Category: Quantum Theory and Parallel Worlds –

Monday – Crunchy Monday –

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Monday, February 26th, 2018 —>-2˚C / +28˚F with light snow falling on crunchy overnight quarter inch of white stuff at 7:16 am in Atlantic Canada —> On Aunt Reggie’s Birthday 🙂 —

Twilight in Keltic Valley

– “Twilight over the Half-Elf Valley ” –

— The actual sky was more orange – As the sun set through a temperature inversion. But when I had to adjust the print so “TaleRocker” was almost visible – the process gave us a much more yellow sky.

Midnight in Keltic Valley.

– “Midnight In Keltic Valley” –

— This {above } shot is modified too – but in order to capture the feeling, I let it stay a bit dark.

 

TaleRocker by Douglas Jay Otterson.

– “TaleRocker” – According to Doug Otterson –

— Doug Says in a text message on the iPhone, “Hey look, I gave you glasses :)” – I was guessing that – on one of his infrequent nights off when he couldn’t sleep he spent a couple hours trying to modify one of his Builder characters. But then I realized that one of the times when he stayed with us in order not to upset his New Brunswick sweetie’s son, he signed on to my account and modified one of mine. On his last visit { Saturday } – He looked at what we’d done in the past week, looked at me, laughed and asked my permission to try to fix something when I was succumbing to complete burn-out – He gave ‘TaleRocker’ a pair of glasses – & after admitting that he gave him glasses, ‘messaged’: “I tried to get him to look a little more like you without chancing anything catastrophic” — Silly me, next time I logged in I had to use one of the tools that can modify characters to turn this guy around to see his face and yup, he’s got glasses.

L'Haeren

– Doug’s ‘Highe Elf’ builder character – Guarding the gate to our new and improved (?) Keltic Valley. –

— I should make him explain his own inspirations – But Doug told me this guy { above } gave him the confidence to try to get a character to look something like the ‘real me’ { After one of my attempts to come up with a replacement for a female builder character who suffered a catastrophic failure and fell out of the world and never came back – Actually looked like his daughter, Rachel as she’d grown up – & I hadn’t seen her since she was about 9 years old – & after he says spent about three hours messing with the facial morphing tools, he thought this one looked a little like me as  tall blond elf  { ‘Highe Elves’ see themselves as being more intellectual than Forest Elves? } & He said he saw me more as a Bard than a Ranger – { We met at a writer’s workshop at Cornell U. in Ithaca, New York } When I whined and didn’t think this guy quite looked like me, he spent more like five hours working on a Ranger and I’ve been using that guy’s screen shot as my Twitter profile for a couple years now –

TaleRocker Icon.

– Adjusted { Exposure } and Cropped – Icon sized image of TaleRocker with his glasses. –

— This is probably okay for an ‘effbook’ profile picture, but there isn’t enough contrast to make it a really good blog icon.

— Doug dared me to use it as my profile picture. I have to think about that. While I hedged and ‘thought about it – he said, “Take his hat off -” So I did and he has bangs that don’t quite fall in front of his eyes and they’re edged in a near indigo blue colour.

— And I’m not going to sit here and type until I wake up with my nose on the keyboard and find fifteen pages of “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” – or something. But I plopped that image to the left because Xhyrean wants to know how that might format things in this blog.

— “Argh”?

— But in all fairness, we got a lot done over the weekend. And I actually felt good about walking out into a beautiful new world before dawn this morning to put out the garbage, walking on the crunchy new quarter-inch of snow with a tiny bit of freezing rain on top of it.

