By "Site Key" I mean an explanation of the things on the site, similar to a map key that explains the abbreviations and symbols and scale of a map.

This black text is writing by me, Flux.  I do 99.9% of the site content, design, etc.

Purple text will usually be indented, like this.  It's a quote from something, usually a news article or email, and is most often seen on the main page in blogs.

For other site design type info, check out the Design Notes page.  It does what it says, and says what it does.  The page headers are all details from various Vincent Van Gogh paintings, chosen for their aesthetic attributes; none of the paintings have any relation to the contents of the page they are seen on (at least not that I know of).  You can see more of Van Gogh's work and read about his life on dozens of web sites. Try this one and this one, or just search for it on google.

Cast of Characters -- updated June 15, 2005

Who are the people mentioned in the blogs here?

Flux -- That would be me, AKA Fluxypoo, Fluxster, and even sometimes Eric. I was based in San Diego, California from the time this site began in early 2002 until July 2003, when I moved up to the Bay Area to live with Malaya (see below). I created the site, write all of the site content, maintain and update all of the pages, etc.  The only stuff here not by me is stuff that I quote from email or news items, and that's generally in purple text and indented. I am all-too impressed with myself.

Flux Photos -- It's only natural that you'd be curious about what I look like, and you can see numerous pictures of me, quite a few with me wearing less clothing than you'd probably like, in the Flux Photos section.  Proceed at your own risk.  There are other pictures of me posted in the daily blogs from time to time, and they'll be archived to the various Flux photo pages at some point.

Malaya -- My girlfriend, partner, housemate, and future wife since I moved to Northern California to live with her in July 2003. Malaya, which is not her real name, mailed me here on February 9, 2003, commenting on my writing and the site in general.  You can see her first ever email in the February 2003 Mailbag. I loved her email and writing voice, replied in detail, she replied to that, I replied to that, we ended up chatting on ICQ, had a few long phone calls a couple of weeks later, and became disgustingly lovey-dovey by early March, 2003.

She was overseas on business at the time of the initial email, but returned to her home near San Francisco, California a few weeks later, I flew up to visit and stay with her for a week in late May and then again in June of 2003, and we hit it off so well that we decided to move in together and I pulled up stakes in San Diego, packed a Ryder truck full, and headed out in July 2003.  It's been nearly 2 years at the time of this update, and things are going great.  We plan on being together for the rest of our lives, though we certainly hope to get our careers going more profitably and move into a larger home within a year or two, travel together, and enjoy some other life experiences before considering the more burdensome aspects of marriage. (I.E. the smaller humans that perpetuate the species while consuming all of their parents' spare time and money.)

Pets -- Rats and snakes in the San Diego days, a pair of cats and the one remaining snake in the Bay Area.  The rodents and serpents were my pets for many years when I lived in San Diego, and they have been frequently discussed in the blog, most accessibly on the various pet photo pages.  Those feature numerous photos of the animals, as well as links to the numerous daily updates when I discussed these lower life forms in much greater detail.

Cats became my primary pets once I moved up to live with Malaya, and became co-owner of her cat Dusty, though Dusty will always love her more. A few months later, in September 2003, we purchased Jinx, who is more my cat than Malaya's, in the same way Dusty is more Malaya's cat than mine, though we all live in the same house. Dusty follows her around, meows for her, etc, while Jinx follows me around, sleeps on the bed when I'm in it, etc. As is the case with the rats and snakes, the best place for quick Dusty and Jinx info is on their photos pages, or the one they share.

Cast of Things -- updated June 15, 2005.

Non-sentient things that feature frequently in the blog.

The HGL Site -- I've been running a Hellgate: London fansite since early 2006. The site can be found at http://hellgate.loadedinc.com.

Hellgate: London is the new game being made (target release; mid 2007) by Flagship Studios, a gaming company founded by the founders of Blizzard North, creators of Diablo and Diablo II.  I followed their departure with some interest, and was paying some (but not a great deal) of attention to HGL until late 2005, when Flagship advertised a job opening for a Community Manager. The job description was largely identical to the work I'd been doing on the D2 site for lo these many years, so I applied. I didn't end up with the job, Ivan Sulic did, but shortly after I found out I wasn't getting it, Elly and Rush, the owners of Diabloii.net, asked me if I was interested in maintaining an HGL site as part of their fansite network.

