Digital Changeling

No new posts for a while

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:26:00 +0000

Hi folks, I just wanted to let you know that blogger is removing support for the ftp system I use to update my blog. Their other option for non-blogger domains doesn't look feasible to me, because my website consists of other things besides my blog.

Anyway, the sum total of this is that I won't be updating my blog again until I get it set up with a new system (probably Wordpress unless someone has a better suggestion). I expect this will take me a while, since I'm going to have to sit down and learn the system and then rewrite my own template like I did for blogger.

Halloween Ephemera, Black Cat Decoration

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:44:00 +0000

I'm a scary cat, fear me!

I've been collecting vintage Halloween Ephemera for the last few years. Some pieces I found at antique fairs or yard sales; others I purchased over the net. I've been pretty terrible about scanning them, but I wanted to start sharing a few, since I know others will have uses for them.

Anyway, this adorable black cat came from an antiques fair in a local mall a few years ago. He was relatively inexpensive and I'm pretty sure he's of at least Edwardian to 20's vintage. He certainly matches some of the decorating suggestions I've seen from that period.

You'll find full resolution scans as well as cleaned and level corrected versions of the cat on this page. Enjoy! :)

Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter, Interactive Fiction Review

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:33:00 +0000

I'm not a hardcore IF person, but I have been playing off and on for a long time. My husband and I often play through games together, both old Infocom stuff and newer things, and I look forward to the yearly IF competition. I played Anchorhead before I ever heard of Jack Toresal, and since I'm a huge Lovecraft geek, Gentry pretty much ruined my ability to enjoy other IF for a year by making that game.

I did not go into this expecting another Anchorhead, but I really wanted Textfyre to be offering me something new and different. I was hoping that their business model had some hope of succeeding and bringing more casual players into IF. I know their self proclaimed target market is young adults, but as I enjoy a pretty decent pile of young adult fiction, it didn't seem like too much of a stretch to hope that I might like their games.... Part of me was also saying, "If this is the only way to play another Gentry game, I'll pay $25 for it."

So, I found myself playing Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter this week. I was excited and apprehensive. I was trying to give the engine the benefit of the doubt. I'm a professional programmer and some of the rumors I've heard about the development of the technical parts haven't sounded very flattering.

I ended up really frustrated and conflicted about the game that I found, even though I approached it cautiously. Some things about it are really good, and some things made me want to throw my computer across the room, repeatedly.

Technical Stuff

The interpreter/engine/application/whatever you want to call it that this game is presented in is very, very new. I would have labeled this as alphaware on the Mac. I played on my MacBook Pro and it was a struggle just to get the thing to let me play at all. There were an insane number of small text related bugs, stuff flowing off of the edge of pages, awkward word wraps, screwed up italics. These didn't even touch the big stuff. The save and load system were almost completely unusable as we neared the end of the game.

There is a fixed amount of save space allowed for all the saves in total. This isn't a problem near the beginning of the game where saves are small, but as you go on the saves get bigger and bigger. At some point you don't have space for more than 4, or 3, or 2, or at the very end 1. If you try to save when there isn't enough space (and it won't tell you how much it needs), it will make a corrupted save file, which takes up all the remaining space, and jam the transcript window open so that you have to restart the application. This was frustrating, but not as frustrating as the load times.

By the 9th chapter it took nearly 5 minutes of the game being completely locked, and I think probably constantly thrashing, for it to load my game. According to my system monitor it got up over 2 gigs of virtual memory and about three quarters of a gig of actual RAM. What the hell was it doing with that much memory, exactly? I think there is something screwy going on during the load of the transcript, but not knowing how they're handling the multilevel undos I couldn't say what. Anyway could they include a load bar of some kind rather than locking the application? Also, maybe look into how background threads work, please?

For all that, I did think that the interface brought some useful things to the table. I wasn't a huge fan of some of the particular art that was provided due to its anatomy issues, but I did think that it added a lot to my visualization of the game. I liked the map screen. It simplified understanding the shape of the world. I have plot related issues with the use of the character dialog system, but the actual system was well implemented and far less frustrating than some of the games of "guess the noun" or "guess the grammatical construct" that I've played in the past.

As much as the persistent transcript seems to have screwed up the save games, I really liked having it there. It was extremely nice to be able to look back and find information instead of having to constantly take external notes that break my immersion in the story. I expect to find it extremely frustrating that I don't have this feature in other games in the future. I could take or leave the multilevel undos. In my mind that's what multiple save games are for.

Note: There is apparently a newer version of the game out now for Macs. I haven't looked at it, so I can't attest to how many of the issues I saw have been fixed.

Puzzles and World

I started out pretty optimistic with the puzzle aspect of this game. You begin in Grubber's Market, a pretty decently sized area with a high level of interconnectivity and an interesting and highly directed and motivated set of puzzles. Once you get out of the market, it's all down hill from there. There are basically two types of "puzzles" after that.

