Free Knowledge (just add Time)
If you happen to be blessed with lots of time, then you could do worse than to spend some time listening to free lectures from U.C. Berkeley on Google Video.
The Bahir Study
Exclusively Kabbalah, the Yahoo Group that I co-moderate, has recently finished an extensive study on the Hebrew Letters and the Sefer Yetsirah. We have decided to continue the study format, while moving to another text. We’ve chosen Sefer ha-Bahir, another classic of Kabbalistic thought. The discussion has only just begun, so if you are interested, let us know when you apply for membership. We’ll make sure to send you all the supplementary information that we’ve been assembling offlist.
I just finished Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime yesterday. Of course, there were a couple of High Holy Days in there where I didn’t play, but I think I still beat it in good time. For a DS game, it was very good in terms of gameplay. Most of the DS games I’ve played to date focus entirely too much on the touchscreen interface and sacrifice gameplay. To me, this is much like writing a novel about calligraphy in an overly elaborate script, causing it to be unreadable. On several games, the touchscreen is used without any recourse to the standard buttons at all – they become vestigial relics. There were several other things that I’d highlight as contributing to the playability. First, the primary attack was more than just button mashing – there’s a directional element, along with a held button, which in practice feels a bit like dragging icons or doing mouse gestures on a laptop trackpad. Second, there are several systems of item creation and enhancement that make almost anything a potential asset, including monsters. In every level there are multiple ways of sending items back to your HQ. This works for monsters as well. Basic items can be combined into more complex items that have greater effects. Monsters can eventually help you out with your primary task: Tank Battling. Tank Battling basically entails firing random objects from two cannons on your tank at your opponent. If an item you fire and an item your opponent fires collide then they cancel each other out. You can also raid the enemy tank, whether to harry them, steal their ammo, or once you have reduced their tank’s HP to 0, destroy their engine. The items you find in the various levels are what you use to fire from your cannons, and combining them usually makes items of greater damage dealing capacity. You get 30 items, but it actually works more like a card system – the number of items of a certain type out of 30 determines the probability that it will show up in the various ammo chutes within your tank. Whether you prefer the tank battling or the standard melee combat, they compliment each other. The main measurement of advancement is how many of your fellow slimes you rescue, and this requires both forms of gameplay. In addition there are minigames, sidequests, and WiFi play (although it’s multicard, not single, and no online option). I finished the game in about 25 hours, but I could probably do another 10 hours worth of extra quests (some of which aren’t available before defeating the final boss). All in all, this was an excellent game, and while it didn’t show off the DS’ features, I think it does something far more important – it brings some solid gameplay to a handheld. And that’s a rare commodity.
Firefox and Opera
While I truly like Firefox and it’s extensibility, I’ve been using Opera for work, as it handles tabs and memory better. In Firefox, I tend to keep quite a few tabs open at a time, but often the memory usage becomes ridiculous rather quickly (120,000K+ after 6 hours, according to Task Manager). In Opera, I can save the 4 tabs I use for work as a session (there’s an option that allows you to load a specified session when Opera starts also), then leave them running for 8 hours, and rarely go over 40,000K. Then I use Firefox for normal browsing, while Opera sits quietly in the background with my work session. So if you have lots of tabs that you reuse frequently, think about using Opera to supplement your browsing. It really works.
Mistaken from the start…
“The thing is, we should have known all along that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction because mass can never be created or destroyed.”
“I, me, the spark of mind that is my consciousness, dwells in a locus that is neither place nor time. The objective duration of my life-span is one hundred and ten years, but from my own locus of consciousness, I am immortal – my awareness of my own awareness can never cease to be. I am an infant am a child am a youth am an old, old man dying on clean white sheets. I am all these mes, have always been all these mes will always be all these mes in the place where my mind dwells in an eternal moment divorced from time…”
- The Weed of Time, by Norman Spinrad
Dream
I was explaining to someone the strange things that I had seen while out walking the worlds. It wasn’t that their strangeness had merit in and of itself: it was the glimpse into the rough spots of reality that was valuable. I had been walking down a road in the midst of a scrub-filled desert. In the distance I saw the beginnings of a town, and specifically a larger building that looked like a train station. This was my destination. I perked up a bit, and started walking a little faster. Despite this, the town only seemed to continue receding. I started to run, and the town moved itself beyond the mountains that had been just behind it. It was gone. I then explained to the person I had been telling this story to, that it wasn’t as though there were actually certain objects of desire. They didn’t really exist, except as objects that were to be desired. If you ever got too close, the universe would just fold itself, and the object would be gone. Specifically I cited a commercial for a small barbecue flavored piece of meat that I called “British Roast Beef” and asked the person if they had actually ever eaten such a thing. They stated they had not. I said it was because there was no such thing, only a mirage that remained continually out of reach before vanishing altogether.
