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Momentele noastre de intimitate

Şi sloganul nostru: D & D for to be more free

The Decoration & Design Building is located in the midtown part of Manhattan on the east side of Third Avenue between 58th and 59th streets.

For even more information check out www.thedanddbuilding.com

The folks behind the game have come up with a way to get rid of the "grind" of regular MMORPGs. Instead of grinding to gain experience and equipment, you can simple buy it. No muss, no fuss. The results are pretty damn interesting from a purely capitalistic point of view. Dig the article....

In high school I was in AP Computer Science. We learned how to program in Pascal, a now mostly defunct language. But I remember really enjoying the work. This was either my junior or sophmore year, well after I had quit playing D&D, but most of the people in the class with me were active players of, not only D&D but, Magic The Gathering. The whole thing just went against who I was in high school. The computer dorks wore highwater polyester pants that showed of their white socks, had greasy hair and pizza faces. Plus, I was also too busy taking photos and working in the darkroom, writing one act plays and reading the books on the senior reading lists so I could make fun of the idiots in my grade who hadn't read The Brothers Karamazov. That is to say, I was too busy being a different kind of dork, the pretentious art/book dork.

But now I'm ready to join up with the polyester panted empire. I'm too old for zits (please gods) and I don't think I own any white socks. Plus, some of my friends and I are actively trying to make a D&D cadre. The open source movement is right up my alley, politically. I can't think of a good reason not to re-up my hit points and roll the 20 sided die for charisma and charm, etc. Go OSS!

Conversely, finding a vocation that fulfills your inner need to be quiet and alone may feel to you like coming home. Unfortunately, over time it will also make you less and less suited for public consumption, until finally one day you realize that it's been multiple days since you talked to someone who wasn't either married or related to you.

At least I have found it to be so since leaving my job. As my inner world has increasingly taken precedence in my daily life, so my external considerations have all but dropped away. So what if “dressing up” these days constitutes putting on my black yoga pants instead of my muddy jeans, or if I haven’t taken a shower in two days? I’ve been gardening! And yeah, maybe I talk to myself a lot more… hey, it’s allowed when you’re in the garden. And the garden center. And Ross. And Trader Joe’s...

OK maybe that’s stretching it, but still, I usually manage to get by without too many mishaps. I even remember to put a smile on my face, quiet my inner dialogue, and go through the motions of small talk with the people I encounter, from the person at the checkout to the various acquaintances I run into around town. Silly me, I thought I had everyone fooled into thinking my life was still normal. Ha.

Then yesterday, while out at the garden center with a good friend, I encountered someone I used to work with. Apparently she didn’t recognize me the first time I smiled at her, because when I caught her eye again, she actually had to confirm my identity. I said, mostly as a joke, “I guess I do look a little different right now!” She replied, with astonishment clear in her voice, “I know, you always look so polished at work!” Read: "Wow, you look like total shit!” Umm… thanks?

The comment stuck with me, and later on it occurred to me: what exactly is one supposed to look like when going through hell on a daily basis?

You see, I’ve had some conflicting input on this front. Apparently, some people think that you’re supposed to look like crap when you’re caring for a dying person. Thus they are surprised to see that you can in fact muster enough energy to lift the mascara brush to your eyelids, put on clothes that match, and perhaps even wash them and put them back in your closet again afterwards. (I’m still working on that latter one today.)

Both my mother and I have had people we know remark with surprise on how good we look. Perhaps they expect the illness to rub off by association, making the caretaker look like they’re the ones who are dying. Or maybe it’s some kind of consolation prize, as in, “Well, your life really sucks, but hey, at least you look good!” I never quite know how to take it. Again, umm… thanks?

Then there’s the opposite side of the spectrum, which usually comes from people who don’t know you that well. Those are the ones who make comments like the one I got at the garden center. I mean, there I was, actually emerging from my self-imposed social withdrawal long enough to spend some time with a good friend on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And what, I’m expected to look “polished,” too? Do you think I gave more than 30 seconds’ effort or energy to my appearance after tearing myself away from the garden? No, because that time might have been sufficient to talk myself out of going at all. I just wanted to laugh at her and go, “‘Polished’? Honey, you’re lucky I even got out of bed today!”

