D&D: Playing this Weekend

I might be able to play D&D this weekend. Well, I write might, but most likely it will happen. I've known about this for some time, but I didn't want to carve anything in stone until I was entirely sure about the group being able to play.

I haven't been able to play for a while, much due to one of my friends, let's call him XR, having a dancing performance he needed to practice on for a long while. He's been practicing for months, and with him being both a good friend to us all, we couldn't exactly just go on without him, and we decided to wait until he was done with his dancing. But now that he's done, we can actually play D&D for the first time in a long while.

In your face, contemporary dance!

Well, provided that one of the girls of the group, let's call her EL, isn't still sick at the end of the week. She wasn't at school today, but I'm guessing that she won't be away for too long. She's not the type to be gone from school for a long time, and though she kind of does whatever she wants to do, she's not the type to dismiss school for an extended period of time because she feels like it.

So most likely we'll get some D&D-ing done, even though we might not reach the point of beginning with my dungeon. Why? Because we had actually just started on another one before XR started to have a ton of dancing to do, and lacked the time to continue playing D&D with us. And with XR being the DM in addition to being a close friend to us all, we couldn't really continue without him in any way, especially since the group is against having as a person as both the DM and a PC.

Not this kind of PC. Playable Character.

If you wonder about why XR's DM and not me, since I've been writing about us going to complete the adventure I made, it's because he was the main organizer of our introduction to D&D (and he was the only one with a DM's handbook at the time we started to play). It's not that we're not going to play through my adventure, but we've all kind of agreed that we'd proceed to a logical point of swapping before doing so.

There were some arguments of that we could all just immediately swap adventure, and pretend like the place we were about to enter got flattened to dust or something, but we came to the conclusion that we wanted to play through at least the first small bit before going back to the village in the game, and we could start with the adventure I've made.

So in conclusion, this entire post is about D&D most likely happening this weekend. I'm excited and I hope that we get past enough to start on my adventure, which I've already told you, is going to be an epic and awesome thing.

MC: Redstone

I like playing Minecraft. There's many reasons behind why, but one of my favorite ones is redstone. It's a great thing that allows creativity and logic to combine into the most wonderful creations and is one of the reasons that Minecraft is, in my opinion, one of the best games around. Experienced players often use and experiment with redstone in many of their creations, while new players don't know what it is or how to use it until they've done a quick google on how to use it, or stumbled across its usage in some other way.

''What is redstone?'' you may ask, depending on how much knowledge you have at your disposition about Minecraft and its gameplay. Redstone is, simply put, usually used for a rough simulation of electrical currents. Signals flow through it, enabling or disabling anything it's hooked up to. It's a form of binary electricity that is either on or off, and can be used for a ton of things, all depending on how creative whomever using it is, and how good they are at logical thinking to get redstone to do what they want it to.

Redstone itself makes three types of signal-related items in the game, even though redstone may be used to affect or be affected by basically any other items in the game. Redstone can be used for redstone dust, redstone torches and redstone repeaters. Redstone dust, when used on the ground, forms a wire that the kind-of-electrical signals can run through, redstone torches are a form of stick that constantly sends a signal that travels through redstone via itself and redstone repeaters are a way of extending the 8-block length that a normal signal can travel.

While these are the basic parts that are required for redstone-wiring, there are a ton of items in the game that can be associated with it. There's pressure-plates, levers, buttons, pistons, powered rails, doors, trapdoors and more that either affect or can be affected by redstone signals. Heck, even most blocks can ''electrified'' by redstone, and sent signals through (though only a very short length).

There's many uses of redstone, and usually the more creative the usage of it, the better it is. The Minecraft community likes new and interesting uses of redstone, and often copy and improve each others designs. It might seem like a waste of time to, say, use redstone to open a door instead of just hitting it once in the game, but the main usage of redstone isn't to do simple things like that. Sure, some people like to use redstone-wiring for almost everything, and often focus more on it than other parts of the game, but the brilliance of redstone allows a lot more to be done.

Based solely on the principles of redstone (it's either on or off), people have through the use of other things in the game made secret doors, calculators, displays, pop-up mazes and even digital clocks and 32-bit memory cells, similar to those used in computers. Redstone truly is an amazing part of the game, and is one of the reasons Minecraft has had such a huge success as it has, as it allows a lot more room for creativity than many other games do.