— & Yes, Xhyrean, Everything does look amazing after staring at a computer screen for eighteen hours trying to fix unexpected catastrophes. & Hey guys, we have a tool to save what we have as it is and come back later to restore it if somebody else falls asleep at their computer and wipes out half the universe — 😉

— “Set and Save Checkpoints!”

~~~~~ Jim

“Darkness – Darkness -“

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Copied & Pasted from https://aerendel.org/komix/ :

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“Darkness, Darkness-“

by on February 20, 2018 at 9:11 pm

Posted In: “Boof!” –, “Weird Weather” – even in the game world? –, Computer Game Building Schnarr –, Conspiracies –, Creativity –, Dreams don’t always make sense – Especially when you’re wide awake –, Exploring Caverns –, Life should be more fun. –, Life should be more relaxed –, No bears in the news today –, Quantum Theory and Parallel Worlds –, Uncategorized

 

Tuesday, February 20th, 2018  —> 0˚C / +32F with light rain @8:15 pm in Atlantic Canada —> It’s Kathy Krafchick’s Birthday { & Patty Hearst’s too } —> Happy Birthday to both of them { Not that either one will likely see this … } —

 

The Stars Returned -

– The Stars Returned – & the night sky got dark. Kaeren was there to see it. –

 

— The [ above ] screenshot of Kaeren gazing at the starry sky [ came out too dark ] too dark to show up well here. I [ had to ] mess with the screenshot.

— A lot has happened since the last time I posted here [ re: progress building/putting together the game’s world ]. Kaeren was really busy – planted a lot of flowers, brought Springtime to DelVahria and to Keltic Vale.

— { & Out of Character -} The dark night skies went away and haven’t come back. We read notes and thought that this could be because of racial issues. Races that can see in the dark might keep the darkness –  and the stars – away?

— & Since I’ve been back { as ‘TaleRocker’ } we managed to light our streetlamps – Get our waterfalls to look something like waterfalls – dropped a large rock across the river at the border between Keltic Vale and DelVahria – lost a couple water troughs – And we think we figured out why a lot of the plants that Kaeren planted kept disappearing { apart from the obvious – Forest elves picking them, taking the plants home and transplanting them – } And we think we might have solved that little problem – But we’ll have to hang on and see what happens next –

— After the last time Kaeren got to go star-gazing night hasn’t fallen in, jeeze, weeks in this dimension – two days back on the Earth we came from – Time passes differently here –

 

 

Dark Couds -

– And we’ve seen some dark clouds lately – { & I Did have to mess with the exposure on this one, too. } –

 

— & We don’t know what’s coming here – none of us have been here long enough to know if they have a monsoon season or if hurricanes come this far inland –

— So, um, We’ll keep you posted –

= = = = =

— { & because I knew and liked Kathy Krafchick – an intelligent, sensitive, artistic young woman who was a bit younger than me – when Patty Hearst was kidnapped – that effected me deeply. I tried praying that she’d come back to her family safely – and because I’d already heard of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ {{ I am 28% Viking – but that has nothing to do with what my ‘radar’ picks up – all sorts of absurd information finds its way into my brain, mind & soul (?) and stays there – }} [ shudder ] — I thought the justice system failed Patty Hearst and all of us when they sent her to jail for not being strong enough (or stupid enough) to resist her captors { and maybe get herself killed. ((?)) } um – }

 

Indigo Skies At Sunset -

– “Indigo Skies At Sunset?” – The orange glow around the mountains might be the temperature inversion effect we were hoping for? –

 

— I don’t know, maybe everything will come out all right in the end — ???

~~~~~ Jim

More Adventures in World Building { Game World Building }

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Sunday, February 18th, 2018 —> -6˚C / +21˚F & snowing ‘lightly’ @ 8:15 am in Atlantic Canada —

Connecting Two 3D Game Areas.

– “Kaeren connecting Stone Lake with Keltic Vale” – Looks interesting, but it’s not for the weak of heart. –

— I’d say I spent about 8 hours working on various areas inside the 3D interactive ‘Role Playing’ game we’re building. But it was probably more like 12.

