My lovely lady has been playing this the last few days, and it's stuck in my head.

Tonight I had a nice online experience. It seems so easy to rant about dumb shit on the internet, so I felt it was high time to report some good (aside from sharing fun, strange or interesting media).

So, yeah, here I was intending on going to bed early (yeah, right) and ended up goofing off and hanging out with the usual suspects of my online life. The chatroom was going through some weird stuff today, but came back up later in the evening, so checked in with the regular crew. I got involved with other things and intended on going to bed (again) when I noticed someone new in the place that found it from the Paizo boards. I stopped in to say hi and the normal stuff, because I want folks to feel at home there (and honestly I’ve met some really solid folks there).

Anyway, the guy pops in talking about how he only played video game RPGs and only recently got involved with tabletop. I thought that was awesome. Sure, I know it happens. I’ve heard the reports. Hell, I might’ve even met a few folks who came to the tabletop hobby that way, but I’d forgotten the details since then. Maybe it was how the guy straight up laid out his journey to tabletop RPGs, or maybe it was that the tabletop RPG that he finally tumbled to was one that is near and dear to my heart. This lovely stranger found Pathfinder. Sure, he said he played 3.5 for like a year before finding Pathfinder, but still, how cool is that?

(Plus, the guy’s GM is a totally solid cat I’ve known on the boards for years, who’s reported a few troubles getting a table together in the past, so it’s good to see he’s got a good game going.)

Take that you we’re-losing-the-hobby-fanbase-due-to-video-games naysayers! Though in similar genres, the two types of games have tons of overlap and heaps of disconnect. I want to see a Venn diagram of those statistics before I make my call where things are headed, but I've still got my money on 'Fine'.

visited 13 states (5.77%)
Create your own visited map of The World or jurisdische veraling duits?

visited 16 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or vertaling nederlands duits?

A friend of mine linked this on his blog and I figured I'd move it along.

I rarely post anything here these days, but I'll leave you few watchers with an amazing mashup of two artists I truly admire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYa7furgQsA

So, today when I got home from work, I was talking on the phone to my friend Tim, when I wandered out to my backyard. I was just pacing while I talked on the phone, as I do, and ended up back there. Now, my lady has been doing amazing things to the backyard as far as gardens and interesting plant life go, but I always find myself attracted to the creek.

The creek always has something new. When I first moved into the house I wandered down to the creek and saw a bit of accumulated trash and decided to clean it up. Well, the creek looked good for a couple of weeks...until it rained again. Now I see the creek as a way for me to find things. Sometimes it's a really cool stone, or a half deflated spiderman soccer ball, or an interesting looking beached log, or some old dislodged bottle from 40 years ago. Well today, I met a fine specimen of a snapping turtle.

Damn thing was timid, so I didn't get the best shots, but here ya go:( Pictures after the cut )

Mardo lifted the chipped, clay mug to his lips, eyes never leaving his opponent’s face, as he spun his last tile between his thumb and middle finger against the oaken table.  The once-lacquered table held nearly thirty tiles of yellowing ivory, each marked with a number of pips.  The man on the other side of the table contorted his face in thought, eyes dancing between each of his three remaining tiles stacked in front of him on the table.

     As if the gentle tap of the mug against the table was the final clue to the man’s dilemma, the opponent’s face washed clear and he picked the tile in the middle of his edge-stacked row and placed it on one end of the sprawling arms of tiles.  Knowing there was no way possible to block his play, Mardo tossed his remaining tile toward one of the arms, edges lining up perfectly.  “Show your hand,” Mardo announced.

     Sliding his mug to the edge of the table Mardo boasted, “Man! You played that hand like you were the one up all night on duty.  That was my last pint and my last game.  Goodnight gentlemen, I am going home, and going to bed.”

     Rising from the old, yet sturdy chair, he grabbed his sword belt and the deep blue coat that marked his station as an officer cadet.  The morning-weary customers nearby groggily mumbled their well wishes as Mardo spun towards the door and headed out into the morning sun.

