Posting this in relay, but not here to check messages (work, work, work.)

One of the old irritants of the White Wolf gaming system has been their catagorization of plurality as a five-point flaw. Previously, there was no distinction made between functional and non-functional; every form of plurality was 'multiple personality disorder' and while your character could have 'an alternate personality' which had a different Nature/Demeanor, it was still considered a derangement.

In the most recent version of Changeling (under the new paradigm) we came across this section while browing the updated Changeling: The Lost:

( functional multiple personalities, by white wolf )

Our feelings on the subject are mixed, naturally. Our overall reaction is that:
1. Functional multiple personality being recognized (though still considered a derangement) is an improvement.
2. Having non-integration as an option and having it called functional is also nice.
3. Re: the 'special Merit.' We feel it's total BS about needing less sleep on a regular basis (even if the mind is restored, the physical body needs a certain amount of sleep and will start to wear down after too little rest under its own requirement), BUT the fact that there is a special beneficial merit does help to make functional plurality look 'cooler' than the dysfunctional version. It's attractive now, or at least more attractive than just a freakshow flaw.

It's a nice change to see, at least. Small, baby steps.

So how's that July going for everyone? Strange and often away from the computer, eh? Me too. Sort of. It's been good to pick up the original writing stuff again, though of course I start brushing off one story and promptly veer to a second that's been brewing for a few years, and then start getting impulses to work on a germ of an idea that really hasn't developed much at all. Yes! Ugh.

[fic stuff]
^Miriam was talking to me today about the feasibility of having some sort of routine fic rec from the rest of the pack, at which point I pointed out: no one reading this journal (still) is here for fic, it's not exactly plausible to put it on my personal journal, and making a fresh journal somewhere means it'll get dusty and never updated. Everyone else reads more fic; I usually don't. I update more; they usually don't. These two things meet halfway in the sense of two tractor trailers passing one another on the highway: they might appear of equal size, but all that means is that any collision will be twice as messy. (Am I the only one of us who rambles at the drop of a hat in text format these days? Apparently so.)

[mmorpg]
^Malik apparently lost ~3.5 gold off his LotRO character bank (in WoW terms, this would be about ~3500-4000 gold), due to a series of messy accidents which involved everything but the money being transferred off the character before it was deleted to make room on the list. As a warning to anyone who plays LotRO: character deletion is not reversible. There goes his mount fund. His reaction? Was to shrug and say, 'I suppose this means I get more time to walk.'

It's so healthy it's unhealthy.

Then, instead of farming, he spent his evening helping out random lowbies on their crafting quests. Not useful, Malik.

Finally got our T4 shoulders. No more Ghetto Bold! Alas. Void Reaver at 1% wipe. Ho ho ho.

[link of the week]
If you are Flash-enabled and love exploring a site for an hour or so, check out Nobody Here. (You may want the English and/or Japanese versions rather than the Dutch.) Every time I go there, I never travel the same exact way twice -- though I do visit the same pages frequently, looping around and around in some kind of hypnotic maze. Great place. Nice Flash. Go play.

How do you tell a coworker that their coffee is awful? At first we were grateful that we could come into the office and a pot would already be made without us having to do it, but my god, this stuff is weak. I've taken to brewing a half-pot in the middle of the day that's overly strong so it'll mix with the weaker and form some magical fusion in the coffeepot. Gah.

[writing] Someone fielded this interview of Philip Pullman with Third Way in my direction, and even though I have a markedly neutral opinion on the man's writing (and almost zero awareness of how he is as a human being), I found it refreshing for several parts, one of which is this:

Q: Many of the commentators in the media have seen you as a conscious antidote to C S Lewis, seeking to do for a moral atheism what he did for Christianity.

A: Yeah, well, it's largely nonsense, of course.

It just struck me as a interview where the author is not taking himself that seriously, and that's always good to see.

