Goodbye Sealand

“…And so in every way, Sealand is exactly what it is, and nothing that I expected it to be.  And it remains somewhat opaque to me, despite all my description.  Jack comes first; work comes second; all of my obligations come third, and that leaves time to explore the environs a distant fourth, if on the list at all.  I am mystified by the seeming lack of people my own age, by the absence of places I’m used to thinking of as integral to a local scene, but I’ve had no time or energy to place into solving those mysteries. I raise my eyes to the horizon and there are the same vistas and landmarks there I’ve seen a thousand times before, but all at new angles now:  familiar things presenting unfamiliar sides of themselves.  No doubt it will unfold as it should.  There is the day to day fight, and sometimes there is beauty, if you know how to take beauty where you find it.

We shall see what Magic there is in Sealand.

And if there is no Magic in Sealand—  then perhaps we shall make some.”

–The Book of the King, “Sealand (part 3)”, October 17th, 2003

—

“Do you recall how, when we strove upon the balcony, you mocked me?  You told me that I, too, took pleasure in the ways of pain which you work.  You were correct, for all men have within them both that which is dark and that which is light.  A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were.  His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires…  his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old-  but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream.  Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure.  Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new.  Reason opposes tradition.  Emotions oppose the restrictions his fellow men lay upon him.  Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked-  guilt!

“Know then, that as we existed together in the same body and I partook of your ways, not always unwillingly, the road we followed was not one upon which all the traffic moved in a single direction.  As you twisted my will to your workings, so was your will twisted, in turn, by my revulsion at some of your deeds.  You have learned the thing called guilt, and it will ever fall as a shadow across your meat and your drink.  This is why your pleasure has been broken.  This is why you seek now to flee.  But it will do you no good.  It will follow you across the world.  It will rise with you into the realms of the cold, clean winds.  It will pursue you wherever you go.  This is the curse of the Buddha.”

Taraka covered his face with his hands.

“So this is what it is like to weep,” he said, after a time.

–Sam (the Buddha), Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

Robot Echoes

Did you know you can schedule posts to appear, even when you’re not online?

I had forgotten that.  :)

See You on the Other Side

I got the keys!  It’s time to pull the plug!

Holy cow…  I’m gonna need a shower curtain…  And a few hundred other things…

You Have Heard of Fire, Right?

One of the more remarkable quirks of the denizens of West of the Rivers is their total obliviousness to alarms, of every sort.  Twenty minutes ago, the fire alarm inside Starbucks went off, at a sufficient volume to curdle the milk in my cup of coffee, and other than looking up briefly, no-one, neither the employees nor the patrons, stopped what they were doing, or investigated the cause of it, or made any move to leave the premises (except for the people who had just been handed their coffee.)  I snapped close my son’s journal, got up from the counter and walked out!

In the fifteen years I’ve been working in the City of Mists, I have seen hundreds of people, literally hundreds, continue to enter the Central Terminal building in search of their buses, walking beneath actively flashing and ringing fire alarms, some stopping their ears as they go past.  Presumably they conclude that if there actually was a fire or other emergency, there would be barriers to prevent their progress, and/or a cop telling them to get lost.  God forbid there ever actually is a fire.  They’re all gonna burn to death.

Even For Me

Yes, I am putting up a lot of Second Life posts lately.  I am living in an apartment from which I am being evicted, surrounded by 100 boxes containing all my worldly possessions, waiting for a superintendent whom I cannot contact directly to call me and tell me that I can have the keys to my new apartment, hopefully before the movers come Tuesday morning to try to move everything into that new apartment.  And I have no income.  And the heat is back.  So cut me some slack.  There are a hundred blogs out there devoted to SL, and just SL.  It’s amazing I held out this long.

Anyway:  on the Krypto sim (10,247,74), stuck in the middle of a bunch of fairly unimpressive and moderately annoying carnival rides, there’s a small building called the Uptown Cinema, that streams old cartoons.  Mostly black and white Max Fleischer and Otto Mesmer stuff, although there were some other things in the mix, too:  the Warner Brothers “Private Snafu” WWII films, early Terrytoons, the original Action Comics-based Superman cartoons, some of the later color Popeyes.  Dragonia and I sat there for at least an hour watching them and laughing and commenting-  which if you take a step back and think about it, is somewhat bizarre.  Here are two people, physically over 3000 miles apart, who are both inhabiting virtual 3D avatars, sitting in a virtual 3D movie theatre, watching a digitized representation of 100-year-old 2D film animation (the content of which is bizarre to start with.)  That’s fairly surreal…

Nobody!

Nobody freakin’ f$@#s with my bunnies.

Hot

Dragonia, as the floor manager of a prominent SL fashion store, gets previews of all the new items created by the designer who owns the place.  And she has a gazillion tattoos and skins and articles of clothing in her inventory to begin with.  So last night while we were at the Skybase she was trying out the preview items, and then she put them together with some of her existing items, and then I pulled out my camera and started shooting, and then Photoshop got involved, and the next thing you know…  well, you can see what happened.

The flames were added, obviously, and I had to do some work on the right arm to fix the penetration inherent in cross-armed avatar positions.  But other than that, yes, that really was what she looked like.