 

— One area, DelVahria, is especially complicated. Most of it is inside a cave. This needs 3 ‘Heightmaps’ { The visible terrain you can walk on and can’t walk through – usually. } One for the ground and the depths of the cave – a second for the ceiling of the cave { and this one has to be flipped upside down at creation – This is because all the terrain you see is one-dimensional +/or solid on one side, but invisible and you can walk through it without knowing it’s there from the other side. } – And the third bit of heightmap terrain covers the cave and in this case looks like a mountain from the outside. — You have to carefully line everything up or it looks really weird. And then you can’t do anything to any one of the ‘maps’ while they’re all together. – If you try to modify the floor of the cave and use the tool that pulls it down – you also end up pulling the ceiling down over the spot you’re ‘digging out’ and you pull a section of mountain over the cave down too. One little ‘oops’ can take half a second to ‘create’ and hours to undo – So you have to slide all the pieces apart, one at a time – carefully – and make sure you don’t loose one in the process – I send the mountain one way and the cave ceiling the other. Then you make your changes, fix your ‘oopses’ and take a breath, close your eyes and move everything back together.

 

— I tried to connect ‘DelVahria’ with another area yesterday – & had disastrous results – all three pieces went in three different directions. I thought the cave ceiling sailed off into oblivion and I would never find it again. But I crossed my fingers and went off in a straight line, lost sight of other two pieces, and whattaya know? – there it was – something like halfway to Cleveland – naked and totally confused. It took me about fifteen minutes to bring it back home and then another five minutes to get it lined up correctly.

 

— Today I tried half measures – ‘created’ a new area and called it ‘Keltic Vale’ – and left its real estate completely flat – and tried to connect that to DelVahria. I used some of my father’s favourite magic words when the two areas refused to line up completely – no matter how much I tried one map or the other was always at least one silly increment off. But okay – I left them a bit off like that – lined them up as close to perfectly as any two areas ever get, and then knitted them together with a tool whose icon is a band-aid. I tested the borders by having my active builder character run back and forth several times and the character did not fall through a crack in the world and fall screaming into oblivion.

 

— Then I tried to connect these two areas with three others that I knocked myself out on this week. Those three areas are connected east to west with ‘Stone Lake’ being the farthest west. I thought they would all play nice if I connected Keltic Vale to Stone Lake. { See ‘Kaeren’ at work ( above ) standing there while I ‘married’ the edges of both areas, and gave her credit for that. }

 

— But, connecting Stone Lake to Keltic Vale broke apart the three areas that had been securely fastened together. I didn’t have to go quite as far out into never never land to find all the pieces, but then the process of lining them up and ‘marrying’ their edges again, and then using the ‘band-aid’ tool to cement their bonds all over again took something like 5 hours. And I had to test all the glitches – have Kaeren run around and fall through cracks in the world again and hope she could recover from the trauma of falling into another dimension. I really like the builder characters that I do a lot of modifications to, & I go into mourning when one of them disappears forever. – Luckily, that didn’t happen. Kaeren must like me back.

 

Kaeren with night vision.

– “Kaeren with night vision” – This is an un-doctored screen shot. – I usually have to mess with the exposure to get to the point where I can identify what I saw when I took the screenshot in the first place. – That’s ‘DelVahria’ in the distance behind her. –

— That’s DelVahria in the background. Kaeren looks frustrated here, doesn’t she? After hours of messing around with getting Stone Lake and both the other areas linked to Stone Lake back together, messing with borders that didn’t want to play nice, falling through a lot of cracks – And then going off on a wild and crazy hunt for a river that didn’t come back with Stone Lake { The ‘water’ just kind of hovered off in the distance, wondering if I’d notice it was missing – then took a lot of maneuvering and resizing to get it back in place. }

 

— So after hours of that kind of nonsense – The border between Keltic Vale and Stone Lake, which was fine five hours earlier – lost all its integrity and dropped her into the underworld no matter what we did – no matter how many times we used the ‘band-aid’ — I finally logged off and back on and had Kaeren run around a couple other areas for fun and then came back in to do some serious planetary healing and it worked.

