View From the Bushes

The blogging software I use has a space to give an entry a title. I have never used it, but if I were going to, the title for this particular blog would be "I'm lame." I really had planned to have another adventure out today. It has been a long time and for that you have my sincerest apologies. I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate your continued patience, and if there is anything at all I can do for you, let me know. If you somehow missed the announcement, I've already given everyone a free/extra month; I hope that makes up for my vast lamitude.

If you've been following my blog, you may have some sense of why I'm behind. My wife has mostly recovered, but she's still completely enervated (one of the seldom-mentioned advantages of being a role-player is that you know all of these great words), and as such I've been taking the lion's share of the work in watching the kids. I don't want to bore you with the mundane details of why I have no time, but the bad news is that it will probably be early next week before the adventure is out: I'm going to need the weekend to finish it off.

Once again, I apologize for the continued, interminable, inexcusable and generally completely lame delay, but stick with me and I promise it will all be good in the end. In any event, I mentioned this game yesterday and it's pretty cool and a nice little 15-minute diversion. I still have no idea what the product is they are using the game to try and advertise, but check out the Dyson Telescope Game. It's a neat little puzzle game.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Under ideal conditions, weekends are supposed to be enjoyable breaks from the normal routine of the week: full of exciting activities like skydiving, road trips, parties or at a minimum, fighting the line at the local cineplex to see the latest movie. My weekend was basically the opposite of all those things; rather my weekend was full of sickness, suffering, sleepless nights and saturn mutilation.

On Friday I was still reeling from the 2k gut punch of the transmission when my wife called to say that she was sick. I got home and found out that not only was my wife sick, but one of the children was sick as well. This was bad. My wife is the one who generally ministers to the sick, so I was thrust into the position of not only having to care for her (which mostly consisted of keeping the kids from climbing on top of her), but I had to spend Friday night with the sick child making sure that whatever came up went into an ice cream bucket rather than onto the bed, or worse still, on me. One of my kids had already demonstrated an ability to vomit with astonishing accuracy (I'll leave his target to your imagination, but just think of the worst possible place), a fate I wanted to avoid at all costs.

By Saturday, my wife was completely out of commission and it was just Ross vs. the Volcano. The rest of the day is something of a blur, but I somehow made it through to the evening and most of the illness had subsided to the point where there was no immediate danger of a "toxic spill." My wife was even feeling slightly better, enough so that I offered to go to the store to get her some pudding and swing by the local Blockbuster and get a couple of DVD's. That's when I made my fatal error.

When I turned right into the Blockbuster parking lot, I assumed I could immediately make another right and cut across the empty parking spaces. As it turns out, there was a two-foot wide spur which bordered the edge of the last parking spot, which was hidden by a small rise of grass next to the sidewalk, so that instead of flat asphalt I ran over two very steep curbs in a Saturn I had borrowed from a friend to use while the van was in the shop. This may be difficult to visualize so I've included a detailed sketch, which includes the gang members who were hanging out in front of Blockbuster laughing.

Everything seemed okay when I went into Blockbuster, but I wisely checked the tires when I re-emerged, and sure enough one of them was flat. I don't really mind changing a flat tire (though speed-wise I'm not setting any records) -- I just wish that it had come with a full-size spare. Because though there is some humiliation being out there changing a tire (which is tempered somewhat by the manliness of the act) there is extended humiliation involved in driving around with a little tiny spare on your car. Or am I the only one who feels this way?

In any event, it took me so long to get back with the DVD's that my wife had relapsed and was too sick to watch them. I spent the rest of the weekend tending to the sick and then got to cap the experience by spending another $250 on car repairs this morning at the Saturn dealership. Overall, it's been a rough couple of days. The only bright spot was in an area I don't often pay much attention to: Sports. On Saturday, Roberto Heras of the US Postal Team managed to sew up almost certain victory in the Tour of Spain in an 11 km uphill time trial (he did end up winning Sunday) . He had to take back nearly two minutes in those 11 km, going in I think most people would have at best given him a 5% chance of doing it. But that was not all my alma mater the University of Utah won a tough game against Colorado State and the Cubs made it to the playoffs (I've watched less than five minutes of baseball in the last 15 years, but the story of someone who hasn't won anything since 1908 is strangely compelling to me).

In any event this has gone on long enough (much longer than normal), so I'll end it here before I start talking about the Dyson Telescope game.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Well, after spending all that money on a new engine, I wasn't very eager to have the transmission looked at, so I waited another year or so before I got around to it. The problem was that when I started from a stop the gear would frequently not engage, which left me revving the engine until eventually and with a lurch the gear would finally engage and I would roar away from the stop sign/light. What made this problem something I could ignore for more than a year was the fact that as long as the overdrive was turned of it (mostly) acted normally. Well, after a long period of procrastination, I finally decided it was time to take it in, which I did on Thursday -- the day I started this story. I had high hopes that it might be something simple (read "cheap") but alas, that was not to be.

When the mechanic called me, he said that the transmission was slipping when it was in second, and that they were going to have to overhaul it. For some reason "overhaul" sounded cheaper than "replace," so for a moment I thought it might not be as bad as I had feared. Then he told me the price: $1900, and I realized that whatever else "overhaul" might mean, there was no sense in which it meant that it would cost me less money.

