"War on string may be unwinnable" says cat general

Nothing really interesting to report since last time (if you considered that interesting, consider seeking professional help), but after a conversation with Depaxus, I'm going to give anybody who reads this a chance to learn from the animals.

That's right, leave a comment suggesting a situation you'd like to see set up on the various people that we laughingly call "security", or else a question you'd like answered either by me or one of them.

Now, I don't expect a lot of hits here, but none of them are aware I blog all of this nonsense. So anything from you will be out of the blue.

I'm Rick James, bitch!

The sun also rises... IN MY PANTS!

I went in to work yesterday, went into my office, and found Barney sleeping at the desk. Soundly. He didn't hear me come in, and I had to thump around a fair bit to snap him awake. Sigh.

So I began my patrol, and about halfway through I got an alarm from an unusual place for that time of night. So I boot over (of course I was at diagonal opposite of the place in the building, and on a different floor) and burst through the door, to find one of the eyes and ears of our new manager sitting there, feet up with a bottle of water, saying "Hey man, took you long enough!"

He counted five minutes since he'd deliberately set it off, I counted it as two minutes since I received the alarm. He was happier when he discovered that I came with all due speed, and the major delay was the alarm company calling me. So we sat and chewed the fat.

He's looking to snag Barney in a bit of a trap next week, when the manager is in town. He wants to put up some of the wireless cameras we have to catch him sitting around watching tv, leaving the site, and generally using his thumbs for fartcorks. I offered some tips and general guidance (when and where to catch him), and we called it good. He tells me also that the manager is really happy with me. w00t

This guy also got to see a really surly bike patrol guys' company mobile guard (that's a mouthful!) come into our building, take the elevator up to one of our areas, and be an ass about it. Twice. The eyes and ears guy was not impressed - I'll be interested to see what's done about it.

DiceGimp started off talking about what a good job he was doing, so I (my mental fortitude was down, so it was harder to resist) mentioned that they did lose the contract for the place, and that they really didn't do their stuff.

I went on to say that since they don't do their work, they shouldn't get paid. He thought that wasn't very good, as he put it: "I show up for the shift, after all". Yeah, it's all about attendance. Moron.

I told him that I hope he lives in a house built by people who take their jobs as seriously as he takes security. Or that he gets his brakes fixed from people as effective as he and his cronies are on site.

He tried to point out that there were lots of useless people in security, but I countered with "How does that affect what you do?"

Then he tried "Well, haven't you ever done anything wrong or forgotten to do something at work?"

"Nope. Not that I'm aware of or been told about." Arrogant but true. ;)

Also, when Q-tip showed up he told me that while he was heading to work (he starts at 0800) his office called his cell phone, saying there were ten alarms on the site since 0600, and that nobody could get in touch with the guard on duty (Indian Guy). "Please Q-tip, DO something!"

He said to me, in his great accent for it, "What do they want me to do, leap from the train, fly through the air, and land on the roof?"

Indian Guy was sleeping and had the phone off and put away, I believe. Frustrating for all.

More low-age sex weirdness.

Surrounded by lumps, and it's too damn hot

DiceGimp is back. See if you can follow the musical guards:

DiceGimp was sent back from Kitimat because the strike is on pause (he claims it's over with great authority, but he didn't even know it was at an aluminum smelter, so we can doubt his sagacity), but Indian Guy is doing his job. So DiceGimp is doing Buffalo Kisser's shift despite not being trained for it, ever.

Of course, you'd think that would be screwing Buffalo Kisser, but his company needed him at a different site for three days, so he's there. But since that shift is only eight hours, and his normal shift is twelve hours, he'd be making less money. So they agreed to pay him twelve hours (with the attendant overtime calculations) for each of those three eight hour shifts at the other site, DiceGimp is doing his shift, and Indian Guy is in DiceGimp's shift. Got all that?

With the range of buildings opened up to DiceGimp, he managed to dogfuck all over the site instead of in his usual spots. He'd have me believe he was working his ass off, but I saw his report and once again he appeared to have simultaneously done a series of interior patrols and had tea with me. Neat trick, that.

When I pointed out to him that he'd never been trained for this shift (doors, alarms, locks, where to be in the mazes upon mazes of rooms and corridors), he defensively said that he knows nearly half of what he needs to know. He was serious. I cry for anybody who thinks they're getting their money's worth security-wise.

Indian Guy is, as I mentioned on my previous post, incredibly lazy. And since he only plans to be doing security for a few days (he's sure the work slowdown of container trucks will stop next week so he can start doing that instead), he figures he's got nothing to lose by just sleeping the whole shift away. What does he care if someone catches him? It's not like he's going to keep doing it.

But with access to anywhere that DiceGimp can get him, he still bangs on my door to let him in so he can sleep in my area! Sure, implicate ME in your uselessness!