Type one involves following a relatively linear exploration path in an area to find something in the only area you can get to. You have to search sometimes, but it is far from rocket science. If you look at the few things in the room and then randomly mess with things, you're pretty much good. Minimal scenery is usually fine with me, mind you, but "hidden" places or items are almost always things that you've been explicitly told to go find by NPCs, so you'll know you need to look for them and roughly where they are. This plus minimal scenery is pretty dull.

The world is generally very linear, so you have little chance for being clever in how you find things or get to places or even remember where things are. The linearity made some of the houses downright incoherent in their lack of normal rooms. For me these highly railroaded search or "fetch" quests had all the intellectual involvement of chewing bubblegum.

Quest type two involves grinding through NPC dialog. The dialog system doesn't work the way most traditional IF games handle dialog. Instead, when you talk with an NPC you're presented with a set of text choices on the right hand "page" of the interface, where pictures are normally displayed. I mostly liked the system, but I was very frustrated by the fact that the choices I was given were very short and often didn't convey the full extent or tone of what my character was actually going to say. More than once she spouted something that didn't bare any resemblance to what I had in mind for her.

Because the system was all predetermined choices, I also often had choices taken away when I didn't expect them to be, or added when I would not have come to the conclusion my character apparently did. If I had a clever idea for how to deal with a social dilemma, that was too bad, unless it was one of the choices I didn't get to do it. The sum result of this was that to "solve" interaction puzzles I just had to grind through dialog until my character, rather than I, figured out the answer and gave me the right choice to select. This sort of deterministic, grindy puzzle isn't very interesting from where I'm standing.

I was generally frustrated that at a given time in the game I usually had one, and only one, thing to do. Occasionally I had a set of very similar, easy things to do. I generally prefer to have at least some freedom in how I explore and what I chose to work on in the middle of a game. Nothing was hard enough to get stuck on, but I never really felt like I was the one solving anything either. Some of my frustration in this area intersects with my frustration with the plot, which has it's own... special... set of issues.

I really liked the first section of the game in Grubber's Market. That area was colorful and complex. Those puzzles were fun and I knew what my overall goal was in the area and why. Despite the fact that there was a "right" answer, I felt like I could find it on my own. I wanted more of the game to be like that.

Plot

This section contains spoilers. If you don't want to read them, the summary is: the plot felt railroaded and managed to make me feel like becoming a nearly stereotypical "angry" feminist at times. I am generally pretty mellow about gender issues, but it hit all the wrong buttons. Despite that, the pure wordsmithery of the writing was good enough that I can't bring myself to completely write the game off. If I hadn't enjoyed reading it, I wouldn't have spent so many words in the rest of this section on trying to express the parts that made me unhappy.

Skip down to the conclusion if you don't want to read the spoilers in the rest of this section.

To start with, the description of this game that's presented on Textfyre's website? Too Damn Clever.

Very, very early on in the game you are going to discover that Jack is in fact not a young orphan boy, as implied by the art on the site and specifically not clarified in the description. Jack is a young orphan girl in disguise. Personally I was thrilled to find this out, as I love games with female main characters, BUT (and I think this is a big but) that is not the game that Textfyre's blurb was selling. "What a clever surprise!" would have been my thought if the game had been free. Instead I thought, how many people are going to pay $25 and then discover that this is not what they expected? How many people are going to pass this by because they would have wanted to play it if they knew Jack's gender?

As I was counseled when writing live action role-playing event descriptions, don't be so damn clever. You are asking people to commit to something. Give them an idea of what they're signing up for.

My second issue (gah, I haven't even reached the actual plot) is with the title. Look, it was exciting and all to put "Toresal" in the title, but Jack didn't know Jack's last name. This telegraphed like 50% of the plot from the first 5 minutes of the game. I would have rather found out when Jack found out... or at least guessed it a little later on in the game. As it was, having all those NPCs know what was going on and having had it shoved in my face it was really annoying to have poor Jack kept in the dark for so long.

So... the actual plot. Things started to go pear shaped for me around the time that I met up with Jack's friend Bobby on the way home. Before that I was capable, smart Jack, who could take care of "him"self. On meeting Bobby it was pretty apparent that I was a teenage girl in love. Ok, I thought, my character is a teenage girl, I should cut her some slack. Just because it's stereotypical doesn't mean actual people aren't silly that way sometimes. So I stumbled through the conversation with him and agreed blindly to meet him for "something" that night.

Returning to the orphanage where Jack nominally lives was kind of surreal. Entering the house I was greeted by an NPC with a stream of abuse, which made it difficult to judge whether they hated me or if I really was an obnoxious brat who did whatever she liked whenever she pleased. I mean I had just had proof that I wandered the city streets stealing fruit for no particularly good reason (I have a home that presumably doesn't starve me...). How was I to know what sort of person Jack really was based on what I was being told?

