Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I’m all signed up for Journalcon 2003, and confirmed as a panelist in the session titled “Niches and Hoes: Specialty Web Sites”. When I went to the Programming page to see if my name was there, I saw that I was a moderator. Zoinks! Sure enough, that’s what I was asked to be.

Hopefully the panels won’t be as formal and structured as panels at other conferences. I’m a little anxious though – I don’t know many of the journal crowd, and here I’m going to be speaking. I hope it won’t end like all the school dances I went to: alone and crying in the bathroom. Okay, not all the dances were like that. Just middle school. Shudder.

Anyway, I’m scouring Google for ‘panel moderator tips’.

I really hated middle school. That’s another story for another day.

A couple of weeks ago I had posted a desperate cry for help in locating a forum about immersive gaming. Someone pointed me in the right direction a couple of days later. What I was seeking is called Alternate Reality Gaming, or ARG.

A couple of years ago when the movie A.I. came out, there was a massive immersive gaming experience in order to promote the movie. History and massive spoilers can be found here. Basically there was some weird stuff on the movie posters that got a group of people interested, who started digging for information. The group came together and called themselves Cloudmakers. The game was known as The Beast.

Not long after, Electronic Arts launched their game called Majestic, which was conspiracy theory laden. The game came to a halt on September 11 with this letter to players:

EA has temporarily suspended service on Majestic. Given the recent
national tragedy, we feel that some of the fictional elements in the
game may not be appropriate at this time. We will contact you again
concerning resumption of the game.

Alas, it was not to be. The game was never resumed.

Fine, you say, but what’s your point, and what is an ARG? Well, as Fark would say, “In Soviet Russia, game plays you“. Alternate reality gaming is played on the web, but also via instant messaging, email, IRC, phone calls to and from you, postal mail, and occasionally elements are played in person. When you sign up for a game, you can choose to give them as much information as you feel comfortable with.

The web puzzles are usually devilishly difficult, which is why people team up to work them. It generally takes a group of people to figure them out. I read about one that had letters interspersed through a block of text. You had to extract the letters, then find out how they had been coded (base 64 and rot 13 are popular choices). Uncoded, they came out to something like “WHO ROBS CAVE FISH OF THEIR SIGHT WE DO WE DO”. You had to realize that those were lyrics from a Simpsons episode about the Stonecutters, then go back to the URL you were previously looking at and substitute “stonecutters.html” for the page.

The ARG community can be as persistent as a yap dog on a pants leg. The site www.8march2003.com generated such buzz that the authors had to put up a disclaimer so that people would leave them alone. The blog She’s a Flight Risk has had people speculating for months whether it is a factual or fictional account.

So where can you go to try out the experience? A very short (some campaigns last for months) game can be found at Random House’s DaVinci Code site. There’s a game on at Jaded Media which is not exactly full-blown alternate reality, which usually has a very complicated plot, but gives a good example of the types of puzzles you’re likely to encounter while playing other games. Martha’s Boarding House has a rundown of games that are ongoing. Currently, the active games seem to be Chasing the Wish, Capture the Flagmonkey, Search4E, and Jaded Media. Other recent games have suffered meltdowns, as either the puppetmasters (parlance for those who run the game) have realized they bit off more than they could chew, or gamers lost interest.

Coming up is Acheron, which has been advertising a Summer 2003 start but is rumored to be waiting for Chasing the Wish to end.

The true immersive games don’t have any replayability factor, nor can you play them after the game is ended. You have to be in the game as it happens. I’ve signed up for the Acheron game and am anxiously awaiting its start. In the meantime I’m amusing myself by reading up on past games and speculating about those in the future.

Other resources:
Alternate Reality Gaming Network
UnFiction and the UnForum
Collective Detective
Martha’s Boarding House
CloudMakers
DeadDrop

Also check out Yahoo Groups for the game you’re looking for. There are several groups on there.

What SWAT hand signals really mean.
Money’s gonna get strange this fall. You have been warned.
For the person who has everything, a kangaroo scrotum to hang from a car.
Isn’t Larry Flynt special?
Saddam as you’ve never seen him before.

I’ve posted about my migraines recently. Lately they’re out of control. I’ve been getting incapacitating headaches around 2 times a week now. It used to be that I would get them twice a year. I’ve tried all of the new migraine drugs – frova, zomig, imitrex, relpax; the old reliable that used to work, midrin, heavy amounts of advil and caffeine; elavil and muscle relaxants to take at night. My lord, that is an insane amount of medication, all taken in trial and error form, and nothing working.