He seems pretty miffed when I don't let him sleep, and threatens to find some other place to sleep. I double dare him to, and that's the last I see of him for several hours. ;)

Interestingly, the contract all of those monkeys have with Evil Property Manager's company is up, and it hasn't been renewed. Other security companies, including my own if you can believe it, have been invited to bid. We've seen various uniformed manager-types outside the various buildings in the recent mornings, snapping pictures. No word yet on whether the bike patrol guys' company is also making a bid.

Supposedly our president mentioned to Barney that if we get the site, he'll get to be S/S of it. If he goes for it, he won't be able to simultaneously be S/S of my site. I wonder if any good of this can come to me. ;)

More pro-Rimmy stuff from work, the manager who is sort of in charge of us (but not formally, and she hasn't spoken to us yet, as she's based in another city) is apparently pleased at the reports I'm sending to her contacts at my site, bypassing the obfuscations of Barney. I've also drawn up a plan to secure our electronic access which has been approved by her immediate assistants, and she's coming to visit next week with a hate on for Barney and him not knowing she'll be there. So he won't have time to get the shoe polish on his tongue. Might be fun.

Isn't it strange that if I had parties like this, with kids of this age, it's just make me a creepy weirdo? Of course, fourteen is the legal age here for consentual sex (unless something has changed), so I could only be charged with supplying the alcohol and drugs to minors.

Not that I'm into little kids or anything, I'm just saying that there must be a lot of people who don't feel they were popular in high school, and I wonder how widespread tapping your kids' friends actually is.

Ooooookay, you're looking at me funny. I'm going to slowly back away now. :P

One last thing - today I saw a guy with an absolutely incredible combover. And my question is, why do these guys do it? They can't seriously think that it looks good, or that people can't tell. Plus, having half a meter of hair greased and oiled to glue it to the rest of your bare scalp is just... weird. I wanted to just reach out and snip that stuff off, but of course I didn't. Mostly because I wasn't carrying anything sharper than my keys.

So, any theories on the combover phenomenon?

Dawn came late this morning, but when she came, she came HARD

Seriously, the sun seemed to be way later rising this morning. Is it only me who noticed this?

Rimmy quote since my last blog that most amused my friends: "Roll initiative, asshole!" ;)

So what's been going on? I went and did a sitter shift at a hospital a few weeks ago. This guy seemed perfectly lucid (he was young - no more than 45) until he started talking about the two black guys that would assault him in the elevator of the hospital, take most of his cigarettes, then make him smoke with them.

Turns out the guy had had a good job (sold hospital furniture, as it turned out), had a wife and daughter, and then was drinking and broke his neck in a car accident. So several months of wearing the kevlar collar and the four screws drilled into his skull to keep his neck rigid, and he's healed.

Except something went wrong, and that's why he's in the hospital now. The doctors cut a hole in the left side of his head and removed a piece of his brain. I never did get the story on what the specifics were, but this quick, bright, funny guy can't distinguish between reality and his slightly paranoid interior thoughts. And he gets upset when he wants to leave and nobody will let him.

The other guards had had problems with him, but he was a pussycat with me. I was more interested in the reaction of the other people in the ward to me. One lady was constantly calling to anybody she could see:

"Charlie. Help me. Charlie. Help me. Charlie. Help me."

"What do you want?"

"Come here."

"We're not coming over Volga, you just want attention."

For hours.

Finally, someone wheeled her to a different part of the room, and her eyes caught sight of me in my yellow jacket. "There's a cop" she said. So what became her new litany?

"Cop. Help me. Cop. Help me. Cop. Help me." :P

One of the nurses (or whatever's ranked lower than a nurse I suppose, she just came on shift and no was was she a RN. Maybe an LPN) went up to her and asked what she wanted, and when she said "That cop", the nurse told her that her cup was right in front of her on the table, and did she want her water?

Anyway, I eventually went over to her, and she told me that they're keeping her here against her will, and that they'll beat her if they hear her telling me this. Especially the tall blond nurse. Who, incidentally, was within earshot and amused to hear it.

When I was sitting outside my principle's room (he was sleeping), lots of very nice people wheeled or shuffled by, and all of them exchanged a few words. One very nice lady told me that she had Alzheimer's, and asked for my name. When I gave it, she said "I'll try to remember it" and used it in every sentence.

I told her that she certainly seemed lucid, and she replied that she had good days and bad days. But she said that the Lord has a plan for us all, and some days she'd say "So Lord? What's it going to be today?". She was determinedly cheery. I hope she's okay.

On Thursday night, DiceGimp didn't show up for his Friday morning shift. Buffalo Kisser gave him the better part of an hour before he phoned it in to the office. Their response?

"We don't have a second guard on at that site." lol

Wow, they're disorganized. Finally Buffalo Kisser convinced them that they did, in fact, have such a guard... and that he hadn't shown up. So they sent their weekend daytime guy.