I’m not sure what’s worse: people lowering their expectations because they know what you’re going through, or holding you to normal standards when they don’t. Either way, I just wish people would let me go about my stinky, solitary business, or let me get gussied up and feel like a normal human being for a day, all without comment. I mean really. Is that too much to ask?

I injured my hip flexor a few weeks ago now, and the recovery has been agonizingly slow. Somehow, in almost ten years of running and practicing yoga, I have managed to avoid many serious injuries. I've fallen a couple times while running, which put me out of commission for a week or two each time, and then there was the Rodney Yee back injury incident last year. (My friend and I were laughing so hard during the video -- "OMG he said buttock flesh!" -- that I wasn't paying attention to the pose and threw my back out so badly I could barely walk. Watch out for that buttock flesh!)

Other than that, this is by far the worst injury I've ever sustained. Quite simply, it is making me insane. Most people welcome any excuse to be inactive, and so do I, for about oh, five minutes or so. But soon I start to get antsy, then jumpy, and pretty soon I am crawling out of my skin. I am like a shark -- I need perpetual motion to survive. So sitting still and resting for long enough to heal an injury is not really an option.

In fact, pretty much the only time I know I need to stop or slow down is when my body forcibly requires me to do so. When my grandmother was in the hospital last year, my husband took me out for a walk around the grounds every half hour or so to work out my nerves. It wasn't until two weeks later, when a terrible cold kept me in bed for almost a full week, that I was finally able to fully surrender to the grief and shock of her sudden departure.

So OK, I get it already: this is another one of those times when I need to slow down and look at life through a different, less frenetic lens. And if I'm not going to do it voluntarily, then my body will do it for me, thank you very much.

But it's more than just my body yelling at me right now, it's my whole life. Suddenly, everything is making it very obvious that this is the time to slow the hell down and recover a bit before the next crisis comes along. So after two months, I have finally stopped spending all my energy beating myself up for not working and accepted that this is the best thing I could be doing (or rather, not doing) right now. At last, I am able to relax into the rhythm of having my own life once again, undefined by someone else's hours or priorities.

I know, I know -- rough life, right? But really, at first it made me very nervous that I didn't have to be anywhere or do anything. There's a lot of safety in knowing exactly where and what you need to be for forty hours a week. It significantly cuts down on the number of decisions you need to make in life, because most of them are made for you. And trust me, for a long time, that was a very good thing for me.

Now that I have managed to accept this newfound stillness in my life, I have discovered that it holds great promise -- if only I can stop fidgeting long enough to actually pay attention. That is the true challenge. It's so easy to fill all my "free" time with other trivialities and make them into absolutely essential items of business: the garden, exercise, studying for class, etc.

But really, when it comes down to it, none of those things matter right now. The question of where to plant my new hellebore is definitely not an issue of life and death (except perhaps for the poor hellebore itself). No, there are plenty of the latter in my life right now, which does have the added benefit of teaching me how to tell the difference.

So I can say with total confidence that right now, what matters is simply the stillness in my life, letting it be and breathe in the space between crises. This is where the growth comes from, the strength that will get me through the next set of difficulties, and on into the rest of my life. Now if only I could actually learn from my injury is trying to tell me, and sit still long enough to really listen -- that would be a real triumph.

Now, keep in mind that I am atrocious at math -- I actually scored a 430 (out of 800) on the math portion of the GRE. That is barely even half of the total possible points, and I think you get 200 just for writing your name correctly. I took it again two years later when I was applying for PhD programs, and with three months of expensive tutoring, I managed to bring my score all the way up to a whopping 510. That's -- hold on, I can do this -- an 80 point increase. How much did I pay for each of those points? I don't even want to know. But since my mediocre goal was to get over 500 points, I was disproportionately happy that I did it.