[film] On that subject, the Golden Compass movie that's coming out has peaked our interest, even though none of us could really get interested in the books. I think it's because we've been hoping for something visually fantastical and stimulating, and while Harry Potter and Narnia both were massive contenders, neither of them really gave us a feeling of wonder. I was hoping that Pan's Labyrinth would accomplish that -- just looking at the DVD packaging -- but a coworker of ours watched it and said that the interjections of visual effects were minimal compared to the packaging hype. Opinions?

In desperation, we have thought about going to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry when it comes out, even though we're confident it'll be awful, just because we can't figure out what to watch this summer.

[tech] So, Safari's come out in beta format for the IBM, eh? What amuses us greatly is the whole 'Macs are superior for graphics' standard (which half of us support; we're divided on the Mac vs. PC line, internally) and yet one common glitch seems to be that some Safari installs refuse to show text when run on a PC with a 'high number of fonts.' Considering that most designers would have said high number of fonts -- and that the fixes suggested don't always work on all machines, our work one as an example -- and we'll wait for the next version to come out. Or we can get impatient and wade through all the fixes and paths and attempts for another hour. I'm thinking we'll wait.

It'll be very handy for testing websites cross-platform though. Eventually.

[mmorpg] ^Malik wanted me to ask if anyone else here is trying out the Lord of the Rings Online game (most of us are not, because we were driven away by the 'woe is me' elves.) Thanks, Mal, you could have told me that before I cluttered up the post with spam.

[other reads]
- Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'; yes, the original proposal was 1994 and you've seen this link everywhere by now, but it's still hilarious.

- You've all probably seen the links of 'Girl in Panic Kills Newborn Child,' but here's one that may have slipped past: Natural Miscarriage Being Charged As Murder. Scroll past all the hype and read the details. I did wonder greatly about her mentality when I read about the use of the freezer, but noticed in the comments that people talked about how that's not a particularly bad idea considering the clinics would need to examine the remains afterwards, and what's the other option for storage -- a cooler?

- As always, the amount of parents who are killing their children with the justification that their children are autistic kind of disturbs me.

Client of the Week, or, Ways to Compromise Security:

Them: Hey, can you FTP the files up to our website? We're not too tech-savvy.
Us: Sure. Do you have a login we can use?
Them: Sure. Here. *hands over the password to their account with their host provider*
Us: WHAT. No. NO. Ok, fine, look, I will close my eyes and pretend I do not have master level access to things like your billing information, and just set myself up an FTP account and handle things that way.
Them: Okay!
Us: Except that doing so requires answering a secret question. Okay, can you guys set up an account after all? Very easy, here are the steps.
Them: Huh? No, we'll just give you the answers to all our secret questions!
Us: NO STOP. STOP. oh god.

Well, hey -- so our reading of lists remains nonexistant, and I'm sure by posting here I've reminded folks that this journal exists at all. That being said, I invite the following just on principle: if you're tired of the journal hanging around without adding much in the way of reading content, it's cool to take it off your list. I may trim the friends listing myself sometime, just to update things. It's a common truth that people will grow away from each other and move across social circles, so if you want to trim us off because we have no interaction whatsoever these days, I fully understand. Tidying house and all that.

Maybe by using neat brackets, I can organize the content better! Probably not.

[writing] Still doing this as a hobby on the side. Still mystified whenever someone tries to say, 'that lucas guy is not that good of a writer' -- well, yes, I am awful. Did I attempt to portray myself in any other fashion? Right. So... if we both already knew that I suck as a cold, absolute certainty, why is it being emphasized? (^Luka tells me people probably assume that I think I'm All That, which would be hilarious if only it were true. But it would explain the, 'by the way, you're a pretty shitty author' 'no REALLY?' rift now and then: 'you suck' 'yes, this is a fact, can we talk about something actually useful or do you want to repeat the obvious some more' -- etc.)

Koan of the Day: "If you created something and at least one person doesn't hate it, you've done it wrong."

I've already done my share of talking about art topics and censorship and society in light of the LJ bannings, so I won't repeat it here. I do see that pornish_pixies is back, which is good; I don't read them, but man did I wince when I heard that 4 years of work on a community got nuked without recovery. Anyway, it's back. I'm sure the first thing they will do is archive.