So all told I've put over $5000 into this van, which is almost as annoying as having to buy a van in the first place. Of course, I could not have bought a better car for $5000 (though it would be close) but if I had somehow been blessed with a full prescience of what was going to happen then I certainly could have gotten a better car for $5000 plus the initial purchase price. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20. As it turns out, the story continues with the car I borrowed to use while the van was in the shop, but I guess I'll have to get to my cross-country destruction of city property on Monday.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

After deciding that the engine of my van could not be saved, I started looking around for the best place to get a new one. Well, the relative who sold me the van recommended me to an even more distant relative who owned the Ford dealership where the van had been purchased. This even more distant relative felt pretty bad about the whole debacle and promised to give me a great deal on a head gasket job, which he did. This is where it gets kind of annoying, because I asked him to replace the engine, but his guys looked at it and decided that all it needed was a head job. Now if he had been right and I had been wrong, which is certainly what you would have expected, it would have saved me nearly two thousand dollars, as it turned out...

Well, I had gotten the van back after the head gasket job and was driving along the freeway when I realized that in an effort to keep my speed around 65 that I had continued to apply gas until the car was floored, and it could still just barely do 65, and the engine wasn't sounding so hot either. The next thing I know the maximum speed has dropped to 60 and then 55 and then 50. As I was trying to get a handle on what was going on, I passed an exit and had to wait a while before the next one. By the time I got to it my maximum speed was 25, and the entire dashboard was lit up with "warning" and "check engine" lights. At that point, it became pretty apparent that my initial assessment had been correct: the engine could not be saved.

So it was back into the dealer (which since I was going through a distant relative was 100+ miles away) for a new engine. In the very beginning before I had done anything, right after the gasket first blew, I called the local dealer and asked him what a new engine would run me. It was in the neighborhood of 3200 dollars. After doing a head job and a new engine, that's close to what I spent at the relative's dealership (lower but close) after all the discounts. With a additional week or so of aggravation, travel time and the like thrown in for good measure. But at the end of it I had a new engine, so that was okay except for the lingering transmission problem I still had, which was the original point of the story.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of Car Repair Theater!

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Back in the good old days, you didn't have to buy a van once you hit the three children mark. You just tossed them all in the car, without regard to whether the number of seat belts bore any similiarity to the number of passangers. I remember, with some fondness, riding all over creation perched on a wheel well in the bed of a tiny Ford Courier with a dilapidated shell. Sure, if we had been in a major accident we all would have died, but we weren't and didn't, so everything's okay right? Before the third kid, we had a dilapidated (see a trend here) Buick Skylark. Besides the fact that its surface was more rust and primer than actual paint, it was a pretty good car, with one big problem: even though there were three seatbelts in the rear seat, there was no way to fit three car seats. So in a move which was to begin my descent into madness, we bought a van.

It was a '95 Ford Windstar, which had been owned by a 70+ year old relative of mine. As such, we got a good deal on nicely cared for, well-maintained car... too well-maintained as it turns out. What I did not know at the time was that this van had a problem with its head gaskets, a failure common to that model, common enough that Ford had extended the warranty on any head gasket problem to 7 years or 100,000 miles. I guarantee that if I had owned the car for its entire life that those gaskets would have blown at 75,000 miles, if not earlier; as it was they didn't fail until 7 years four months and 105,000 miles. The previous owner had just been too nice. So then I was faced with a decision: replace the head gaskets, replace the engine or replace the car. The transmission was already going quirky and a lot of people told me I should just buy a whole new car, but I decided to replace the head gaskets.

I have this real problem when it comes to car repair. If something is going to cost me 100 dollars (most of it labor), I'll have the mechanic do it. But if something is going to cost over about $500, I'll try and do it myself. Such was the case with the head gaskets. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my dad is a great auto mechanic so after playing on what little paternal affection he still posesses I convinced him to come down and help me with this project. In the olden days (back when my dad actually made a living as a mechanic) replacing a head gasket was a simple as taking the head off. These days, everything but the kitchen sink is on top of the engine, and it took us the better part of a day just getting all of the accessories off. Once all that was taken care of, the head came off pretty easy. What we saw at that point filled our souls with dread. The gasket had blown in more than one place, the engine compression was all over the place there was grit in the cylinders. We'd spent at least a day and a half and the conclusion we came to was that this engine could not be saved.

To be continued....

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Every year, my wife and I get season tickets to our local theater, Pioneer Theater. In some respects, it's our big entertainment indulgence. Every so often, I'll go see something, and it will be good but not great, but that's far and away the exception rather than the rule. In general the performances are fantastic and you end up seeing some really great works of art. Tonight, they're putting on Cyrano de Bergerac, which I assume should be familiar to most of my readers. It was originally written in French, of course; I even went so far one time as to try and read it in the original French. Unfortunately, reading Rostand is to a non-native French speaker what reading Shakespeare is to a non-native English speaker: very difficult.

As you can tell from the above description, I'm looking forward to it. Generally, my wife and I go out for dinner before the play; tonight for a couple of reasons we are skipping that part of the festivities. For one, our babysitter can't get to our house early enough and for another, my youngest child is still breast-feeding. Anyone who has enough experience with that will know immediately why we would want to keep the evening as short as possible. We'll just leave it there.

Well, for exactly the reasons mentioned above I'll have to end here. But let me close with a plug to support community theater, and for that matter Dire Kobold...

