown race that lives in the deserts and might have some racial ties to the Elves; but mention this to an Irekei and you’ll usually wind up taking a dirt nap. The nice thing about playing Irekei is that they don’t like much of anyone as a general rule and only really appreciate folks who can offer them something. This leaves me, as a player, pretty much free to sneak up and back stab anyone I want.

And trust me, I do, and I’m damn good at it too.

If the racial tensions aren’t enough, there’s also a bit of a god war going on. A new being of great power which the humans call “The All Father” has recently arrived on the scene and has brought the humans up in power greatly. The Centaurs are divided in this, with some following this new god while the others still follow Kenaryn the Hunter. We Irekei, being the enigma that we are, follow something called “The Dragon”… We know what this is, but no one else does, so they aren’t sure whose side we’re on. Meanwhile the Minotaur, being a created race, have no one to follow; but rumors are spreading that a Lord of Chaos has offered them, as a race, his power in exchange for their servitude… Some time in December (with the expansion pack) the game world will see its first Minotaur clerics. This has me worried as an unstoppable mountain of muscle is bad enough, but if it can smite you with the power of chaos, that’s really bad.

That explains why I like it so much. 😉

Commercialism; it’s what makes the holidays so… Ick.

Now, before you read any further I’d like to let it be known that I’m not a huge fan of the common perception of holidays to begin with so the following might be a bit more scathing than anticipated.

What started my whole “HoliRant” today was while I was on the way back from the shop; I happened to have the radio on and hadn’t made it to the CD play button yet when a commercial came on (imagine that):

This commercial was an advertisement for holiday shopping at the big “Mills Mall” in Denver. They were sure to mention several times during the ten minute ad that the day after Thanksgiving is the biggest shopping day of the year. But what made the ad truly odd was when it ended with a hotel near the mall advertising special room rates for the sale…

Yes, the rooms at the Hilton near the Mills Mall in Denver are only $55 a night if you mention the radio ad and there is special bus service to and from the hotel…

Some other interesting points of this radio add was that they made a big deal out of the fact that one woman’s clothing store would be open at 6am Friday and another would be open at 5:45am. Several stores have special prizes for the first X customers and the mall in general will be open 24/7 till Monday.

Christ! It’s not even Thanksgiving yet and the Christmas “consume” programming is going on full force. I mean, you win a freaking PRIZE if you’re one of the first people in there on Friday and stores are having competitions to see who opens first…

And people wonder why our civilization is self-destructing.

This of course all leads into the common misconception of “Christmas” in general. Xmas is about as religious these days as Easter…

Speaking of which, can someone please tell me what a freaking bunny rabbit and painted eggs has to do with the puppetry of Emmanuel rising from the dead on the third day? C’mon here, are people really this stupid? The bunny and eggs come from the Teutonic lunar Goddess Eostre and the holiday is for the pagan vernal equinox celebration, Oestara which is held on the Vernal Equinox Full Moon. Of course, the Church doesn’t celebrate full moons, even if they do calculate by them, so they planted their Easter on the following Sunday. Thus, Easter is always the first Sunday, after the first Full Moon, after the Vernal Equinox.

If you’ve ever wondered why Easter moved all around the calendar, now you know. (By the way, the Catholic Church was so adamant about NOT incorporating lunar Goddess symbolism that they added a further calculation: if Easter Sunday were to fall on the Full Moon itself, then Easter was postponed to the following Sunday instead.)

So back to Xmas; which is about far more than buying stuff and cutting down a perfectly good pine tree…

Xmas is another of those pagan holidays that was usurped by the Church. Rather than outlawing Yule, they just changed it’s meanings a bit and got everyone singing their tune eventually… Remember, the Church was staffed by people who came up with the term, “If we can’t beat them out, we’ll breed them out.”…

Yule, for those of you who don’t know (yes, you two over there in the corner), is associated with Nordic divination, Celtic fertility rites, and Roman Mithraism which is why both Martin Luther and John Calvin abhorred it, why the Puritans refused to acknowledge it, much less celebrate it, and why it was even made illegal in Boston for a while. But further back in time, Yule was a pretty big thing:

