Category Archives: Planned Obsolescence

New Year – Progress?

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– Thursday Morning, January 10th, 2019 —> -2˚C / +28˚F —> dark & snowing very lightly around Fredericton New Brunswick @ 2:34 am –

Jessicka by night.

– “Jessicka by Night” –

— {{{ Jessicka was a main female character in my NaNoWriMo novel last year –  which still needs a bit of ‘fleshing out’. Her father was the head of a university’s psychology department and he grumbled at their family dinners about ‘non scientific’ ‘Morons’ who filled people’s heads with nonsense about life after death when the truth was obvious to him that the human brain manufactured fantasies like near-death experiences because the average member of ‘the great unwashed’ couldn’t face the ‘truth’ that there was no god, there was no after-life and their pitiful little egos would simply cease to function when their heart stopped pumping and their physical brains shut down. Her mother was a nurse with a warm, nurturing nature, who quietly muttered things like, “Never tell your father I said so, but I believe his ‘scientific approach’ is full of holes – he dismisses anything that does not support his pre-judged attitude on any subject. I rather think the human mind only functions when it is open to possibilities that have not been satisfactorily been dis-proven – and I rather call myself a militant agnostic: ‘I don’t know and he doesn’t either.’-” In the opening chapters of the novel Jessicka goes through a nightmarish experience that could shatter the sanity of almost anyone, and as she is nursing the man who saved her from a hellish death, she feels stinging tears as he describes the near death experiences he has as he’s in and out of a coma. She thinks he’s dying and his dreams and visions just might be the product of a dying human mind trying to shield itself from the truth. }}}

 

— Meanwhile, here on Earth, In case you haven’t been paying attention:

  • U.S. Presidink Donald J Trump appears to be trying to exploit something of a mole hill he wants everybody to believe is one hell of a mountain as he’s tantrum-ing over getting his border wall between Mexico and the U.S.A. { One night we get a news story about drug lords and other nasty people tunneling hundreds of yards beneath border check points to sneak their guns and drugs and killer henchmen into the USA and the next night Donald J Trump is trying to make everybody believe that if they give him 5.7 billion US dollars to build his wall – everybody will be able to sleep well at night – safe and sound and secure —> Until the people who love keeping everyone else in a state of anxiety so they can be easily manipulated into surrendering their constitutional rights and forking over the ‘hard earned dollars’  that jerks like Trump claim they are trying to take back from the ‘tax and spend liberals’ and put into the pockets of the fine, upstanding { ‘White’ } working people. } —> { but – do you have any evidence that all the ‘major tax cuts’ the conservative, republican types have pushed through in the last hundred years or so have put any real money into the pockets and bank accounts of anybody but the filthy rich ‘robber barons’? }
    • & in the realm of G.M.O’s : where nobody came right out and mentioned “Monstanto” :
  • In ‘main-stream’ morning news up here in Canada – on a CBC morning News programme – ‘Information Morning’ on the radio and through the internet – ‘New Brunswick First’ on television – A doctor with no apparent political agenda – talking about the various trials and tribulations of health care in Canada and answering questions about food allergies versus food intolerances – fielded one called-in or emailed-in question with, “Well – for one thing – you should avoid high-fructose corn syrup altogether if you can, it’s no good for anybody.” – implying that high fructose corn syrup caused a lot of gastrointestinal discomfort that many patients believed were caused by some kind of food allergy they couldn’t quite figure out.
  • But then again today, on another programme on the same CBC radio station, another Doctor – & this one sounded to me like he ‘drank the cool-aid’ – responded to a negative comment about Genetically Modified Organisms with, “But what you people don’t understand is: There are a hell of a lot of people on this planet and we have to do something to step up the production of food because our resources have their limits.” —> What this guy missed – or ignored – was all the verifiable research that Genetically Modified seeds have proven to deliver much less harvested food than the ‘old-fashioned’ non-modified, non-proprietary, non-poisonous, { idiotic } seeds that Monsanto sells to unwary farmers who then discover they can’t afford to constantly buy those high-priced seeds every year and the seeds they try to save from the crops they’ve planted and harvested have been ‘scientifically treated’ not to grow.

— I think that’s all the pain I can handle for one morning.

— Time for an extended chorus of “When will they every learn? When will they Ehhhhh-ehhhh-verrrr learn?”

 

~~~~~ Namasté —

~~~~~ Jim

 

— Yesterday —

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Thursday — September 22nd, 2016 — 13°C / 55°F — Dark Damp & Cooler in Atlantic Canada @9:23 pm —

— I have no idea why the latest WordPress UpDate decided this blog should default to an italics font— But I did manage to change it – The “Cambria” font looks fantastic in some blogs but not so hot in this one – hmmmm-?

Ganesh

Ganesh – He was here in one update, then disappeared, and now he’s back.

— Yesterday, All I wanted to do was sit down and work on the novel I’m writing. I’ve been ‘on a roll’ – This is something I began in 1987 – after discovering the world of doing things ‘on-line’. I was part of the SFRT  – Speculative Fiction Round Table  on GEnie – General Electric’s venture into moving to the next step toward what became the internet. General Electric want to make money from this venture. Using that ‘service’ cost something like six dollars an  hour after 6 pm and before 8 am on Weekdays. the prime time rate was more like eighteen dollars an hour. weekends and holidays were also six bucks an hour.

— Writers’ Workshops are a great place to get yourself inspired. What I liked was tapping into everybody else’s ideas. What excited and inspired them. Whether they were producing masterpieces or nothing at all. The obvious stuff didn’t matter. Nobody was going to listen to read part of a chapter or your latest poem, or whatever – and tell you exactly what you had to do to make a million dollars with your ‘masterpiece’. They may tell you that they hate the way anybody still writes anything that includes words that end in ‘ing’. They may tell you that what you’re doing sucks because it concentrates on one little area of life that they don’t want to bother with. They may try to tell you that nothing you ever do will be good enough, because somebody’s already told that to them, about whatever they were doing and in their hurt, they want to hurt others. But somewhere in the mix, between the nonsense and non sequiturs – something happens. In the world of imagination, someone lights a spark and someone else gives it a candle and maybe a third person moves that candle to somewhere that shows you something that you might never have thought about, or points your toward something in the realm of imagination and ideas that fires you up for weeks, even months at a time. Think about this – most people who have written a novel, or any other book, have spent at least a year working on that novel, ( or  whatever ) might have changed details that drove them to distraction five or six different ways, or more, and stuck with it, finished it, did some editing, rearranged some plot elements, believed in their story line and the finished product enough to bring it somebody who might read the first ten words and laugh in their face. They might send or bring their story to dozens of editors and publishers, received dozens of humiliating rejections, and then found somebody who took a chance – and then, not every book that is finished, gets edited and even published reaches more than a handful of readers. Somebody’s imagined ‘best seller’ might only sell to friends and relatives- or might be way ahead of its time and disappear into oblivion only to be ‘discovered’ decades later, maybe after the writer left this world – temporarily or permanently? Left and come back? Left voluntarily or left kicking and screaming – devastated by disease or fell asleep and never woke up again?

