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.. but watch yourself.

And in other news, my old indymedia friends are up in arms over the latest example of the government abusing its powers to quell free speech. From the ACLU press release:

In a letter sent today in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the Secret Service, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union said they are representing a web hosting service and administrators of an independent media website regarding the anonymous posting of publicly available information about delegates to the Republican National Convention. The groups said the investigation is but the latest example of government agencies using law enforcement powers to chill free speech and intimidate protesters. (…) Beeson added that the posting did not include anything remotely threatening, but involved political speech fully protected by the First Amendment.

Apparently, an anonymous poster put up a political screed (which is First-Amendment-protected speech, and then attached a list of the 2,200 Republican National Convention attendees. This information is public and freely available, not secret or a security leak. But looks like someone doesn’t like having a news source that they can’t control.

(thanks BoingBoing and PolitechBot!)

Damn.. can’t believe I forgot to mention it yesterday. This whole thing with Natalie’s mom this week has kept me busier than I’d like. But anyway, better late than never: Yesterday, August 28, was Software Freedom Day, a day dedicated to letting people know about the existence, advantages, and realities of Free and Open Source software, such as Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc. If you still don’t quite know what the fuss is about, or why you should care whether a program your use is Open Source or not, go visit the page and spend a few minutes reading up. They make a lot of excellent points and it’s a great place to learn a little bit about the software that makes the Internet run.

First off, another big up and thanks to everyone who’s been asking around about Natalie’s mom.. she really appreciates all the concern and it does help her recovery. Some sad news, however: she’s currently back in the hospital, as apparently she’s contracted some sort of stomach virus which had her with nausea and vomiting, and we had to take her back as she was getting dehydrated. Hopefully this won’t affect her recovery too much. Keep her in your thoughts, everyone.

Secondly, thanks to everyone for your support on our decision to move off to Dorado. I already spoke with our landlady and let her know this is our last month here at the apartment, so now it’s officially official. It’ll be a bit of a challenge, but it’s doable.. As my good friend Monster mentioned, just have to Do What Needs To Be Done.

Anyway.. Natalie seems to have come down with the same stomach bug as her mom, so she’s back at the apartment with me for a bit while I take care of her and make sure she doesn’t get dehydrated on me too. Nothing in life’s ever simple, huh? Even the people who are supposed to be doing the care-taking fall ill on us. Ah well.

Oy… what a week. Yeah, so I’m typing this from a client’s office while I wait for some updates to download. It’s about the only free time I’ve got these days. It’s been a hell of a week, but I’m looking forward to some semblance of normality returning around Monday.. although not for very long, since I’m moving before the end of this next month.

So what’s been up? Well, as I suppose many of you know, Natalie’s mom had a fairly major operation this week, and has been in the hospital since Monday. This has meant a lot fo car-juggling, since I’m depending on the car for work, and Natalie needs it to deal with her mom. Normally we’d be able to count on Natalie’s mom’s car to even things out, but in a particularly poor example of planning ahead, we hadn’t counted on that car having its license expired since last month, so no one’s willing to drive it for any real use, especially not between here and Dorado. That should be fixed early next week, though. In the meantime, if I thought it was a hassle having to juggle the car while we were all here in the Metro area, it’s gonna be 10 times worse juggling the single car between here and Dorado.

Still, Natalie’s mom finally got out of the hospital today, so that’s a good thing, Natalie’s taking her home tonight to rest and start recuperating. Apparently the operation went off without a hithc and she’s recovering very well. Thanks to everyone who sent their nice thoughts and goodwill during this past week.

In the meantime, the week for me’s been hellishly busy with work and everything, and to top it off I came down with a really nasty cold that kept me useless all of yesterday (though I got a much needed break from work). I’m feeling much better today, though.

Finally, we’re still working on moving out. We’ve found a few apartments that look pretty nice, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that just switching to another apartment won’t fix anything, really. Our main problem is still the lack of money. I do earn a decent amount, but due to my bills, I end up broke at the end of every month. I don’t get to save so much as a single red cent in between every month, it *all* goes to paying bills, rent, and keeping us fed and sane. Moving to another apartment would possibly ease some of the stress we’ve been having with this apartment lately, but it wouldn’t do squat to solve the money problems. If I could get a raise or maybe a higher paying job, that might help, but in order to do that, I need to get some more certifications, and the tests for those certs run in the $100-$200 range, money which I simply don’t have right now.

