Blackmoor Vituperative

What a day. I tracked down a very devious bug of my own design and fixed it, so hopefully that project I am two days behind on will be finished before I am four days behind on it.

Then I cleaned the hot tub thoroughly with a mop and a bucket of bleach-water, in the dark. Thank goodness for security lights and cotton string mops! There’s nothing quite like a cotton string mop for a job like that. Then I filled the tub and started it up. The pump is running and the tub doesn’t appear to be leaking, but there’s a lot of water splashed all over the place so I can’t be absolutely certain about the lack of leaking. The current water temperature is 58 degrees — let’s hope the temperature rises!

And now I get to spend the next couple of hours before bedtime working on the Character Sheet Helper for Bulletproof Blues. I have renamed it from “Character Builder” in the hope that the new name will better convey the notion that this spreadsheet isn’t required to play the game: its main purpose is to help make attractive, easy-to-share character sheets.

While visiting my mom, one of my sisters, and my sister’s family a few weeks ago, I took a few minutes to change my Champions Online password because I received an email that made me suspect my account might have been hacked. I logged in just long enough to do that and then logged out again: a minute, perhaps, at most.

I did not realize that my 6-year-old nephew Malakai was looking over my shoulder while I did so (children are sneaky). Later that day, he presented me with the drawing on the left, which he had done entirely from memory. Note the things he noticed and remembered: not just Grimknight in the foreground, but the waving police officer and the insectoid spaceship behind him! I was, and am, amazed.

Here are two meme images I made in response to the outrage over the cost of PBS, and the outrage over that outrage.

The wildlife around here is pretty amazing. Other than the usual birds and squirrels, in the last 24 hours I have seen a bunny, a deer, a huge possum, a tiny frog, and some kind of tiny, ground dwelling yellow-jackets.

The possum led us to the yellow-jackets. Last night we were watching Cabin In The Woods (which isn’t bad, if a little slow and predictable). Suddenly, the motion-sensing light on the balcony came on, startling us. Looking out, we saw a huge grey skull-faced animal walking along the railing: a possum! It wandered around, but had meandered away by the time I got the camera.

This morning I was out back, spreading grass seed and generally looking around, and I found a huge hole. Could this be why the possum was on our deck? Had it taken up residence? Crawling closer, a bug flew out. I backed off, and it flew back in the hole. Huh? I crept closer again… and a bug came out again and flew toward me. I backed off again.

I retrieved the camera and took some zoomed-in photos. Examining the photos, it’s clear that these are yellow-jackets. Did they take over the possum’s hole and drive it away? If so, where has it gone? In any case, tonight I’ll need to do something about the yellow-jackets.

P.S. Here is a photo of that tiny frog.

You may have been cordially invited to the 7th Annual Blackmoor Halloween Party! If so, keep reading. If not, bugger off.

Costumes are encouraged! Snacks, drinks, and Halloween Chili will be provided. If you have special dietary needs or are prone to complain about what is offered, bring your own.

You may bring guests and/or children, but you are responsible for their behavior.

We have abundant amounts of room, including a couple of private rooms. Regardless of where you sleep, you will need to bring your own bedding (such as a sleeping bag or inflatable mattress). You may also reserve a room at the nearby Best Western Plus Crossroads Inn & Suites. A sober driver will be available to drive drunk guests back to their motel rooms — your safety is important!

Update! All of the private rooms are spoken for (if you haven’t already arranged for one, you don’t have one). However, we will have tons of open floor space on the first floor, and you are welcome to bring an air mattress and crash. Just be aware that you may have trouble getting to sleep until the party is over. Also, don’t forget that there is a nearby motel, and that a designated driver will be available to shuttle people to the motel.

Please RSVP, so that we can plan appropriately. Thanks!

When:
6 PM, Saturday, November 3, 2012
Let us know if you want to arrive early!

Where:
Castle Blackmoor
70 Starling Ln.
Troy, VA 22974-3278

I love Christmas. It vexes me when this or that group wants to claim it as “theirs” and declare that no one else can have it. It vexes me when someone dismisses it as no more than an excuse for crass commercialism. Christmas isn’t about some guy being tortured to death, and it’s not about feral crowds and shopping. It’s not about this or that religious festival which coincidentally happens to be held at the same time. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family. It’s about reaching out to people that you’d normally ignore, at best. Frankly I wish we — and by we I mean everyone: atheist, Jew, Buddhist, Christian, Pagan — would take Christmas back from the Scrooges that want to poison it.

