• Riddle me this, Maire
• Another year, another MacHack
• Red Robot propaganda

11/8/00: Today marks the second anniversary of this site. The second year has indeed been groovy. It saw more than one thousand visitors to the homepage, plus an order of magnitude more people visiting other pages here about. The next year promises to be full of love and adventure, both on personal and electronic fronts.

11/10/00: In the campaign I've been running, there is a terrible creature known as the Fishwife. It is sometimes called a Bridge Troll, but properly speaking it is not a troll at all. It merits the misnomer by standing on bridges during rainy days, blocking the way, and allowing travellers to pass only if they can answer a riddle. In tonight's session, it turned up to pose this one. I won't post the solution, but if you can't guess it then e-mail me and I'll give you a clue.

I come from heaven but do not bless thee.
I come like rolls of cloth but none can wear me.
I bear a fork but no tine.
Applaud my coming.
Come now, come now, can you guess me?

11/17/00: I have been spiralling towards the purchase of a digital camera for several months. Despite the fact that I have no clear need for such a gizmo, my trajectory recently jumped to the attractor. I picked the Canon PowerShot S10, a camera replete with nifty features that I only half understand. Since I can take photos with no per shot marginal cost, I can now indulge in whimsies like this 3D anaglyph.

11/28/00: The site Dice Tales, which featured gamers' recollections of past campaigns, was dropped from the Tripod webhosting service because Chick Publications had complained about the display of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 meets Dark Dungeons parody. I still proudly host the parody, which you can groove on here. I've added the recollection that I contributed to Dice Tales to this site, so you can also check out the Story of Fabio.

11/29/00: I revised the Links page, culling out some and adding zestier new ones.

12/5/00: Prompted by discussion at MetaFilter, I've decided to share a few lessons in multiculturalism that I learned from Jack Chick.

12/7/00: The cable modem's failure left me without a network connection for a couple of days. I spent today waiting around for the cable guy, thinking up things I could do with my time but stopping short when I remembered that all those things involve the net. He just came and changed out the modem, allowing me to resume my wired life.

The gaming group is taking a go at Amber Diceless Roleplaying, so I've added an Amber section to Gaming Stuff.

12/9/00: I went to the Russian deli across the street from my apartment complex today and was delighted to find tvorog, a Continental dairy product that's something like the lovechild of cream cheese and yogurt. The Germans call it "quark," but we Americans rarely have cause to call it anything. I haven't found it anywhere else in the States. Foreign-English dictionaries usually translate it as "curd," but the little sign at the deli said "Farmer's Cheese." Tvorog by any other name, and so on. Mmm.

In sitely news: I've added more 3D photographs plus a How-to guide.

12/24/00: I haven't updated anything in a while. There's a new page showcasing the PC's of our Amber game, but it's only one new picture's worth of fresh content. I thought I'd chime in regardless and wish everyone a happy holiday. I hope the season finds you in happy places with people you love. Peace.

Oh yes... a holiday anaglyph:

1/3/01: Yesterday was unseasonably warm, even for San Diego. Today, a tremendous brush fire started outside of the city. It made for noticeably bad air here, providing as bonus a light rain of ash and a sky that glowed a disturbing shade of orange.

1/5/01: With the New Year, S John Ross has wrapped up the Sparks Scrapbook 2000 project. It's a font of paper miniatures designed by an odd lot of contributors. I contributed the 'a' glyph, the beautiful but treacherous Alexis Lucky.

I've added a page of random stuff from the Amber campaign. It begins with a grim one-liner from last night's game.

1/11/01: Tonight's game saw the Dragon Oracle busting free-style rhyme.

1/18/01: Hark, a new adventure of God-Man!

1/31/01: The end of January finds me working around the edges of things. Today's update fixes a few bugs and, since the Amber game is on indefinite hiatus, puts some content in the past tense.

2/2/01: Today's issue of Pyramid magazine features my Subplots expansion for Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond . . .. Even though the illustration was on file and not drawn to match, it tickles me to see 'Art by Phil Foglio' at the top of an article I've written.

2/13/01: It's nearly Valentine's Day, a holiday which the marxist in me wants to throw off and which the romantic in me wants to use as an excuse to hug Cristyn. Oh yes, and let's not forget the chocolate.

2/14/01: Last week we had a hail storm. We watched from inside as as the pea-sized bombardament played percussion on the apartment, and I took this picture of the aftermath.

2/19/01: I am the only flower of meditation in the wilderness. At least, that was my fortune after lunch at the Mandarin Garden. It's the sort of thing that might make one uncomfortably aware of one's buddha-nature.

