Year: 2012

Forget, for a moment, that there are still thousands of New Yorkers without power, and even more who are have no heat or hot water in housing developments.  Forget that the governor is starting a commission to go after the power companies for criminal neglect. Forget that the MTA has told people who rely on them for transportation on a monthly level that they will see no extension or refunds for the time the system was shut down.  If you can, ignore the fact that there are still thousands of New Yorkers without basic needs for life, dependent on the good will of others.

Below is an actual e-mail sent to anyone who works in the law division for NYC.  All non-exempt NYC employees who couldn’t get to work or a shelter during the Hurricane now have to use vacation days for those days, or they get docked pay.  The city is being _generous_ enough to advance people future vacation, in the case that they do not have one.

The Mayor’s signature is not on that email,  but he is the one making this decision, ultimately.  It is unconscionable to ask hard working New Yorkers who couldn’t get to work or a shelter due to weather AND an MTA shutdown that they should be giving their time back to the city.

~~~~~~

From: Higgins, Malachy [mailto:mhiggins@law.nyc.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 12:46 PM
Cc: *ALL SUPPORT MANAGERS
Subject: Timesheet for the week ending 11/03/2012 – Hurricane Sandy – Handscan/Webclock Users ONLY

To All Support Users ONLY,

• If you were unable to:
  • report to work at either your permanent location or one of our other locations or,
  • to a shelter in your community or,
  • reported to a shelter but were turned away and returned home.
• The reason for this Annual Leave is Other Usage, this leave is located on the left side navigation bar and requires two levels of approval – your approver and Timekeeping.   
• If you do not have annual leave and would like to have annual leave advanced for Hurricane Sandy event ONLY, please send an email requesting an advance of your annual leave to Kathy Bryan via email, copying your Division Chief . 
• However, if you were pre-scheduled for annual leave during the week of 11/03/12, you must use your annual leave.  If you were also sick during this time, please record accordingly.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Kathy Bryan and Timekeeping via email.   

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
the Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent to blow up King and Parliament.

Three score barrels were laid below to prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s mercy he was catch’d with a dark lantern and lighted match.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.

A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.

Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.

Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!

I just had the fastest commute of my life. I made it from Hamilton Heights to Brooklyn Heights in 22 minutes. This was, in part, due to the fact that I managed to drive from 34th to the Brooklyn Bridge never once tapping my breaks aside from when I crossed the West Side Highway.  Though on some level, shooting 50mph down  dark stretch of road normally snarled with cars, cops, and trucks was surreally exhilarating, it was also nauseatingly eye-opening.  All the images I’ve been seeing secondhand came home in a visceral wave. Driving throughower Manhattan left me feeling like a tomb robber, skulking about a dark and forbidden place, waiting for something horrible to happen.  It was not until I turned on to Broadway, and was faced with the flashing cavalcade of the NYPD ‘security stop’ at Fulton station that it dawned on me just how dark it was beyond the glowing cone of my headlamps.

I have written a lot about NYC over the years – flights of fancy, poems, and odd lots of experiences lurking at the periphery of dawn. Never have I seen her like this. I feel like I was witness to a compound fracture, but the break starts in midtown and travels the remaining length of the island, rather than a femur or shin. To those living downtown, as I once did, my morbid moment of self-realization is two drops of pee in a roiling cauldron of a pisspot, but that connection was sobering. Strength and resilience – hell, maybe even stubbornness have seen New Yorkers through worse, but rarely, and even more rarely with the wounds so garish and laid bare. My heart goes out to the populace of the city which will never quite be the same again. For all our concrete and macadam, copper and steel, wireless and fiber optics, we really aren’t much more than a colony of fleas precariously colonized in the mane of Nature, gambling on our survival through the next big itch.

You cannot know what the sadness in you does to me,
the same way that you cannot know the
heat of the jealousy your sadness enkindles.