The timing was fortuitous; a few months earlier I'd have said no way, and a few months later I'd have stopped following HGL closely; but at that moment they caught me on the rebound, so to speak, and I said yes. How long I'll be able to keep putting in a few hours a day on this remains to be seen; I'm prioritizing my fiction work above it, as well as time with Malaya and other real life events, but while the game is under development it's fun. It becomes more of a grind and more job-like once there's an actual product and more time is required to keep the site up to date, but we'll see how it goes come beta time, in early 2007.

The D2 Site -- This refers to the other website I work on, www.diabloii.net, one that a lot of the readers of this site first enjoyed my work on, and clicked over here out of curiosity. "D2" = "Diablo II", a very popular computer game.  I've worked on the D2 site since long before D2 was released, and as that's the leading fansite for the game, and I'm the best-known worker on that site, you could say I'm famous, at least in the limited population of Diablo II fansite readers.

It's important to note that I am just a volunteer worker on the D2 site; I do not own it or set the site policies, and I am not free there to do whatever I want, with the exception of Flux's Decahedron, my every-other-weekly column which began around Halloween, 2002, and has been the only thing I enjoy doing and the only reason I still have any connection to the D2 site at all since about January 2003, given my general disinterest in the game and lack of time/energy to do work on the D2 site, or any site other than this one.

The Fantasy Novel -- This is what The D2 Novel became once I realized, in mid 2003, that it could be adapted and modified into an original novel in the fantasy genre, rather than just some sort of absurdly-oversized fan fiction. The metamorphosis process was been discussed in numerous daily blogs, and by the time of this update, (April 2004), there is almost nothing left in the ongoing novel that ties it to its D2-inspired origins, other than a few fantasy conventions that numerous fantasy worlds share (there are Necromancers in D&D as well as my novel and Diablo 2, Demons in most fantasy ever written, etc).

The fantasy novel, initially entitled Gathering of Prophecy but now using that as a working title only until I think of something I like better, is proceeding well, and is going to be very, very long, probably too long to fit into one novel, though I'm not sure if it will break up into a trilogy very well either. I hope to finish it and get it published, as a start to my hopefully long and successful professional writing career. You can read much more about it here.

The fantasy novel was completed in late 2005 and we hope to have it published in 2006.

The Diablo II (D2) Novel -- This largely mythical creature was what my initial idea for a fantasy novel was going to be. It lived in my head for several years when I was shamefully not writing fiction, then finally began with a rough first chapter that I posted on the D2 site on Halloween, 2002. I kept meaning to get back to it and get back to it, wanting to write the whole thing, post a new chapter every two weeks, etc.  But I never did until early 2003, when I edited and rewrote the entire thing and got it into a near-final form, which you can see in the writing section today.

Unlike most other story ideas I kick around, the D2 novel really came together in my head, and I had most of the key events and the conclusion in mind long before I ever started typing it out. The hope was that once I began I could produce it fairly quickly and in linear fashion, rather than getting halfway through it, realizing one character or plot element wasn't working, and backtracking to rewrite tens of thousands of words (as I usually do in novels).

The problem with the D2 novel was that once I got back to working on it in early 2003, I realized that it was uncommercial as a D2-inspired fan fiction, no matter how loosely-based on the game it was, and how brilliantly I might write it.  So I wondered if I should keep on with it anyway, post the plot outline and summary for the curious, abandon it for now, or what.  Finally I realized that it was too good to let go, and that since it was so loosely-based on the game, I could pretty easily change a few minor things and write the rest of it just about how I had always wanted to, and it would, in theory, be a viable novel to get published and earn some money from.

The revelatory and official confirmation of change from "The D2 Novel" to "My Fantasy Novel" came about in the daily update on March 23, 2003. Read some collected blog entries about it here.

Miss Pretty Lies -- A contemporary horror novel that I wrote back in about 1993, updated a bit in about 1996, and then abandoned until early 2003, when, thanks to Malaya's prodding, I dug it up, reread it, and posted it for her to read.  She liked it far more than I expected, far more than I did, and thought it had the potential to be rewritten and turned into a viable novel. While I initially thought she was nuts, I have come to grudgingly agree, though I really don't want to do it.