 

— But then the link between Keltic Vale and DelVahria was even more messed up – trying to cross a simple no-nonsense straight-ahead border sent her teleporting off into mountains somewhere – and trying to get out of the mountains dropped her through the world again. More than once. So we logged out again, twiddled our thumbs for a while, logged back in and closed our eyes and ran across the border and – holy cow! It worked fine! Maybe this was a case of, “You used up all the memory I’m going to let you play with in this session, – kid.”

 

— AND – The sky went black at night – That hasn’t happened in a long time. I wondered why not and what I might have to do to get the night and the stars back – but there they were. Maybe the ‘world’ has to be up for a long period of time before the background routines allow for darkness and stars at night? Anything’s possible, I suppose –

Dark Skies and Stars!

– “Dark Skies over Stone Lake” – The lines around that area back there { which is what Stone Lake looked like from Keltic Vale before we got busy fixing things after we got the borders to work } – Define that area and tell us it is ‘selected’ while we’re working on it. –

— I was able to get the dark skies and stars to happen over at least one more area after checking out the settings in the ‘Environment’ Control/Editing panel.

Cave Entrance in Daylight.

– “Cave Entrance in Daylight” – With Kaeren about ready to cry and ask if she can’t just please go home and get some sleep. –

— At night the fog behind her is dark – in the daylight – those cave dwellers must have rigged themselves an ingenious method to get sunlight down inside their cave.

 

— So now, after twelve hours of working on this, I think I just spent another four cropping the screenshots and telling you all about what a long day of Game World Building is really like. Ya gotta love it –  or you’ll never stick to it long enough to get anything done at all.

 

— “Run Away Screaming-” “Aaaaaaaaaaa!”

~~~~~ Jim

Jassper’s Latest Adventures in Game World Building –

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Tuesday, February 13th, 2018 —> -16˚C / +2˚F — Dark, cold and Mostly Cloudy @10:40 pm in Atlantic Canada —

— Jassper spent most of yesterday fretting about his minor surgery today, { “Friday the thirteenth is a Tuesday this month.”  — “But it’s bad luck to be superstitious -” 😉 “Yeah yeah, I know – but -” }

— His post should be visible here below this :

 

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Adventures In Game Development

by on February 13, 2018 at 12:32 pm

Posted In: “Boof!” –, Computer Game Building Schnarr –, Creativity –, Life should be more fun. –, Life should be more relaxed –, No bears in the news today –, Quantum Theory and Parallel Worlds –, Uncategorized, Welcome –

Tuesday, February 13th, 2018 —> -9˚C / +15˚F – Sunny & clear with over-bright sunlight reflecting off snow and ice @12:02 pm Atlantic Time —

Stitching Stone Lake And Wolf Ridge Together.

– “Stitching Two Game World Areas Together” –

— I wasn’t at my best yesterday – arthritis aches and all that. I logged in to our Game Building site and messed around with building another area – then stitched it together with ‘Stone Lake’. I was pretty happy with the way the new area looked – and was adding a few cosmetic improvements when with one click, I somehow deleted the southern half of that new area. So I bit the bullet, un-joined the two areas and built a new version of the new area – left it all dark and with some ‘geological’ problems I’d have to fix later.

— The above Screen shot ( or maybe it’s over on the left? ) shows part of the process of blending the two areas together, using a terrain tool to match up the borders. The white mesh stuff around what looks like a cave is how it looked about three quarters of the way through blending the borders – [ I later trimmed down that mountain in the all dark brown there because that area is not supposed to be higher than “Stone Lake” ] & after something like 10 hours I had the two areas ‘seamlessly’ joined and knew I had a couple days’ work ahead of me to get this right – but I’ll be recuperating from minor surgery, so I’ll have the time – I believe…

Jessicka / Kaeren

– This is supposed to be Jessicka from Jim’s latest novel –

— I don’t know how well this will load in the ComicPress Blog. The yellow is ‘pre-dawn fog’ in the Stone Lake area after a lot of work changing the path in from the new area (version 2.0) She does have reddish hair, is dressed rather modestly, I think she looks like somebody from my ‘sordid youth’, just can’t quite remember who – After the screen shot left her pretty much completely in shadow,, I had to mess with the exposure to get this, and what it looks like here is what I saw on my working computer screen. [ She’s got a ‘Ranger’s Pouch’ on her left hip there – probably  has some healing herbs or something like that in there. ]

— So that’s today’s progress report from Atlantic Canada –

— “Boof!” —

—jlb—

= = = = =

— I think he did a darned good job – And today, he says he has survived losing to a toenail to a ‘minor surgical proceedure’ – but I think he’s probably mourning the loss of that toenail, and looking forward to several days taking a combination of Ibuprophen and Tylenol – that’s what the doctor told him to do for any pain he might experience.

— He also told me he went back in to our game world and resurrected the area that half deleted itself yesterday when he tried to get rid of a ‘billboard’.

— & I’m thinkin his builder character looks like a combination of one friend’s sister and a young woman I had a monster crush on in junior high school – But with redder hair 🙂 —

 

— Thank you, Jassper,

