2008-07-31

Beginning to Break

Filed under: Family,Writing — Tags: , — D. Moonfire @ 14:27

Got my driver’s license yesterday. About 3 hours in the DMV, nice people, finished an article I had to read for school, and basically just hung around. I didn’t even have to talk the written or driving test because I was just changing it over. On the other hand, I almost failed the vision test. And, with everything else going on, from being kicked out from the flood to news I can’t talk about yet, the idea of having to wear glasses again actually hit me rather hard. That and the feeling of staring into the vision test, realizing that I simply couldn’t read half the characters because I have permanently blurry vision (drawback of LASIK) was getting really damn close to making sure I couldn’t drive.

And that bothered me, a lot.

We are also seeing if I have to head back to Illinois this weekend to fix the MythTV box. I’m hoping not, I really hate driving and every trip I take is just that less money for GenCon. Not to mention, I think I’m going to be hit with a $500 medical bill unless I can pass the buck to my insurance company who may have already rejected it.

I wonder why I’m not feeling the greatest in the world? I feel like I’m breaking at the ends and one thing is being added on top of the other. The cable man refuses to enter my apartment without me, I have meetings that I have to be at, the phone guy couldn’t do anything yesterday, and basically I spent all last night mindless playing a video game because I couldn’t find the energy to write.

Now, on thing that doesn’t make me sick. This salmonella outbreak. And here is why, we’ll take an article from US News:

A contaminated jalapeno pepper had been identified two weeks ago at another Mexican farm in a different part of the country, which turned the months-long search for a source of the nationwide outbreak away from fresh tomatoes.

Meanwhile, the latest victim count across the United States and Canada, as of Wednesday, stood at 1,319 , with at least 225 people requiring hospitalization, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Millions of dollars lost because of this, but let’s look at the hard numbers. 1,319 people were reported as sick. We’ll be nice and say ten times that actually got sick, but didn’t report it, so about 13,190 people were sick. This includes people in Canada, but let’s just pretend they are all in the USA. Why? If we got to the estimated population of the US, the US Census Population Clock, we’ll see that there are an estimated 304,742,854 people in this country. That means that the 13k people sick comes out to 0.0043% of the population.

On the other hand, according to this site, we have over 23.6 million people with diabetes or somewhere around 7-8% of the population. Guess what I think should have more panic, discussion, and effort on?

Ah, but that’s a long-term disease. How about something just as short of a response as E. Coli? Maybe influenza (i.e. the common cold). With this site, which is based on 2002 numbers, 65,313 have died from the cold. Died, not just gotten sick. That’s 0.0214% of the population. If we were going to compare those numbers, we have to go less than the 225 people who just went to the hospital. We dealt a major blow (in terms of millions) to the tomato growers of this country because we thought it was infected, just to protected less people than normally die of the flu every year.

And that is why that doesn’t really bother me.

2008-07-30

Flood water draining…

Filed under: Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 15:14

The flood comes in a rush,
Pounding down the streets,
Amidst the panic, pomp, and protocols.

When the water drains,
The recovery starts anxiously
It takes a bit longer
Okay, a lot longer
But there isn’t so much on TV
And a lot less speeches

Then, the summer comes
When the roads are bone dry
And the repairs slowly complete
When the paperwork takes forever
And the world already forgot the waters
And moved on to the next crisis
It is that tail end that gets me
When every little thing is a fight
And being numb is no longer an option
You have to look for the future
And slowly recover your life
One tiny piece at a time

Submitted Unspoken Violence today to White Wolf’s fan contest. I got a confirmation email which is just nice when you send email submissions anywhere. A tiny little detail. Of course, the intern (I think) who handles this is probably swamped with entries. I’ll find out in December probably if I won, otherwise I’ll throw it on my website.

I’m also still recovering my utilities. Everything but phone and cable are up and running. Both are sending technicians “sometime”. Frustrating and slow, but its one of the last few things to get my apartment back up and running. And to handle the Internet withdrawal.

Other than that, I’m going to get my Iowa’s drivers license today so I can be all official and have a voting place that doesn’t require 3 hours to drive to.