In 529, it was a civic holiday, and all work or public business (except that of cooks, bakers, or any that contributed to the delight of the holiday) was prohibited by the Emperor Justinian. In 563, the Council of Braga forbade fasting on Christmas Day, and four years later the Council of Tours proclaimed the twelve days from December 25 to Epiphany as a sacred and festive season. This last point is perhaps the hardest to impress upon the modern person who is lucky to get a single day off work. Christmas in the Middle Ages was not a single day but rather a period of twelve days from December 25 to January 6. Ever hear of the “Twelve Days of Christmas”? It is certainly lamentable that the modern world has abandoned this approach along with my favorite, the Twelfth Night celebration. Thanks be to the SCA who still ensure this wonderful celebration continues to this day.

At any rate pagan customs are still enthusiastically followed. Once, the Yule log had been the center of the celebration. It was lit on the eve of the solstice and must be kept burning for twelve hours for good luck. It used to be made of ash but later the Yule log was replaced by the Yule tree and instead of burning it, burning candles were placed on it. In Christianity, Protestants might claim that Martin Luther invented the custom, and Catholics might grant St. Boniface the honor, but the custom can demonstrably be traced back through the Roman Saturnalia all the way to ancient Egypt. Needless to say, such a tree should be cut down rather than purchased, and should be disposed of by burning, the proper way to dispatch any sacred object.

Above all the holiday is a festive occasion to celebrate the turning of the wheel of time and to remember, in happiness and amongst friends, those who have traveled it with you and those who have moved on. In a more religious vain it is the birthday of the new Sun King, the Son of God – by whatever name you choose to call him and on this darkest of nights, the Goddess or Mary – again your choice, becomes the Great Mother and once again gives birth and in doing so, gives us another year to do what we will.

It all makes perfect poetic sense; that on the longest night of the winter, “the dark night of our souls”, there springs the new spark of hope, the Sacred Fire, the Light of the World and that we all travel onward.

So, don’t get caught up in the commercialism of the season. There is no need to sweat the details of what gifts you’ll buy for which person.

Your gift could simply be remembering them in a kind light; a memory of fun and happy times and the retelling of it around the dinner table. For after all, isn’t that what makes us who we are? We are judged solely in the memories of others; all of our great acts and dismal failures are just another spot of paint on the canvas for others to see.

Looking at it that way; just spending some time laughing with your friends or relatives over dinner will mean far more than a pair of socks or a new kitchen gizmo ever could.

With the best of wishes for this holiday season, to all those I know, will know, or have known. I remember you all fondly,

Bill..

Ok, you know how I’m an avid fan of Yes; you know, that band with all those deep meanings and whatnot that very few people actually get. Well, now you can take “Yesology” in college and learn about all things Yesian.

http://www.csi.edu/ip/ce/yesology/

Of course this isn’t a credit bearing course (yet), and it’s at a community college, but I still think it’s cool that the band gets this kind of recognition… You don’t see “Rolling Stoneology” offered anywhere. 😉

Kind of reminds me of the old “Bill and Ted” movies; wherein a band becomes a method for living that unites the world in peace. Well, I can’t think of anyone better than Jon Anderson to play the part… Of course they’ll have to hire Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull too just because he’s so worldly and grounded compared to Jon’s ethereal and dimensional.

Speaking of Yes, there will be a 3 hour DVD set coming out here in the US on Feb. 3 that promises to be quite good. It’s not your usual “concert footage” affair, but is instead more of a documentary of the band over the last 35 years.

Aryntha and Rai headed back down last night to avoid what has become a full blown blizzard up here. The road out in front of the house comes and goes and there are times one feels like the entire house has been removed from the fabric of reality. (Wouldn’t that be cool?)

So with the weather, and Jack’s knee being messed up, it has been decided that we won’t start working on the new store till Wednesday. So here I sit in front of the fireplace, laptop fired up and a continual loop of one of the 40+ gigs of MP3s I have running in the background. I finally got around to making that big pot of chili today and the whole house smells very “winter” as the slow cooker does its job in the kitchen.

When I make chili, it’s an all day event as I take it very seriously: Cubed steak and some kielbasa for the meat, a few diced potatoes for the base, onions, three kinds of beans, and my own mix of seasonings, and the secret ingredient; a little bacon!… It is mighty.