— Yeah, so the story I was writing in 1987 hit a brick wall, I didn’t know where to go with it. But I never gave up on it. Sometime in the middle of this August I found a file on a hard drive I haven’t visited in a while and thought, yeah – this story needs to be finished, but I’m not too crazy about this part, or that part or the way it started going off in that direction, or whatever – So I started re-writing from the beginning. I looked up a bunch of things, Word Processor on one screen, browser in another, looking up movies that were playing in various months during the time the story took place – what kind of cars were new that year? What colours did those cars come in? Did they have cup holders that year or did they come later?

— I was over 102,000 words into the re-write- on page 219 using a 14 point Cambria font. ( it just looked ‘right’ ) & like I said, all I wanted to do is move the story along some. — But — I never did get to that story yesterday.

— & Here’s a bit of yesterday’s time line.

— 7:30 am – Checked email, groaned a bit, shook  my head a couple times – followed one link and was just distracted enough so when I got up and left the ‘office’ to see and talk with the love of my life before she left for work, she was already gone. I poured a cup of coffee, made some toast, buttered and jellied it, ate it, went back into the office, sat down, listened to the morning news, which was coming to me through a CBC web site on a mac computer beside the one the bulk of my novel is growing in- /sitting on? The ads coming in to the browser froze that browser, I had to force quit out and start back up again. And then, just after 8:30, in the middle of an interview I was interested in –

— 8:33 am – lost power. no electricity came into the house to power the computer I need to be working if I’m going to write and/or continue writing that story. Now power to the television or radio either. Grrr

— 9:33 – ish am – I called Cathi on a cell phone to tell her we had no electricity. She hinted that she was having a weird day too. Mercury was still retrograding around, proud of itself. I tried resting, lying on the bed. That didn’t work. A while later I needed to get up and go into the washroom.

— 10:00 am -ish – power came back through our electricity lines when I was coming back into the bedroom from the washroom. It was time to feed the pets. and reset a couple clocks, like the one on the microwave, which needed to be set before I could ‘nuke’ a cup of lukewarm coffee. I restarted a couple computers, wanted to take some photos from a digital camera and work on them on the computer that is mostly email and photos, with a little bit of ‘lite’ blogging going on now and then. Then I walked around, let the dog back inside after he wanted to go out and bark at any dogs walking their humans up and down the road he can see from his dog ‘run’ – fenced off area. I think I ‘nuked’ myself some instant oatmeal, then ate it, probably drank some nuked/reheated coffee.

11:00 + something – When I sat down to seriously get with messing around with digital photographs, I discovered the browser was frozen. Then, not just the browser, but the whole computer was frozen. I sighed, pushed the button, turned it off, waited a minute or so and told it to ‘reboot’. The computer took longer than usual to come back to life.

—> 11:30 -ish, am. I discovered the computer did not boot from the large ( 1 terrabyte ) usual external hard drive, it booted from the smaller, interior drive. The external drive did not ‘show up’ on the desktop like it should have. This could either have been a weird part of a routine, it may have been slow to come up online – or it could have been a problem – the blackout might have killed it. So I tested it, moved it over to another computer, plugged it in, turned it on, nothing happened. I’ve had problems with externals drive that have gone to sleep before. When they go to sleep, especially in the past after upgrading the operating system or something like that- updates can be a problem. The trick when they happens is to move the firewire cable to its other ‘home’ connect it with the computer off, turn the external hard drive on, and immediately turn the computer on. When the computer finds the sleeping hard drive it magically wakes it up and everything is fine. It just wanted to see me act like I might scream and throw things or sit down and cry. Okay, tried everything. Nothing worked. It might work in a different enclosure. Maybe something went ‘kerfloowie’ in the enclosure. I plugged in another, similar enclosure that houses two older partitions with Mac OS X 10.4.12 (I think-) for starting up older computers that can’t handle any newer operating systems. Those partitions showed up, no problem, okay, so I opened up both enclosures and swapped the one that was giving me problems into the enclosure that worked fine with the older operating system hard drive w/ partitions. plugged it in, turned it on, turned on a computer, — twiddled my thumbs a bit, and nope- nothing shows up. check inside the ‘About This Mac’ routine, click ‘Get more info’ to check the system profiler select firewire and there’s the problem : “Unknown device” It’s either fried or its connection got scrambled. Okay, time to grit teeth – Back up the 1.5 terrabyte drive with the older system on it. Then erase that drive, make sure it gets the GUID schnarr so it can start a freakin stupid intel mac – install the stinkin operating system, then migrate the stuff that is a year old so none of the wedding photos from two of my cameras and one of Cathi’s, wedding videos from my flip cam and Cathi’s Nikon, And the wedding photos etc are something that takes eight hours to down load, and I don’t know how long it takes to work on them because I was halfway through that and had spent another eight hours doing that grrrrrr-

— Ack! I begin the automated backup the hard drive process, it gets about an hour into that and craps out, says “The file “Moe” is too long and contains characters that are not compatible with this computer-” um — “WHAAAAAAATTTTTT?” So I tried again, “This backup attempt of yours contains backed up and non backed up files- so you can’t back it up-” [ which is utter b.s. ] “WWWHHHHAAAAAAAATTTTTTT?” so I gotta go through the whole process of copying every file onto its nice warm and friendly backup home MANUALLY? one at a time?

—> Time Line for everything that followed:

—> 10:45 pm – Backing up everything manually is finally finished.

——> 10:46 pm Begin erasing, reformatting and installing Mac OS X 10.6 on larger of two partitions.

—> 11:00 (+ something) pm Connect to iMac with good stuff & same operating system – restart iMac holding down the correct key to put it into ‘Terminal Mode’ and select the right hard drive to copy from, begin the migration process:

—> 11:15 -ish pm, Begin!

—> 2:15 am —> “[estimated] 45 minutes remaining”

—> 2:30 am —> “2 hours, 35 minutes remaining”  { “AAAaaaaaaa!” }

—> 2:40 am —> “Transferring Applications Folder” —> No estimate of how long this might take —

—> 2:42 am —> “About 3 hours, 15 minutes remaining”

—> 2:45 am —> “About 54 Minutes remaining”

—> 2:50 am —> “… 45 minutes….”