~~~~~ Jim

Thursday – Morning After Another Foot Of Snow –

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Thursday, February 8th, 2018 —> -5˚C / +23˚F – with bright sunshine on our new foot of snow @ 11:30 am in Atlantic Canada —

Snow blown driveway and blue sky with clouds and brilliant sunlight.

– “Snow-Blown Driveway” – 11:30 am February 8tt, 2018 – With Van, Blue Sky + Some Clouds + Brilliant Sunlight –

— The sunlight was – possibly – too brilliant – I couldn’t see enough in the view-finder to know how level the photo might be – or know a lot of things that are crucial to ‘real  photographers’ — { Schnarr – }

— I tried to stay awake too long to get a jump on clearing the snow earlier, but the great big dump trucks plowing snow were experiencing troubles as they attempted their first clearing of Canada Street ( out of the photo, off to the left and a bit down hill ) – leaving about a five feet tall ridge of plowed snow when they could get up to speed. And that was something like 4:30 am – before the snow had stopped falling enough to say so.

Driveway with snow hills.

– Firewood under tarp { Pile slowly shrinking as we find time to get the wood out of the driveway and into the wood shed } in foreground – And Two good sized Snow Mountain Peaks back closer to the porch with a bit of the canyon leading to the deer hill between the peaks. –

— When the snow began falling yesterday afternoon – it didn’t look like much. I thought maybe they’d over-estimated our potential accumulation again. Nope – Luckily it was lightweight fluffy dry stuff and I didn’t drop dead from clearing the way to the shed where the snow blower lives ( After Cathi cleared the way once last evening ) –

Canyon toward Deer Hill.

– Closer to the Canyon –

— Being partially snow blinded { when trying to see the view-finder } had some interesting side effects – I couldn’t see the little bit of colourful lens flare to the right.

Close up on the van& snowy world beyond.

– & This was another happy surprise – The reflections on the van –

— This time yesterday I was thinkin that becoming a ‘snow bird’ & spending winters in bug-infested alligator-rich Florida might not be a bad idea. Today? It’s cold and beautiful up here. & A higher percentage of Atlantic Canadians are really nice people than most of the adults I remember surrounding me while I ‘grew up’ in the good old USA –