I’ll add this mixture, when done, to a bowl full of “freetos” which is a little something Wolf showed me the other day. She calls it a “Straw Hat”… I call it delicious. 😉

Other than that it’s a writing day. I plan to get two or three chapters done before going and playing around with “Second Life” http://secondlife.com/ which is a little thing Aryntha and Rai showed me the other day that has some promise. Basically it’s a huge multi-user 3D world where *everything* has been handed to the players. No rules, nothing… You have to build everything (and anything) with a built-in modeling system and scripting language. Basically it’s the player’s world right down to the nuts and bolts.

If they can keep the trolls out, Second Life promises to be the next big “muck / mud” out there… Right now you have the usual dearth of freak-shows online, but they (the managers) are pruning them as fast as they can. You know the ones; they exist purely to fuck with the system and the normal folks online. Imagine how nice the world would be if people in general didn’t suck.

Aha, it looks like the sun is coming out. Once neat thing about living in the mountains is if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, it’ll change.

Got to run…

Well, Larry and Vivian are off again and once again I’m alone here in the solitude of Château D’Isaster.

We had a good long meeting in regards to the store and have ironed out everyone’s marching orders. I’ve also been given my art assignments for the next consulting job which should be pretty easy this time around… It’s a simple schematical breakdown of a power conversion system used to accelerate a 40,000 pound object to 200mph in 350 feet. Whee!

I just *love* linear motors.

Aryntha and Rai are on their way here to spend a few hours up here in the snow and thin air. I don’t think we’re going to do anything earth-shaking, but one never knows.

I think I’ll sign off and start a pot of chili…

This is just a quick update for today.

Larry and Vivian made it back last night and will be leaving again this evening after dropping off my art “to do” list for the next project.

I finally got a web page up and running. For the curious; http://home.comcast.net/~rihahn/
(Includes a nice embarrassing picture of the perky-goth.)

Comcast is a little slow as it’s the warez web server of choice right now and all their bandwidth is used up by 13 year olds getting the latest leaked version of “Half-Life 2”.

Well, I have to get going. Larry and I are going over store plans this morning and we’ve only got a short while to do it.

Well, here I am down in Denver at Lyon and Wolf’s place. They came up to Château D’Isaster Tuesday night and then kidnapped me Wednesday afternoon and brought me down to “the big city”… They’re off at work so I’m doing what I can to help out and am cleaning the kitchen.

See, Wolf is almost a professional cook and as such she makes some positively delicious meals. The down side to all this wonderful feasting is the clean up afterwards, which so far has resulted in two loads in the dishwasher and about a half an hour of counter scrubbing and stove cleaning. Well, I had to do some minor repairs on the dishwasher too, but I’ve always been a fixit kind of person…

It’s no problem to do it really. I’d be doing about the same thing up in Avon and I feel it’s only right if I get to eat the good food, I should help clean up afterwards. Right?

So, with all of that out of the way, I have some time to sit and ponder the world. Right now I have “Dusty” the 24 year old Siamese sitting net to me, “Naga Neen” is perched next to my head on the back of the sofa-chair, and “Raya” the Greyhound (she’s really an ROV for a Chihuahua, but don’t tell her that) is snoozing at my feet. The only pets unaccounted for are Kaitlin’s rat and “Ashley – the brain dead kitty” who is another house cat… It’s going to take weeks to get all the pet hair out of my laptop. (chuckle)

Well, that and the only thing keeping me breathing is the allergy pill Lyon gave me this morning. See, I’m allergic to cats and the house here is full of them. I like cats well enough; I just find it hard to breathe around them. I got up this morning feeling like I had a hairball and my eyes were swelling shut… Yay fexofenadine. Dunno what it is, but it sure works.

Some of you might be wondering about the wisdom of taking an unknown pill for something. Well, wonder not; Lyon is a working physician’s assistant for Kaiser and is currently working on his LPN (licensed practical nurse), so I feel I can trust his judgment on medications… He’s been giving people drugs for years now. 😉

Well, the dishwasher just stopped, so I suppose I should go unload it then head for the shower.

Later…

Well, the Wachowski brothers have re-earned my respect after the horror that was Matrix:2.