—> 2:53 am —> “… 29 minutes …”

—>2:56 am —> ” … 38 Minutes… ”

—> 3:13 am —> ” … 4 minutes … ”

—> 3:17 am —> ” … Less than 1 Minute … ”

—> 3:18 am —> ” … less than 1 minute … ”

—> 3:19 am —> ” … l/t 1 minute … ”

—> 3:20 am —> ” … l/t 1 Minute …”

——> 3:21 am ——> “Click Here to Restart Computer ” —> Click!

—>3:25 am —> “Checking for New Software Udates…”

—> 3:41 am —> “Restart after updates…”  Click!

—> Daylight! —> “September 22nd, 2016 and you still have a pants load of snarr to do before you can think about getting back to the photos – and then maybe you’ll be able to get back to your novel — bwa hahahahahaha! I lied – ” -Alzo Spraque l’ordinatuer – And I’m so tired I don’t a chips if anything’s spelled right.

— “Sleep? What a concept -” — Gary [“Scarf”] Gray —

— I did get some sleep, stumbled around in a trance – sat down at the computer at 7:30 am and discovered that several things were still not right, it’s telling me to reinstall iTunes. It’s told me that ‘Google Chrome does not support this ancient piece of shit – wtf is the matter wit U? – U moron!” The version of iPhoto won’t work. I check for updates and hey, “We have another two hours worth of updates for you, kid!” My brain feels like crying at the thought of playing any silly computer games to pass the time while that computer is updating / getting its act back together.

—> um —? Noon-ish? —> updates worked, but now the iPhoto app is the ‘upgrade’ that makes you go through three extra steps to move what you could have moved with a mouse or track ball and an easy ‘drag and drop’ But W.T.F. – load photos from one camera anyway.

—> 3 pm —> “Oh hell with this, time to install the OS on the smaller, half a terrabyte partition.” Fire up the  install disk start up when I’m done, do not migrate anything right off, make sure it works first –

—> 4 pm —> So Speaketh  the Computer,  “Oops, no iPhoto – Oops iTunes is configured wrong, please re-install —> ooops, iTunes is configured wrong, please Re-Install! —> I SAID! iTunes is fupped up, reload the fupping thing! // to which I replied “I reinstalled the bloody thing 4 times, restarted the fupping computer 4 times and it’s still futched up? —> Moving right along —>

—> 4:30 pm —> Migrating “Renard The Third” and “Z-Schnarr The Second” —> ” … About 17 hours and 38 Minutes Remaining …”

—> 5:10 pm —> ” … 6 hours, 21 minutes remaining … ”

—> 8:10 pm —> 6 hours, 24 minutes remaining —> Walked the dog.

—> 8:45 pm –>- “4 hours 33 minutes remaining” Watched the Black List on PVR

—> 11:15 pm —> “49 minutes remaining”

 

—> 12:45 am Friday, 23 September, 2016 —> “Restart—”

—> 1:30 am —> updates loaded —> “Restart—>”

—> 1:35 am —> Updates didn’t do anything —> “Restart —>” —> “Oh, you wanted me to actually install those updates? well just who do you think you are to tell a computer what to do?”

—> 1:45 am —> Computer restarted. looks okay, good night.

—> 4:45 am —> visit washroom, check on computer. it’s still there- fire up iPhoto —> load 646 photos from camera (two years worth of saved photos on the SD card) –

—> 5:53 am —> check out iTunes. “iTunes is not configured correctly, please reinstall—>” Reinstalled four times? Nothing works. log out, relog into top User on this partition. Reload iTunes there? doesn’t work. Reload the workhorse user? click on iTunes, = “Oh, you wanted me to start up? Why didn’t you say so?”

—> 6:30 am —> Your system does not support Firefox, you can’t load it. WWHHAAAAAAAATTTT?

—> 6:35 move firefox from top user to workhorse –  it works – do search for older versions of firefox using safari – hey, only their latest piece of poo-poo won’t work with this vintage operating system The install OS DVD gave us a version that did work – stick your tongue -out at anybody who worships at the altar of planned obsolescence. Dance around and smile at nearby statue of Ganesh.

—> 7:30 am —> wake up Cathi, “What time do you want to get up for work?” — “But it’s Saturday!” — “No, it’s Friday—” Now that’s gotta be the worst ….”

—> 7:45 am -ish —> Cathi’s out the door. The dog wants to go outside. It’s raining. But he wants to go outside.

—>7:55 am —> The dog says “Boof!” half heartedly, but twice – I open the door. It’s pouring rain, I can’t see the dog anywhere, I call him. A big happy very wet black Lab comes bounding from where he was barking at some small animal way the heck in the back corner of his ‘run’ — I dry him off with an old towel, he is deliriously happy for the rub. And the attention. He gets a small treat.

—> 8:15 am —> I fire up a couple programs. Everything seems to be working fine. software update wants to load a security update and a couple other things. —>yeah, go ahead. It wants to restart —> “Knock yerself out-”

—> 8:45 —> updates loaded & installed, Computer Restarted, Fire up the Mail program. —> Mail wants to use your login keychain. —> What login keychain, there never has been a login keychain. —> Wong answer, Mail wants to use your login keychain, please enter your password now. —> drop dead, get outta here —> instead of disappearing in a cloud of acrid smoke, the mail program pops up and looks around bright eyed and bushy tailed and says, “What’s new?” —> so I load about a dozen email accounts. two of them don’t like their passwords. I go into the living room, tell the laptop it’s December 31st, 2037 @ 11:11 pm and send myself a message. The mail app has a nervous breakdown. The malware program says hey wait, I haven’t had an update in 20 something years! the laptop freezes. —> I push the button, kill the laptop, smile at our very handsome and newly clean dog, then start the computer back up. —> programs that I shut off before the laptop had it’s nervous breakdown pop back up and hog all the desktop RAM. —> I shut them down. —> The mail program springs back to life and sends email message from the year 2037 – after I had told the time and date app to set itself automatically, —just before the laptop’s nervous breakdown.

—> 10:00 am —> the cat goes crazy thinking I’ll never feed him again. —> you keep that up, maybe I won’t —> feed the pets, and not to each other, that would be too messy to clean up before Cathi gets home.

—> Noon-ish —> Okay, most of the important programs I’ve tested work fine. —> a couple of them have anxiety attacks on startup and tell me I need to enter their login keychain passwords. I tell them to eff off and they fall to their knees in tears, beg me for a password. I tell them to eff off again and the programs say, “Oh, you want me to startup? why didn’t you say so?”

