ONE LAST CHANCE TO MAKE IT REAL

Our assignment for today, class, is to craft a blog entry so inaccessible and/or boring that no one whatsoever posts a response to it.

You’d think this would be easy, since I’ve done it many times before. But we’ll see.

Odd little notes:

At some point, I may get back onto something remotely approaching a normal sleep schedule. I don’t think it’s going to happen while I’m living with Paul, though. Unless I end up getting a job with normal hours, in which case, well, the adjustment for the first week or so is going to be brutal… and the contrast between my schedule and Paul’s, until I get enough cash together to move out, will be… interesting. But that’s not happening yet, and there’s no point in borrowing trouble by worrying about it.

The Day of Reckoning, in re: an immediate need for re-employment, got put off a little longer yesterday by an email from the Website Publisher Who Must Not Be Named, telling me that even though I hadn’t submitted much of anything for the last 90 day quarter, nonetheless, he’d just cut me a check for slightly in excess of $400 and mailed it off to my new address.

This is amazing for many reasons (ah… I’ve been beating on my monitor intermittently for the last five minutes to make it show my red tones again, and finally it got its act together): First, it simply underscores again the sub-economy of Zephyrhills. In Tampa, $400 wouldn’t have covered my rent. Here, on the other hand, $400… well, sharing expenses with a roommate, it’s pretty much enough to cover my monthly nut with a tiny bit left over.

Oh, on that subject, Paul’s landlady got clued in as to my presence here, and Paul seems to have (rather shrewdly for him) cut her off at the pass by suggesting a $50 a month rent increase before she could jump in and suggest more. So that sub-economy has just increased a bit, but still… my half of the rent is now $175. I mean, geez. With a $30 phone bill every month, and about another $200 in water and electricity, that means… well, it means my $400 goes a long way, as noted. Whereas it would have evaporated in a heartbeat back in Tampa, as also noted.

What’s also interesting is that I’d really expected to get no check at all this quarter from The Website Which Must Not Be Named, since I really haven’t written much for the last three months… these quarters and this atmosphere aren’t conducive to that kind of creative production. That $400 is almost entirely based on the backlog of stories still up on the site. So, if I dig in and start really hacking the crap out for the next three months, posting a new story (however brief it may be) every three or four days to keep my name and the link to my page prominently displayed at the front of the site, I might double or even triple that amount 90 days down the road. I have to assume, if I’m still here in November, I’ll have had to knuckle under and get some kind of job by then, and if I still manage to produce stuff for the site the way I hope to, getting a check for, say, $900 or $1000 sometime in November…

Well, chickens not to be counted at this time, yeah.

My mom sent me an email yesterday. Ironically, while she meant to encourage me to keep doing this blog because it’s one stop shopping for news of me and Paul, she also mentioned that she finds some of my opinions regarding the family to be really annoying. This troubles me; my mom is important to me and I don’t want to aggravate her. Which means that, basically, it’s yet another argument for going back to a private blog. Or, I suppose, I could simply resign myself to only doing Happy Happy Family News, featuring Only Well Scrubbed And Relentlessly Cheerful Versions of my various relatives. Or I could just stop talking about my family at all, I suppose. However, in the end, it’s just another layer being added to the filters between me and complete truthfulness, and, well, that’s what’s going to happen when you’re writing for an audience, but… as I say… it’s another point on the graph.

I took some of the Instant Cockroach Death Goo and spread it on my wall in the area where I’d seen a few solo bugs crawling last week, and it seems to have worked; I haven’t seen a one of them since back here. However, they’re making a sluggish comeback out front; Paul and I have noticed more of them lately out there. Doubtless it’s time to change the various roach motels in all the corners of the perimeter, and by more Instant Cockroach Death Goo to spread around. My cousin Chad says that when he and Mel had this problem last year, they bought a ton of ICDG and Mel basically used it as caulk, lining the seams where all the walls come together floor to ceiling with the crap, and all the baseboards, too. I’m thinking this may be a good way to go.

