I know, I haven’t been blogging. Many excuses that no-one cares about. To fill the void that is this blog, here is a recent post I made on lostheroesrpg.com. Enjoy!

I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)

The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.

It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.

Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.

And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.

One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.

Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:

Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?

Which it later got imported into Google Buzz where some discussion occurred.

I have no conclusions so far. I’m going to keep tapping away at this drop, hoping in the end that the bits will fall together. What do you think?

And the rain this morning really tops it off.  I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

Long time back, I setup a WordPress blog to support our roleplaying games (you can see the site here if your really interested). The tech-savvy players and GMs used it store copies of their characters sheets, write-ups, house rules, etc. I did some hacking of WordPress to do this, mostly so that each campaign we played had it’s own webpage and look and feel and that you could browse the site by game. It was all a bit ad-hoc structure, with each game working out differently with different degrees of use. Now WordPress has evolved and my plugin-fu is much greater that can build some dedicated plugins and features for that.

So I’m curious, what web-based tools do you think are useful or could be useful for roleplaying and gaming, be it tabletop, LARP or even for play-by-blog?

I know I bullshit a bit (okay a lot). I mean that’s part of the fun of this blog-conversation-web2.0-social-networks isn’t? But I don’t see how it affects my intelligence or performance in bed? Do you?

LAW of BULLSHIT BLOGGER IDIOCY: The more dumbasses that get on the internet, and then create their own blogs like “thedeadone.net” and then go around judging things, some of which they haven’t even watched, and then type a bunch of bullshit onto their blog and onto the internet thinking that everyone else can’t see right through it, the more the dead one blogger bullshit factor increases.

Corollary: A blogger’s bullshit factor increases, as his IQ decreases. And is proportional to the amount of bullshit they repost in their own blog that they got from reading some other bullshit blog on the web and thinking that if somebody posted it on theirs, then it must be true, when in actuality, it’s simply geometrically spreading blog bullshit like thedeadone here by idiot blogsters sitting at home in their old underpants who dont know wtf they are talking about.

Probability of thedeadone blogster being an idiot and that his wife gets bored with his own lack of plot in the bedroom within about 2 minutes, an apparent certainty.

This lovely piece of constructive criticism comes from a “Randall Brougham, Ph.D.” I assume the Ph.D. is important here. (The original comment here). Perhaps he felt the need to indicate that he’s educated. Certainly I found no grammar or spelling mistakes in his comment, which is impressive for a troll.

I know I should just laugh about this, delete the comment and move on but I didn’t. It upset me, left me annoyed for the rest of the day. I followed up the comment, but the guy is probably troll so I don’t expect a response. He left his email and I’ve very tempted to contact him directly, however I’m also tempted to just ban his IP. I did some sniffing but I couldn’t find anything on google about this “Randall Brougham, Ph.D”, not even where he found the post (I checked my logs). It reads a little like a bot but his insults directly use the content of the post, so it’s not.

I’ve been trying to find the right analogy to sum up how it felt. It’s like a stranger hears your conversation in a public place and then decides to shout insults at you for five minutes before running off and not giving you the chance to respond. I did briefly pull the post, but then, part of me said, no, fuck Randal Brougham, Ph.D., I can’t let the trolls win. Even if Randal Brougham, Ph.D. is just some random asshole and it means nothing, its still disturbing to think that some stranger that I’ve never meet or talked to can be so venomous towards you.

This is my reply comment, in case he comes back here some day.

Hi Randall Brougham, Ph.D., thank you for your comment and I will now avoid bullshitting and having opinions and displaying those opinions online. From now I will just write about the pretty little flowers I drew, the new wordpress plugin I wrote or my new baby.

Come on! Yes it’s a little bullshitty. Writing one’s thoughts is mostly an act of bullshit. I obviously hit a nerve but you don’t really elaborate on why, instead you just call me stupid and impotent. How witty of you to rip through my bullshit with such an insult. Seriously, I can just delete your comment now and ban your IP but why bother? The probability is that your just a troll who has some issue with bloggers in general. And if you do reply, I hope you actually say something instead of being offensive.

Yes, I haven’t read Harry Potter and I’ve haven’t seen all of Lost. I’m not even saying that they are crap, only that my perception of them diminishes over time despite how good they are.

And also, this bullshit is mine alone, thankfully. I’m not re-posting it from somewhere else. I doubt anyone else will re-post it either. Cartographer was talking about her feelings about the current Harry Potter and how her view of a good novel has changed from when she was a teenager. The whole of this post is in relation to my view.

Thanks for your attention.

Update (24/08/2007 9am): Google seems to like me. Within a few minutes of this post, I did a new search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D (the troll). Look what hits the number 1 spot:

So if anyone does a search for Randal Brougham, Ph.D. They’ll find this post calling him out as a troll. It was unintentional. I wonder did he really use his real name?