—> DreamWeaver CS3 thinks all my html files are in Chinese characters. I will be damned before I’ll click on any of them to see what just might happen.

—> iPhoto the happy correct version is sleepy and complains that it doesn’t want to download no 646 photos, but it goes ahead and downloads them anyway and then smiles and says, “See? Ain’t I amazing?” and I say, stick around, I got another three or four hundred photos to upload from two other cameras, and then there’s the video – but flip-share should handle that-

—> the ftp program whines and complains and wants its login keychain password, but after half a dozen “Cancel” clicks it pops up, yawns and says, “Good morning, what can you do for me today?”

—> Firefox is working fine, thank you. Google Chrome is off in a corner abusing itself. Good, I don’t need no stupid Google Chrome.

—> it’s Friday, September 23rd, 2016 – Mercury stopped retrograding yesterday and is now dancing forward across the sky. Bruce Springsteen’s trying to catch up to me in the age department. But I’ve got two weeks more under my belt than he does, and I still like Born to Run and a couple radio stations are playing happy birfday mini concerts of his stuff and then saying it’s his birfday, so Appah Hoopey Bruce!

—> it’s 11°C / 51°F and “overcast” here in this delirious little corner of Atlantic Canada @ 1:35 pm and if they dropped the bomb on me right now I’d deflate their silly egoes and laugh them to death.

Another interpretation of Ganesh.

Here’s another view or interpretation of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. My favourite Ganesh moment was when I was cleaning a haunted building, chanting to myself and realized Ganesh was dancing beside me. Apparently – He liked the chant -(It couldn’t have been my voice – nahhhhhh-)

—> And Ganesh is smiling at me from H.J. d’Aerendel’s last posting – Life is good. for at least the next thirty seconds or so —? Right?

— Schnarr! — 🙂

~~~~~ Jim

 

 

 

Fun With Geo-Magnetic Storms?

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Thursday – September 22, 2016 — 20°C / 67°F – & Kind of Grey & Cloudy 4:46 pm in Atlantic Canada —

‘Fun with geo-magnetic storms’ is something like ‘Fun with Mercury Retrograde’ – For the last four or five days people have been more ‘on edge’ than usual. Many people who are usually easy-going and friendly have been ready to ‘bite people’s heads off at the drop of a hat’ –  Last night I read something – on a facebook page no less – that may have shed some light on why people are walking around feeling like human time bombs. (Eek?)

Solar storms that kick huge magnetic  storms out into our cute little neighbourhood  in this material universe, have the ability to scramble human beings’ state of mind. According to ‘Starfire Tor’ – if you’re on facebook, go to her real page, not the ‘fan page’ – funny things happen along with these ‘storms’. Funny ‘sheesh’ not ‘Funny – that’s a good one’ or ‘LOL’ or “LMAO” or ‘rolling on the floor laughing’ – happy bursts of mirth?

Cosmic good guys and cosmic bad guys are apparently able to use solar mass ejections and solar magnetic anomalies which cause geo-magnetic misadventures – to try to ‘correct’ events that humans on the earth at this time may or may not deserve. If you can understand ‘Karma’ as ‘Your thoughts attract consequences’ or ‘good and bad deeds attract good and bad consequences’ / – If you kick the universe, you get kicked back. If you hug the universe, you get hugged in return. –

Look out, I’m about to open the door to parallel world theories and treat them as if they are true. Somebody told me that a big part of the reason that the US political scene is so squirrelly this year is the ‘fact’ that somebody else was supposed to be running for president of the U.S. of A. – but the ‘bad guys’  threw in a monkey wrench and hurled a nuclear bomb somewhere on earth and the Angelic good guys tried to fix that. But trying to fix things on that scale has unforeseen consequences. whoever the sane candidate for U.S. President was or is – He or she is not in the running – not in this parallel –

There may be zillions of possible parallel dimensions out there where you are living your life in your body with your dna – and maybe a few things are different there – Maybe Charlie Brown ran to the red haired girl and gave her a big hug and a kiss and she fell madly in love with him and the Peanuts comic strip was a colossal flop.

Somebody told us that there is a nearby parallel world where MK Ultra victim Sirhan Sirhan was nowhere near Bobby Kennedy in 1968. The guy in the security uniform did not step up behind Bobby and shoot him in the back of the head while glassy eyed, hypnotized, Sirhan Sirhan aimed a gun at nothing and pulled the trigger, giving the real assassin the distraction he needed to put that bullet in Bobby’s brain. In that world RFK was not assassinated, ran for President and was elected, reformed the Federal Reserve Banking system and avoided all kinds of ‘economic fit hits the shan’ nonsense that bankrupted thousands of honest Americans and put all kinds of ‘taxpayer dollars’ in the ‘beedy grastards’/ “Banksters” hands in this world. That parallel dimension is doing fine, thank you. The greedy idiots who are trying their damnedest to control everything in this messed up parallel dimension are out of luck there.

Why aren’t we there? Why aren’t we in any one of a gazillion parallel lives that may be a lot more fun than this one? You may have married the wrong person in that world. You may have married the right person and lost them to an insane accident. He or she may have stepped backward when the wedding photographer asked him or her to so and a space lab chose that micro milli second to fall out of the sky and landed on his or her head. (“ooops”?) – Your favourite, most reliable friend in this life may have had a weird vitamin deficiency over there and become a pathological liar, or been raped as a child and became a sociopath? The possibilities are supposed to be endless. Be careful what you wish for – you might get what you wanted, but jumping up and down in celebration, you may have slipped and hit your head, and developed total freaking amnesia – or stepped on a banana peel, landed wrong and become a paraplegic –

This is confusing. If we’re the ‘main’ Parallel Universe / Parallel Dimension and something horrifically bad happens – does a new Dimension suddenly burst into being and uncountable angelic beings ‘slide’ vast numbers of us from the bad place to the nearly identical – new ‘good place’- ? I began to write a story once, um, thirty years ago? – Something like that – A guy going through a divorce went to a party with his co-workers near the end of May – up here in the northern latitudes – A really cute cousin of a best friend at that party developed a wicked headache and needed a real aspirin when the only stuff they had at the house the party was at was either tylenol or advil, or that other non-aspirin snar. He said he had aspirin at his house and the cute woman said she needs it so bad she’s gotta go with him.

On the way – what should have been a five minute drive became a nightmare as a freak blizzard exploded and dumped six inches of intensely blowing snow in half an hour and showed no likelihood of letting up. The ‘hero’ gets the woman to his house and discovers that the front yard is under six to eight inches of intense snow storm and the back yard is idyllic, warm and sunny. He gives the woman the aspirin, before she even swallows it, she’s all better, they go out back, walk around the house and everything’s fine, but his car isn’t there, and the front door is locked, his key won’t fit. They walk around back and the door they left unlocked is still unlocked, they go inside. Halfway through the house the woman is again incapacitated by the wicked migraine. They can see his car, but they can’t get to it without spending over an hour shoveling. The phone line is dead, electric lines have blown down from utility poles and are sparking on the street. She passes out, he carries her to the bedroom closest to the back door and sits there, stays with her until he passes out, wakes up and the storm is over. She’s awake, but weak and just wants to rest.  He walks to the front of his house and there is no snow visible anywhere, but his car isn’t there either. – That’s as far as I got, what I had planned was – in the next few days they discover that many of the people they knew are not around and nobody else remembers them. It seems like all their most loving, forgiving, altruistic friends and acquaintances are still around, but the short-tempered, conniving, manipulating &/or power-hungry types are all gone.

In my plans for the end of the book, a Native American / First Nations medicine man tells them the wold split in two and ‘all the good ones are here and life is good – all the not so good ones are in the other place, and they are running out of food, they have no electricity or even water. Very bad storms have made it impossible for them to go anywhere and get what they need – they are in real trouble.’

So – that’s my weird take on parallel lives, time shifts and the “WTF is going on here?” weirdness of the past few days.

— If this makes sense to you, we may all be in trouble, or we may be about to step through a door that wasn’t there yesterday and discover paradise where we never thought to look for it, right under our noses.

 

