What’s that sound?

My next D&D session is going to start with the players inside a church watching an NPC being raised from the dead. And unknown to them, Orcus, Demon Prince of the Undead is going to try to interrupt the ritual. The attack is going to start with a flock of undead birds flinging themselves against the window, slowly at first and then more and more as the attack increases.

And I thought: how can I make this into a jump-scare? Or use sound to unnerve the players?

We play over Discord, using a private channel because we’re not all in the same state, so we needed an online way to play. There may have been a way I could pipe sound effects over the call, but I wanted something simpler because I’ve tried using hacks to re-route sound on my Windows computer and it’s always super complicated and breaks easily and doesn’t produce the best audio.

Luckily, the site we use to share battlemaps, Owlbear Rodeo, has an option to share audio to anyone else with the page open. I found a video of birds hitting a window over and over again, and with that playing in one tab, I can share the sound of that tab over Owlbear Rodeo. But I had to replay the video manually; YouTube doesn’t have the option to loop a video.

But there’s another site that does! I drop the URL of the bird video into LoopTube, share that over the battlemap site, and Bob’s your uncle.

I really wish I could find a video that starts slow and reaches a crescendo, though. I still have a day or two to search. But this will do for now.

Nobody tell my players, OK? I want this to be a surprise.

Factory Raid

I should have recorded last night’s game of 7 Days to Die with Max and Luke. Particularly the raid on the Shotgun Messiah factory in the wasteland. It was pretty epic.

We met while on the way. I had just dug up a buried treasure in the desert. Me on my motorcycle, them in the 4×4, when we got to the factory we had a time just clearing out the parking lot. Several zombears, many birds, and a dozen zeds. I reminded them that the respawn timer in the wasteland is 0 – for every deado we kill, another one will respawn.

We tried to follow the path through the factory but sometimes it was easier to beat a door down to see what’s around us. Sometimes the zombies did the destruction. At one point we had to swim through a flooded section and we had trouble getting out of the water. Luke and Max could pole up on frames, but for some reason I wasn’t able to get high enough in the water to get a frame under me. I had to place ladder frames on Luke’s blocks and climb up. While I was struggling with that, they were dealing with the zombies in the room above me. I did make it up in time to help them take out the zombies, though.

We reached an office space filled with cubicles and undead businessmen and cleared it out, and we were only one floor above ground level, so we jumped out to dump all the loot we’d collected in the car, then climbed back to where we were. Found a storage area and cleared it out, and there was a ramp made from the collapsed ceiling up to the next floor. It was unclear how to proceed. Nighttime was coming so we decided to hole up there. Luke tried to block off the ramp but we could hear a witch (screamer zombie who calls in another horde if she sees a player) and sure enough she saw us and we had a mini-horde on our hands. Cleared them out, and by then it was night, when the zombies get faster and meaner.

Tried to block the door to the stairwell but we had a constant line of undead coming up to us. Luke and Max started taking out the stairs so they wouldn’t see a path to us. I stood watch looking down the stairwell. At one point a bear charged up the stairs to us but we made short work of it. Luke ran out of gas for his auger so they switched to pickaxes, much slower going, while Max and I fired on the advancing army of the dead.

I tried to reach for a loot bag that dropped just beyond where we were breaking down the cement stairs, and fell almost all the way to the bottom, and had to run and jump back up to our perch with the decaying non-people right behind me.

With the dawn we proceeded upward. Hit a section of the factory where there were huge metal tanks with hatches on top and through them, surrounded by catwalks, that led out to a lower-than-the-top roof but it was a dead end (pun intended) so we had to circle around to find another way up. We gave up, though, and tried to build pillars and ladders to skip to the roof. Max fell, hurt himself, and quickly found himself surrounded by brain-eating zombies. Luke and I were way up on the very top, eyeing the loot. I went back down and saw Max limping around, sure he was going to die, chased by radioactive zombies and acid-puking zombies and dogs and everything else. If it wasn’t so dire it would have been hilarious (OK it was actually hilarious.) A cop zobmie took out our ladder up, stranding Luke. Max found a room he could barricade himself in so I ran in to bandage him up, but he still had two broken limbs.

Once we’d cleared a break in the waves of attakers, we made it to the loot on the roof. Found a chainsaw, an assault rifle, and a bunch of food, and some good schematics, among the other loot. Totally worth it. And nobody died.