If you're having a lovely time trying to deal with inspiration after watching the most recent Pirates movie, here's a quick, useful diagram to help you remember which part of the ship is above water: Notes on Sailing Warships Browse around a bit too, the other information is easy to digest if all you're looking for a quick and dirty 'which sail is this' reference.

Also amusing if you know Stargate Atlantis: The Rodney McKay Backhanded Compliments Meme. I have no idea how we navigated onto this page because ^Dom simply prodded me and went, 'hey, this is funny, come be amused.' So I am. And I'm passing it along because the concept may amuse others.

[tech] If you haven't seen the advancements yet into touch-screen UIs, Microsoft's been continuing to develop their Surface product. It's still a far cry from the sci-fi shows, but it's interesting to see at the rate of which things are progressing. Check out how they've got the UI set up so far with pressure recognition.

Two-point touch (aka, 'holding' a window in place with one finger and 'stretching' it with a second finger dragging) has been a serious technological issue to confront in the past, but it seems as if it's being dealt with at last.

Microsoft Surface Promo Clips (note: Flash required, high memory drain.)

[webdesign]
- If you like Flash work or simply interesting animation, AcroMedia's got some nice, solid stuff up in their folio. (Flash)
- If you are like us and benefit from a visual explanation of CSS positioning, BarelyFitz has a very useful set of illustrations you can tab through to see comparisons. Invaluable for our artists, who can't connect code to what happens on the screen.
- Pantone/RBG/HTML/Color Sample chart. Useful if you're trying to dial back from a client who's picky about their Pantones, and you're frustrated trying to find it under Photoshop, or if you want to spot-check a color.

Oh, sweet. A movie adaptation would be just great for this game, if it's done right.

Here is the IMDB listing too.

I need to dig out our copy of the game and load it onto the computer now that it can finally handle it.

Lucas: "His blog has nice Red pictures."
Me: "Stop thinking about writing."

Earlier this week, ^Isere woke up from a dream of a WSG where the Horde were turtling (more common than you think these days) which apparently had turned into a nightmare that he was me. I'm not sure about exactly how that works, but sure, why not.

"So," I ventured, "what was it like, being me?"

He turned wide, horrified eyes to me. "...arrogant."

I was amused.

Apparently I was so exhausted last night that, when my cat started to chew on my finger in its customary attempts to make me wake up early and feed it, it broke the skin twice.

I have dim memories of moving my hand under the covers, and now, two puncture wounds.

Rank 11: Accomplished.

And now I'm going to take a night off.

When maintenance finishes at Blizzard today, we'll get to see if ^Isere finally made Rank 11 with our druid. All I've heard in the last two weeks from his direction has been a lot of grumbling about standing and bonus honor weekend and something about wtf pom pyro mages with 4k crit + insta followup 800 fire blast. Considering that Rank 10 was the only one that he had to spend more than a week clearing, I hear that's pretty good, but I think after seeing his progress, none of us want to do it again. Maybe with ^Miriam's priest, and then, only for a little +dmg gear for grinding.

(For the curious, he's about 70% through Rank 10, placing consistently at ~standing 30 each week. Even with a lower honor count than usual this week, we're betting that he still makes it, but he'll be restless all day until he finds out.)

However, the honor system is getting completely revamped for the expansion, so the Rank 11 mounts should be more manageable. Last I heard, it was 80 battleground tokens for the AV Mount; there's the riding cost left to buy, I'd imagine, but I also heard the normal Rank 11 war mounts only take 75 skill, even though my AV ram has a nice shiny label of 150. I suppose it's apples and oranges.

I took a look at the BG rep he had racked up along the way last night. It's a bit depressing that the BG rep will also be wiped out come expansion, so I wanted to see how far he'd come before the clear. Full 999/1000 AV, no surprise there, but he was 10/21k AB and 999/1000 WSG.

"How did you get that?" I asked him. WSG is our lowest rep on all our other alts.

"Flag running," he told me, straight-faced. "Nothing but flag running."

That's a lot of flags.

Apparently there is an Alliance guild out there called, [At Least We Have Stables]. This is counterweighted by the Horde guild, [We Still Have the Farm]. Oh Alliance, why do you have a communal allergy to AB.