~~~~~ Jim

Ack? — It’s been a very weird day in the compute-us-sphere —

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Wednesday, August 3rd, 2015 — 24°C / 75°F — ‘mostly cloudy’ & muggy @ 8:30 pm in Atlantic Canada —

Flouride is poison

Doug asked me to publish this somewhere so he could get some sleep before he has to work all night —

— & I need to get out and walk the dog, who is getting better, his arthritis and pulled tendon still give him problems now and then, but he gets around more quickly and with a little more energy, now that we’re walking him ‘religiously’ every night.

Moe's baby picture?

And I could swear this is our orange cat’s baby picture – Of course he thinks he’s a ferocious lion – even while he’s purring and acting like the most loving beast of a cat-

— I gotta go – Cathi’s yelling for me to walk the dog with her.

~~~~~ Jim

And We’re still getting stuff done –

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Sunday, July 12th, 2015 -(24˚C / 75˚F – Sunny & Pleasant in the shade, but hot in the sun @ 9:23 am in Atlantic Canada )-

Cathi with a hammer when we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy - err - build next.

Cathi clowning with a hammer Thursday after we had finished one project and were plotting and planning what to destroy – err – build next.

— We got a few things done on Friday – I woke up early and felt like doing stuff with our pallets – but I thought the neighbours might not appreciate me banging things apart or swearing at nails that would not let go at 5 am, so I waited for the clock to tick itself into a more reasonable hour.

— Then I discovered that my graphics/workhorse computer was blowing up faster and/or earlier than it was on Thursday. Every little thing I tried to do with blogging or surfing earned me a “Firefox is Not Responding” message. And I’ve got this annoying problem-solving mentality – I have to try o fix things, or at least understand what is going wrong when they’re breaking down. Too many times lately I’m coming to the conclusion that accelerated planned obsolescence is at the bottom of things. (“Grrrrrrrrr-“)

— And Cathi, when she got up, said she was determined to go swimming at least once on her week off, so I finished what should have taken 5 minutes in just under half an hour and we went out, stopped off at a pharmacy with lots of other good things for sale and got an 18 & 1/2 litre jug of spring water for our cooler/dispenser – then went to the Lake, where an awful lot of other people had the same idea Cathi did – She jumped in and out of the lake, swam around a bit, smiled, and decided that under the crowded conditions, that was enough. We stopped off at a hardware store and a dollar store on the way home, got a couple small things and I went back into fix-it mode until I nearly made myself sick not getting anywhere. So I conked out for a couple hours.

— & When I got up again I decided that, instead of making myself sick over the computer’s distress, I’d wander around in a daze trying to un-clutter the ‘office’ here. I found a couple things, like needle-nosed pliers that have been hiding from me for a couple months, lost the bottle of windex about a dozen times and felt like I was getting somewhere.

pallets

This is a ‘Before’ shot, from – I think – last Monday – the 6th – On Thursday we took apart the three-tiered pallet shelving thing, that was probably used for selling plants during the spring -get-your-garden-going- season. What we have in its place are three pallets and some interesting ‘one by somethings’ that would make interesting paneling, or something like that-

— Saturday. I woke up early again and twiddled my thumbs and de-cluttered until around ten a.m., then zoomed off to my favourite hardware & building supply store, bought one 4x4x8 piece of lumber to change a bit of the configuration of the desk I am typing on right now – I’m using my MacBook to write this as the workhorse is still not feeling well. But, anyway – Cathi had been up all night writing and listening to Coast to Coast AM, so I did not make a lot of noise with my power miter saw and let her sleep. And by the time she got up I was falling asleep at the keyboards here, not typing anything worth writing home about, but –  So I needed a nap, and when I opened my eyes it was after 10 pm And there was a nice bowl of spaghetti in the micro wave waiting for me, and it was still almost hot. 🙂

— And then I went down into the basement and cut my pretty new 4×4 into 3 nice, solid legs for this desk here. 🙂 – Worried the cat, I think every time I start building things he’s afraid I’m going to build him a cat prison, or even worse, put up a couple doors where they shouldn’t be, because everybody knows, a closed door is just not acceptable to any cat on this planet.

— I needed Cathi’s help to remove the (temporary for almost 2 years) rolling printer stand out from under the end of the desk while I placed the three new 4×4 legs and let the desktop down to rest on them – &, because the desktop became slightly warped (to match my personality?) (no- because the rolling printer stand was an inch too high) I went and found a piece of thick, healthy cardboard to ‘shim’ one corner of the desk until it warps back into shape.

— And, when the desk was looking better I had to drive Cathi into a worried state as I moved stuff around in the ‘office’ and had to wheel a couple things out and around the corner into the bedroom. She was afraid I wouldn’t get the un-cluttering clutter out of the bedroom before it was time for her to rest and recharge her beautiful self. 🙂 But I somehow, even though I was in the depths of mind numbing what-do-I-do-next syndrome complicated by everywhere-I-look-there’s-something-else-I-should-be-dealing-with syndrome – got things done, and cleared the stuff I had to move into the bedroom for a couple hours out of there amd back into here. So I don’t know – I might have uncluttered about one fourth of this room, at least below the height of five feet – some of the shelves might still be in distress – and I have a lot more to do, like, what the bleep am I going to do with all the books and stuff that should be within reach but this room isn’t big enough??? — Shrug — I took a ‘before’ and a couple ‘during’ snapshots, but we’re not finished, so I can’t post an ‘after’ shot yet –

Dog in a crate in a van whose seats were hiding.

Jassper, deliriously happy, even if he is in a crate, on September 12th, 2013 – When we went to pick him up at the kennel where he had to stay for a couple days while we were moving. Poor dog thought we were sick of him and he would have to spend the rest of his life in a dog jail, unwanted and abandoned. 🙁 – Oh, There was a heck of a downpour just before we went out to pick up the animals. But we couldn’t let that stop us.

So, yeah, the ‘office’ is starting to look like I might yet whip it into shape, even if there is a new obstacle course between me and the door – And I had to deal with pets who were afraid they’d starve to death if I was a couple minutes late in feeding them this morning, so it is now, 11:43 am – 2 hours and twenty minutes after I started this. & It will probably take a couple more minutes to check the spelling and do a bit of proof reading, so, have a wonderful Sunday, both you people who will probably read most of this. 😉