2008-07-29

Juggling Schedules

Filed under: Graphics,Writing — D. Moonfire @ 16:54

Getting situated back into my apartment again. That part is nice, but it always takes so many days to really get comfortable. My insomnia wasn’t nearly as bad as two days ago, five hours sleep instead of three. But, I’m still so happy to be in my own bed, I just have all these ideas burning in my head that desperately want to get out. And they sit on the foot of my bed, telling me I should be writing instead of sleeping. As I get more in place, things will get better. I just need to work on it.

Despite all that, I couldn’t really write much last night. I finished the second draft of Unspoken Violence and planned on turning it in, but then didn’t put it on a thumbdrive this morning. I’ll do that tomorrow or get Internet in my apartment (still waiting) so I don’t have to sneakernet it. That would be nice.

A working phone would also be awesome.

Speaking of awesomes, I was reading my RSS feeds and saw the Freestyle in Blender project is moving forward nicely. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this since my hand-drawing skills aren’t that great, but I model much better. I’ve decided to redo all my site themes this year (even the two I just redid but don’t like right now). For the d.moonfire.us site (which doesn’t exist), I wanted to go with a steam-style theme that uses NPR (non-photorealistic) for technical-style drawings. I can make gears and pistons, and this will hopefully give it a nice feel. So, having Freestyle in Blender will make that part much easier. I love NPR.

Was the “Character Flaws” posts useful or just me babbling? It seemed like an interesting idea, just not sure if anyone even read them. :)

2008-07-28

Character Flaws: Pride and Apathy

Filed under: Writing — D. Moonfire @ 19:52

Another interesting aspect of creating a character: pride. And its reverse of apathy. I’m including a bit more with pride, but I don’t really have the words. If you think something is the best, its pride. If you think you live in the greatest country in the world, that’s nationalism and pride. If the words, “they don’t deserve the land”, its probably related to what I’m calling pride.

(more…)

I can has apartment?

Filed under: Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 14:07

I moved into my apartment on April 21, after three hours of searching and an incredible series of poor customer service. On June 6, I was there 47 days before I fled before the rising flood water. On July 26, I finally returned, 50 days after I left. At least, I’m pretty sure of those numbers, my calendar math is only my second word form of math after time zones.

I was displaced for more days than I lived there. No wonder I had so much trouble the last few days sleeping. But, there really is no description of how wonderful I felt to finally have my apartment back. No Internet, of course, there are problems at the building and financial levels for that (apparently the landlords haven’t paid their cable bill in the last 50 days for some reason and some wires need fixing). We also don’t have a fire alarm. On the other hand, we do have some cute twenty-somethings running around in uniforms to look for fires, so I really can’t argue.

Without the electronic brain (da Internet pipez) to feed me, I basically just slept, fretted over homework I couldn’t submit (I love my teacher this time, she is so understanding), and worked on a first draft of Unspoken Violence which is due in two days for the White Wolf fan contest. I also got some reading done, sadly not the books I should read, but just comfort books to relax. And watched some movies.

In the end, I’m much happier than I have been in a while.

2008-07-25

Unexpected Inspirations

Filed under: Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 16:48

Yesterday, I had the idea of using LEGO components for doing miniatures. It handled a lot of the things I was looking for, including the ability to have relatively easy map creation, let me create the maps according to my imagination, and to not require tons of hours or, more importantly, tons of space for a one-shot item.

Before I left for the day, I decided to do something scary, I did a google search for “steampunk lego”. Let’s say… I really liked the results and they lodged themselves into my brain in about 10 seconds:

Well, that pretty much set my mood for what can and can’t be done with LEGO. It also made me really want to know if I could play a proper game with it now. So, on the way home, I stopped by Walmart, moaned at their lack of LEGO, and then over to Target which had a nice selection. A bunch of money later, I hurried to my temporary home to sit on the bed and play with new toys, imagining what I could do with them.

You know what? They would work perfectly for a good HERO game or even Exalted. I think they’ll be perfect, but its also pretty obvious that I need to collect a lot more sets and raw components to really make some reasonable sets for adventures. Well, I’m willing to try.

There were two results that came out of this shopping trip. The first is that I really want to run a steampunk RPG game now. Something with lovely adventure crawls, temples that go boom, and otherwise start to develop my world via adventuring which is one of my favorite things to do.

