Haskonomicon

So it’s been two weeks or so since I’ve given up pop (not soda) as well as Xbox for Lent. It’s been tough on both fronts, which is the intended goal of the Lenten sacrifice.

I tend to keep my faith quiet and close to the chest, except when talking about idiot preachers blaming earthquake victims for the natural disaster on them, so a few folk were shocked that I’d commit to this.

I have not the sacrifice thing for a while, and I’d be lying if part of the reason wasn’t secular, health on the pop removal and time/focus reasons for Xbox.

But the pop sacrifice really grabbed my attention; how hard it was to give up, how much I would want a Pepsi and have to say no. From a Christian pov, the Lenten sacrifice is meant to give us a glimpse at the sacrifice our deity made.

While denying myself caffeinated sugar water really can’t compare to needlessly dying as an innocent, the constant, everyday denial is giving me the closest glimpse of the Christ sacrifice I’ve had.

I still order a large meatball sub every Friday, though. That habit I picked up at a Catholic college doesn’t die easily…

Just testing to see if the Wordpress app for my phone works.

If it does, I can now ignore my blog ON THE GO

I’ve always turned a deaf ear towards Lent. In fact, one of my favorite Lenten pastimes is getting a meat-lover’s pizza on Friday. Just because.

But I’m giving up a few things for Lent this year, to actually examine the spiritual side of doing so.

-Pop. This is a big one for me. All pop, diet and regular. I reflexively order it when out at restaurants, so either avoid those or get water or iced tea. Beer is a valid option, however.

-XBox games. I’ve been letting my eternal quest for Achievement points drive too much of my free time. So I’m giving up all the games for Lent. Note that I can still use it for Netflix and DVDs, which is a much, much less considerable amount of my time.

December 15, 2009
First Niagara Bank
Oxford Place, 3rd Floor Branch

“I’m back” I say, jokingly, to the tellers behind the counter. The one waves to the me, making a motion to the back room.

“She’s in the back, on lunch.”

I chuckle, walking through the roped off waiting line area even though there are no customers there. I always walk through the line even if there’s no one else waiting, it’s what I do. “Alright, you think you can handle it this time?”

The teller shares a laugh. “Yeah, it shouldn’t be too hard, now that we figured the system out. So same amount as last time?”

I think about it for a moment. The last trip here had produced a small stack of 25$ gift cards, how many more did I think I was going to need? “Give me 2 at 50, then 6 more at 25 each.” I slide my card across the counter to the teller, who already has the stack of slips out, the required paper work needed for producing a huge stack of prepaid gift cards.\

“Sure thing, let’s hope this time the system doesn’t break.” My previous visit at the beginning of the month was the other cashier’s first time for these gift cards, and by asking for 8 of them, at once, not only broke the central system for all the constant requests (I set off some type of alert, it seemed) but also caused her to stress out as one does when learning a new process. The second time wasn’t as painful as the first, and 20 minutes later I left Oxford Center with a stack of plastic cards, total worth $250.

If I get mugged walking the block back to my work building I’d be kind of upset, these are the majority of my Christmas / Spendmas gifts after all. Then again, the nature of the gifts would speak rather well for someone who was in sure a dire straight as to resort to mugging.

.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.

January 11, 2010 (I did just type 2009 there. Stupid year change)
Coversation Twitter

>Hey Mike, did you blog about your Christmas experiment?
Me: No, it’s the Akoha problem for me. Going out of the way to brag about it sort of ruins the sentiment
>I wouldn’t say blogging is bragging. Especially if you frame it in a “something you may want to try next season?” way

…good point.

So, here’s something you may want to try next season for the Christmas / Spendmas.

.-._.-._.-._.-._.-._.

Admit it, you’re going to go out and spend a good 20 bucks on something for your circle of friends during the Spendmas season. Odds are your friends don’t really need something new. I tend to think if you have a roof over your head and have had a warm meal in the past day, you’re doing better off than a good part of the world, and there’s little more I could give you that would improve your lot in life.

So, in an effort to put the money I would have spent during the Spendmas season to good use, I did the following for the majority of the people on my gift list:

1) A holiday card, with elements of hand craftedness. I’m not a cat person. I don’t like the LolCats fad. But I saw a bunch of holiday cards with a sleeping cat in a Santa hat, and bought them up. With magic marker, I wrote “Oh Hai I iz goin to steal Cristmas. Furst I takes nap…” on the front of all the cards, and signed the inside.