This guy is... dumb. Not with shocking behavior dumb, just dumb dumb. And so you get the kinds of things happening that you expect with dumb. An example:

When he first made it to the site, he didn't report in, and didn't tell Buffalo Kisser he was there. Instead, I found him in my nearly pitch black cafeteria apparently having a conversation with the candy machine. Complete with gestures and "Ohhhhhhhhh"'s indicating the candy machine had made a particularly stinging verbal riposte. Eventually they settled their differences with a Coffee Crisp, after a good three minute conversation.

Later, literally moments after Buffalo Kisser had gone home, DumbGuy got an alarm call. Normally this would mean that you note down the information, then hop on the bike and go check it out. Not DumbGuy.

Apparently forgetting there was a bike, he walked outside and broke into a sprint that is best described as a giraffe suddenly realizing he left the stove on and wheeling home to save his tree. It was really really funny to watch this gangly guy lope.

Typical time to deal with a false alarm (almost always false at that time of morning, as there are employees everywhere and it's them setting them off) is less than ten minutes. So a half hour goes by. Then an hour. So I called him up, and he asked if I had a key to their storeroom downstairs.

I said no, and he said that he locked the keys for that room, his keyscan card, and his keys for all the buildings down in there. And that he was responding to two alarms.

"How are you responding to them without keys?" I asked, all innocence.

He said that since he couldn't get in, but he couldn't verify that the alarms were clear, he was just endlessly circling the buildings. Uh... o_O

He was still doing that when the next shift showed up. He was unwilling to just let it go. Can you believe that normally this guy works unsupervised? I can only imagine the shit he gets into!

On the weekend, I went and worked the Telus picket line. Initially my communist (his words) friend thought this was no good as it meant I was supporting Telus, but that's just not the case. Eventually both sides are going to be working together again, and I'm just part of the buffer between them. Ostensibly we're there to make sure the picketers obey the law and don't bother the managers or property, but if the managers starting doing stuff to the picketers, we'd be in there pulling them off too.

Of course, this was the first weekend so it was still a semi-carnival mood. Nobody had really missed work yet, and they hadn't missed their first paycheque. I expect the mood will get darker in a couple of weeks, or sooner if some professional protesters join in. At least I'll have unlimited extra work if I want it while this is going on, although I've discovered it's harder to stand for twelve hours than it is to walk for twelve hours. :P

It turns out that DiceGimp went up to Kitimat with a bunch of other low-rent security for the strike at the aluminum smelter up there, although I see that's currently on hold. So who replaced him at the regular site? Why, Indian Guy is back from his vacation, and they offered the position to him full time!

He declined, but he'll take it until his other job starts giving him more hours.

And how did he do, Indian Guy, on his first day back? Two hours of non-stop talking, then he slept until 0400. Then an hour for tea, then he vanished for an hour or so, sat at his table, vanished for an hour, then packed up and left.

Tonight he plans to sleep as much as possible. Ah, pride in your job. Got to love seeing it in action, eh?

He, and others at my site who have been coming back from long vacations have all been asking me about the baby and my lady, and so once again I get to recount the whole sorry tale.

And this weekend has been especially hard, since because she's cut me off from communication for lo these past two months, I haven't heard from her if the baby's been born (the due date was July 23), or if she and the baby are even alive. I'm not sure just what happened, as in the last conversation I had with her she indicated that she was still confused about what she was going to do about things, although she told me what everybody else wanted her to do, but I know that she's blocked me on her IM. All this because I was tired of her dragging out important decisions to the point of ridiculous no return?

It would seem that she was playing some sort of game with me for the past year or so. Partial or hesitant truths are not truths at all, and I think she played me. Even worse, I let it happen. Look at what I agreed to: marriage and fatherhood, and on an accelerated schedule!

I got treated (and since she's not done me the courtesy of telling me what's going on, even though it's obvious to the most optimistic holdout, it's still going on) like shit, and it's taught me a lesson for future relationships: always be sure to give the woman I'm with lots of TLC.

TLC, in this case, standing for Time-release Lithium Capsules. And hopefully that will smooth out some of that cuh-razy!

Sorely disappointed in someone I thought I knew and could trust,
Rimmy

A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy up and hold the burning fuse up to the phone.

"Hear that?" you say, "That's dynamite, baby!"