I just got back from M:3 and it is a much better movie than 2. No gratuitous rave scenes, no pointlessly long sex scenes, and no deliberately confusing plot development here; just lots of butt-kicking, supreme special effects, awe-inspiring wire-fu, and the conclusion (?) to the story.

If you’re the one person in America who hasn’t seen M:3 yet, unglue yourself from the couch and go see it. 😉

In other news; THE MOVE IS OVER! (Confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling)

Yes, it’s official, we’ve finished the “move from hell” and I’ll be taking a much needed 2-3 days off before starting the rebuild process. I’m celebrating right now as a matter of fact, even as I type; the healing powers of 10 year old “Old Speyburn” scotch are quite amazing. If you combine the single malt with 802.11, an IBM T21, the snow outside, and the big fireplace in the living room, you get a pretty good idea of my evening tonight.

(Contented sigh)

Pity the thermostat in the hot tub has gone south. I suppose I’ll fix that tomorrow as I could definitely use a good long session in the Cannibal Special after the trials of the past two weeks.

Now for some philosophy:

I got a call from Aryntha this evening: Apparently it’s a crime against humanity to take pictures of a lunar eclipse these days as he was hassled last night by the bone-headed “perfect hair” types across the street for doing just that.

Be careful out there dear readers, the world isn’t looking too fondly on those who do anything different from the prescribed “norm” these days. Dressing different will prevent you from getting a job, looking different will get you cornered by thugs, and the ultimate sin, thinking different, can land you in jail or worse… Just be careful out there.

It all reminds me very much of the 40’s and 50’s: When the Cleaver looking letter jacket clones would seek out “greasers” to beat the hell out of. Here in the 00’s we have losers in daddy’s ’04 BMW hassling anyone who doesn’t drive a car made this year or wear the latest in designer clothing.

I suppose it’s just human nature: What a human does not understand, they fear, and that which they fear, they destroy. So as the little valleys between human archetypes widen into un-crossable chasms, I think we’ll see these incidents increase.

The guys across the street cannot fathom Aryntha’s desire to photograph a celestial event any more that Aryntha can fathom their desire to do nothing but watch football and drink beer… The difference is that Aryntha’s human archetype is far less aggressive than theirs and he doesn’t need to understand nor feel threatened by their differences.

Unfortunately, as human history shows, to the aggressor go the spoils.

As the war-like CroMagnon man killed off the peaceful Neanderthal man, will the same happen to us? I hope not. We still have a corner on the intelligence market. Let’s hope smarts beats brawn here in the 21st century.

I’ve been *very* busy with the move of the store and as such have been ignoring both my in-box and the journal here. With this move I’ve discovered whole sections of my body that I didn’t even know existed, let alone could hurt… Want to do something big? Try moving a 2700 pound safe some time.

Anyways, I’ll attempt to remedy this communication oversight this evening. Stay tuned for a flood of overdue emails dear readers.

So, on to the latest news and views:

• Tonight is a big event cosmologically with the total lunar eclipse *and* a pretty decent planetary alignment happening at the same time. Wolf was kind enough to remind me of this (I’ve been so busy I’m forgetting a lot) and I’ll post some links for others who might be interested:
http://www.harmonicconcordance.com/
http://www.crystalinks.com/harmoniconcord.html
http://www.healingsounds.com/worldday/project_om.asp

• I’ve discovered that “big iron” computers can save your life. No, really. Winter has finally come to the high country and so the roads have become icy in the evenings. Well, to make a long story short, I had my ALR 6×6 fileserver in the trunk of the Lincoln along with its external drive cages in the back seat and that extra weight allowed me to steer out of a pretty bad spin to avoid another car that was out of control. Let’s hear it for computers so heavy they have casters!

• I’ve finally gotten to see the entire series for “Taken”… Went out and bought the 6 DVD set 4-5 days ago. It’s pretty good; if you haven’t seen it, do so.

Well, that’s about it for news. Like I mentioned above, I’ve been lifting and hauling for the last week and a half and have simply been too pooped to do much more than stare at the TV of an evening. Fortunately tomorrow should be the final move day where I pack out the last of the trash and turn the keys over to the land-lady. Once that is done I’m taking a week off before we start building the new store. Hopefully we’ll be open for business December 1st!

