A word from the penny arcade

( snip snip )

It's life Jim, but not as we know about it.

Caution this post contains references to creepy crawlies

Spiders. Spiders spiders spiders. Now normally I don't have a problem with these little guys, note the use of the word little money spiders and suchlike I find pretty harmless and ignorable, but lately forces of the ISLF (International Spider Liberation Front) have been steadily taking over my house and I had been doing my best to ignore them and let them get along with their eight legged lives, such as it is. Including a fair sided one (about a inch and a half) across in my office that had a tendancy to hang over my head on the ceiling. After all, live and let live this is a planet of things more than humans and generally speaking enough though I am a self confessed carnivore I have no wish of unneccessary harm to any sientiant thing, save wasps, hornets and other flying stinging things which must all be wiped out.
Last night the spiders crossed the line when, when going to do my teeth before beddy byes, I discovered a four inch across eight legged beastie of doom sitting in my sink. Irrational icky sensations crawled down my spine and I ran out of the bathroom like a scared little puppy, grabbed my can of nuke-a-bug and ran around the house spraying everything I could find that had more than two legs (which meant incidentally that my penguins were safe) however the huge creature of death in my sink refused to go, even after I sprayed it to death and tried to flush it's shudder evil carcass down the sink with boiling water. It is currently suck in the sink bit at the bottom, one leg pointed slightly up as if to point at me and say "I'll get you for this, my minions will rise again".
My new plan is to get some sink de-gunger and chemicalise it away in a toxic burst of evil hissing and bubbling - which will make my bathroom stink even more after the lingering scent of bug-b-gone is still hanging there - because there is no way I want to touch the thing at all, or even go close to it. I did my teeth and shaved in the kitchen sink this morning.
Yes this is irrational, yes this thing could in no way hurt me, save in ways I don't really want to think about - but that doesn't mean that in any way I want to go near or touch the bloody thing, ewww.
This morning they struck back, and the war against spiderism went up another notch; I extracted my car from my garage this morning, so I could drive into town over lunch, and noted I'd left the sunroof open. Sure enough, hanging in my car was a frikking spider. I punted it out the car with a piece of cardboard.
Well if they want war, it's war they'll get.

Plug a dub dub

A brief horah for Leisure games here after this morning bright and early my copies of the new editions of Vampire Dark Ages and Dark Ages Companion arrived - huzah! Excellent service :)
This is now the point you should stop reading before I start obsessing.
Ahhhh the new dark ages companion is out! The Lhiannan have been almost completely changed! Their crappy discipline remains, thankfully, crap, although it is slightly less crap and better explained, the latter being more important. But most importantly the description and details for the clan have changed from a 14 point font ramble about "ooo they're like, pagan vampires and don't like the church, yeah man." to 12 point historical, interesting slant completely away from what they were to a line of vampires who have a shard spirit co inhabiting with the blood of power in their veins, it all makes so much more sense and their flaw has changed to something a lot more sensible and interesting as well. This means I may have to change my character of doom if it ever gets approved but it does mean that they've actually thought a lot more about the clan as a whole even though it does only get two pages for it's description. I can only hope for a bloodlines book or maybe (ha) a clanbook in the future, regardless I have a lot of work to do now on my own offering.
Go White Wolf, in two pages they've done more to keep my cash and enthusiasm ensured than anything else they've done lately.

