Tuesday 1 April 2003

Pic of the day: Itlandsen, Guardian of Darkness and Mysteriously Dead Lamps.

Guarding in the darkness

As I was sitting in front of my PC, most of my living room was cast in shadow. Only a single light bulb on the table was still burning.

It has not always been that way. When I moved in, 7 lamps lit up the largest room in my apartment. Two were in the kitchen section, which is part of the living room. Then there were the standing lamps, two metal frames each with two projector-type lamps that I set to shine on the ceiling and the wall respectively. (The material in ceiling and wall does not lend itself to lamp fixtures there.) Finally there was the table lamp.

The kitchen lamps were the first to go, one by one. Buying a new light bulb had no effect: Evidently something deeper inside the system had stopped working. Next went one of the projector lamps, then one on the other. I tried with new light bulbs, of course, but the lamp just ignored this gesture and remained dark. Then the second projector on the first lamp, until finally a few weeks ago the last of the standing lamps was reduced to worthless scrap metal. All this happened slowly, over ten years or so. To translate a line from a song that came to mind: "In the world everyone got familiar with the darkness that slowly descended."

Since our eyes get accustomed to the weaker light, I can still see the keyboard quite fine; and the monitor has its own light, so I can still write and play. But I am uncomfortably aware of the darkness. I have never been a person to love the dark, neither literally nor spiritually. As a child I was scared of the dark, and it continued into adult age even though I kept it under control. Only gradually did I realize that it was the darkness inside myself I truly feared. And I still prefer the brightness of day, or at least a well-lit room. I just don't do anything drastic to change things. As I said to Catwoman yesterday: If he thinks his priorities are wrong, he will change them. Yeah, right.

***

I was playing, ironically, Dark Age of Camelot. For reasons still unknown to me, I have returned to Albion here. I know I used to praise Hibernia for many months last year as the place to be, but now on the cooperative server I can go wherever I want, and where I want is usually in Albion. Be that as it may, my paladin was hunting giants on the Salisbury Plains when contacted by a guild recruiter. The guild was named "Guardians of Darkness".

"I don't think the guild name would be fitting for a paladin" I told the friendly spellcaster. "But we guard to keep the darkness out!" protested he. This was such a charming explanation that I agreed to give his guild a try. After discovering that the guild colors were yellow and red, I recommended that the guild be renamed "Guardians of Sunset", but I'm not sure if it is even technically possible to rename a guild.

Being distracted by so many other things, I never got around to creating my ideal guild on the coop server, "Bankers of the Realms". Luckily some other people have founded "Merchants of Gaheris", so I guess the need is taken care of. Good thing too, as being a guild officer is time consuming and I simply cannot spend that much time in the Dark Ages each day.

Even if the Dark Ages seem to have come to my living room...