     Not three steps off the decked walkway onto the packed dirt road, last night’s rain already dried by the early sun, a crash and a number of screams sounded out a few blocks down toward Milharbor.  “A man’s work is never over,” he thought aloud.  His shoulders dropped as he rationalized, “There’s got to be someone else there to get this one.”  His brows knitted as if he was playing a tough hand and he almost turned away as his eyes locked on an old woman behind a cart hawking fruit.  “Damn it!”

     Mardo spun toward the disturbance, away from his welcoming bed, a low clamor issuing from the area.  He trotted a few paces as he buckled his sword belt around his narrow waist and drew his coat over his strong shoulders, and then he broke into a light run.  Never over, indeed.  He glanced back a few paces down to nod to the old woman, but she was not looking.

Today is my Dad's birthday. He would have been 61 today.

Happy Birthday Dad! I miss you and will raise a glass to you this evening!

Barton followed on hands and knees and watched from a fair distance as the beetle crawled through the well-trimmed grass. It was the biggest bug he had ever seen. It could probably eat one of the kittens Minnow had last month. This bug was huge. Its dark iridescent carapace glistened rainbow hues in the morning sun as it scuttled along. No one seemed to notice except him. It was nearing the whitewashed picket fence of the recess yard as the young boy glanced toward the Sister, as if to check if he was straying too far. A wink too short and he would have missed it as the enormous beetle struggled between two slats, stopping only to readjust its delicate wings under the hardened forewings. The Sister started to beckon Barton back just as her call was overwhelmed by a cacophony of splintering wood and the tumble of human flesh just across the street. 

            Two men, only moments ago loitering against the slat-board hostel, were knocked to the ground under an avalanche of stained lumber. A beetle the size of an ox, shining like an emerald in the sunlight, only interrupted by dissipating puffs of dust, steadily lumbered out onto the street through its newly crafted tunnel toward the schoolyard.

             “Barton!” the Sister shouted as she sprang from her seat, embroidery ring clacking against the lacquered timber decking. Behind dark curls, the boy’s eyes widened and he darted across the yard without even thinking, to catch the excitement. Upon seeing the monstrous insect intent on marching through the schoolyard, Barton froze, his eyes feeling like they took up his entire face, mouth going slack and perspiration beading on his soft skin. The shouts of the Sister sounded as they were issued through sewer pipes with his ears stuffed with cotton. His vision narrowed as everything in the periphery faded to a blur, except, in perfect clarity, this monster. The massive, shimmering vermin that is headed...right…for… 

            The child’s body went limp as Nydelle slipped her arms around his thin frame. Not expecting the resistance, the Sister’s slippers slid in the grass and she fell, legs sprawled in front of her, rear firmly on the dew-dropped lawn and her arms around this mesmerized child’s waist. The creature rose up as a spiny leg folded the wooden fence, creaking in the ground, down toward the child. She watched in slow motion shock as the angled tips of the fence fall within an inch of the dumbstruck child.  Shaking the fear from her mind, she pulled the boy to the ground and began to crawl away from the now-destroyed fence, while the shining, spiny beast marched across the schoolyard paying them no mind whatsoever. 

Tomorrow I am going to the fakest place on Earth. It should be interesting. 

Today, inside the normal envelope that holds my paycheck was boarding passes and hotel information for Las Vegas and $300 cash money. My boss rocks. 

He had been wanting to do a company trip. One of those “Team Building” bullshit things. He knows it’s not team building. Our company is six people large and the sixth one has only been with us for maybe two months. He just wants an excuse to reward us and take advantage of having a slow period (something we haven’t had for two years). 

When we first started talking about this, he was talking about going to New York. I’ve never been to New York, but I was nervous when he mentioned it, because I have so many people I need to visit there that I’d feel guilty about going to the city and not seeing them. Conversely, I’d feel guilty about ditching my work crew to go visit the folks I love and rarely get to see. After we spent some time debating it and trying to find a weekend that was good for everyone, it was already Fall, and I have issues with being cold, so we started looking South. 

Brett and I pitched Belize or somewhere in the Caribbean, but since I’m the only one who has a valid passport, the plan never got off the ground.Brian was wanting to get this trip done quickly, I think. 

So, here we are. My flight is in five and half hours and I can’t sleep. It’s not that I’m particularly excited, it’s just that he scheduled an early flight and I’m not used to going to bed before midnight thirty. We’ll have a ball. I don’t even gamble and I don’t have the requisite briefcase, but it will be fun all the same. Hell, it’s an all-expenses paid trip. How can that be bad?