Sneaking out with Bobby that night started the long parade of "NPC holds my hand" time that lasted through nearly the rest of the game. At any given time I either had an NPC with me (sometimes even actively telling me what to do), had been given very specific instructions about what to do next by an NPC, or both. This was frustrating. I felt kind of like now that I had acknowledged the fact that my character was a girl I was not allowed to be alone or figure anything out for myself. Everyone else wanted to tell me what to do, and I could either do it or not advance in the game. That's a super awesome choice there.

I'm not saying it was all boring. I did break into a house (on Bobby's orders) and lockpick my way out of jail (under the instruction of a burly merchant's son), but by and large, I did not feel very capable of independent action. This got worse when my character finally decided to fully accept her heritage and gender.

After Jack finally discovered that she was the long, dead Duke's bastard daughter (so... telegraphed...), my guardian, Widow Fiona, gave me the key to the Duke's house, telling me that I would find answers there that she didn't have time to tell me. Another friendly NPC, Widow Shannon, came along to help me. It turned out it was necessary to have her with me to be able to get in, but she came without my asking and basically auto-solved a bunch of obstacles without any input from me. So, you made up some puzzles and then you solved them for me... yay? Could I possibly have asked her to help me rather than having her just do them all automatically?

I got into the Duke's long abandoned house and it was mostly empty. I was allowed into like 5 rooms and the connectivity of the area is just bizarre, not like a normal house at all. Eventually I found to a bathroom. This was the tipping point in the game for me. The character was musing about the fact that the Duke had indoor plumbing, which was apparently very new and luxurious in this place/era and I, the player, was curious if it still worked.

I typed in "turn faucet". The character went off on a page long internal monologue about how she deserved to and should have been brought up in luxury (because she's someone's bastard child?) and how she'd been denied her birthright all these years. Even assuming I believed in the divine right, entitlement much? There are obviously many people in her world who suffer because they are of the lower classes. Why should she suddenly deserve riches and they should keep rolling around in the dirt and getting stepped on? I'm sure some of them are also bastard children of nobility and it doesn't do them a lick of good. Argh!

I was getting kind of pissed at Jack at this point. She proceeded to take a bath in "exquisitely hot water" with no further prompting from me. Where the water heated up in a building that had been abandoned for more than 5 years I'll never know. Still without any prompting from me Shannon found me a dress to wear... a dress that had belonged to the Duke's wife. That would be the wife that he cheated on in order to sleep with my mother. The wife who conveniently disappeared, along with my mom sometime or other in the mists of the backstory. I'm sensing a distinct lack of empathy to these women.

I was starting to think this couldn't go much further down hill but I was wrong. I assumed the game wasn't going to let me go anywhere or do anything until I put the dress on, so I did. Then I was treated to a description of the "new Jack". Or, as I was starting to think of it "Look at me! I'm a pretty pretty princess!" Seriously... just argh. I know we have a long tradition of fairy tales of this sort, but I'm 100% sure the game description did not in any way suggest I would be playing a Disney princess.

After all this, Jack and Shannon decided that we were done at the house. So apparently the "answers" that Widow Fiona couldn't tell me amounted to a bath and a dress. I was feeling really cheated here. I wanted something else... I don't know, a diary from his wife saying she knew maybe? Some other insight into the Duke's life and his family that would help me get a sense of purpose perhaps?

Well on the inexorable story went, dragging me to a contact in the nobles' part of town. They would let me in now, since I didn't look like I came out of the sewer, so I guess I solved a problem I didn't know I had with that bath and dress. This is a hallmark of a lame puzzle or a lame plot limiting device; I'm not sure which I think it is in this case.

Then the contact, Dame Sandler, told me I need to go to a ball. I was just about ready to bang my head against a my laptop. A ball? Seriously, a ball? And I apparently need to go get a better pretty princess dress? And pick jewelry? *sigh* At least she also wants me to take a weapon, but gah. I'm apparently so unable to do anything by myself at this point that Dame Sandler sends her shop guard, Pieter, with me to keep me from stubbing my toes on the way there.

The ball wasn't too bad until the end bit. I took the "secret" way in (that Bobby showed me in excruciating detail) and the social puzzles in the ball itself were more conversation grinding, but at least the conversation and characters were interesting and had some interconnection in ways the other conversation puzzles hadn't really. Near the end I, of course, met a mysterious prince who told me: he had been watching me all night, I was special, he could see my fate around me like an aura, I shouldn't bother to try to escape the mercenaries closing in on me because it was much more pleasant to talk to him while they did. Then I looked deep into his brown eyes... and the mercenaries dragged me off. Yea, whatever creepy stalker prince. No glass slipper for you if I get any say in the matter.