The fashion store has a poster contest every month, open for public submissions.  I did a copy with the store name superimposed in the upper left, and we threw it into the ring.  (Being a type-hound, of course, I actually like the version with the store name better.  But I don’t want to create the impression that it was commissioned or endorsed by the store owner, so I’m posting the textless version here.)  Given the tremendous amount of diverse visual art talent out there, it’s never gonna be a slam dunk, but I feel comfortable saying we’re at least in the running…

Iconography

Speaking of Myst:  these are a series of buttons I made for an app my friend is developing.  I am not at liberty to divulge the nature of the app, nor the intended functions of the buttons, but I can tell you that after a long (pleasant, interesting) discussion about it, he decided against using them, as he felt that they were too abstract for inclusion in a GUI.  This, as we determined, was something that would never have occurred to me, since I have been playing video games with heavily stylized GUIs all my life-  and the series I’ve spent the most time playing tends to drop you in front of beautiful and complicated machines of unknown purpose, and require you to figure out the controls by trial and error…

MOULa: Kadish Tolesa

<more photos like this>

Escape

It is still cool.  Still raining.

Three of Gloria’s tires have been refilled to 32 psi, and are holding at that pressure.  The fourth remains at 28 psi, because on that tire, the Union Jack valve stem that the Empress gave me has again fused to the valve, and cannot be removed without a wrench, and I did not have the wrench in the car when I visited the gas station.

I called the A+ mover back and told them that the other estimate I had gotten for the job was significantly higher, and asked if it was possible for them to send a representative to the house.  The owner of the company came himself.  He proved to be an extremely competent and professional individual, and allayed all of my fears that I might be getting swindled with a long discussion of all the particulars, including a thorough discussion of moving insurance, which the other company had not bothered to address.  He adjusted the estimate upwards slightly given the access conditions here at the Sealand apartment, and because we both could see that I was going to have more boxes than I had originally claimed, but the estimate total remained in the ballpark of the figure he had first given me, and I resolved to hire his company if possible.  When the supervisor at my new apartment confirmed the date I would finally have access, I did.

I get the keys Friday night, the 27th.  I unplug Eve on Monday, the 30th.  The movers come between 7:30 AM and 8 AM on Tuesday, the 31st.

I am moving to Shadetree.  My new apartment is 300 feet from the co-op where my son Jack lives.

Lunch Break

I’m eating ramen.  The kind from the food store, that comes out of a plastic packet.  I found it in the back of the pantry cabinet, and don’t remember buying it.  Possibly I bought it when I was still living at Flora’s place, and moved it here.

I haven’t eaten ramen in…

I can’t remember when the last time I ate ramen was.

I didn’t use the little flavoring packet, though.  I dosed it up with spinach and mushrooms and a lot of organic red miso.

It’s salty and good.

Critical Failure

I packed the coffee!

What the fuck was I thinking??

Value

It really doesn’t cost too terribly much more for me to drop off my laundry at the laundromat and have them do it than it does for me to do it there myself.

And I don’t have to sit there.

AND they fold it really, really nicely.

Good use of $, and one thing off my plate.

Breathe

The heat wave has retreated.  It started raining three days ago:  a real, steady, all-day rain, with a wind that drove the drops through the windows and over the sills and into every room in the house.  Every time that happens, it feels like the first time it’s ever happened, anywhere, ever.  Every time that happens, it’s a relief.

Gloria is protesting, convinced that the pressure in her tires is low.  And really it is, since the ambient temperature has lowered by a factor of 30 degrees Fahrenheit or more, which is sufficient to lower the pressure inside the tires by a considerable margin.

I have been in touch with two movers.  They are both accredited BBB businesses.  One has a B+ rating;  the other an A+.  The B+ company, as required by law, sent an estimator to the house who examined everything, had a discussion with me about what could be moved as is and what needed to be packed, gave me a bunch of information, and then provided me with a written non-binding estimate which was both much more than I wanted to spend and exactly what I expected to have to spend.  The A+ company, in defiance of the law, did not offer to send an estimator out.  They requested instead that I send them an e-mail list of what I needed moved, and the owner of the company talked with me about it and the circumstances on the phone.  The information he gave me about what could be moved as is and what needed to be packed more completely matched near exactly with that of the B+ company.  The estimate came in at about half the price, partially because he figured on a lower time to complete the job.  I was not offered a written copy of it.  These circumstances of course, are precisely the circumstances under which all the horror stories start on the Internet.

The time period I am attempting to move in is also apparently the busiest moving time of the year:  end of the summer, end of the month, right before school starts and Labor Day, which further complicates matters.  And I have no way of knowing when I’m going to get the keys.  The super thinks it will probably be this Friday.  Probably.  If not then, he says definitely by the 31st, so I suppose I should try to book the move for then.

Packing continues.  It is, of course, only me packing:  none of my family is available or willing to help, few of my friends are local and able to help, and concerning those few, I already spent their effort and goodwill moving into this place, and figure I better not impinge upon them again, lest I totally piss them off.  I might be able to get it done in the time left available to me.  Maybe.  I have the very small advantage of having thrown out a lot of crap moving in.  It may not be enough to counterbalance the short time period.

I am also running out of groceries.  And clean laundry.

Of course, if I give up and pay double rent for a month, I can take as much time as I like…

If It Isn’t, It Should Be

Ace:  Hope you’re feeling better.

Schnallity:  Feeling like shit.  But what can ya do…

Ace:  Die.  Eventually.

Schnallity:  Isn’t that a new Juila Roberts movie?  Eat, Shit and Die?

–Skype exchange