No Internet

I haven’t had any home internet access and I probably won’t get it until I get the electricity’s ‘new customer’ deposit paid off.  $200 dollars if you are not an existing customer.  The power has been in my former roommate’s name for the past 5 years.   That hurt.  I didn’t expect it to be that high.

So I didn’t bother to hook up my computer.  I finally did it Thursday night.  I wanted to build a house with my apartment’s layout and see how the sims dealt with it.  It will not be exact.  Sims actually will not let you do a bathroom like mine.  The game indicated there isn’t enough room for the door to open and close.  I find this very funny since the game was built to set out floor plans originally.  And my bathroom would not pass muster.

Instead I focused on getting my first ‘genie’ family in Sims three together so they can have kids before the man ages up to old age.  I’m having trouble getting them pregnant.  I couldn’t get them pregnant but I did get them to get married.

I am thinking that I should have waited to finish unpacking the rest of the boxes.  Having the computer up and running may slow that activity down.  My biggest problem is that at this point, until I can get two more book shelves, I’m somewhat stuck.  I have more stuff than I have space.  I can get a storage unit in the building but that is also going to have to wait until I get everything caught up and the cards I put the moving costs onto paid off.  The storage space.

The book shelves will be one in three weeks and one more four weeks after that.  My biggest issue will be getting them into the car and house.  The 35 lb boxed ones are no problem.  But these are the tall ones I need now and those are 50 lbs.  I may be able to get away with one tall one and one short one.  I want to do the tall one first to make sure.

I’m trying to accomplish my internet stuff before and after work at the office, in the meantime.  It is frustrating.  But I don’t know when it got so expensive.  It costs twice as much as it did when I last paid for internet.

Lily ‘Calla’ Brandybuck. Back story prep. One Ring RPG.

She should be in pants but the program won’t let you put female Hobbits in trousers.

Once upon a time, in a part of the Shire called Buckland, a hobbit family with a lot of sons lived. The mother always wanted a little girl to dress up and do all the girlish things she wasn’t able to do with her sons. Eventually, she did have a baby girl, born with fair skin and a shock of black hair. What she didn’t count on is that any younger sibling wants to play with her older siblings. So little Lily, as her mother named her, wanted to tear around after her pack of older brothers. This did not really surprise much of the Shire, for most of the Hobbits living there thought those that lived in the Buckland area were a bit odd at best or downright mad at worst. They were a more curious and more active and more adventurous sort.

Lily’s mother despaired of ever getting her to behave properly and the more she pushed the more Lily tried to be like her brothers the more Lily resisted and the more troublesome she became.  Lily grew up to be a tomboy and troublemaker.  But at least she wasn’t a bully.  She like to pull pranks and practical jokes which occasionally got out of hand.

When two of Lily’s older brothers both reached their majority at 33 years of age, they wanted to take off and go adventuring.  Lily’s parents kitted her out in suitable clothes and travel gear and even got her bow and dagger for hunting and cooking and a short sword for protection.  They knew she at least had the basics down from practicing with her brothers who would occasionally get humans to teach them things when the went to town to trade with them.  They hoped that actually living in the rough, traveling, and making do for themselves would make Lily realize that adventuring wasn’t all that glamorous and she would finally come home and settle down and behave like a proper hobbit lady.  Well, as proper as a Hobbit from the Buckland side of the Shire can be.

Unfortunately, this plan backfired.  Lily loved to travel as much as her brothers.  She loved seeing new places and people.  She also discovered that most people underestimate Hobbits.  Either they treat them as children or they treat them as simple country folk who are innocent and naive.  To be protected or taken advantage of, depending on the other person’s inclinations.  Lily found this to be very advantageous and discovered a niche market for gathering and selling information on what competing businesses are doing in secret.  She also learned she was good at liberating object from one person to another.  This bothered her a bit but she discovered that a surprising number of people liked to blackmail others and people would pay her to get back the evidence the blackmailers had on them.  This wasn’t steady work put paid well enough.

