Sunday 18 April 1999

Pic of the day: My electronic Petz, captured in an intimate moment. Like catz and dogz, huh?
Actually, I don't much regret adding Catz II to my Dogz II installation. Fluffy the Persian is easily my single most entertaining petz, and it's particularly funny to watch Fluffy sneak up on one of the dogz and suddenly thwap their toys out of their grip. The sound effects are hilarious too. *mrrowr!* *fnaf!*

Another relaxed day. Played a lot of Daggerfall, and took down notes, for my Daggerfall site and for alt.games.daggerfall. Surprisingly, there are still people playing the game. Then again, there has never been made a computer roleplaying game with such a vast scope. While the graphics are starting to look a bit dated, it is probably still the best roleplaying environment for those who want to control their character's fate - to write their own book - rather than follow someone else's script.

I'm trying to curb my online activities in anticipation of the phone bill. -I've signed up for the Internet rebate program at Telenor, but it's still going to be not much under $1 per hour. That's quite a bit if you hang out online playing The Realm or MUDs, or just watching people sleep on other continents. E-mail and newsgroups are great, they can be updated in a few minutes and handled off-line. Similarly with web journals. As y'all know by now, I use Opera for my day-to-day browsing, and it can load in a set of different web journals each in its own window with minimal system overhead. Or I can just race through them online and then browse them offline, a technique that should work well with Internet Exploder also. (I'll gracefully ignore the other bloatware twin, which seems to have fallen among robbers.)

As usual, I've cooked my favorite pasta. Two days a week isn't enough to get bored by it. But five days a week of pizza buns is starting to get to me. They don't taste as delicious as the pizza slices from Dolly Dimple. Just the other day I snuck in and bought a cheeseburger from McDonalds. Pretty bland too, but at least it's a change, and I don't normally get sick from their food. I cannot vouch for the rest of the world, but McDonalds here in Norway seems to be great on hygiene. I feel practically safer than making the food myself. (Not least because some of meat sold in supermarkets in Kristiansand is stored above maximum storage temperature, or frozen and thawed and frozen again, or repackaged with a new date when it gets too old. There have been several scandals, though as far as I know nobody has actually died.)

Spring: It's past 9 PM, and a glorious sunset outside. It's not that long ago it used to be pitch dark when I came home from work, around 7.

I feel pretty good, in general. Sure, I've been more fit physically (though rarely in my childhood) but there's some kind of ... not exactly clarity, but something close to it. I'm getting to know life in a new way. Life is no longer far away in the future, and neither is it in the past, yet. This is sort of my rendezvous with life, and I think I'm in love with it. I can enjoy small luxuries like a fragrant new soap or a brighly colored candle, with no regret to the fact that they'll soon be gone. I even know that I dare to love, though I still don't dare to be loved. But that's OK, there's not a rush of lovesick people crowding me either.

I truly wish I could live forever. It feels like I've just begun.