My friend Hugo Solis (aka Butterfrog) drew this amazing picture of a very personal "character" of mine. Meet Elgiad Mada!

Hey! Whooo! Voting day! 

I’ve never been on the side of a winner. That’s fine. This isn’t a game.

 Everytime I’ve ever voted for a president, and most of every other political position, I’ve voted for someone other than a Democrat or a Republican. I’m sick of the concept of a two-party system in the United States of America. Why is it that I can choose more types of toilet paper than I can political candidates? Ridiculous.

 In the past I was yelled at for “wasting my vote”, and now that “Change” is the buzzword, I can proudly say that if you voted for a Democrat or Republican you had absolutely nothing to do with change. This is just business as usual. If the protracted campaign season didn’t clue you into this, just wait for the next four years.

 Please Americans, really consider change next time around and get rid of these corporate jokers.

Excerpt from It Went Like This: Memoirs from the Future

Though they said that the Cloud would disperse over a long period of time, one morning it was gone. We all woke up in the camp one day with the sun burning bright into our squinting eyes.

Martin, our camp officer let us all go out into the yard for the whole day with work duty cancelled. We must have looked like zombies stumbling about the dusty enclosure, among brave patches of brown grass clinging to life around the edges near the fence. Everything reflected the light and we shielded our eyes while defiantly gazing up into the sun. No one talked for the first hour. What would we have said? No one was accustomed to much more than the light tubes in the dorms and the pale grey glow trying to break through the Cloud on the light days.

The early morning warmth soon grew into a blazing heat. At least a heat compared to what we had been used to. The smattering of snow in the yard began to melt away. A handful of people, who normally would be working their way around the camp with blowtorches getting rid of the snow so that the children wouldn’t touch it, were animated in their discussion of the melting. They gestured to the snow and threw their hands up to the sky in adulation.

 It was over, for better or for worse, and we knew it. I quietly stood there looking at everyone celebrating and wondered how things would be now.

My best friend since our sophomore year of high school, Jessica had her baby today. I hooked her up with my friend Jeff and was the minister for their wedding a few years ago. They looked tired and wiped out, as one would imagine, but were totally stoked. The kid was pretty strong and alert for only being a little over four hours old in this picture.

Bennet Bear Walsh, give them hell.

Jess and Jeff, thanks for having kids so I don't have to. I'm more than happy to corrupt him when necessary, teach him all kinds of fucked up things, have a blast when we can and promptly give him back. I'll teach him to drink whiskey when the time comes, be sure of that.

This may be heresy to some of you reading this, but I do not play video games. (I do like watching people play them, however. Weird) Anyway, I'll keep this short and sweet.

I hate final fantasy.

Each time I start to research a monster idea - they've done it. It's like that "Simpson's did it" joke. Now, it makes sense. In a game where you have to beat up and kill a buncha monsters, you gotta have a buncha monsters, but it gives me pause as I plow though my monsters just knowing some console junkie is gonna try and call me out because my ****** is nothing like the one they played in FFXII.

So, I coin a new joke...."Final Fantasy did it!"

“No one wants to hear about what you dreamt about, unless you dreamt about them.”

                                                                                    -Doug Martsch

 Yeah, so.

 I really enjoy dream and have experimented with it since I was a kid. Even though the majority of my dreams are truly mundane, I dream lucidly often and have had some pretty interesting dream experiences over the years. Despite my love for the mental exercise, I really hate talking about my dreams to random other people. I even started a thread on my favorite message board a year or so ago about dreams, because I was inspired by a particularly powerful one, and have barely contributed. I don’t write them down, I don’t record them in any way and when I tell people about them I hate the look on their face. As Bill Hicks described it, they look “like a dog being shown a card trick.”

 Dreams are entirely personal affairs that rarely translate well. Bits and pieces of your nighttime journeys are easy to convey, but most of the time the sensation you felt upon waking is lost on the general audience. Dreams are a very singular, rambling jumble when they happen and trying to edit and condense them into a linear story for a strange audience, in true form, will never work. Only those that really know you, or other dream enthusiasts, will ever get it. This is not to say that you can’t part out your dreams for all manner of inspiration, but just don’t expect a second or third party to get it. I draw many of my creative exploits from dream.