Work numbers need context

I started a new job this week, after a long 4 months unemployed. I was very picky about where I applied, and I think the results speak for themself. It’s early, but I think I’m going to be very happy where I’m at. It’s a contract position and I’m doing my best to angle for getting picked up as a full employee.

How, you might ask? Well, here’s a little story. The hiring manager made it pretty clear that they’re hiring a temp to help them clear out a backlog of tickets and computer deployments. The team has been overwhelmed with projects and has fallen behind. I’ve taken that to heart; I sold myself as someone who has a lot of experience in both basic help desk stuff and getting computers out the door.

The hiring manager (let’s call him M) has been checking in with me at the end of every day, and before my last call with him on Friday, I decided to take a look at my stats. Wanted to have something concrete for him. I discovered that I had handled 47 tickets so far; 13 of them were still open (waiting for the users to get back to me.) That’s not all that I’ve done, though. I know there are tickets that I’ve passed off to others. I don’t have full admin rights yet, and I don’t have access to all of the tools the other techs have. But that’s the number of tickets assigned to me, closed and open: 47.

I have no idea what that means in context, though. How many tickets do other techs have? What’s a normal day, or a normal week, look like? In my meeting, I mentioned this, and M looked impressed. So it felt like a good thing. Afterward, I checked in with the team lead, L. They said, “a busy week for us is 60-70 new tickets coming in.”

And I’ve handled 2/3 to 3/4 of that number? Oooook, that… yeah, that seems good.

Just trying to make myself useful, here, y’know?

The Rumsfeld Doctrine

Back in the mists of time there was a website called Geeks Against Bush, founded by friends and me, trying to write about politics from a liberal (for me at least not yet “leftist”) but techie point of view. I wrote a lot of posts there, but sometime after Obama got elected, Caleb stopped renewing the domain, and the posts all fell off the internet. But the one I am most proud of was my post about then-Defense-Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s cynical and heartless military doctrine.

I’m in the process of going back over my backlog and updating the links, and I managed to find the text of my original post about The Rumsfeld Doctrine on the Wayback Machine. Below you can find the full text.

The links below may or may not work, though, as of this posting. I’ll need to update them, I’m sure.

Nothing is ever really gone on the internet, after all.

More

Two Decades Already?

Insert “is this thing on?” joke here.

Twenty years ago today, I registered this domain. I don’t remember the details all that clearly, but what I can remember is that I wanted to own my own domain without really knowing what I was going to do with it.

Up to that point I kept a blog of sorts that was part of my IO.com account, so it had some dumb long URL like http://io.com/users/~lunarobverse — that’s a dead link, so even if your browser makes it a link, it’s not going anywhere, sorry. I’m not even sure if IO.com is still a thing. It was an early internet service provider that grew from a BBS started by Steve Jackson Games after their offices got raided by the Secret Service. Listen, it was a whole thing back in the 80s and 90s, kids, I’m really going off on a tangent here. IO stood for Illuminati Online, which was named after their card game about secret societies that control the world. It was Boomer cynicism and it seemed fun at the time until the Feds are beating down the door and confiscating all your laser printers.

So I wanted a simpler internet address to share my weird personal oversharing. I wanted Moon.com but the publishers of that same name had had that locked up for a long time already, so the shortest variant of my own name I could buy was bamoon.com. At the time, I had to buy it directly from ICANN and it cost US$35 a year. Since I was newly flush from my first real job in a long time, I also purchased brian-moon.com. I had vague ideas about putting something professional at the hyphenated URL, but that’s never really happened, not in twenty years. All it’s ever really done is redirect to the shorter address.

For good measure, I also purchased my online handle, lunarobverse.com, which these days is my custom Tumblr domain. I’ve recently created an LLC of that name as a way to consolidate my freelance income under one business, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep using that URL for Tumblr or convert it into a business site. Honestly, I have no idea what I should be doing with any of this. I don’t have a head for capitalism or marketing. You’d think, after decades of being online, that I would have even the vaguest sense of what my brand is. I don’t. I really really don’t.

bamoon.com hasn’t been Lunar Obverse since the beginning. I didn’t even set up a blog and post under this domain until November 2003, as you can see by perusing my archives, and even those first posts were re-posts of things I’d written previously. But from that first post on, I’ve only ever added to my archives. WordPress tells me that I have 2,565 published posts (including this one) and another 108 unpublished drafts, unfinished thoughts that will likely never see the light of day. The heyday of my posting was in the mid- to late-00’s, mainly during the second Bush administration, because liberals (I identified as a liberal back then; I’ve moved more and more left over the years) were documenting how bad the GOP was back then. But also there was an explosion of blogging, political and personal, and I wanted to participate.

