Went to:

Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument
Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center
Cave of the Winds

Got:

Sunburned
Some fossils
An appreciation for how goddamned hard dungeon crawling would actually be

Longer, thoughtful post when I'm not so exhausted.

Rabbit, Rabbit, first of the month.

I need to shake things up somehow. Join the Merchant Marine or get kidnapped by extraterrestrials or something. I can't keep going to work and either not working or working on stupid bullshit projects. I just can't.

There's an image in the post below, just the html doesn't want to process or something.

Wiwaxiids have been classified as molluscs, annelids and stem group annelids. What they really were, nobody knows...

Empire Under Fire
The players are Imperial intelligence and counter-insurgency agents, battling rebel scum that seek to overthrow the only stable government in the Galaxy and bring anarchy to a universe still recovering from the wars and adventurism of the corrupt and collapsed Republic. Adventures will be in the Star Wars heroic mode, with lots of exotic locations and crazy action set pieces but with the moral complexity of hard men making hard decisions.
System: Star Wars d6
Inspirational Material: Equilibrium, Star Wars, Burn Notice, 24

Corporate Sector Adventures
The players are members of the criminal underworld in the Corporate Sector, a mercantile federation of worlds that exists parallel to the Empire/Rebellion conflict of the Galaxy; the game will be set in the New Republic era. They will undertake black book missions for the various factions at play in the sector from corporate extractions to data theft to smuggling to more exotic tasks. Adventures will run in the vein of a Cyberpunk or Shadowrun game, with a Star Wars twist!
System: Star Wars d6
Inspirational Material: Leverage, Ocean's Eleven, Serenity, Neuromancer

How Much For Just The Eyestalk?
The players are a small association of ambitious merchants, supplying the more exotic or delicate materials required by spellcasters in the world's most popular role-playing game. They'll travel the world making deals, harvesting materials, fending off the myriad dangers they'll encounter, and hopefully not getting turned into toads by their clientele. Adventures will be a combination of picaresque, social maneuvering, and the odd dungeon-crawl.
System: Pathfinder RPG
Inspirational Material: Kino's Journey, Rise of a Merchant Prince, Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Discworld

http://www.cracked.com/blog/exploring-the-mysteries-of-the-mind-with-the-sims-3/

Why aren't you doing science on a par with Seanbaby? Why do you hate America?

Look around your world pretty baby
Is it everything you hoped it'd be
The wrong guy, the wrong situation
The right time to roll to me

Look into your heart pretty baby,
Is it aching with some nameless need.
Is there something wrong and you can't put your finger on it
Right then, roll to me

And I don't think I have ever
seen a soul so in despair
So if you want to talk the night through
Guess who will be there?

So don't try to deny it pretty baby,
You've been down so long you can hardly see
When the engines stalled and it wont stop raining
Its the right time to roll to me

Look around your world pretty baby
Is it everything you hoped it'd be
The wrong guy, the wrong situation
The right time to roll to me

This has been on infinite loop in my head all goddamned day

So, a few weeks ago, my cat caught, killed, and ate a bird just outside the house. I couldn't do much because I didn't notice she'd done so until the little bird was already dead. This puts her confirmed kill-count to three, for those keeping track.

Today, I hear every bird in the neighborhood screaming about something, and she comes running in with a bird in her mouth, apparently uninjured and screaming its head off. I pick her up, take her outside, and tap her on the head to make her drop the bird. Bird drops, runs the hell away, and Cassiopeia goes tearing after her. I pick up the cat, take her back to the door, and drop her. Cat runs back after the bird. I repeat the bird/cat separation process. Cat runs back after the bird. FINALLY, the bird is out of sight and Cassiopeia gives up the active pursuit. Meanwhile, every other bird in the neighborhood is in the tree screaming THEIR heads off.

Sometimes, it's rough being the legal guardian of a murder machine.

One unforeseen side-effect of the medication easing my chemical depression is that I'm made more aware at how completely dissatisfied I am with my life as the contrast between my inner and outer landscapes grow. I hope I can fix this in the coming months.

I don't want to do anything today.

I've been to three weddings by choice in my adult life - Harry Fishback's, parr's, and Maus'. All have left me with a sense of ineffable sadness, even while I was happy for my friends' happiness. I'm glad I don't expect to go to any more weddings in my life.