Random thoughts/memories from the past little while:

• Having exposed hypocracy, those to whom it's revealed become staunch supporters of the exposer. Others just discount it, saying "It must have been done for a good reason."
• To grow older is to grow more wicked.
• Buffalo Kisser thinks that because he has an interest (but no background) in psychology, that makes him fit to pronounce on all matter of things. Case in point: DiceGimp got called a faggot on the SkyTrain while wearing his uniform. A couple of weeks later, a guy fixing his car looked up to see DiceGimp watching him, and called him a fucking asshole. Buffalo Kisser's take on these two events? "You should smash your glasses on the ground." Thus spake the oracle.
• I have to reassess what my concept of "ignorant" is. DiceGimp and I were talking about Israel, but it turned out that he didn't know anything other than surface bluster. So then shortly after, the subject of Greece came up. Half-jokingly, I asked if he knew where Greece was. "East of Israel," he said. I stared at him, and he corrected himself. "Straight north." "Straight north?!" "Yeah, there's Israel, some other countries, then Greece." He was not, in fact, joking. However, subsequent people of various ages and educations that I've told this story to have been unable to immediately pick a direction from Israel to Greece. So perhaps I'm the odd one here.
• After getting called back time and time again to babysit patients at hospitals, I'm recognising what a horror it must be to be trapped in your own mind, filled with wind and mist.
• Evil Property Manager and the company he works for, along with the bike patrol guys that work during the daytime are frantic about kicking the garbage pickers and butt collectors from the site. Apparently one of them (we call him Chemical Ali, because he sniffs solvent and has some fairly odd behavior) spit on an employee from another building the other week. I've met him and talked to him a few times, and my bet is that someone told him to fuck off while he was conversing with the ghosts in his head or making sweet love to the parking lot, and he spit on her. Bothering them in the daytime gets your windows broken at night.
• Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.
• Keep secrets all you want. But what kind of person keeps secrets from themselves?
• It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Every experience carries its lesson.
• I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory yesterday with my folks, and it wasn't bad. But you know what really made it for me? The little boy sitting next to me. "Look at that giant chocolate bar!" and "Here comes the chocolate river!", along with gasps and "Wow!"'s and the rest. What does that say about me?
• We accept too damned many things on the explanation of people who could have good reasons for lying.
• Long-term supporters at the site I work at have indicated that they'd like me to succeed Barney as chief security guy. Many of them also indicate a willingness to help hasten that day. Dare I swim in water when I can't identify the undercurrents?
• When politics and religion ride in the same cart, the participants are suffused with a sense of invulnerability. Gathering speed in their forward charge and believing that nothing can stand in their way, they forget that the road is not always straight and level, and fail to see the crevasse ahead of them.
• Also at my site, protective pro-Rimmy supporters are looking to hook me up with some sweet young thing. I find this incredibly disturbing.
• Sometimes you have to test something to destruction.
• I'm harsh in the way I talk and dissect what others think/do/say. I admit this, and there are no lack of angry people who bark it to me in their defensive heat. They tell me about how I make them feel when I don't smile and nod and agree with what they say. And they seem discontent with my contention that anything less than abject submission has to have some attack in it.
• School is looking better and better, but not as a means to anything other than access to more information and interesting diversions.
• I've been astonished by how much more depth I've found in The Book of Five Rings lately, as opposed to other times I've dipped into it.
• Equality doesn't mean sameness. The strong and the weak may be equal, but only one of them is fit to open the pickle jar.
• Similarly, just because you have an opinion doesn't mean it gets treated to the same consideration as other opinions. You might espouse that people who drink an A&W root beer float before setting out on long car trips don't run out of fuel, but don't think that's going to carry weight in a discussion on mileage.
• How far inward can one turn before they forget there's a world outside as well?
• I've nicknamed one of the bike patrol company's day guys "Q-tip". I'm wondering if that's too harsh.

You may not like what I have to say, but I'll defend to your death my right to say it. ;)

Updated Monday, July 18: Q-tip walked in this morning with a haircut. Anybody got a good name for a tall skinny guy that's a bit of a close talker?

A story inspired by Lovecraft, fin.

MARCH 15, 2337

They rolled, clanked, strode forward a few meters more, halted once again at the very edge of the ancient ruins. Shoten Binayakya sent two core samplers downward from mechanized instrumentation compartments, one to sample soil, the other to clip some material from the ruins themselves. Carbon dating would proceed automatically within Shoten's cyborged componentry.

Sri Gomati gazed at the ruins. They had the appearance, in the faint distant starlight, of stairs and terraces walled with marble balustrades. Gomati ran her optical sensors to maximum image amplification to obtain meaningful sight in the darkness of the occultation of Yuggoth.

And then - it is highly doubtful that the discovery would have been made by the single brief expedition, working in the ruddy, pulsating light of Yuggoth; it was surely that planet's occultation by Thok that must receive credit for the find - Gomati turned at the gasp of Njord Freyr. Her eyes followed the path of his pointing, armor-gauntleted hand.

From some opening deep under the rubble before them a dim but baleful light emerged, pulsating obscenely. But unlike the crimson pulsations of Yuggoth above, this light beneath their feet was of some shocking, awful green.

Without speaking the three surged forward, picking their way through the ruined and crumbled remnants of whatever ancient city had once flung vaulted towers and fluted columns into the black sky above the tiny world. They reached the source of the radiance barely in time, for as the disk sped across the face of Yuggoth, the black shadow that blanketed the landing site of the ship Khons and the ruins where the crew poked and studied, fled across the pale grey face of Thog leaving them standing once more in the red pulsating glare of the giant planet.