The final scene involved a bunch of actions that I'm pretty sure were total forces (hint, just go ahead and write out all the text if I really can't do anything - this goes for the gallows scene as well) and brave men doing all the fighting for me. Then there was a totally inexplicable bit tacked on so that they can lead into the next game in the series. How they worked it in was not really satisfying, since I pretty much felt I had no input on any part of the final scene.

From the last few paragraphs you might get the feeling I'm a little bitter about the gender roles in this game. Yes, that sounds about right. Jack seemed like a smart girl, or at least she had the potential to be, and this sort of bizarre, railroaded wish-fulfillment (for a value of wish I did not have even when I was 16) where she gets no choices and most of her emotions are dictated to me makes it very hard for me to empathize with the character. I wanted Jack to be me. You gave me a female main character, so I tried, I really did. I just couldn't like the role that you picked for her and I don't feel like you let me "play" Jack rather than just "reading about" her.

All my complaints aside, if this game had been a short story, I probably wouldn't be nearly as angry. My expectations and desires in IF are different than my desires in pure writing. The pure writing in Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter was very good. The descriptions were detailed enough without being monolithic and I genuinely enjoyed most of the dialog and the writing in the more active scenes (where control was often taken away from me for two or three pages at a time while all the "important" people - read NPCs - did stuff). The overall plot was interesting. Despite my annoyances, I want to know what happens to Jack and all the other characters that I learned so much about in the story. Had I only "read" the story I would probably have chuckled and rolled my eyes at the "pretty princess" bits, called Jack dumb or silly at times, and enjoy it quite a bit more.

Please stop making all my choices for me. Please stop preaching all my feelings at me. Yes, I get that Jack may be destined to be Queen, but I want to be a strong, clever, and wise Queen, not a pretty pretty princess. If you can give me that much, I'd probably even be ok with being married off at the end of the story, although I still object to stalker boy. I like my princes more wholesome and less nutzo-creepy.

Conclusion

I had fun playing this game and it also drove me up the wall. I wanted it to be so many things that it was not and not be a number of things that it was. I was constantly aggravated by the handholding and the NPCs following me around, but I really liked the writing and wanted to keep reading the story, even when the plot itself made me want to hunt Gentry down and strangle him. I don't know if I can recommend this game to others. I don't even know if this game is a good introduction for people who are not IF fans. It lacks some of the things that I love about IF, but maybe it would be a gentle transition for some audiences.

I can't tell you if this game would be worth $25 for you. I think it was probably worth $25 for me, but I'm also incredibly frustrated. I know that both Textfyre and Gentry can do better and I mean in ways that have nothing to do with more art or a less faulty interface. I will probably buy the next game in the series, but I have a lot of trepidation about it. It will really need to shine if they want me to believe in them wholeheartedly in the future.

Back from Intercon I

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:58:00 +0000

Our costumes from All's Well That Ends.
(I made mine; Alan's came from Ravenworks.)

We're back from Intercon I ("Intergalactic"). :)

All's Well That Ends was totally awesome. I can't say it far exceeded expectations, but that's only because its writers warrant pretty high expectations in my book. It is in the running for best game I've ever played, along with one of their other games and several of the Freedmans' games (which is sort of like apples and oranges, but oh well). The players pulled out all the stops as far as costuming goes. Katie, Kathleen, and I formed the core of the court ladies and I think we made a respectable showing. ;)

Jamais Vu was fun for me, but a bit uneven for some of my friends. It suffered from a rather non-specific description, confusing physical space (I know there are limitations at a con, but there were ways to untangle things), some poorly built characters, and at least one very overworked GM (that lead to poor narration of imaginary places/encounters). I still thought the core concept of the game was good and most of the characters and the world were well written. I feel bad for the folks who got the crap end of the character pond, since it is never fun to end up with one of the hand full of inherently "bad idea" archetypes that occasionally crop up in large games. I do think there's a really brilliant game inside that generally good game. It's too bad we didn't get to play the brilliant one instead.

Future Imperfect: Gulag exceeded expectations with a very cool environmental build. I think I also ended up with a group of players who were particularly well matched to the experience that I wanted, but the core game was well written to give the players a lot of flexibility in their interpretation. The characters were very minimal, but I've seen minimal characters carried to a much more dysfunctional extreme in a boffer game, so this didn't really bother me. We were also cast ahead of time, so I felt comfortable with the idea that I could sort of interpret the character somewhat for myself. The folks running the game need a lot more practice with the logistics of running con games, but since they are actually new to doing so I'm not going to hold that against them. I am kind of sorry that I don't live in the area, as I would like to check out their long term sci-fi boffer game (which they describe as Firefly-esque).

I also played in my first horde game, The Time Travel Review Board. We apparently had an atypical run, but it was still very amusing. Most of the horde characters seemed relatively low key (although I suppose that might have been the result of tired, Sunday morning players), which was less demanding for my first try at that style. Playing in the horde seems to be a lot more like playing improv games than playing in a "normal" LARP.