Christmas is no more a “Christian” holiday than Tuesday is a “Norse” day of the week. It’s just a name: the actual holiday is much bigger than that. Christmas is a human holiday. Christmas is about love, hope, good will, generosity, friends, and family.

Here is an interesting article from Matt Bai: How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game? The gist of it is that Citizens United may not have exactly the impact that people tell you it has (or will have). Which, in retrospect, really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And here is a … not so much a rebuttal, because he doesn’t respond to any of the original article’s points… it’s a reply, I guess, from Russ Feingold. I don’t find it persuasive. “A new form of corruption”? Hardly. Matt Bai makes it amply clear that this form of corruption has been around since at least the 1990s (and in my opinion, since long before that). But this Feingold fellow was the ONLY Senator to vote against the so-called PATRIOT act during the first vote on it, so I’ll give his arguments my attention based on that alone.

We saw The Dark Knight Rises last night. I’m not bothering with a spoiler warning, because it’s unnecessary: the movie is just that predictable. I started looking at my watch after about 70 minutes. That’s not a good sign.

The first half of the movie is a strung-together series of Long. Serious. Monologues. After a while it picks up, and turns into a dull, predictable remake of Batman Begins (a fantastic movie).

I liked Anne Hathaway, but she wasn’t onscreen enough to salvage the movie around her. Dull and predictable sums it up.

Oh, and if you think the ending needs further explanation (why anyone would need the ending explained is a mystery to me, but apparently some people go looking for ambiguity), this toy can explain the ending to you.

I am completely sincere when I say Batman & Robin was better in damned near every way. If you’d told me a week ago that I would say that, I would have laughed at you.

Edit: Someone saved me the trouble of listing most of the problems I had with the Dark Knight Rises script. They leave out one noteworthy problem: the “these guys are the League of Shadows, no wait, now they’re revolutionaries, no, wait, now they are suicidal goons … who the hell are these guys, anyway?” problem.
(Note: Google erroneously marks this site as malicious.)

I am watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. The kid made a tsunami and then deliberately didn’t destroy the Fire Nation fleet with it. I would have sunk them like stones. I guess I’d make a poor messiah. And… um, while I was typing this, the movie ended abruptly. What the hell?

Other than the abrupt, inconclusive ending, I didn’t think this movie was all that bad. Certainly not as bad the negative things I’d heard. I’d say it is on par with The Neverending Story, and that’s some kind of classic, isn’t it?

I typically have DVDs or something from Netflix streaming in the background while I work. As it happens, today I am running through the Universal Frankenstein movies. The movie currently running is Bride Of Frankenstein, which is actually my favorite of the series.

So I am typing away, adding validation to web forms (not a sexy project, but important nonetheless), and I notice that the sound of howling hounds is really loud. I stop and listen, and then I pause the DVD — the howling continues. The howling is coming from the woods behind Castle Blackmoor, out toward the creek that feeds the moors. Curious, I went outside to look and see what was doing all of this howling.

I got to the edge of the path which leads off down to the outpost, and the howling stopped. Not abruptly, mind you: it just sort of faded away. As I stood there, the woods were eerily silent, somehow made even more eerie by the bright sunny sky above. The sounds of wildlife, birds, churring insects and so on gradually came back, and then a bit later, I heard the howl again, so far away that I could barely hear it.

At which point I realized that I’d come outside without even taking along a pistol, much less a proper rifle, as one might reasonably do when investigating a mysterious howling on the moors. Imagine how foolish I’d have felt if I’d found the source of the howling.

It’s easy to criticize the behaviour of victims in horror movies when they do foolish things: going into dark basements alone, going outside to investigate strange noises, chasing an escaped cat in one’s space-underwear, and so on. It’s much easier to make foolish choices than we’d like to think, particularly when the sun is bright and the sky is clear and we are in a familiar environment where a monster has never attacked us before.