In the obscene half-daylight, the hideous metallic glare of bronze-green was overwhelmed and disappeared into the general throbbing ruddiness. But by now Shoten Binayakya had shot a telescoping core-probe into the opening from which the light emerged, and with mechanical levers pried back the marblelike slab whose cracked and chipped corner had permitted the emergence of the glow.

Servos revved, the stone slab crashed aside. Steps led away, into the bowels of the worldlet Thog. In the dark, shadowy recess the red pulsating light of giant Yuggoth and the baleful metallic green fought and shifted distressingly.

"The Ghooric zone," Sri Gomati whispered to herself, "the Ghooric zone."

They advanced down the stairs, leaving behind the baleful pulsations of Yuggoth, lowering themselves meter by meter into the bronze-green lighted depths of Thog. The track-laying cybermech of Shoten Binayakya took the strangely proportioned stairway with a sort of clumsy grace. Njord Freyr, his wheeled undercarriage superbly mobile on the level surface of Thog, now clutched desperately to the fluted carapace of Shoten.

Sri Gomati walked with ease, gazing out over the subsurface world of Thog. Seemingly kilometers below their entry a maze of dome on dome and tower on tower lay beside - she shook her head, adjusted metallic optics. There seemed to be a subterranean sea here within the depths of tiny Thog, a sea whose dark and oily waters lapped and gurgled obscenely at a black and gritty beach.

At the edge of that sea, that body which must be little more than a lake by earthly standards, on that black and grainy beach, great terrible creatures rolled and gamboled shockingly.

"Shoggoths!" Sri Gomati ran ahead of the others, almost tumbling from the unbalustraded stairway. "Shoggoths! Exactly as he said, splashing beside a foul lake! Shoggoths!" Exalted, she reached the end of the stairway, ran through towering columns past walls of sprawling bas-relief that showed hideous deities destroying intruders upon their shrines while awful acolytes crept away toward enigmatic vehicles in search of morsels to appease their obscene gods.

Gomati heard the grinding, clanking sounds of Shoten Binayakya following her, the steady whir of Njord Freyr's undercarriage. She turned and faced them. "This is the year 2337," she shouted, "the four hundredth anniversary of this death! How could he know? How could he ever have known?"

And she ran down hallways beneath vaulted gambrel roofs, ran past more carvings and paintings showing strange, rugose cone-shaped beings and terrible, tentacle-faced obscenities that loomed frighteningly above cowering prey. Then Gomati came to another hallway, one lit with black tapers that flared and guttered terribly.

The air in the room was utterly still, the shadows of fluted columns solemn against walls carved and lettered in a script whose awesome significance had been forgotten before earth's own races were young. And in the center of the room, meter-tall tapers of Stygian gloom marking its four extremities, stood a catafalque, and on the catafalque, skin as white as a grave-worm, eyes shut, angular features in somber repose, lay the black-draped figure of a man.

Sri Gomati raced to the foot of the catafalque, stood gazing into the flickering darkness of the hall, then advanced to stand beside the head of the body. Her silvery eyes shimmered and she began to laugh, to giggle and titter obscenely, and yet to weep at the same time, for some cybersurgeon long before had seen fit to leave those glands and ducts intact.

And Sri Gomati stood tittering and snuffling until Njord Freyr rolled beside her on his cyborged power-wheels and the ambiguous Shoten Binayakya ground and clanked beside her on tread-laying undercarriage, and they took her to return to the spaceship Khons.

But strangest of all is this. The stairway by which they attempted to return to the surface of the worldlet Thog and the safety of their spaceship Khons had crumbled away under the weight of untold eons and that of the cybermechanisms of the exploration party, and when they tried to climb those crumbling stairs they found themselves trapped in the Ghooric zone kilometers beneath the surface of the worldlet Thog.

And there, beside the oily, lapping sea, the foul lake where puffed shoggoths splash, they remained, the three, forever.

-----

Cthulhu noster qui es in maribus, sanctificetur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua sicut in R'lyeh ey in Y'ha-nthlei.

- Olaus Wormius

-----

Like all good Lovecraftian stories, there's lots of flavour and atmosphere, and even tantalizing hints, but it ends weakly. Bugger. :P

Bound in soul and blood

"I'm not a vampire, but I play one on tv."

That's not exactly true. I play one weekly in my friend's game, though. And something's been happening.

If you don't know the game, here's the introduction from almost all of the sourcebooks. We play Vampire the Requiem.

A Modern-Gothic World

The setting of Vampire borrows greatly from gothic literature, not the smallest amount of which comes from the "set dressing" of the movement. Key to the literary gothic tradition are the ideas of barbarism, corruption and medieval imagery. This World of Darkness can be said to be our own seen through the looking glass darkly.