I was still more than a little fried from being sick for so long in Feb., so I wasn't nearly as social as I would have liked, but it was a lot of fun none the less. We got home on Monday and immediately started trying to deal with house fixing and moving related stuff, but I'll leave the details of that for a different post. :)

Some Number of Things About Me

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:54:00 +0000

So there is a meme going around the net of writing 25 random things about yourself. I've been "tagged" several times, so I thought I'd oblige folks, with the understanding that I don't tag other people for memes. If writing 25 random facts about yourself sounds amusing/inspiring to you, drop me a link to your post in a comment. :)

I'd imagine some of this stuff will be surprising and some will be very old hat for people who know me.

1. I suffered from huge amounts of social anxiety as a kid. There were days at school where my eyes never left the floor and I pretty much only opened my mouth to answer teachers.

2. When I took Saber fencing in college I discovered that my instructor was one of my parents D&D buddies from when they were in school, well before I was born. He is an excellent fencing instructor, btw.

3. I find it more difficult than some people to hear the difference between certain vowel sounds. Apparently someone noticed this when I was in elementary school. It made learning to spell properly in our stupid non-phonetic language an even greater hell.

4. I had 16 fillings in my baby teeth. I list this under "things I am not grateful to my Dad's genes for."

5. I attended GenCon as an infant of less than a year old. I later said my first word in the old MECCA center (not that year, obviously) and have only missed two GenCons in my lifetime (stupid little brother having to be born in the fall :P ).

6. I still remember the worst nightmare I ever had. I was like 3 or 4 when I had it.

7. I have two cats that are both named from Lovecraft's Mythos: Miskatonic ("Miska") and Unaussprechlichen ("Una" - from Unaussprechlichen Kulten). I'm still not sure how I talked my husband into this.

8. I took riding lessons (English) for 5 years as a kid. I miss riding, but don't have the patience to take lessons again or the money to own my own horse.

9. I still think of Batman: the Animated Series as being in black and white. Our color TV died the month before it premiered, so my brother and I watched it for quite a while on a tiny black and white set. It holds up extremely well.

10. I tend to obsess about hobbies and soak in knowledge for weeks whether or not I'm actually doing the hobby. I used to haunt libraries for this reason, now I roll around in the internet a lot.

11. For the last two years my Christmas tree has been about 15 inches tall with a santa ornament on top. I love that tree.

12. I own and have played all the Myst games. I have rants about plot continuity... yea, so another nail in the geekdom coffin. Even more damning is the fact that I own and have read all the Myst novels.

13. I actually think properly sized parachute pants made my butt look smaller.

14. I've been a Weight Watchers member for more than a year now. I've lost more than 30 pounds. I think I'm near halfway to where my weight should actually be. I still need more exercise.

15. As a small child, I had not one, but seven febrile seizures. Like the vast majority of children I grew out of them. I almost never suffer from fevers of any kind as an adult. Still, sorry Mom!

16. I love Art Nouveau. I am going to do my damnedest to decorate my house in Art Nouveau with a tint of Steampunk. Since I am not fabulously wealthy this will take a while.

17. I only started to enjoy learning history when I started collecting Victorian magazines. Looking at the period through the words of someone living it (even if they were talking about relatively trivial things) made it much more real to me.

18. I am very fond of British mystery shows. I watched Mystery with my Mom every week when I was a kid.

19. I was recently asked if I did any "outdoors" things and was a bit sad that the answer was no. I love being outside and walking and being in nature. The problem is that nature also loves me. My mom used to joke that you could find my dad and I at a camp site by following the clouds of mosquitos.

20. I've grown to be violently allergic to mosquitos. Bites will swell up and remain for days or even weeks if I don't refrain from so much as touching them and take major antihistamines. Why nature? Why? :(

21. I realized in advanced English in high school that if I was even going to find a spiritual grounding in my life it was probably going to be along a path similar to the one taken by some of the American Transcendentalists. I can see the possibility of finding the divine in nature and in solitary reflection. As nature appears to hate me (see 19 and 20), perhaps it's suggesting that I settle for Agnosticism? I'm still undecided here.

22. I have a scar on my right thumb that looks like /. I mean literally like the characters "/." I assume they arranged some cosmic mojo to brand me when I stupidly grabbed the front wheel of that exercise bike in middle school.

23. I've always been extremely stubborn about physical things. If I want to lift a box, I will lift it. If I want to take something apart I will figure out how. This tends to make me good at thinking outside the box when solving physical problems because their very unsolved existence pisses me off on a deep psychological level.

24. I've never been good at writing in books. I had a professor in college who required us to highlight our reading... total debacle.

25. I am poor at defining my own identity. It takes me agonizing hours to write a bio of myself unless I just write something stupid or flippant. I have a lot of silly bios.

