Category Archives: Personal Life

Child’s Play

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Just a quick post. Penny Arcade is currently partnering with Amazon and the Seattle Children’s Hospital to do a toy drive for the kids. It’s called Child’s Play, and really is a pretty awesome thing. It’s also impressive just how much support they’ve received, and how quickly.

In other toyish news, my friend Gareth is a finalist in the Lego Master Builder competitions. (Gareth, not Garrett. Scroll down.) Good luck in the finals, man!

UberCon is coming along. We’ve set up some Forums, which you should check out if you’re a foruming type of person.

See? Quick post. Later. :)

Online Community… Buh?

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I participate in a lot of different online communities, believe it or not (I mean, it’s not like I wrote a 50 page treatise on the subject or anything).

I’m a general participant on IRC over on the Aniverse servers (#applegeeks, #machall, #megatokyo, #utopianpigs, and #inquisition), but I don’t “connect” with the users all that much (for reasons I’ve gone into before, mostly a matter of a large percentage being teenybopper idiots who haven’t a brain in their head, and EVERYONE looking for a fight).

I’m a sporadic regular on the Penny Arcade Artist’s Corner (PAAC), posting regularly for a few weeks, then disappearing for a month or two. It’s not that I get bored or fed up or anything… I just get distracted and forget to log on for a while.

I’m an aging veteran on Avatar, having logged in literally thousands of hours there, both to play, to chat, and to administrate. I don’t log on as much as I probably should anymore, because the thought of logging on just makes me feel tired. Not sleepy tired, either. The weary aching feeling in your bones tired. I have a niggling feeling that I should retire, which is hard, since “Nadreck” has been a part of my life for going on 7 years now. One of my justifications in not retiring is the feeling that I should go out with a bang, write the very best area I feel I can, and retire as it is put in. It is an area that I have not yet felt capable of or ready to write.

I have Final Fantasy XI which, while I thoroughly enjoy, has not yet given me the feeling of cohesive community yet. Only time will tell on that on.
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FFXI, Foo

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Well, there goes THAT little streak of post. I’ll try to do better, blah blah, yadda yadda, you’ve heard it before and frankly I bet you’re as tired of hearing it as I am of saying it. My GOAL is to post daily (barring life interfering), but like any other goal, it’s something that you have to work at and don’t always succeed in hitting.

So why haven’t I posted since I got back into town? Something profound and rewarding? Tragic and horrible? Nope and nope. Mostly it’s just been getting back into a routine with my life. I got in at midnight on Sunday, which means I was in bed by 1am, and then up at 8 for my chiropractor appointment. Did various errands (got diagnosed with Lyme Disease at my physical, so I’m on an antibiotic for the next month, which I needed to go pick up), and got some shopping done.
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Last Day

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This is the last day of my October residency. My study plan has been approved, and at this point I really just need to go to my last two meetings.. I’ll be gone by tonight, not back until April 9.

It’s been a long few weeks (three, to be exact). While it has been a fun, enriching time on this visit (between seeing my friends again, UberCon, and the school residency), at this point, I’m ready to sleep in my own bed, snuggled up with my wife (whom I miss very, VERY much). I’ve had quite a few sympathies sent my way the past few days, once people found out it had been so long since I’d seen my so recently-married wife. (Most start really missing their own SO’s after only a week, so they’re generally pretty impressed that I haven’t gone starkers yet. Little do they know that I’m just better at hiding it!)

I’m really looking forward to this study. For those too lazy to read back a few posts, I’m studying mysticism in the Baha’i Faith, with brief comparisons of other forms of mysticism, such as the Kaballah, Gnosticism, and Sufism. I think this will be a really enriching, interesting study to do, both on a personal and on an intellectual level. Of course, I’ve also added an additional component that is not directly linked (but in my opinion in some ways is): creativity and spirituality, in an attempt to revitalize my own creative energies, something that I feel has been lacking lately. This loss of creative impulses is exemplified by a regression I’ve had lately of overanalyzing EVERYTHING, giving reason and rationale even to emotions and sentiments. I worked really damn hard to get that under control, so it’s kind of disappointing that I’ve regressed into it so much.