With regard to barbarism, the world of the vampires is like our own, but with a significant upturn in violence and decay. The streets are more brutal, with the desperate eyes of the unfortunate ever watchful for someone more priveledged from which they can steal something to make their own bleak lives more comfortable. Gangs are more active and violent; vagrants are bolder or they obliviate themselves even more. Even those with vast resources are more fearful of those who would harm them - or more jealous of those who rival their own wealth or power. Their actions can turn fierce with the slightest provocation.

Corruption goes hand in hand with the idea of barbarism. The world is nasty and brutish, and anyone who can get ahead had best avail himself of the opportunity. This is a world of indulgent clergy, avaricious businessmen, cops looking for a payoff and gangsters who have no other options than crime. Even those who don't fit into such neat iconic archetypes face corruption of their own, such as an unwed mother who finds herself addicted to drugs and sells her child for a few grams of crank, or an otherwise honest journalist who finds out that his brother has become a bloodthirsty creature of darkness and must keep the secret for kinship's sake.

Medieval imagery adorns all of the visual elements of the setting, and it can even bleed over into other aspects. Buildings soar heavenward, supported by flying buttresses, gilded when the architects can afford it and studded by gargoyles that scare away evil spirits that are all too real. Streets have fallen into disrepair. Even cities themselves are like medieval bastions, isolated from the outside world, xenophobic and cut off. Anachronisms abound, from antique decorations in otherwise ultramodern buildings to forgotten catacombs beneath bank vaults and subway tunnels. Honest-to-goodness castles might exist in the World of Darkness where none stand in the real world. Moss and vines cling everywhere. Torches and candles light hallways and anterooms. Walls bear breaches, cracks or other signs of disrepair. Ars moriendi punctuate works of art. A sense of dread and fear looms visibly on the face of every passerby.

Is it so strange, then, to believe that such a world hosts the Damned, as well?


And against all of that, we play.

I've played this game before, and the system is pretty good. It's even better since they revamped it, and it is certainly superior to the D20 (Dungeons & Dragons) system for modern-setting games. At least in my opinion.

Anyway, when I make a character to play as (like a lot of people do, I imagine) I imbue some personal aspects in there. Either parts of me, or parts I wish were of me. You can do things that you couldn't do in real life, either because of lack of opportunity, or because social convention wouldn't allow it. Or you could be nice. ;)

My current incarnation in the game is a Tasmanian who's been a vampire for a hundred years or so. Just long enough to get comfortable with his damned existance, and sort of eke out his personality. He was (in life) a standover man. That is, a criminal that preys on other criminals, usually by beating the hell out of them until they give up their goods, and as often as not they wouldn't survive it.

Flinch at the concept all you like - it's a real enough vocation (the term is Australian), and you did read the description of the world we're playing in, didn't you?

Of course, being a blood-fueled corpse only adds to the violence, but there is room for hobbies, moments of humanity, and hollow echoes of caring. Except...

Except that both in what the Storyteller is throwing at us, and our (my and my coterie-mate) own choices, limitations, and reactions... we're getting worked. Which is insanely fun, let me assure you!

But I'm getting sick of it. Not of the game, but when I slip on my character's persona and I feel mentally and emotionally neck deep in the blood (and knee deep in the bodies and gore), I can feel my (character's) humanity dribbling away, and the weight of the everlasting night before me. And I'm tired.

Even worse, as my humanity drains away (Humanity is an actual variable in this game, you understand. You chance losing it by either doing something heinous, or by merely being in the wrong place), and the resulting madness takes hold, I'm more and more unlikely to find my path (dark as it may be) and I draw closer to being a mindless ravening beast.

And sometimes that can be awfully rough on me, the player.

But am I enjoying it? Hell yes! It must be that perverse impulse that makes a little pain pleasurable. Not that I'm implying I masturbate with sandpaper or anything! (whistles innocently)

We play again tomorrow. I'm anticipating/dreading it greatly.

I was going to write about blood, but I ran out of room. Next time!

It was Independence Day in the US yesterday. On a semi-rant on a site I frequent, a guy noted that "Christ, I drive an imported Japanese vehicle to the bar, fueled by Saudi Arabian oil, and I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt sewn together by young Third World Asian hands. My shoes were stitched together in the Philippines, the glass I'm drinking from was wrought in France, and the basketball players prancing across the television screen have Islamic names. Believe it or not, the very code utilized for you to read these words was put together by Panamanians and Philipinos for trivial installations of money. The drugs to which I've become addicted are a product of Peru, and the vodka I'm pouring down the throat of this woman is imported from Sweden. "

Things the US depends upon:

• Thailand and Taiwan for their clothing;
• India for their computer programming;
• Central Africa for their processor chip and cell phone components;
• Mexico for their immigrant minimum wage labour force;
• Japan and Germany for automotive engineering;
• South America for drugs;
• South Africa for diamonds;
• The Vatican for approval;
• The Middle East for petroleum;
• Caribbean Islands for vacation resorts;
• Russia for their space program;
• Scandanavia for premium liquors, and;
• Great Britain for bullshit political support;

Well, none of that was from me. Just a little friendly bashing. ;)

Twelve days have passed since Jay wondered if I could put my old restoration skills to use in knocking back DiceGimp's smell. After careful consideration, both chemical and mechanical, I've come to the conclusion that anything that would do the job suitably would almost certainly be fatal and/or impractical.