26. I hate meme rules. They remind me of the chain mail spam I got as a kid with the "or you will die a horrible death" crap tacked on the end. I think meme's should inspire you, not make you feel like you need to be chained to your computer slavishly following the letter of their laws.

History is the Horizon We Live On

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:34:00 +0000

I'm watching the inauguration this morning. It took a while to find a station with mostly footage of the actual events on the Mall and minimal commentator "assistance." I actually ended up on some brand of CNN, but they're mostly behaving. I could do with a little bit less fussing about the historical roots of slavery (I absolutely haven't heard this 4 billion times during Obama's campaign...).

When I was a kid, history was a very abstract thing for me. It was this nebulous string of events and dates that came out of books and lived in "the past." Nothing I or my friends or family could do would actually change it and day-to-day nothing much would really be added. It took me a long time to accept that history is the horizon of now and that I will see things and can do things that qualify (I'm not likely to do any things that will make it into books, mind you).

I think part of the problem is that despite the fact that I've experienced a number of huge historical events in my life, it's taken me years to see my life as a journey. It's the sort of thing you hear older people talk about looking back on their lives, so it's hard to accept. It's sort of like accepting the truth of mortality. You'd think that at 27 that wouldn't be so hard for me. I'm out of school. I'm married. If all goes well we'll be closing on a house at the end of February. I can't pretend I'm not "grown up" or that my life isn't changing.

As Gaiman's Death told me, I get a lifetime. I'd hate to look back and realize that I wasted it. Even though hiding is easier sometimes, I'll try to pay more attention. Just because my story has to end some day doesn't mean I shouldn't live it now.

With eyes open I'll continue on, toward the horizon of history. At the moment, at least, I'm feeling highly optimistic. :)

Warm Holiday Wishes, circa 1917

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:18:00 +0000

(more info on the postcard and the original scans)

I've had a pretty tumultuous year in 2008 and my life appears to only be headed for more complications and "interesting times." I can say, however, that I'm very grateful for the people in my life, both friends and family.

I wanted to wish you all Happy Holidays (or Merry Christmas if you prefer ;) and share this lovely image from a postcard in my collection (restored and slightly modified by me). The postcard summarized a lot of things I've been thinking about. To paraphrase the poem written by the sender:

All tunes and
Christmas Chimes
bring memories
of dear friends
and olden times.

Mom and Dad, I'm sorry I can't come home this year. I hope you have a good Christmas and hopefully I'll be able to see you some time in the spring. *hugs*

Halloween Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:23:00 +0000

The pictures we took at the Halloween party as well as a page about the construction of my costume are up now. :)

I think making my costume was worth the work, although now I've got 23 birds and one pie that I'm not quite sure what to do with. I considered trying to get them into some sort of shape to sell on etsy, but I don't think that they're all that durable and to be honest, I'm not sure what to make them into... I mean as clothing patches they really aren't going to last all that long!

Back Now!

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:16:00 +0000

We're back now and we had a lovely time on our honeymoon. We won't have the professional wedding photos for a few weeks yet, but I wanted to give folks a preview of the amateur photos. We've got a pretty awesome set from the disposable cameras on the tables at the reception. :)

I'm going to try to get the full set of pictures up this month. I may break down and ask Brian if he can install Gallery for me, as I'm getting rather sick of dealing with my current system.

*For folks who wanted more pictures of my dress, here are some other shots of the cake cutting: Alan tries to decide how this "knife" thing works and cake cutting from a different angle.

Drive-by commenters, F' you

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 18:14:00 +0000

I'm very busy with wedding stuff at the moment but I wanted to post to mention that I've changed my comment system to only accept comments from folks who have some sort of login. It's happy to take OpenID, so you don't need to sign up for Blogger or a Google account or anything.

Also, people who comment on my corset pictures telling me how fat I am and how I need to "get in shape" (as if I was ignorant of my weight issues and your response would motivate me to suddenly go to the gym every day? wtf?) my response to you: "go to hell." That's just a damn hurtful comment to leave randomly on someone's blog and I hope karma kicks you in the ass.

I'm not so damn dense I don't know I have problems and if you made any attempt to read the rest of my blog you'd know I've been making changes to my lifestyle over the last two years and have lost significant weight.

Okay. Done being angry for now. Back to working on stuff.

A WTF (not daily): Bloglines

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:41:00 +0000

Apparently the comics I read are truly innumerable.

Shiney "New" Sewing Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Tue, 20 May 2008 04:40:00 +0000

More pretty pictures!

I've got some cleaning and restoration ahead of me, but I'm soooooooo excited! :D

Neato Game

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 07 May 2008 03:44:00 +0000

Yes, I suck and haven't been blogging lately. I've mostly been sick, busy, or both. I've got piles of stuff to share (pictures, scans, session notes, etc.) but no time to deal with getting them online. I'd imagine things will continue on like this for most of 2008.