Last night I had a brainstorm. After my second daughter was born I was getting occasional migraines, a little more often than usual. I changed my Pill to a different kind. I called the nurse at my doctor’s office today and after hearing what I had to say about the migraines and some other stuff, she agreed that something was woefully wrong and that I shouldn’t take it anymore. I’m so glad it only took me over a year to figure that out.

What’s awful is when I get one of these headaches and guinea pig my way through the new medications I’m supposed to try. Nope, relpax didn’t work, wait an hour, try another. That didn’t work either, wait an hour, try midrin. Nope, that’s not it either, wait an hour, try a pain pill. Now I’m woozy and my eyes are rolling back in my head, guess I’ll just sleep through the pain as best as I can. It’s scary. I don’t like taking all that crap. What if I have a reaction to something? Bad juju.

Max the kitten is amazing. He’s stuck to me like glue. He follows me everywhere I go and jumps into my lap while I’m still in the process of sitting down. He looks and acts a lot like Gus, with some of the same weird idiosyncrasies. Like digging underwear out of the dirty clothes pile and running around the room with it on his head. That’s weird. And gross. But Gus did it too, when he was a kitten. I did a little research – cat gestation times are 57-65 days. Max was born 57 days after Gus died. Hub thinks Gus was a Buddhist. Which makes me feel pretty good, I think. Following that line of reasoning, his reward for a good life (and it was good, he was in every way a wonderful cat) is to come back and spend another lifetime with me?

Not to say that I think I’ve replaced Gus. Max is definitely his own little cat. But he does remind me of the good times with the kitties who have gone before, and I’m remembering the cute things they used to do before getting elderly and ill. I think of Gus and Lilly with more smiles than sad now.

Of course, the only problem is that Max has a godawful case of the farts today, and if you have never smelled a cat fart, you don’t know from noxious. That’ll teach me to switch his food.

I think I’m going to join the panel at the Journalcon this October. I’ll find out some more about it tomorrow at the Meetup (barring unforeseen circumstances; I’ve been adding that caveat to just about any plans I make recently because of how often I get migraines).

This is reprinted from the Austin Flashmob mailing list, with permission from the author.

Greetings mobbers. Please forgive any and all grammar and spelling blunders. It’s late. Last Friday, I awoke to find three men at my apartment’s front door. Not just men – detectives with the Austin Police Department, badges in hand. “Is your name (insert my real name here)?”, thus ending my half-second speculation that they were looking for a roommate or were at the wrong house.

“Um, yeah” I replied and immediately panicked. A death? Serious injury? Had I been followed on one of my nighttime dumpster-raiding adventures? I played it safe and asked if there’d been a death.

“No,” the only un-mustached cop said. “We’d like to have a word with you. Mind if we step inside?” I told them I’d step outside, which really seemed to irk them. I tried to go get a shirt, but I was told it could wait. Hmm. This seemed serious . I stepped outside and offered them a seat on my ratty old porch-couch. They said they’d prefer to stand.

“We’ll get right to the point. What do you know about “Slash Mobs”. Ha. Ha, ha. For those of you that don’t know, I am/was the moderator of this now nonexistan t Yahoo group: Slash Mob Austin. A quote from the main page (which I had to get from here, as the group is no more ):

“The Slash Mob Project is an interesting phenomenon where people gather at a determined point, kill all surrounding onlookers, and then disperse as fast as arriving, thus leaving the onlookers dazed, bewildered, and hopefully dead by what they just experienced… Join the group to find out what great ideas pop up around Austin, to show o ff your new fannypack, and to kill people.”   
 
“Slash mobs?” I asked. “Um, why are you asking me this?” I didn’t know what to do. Previous experience with law enforcement has taught me to not demand my lawyer (like I have one) right off the bat. It only pisses them off and makes it look like either you’ve got something to hide or you’re used to being questioned or both. No, it’s better for all parties involved to let ’em ask away, answer what you feel comfortable with answering, not incriminate yourself, and hope they go on their merry w ay with only a stern look and a lecture.

“Well, we received word that someone with your [looks at a little notebook I hadn’t noticed he was holding that he’s holding] IP address going under the handle [looks at notebook] ‘the beatles they rock’ was the founder of the [looks at notebook ] Yahoo group [looks at notebook] ‘Austin Slash Mobs'”. All right. They at least could’ve sent three dicks that’d heard about this crazy new sensation called ‘the internet’ before that morning. The cop looked tired. They all looked tired. All my sleepy brain could think about was boy, I’d hate to be a cop.

“Do you like the Beatles?” one of them *actually* asked in their best kindergarten teacher voice. Great. Good cop/bad cop begins.

“Ah, no. It’s a bad joke. Listen, yeah, I formed that group. I think I can see where this is going. It’s a parody of the flash mob phenomenon.” Blank stares, followed by:

“Care to explain?”