Time for lunch. I promise to try and post tomorrow as well, but I’m thinking Sunday will probably be a dead day, since I’ll be in transit for a good chunk of it.

Sundry Esoterica

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This is really only a semi-post. It’s just random stuff that I thought was cool or interesting, and probably won’t be for anyone else.

– I finished my study plan a full day early, and have already gotten it okayed… we’re going to photocopy it tomorrow and submit it, at which point I’ll be done and on my way. I’m pretty damn pleased about that.

– The pictures I took at UberCon have been put up in the UberCon web gallery. In the week since they were posted, one of the pictures I took has become one of the most viewed images in the gallery (viewed ~1400 times when I last checked). Not unsurprisingly, it was a picture of a cute girl in a costume.
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UberCon

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For those readers that are new: read the old posts to see my prior concerns about UberCon. For the rest of you: it went far better than I had feared, but not as well as I had hoped.

Let’s get the basics out of the way: UberCon was a hell of a lot of fun. Everyone seems to have had a really good time, including myself. More importantly, many of the vendors have already expressed interest in returning, so things are looking QUITE favorable for UberCon III, to be held sometime in late March-early April. Having had a sit-down with Kevin, we’ve worked out a lot of the issues that were bothering us, and things are going to be firmed up in a more final fashion sometime in the next few weeks.

I got to meet a lot of really cool, interesting people: I had made it explicitly clear prior to the convention that I was not volunteering for anything, and was coming as an attendee. This allowed me to roam as I wanted, and talk to who I wanted without having to worry about having to be somewhere. I even exchanged information with a few, so I’ll be able to keep in touch.

The only major letdown was the number of people: we had more than last time, but not by much. This could be for a variety of reasons, and really didn’t hinder anyone from having a good time. From a business standpoint, however, it was disappointing.
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New WebComic

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I’d HIGHLY recommend going to check out Daryll’s Advocate, a syndicate-worthy comic strip done by a fellow forumer.

When I say “syndicate-worthy,” I’m not kidding. The art is top notch, and the writing and concept is reminiscient of Watterson. He’s doing it as a webcomic at the moment because: 1) it allows him to get the comic public and start getting support for it, and 2) it can act as an online portfolio for syndicate submission.

Go check it out. Oh, and be sure to check the portfolio page, too… some great stuff in there.

Settling In

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Everyone talks about the horrendous lines and crowded waiting rooms when dealing with the DMV. It has become something of a cliche, really. I have been blessed with having never had to wait for more than 10 minutes at any DMV, ever. I can’t help but wonder if this is somehow related to the fact that Gladys seems to be my Godmother of sorts.

For those not familiar, Gladys is the goddess of parking and traffic. Every time you pay a toll or a parking meter, you are leaving money at her altars. If you don’t want to consider her deific or anything, just think of her as one of those spirits that Shakespeare was alluding to when he said “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet I,v,166) Personally, that’s more of how I consider Gladys. I was first introduced to the reference by my wife shortly after I met her for the first time.
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The Update of Quasi-Doom

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Ahoy there, mateys, it be “Talk like a Pirate Day!” (Arrr).

Relax, I’m not going to do an entire freakin’ post in “piratespeak”. That would be akin to the deliciously evil torture of writing in l33t, and I’m just not that mean. It’s been a while since I updated, so I DO expect this to be a fairly lengthy post, so you are hereby forewarned.

It has been nine (9) days since I last posted, and I think it would behoove me to explain what I’ve been doing. I think the best way I can sum it up would be this: go read my essay. Though it is now done (I mailed it around 2:30pm yesterday), there was a LOT of final preparations that took up the past week. This would include: finishing the last few chapters, and making requested/suggested revisions to the rest of the essay, doing a final self-crit, and printing it out. The essay is 49 pages, with bib it becomes 51. NOT included in that PDF is the other 50 pages (table of contents, cover sheet, testimonials, and examples). This is partially because for formatting reasons I did them as two separate files, and partially because I’m not making the area I submitted available to the public (I chose Senex Operis because it is relatively short at around 40 rooms, and has the most real-world research in it, as all the gladiators in the area are accurately depicted from their historical counterparts).
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