Child Gamer

My PC gaming career began at the age of four, with a few old sidescrollers like Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures, Duke Nukem (yes, the Duke began as a crude sidescroll shooter. Oh, the memories), Commander Keen, Jane of the Jungle, God of Thunder and... Xylon? Xyrex? Something like that...

A strange brew, certainly. It was all on my father's machine, and he wrote these neat batch files to make the games more accessible, with alphabetical, numbered lists and everything.

At age seven, I got my own computer. Maybe I was eight, not sure now. That was ten years ago. It had a pitiful Intel 486 25 MHz processor... even at the time, it was not a new machine, but it was my machine, and that qualified it.

Of course, I was upgraded a couple years later to a 256 MHz with crappy onboard video that lacked any kind of 3D acceleration, but it sure as hell played a mean game of Descent. It wasn't until Half-Life came out that I was desperate for a 3D card.

That came to me around age thirteen, five and a half years ago. As I recall, Diablo II was still a huge hit, Starcraft was my current love affair, and I was just getting good enough at Descent that I could kick my dad's ass once in awhile in a dogfight.

But, damn those mega missiles. I remember one time on a big map, he tossed two megas at me at once. I dodged both (they have homing devices, so you pretty much have to get behind them to lose them), then a third. Then - surprise! a fourth. I felt the heat of it when it zoomed by.

Well, I had him then. I was punding into him confidently with my weak lasers, having dodged four of the worst missiles in the game, when the fifth hit me.

ANOTHER one? You can only carry five missiles, and there might have been six on the entire map. How, in five minutes, had he acquired all those missiles? Well, you don't survive even an indirect hit with a Mega missile, so down I went, in flames.

Thanks, dad.

I never did beat him at Starcraft. Eight carriers running scared from an EMP and a nuke do not a successful campaign make.

Two years ago, while browsing the America's Army forums, I found a little gem of a Korean game called Kal Online. I was told that it's scheme was much like the pay-to-play games like Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest. I tried it out, never having seen a better game, and fell instantly in love with it.

I found a guild in Kal called Jaine's Outpost. They were not an ordinary gaming guild, but one put together specifically to facilitate a fansite, www.jainesoutpost.com

I was immediately intrigued. I had met a lot of assholes in my first MMORPG. I had almost given up on finding any decent company when I learned about Jaine's Outpost. They were a community dedicated to the instruction of players new to the game, and to providing a clean, family-oreiented and sophisticated forum for more intelligent players.

The site has so far had two or three thousand registered visitors, and gets about half a million hits per month.

I'm now one of the site's administrators, since I've been with the site for about a year now. I've gone from FPS and RTS gaming to a solid line of RPG's, including some bigger names like Guild Wars and EVE Online.

But I still play Descent.

And you'd better have more than one Mega Missile if you want to knock me out of the air, bub. You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to out-circle-strafe me.

Whoa!

I had moved all my blogging over to Jon's blog and quit this one, because I really had no interest anymore in blogging without some feedback. This blog never got much more response than that from friends I told about it, and some spam.

Now, scroll down a page. You'll find that someone named Matthew has actually found this blog and posted on it.

What the hell? I haven't posted on this blog in... what, a year? A week more than a year since my last post.

And out of the blue, Matthew (a fellow gamer, praise be) shows up.

Gott im himmel, there's hope still.

So, boredom plus response spurs me to begin writing in this blog again.

Scouge of the Net

I am the Scourge of the Internet!

I post irrelevant nonsense wherever there is meaning and art and the tranquility of effortless communication...

In this case, the Blogosphere.

Now, as I enter the second month of my bloggage, I shall review the last month;

First, I mentioned two websites that I like.

Um... an okay start, I guess, but proper use of my extreme, effortless Bloggability? Perhaps not.

Second, I proposed, in several loose and badly organized messages, a general, ultra-democratic (or anarchic) gaming clan, which any interested gamer could join.

Well, that was a bit better. I even misguidedly created a whole new blog for it (http://alcazmc.blogspot.com).

And lastly, I sounded off about recent events and lack of events in my school life. Looking at the various blogs that I have seen, that seems like the most bloggish series of blog posts that I have yet come up with. None of this deserved its own blog, of course, but there you have it.

Well, my blogging experiences have been fun. Cyall next post.

And try not to judge until you hit that "Next Blog" button a few times and see what else is out there.

You can check out my freind's blog (on which I post) at http://jonaldsdwelling.blogspot.com. Please give him a visit.

No Worries

No worries, even though life itself crashes down about my ears.

School is thouroughly un-fun these days, as i have an impossible project to complete.

I must improve my short story (view below). I am told it is shallow, repetitive and unworthy of the grade that it wasn't given. I must rewrite it, or present a better story by Thursday.

Arrg. My best short story ever, and I must revise it due to lack of emotional content.

Emotional content! The entire project was based on the idea of writing visually, to paint a picture! Now I must make the story "deep" enough to give it dimension, but what for? No painting ever had dimension, it is only as deep as its brushstrokes.

I feel oppressed. But, I need credit, so I will alter my story.

Today's Thoughts

Lately my life just has not seemed that creative.