*Cough* Ninja Blade *Cough*

Some people even play Minecraft for the sole reason of experimenting with redstone, often ignoring any other parts of the game that are unrelated to their experimenting. Many people also install mods that allow them to get a completely flat map, without mountains or hills, to make it easier to experiment and make complicated and intricate designs for whatever they feel like making. Luckily I don't know of anyone's who plays with redstone to the point of obsession, but it's not entirely unlikely that many hours, if not days or weeks, have disappeared due to ''redstoning'' .

Basically, I'd sum redstone up with calling it a way to creatively play with electrical signals and make complicated designs, while being neither too complicated to not understand nor too simple to have a wide variations of usage. If anyone ever wants to play Minecraft, or already play it without knowing what redstone is, I recommend that you start playing with redstone, and find out what you can do with it. Redstone is one of the coolest things about minecraft, and should not be ignored, atleast not by anyone who wants to test Minecraft for its full worth, be it an expert, newbie, obsessed person or anyone else. Redstone is in simple terms: Absolutely great.

Wasting Time On Minecraft

I play Minecraft. You know, that game with the blocks and stuff. It has a ton of blocks that I can play with, and I like that a lot. Maybe a bit too much. It's like a virtual lego, only that you can do more with it. The past few days I've started playing it again, and it really is sucking up all my time and makes me spend time on it that I really should be spending on stuff like my D&D dungeon, school, playing on musical instruments, blogging, hanging with friends, etc. And even though I feel like I'm doing a lot, I really am just wasting my time, putting virtual blocks on top of each other, making virtual farms with virtual animals, making virtual furniture to put in virtual houses, and making virtual weapons to kill virtual monsters with.

Like this guy. Only without the fancy hat.

I know I should be doing other things, but I just can't stop! I started building a small hut, which i used as a shelter to dig for materials for more tools, which i used to make a wooden wall, which protected my plot from mobs (since i put torches in it that prevent them from spawning), which allowed me to build houses in my area, that needed space, forcing me to expand my plot, etc, etc. I just can't stop playing the game, because I never feel like I'm done. As of now, I've leveled mountains to keep it all the ground the same height, I've made a huge river flowing through my plot (now a kingdom), I've got both animal and plant farms, a community gathering hall, a storage house, a relatively big mine, etc. I just can't stop. I want to work and do other things but Minecraft won't let me.

And it has interferred with my blogging to the amount that I simply stopped. If I hadn't remembered the blogging rule of thumb I'm using (at least blog once every 3 days) I wouldn't have typed in and published any of this! I had a plan about keeping blogging at a steady pace for 1 month, before going all commercial and ''read my blog guys, it's TEH BESTEREST!'' but I couldn't uphold my rule of thumb for 1 week, and it really seems like I can't keep so many balls in the air as I'm doing.

As of now, I'm able to keep throwing and catching, but I'm worrying about all the exams and tests that are upcoming, as it's nearing the end of the year. Every teacher has learned me a ton of things they want to test me in, and they all want me to do my best, but all the tests and papers to turn in are really keeping a leash on how much spare time I got. At the current time, I stay at school until 7 o'clock, that's 5 1/2 hours after school usually quits, every single day, just to keep throwing the balls in the air, and when I get home, lukewarm rests of dinner await me, along with a troubled father, worrying about what I'm out doing every day, and two annoyed brothers, wanting me to do my part in the household.

But that's the life that I've chosen. I have even compromised my social life, and I barely hang with friends outside school, but I know it's the choice I've made. I got so many things I want to do, and so few hours in a day, and I really want to succeed in all the things i pick up, and add to the juggling pile. Recently I picked up a ball I dropped a while ago, Minecraft, and felt like juggling with it again. The problem is that minecraft is a game, meant to waste my time, and it does just that. It wastes my time.

Pictured: ''Productivity''

But even though it wastes my time, I know that it's a way to stress down, and I really need that at the moment. I've had a lot of schoolwork, hobbies that needed attending, abilities that needed to be kept warm, a sick father and younger brother, a messy house that needs cleaning, and some other things that have just kept stressing me out. In a way, Minecraft is doing a lot more good than many of my other hobbies are. The stressing down is great, because I've felt signs of heavy stress lately, that have subcounsciously bothered me a ton, causing me to almost snap at my friends for things that are a part of who they are.