My inability to do math has become something of a phobia for me, which of course only serves to make me worse at math. It's a vicious cycle. So it is very interesting that my subconscious mind would conflate a test I'm nervous about with the incomprehensible language of math. No, I'm not talking about the midterm here, since I'm not taking the class for credit (and might not even attend the test -- yikes!) But it is a class on death and dying, and it has given me a lot of homework that cannot be found in any workbook or solved with any answer key.

No, the test I'm so nervous about that it manifests itself in my worst mathematical nightmares is a different kind of test altogether, one which I have been cramming for almost two years to pass. It involves fun multiple choice questions such as these: How is it possible for my dad to be dying when I'm only 27? Will the amount of anticipatory grief I'm experiencing alleviate or aggravate the amount of grief I feel when he's gone? Am I spending enough time with my family? Too much? Should I get out of bed today, or should I take out all my frustrations on my garden? Hmm. Choice C, none of the above? Or is it choice D, all of the above?

Little wonder then that my current situation is leading me to have flashbacks to taking the math portion of the GRE. Those concepts were also huge and incomprehensible, and while I knew they were vitally important for me to wrap my head around, I had no idea where to even start.

Somehow, my dream took all of this anxiety and conflated it with tonight's very simple midterm, which I find fascinating. So, although it violates every bone in my geeky academic body, perhaps I should take the message my subconscious mind was clearly trying to send me and not go to class tonight after all. I think I'd be better off studying for the much bigger test in my life by spending the time with my family instead. Or maybe I'm just that scared of math...!

More than a sniff of Freemasonary and hey! Slayer's first full album Show No Mercy. Often derided as 'immature' and even 'laughable' I have a massive soft spot for this album, I own it on cassette and as far as I'm concerned it's all killer and no filler, in fact I've just realised it's the only cassette I still play. I even like Metal Storm/Face The Slayer.

"You see me lift the axe and it plunges through your shield..."

and my favourite line...

"Now, I can freeze your burning eyes!"

The song, about a warrior who is trapped in some sort of twilight world, locked in combat with a demonic being that prowls through a mist-filled maze, reminded me of Role-Playing Games.

Bear with me here, this is only a slight digression from cycling as you'll see in a minute. I wish to salute the late Gary Gygax. Gygax was the co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons - if that interests you at all, then read this brilliant article about his passing from the NY Times that futurist and publisher Betageek sent me. I'm not going to write an obit or anything, partially because I didn't get on with D&D, I was strictly Warhammer and Call of Cthulhu, but I acknowledge that he pretty much created the fantasy roleplaying game and as such is worthy of great praise from me. RPGs had a huge effect on my life, but in order to play them with any regularlity I had to get from Hilmarton to Calne, where our gamesmaster lived.

At the age of fourteen, hammering down the Swindon Road was pretty much out of the question, there were regular accidents on that fast and in places narrow main road. So the way to get to Calne by bike was via Compton Bassett. The rider would have a pleasant pedal through gentle country lanes, finally to be spat out onto the Marlborough road just as it hit Calne at the start of the 30 mph zone, relative safety, but it did make the journey about five miles instead of three, and put in a pretty serious hill to the equation. As I got bolder, and my player character (a psychotic dwarf called Mad Morgan Khazias) entered deeper and deeper into the fiendish campaign poured out from the mind of our gamesmaster (Mark Johnson), I began taking my life in my hands along the main road. Many's the time an artic lorry would scream past me having just emerged from behind a bend, so close that I could have reached out and run my hands down its side. I had no helmet, the only protection my head had was provided by a cushioning of imaginings; orcs, elves, dragons, daemons so that I cycled along blissfully and didn't consider the perils of the road. The too fast traffic, the blind corners, the massive, clanking lorries that seemed almost out of control as they hurtled along.

The way back was the old route via Compton, a slow meander home, time to think on the day's adventuring. The rattle of D10s across Mark's mum's kitchen table, the acidic taste of cheap lemonade, banter with friends, battles won and lost, fat purses of gold pieces. My mum wasn't too keen on the RPGs, there were numerous scare stories in the media about kids commiting suicide or murder as a result of playing them. So my mum thought they were dangerous. Ironically she thought I was going for three to four hour rides on my own on Sunday afternoons, an activity much more dangerous to a 14 year old (pre mobile phone) than sitting down with my mates in Mark's kitchen, battling through a fantasy world using the power of our collective imagination, a rulebook and some many-sided dice.

