Just a quick note – as I’ve done for the past couple years, with Christmas and my birthday coming up fairly soon I’ve created an Amazon Wishlist for friends and family looking to tickle my gift fancy this year. As always, the WoW Gift Card is the thing that really floats my boat – since WoW is about the entire extent of my socializing and entertainment, an extra two months is always cause for celebration!
Just a quick note to let everyone know I’ll be out of town and away from the computer until around Sunday August 30th. I’ll catch up on email and forum posts when I get back.
UPDATE: Actually I’ve extended my return date three times since I’ve been here! Currently scheduled for return on Saturday September 12th.
UPDATE2: This is it now, for real – flying back to Tucson on Saturday night, September 19th … my week long visit turned into a wonderful month-long vacation and retreat.
Greetings all!
I’ve been back from Vegas for a few weeks now – had fun, took many pictures of the casinos we trekked through, I’ll try to get those uploaded to a gallery soon.
It seems impossible, but Christmas is once again just around the corner – as happens every year, I remember now my thoughts of last year, thinking to myself “Well there’s no way I’ll still be in the same horrible state of mind next Christmas as I am this year”. And the year before that, and before that, going back more years than I care to count.
Anyway, the reason I’m thinking of Christmas in early November is because I’ve had a couple people poking around already for gift ideas for Christmas and my birthday (same day!) – so, I’ve updated my Amazon wishlist for friends and family with gift-giving on their minds:
The big thing for this year of course is the new World of Warcraft expansion, “Wrath of the Lich King”. My dad and sister were kind enough to pitch in on that one as an early present, so I should be playing it in less than a week – woooo!
Well folks – visitors to TheMook.Net, Laid Back Assassins, SoF2 players, MookUI users, GURPS players, and any of the other sundry net crawlers who frequent these pages: I’ll be offline for a week (that’s right! a week!) while vacationing in Las Vegas with my family.
It will be unusual to be completely off the internet for so long (I’m not bringing my laptop), but my guess is there might just be enough interesting things going on in Vegas to keep my mind off it.
I hope everyone has as good a week as I plan to. I’ll catch up on email and forum posts once I get back, and I’ll be sure to take some pics … until then: be well!
So I notice it’s been nearly three months since last I posted. No surprise there, I tend to live in my own time continuum where weeks and months fly by and crawl by simultaneously. But eventually something sufficiently motivating will occur and I’ll do a little typing.
I just found out that George Carlin died yesterday, of heart problems. Sad news to hear. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Carlin – we certainly disagreed on a lot of things, but that’s completely irrelevant to me, because he was a thinker (and incredibly funny).
In particular he would think me a fool for believing in God: he passionately believed that all religion was the worst kind of ridiculous make-believe. But he was a thinker, he came by his beliefs after a lot of time and energy, and I have infinitely more in common with a man like that than with the countless hordes of my fellow believers who give no thought whatsoever to anything deeper than what’s on tv tonight.
My faith didn’t just fall from the sky one day. It is what it is today because of untold hours of thinking, reading, writing, meditating, praying; I’ve looked inside myself, outside myself, considered dozens of viewpoints about the meaning of life and humanity’s place in the universe. In short, I’ve worked at it – I’ve taken the time to consider the profound questions, the important truths, and while Carlin would doubtless be disappointed at my conclusions, I like to think he would respect the thought and self-examination involved in the process.
George Carlin was foul-mouthed, brutally honest, and very, very funny. He was a great comedian, but not a clown or a buffoon. He entertained his audiences by challenging them to think – think about themselves, think about those they allow to govern them, think about the world around them.
I’m sure many will fondly remember Carlin for his classic bits, like ‘Seven Dirty Words’, or his memorable movie roles, like “Bill and Ted’s” Rufus, or even his TV role as ‘Mr. Conductor’ on “Shining Time Station”. Here is one of my favorite Carlin routines – I’ll miss ya George.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HAGc521SAo[/youtube]
P.S.