Since my foray into LiveJournal, I’ve started writing more for my website (which is more and more becoming like some sort of blog). However the way entries are organised on my webpage (I’m talking about thedeadone.net and not livejournal) means that most of my writing gets filed under the general category: “News, rants, opinions and general thoughts”. Not a clever way of doing it. So I need a little feedback on it…

I was using categories to highlight particular entries, ones that I felt formed a more complete article or are, in themselves, for presentation. For example, software I wrote and made available is filed under software but when I write about software, I don’t put it under there. This is probably not a clear-cut example as it makes sense to have a separate category for downloadable software. I better example is roleplaying. This is in the subcategory of writing. Here I put mostly complete articles that I would like to have people find easily. However I’ve written much more about roleplaying that I haven’t put in there because it’s either throw-away or I’m still thinking about it.

What I was thinking of doing, was to be more free with my category usage, breaking up my general category into numerous others but then having a category called “Gallery” which contains a subset of categories. I can assign an entry to multiple categories so I assign under the correct category and if I want to highlight it on my website, I stick it also under the gallery one. Then, from the main links on my webpage you can browse the gallery category for my showy articles and from there then explore the more general categories. In a sense using categories like “tags” and then using the special Gallery subset of categories as the way I have been using categories all along. Is this a good way of doing it? What do other people think?

One of the problems with reorganising my categories is that it changes the url’s of my articles. Which can mean they get picked up as “new” articles by the various feeds such as redbrick planet. I’d like to get this right in one step, so I have to make sure that it’s a good layout. If I do re-orgainse, it’s probaly a good idea to trim back and delete some of my entries, perhaps archiving really old ones that, to be honest, are utter rubbish, mental note to self.

Aside: mental doodle (which is described here somewhere) for this week: “I walk the moonlight path, the stars dancing on infinity. The Devil sings a lullaby while the Angels die on stakes. Far below is Earth, far above is darkness; the dead void of fear and hate, full of the light of madness. Seek the voidless untruth and find the greatest truth of all.”

Update #1: Did a little surf’in and found this and this articles from a wordpress blogger called Lorelle. Seems she’s done much more thinking on the subject of using categories and tags. More food for thought. In a sense, my “gallery” idea could be done using WordPress categories and then I just “tag” all my other posts. However I’m not completely happy with that. It would provide an immediate solution… but that still leaves the majority of my entries sitting in “news” or (worse) I could stick them all in uncategorized. I’d like to be able to categorize my existing entries, just for my own sense of order.

Update #2: No comments yet, so I figure it’s okay to add my thoughts directly to the article. So I did a brief scan of all my previous posts. I’m quite happy to leave them all, oddly, though I may update links and such that have gone dead.

Categories to leave alone

I’m happy enough with these categories. I see no reason to change them. These would have formed the bulk of what I was calling “Galleries”.

Computer Games > Quake; Quake 2; Vampire the Masquerade Redemption;
Drawings > 3D; Alice in Wonderland; Black and White; Character; Chargey Studies; Renegade Art; Sketchs
LJ
Software
Writing > Roleplaying; Short Stories

Categories to remove

There is really only one problematic category. Even from the title, it is obvious the category needs to be split.

News, rants, opinions and general thoughts

Categories to add

This is how I’d imagine breaking down the all-consuming news category

News > Webpage; Personal

I would split actual “news” into two. “Personal” (which is kind of like a blog) and “Webpage” which is about the webpage; new features, changes, updates, etc.

Thoughts

Thoughts, “off-topic” posts and rants. At some point I should review them of course and see if a new category is needed.

Projects

News, rabblings, thoughts, etc. about any personal projects such as RPGs, writing and software.

Tech

Writings about programming, technology, software etc.

Weird

Weird stuff I found. I do try to avoid posting links I find via digg.com and boingboing.net but occasionally stuff passes my way that I find interesting.

Writing > Musings

Thoughts, articles, rabblings and other tit-bits to do with writing in general.

I’d also expand my usage of Writing > Roleplaying. Right now it’s a mix of full articles and adventures. It will now also contain my thoughts on roleplaying too.

Is this a good layout?

For literally years, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with my web space. At the moment it’s a dump for anything I’d like to keep online or be able to reference online such as my weird and wacky writings, my pleasant amateur art and various pieces of software or code I’ve done. And thats enough for me, I think.

However, I was interested in blogging software before the word “blogging” became hip. I didn’t blog, I just used the software from GreyMatter to MovableType and now WordPress (which now runs this site). So the question haunts me (only a little though)… why I don’t I really blog and who reads this anyway?

My posts are aggregated into Redbrick Planet (which means they get posted to Redbrick) and now they get cross-posted to my livejournal. However comments are few and often come from random web-surfers or those looking for support on my software. Occasionally comments can be found on the Redbrick boards (Redbrick Planet gets cross-posted to the boards) but not that often.

In my mind there is three (possible four) types that most blogs fit into. I’m not saying these are categories that all blogs can be fit into or are strict definitions. They are simply the way I think of blogs when I come across them.

There are the online diaries such as LiveJournal. Unless I know the person, I ignore theses. However I’ve posted several times about personal incidents good and bad. But I do this infrequently. I don’t want to share with the world my problems, I have family and friends to do that. I’m also not comfortable talking about things that might land me in trouble other people’s privacy or work-related stuff. More than one project I’ve done in work has been smothered in NDAs.