— Sigh — Have a nice day — Have a nice life?,

 

~~~~~ Jim

Saturday – February 3rd, 2018 – Kindle Scout Campaign for my Novel has launched –

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Saturday, February 3rd, 2018 —> -21˚C / -6˚F with an evil wind chill and clear skies @ 7:45 am in Atlantic Canada — I think today is Melanie Savka’s Birthday ( “Lay Down Candles In The Rain” “Brand New Key” “I Am Not A Poet” & More ) And I used to think it was Ian Anderson’s birthday too (Jethro Tull?) But I had that one wrong. —

Web Cam Photo

– Web Cam Photo – I thought this looked like a painting 🙂 –

— I was up early, knowing that today was the launch of the 30 day “Kindle Scout Campaign”. I thought it would launch at noon EST, but it launched at Midnight EST – and instead of finding user friendly badges on their site, I had to get creative &/or ‘problem solving’ and figured out how to get decent links that showed the book cover – and so far my feedback says I’m at 0% and the average for a Kindle Scout Campaign is 20%. Hmmmm —

Screenshot of book link.

– This is a ScreenShot – Don’t try to click on it –

 

— But anyway, We are on our way here. Can I scream now? Betcha I won’t be getting much sleep for the next month —

 

— This is the link to that page (Below? )—>

—> https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/2QR82SBDNQMRN <— Link

— Um, I’m pretty close to feeling brain dead at the moment-

— Maybe I should just finish this sentence andhit the ‘Publish” button?

— (help?)

 

Jim With Boston hat

– My Profile Pic at Kindle Scout –

 

 

 

~~~~~  Jim

Snowstorms and Possible Progress in my ‘Literary Career’

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Friday, February 2nd, 2018 —> -8˚C / +17˚F with light snow and some wind creating interesting swirls out there @ 2:52 pm in Atlantic Canada —> It’s Lisa’s and her son, Ricky’s, Birthday today 🙂 and also Cousin Lynn’s ( not really sure how to spell his name )’s birthday too 🙂 —

winter scene February 1st, 2018.

– Yesterday – I think I was able to capture the feeling I got when I looked between trees up close and saw a nice winter wonderland about fifty yards farther away through a frame of evergreens and birches –

— I submitted a manuscript that that was accepted for a “Kindle Scout Campaign” – The manuscript will be available for Kindle Scout Members to read for the next thirty days. And if enough readers are impressed enough to ‘Nominate’ that manuscript for publication, they might help the editors at Kindle and Amazon decide to publish it. I’d get an advance and maybe even royalties if I’m not too far off into the fringes of ‘weirdo writers’ or vastly over-estimated my writing ability and/or style?

llyn Ellyn Cover.

– “Llyn Ellyn ( Healing Waters Run Deep )” – Cover art by Catherine M. Harris. –

— “Llyn” is the Welsh spelling for the Welsh word that may refer to ‘a pool of water beneath a waterfall’ or may include ‘River’ and/or other bodies of water.

— This was my NaNoWriMo { National Novel Writing Month } project for November – NaNoWriMo is a yearly opportunity for writers to set the goal of writing 50,000 words in 30 days.  & If you reach or exceed that goal you get to download a badge for your website or facebook page – but more importantly – prove to yourself that you can do it. You need to upload your project and have it verified. You can’t get away with repeating the same word 50,000 times.

— This year, among the goodies we ‘winners’ get links to, was the ‘Kindle Scout Campaign’ & we had until January 31st to edit our NaNoWriMo story, get it as professional as possible, and submit it along with a short bio, book description your photo and a ‘thank you’ message to anybody who reads your story. I did manage to edit my story, changed the title a bit – Catherine M. Harris liked the first couple chapters she read and volunteered to create Cover art –

— That’s the cover to the left – and what you see there is a male humanoid with primitive bandages around his eyes – and  he might even have wings. He can’t remember much, but he’s been told he flew down and rescued a young woman from monsters from another dimension who were going to kill her, or worse. The woman he rescued has been placed in charge of watching him while he heals from severe burns he suffered during the rescue. She tells him they are in a huge cavern where a Medieval society includes Healers with near miraculous abilities. There is a river running through the cavern and that river flows over waterfalls. The community has named their underground city “Llyn Ellyn”.