Take it easy out there in ‘net land…

Just got back from seeing “Brother Bear”, and it’s just as good as I had hoped. The only thing I think that might stop this movie from getting the acclaim it deserves is the fact that *none* of the children in the theater “got it”, and I’d be surprised if more than a dozen parents, or critics, figure it out also.

It has a lot of action, suspense, and laughs, which I figure are for the rubes, but it also contains a lot of subtlety which is really neat in my opinion. Much like “The Last Unicorn”, which kids love and parents like, but intellectuals watch over and over again just for the layers and layers of intertwined meanings. Sort of a cartoon version of “Finnegan’s Wake” I guess.

Anyways, “Brother Bear” is a pretty deep movie for being a G-rated kid’s flick. Which is fine by me as I’m a real fan of animation in general and if it has a story that makes me smile while others are scratching their heads or telling their children “no, he’s not God” (you’ll understand if you see it), I like it even more… Seriously, the mother of the family next to me was really telling her kids that. I’d have to assume at this point that Disney Studios just loves to push the fine line of Right Winger “heresy”. 😉

One thing I noticed immediately is how the saturation of the colors got ratcheted up right after Kenai’s transformation from man to bear. They also beefed up the ambient sounds, which is most likely designed to emphasize the differences in Kenai’s perceptions as the story progresses.

I also just loved the tribe’s Wise Woman who reminds me a lot of Wolf. The whole sequence where she is talking to Kenai while completely unperturbed as to the fact that he is now a bear is priceless in my opinion.

“Rutt” and “Tuke”, the two moose voiced as Bob and Doug McKenzie, are also a real hoot for anyone old enough to remember SCTV. It’s tough to animate most ungulates like horses, deer and even moose due to the lack of “squash and stretch” in them, but Disney pulled it off. Wait till you see “Moose Yoga”, ROFL!

Anyways, go see this movie and if you must, simply enjoy it for the wonderful art that it is. Otherwise, revel in the meaning behind the story and I guarantee you’ll leave the theater with the biggest smile you’ve had in weeks.

Well, if the movie is as good as the soundtrack, it’s going to be a pretty amazing thing.

I got a promo-copy of the soundtrack and it’s really good. The best track is the “bonus track” at the end which has no title and I was unable to find official lyrics for it on the ‘net. So here is a sample of the depth of the music in this movie as transcribed by me. When the actual lyrics are released there my be some differences, but I think I’m pretty close. (lets hear it for typing fast 🙂

“Bonus Track”
Brother Bear Soundtrack
(C) 2003 Walt Disney Corportation.
(C) 2003 Phil Collins
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

When the Earth was young, and the air was sweet, and the mountains kissed the sky.
In the far beyond, with its many paths, man and nature lived side by side.
Great wisdom does not come without learning, and great vision not only with our eyes.
We can think that we see, truely see all around us.
But when we look, do we see with open minds?

(chorus)
Great spirits of all who lived before, take our hands and lead us, fill our hearts and souls with all you know.
The key to understanding, is to see though others eyes, find a way to help us see from all sides.
Truely see from all sides.

Teach our children to look deeper than the surface, and see the world through another’s eyes.
To be blind beyond yourself is to look but not see, and knowing much is not enough to be wise.
To see the wonder in all we’ve been given, in our world thats not always as it seems.
And the path that we choose, turn every corner, follow on before another begins.

(chorus)

(chorus)

In the local news: I finally got that nice big LCD monitor I’ve been wanting for a while now. It’s amazing how much desk space a 19 inch monitor takes up when you compare it to an LCD. It also looks really good, and has a better dot pitch, better Kelvin, and is color matched which makes doing art on it a lot nicer.

In the regional news: Another example of “yee haw” stupidity happened this last weekend when a “sportsman” shot and killed the big bull moose at Piney Lake. Now, shooting a moose is about as challenging as shooting a cow; they don’t have any natural predators other than man, don’t have and real fear of people, and as such won’t run from you. For one selfish moment of bloodlust this person deprived the area of a true celebrity as hundreds of folks would stop and watch him and his mate browse near the lake every year…

And finally, the national news: The Pledge of Allegiance is back in the news because they’re still hashing out if the mention of God in it is constitutional.

