you may see strange things happening, don’t worry, i’m working on the site, and i plan to get it all back up and running well soon. when i’m not actively working on it, the old layout will be in effect.

“Several large corporations have lobbied for socialized health care, partly to reduce their own medical costs and partly to make every other employer face the same costs. If Ford makes side air bags standard on all their cars, it makes sense for them to ask NHTSA to require that of every car-maker; it costs them nothing extra and costs all their competitors more.

I see this less in PvP, but it tends to be of the form of encouraging steep learning curves. Let’s make a third of the powers function differently in PvP while working under a different ruleset. If you are a dedicated PvP player, you learn it in 10-20 hours, practice under the different rules, and get ready to own. If you only PvP casually, it might take you months to put in that much PvP time to learn enough to be effective. Bonus: while you are trying to learn the differences in the rules, I am exploiting them to crush you. Yeah, try to learn while spending half your time in the graveyard/hospital/whatever. QQ more n00b carebaer lol”

read the full article here

“So this is immediately what I think of whenever I hear someone complain about “easy mode.” “People are leveling too fast” translates to “people can keep up with me.” If you want to say that the game is too easy because combat means pushing “1 2 3 1 6 rest,” then we have something different on the table.”

i saw him last night for the first time in 9 years. wierd, i recognized him…. he’s the same guy that raced to the heavens with me so long ago, only then he had a hood on and i couldnt see his full face. last night he showed up again and took me on what i can only call a ‘date’ of sorts. we went to see muppet playing at a venue with a proper stage, kindof like the Kentucky theater.. he was in bliss, i didnt recognize the songs but they seemed to be his creation for sure, and the floors were sticky there. after that we went to look at paintings i have not yet made. i think it meant that i shouldn’t give up on my body just yet, that there’s still much more that i can accomplish and experience. we have never actually spoken to one another with words (from the lips, anyway), the only reason i recognized him for who he was was the smile; and then it all came clear to me again, the slight build, dark wavy hair, wearing all black, delicate features and ivory skin that felt more like alabaster. i can never touch him directly unless he touches me first, and although i know him deeply i have no idea who he really is.

it seems like the only times he has visited me was when i was under great distress in the waking world. the first time i felt like the walls were closing in on me, that i was imprisoned.. at that time i was having serious issues with school (in that i was no longer going), my parents were fighting, noone was happy then. he sortof reminded me that when there were four walls keeping you in that nothing could keep your mind imprisioned but you. i had always wondered if i was going to see him again after that. i had ridiculously grandiose ideas of who he may have been at that time.

this time around i wonder if he is the personificaton of my overdeveloped escape mechanism, or maybe a person in the waking world who needs some kind of mystery to keep him going.. if the latter i wonder if he’d recognize me in waking, or would i recognize him? another idea (i was having trouble sleeping last night and toying with different scenarios) is that he may be my twin. twins apparently run in my family on the female side, and there’s a fairly common thing that can happen called ‘vanishing twin syndrome’, where the ultrasound picks up two babies early on and then sometime in between the next monitoring one of them ‘vanishes’: gets re-absorbed into the uterus for whatever reason…. but i have a feeling that this is more overactive magination and fancy. this occurrence is more than likely my brain making a personificaton of specific feelings so that they are easier to understand on a conscious level. still odd though.

i’m left wondering if i will see him again (again), but i think that if he is a mechanism of distress then i wish i won’t ever have to.

i give you the 8th wonder of the word, Leviathan:

a 1947 Royal Standard (Model 10). picked it up at a flea market for 20$ this past weekend, and took about 3 hours to repair and restore it today.

i made some repairs to the typebar mechanisms, including fashioning a typebar hinge pin, as well as modifying (in a reversible way) the spool carriers to accept modern 1/2″ ribbon spools (you can still get them for some calculators) that i picked up at an office supply store today.

hurray for old tech!