Lunar Obverse, though, never really hit that growth spurt that gave my writing a huge audience. At the most, I think I was averaging around 200 unique visits a day. That seemed like a nice number, easily manageable. 200 people would fill an auditorium, and it’s a number of people that I could feel comfortable addressing. But I never kept up the pace, and stopped writing so much, and digital cobwebs and virtual dust began to settle around here.

The blog has run on Blogger, and now on WordPress, and briefly on a bespoke system created by a friend I’ve lost track of (hi Caleb, if you’re still out there, I see your Instagram posts and it looks like you’re doing great), but the backend stuff has never been the reason I care about writing. The reason I stopped writing is personal and sad, but I still want to write. I have things I want to say, and here’s a place I can say them without having to go through anyone else. That’s the power of the internet, after all.

There have been years, here and there, where it’s been iffy whether I could scrape together the US$105 I needed to keep the domains. I remember having to borrow money from friends a couple of times. But I’ve managed to hold on to them, even if I haven’t done much with them. I’d like to change that. My plan is to go through all the old posts, and resurface the best ones, and start adding new ones. Best by my own measure, primarily; if I look at the analytics for this domain even the highest-traffic posts get only tens of hits every month. There are posts here I’m still proud of, though, and maybe they might mean something to someone else out there.

I had a coworker a couple of years back remark that my domain, being so short, might be worth a lot of money. The best I can tell is that I could sell it for a couple thousand bucks. That’s not worth it to toss away all these posts and give up the one thing I’ve owned for longer than I’ve ever owned anything. Nah, I’m gonna keep this, spruce it up a little, do some pruning and promotion, and get it back up and running.

So, if you’re reading this, thank you, and welcome. Maybe welcome back? There may be some life left here after all.

Election Day

How can I think about anything at all other than the election? And the consequences of that election. And the potential outcomes. And my predicted outcome, which is that the tangerine tyrant will continue in office while the ostensible opposition party rages ineffectively, while the rest of America descends into (even more) violence. That’s all I’ve been imagining for months, going back to last year when the election season kicked off. The Democratic Party leadership seems, and continues to seem to me, to be completely unable or unwilling to challenge the GOP, and therefore the GOP is going to do whatever they like, including installing a fraudulent judge on the highest court in the land, supporting and defending an authoritarian nightmare in the Executive, and ignoring two centuries of precedent and rule in the Legislative in order to hold on to power.

Meanwhile, the D’s seem content to pretend everything is normal and that normal Robert’s Rules of Order will prevail if only they can keep doing what they’ve always done, ignoring the rioting citizens and the freshmen Congressfolk who want to kick ass and take names in favor of collegiality.

And people die, from the plague, and from the hands, guns, and vehicles of the right-wingers who pretended to want to eliminate fascist government but now take action to uphold and defend it by killing people who just want everyone to be treated like a human being.

I’m in a dark place this Election Day. It would be beautiful if our votes actually turned things around this time. If we could, in an overwhelming, unprecedented majority, reject the GOP and turn them back. The pundits keep talking about the amazing pre-election turnout across the country, but they are also reporting on the unprecedented levels of voter intimidation, voter suppression, and outright overt actions to simply prevent votes from being made and to not count all the votes. It would be beautiful if basic democracy could overcome all this, the result of decades of work by the GOP towards the goal of power and nothing but, of Realpolitik.

I want that to happen, but I don’t have any hope that it will. I’ve done all I can do in my small circles. I’ve argued, I’ve donated what money I can, I’ve voted. Today, for once, I’d like to rest, because I have a feeling that the fight isn’t over, and I’ll be needed tomorrow. I see a war coming. Wait, that’s not right. I see we’re already in a war, but the election is going to kick it into a higher gear. Things are already dangerous (for some Americans it has always been this dangerous) but I have the feeling it’s going to get even more so. Tyrants don’t let go of power easily, and it’s rarely the tyrants’ whose blood is spilled in order to get them to leave. I may or may not be safe, but my conscience does not let me rest while others are in harm’s way, so

how can I think about anything at all other than the election?

A Lack of Vision

A kitten peers out from behind a wall, only one eye visible.
It’s hard to find royalty-free images of blind kittens, you know?