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

I'm always impressed by what people can do when they really put their mind to it. Especially at what people can do with no hope of monetary reward, no promise of fame and no guarantee of happiness. For an example take a look at this Map of Springfield that someone compiled. Given the level of detail I would guess that this person watched ever single episode of the Simpsons, made meticulous notes, cross-referenced various episodes, slaved over details. He probably posted to newsgroups to get opinions on possible conflicts, debated minutia, spent time piecing all the disparate parts into a grand hole. I'm taking a stab in the dark, but I would guess this would be at least 100-150 hour project, and for what?

I have spent quite a while looking at it (I had to find the Android's Dungeon) and though that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with this, I have no idea why people do these sort of things, I don't know why I do these sort of things. One of the major reasons for the Renaissance (and I realize that this is a vast over simplification) was that improvements in the production of food finally allowed people enough time to focus on things other than surviving from one day to the next. As such we get Shakespeare, Leonardo, Raphael (if you haven't ever seen his School of Athens you should really check it out) and Erasmus.

These days we not only have enough free time to produce art we have enough free time to produce maps of locations peripherally referenced in a tv show which is a satirical homage to all of the assembled works of art which came before. Is this cool or what?

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Red Bull has these really annoying commercials -- so annoying that they have prevented me from ever even merely considering the purchase of a Red Bull energy drink. Not that I buy many energy drinks; I worry about my health enough without going out of my way to cause an arrhythmia. However, they have hopefully given some people out there an slight understanding of the legend of Sisyphus(for a more accurate overview go here). The idea is that this guy is doomed to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom the minute he gets to the top, so that he has to start all over again. It's sometimes frightening how closely this legend is a metaphor for my life.

Although I think to truly map my experiences, the legend would have to include around a dozen boulders, all of which I am trying to get either higher up the mountain or to stay in one place for a minute while I push on another boulder. And of course, there is the whole business of the boulders rolling to the bottom of the hill and with several boulders, sometimes it feels like it's a hailstorm as everything goes to the bottom simultaneously. Before I go much further, I don't want anyone to think that things are going poorly. No one has died, I still have a job (albeit one which is more monotonous than I would prefer). All of my kids are healthy. I'm not broke, homeless, in chronic pain or ugly (though some may disagree with that last point). Roberto Heras, my pick at the Vuelta, is probably not going to win, but he should at least be on the podium. With that in mind, let's move on.

I stopped by the Jewish World Review today (I'm an unapologetic Thomas Sowell fan), and the webmaster for the site had a letter up, talking about some heart problems he had experienced back on August 17th. He mentioned that the JWR site is a one-man operation, and that in the beginning when he had said that he was going to "put his heart" into it, that he spoke more truly then he knew. DireKobold is also a one-man operation, and for a while there, I was more or less trying to publish on the same schedule/level etc. as Dungeon while helping to raise four kids, working a normal 40-50 hour a week job, and sleeping. After doing that for many moons the boulder rolled to the bottom of the hill. Once it was there I decided to leave it there for awhile and take a break, and a good long look at what I was doing how much of my own money I was sinking into the project and everything else.

Thus the restructuring, thus the free month, thus the lack of any recent adventures, the slow publishing schedule and a reduced presence on some of the boards (most notably ENWorld, though my own have suffered a little bit as well). But never fear, another adventure will be here by the end of the month (though when I say the end of the month I pretty much mean the end of the month). Things have settled down in other areas of my life and I'm ready to start pushing the boulder back up to the top. Things are going to be changing here at DireKobold, but hopefully for the better. As always you can e-mail me with any comments, compliments, complaints or death threats, and I'll do my best to make things right. I may have more to say on this subject or I may not. As ever I am your humble servent:

Ross

I have several page-a-day calendars. I find that they help a great deal in distinguishing one day of utter monotony from the next. One of my calendars is a Dilbert one, the cartoon for today was about working from home. In case the link doesn't work, basically it has Dilbert working at home and telling Ratbert and Dogbert to not disturb him unless the house is on fire, what they hear instead is: "I am your servant; my specialty is killing spiders." It made me laugh. See, I have always had this dream of being able to work from home. Which is one of the reasons I started DireKobold, though so far all that I have accomplished is making myself work away from home to a much greater age as I replenish my retirement fund, but I digress.

Working at home, as anyone who's tried it can tell you, is exactly like the Dilbert cartoon, because it is impossible (without building a separate structure for your office, which a lot of people I know have done) to separate yourself from the activities of the rest of the house. This statement should not be construed as an indictment of my own wife. Given that we have four kids, my wife is a giant in the field of leaving me alone while I work at home and should probably give lectures on the subject, but no matter how hard people try, inevitably you're going to get interrupted. Now this doesn't mean that you still can't be as, if not more, productive at home, because as is often pointed out to me, you get interrupted at work a lot too.

Suddenly during my rambling discourse I've undercut my own point. Nothing is more tragic than losing an argument you're having with yourself. For some reason I'm reminded of the Coffee Talk sketches that Mike Myers used to do on SNL. Working at home is neither work nor homey. Discuss amongst yourselves, Or as Voltaire would would say the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Yesterday, I decided to take a sick day. That's one of the great things about doing something that was your idea: no one pays you, and no one cares about you. Like my blog, you can pretty much take as many sick days as you feel like. Yesterday, the problem was my neck. The last week or so, my neck has really been in a lot of pain. I'm not sure what's causing it, but theories range from my children's use of me as a pillow to my massive, eclipse-causing head. My favorite theory is that my first wife, whom I swallowed, gave birth to a baby who is currently trying to get out of my head. Okay, it sounds implausible, but I do have a splitting headache.