And that's part of the reason why I'm going to keep playing Minecraft (and other games like it). To keep me from stressing out too much and snapping at people who aren't really related to why I'm so stressed, even if it takes time that should be used on other things. It's great to have something to do that keeps me stressed down, and if it wastes some of my time, so be it. I'm 17 and got my whole life ahead of me, I've got decades before it's too late for me to live my life.

Introduction To My First D&D Adventure

As some people who have looked through what's on the site most likely know, I play Dungeons and Dragons, abbreviated D&D. I am currently working on a D&D dungeon for my D&D group. It's what I would call a mega-dungeon, as it is several times larger than a normal D&D dungeon. I have been working on it for months now, spending many hours after school and in weekends, to get it finished. While I have not finished it yet, I am planning to have it ready (hopefully) within 2 weeks, which is when the next chance to play D&D opens up among my group.

I'm going to place the parts of the adventure on this blog, piece by piece, at the rate of which we complete them, to avoid spoiling anything for anyone from my D&D group potentially reading my blog, to avoid spoiling the adventure for them. What I can say on the other hand, is that it will be epic. The sheer size of it means that if we play several times a week, it will take a minimum of 1/2 year to complete at our current speed, and the quality is, as I simply must admit (brag about), excellent. There's a main storyline, several sub-storylines (that play little role in completing the dungeon, but is a nice spice), a plot, realistic motivation, relatively realistic dungeon set-up, and much more, to make the dungeon the greatness that it most surely is.

I've spent, as stated, a lot of time to get it complete. I've given it a lot of my energy, sucking up a lot that should have been used for school and such, to get my average grades up a bit (even though they aren't actually bad at the moment, it's just that they could be higher). I'm itching to tell everyone and everything about this amazing thing, but I can't, as it would spoil the moment of actually playing through it for my D&D group. But, tell you what, I'll make an exception this time, and I will reveal enough to keep most D&D players interested.

The setting takes place in the published campaign Eberron (though it could easily be swapped to another campaign), and centers around the pillaging and plundering of farms and small villages near an old castle, where nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Except for one thing; The corpses of those fallen in the raids are nowhere to be found. Neither the corpses of friends, foes or anyone else can be found among the ruins, and those lucky enough to have escaped, only saw glimpses of those who so easily killed their families, burnt their homes and desecrated their homes. Horrifying glimpses, that the survivors may have been better off forgetting.

Why are there no corpses? Where have the corpses been taken, if they have been taken? What's with the raiders? Who's the mastermind behind all of this? Many questions arise already from the beginning, and I can promise many more mysteries. The survivors' tales of the glimpses of the horrifying raiders, mysterious pentagrams in the raided villages and a fight for the old castle awaits those brave enough to start this adventure. Dare you enter the castle of a human king who's lived to be 120, many opposing forces who are all seeking to take the castle, and fight your cause, when even the castle itself works against you?

Thus is the introduction I will give you for my adventure, where I will add more and more as we venture through the dungeon (I've already spoiled a bit more than my group should know, but since I haven't told any of them I'm posting this on my blog, I doubt they'll notice as of now. I will be more careful about spoiling in the future, but as of now, I needed a nice introduction for the adventure, because I know people like a good introduction, especially to such a great adventure. I hope this glimpse of what's next to come is enough to keep you reading, and possibly get you to read some of the other posts on my blog. Any comments are appreciated, and I will read as many comments as I can, and answer those that need answering.

-Penguin

The Internet

The modern internet is relatively young. I write modern because the internet has since its inception in the late 50's/early 60's evolved a lot. It started in the hands of a few individuals, got into the hands of the government, then moved on to different computer universities, moved to the professional basis, refined itself in the hands of the military, got sponsored and basic ruleset layed out by National Science Foundation, was further refined by different educational facilities and CERN, before becoming more commercialized, later expanding gradually to the public, hitting those interested in computer technology first, before moving on to the general public.

The problem is, as the internet first was used by people who can be considered ''common public'' in the late 90's, and the curve over who used it could closest be described as exponential, most webpages aren't actually very old. Very few websites can brag about being anything older than 10 years, but despite this, most domain names have been claimed. This basically means that the internet, as young, yet important to modern life as it is, is looking at being filled extremely quickly, where all domain names are looking at being taken by relatively short time. This basically means that no webpage can be created without destroying the one that is already existing, when this happens.