Dreamt last night that…

Look, I know that other people’s dreams aren’t always the most interesting to read. It’s just that I haven’t had the energy to write much at all lately, but this morning, for some reason, my fingers itched to tap out something, and I had this weird image stuck in my head from the moment my eyes opened, and I’m taking advantage of it.

Journeys begin with a single step, and all that. Y’know?

So in my dream, I adopted a tiny baby kitten with one eye. A little floof, all awkward movement and meows, grey or maybe black, and it had exactly one eye, it’s right eye. The other eye wasn’t damaged or anything; there was just blank fur on the other side, like nothing was even meant to go there.

And this little kitten was very devoted to me. It would follow me around, up and down the stairs in my apartment, always wanting to be near, in what would normally be un-cat-like behavior.

As I went about my daily routine for hours, in dream-time, although it was more likely a montage of feelings and images, I’d reach out to pet its fur, and it would curl up next to me, or in my lap, or even climb up on my shoulders.

It was scooting around near my feet, and I was afraid of kicking it or stepping on it, so I reached down to pick it up, and… I fumbled briefly, it started to turn around, and… I popped its one eye off. Dream logic.

I distinctly remember an audible sound, a cork in a bottle coming free, and I saw the eye fly in an arc away, bounce off the floor, and roll randomly.

The kitten did not seem in pain, but it was suddenly confused, mewing, head scanning back and forth. It, and I, did not understand what had just happened. I apologized profusely, and carried it with me in the direction of the eyeball’s escape. I found a small box filled with things, and I rooted around among the contents, and did not find the kitten’s eyeball, but did find a package of googly eyes. You know the ones, they sell them in craft stores, little bubbles of plastic with a round black disk in them, and a sticker on the back for sticking to things.

I opened the package and got out two, peeled the protective tape from the back, and carefully stuck them on to the kitten’s face. And, again, dream logically, it could suddenly see again. It looked clownish and more than a little odd. But I’d given it vision again.

I had repaired the damage I’d done, but in a temporary or off-putting way. That’s the feeling I get from this dream. My intentions are good, but I’m just not quite up to the task of doing the thing being asked of me. Inadequate. Ineffective. Over my head.

These are strange days, my fellow quaranteers. Strange days, indeed.

More Kindness

We made it, everyone! We made it to the Gregorian year 2020, a year I’ve mostly associated with cyberpunk and dystopian futures… bad news, this is pretty much the dystopian cyberpunk future William Gibson warned us about. But there’s still some cause for hope. At least, I still have hope.

I rarely do “resolutions” because they are sources of stress for me when I fail to keep them. The only resolution I made for the past two years is one I’ve learned from Dave Gonzalez, podcast host of The Storm: don’t fall down. It’s simple, straight-forward, positive in nature, and there’s no big stakes riding on its success or failure. And for 2019, I made it! I did not fall down at all last year. I’ll repeat the intention this year, with hopefully successful results, and no great shame if I don’t.

However, there are things I would like more of in my life this year. Wanting more of something good is normal, and since it’s vague enough, I can just keep these in the back of my mind, and use them to direct me towards better and more enjoyable experiences.

In 2020, I would like more:

More reading – Goodreads tells me I read 15 books in 2019. I can read 16 books this year; that seems doable.

More writing – On my blog, I published 91 posts in 2019, for a total word count of 52,892 words. That’s enough to win a NaNoWriMo, spread out over 12 months instead of one. And that’s with a huge gap in posts at the start of the year. I can write more, and the more I write, the more I seem to have to say.

More movement – I miss running. If you go back in the archives, you’ll see posts about running on a regular basis; both training runs and races. I want to move more in 2020 than I did in the last year. The Lose It! app on my phone tells me I took 1,352,414 steps last year. Is that a lot? Seems like a lot, but it’s just walking. It’s an average of 3,696 per day. I can do better.

More cosplay – I enjoy dressing up in costumes to connect to media and entertainment I enjoy. I only really have two costumes at this point: my Fallout Vault-Suit, and my Old Luke Skywalker costume. I have plans for more, and dreams to improve the ones I already have. I am going to Emerald City Comic Con in March, so I have a goal to get started. It’s fun, creative, and social! I want to do it more.