And the range on his breath is getting longer. We're up to close to a meter, and this on the SkyTrain with the nearest window open and giving me a breeze. It's probably due to how he drinks his hot chocolate - a packet in a styofoam cup, hot water, and then enough white sugar on top that it doesn't fall in - it actually floats in a pile.

Can you even have teeth after knocking that back every night? :P

I think he might have a film over his eyes too. Let me explain:

I think I've mentioned before that DiceGimp isn't exactly the most observant character. There are lots of examples, but about the best one is when he's doing the exterior of my building.

Among other things, he's to see if there are broken windows, people where they shouldn't be, et cetera. But during my initial round, I go around on the ground floor and close all the blinds so that the various baddies we have in the area can't see if there's anything to grab on the other side. The theory being, of course, that if you can't see it, you won't try to take it. So far so good - we've never had a broken window where the blinds have been closed.

Anyway, as I've also mentioned repeatedly, to close some of these blinds involves me climbing on the desks and stepping into the window ledges to be close enough to twist the louvres shut. While I'm doing this, I'm about as big and visible as can be - standing half a meter off the ground, legs spread for balance, one arm out to steady myself, and the other stretched to the other side of the 1.8m wide window to close the louvres. The white shirt and bright yellow jacket with reflective stripes ought to be a beacon outside.

But you'd never know it to see DiceGimp. Many times he's ridden by outside, at no more than two meters distance, and not seen me. I know this, because there's no reaction, and he's staring into the distance straight ahead.

From my perch in the windowsill, I've immediately phoned him and said, "Dude, how could you blast by and not see me? I'm like the freaking bat-signal over here!"

"What? Where were you?"

"In one of the windows - you just blasted by me!"

"On what side of the building?"

"Nevermind." Sigh.

When I finish my first round, he's usually sitting out in the lobby already, so many times I've gone out there laughing at him, poking fun at his apparent blindness. I tell him (since he doesn't seem to understand) that he's on a bike so that he can respond more quickly to an alarm, not to zoom so fast on his patrols that he can't see anything.

His response?

"Oh, I'm paying attention."

"Oh really," I say, "then how is it you never see me under this ever vigilant scrutiny? If there was someone breaking in, they'd pick one of the windows that doesn't have an exterior spotlight beaming off of them, behind one of the bushes, and they'd be wearing dark clothes. Harder to spot than I am. Besides, I see you when you go by - you're watching straight ahead, where you're biking, not looking around."

"Oh, I look around. (Begin lame improved excuse that really doesn't make any sense) See, what I'm doing is scanning ahead of me to either side at a thirty degree angle. That way, I can take everything in before I get there, and I miss nothing."

Pause for a beat.

"You missed seeing ME!"

"Yeah, I can't figure that out. Why don't you knock on the window to get my attention when I'm going by?"

It's entirely possible I stutter a bit when replying. "Do you think a thief is going to bang the glass and yell `Yo!' at you when you go by?"

"Oh, I'd see a thief."

And so on. In other conversations, he'll brag about how observant he is, and construct various (unlikely) scenarios and how he'd respond, most of them relying on powers he just doesn't appear to possess.

So being the arrogant asshole that I am, I attempted to demonstrate his lack of observation to him.

In the middle of my first patrol on Tuesday night, I snuck out of the building with a roll of masking tape and went over to a window that I'd previously pointed out to him as having badly cracked under its own weight at one point. It's long since been fixed, but in telling him about it I mentioned how the two guys from his company (it was The Romanian and Polish Guy, if you're interested) on patrol that weekend never noticed the cracks across the 1.8m width and 2.2m height.

Anyway, I went out and wrote UF in tape letters thirty centimeters high, at about head level if you're on a bike, above the decorative hedge on the outside of the window. Since the interior is dark, and the blinds were closed, the glass was very black. The exterior spotlight reflected against that whitish-yellow masking tape and made it blaze. Even from a distance, but certainly from the distance that he patrols at.

Then I went back inside, finished my patrol, and told him that Umbrella Foxtrot has really left his mark on the site tonight. He didn't know what I meant, but that was my clue to him.

You may or may not remember that we're calling Buffalo Kisser "Useless Fucker" at work now, since he does nothing at work anymore but show up late, go home early, and watch tv/surf the net during his shift. "Umbrella Foxtrot" is just the radio sign for the initial "UF".

Well... technically it should be Uniform Foxtrot, but to me that just sounded like he was well-blended, as in uniform in consistancy. So sue me for creative licence.