If you're having problems with accepting this, it's easy to prove it. Most good websites have within 10 letters in their domain names. And while the amount of combinations of letters in a website name are many, they are limited to a finite number of variations based on the ASCII system, where few of the combinations are actually usable. It's like if you have a big bowl of metaphorical sandwich pieces, and every combination can only be claimed by one person. The problem is that there's not an eternal number of ingredients, and more and more people have found out about the nom-ability of all the sandwiches, so they all wanted one. The combinations are running out, and fewer and fewer sandwiches taste any good.

Metaphors based on food. I think I might be hungry.

But the internet being filled up is just one problem. Another problem is that the internet is being abused by everyone. Whether it's corporations trying to commercialize and claim the internet, professionals and hobbyists trying to ''improve'' it in each their own way, and amateurs who are rambling about without knowing what they try to do, or how they are supposed to do it. The web is enormous, and everyone have their own ideas of how it is and should be, and act accordingly.This leads to the aforemented, though relative, abuse, where nobody agree on what to do (except for the standards set by the W3C), and keep on moving the internet in different directions.

The internet is in this way pulled in different directions at the same time, leading to more and more complexity and chaos. While the internet has actually gotten less complex to use, it's become harder to understand. To take an example, there's all kinds of social groups conflicting with each other, and if you say one thing that supports either one of them, you're going to get some reactions against you, and discussions about why you suck for believing just that. You have to know everything about the sosiology, anthropology, norms, customs, etc. about a site before actually being able to do anything on your own there.

Whether it's asking a forum a question, posting a funny picture on a funny picture site, or even just leaving a comment on anything at all posted online, there's always a social environment with their own customs and opinions who will react in different ways at the exact same actions. Some will even do things as simple as banning you for preferring regular milk to chocolate milk. They don't care if you may have allergies, or even if you have some kind of chocolate-related trauma, they will act the way the rest of their social group does. With negativity towards anything that's different or disliked.

What, you thought I was kidding?

But it's not that odd that they react to different things, the reason for the being there is after all that they have an idea of what to expect, and if anyone try to change it, they'll oppose them as a defence mechanism against someone trying to break something they like.

The internet is huge and complicated, and even though I've written a lot right now about its history and culture, it's an incredible amount more that I can't possibly cover. The internet is a massive source of information, and more and more just keeps getting added, making it impossible to cover it all, at least for more than the second it takes to add more information. The internet is currently as I'm writing this at the a size of over 7.43 billion sites. Each of them have a differenct culture associated with it, and unless you have no opinions at all, you're going to collide with some of them.

Skyrim Vs Mother's Bacon

My parents are divorced. It's not a very special or uncommon thing, but it means that they live at separate places and that I swap between staying at my father's house and my mother's house. Every other weekend i stay at my mother's house, while the rest i stay with my father, assuming it's not in a vacation. This also means that my mother wants me to stay with her more than I do, as I'm not there so often. But despite how she tries by being nice and making good food, there's some reasons she can't do anything about that keep me from staying here for longer.

One is that bacon doesn't give me a hard-on.

  

The first is location. My mother lives in a different county than where my school and friends are. It's not more than a 50 minutes bus trip to get to the city, but it's still enough to become a negative impact on how I feel about being here. Having to spend 1 hour to get to school by bus, and 1 1/2 hour to get to friends means both that I have to spend more time on public transport and that I have to wake up earlier to start travelling sooner. When I meet my friends, it's usually not in the evening. Normally, it's a meeting by 12 o'clock (military time), meaning that I have to leave 10:30, which, because I don't like stressing, means that I have to set my alarm to 9:30 on weekends.

It's not a major annoyment to me, as I'm not the worst of sleepers. I wake up early enough on normal days, and I don't have to have my bed flipped upside down before I get out. To me, it is at most a mild annoyance to not get to sleep as long as I'd like, but it is one of those small stones that make out the pile of annoyment keeping me from staying here for longer.

Another one of the stones of annoyment is housework. My mother likes to have a clean house, while my father slacks more on that area. This means that at my mother's house, there's always something to be done. Either if it's a floor that looks kind of dirty, a dusty window or the bathroom is kind of dirty, there's always a spot she can see that needs a bit of cleaning. And while I don't mind having a place clean, sometimes I feel like doing other things, which collides with her wish for me to clean or fix something, resulting in a slight quarrel. And I write slight because I don't object very much when I can see that something needs doing, and that the one doing it might as well be me, because what I'd rather do rarely is very useful.