To keep people from connecting this shady activities and her, she took on the name Calla to use for her wandering and her less than legal activities and used Lily Brandybuck for everyday living in town.  Strangely enough, she learned all the ladylike behavior her mother always wanted her to learn in order to keep people underestimating her.  So she played the part of a rather innocent young Hobbit woman who had enough curiosity about the world to want to travel.

Lily originally just followed along with her brothers.  But they were wanderers who were motivated by wanting to know what was over the next hill.  Lily liked traveling but she also wanted a home base.  Some place to go back to when she wanted a break.  She wanted a goal.  If she was going someplace new, she wanted a reason and a purpose.  Because of her skills in getting into places from which people wanted to keep others out, she became popular with treasure hunting groups, and was able to keep up a good living from her share of the treasure,  stealing back evidence from blackmailers, and the selling of information.

Lily continues to get letter from back home keeping her updated on the happenings in the Shire with inquires on when she plans to come home, settle down, and get married.  Lily suspects she will never return to the Shire. Maybe to visit, someday.  She suspects that if she ever marries, it will have to be a some one like her, who likes adventure but isn’t really a wanderer who has to keep moving all the time, and won’t expect her to behave like a proper Hobbit wife.  Lily will never be ‘proper’.

Did I die? Or are angels ice skating in hell?

I’m such a pretty Sith Sorcerer.

So something happened today that has my brain in a dither.  It was announced that Disney is purchasing LucasArts.

Disney purchasing it isn’t the surprise.  Lucas selling it is.  Something has disrupted the space-time continuum.  This is not the Lucas with the Iron Grip that we all know and hate.

Since my mind is having trouble processing all information now, I shall go and play SWTOR.   Williams posted the trailer and now I feel I ought to go work on my Empire toons.

Hidden Goodness in Canceled Plans:

This has NOTHING to do with the post. It is just a great fantasy, day dream, fantasy concept floating around Facebook. I may turn it into a stitch pattern.

What today looked like:
1. Get up 1.5 hours early to go to work early.
2. Forget to take all medicine before leaving.
3. Lose phone so you can’t call roommate and ask him to bring them to work.
4. Dental appointment and get the first half of a root canal done.
5. Find the missing phone.
6. Be hungry but have no desire to eat once the dentist stuff wears off.
7. Spend rest of the work day in pain w/ headache.
8. Game night gets canceled.
This is hidden goodness disguised as much sadness. It means I could get home, take blood pressure meds, take pain meds, and I can go to bed early so I can have a better day tomorrow.

Humans Hunting Humans

I am actually farther along than this. New photos will have to wait until tomorrow or Wednesday.

Last night I was ensconced on the couch, madly working away at Elegant Pumpkins, watching episode after episode of Supernatural.  I fail to understand how I never saw this show when it came out about 7 or 8 years ago.  The only explanation I can find is that it must have been on opposite something I was already totally hooked on. 

Progress was being made and I really wanted to finish that one section, so I started another episode, entitled Benders.  I was trying to imagine what it could be about.

I didn’t expect it to be ordinary humans with a not so ordinary hobby.  It was all about people kidnapping other people in order to hunt them.  What really gets me is the name of the Episode.  Is doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.  I can only guess that it might be the surname for the weird family.  Not that it was ever mentioned in the episode.

On the whole, I’ve seen a lot of variations of this particular story.  Richard Connell has a lot for which to answer.  Or maybe it is the producer of school texted books.  Particularly Jr and Sr High Schools text books.  I don’t know if it is still a mainstay of English Lit textbooks or not, but when I was in school it was, and I know people up to 20 years older than me who remember it from school.  Everyone I mention it to goes, “oh yeah, that story”.  But no one remember what grade it was.

First published in 1924, the title was The Most Dangerous Game.   A famous big game hunter somehow gets stranded on an island where he is captured and invited to be part of a game.  Initially, because the owner of the island knew of him and admired him, he was invited to participate as a hunter.  But he refused.  The game was hunting humans.  He would send the out in the jungle with a weapon and food supplies.  If they survived three days they were allowed to go free.  No one had ever survived.  So the title was a play on the word game as something for entertainment and an object that is hunted.  This refusal angers his captor who then says that  he can either be the hunted or get beaten by the man’s huge bodyguard.

