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Okay, we have 16 paths of magic in Doggainia: Summoning, Healing, Mastery, Prophecy, Technology, Death, Life, Light, Spiritual, Recall, Illusion, Communication, Nature, Truth, Mental, and Physical. A lot of people ask me what the chaos that all means. So here it goes. Allow me to explain how a practionery of each path would cast a simple "fire" type spell. A Summoner will summon the fire from the plane of fire. A Healer will take a peice of ash and heal the extinguished fire (and the wood along with the fire so the fire would have something to consume and thus not immediately extinguish). A Master will bind the will of fire to herself and thus command the fire into existance. A Prophet will discover at what point fire will appear and then the fire will appear there.(yeah, I know pretty useless.... The variant on this is that we haven't entirely ruled out that the prophecy of the being fire is what brought the fire into existance in the first place.) A Technomage will invent a cigar lighter (or a flamethrow, your choice really). A Deathdealer will extinguish the existance of "not fire", which will logically create fire. A Lifeuser will give birth to fire (sounds painful, so I doubt they would do this often). A Lightgiver will cause light to be emitted which can only be sent out from fire, thus recursively bringing the fire into existance. A Spiritualist will call out to the spirit of fire and thus create the spirit of fire. A Recaller will bring back into existance fire which was previously there, but no longer is. An Illusionist will create the illusion of fire (and a high enough grade of illusion is completely indistiugishable from the reall thing). A Communicator will speak to a single flame and thus ask it to explode into a greater fire. A Naturalist will create an enviroment whereby fire must erupt. A Truthseeker will know all that is fire and thus through knowing fire, she will determine fire. A Mentalist will force one's mind to detect fire that is not there, and respond accordingly. A Physicalist will hurl an existing fire to where they want it to be. Musings on April 08, 2003 Topic: How to be a Writer "If you want to be a writer, then just start writing." That was what my seventh grade english teacher told me. I asked her what should I write about? She answered that it doesn't really matter what you write about, only that your write about something. Stories are good, but they require structure. Rather, instead of stories, why not just free form for a bit. "Free-forming" for those of you who don't know what that is, is a way of just writing whatever is sitting at the top of your head at a particular moment. It is ALOT harder than its seems becauses you ahve to look past the giant wall that most teacher have spent your life building. You know, that wall that says YOU don't have anything important to say, so you can only write about what you have researched from others. That's the biggest load of B.S. that I've ever heard, but for a long time I believed it. Now, I've come to realize that the value of what I write, is not just about what I have to say, how I say it, and how it affects you. Rather it all of those things together and mixed with a generous dallop of just the act of writing as well. Writing is an art, and, like any art, you have to practice it before you can master it. So, my seventh grade english teacher was right. It is not WHAT you write that is important, but rather that you JUST WRITE. So for all of you out there who want to be writers some day, my advice to you is pretty simple. WRITE, after all, you want to write, so go ahead and do it. The more you write, the better you get. The better you get, the more you will want to write, and so on. The key to success is writing, not just somethings, but alot of things. As much a possible. However, don't just keep turning out rough drafts. Take the time to polish your work, make it better than it was before. 80%-95% of writintg is re-writing. A fun exercise to understand how re-writing works is to take a favorite play (preferably one that REALLY outdated speechwise) and re-write as though you were editing it for mass publication. You'd be surprised by how much you learn and how much you can make a peice of work evolve from its original form just by moving some words around. Musings on October 22, 2002 Topic: What is Truly Mine? I sit here in the glow of a monitor, thinking. The white space, which lays before me on the screen, intimidates my eye. I could write about dogs, my all-time greatest passion. No, there are already enough books like those laying all around. I would just be saying what could be found by opening any one of them. Besides, almost everything I know about them came from inside of a book. What then, can I possibly write about that I can say actually came from me? All that I have inside me are ideas and knowledge that I have borrowed from others who wanted me to have it. The memories of my youth where given to me by those who are in them. Even the words I use to describe those memories come from someone other than me who started the language long ago. Since that time others have added little touches, changing "thou" to "you," but still those changes are not my contribution. I type upon the keyboard in a style of writing that one would think must be unique. Yet, I can point out to them that each in each sentence, paragraph, or phrase is a device or style that someone else once used. Maybe I am the first to fit them together into the pattern that I use. Working with someone else's tools could I have discovered a brand new writing style? Me, just the average person who comes home every afternoon at four, then reads and computes until he drops to sleep promptly at ten? Well, this is the land of opportunity (or so I've heard it said), and anything can happen. Perhaps there is something, then, that I can call my own. Sure came from others, but so did the basis for Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion. Sir Newton was just the first to accurately put together the many different pieces of the puzzle. All great achievements come about by someone adding something new to an idea that has been around, but no one else could figure out how to do. I look around at what I've done, and realize that there is a difference to what I have done, compared to what others have done. Oh, sure I'm not the first to turn from public schools to private institutions, but I know that no one else received the same experience from the people that they met. Not all others that I learn from are human. For example, take my dog. Her name is Lady, and she is a Lhasa Apso. From her I learned that it does not take much to escape a sour mood. Just wag of the tail and a spiked, squeaky ball. Lhasa Apso means "bark sentinel dog," Lady did not teach me that, but did she ever prove its truth. What I know I learned from others, but what they know also came from someone else. Musings on October 21, 2002 Topic: Being an Adult To be an adult has nothing to do with age. Age is just a measurement to