Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ In the old days, a man knew how to command his camera.

I don't think I'll be reading/posting much political stuff in the immediate future, but this one just cries out for publication.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Baghdad bunker which the United States said it bombed on the opening night of the Iraq war in a bid to kill Saddam Hussein never existed, CBS Evening News reported Wednesday.

"When we came out here, the primary thing they were looking for was an underground facility, or bodies, forensics, and basically, what they saw was giant holes created. No underground facilities, no bodies," Col. Tim Madere said.

Shortly after the attack, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters: "There's no question but that the strike on that leadership headquarters was successful. We have photographs of what took place. The question is, what was in there?"

So Saddam and sons have vanished without a trace, no WMDs have ever been found, there is rapidly building fundamentalist terror activity in Iraq, Al Quida is very active in the region and they just blew up things in Saudi Arabia.  What exactly did the Iraq attack accomplish again?  And it wasn't just about the oil and a whole "wag the dog" ploy to keep the US voters' attention away from events in the homeland, right?

Access to this site has been pretty slow lately, and just today I checked my hosts and saw this message on the client log in page:

11:00 AM, PST, May 28, 2003 - Denial of Service (DOS) Attack Update - Most website and mail performance issues have been stabilized by upgrades we have implemented to our network. Our engineers have made changes to the network that are absorbing most of the traffic generated by the attack, although you may still experience periodic slowness and brief downtime. This DOS attack is a broad one impacting numerous service providers. We are in discussions with both the FBI and other service providers, and are working collaboratively to end the attack at its source. Our team remains focused on minimizing the impact of this attack on customers until it can be stopped, and continues to work toward restoring all services to full capacity. We will provide periodic updates as the situation changes. Again, thank you for your patience.

So there you have it.

Yesterday I said I would discuss future writing plans, amongst other things. I don't have it all thought out yet, but I am planning on trying to spend less time on this daily blog, and a lot more on fiction. For economic reasons, mostly. Fiction may someday earn me a living. This blog never will.  Pretty much covers that angle of things, eh?

In a larger sense, I want to write fiction more.  During the week I was visiting Malaya I surfed for about 15 minutes total, and really didn't miss it.  I watched almost zero news, didn't surf for news, didn't read any blogs, and I was quite content. Which makes me realize that I don't really want/need that sort of input coming into my brain; I just do it since I'm bored here and don't have anything better to do.

This is something I want to change.

What I should be doing is writing, not just skimming blogs and news sites and chatting some about the topics I see there on this site. Well, perhaps "should" is too strong a word, since it's entirely up to me what I do here. But doing less surfing and more fictioning is what I need to do, and what I want to do, and what I'm going to do.

I do enjoy blogging though, and what I think I'll do is write longish articles, much as I have been doing, but instead of posting them all one day along with a bunch of news items and a photo and making a blog that takes you an hour to read, I'll try to actually review and edit the article somewhat, and then post it in 2 or 3 parts, covering 2 or 3 days.

It'll be along the lines of, "Here's this, come back tomorrow to see part 2."

Of course I'll still do other stuff: movie trailer reviews and random thoughts and circumcision discussion and all that other happy crap that gets me by. But I'll try to improve the quality while decreasing the quality.  Largely to give myself more time to work on stuff that I really need to work on.

If reading this makes you happy, or sad, you should keep in mind that I'm almost certainly lying. I write something very much like this every few months, and then within a week I've completely violated whatever new paradigm I spent so many seconds setting up just a week earlier.  However, since this time I'm strongly motivated to change (to earn a living while quitting my job and ultimately living with Malaya), and I'll be directly motivated in person to change my behavior (by spending so much time with Malaya), there are somewhat better odds of it happening.

eturning to discussion of my vacation/visit/trip, again.  Expect more of this for the next few days.

Unfortunately you won't get that much of it today, since I had a ton of things to do, didn't get all of them done, and I have to get up for work early Thursday morning, which means I can't type that long right now.  Yes, I'm sick of reading my excuses for not having things done by now also.

I was going to post a few photos from the trip today and just chat about those a bit, while gradually working my way into the whole "falling in love via several days of worried misery" topic that I need to talk about.  But since the DOS attacks (that my ISP claims are the slow down problems) are apparently still ongoing, I can't currently get any images to upload at more than about 80 bytes/sec.  And you won't have much more luck than that trying to view them.  And that assumes I can even get the damn update online before I go to sleep in about 30 minutes.

I'm not at all convinced it's really a DOS attack causing the problems, by the way.  I keep getting super fast access speed when I start to upload an image, like 60k/sec, and then it instantly drops down to like 1.2k/sec, and then drops from there. With a DOS attack I should be able to connect, or not.  I've had problems with uploads on this server in the past just like this, and on past servers with Diabloii.net, and it's often like this; fast start to all uploads, and then it drops to a crawl. The hosts always say they haven't done anything and it's not their fault, and then if you keep bitching after a few days they'll get some techie to fix whatever stupid thing they broke and all returns to normal.

Anyway, I see the following pictures, and hopefully you will too. Of course I see them because they are on my hard drive, but let's not go there.

