Author Archives: Andy

Ashkelon update

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Michele is doing well and it sounds like she’s settling into the excavation routine over at Ashkelon. I just talked to her for a few minutes this evening, but I foolishly squandered most of the conversation complaining about the cats. Sounds like they’re working their student excavators pretty hard–work starts at 5 in the morning and continues through mid-afternoon. Fortunately, I sent her to Israel with this killer arctic camo hat (that’s me wearing it on the left) with which to ward off the sun’s harmful rays. Dang, that’s a cool hat.

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Politicalamity

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Where do you fall on the political compass?
According to this quiz, I lean towards the right with a fairly even balance between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Here’s my chart.
I wanted to answer “no strong opinion either way” to a lot of questions, but I think that’d just make me a wishy-washy fence-sitter.

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Update

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Talked to Michele on the phone this morning–everything went OK with her flight and she’s on site at Ashkelon now. Sounds like excavation work starts up tomorrow. She said the flight wasn’t too bad, as far as international flights go–no crying babies in the seat right behind her, that sort of thing.
If you’ve ever been overseas for any amount of time, you know how great it can be to get letters and email from home. If you’d like to drop her a note (via email or snail mail), I know she would really appreciate it. If you’d like her contact information, just drop me a line and I’ll happily get it to you.

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All that you can’t leave behind

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Michele is off to Israel–she’s on the plane as we speak (a few hours out of Tel Aviv by now, if her flight kept on schedule). While the part of Israel in which she’ll be spending most of her time is relatively safe, your prayers for her safety are much appreciated. I’ll post periodic updates from her as I receive them.

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Through the underworld

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Tonight was Michele’s first shot at gamemastering an RPG. For several weeks, she has been hard at work researching and assembling an adventure for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.
I am of course quite biased, but it was brilliant. She incorporated a slew of Egyptian mythology, mingling it with the Cthulhu setting and sending our characters through the mythical Egyptian underworld. This underworld, however, was malfunctioning badly due to the ravages of Cthulhian entities. We had to find a way to escape the underworld by traveling through its guarded gates and facing the great serpent Apophis. I’ve never played a CoC game (or any game, for that matter) even remotely like it–Egyptian mythology, despite its popular appeal, is a surprisingly uncommon theme in RPGs–but by Hathor, it worked. After the adventure, we (the players) were just stunned, and immediately began grilling Michele about all the interesting Egyptian-mythology aspects of the adventure. It was also spooky as heck–travelling through the lightless underworld will do that for you–and our characters had their usual fun losing Sanity points left and right.
I’ll try to convince her to post some of her notes, or maybe a basic summary, over at her blog. I hope Michele enjoyed GMing, because as soon as she gets back from Israel, she’s going to be roped into running a sequel adventure for us.

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“Not even God could sink this ship”

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I can’t even begin to imagine the negative cosmic karma posting this is going to rack up for me…
…but I made it all the way through this last winter without taking the Fall.
I figure there’s no snow or ice around anymore, so it’s safe to mock Fate now.
Looks like I outwitted Old Man Winter this time around. You hear me, Michigan Winter? I’m down here laughing at you! You managed to kill just about everyone else, but… you keep missing the target!*
* bonus points for identifying that movie quote. If you know my movie-quoting habits, there’s really only about three movies to choose from.

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Two games that look cool

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I am most pleased to see that a new version of Red Orchestra is out. Red Orchestra is a fan-mode mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 set on the Russian front of World War 2. Among its features are a high level of realism and massive battlefields. I played an earlier version some months ago and greatly enjoyed it (although it was still pretty glitchy at that point). I have fond memories of multiplayer battles in a huge Stalingrad map. Can’t wait to check out this new version.
Another game that I’m really looking forward to is The Political Machine, a presidential election sim. It involves creating a candidate and then managing the different aspects of the election campaign. Looks to be pretty fun. Hopefully it will be out soon, so I can glean some enjoyment from it before endless election-year news coverage and third-grade-name-calling candidate back-and-forths cause my brain to shut down all sensory input in a desperate act of self-defense.
What was I talking about? Oh yeah–games. You should check ’em out.

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Fedora Core 2 dual-boot problem

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More discussion on that Fedora dual-boot problem. Sounds like it’s not limited to FC2, but crops up in other recent Linux distributions, too. Ah well–given the general pluckiness of the open source world, with any luck there’ll be fixes or workarounds available shortly.
I hope that when the problem is addressed, the Fedora Core people release an updated version of FC2 (as opposed to just a downloadable patch or something).
I did successfully upgrade my work laptop (dual-boot Win2k and FC) to FC2 on Friday without any subsequent dual-booting problems (although it did warn me during the install process about possible boot/partition problems). So far, I like what I’ve seen of FC2, but I haven’t yet spent enough time with it to come to any grand conclusions.

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Celestial chorus

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Do you have a particular song that strikes you as so so perfect, so sublime that just hearing it makes you choke up and weep that this broken world is unworthy of its beauty? I bet you do. For you, it might be Pachelbel’s Canon; for others, perhaps Nick Cave’s “Red Right Hand” or Wagner’s “Ice Ice Baby.” For me, it’s Johnny Cash singing “The Wanderer” with U2:

I went out walking through streets paved with gold
Lifted some stones, saw the skin and bones
of a city without a soul.
I went out walking under an atomic sky
Where the ground won’t turn and the rain it burns
Like the tears when I said goodbye.
Yeah, I went with nothing
Nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.
I went drifting through the capitals of tin
Where men can’t walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in.
I stopped outside a churchhouse where the citizens like to sit
They say they want the Kingdom,
But they don’t want God in it.
I went out riding down that old eight lane
I passed by a thousand signs
Looking for my own name.
I went with nothing
But the thought you’d be there too.
Looking for you.
I went out there
In search of experience.
To taste and to touch
And to feel as much
As a man can before he repents.
I went out searching, looking for one good man
A spirit who would not bend or break,
Who would sit at his Father’s right hand.
I went out walking with a Bible and a gun.
The Word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one.
Now Jesus, don’t you wait up
Jesus, I’ll be home soon
Yeah, I went out for the papers
Told her I’d be back by noon.
Yeah, I left with nothing
But the thought you’d be there too.
Looking for you.
Yeah, I left with nothing
Nothing but the thought of you.
I went wandering.

I usually make it all the way to the last verse–where he goes out looking for one good man–before being overwhelmed by sorrow at the sad state of this world. By the time we learn that he told her he’d be back by noon, I’m usually a weepy emotional wreck. Johnny Cash, we’re not worthy.
How about you?

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