In Pursuit of Mysteries

An Amazing Fantasy Universe…

This is amazing. I just read through the author biography on the site and a few other bits.

 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69641,00.html

The Saga of The Saga

Four days isn’t a lot of time to weave an entire fantasy world of whole cloth. Yet in less than a week, scores of people from all across the world have crafted the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga, a detailed history of the world of Battal, where powerful wizards seek adventure with ambulatory furniture at their side.

Spanning more than 1,400 articles, the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs — or as fans have unpronounceably abbreviated it, ELOTH:TES — has all the trappings of modern fantasy franchises: a rich history that spans thousands of years; a contentiously out-of-canon cartoon offshoot, The Wizbits; as well as a crazed, seizure-ridden chief creative director, James Langomedes (an obvious caricature of mad comics genius Alan Moore).

But despite references to 28 years of "real world" history, The Saga never really existed, at least in the conventional sense.

Spawned this past week from a single page of material posted on a public wiki by web comic Penny Arcade scribe Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, The Saga is a fan-driven parody of the banal fiction that serves as a backdrop to the majority of modern fantasy game franchises.

"(These worlds) are the half-ass bullshit used to underlie the money-printing extravaganza," of game systems like Wizard of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering collectable card game, explained Holkins. The Saga exists in part to prove the facileness of such back stories and in part to acknowledge the culpability of fantasy fans who buy it all, no matter the quality. The wiki is the "joke that everyone is in on," said Holkins.

The rest of the article goes into it a bit more…

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls…Not

When you watch your old tomcat walk into furniture repeatedly, it doesn’t take long to realize that maybe he can’t see…

Pollux, whom most of my friends have met over the years, seems to be blind now. He’s walking around and stopping when his whiskers encounter something. He still seems to know his way around the house so diagnosis has been difficult. When you wave a finger about a centimeter in front of a cat’s eyeball repeatedly, you do get a definite impression that he isn’t seeing though.

I think this has happened over the last couple of weeks. We’ve noticed that he’s looked a bit like Puss ‘n Boots in Shrek 2 recently. By this, I mean that his eyes look very large. I realized today that it is because his pupils seem to be dilated almost all of the way open all of the time. I’ve only seen them close down a bit when he has faced into direct sunlight. It isn’t normal for a cat’s eyes to be open to that degree in normal light. That’s night vision mode in my experience.

After some testing, it seems that he may be seeing some light and shadow with at least his right eye but I’m not entirely sure. This strikes me as possibly a good reason to take him to the vet. I don’t know for sure that this came on suddenly but it seems that way and that could mean that there are other problems.

Old Pictures

I found some old pictures today in some papers…

Me and Madeline when she was little…

Erynn, Unknown Dude, and Rubylou at the opening party for Edge of the Circle Books at its current location in 1993.

Erynn is a pagan that I’ve known since I was about 18. Rubylou is one of my oldest and best friends (we worked at Edge of the Circle together) and she’s the “other tall, hot chick” that I dated before my wife. She’s some kind of Gnostic Catholic these days.

As a side note, that may be the only picture of my own that I’ve ever taken of Rubylou.