So, what are we going to do? Well… as much as it pains me to even consider it, since its something I really, really didn’t want to have to do, I think we might end up moving in with Natalie’s mom in Dorado. It’s really only a 20-25 minute drive away, pretty manageable (hell, I did that drive practically twice daily when I first started dating Natalie, and didn’t think twice about it), and the house there has room for all of us. Of course, finding where to put our current furniture from the apartment (especially our big bed) would be one hell of a hassle. And I know Natalie’s mom is not too fond of the ratsies. But she’s allready said that she’d be thrilled to have us stay with her, and I did the math, we’d be saving anywhere from $400 to $600 a month by doing this.. money that we can use to pay off at least one of my debts completely in just 2-3 months, as well as money I can use to pay for the tests for my certifications, so I can be in a much stronger position for demanding a raise or looking for a better paying job. And once that debt’s out of the way and I have my certs, that’s money that can be put away in the bank monthly, to save for getting us the hell off the island. There’s really no future for Natalie here on the island, they don’t teach what she wants to learn, there’s no job opportunities in her chosen field, and even if she were to stick around and study Graphic Design, her fall-back option, it would take her nearly three years to finish those studies, only to maybe qualify for a job that pays $7/hour if she’s lucky. No, I prefer to swallow my pride, I think, and go to Dorado and save that money so we can move to NYC, which should take us maybe a year, possibly less if I get a raise. There, she has a really good chance of getting into John Jay, and there’s bound to be much better job opportunities for her. And hopefully, with my new certifications, there should be slightly better job opportunities for me as well. Plus, if she does do the John Jay thing and gets a decent paying job, maybe finally we’ll be able to afford for *me* to go back to school and get a BA.

Our only other option is to either stick it out at the apartment or find another apartment and keep living like now, barely paying the bills from month to month, with no funds left over to pay for anything, be it extra certs so I can advance my career a bit, or even to pay for any studies Natalie might want to settle for here. I know some of you absolutely love Puerto Rico, and think that NYC is the hellhole from which all human evil spews forth, but, frankly, the more I look at it, the more I see that there’s no real future for me or Natalie here on the island. Our only shot to make something of ourselves lies in being able to get out of here and going to the one place where they teach what Natalie’s always wanted to learn, and that’s NYC. If that requires me swallowing my pride and moving in with her and her mom in Dorado for a year or so, it’s a sacrifice I’m perfectly willing to make.

Okay, this is straight out of late-90’s dot-com euphoria, but it’s still pretty cool, if mainly useless: Ecotonoha, some sort of weird topic-less message board that arranges posts like branches and leaves on a tree. The more posts, the bigger the tree grows, and the greener it gets. You can even click on a leaf and zoom in on its area, seing branches and leaves hidden behind it, or in its general area. Lots of pure randomness in those messages too, since you’re limited to an arbitrary 37 characters in your message, there’s a lot of Zen in there too.

This is disturbingly adorable. I so need a raise so I can enroll Natalie in this club: Morbid Tendencies: Bunny Of The Month Club. (PS: read the ‘fine print’, it’s pretty funny. )

Well, I must apologize. I’ve been blog-less for a while now, though, as always, I blame other things. Like, say, work and.. um.. yeah, I’ve been playing a lot on the MUSH. I.. I’m an addict. I know it.

But, here, let me make it all up to you. I finally got some GMail invites to hand out, so… leave me a comment and convince me that I suck so much that I have to give you an invite to make it up to you, and it’s yours.

I know, I know, I owe you guys some posts here. I promise, tomorrow, there will be posts. Tonight, however, I have to pass out.

The LiveJournal of Zachary Marsh is downright hilarious.. Lovecraftian horror, told through a blog. If you snigger every time you hear about how Cthulhu lies dead yet dreaming in sunken R’lyeh, then you need to read this. iicf!

Well, things are going pretty well with the whole Mage-staff bit on Monaco. The response from the players has been almost overwhelmingly positive, and while a few are understandably leery of getting too excited till they see some realk changes and not just another Wiz making promises, things are looking up. I’ve still got a lot of preparation work to do before I can start running new plots for the players, but it’s all going much better than I’d hoped. Wish me luck and hopefully things will continue this smoothly once the plots start running. Oh, and for those players who’ve found my humble blog, welcome!

In news more accurately relating to the title of this post, I wanted to mention that the rats are doing good, and growing as quickly as ever. The 4 week mark has passed, so we separated the boy, Mr. White, from the gaggle of girls. We had to buy yet another cage to put the 5 girls in, while the boy got to keep the previous big cage. The new cage for the girls is even bigger (and anyone who’d seen the old cage will likely be surprised to hear that) but they seem very comfortable in it, they have room to spread out, and even a big excercise wheel that’s good for rats (no open bars for their tails to get stuck in. La Blue loves it.) However, the boy is all alone now, since we can’t keep him with the girls. Since rats are very social animals, we’re spending extra time with him (the girls do a good job of keeping each other entertained), and he seems to appreciate it. The only problem we’re havng with him is that he seems to love to poop. If you’re holding and playing with him for more than 10 minutes, you can be pretty much guaranteed that he’ll poop on you at some point. We’re hoping as he matures he’ll stop that. I mean, after all, La Blue never poops on us, but she’s also older. We’ll see.

