I love Wolfram Alpha….

http://bit.ly/O9rgE

Happy First of May!

Happy First of May, everybody. While not an astronomically appropriate holiday, May 1st is one of my favorite Pagan holidays, Beltane. Beltane isn't the most spiritually fulfilling of holidays, but it is fun.

Flirty goodness, love, mischief and beauty is in the air. Time to be and feel alive and awake and aware of your own energy, and if you are an adult, to own your senses and your passionate power. Mmmm. Good holiday. Happy Beltane!

Anyone play NERO Atlanta?

Hi there, friends list and all the ships at sea. Is there anyone reading me who knows a thing or two about NERO Atlanta? Not NERO in general, but the chapter here in Atlanta. I'd love to know one of my friends / contacts who already plays with them.

Thanks in advance for your help!

(BTW, I found their website already, I'm just looking for people who can speak to the experience and who may even be attending this weekend's event)

Who are our fathers and mothers?

This is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. In fact, I've done a lot of thinking about this over the course of my life. As an adopted person, I frequently wonder about who my parents were. Did my biological mother even know who the biological father was? Could it have been one of a number of people? In the Sixties, there was some experimentation with free love in hippie society, and when people experiment with relationships, this kind of uncertainty can definitely be introduced. Maybe she couldn't really tell without DNA testing, which wasn't available in 1967. Truth be told, I have no idea: I was adopted as an infant, so I never knew her.

Because I am adopted, I have a lot of deeply felt emotion regarding these people, my bio-mom and bio-dad; but it is so deep that it has taken years of introspection and therapy to get through to it, and I really don't want this to be a post about my biological parents. (I've done that, here. It's very emotional and very intense, so you've been warned.)

So, who are my father and mother?

One theory is, "My father and mother are the people who are biologically related to me." Well, that is true in a scientific sense, I suppose. But those people, whomever they are, had very little to do with the person I would later become.

Another theory is, "My father and mother are the people who cared for me and adopted me. The people who reared me." And that is true too, very true. More true perhaps than the first idea. My adopted Dad died in September of '08, and I have yet to truly process what all that means. I'm still grieving for him. I feel this grief no less because he was someone who chose me, rather than someone who got my mother pregnant. My adopted mom, whom I basically just call "mom," and I are rebuilding our relationship after a lot of estrangement. I am thankful for this, because in my head she fits the slot of "mom" more than anyone. She is my Mother, and I love her dearly.

And then there is, "My father and mother are the people who nurtured my soul, guided my path, gave me inspiration and beautiful dreams." This is also true. So, I can name many fathers and mothers then. I name Barbara Jean Fant, I name Robert Heinlein. I name Gary Gygax. I name Starhawk and Luisah Teish. There are many, many others I could name. I'm grateful for them all.

That leaves the question, "Who are you nurturing and guiding, who are you a mother or a father of?"

I have the kids I have claimed as my own: G and Rowan. Certainly the States of Georgia and California think they are my children, as I paid child support for them and continue to pay for G. And, truth be told, it doesn't matter what the State or anyone else thinks: they are my children, plain and simple.

As a younger man, my life was very strange and many things were completely chaotic. But I reared my kids, and, even if we have been distant since they left my house, I still love them without reservation or condition as my daughter and son. If you are a guy and you change a person's diapers, hold them when they cry, discipline them, and take care of their boo-boos, and you do this every day until they can stand on their own two feet and take care of themselves, I truly believe that you are that person's Daddy.

I was there for them, and I would never give up those memories and those times; they are precious to me.

I have Katie, who is my step-daughter-in-heart (the daughter of the woman I'm life-partnered to), who lost her own biological father and came to live with us and has now lived longer with me as her male-authority-figure than she did with her father.

And then there are other more nebulous children: the children of my mind and spirit. Who are they? I have no idea. But I would love to know if I do.

And, speaking of nebulous children, if I knew that I had a biological child out there in the world, I would want to at least acknowledge him or her, and do what I could to show them love due to our tie of blood.

Certainly, I am the proud father of two novels, two games, many podcasts, and several blogs, and what are they if not children of my mind and spirit? I have hope that something I do in this lifetime will spawn life, love, hope, and future for other people.