I think she did lose weight, and I know I did.  I'd say about 5 lbs/2 kg, and while I didn't get much exercise while I was there, and slacked off on my usual push up/pull up/sit up/weight lifting, just dropping a few pounds made me look better, since it removed the flab from over my muscles.  I'm not really flexing in this one, just hanging onto my pull up bar with one hand, while the other is holding the camera to point it at the mirror.

Malaya drools over my body (and face) regularly, and perhaps some of that is rubbing off on me, since I'm feeling a lot less negative about my appearance.  And one of our major issues (well, my issue) was that I had to get rid of/break through most of my self-loathing to really accept that this wonderful and amazing woman really did love me. When the time came that I realized I really did feel that way about her in return, it was like this incredible weight was removed from me, and I was laughing and crying at the same time for about 15 minutes, and hugging her and looking into her understanding face and sympathy-filled eyes.  One of the more amazing experiences of my life.

Anyway, the point is that I don't think I hate myself anymore, though I am a long way from loving myself.  This is a good thing for my psyche and relationship with Malaya, but it sort of takes a bite out of my usual self-deprecating humor. Sure, I can still do some, and will, but it's always been so easy to throw in a few "I hate myself and want to die." type remarks to diffuse any situation where it might sound like I was saying I was a good person. And sure, I could still do that, but my blackened, rotten, shriveled heart wouldn't be into it.

Not that I mind being in the pictures, it's that I mind my photographic skills sucking on my own camera, compared to Malaya.  I took about twice as many shots of her as she took of me, yet there are more *good* shots of me than of her.  And this has nothing to do with the model in the photos, and everything to do with bad angles, out of focus images, blurry pictures from the camera being jiggled, etc.

You can click this one to see the full size shot, and it's really quite a nice pic, assuming the FTP program can ever successfully upload the 200k image.  The image seems very Hobbity, like the forest path in FotR where they first saw the Black Rider.  Though somehow the red-headed webmaster standing there with shades and jeans and hiking boots doesn't exactly fit the Middle Earth theme. 

Yes, Malaya and I walked into there.  Yes, there is a similar pic of her standing where I am, but she's got to look over the shots of her and decide which she's comfortable with me posting, and since I only just finished sorting and cropping them a couple of hours ago, and she's asleep, and I can't upload them with the server problems anyway.  Maybe tomorrow I'll post a few more, and at some point there will be vacation photos in the photos section with new pages for the Woods photos (of which this is one, for obvious reasons), the Hills photos (not yet pictured here) and the Blizzard North visit photos (pictured below).

I didn't think I'd get to talk about this any time soon, but since I was told that I could at least say I'd been there in relation to the set items thing Geoff had been failing to inform the readers about, and did so (check the post on dii.net now), here it is.  Malaya and I got a tour of the Blizzard North offices and got to test play v1.10 for many hours Saturday the 24th.

I can't give any details about the patch and I'm not sure I'm allowed to even talk about being there, other than just saying that yes, I really was.

I had talked to a friend who works there about meeting him for lunch, and perhaps getting a quick office tour.  I was there a few years ago, but Malaya had never been (few have) and since her favorite computer game of all time (as far as I know) is Diablo II, I thought she'd enjoy it.

So we had our little testing room and were there most of the day, with a break for pizza, and then a full office tour later on. And we were useful testers, giving them feedback on things and suggestions and our opinions on how things needed to be changed.  And I'd love to talk more about it and what they thought of our ideas and what the changes are, but I signed an NDA and agreed not to talk about it, so I just can't.

And if I could, I'd be doing it on the D2 site anyway.

I can write about it, and pending that article being approved by various people at Blizzard, can post that as soon as the patch is finished and uploaded.  But not before then.  And yes, I asked about it, and they were unyielding.  I'm not sure why they want to keep the v1.10 interesting info from being discussed or revealed in advance, but I'm not the one setting their policy, so it is what it is, and we mortals can merely grumble about it like so many pigeons bemoaning the lack of comfortable perches on a new park statue.

Diablo is an old model and somewhat depilated, but Thrall new and in excellent repair, and seems to be built of stronger stuff than the old foam-rubber Diablo model. It's like a manikin with armor and a mask on it, sort of.  Maybe a manikin of a muscular guy that was painted and had a new head made for it.  The armor is real.  Not that it's sword proof or something, but it's not part of the mold; it's actually stuff that's strapped onto the model.

It's not quite WETA workshop LotR quality stuff, but it's pretty cool for the lobby of an office building. I want one.  Or I suppose I could just work for Blizzard doing plot and quest writing and creation and NPC dialogue editing and writing. *cough*

Not that I've given it any thought or anything; I mean it's not as if it's a job that I'd be really good at, would enjoy a lot, and one that would let me live with Malaya while earning more money than I do now.

Tomorrow I'll start blogging before I'm 95% asleep, and will get into more of the personal issues, rather than just describing what we did and when/where we did it.  At least that's the plan.  I'm too busy yawning and rubbing my eyes to do anything more right now.

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