In other, probably more important news (which is, of course, why I mention it last and don’t say anything about it in the post title ), Natalie and I are looking to move. Like, yesterday. The apartment’s been a source of trouble practically since we moved in, what with the leaky roof, the termites, the fact the we live in someone’s back yard, random animals wandering outside at night, and now the sink in the bathroom beggining to, literally, crumble. The little apartment is falling apart, in a most spectacular fashion, and we’ve had about as much as we can stand. So we’re looking for a new place to live soon. I’ve allready got my people out there looking for possible places, and Monster mentioned one pretty good possibility, so I’m hoping it won’t be too long before we’re out of here. Of course, Natalie’s leaving for Dorado to be with her mom while her mom recovers form an operation, and that means she’ll be gone for a little over a month, so I might end up doing the move alone.. I’ll keep y’all informed.

I have to apologize for the lack of updates lately, life’s gotten busier than usual in the past couple of days. Let me try and catch up and bring y’all up to date.

First off, although I allready wished her a happy birthday face to face and got her Karaoke Revolution 2 as a present, I’d like to take a moment to wish my lovely little kitty girl, Natalie, a very happy birthday (it was last Sunday, the 8th, but today’s as good a day as any online. ). And thanks to Jancelot for popping on the Doom 3 post earlier and wishing her a happy b-day as well. She quite appreciates it.

Next is the return of the RPG bug. After thinking about how I missed the good old online MU* days, I decided to take a stroll along some of my old online haunts and see how things were going, maybe make a character here or there and ease into playing again. So the first place I visited was one of my old favorites, Monaco: Mediterranean by Night. Got lots of great memories there, and I was surprised to find my old login still worked. I quickly ran into a few of my old friends there, and they brought me up to date on some changes that had been going on among the staff and players there, and how they could use some help.. and well, long story short, but all of a sudden I’ve been inducted as the Mage staff-person for the whole MU*. I was kinda hoping for Changeling, but Mage can be a buttload of fun as well. I’ve allready got a few plans in the cooker for making the player’s lives miserable.

What else? Well, Doom 3 continues to scare the pants off me. I installed the Duct Tape mod, which sort of assumes that somewhere on Mars, someone has to have a roll of freakin’ duct tape so you could strap a flashlight to your shotgun and machine gun, and that’s helped quite a bit, but sometimes it’s still too freaky for a wuss like me. Maybe I should go all the way and install the Hello Kitty Flashlight mod, or maybe the Batman one? Or, hey, there’s always the Thundercats.

So… I got Doom 3. It runs well. Very well. It’s fuckin’ gorgeous. It is, in fact, shit-hot. There’s no accurate way to describe this game without resorting to all sorts of profanity, because, well, goddamn. Fuck, even.

Seriously, I could barely play it ’cause this game will fuck. you. up. I played about an hour of it tonight until I had to put it down ’cause I was shaking. It’s amazingly immersive, eerie, dark, and everything else they were shooting for. Seeing demons rip their way out of the walls and attack me set my heart racing like I was actually there. I could barely react logically, it was like going on instinct. People of id, I salute you. Damn.

And on the whole other side of the whole ‘graphics so hardcore I think I’ve found religion’ debate, I visited one of my old stomping grounds in the text-only world of MUSHes (Multi-User Shared Hallucination, think IRC but made for RP and with rooms and programmable objects), Monaco by Night, and hooked up with a couple of old friends. No promises made, but I might be stopping by there more regularly to get a better fix for my RPG cravings as expressed in my previous post. I’ll keep y’all posted.

A comment on one of my earlier posts got me thinking about all the years I spent immersed in tabletop and online text-based RPG’s (mostly MUSHes, none of that robotic MUD stuff for me, thankyouverymuch), and the fun I had. And now it’s 2k4, and I haven’t played any RPG’s for about 3 years now at least. I mean, I’ve hit the console ‘RPG’ games and the PC ones too, pretty hard. But the actual interaction with other people, the coming up with plots and events that only other human beings can come up with, I haven’t gotten so much as a whiff of it in years. However it’s not because I’ve gotten over the RP bug, as it were. I think it’s more of a thing where my circle of friends now has other responsibilities, and my real life relationships are more mature. I still long to spend a night or two a week just throwing dice over a table and trying to cast ‘Dispel Blueballs’ on the Celestial Emperor (long story, don’t ask), or logging onto my favorite MUSH and striking up a conversation with a werewolf before dashing off to battle a chimera or two. But for tabletop, most of my friends, and I myself, simply seem to have more important priorities. Who can take out a night a week when there are bills to pay, or you’re exhausted from work, or there’s no one to babysit the kids? As for the online games, I’ve found it hard to recapture the easy camraderie I used to have with online friends who’ve all dropped out.. and I recognize that a lot of the MUSHes I played on were sort of a replacement for real life relationships. Now that I’m in a seriously commited relationship with a woman I love, somehow I don’t feel the *need* to bond with otherwise total strangers in a MUSH. I still miss it, though.