My school is one of my problems.

Stress causes people to get creative, and productive. The best of people always get their thinking caps on when their world is coming down around their ears, and they decide to do something about their situation.

So, I could see the humor and wit of my peers come out when they were under the tyrrany of Finals week, and narrowly escaping failure in all their classes. Life was a little more than routine, and we all were challenged a little more, academically and socially.

Now, we are entering our second semester. We have a whole semester ahead of us, and the pressure is off. We have settled back into life with a sigh, and seem to consider ourselves momentarily obsolved of the obligation to inject creative content into our lives.

Maybe it was just this day in particular, but I felt opressed by the general lack of enthusiasm... in everything.

Short Stories

Today, in the same Language Arts class, we got to read what was probably the most heartfelt story ever written in McClure's class. It was vague, visual, and extremely moody. Just precisely what the doctor ordered.

It was, in fact, better than my own story by a factor of maybe ten.

My interesting little description of a sunset is just not gonna cut it if McClure wants the kind of emotion and imagery that were in this story. It was an old favorite student of his that wrote it.

The bastard. Two days before the due date (the day after I turn mine in) he gives us this bombshell short story and all but says "Hey, look! isn't this great? Now, are all of YOURS that good?"

Well, in actual fact, he probably had no agenda in reading us that story, but it still chafes a bit to suddenly find out that your own story (which I thought was pretty good) is in comparison with this masterpiece a superficial-looking photograph next to a popular Picasso.

Well, kudos to the girl who wrote that thing. It was an excellent story, though she will probably never give me permisson to publish it here. I can ask, maybe, but I still smart from the blow to my ego.

Cya next post.

My Short Story

I started from my reverie, and the horse twitched under me. We had been going at a slow plod for several days, and the prairie was utterly unchanged. The sky had been an overcast grey blur for hours, and I had been staring at the long, muscled neck of my horse for lack of interesting scenery.

I looked around, and was startled to see that the sun was setting to the west. It was a brighter spot behind the clouds. The clouds had changed as well. Looking to the right, I could still see the featureless grey roof, but directly above were higher, lighter shapes. My mood lightened as I watched the stringy, fluffy bits of cloud wrap themselves around each other. They were bright streaks of almost pure white, next to long inverted valleys of dark inner-cloud. It looked like a giant cat had swiped repeatedly at the sky, and left the clouds torn and roiling. There were occasional patches of blue peeking through the cover, and they became more and more frequent as I looked west, where the sun was setting.

The sun flared briefly through an opening in the cloud, but was covered quickly. The sky was a deep, dark orange settling slowly into pink; the clouds caught the dying light and played with it, bouncing it at each other even as it died.

It was twilight. I unsaddled the tired horse, and tossed my bedroll to the ground. The clouds were still clearing. I was tired from the day’s ride, but I couldn’t bring myself to sleep. Stars began peeking out of the deep, almost black sky. They grew stronger, and the cloud grew sparser, as the sky lost the last of its color. Bits of fluffy cloud still stifled many stars, but I could make out parts of glittering constellations. The twinkling little diamonds sat there in their bed of velvet, little prizes that no jeweler could match.

I looked for the moon, but it was still obscured by the mass of cloud to the east. I would see it tomorrow, I mused, as the clouds lazily departed. I fell to sleep.

Dawn found me before I found it. As I rose the sky was already brightening. The stars were giving up ground unwillingly, but soon they admitted defeat as the blue haze reasserted its position. The clouds today were light, wispy horsetails, still high, but this time they seemed aloof.

I looked around at the grass. It was dark, and it was hard to see the hidden depths at the roots. The dark, lush greens seemed inviting to my horse, which was nuzzling around in a particularly thick patch of it.

The high clouds were already brightly shining in the sunlight, but the sun itself was still not visible. I watched as the dark blue of the sky lightened to an enchanting grey. Light crept up from the depths of the distant horizon, and I watched the advancing line of sunlight sweep inexorably toward me. The first sliver of sun became visible as I swung my leg over the saddle, and I stopped to watch its entrance.

It grew on the horizon; growing there like the most dazzling blossom this prairie had ever produced. The sky around was a bright, almost white, blue, darkening as I looked west. The roof that had shut the sky for most of yesterday was nowhere to be seen, but the last of the stirring, streaked texture greeted the sun enthusiastically. In reds and pinks slowly growing to orange, the clouds set as the sun rose above them.

I watched the sky around for several minutes more, but my horse recovered before I did, and nudged my leg. It was time to go.

Writing Visual

Lately I've been asked to write a short story that "paints a picture" in the reader's mind. This is in my Language Arts class, and it is due next Thursday.

We had just finished reading another short story that very graphically describes a sex scene. It was called "the storm" and was about an adventurous Cajun housewife that takes an old flame into her home while her husband and child are sheltered in a store down the road.

The "visual" part was during the sex scene, as you may have guessed. We speed-read the story in class, and discussed writing in a visual fashion.

Next it was our turn. We were told to write a short story that is very visually oriented. I had a hard time coming up with something that would work as a "visual" piece, but finally I landed on something that no one would associate with sex, or with women.