~~~~~ Jim

We Got Stuff Done Yesterday-

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Friday, July 10th, 2015 -( 26°C / 79°F with another weather station in town reporting 32°C which would be more like 89.6°F- Sunny and oppresive here in Atlantic Canada @ 3:30 pm )-

Woman posing with hammer and cordless power screwdiver near a project she just saw completed.

Cathi was going to screw four pallets together to build her fenced in compost heap, but the power screwdriver quickly ran out of juice. I came to the rescue with a hammer and some nails, but she deserves credit for this- we had to trim back at least two pallets to get the shorter heights to match, but she found out about people using throw away pallets for all kinds of beautiful and wonderful things. 🙂

Pallets hiding behind steel shed.

We’ve grabbed a few pallets -with the blessings of local businesses- to begin Cathi’s ambitious projects with, not enough to suit me, but enough to worry her that the neighbours might complain about the mess in our yard here. we try to hide most of it behind the steel shed.

— And the internet is giving me doo doo today, so I will keep this short. We got things done and Cathi was happy about that. We have more to do, and today she wants to go jump in a lake. If the 32°C /90°F thermometer is right, she probably has the right idea. 🙂

Woman cleaning up after a bit of work.

We are making progress with taking apart multi pallet units and getting ready to build things.

—

Rethinking Internet Games

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Thursday, July 9th, 2015 -( 18°C / 64°F & Clear & Sunny @ 10:30 am in Atlantic Canada )-

— I’ve been rethinking the value and potential of internet games. Role playing games especially. First Person Shooters never did float my boat.

Cute blond in modest apparel.

Elise, one of the ‘builder’ characters in our game world.

— Back in 1987 or 8, I got my first look at interactive text-based games on GEnie. A close friend was raving about a game she was playing and wanted to show me what it was all about. She went through the process of showing me how to ‘roll’ a character and pick his or her stats, occupation or ‘class’ in a fantasy world that in a text game was entirely in your imagination. Her character popped into that world and an ice hole player with a strong character came along and killed her brand new character with two punches. She was logged out, she didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of the ice hole ( or Troll, as we call them in discussion groups etc, the morons who just want to jump in and stir up trouble and try to make everybody feel like a third or fourth class citizen in a universe ruled by ice holes and jerks who want to dance around and sing ‘I’m number one- you ain’t doo doo-‘.) My friend groaned, “They’re not supposed to do that, they know they’re not supposed to do that. I just might report him, get him barred from the game.” I wasn’t impressed with on-line gaming after that.

— A couple years later, after I had moved back closer to my parents, with my father ailing, then wheel-chair bound – my mother at her wits end from trying to deal with that, and my father’s always abrasive personality – He watched ‘all in the family’ that he called the Archie Bunker Show, and took notes – mental notes – and picked up a lot of put down words and nasty things to call people to their faces and thought that was cool. The same friend who had tried to interest me in playing on-line computer games – when they cost six bucks an hour to play in ‘other than prime time’ – they cost 18 bucks an hour during prime time – drove 250 miles from an inland university town to be around friendly people and interact with somebody she knew wouldn’t try to humiliate her or in any way make her feel uncomfortable about herself in a world where even good-looking young women like her can feel like they’d been born with targets on their hearts and souls and minds, and clouds over their heads radiating “Humiliate me- Make me more miserable than I already am – PLEASE!”

— I don’t think I should go into an explanation that we’d both come from – ‘not quite fully functional’ – families, had one parent each who was at least border line alcoholic – and relatives who would go way out of their way to make us feel less than human any chance they got. But I should say that she was at least as intelligent, imaginative, sensitive and creative as I am, I was really impressed by the way she could sit down, sigh, wrinkle her forehead and gasp through several worried looks as she thought her way through something, gasp or sigh one more time, write out an outline, smile, then go sit down at her computer and write a work of fiction with engaging, believable and likeable characters, follow that outline and get it done. All the time I’d be writing my brains out, not having any idea where my characters were leading me, and having no clue at all whether anybody else in creation would ever want to spend time reading about my characters and the crazy situations they got themselves into.

— And while she was in my old home town, she asked if she could use my computer to check her email a couple of times and came back with an “Oh shit!” To which, of course I replied, “What’s the matter?” And she said, “Roxy’s gonna have her baby tonight and since I’m one of the characters who can’t attack or be attacked by other player’s characters I’m supposed to be there and be on guard against things that go bump in the night-” -or something quite close to that. After I said, “Huh?” She replied, “Oh- this is Dragons Gate- the new game I told you about a couple of times, the one that is so much more fun than that other one I was playing.”

— I think I felt like Steve McQueen in a movie I once saw, who has just heard an explanation for something that could never make any sense to anyone, but he nodded, and said, “Okay, I’ll do it-” And I nodded and said, “I have a modem- you know your account stuff and your password?”

— And my friend was in seventh heaven, I never saw her so animated and full of bliss and ready to party- I mean, she was like a kid at her own birthday party. We got set up with her at my clunky old apple IIe – she was used to a less clunky Mac- and I sat back, somewhat puzzled and a little bit amazed at her transformation, maybe a little bit bedazzled by the power of a computer game.

— I showed her how to start recording everything that happened onto my ridiculous $795.00 – ten megabyte hard drive. She was as animated as a lot of university students might be, if they were watching a really good movie with a room full of friends, maybe slurping down legal or illegal beverages and forgetting their inhibitions bouncing up and down in the chair and going ‘hoot hoot!’ as she typed faster than I ever could.

