I've mentioned my home brew campaign world, Thorvar, previously. Here's a link to the Obsidian Portal home page.
I realized that I had 3 players that were using one of each of the three elven races, so one early motivation for me was to go ahead and write up the article about how they went from one elven race to three. Here's what I came up with.
The Sundering of the Elven Nation
The first, greatest rulers in the lands of Arek were the elves. At the end of the dawn wars, when the world was scarred and wounded by the bloody remnants of the war between the gods and the primordials, only three of the Gods were exempted from the compact struct during the peace accords creating the Primodial Veil which surrounded the world. These three were tasked with repairing the damage inflicted, and thus were chosen the three sibling gods, Corellon, Lolthana, and Eladrineth. Born of the world itself, it was felt between the gods that they would have the best and most neutral of the gods interests’ in mind.
The ancient ancestors of the first races had already spread throughout the lands, but the caretaker gods’ decided they needed servants which were more closely related to their interests to aid them in their task. Towards this end, they took a subset of these early mortals and infused them with a fragment of their own immortal essence, helping them to ascend and giving them a fragment of immortality. These newly elevated servants, the elves, were then given to the world to remake, and glorious were their numerous works. They planted and tended the forests, filling them with animals and helping to shape the natural world. To the seas they gave fish, and to the air they created the birds. It was said that the very wind echoed with the joy of their laughter and the world was filled with the simple energy of their love and care, and above all ruled by the elves. The crown jewel, upon deeming their works in the world complete, was the construction of the magical Kingspire Citadel from which to reign across the world, built both as practical seat of government and tribute to their divine progenitors.
This, however, was not to last. Emboldened by their favored place amongst the gods, the elves began to rule the world more openly. Arrogance took the place of humility in their hearts. They began to treat the world more as their subjects, and this bred discontent amongst the people. Moreover, the elven race began to drift into separate directions, factionalizing along lines of loyalty to the individual elven gods. Sensing that their subjects loyalties were waning, the youngest of the triumvirate, Lolthana, suggested a competition amongst the elves, believing that if the growing factions were motivated to come up with great works on behalf of their patrons, that the subjects would be inspired to become more loyal to them. Eladrineth, always the more creative of the group, agreed at once. Corellon, however, had reservations, but eventually relented at the behest of his two sisters. The three factions, tasked with this new goal, set to work immediately.
The follower of Corellon sought to improve the world in which they currently lived, and did so by granting the worlds peoples each a great gift. They taught agriculture to some, mining and craftsmanship to the others, in the hopes that the world would be a better place for it. As per Corellon’s typical MO, it was a subtle but generous gift to the world. Lolthana, inspired by the pristine works of some of her favorite creatures, sought to build her own magical fortress to rival the Kingspire, one which possessed all the strength and fragile beauty o the web of a spider. It was elegant, beautiful, and possessing of an underlying strength, just like the goddess that designed it. The greatest of works, however, was produced by Eladrineth, who took the brightest and best parts of the world and molded them into her own plane of existence, the Feywild. It was bright, filled with primal energy and life, and every mote of dust and blade of grass seemed charged with arcane energy. Corellon, laughing, had to accede that her works were the finest of them all and a fitting tribute to the world, and chose Eladrineth as the victor. Lolthana, however, having poured her heart and soul into the creation of her webbed fortress, could not handle the defeat.