Anyway, it took DiceGimp five and a half hours to spot "the anomaly". He counts it as a victory that he found it. I count it as a failure since it took so long. Bah.

And, and he has the temerity to lie about when he found it!

I was keeping an eye on it from the inside, and when I saw that it was finally gone I went to the front lobby and told him congratulations for finally finding it. A while later, he told me he'd actually found it an hour before I congratulated him.

"Really?" I said. "Really," he said.

"Dude, an hour before you were drinking tea with me in the cafeteria. I was with you for forty minutes, and then I kicked you out because I was starting my patrol. So you started yours and that's when you found it. Don't lie to me about stuff I'm involved in!"

"No no, I really found it an hour before you mentioned it!"

Oh please.

Anyway, the next night I taped a giant X, a meter square, on the window of an adjacent building while on my first patrol. This sucker was clearly visible (light on dark, and with another exterior spotlight on it) at over one hundred meters distance, which is as far as I checked it. Then I went inside and told him I'd put a mark on the ground floor window of one of the buildings.

He never found it.

Several times during the night he'd say that it wasn't fair that I wouldn't tell him the shape, or which building it was on. That if only he knew that, he'd pay extra attention to that area. He appeared not to understand that reflective tape is much easier to see than someone in dark clothes crouched behind foliage, or a dark window with a hole in it.

So at the end of the shift, I walked him out to the general area on the pretext of looking at some sprinklers, and then asked him where the mark was. He said he didn't know. I looked him straight in the eye, and said "Where is it?"

He caught on that he could see it from where we were, and slowly looked around. On his second pass, he saw it. Across the road. Blazing not as brightly as at the start of the night (dawn had broken, banished the high reflectivity) but still clearly visible from many angles and distances.

"Huh," he said. "I don't know how I missed it!"

Indeed.

The next night he was on with The Romanian. Because I was feeling lazy, and to amuse The Romanian, I taped a swastika on the back of Dice Gimp's chair.

Normally I wouldn't have done that, but it was July 1 and nobody was coming in to the building that morning.

He never found it either. Sigh.

Last night though, after mid-shift tea when I remarked that he hadn't found the latest mark, he did find it. Another meter-wide X on the window where we'd last been broken into, on The Sleeper's shift back in November.

He was very proud of having found it.

I put that up the previous day. No kidding, it had been there for 28-29 hours. Way to notice, dude.

He's finally admitted that his powers of observation might be lacking a bit, but he says he's doing the best he can. Which he's not, because both The Romanian and I have explained to him how you're supposed to see things.

This may sound pedantic, but at night in a place where there's no people and things that are desireable to steal, we're all at a little bit of risk. If a window gets broken, and two or three people come in, and hurt me... how long before DiceGimp notices the broken window and discovers I'm not answering my phone? Must I bleed out for five hours before anybody even looks for me?

The Romanian feels the same way.

Well, enough of my "dance puppets, DANCE" routine. Stuff in the news lately that I enjoyed:

You know what TiVo is, I expect? Well, the RIAA is taking except to RiVo (which is the same thing, but for audio), wanting to either cripple it beyond usefulness, or ban it outright. If you read through the article I've linked, check out the short form of Gary Shapiro's (president/CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association) reply to RIAA president Cary Sherman's memo to him. It starts at paragraph four, with "Shapiro's reply stopped just shy of telling Sherman and the RIAA to get bent, saying ..."

Tit for tat! Down in the US there was a decision made (not at a federal level) that local government can seize the homes and business of residents to facilitate the building of something (office complex, mall, whatever) that would provide economic benefit to the area, and more tax revenue to the city.

This is different from how it was, which only allowed such action for public use things, such as highways, and not for private use.

So, a property developer has filed to have the Supreme Court Justice that handed down the decision's personal house and property to be seized so that he can build a new hotel on it.

Wrote the developer: "Although this property is owned by an individual, David H. Souter, a recent Supreme Court decision, Kelo v. City of New London, clears the way for this land to be taken by the government of Weare through eminent domain and given to my LLC for the purposes of building a hotel. The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare."

According to the developer, the "Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Cafe" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in the US. Instead of a Gideon's bible in each room, guests will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged", the statement said. Read the whole thing (article, not the novel) here.

Down in California, the state is weighing a couple of bills requiring bullet marking. The bill, dubbed SB 357 after the popular calibre, basically says that all of the bullets in a given box would have to be engraved with the same serial number, and retailers would have to record who purchased each box. Read more.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Oh, and BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRN to the US! Toyota is building a second plant in Ontario in Woodstock, to make RAV-4s. The reason they chose there instead of one of several places in the US that was willing to subsidize them even more? Essentially, "Americans are too stupid for factory work". Check out the article. :)

Rapture. Rapture's coming.

You know what I'd like to be?

I mean if I had my goddamn choice,

I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all.