Me: I draw my sword and point it to the heavens, I lean back and shout to the sky "Gary Gygax I salute you!"

GM: [rolls two d10, consults rulebook and notes] hmmm, the tiny readership of your blog has no idea what you're talking about.

I found this and just had to laugh.  Half of you will understand this, half of you will not.  But I found this diagram rather amusing.  Kudos to this guy for putting in tedious hours of research.  Or not.  Whatever.

But here's another picture in case this one just boggles your mind too much...

I hope you can read it.  This is in honor of my roommate buying the latest Pokemon game and playing hours upon hours of it.  She even up up a Pokemon poster in our kitchen.  "I wanna be the very best!"

(P.S.... You have to click on the picture and open it in a new window-- It's an animation)

So, following the death of Gygax The New York Times published this handy chart of the life of a geek.

It's pretty spot on. Dune, Lolcats, blogging about diagrams, HP early adopter, Mountain Dew, Neuromancer...Yeah.

Again. I do have a girlfriend.

And yes, I do obsessively check my page stats. The internet is a dungeon. I ROLL TWENTIES.

...not really, its more of a critical fumble.

Today, generations of gamers lost a true hero.

Gary Gygax, who co-created Dungeons & Dragons along with Dave Arenson in 1974, died in his home this morning. He was 69. He had been suffering from poor health for some time, and had endured a heart attack, multiple strokes, and an aneurysm.

Mr. Gygax's D&D tabletop RPG has been enjoyed by millions worldwide over the years, and has found its way into TV shows, movies, and fantasy novels.

Quad's Corner mourns his passing. He was a man of Epic Levels.

Dez is giving the nerds what they want, namely naked World of Warcraft based plots. As a strong believe in niche fetish, I'm fully in favor of this. Mostly. Sorta. I mean...why not?

The class is taught in a somewhat unique way, in that you meet once a week for a short semester (11 weeks) of class. This is then supplemented by a weekend long intensive seminar on key subjects in the class, which I took this past weekend. Luckily, the weather was appropriately gloomy for spending a weekend with Death and Dying -- I couldn't imagine doing it in April, which was the other alternative on offer. Far too cheerful.

When I told people what I was doing all weekend, the unanimous reaction was, "Good God, why are you doing that?" Even my brother reacted that way at first, but after a minute's thought, he added, "Actually, that would be pretty cool." He got it, but it just took him a while to get past that initial reaction to those ultra-taboo words, "death" and "dying". This is a very telling reaction, by the way, since at this point my brother is almost as comfortable with those concepts as I am. You can't have a father with a terminal illness and be in the Rangers without increasing your familiarity with death in leaps and bounds.

At the end of the weekend, I came out of that classroom feeling like I'd run an emotional marathon, or at least done a really freaking long training run for one. I was wrung out, exhausted, barely able to think straight, but somehow strangely peaceful. I felt lighter, as though a huge burden had been lifted, just a tiny bit.

I think what made me feel this way was the simple fact that for once, I could talk about my experience candidly and openly without feeling the usual stigma or revulsion that the concept of death usually inspires in people. I didn't have to watch my words, or moderate them to save other people's feelings. No, for the first time I was not only allowed but encouraged to speak openly about my experience, and people listened without judgement. I felt somewhat guilty at first for using these poor kids as my group therapy, but I was encouraged when the teacher started asking me questions about my experience with terminal illness. I hoped that it was helpful for the people in that classroom to see someone close to their own age dealing with these issues, that perhaps it made the concept of cancer a little bit more real to them.