The other is that Welf, from Flight of the Scions, is going to change drastically. Working out the ideas, I think it would work better of he (um, maybe) actually doesn’t have any powers, but really build up on the mechanical things I already hinted at and basically give him the ability to gadget in a hurry. As I was driving, I realized I had set the foundation for that already, I just didn’t take advantage of it. So, once again, the ending of the book entirely changed.

On the way into work today, I considered the idea of changing his gender to a female. Kind of confusing the mental processes where this came from, but then my mind happily went down all the possible paths of the story and I think I like it better. In this case, it changes this book and the next three. And in a good way, I think. More importantly, I think I like the story even better now.

Character Flaws: Basis of Decisions

Filed under: Games,Writing — D. Moonfire @ 15:55

I’m going to change this a little bit in attempt to remove some of the personal whining and actually write something that might be useful. Heh, imagine that. Probably be more interesting than me whining about people who have decision making processes that I don’t really understand, but I do use in my character creation. Don’t worry, there is personal bits in here. I also give you a dose of healthy emo on top of your salad.

I consider one of my strengths to be creating characters quickly and, for the most part, giving them a fair amount of depth and making them interesting. One thing I do struggle with is making characters significantly different from myself, so I use a few tricks as part of the building process. A good part of that is actually coming down with a list of beliefs and preferences, but also the reasons behind those beliefs. You can get a lot out of knowing why characters have their quirks.

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2008-07-24

LEGO Minatures?

Filed under: Games — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 20:25

Now, this is going to be pretty obvious for just about everyone in the world but me, but I was wandering around the Internet for a break of doing programming and I came up to Brikwars. Now, I’m not really into the mechanics in general, but reading through the rules gave me an interesting idea: using LEGO (and related) products as miniatures.

I love miniatures in general, more so for gaming. And those little suckers are rather extensive in pieces and parts and I could rebuild them more easily than the plaster models I’ve been lusting after at GenCon all these years, and relatively speaking, more flexible than anything else I considered for doing scenes. I would spent hours working on something that would only be used once then never seen again. And mixing and matching the figures would let me create a wide variety of characters with very little effort.

They also have a set measuring system built in (the studs) and you could easily say a 4×4 stud square is a “square” for purposes of the game. That isn’t normal, but since a figure stands on 2 studs, give them a 1 stud to the side to handle their arms and you’re golden. Assuming you want a grid system, that is. Of course, I’d have to give up hex grids, but I could live with that.

Wonder if it would work?

Wonder why I never even thought of this before?

Wonder why I just gave away all my bricks two months ago?

Character Flaws: Unbiased

Filed under: Writing — D. Moonfire @ 14:50

I ended up being about 10 minutes late for work today because I got drawn into a set of philosophical and political discussions. For some reason, I have a serious craving for these things, even when I’m late for something I enjoy… like work. In this case, it came down a single question:

How can you call a show unbiased when you acknowledge it brings people identified as liberals on, lets them talk, then tells them they are idiots?

For me, I consider that one of the definitions of bias. It has one, but this was the result of discussing a certain news channel (Ch7) verses another news channel (Ch9) with MiL. According to her, Ch7 is unbiased because it gives McCain more press and it has more coverage of the war on Iraq. And that, according to her, Ch9 has already decided that Obama is going to win, so they don’t cover anything else. And, for her, that is a huge bias.

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2008-07-23

i hate…

Filed under: Writing — Tags: — D. Moonfire @ 18:01

There is a certain someone who said something that reminded me of my own loneliness when I was in my late teens. It was painful, because I remember it so clearly, and I’m very sad that someone else is going through it. And, since they aren’t really allowing conversations on said topic, I’m going to post a poem I wrote when I went through it. Okay, I wrote a lot of poetry during that time, about a books worth that someday I hope to make a real book, just because I think so many people go through it and so many people don’t have someone to help them out.

i hate…

i hate this feeling
the sounds of my footsteps in puddles
and echoes down alleys i already went
through the laughing crowds

i hate being alone
seeing people not see me
others enjoying their lives
and me unable to find anyone

i hate not hearing
the laughter of friends
or the gasp of a lover
or even the roar of anger

i hate walking
moving forward endlessly
because standing still
just hurts even more

i hate the silence
fleeing it with pounding steps
moving forward to find something
trudging in that simple hunger

i hate the next step
terrified it will be in silence
feeling broken soles
and my heavy heart

i hate hope
it drives me forward
since there is light somewhere
and i must find it

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