As a result, the average mailbag page should have 6 or 8 or 10 mails, all with comments from me, all about things that weren't beaten to death on the main page, and all on interesting subjects.  Enjoy April's offerings.

Mails are arranged in chronological order, with the earliest on top.

Date: April 3, 2004
From: Nathan
Subject: Kitties

I finally got around to uploading a few kitty pictures. Hopefully they entertain you as much as yours entertain me ;) My wife and I have two cats, Liberty and Star. Their kitschy names derive from their birthday, July 4, 1999. They are sisters, and they looked almost identical when they were kittens. However, as you can see from the pics, they have certainly diverged since then. I will see if I can find some photos of them as kittens, as they looked much like Jinx as a kitten. Star is the big fluffy one, and she is the one whom I think most resembles Jinx. If I get a chance, I will catch her lounging belly-up like Jinx. She resembles her most in that pose, since Star's back fur is darker than Jinx's, but her belly is quite light.

Enjoy the pics.

Nathan

Here are two of the shots he sent, cropped down somewhat, and it's true, his kitty Star does look quite a bit like Jinxie, at least in the face. The shot on the right is strange though, I mean doesn't the head look like it's a mask, or like it's been Photoshopped on from another image? Light gray head, slate body.

There are literally dozens of Jinx photos on the Jinx Photo page but here are a couple to make a quick comparison possible.

The left pic off Jinx was taken in late 2003, while the one on the right is from around April 2004. She grew quite a bit between them, but she basically still looks the same; just bigger. She's about a year old now (August 2004) but isn't very large for an adult cat, so we assume she's still growing. Her body fur isn't as long as Star's, but her facial fur, especially on her cheeks, appears to be longer (not shown that well in either of these photos).

And no, no one really cares how long the fur on my cat is. But what's the fun in having a homepage if I can't talk about my pets in excruciating detail?

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Date: April 8, 2004
From: Aahz
Subject: April Fools?

Just got back from vacation and caught up on the daily blogs. Something stood out on the April 1st update at the end. You were discussing the Star Wars project. Quoting:

"Despite the fact that it doesn't work, it's colossally expensive, and the main threat to US security is clearly no longer IMDBs."

I'm going to guess that you mean "ICBMs." But perhaps an Internet site about movies once was a threat to US security. The C.A.P. guy probably thinks so.

Letters are hard. There are too many of them.

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Date: April 26, 2004
From: Derek
Subject: Not blogging for a year

I'd understand it if you blogged only once a week or something, in order to free up spare time for novel-creation. The fact that you blog on a near-daily basis with a such a considerable investment of time per day is amazing. Most people just bitch about whatever they ate and bullshit like that.

Thinking about it more, I'd feel less like I was missing out for those days I work 2 shifts and collapse into bed at 1am if I knew you weren't blogging until the end of the week (or something).

 

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Date: April 26, 2004
From: Leo
Subject: blogging and writing

hey flux,
just a quickie to say don't worry about blogging. the novel is much more important - it'll get you money :) blog when you want to, not when you feel you have to

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Date: April 23, 2004
From: Donnie
Subject: as per your request

If you did not blog for a year, but your novel (first one anyway) was released in a year, I think that the majority of your site readers would really understand that. Though being only one of like 200 I really can't speculate as to the other's tastes. I think that it is certainly a good thing that you are focusing more on your novel than your blog, but I am always the one that pisses on the party, so to speak, and if all of your other site readers would rather have blog than fiction, they should seriously consider medication.

I was talking about time spent writing fantasy vs. time spent blogging, and quoted an email from a reader who said he'd be happy if I didn't blog for a year if it hurried my novel along and that he thought my readers would understood. I quoted him and appreciated the sentiment, but replied that I didn't imagine I would still have any fans if I didn't update the site for an entire year, and certainly wouldn't blame anyone for giving up on checking for updates after that long.

In response to that came several emails, three of which you see here, from readers fully supporting me if I stopped blogging entirely to focus entirely on fiction. I'm usually very flip and snarky, but I really do appreciate this sort of thing, especially when it's as entirely undeserved as I feel it is. After all, it's not like anyone reading this site (other than Malaya) has really read anything by me other than a few Diabloesque short stories and a sample first chapter of a fantasy novel that I banged out in a few days one Halloween. And yet people believe in me, believe in my writing skills, and constantly tell me how eagerly they await my published novels.

I don't know what to say -- sincerity isn't my strong suit. Thanks, though.

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Date: April 26, 2004
From: Vik
Subject: Question

How did you come to the name "Flux"?

His email actually contained quite a bit more than this, but since the rest of it was about political issues of the day, and I don't believe I've ever answered this short question anywhere...

The name actually came about from my early play in Ultima Online. I'd played Diablo 1 before that, and gave all of my characters theme names. I've since forgotten most of them, but they all had the same word as part of them. My main character was a rogue named "Daughter Goose," and I believe I had several others with "goose" in them somewhere. Being as that particular type of waterfowl has no real meaning or interest to me, and I just picked the name for the semi-pun off of "Mother Goose," I wasn't going to stick with that as my online handle forevermore.

I continued the idea of having one word as part of all my char names in UO, so my friends (and enemies?) would know who I was even if I was playing a different character that day. I tried a number of different names, wanting a cool one that wasn't too common, including Ophidian (snake-like), Morpheus (Greek god of dreams; this was long before The Matrix, and when that came out and the name became as fanboy overused as any character name from DragonBall Z or LotR, I was very glad I hadn't stuck with it), Flux (I liked the verb-meaning of it, and I was aware of the cartoon Aeon Flux as well), and a few others. For a while I used two names, "Flux Ophidian," and a few of my very first news posts on the D2 site, back in 1997 or 1998 were under that name, but since no one could ever spell or remember the Ophidian part, and it felt sort of silly to me to use two names like that, I gave it up and stuck with just plain Flux. I didn't love the name and it didn't have any special meaning to me, but it was short, memorable, and seemed relatively uncommon. 

All was well for a couple of years, until I started seeing more and more people using that name, found out that one of the best-known cheating PKs from the old Diablo 1 days used that name, and started hearing weak jokes based on the homophone aspect of it (sounds like "fucks"), or mentions of the Back to the Future "flux-capacitator." It grew yet more annoying as the D2 site grew more and more popular, and I started getting several emails a month from people who thought they knew me from some other game I'd never played, (I never got one from someone who did know me from UO, oddly enough.) or who had met someone in a D2 game who claimed to be me, or just happened to have my nickname.

Looking back, I would definitely have picked a different, longer, more unique name, or maybe even stuck with Ophidian. I still love the ring of it, it's got a nice feel sliding off your tongue, and even though I've seen it in use a few other times as an online nick, it's still far more distinctive than Flux has turned out to be.  If I were still spending much time in an anonymous online environment I'd probably consider picking a new, better, more unique, etc, name and going with that and building it up so people knew me from it. But since I'm not, and since I've got my real name all over this website, there doesn't seem to be much point in worrying about aliases now.

If you would like to be included in a future mail bag, give it a try.

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