So I notice it’s been nearly three months since last I posted. No surprise there, I tend to live in my own time continuum where weeks and months fly by and crawl by simultaneously. But eventually something sufficiently motivating will occur and I’ll do a little typing.

I just found out that George Carlin died yesterday, of heart problems. Sad news to hear. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Carlin - we certainly disagreed on a lot of things, but that’s completely irrelevant to me, because he was a thinker (and incredibly funny).

In particular he would think me a fool for believing in God: he passionately believed that all religion was the worst kind of ridiculous make-believe. But he was a thinker, he came by his beliefs after a lot of time and energy, and I have infinitely more in common with a man like that than with the countless hordes of my fellow believers who give no thought whatsoever to anything deeper than what’s on tv tonight.

My faith didn’t just fall from the sky one day. It is what it is today because of untold hours of thinking, reading, writing, meditating, praying; I’ve looked inside myself, outside myself, considered dozens of viewpoints about the meaning of life and humanity’s place in the universe. In short, I’ve worked at it - I’ve taken the time to consider the profound questions, the important truths, and while Carlin would doubtless be disappointed at my conclusions, I like to think he would respect the thought and self-examination involved in the process.

George Carlin was foul-mouthed, brutally honest, and very, very funny. He was a great comedian, but not a clown or a buffoon. He entertained his audiences by challenging them to think - think about themselves, think about those they allow to govern them, think about the world around them.

I’m sure many will fondly remember Carlin for his classic bits, like ‘Seven Dirty Words’, or his memorable movie roles, like “Bill and Ted’s” Rufus, or even his TV role as ‘Mr. Conductor’ on “Shining Time Station”. Here is one of my favorite Carlin routines - I’ll miss ya George.

P.S.

The irony of this post’s title does not escape me - I believe George’s exact thought would be, “He didn’t ‘pass’ anything! He fuckin’ died!”

P.P.S.

Or, as my good friend Hydrophidian put it: “George Carlin Passes - TOUCHDOWN!”  I think Carlin would have appreciated that.

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I am so, so unbelievably upset right now! I’m amazed I can even type my hands are shaking so bad from anger and shock.

It was supposed to be a great day. I’ve been planning on getting a tattoo for years, and my sister offered to pay for it with some of the tax refund she got back. So I made an appointment last week and today was the day, 9am, first thing in the morning.

Got a little lost finding the place, but was still there before 9:00 so no biggie. The place seemed a lot dingier than it did when I had made the appointment, suddenly I was thinking about hepatitis and infection and all sorts of horrible things, and the artist who was doing my arm either smelled like cologne or alcohol. Since it was still so early in the morning I chose to believe it was cologne.

(Read on …)

So Gary Gygax died yesterday, at the age of 69.

I know that for very many of you reading this, your first thought is ‘Oh that’s too bad - who is Gary Gygax?’

He was the co-creator of the role-playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’; which gave birth to a galaxy of other role-playing games like Traveller, GURPS, Vampire: the Masquerade, and literally hundreds of others; which directly paved the way and provided inspiration for countless computer role-playing games, novels, and movies over the past 30+ years.

It’s hard to overestimate the influence Gary had on the landscape of modern entertainment - things would be very different today were it not for his ‘little game’.

But it’s much more than that - I’m not sure I can adequately explain what gaming meant to me growing up, or the impact it has had on making me who I am.

(Read on …)

Made a few more site changes and updates for our enjoyment:

• Updated the Soldier of Fortune 2 Player Stats for those who play on our Laid Back Assassins server, the Kill-a-Rama.
• Changed the tracks in the site Jukebox; this set is a shout out to the smoking crews.
• Added a new section called Games and Gadgets - just a few little games and time wasters.
• The biggest change is that I added a second blog, The Hollow Valley. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while - it’s just too out of place to have posts about my unending depression or my mother dying in the same list as posts about TV shows or troubles with my internet connection. The new blog will be for more personal posts and thoughts; I’m not exactly hiding it, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea either, so I’m not putting it in the main navigation bar that shows up on every site page. It will only be linked from the core ‘Home’ pages, and the forums.

I think that’s everything. You know the drill - please let me know if you notice any errors, have any suggestions or comments, etc. Thanks for hanging out at TheMook.Net.

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Wow.

Did you ever see someone and just want to slap the ever-living hell out of them? I mean seriously just want to pop them in the mouth until they cry?

This is the biggest, most obnoxious d-bag I’ve seen in years. Seriously, just watching this clip makes me want to break something.

Sure, maybe the kids were giving him some lip - tough shit. The only one disgracing that badge and uniform was you, you worthless piece of trash bully.

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Howdy Folks!