Since I can't get the concentration together to write, and even less to actually be productive finishing off some work projects, I figured I'd post a little bit here.

( livejournal layouts )
( if it says, 'do not touch', it probably means, 'do not touch' )
( self-fulfilling standards strike again )

For some light gaming humor: if you play FFXI or WoW at all, you might be amused by [GM]Dave's Bannable Offenses. What struck us as specifically funny was this entry about Refresh with Red Mages; as ^Isere put it, all you'd have to do is swap 'Paladin' for 'Red Mage,' and 'Blessing' for 'Refresh,' and you'd have something which transcends worlds.

This has been your daily dose of snark from my corner; I'll go back to attempts of productivity now.

Oh, right: and ^Janus's coloring of kytha's lineart gets you something from Kingdom Hearts 2, and something involving cats.

And whoever renewed our account for us... thank you!

Unfortunately, since we haven't updated our email information for a year (and don't have rooknest at hotmail anymore), the culprit didn't get sent to us, so... thank you whoever it was!

Time to do the final checkthrough of Magpies chapter, and it should be set...

I'm lazy, so I'm not posting to my writing journal right now. This one is so underused. Everyone who's in internal government right now just isn't in the habit of journaling, except possibly me, and I post everything to rabbitprint anyway.

We're good though, if anyone's curious. Stable job, could use more pay, but that's about par for the course. We've had a few people get hired in internal offices -- notably for our external job -- and they're doing wonderfully. I've been writing still, but my time gets split with people who actually do work, so it's only fair that they have downtime to relax. Apparently, this downtime includes raiding C'thun and Naxx. Will I ever get more free time? I ask them, and then they point out that I hogged the last few years of recreational hours, so I can't really protest. Much.

^Janus has done some coloring with kytha, but I'm not sure what the release details are on that, so maybe I'll get a link in here sometime.

We have a backlog of updates to do on the side for things like the Layman's Guide and our website, but those are on the agenda. Otherwise: healthy, still employed, doing well, the usual.

And somehow, I forgot to renew our picture count -- it'd be a waste, since we... don't post here much -- so I can't use my userpic, but imagine it's there if you'd like.

- Lucas

It's strange, but I'm relaxed today. And before I get diverted trying to find a good LJ style that displays the pictures next to each entry, I think I'm going to be selfish and journal first.

Relaxed, in that way that I want to throw grammar out the window and start to drawl. Bryant and Kirstin have met with Luka and Angeline to go over the monthly budget, which ended up with figures much lower than anyone's happy with, but c'est la vie.

Selfish, because I've engaged in light debate with Malik and have agreed with the school of thought that says a person can only do so much, and isn't responsible for the entire world. Right now I'm of the opinion that a lot of what people go through might be pointed at you in nasty ways, but nothing about it's going to be clear until they overcome the actual issue at hand--which might be something completely different than how it seems to be manifesting. Someone might be angry, they blame you for not giving enough attention to them to magically fix their problem, but that isn't really the solution, nor the real underlying issue.

( boring spam about human interactions, blame, and recognitions )

Enough of that. I sound like a motivational poster.

You forget about the stupid choices other people make, because they weren't really pointed at you anyway. Not really. And they can forget about all the idiotic things you've done, if they feel like returning the favor. Malik said that 'living well isn't the best revenge, it's the best forgiveness', but that's the kind of sappy thing he likes to come up with.

Anyway.

That could just be a perspective that stems from the fact that time has a short shelf life. Ten years might be enough to make a person entirely different. Might as well toss out everything that's over a year old and keep meeting them anew, just to keep yourself up to date.

And of course this is a different opinion than I had a few years back. And it'll be a different opinion than the future. That's because the environment around me is always changing--not maturing, just changing--and I like to keep up with it.


I actually like what I've started writing for Nanowrimo, which is a sign that the world's going to end.

I also like this, which reminds me of the Griffin and Sabine stories, and I believe is related to kytha's Nanowrimo. I could be wrong; I usually am.


- Lucas