9/13/07
Whoops, made a fuck-up with yesterday's entry. Only wrote a brief outline and wrote about everything else except the outlined bit.

So since Friday I've been playing Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Pretty much it's a computer roleplaying game set in a fictional world where steampunk technology exists alongside magic. I got as far as the main city, Tarant, where I ended up giving up once again because the game's pacing is poor, levelling is not worthwhile and all skills suck unless one pumps massive amounts of points into a skill.

When levelling up, you have to understand that a character gets one point to increase something about the character. One has the option of increasing a stat (int, str, etc.), buying a new schematic for technology or learning a new spell. Shit like magic and technology are very important because they give a character an edge against opponents. So once again, Arcanum became frustrating and I put it aside even after using a cheat program.

NetHack, on the other hand, is an amazing game with no graphics. A simple dungeon crawl where the primary quest is to recover the fabled Amulet of Yendor for one's diety. The character levels up quickly but plateaus around level thirteen which is the time when folks start looking for potions of gain level or mixing potions of enlightenment and levitation for potions of gain level. Dungeons are different everytime, the only mainstays are the elemental planes, the castle, Medusa's lair and Gehennom. I've never gotten tired of playing NetHack nor have I been as frustrated with NetHack as I have become with Arcanum.

Of course I really like the concept of steampunk. Basically that's Victorian level tech which does the same job as modern day technology. A gigantic steam powered artificial intelligence that has whistes, brass fittings and cog wheels instead of a piece of plastic that weighs less than 5 pounds and requires less energy. I did make a suggestion over at rec.games.roguelike.nethack to include some stuff like schematics and creating steampunk devices but yet another NetHack idea went ignored on the newsgroup.

I did discover there's Steamband, a variant of Angband, with steampunk elements but I'm not inclined to try any other roguelike until I ascend a chaotic male dwarven valkyrie and Kokujin the monk who has been reincarnated 470 times to reclaim the Amulet of Yendor according to my log file. Ilsa's only been reincarnated 190 times and the logfile has a total of 782 entries.

My beard is now trimmed after wearing it long for nearly seven months.

The longest streak of dreams per Dreams and Nightmares is fifteen in a row. From Hallowe'en 2005 to November 14^th, 2005. That's #650 to #664. Now I can argue that it doesn't count because dream #661 on November 11^th, 2005 was an old dream rather than a fresh dream.

As I write this on 9/11/07 @ 10:10 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time I've had nine in a row.

Jeez, 939 dreams. I don't have the time or patience to go through them all. Plus the big list weighs in at 53 kilobytes. Laughable in this day and age but it was making the main page of heptapod.org unwieldy.

I believe that most of the dreams I've been posting have been dreams that happen in the early morning hours rather than the middle of the night.

One of the pleasures of living on my own out in Colorado regards the morning hours. My parents have a habit of turning on the lights in the house in the morning. The business areas of the house all face the east so even in winter there's usually a decent amount of light coming through the windows. The den will be bright enough to navigate and so will the kitchen. Yet the lights would be on.

This would always get on my nerves. As a practical person, I'd see it as wasting valuable resources. Plus on a visceral level it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Even though I live in a basement apartment there's a decent amount of natural light during the day. Enough to read by but usually a small lamp is necessary so I don't ruin my eyes.

Despite Olympics Guy being a clod and thumping around with 500 pound feet making my ceiling squeak, I reckon I would've awakened at the ungodly hour of quarter past seven on my own. Now I understand why retired people are always waking up at five and six a.m. without any ill-effect. Over the years they've been trained by the corporations of the Republic to rise with the sun. Heck on Tuesday I woke up around eight-ish.