Maybe there’s a way to recapture it, if not at its former glory, at least in part? I’ve been trying, slowly snagging up RPG books and reading through them, trying to get inspired enough to run an adventure. But while everyone of my friends I’ve mentioned it to seems to like the idea, there’s something missing. No one has that ’spark’ anymore, that sudden burst of “Ooh yeah! I’ve had this idea for a character banging around in my head that I’d love to try out!” that we all used to have. As for online, almost all my old haunts are dead or dying, and I’ve found it hard to get into any new ones.. the few that come highly recommended seem to be a bit clannish, requiring long, detailed sumissions and for your character to be cleared by a panel of judges before even allowing you to step inside, in a misguided effort to keep out the usual trolls and miscreants.. and the other places that allow open character creation are, of course, practically overrun by said trolls and miscreants. Is my golden age of gaming really over, I wonder? Are electronic games all I have to look forward to? I’m sorry, but something about having graphics means that pretty much no online MMORPG can hope to capture the sheer imaginative heights that a good old text-only MUSH can convey. Second Life, with its freedom and creative tools, comes close, but it’s such an immense effort to build that mystical castle, or model your character’s trademark flourish at the end of a strike, especially compared to the ease of just describing it and letting your imagination do the rest… *sigh*

Well, lest I continue to be accused of failing to blog people’s faces off, here’s another update. I bet you get all turned on just thinking about it, don’t you? Yeah, I thought so.

So, anyway, I just got my filthy little paws on a copy of White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse ‘Time of Judgement’ book, the last Werewolf book ever.. well, until they release the new WoD books. In any case, been reading it tonight… good stuff. They’re not kidding when they say this is THE END. The book presents a series of scenarios that you can take and leave and mix and match at your convenience to create an End Times story unique to your group of players, but even the scenario I was reading tonight, which they state is the most ‘light’ of them all, involves a head-on battle against the Wyrm itself, the destruction or corruption of pretty much all the Umbral Realms, worldwide war, chaos, destruction, every volcano on earth erupting at the same time, the death or sacrifice of most of the PC’s, and that’s just for starters. They intend the WoD to go out with a *bang*.

Of course, now I lust after the other WoD Time of Judgement sourcebooks, that being Mage, Vampire, and the general ToJ book, with its measly 20-something pages describing the end of my beloved Changeling series (compare that to Werewolf’s 270-ish pages). I’m sure I’ll find them if I look hard enough in the.. ahem.. right places.

Finally, with another update on the iPod thing, a few of you have let me know that you’re happily willing to do the clicky thing, but you’ve been putting it off ’cause it looks a bit complicated. Well, I’m here to help. Look for me on MSN or ICQ and I’ll walk you through the whole thing, step by step. 9616049 on ICQ, fourthfate@hotmail.com on MSN. It’s the least I can do if you’re gonna help me with this.

… is another moment that I gotta race the clock. (Bonus points to anyone who can name the song)

So, after being accused of failing to blog someone’s face off, I realized that it was about time for another action-packed update into what’s on my mind. Rejoice, dammit.

Well, La Blue’s back in the big cage. Or at least, we used to think of it as the big cage. Suddenly, with 6 rats inside, it doesn’t seem so big. Looks like we’ll be investing in a bigger cage (which, y’know, sucks, ’cause we coulda used that money for other stuff..). Anyone interested in buying a slightly-used three floor hamster/gerbil/rat cage for cheap? At least the kittens seem to love La Blue, and she has, so far, not tried to decapitate any of them. The kittens climb all over her and groom them, and she seems to tolerate them for a good while, until she gets sick and tired of it and goes to take it out on Nezumi by grooming her viciously. So, really, the one with the short end of the stick here is poor Nezumi, who has 4 baby rats sucking the life out of her on a daily basis, and La Blue, who’s almost twice her size, pinning her down and grooming her viciously whenever she thinks she can get some rest. Still, overall, everyone seems happy enough in the big ratty commune. We’ll keep ya updated.

In other news, the William Shatner/Ben Folds masterpiece, ‘Common People’, is now available for listening in my radio.blog. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go click. The radio.blog makes it so you can stream it pretty handily even on a dial-up connection. Enjoy.

Finally, the iPod fiasco is back under control, I got a volunteer to let me use his mainland address for shipping the iPod (thanks Luniticus!), so it’s all back on track. Click on the linky, sign up, and help me get an iPod. It’s the best birthday present you can get me, admit it.