The other day I was browsing Rotten Tomatoes and I came across a movie called Bubba Ho-tep. I think I had heard the title before, and I had no idea what it might be about, but every single review Rotten Tomatoes had listed was positive, which outside Pixar movies is pretty rare (and probably won't last once more reviews come in), so I thought I'd see what it was about; here's the Rotten Tomatoes summary:

Based on the Bram Stoker Award nominee short story by acclaimed author Joe R. Lansdale, Bubba Ho-tep tells the “true” story of what really did become of Elvis Presley. We find Elvis(Bruce Campbell) as an elderly resident in an East Texas rest home, who switched identities with an Elvis impersonator years before his “death”, then missed his chance to switch back. Elvis teams up with Jack(Ossie Davis), a fellow nursing home resident who thinks that he is actually President John F. Kennedy, and the two valiant old codgers sally forth to battle an evil Egyptian entity who has chosen their long-term care facility as his happy hunting grounds…

Now, I admit to a fondness of the absurd. Pretty much any movie which has the guts to combine old people, Elvis, the walking dead, and Egyptian deities is going to get me excited, but you toss Bruce Campbell in there as well and I positively twitterpated. Apparently, it's only going to be released on a very limited basis but if it makes it to my neck of the woods, I'll be there.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Tonight, I got together with my college friends. When we were in college, we used to get together at eleven or midnight and play and BS until dawn. Tonight, we got together at around 5 and called it a night around 8:30. To be honest, I had higher hopes for this evening, but I guess we're getting old. I know I'm old and infirm but none of my other friends have kids, only one of them has a wife and two of them are unemployed. Yet despite a distinctive lack of all the things which have aged me prematurely, they all seemed ready to call it a night before me. And I thought I was the stick in the mud.

In computer game news, it appears that The Temple of Elemental Evil should go Gold any day now. It's made by the same people who made the steampunk game Arcanum, which was a pretty fun game, so I have high hopes for TToEE. One of the biggest things going for this game is that it is completely turn-based. The whole real-time vs. turn-based debate is one where I come down firmly on the side of turn-based.

Even when I was young and spry, my reflexes weren't such that I could really play any game which requires any level of reflexes. As such I'm much more of a tactical person when it comes to playing games. When people are rushing at you from all directions it's really difficult to implement any kind of a strategy. In any case, this has been somewhat jejune -- probably the big meal I had with the college buds is sapping my will to stay awake. Till tomorrow, then.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Due to gross stupidity on my part, the first paragraph of this entry was posted on the home page but the rest didn't make it into the blog until a day late.

The weekends are generally pretty slow for me in terms of e-mail, web traffic and stuff like that, so I hope not too many people were inconvenienced by the unscheduled downtime we experienced yesterday. Calling some massive server a problem an "unscheduled downtime" is one of those euphemisms you'll find a lot in the I.T. industry. For those that are curious, I share (a better word might be "mooch") some rack space with a friend of mine who has a large, profitable dot-com. His guys were moving some servers around, and apparently mine got bumped, which led to losing its swap space or virtual memory.

This is where I get a little bit confused, since I have no idea how having your server bumped could affect your virtual memory without affecting a lot of other things as well. I need to get the rest of the story. The bit that I know now was waiting for me this morning when I woke up, as an IM
which had been sent at 3:30 am or thereabouts, so I haven't bothered to try to call anyone. In any case, everything is back to normal. At least I hope it is -- I haven't had the time to give the site a thorough walk-through, so if you notice anything don't hesitate to drop me an e-mail.

To all those who complained about my non-stop coverage of the Tour de France, you should be grateful that even though the Tour of Spain (or La Vuelta for those of you feeling exotic) is currently taking place, and has been for over a week, that this is the first time I've mentioned it. I might have mentioned it
earlier, but so far my "horse," Roberto Heras, is doing good but not great. In fact, his teammate Manuel Beltran is doing better, and was all the way up to second, but the last few days in the mountains his form hasn't been quite up there with some of the other top contenders. In any case that's the
last I'll say about that... maybe...

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

One of my biggest worries last night was that my two year old son would wake up screaming for his "mommy." Despite the protestations in one of the comments, I'll mention that his name is Addison. Which by the way is NOT a girls name: the etymology is "Adam's Son". Back to the story. The last couple of weeks, just about every night Addison has woken up in the neighborhood of 2 am crying uncontrollably. After four kids I have absolutely no problem sleeping through uncontrollable crying -- it's the piercing screams I mentioned earlier that interrupt my sleep. Strangely enough, my oldest daughter (whose name as yet will remain undisclosed), who sleeps in the same room doesn't even stir no matter how long he screams. The easy solution from a short-term perspective is to just get him out of the crib and put him in our bed. That appears to be what he wants and it quiets him down immediately.