Then there are the journalistic type where articles about various topics are posted. If I’m interested in the topics, the writing is easy to read and the content is fairly frequent, great. I’ve written a few articles, mostly on roleplaying, but they are very infrequent and they are truely first drafts. They have the basic points but lack structure and decent prose. I just don’t have the time between family and work to really do proper essays and the research required for them. And like all ego-driven things, the response I get to what I have done is minimal if at all and this discourages me from really put more effort into it.

The last type is what I think of as the tracker or the journal. The blogger in question posts updates and news on various projects like this guy who has managed to swap his way from a paperclip to a house! I have various pet projects I’m working on such as two RPGs, writings and even my “astral projection” attempts. I could certainly write about those but then I’m taking time away from working on them. Also in part I’m rather private about them, I guess I’m little paranoid to be honest. I don’t wear my life choices on my sleeve and I don’t know who reads my blog. Guess that makes me seem a little boring. On top of that, my life-work balance sucks so updates would be even less frequent than they already are.

(There is another type, but is it really a blog? Software, art and other content put online via blog software, kinda like what I’ve done on my current webpage. I don’t really consider these blogs, though they may be part of a real blog. It just turns out that blog software are handy (if simplistic) content management systems too).

I guess a way to look at it is, if I trawl back through my archives, how much would I like to keep or promote on the site. And I’ve already decided that with my layout and categories. I guess I’ll still be haunted by the missing purpose of this space, but I won’t be loosing any sleep.

In an ironic way, this post is reflective of my blog’s current state. It has neither purpose or conclusion. I’ve even failed to really phrase the question.

Started playing around with Planet which is this RSS feed aggregator to HTML thingy.

I set up Irish Gaming Planet as a test and people seem to like it. Now if I can only get other gaming sites to have real feeds…

And while I was doing that, colmmacc has set up a Redbrick Planet. I’m helping out too.

I kinda like it a kalediscope look at the blabbering minds and egos of Redbrick.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t win the Redbrick Award (2005) for Best Contributer to the Boards

Maybe next year… (like hell)

Someone nominated me for Best Contributer to the Boards (2005 btw in case your reading an old archive of this post). Now the thing is… I wouldn’t have nominated myself.

As I said on the redbrick boards:
Excuse me, excuse me. Apparently I’ve been nominated in this category. This must be a mistake. With the amount of shit I spout out, I’m surprised I’m not just automatically kill-filed.

Mark, walking away and shaking his head in bewilderment…

Sorry for the lack of news and updates. There are many reasons.

I could blame Redbrick for moving their web services from Prodigy to Deathray. I use Movable Type for my webpage and I’m using, still, BerkleyDB instead of SQL. This broke, of course, moving from the two different machines. The standard solution from MovableType manual didn’t work. But luckily I found someone else online who had similar pains to me and gave a lovely long description of the problem and how to fix it. Unfortantly it still required admin intervention. But the admins on redbrick eventually fixed it. The stupid thing is… I’m still using BerkleyDB. I should really upgrade to MySQL.

But, oh, my technology worries did not end there! I bought a rather nice piece of kit for my home. It’s a 4 Ethernet Port Router, Wireless Base Station and a ASDL modem in one from NetGear. And all the software is Linux and Opensource to boot. (The model number is DG834G if your googling for solutions). I got it all up and running in moments and was happy as larry.

Then I upgraded the firmware.

It stopped working. I checked the NetGear website, nothing. I emailed them and after 24 hours, got an automated reply. I’m still waiting for an answer. I would have called them except, the support number is UK and a premium rate. It also says on the box 24/7 support (not that I bought it for the support option)! I googled a lot and found that lots of other people had similar issues and that NetGear support was useless.

Luckly I found that NetGear did have solutions, except that most of the time they don’t know they have solutions(?). Some other users have posted the tools and steps to fix it on broadbandreports.com. The thread is here.

Now that all my technical woes are solved, there are other things in the way…

Moving House is a big one. We’ve put down an offer on a place in Lucan but we haven’t sold ours yet. We’re waiting for that buyer so if your looking for a two bed appartment, near town, near the luas… Tramyards 2 bed Appartment, Inchicore isn’t a bad bet!

And because of that, I’ve had to put all my drawing stuff away to hide the clutter so thats why there isn’t any new drawings recently.

We’ve started a new game, which you can read about here, and that webpage has been incredibly busy with comments, posts, writeups and lots of other stuff. If your into rpgs and gaming, check it out. It’s SLA Industries with is a great setting. So thats suckling my energy too.

I’m also busy working on my writing. I may post up some extracts later (after Soph kindly corrects my grammer) but don’t hold your breath I’m afraid. I’m preparing it so I can start sending drafts to publishers. I’m hoping for some interest but I have no idea what my expectations should be.

The final barrier to regular updates then is stress. With Strawberry on the way in less than 3 months, no nursery ready (because we’re moving house), so much stuff to buy (and not enought money)… ’tis a very tiring time.

So take care reader and bare in mind that there is much more to this writer (programmer/husband/father-to-be/gamer/artist/boring sod) than some simple text on a webpage.