Who is the fool so lucky to have you as a possible
companion
seeker
laughter
lover

And turn it away? For what?

I would forsake all I have, to hold that momentary gleam in your eye
which makes someone else’s poor judgment
something that hurts you so
and reminds me that no matter how much I am entwined by you
it will always be by limbs invisible to one of us.

Life has been hectic and chaotic and exhausting, so what do I do?  I dive me into some fantasy.  In this case: creating a mini-world to run a DND Next playtest campaign in.  Two of my players are opting for magic users – a warlock and a cleric.  Since my players are all veteran roleplayers, the idea of using the cookie-cutter options presented in the playtest packet didn’t _quite_ jive with character concepts or ideas.  Also, I have never dug the generic gods of published DND worlds – Greyhawk was meh, Faerun had too many, Dragonlance had the best, but the least accessable in some ways, and who knows who they worship now that I stopped reading books…

I am placing the mini-campaign in a newly spawned sandbox world to test the rules, without tainting Toworia‘s ruleset/canon. The first session went fairly well, and I am optimistic about where it will develop.  In order to assuage the aforementioned discomfort about magic-user character classes, I spun up some new content I am giving away below:

Peace Domain (new Cleric Domain):

Eldritch Pact – Herjul the Mistbat (new Warlock pact):

Sure Mr. Contractor Man, I can meet you at 8am.  Wait, what time are you confirming this request?

Over the years, my experiences in digital have led me to be seriously paranoid about backups.  Over the summer, I took a big power zot from a breaker cascade caused by my wife running dishwasher, AC, and washing machine simultaneously.

I was prepared.  Within a few days, I had my archive drive loaded up on the network, and started restoring away.

Then it happened again, while I was doing the restore.  My backup drive was fried, as my source had been.

Since mid-July I have been doggedly avoiding digging through all my archival files trying to replace whatever was lost in that aborted backup.  I’ve been working online since about 2008, so what I was missing was more of an archive of work in progress, old completed work – letters, poems, notes…

1994 to mid 2007 are now lost to me, permanently.

I’ve manually gone through 22 hard drives, three old laptops, and run every undelete and unpartition utility in my bat-belt.

The data just doesn’t exist anywhere else.

I can’t even begin to calculate the loss – how many hundreds of hours of writing, mostly, gone.  There were six novels, probably two-dozen short stories, and a bunch of Nanowrimo in there.

It is horrifying, and somewhat freeing at the same time.  Some of those writing projects were so poorly executed that they needed to be edited so heavily that it might as well have been a re-write.  Now, I guess it is a re-write.

Everything else is getting triple-clouded now.

I think the poetry hurts the most.  I can replace the fiction eventually, but poetry is way more ethereal for me – I can’t ever put the genie back in the bottle once out.

I guess I need to figure out where to start.

Today marked the launch of DNDNext’s first round of playtesting.  The rules are compact, but intruiging.  The launch, however, much like Diablo 3, has overshadowed the game.  Like Diablo, this was a frigging trainwreck.

I mirrored my packet on google drive, which promptly went 404:
http://tinyurl.com/6rxahrv

I have re-mirrored on Dropbox:
http://tinyurl.com/cfrumgs

I am also mirroring here:
D&D_Next_Playtest_5-24-12.zip

Mirror via @thenexted

http://wobzip.org/file/71bJP

Bonus – Blank Character Sheets for anyone who wants to try and hack together their own stuff

http://tinyurl.com/dy2amzk

Best luck to all!

Recently, I had a bit of a falling out with my ISP – this was related to the bricking of an internet router, and complicated by arcane corporate bureaucracy.

The short of all this chaos and churn is that my internet service was interrupted for a few days, and chaotic for a few days on either end of that outage.  As a result, my entries via DYNDNS were hopelessly disconnected from reality, and the handful of sites still connected to my home server were disconnected from the aether.