Socially it’s been odd around here. Pat still drops by most nights but only for a few moments, apparently just to reinforce his and Paul’s mutual reality. It’s the STAR WARS game, of course; since everybody in the immediate clique bought their own copy, that’s eating up most of their social energy.

I haven’t seen Kyle in weeks; since Pat isn’t dropping by to game any more, he isn’t hanging out at all. Scott, on the other hand, is over here pretty much every night and, on his days off when they coincide with Paul’s, all damn day, too. Those tend to be very intense days for Paul’s budget; he and Scott go through the horticultural supplies like a forest fire, getting wasted and staying wasted for 12 hours at a stretch. Not that it makes them bad company; as I’ve noted, when people are really wasted, they laugh at anything you say, and, well, it’s nice to be in a social environment in which, apparently, one is a complete hoot.

The STAR WARS game itself seems to be gradually losing its hold on these guys, though. Paul had said, when he was about a third of the way through it his first time, that it was definitely worth the money, because when he finished it with his first character, he could just go back through with a different one and make different choices and everything would be a new experience. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. I’m on my second game now (with the same character; I had a saved game from very early on and I just went back to that and have been playing her quite differently since then) and while there’s a lot of stuff you can do differently, the overall shape of the story remains immutable. I’m just poking around now, doing all the little side missions on each planet while resolutely ignoring the main plotline, for the good and simple reason that if I start doing the central storyline and accomplishing its goals, that triggers various subroutines and certain planets get blown up by the enemy forces that are pursuing me across the galaxy. Since a lot of the various missions you go on are to help out people living on these planets, it’s very depressing to have the entire planet get blown up right after you’ve finally convinced the two feuding clans to end their squabbling and let their son and daughter get married. It just gives you a real sense of futility.

However, it’s nearly as bad exploring each planet in depth, which I’m taking the time to do, because it really brings you up sharply against the limited vistas of a computer game. Tattoine, for example (the desert planet you’re all familiar with from the first STAR WARS movie) has basically four major areas… the city of Anchorhead, the Dune Sea right outside the City of Anchorhead, the Sand People's Enclave, and the Eastern Dune Sea. Each of these places has specific stuff to do in them, but they’re all very small and limited, and once you’ve run through the programmed storylines, that’s it, you’ve pretty much mined the entire planet out.

There’s probably still stuff that none of us (Pat, Paul, Scott, and I, in our separate games) have discovered, but it’s got to be getting pretty thin on the ground. On Tattoine, I’ve done pretty much EVERYthing… killed the krayt dragon, wiped out the raiding tribe of Sand People, tracked down the Gammorean assassin and his killer android and gotten rid of them, flummoxed the evil Gamorrean ambushers, recovered the lost holocron from Bastila’s father’s body, gotten Bastila and her mother to reconcile, found the local Star Map, rescued Mission’s worthless brother Griff, along with a bunch of captive Jawas, from the Sand People, purchased the crazy homicidal droid to add to my party, triggered the stupid subplot with Carth’s son so we can do that when we get to Korrigan… oh, yeah, I haven’t triggered the sub-plot where I deliver smuggled spice to the Hutt at the swoop track yet, I have to go to another planet to do that. Ah, but I did find the stowaway in my storage hold, learn to communicate with her, and dump her back with her parents on Dantoine. So, yeah… Tattoine is very nearly entirely done.

And all the various planets are like this. When you first play the game, there seems like a bewilderingly realistic complexity of stuff to do on each world, and you feel like you couldn’t possibly do all of this crap. (Some of it, like the feuding clans nonsense on Dantoine, I didn’t even want to bother with, but, hey, it’s experience points and, depending on how you run your character, Dark Side or Light Side points, too.)

An interesting aspect of the game is that it’s kind of Zen. Various things simply don’t exist until you’ve triggered them. For example, if you don’t take Carth off the ship on Tattoine, then his buddy from the Mandalorian wars doesn’t come up and mention seeing his long lost son on the Sith planet. If that doesn’t happen, then when you go through all the Sith Academy stuff, Carth’s son simply doesn’t exist and you never run into him.