2) One of the 25 dollar gift cards I’d purchased.

3) A hand written note on the inside. This is the text of my note:

So you may be thinking that I got lazy on you, just getting you a gift card for 25 dollars.

This intangible fuzzy is my gift to you.

So yeah, I tried to force the gift of enforced random acts of kindness on my friends. For the most part, everyone seems to enjoy the gift for what it was. Most people have excitedly told me that “I just got my warm fuzzy” via text or e-mail. I really hope that someone takes this idea and does it, and the year after that at least one more. I can’t claim to have come up with the idea, I’m sure it’s as old as Spendmas.

I just want to light up the world with small sparks of intangible fuzzies, one person at a time if I need to.

So way back in February, around the last time I posted anything here, i had a funeral, a wedding, and a trip up to Syracuse all within a 2 week span. After that cluster of a few weeks, the release at work heated up. For many people, I’ve been MIA. And I’ve felt it.

But the software’s been handed off. Friday was the ‘hey, we just handed off the CDs time to head out at 3 for a well earned happy hour’ day. This has been the first weekend where I haven’t checked my work e-mail or done any working from home on a Saturday or Sunday since February.

I’m free to start working on my podcasts again. Or writing again. Or finishing my CoH/FMA machinima. Or writing something new for the MA in CoH. Or working on something for a 4th edition campaign.

And yet, I’m having a hard time starting any of them up. Maybe I just need some time to catch my breath before it will all come back, I don’t know. But I sat down today and could not form any words, a blank page mocking me more than usual. I was hoping to dredge up some funny slice of life story that occurred during the past few months to share with you all, and nothing.

I’ve even come back to the Panera where the guy told me you gotta cool the oceans, in hope of having another random encounter. Nothing.

Oh well, I’ve posted a blog for the first time in a while. Maybe this will kick start me out of this rut. And yes, I mixed metaphors there, sue me, I’m rusty.

So, as a reward of getting this far, I present 2 videos of me singing songs in Rock Band.

Pez sings You Oughta Know, by Alanis Morsette

Pez sings Chop Suey, by System of a Down

So there’s been a lot of things I’ve want to blog about. All sorts of neat, slice of life, This American Life-esque or Wil Wheaton-esque type looks at little things that just fascinated me. Watching a woman on the bus solve Rubic’s Cube, the total look of serene concenration on her face as she twisted the multichromatic cube, iPods earbuds snuggly in place playing what I imagined was death metal. Jogging in the 60 degree rain earlier in the week, my Pepsi-gut a reminder of my soon to be 30th birthday in December mixed with the childish joy of running in the rain.

But all my thoughts this week keep coming back to a very good friend of mine, whose mother passed away on Sunday; the victim of cancer that of the “Dear Lord, just take her now so she stops suffering” variety and severity. This friend (Keeping them anonymous to stay in the safer spectrum of caution) had been at their mother’s side for the past three weeks, doing everything in their power to keep their mother comfortable, fighting with Hospice over medication limits, rotating in shifts with their other family members so someone could keep an eye on their mom.

When they had relocated almost a month ago to be at their mom’s bedside, they started a blog to keep the curious swarm of people interested in both their well being and that of their mother. All the updates were simple statements that said all that was needed about what was happening. I could easily imagine writing any of those entries in a half-zombie like state I seemed to inhabit through most of college; barely awake, a few wisps of coherency. I can’t imagine doing so while watching a family member waste away.

But what really amazed me is how much support this one person could garner. Because of the Internet’s reach, people from all over were notified of what was going on, and able to report not only their thoughts back to those at health ground zero but the thoughts of those around them. And we all realized that my friend’s mother had touched a lot of people.

I’ll be going to the funeral. I’ve only ever been to two others, one for my grandmother and one for the father of another close friend. (Scoring 2 for 3 on ‘Friend’s parent has cancer’, for those keeping track at home). I’ll admit I find it odd going to the celebration of someone’s life I’ve only met in passing a few times. Because of my past experiences I’ve always had a distant relationship with death; thought that funerals were more for the reassurance for the living, yadda yadda yadda, thought I could be that guy to tell a joke at a funeral.