 I’ve had a very active dream cycle lately, and when I commented on this to a friend, they said that they heard that everyone in your dreams is an extension of yourself. Reflexively, I was opposed to that idea, but in less than a second I realized the idea was as simple as thought itself. Of course all the characters in dream are representations of self, they are birthed by your own mind, cast as your basic thoughts.

 The reason I’m getting into this subject here, is that this past week, I’ve experienced a phenomena that I have never had as strongly in all my years of dream walking. Almost a theme throughout my last week of dreaming, duality has popped up. In an earlier dream, I was being forced to choose which of two people I was and wanted to be forever. That is a terrible translation, but I already warned you about that. It’s all dream hogwash that I don’t want to get into here, but the dream I had last night really stood strong.

 I was hanging with my Dad, who was younger than I ever remembered him. He was close to my age now, and I was close to the age I was when he died. With him was a small boy with bright blonde hair who was about three or four, who kept running around us trying to butt into our conversation, or at least get attention. In the dream, we had that best friend feeling about ourselves as we talked about life changes, things we were up to in our lives and the kind of things confidants discuss. Throughout the dream, the perspective kept switching. One moment I was talking to my Dad with this little boy running around us, and the next I was running around my Dad and this guy, who were talking and having a great time while I tried to get their attention. The whole conversation flowed naturally, but it was a little jarring. I managed to stay in the dream for a while.

 Waking was bad. I wanted to stay in. I wanted to not have to go to work. I wanted to talk to my Dad some more, who ever I was at the time. I floated through the rest of the day kinda weirdly. I had a visual migraine the night before and went to bed with one. I woke to a headache that didn’t go away until I was nearly off work. I don’t think they were related, but if for any weird brain reason they were, I would do it again and again.

I thought it would be fun to start taking pictures of the board after a game and then use the collection of words as a practice tool.

I breathed powdered concrete today. In an office where we were doing an install, the frugal doctor was upset that his stained concrete reception countertop was not as smooth as marble or granite. I figure that if you want marble or granite, buy marble or granite. I don’t bitch when a lower quality facsimile isn’t as good as the original, but I guess people have different expectations.

So the doctor had his countertop guys out today grinding down the concrete and buffing it. All day, grinding, buffing. One guy had either a dremel or a sander interchangeably while his helper followed him around with a shop vac. He had the hose right up against the tool slowly creeping behind the sander as it buzzed finely pulverized concrete into the air. Only some of it went into that bellowing mechanical elephant, and the bits that did were mostly just blowing out the exhaust of the vacuum.

In the last two years of doing this job, I’ve been in crawlspaces that haven’t seen action in thirty years. I’ve crawled around in the ceiling of a hotel right behind, where they do all the washing, drying and folding of all the towels, sheets and uniforms, where lint stood three inches thick on the ceiling tiles making the space look like a Christmas display. I’ve crawled under buildings where I talk to the colonies of spiders and other bugs living down there. I’ve been in a number of new buildings where sawdust, drywall and concrete dust linger in a haze throughout the whole building.

Taking a shower when I got home, I was actually wondering what color my boogers would be. See, when you breathe in this stuff most of it gets trapped by your mucus. Anyone who’s ever been to a big dusty outdoor concert or sat around a campfire all night has probably noticed this. I was wondering, there in the shower, if this stained concrete dust would be anything but plain old grey black.

I also thought about where I grew up. I grew up right in the middle of no less than a dozen refineries (probably twenty or more of different sizes). My Dad worked in one. Most of my friend’s dads worked in one. Everyone saw them. You couldn’t miss the towers full of lights standing tall across the low coastal plain. When I was a kid, I imagined they were skyscrapers of Martian cities. These towers burned these huge flares to release pressure from gas buildup or something, and the jet of flame looked like it was ten stories tall. The sunsets were in Technicolor. It was like a classic Southwestern sunset, or the pictures in the brochures for an island getaway, but filtered through such a copious amount of chemicals that the colors stood out a little differently. The purples I remember the best, and sometimes, on certain days, you could almost swear there was a greenish tint to it.