Jealousy immediately crept into and blackened her divine soul. In a fit of passion, she stuck a blade of mystical energy between the ribs of her sister just as Corellon chose her as the victor, striking her dead immediately. Corellon was horrified and, in a fit of rage, seized the webbed fortress Lolthana had forged and, trapping her within it, cast it into the depths of the Abyss forever. The followers of the slain Eladrineth wailed for justice upon Lolthana’s followers, but Corellon denied them. Sensing that civil war was coming amongst the elves, he forbade that any Eladrin should strike a blow against their kindred. Towards this end, Corellon banished the followers of Lolthana to the Shadowfell, the plane of the dead, and branded them forever as “Drow,” the elven word for outcast. Denied their vengeance, the Eladrin withdrew from the world to the plane created by their slain goddess, their to rule and remember her in their grief. The remaining elves, the followers of Corellon, were left as stewards of the world, vastly undermanned and no longer strong enough to maintain their tenuous hold. Emboldened by this fact and embittered by the resources the hungry gods had consumed in their contest, the barbarian tribes rose up and overthrew their rulers, storming the Kingspire which was destroyed in a flash of magical energy. In this moment, Corellon knew that he had failed. His time as caretaker of the world had ended, and it was time for him to return to the Astral Sea to live amongst the rest of the gods and leave the world to mortals.
His heart filled with grief, Corellon turned to his remaining followers and bade them to go out into the world and live amongst it, no longer as rulers but rather as a part of the world they had created. Sorrowfully, Corellon took his leave and rose up amongst the stars, leaving his people behind.
Since then, the elven people have divided into three very distinct nations. The elves remain in the shadows and fringes of the world, taking the lessons of their failed empire to heart. They rarely stay in one place, preferring to be on the move and look for new places to guide the hands and fates of mortals. The Eladrin ruled the Feywild as they ruled the lands of Arek long prior to their departure, their arrogance only having grown over the eons of uncontested rule. Only now that their lands have been invaded have they deigned to rejoin the mortal world. The Drow, having endured in the lands of the dead for this amount of time, haven grown isolationist and distrusting of anyone outside of their society. Though torn with the internal strife and competition that their patron, now known simply as Lolth, had inspired in them, their understanding that there is no one outside of Drow society who can be trusted.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Why Is Everything Broken?
Some days I curse the fact that I'm currently living in the future.
There was a time when things were much simpler. You went through your day, and in the background there were television programs that came on, and maybe you watched them, maybe you didn't. Either way, the time that it came on was the time that it came on, and that was that. There were VCRs when I was a kid, so I suppose if you could figure out how to program the damn thing (which was supposedly impossible, if television sitcoms were to be believed,) you could record a show and watch it later...assuming your clock was right, the tape wasn't so old that it fell apart (anybody remember that particular joy?), or some other thing went wrong, you could perhaps watch that episode of Alf or Family Ties that you always wanted. But, some time or another things didn't work out and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, we have the magic of the DVR. Now, don't get me wrong, I adore this thing. As someone who occasionally is still at his office at 7 o'clock on a tuesday (as I am while writing this) occasionally I miss things when they run live. And when I say occasionally, what I of course mean is every time a show is on TV. The last thing I watched live on television was the Super Bowl, and the only non-football related thing I've watched live on TV in recent memory was the season premiere of The Walking Dead, which aired Halloween last year. But now, praise the gods of tech, we have this invention that can sit at home and record everything digitally for you. You just tell it "Hey, I watched an episode of Chuck once and found it vaguely amusing. Could you do me a solid DVR and record every episode for me?" And the DVR, being the accommodating device that it is, eagerly performs this function for you. Every single time a new episode of this program you fancy gets recorded safely away on your DVR disk, ready and waiting for your viewing consumption. But then, time passes. Television shows change. A show about a witty kid in way over his head in the world of spies jumps the shark, and the witty kid turns into Neo from the Matrix, spawn of the guy from Quantum Leap and Sara Conner from the Terminator (she actually said "I'll be back" once, which elicited a loud, verbal groan from me.) You lose interest. You get busy with other things. Next thing you know, you come back and there are roughly a dozen episodes of this television program still waiting for you on the list, staring at you with their accusing, sad eyes, whispering "Hey buddy, we had fun once, why don't you give it another shot? Maybe things could be better this time? I swear we'll show more of the hot Russian chick's cleavage in some of these upcoming shows." And now you're stuck between your DVR guilt and the amount of time it would take to actually go through and heartlessly delete every episode individually.