But when I’m there, I have the feeling I’m going to be lost in the crowd. I get the impression that this single person could so positively change the life of so many people that the brief glimpses I got to directly see myself are hollow, when compared to all the other primary sources out there. One of these primary sources is my friend, who has proven to be amazingly strong when needed, bending when called for but never breaking at those times of too much pressure, and I know from our long friendship they have already inherited their mother’s ability to not only better the lives of those around them, but have that wave of positive humanity ripple through their immediate circle of acquaintances.

My thoughts and prayers, this past month and especially this past week have been going to my friend and their family. It helps to know that their mom is dancing in heaven right now, when she’s not vacuuming the living room up there. Because she’s totally that type of person, wanting to make it homey and comfy for us when the rest of us finally get there.

So I’m standing out on a porch of a friend’s house in Mifflin, listing to the neighbors yell and shout. The sound seems to echo weirdly on the hills up there, coming from beyond the houses that I can see; coming as if from the other side of the world. Cars are honking, there is cheering and shouting coming from behind me as well, answering the almost arcane liturgy from the hills beyond. And I can’t stop grinning like a mad man.

Sure, I’m wearing a Steeler’s jersey, waving at Terrible Towel like a mad man. But years ago you’d never had pegged me as doing such a thing. I was born and raised outside of Buffalo, New York. I’m used to cheering for teams that get just to the cusp of victory only to throw it all away in a cavalcade of mediocrity. And after a few of the plays in the 4th quarter, I could feel that old Buffaloian sense of despair and loss coming through.

But Big Ben and Holmes pulled through on that last drive. The defense came up with a stop when they needed it most, with less than ten seconds to go. And all around me, in the living room on the top of a hill in Mifflin, in the neighborhood that surrounded said house, and in the city said neighborhood was a part of, true communal joy bleed out. In Black and Gold, of course.

I’m not a native to Pittsburgh, but I’ve chosen to live here for the past three years. My job is great, but I’ve noticed something of the town and its people, something that even now I’ve have trouble putting into words. There is a sense of ownership in every Pittsburgher that I’ve not seen anywhere else, in my times living in Buffalo, Erie, or Cleveland. There is an immense sense of belief in one’s town and the people around it that is almost palpable.

I was given a Terrible Towel at this Super Bowl party I went to, and I treated it as the revered object it is. It was my greengold card into Steeler Nation, and I made sure to put it to good use. As I drove back from Mifflin to Shadeyside, I had one hand hanging out the window, waving it at every intersection, or when ever another Steeler fan would honk and wave their towel. And it’s safe to say the whole way home I was doing so.

As cool as that was, and it was freaking awesome let me tell you, standing on that porch and just listening to random strangers I’ll never meet cheer and shout from who knows how far away is what’s going to stick with me the most. There’s a lot of talk of how united a town Pittsburgh is, and this single moment, to me, is the best way to describe what a great and communal feeling it is.

…so that means I must be meeting interesting people. I may need to add Panera tags to my blog if this continues.

This time I’m at the Panera near my house. I’m trying to get a story edited so I can start recording it as a podcast (Something that needs its own post or five). I’m sitting near the fireplace. This Panera has only three chairs sitting around the fireplace, the leftmost one next to an electrical outlet that never works.

I sit down, boot up, and after browsing a few sites I turn the WiFi off and get to editing the first part of chapter 2. I’m wearing my bright orange Pez teeshirt, and everyone else is huddled in long sleeve shirts and fleeces and dark coats. After about an hour, a couple come to the fireplace area, a friendly looking woman and a type A personality man. He has a bluetooth cell phone headset on, and a “I need to get stuff done and not take guff from anyone” attitude (What ever guff is…), but he’s not coming across as a raging asshole in the process. He moves to plug his laptop in to the outlet next to me when I say it’s not working.

He sighs but not only tells the manager on staff about it (Something I don’t think I’ve ever done) but moves around the resturant looking for an outlet. His wife sits in the chair opposite me, we do the polite smile and nod to a stranger in one’s nearby space thing as she opens a book, and I go back to editing.

About ten minutes later, another woman shows up, and sits down in the chair between us. She is overweight in the kind motherly way, rather than the eats 2 whole pizza pies a night way, wearing a black coat with a yellow squeeze water bottle, and a plastic Subway bag.

I nod to her, as does the woman across from me. I notice, a few seconds after that, that she keeps looking back and forth between myself and the reading woman across from me, as if expecting one of us to say something. I have my headphones on, and the other woman had returned to her book, so I did what most people would have done, ignored the new woman and focused on my work.

Water bottle lady cannot hold back the silence any longer, and says hi to both of us in order. Now, with my headphones on I have the option of ignoring the conversation, which I take. I can hear the other two woman exchange name. Reading lady puts a slip of paper at her location and sets the book down, and the two start to chat.

At this point, I’m feeling a bit guilty. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought water bottle lady was a bit crazy, and I didn’t want much of anything to do with her. I listen in to the conversation for a bit, and she doesn’t seem TOO crazy, like a certain person interested in cooling the oceans I once met was. So I pull off my earphones, to make myself approachable to the conversation.

Within 30 seconds, water bottle lady has looked in my direction and asked me what my name is. I of course gave my first name, to be friendly. “I like your shirt.” she said.

This is where I got hooked. Someone had left me an opening to talk about Pez. And I fell right into the trap. I shut my laptop, and with a little prompting and questions from both women, go into a 10 minute discussion about Pez, the history, the name, etc etc.

After a bit, water bottle lady says that I remind her of someone named Shannon Norman. Now, book lady and I are not from around Pittsburgh, so it seems that Mr. Norman is known locally for The It’s Alive Show, a Saturday night B-movie show on one of the local stations. Shannon Norman plays a character called Stuffy The Dead Clown. Whom I supposedly look like.

There’s no real good way to segue out of a conversation where a strangers says you look like someone who plays an undead clown, let me just say…

After a few more minutes of water bottle lady shares some more details of the Pittsburgh Horror Movie scene (Of which I didn’t know existed until now) she said she had to leave “To meet a friend” somewhere. Book lady and I nod to her, then go back to our respective media consumptions.

So here’s the thing. Although a bit weird (Not as weird as crazy ocean cooling guy) the conversation was pretty interesting. And I could’ve ignored the whole thing by pretending to be oblivious to it all. Back in college, I used to enjoy random conversations with strangers; such a situation back then and I would have probably initiated said conversation. But I’ve become more passive around strangers as I’ve aged (That’s saying something) at the same time as I’m opening up and outgoing around those I know. I’m sure that means something, I just don’t know what, to be honest.

I had a pretty great Christmas/New Years/Birthday, including the traditional week long gaming in Syracuse and the return of an old favorite tradition of mine, bare skinned snow angels. There’s plenty I could talk about, talking about such diverse topics as rampaging toddlers, taking down a red dragon with a vorpal axe and bladed shieldof difficulty 6 with a dice pool of 19, how scarily awesome Quelf is as a party game, or my new found love for the treb show and welcoming people to it.

But the story of note starts when I was returning to Pittsburgh from all of this. I drove back home Sunday night, it was an easy drive except for the hellicious amounts of fog that started outside of Erie and lasted all the way through to Grove City, about an hour and a half. I’ve driven in blizzards before, I actually kinda like it, but this fog was something else; probably the most frightening drive I’ve had in some time.

Flash forward to Monday morning at work, when everyone is slowly filtering in, back from a nigh-two weeks off, spent with family and friends. There was a lot of general chit-chat and kibitzing in the office this morning, happy new years, how were your holidays, how’s the family, etc.

I was talking with one person, let us refer to his individual only as B. After receiving a belated birthday present from this individual, we got to talking, and I talked about the crazy fog. B related how there was tons of fog around where they lived as well the previous night. A bit back and forth and I asked, “Have you ever read Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’?”

B’s response was, “Well, no, I highly doubt it was anything like that.”

My rebuttal, “Well, yeah, but you never know.”

This produced the expected “You’re talking silly business now” look on their face, like they did not know if I was merely kidding about the possibility of extra-dimensional bloodthristy creatures that can dwell only in mist existing in our world and just keeping a straight face, or actually serious about concerned on entering fog because of the elder eldritch entities contained deep within.

Now one part of me, the engineer portion, knows it cannot be true. Not only would such creatures be so biologically inefficient to exist, the constant stream of cars coming out of the fog in a normal and orderly manner common to any other time driving at night ensures that even if such fell beings of the mist were possible, at the very least they did not exist in the current bank of fog I was traveling in. Nor would the radio be playing normally, I would rather think in the event of an apocalyptical uprising of fog creatures the Gannon University radio station would not be playing music, but rather would either be silent or using the airwaves for the better communication of survivors and pockets of resistance groups.

So yeah, on that end, I’m totally joking.

But you know what, where’s the harm in thinking it might be true? And I don’t mean in a pretend along with the kids that so and so is real, but believe it to be true like you believe water is wet, soil is dirty, and the Bengal’s home games should be held at the state penitentiary for ease of the local players. First off, all it takes is one opening of a rift to a horrible other world filled with living nightmares who live in an eeriely silent white smoke to make a little thing like entering a fog bank seem like a real and frightening thing. It’s not scientifically possible, you say? Well, 600 years ago, try saying that little tiny living things that you can’t even see are what make you sick, and not an imbalance of the four humors.

Another tack: science is always working under theories, revising them as new technology all for new discoveries. This, of course assumes that the rules are always constant. Who is to say 2000 years ago, the atomic model did not exist, but everything was composed of the four primal elements? Then once humans figured this out, a god figure or series of god figures all decided to change the rules under us, keeping them this way until they figured this system out, and the cycle goes again?

Both cases, and countless more, sound like hooks from works of fiction. They are offspring of a creative mind taking the physical realm around it, working it with the hammer and forge of fantasy. But the world of fact is wholly separate from the world of fiction, we can enjoy the highs and lows of fiction preciously because it is not true. Seriously believing these rogue fictional things can live and breath in our world of cold, hard, logical fact is at best the sign of a fantastical mind and at worst the sign of an immature child who refuses to grow up, isn’t it?

Perhaps. Heck, probably. But I don’t really see that as a bad thing.

For me, letting elements of the fantastic into our world, honestly in my heart believing these things, however minor it is, is not a sign of immaturity. It is an indication of open mindedness, a leaping point for the chance of adventure and discovery that does exist in the logical world around us. Maybe getting off the interstate because the dimensional mist monsters are sticking to the highway sounds absurd. But when you’ve been driving for 5+ hours and it’s late at night, believing there really are things out there that want to go bump in the night makes you a much more alert driver, paying attention to everything a bit more than when the cruise control was going and the radio was playing. Which, I might add, is a safer way to drive through bad weather.

So maybe the mist monsters don’t really exist. But you know what, believing in them makes me a better driver and a more creative person. Believing in them allow me to see the everyday for what it really should be, a grand adventure in our limited time on this planet. Most people seem to behave as if their daily routine were just ordinary, not extra-ordinary. For me, it could be my day is trudging into town for a day sitting at a computer for nine or so hours and attending meetings.

Or, what if some government secret will flash across my screen at any time? Who knows if the key to unlock all the government’s secrets will be generated by pure random accident in the code I’m working on? Heck, what if my entire company is a front organization for some secret NSA project? Guess I’ll have to go in tomorrow, with a smile, to find out, just in case.

(Also, apologies to B if you read this and take offense, none were intended)

Been a while, hasn’t it all 3 of you who read this?

There I was during NaNoWriMo, working on a story, when a different project sort of fell into my lap. The nitty gritty details can be found here at BoardGameGeek, but in short it’s a unique carrying case for a board game called Arkham Horror. The game is based on the Cthulhu Mythos, which traditionally takes place in the mid 1920s. A common theme in the Mythos and the game is that certain books contain terrifying power that could drive the reader insane, but reading the forbidden knowledge within my be the only way to save the world. (To be fair, everything in the Mythos world can drive you insane, books are just the most common.)

So after spending, cumulatively, more money on tools, supplies and materials for this project than the game itself, I’ve hit a good starting point, as shown in that link to BGG.com. But to get to that point I’ve had to spend all my creative energy in working on that. Energy that is usually spent on things like silly blogs or other writing nonsense.

It’s rather nice to have, if not done, that at a comfortable resting point, the Arkham Horror project. I’ve had a working structure to get tasks started and finished at work, but coming home it’s been harder and harder not to fall victim to humming bird disease; a frantic “Ohh, look at this, this looks like fu…oh, look at that that looks like fun, hey this new thing over here just reeks of awesomeness!” I’ve always shrugged that off as the rewards for a hard worked day, the chaotic task lists the spoils of war earned in my ordered 9-5. But having something reach a natural stopping point in for a silly personal task (I can transport the base game in my new set up, 4 expansions to go…) is a real win for me.

Plus it means I can come here and write silly things more often. Or work on the next silly thing on my list…-sigh- never a dull moment…