Neat New Fun Thing
I have now officially knitted a strip 2in.x5in. of what will probably end up a bit of scarf. It is rather scarf width and as I only know how to do this so far, making it longer seems to make quite a lot of sense at the moment.
Knitting apparently uses hand and wrist muscles not used by my regular hobbies or general daily stuff. This is interesting and new.
I think that yarn racks are rather fun to look at, it is something like being in a rainbow that has nifty textures you can play with. This is of course more fun when there is a small monkey child perched on your shoulders also enjoying all the colors and textures. Then the clerks get a bit testy, so maybe it is only fun for me.
My mother is having another mid life crisis. I am going to have to readjust the estimate on her life span again. I told her it gets really confusing when she has these yearly, and that there are better ways to add years to your life. This one finds her thinking that I am incredibly talented and neat. She has decided that crystals and Reiki are awesome, and I am doubly so. While this is better than the last one where she thought I was a spawn so evil the devil wouldn’t let his child date me, it still is a bit unnerving. Last time we discussed my spirituality at all she asked repeatedly whether or not I was a satanist, why I didn’t believe in Jesus, and why I didn’t read the Bible? Ah, the joys of my family.
I like life.
Haven
I’m not a big fan of the “Other World” paradigms in spirituality. They lend themselves to inaction and apathy, in my opinion. This leads to all sorts of strategic errors as one progresses, most of all, the idea that in becoming enlightened, you will somehow be someone else when you get there. As far as I know (which may be much or little depending on who you are), even if you get to the proverbial ‘end of the road’, you’ll probably be mostly you right up to the end.
However, there is another world that I regularly visit, sometimes willingly, sometimes not. It’s the world that I created when I was in junior high school, and it was pretty elaborate. It started out simple: I wanted to create my own world with a group of winged, scaled, fire breathing people. Later on, the fire-breathing people were toned down into people with wings. Leathery ones. There were concepts embedded in it that I didn’t know much about (mainly magical and spiritual concepts), but looking back, they make a lot of sense right where I put them. There was a lot of history, several languages, and empires that rose and fell. There were cthonic entities that formed cults of sea-going web footed people, and a monotheistic group with angelic priests, as well as several races of dragons (a fork from the original scaly people), giants, vampires, dwarves, shapeshifters, nature spirits, half-animal (canine and feline) people, and many others.
Many of these things have come to take residence in my own life as groups of people who share qualities with these mythological groups. To add a further layer of complexity, I also see various forums and communications mediums as realms within that world. People corresponding to groups periodically cross my radar in new places – creating symbolic juxtapositions that I read back into the story. If you are reading this, you probably inhabit one group or another in my symbolic framework (or I don’t know you very well).
Hence the involuntary nature of some of my visits. Part of my mind drifts, and settles back into that framework; I sit, lost in thought for hours sometimes, just remembering where I left off with the story or how I might modify this group or that to subtly shift the ending. Not that I’ve actually shifted anything in a long time. I stopped writing it in high school, not because I was bored or lost interest, but because I ran into a insoluble riddle within the philosophical framework of the story itself.
I’m still pondering it, after a decade of having halted the story. I retell parts of it to myself as I walk through stores, while I work, or while I fill up the car with gasoline. I often research concepts for the book, but I’ve long since lost any actual drive to write any of it down. The concepts themselves evolve with new knowledge, but nothing has shed light on the essential conflict of the story. Until I understand it, I will probably never even have the urge to write it. It is almost too precious for writing, and too vivid for forgetting.
The story still lives on inside me. It is the home I never truly leave.
SRPG’s on the brain…
Hello everyone!
I’m taking a short break while I get into Disgaea 2. It’s a very time-consuming game. To give you an idea, I’ll just say that my savegame for Disgaea 1 is at around 500 hours, and I’m still nowhere near the level cap of 9999. It’s an SRPG gamer’s dream game.
If you have something you want to talk about, feel free to email me. I’m always around.
See you guys! 