But maybe you do take the time to give the show another shot. You turn on "Chuck versus Spy Agency of the Week," and settle in for a nice episode of make-up-sex-like TV viewing. But, oh, what's this? The DVR's jammed up? Sometimes if the disk is full or it's an older DVR box, the damn things get scratched up. Or, (and this is entirely my armchair cable guy view of things) you live in an ancient apartment that gets crap cable signal, and the result is the show skips. Sometimes the sound cuts out. You get to a commercial and the fast-forward button for doesn't work anymore. Now, just the fact that this convenience exists beats the hell out of the VHS days, but that almost makes it worse, because it suggests a level of expectation to the viewer. "This gadget works," they tell you. "All the shows you want, at the touch of a finger." And you buy it, because for a time it all works out. This, of course, makes everything worse when it eventually fails. It's a paradox, in a way. The more successful a device is, the more intense the aggravation is created when it inevitably fails, as all things do. You get used to things just working, and then they don't. It's like a betrayal in a way. "You worked yesterday?" you tell the DVR. "You recorded that episode of House just fine. What the hell happened?" And all it gives you is the little, uncaring, mechanical shrug. "Error 404." Blue screen. Static. And there you stand, your broken expectations in one hand and your proverbial genitalia in the other, and no one to blame but yourself for how ridiculously dependent you let yourself become on something that shouldn't matter at all.
And that's just a simple thing like the damned TV.
What about the internet? I can remember playing Rampage off of a floppy disk on our Tandy 1000, and it was the hottest thing you could imagine a computer doing. Now, I go home some days and turn on World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online, that allows us to interact real time with people on the other side of the world in an environment where more than half a second's lag from keystroke to showing up on the other guy's monitor is borderline unacceptable. I'm typing this on my laptop while, next to me, my IPAD is streaming season one of Damages from Netflix with similar visual quality to what I would have gotten from the television (leading me to question almost daily why I'm paying so much for cable in the first place, but that's another blog post.) It's a digital world, as old people who don't really live in it are fond of saying, and we're all rushing along with it. Really, it's quite miraculous, and makes me feel every day like I'm living in an episode of Star Trek.
Until something breaks.
Currently my modem at home enjoys dropping it's connection to the internet randomly. It doesn't matter if I have one device or three running through the router. It doesn't matter if I'm running WoW, looking something up on the iPad, and talking to someone on Skype or just checking my email. Time of day, usage hours, none of it seems to make any difference. Occasionally something goes wrong, and then the internet shuts off. It only takes a moment of my time, but it's infuriating, as my fractured headset from the other night's attempt at running heroic Stonecore can attest. It's a thing beyond our control, once again the loss of a basic convenience that we've come to take for granted and even depend on, and ultimately this is where it gets us.
There was a time when things were much simpler. You went through your day, and in the background there were television programs that came on, and maybe you watched them, maybe you didn't. Either way, the time that it came on was the time that it came on, and that was that. There were VCRs when I was a kid, so I suppose if you could figure out how to program the damn thing (which was supposedly impossible, if television sitcoms were to be believed,) you could record a show and watch it later...assuming your clock was right, the tape wasn't so old that it fell apart (anybody remember that particular joy?), or some other thing went wrong, you could perhaps watch that episode of Alf or Family Ties that you always wanted. But, some time or another things didn't work out and it wasn't a big deal.