So, I decided to migrate this blog to my paid hosting account – I still have and use Livejournal, but I distrust it implicitly since it was bought by the Russian mob, so I cross-syndicate there, but want to keep proprietary contol over my years-worth of writing.

This move has been quite a mental process.

The actual transfer of files and settings was not a big deal – that was a couple hours at most.  What changed is that my new install of WordPress is apparently now cross-syndicated to the blog post services out there.  This means that I’ve become a target for smapbots that leave comments.

Interestingly, these comment bots come from all over, and have quite a wide range of styles and content to post.  In certain cases, I think, to get past automated filters, they leave what seems like constructive comments.  In other places, they are obvious link touts.  Occassionally, I get Finnegan’s Wake-esque content, with a link embed in the account name.

The bots have been commenting on over nine years of content.

_THAT_ has been what is rough – I have taken these automated comments showing up in my moderation folder as a form of daily mental exercise and a dash of oracular ghost-in-the-machine.  Some of the posts commented on are dead-link web content.  Some are old writing segments.  Some are inside jokes of yesteryear made public.

All of them have been things that I would never mine in my own data collection.  I have gotten 177 spambot posts since last week, and none of them have been on what I would consider the dozen and change posts worth anything in the thousand-something I’ve written.  A number of them, however, have driven me down roads of nostalgia and past situation I often avoid – my reactions, in some cases, are identical to the reasons I avoid the issues in the first place.  In some cases, however, I have found my mindset to be better or worse than the sentiment in the post, or the power of the comments.

It has been interesting.

I assume once my validity as a data mining enterprise is exhasuted, the comments will subside somewhat, and, after that, the outpouring of nostalgia will die down a bit.  For now though, it is an interesting intellectual process – almost like having a future curator pick what is relevant out of your life, and forcing you to think about those things, even if you see them as marginal in most cases.

I’ll have to work on the insights all this braintime is providing sometime soon, in the near future hopefully.

In the deep dark, beneath the clan-hold caves,
Light was brought by those from beyond the Mist.
The eight-clan’s ranks and allies did not quave,
united behind the clan-lord’s glowing fist.

A carv’d salt shrine and prayers to unknown gods
brightened darkened grotto and brought a chance
to the clan’s best blood, gathered in grim squads
awaiting arcane call to deadly dance.

Jagged shadows crossed the blessed grotto,
as claws and fangs of those gathered unsheathed;
tense growls drowned out fear’s heartbeat staccato,
awaiting the attack call to be breathed.

In brightened darkness they bled, died, and fought,
to end the curse the Lich’s reign had wrought…

Of those who answered battle’s bloody roars,
one in ten lived to see the rising dawn –
a blood-price steep, but less than all the scores
the Stalker’s blades over the years had drawn.

With draughts and blessing, battle spell and claw
against grey flesh and profane mattock blows,
victory was snatched from the titan’s maw
but exultation only brought new woes.

For while the brave battled and bled below,
above, a bloodless coup was being fought –
as Boar fought to alter tradition’s flow,
and claim Alpha’s name not with fight, but plot.

In brightened darkness they bled, died, and fought,
to end the curse the Lich’s reign had wrought…

When victors returned, thinking trials done
bearing bloody trophies and battle song,
the Sharptusk’s craven battle had been won,
infirm and child alike were sworn lifelong –

to darkened ends of traitors’ cunning plot.
In Sharptusk guile were childrens’ lives entwined,
by hostage blood was the true Alpha caught,
and with black deed was leadership maligned.

A combat call was lifted once again
and challenge changed to counter Alpha’s arm,
and though the mattock’s grip brought only pain
the Sharptusk leader claimed it to deal harm.

In brightened darkness they bled, died, and fought,
to end the curse the Lich’s reign had wrought…

Within the caves, there were one time eight clans
Before the time of Sharptusk’s wicked plans
But mattock fell to Alpha’s silvered hand,
and Sharptusk’s cursed clan forever banned.