Being a world renown hunter, he chose to be hunted.  The ensuing three-day hunt ends with the hero diving off a cliff to escape.  The villain returns home to find the hero in his own bedroom.  The villain views the hunt as over.  He seems to be honoring the terms of letting people go if they survive the three days.  But the hero sees him as a monster, a beast that is no better than an animal himself.  They fight.  The outcome is not stated, but the hero ends the story with how he slept that night, implying that he defeated and killed the villain.  But it also ambiguous.  He ended up playing the part the villain originally wanted him to play.  He hunted another human.  He hunted his hunter, catching him unaware in his own den, and defeating him.  Did he learn the value of life and think less callously about the animals he himself hunted or did he end up turning into another hunter like the villain, who succumbed to the thrill of hunting people, losing his own humanity in the process?

At least 24 films have been influenced by this and at least 30 t.v. shows.  Every kid reads it in school.  It is a familiar story.  So every writer has it in the back of their minds as possible material.  No wonder we see it crop up so often.  There was a one serial killer in the 1980 who followed a similar pattern.  And the inventors of the Paintball game developed it after talking about an African hunting trip and developed the actual idea directly based on the story, creating a nonlethal way to experience the thrill of the hunt against an opponent who could hunt them back.

Like I said, as I watched yet another version of the story, I thought that Richard Connell had a lot for which to answer. I understand why he wrote it.  In part it was seems to be dealing with issue of killing humans not long after WWI.  There seems to be an element of working though the idea what is humane and what is inhumane and what it means to be human and what it means to kill. 

Maybe Richard Connell is not the one who has to answer for anything.  Maybe it was whomever decided this was a vital piece of literature and all school children should read this.  I know it was in the text books for decades.  I just don’t know for how many years and it if it is still there.  But it has become a part of the American psyche and I don’t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

Strange Dreams

Lebbeus Woods ship for Aliens 3

(Apologies, I will have to tidy this entry up a bit latter.  But I burnt lunch twice while doing this and I don’t really want to waste anymore food.)

I had a dream about a planet ship built on earth. There was NOTHING really new in this dream.  But that is  usually how the subconscious works.  It pulls from a variety of sources.  Usually from things watched, read, or thought about recently.  Since I’ve been watching comedies and Korean horror, reading fantasy and children’s fantasy, and working on non-fiction and some fantasy, this extremely Sci-Fi focused dream has to have been inspired by the only source of Science Fiction I’ve had the past month.  Thanks StoriesbyWillaims, Sci-fi is invading my sleep.  Also credited are Star Wars the Old Republic and Alpha Centauri.

It was partly built with technology from ‘somewhere else’.  The dream didn’t specify.  Perhaps another planet, fleeing the ravengers came across earth and a joint project enabled the two to build something beyond what their individual technologies would allow.  The technology and programing itself was highly adaptable so that it would update itself.  It was intuitive so that it could see connections between two lines of study and research and be able see where the results could be connected to create new things.  But it stopped just short of being self-determination and self-awareness.  People were loaded onto this craft and sent out into space.

People need purpose so we set up city like communities.  People had homes, jobs, and mostly replicated the normal lives they left behind.  I am myself in this dream and I have no idea what my job was exactly.

We encountered others who needed to be saved and were able to save portions of populations.  The ship ended up in districts where certain, more compatible races, lived.  Shortly after this ship takes off from earth, robotic and medical joint research enables the ship to see a way to create cybernetic bodies and download personalities into them with some reproductive capabilities.  People still desired children. It would massively extend life spans, slow down childbirth rates, control population growth without legislating it, and even enable people to cross over to a different species.

I took advantage of this tech as did many people.  Some people did not.  It was too strange, to scary, or denied God too much.  But most of the overly religious never got onto the ship to start with.