I had made it my mission, you see, to make something very much distinct from the theme of the short story we read in class. I was frankly disturbed by the piece of what could certainly be classified as "porno" that we were reading in that class, so my story was going to depart as far as possible from that model.

My subject, cliché though it was, was a sunset; with subsequent sunrise. Speaking in visual terms, it is an excellent starting point for your "visual" story, that is no doubt why it is such an obvious cliché.

Above is the story I finally hammered out, if you wish to bother yourself with reading it.

The Origins of Alcazabedabra

I thought I ought to explain how I came up with this wacky name I use online. It has become the name I use the most online, and if you see it anywhere again, it will be because of me.

The name is valuable because it is unique. When I encountered it, it was in the James Clavell novel, Tai-Pan. A certain intriguing character named Aristotle Quance uttered it. He was a painter, painting a portrait of a young girl, when he exclaimed "By the beard of Alcazabedabra!". When the girl asked who or what "Alcazabedabra" was, Quance told her that he was an old freind of his, a bearded freind that watched over painters and "little girls like you."

I don't know exactly what Alcazabedabra is, but the name was so unique that I found myself memorizing it and its spelling.

Since then I've used it everywhere and for everything. I use it as a username in online games, I use it for this blog, and I use it in my email addresses (hence, Alcazabedabra@gmail.com).

I doubt Clavell minds my use of the name, I've never had the chance to ask him. In any case, I've made the name my own.

Thank God It's Friday

TGIF, everybody!

My blog has survived to its first Friday already.

Let's get off of the clan subject, I have a separate blog for that.

Did anyone see George Bush's speech yesterday? I didn't. I've seen some of the transcript, but I never listened to him speak. Mostly that was because Presidential speeches nowadays are mostly for the benefit of the press and the masses. Most of Bush's speeches have been a giant collection of sound bytes for the news and talk radio and such.

A president's intentions are much more easily read by his actions, anyway. Look at what actions he's taken, and see if you agree with those. I never really approved of Bush, but to be honest, I liked Kerry a lot less. I'm very glad that Kerry is somewhat out of the picture.

I have a clan blog, now.

As far as I know, no one has even seen my page, let alone taken me up on the clan idea.

If there is someone out there reading this post, comment on it! i'd like to know if I have readers at all.

Anyway, how does one get a blog noticed without spending any money? And, who do you contact about it?

Visit my new clan blog at http://alcazmc.blogspot.com

Make comments there if the clan idea makes you laugh, or intrigues or interests you.

I'm desperate for attention. COMMENT! I would simply LOVE the feedback.

Any takers on the clan idea?

All of a sudden, I can't help but be pleased at the thought of having an open-ended, entirely non-clannish clan. No obligations, no fancy site, just a blog, maybe a small, simple site later...

And no specific game to attach it to.

And you get the benefit of the cute little [AMC] tag that says "yeah, that's right! i'm in a clan!". for all of you gamers out there that never liked clans, this is the clan for you.

My Email Adresses

I have three email adresses.

My hotmail account - don't use this one, it is my repository for spam
Alcazabedabra@hotmail.com

My gmail accounts, use the first one, the second is just extra
Kl.Bear@gmail.com
Thegrizzlybear@gmail.com

If you are actually interested in my sorta half-clan, you can email me at
Alcazabedabra@gmail.com

Clans - thoughts

I have seen the secret underground culture that is -- WC3 clans.

What is it with the clans? you find clans in every game you play, but what does being in a clan do for you? as far as I can tell, nothing much.

There is a clan ladder, ranking within the damn clan, all kinds of clan BS that really doesn't mean anything other than the fact that you take the game WAY more seriously than you EVER should.

I consider myself an avid video game player -- but I just cannot see the logic in getting involved in some kind of group that just wants you to spend even more time on the game than you ever do, and be more competitive about it than you already are!

So, you clans out there, have you ever thought about how much time you are spending on these games? Counter-Strike, Warcraft 3, America's Army, leasing servers, putting up clan websites, and playing for more hours every week than you probably spend working?

I am not, have (almost) never been, and will probably never be a member of a "clan", and I really enjoy the wide scope of games that I play! Someday i'm gonna start an all-purpose clan for people who hate to be obligated to clans. It'll be called Alcazabedabra's Motley Crew, and anyone who wants to be part of it can just add the prefix [AMC] to the beginning of their net names, and call yourselves a clan.

Email me if you have thoughts, but otherwise just leave me alone and enjoy being in a clan.

My First-Ever Post

Since this is my first-ever post on my first-ever blog, I'll just mention a few websites that I find amusing, and leave the rest for later (baby-steps).
First, ebaumsworld.com is an immensely popular, incredibly funny media source that is FREE, infested with the worst advertising gimmicks known to man, and always worth a visit.
Well, now. That wasn't too hard.
Also, if you're into console emulators, you might try checking out emuparadise.org, which is about the only site that offers roms without forcing you to "vote" for their site. However, please observe the copyright laws. After downloading a rom, you HAVE to delete it after 24 hours unless you already own the game.
Alright, I think i've got a good start here. Cya next post...?