So I invite you to ask yourself, "Who are my fathers and mothers? Who am I a father or mother to?" and think outside the normal definitions. You might be surprised who you name, or who names you.

Food Dreams and Nightmares

One of my dreams has always been to open a restaurant. The idea of being open for business, of creating wonderful experiences for people, of making a whole lot of people happy with food, this really excites me. Right now, I'm far, far too thin skinned to go into the business, but I hope to one day get the kind of training necessary to be able to stand on my own two feet and face the public with my food.

I don't have aspirations to be some kind of incredible chef, however. I just want to take care of people, feed them, give them a place where they can get out of the world for a while and enjoy an experience that lifts them up out of their noise, trouble and stress.

People who know the business tell me that I am describing a sure fire method for losing a lot of money: the best way to get more bucks in the food business is to move people through as fast as you can.

I have to believe that there is some happy medium between that model and the concept of people enjoying a meal, taking their time.

Anyway, I am hoping I will have time to realize this dream. In the meantime, I am always learning, as much as I can, about the restaurant business. I've even thought of taking a job as a busboy on the weekends so I can learn the business from that angle.

That brings me to talk about Hell's Kitchen. I don't usually watch Reality TV shows. Something about them really ticks me off, but that's a different rant for a different post.

However, Hell's Kitchen season 5 has caught and keeps my attention. On one hand, I am constantly astonished by the amount of emotional and mental abuse Ramsay levels on his participants. The entire show seems to be designed to put him in situations where he freaks out and screams. Like a bad, rage-a-holic father, Ramsay continues to berate people, push their buttons when he can find them, and does everything he can to increase the stress and pressure in the kitchen, in order to cause other people to freak out. Time and again, I heard the chefs saying that they didn't know why they were making dumb mistakes. A fellow who works in a steak house couldn't even grill steaks right!
This guy reminds me of a person I worked for once. By yelling and screaming and threatening people in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he manages to put everybody off their A game. It's not surprising that people who cope best with his management style are people who were themselves abused as children; in an abusive relationship of any kind one learns the necessary skills to deal with irrational people.

So why do I keep watching? I think it is partly a therapeutic experience. Exposing myself to this kind of abusive situation lets me tell myself how I would respond in the situation. I can talk back to the feelings created. I can root for individuals who are competing and empathize with them. At the same time, some of it is truly informative.

It's possible that I will drop this pastime pretty soon, but for now I think it does provide both entertainment and an opportunity to recognize the craziness and flaws of management through rage and destruction. The show is about shredding 16 potential chefs, and in the end, there is only 1 who emerges victorious. That's a 6.25% success rate, which is a terrible statistic if you think of the show as a teaching experience. If we could replace Ramsay with a chef who cultivates, not eliminates people, how many awesome world-class chefs would be created? It would be more than just 1, but I think that the main problem is that building people up is not as interesting television as breaking them down.

A side note: I see that most, if not all, of the restaurants Chef Ramsay has helped in his other show, Kitchen Nightmares, have all but failed. The shows seem to represent him as being a godsend, but ultimately I feel as though his ideas and "help" are just as toxic as his personality.

Bad MARTA, good Fantasy Beverages

I've not made it a secret that I live near the Kensington MARTA station, and I travel through there on a fairly irregular basis.

Lately, they have been undergoing a thoroughly mystifying infrastructure upgrade. They are resurfacing the bus intake area, where the buses drop off and pick up passengers. This means they've had to create a completely separate bus transfer area.

They did a pretty good job of crafting a bus shelter out of PVC pipe and plastic sheeting. They sunk PVC pipe into buckets of cement, and used those as the supports for the structure. They kitbashed a single line as a support for the top. All of this was set up in an adjacent parking lot.

The asphault in this area is abysmal, however. I don't know enough about things like asphault, so I can't really tell you what is wrong with it. Suffice it to say that the surface in the parking lot is eroding away at an alarming rate. In order to address this problem, many large steel plates have been put down over the surface wounds of the parking lot. You've seen these plates in cities covering potholes. They look as though they would make great armor for personnel carriers as well. Anyway, the net effect of these plates is that the bus sways like a schooner on the high seas whenever the driver drives over them. It is a sensation one is not accustomed to when riding a bus, but it is an interesting feeling nonetheless.