Well, here are some facts you can ponder while the right wing crazies and the FFR folks fight it out:

1 – The Pledge was not written by our “founding fathers”. The Pledge didn’t exist when the Declaration of Independence was written, the Constitution was written, or when this country was founded. The Pledge was invented and adopted in 1942 during the horrors of World War II. It was not, nor has it ever been, part of the foundation of this country as we seemed to do perfectly well without it from 1776 to 1941.

2 – The words “one nation under god” were not part of the original Pledge written in 1942. Congress added those words in 1954 under the urging of folks like Senator Joe McCarthy (ever hear of McCarthyism?) to distinguish the US from the “godless commies”.

The Pledge was a patriotic stance, not a religious one. So in the court battles, remember this, and it’ll make the whole thing a lot more entertaining and funny. 😉

Aaaand back to the game notes:

So, we need a conflict that the players will weave in and out of in an attempt to solve. Global conquest is a tried and true scenario as it’s possibly the most used plot device ever put forth in popular literature. So we can use that, but we need a few twists in the concept to keep folks on their toes… For example; the BG’s are seeking, though covert means, the supplanting of the leadership of the world’s governments and therefore allowing their harvesting of human “potential” to go relatively unnoticed and making just about any human encountered a potential threat. Or something like the bad guys turn out to be ok, but are running away from something even worse which the players and the BG’s need to team up to defeat.

Remember, for conflict there has to be a goal for each side. Will the bad guys’ goal be the total enslavement of the human race? Will they be seeking to control certain nexus’ of ethereal power so they can funnel it back to their home? Will they simply be seeking entrance into this reality and equality with humans? Whatever the case, the player’s goal is usually to thwart these events, or promote them. Whatever the case, you need to know what the ultimate goals are and have both groups work towards them.

So, an idea would be:

Throughout the history of humanity the have lived amongst the Fay and with the exception of a few well focused folks through the ages, they’ve been unknowing of this. The Fay are extra planer, having been exiled there for some transgression (will of god, lack of belief, fear of industrialization, etc) but since the great sundering of the year 2000, some have found they can get back here.

This started out pretty invisibly but has been growing bigger over time. The Fay, once here, gain sustenance from the belief of humans and so tend to gather around those gifted with “paranormal” senses or abilities as the ‘norms’ are incapable of affecting, or being affected to a large degree, by the Fay and don’t tend do a lot of believing. Of course the Fay are also tricksters and tend to make the lives of those poor souls a bit strange. As each gifted person gets a little stronger the miniscule and well hidden rifts that allow the passage of the Fay into this real open a little bigger and allow more to pass through.

The Fay also bring with them minute amounts of raw, unfocused power from their home realm, “the Court”, and as the subject of their attention is a ‘sensitive’ they can, and often do, learn to harness this energy. This harnessing can range from subconsciously affecting the outcome of events in a minor degree to full on magic with special effects. Of course, the more one attunes to this Fay power, the more belief they naturally have to exude and the more attractive they become which gains them more potential power.

Now, we can’t have herds of mage-like humans roaming the fertile planes of our game here, so we need a limiting mechanism. Something like 99.9% of humans, when presented with a Fay encounter, immediately try to explain it away logically and this pretty much instantly destroys the Fay. This effect also works against the attuned humans who have to work pretty hard to do anything “special” when surrounded by the norms who can logically explain their magic right into non-existence. So the whole game premises becomes pretty secretive and can be played off in a “today” setting.

Now along with all of this specific attuning to the Fay powers, the Fay also bring with them minute amounts of “free” essence which will, if things continue the way they are, bring the entire world into a more magical vein. This untapped power tends to coalesce in clumps and in random places (old houses, secluded glens, abandoned subway lines, etc) and gives rise to spooky or magical places. This allows for the spontaneous creation of an attuned player; they walk into a magical “hot spot” out in the forest, encounter some critter that suddenly awakens them, or any other thing they really just can’t explain for example.

