Current Entertainment:
DVD ¤ Matrix: Reloaded
CD-ROM ¤ D2X
CD Player
¤ Metallica - St. Anger
¤ Nine Inch Nails - Still
¤ Orff - Carmen Burana

Books Lying Open
¤ A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe

If you're dying to read more, and who isn't? You should hit up my new Halloween story.  I wrote it for the D2 site, and the version you're reading on this site is 99.9% identical, though I'll eventually give this one a more thorough editing, while the version on the D2 site isn't changing ever.  There are also added notes at the bottom of this one that you won't see on the D2 site, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

As the intro says, it's the 5th in my ongoing series of humorous holiday tales set in the D2 universe.  It would be good if you read them all in order, since the characters and monsters and events are continuous.  You need to know that Duriel and the Necromancer have a bitter rivalry to appreciate some of the jokes in this one, and you need to know that the monsters ambushed and betrayed and almost killed the characters in the 4th story to appreciate the humans' caution at the start of this Halloween tale.  And of course it would help if you knew about the spells and skills in the game, what the characters are like, what the monsters look like, etc.

But even if you don't, you'll probably still enjoy the story. And if not, that's too bad.

In other news, I received zero comments about yesterday's post on the PayPal account closure and my financial issues with site hosting.  No one loves me.  I didn't get to look into the Amazon.com tip jar thing yet, but I'll try to find some time for that Saturday evening.  It occurs to me to wonder if hey have similarly conservative anti-adult content issues, and what I'll do if they do.

Is it worth it to me to tone down and remove some of my site content in order to keep open an online fund transfer option that's used just a few times a month?  Perhaps.  I'm probably just going to hope that Amazon.com doesn't notice/care, since I've had the sell through merchant thing for about six months (and made less than one month's hosting costs in that time) and they've never objected to anything yet.

Some day I'll have money and/or a real job, and will no longer care about trying to hustle up $20+ a month from site readers just so I don't have to spend dozens of hours a month writing this site, and then having to pay for the privilege of posting it on the Internet as well.  Of course when I have money and if I had a real job, I probably wouldn't have time to do this more than once or twice a week anyway. Catch-22.

Halloween here was quite boring.  I had written about 60% of my D2 Halloween story on the 30th, or so I thought.  So upon waking up and eating breakfast (lunch) with Malaya on Friday, I started writing in the early afternoon, thinking I'd need a couple of hours to finish up.  Malaya wanted to go do some shopping, but I asked her to wait and work on her own thing and I'd take her once I was done, since I didn't think it would take too long.

Of course it took longer than anticipated, as I was less than 30% finished, judging by the final length and the complications of late rewrites and editing, and by the time I was done and posted the forum thread and the story and news about it, it was after 7pm, and too late for the mall or any other shopping, and Malaya was starving, having put off eating or going anywhere or doing anything all day as she waited on me.

We finally got out and went to dinner at Chili's, eating there for the second time in a week, after I hadn't eaten at a Chili's for something like 6 months.  I'd sworn them off after the food had gotten steadily worse every time I went with my dad (about once a month) for about half a year, but either they've improved or I was having a run of bad luck, since it's been pretty damn good both times with Malaya.

Last week I got a cajun chicken sandwich which was tasty and decently spicy, and the chocolate shake was excellent as well.  This time I got a veggie/mushroom quesadilla with rice and beans, and it was very good also; if a bit too oily, resulting in the bottom of the quesadilla being rather soggy.  Malaya had chicken fried steak last time and loved it, but got mediocre chicken strips with fries this time.  She didn't like the flavor of the beer-batter too much.

Anyway, it's nothing earth-shaking, but the food was pretty good, there was no wait to be seated (something I never saw in San Diego at any Chili's I ever ate at), the service was pretty quick and it was about $20 for the two of us each time, not including the tip.

All of the wait staff at Chili's had on costumes as well, though I don't really consider that a bonus since they were lame costumes.  Our waitress was dressed as Poison Ivy, according to Malaya. I would have thought she was the Jolly Green Giant, personally, with green tights and lipstick, but this big baggy leafy dress thing, and leafy shoes as well.  Zero sex appeal, and I believe Poison Ivy was supposed to be hot, in the old Batman lore. The door greeter/"I'll show you to your table" guy was in some sort of prairie maternity dress, for no reason I could ascertain. One other waiter I noticed had on an Indiana Jones outfit that was pretty cool, aside from his white and black striped whip.

For other Halloween stuff, there is none.  We had zero trick or treaters, unless some came while we were out to dinner, and I haven't seen anyone in the condo complex with a jack-o-lantern out.  Perhaps they've decorated indoors as Malaya and I have done.  And speaking of decorations, see the pics of the Halloween tree below.  It's been done and on display for a week or more, and while I'd like to say that I saved the pics until now, that would be a lie; I've just never gotten around to posting them.  If I hadn't done the story yesterday I might have put up the Halloween Tree photo page for the Halloween occasion, but since I didn't, and since I still don't have it, you'll just have to settle for some final tree pics below, and a full page on it at some later date.

I've seen it argued that one of the primary motivations for the whole Iraq Attack thing was to enrich friends of Bush and the other plutocrats who are in his administration.  Not that there's any evidence for that sort of thing, you understand.

I spent some more time bending the branches (mostly making them straighter, removing a lot of the kinks and twist I'd put in) and then finished applying the branches to it, eventually adding twigs to at least 95% of the metal, and extending the sticks well off to the ends of the wire in numerous places.  You can see the finished model below, both before and during the spray painting process.

The painting was easy; I just used a paper clip to hook an upper limb and turn it around after spraying at it from every angle, and in about five minutes the whole thing was done.  I left it to dry overnight and then painted it upside down the next day, holding it by one of the legs.  Lots of the bottoms of branches were still brown and brass, so this was necessary. I did some sideways touch up the next day, and while it's far from perfectly ebony over every square cm, that's okay.  It's supposed to look a little ragged.

With the painting finished the decoration could begin.

We had a bag of mixed Halloween things that cost us about $3 at Michael's, and that came in very handy.  It provided all of the orange spiders, the five finger puppet evil figures, the five larger plastic spiders, the bats, and the few black spiders we put on top of the cotton spiderwebs.  A bag of those, of which we used about 1/20th, was like $1.50, and I twisted craft wire around several other ornaments, decorative rocks and such that I got for about $1 each, and hung those as well.

Here you see a couple of shots of the completed thing, sitting on our bed since the kitties wouldn't leave me alone long enough to take any photos of it on the floor, and I was able to lock them out of the bedroom for long enough to take these shots.  Or mostly lock them out, as the next two photos attest.

I only covered one face of it with the cotton spiderwebs, thinking that it would be cool to have a different look from side to side, and also that I didn't want to bury all of my nice wood work and decorations beneath obscuring cotton strands.

Malaya's idea was to put some of the black plastic ring spiders on top of the white spiderwebbing, but I didn't put the stuff on heavily enough to make the black ones on top of it visible, so that plan was scratched for now.  Perhaps next year, if we dig it out and make some modifications before display?

Does Jinx like it?  Does she smack at it if given any chance whatsoever?

Of course she does.

Isn't she cute as she does herself permanent brain damage from the paint fumes?

Of course she is.