— She laughed and blushed and beamed and tried to explain everything about every character who was there for this on-line gaming event. She had anecdotes about every character, and each character’s player. She’d been in touch with all of them, some of them over the phone. I think she’d even met one or two in person. And then they got into wandering around the virtual landscape that was all in our imaginations, trying to find just the right spot for Roxy to do her birthing dance. – Roxy’s player was one of the artists who -worked for the brat- behind the scenes at “The Simpsons” and she was fun. She had two other characters who were quite busy in the game and you never could have guessed she played all three. So Roxy found a nice tree or pole to hold on to and do her dance with my friend’s Forest Elf character standing guard and then – “Wooosh!” -A dark cloud, something from a spell came over everything. Nobody could see anything at all – but they could hear Roxy’s voice calling frantically as an impression of dark wings flapped and her voice got further and further away- and when the darkness lifted, Roxy was gone. Everybody there, and in a very short time it seemed that everybody who was playing the game that night, became involved in running all around the known game world, looking for Roxy, Yelling her name- wondering what happened to her. They found her, wounded and delirious in a darkened alley near the centre of town – and no longer pregnant. It felt to me like I’d fallen into a very engaging world where the players drove the story lines and suddenly, the potential here had no limits.

— A couple months later I went to stay with her for a weekend. As we drove around on things no more complicated than me accompanying her on grocery shopping we talked about the game world and the different races the characters could be part of. I jokingly came up with a cat person character named Purcival Alleyscourge. She got a good chuckle, but then later, that evening, she deleted one of her characters that she’d become bored with and rolled up Purrcival Alleyscourge. She was surprised at some high ‘stats’ and chose the recommended ‘Class’ or occupation of ‘Thief’. Still later, when she was tired and I was still much too wide awake, she suggested I get on her computer and wander around the game world as Purrcival. I did. I encountered an evil NPC rogue who jumped out of nowhere and nearly beat Purrcival to death, yelled ‘help’ when a passerby wandered by and that character stepped in and saved Purrcy’s hide. I found out my friend secretly had two accounts, one based on the west coast, where she came from, and one on the east coast, where she was going to school. For the next couple weeks she let me sign in to one account while she was on the other, and we interacted. About a month later she asked me to house sit her apartment while she went to visit her parents for a week and I spent more time as Purrcival and after she came back east I went home and activated my own account at GEnie and rolled up a character or two, and she deleted Purrcival and I rolled him up on my account. Purrcival changed occupations, as some of the cat people he hung out with did not approve of thieves. He made good friends quickly, even fell in love with one character who proposed marriage to him. Since I could not afford to be playing the game during prime time at eighteen bucks an hour, I wrote stories about the characters. And when GEnie held a story writing contest to promote their money-making games, I submitted a couple and won a second and a third prize. The friends I made there back then were very creative types, many of them went on to become paid elders in the game and concocted some of the scenarios – plots that drove the game, one plotted and created a haunted house, wrote all the room descriptions, sent them to the game’s owners and they liked his ideas, ‘built’ the haunted house, and gave him a ‘position’- I’m not sure whether he immediately became one of the paid members of the staff, or got to play for free as long as he contributed designs and plots for scenarios.

— One of the fun things that would happen is when several of us would sign on as soon as the price dropped on the east coast and met in the town square and the ‘psychic’ characters would give those of us whose characters were not psychic the gift of ESP so we could communicate on the PSI channel and not drive the more serious gamers crazy. We could send messages directly from our character to theirs, or broadcast to anyone who had ESP in the game. I jokingly sent silly suggestions to the elders and, one night one of the elders contacted me through the ‘psi-net’ and asked what was happening tonight. I shrugged in real life and said, “Oh- it feels like grumble bunny from hell night around here- but I have to go- catchya later-” & after signing off, I got a call long distance from my friend who could barely contain her laughter, saying that the elders had whipped up a bunch of wimpy characters, with little or no ‘treasure’, called them ‘Grumble Bunnies’ and there was a mass invasion of the town square of these weird creatures whose annoying attacks would cause minor damage, nothing life threatening, but enough to encourage the players characters in the town square to clear the town square of the annoying grumble bunnies. I sent email to the game owners with suggested buildings, suggested new races, and got positive encouragement from the head owner, who said he was looking at giving me some kind of a ‘position’ that might be a free account or even a paid one. So I wandered all around the game, captured every description of every ‘room’ I could. When the elders asked for ‘sign painters’ to paint signs for a number of places around the town square I jumped in, sent them at least sixteen suggestions and was promised a really nifty in-game object with magical abilities attached to it. Then I got laid off from a job I had and couldn’t afford to play any more. And the owner told me that someone he’d given a free account to had ‘burned him’ by playing all the time and did not contribute half of what had been expected of him, so he, the owner, wasn’t going to be giving away any free accounts for a while.

— And now let me get to some kind of point here. Playing that game back then, when it was still in its early development stage, was fun and gave me insights into what kind of on-line games appealed to people. There were more or less two groups of players. There were the finesse players who wanted to develop characters who were unique and had definite personalities, quirks, idiosyncracies, tastes, and in general, gave that world a lot of character and culture. Characters gathered in the town square and told jokes, pretended to get drunk, enjoyed each other’s company- more than two couples I know of met in real life after playing in the game and got married. I know at least one couple is still married.

— Then there were the rabid hackers and slashers. The kind of players who enjoy first person shooters and want to kill everything and everyone in sight. The finesse players would spend hours, weeks, and months developing their characters and the hack and slash trolls would come along and attack and made life so miserable for my friends that they stopped playing that game.

— I remember complaining about something over the ‘Psi-net’ one evening and got the immediate response: “If this game is driving you nuts, why don’t you write your own game?” I was stunned. I started plotting and planning my own game. My rocky experience with employment had me either too exhausted to try to seriously get down and develop my own game or just broke enough so I couldn’t afford whatever new bit of software was required to put something together that anybody else would want to play.

— I wrote a text game in applesoft basic when the program limit was 32k- I could write a character rolling program, link it to an area with six ‘rooms’ give the characters healing skills to heal wounded npcs and sword fighting skills to defend themselves. I could link programs so the characters could go off and defend the world from maintenance robots that some evil genius had programmed to kill anything living, & when ‘killed’- the robots exploded and left something on the ground worth picking up, carrying to the local merchant program where their treasures were sold for silver and gold & and they could buy better weapons. If they wanted, they could go off into six-room wilderness area where they could search for herbs. Good herbs would improve their stats. Bad herbs would reduce them. They had to learn the difference. Or they could go to a one room area where they could become blacksmiths and hammer out weapons with random success, and keep their weapons or sell them to a merchant would appear each time they finished a weapon and offer them something for it. Silver or gold. My nephews, who were six and ten years old at the time loved it. They didn’t realize they were moving from program to program when they moved from one ‘area’ to another.