It is a real novel though, long enough, detailed enough, with enough events and interesting characters and such.  It's just really messy in places and needs to be tightened up and streamlined.  None of which do I want to do.  However, since digging it up and letting her see it, it's far more alive in my mind than it was previously, and I can envision taking it apart and putting it back together again at some point in the future, perhaps after Gathering of Prophecy is completed.

The Mountain Bike -- My primary form of exercise while in San Diego. Since moving to the Bay Area and settled in with Malaya in an area that's pretty lacking in good mountain biking trails, the bike has become mostly an object that takes up precious space in our storage shed. However, when I was in San Diego it was a machine that I utilized primarily on the perilous dirt trails of Mission Trails Regional Park, a great riding area not too far from my dad's house. Photos of the park and more information about it can be seen here, and also when I visited it after the big San Diego fires of summer 2003.

Older Characters and Things

The following were at one point featured regularly on the blog, but have since been retired for various reasons.

The Crappy Apartment -- I lived in first one, then a second crappy apartment during my time in San Diego. These were both small, empty, ill-decorated, lonely places that I'm quite happy to forget now that I live with Malaya, in a small but non-crappy condo. She owns it outright, so we're not being raped on rent or mortgage payments, and can decorate and modify it as we see fit. Our long term plan is to earn enough money to buy a much nicer place, a house ideally, and live there while keeping this one as a rental property/investment.

Kay -- Kay is the nickname of a self proclaimed hot chick who happened upon this site, liked the writing style of the webmaster, and mailed him asking to see a photo or two in early January, 2003.  She was first discussed on the site in the update on January 7, 2003, and yes, she was cool with me posting that pic, and then the two showing her face the next day.

Kay was initially interested in me as a potential date, but I was not in a place mentally at that point to consider that possibility (how could a girl like me when I had so little regard for myself?) and my negativity about myself turned her off to the dating thing. Which was just as well, since as we got to know each other better and became friends, we realized we wouldn't have been real compatible as BF/GF.

We remained friends for a couple of months, and she featured prominently in the blogs, until we went through a messy online break up in early April 2003. I dumped her for her own good, basically, since she was a very unhappy and self-destructive person who kept repeating disastrous behaviors in her life and was using me (and other friends) as crying hankies while refusing to listen to any and all advice that she might have followed to improve her life.  Though we parted with her furious at me and very hurt, I really do wish her the best and would be happy to bump into her in about 2008, when she'll hopefully have gotten some counseling, found a great man instead of just another user to throw her vagina at, and had a lovely child or two.

Starina -- Was the flamingly gay online alter ego of a gay male loyal site reader who mailed me regularly and was quoted on the site frequently for several months early in 2003. Her (yes, "her") proudest moment to date was supplying a prominently-quoted email the day after my first effort at posting a sexy picture (of myself) in late February, 2003. Starina is usually labeled with the female pronoun, by her own preference, and is somewhat of a caricature of the flaming homosexual male. All intentionally, of course.

Starina was last mentioned on the blog on March 23, 2003, though I communicated with her and her real life counterpart via email all through April and May 2003. I stopped receiving mails from him/her by June of 2003, and have never heard from him/her since, for no known reason.  She/he may still read the site and just never feel like emailing, or she/he might have been offended by something I blogged about or emailed, and just decided to vanish, rather than discussing or arguing about it with me.

Charlene  -- A quickly and mercifully-abandoned experiment, Charlene was an imaginary female co-writer, dreamed up when I was feeling especially full of self-loathing and self-criticism. I quickly grew sick of her input and abandoned her, to the great relief of my few (at the time) regular readers.

While she lasted, Charlene contributed nasty comments about whatever I'd just said, comments that were spread here and there through the daily blogs whenever I felt a strong need to prick my own bubble. For example:

Red text like the following is a comment by Charlene, a friend of Flux's.  She doesn't do much content, just makes a remark here or there, usually based on something Flux says.

Yeah sure, minimize my contributions already.

She tends to be caustic, or at least sarcastic, but that's just how she and Flux show their affection.  Or something.  Why am I slipping into third person as I write this anyway?

Because you need the practice to keep up with Charlene?

As was pretty obvious at the time, and was officially revealed somewhat later, Charlene, who debuted August 7, 2002, was never a real person; just a phantom in my head. And a bitchy, unpleasant one at that.  The experiment in alter ego blogging lasted only a couple of weeks, mercifully.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.