I ran through a brief (because there’s no other) history of flash mobs, from their orgins in New York way back in May to me being interviewed by a New York Ti mes reporter – true! She saw my posts I’d been spamming various flash mob froups with that held a link to the Slash Mob group. She claimed she was doing a piece on flash mob backlash, whatever that is. Everybody loves flash mobs, as far as I can tell. The piece has yet to run.

“Why did you pick Slash Mob? Why did you threaten to kill those not involved? That’s a serious crime, Mr.____. You know that, right?”

“It’s a parody! I thought satire was covered under the First Amendment, right?” I stuttered. when i’m nervous, I stutter and shake even more than I usually do.

“Yes, it is, and I don’t know that there’s a real crime involved here. We don’t want to have to visit you again, do you understand?” Un-mustache said.

Understand? I didn’t understand why I was paid a visit in the first place. “Wha – uh, yeah, I understand.” I’d love to say I argued, that I bravely stood up to these evil beasts, that I fought off their demons with a battle cry of “Censorship!”. At least mention my love of slasher movies. But I didn’t. they hadn’t mentioned some out-of-state warrants that I may or may not have, and I really wanted to keep it that way.

For some reason they gave me a card on the way out. I proudly stuck it to my refrigerator with a gob of spit. Weird thing is, it vanished later that day, same as my proud little Yahoo group. They claimed I violated their ToS, which I very well might have having stolen most of the text on my fromt page from the text on the front page of this group. Oh, and I threatened to kill a bunch of anonymous fictional people with my fictional group of Slashmobbers.

Does anyone have experience with Austin nursing homes? Who to avoid, who’s good, who’s depressing, who’s cheerful? I’d appreciate any comments you have to offer.

I’ve been looking through the Nursing Home Ratings in Texas and it’s just depressing. There are degrees of bad things nursing homes can do. “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm” is worse than “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm that is not immediate jeopardy”. Keeping residents strapped down, known as “The facility did not keep each resident free from physical restraints, unless needed for medical treatment”, qualifies as “No actual harm with potential for More than Minimal Harm that is not Immediate Jeopardy”. In order to be in compliance with state standards, errors in dispensing prescription drugs must be less than 5%. That includes wrong drug, wrong dose, and wrong time. Like what happened to this woman, who was prescribed chlorpromazine for depression, but the pharmacy gave her chlorpropamide, which lowers blood sugar, instead. She died.

If you’re caught in that middle land between wealth and poverty, you’ll end up paying $150/day out of your pocket. Medicare doesn’t cover nursing homes. If it’s just one member of a married couple going in, you can divide your assets in half, and the spouse who’s going into care has to spend every dime before Medicaid will cover costs. And if you have more than $180,000 in assets, you can’t get Medicaid at all. Older people have been working and saving all their lives, working full time for 50 years or so. Are there that many who really have less than $180k?

It’s a depressing concept, but necessary for some. No need to make matters worse by putting a loved one into a facility that beats patients. So on behalf of a friend, I’m searching for recommendations.

Today we headed north of town to a gun range, where we met up with a bunch of people and shot guns all day. We got to the range around 10:30 and stayed until they closed at 5. Luckily we brought a canopy for shade, since there wasn’t a shelter in sight and it was around 100 degrees. At one point I thought I was about to pass out – I couldn’t breathe and I stopped sweating. Bad. Chugged 2 bottles of water and let the car AC blast me – better. For the second time, hub broke a pair of Flexon(tm) unbreakable glasses. The boy has talent.

I’m pretty disturbed by the fact that for the past 4 months, I’m shooting low with every single handgun that I try. Normally I’m a very good shot. I can’t fathom what’s gone wrong. I don’t feel like I’m flinching, I don’t feel like my stance or grip have changed, I’m making a conscious effort to put the front sight dot on top of what I’m aiming at. I’m low at short and long distances. I’ve tried slow and fast trigger pulls. Today at 25 yards I shot a nice group, maybe around 8 inches around, 8 inches underneath the bullseye. This is so frustrating to me! It’s making me really discouraged. Luckily I’m still a dead aim with a rifle. Hopefully all is not lost. I’m just going to have to get a group of people watch me shoot (hello, nervous) and critique me. What a bummer.

I just got an email from Jette of Celluloid Eyes, who is on the committee for Austin Journalcon ’03. She asked if I would be a panelist. I’m dumbfounded and really honored. I’d love to be a panelist, but just this afternoon we scheduled that weekend to go to the ranch. I’m trying to see if there’s a way I can weasel into both going to the ranch and going to Journalcon. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.