Anyway, I didn't decide to post to tell you about how much my life is stress at the moment. I wanted to mention that my friend Joe has just publicly released the coolest game ever. I promise you, it is awesome. Also, I love the main character. We dubbed him the clock-bear during the beta testing. ;)

Eberron Haiku

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 03:37:00 +0000

city of towers
why won't the rain stop? it's not
city of brollies

(Yea... I've been busy with cleaning and sewing prep, so this is all I've got for the moment.)

A Joyous Eastertide

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 03:50:00 +0000

(Link to the page for this scan.)

New Victorian Magazine Scan

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 01:03:00 +0000

I've just finished uploading a scan of the October 1885 issue of the Delineator.

I've been pretty busy with work stuff for the last two weeks. I suppose the fact that we have Rock Band hasn't really helped either. I'm on a personal enforced "no singing" ban for this weekend because I sang my voice raw every night last week. I also discovered that up until the point where I start losing control of my pitch, I can play hard on songs I don't know and still get accuracy in the area of 90%. I have no idea when this happened either.

I have a bunch of scanned photos, postcards, and trade cards I want to get up soon, so hopefully I can ignore the call of the music a bit next week.

Costume Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:29:00 +0000

So Intercon H went pretty well. I was sick on Sunday morning, but I had loads of fun in the Friday and Saturday games.

I've managed to put up costume info from Intercon H and some leftover stuff from GenCon as well. Hopefully that will be an acceptable offering until I can get back to doing regular photo and magazine updates. ;)

Terrifying Can Attack

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:50:00 +0000

On Friday I manged to slice my hand open while trying to pull the lid off of a can of cat food. The doctor in immediate care assured me that it wasn't deep and didn't need stitches, but it's still the worst I've cut myself in... ever (unless you count the terrifying exercise bike attack, but I usually don't). I have to wear a splint over the weekend so I don't bend my left index finger (opening the cut back up) and I'm not allowed to get my hand wet. So I guess this will be a yucky, bathing optional weekend.

I'm doing pretty well with coping, I think. I type much slower but I'm doing okay with sewing so far. I have a lot of sewing to do this weekend, so we'll see how I hold up in the long run.

We win!

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:38:00 +0000

It's official. Madison wins snowfall. ;)

Cold

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:30:00 +0000

Today it was warmer in most of Antarctica than it was in WI. Despite being inside my feet were cold all day at work. It was really hard to concentrate.

I think I'm taking my slippers to work tomorrow.

Depressing Thoughts and A Good LARP (with bonus kittens!)

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:40:00 +0000

This post is a bit morbid. I'm really okay, really. I just thought that getting this stuff outside myself might help me to deal with and understand some of it better. To reiterate, I'm not that upset, just stressed out and having a touch existential angst on and off. I'm sure it'll pass, perhaps more swiftly with the cute kitten photos I've just uploaded.

I'm turning 27 this year. I'm now moving firmly into "late twenties" and I can't tell if that inherently bothers me or not. I've been a bit stressed lately, which I think is causing the persistent thoughts of death and loss that I've been having. In my mind I know it's dumb to be so upset about it. I get one lifetime of a finite duration and I shouldn't be wasting parts of it worrying about that fact. But it still preys on me sometimes when I can't sleep.

In a way that seems ironic, since what usually upsets me is not the fact that I will die, but the possibility that I will cease to exist. It would be nice to have a firm faith in the existence of the soul as separate from our corporeal bodies to fall back on, but I don't, and I have to live with that. It's sort of hard to think about, since by definition I've never known a time when I did not exist, except by the shallow comparison to times that I just don't remember. Like sleep. I don't fear sleep (that would be silly) but I can't help but think that death is very much the same problem with less experience to reassure you. You give over your consciousness and wait to see if you get it back. You fundamentally don't know any given night if the you who goes to bed will be around until your memory kicks in again in the morning.

I played in a game recently that was very cathartic for me. If you're playing in Anandi's game at Intercon H, you might want to stop reading now. I'm talking about a related game, and I don't really know what's a spoiler and what's not. The game I played in wasn't really about death. It was about life, life's story, and how you deal with it. The characters (and players) didn't really catch on to this however until quite a bit of the game had pass. The basic concept hit me a bit below the belt, because I ended up inadvertently method acting with a twinge of that death-fear coloring my mind. There came a point in the game when my character realized that no, she really did exist and would continue to do so after death, and I was so relieved that I literally cried.

It was a good game. It brought the players together in a way that I have never experienced before. There was at least one point where I genuinely felt like I knew everyone else in the room, really knew them like I'd known them my whole life. On one level it was all IC, but on another, I don't think I've ever felt like that in real life. Usually there is, what seems to me like, an impenetrable layer of difference between people. Even when you want to know each other you can never really completely understand each other, because we are separate people who've come from different places and lived different lives. Maybe I dwell on it more than other people because I acutely feel the discordance as social anxiety when those differences are too great (or I don't know yet what they are). For a short while during the game that feeling was completely gone. I could sincerely trust those other character (those other people) as if they were me.

