Thursday 14 January 1999

Pic of the day: Daggerfall nightmare enemy of the week. Actually I never noticed until now that he looks surprisingly like Magneto (of Marvel Comics X-men fame) except the colors are all very wrong!

As for the stories thing, it may in part be a question of not growing up. Even since I was a boy, I told stories to myself, and I started early to write down some. As I got better at the mechanical skills of writing, I was able to write down almost the way I was telling, or hearing, the stories. My stories are not quite as vivid as daydreams, it is more like a book I would have liked to read myself. I suspect that there will be a time when I can no longer say for sure if a story was made by me or someone else, but I don't think I've reached that point yet! :)
I do have some influence on the stories I make, but the characters tend to develop their own personality (much like people in a dream) and I can not really make them do something "out of character" without destroying the story enjoyment for myself. I can however throw new situations at them, new environments, new challenges. Or tests, rather. A comfortable situation can be just as much a test as a painful one, in that it reveals more of the character's personality. Or the personality's character, perhaps. :)

Sometimes I wonder, if I were unable to write, would I develop multiple personalities? Or at least memories of previous lives?

In light of the above, you might wonder if someone up there is actually treating me the same way as I treat my characters. Look at today for instance. It snowed truckloads, and I could not get to work in the low shoes I've preferred for winter use for the last years. I found my trusty old high shoes from ca 1985, and while I made it to work extremely delayed, the shoes did not. They actually had the temerity to dissolve on my two feet, the rubber falling off in flakes until I walked on textiles. Woa! So I off and bought another set of high winter shoes. I found a nice brown Ecco Goretex something. A helpful childlike girl ran off to fetch the other shoe of the pair, and it was gone. Or whatever they do. Disappeared. Soon several employees were hunting for the missing shoe, and finally they promised to send it to me later. But later there may not be any need for it, and so I bought a dark green pair instead. They look slightly out of place, but one can always hope that I'll never need to use them again.
Particularly because, yes, they gnaw.

There had come some Very Important Files which almost the whole house were restlessly waiting for. The hard disk was practically full, but we had ordered a new one and got it in time. Except that now there are some obscure firm who have the sole right to install them, or so it seems. (Installing these disks consists in pulling out a cover on the main computer rack, pushing the disk in until you hear a click, then write a bill.) They cannot come until Monday, but after importing the files in the two smaller counties I found that I could at least do the first part of the file merge with our current storage. Of course this all takes time, and I had to run (in my clumsy gnawing new shoes) to the doctor for an appointment at 18.00. Then the bus was delayed and I was home around 20. And it's the birthday of a certain young lady who I definitely should have called and wished happy birthday. Well, she was probably gone partying long before this. I'll not know, since as I walked towards the phone before even taking my shoes off, it rang. My brother, who I've spoken with only rarely for the last several years, had a lot of questions about his new computer. Or rather the software, which was all unknown to me. It's part of a package bought through the farmers' union. It was certainly nice to hear from him, despite the fact that I could not help him with one single thing during the three quarters of an hour that we talked. Come on, he's using software from Lotus, which is part of the evil IBM empire. (Yuppies may hate Microsoft, but we who have lived for a while know who the real enemy is. Without IBM there would probably not have been a Personal Computer as we know it. And CP/M would still been alive.)

Finally, since nobody has read this far, I sheepishly admit that I've written 1998 instead of 1999 all year, until ARJ sent me an e-mail about it. Thank you, you are a true friend. (Either that, or you just like to show that you're smarter than me. ;> Anyway, thanks!)