the end of an epoc

The D&D campaign I've been playing in for several months now is finally coming to a close. Here's a short recap: The evil necromancer Larlac's soul was stolen hundreds of years ago his last action was to raise my party with the instructions to retrieve his soul and restore him to his former glory. Hilary ensues.

I played a Neutral Evil (that is sociopathic) Dread Necromancer. My real goal in this campaign was to get every person in the game to comment that I was just absolutely the most evil person in the party. I definitely succeeded. The biggest evil compliment came in the game this past Sunday when I was compared favorably to a god of death because of the evil and horrors I had wrought. I've killed hundreds of innocent people for personal evil gains, suggested using the torture of the living to get holy knights to abandon their lovely safe position and try to stop me, made dark pacts with demonic forces for fun and profit, used my own party members to my own advantage repeatedly, tricked people into getting themselves killed using only my skills of manipulation, desecrated holy lands and churches, defiled the corpses of holy monks, and assisted in the deaths of no less than fifty angelic creatures. I've been busy.

Now that this campaign is nearly over, we're making plans for a new campaign with all new characters in an entirely different light. I'm going from Neutral Evil, arguably the most evil alignment in the game, to Chaotic Good, something much more like what I am like in real life. I am changing from a hideous creature birthed by rage and spite to an easy-going, good humored (and living) guy who is only slightly morally ambivalent. I look forward to confusing the crap out of my fellow players with my fresh and friendly new attitude.

See what you people are missing by not playing RPGs?

I realize this post may be a repeat for some of you, but I liked it so much, I thought it needed a bigger audience. Besides, I don't post here enough.

Windows part II

There were some glitches here and there but everything is back to normal. In fact things may even be more normal now than they were before.

My windows are in. I'm not 100% happy with how I made it down this path, but the important details, the windows, are completed. Now the novelty of opening and closing my windows has become something of an obsession, as this is the first time, ever, I've been able to open most of them. So I've been wandering around my house, actually opening my shades enough to open my windows, marvel at them being open, then closing them again. They also have this neat feature wherein you can swing the windows out from the wall so you can clean the outside of the windows while still inside your house, and that rules. But really, just opening and closing my windows over and over has provided me with far too much amusement.

Last night, when the searing of meat provided smoke, rather than just turn on my weak anti-smoke blowy thing, I opened some windows! It got rid of the smoke! Huzzah! Also, when I turned my heat past 50 degrees, the heater went on once in three hours! Huzzah! Any annoyance I felt yesterday has pretty much disolved under the sheer amusement value of me opening and closing windows and realizing that my heating bill is going to plummet. When it's cold again. I mean, I know my heating bill is going to go down now that it's almost nearly officially spring, I'm not that much of an idiot. Stop looking at me like that.

Anyway, to bring something of a point to this rambling post: I like windows that open and then close. I'm not sure I'll like watching my savings decrease by 2/3, but I'll get over it. 'Tis a wise investment in the long run.

Window goes up... Window goes down!

Have you heard of Pandora?

I'm sure most of you have heard the myth of Pandora's box (and if you haven't, shame on you). However, I'm pretty sure most of you have not heard of the Music Genome Project. The MGP is an attempt by a buncha artists to create an algorithm that can be given a song or band to start from that will then start picking new music for you to listen to based on a set number of parameters. You give the algorithm feedback, and it starts to learn what your musical tastes are. With enough time, the algorithm should, in theory, always provide you with music you like without just sticking to the same bands all the time.

I've made several stations, and frankly, when you consider just how smegging picky I am when it comes to music, it's bloody amazing to see this thing work. I've rarely gotten more than three songs in a row I didn't like, and there are times when I don't have to skip a song or have anything to complain about for hours. Swapping your personalized stations to go with your mood couldn't be easier. It's like radio, except you don't have to listen to hours of crap to maybe hear the three songs you really want to hear.

So where's the smegging link? Linky: http://www.pandora.com/

Go! Play! Listen! ROCK!

300

I went to see 300 because I was looking forward to wanton violence, blood, and gore, and I got all three in spades. I did not go to the 300 expecting to see a good movie, merely a beautiful and violent one. Instead, on top of the beauty and blood, I saw a powerful story of the heroes of Thermopylae, how three hundred men defied an empire. Beautifully shot, excellently acted, and a story told in an fantastic style left me wanting to say one thing:

THIS IS SPARTA!

Yay windows!

For those of you paying attention, I don't normally use proper names of just about anything while I'm blathering on here. The way I see it, I really just don't want to truly publicly air anything here with names intact. That level of anonymity just lets me feel a tiny smidgen better about blogging out in the wilds of the Internet. However, I have come across a situation where I cannot hold in the name because, frankly, I'm so bloody impressed.

Castle Windows, the company installing my windows, every single one in the house all at once in an estimated 6 hours, fucking rules. Aside from being cheaper than anywhere else I looked at windows by quite a bit, and from having a far better work guarantee than any other company I looked at, they're installing my windows a good month ahead of schedule. I was worried that the timing might give me a problem with my sister's wedding in April. Instead, my windows are being installed this weekend! Unbe-smegging-lievable!