Now, we have the magic of the DVR. Now, don't get me wrong, I adore this thing. As someone who occasionally is still at his office at 7 o'clock on a tuesday (as I am while writing this) occasionally I miss things when they run live. And when I say occasionally, what I of course mean is every time a show is on TV. The last thing I watched live on television was the Super Bowl, and the only non-football related thing I've watched live on TV in recent memory was the season premiere of The Walking Dead, which aired Halloween last year. But now, praise the gods of tech, we have this invention that can sit at home and record everything digitally for you. You just tell it "Hey, I watched an episode of Chuck once and found it vaguely amusing. Could you do me a solid DVR and record every episode for me?" And the DVR, being the accommodating device that it is, eagerly performs this function for you. Every single time a new episode of this program you fancy gets recorded safely away on your DVR disk, ready and waiting for your viewing consumption. But then, time passes. Television shows change. A show about a witty kid in way over his head in the world of spies jumps the shark, and the witty kid turns into Neo from the Matrix, spawn of the guy from Quantum Leap and Sara Conner from the Terminator (she actually said "I'll be back" once, which elicited a loud, verbal groan from me.) You lose interest. You get busy with other things. Next thing you know, you come back and there are roughly a dozen episodes of this television program still waiting for you on the list, staring at you with their accusing, sad eyes, whispering "Hey buddy, we had fun once, why don't you give it another shot? Maybe things could be better this time? I swear we'll show more of the hot Russian chick's cleavage in some of these upcoming shows." And now you're stuck between your DVR guilt and the amount of time it would take to actually go through and heartlessly delete every episode individually.
But maybe you do take the time to give the show another shot. You turn on "Chuck versus Spy Agency of the Week," and settle in for a nice episode of make-up-sex-like TV viewing. But, oh, what's this? The DVR's jammed up? Sometimes if the disk is full or it's an older DVR box, the damn things get scratched up. Or, (and this is entirely my armchair cable guy view of things) you live in an ancient apartment that gets crap cable signal, and the result is the show skips. Sometimes the sound cuts out. You get to a commercial and the fast-forward button for doesn't work anymore. Now, just the fact that this convenience exists beats the hell out of the VHS days, but that almost makes it worse, because it suggests a level of expectation to the viewer. "This gadget works," they tell you. "All the shows you want, at the touch of a finger." And you buy it, because for a time it all works out. This, of course, makes everything worse when it eventually fails. It's a paradox, in a way. The more successful a device is, the more intense the aggravation is created when it inevitably fails, as all things do. You get used to things just working, and then they don't. It's like a betrayal in a way. "You worked yesterday?" you tell the DVR. "You recorded that episode of House just fine. What the hell happened?" And all it gives you is the little, uncaring, mechanical shrug. "Error 404." Blue screen. Static. And there you stand, your broken expectations in one hand and your proverbial genitalia in the other, and no one to blame but yourself for how ridiculously dependent you let yourself become on something that shouldn't matter at all.
And that's just a simple thing like the damned TV.
What about the internet? I can remember playing Rampage off of a floppy disk on our Tandy 1000, and it was the hottest thing you could imagine a computer doing. Now, I go home some days and turn on World of Warcraft or DC Universe Online, that allows us to interact real time with people on the other side of the world in an environment where more than half a second's lag from keystroke to showing up on the other guy's monitor is borderline unacceptable. I'm typing this on my laptop while, next to me, my IPAD is streaming season one of Damages from Netflix with similar visual quality to what I would have gotten from the television (leading me to question almost daily why I'm paying so much for cable in the first place, but that's another blog post.) It's a digital world, as old people who don't really live in it are fond of saying, and we're all rushing along with it. Really, it's quite miraculous, and makes me feel every day like I'm living in an episode of Star Trek.
Until something breaks.
Currently my modem at home enjoys dropping it's connection to the internet randomly. It doesn't matter if I have one device or three running through the router. It doesn't matter if I'm running WoW, looking something up on the iPad, and talking to someone on Skype or just checking my email. Time of day, usage hours, none of it seems to make any difference. Occasionally something goes wrong, and then the internet shuts off. It only takes a moment of my time, but it's infuriating, as my fractured headset from the other night's attempt at running heroic Stonecore can attest. It's a thing beyond our control, once again the loss of a basic convenience that we've come to take for granted and even depend on, and ultimately this is where it gets us.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Life, as of 2-6-11
It's been a long time since I posted on here, and maybe inspired by Amanda Baker's recently reinvigorated blog, I'm wanting (for probably the third or fourth time) to start posting more and getting some more of my ideas put to paper. What form that might take will vary significantly from one moment to the next, but I hope at the least to entertain.
