A Place Like This

My poor old Palm Treo 700p, which has served me (reasonably) well for the last 3+ years, finally gave up the ghost, turning itself completely off just, you know, because.  Time for a new phone!  I love new toys.

I really, really want an iPhone.  They are sexy and fun and intuitive, and all the cool kids have one.  But . . . AT&T’s cell coverage in San Francisco is horrid, and Sprint still has the best cell coverage in the City, so Sprint remains my carrier.

This weekend I picked up a new Palm Pre at the Sprint store near my house.  It was only $200, which isn’t bad at all (especially considering what I originally paid for the Treo).  I’ve been playing around with it as time permits.  Here are some early observations:

Likes

• It’s much smaller and lighter than my old phone.
• The screen is beautiful and bright.
• The built in camera has great resolution, and a built-in flash.
• It backs up all of your data on a server at Sprint’s headquarters.  If you lose your phone, they can issue you another one and download all of your data to the new phone, and ta-da!  Back in business.
• I can now see actual web pages, instead of the smashed-down versions I had on the Treo.  I can even zoom in and out on the pages using simple finger gestures.  Actually, I usually have to zoom in, because your average web page today looks very tiny on the screen of the Pre.
• It automatically syncs up with all of my mail accounts everywhere, and checks for new mail at intervals.  My old phone wouldn’t do this, and would often choke up and freeze if I tried to check my mail.

Dislikes

• It appears that you can’t change the paging/text chime.  The default chime is rather lame, and I’m not sure it will wake me up.  Since I rely on my cell phone to do so when I am on call for work, this could be problematic.  It’s nothing they can’t fix with an OS update; still, it seems an odd thing to exclude.
• There aren’t really any interesting applications available for it yet.  This should change going forward.  I doubt it will ever match the app library for the iPhone, though.
• It doesn’t synchronize with stand-alone Outlook.  There is a small program available that allows you to do a one-time transfer from your Outlook to your Pre, but it’s not the same as Hotsynching.
• I think having all of my phone data in a “cloud” somewhere is kind of creepy.  But I am old-fashioned, I guess.
• No more voice and video recording.  I’m sure there’ll be apps for that, but my Treo did it out of the box.

It finally hit me last week:  my Dad is gone.   I heard the theme song to M*A*S*H, and burst into tears.  It took me a few minutes to process what had triggered my sobbing attack:  I grew up watching M*A*S*H with my Dad, every week, like clockwork.  I still remember crying during the final episode (not so my Dad could see, of course).  So when I watch M*A*S*H, I will always think of Dad.

It’s taken me this long to actually deal with the fact that he’s gone.  So many bad things happened this past winter . . . I had a good cry, and thought about other things we did together.  He used to put me on the back of his motorcycle and ride around the countryside in North Carolina with me.  It terrified me, but I loved it.  He tried to get me to play sports, but I was always a disappointment.  I hated baseball, I hated soccer, I hated tennis, I hated anything that made me realize how scrawny and physically awkward I was.  But Dad would sign me up for little league, or tennis lessons, or season after season of soccer, ever hopeful that something would stick.  He’d force me out into the yard so we could toss the baseball, when I really wanted to be inside playing with my Atari or my Star Wars figures (or next door with Gina, playing with her Barbies.  Shhh!).  We used to watch Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on PBS on Sunday nights.  Or at least, he would watch it, and I would pass out cold after about a half an hour of Dr. Sagan’s mellow drone, and Dad would wake me up at the end to put me to bed.

As I grew older, we grew further apart, especially after I came out.  I still think kicking me out of the house was the best thing my Dad ever did for me: it forced me to grow up, gain my independence, and find my own success.  It came with a high price, though; I had to make new family, new friends, and rely entirely on myself.  My parents made it pretty clear they didn’t want anything to do with my new life, so for 20+ years I lived hundreds, often thousands of miles away, with the occasional phone call or holiday visit serving as my connection to their world.

In recent years, as they grew older (and so did I), our relationship changed.  They became more accepting of me, going so far as to ask after my then-partner, including him in Christmas cards, and so on.  I actually brought him to my parents’ house once, the first time I’ve ever done that, and they got along with each other famously.

Dad and I talked more often, with work as a common topic (both of us were DBAs).  We still butted heads on a number of things (especially politics), but it was as equals.  I still don’t really feel reconnected to my family, and I’m not sure I ever will, but in the end, we had come to a sort of peace about the past, uneasy as it was.  I am so grateful that, the last time I spoke with him over the phone, our last words to each other were, “I love you.”

So rest in peace, Pop.  I do love you, and I miss you.

Over at rpg.net, DaveB, famous for his Mage game descriptions in the Actual Play forums, described Mage:  the Awakening thus:

“IMO, it’s this – Vampire and Werewolf are your classic “once-human monsters” games, Vampire especially. Humans are things to be feared and envied.

