Tuesday 11 January 2000

Pic of the day: It's winter in Daggerfall. (Here on the south coast of Norway, however, it is mild and not a snowflake in sight. Not that I am sorry for this, not at all!)

This is likely to be a fluffy entry, because I am lazy and tired today. I've got a bit too little sleep last few nights, because the Gurgle Girl is back on IRC and is irresistible. (Well, actually I could resist, I just don't want to.) There are also several other hysterically funny and non-stupid women and a man now and then on that channel.

Today I was so hazy that I left my carrying bag at work, with the stuff I read on the bus. Bus it does not matter much, I slept most of the way home. But I did not fall asleep at work. This is good. I even got along to fill in a form to get money for being there on January 1st. Extra money, that is. I don't think it's a lot. And it won't be on this month's salary, which is probably in the bank already. Payday is tomorrow. This month's pay is on the contrary going to be less than usual, as I worked 17 hours less than standard during late autumn. (This time was mainly spent looking in shop windows, as far as I can remember.)

I never got along to ask for extra money for the days I had instruction last autumn. I still think it is a stupid thing that I should have more money for that than for my daily work. But SuperWoman is going to have kittens if she hears that I don't ask for money. "If you don't need the money you can give it to me" she will say. I just hate filling in forms, they are complicated and there is no way to know if you've done it right. I like to go to work, laze around, go home, get money, buy stuff, eat, write, be happy. And play games.

After some discussion of paladins on alt.games.daggerfall, I went off and made a "cleric paladin" for Daggerfall. A class combining some of the best traits of traditional D&D clerics and paladins. I am pretty satisfied with the result, but it is a slow levelling character so takes a lot of play to get big and powerful. Then again, the game is often most fun before characters become too powerful.

In Civ2, I am still playing the Holy Australian Empire on Mars. The unexpected problem now is that the empire is just earning too much money now that the rival civilizations are subdued and there is no war anymore. I invest heavily in infrastructure, but after a while the cities turn a surplus and I have to found new ones to have a place to invest my money. I want to irrigate or terraform most of the planet before I stop, even though I've won long ago.

I haven't gotten around to buying any of the new games on the shelves lately: Pharao, a strategy game based on ancient Egypt; or Wannabe, a game in which you try to stay on the top of the news industry. Once upon a time I used to buy new games every month; now it is very rare. I look back at the archives of last year and find the same games. And not just games.

I guess I should read my own archives more. Because it seems that I write the same things again, and some days or weeks later they turn up in the "year ago". And generally I say the same things about them as I did a year ago, only I use more words. And a better layout. One of the nice things about entering the journalling community last year was that I learned some basics about layout and how to build a reasonably user-friendly journal site.

One of the other nice things is the online friends that I've made. Or they've made me a friend, perhaps. It is strange and a little moving to be so accepted by people who owe me nothing. Lately I have had a long e-mail discourse with a fellow journaller. We have very different views on some things, but we can still discuss in an open and friendly atmosphere where we can learn from each other and get more insight into the width of the human condition.

Another example of this is to look at the diary of someone who lives in a different culture. Say Russia. In Russia lives a man known as Cold Heels. He is a very sharp observer of girls, and has some words that stick like nails in the mind. Look at these:
"Every medical girl dissects thousands of frogs in her life. And she does it not because she is callous but otherwise - because she has a very kind heart."
I know a "medical girl" who has dissected both this thing and that, and I can attest to the truth of it. But I could not have said it so well. (The number of frogs may be a bit high, though. They move on to human corpses after a while. They still do it because they have a very kind heart, though. Or at least one of them.)