All this to say this: whomever got the contract to originally surface this parking lot must've been related to someone important. That's all I have to say about that.

I am constantly and continuously surprised at the total lack of entrepreneurship in and around train stations here. Why doesn't MARTA have little kiosks for people to have a cup of coffee or whatnot while they wait for their train?

Of course, I've been stuck on a train a few times with some individual who had liberally interpreted the gray area between "Transporting Food" and "Consuming it on the Train," so I understand the urge to not make food and drink too available. However, for the most part, the land around most train stops is mostly devoid of restaurants. There are a few notable exceptions, and I'm going to post a link to this really cool website that talks about those exceptions.

I remember when I was living in New York that there was this coffee stand on the street. All you had to do is have a dollar bill ready, walk up to the window, say, "Cream and sugar" and hand them the dollar bill. Or two dollars, I can't remember how much it was, but it was a fairly negligible amount of money. This was a very cool, simplified business. They took beans and water and made coffee. They sold the product plus dairy and sugar, and no BS. If you wanted this stuff, you would go to that window, you would get it. There were no lattes, no half-cafs, no double-cafs, no mochacinno java chips. This was serious coffee for serious people who wanted to get it fast. You could obtain coffee in just about as much time as it took to decide to get some. In fact, if you were walking down the street and saw the coffee stand you could just turn that direction with money in your hand and, in mere seconds, be on your way with a fairly amazingly perfect cup of coffee. Now, realistically these guys did not care about coffee prep technique and I would hate to see the interiors of their urns, but the coffee was good, hot, relatively fresh, and not too bitter. And it was frickin' fast.

That's what I want. Coffee that's a heartbeat away. Not to put down my little French press, which is super delicious, but really, having someone else go to the trouble is very compelling.

That reminds me. I have been thinking about the kind of beverages people find in fantasy and science fiction, the wakeful beverages of those genres specifically. The Liaden books have a lot to do with wine and tea. These people drink an awful lot of wine, and they seem to also imbide a great deal of specific kinds of tea. Really, what you drink in the Liadenverse is very important. It's almost like it's a mini-personality test: are they going to choose the red, the white, or the green? And the fact that the nasty bad Liaden traders make their crew drink fake coffee....*shudder*. That tells you everything you need to know about their inherent evil.

And coffee is a big theme in the stories of Nathan Lowell, Quarter / Half / Full Share, etc. It's coffee making that sets our young Ishmael apart from his crewmates.

In the fantasy realm, klava is a drink that seems to be based on hungarian coffee, the preparation and ingredients of which are not to be believed, really. It is intriguing, however, and I think I might like to try it someday when I have regular coffee close at ready hand and I want to waste some ingredients.

I've made some reference in my gaming and my fiction to some special drinks, but I have not yet put down any recipes. There is a hot Amishkan drink called kafva or kav, which is of course very much like coffee. The Lunargenti and Sydalians love their cider, hard or soft. Distilling alcohols is a favorite pastime of alchemists and sorcerers, and places where magical people are welcomed will have these spirits in bars and the like. I've yet to come up with something truly fantastic, however.

All this talk about drink is making me thirsty. I wonder if there are any fantasy or science fiction drinks I'm missing? Ok, yes, the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Anything else?

Note: Since I first wrote this, it has been announced that MARTA will possibly start doing concessions in some of their stations. More on that as it develops.

Joe Day

I never met Joe Murphy in person, but I did hear his voice on various podcasts. He was a cool guy, and he died this day in 2007 of cancer.

I post this in memory of him and offer these links for those who are unfamiliar.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Murphy_(podcaster)

Edited to add: If you are moved to contribute, please visit the Leiomyosarcoma Direct Research Fund site at http://lmsdr.org

(Thanks, PG!)

Ada Lovelace Day!

Check out http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay for more information about this post and about this wonderful day!

I want to write, today, about my co-worker Olga. She came to America from the Ukraine, and when I first got to know her, she was not an expert in technology. However, over the course of time she has both taught herself (through experience) and learned (in college and from reading) from others to the point where, now, she rightfully can claim the title of computer technician in her own right.