But for some people, the reproductive functions didn’t.  Some people greatly pitied those who realized they would never be able to reproduce.  Some of them fell into a deep despondency.  Other didn’t care.  It created an almost eternal life span for the people to went into it early on. This was soon seen as a flaw and some limitations on life spans were incorporated into the design.  With a long time to live, some who realized they wouldn’t be able procreate took the view that it was simple a matter of time before the weird glitch would be found and corrected.

This saw an upswing in people from less human-like looking races towards more human like races.  Or adapting  the particular physical attributes the races prized most to a more human-like base structure.  Not out of any idea that ‘human’ were better but because, off of the native planets and on a ship, even a planet sized one, it simply had better functionality.

I was in one of the early batches with nearly unlimited life span and ended up in some sort of military capacity.  At a shop one day I ran into the first person I had known in childhood who also made it onto this ship.  Eric Hansen.

Eventually, the districts came to represent different political ideals and world views.  And the natural progression was, of course, war.  It was bad enough having to deal with war between our various ideals but there was also the ravengers to deal with.  As the scientists and the labs were busily churning out research to find a way to deal with them, the ship puts two and two together and creates a new drive and shooting use far away and beyond anyplace we could identify.  And a new internal transport vehicle is produced based on the Kia model my roommate recently bought.

Custom Kia Soul (in my dream, it could fly)

The thing is, during this ‘jump’ the ship pretty much put every one to sleep.  But there were some damages when coming out the other side.  Various areas were woken up at different rates.  Some of the districts took advantage of it to advance their war efforts.

We were fighting off a unit with newly adapted, close quarters weaponry.  Cutting weapons for up close, personal, fighting.  I grabbed two pieces from a downed enemy and was trying to figure out how to use them when a new surge was pushed forward, largely civilian cannon fodder.  I was told to fall back and give them to someone else when I finally got the hang of it.  These were ugly, brutal weapons causing pain and suffering rather than a quick death.  Once I figured them out, it was basically a bloodbath.

Only I don’t like slasher films so my brain, which dreams in vivid, color, movie-like patterns kindly avoided letting me actually see some of that stuff.

Anyway, it was a very detailed, elaborate, drawn out dream with lots of elements from many sci-fi movies, books, and t.v. shows.  Opps, and games.

My Pretties, My Precious.

Whether it is the Wicked Witch of the West or Smeagol, they work equally well.  They are slightly interchangeable when you think about it.

My Pretties, My Precious

I feel the need to have pretty dice. I am such a girly girl for gamer girl. Yeah, I like pretty races even if I prefer to play Horde or any ‘evil’ side faction on games.

Blue-Magenta w/ Gold

I didn’t have a set of d6’s. So I had to pick up a set for Shadow Run. I went with the smaller dice so I would have a lot more of them. They are pretty, but if the store hadn’t been out, I would have gotten two sets of the d6’s that looked like shards of crystals.

Copper-Steel w/ White

We ended up having to take a break from the Shadowrun and picked up a Castle Ravenloft game instead. I had a set of ancient (1981), plain red, D & D dice. But I couldn’t find them. Last place I remember seeing them was in the box with my old girl scout patches. So I decided getting a new, prettier, set was in order.

Gamer Girls Unite! (Okay, I guess we can let the boys in, even though they tried to keep us out of their clubhouses.)*

Someone, Somewhere, Somewhen has probably already blogged about this. I’m just too lazy to look it up and see what they decided to write about it.

 

Anyway, it might color my own writing if I do.

 

The Guild.

 

I Love This Show!  Season Five is finally on Netflix and I will have to watch it this weekend.  I may make my roommate watch seasons 1 – 4 this weekend as well.  After all, he also plays a MMORPG.  Well, until a few weeks ago.  He started taking two night courses and is taking a break from it.  Sort of.  He has something he calls an AFK build.  It only works for one area.  It is a set of skills that allows his to take his ‘toon to a certain location, kill all the mobs, and then walk away and somehow he accumulates points. 