Stuff like that happens a lot. It’s certainly deliberate, to keep people from cheating once they know about certain plotlines, and simply going there and aborting them before they develop. There’s an internal timeline in which certain events have to occur before other events can occur… a sort of causality that most quantum physicists these days believe is actually illusory, a side effect of the way our organic brains process information… but very much part of the virtual reality of this game. Things HAVE to happen in a certain sequence in this game or they just won’t happen at all.

Now, can I get even more boring than several hundred words on a game no one in my audience is playing? Sure I can.

I was looking at my Window’s desktop right before starting this page this morning. What’s interesting (if you have a truly demented definition of ‘interesting’ ) is that I have three different graphics programs… PhotoWise, which was on this hard drive when my mom gave me the computer, and two others, AcDSee and PhotoStyler, which I brought over from previous computers.

PhotoWise is a nice program; you open a directory and it gives you all thumbnails, which you can then click on and bring up to a variety of different sizes. You can edit them somewhat too, adjusting their tone and contrast and sharpness and like that, cropping and copying from one file to another. However, PhotoWise has two major drawbacks… its editing features are very limited (you can’t, for example, insert text into a graphics file, or really modify a graphics file on a pixel by pixel basis, as in, for example, drawing Groucho glasses on someone, or something), and it won’t display GIFs, which is truly annoying.

AcDsee is a shareware program I downloaded years ago off AOL. It’s strictly a viewer; you can’t edit graphics at all with it. However, it displays nearly any sort of graphic (except goddam .art files, the utilization of which should be punishable by public exposure in stocks), and best of all, has a lovely directory display system that makes moving files around really simple, which neither of the other two have.

PhotoStyler I don’t use all that much, but it has quite a few more editing tools than PhotoWise, and for displaying certain types of graphics, especially if you have a lot of them, it’s better than either of the other two.

I should also mention, though, that for actually creating and editing graphics, I use the generic Windows Paint program a lot. If you want to take a scan of an old DC subscription ad showing Superman with his arm around a mailman, and edit the mailman slightly to make him look like Hitler (all you have to do is add a swastika armband and a little pushbroom mustache; it’s amazing), Paint is your baby. (Now, why you’d want to do that is another matter entirely. Unless you’re as demented as I am, and as Jeff Webb was, in which case, you’ll understand immediately the uproarious hilarity there is in looking at an obviously Curt Swan rendered picture of Superman buddying up to his best pal, der Fuhrer. Honestly, it’s just hysterical. But probably only if you’re deeply, deeply strange.)

And while I’m going on and on and on in a truly coma-inducing manner about my goddam Windows desktop, I should note that the Katie Holmes montage has been replaced. First I had a Katherine Heigl montage, but that was up for several weeks before Katie, so I cycled through some other stuff. I have a nice graphic of Eliza Dushku I shopped together against an American flag backdrop, but the problem with using that is, I like to have two different graphics… one that comes up when you first boot the computer, and then a different background when I sign onto the system and go into the actual active desktop. Now, the Eliza graphic, which is lovely (I can just look at Eliza Dushku all day long) has to be tiled because of its size, or the program squashes her head and changes the shape of her face, which is just Completely Wrong By Any Universal Standard. However, my current front graphic, which is a very nice pic of Rachel Weisz (the MUMMY chick) doesn’t look as good tiled, and you can’t set one graphic to full screen and the other one for tiled or centered, it won’t work that way.

So, Eliza got put away again and right now there’s a pic of Drew Barrymore up there. I like Drew fine (thank God she got over that Tom Green thing) but I’ve had that pic for a long time and it’s not Drew’s best shot. I’m trying to stay resolutely away from using any of the many Jess pics I have as a background, since that just gets me all sulky (although she has some very nice pics on her dancing website). I don’t know. I may need to go back to Googirl.com and see if I can find anything nice of some actress I find very doable… someone other than those listed above, since I’ve been O.D.ing on Katie Holmes and Katherine Heigl lately.

Actually, it occurs to me I downloaded a nice shot from Charlotte Ross’ Playboy spread a while back. Let me go see if I can dig that up and how it looks as background…

Well, beat the drum and hold the phone:

Just checked my email and found this:

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