Frivolous Profundity

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.

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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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Ah, apathy my old friend – still with me after all these years.

So 2008 is upon us, and as I muse on the years gone by I see that, still, nothing has changed. Perhaps nothing ever will, I don’t know. As more and more time passes, it becomes more and more difficult to remember those days when I was happy, when I was normal, when I was alive.

It’s one thing to be depressed, distraught, but struggling against the darkness. Fighting to keep going, to overcome, to somehow reconnect with the great human family and rejoin life. I’ve had a few periods of that, over the years (15 years now since things fell apart). But since I’ve moved, probably since well before that, the fight is simply gone out of me.

I sleep. I wake. I eat. I sleep again. I think there might be the occasional tv show or video game in there somewhere, but everything tends to blur.

I have no shortage of ways to improve my life, to fight back: Pray. Write. Read. Exercise. Volunteer. Find a new hobby. Get back into karate. Join a club. Get a job. Really, pretty much anything. What I do have a shortage of is the will to do any of those things, the energy to actually lift a finger in my own defense. I simply – don’t care.

I’m like a man on fire, only inches from a swimming pool full of water, but I just can’t be bothered to move even as my flesh bubbles and pops.

Maybe someday I’ll find the energy. Maybe I won’t. Somehow, it just doesn’t matter.

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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).

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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

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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.

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My mother would have been 81 years old today. It’s hard to believe she’s already been gone for a year’s worth of phone calls and cards – time really flies when you’re numb.

How to even put into words what she meant to me? When I was a baby, she protected me, fiercely; when I was a child, she loved me, unconditionally; when I was a man, she was proud of me, blindly. Every single day of my life she did nothing but want the best for me, see things in me that I still don’t see, ignored every failure and celebrated every strength. She was hope when I was in pain, she was comfort when I was afraid, and she was love when I was alone.

Never once did she ask a single thing in return. Not once. She deserved a better son than me, but she never complained. She just loved me. The happiest I ever saw her was at my wedding – she was beaming, I mean almost literally glowing. My joy was her joy. And when the traditional dance of the groom and his mother came, despite my being six feet tall and having to bend over almost in half to reach her, I still felt like her little boy. That’s the way she always made me feel.

I miss you Mom. We all do, every day. In the quiet of the night I can still hear your voice, and you’re still always telling me that everything will be okay.

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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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