Life, time and the last great roundup

And so the month rolls ever onwards, and the days on flying past. It's 2002, "already", it's nearly autumn again and another year is racing past with just a few snippets in my mind for what has been and gone. Five months to go and the ever worrisome big three oh will arrive and the playtime numerical count of the twenties will roll past and despite what I am and how I act I will fell that a landmark has passed. So what happened? There's been life, love, laughs, ups and downs, and practically speaking 30 is likely a mid-low end point for midlife (60 not an inaccurate guesstimate of lifespan given my diabolical diet) and I look back at the threads and trails that have led me here, I can see what ifs and maybes and possibilities and, mostly, I believe that I have made the right choices for the most part, as they were available, and that all-in-all I have very little regrets or woes to bare basically about it all. I've got a decent job that pays a nice amount of cash, I have a house, car and a good bunch of friends. I'm not yet struck with any bizarre or twisted disease or overtly noticeable insanity and I still have use of all primary physical functions of my body. It's just that number looming that is worrying, I vividly remember back in my mid teens looking at the world ahead and wondering where and what I'd be when I hit thirty and what I'd be doing, I think mostly I would be happy that I'd be ending up here, true there's no architypical marriage and kids ^tm but that maybe isn't beyond the realms of possibility before extinction. So all in all not too bad.
So why the pre mid-life crisis? It's just the number, a number I hadn't actually ever planned, or thought about reaching in truth; I never had thought past the year 2000 for any of my plans or ideas for life and now two years on I find that I have no plan, no idea or direction for where I want to go, do or be after this, through the thirties and into the forties and what will be happening, no plan at all.
My mind blanks when I try to think about where tomorrow will be and often yesterday drifts into a vague dream of today, there is always only the now, the instant, this moment that I live and breath in that slips away, second by second, and vanishes and flows away like a stick caught in a river. No plans.
Caution; rare personal views on religion follow, may cause issues or offense; I think that this is one of the lures of religion and faith, and to an extent science (which is religion after a sense) they give an easier perception of where you are in the world, you no longer need to define, or deconstruct certain pretexts of the world because they have already been defined for you; but this I cannot do, I can't for myself accept what - even maybe science - things are laid out for me in this world, I don't want to have to rely on what others have determined existence is, which eternal essence has created me, I want to define and deconstruct what I am, what I mean and what I should do; free will, free thought, free perceptions. These are my most fundamental parts as a free thinking being, true I am "tainted", biased and influenced by all that I see, all those I talk to and all that I read - but that is part of what the world is, in investigating and examining it I become more part of it as I understand (such as I can) more of it, and in doing so I loose more of myself to it as less of myself becomes me and more of what the world plays to my mind with twin channel 3D technicolor.
Feed my mind and my senses and seduce me with your targeted concepts.
So, brain dump mostly completed now, and slightly more cohesive and comprehensible than my usual ones, ah the wonders of old age and the clarity of wisdom, ahem. Time is still running whatever, and that is the single truth I suppose, you can't change time (pending scientific creations which, since nothing has appeared to indicate anything from the future directly as of yet, tends to point into the negative for it ever being created - but I digress, always footnoting) but you can change reality by imposing yourself on it and those who live in it, no matter what you believe, at least in this stage of consciousness I think I'm still walking on the right path for now and if I do end up at the pearly gates at the end I can look ol' St.Peter/agent of the afterlife in the eye and honestly say "I always tried my best to do what I thought was right."
In the end, this world here and now is the only one we know we can change anyway...

War correspondant report

"Good afternoon, here is the 13:36 news at I-LJ, we have an update for you on the latest on the War on spiderism straight from the field today.
Commander Penguin of the European Executive for the Extermination of Killer Spiders (EEEKS) reported that whilst on a routine mission to supply base C for crucial supplies of pixie crack he encountered a spider inflitrator hiding on the wing mirror of his transport and was forced to employ an immediate strike of cardboard level in a flicking action against the spider, George?"
"Well I think it's clear to say at this point that the spiders are obviously taking this war seriously, the commander is being harassed here almost immediately after his public statement of 'No tolerance on spiders' and I think we'll be seeing a lot more incidents like these as the spiders demonstrate what they're capable of."
"Indeed, George, there have been rumours that the spiders have been preparing chemical based silk entrapments back at the commanders base, is their any truth in this."
"At this stage John, it's hard to say; indeed the commander has mentioned to be only earlier this morning that a new line of defense more suitable for use around our troops will be employed this very evening in a renewed assault against the spiders' defenses."
"Do we have any clue as to this new weapon?"
"Not at this time, John, no."
"So you can see with the war only in it's first day already the stakes are running high, we'll bring more reports as and when we get them."