More travel – I love road trips, I love seeing parts of the world I’ve never seen before, I love getting out of my home town. Last year I think the farthest I traveled was to the coast and back, a couple of times. Travel costs money, though, so that’s a limiting factor. But there are ways to cut down on the costs of that: traveling with someone else, for example. As mentioned above, I’m already planning to visit Seattle in March, so that’s someplace I haven’t seen in a while!

More live music, more karaoke – I’ve gotten into listening to podcasts a lot, especially when I’m home alone or in my car. I think it’s because I’m a little lonely; having the voices of other people in the background helps me feel less alone. I would like to replace some of that time with listening to music because it stimulates a different part of my brain. In addition, though, I want to go out and sing in public — my birthday last week was spent in a karaoke booth at Baby Ketten Klub with my friends, and I loved it. And some of my favorite memories of 2019 were attending concerts with my friends. Want to do that more. Maybe just wandering from club to club in Portland and finding new music… about which I can also write and post here.

More kindness – The world needs more of this. We are all connected to each other, in many ways. This seems touchy-feely, but I would much rather push back against the darkness with kindness and compassion than with hatred and anger. Sure, anger is often justified, but can we use that passion for the protection of the vulnerable, and punishment of the abusive powerful (and maybe more of a focus on the former than the latter)?

What do you want to see more of in 2020? I’ll leave my comments open for a few days. Feel free to say hello and drop a note!

The Ol’ Double Nickel

Fifty-five years ago today, I was born, making today the anniversary of my birth, or “birthday” as the day is commonly known.

Feels weird. Time passes without much effort, but to be honest, for a lot of my life, I never dared to imagine my life beyond the next few days, weeks, or rarely, year. Did not believe I would get this far. Never really thought I would make it past 40, which is now a decade and a half behind me. And yet, here I am.

I have family, and my found family. I have memories and experiences, a tiny sampling of which are documented on this blog, but many many more lives only in my head. If I wrote 500 words a day, I could not set down all the things I’ve done. Might be fun to try, though. This blog has been going for 16 years, though; I might end up repeating myself.

And even as I never thought I’d be this old, it is likewise difficult to imagine what I could be like getting even older. I don’t have plans. Is that weird? Very well, I’m weird. Definitely outside of the mainstream. I’m a 55-year-old guy who has never been married (engaged twice, but both times fell through) who doesn’t own a home and has only owned a car for the last 3-4 years out of necessity. I don’t, as it turns out, like to own things, which puts me on the wrong side of capitalism.

I have my dreams and thoughts but no clue how to achieve them. I have my skills at computer repair and troubleshooting, my writing habits, and the desire to create: podcasts, videos, cosplay. I have this domain, with which maybe I could turn into some cash flow, but, again, not the faintest idea where to start with that.

I don’t have a cat, though I’d like one. The last one I had was a handful and eventually ran off, sadly.

I have a job and a boss who says he believes in me. That’s nice, and a good thing. It’s a good job, and my boss is an ethical and decent man. My co-workers are all good people, too.

I have a beard that many people say they like. It’s fun to keep it trimmed and neat and clean and oiled, though I imagine I’m going to be shaving it off when the weather turns warm.

This is turning in to an inventory. What else do I have? I don’t know. You tell me. What am I known for? If you’re reading this, what is your sense of me? I always feel like I reveal too much, but maybe that’s just my natural caution and anxiety. Maybe I haven’t explained who I am at all. Or maybe what you get from what I write is very different than what I think I say. I would be very interested to know your thoughts. I’ll turn on comments for the next few days.

Happy birthday to me. Tonight I’m meeting my closest friends for dinner and then karaoke. That’s the perfect celebration of another trip around the sun, in my eyes at least. Here’s to another, and another, and as many more as I can get.

Feeling That Way

Took a nap, a late nap, today, Christmas Day, because I had nowhere else to be and no one left to see. Slept in the big bed in the house I’m watching, with a big floofy doggo on my feet, and dreamed of silly things.

When I woke up, it was dark in the house and the dog was downstairs, whining to go out. I tossed on a pair of jeans, some shoes, my hoodie, and walked the dog. Realized I was hungry, remembered one of my favorite diners was open serving prime rib dinner.

A short drive later, I was sitting in the dining room, with a giant slab of meat and potatoes in front of me, a warm boozy drink melting in my stomach. Was nice.

The sounds from the bar, through the doorway, felt fake, like foley from a TV show. Was I dissociating? Maybe I was slipping through the cracks in reality. Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe my dreaming mind didn’t wake up from the nap.

Merry Christmas.