— Ancient cave dwellers discovered crystal deposits in the ceiling of the cavern that can capture and amplify sunlight during the day and subsequent engineers have been able to fashion reflective panels of silver to reflect that light around some of the larger chambers of the cavern. The healers can reportedly use more crystals embedded in the walls of a “Healing Chamber” to aid in healing processes.

— He’s told he’s been given an “Elvish” name in lieu of being called something like, ‘John Doe’ – & that name means “Stranger” – or possibly “Magical Stranger” or even “Holy Stranger” – Some of the locals saw him fall out of thin air and into the pool near their central waterfall- they saw him with wings and thought he might be an angel. Some think he might be an evil fallen angel. He doesn’t know what to believe and he embarks on an odyssey through dreams and reality, ‘Dream Walking’ – and trying to piece together clues to who he might be and maybe what he might be.

— He can’t remember ever having wings and there do not appear to be any strange bones or odd muscles that might indicate his healing body ever had wings. He doesn’t know what to believe –

= = = = =

— The ‘Campaign’ begins tomorrow, February 3rd, 2018 – and will go until March 5th.

— I will be given links I can post to social media and I might be able to explain a few things about this campaign a little more clearly – unless today’s heavy wet snow messes up the electrical grid around here and then it might take me a few more days before I can post those links and try to explain things a little more clearly –

— Thanks,

~~~~~ Jim

Good Morning/Afternoon —> Some Archival Schtuff —

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Tuesday, January 23rd, 2018 —> -4˚C / +24˚F & very grey and drab with almost invisibly falling snow @3:15 pm in Atlantic Canada — Imported to “Mirror Blog” much later —

Deserted Manor Houses

– Faer Kingdoms – Deserted Manor Houses at Dawn –

— One of our first glimpses of a parallel world within a parallel world – In this case it’s an anomaly-created ‘pocket dimension’ called, “The Faer Kingdoms”. This is an area where mythical creatures and “The People Of The Glenn” live side by side with humans and elves and upright bi-pedal Cat-People – among others.

Cavern Details

– Cavern Details – A guide named Daerenn led us part of the way to safety through a cavern that had been formed by rushing water from melting glaciers eons ago. –

— This cavern is mostly stable with wild portals opening in random spots from time to time. In a lot of areas it’s dark and scary, in others, engineers have been able to chip away excess stone near deposits of fairly clear white or perfectly clear colourless crystals in the ceiling and set up mirrors and lenses to amplify and focus daylight into the interior of the cavern so sights such as this one are spectacular –

Wild Portals

– Examples of Wild Portals springing up – Not inside the cavern –

— Guards rush to stand near wild portals on a dark and stormy night in a section of the Faer Kingdoms. This was just before a really intense lightning storm and the kind of downpour that produced flash flooding everywhere.

Cavern Guard - "Don't Look Down"

– Doug hinted that there were several areas where various guides warned us, “Don’t Look Down!” This was one of those areas. –

— Luckily, most of the guides and guards in this cavern are hyper-vigilant and not afraid to body slam somebody who looks slightly woozy against a wall when they might just pass our and teeter over the edge. There was a deep pool of water at the bottom of this drop. We were warned that some pools can be extremely toxic.

Moonlight through channeled crystals

– Moonlight channeled through crystals –

— On a night with a brilliant full moon outside the cavern, the engineers were able to filter that moonlight through crystals and flood areas of the cavern with bright, nearly magical light.

Woman guard guarding Crysal deposits

– Crystal deposits – Colourful glowing crystals light up some dark spots. –

— Her name is Eslyn, she’s a guard – and she told us, “When we dress like this, a lot of guys can’t think straight – Sometimes we need all the unfair advantage we can get.” She smiled. Other guards glared at us like, “You’re not supposed to look!”

Crystal Cavern Guide.

– Vollffe was another guide/guard. He told us that many guides and guards adopt flashy dress to suggest to potential looters and vandals that they’re already rich enough so bribery would be out of the question. –

— Rods and shards of mined crystals litter the floor while scars from miners’ picks and other implements of destruction are plainly visible in the walls of this section of the cavern.

Cave Entrance as seen from the Faer Kingdoms

– When we glanced back at the cavern’s entrance/exit once we could see again in daylight. This is what we saw –

— The Faer Kingdoms landscapes, and many other features there – exhibited much richer colours than we were used to in our ‘normal world’.

Dhoreena beyond the cavern.

– Dhoreena is an artist and a gentle soul from our world who became fascinated with this dimension and stayed on to capture as much of it as she could in paintings and occasional contraband camera photographs. –

— When our eyes became adjusted to daylight again, an artist named Dhoreena greeted us and led us to a safe hostel where the food wasn’t bad and the beds were a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the cold hard stone in the cavern had been. She admitted that she came from our world, said something about a designation “Earth – North America-Canada-Mexico Number Minus Five” – And mentioned that the only difference between minus three and minus five was the borders of Maine and New Brunswick. Presque Isle is part of New Brunswick in her world. She also told us that she’d heard rumours of a dimension in which Robert Kennedy avoided assassination, where the Psychiatrist who hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan confessed to trying to set up the hapless immigrant as a diversion for the man dressed as a security guard – who suffered a broken neck when a football player near Bobby Kennedy saw the gun in his hand – and Bobby went on to become a three term President of the USA and jailed the manipulators of the Federal Reserve Bank and the Economy, in her words, “Went Gang-Busters!” She also told us that she didn’t mind that the locals had her change the spelling of her name to reflect their customs.

— I probably need to come back and say a lot more, but I can do that later –

