Recently, I’ve been re-reading some of the Rifts sourcebooks. Partly it’s just for nostalgic reasons: I only ever played the Palladium games long, long ago, maybe in middle school. It’s also to look at some of the more interesting ideas that Rifts had to offer. This can be challenging, since so much of Rifts is just serious twink-fodder. It reminds me of a lot of long-running comics: the authors have to keep struggling to make their characters even cooler than they were last year, so you end up with Cyclops sinking every ball on a pool table with one blast to the cue, Superman turning back time, and Batman beating God at hide and seek.

Well, there are two ways to look at it. On one hand, I have about a thousand more dollars in my bank account now than I did yesterday. On the other hand, I am in well over a hundred thousand dollars in debt, now.

I have been putting off writing anything down here because I want to wait for some things to be finalized before I talk about all the big stuff that’s been keeping me so busy and stressed out, but I thought I’d jot a few things down. If I don’t, I never will, and anyway this is a little sign of life.

I often get irritated with things on Amazon. Sometimes, I send an email about my complaints. Usually, I get an automated or otherwise not-very-promising reply. Then, the problem gets fixed after a year or two. The weird thing is that the things that bug me that get fixed never get the kind of fanfare that new features I don’t like get. Those giant video clips kept getting in my way, the animated shaking gold box made me want to smack somebody, and so on.

I really try to buy things locally whenever reasonable. I’m willing to pay a fairly substantial premium to do so, because I like to support my town. That said, Amazon gets a lot of my business. They have a lot of things that it’s hard to get locally, we have no local bookstores that I consistentlylike shopping with, and Amazon Prime makes it feel like there’s never any shipping tax on my orders.

I moved from CVS to Subversion a few years ago, and to SVK about a year ago. Moving to Subversion was an unqualified success. Everything is either as good or, usually, better. It has some quirks, and some things that I’d like to see changed, but it has never caused me to scream or waste much time.

Making a resaonably tasty sandwich isn’t all that hard, especially with decent ingredients, but I think that my new rule will be that I won’t order any sandwich of a type that I don’t think the wichsmith has consumed himself. This rule might be good for all food: if you, food preparer, have never eaten duck, I do not want to see it on your menu.

Where have I been? The pits!

So, I lost my phone. Honestly, I think it was stolen. Whatever! I’m mostly over it.

I dreamt that Dominus, someone else (though I can’t recall who), and I were walking around Philadelphia. The third person had once lived there and Dominus was taking her around to see what had changed. At some point, we went to a large hotel-like building with two E’s on its gates. I poked around and determined that it was now a dormitory for a very hoity-toity university. I had gone on ahead, and when the other two caught up with me, they were sad to see that this building had been so repurposed. They suggested we sneak in, and despite my protests we did so. As we poked around its library, a few students showed up, and we seemed sure to be thrown out or arrested or something.