Ok, queue the BG’s…

Unbeknownst to the players, the Unseelie are the ones who spirited away the Fay in the first place and sealed them away in their realms to fuel their magics. This leakage back into the mortal realms will have them a bit worried and so they set about to fix this. Of course this means taking out the sensitives, cleaning up the clumps of untapped power, and doing it all without awakening the norms who will just make the holes bigger and escalate the problem.

Bingo, we now have our conflict.

Now most players won’t want to play “Joe Human” so we need an excuse for their existence.

The great sundering severely weakened the barrier that separates this reality from all the myriad others that are just slightly off from this one and where the Fay’s untapped power pools, the barrier is the thinnest and often will pull beings from other places into this one. Unfortunately for them, the disbelief powers of the mundanes can drastically weaken them, send them back home, or in really bad instances, destroy them.

This would tend to have our otherworldly friends either hiding most of the time or learning to disguise themselves to move about in the daylight or local mall.

So here we have the necessary “secret war” quotient to allow all of this to occur in a “today” setting. We can use current events to further the story line very easily. For example; the big blackout of a few months ago could have been the result of the Unseelie cleaning up a conclave of “other characters” up in the North-East and the resulting exchange of power blew the grid.

We can also have groups of Unseelie who have discovered that humans generate their own form of power, much like the Fay, and this power can also be tapped. This human generated power is based on their fear, confusion, and hatred.

The Unseelie have decided that humans make nice cattle and they have decided to stick around. They’ve been insinuating themselves into official positions and creating the chaotic events of late like the war in the middle east, the world trade center event, and other such “insane, but they did it anyway” events of late. Notice how really bad shit is happening and the vast majority of people don’t care? That’s the Unseelie siphoning off the fear and anger for themselves. 😉

This adds another layer of conflict, for the players now have to (A)-remain hidden / undetected from humanity in general, (B)-keep the Unseelie from erasing them / Opening the gateways to access more power to keep the Unseelie from erasing them, and (C)-prevent the local Unseelie from throwing the entire world into chaos just to send power back home.

So there we have the basis for an ongoing game that fulfills the requirements I set out in the first installment. With this template we can accommodate any character, have an all-consuming bad guy, place the events into today’s newspaper, and have a formula for a continual gaming environment.

And with that I have to head to work. Good luck and happy gaming!

Ok, to continue we need a situation that will keep the protagonists (players) active with the antagonists (bad guys) for a good long time. A good example of this is, believe it or not, Star Wars; there are two sides in Star Wars and each is so large in scope that the conflict has literally lasted for 30 years, 6 movies, and countless books… And there is no end in sight.

All “epic” games have this commonality in that the scope is so large that the players are but a small piece of the greater whole, even when the players are the biggest pieces on the board. So, as we see in “Episodes I and II”, Obi-Wan and Anikin are both “main characters”, but we are shown that they are just mere players in a much bigger game. This mirrors real life where we are the main characters in our personal episodes, but the game is much, much bigger. Game wise this gives your players a conceptual “peripheral vision” that helps to immerse them in the story.

So, with this in mind we need to formulate an overall synopsis that is vast enough in scope that the players will both be challenged for many repeat sessions, yet will have enough hooks to allow the players to be larger than life, for where’s the fun in being Normal Joe?

The classic example of this is war, much like in our Star Wars example. War gives us a reason for conflict which is a key element to the growth of characters and personalities. Conflict can come in many flavors from interpersonal crisis to all out racial warfare.

Now that we have that ironed out, we need a conflict of our own:

We know who our bad guys will be, and we know that we need some kind of conflict, so let’s brain storm a few options.

To be continued when I get home, it’s busy here today…

Yay Thursday! In theory, once the deal is hammered out, we will be moving the entire contents of the store to a new location across the parking lot. This could happen as soon as tomorrow, but more likely Monday. It’s going to be quite the undertaking to move all of the inventory –and- all of the display cases, shelves, slot wall, racks, phones, fax lines, data lines, and other accoutrements of a retail business. We’ll need to have it done by the first if we hope to catch the beginnings of the ski season.