Such as looking up penguin-related things.

Which brings up another figurative stone. I like using my computer to do various things, but at my mother's I have very few things to do on my computer. It's not that I don't have any games to play or programs I feel like running, it's more that there's many things I can't do, because the laptop I'm using there is old, and following, it's slow. It's actually so slow that I experience delay and lag while playing games that were released 10 years ago. For me, who uses a computer a lot, it's much more preferred to use a custom-built stationary computer, capable of easily running Skyrim at the best graphic settings.

A must for any proper gamer's computer.

But there's not much to do about that. I don't have the means to buy a brand new computer, and my mother has neither the money to waste on it nor a reason to buy me one out of the blue. Computers are expensive, and good ones even more so.

But all of these reasons are due to the different lifestyles of my parents. My mother has a relatively normal view on how a family should be run, while my father has a more lazy attitude. And it must be said that while I don't have to do much at my father's place, it gets kind of messy there. The lifestyles at either of my parents' place are two different lives I have to relate to, and while I don't think either is very much worse than the other, and that they both have their ups and downs, it all boils down to which differences i prefer over the other. My mom isn't doing anything wrong, and neither is my father, but I have two choices, and I pick the one that suits me the best.

My strange self

 

Pictured: Not actually me

Well, since I've decided to make a blog, I might as well start by introducing myself. I am a norwegian 17-year old guy with two brothers, who studies art in high-school, and leans towards the geeky type of person (This might sound a bit ''hipster'', but it's the best thing i could think of to describe myself). I am in a relatively good physical condition, I have a plan for my future, and I like sweets.

While this could be just about anyone, I must admit that I have a few things that separate me from the rest of the pack of tittie-staring hormone-bombs. While I might hide a lot of stuff I don't want publicized, I'm going to try and present myself in the best manner possible, and I will at the same time try to keep the reading interesting. I will in other words, take off my ''clothing'', but leave my boxers on (Which I know some people would prefer me to).

First thing about me that isn't very normal among others is that I'm very close to being asexual. I've had huge tits literally shoved upon me, without having any kind of boner-inducing spell cast upon me. This is a thing I'm able to control myself, luckily, allowing me to easier focus on other, more important things. It also prevents me from getting horny from looking at naked act-models from the aforemented art study, but I'm mostly pleased by the way I'm allowed to ignore the common boner-vision, which causes a craving for anything with boobs, reduced environmental awareness and clouded/boner-affected thinking.

Second thing people should be aware of, is that I got a very logical sense of thinking. I used to be a borderline sociopath person, completely ignoring, denying or deproving anything that I found illogical. I was even very much for using less medical resources on the sick (even the terminall ill), because there's little point in keeping people alive like that. It drains resources that might be spent on other things, it makes for the need of more medical personel (who could be doing other things), and not least: The survival of the fittest is completely ignored by mankind, which I found to be really stupid, because we get so many weak genes that are less resistant to sickness. I have, of course, begun thinking differently after this, but I'm still very logically contructed.

Third thing about me that separates me from others is my, strangely, large amount of empathy (atleast as percieved by me), leading me to often abandon my own side of a discussion, simply because I feel like whomever I'm discussing against should be right. It is weird why I'm so empathic, seeing that, as aforemented, I lean to the logical side of the brain (the left), which, as far as I know, isn't the one that takes care of the emotional information (aside from being the part that takes care of one's feeling of ''self'').

Fourth, and the last thing I will be writing about myself in this post, is that I tend to think wrongly in some situations. Not that i come to the wrong conclusion, but rather that when I'm supposed to think deeply about a subject, I end up blurting out whatever brain-farts I can produce in the time it takes me to finish talking. But also, opposite, I think too deeply about some things, and try to analyze things for possible end-results and reasons, leaving me saying nothing, while the other people talking change subject. I luckily have reduced the amount of times I do the latter, as it complicates social interactions more than necessary, yet leaving me more ''brain-gassin" than ever.

I hope this has been an interesting read (as it is my first actual blog-input), and I hope that whomever reads this will continue reading this blog (which i hope to keep going for a while). I also must say I accept comments on whatever I'm posting, either it's grammatical, logical, spelling or other mistakes, as I want to keep the blog as good as possible for the public. For those interested in what I'll be blogging about further on, the answer isn't very hard; Anything I feel like.