My two year old can count to ten. Beyond that numbers, math and surface area are completely beyond his comprehension. In spite of this, he is able to instantly register how I am sleeping and choose a sleeping position which takes up the maximum amount of surface area with mathematical precision. I also have no memory of him taking any martial arts, but his appendages are always poking me in the spots which will cause me the maximum pain when I wake up in the morning. An elbow in the small of the back, a foot pushing on my neck, or occasionally he'll just lay on my head. This is why I have tried futilely to get him back to sleep the last few weeks when he woke up, generally to no avail. I had no power to comfort him: he only wanted his mother (sounds Oedipal though of course everyone knows Freud was a quack.)

So that was my big worry: for once I had plenty of room in the bed (though as most parents know, that makes absolutely zero difference, since all children are like heat-seeking missiles, but enough about the long term damage to health sleeping with children causes), but my wife was completely gone, and if my two year old woke up in the middle of the night and screamed in his patented piercing fashion for a couple of hours I wasn't sure that I wouldn't lock him in a closet downstairs and go back to bed, which once again is easy in the short term, but expensive in the long term when I'm paying for the therapy.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

My wife is leaving me. Unfortunately, she's not taking the kids. Okay, that's not entirely true: she's taking the youngest, but if I could lactate she'd be leaving her as well. She's promised me that she'd come back, but I have a secret fear that if she ever got in a solid 24 hours without the kids or (especially) me, that it would be like Paul on the road to Damascus. A whole new world free of diapers, uncontrollable crying, messy high chairs and tantrums would be revealed, and those are just the advantages of getting rid of me, to say nothing of the children. She's leaving at around 4:00 this afternoon and has promised to be back by 3:00 tomorrow. I'm hoping that the difference between 23 hours and 24 hours will be enough to avert catastrophe.

My mother and my sisters, who have always liked my wife better than me (even before I met my wife, which should tell you something), started this annual pilgrimage to the factory stores up in Park City (for those unfamiliar with the are think Robert Redford and the Sundance Film Festival). They go out to a nice restaurant, watch "chick flicks" till the wee hours of the morning and then go on shopping spree that would have the Hilton Sisters asking for pointers. Apparently they also spend quite a bit of time discussing their husbands' flaws. That activity alone could easily consume a week or more, but I think in order to fit it all in they limit everyone to only discussing issues where the man cost over $2000 or committed a felony.

Did you ever see that Simpsons where Marge has a gambling problem? (Favorite quote: Joblessness is not just for philosophy majors anymore. Useful people are starting to feel the pinch.) She spends all her time at the casino, leaving Homer at home with the kids. Bart comes and tells Homer that he may have seen the Boogyman. When Marge arrives home she finds the windows boarded up and Homer and the kids behind the overturned couch with a gun. That's what tonight is going to be like. Wish me luck.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

As I've listened to the radio today (NPR), watched TV and surfed the web, I've come across a lot of stuff commemorating the 2nd anniversary of September 11th. Enough so that I contemplated making it the subject for my entry today. And then I decided not to, and then I changed my mind again, but rather than talk about September 11th I actually want to talk about how while it is entirely appropriate to discuss, commemorate, remember and even in a sense venerate this day that talking only goes so far.

In thinking about this, I was reminded of The Gettysburg Address. I think Abraham Lincoln expressed my sentiments about September 11th better than I ever could. So I'll just let him speak:

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain...

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Well, I had hoped to have another adventure out today, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. As part of the restructuring, I'm training someone to help me out with "wiring" the adventures so that I spend more time with some of the "high level" stuff (like playing computer games). As it turns out, there are plenty of people out there who have the requisite programming knowledge to work with the Xenogenic system. There are actually fewer people who have the D&D knowledge to "wire" an adventure (plus there's the je ne sais quoi I obviously possess which is unduplicatable by any means short of genetic manipulation or divine intervention). Trying to find both in the same person is where it gets really difficult.

One would think that finding a computer geek who's really into Dungeons and Dragons would be easier than finding a virgin at a Star Trek Convention (and perhaps involve similar methodology), but it's all about age. People who are old enough to still be able to give you page numbers from the 1st edition DMG (the one with the City of Brass on the cover) are all either fairly set in their careers (i.e. they wouldn't come cheap) or they have shown such a complete lack of ambition as to be completely useless. On the other hand there are kids just out of high school who are willing to work for pretty cheap, but very few of these kids have ever played D&D, let alone have a feel for issues like balance and mechanics.

Anyway, back to the original point. I want to spend the time it takes to train this new guy. I've tried to train someone as a helper twice before and because I was in a rush they were never as much help as they could be because I didn't have time to train them properly. As such, I'm not sure when the adventure will be out, but probably it will be the only adventure this month. To make up for this I'm adding a month to everyone's subscriptions and giving everyone who's on the month to month plan this month free. This way I won't have the pressure of a deadline hanging over my head while I try and bring Mikey up to speed. As usual, just click on the name at the bottom of the post for an address to send all pejorative-laden e-mails to.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Well after many, many moons (more than a year actually), this big project I've been working on at my "real" job finally wrapped up. And by wrapped up, I mean we shoved it out there and said we'll fix the rest later. But so it goes. After spending all that time working on this one project, I figured I needed a break, so tonight's VFB is going to be abbreviated. In addition to working to get out the last minute bugs on this project, I have around 400 unread messages in my inbox stemming from the huge debate over the change in the D20 license. In any case I know you're all crushed but this is it for tonight.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

While I was at GenCon, one of the most popular/controversial booths was the one for the Valar Project. (Normally I would post a link but their site claims to be an 18+ site.) See, last year at this time, a guy by the name of Anthony Valterra worked for Wizards of the Coast and was in charge of (among other things) handling the OGL and D20 license. It is, of course, those two licenses which makes possible the kind of publishing that I and dozens of other D20 publishers engage in. Somewhere between then and now (I believe it was back around April of this year), good old Mister Valterra announced that he would be publishing, under the d20 license, a book entitled the Book of Erotic Fantasy.