describe how long a person has been on the planet. What does determine an adult is experience. This makes adolescence a very strange and awkward time in the life of a person. On one hand adolescents are being told that they are becoming adults. On the other hand, they don't yet have the world experience to become fully integrated into adult society. Experience is the key to rising to the next level in anything. From promotions at work, to graduation from schools, experience is what it is all about. The longer you work at a particular job, the more you learn about it, and based on your knowledge from your experiences, you are able to do your job better than when you first started. The biggest (and most important) job that people have is that of living. As a person gains experience they become better equipped to live their own life. Children are those people who do not enough experience to make decisions more complicated than what game to play with. Adolescents are those who have not yet gained enough experience to create the life they want to live. Adults are the people who have already created the life they are leading, even if through bad choices it is not the one they had wanted to lead. The adults with the most experience are the few whose experience has shown them that they can still create a different life for themselves and are able to then create their "new" life. Musings on April 18, 2001 Topic: Ever Wonder... There are some strange things in the world, and a great deal of the defy logic as well. Here are some interesting points for you to ponder on you next day off. Easter is celebrated primarily by people living in the West. West Virginia is farther East than a portion of Virginia. Flashlights only flash when they run out of battery power. There is no channel 1 on you television. In the convience store down the street, they sell 2-liters of pop and 20 ounces of pop. There price of 2-liters is 69 cents, the price of 20 ounces is 85 cents. Terran means "of the Earth or Ground" yet most of our bodies are mostly water and we have greater need for air and water than soil. In football the ball touches the foot, in basketball the ball touches the basket, but in baseball the ball doesn't touch the base. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, which is a state between gas and energy; yet the part of the blood called plasma is solid. "De" is a prefix meaning to remove, so deoderant should mean "To remove oder; however, deoderant only masks oder, not removes it. If you look at a penny or a quarter, there are heads on both sides and no U.S. coin has a tail facing outward on it. Most guys fear loosing their hair, yet most pro basketball players are bald. Money ISN'T worth the paper its printed on. Kilo means 1000, yet a kilobyte is larger than 1000 bytes. Diamonds and Lead are chemically identical. Ever notice the people who tell you not to complain are the same guys who are kicking you when you're down? Glass is a liquid at room temperature. Oil is often portrayed as being black and opque, yet poly lens are made only of processed oil, and they are clear. The Far East can be reached by going a short distance West if on is on the edge of the International Date Line. If magnetic North was on the equater, would Canada still be in the North? M&Ms have "W"s on them. Musings on Feb.16, 2001 Topic: The Thoughts in My Head.... The thoughts in my head are after me. They seek to escape the brain which contains them. Barely can I control them now, as loonier and loonier they become. Once I believe I have contained them, I see a new thing and then a new thought appears to destroy my delicate balance of control. In part these thoughts are the reason I now have this site. For if I had not the outlet which with to allow these thoughts escape from inside my mind, quickly do I believe that loose my sanity I will. For, indeed, all that I see and do, become brand new thoughts in my head. Swirling and dancing like little leaves in a peaceful pond. Ever do their patterns rotate around and around in a never ending array of color. Eventually the leaves fill the pond of my mind until their movement is stalled by sheer volume of thoughts wishing to float upon the water. It is then that a small dam releases and out of the pond flows a gentle creek which carry the stray and wayward thoughts away, cleansing the mind so that a new batch of thoughts can come and enjoy a pleasant dance upon the surface of the pond. Musings on Feb. 9th, 2001 Topic: The Futility of Schedules Not a day goes by without my seeing some advertisement which proclaims the benifits of some great new product that will help you ogranize your life. These products are great! No mattere how completely disorganized your life is, these tools can take all of the appointments you have a create a for you a schedule that will allow you to make every last meeting and luncheon that you will ever have. Granted, all this is also contingent on one small fact that is so unworthy of meantioning that most of these adverts don't bother. This fact is that your life will NEVER follow that schedule that you paid $350 to have created for you. Don't believe me? How many meetings have had their times, places, and/or reason changed at the last minute? Perhaps more importantly, have you ever gone to a meeting that ran longer than its scheduled time? (If you say "no" you're probably lying) And after rushing out of that overlength meeting have you ever been force to be late or miss another meeting all together? (of course you have) This in turn would force that meeting late, and such would continue until the schedule your $350 Mega-Planner with Multi-Featured Database Crossrefferencing Schedular Designer is hopelessly fouled up and you end up not getting anything done as you spend all your free time trying to salvage the remaining parts of your schedule and to re-organize the rest. If you do ever find a tool that rather than creates a schedule for you actually enables you to keep up with your schedule, please tell me as I would be most interested in it. Musings on Feb. 6th, 2001 Topic: The color Black Some think that there exists a color which is the opposite of white. Those misguided souls have determined that this color is BLACK. As anyone with half a mind can tell, black is not a color! Black is purity. Black represents that absence of all color, this is its strength. For unlike the colors, black does not have to worry about light sources or illuminations. For black shall shine in its true glory regardless of any circumstance. And that true glory is indeed great. When compared with that pathetic white, black dominates the feild of vision. No color has the intensity or ability to grasp our attention like that of black. Artists have long known this power of black, that is why black is the color of choice for separating the lesser colors from eachother in art as well as why we use black in our writings. For unlike white which when intense causes us to look away from its brutal majesty, black intesified draws us in and seems to claim our very soul with its infinate depths... |