~~~~~ Jim

Was Today Saturday?

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{ Imported as a “.png” image on Thursday, February 1st, 2018, then pre-dated – & posted as an archive here – }

Screenshot from 2009.

– I really liked this WordPress theme – with Tolkein scripts – You may be able to download this –

— Archives from July 26th, 2009 – The 29th of July was my cousin Jaimie’s birthday and a friend, Kaylie’s, birthday, too – 🙂 – I was experimenting with formatting when I posted the above, and I think this might even be readable as an image here – Yay!

Mother's Day, 2009 post

– Mothers’ Day Post, from 2009 – Shows the theme’s author. I went looking for her in a StartPage search and was able to download a copy of this theme from her site after it disappeared from WordPress’ offerings. – 🙂 – If you go to http://www.aerendel.ca/wp/ “Karen Blundell aka arwen54)” is a link that might even still work – 🙂 –

— & at the bottom of the page at http://www.aerendel.ca/wp/ you can click on the author’s name and go to her site and maybe even still download a copy of this theme if you really like it.

~~~~~ Jim

Poetry from 2009 –

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Sunday, February 4th, 2018  —> -7˚C / +19˚F & snowing lightly outside at 1:11 pm Atlantic Time —

Boof with bone.

– Jassper – May 17th, 2008 –

 

 

jassper onda couch.

-“Boof!”-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

— This is from the old “Aerendel News & Review” WordPress Blog:

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Saturday, June 6, 2009

Posted by Jim – June 6th, 2009

 

The dog just “booof” ed on the back porch.

I’m staring at a world that keeps demanding stuff from me

And dismissing every effort I offer

to try to make it a  better place for everyone involved

I just wrote in a venting page

“If nothing I could ever imagine

could possibly be good enough for you

Why would I ever bother trying?”

And the dog is still boofing on the porch

And I can’t see anything I can propose to make anything any more liveable

That could meet with anybody’s approval.

And laying down and dying just isn’t an option.

So I’ll write this down and let the dog in.

And see if it’s at all possible

to go back to sleep. (10:19 AM)

 

—–“Truth Seeker Indigo” —