I'm at a point now where my career is ultimately in my hands. as I'm a month out from my comprehensive exam (presumably, I don't take anything for granted where this process is concerned) and I finally, at long last, after much fumbling about and not getting anything worth a damn in the lab, have found an interaction between one of our virus's proteins and a host protein that could prove to answer a problem that has existed in the HPV field for some time now: how exactly the virus tethers itself to host chromosomes during mitosis to ensure segregation. It's been a long road, and there's a ton of work left to go before anything conclusive can be determined from the work, thus far, but it was definitely encouraging to finally get a little light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, we're entering an important time for determining in the Angeletti lab. I don't think it's any kind of secret that we've had some issues with funding. Hell, the entire scientific community is reeling. PIs in my building that have never had funding problems are suddenly getting their grant applications rejected for the first time in decades. A couple of years ago, the keynote speaker from our annual Flyswat meeting, one of the leaders in his field, had a grant get the highest score he'd ever received on one of his grant applications and had it end up NOT FUNDED. And that's in a situation where the NIH budget has simply failed to increase from one year to the next. Now, this year, the NIH budget is going to be reduced possibly 5-10%. This could be a horrific set of years for the science business, which admittedly puts us in the same place as a large number of other workers all throughout this country.
That's the bad news. The good news, however, is that ultimately that doesn't make a difference to whether I get out of here or not. It's on me now. Hell, the budget problems are just a reason for my boss to want to get me graduated and moved on down the road. I've got no one to look at but myself at this point, and I think that's finally starting to settle in. It's a humbling feeling, having your future in your hands, but it's also empowering. I know, in some part of my heart, that this is it, make or break time. Time to stand up, time to get moving, time to get WRITING.
That's where I'm stuck now. Those who spend time doing any kind of writing under stand what I'm talking about when I talk about the daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to start writing. Californication's Hank Moudy refers often to the blank page, ultimately ever writer's best friend and greatest nemesis. I really don't know what it is about starting out that is so difficult. Ultimately once you get writing it just seems to flow (for me at least) but it's those first words that are always the hardest to put down. Maybe that's part of why I'm posting this today, trying to prime the pump. Here's hoping it works out.
Another bit of writing I've been doing of late is a return to my homebrew campaign world in an effort to repair the trouble that I've set in motion there long ago. It's a great feeing being behind the GM screen again, to be honest. I like creating a D&D character and putting him out in someone else's world, but it's really a special occasion to be in charge of the whole thing. It's indescribable to someone who hasn't done it before. It's creative writing. It's improvisational theatre. It's game design. It's being responsible for not just your fun but also the fun of the other players (I have 7) that are sitting around the table with you. When it works, it's just flat out magic. My GMing Hall of Fame is filled with moments like scaring the hell out of one of my friends with a little girl's ghost, instantly turning an otherwise jovial game session into a night where my party was quietly angry and determined to beat the fictional nemesis I had placed before them, and my all time favorite campaign, the truly special Dragonlance game that has filled our memories with gaming stories that have endured for years. And it all started once again, with my party waking up in a mass grave and fighting desperately to escape from a zombies, grave robbers, an ettin, and the rain waters slowly flooding the cemetery.
It's good to be back.
And last but not least, I'm with a wonderful woman with two great kids. No one should be too surprised that I'm not supremely comfortable publishing my personal life to the world via the intranets, but I'm happy. Very happy. It's not every day you find someone who can take a day that has been awful from top to bottom, leaving me ready to just lay into somebody or sink into myself and just wallow in self-misery for the rest of the day and, just by seeing her, make it all go away in a flash. It's something I never really thought I would have again, let alone find myself in the position of wondering if I've ever actually had it previously. Any time my apartment building gets sold to a new owner, my car gets a parking ticket for parking on a street two days after it snows, or things are falling apart at work, I can think of lucky I am to have found what I've found with Jen, and all the rest of it seems inconsequential.
So that's me, as of today. Now I'm off, to resume celebrating a certain World Champion football team. Go Pack Go.