Shortly thereafter, Anthony left WoTC and struck out on his own. Right off the bat, he seemed to be playing fast and loose with some of the restrictions of the licenses. For example, it's impermissible to claim direct compatibility with D&D. He put out a press release which said just that and claimed that press releases were somehow exempt. There were quite a few other things as well. Needless to say, because of the "adult" nature of the product he got a huge amount of press (more than my insanely unique system *grumble* but that's another subject). Somewhere in there, whether it was at the beginning or as things progressed, he and WoTC had a falling out, so much so that to all appearances WoTC went and changed the D20 license just to deal with the BoEF.

Essentially they added a clause covering "Community Standards of Decency," which essentially means that D20 products can not include violence and gore, sexual themes or prejudices. Needless to say this has generated quite a bit of discussion (one example can be found here.) One of the big arguments is that previously, with no review clause if something was objectionable, WoTC had no liability because there was no real connection between them and the content. Now that they have a review clause, if something is objectionable to someone and they didn't do something about it, suddenly they're brought into the loop. Overall the OGL and D20 licenses are endlessly fascinating and I fear I've reduced a very interesting topic to a minor dusting of the issues, but trust me, it's generated a firestorm.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

It's interesting how you can do something every day for several months and still let it slip your mind. I was pretty busy today, and suddenly it was 10:30 and I realized that I hadn't made an entry in my blog. One imagines that on the scale of things people are upset about when the deadline is missed, that my blog is pretty low. Nevertheless I take some pride in putting something out there every day. In any case, one of the stories I've been following for the couple of weeks is the guy who fell on an 18-inch-long, 1 1/8-inch chip-auger drill bit and lived to tell - and joke - about it.

I think the one of the interesting items about this story and of course there are many is the x-ray. The first couple of times I saw it I wasn't sure what I was looking at because the skull just looked too small in relationship to the drill bit. At first, rather than a skull, you think that instead you may be looking at a thumb or something. It's mildly interesting that they even took an x-ray. With the ability to see both ends it might have seemed fairly obvious what had happened and fairly urgent to do something about. Certainly there are a lot of reasons for taking an x-ray, but hopefully one of them wasn't trying to figure out what had happened.

In any case, though the guy did not suffer any brain damage he was far from unscathed. It's pretty tough to have a big freaking drill bit go in your eye and come out the back of your head without having some problems. It's stories like that that make me whine just ever so slightly less about my life. Not that I don't have problems; I just think that most of them are a direct result of doing some really dumb things.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

So I'm playing a little bit of Neverwinter Nights the other day before dinner, and my son Preston is watching me play. He likes to watch me play my computer games almost as much, if not more, than he likes playing his own computer games. In any case, I'm playing a sorcerer in NWN, and of course I have a henchman and a familiar (a pixie). Well I got into this really nasty battle with a "bloated dire spider" and my familiar kept dying. Which distressed Preston (who's four) to no end. After reloading a couple of times, I realized the easiest thing for me to do would be to just unsummon the familiar, since she really wasn't helping. Preston, of course, wanted to know where she had gone, so I told him that I sent her home so she wouldn't get hurt.

At that point, it was down to me and my trusty henchman (the half-orc barbarian Daelen if you're curious). But it was still a pretty tough battle and I was still having to reload because my henchman was dying. Well, earlier my son had asked me who the henchman was and in an effort to involve him I had said that it was him. Well needless to say when the henchman started dying, my son, confronted by his own mortality, reacted with some dismay. After "he" had died for the third time and as I was reloading, he demanded that he be sent home, just like my familiar, so that he would be safe. An emminently practical suggestion if not for the fact that I had no chance of winning the battle without my loyal sidekick. Apparently he didn't care if I died -- he just wanted out.

Tonight is role-playing night. It's interesting that when I was younger, summer was the boom time for role-playing and it was during the school year that campaigns died. But this year, at least, we had a heck of a time playing during the summer. Part of the reason was that my sister had a baby, but there was also a huge amount of traveling going on (not many of us were part of the jet-set back in elementary), and as a result I think we played only two or three times all summer. But now that winter is approaching and college is back in session, it looks like we'll be back in the swing of things. I'm looking forward to it.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

Well, here I go, continuing the opening post from my play by post campaign.

-----------------------------------------

Displaying something of a passive-aggressive streak, the local legate seems content to let you die of thirst before the time to sacrifice you arrives. Fortunately, one of the orcs inexplicably sneaks you a little bit of water each day, but it seems to be portioned to only keep you alive only long enough to be slain. After losing track of time in the lightless dungeon, you suddenly become aware that your arms have been released from the manacles which kept them suspended over your head. Just before you hit the ground a thick orcish arm scoops you up and tosses you over its shoulder, and you hear the sounds of chanting nearby.