Now you may be wondering what this has to do with me pondering what color my boogers might be after breathing stained concrete dust all day. It was then that I realized not everyone is used to seeing what they breathe.

Excerpt from It Went Like This: Memoirs from the Future



"For our honeymoon, we went to the gardens in Paris to see their collection of plants that survived. There were all sorts of cacti and succulents, orchids and bromeliads. In the far back of the dome where there is less traffic, there is even a section housing all the plants that people considered weeds.

I liked this part the best actually. There was much more diversity in these tenacious little plants. Some were creeping vines and others spread out across their bed like a puddle of rounded leaves and purple flowers bubbling up from the ground. Floating through the air in this section was feathery seedpods and specks of pollen doing loopty loops in the eddies of passing tourists. My mom told me how they used to pick dandelions in their backyard and make a wish on them as they blew the seeds away from the stem.

Children helping spread the next generation by blowing wishes at these ‘weeds’ and fathers across the old suburban sprawls admonishing them for making their lawn care that much more difficult. As hard as people tried for years to get rid of dandelions, it seems strange to seem them in a display these days."

Excerpt from It Went Like This: Memoirs from the Future




"I was working at a Dairy Queen in Port Arthur, Texas when that first satellite came down. I went outside for a smoke break and was sitting on a milk crate next to the grease trap when I saw something lighting up the clouds, like a refinery flare. I walked out into the parking lot to see what it was. In a little break in the clouds, I saw a ball of fire streaking across the sky. I raced to my car for my camera and was able to snap a picture after it went right over, racing towards the horizon."

Excerpt from It Went Like This: Memoirs from the Future




"I nearly died from wasp stings when I was a kid. My hands and arms swoll up so much that they looked like engorged firehoses, even poking up and away from my body as if under pressure. I didn't recognize myself in a mirror with the fat cheeks and pinched slits for eyes. My throat constricted so much they had to put a tube down there so I could breathe. Even after all that, I kind of miss them now that they are gone."

Photo from Expedition to the Backyard
Braving the Boggy Creek

Once, in those lovely times of the early 90’s, I captured a quite large cockroach in my family’s kitchen.  I carefully grabbed the spiky squirming insect and upturned my hand to cover the mouth of an old Bell canning jar, but the bug would not climb down into its new home.  With a shake, it dropped down into the cool glass jar and I capped it.

            I watched the critter for a little bit and dropped some foods I though it might enjoy, like breadcrumbs, some grains of sugar, a bit of an apple and a few drops of water.  The cockroach was not concerned with the food at all.  It only sought to avoid the bright light of the kitchen and climbed into the lid of the jar, safely hidden in the shadows.  I dimmed the lights and continued to watch.  It climbed down and immediately began cleaning itself.  Apparently, I am the filthy creature.  Who knew? 

            I carried the jar around with me for a couple hours when I went out with my friends, then felt guilty for my abduction and experimentation.  I opened the jar and laid it on its side in a parking lot.  Carefully sorting out its environment, the cockroach crawled out of the jar and wandered over to me sitting on a nearby parking block.  I put my hand down and it climbed up and into my palm.  Seems I wasn’t so filthy after all.  I set it loose behind a fast-food chicken joint and went on with my evening thinking if a tiny biological machine like that is even capable of a spark of reason.  Do bugs just follow a program?

            I’ve always liked bugs and creepy crawly critters.  Always having been a champion of the underdog, I love the power that such tiny and harmless creatures have over us – the kings of the world.  They certainly have us outnumbered and a few of their brethren can kill or injure with but a prick of the skin, but we have feet and brains that come up with all manner of chemicals, sticky starvation traps and mechanical extermination devices.

            Cockroaches instill a particularly strong sense of disgust and fear.  It is interesting to note that they solely subsist on decaying organic matter; something modern humans are unparalleled at creating.  They have been around longer, but cockroaches have found a friend in humans.  Despite our attempts at insecticide, our activities, habitats and movements across this most insecure of planets has only helped them.  Cockroaches, like humans, are ridiculously adaptive, so take time to think of all our tiny cohabiters every now and then and resist the power trip to swat and smash.  Do it for me