On to some gaming notes. With an upcoming game I find it’s easier to freebase ideas onto paper, but in this case I’m going to go though the motions into the journal here for the benefit of others: The target game is genre “today”, the power base is “current technology with magical underpinnings” with a strong mix of “secret society”, and the player limitations will be the same as the world with underpinnings of “supernatural”. Now, on to the freebasing…

I’ve found that the Unseelie are quite possibly the best bad guys for a game out there. They fit well into any genre from “High Fantasy” to “Far Future” as they’re timeless, they have the whole “secret society” thing down pat, they work well with “bad guy” players as they’re out to be the top dogs and couldn’t care less, and they can be unbelievably powerful and well outside the realm of reality when needed. They also have a nice built in power structure and are an entire civilization so you’ll never run out of them.

With even a little research into them and some scrutinizing of the *heaps* of background on them I think you’ll agree. The lesser Unseelie live to mess with mortals and the higher ups live to control them or situations surrounding them. They’re attracted to places of high levels of PK, Magery, or “otherworldly force” like, oh, Seattle, Denver, or London.

So, with an antagonist in hand we need to come up with a reason for folks to be either in cahoots or against them and it has to be “big” enough to be ongoing.

I’ll continue this train of thought from work as I have to get rolling right now.

Later…

Ok, ok, I was watching the news again and that’s always good for some odd thoughts. An example would be that I now know why Governor Gray Davis was removed from office: He’s a space alien.

No, really. In a speech he gave on the capitol steps in Sacramento on September 17th he let the world know his true intentions, and I quote:

“My vision is to make the most diverse state on Earth, and we have people from every planet on Earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on Earth.”

I’ve always had a strong feeling that a lot of people in California aren’t from around here, galactically speaking. Now it’s confirmed.

So now there’s a new guy in office, Arnold… Well, he’s pretty much par for the course over there. Seriously, I saw the new governor of California playing electric guitar on stage with Dee Snider during a rousing rendition of “We Ain’t Gonna Take It”…

In all seriousness I think Arny will do well as governor because he’s got something professional politicians don’t have; he knows he’s a political idiot and doesn’t take himself seriously… He’s got lots of hired professionals from both sides of the fence to make policy and he just has to decide which policy is better according to what people want.

Well, that and he’s a cyborg from the future who’s trying to save the human race from computer-controlled destruction.

So there you have it; Californians prefer cyborgs over aliens nearly two to one.

Because of heavy computing requirements we are currently using all of your unallocated brain capacity for backup processing. Please ignore any hallucinations, voices or unusual dreams you may experience. Please avoid concentration intensive tasks until further notice. Thank you.

It’s the beginning of another week up here in the high country.

I managed to get a little writing done this weekend. I’m currently working on a story line involving Wolf’s “Mythago” concept. It should be a fun read when I get it done; lots of suspense, action, mystery, and one liners.

I also got a chance to play around a bit more with Shadowbane. This game is really cool and I highly recommend it to others looking for a fun time online. The people on the server I’m on, which is an unofficial RP server, are really quite friendly and the level of maturity is a lot higher than most of the MMORPGs out there; which is probably due to the game requiring a high level of cooperative interaction.

I’ve decided to work up a centaur commoner who’s quite adept with a spear. Of course this meant starting over from square one, but I’ve managed to make it to 17th level in two days. It’s all a matter of how well you get along with new people and your ability to make yourself useful in a group. I’m a bit of a tactician thanks to a fellow known as “T” that I used to hang out with in the Navy… He was a brilliant tactician and could brutalize anyone in games like “Mechwarrior” and I learned a lot from him.

Anyways, still haven’t seen a full scale war, but I’ve been involved in two small skirmishes and came out on top of both. Fortunately centaurs have excellent ground speed and are pretty tough (being half horse does that I suppose) and I can cover the ground between myself and a spell casting “finger twiddler” before he can get off more than one spell. Robes just don’t help you against flailing hooves and a really long poky-thing. I’ve also gotten proficient in the flanking maneuver and have wiped out the entire healer contingent of a squad solo. While the tanks were concentrating on our frontal charge, I circled around and took out their four healers, which are armor plated finger twiddlers. It was a slaughter once that was done. 😉

I have enough money now for a half suit of plate mail, but I need to bring up my heavy armor skill a bit more before I can wear it. Then I’ll be the equivalent of a Bradly fighting vehicle; not as tough as a true tank, but fast, agile, and packing a bit of a punch of my own.

Well, gotta run. Gotta get to work.