Changeling and Promethean, the younger games, have humanity as a thing to be aspired to. Changeling is about reclaiming your life after abuse. Promethean about becoming a person. The new World of Darkness tries hard to make the normal human being something other than a joke.

Mage is aligned entirely the other way – it’s about people who have what all the other game lines envy or try to get but aren’t satisfied. Humans that turn themselves into monsters chasing power. The anti-Changeling, if you will.

Everything’s about that power. The Lie is the Gnostic vision of the world – the world of darkness we know is the proverbial shadows on the back of a cave, with the Supernal as the light and the Abyss as the thing casting the shadows, interposing itself and creating reality as we know it as a result.

And incidentally, Matthias? That’s what the Abyss is – it’s negatives. That isn’t a calculator, it’s the thing that makes a calculator shape when you shine the Aether behind it. Abyssal Intrusions are things like mathematics gone wrong, language gone wrong, false histories that kill and parasites that reverse your sense of pain so you become addicted to eating glass. They’re *lies*. The Supernal is everything that Is, the Abyss is everything that Is Not and the World of Darkness the interface between the two.

Mages are obssessed with Truth, though they have a funny way of showing it. They’ve squinted out into the light and convinced themselves that it’s better than staying in the cave. Never mind that the cave is neccessary for human life as we know it. Never mind that fire burns – the Supernal is True therefore it must be Right.

Mages give themselves magical identities – their Shadow Names – only partially out of a sense of self-preservation. It’s not *that* big an effect on sympathetic magic, after all, not until you get (through Archmastery) close enough to touch the light and replace your real name with it entirely. It’s a rejection of the world and recasting themselves as they want to be. Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter. Mages lose wisdom as they deny their responsibility to the world in favour of chasing Ascension or becoming wrapped up in their power. They cling to half-remembered bits and pieces of the Ur-Civilisation the Guardians of the Veil would like everyone to call “Atlantis” because it was closer to Truth, and those that don’t like it as a myth substitute their own quests.

Never mind that the last time anyone walked out of the cave en masse they killed the campers, took over the camp fire outside and built a sturdy gate over the cave’s entrance so noone else can get out.

And the Light isn’t Nice. The Primal Wild is not a cartoon Eden (I personally have been gently corrected when Freelancing for comparing it to Eden in the same sense that Aether is often compared to Heaven). It’s the Truth of Nature, and the Truth of Nature is not a pleasent place for humans to visit. The Aether is the Truth of Power; not for the faint-hearted, even for those that prefer beautiful women with fluffy wings to old-testement visions of how Angels appear and behave.

What kind of person rejects everything around them, in favour of chasing the ability to play with that kind of fire? They’d have to be *crazy*. Visionary. Inspired, reckless, hubristic and any other adjectives you like.

That’s Mage. Marching wide-eyed into certain destruction out of a sense of a better world. The Tarot Fool at the edge of the cliff. When the end comes and they get chewed up by the things they go poking into in this world, the Abyssal things they try to force their way past, the Supernal things they’re trying to grab by the tail or (most often) their own fellow Mages, shoving and jostling for prime tail-grabbing position, there’s no True Fae, Demiurge or Sire they can point to – it’s all their own fault.”

Extremely late to the party, I picked up Halo for the PC yesterday.  I have been hankering for a good science fiction game lately, and I’ve always meant to try Halo out.  Adventuring on something like an Orbital sounded fun, since I’m a big Ian Banks fan.  What would it be like to live on one?  Orbitals are much, much smaller than something like a Ringworld, but they are still stupidly big for an artificial construct.

Since it’s a first person shooter, the game is more about shooting aliens than it is exploring the Halo, but the environment is still there for you to oggle.  I love pointing my camera up and seeing the world arching overhead.  Halo is several years old, but I think the graphics are still great.

As we were sitting around with all of our relatives this last week, mourning the loss of my Dad and just catching up, I rediscovered the joy of listening to my Tennessee relatives storytelling.  I always loved it when I was a little boy.  When they all get together, one after the other they regale the group with stories from the past, and everyone listens in rapt attention.

When it came my turn, I decided to share a story about my Dad.  When my brother Ken and I were very little, my Dad had one of those college rings, with a big red crystal in an ornate gold setting.  I was always fascinated by it, because it looked magical.  One day, my Mom left Ken and me with Dad while she went out to run errands.  When she left, my Dad took off his ring and handed it to me.

“There’s a genie in this ring!  But he will only come out if it’s really quiet and pitch black!”

Ken and I shuffled off to the bathroom, closed the door, and shut off the light.  There we sat, staring down in the dark, quiet as could be, waiting for that genie to pop out.

I’m not sure how long we were in there, but the next thing we hear is my Mom shouting, “DEL MAYS!” and my Dad laughing.

I still think that ring is magical.

I am revamping the site, and hope to add a lot of features in the future.  For now, the blog is back.