You're carried a short distance into what you assume is an adjoining room, but the darkness is impenatrable by any normal means. You realize that this is where the chanting is coming from. The orc kneels you down, grabbing the back of your neck with his left hand and stretching your right arm out with his right arm. The chanting gets louder with the addition of several new voices. You attempt to twist your head to one side or the other, but the orc has you in a vise-like grip and you're not sure what you hope to see anyway in the unbroken blackness, though you can feel the shoulders of others to both sides of you. The pace of the chant quickens and suddenly the smallest suggestion of a shape begins to appear. In a few seconds the entire scene resolves itself before your eyes.

There is no apparent illumination and you are sickened to realize that the chanting of the legates has summoned the power of Izrador, and it courses through you granting the power to penetrate the unholy darkness. You are kneeling in front of a large, empty stone basin, and though you have never seen it, this can only be a zordrafin corith, a high altar of the Dark God. The other prisoners who made the journey along with you are also arrayed on their knees in a circle around the altar their right arms held out over the basin.

The chanting reaches a crescendo and the evil washes over you as a tangible force, and then, silence. It only lasts for an instant and then a legate leans in and makes a long quick slash in your exposed forearm. With incredible precision and rapidity he repeats the cut eleven more times.

Time slows as the hour of your death arrives. A tiny part of you is surprised to find that you have any blood left in your desiccated body, as it wells up along the cut and drops in a thin stream onto the side of the basin. Seven other streams form near the rim of the basin. Whether due to the skill of the legate or the will of Izrador, it appears that the blood will all reach the center at exactly the same time. You still have no idea as to the purpose of the ceremony but it's obvious that it will reach it's pinnacle when the eight red rivers meet and mix in the center, and indeed, just as it happens, the world goes black and you remember no more...

You have a dream of rain. It is a thunderstorm like you have never experienced. For decades, Izrador has dried up the skies in order to set fire and kill the forests of the Witch Queen. In your dream, the heavens have opened and a downpour not seen for many years rages from the clouds. A bolt of lightning arcs down to the earth; a second later the accompanying thunderclap shakes the earth. You sit up in shock. The rain, the lightning and thunder are real. Apparently you're not the only person the thunderclap awoke. Looking around you see maybe a half dozen other people sitting up. Beyond that the scene around you makes no sense.

You're lying in the bottom of a large crater. Scattered piles of rubble litter the sides. The thunderclouds overhead are so dense that the entire landscape is shrouded in dusky twilight. Before you can entertain any further speculation your overwhelming thirst strikes you like a hammer. You immediately open your mouth into the deluge. You notice some of the others lapping at puddles in the rubble. The downpour is fierce enough that the edge is taken from your thirst in a moment, to be replaced by the dull ache of hunger which has haunted you for untold weeks.

Once your thirst has been somewhat abated your first thought is: "What happened?" And then the question is asked again, "What happened?" Only the voice is not your own. "What's going on? Who's there? Who's talking? Where am I?" Voices flood your head. Through the dimness of the clouds and the concealment of the rain you turn your focus to the people in the crater with you. Those who are closest to you clearly have long cuts in their forearms that appear to have been seared shut. As you look from face to face you realize that though an unknown means you can hear the thoughts of the others in the crater. The revelation seems to strike the others at the same time, as you view your fellow prisoners with a mix of fear and wariness.

After days and days of mind-numbing monotony, suddenly things are happening with alarming alacrity. On top of being able to hear the thoughts of the other people in the crater, you realize that there's something different about you. Your body has changed -- it's different, but things are too confusing for you to determine how.

Looking at your fellow captives who, along with you, have been miraculously spared, and with what seems to be the same thought, (which very well may be the case), you all scramble to the lip of the crater. Looking out through the curtain of rain, you see the ruins of the town where the temple once stood. At first you only see the dark shadows of blasted buildings, but just then a flash of lightning illuminates the landscape. Your hunger-clouded brain finally puts everything into place. Somehow the altar and the temple were destroyed. By what can only be described as the strangest event of all, you and all of the other captives came through unscathed. But the rest of the town is a blasted wasteland full of abandoned buildings and the corpses of the recently dead. Another lightning strike illuminates your field of vision and you see dim figures moving through the ruins. For a moment the hope of assistance flares, but only for a moment before you realize that the figures you see are the bodies of the villagers who died in the explosion. Risen from the dead as Fell and searching among the rubble for the flesh of the living.

Your have been pulled back from the brink of death, but any hope that might have given you dies in your breast as you assess the sitation. Your body has been ravaged by hunger; you have no weapons, your sole raiment consists of a tattered loincloth; you're surrounded by the ravening appetite of hundreds of the walking dead, and if that were not enough, surely the Order of the Shadow will hunt you across the length of Eredane for what happened to the temple. Just then, a distant cry pulls your eyes upwards, as a lightning strike reveals the form of a huge black vulture circling above your heads...

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

First off, for those of you who don't read the comments, there was one from Rizzen, who happens to run www.neverwinterconnections.com. I went over and checked it out, and it's a very cool site. I don't have the time to play multiplayer NWN over the net, but if I did, this is the place I would start with. They have tutors, which for a guy like me who is basically completely clueless about stuff like how to find servers and etiquette and stuff like that, would be invaluable. In other news, I started my Midnight PBP campaign the other day, so I thought I'd post the opening of the campaign here in the blog (yes, you got me: I'm recycling content to fill space). It's rather long so I'm going to break it up into two parts (see what I did there two days of content I don't have to think about).