 

But back to The Guild.  Felicia really captures a lot of different types of players with her show.  Of course, they are, to a certain extent, exaggerations.  But that is part of what makes it so funny.  And most gamers know people very much like them. 

 

Part of me wants to give a synopsis of each season and an analysis.  But then it gives too much of it away.  Mostly, I just think anyone that plays any type of MMORPG should watch it.  Very funny, even if it is based on exaggerations of stereotypes: the awkward gamer girl who substitutes the game for a real social life, the girl whom you would think would have a social life and friends but just isn’t nice enough to get along with real people without the computer as a buffer, the guy lives under his mother’s thumb, the older single guy who has so many flaws that RL people won’t put up with him, the typical high school kid, and the housewife who games instead of watching soaps and neglects her family and kids.  Okay some of these are actually two stereotypes in one person.

 

And that is just the Knights of Good.  (Really, what are the odds of a very small guild of players actually living in the same city and not already knowing each other.  They are either spread out in different cities or they all know each other and set up the guild for that reason.  Or at least, that is my personal experience. 

 

The Axis of Anarchy, their primary in-game opposition, also includes some different stereo types.  And Wil Wheaton is perfect for the part of Fawkes.  It is rather hilarious.

 

I can’t wait to start watching season 5 and I’ve heard season 6 has been purchased.  More gamer girl geekiness to look forward to. 

 

*(Then I was in 7^th grade the only other people playing what I wanted to play were the 8^th grade boys.  They wouldn’t let me play with them.  Bad Boys.  Bad Bad Boys. Shame on Them.)

Best Buy, Amazon and PC Games

Best Buy is closing stores and the question being asked is, “Is Amazon to blame?”  I do not think so.  I used to shop for my pc games there.  They used to have 3 aisles devoted to games and one devoted to other types of software for a total of 4 aisles.  They slowly started shrinking the PC gaming section and expanding platform games. 

 At the same time, they got rid of the value games.  I used to go to Best Buy for various items.  If I didn’t find what I actually wanted I never left empty-handed.  I might buy one or two value games.   I never left without spending over 10 or 20 dollars there.  Now I go in and don’t find anything, I leave without spending any money.  As the PC games is now down to half an aisle, I don’t even go into Best Buy anymore.

I don’t do platform games because the PC is a superior gaming system.  The makers of the various Platforms have advertised so aggressively that people seem to think that they need these expensive machines.  I remember when you could find the games made and marketed for both platforms and PC’s.  But in the big push to get people to switch to laptops or notebooks or pads, more game makers are making exclusively for platforms and not for PC’s.  There are still a lot of PC games out there, but the stores you would expect to get them at are carrying less and less of them. 

As a result, stores like Target are increasing their PC gaming sections.  It’s a pretty sad statement on PC gaming in general and game marketing in particular.  There are a great many people who still prefer PC gaming.  But some have broken down and gotten gaming consoles because the games they want are only available that way.  Now you spend over two hundred dollars on a console that you pretty much have to use for gaming only.  Or maybe getting Netflix or Hulu on as well.  That is it.  If I have to spend that much money I want it to do a lot more.

To tell you the truth, it really pisses me off a whole hell of a lot.  But I’m at a loss on how to go about fixing this issue.  So instead I sit and fume and Best Buy slowly goes under.  Serves them right for carrying less PC games.

31 Days of Halloween – Days 5 – 7. Or When Best Laid Plans get Taken over by New Video Cards.

Tuesday:

Repaired computer.  Spent the evening killing things in Divine Divinity.  I couldn’t find Fable.

Wednesday:

The plan was to watch the Swedish film, “Let the Right one In”.  I usually like the foreign versions of films Hollywood remakes.  I hear it was very good.  My allergies were so bad I went to bed early.  As a result, I woke up in the middle of the night and was up for two hours before I could sleep again.  So I got on the computer to kill things some more.

Thursday:

I killed things on the computer.  I really really really meant to gow down to the storage unit to pick up all the halloween tubs and decorate.  I will do it tonight.  It I don’t end up going to see “My Soul to Keep”.  Or is it ‘Take’?