I'm at a point now where my career is ultimately in my hands. as I'm a month out from my comprehensive exam (presumably, I don't take anything for granted where this process is concerned) and I finally, at long last, after much fumbling about and not getting anything worth a damn in the lab, have found an interaction between one of our virus's proteins and a host protein that could prove to answer a problem that has existed in the HPV field for some time now: how exactly the virus tethers itself to host chromosomes during mitosis to ensure segregation. It's been a long road, and there's a ton of work left to go before anything conclusive can be determined from the work, thus far, but it was definitely encouraging to finally get a little light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, we're entering an important time for determining in the Angeletti lab. I don't think it's any kind of secret that we've had some issues with funding. Hell, the entire scientific community is reeling. PIs in my building that have never had funding problems are suddenly getting their grant applications rejected for the first time in decades. A couple of years ago, the keynote speaker from our annual Flyswat meeting, one of the leaders in his field, had a grant get the highest score he'd ever received on one of his grant applications and had it end up NOT FUNDED. And that's in a situation where the NIH budget has simply failed to increase from one year to the next. Now, this year, the NIH budget is going to be reduced possibly 5-10%. This could be a horrific set of years for the science business, which admittedly puts us in the same place as a large number of other workers all throughout this country.
That's the bad news. The good news, however, is that ultimately that doesn't make a difference to whether I get out of here or not. It's on me now. Hell, the budget problems are just a reason for my boss to want to get me graduated and moved on down the road. I've got no one to look at but myself at this point, and I think that's finally starting to settle in. It's a humbling feeling, having your future in your hands, but it's also empowering. I know, in some part of my heart, that this is it, make or break time. Time to stand up, time to get moving, time to get WRITING.
That's where I'm stuck now. Those who spend time doing any kind of writing under stand what I'm talking about when I talk about the daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to start writing. Californication's Hank Moudy refers often to the blank page, ultimately ever writer's best friend and greatest nemesis. I really don't know what it is about starting out that is so difficult. Ultimately once you get writing it just seems to flow (for me at least) but it's those first words that are always the hardest to put down. Maybe that's part of why I'm posting this today, trying to prime the pump. Here's hoping it works out.
Another bit of writing I've been doing of late is a return to my homebrew campaign world in an effort to repair the trouble that I've set in motion there long ago. It's a great feeing being behind the GM screen again, to be honest. I like creating a D&D character and putting him out in someone else's world, but it's really a special occasion to be in charge of the whole thing. It's indescribable to someone who hasn't done it before. It's creative writing. It's improvisational theatre. It's game design. It's being responsible for not just your fun but also the fun of the other players (I have 7) that are sitting around the table with you. When it works, it's just flat out magic. My GMing Hall of Fame is filled with moments like scaring the hell out of one of my friends with a little girl's ghost, instantly turning an otherwise jovial game session into a night where my party was quietly angry and determined to beat the fictional nemesis I had placed before them, and my all time favorite campaign, the truly special Dragonlance game that has filled our memories with gaming stories that have endured for years. And it all started once again, with my party waking up in a mass grave and fighting desperately to escape from a zombies, grave robbers, an ettin, and the rain waters slowly flooding the cemetery.
It's good to be back.
And last but not least, I'm with a wonderful woman with two great kids. No one should be too surprised that I'm not supremely comfortable publishing my personal life to the world via the intranets, but I'm happy. Very happy. It's not every day you find someone who can take a day that has been awful from top to bottom, leaving me ready to just lay into somebody or sink into myself and just wallow in self-misery for the rest of the day and, just by seeing her, make it all go away in a flash. It's something I never really thought I would have again, let alone find myself in the position of wondering if I've ever actually had it previously. Any time my apartment building gets sold to a new owner, my car gets a parking ticket for parking on a street two days after it snows, or things are falling apart at work, I can think of lucky I am to have found what I've found with Jen, and all the rest of it seems inconsequential.
So that's me, as of today. Now I'm off, to resume celebrating a certain World Champion football team. Go Pack Go.
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