-------Campaign Opening----------

The days since your capture are an endless blur of constant pain, incomprehensible exhaustion and soul-crushing despair. During those few moments when you've been able to summon the strength to reflect on the journey, the strangeness of it is all too apparent.

You expected to be killed immediately, or sent off with a group of other slaves to work the iron mines, or build temples to the Dark God. Instead, the journey started with just you and a dozen orcs, and rather than a short journey to the dungeons, torture and interrogation, you've been on a long overland journey that has lasted the better part of an arc (a month).

You remember nights in the chilling cold, and days locked in a small cage in the middle of a field of mud, deep in the slums of a conquered city. It was during one of the latter occasions that you first realized that the group of captives was growing larger. The orcs seemed to be assembling an ecclectic mix of races for some mysterious purpose. The fact that the orcs had taken elves as prisoners rather than slaying them immediately was perhaps the greatest mystery yet.

Somewhere in the journey you crossed the Sea of Pelluria. You can't remember if it was before or after you noticed the others, but knowing how much the orcs hate the open water added one more piece to a puzzle your hunger-clouded mind had no chance of putting together. With the exception of the landmark of the sea you have no idea where you are and only a vague sense of what direction you're heading. And even the sea gave up very few clues since you spent all of your time chained below deck.

But finally it appears that your journey is drawing to a close. By now your group numbers nearly 60 orcs and several legates. Which once again strikes you as an excessive number to be charged with the guarding of only maybe a half dozen or so underfed, barely conscious prisoners. The realization that you have reached your destination arrives in tandem with the realization that they have brought you here to die. An argument takes place on the steps of what appears to be a newly constructed temple to the Shadow.

"...they must be sacrificed tonight, at midnight...there have been some delays...assembled from all corners of the land...first time on this scale.." At first the voices seem to be one of the many, many waking nightmares you've endured. But suddenly you realize that it is not.

"What do you mean it's not done!" Shouts one of the legates who accompanied you to another legate standing at the top of the short flight of stairs leading into the temple.

A huge black vulture flies low and screeches. That must be the Astirax of the legate who's shouting, you think, remembering the vulture from the journey and thinking at that point that it was tailing the group waiting for you to die.

"A few more days, Gray One, a week at most." The legate on the steps says in an obviously deferential tone. The confrontation has kindled what few remaining embers of curiousity you still posses and you strain to see past the broad backs of the orcs surrounding you.

The Gray One must have gotten his name from his robe, which as the first element to actually make sense, was hooded and gray. You're not sure how you knew this but you are pretty sure that it is magic as well. Other than his larger hooded robe you can see nothing else about him. In fact even his voice sounds strange, as if you are hearing him from a great distance. This unusual quality makes it so you are unable to even venture a guess as to what race he might be.

The Gray One says, "I must be in Highwall before the helial zenith. I don't have a few more days..." He says this very deliberately with almost a hiss at the end.

This last pronouncement obviously frightens the local legate, and he begins to immediately genuflect while a stream of apologies pour from his lips. The Gray One turns to the Orcs, "Take them below." You try and see what manner of face lies beneath the hood, but just then an orc, moving to obey the order, blocks your view.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross

I was planning on posting something to the blog yesterday, but then I thought, "Hey, it's Labor Day, and the last thing anybody does on Labor day is actually labor." Plus I thought of holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Was I going to post an entry to my blog on those days? The answer would be "no," unless I want to be accused of even more severe familial neglect by my long-suffering wife. Plus, I had already set a precendent for skipping holidays back on the 4th of July. And then of course there was the demon of game playing... I may have become hooked on Neverwinter Nights...

When I first started DireKobold, I swore off all game playing. My theory was that I spent enough time playing computer games and that if I just devoted that time to DireKobold there would be plenty of time. So the idea was I would just trade one for the other, but in any case I was sure that I couldn't do both. As it turns out, a certain amount of recreation would seem to be necessary to my continued sanity (or maybe I'm already insane and thinking that I need to recreate is just one symptom of that insanity). Since then, I have played a couple of games here and there, but since I had sworn off games, it was always furtive and not for very long. Which is one reason, even though I had been looking forward to Neverwinter Nights, I didn't pick it up when it came out. Then I heard some less-than-stellar review of it and my mind was made up.

As it turns out, NWN has one big feature which makes it very attractive to me. In many CRPG's, I get bogged down by inventory management. I mean, you've got six characters, you're picking up a ton of stuff -- most of it enormously useful and you're trying to make sure that it all gets used, that you remember you even have the item, plus then you run out of space and you've got to decide which equipment to leave and which equipment to keep and sell. In NWN you only have one character; as such the choice of what sort of things to keep is much easier, plus they don't throw nearly as much crap at you. Overall, I think it could be a more enjoyable experience. In some cases it's similar to Planescape: Torment. Mostly because all the items were very much restricted as to which character could use them so if you didn't have a particular character it was an easy call. In any case, anyone who doesn't play many computer games will probably find this a mind-numbingly boring entry (but then again aren't they all?) So if you made it this far here's a cool link that demonstrates the miracles you can perform with photoshop.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross