godless_temple's Journal

2:04AM

The thing I like in social networking is that occasional you run into old friends that you haven't seen, literally, in a decade. Today an old friend named Emily sent me a message. She was a girl who lived in the same dorm I did when I was going to college in Wichita State in Wichita Kansas. Seems like a million years or perhaps a different reality. Who is Emily now? I must find out! Her picture had a very cute baby in it, and a nice looking man that assuredly his husband. How many stories and tales are there about her, and about so many of the other people I've met out here.

12:08AM - Iphone 3GS

Yeah I know Im an Apple Employee so I am supposed to love our stuff but I really do dammit.

The 32GB freaking rocks.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

10:14AM - I am a killer robot

I am a killer robot sent from the future to destroy you all . . . happy 4th of July!

10:35AM - AE and 4E

4E: So DND insider is very very cool. The character builder makes things a lot easier to build NPCs and level up PCs. I really like how players can just email me their files and I can see their builds. The extra tools are pretty cool, esp. the Compendium. Also combat is very straight forward and easier to run. I'm trying to incorporate my iphone into the mix, so we will have to see if that works. Last week it was ok, but loading any PDFs was too slow.

AE: My AE game is going very well. It's very story based and while I am running a lot of combat, it's been really fun. Keeping the combat types separate is kinda a pain on weeks when we play both games, but both groups are amazingly interested. I still need to jump in and get into Lands of the Jade Oath. From what I have seen it has a TON of really good stuff.

Thats the gaming news for this right now.

11:10AM - State of Projects June 2009

Ok so here is the state of my various projects right now

Ziggurat's Shadow, Fantasy Novel - Right now I am writing a glossary for the world. I found a nice wiki program that makes it a lot easier to write. The actual manuscript itself is still around 60 pages and for the most part totally workable, I just need to re-write chapter one.

Comics - I have a good friend who is going to handle art on a book for me so I am brainstorming and working on a script. Still in very early stages.

The Apartment Project - With the realization that I am a setting based writer I am building a virtual apartment complex and populating it with characters that can be used for short story/novels.

Seed Ship - This is my Space Opera/Cyberpunk/Dinopunk project. Some writing has been done, but still in very early stages.

Also I am DMing two weekly DND games. One thats AE and one thats 4E. Both games are pretty fun and prep time has been more or less going well.

1:38AM - To Saul Williams on 10/4/2008

Dear History, you banished all thought of other government until your Tower came down in Babylon.

How many times have we heard that song?

Endless Rome! Egypt's Throne!

Dear History, your sons beat down by the Flood of oil and money.

Dear History, We forgot who we are. Invade Iraq, bomb Iran, Afghanistan. Isn't that enough? Make them just like us. To remember Ourselves.

The fruit is ripe.

Dear History, we make a special month. For you. A holiday at school.
Revolutions, illuminations, shamanistic and oracular visions--now all cliche.
Government says its drugs anyway.

Dear History, What is the meaning of the Flood? Why must we leave the Garden?

We ate too much.

Gather the things that are dying, two by two. pink dolphins, rainforest gifts, small lizards, birds. Build a boat. One must release the raven and the dove. Fly forth you birds of omen. Seek the land. It's time to start again.

8:07PM - Power Hour Love

So for those that don't know I no longer work in the fraud team at apple. I'm back on the phones taking customer service calls. Not a glamorous job . . . but one that I am good at. I apparently haven't lost any of my skills because today I won the "Power Hour." They randomly listen in to calls and whoever had the best call gets a tiny wrestler or some such call center silliness. Actually I am quite enjoying the new job.

As for the rest of my life, its gotten better since I started seeing the new psychiatrist. She is waaaay more though, changed up my meds, gave me the diagnosis of major depression with high anxiety vs. bipolar. I got back onto zoloft, the only thing that has really helped and I have a proactive dosage of anxiety meds instead of waiting for a panic attack to happen.

For my last piece of news, it finally happened. Huster put out a Palin movie. Whose Nalin Palin. I downloaded the first scene and laughed my fucking ass off. This is what free speech is all about. The fact that we can mock political figures using "obscene" and satirical methods. Thats what its all about.

Oh and I did my early voting for Obama. What about you, voted yet? And dont tell me you are not doing it cause of some fucking machine. You can ask for a paper ballot! Take off your tin foil hats and FUCKING VOTE! Yes Rev. Joe that means you!

3:47PM - Vote

Everyone go vote. vote for who you want to but VOTE!

In other news I am working on a new AE game with nothing but brand new players. I figure it'll be pretty interesting.

8:21PM - Testing

So I'm testing out blogging to LJ hoping it will get me off my ass to post more.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

5:13PM - Ah the Fringe

So last night when Kris and I were watching the Fringe I mentioned that one of the characters sounded just like Desolation Jones by Warren Ellis (actually I think the show is a LOT like his book Planetary.)

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6624

Received in email:

The latest episode [of TV series FRINGE] (1×05) mentions a Doctor Fisher who performs illegal human experiments including "One subject [that] was pumped full of stimulants and kept awake for a solid year, fed on a steady visual diet of horrific images."

Still working on bringing that book back. News soon, with luck.

I should start a collection of TV shoutouts. My family were watching a vampire show, the name of which escapes me, earlier in the year, and almost fell out of their seats when a character dropped my name.

In other news, TV writers get paid an astounding amount of money and I get paid in beads and alcohol. Rubbing alcohol, at that. Don’t mind me. I’ll be over in the corner, trying to suck sustenance out of the bottom of an old corn flakes box.

From Wikipedia:

Desolation Jones was chosen to participate in a secret government project called the "Desolation Test." Jones believes he would be taking part in an innocuous research study, but instead becomes an unwilling human test subject. Part of the test was being strapped to a hospital bed for a full year without being allowed to sleep. Jones is the only known survivor of this program.

2:05PM - update

I dont remember the last time that I blogged. It's been a long while. I've been pretty down lately, am not working again, and have entered an intensive outpatient program for mental health. When I say intense I mean intense. It's the hardest therapy I've been in so far. My meds have been changing a lot lately. They took me off of zoloft and onto Lithium, but that didn't work. Now I am on something that I can't pronounce but it does the job of both the ambian and the zoloft, or so they say. There are days when I feel like throwing all the meds away and trying it on my own, but I know thats a bad idea.

Kris has a new job. She is working at Apple now too, so the money is nowhere near as tight as it was last time I had a melt down. She is stuck doing telesales for now but Apple has a lotta room for advancement. I do worry about us working at the same place, but Apple is stable enough that we should be ok. I think it is by far the most stable of tech companies.

My sister recently came to Austin for a visit and we had a lot of fun together. This week my three nieces on that side of the family are in town, so that should be a blast. They brought guitar hero and tell me I'll be forced to play it with them.

As for writing there is a little of this and a little of that. Nothing to get too excited about. Some poetry. I've been working on learning how to write scripts to further my goal of eventually writing comic books. I really enjoy the format, and I am blessed with three good artists who are all willing to work with me, so hopefully in a year or so I'll not only have something written but have an actual comic to show off. Besides script writing is something I've always wanted to learn.

DND 4th ed. I went ahead and bought the player's handbook and downloaded the leaked MM and DMG. Yes I know I am a bad boy. You can definitely see Mike Mearls influence on the game. I think Book of Nine Swords did it better, but there are some very good enhancements to the game.

Music has been a lot of metal lately. AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Metallica, etc. I didn't expect that at all, but I'm really liking it.

Pros
1. Combat is simplified and clarified. I've actually managed to read most of the combat chapter, which is always the driest reading in an rpg book. What you can do in your turn is more clearly outlined and the steps of your turn are broken down, which reminds me of Magic: the Gathering rules. That's not a bad thing.

2. The Monster Manual actually has baddies that you can pull out of the book and play on the fly. That is a hell of an advancement from 3/3.5. Also making monsters is easy, no crazy ass build the bad boy with ten levels of various classes. Bah that sucked unless you were really good with the rules. This again is clearly Mike Mearls' influence. Reminds me a lot of villain classes from Mastering Iron Heroes.

3. Magic items in the PHB.

4. Traps, spells, powers, magic items etc. have a standardized form of being listed. This certainly simplifies things.

5. Healing surges, at-will, and per encounter spells/powers are a good thing. I still like the True Sorcery magic system better tho.

Cons
1. There is still an implied alignment for each race/class. Yuck! I should be able to play a Teifling Warlock without getting pigeonholed. Why can't that character be a truly good guy who doesn't have implied social ramifications against him. Drow are a good instance of this. If you don't play with a black/white (2 point logic system, or an on/off system if you will) morality spectrum then there is no reason that Drow (or other so-called evil races) are immediately the bad guy. In that world you would have trade and social interactions with the "evil" races. Again the rulebook leans heavily against this viewpoint.

2. I don't like how some of the classes are set up.

3. There is still an implied setting. A player's handbook doesn't need you to define gods, give me the rules to build them in the DMG.The same goes for a lot of things in the game but I'm too lazy to list them all.

To go back to the whole morality concept from Con #1 - I hate 2 point logic systems and I hate color associations with moral representations. Our language changes how we view logic/morality/reality. In other words our lives are changed by how we observe the universe. The Quantum Physics concept of Observer Effect (not to be confused with Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which it usually is.) This is nothing more than General Semantics dammit!

As for morality representation in a color spectrum:

Black-------White or Black-------Gray-------White

We imply number set thery to moraltiy. While that is a clean way to look at it, its totally and utterly false. For this to work you have to accept number theory and the placement that people assign to it is:
Black/Evil/Bad (Negative)-------Gray/Zero-------White/Good/No Sin (Positive)

When did the middle of morality, the most questionable, become the zero point! That is the most silly thing ever! No one with any education/knowledge would accept that as zero. Also this model can be viewed as a wave function.
White/Good/No Sin (Positive)-------Gray-------Black/Evil/Bad (Negative)

So by that line of thought Buddha, Gandhi, Jesus all had the capacity to be negative. Not only that but since Quantum Physics tells us that all states of matter are in all possible states at the same time they WERE negative. Again asinine. Just throw out this model it doesn't work.

Ok I am done with my rant now. Talk to you all again soon.

Kevin

10:12PM - Louve 041

Louve 041
Originally uploaded by kevpenning

10:46AM - Ode to a Peruvian Chef

Ode to a Peruvian Chef
(Jose is a Peruvian chef living in Austin, Texas. He brings joy with his exquisite meals.)

the nature of a fly
is to buzz and dive
Jose killed MY buzz
so I must have cried
out, Judgment Harsh!
Pan's pipes taken away
Red balloons popped
Some escaped to the sky
began the day or
continued the night
for the nature of a fly
is to buzz and dive

2:54PM - new poem

written with the muttering of a sentence at work

It is a flower
for no other reason than
to be a flower

12:19PM - Grand Unified Theory / Not Grand Unified Theory / Form / No Form

11 deminsion Spacetime
WORD IS VIRUS!
There is no truth, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED!
Religion is only in one corner
did someone say my name?
WORD IS VIRUS!
whats the SO?
VOID IS FORM!
TIMECUBE = No 1EARTH/1GOD
MATTER/ENERGY/ANTIMATTER=MEANINGLESS BYPRODUCT UNIVERSE IS INFORMATION
This is the only world, NO OTHER WORLD EXSISTS
superstring M-theory, timecube, William S. Burroughs, Hassan i. Sabbah Old Man of the Mountain, General Semantics, bagavagita, Buddhism, Poet Robert Duncan
not postmodern!
Ancient knowledge 3000 years!
no TIME! WORD IS VIRUS! NOTHING IS LINEAR but CUBIC 4!
Transmigrant seen in news on hook in school!
WAGHDIS!
black hole=asshole
A city of the red night
have I lost you?
(response) I'm grasping at a mud cliff
mud+nude=original state of mankind
reject the first and second woman
original state of mankind=cube 4 sides
now its delved into Kaballah
I've been chasing it for years
ummmmm
thats a hard question
Old Testament / Book of Judas PDF (national geographic / Isaiah / Ezekiel / Genesis / Job
Stephen Hawking - A brief History of Time
Cities of the Red Night by Burroughs [Queer Utopian / (Asshole;Black hole theorem) / WORD IS VIRUS.]
Mahābhārata - Hindu holy book, esp. Bhagavad Gita
Wikipedia - Moore's Law, M-Theory, Grand unification theory / Timecube / General semantics
for Grand Unification
for general philosophy -- gimme a min
Plato (Form esp.) / Aristotle
Bertrand Russell (anything, specifically Why I Am Not a Christian)
Allen Ginsberg (Howl / Kaddish / White Shroud / Sunflower Sutra. . . Jewish/Buddhist Prophet)
Karl Marx - Das Kapital
Albert Einstein - General Relativity / Special relativity
that barely touches the surface
Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow / As if it were a given of the Mind

10:45AM - Good news

On friday I had an appointment with the shrink and he told me that my depression is in full remission. I'm still on the meds, but I have been feeling so much better. Huzzah for feeling like me.

My sister Teresa and her husband Richard were in from London last week. Wizard! it was great getting to spend some time with them. I get lucky if I see them 1-2 times a year. In fact I haven't seen Richard since our honeymoon, and that was very brief.

In other news I am actively working on research for the Shattered Orb novel. I'm currently writing a glossary of terms/locations/religions/races ect. I've gotten a map drawn out that I am happy with. I had the revalation the other day that I don't need gods. Both the mortal world, the soft planes (Mindscape/Shadowscape/Otherlands/Elemtntal planes), the higher planes (Celestial cities), and the Lower planes (City of the Dead/Hellish Realm ect.) don't require gods. Instead I have moved to Bodhisattvas, Devas, and Demons using the gods I had created as different creatures still trapped by life and death. Now thats not saying they do not have religions based around them, but they are not "gods" in the sense of say Roman or Norse gods. None of them are strictly benevolent or evil.

More of the comic book I am trying to write is coming together. The puzzle is starting to fit and I have a new name for it. Singularity.

Last if you havent seen Juno or No Country for Old Men get off your ass and see them.

12:52AM - cut-up Sutra

5. Sutra

form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form ; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, ; There is no Truth, everything is Permitted; Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow; THIS is the world. There is no other!; Great City of the Dead; the City of Gates; Word is Virus; It is hard going to the door; The key is in the sunlight in the window in the bars the key is in the sunlight; just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down; The wilderness grew up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild; Until you meet the Agony--live or die; whatever is left, whatever; we must choose our words; a desire to question him concerning the living and the dead; Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,; There is no continuity then. Only a few; born of yourself, born; All creation open to receive; we call recall of love's watery tones; Meaning: life will never end.;

----

Each quote is separated by a ; Everything is a quote, my words are not here. Can you guess the sources of each?

8:28AM

So the RIAA has gone to new lengths. Now they claim that if you rip a cd it should be considered unauthorized. This goes against ever single precedent there is. Why is a digital copy so scary?

It seems to me that the RIAA is spending a lot of time suing people when the time might be better spent developing ways for companies to profit off of new media types.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/0436215

The RIAA are not the only nutso jobs about digital copies right now. Marvel and DC comicsare getting torrents shut down that have their comics for download. They have also attacked usenet groups. Oroboros, the leading distributor for the DCP (Digital Comics Preservation). Basically there are a ton of scanners out there, each buying a few books, putting them in .cbr format and sending them to Oroboros on zero day (the day the comics come out). Oroboros would then post to the usenet groups and torrents. At the back of each scan is said:

Like it, Buy it.

http://www.sachshah.com/2007/11/digital-preservation-of-comics.html

http://zcultfm.com/~comic/viewtopic.php?t=70795

There are a ton of posts on the usenet groups by people who say they had stopped reading comics, but started buying them again because of the DCP postings.

This happens to co-inside with Marvel launching their own subscription based online comic service. Their service does not allow you to download the comics, only read them online, and does not have anything newer than the last six months. A rather poor service in my opinion. I am considering boycotting Marvel and DC and only reading smaller companies that have creator owned comics. Avatar comes to mind. I'm happy to give my money to Warren Ellis or Allen Moore.

More on this later.

11:30AM - Haiku

Love is a harsh word;
mistress of my servitude
gentle as the sun

--Apple, Austin TX, 12/06/2007

12:36PM

I wrote this as a comment on my friend Varianor's journal. After I wrote it I thought it would make a good entry on its own so here it is. First the post I responded to.

http://varianor.livejournal.com/194654.html

"I used to live in Kansas stuck in a pretty dead end job with no hope of promotion and only making 6:50-7:50. This was before I got off my ass and went back to college. At the time I thought of those long years as wasted but as I've grown older and maybe (hopefully) wiser I now look at them as the formative years of my mind, spirituality, and writing.

There is a large number of Beat Generation writers and artist that came out of Kansas. I got the chance to study under one of them. He was a beautiful excellent man and the best film maker/photographer I have ever met. In his class he explained that writers/artists are like diamonds. The harsher they have to live in oppressive situations the stronger they become.

The best piece of advice he ever gave me:

One line is as good as any other. One brush stroke is as good as any other. One page is as good as any other."

To elaborate even further those years gave me a chance to do a lot of reading. Its when I first read Milton, Pope, ect. Sure I had gazed at them in school but I never really read them. When I went back to school and really really got into Contemporary Poetry those readings are what really gave me a base to learn from. I think they taught me how to formulate my thoughts into a (this isn't quite the word. i don't know that there is one) shape to receive the poems. I think this may be best articulated by Allen Ginsberg's poem Transcription of Organ Music (link to poem http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/allen_ginsberg/poems/8390):

Flowers which as in a dream at sunset I watered
faithfully not knowing how much I loved them.
I am so lonely in my glory--except they too out
there--I looked up--those red bush blossoms beckon-
ing and peering in the window waiting in the blind love,
their leaves too have hope and are upturned top flat
to the sky to receive--all creation open to receive--the
flat earth itself.

also from Transcription of Organ Music:

The closet door is open for me, where I left it,
since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.
The kitchen has no door, the hole there will
admit me should I wish to enter the kitchen.
I remember when I first got laid, H.P. gra-
ciously took my cherry, I sat on the docks of Prov-
incetown, age 23, joyful, elevated in hope with the
Father, the door to the womb wasopen to admit me
if I wished to enter.

In other news I've been reading some poetry aloud to my good friend ponskum. I've read some Ginsberg and Whitman's Scented Herbage of My Breast. I think I want to start reading more aloud for people. My friends, my neighbors, my family, my wife. I love you all.