2/28/01: MST3K meets Dark Dungeons is featured in today's Daily Illuminator. It would have been cool to be the Illuminated Site of the Week, but I'll take links where I can get them.

3/11/01: This is the second Sunday that Cristyn and I have gone to Torrey Pines Christian Church. The sermons are thoughtful, the pipe organ tuneful, and things are generally rather nice. The buidlings are simply snazzy, as you can see from this anaglyph.

3/15/01: A frivolous addition over in zettel: 10 questions to help you decide Which Os is right for you?

3/29/01: God-Man defends the comics in a bold new adventure, and his fan page gets a face lift.

4/10/01: I recently received a riff on my silliness, in the form of a letter extending the project of Stickman Logic. I've added it as a postscript to the original article.

If that's note enough quasi-philosophical, cryto-comedy, then you can check out a page I call am i and or not? It's a riff on pages like am i hot or not? and its original parody am i goth or not?

4/18/01: A few updates to the Obfuxicon. I've found that I'm using necrolocutous a lot in conversation.

4/21/01: I recently eschewed the world of desktop computers by buying a titanium powerbook and selling my cube. There were a few grand days of toting around the laptop and editting papers in the back of seedy cafes, but that came to an end Thursday morning. I awoke to find the powerbook in a condition entirely fatal (to it, not me). Repairs will be covered under the warranty, of course, but in the meantime I'm back to using the Umax mac clone that I was so angry at in August that I bought the cube.

Besides that and the head cold, things are going rather well. My philosophical (read: professional) activities are moving along at a slow but steady pace. My ludographic (read: frivolous) actvities warrant mention on two counts:

Dino Rampage is my Dino Hunt variant that turns dinosaurs loose in present-day San Diego. It ran in the recent issue of Pyramid Magazine and although you have to be a subscriber to download the whole game, the sample includes a teaser that sets the tone for the mayhem that follows.

Last year, I submitted an entry to the Thulhu Design Contest for the then-upcoming, now-released Pokethulhu Adventure Game. My entry was the first runner-up and now sits next to its worthy competitors in the Pages from the Pokenomicon.

5/7/01: Several weeks have passed, but my computer woes persist. Apple will do repairs on the powerbook, they assure me, just as soon as the factory sends them a replacement logic board. They were so pessimistic about the prospects of that happening soon that they sent the powerbook back to me Saturday and picked it up today, giving me the chance to get my data from it in the intervening hours. That was an adventure in itself, but I will spare you the details. The upshot is that I have the working version of my dissertation in a place where I can work on it again, even if the machine I have to write at is decidedly suboptimal.

5/17/01: The warranty repair debacle is nearly at an end. Apple gave up on my prior powerbook and sent me a new one. There is the dangling issue of some RAM, but I feel confident that will be sorted out soon. I've had several chances over the last few days to set up in coffee shops and write on the dissertation. It's astonishing how much more work I can get done when I actually do some work, as opposed to any of the other things I've been doing recently.

It's only a little over two months until the wedding. Much excitement.

5/24/01: I now have a powerbook and all its memory again. Earlier this week, I gave a draft dissertation chapter to my advisor and submitted a paper to a journal. Perhaps I'll wallpaper my room with rejection notices. Tomorrow I get fifty-some undergraduate essays that will demand grading. The weather is inconstant, making me lethargic on top of everything else.

Speaking of wallpaper, here are some desktop backgrounds I made using other peoples' Red Robots.

5/29/01: The site has migrated to a new server. If things have gone well, of course, you won't have noticed any difference.

6/6/01: The counter here on the homepage has cleared three thousand. Yeah! Other recent changes around here: a new look for the philosophy page, a new fallacy, and some rum drinks.

Since this is the last week of classes, only a few days separate me from a deluge of grading. After that, there's more work to be done on papers and the looming dissertation. Sometime over the Summer, of course, I'll fit in time to get married and live happily ever after.

6/14/01: I have exams to grade, and by way of procrastinating on them I added my gingerbread recipe and the full story about my character in the short-lived Amber game.

6/22/01: I'm at MacHack, staying at the computer into the wee hours of the morning in the company of hundreds of fellow nerds. I wrote a paper again this year-- this logo is from the papers t-shirt that I designed.

6/26/01: I'm back from MacHack now, trying to catch up on a thousand things. I hadn't planned on doing a hack at the conference, but got involved with Dave Baum and Mike Schmiderer on designing a remote for iTunes.