— Then I learned to program in “C” and instead of 32k programs linked together, I could write 1 Meg programs and link them together. The long version of the character rolling program was 5 programs long, but explained everything about each race they thought they wanted to roll.

— And every time I thought I had something worth showing somebody – The ‘industry’ raised the bar on me to just beyond my reach. One 3D world engine that would work on a Mac or a PC cost $138.00 to buy, and I could mess around with it, but I couldn’t get it to save anything that would consistently work when I tried to open it next time. That company announced their new and improved version, it went on sale for $250.00 when I couldn’t afford that much, and the next time I had two hundred and fifty bucks the price had gone up to $1,000.

— Another game engine was advertised on the web, I went and looked at it, viewed the video propaganda and noticed the price wasn’t listed anywhere. I sent email and a company executive asked me what my budget was like and wouldn’t answer my ‘how much does this cost?’ until I told him I’d been looking at the $1,000 program and he informed me that his company’s game engine cost six figures.

— Then a game engine in a ‘cloud’ came along, got my email address from somewhere and recruited me with a free account because they needed to know how many games could be developed in each server without blowing that server up and causing it to crash. I got busy creating my world, watched it change from my original idea into what their game engine could produce, and I was doing pretty well, until I reached a conclusion that the help I needed from other developers would not be  coming and I couldn’t go any further unless the universe dropped several thousand dollars in my lap.

Builder Character smiling down at us.

“Xyreana”, shown here, is the one builder character / Experiment with facial morphing etc. – who came through the process looking happy. She’s wearing a Bard woman’s bodice and a Wizard’s short skirt, so she looks like any lonely computer nerd’s vision of the woman he might meet in a game who will of course throw herself at him, take him as he is and demand nothing but wild and passionate love from him. But, because I still have to figure out how and why she came out so smilingly happy, I kept her around, anyway.

— And now, in the last couple weeks, the spiffy HP computer I bought specifically to develop the game, because it was fast, had a great graphics card and a poop load of RAM- started crashing whenever I was trying to do anything with graphics – the computer doesn’t care if I write my brains out in Open Office or Word Press – & I can surf ad nauseam, but as soon as I try to do anything that’s heavy into graphics the card has a melt down and the monitors go black and say they are receiving no signal. boom – crash – dead.

— But then, last night – Wednesday Night/Thursday Morning – on Coast to Coast AM they interviewed a guy named Gordon Asher Davidson, who talked about the battle between good and not so good aliens over the future of this planet, Earth – and his take – whether it is poetically true or actual fact-based – was quite uplifting. The evil idjits who have been trying to manipulate us for centuries, if not millenniae – who were responsible for 9-11-2001 and world war two and every divide and conquer manipulation including the re-writing of the Christian Bible to fit into the Romans’ view of how they wished to rule the world- etc. have been removed from power. They still have their human agents in place who are trying their damnedest to hit us with false flag operations, but have not been able to pull off anything really big since the twin towers attack which gave them the atmosphere of terror they wanted in order to convince good old Americans to gleefully surrender loads of constitutional rights and all that under the Homeland Security (Bull Chips!) Banner – And every day more and more of the dark minded bad guys’ shenanigans are being dragged into the light and pretty soon the banksters will be strung up by their private parts in public and stripped of their ill-gotten gains, with – for instance – all the money and resources and basically anything of value that the IMF is trying to steal from everybody, everywhere on the planet, will be going back to the people it was stolen from. The US Government will have to pay back everybody they fleeced with their student loan scams, Banksters will either wake up in jail or in an alternate reality, believing they’re still in control here, until the fruit of their labours turns that reality to a wasteland – Anybody who will not be able to stand the atmosphere of Love and Forgiveness, Peace, Love, Harmony, Evolutionary Giant Steps and all that, will just not be here. So of course somebody who’s been duped by the re-written parts of the Bible had to call up and accuse Gordon of being a liar and an agent of the devil because everybody knows, it will be the good Christians who will be raptured off the planet, not the evil ones who will wake up somewhere else and not know they’re not here, messing with us any more.

— Um, I didn’t get much sleep last night, after a short sleep and a curious dream that my mother fell asleep while my sister, Sharon, and I were doing something together for Mom’s benefit- And then I had to get up, thought about trying something a bit different with my spiffy graphics computer, watched it blow up and crash more quickly than ever, so I sighed and cleaned a little bit of clutter away while I was waiting for the spiffy computer to come back up from its self checking after a crash routines.

— I really felt good about the future. Everything that guy said was resonating as “True” and passing through my not quite perfect B.S. filter – and I went back and thought about everything I’d been trying to do with creating with the goal of running an MMO-RPG world that lived up to the highest of my pretty high standards –  which would mean that the hackers and slashers would have their own island where they could drive each other crazy, and wouldn’t have much fun in the areas where the finesse players wanted to hang out. I built the original game so my nephews could play something they were interested in and didn’t have to kill everything in sight to thrive and advance. I’d ‘created’ wounded Non-Player-Characters who would be nearly dead on a battlefield, where healing characters could come along, heal the wounded, get loads of experience, and when the wounded characters reached an acceptable (to them) level of health, they would sit up, thank the healer, and give them a random weapon or halfway valuable item that the healer could either keep or cash in next time they went to the market or came across a wandering merchant. Several players I talked to loved that idea. The couple of game owners I talked to didn’t want to be bothered, they said they would have to create a whole new class of NPC’s and that would be a pain in the butt. -B.S.-

— But as I thought more about my ideas for that game, the more I felt like I was contributing more to the light side of things than to the dark, and I began to remember the psychics I had met through my job as a video producer for a cable teevee outfit, and how they’d looked like they wanted to roll their eyes and get away from me when I told them I’d been trying to create my interactive computer game – and then they’d look astounded, like they were getting a message from somewhere and turn to me with a new light in their eyes and say, “Yes- that game of yours can be successful, but only if you stick to your original ideas and don’t let anybody talk you into doing it the old ‘tried and tested’ way, which would destroy your basic concept and drag that game down and contribute to the dark side of things.

— So, If the light side of things, the Freedom of Choice and the aliens in the Federation of Light – or whatever – want to help me with this, they know where I am. And if this is something that angels of light and all those agents of God who want to help us silly humans manifest Heaven on Earth – believe is worth completing – a wonderful new computer or a spiffy new (working) video card will almost magically appear here in my slowly becoming uncluttered office.

🙂 — 🙂

~~~~~Jim