Had a pretty “productive” (as productive as working on TheMook.Net can be) weekend, most unusual for me, but I got a lot done around the site. Tons of little tweaks here and there to try and get everything working and looking a bit more uniform.

Some of the bigger changes/updates:

• streamlined some of the Blog categories and posts
• added a small Jukebox just for kicks (I’ll try to change the music now and then)
• moved the Gallery into the overall site template (though it still stretches the formatting, at least it looks more like the rest of the site)
• on the SoF2 pages, updated the Clan Roster and the Server Status page (the status page doesn’t look as pretty as it used to, but it no longer relies on ServerSpy, it just runs off TheMook.Net; aesthetics aside, this is good because it no longer sucks $7/month out of the LBA account for ServerSpy!)
• the RPG pages had a lot of work done - I got the fully indexed and cross-referenced version of Mudge in place, and I also posted the complete details for all four of my last campaigns. Took a long time to get it all formatted and uploaded, but I’m really happy that stuff is finally back online.

As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions, or find anything that isn’t working, whatever, I’m always happy to get feedback on the site, good or bad.

I’d particularly like to get some feedback on a new project I’m starting, a small database of combat examples using the GURPS 4th edition rules:

http://www.themook.net/rpg/examples/

That’s the only way to get to it right now, it isn’t in the usual navigation links yet, and the only example posted so far is under “Melee (Weapons) - One“.

I’ll be using that one as a template for all the rest, so I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on the format and layout, the colors, is the example clear enough, all that stuff, before I start using it for many more.

The next big project is a completely fresh reboot of our SoF2 game server, the Kill-a-Rama - expect a lot of changes there in the next week or so as we get things ironed out.

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As a complete counterpoint to my recent issues with other companies, let me tell you about the webhosting company I use for TheMook.Net, EsoSoft.

From day one they have been an absolute pleasure to work with. My website’s uptime is well over 95%, probably closer to 98% or 99%, and their fees are incredibly reasonable. Every single time I’ve had a question of any sort, they’ve answered it quickly and with a smile. I’ve never had a single problem related to their servers - php works the way it should, the MySql database has never corrupted or frozen, all of their user control panels work flawlessly.

When an irate company requested that they take down my site, they stood up for me and rightly responded that, barring any sort of illegal activity, it isn’t their place to censor their customers’ sites. When I recently made huge upgrades to my site’s forum and blog software, the changes went off without a hitch - no traffic caps, no permissions errors, nothing.

In email after email over the years, without exception, regardless of what I was inquiring about, their customer service has been friendly, knowledgeable, and sociable. The email exchanges have always been more like chatting with buddies than dealing with a corporation! In a word, I’ve always found EsoSoft to be the perfect company (and no, I don’t have any sort of connection to the company beyond just being a happy, super-satisfied customer).

(Read on …)

Okay, it’s been just about a week without any downtime at all - I’m ready to say, tentatively, that my internet problems are finally over.

As it was before all the trouble started, the connection is once again rock solid and fast as hell. I’ve never had any complaints at all about the speed and stability of Comcast when it’s working, so I’m glad to see it has returned to full functionality.

These are the kinds of downtimes I was dealing with:

Connection Log

(Read on …)

The Customer Service for Comcast Internet is just awful. If anyone, anywhere, at any time is considering using Comcast “High Speed” Internet - DO NOT. In my opinion they have the worst customer service imaginable, will tell you whatever you want to hear just to get you off the phone or off their backs, and in general couldn’t care less about their customer base.

As mentioned previously, my internet connection has been dropping nearly every single night for two weeks straight. It generally goes completely dead somewhere between 6pm and 10pm, and remains completely offline until sometime in the morning; generally by 9am it’s back up and running. I’ve had the modem swapped out, I’ve had two different technicians (soon to be three) come to check on it, but I’m no closer to having my internet connection reliably restored.

(Read on …)

Another Comcast technician came out today to see if he could solve my internet problem, namely, pretty much every night my connection goes down in the evening and is completely dead all night, only to rise miraculously in the morning.

Frustrating to say the least - I can’t download anything, can’t make any online plans, can’t really do much at all online (at least after dark) because at any moment, without warning, the connection might just die.

This tech seemed to know what he was talking about (you don’t always get that sense), so I’m hopeful … he said he could see two problems, one that my downstream power level is too low, second that two of my levels were actually reversed (don’t recall which ones exactly). He put in a call for a maintenance technician to come and correct these problems out on the pole, if not today then tomorrow, so I’m crossing my fingers that once this is done the problems will finally be fixed.

At the moment, not only is my connection up and running, the connection speeds are literally twice as fast as I have ever seen them!

Hopefully when the maintenance technician fixes my settings the speed won’t get gimped too badly.

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