Castle Windows rules. I'm guessing I'll have even more nice things to say this coming weekend. Granted this will temper my Friday night plans a bit, but who cares? I'll be able to open and close my smegging windows for the first time since I moved into the house! That's fantastic! Cooling bill/heating bill go down, the noise reduction goes up, and I can have a house with a cross breeze if I am so inclined! It'll be a good day.

So think Castle Windows for all your windows needs! Small jobs, large jobs, it matters not! Castle Windows is your friendly window company. Plug plug plug plug plug! :)

must... resist... urge... to strangle... asshole...

I try not to talk about my job overmuch here, as this is a glaringly public place that I don't find to be an appropriate place to complain, but this particular matter has me growling, so I gotta vent somewhere. I have to deal with this utter asshole here at work. If any of you have seen Red Dwarf, he very much reminds me of Arnold J. Rimmer BSC, because he's a snively, simpering, obsequious, little weasel of a man, with all the charactaristics of a New York city sewer rat without any of the good qualities. His job is to administer a few servers with a few projects running on them. This is a job that a monkey could do. If someone says "deploy this" you click a few times and you're done; if someone asks that something be restarted it's only two clicks if you have the web app open. I can't emphasize how easy this job is enough.

No, what's my personal problem with this man? He, a glorified monkey, treats me as if I am some kind of personal bother to him when I ask him to do his job. Any time I request something from him directly, he gives me the run around or flat out tells me no. Never mind that I am well within my rights to ask these things of him and that I am more than capable of keeping my job and doing his at the same time; he really seems to think of me as little more than a buzzing bug on his shoulder that wants nothing more to do with than to brush me away. That pisses me off.

What pisses me off more, however, is that the very instant someone slightly higher on the totem pole is involved, the little bastard suddenly snaps into action and treats me and my request as if it were handed down by the gods. I could email the same request ten times in a week and never see action on it, but CC my boss? Wow, my head almost spins with how quickly the jackass responds. I HATE that. Just thinking about it has me grinding my teeth. That kind of lying, manipulative bullshit really make me want to punch the little shit right in his stupid face. Yes, his face is stupid, shut up.

On the plus side, it looks like my boss has had enough of the little shit and is currently explaining to the asshole's boss the situation. Knowing my company, this could mean nothing, but knowing my boss, it could mean something might actually come of this. So long as when I tell this little shit to do something he fucking does it, I don't care what happens. But if I have to sit there telling him the same thing over and over while he flatly ignores or refuses my requests, I may just have to kill him. Course, if I did kill him, I don't think anyone would mind really. He's not what you'd call popular round these parts. Oh what a tempting thought...

Urge to kill... fading...

writer's block of a sort

I have writer's block. I don't mean that I don't have ideas for writing my book, I mean that I'm so desperate for thinking of something to blog about I'm actually blogging about my inability to come up with a topic to blog about. Now that's just really stretching for something to write about, but I'm gonna go with it as I'm out of other ideas and I really feel like I need to write something.

Sometimes it feels as though I am allowed a limited number of words to use competently at any given time and that if I've successfully written a large portion of my book, say a chapter or two, my ability to come up with anything else to say seems to dry up. Saying that out loud (or typing it out loud, whatever) makes me think I am crazy(er). Rationally there's no limit to the number of words I can use competently, but rationality cannot always run my life. We humans are prone to superstitious behaviors and other irrational thinking; it is a part of our very nature. It's why people in general tend to believe in ghosts, spirits, and gods. So for some reason, after writing a lot of something I then have a hard time writing anything else.

So then, you might ask, why am I trying so hard to come up with something to write about as I am here? Because supersitious nonsense isn't allowed to run my life, and the easiest way to break a superstition is to break it. I'm allowed more words to write than my nutball brain seems to believe, and the more I type here the more I prove that. Excepting, of course, that if there really is a limit, I am fast approaching the end of that limit with this very blog post. Or perhaps that my limit increases with time away from the original plot and I am busily respending all my word allowance in a futile attempt to convince myself that I don't have a word allowance. Never underestimate your brain's ability to undermine everything you want to do with ridiculous crap like this.

I don't really believe that I'm limited in what I can say in a certain period of time any more that I believe that in wearing my red socks I will do better in Wii Bowling because I got that 204 that one time I was wearing my red socks. (note: I don't own red socks) Sometimes I think I just need to jumpstart my writing by just writing something, anything, good or bad, just to get my fingers moving and my mind rolling. Theoretically that's what my other blog was supposed to be, a nice sandbox in which to write whatever to keep me moving along, but in the end my urge to keep to continuity was too strong to overcome. Start a third blog that's an actual sandbox? Hmm... No. I can hardly post enough to two to be remotely interesting.

In conclusion, I like spoons. And writing. Both are an outlet of something. What I'm not entirely sure, but hey, if it works, it works, and it works, so I'll let it work at whatever work it is it works at. Clearly coherency isn't high on that list of what it works on.