The hack involved two Lego robots and two powerbooks. It begins with Dave using his initiator device to cue the first robot, the Mouse Driver (pictured on the left). That robot launches an application on the first powerbook and selects a menu item that transmits a signal to the second robot, the Keyboard Driver. The Keyboard Driver then navigates an optical guidance path to the keyboard of the second powerbook and cues an iTunes song. To celebrate a job well done, it does a victory dance in time with the music.

7/6/01: In the course of spammers being thwarted, web-functionality on the server was switched off yesterday afternoon. Due to an oversight, it wasn't switched back on until this morning. If you tried to come by but couldn't, that's why.

My summer is off at a wriggling pace. I'm helping develop instructional materials for a logic course, reogranizing the apartment as Cristyn moves stuff in, and procrastinating about a thousand other things.

7/28/01: The wedding was on campus last Sunday. Many pictures were taken of the beautiful event, and I'll put up some choice ones here. In the meantime, you'll have to be satisfied with this brief recounting of our honeymoon.

We have been back a couple of days now, and life is starting to muddle along again. More updates on married life soon or perhaps not, as time permits.

8/9/01: I'm doing some programming this summer, learning how to put together Flash presentations, reading some philosophy, and still finding time to slack here and there. Married life is groovy. There were almost too many photographers at the nuptial event, but all I have at hand are some nice black and white photos taken by my friend Giovanna. Here's one of the ceremony:

8/20/01: I made this poster shortly after Sam Brown organized Red Robot World Domination. I ran across the file and decided to make it available here. Here's what to do: Download it in pdf format, print it off, paste it on walls next to Obey Giant posters, giggle, repeat.

Also: I've put up a few more photographs of the wedding and collected them together on a page I cleverly call The Wedding Page.

8/27/01: I discovered today that About.com's Worst of the Web featured my Stickman Logic as one of it's featured links last Monday. It has since been cited as something of interest on several blogs. I would be flattered by all the attention, but it is clearly a case of one link page getting links from another link page, which in turn got the link from yet another link page. That the first in the chain was Worst of the Web flattens a bit of the flattery.

As an aside, I am confused by the blog phenomenon. Actual journals make sense to me. Most blogs, however, are rolling collections of links and-- as was the case here-- links nonsensically passed around like a case of the clap from blog to blog.

9/13/01: Much time has passed without a site update here. I've been plodding along at a moderate pace, all the same. I moved Vector Heroes over to the new Magnus Ludus site, the future home for any of my quixotic game releases. There's also an on-line game there, ostensibly written to figure out how Flash handles interactivity.

I've mentioned before that I've been doing Flash programming for my summer RAship. I played with Flash a bit last year, but I didn't do much more than make this little movie about a bird. I used my new found Flash acumen to add buttons to it, and I offer it here for your delectation.

I grew a year older since the last update-- another uneventful birthday. Married life is going swimmingly. Classes start back soon, and Cristyn is already undergoing her grad student orientation.

9/20/01: Some time ago, I bought the entirety of Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD. The the original graininess of the shows is reproduced with crystalline clarity, and they are a delight to watch. There is some additional animations on the DVD's. Where it's impossible to skip over these, they can annoying. Worse is the lack of a comprehensive index. In order to aid in my own navigation around the set, I scoured the web for a sketchography of the series. I found one and cleaned it up a bit for my own use, so I offer it here as the Bootleg Monty Python Sketchography.

Classes began today. I agreed to TA a course this term, unwisely failing to notice the 8 o'clock time of the class until is was too late. Yawn.

9/21/01: Years ago, when I ran a campaign using the gone but not forgotten West End Games Star Wars RPG, I developed a handy system for generating character names. I submitted that system to Pyramid Magazine a while back. Due to concerns about licensing, it appeared in today's issue as the Space Opera Name Generator.

10/6/01: Life creeps along like the great slug that it is. Today I finally got around to listing a bunch of stuff at eBay.

10/10/01: Godman revisits Afghanistan in an adventure that sums up the frustration of trying to do political satire this last month.

10/31/01: Life seems to have settled into new normalcy, as a chuckle-headed pundit might put it. I'm making modest progress on my dissertation, puttering around, and drinking tea. The only thing that makes this different than the old normalcy is that this is happening in the present, whereas what I did before happened in the past.

There was an earthquake just before midnight last night. It was a few dozen miles to the northeast, so the tremors here were only intensity III. It was gratifying in a way, since this is the first quake in the five years I've lived in Southern California that I've actually noticed as it was happening.

I've opted for a costume-on-the-cheap this Halloween. I'm stepping out as Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Cristyn in going as Fenchurch, Dent's paramour.

May Halloween bring you fun, love, and a suitable respect for the dead.