Always nice to have some stuff to use for In Nomine or such.

The seven deadly sins began as eight sins, in the 4th century:

* Gula (gluttony)
* Fornicatio (fornication, lust)
* Avaritia (avarice/greed)
* Tristitia (sorrow)
* Ira (wrath)
* Acedia (acedia/despair)
* Vanagloria (vainglory)
* Superbia (Pride)


Sorrow was viewed as a deliberate rejection of God's gifts in this life. This is a bit [i]Paranoia[/i] for most people's tastes, so by the time of Dante's famous poem, the list stood at:

1. luxuria (extravagance)
2. gula (gluttony)
3. avaritia (avarice/greed)
4. acedia (acedia/discouragement)
5. ira (wrath)
6. invidia (envy)
7. superbia (pride)

Luxuria evolved in most of the Romance languages to have a strictly sexual meaning, while in English it involved into the entirely non-sexual luxury. So, the Roman Church subbed in Lust/Lechery which derived from the same Latin root as Luxuria, but was exclusively sexual. Acedia is more accurately translated as apathy, a sin of omission where one failed to love God enough rather than the other sins which placed something above or ahead of God. As time went by, the consequences rather than the emotion became the focus, and so Sloth became the sin. It was still regarded as one of the least of the seven deadly sins due to its nature of omission rather than commission.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that there are six ways to commit Gluttony:

* Praepropere - eating too soon.
* Laute - eating too expensively (washedly).
* Nimis - eating too much.
* Ardenter - eating too eagerly (burningly).
* Studiose - eating too daintily (keenly).
* Forente - eating wildly (boringly).

I couldn't find a break down of the other sins in a similar fashion.

So, here I am at work, sick with what I think might be a mild 'flu bug. Why am I at work? Because I don't want to use my sick days. Why am I sick? Because my boss comes in to work sick, even thought she's ostensibly trying to USE UP days. As usual with the summer, I have absolutely nothing to do, which is why I'm posting from work instead of doing something that could be considered work related. The worst thing about this bug is that it seems to have invaded my lungs, making me short of breath and when I take a deep breath to try and catch up to the deficit, it makes me cough and cough.

I went to the doctor on the 15th, and they did some bloodwork. My triglycerides were high, my "good" cholesterol was low, my blood sugar was high, but everything else was in parameters. I suppose this means I need to exercise more. My big hurdles have been the cost of a gym, and my reluctance to exercise alone. The doctor recommended working on my diet in addition to the exercise, but on that front, I'd rather be happy than healthy. Maybe in some hypothetical future where I'm not near constantly stressed out about something, I'll stop eating fatty or sugary comfort foods. For now, I'm taking fish oil tablets with my meals to try to help with the cholesterol, and I'm cutting back on calories until I can figure out how to become active again. The doctor wants me back in 6 months to re-test.

I wish I knew where my phone was.

Sometimes, I despair of your long delays between updates. But you never fail to amuse:

http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_062.html

essential

I saw it. I wanted to hate it, but it was just too damned big and dumb and Star Trek-y in the way the plot barely hung together long enough for all the Star Trek the writers wanted to do to happen for me to not love it for the big shaggy dog it was.

Karl Urban was a great McCoy and I could watch Simon Pegg be Scotty all day long.

Ave once told me that people either role-play themselves or who they wish they could be. I guess it explains lately why I've been playing a lot of self-confident extraverts. And that explains why I'm always exhausted and depressed on Wednesday nights, because pretending to be an extravert is an EXTRA drain on my limited supply of soul coal or people juice or whatever you want to call my introvert's ability to deal with people.

Dom DeLuise is dead! Now who will co-star in Cannonball Run 2012!?



1933-2009

Godspeed, and may angels guide you to the heavenly buffet.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090430/ap_on_he_me/un_who_swine_flu

On Wednesday, Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs as precaution, even though experts said swine flu is not spread by eating pork.

I'm compelled to speculate if this is because Egypt hasn't joined the 20th century, nevermind the 21st century, in terms of, you know, not being idiots; or if this is an excuse for Islamic hardline elements in Egypt to eliminate "unclean" animals at the expense of non-Muslim inhabitants.