The irony of this post’s title does not escape me – I believe George’s exact thought would be, “He didn’t ‘pass’ anything! He fuckin’ died!”
P.P.S.
Or, as my good friend Hydrophidian put it: “George Carlin Passes – TOUCHDOWN!” I think Carlin would have appreciated that.
I am so, so unbelievably upset right now! I’m amazed I can even type my hands are shaking so bad from anger and shock.
It was supposed to be a great day. I’ve been planning on getting a tattoo for years, and my sister offered to pay for it with some of the tax refund she got back. So I made an appointment last week and today was the day, 9am, first thing in the morning.
Got a little lost finding the place, but was still there before 9:00 so no biggie. The place seemed a lot dingier than it did when I had made the appointment, suddenly I was thinking about hepatitis and infection and all sorts of horrible things, and the artist who was doing my arm either smelled like cologne or alcohol. Since it was still so early in the morning I chose to believe it was cologne.
So Gary Gygax died yesterday, at the age of 69.
I know that for very many of you reading this, your first thought is ‘Oh that’s too bad – who is Gary Gygax?’
He was the co-creator of the role-playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’; which gave birth to a galaxy of other role-playing games like Traveller, GURPS, Vampire: the Masquerade, and literally hundreds of others; which directly paved the way and provided inspiration for countless computer role-playing games, novels, and movies over the past 30+ years.
It’s hard to overestimate the influence Gary had on the landscape of modern entertainment – things would be very different today were it not for his ‘little game’.
But it’s much more than that – I’m not sure I can adequately explain what gaming meant to me growing up, or the impact it has had on making me who I am.
Wow.
Did you ever see someone and just want to slap the ever-living hell out of them? I mean seriously just want to pop them in the mouth until they cry?
This is the biggest, most obnoxious d-bag I’ve seen in years. Seriously, just watching this clip makes me want to break something.
[youtube width=”400″ height=”334″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GgWrV8TcUc[/youtube]
Sure, maybe the kids were giving him some lip – tough shit. The only one disgracing that badge and uniform was you, you worthless piece of trash bully.
As a complete counterpoint to my recent issues with other companies, let me tell you about the webhosting company I use for TheMook.Net, EsoSoft.
From day one they have been an absolute pleasure to work with. My website’s uptime is well over 95%, probably closer to 98% or 99%, and their fees are incredibly reasonable. Every single time I’ve had a question of any sort, they’ve answered it quickly and with a smile. I’ve never had a single problem related to their servers – php works the way it should, the MySql database has never corrupted or frozen, all of their user control panels work flawlessly.
When an irate company requested that they take down my site, they stood up for me and rightly responded that, barring any sort of illegal activity, it isn’t their place to censor their customers’ sites. When I recently made huge upgrades to my site’s forum and blog software, the changes went off without a hitch – no traffic caps, no permissions errors, nothing.
In email after email over the years, without exception, regardless of what I was inquiring about, their customer service has been friendly, knowledgeable, and sociable. The email exchanges have always been more like chatting with buddies than dealing with a corporation! In a word, I’ve always found EsoSoft to be the perfect company (and no, I don’t have any sort of connection to the company beyond just being a happy, super-satisfied customer).
Regarding my internet connection – today has been pretty good, it was down most of the morning, but it’s been up and steady since about 11am. Still keeping my fingers crossed!
This post is mainly for my family and friends though, mostly back East, who keep asking ‘What do you want for Christmas and/or your birthday?’, and I usually just say ‘Uh … I don’t know.” Not very helpful I know, so I set up a little Amazon wish list to give you some ideas:
Christmas-Birthday 2007 Wish List
Frankly good ol’ cash in a card is nice too, owing to my “cash flow problems”, but I know a lot of folks find that tacky for whatever reason, hence the list.
Nothing other than a ‘Merry Christmas’ is fine too, considering I’m not really in a position to reciprocate any holiday gift giving (and as for birthdays, I’m usually awful at remembering them – if mine weren’t on Christmas, I’d probably forget it too).