This woman can troubleshoot a laptop problem in a heartbeat, and every new angle she learns to repair, reform, or cleanse a machine of its imperfections she retains seemingly effortlessly. She grabs bright shining facts and holds on to them like a magpie; that she can correlate a lot of disparate elements and keep them all in her head is of major benefit. She follows processes and always has suggestions for improving them.

Although she told me that she worries about an excess of automation in the future (so do I), she said that she enjoys having the wealth of knowledge available to her through the Web.

I asked her what, if anything, she has to say to girls about technology. Here's what she said:

"Technology field is no longer for man only. Being a network or computer engineer was not considered a job for a woman, but I believe that if this is what interests you and where your heart is, go for it."

Go for it, indeed, Olga. You and Ada share a great deal of sisterhood.

Thanks for lending us your skills, your intelligence, and your knowledge at work!

What makes for a valid community?

(Note for my boss & other interested parties: This was written over the course of many days, just pulling the trigger on it now)

I have recently begun playing City of Heroes again after several years' off. I still have my old, old characters that have been idle, it says, for over 728 days, and I have not recently logged them in.

City of Heroes / City of Villains is a game where you play a super hero or a super villain. As a hero, you have super powers, you run around and beat up (incarcerate) bad guys, and you have missions in place of what is normal for this genre of computer game, "Quests." Instead of gold pieces, we get a currency called "Influence," which enables us to buy cool gadgets and add-ons to our characters. Characters get experience points which add up to more and more levels, as you get levels, you get more super powers, and so on.

The same thing is done with villains, only the villain stuff is branded for them. So, instead of Influence they get Infamy. Some of the powers are the exact same, except that, for example, Villains don't get to use a power called Empathy which is all about healing and helping people (they have a similar power set called Pain Domination, which is not as powerful as Empathy in my opinion), and heroes don't get to use powers like Poison, which is available to a villain character.

Surprisingly, there are a number of co-op areas in the game where heroes and villains can fight a greater bad guy together, which is interesting.

Anyway, back on track here. I've been playing City of Heroes, and in that game, I have come to know some folks who have become increasingly special to me, that is to say, they are my SuperGroup.

Yeah, I'm part of a super hero group like the Justice League or the X-Men. I'm a member in good standing of ICONS. Yes, we have a super base. Yes, we have a cool costume. But the most important thing about ICONS is the community it represents.

We all chat verbally online with each other using software called TeamSpeak. My microphone is set up to detect my voice and go "live" in time to catch what I'm saying, so all I have to do is speak and my team-mates will hear me.

This helps us when we are fighting bad guys. We coordinate our attacks and the powers we use so that we are more effective.

But more importantly, we have social time, too.

Let me be clear, I haven't met most of these folks in real life, but I feel as though I know them, and they are serving, for me, as a social outlet.

This is ideal for me because I can be at once both "at home" and in "social space." I don't like to be away from home much; my family needs me. This means that I can be social in a positive way without being totally unavailable to my family.

Now, time will tell. But I extrapolate this concept of a group of people, loosely connected through the power of our voices, and I see all sorts of interesting possibilities for the future.

In a short story I wrote recently, I was adamant that some people we meet and know online are just as real to us as people we meet in person. Over time, we in the super group come to know and trust each other. We know what's going on with each other's lives, we pull together like a family does. If one of us is sick, we'll yell at him until he gets help. We offer support and understanding to each other, and honest critique; something I've come to really value over the course of years.

I think the time is past to redefine what it means to have an affiliation with someone. If the word "tribe" applies, what does that mean?

I think that it's important to think about this and to be conscious of it. So much is just disregarded because it is not face-to-face, and I feel that is egregious.

"There's not a word yet / for old friends that just met." - says Gonzo from The Muppet Movie.

I love that idea.

Online gaming wasn't nearly as fun until people like the ICONS, and my friends the Old Fartz, started meeting regularly to play.

P.S.: Wanna see my oldest City of Heroes characters? Click to see the gallery.

Welcome!

You've reached my main blog and casual podcast page!

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