I really don't know how Anandi did it, but she cast me as a character who was so like me in some ways that I was blind to it. The character back story spent much of it's time talking about making or doing or wanting to do creative things. She wanted to make something new and special in the world. It came out much later that the character was, in fact, meant to personify creativity. But I never would have guessed it on my own. The feel of that sheet seemed perfectly normal and natural to me. It took me a long time to realize that was because that's who I am in my real life. I spend an inordinate amount of my time wanting or trying to make beautiful, useful, and interesting things. On some level I don't know how some could not feel that sort of creative drive.

LOL Miska

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:08:00 +0000

Okay, I know I promised more kitten pictures, but hopefully this will tide you over for a few days. I've culled the 560 candidates down to about 70 really good ones, but I've got a bunch of other stuff I need to work on over the next week, so it will be a little while before they're up.

(Sorry!)

Cats are most awesome!

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:55:00 +0000

This really makes me want to laugh manically. :)

Pysanky Time

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 05:22:00 +0000

I've gotten back into decorating Ukrainian easter eggs (pysanky) in my "copious" free time. I'm somewhat limited by the fact that I'm completely incapable of drawing a straight line for more than about a quarter of an inch. I am really enjoying it though. The process of wax resist dying with an egg and bee's wax heated by candle is just satisfying in a way that most of the other crafts I do aren't. I mean I love the results I get out of drawing and sewing, but I don't really enjoy the process so much.

Anyway, I think the eggs I've done so far have turned out pretty well. I got most of the patterns from Luba's Pysanka site. She's got some stunning eggs. I'd like to be that good some day, although I probably won't have the patience to get quite that good. ;)

There are a few other existing patterns I still want to try. I've got a some pysanka books including the one I bought when I got into making the eggs back in high school. There's really no end to the neat things you can do, since the technique itself limited to traditional patterns. While I was going through my old stuff I actually found one of the first eggs I did way back when. It has a cute little Hello Kitty holding a stuffed giraffe. It is nice to just copy existing designs sometimes though. It can be more relaxing not to have to be creative all the time.

On a sort of unrelated note, my mom is going in for (relatively) minor surgery on Wednesday. So please think good thoughts for her if you have a chance!

Kitteh!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Eva) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 05:02:00 +0000

As the picture suggests we brought home these two adorable fuzzballs on Monday. They're female purebred Siberian cats from Absolutelay Siberians in New York. I would definitely recommend Absolutelay Siberians to others. The breeder, Lori, is really nice and worked very hard to help make sure Alan has the best possible chance of tolerating the kittens.

The gray kitten is Una (short for Unaussprechlichen, as in Unaussprechlichen Kulten ;) and the silver tabby is Miska (short for Miskatonic). They're both very sweet, although poor Una is only just starting to recover from the trip home. Our flight was canceled because of fog in Madison, so we had to wait an extra four hours, fly into Chicago, and drive a rental car home. Fortunately Mark very kindly let us crash at his place.

Miska is very, very people oriented so far. She's perky and interested in everything and every one. She actually follows us around in a very puppy like way at times. Poor Una spent the first day or so hiding behind the stereo and TV. She's just starting to relax a bit. This morning she was sleeping inside the bookshelf behind the Webster's Dictionary, but now she's out on the cat tree and she's letting us pet her or walk around her as long as we are a bit quiet and slow. Hopefully she'll be feeling a bit better by the end of the week.

They both love the climbing structure and are enthralled by the Cat Dancer and laser pointer that we rounded up for them. We wedged the Cat Dancer under a book on the coffee table so that one end dangles invitingly and they are both very amused by it. They've also got a pile of different balls (some with noisy things inside) which they play with on and off. The other toys seem to be sort of hit or miss. They've been keeping to the living room, but I expect they'll get more adventurous as they get more used to us and the apartment.

They've got very different "play" mannerisms than I'm used to. They both make squeaks and chirrups, but only Miska seems to meow. They tend to rear up on their hind legs with attacking something small and bat it back and forth between their front paws. They also do an "I crush you!" pounce onto things with both front paws extended to slam into it. I think the only other cat I've seen do that sort of pounce is a serval. They also have the cutest leaps and bounds. I'm not even sure how to describe them, but they're not like other little kitten jumps that I've seen before!

Alan took them into their first vet visit today, and apparently they were both very good. Apparently many of the staff commented on how pretty Miska is. Alan was joking that poor Una will have to put up with being the geek child, since Miska has already claimed the supermodel slot. :P

Despite the fact that I can only photograph them reliably when they're sleeping, I've already got over 200 pictures to sort through. There will be a gallery at some point when I'm not quite so wiped out from all the traveling.