However, as I talk about it more and listen to other people's reactions, I'm finding that many people around me have struggled with similar issues. Here I have been feeling isolated for so long, as if I'm the only person who could ever understand this experience, when all around me are people who have lost someone or are struggling with a loved one's illness. A couple times now, people have come up to me after class or on the break and talked to me totally candidly about their own losses, baring their souls in a truly heartfelt effort to ease mine. Sometimes we cry, sometimes we laugh, but always there is a connection over the grief that we have in common. Quite simply, it is amazing.

So my question is this -- if death and grief are more of a unifying factor than I had previously thought, why does no one talk about it? Death is the lowest common denominator for all of us, no matter what our background, our color, our profession, our culture. We all die, and we all know people who die -- some more than others. So why are we still so afraid to mention death, as if in doing so, perhaps it will come true? I am fascinated by this question. I'm not sure if I will ever succeed in answering it, but I think it is definitely one worth asking again and again, even long after I have left this class behind.

Two weeks they had my computer. Two weeks. For a flickering screen! The initial repair (oh sorry, that would be the initial second repair, since the first one Apple did a month ago didn't work) only took about five days. But when I got my computer home, sat myself down in my favorite writing spot on the couch, and flicked on the power button... nothing. It booted up with Apple's diagnostic programs still loaded onto it. Fantastic!

So I took it back in, and all hell broke loose. Initial diagnosis was that Apple had wiped my harddrive -- duh. But it's fine, right, because I paid $80 for a backup the first time that I brought it in for this same repair? Um, wrong. Even though two people had reassured me when I dropped it off that they still had my data and I did not in fact have to pay for another back up, now I was told that oh, by the way, they only keep their backup data for 30 days. And because they had turned me away when it first started having problems again, it had been in excess of that period.

Panic set in. Panic got exponentially worse when I suddenly realized that our wedding video had been shot straight to my harddrive and never copied.

Oh. My. God.

But then a light came through the darkness. They did a full data recovery, and it looked like they had almost all my files. Huzzah! So I went in to choose what I wanted to transfer back to my computer from their master harddrive... only the tech I'd been working with had just gone home sick ten minutes before -- and wouldn't be in until three days later. Fantastic.

I went back in three days later, very excited to have my computer AND my data back intact. The guy sits down at their master computer, starts looking through his files, and goes, "Uh oh. I don't believe this." Ummm... what?

Yeah, you guessed it. Somehow, the recovered data from my backup had been erased, written over, dumped, burned, something. No one could tell me what had happened, and no one offered me an apology. I was flabbergasted, but really, all I could do was laugh and walk out of there before I started screaming and crying like a banshee. I am a little on edge these days, after all.

No call came the next day. When I finally swallowed my pride and called the store, they simply told me to come and pick up my computer while they continued to search for my errant data. And still, not a single apology was heard. Oh wait, let me amend that. I apologized to them for causing them the inconvenience of having to search for my data. Remind me how that works again???

So after two full weeks, last night I finally pried my poor amnesiac computer from their utterly inept hands. I even managed not to break down in helpless tears until I was safely back in my car and on the phone with my husband. But the final indignity was yet to come. After I had cleaned myself up and gotten to my next destination relatively on time, I reached into my bag for my pen -- only to find that the tech who made me sign off on five different invoices before I could retrieve my computer had kept my best pen. Damnation! They win again!

Since then, it has taken me another twelve hours to even turn my computer on, because I didn't want to be faced with its poor blank stare and a stranger's desktop image. Not to mention its harddrive devoid of my documents, pictures, music, and most importantly, a movie.

Not only is all of this devastating in its own right, but right now everything seems to get blown out of all proportion because it inevitably gets conflated with my dad's illness. So instead of just shrugging my shoulders and getting on with it, I feel deeply violated by this whole experience. The anger and helplessness mirror my emotions around my dad's cancer, as does the lack of comprehension as to why exactly this all happened.

So yes, I know it's just a computer, but it's the only one I feel comfortable writing on, and it's an integral part of my daily life. The loss of my data is a deeply personal one, and the callousness with which this loss was treated is simply inexcusable.

What lessons have we learned today, children? 1) Always always ALWAYS back up your data yourself; and 2) never ever EVER go to this particular Mac store again.