My minecraft skin.. and other updates
So I haven’t updated my blog in a few days. That last post was a bit hard to follow, and frankly I just have been in a lousy mood lately and haven’t felt like posting much.
Since the last post, I’ve had to move my blog and store website to a different hosting provider.. aka one I have to pay for. A big shout of thanks to Luc Aubret (of AubreTEC) for letting me squat on his webserver for the last year and some change. The move to paid hosting wasn’t totally unexpected, but the timing could have been better. With sales up and down, the economy doing scary things, wars and rumours of wars, etc.. well it was a scary time to pay 3 years of webhosting in advance.
The move was a rough one, and to be honest, it was about all I could manage. Since then I’ve been struggling with money fears (that was a lot of money to spend in the same month as I paid my annual SL membership AND had to boost my SL tier, and had to renew my domain registration.. not to mention recent and future medical costs.. and the rent’s due in a few days.
Stress.
Aside from all of that, I’ve done a bit more playing in minecraft, having hooked up with Cheesius‘s server (with some other of his friends). It’s kind of weird playing the game in a social server, if only because we’re so damned spread out that I end up working alone in a world full of people.
Anywho, here’s my minecraft skin.
Before anyone asks, screencaptures taken with “SkinCraft” and “SkinEdit“.
Most of the preliminary work was done using SkinCraft, which is a downloadable flash application (which you can run directly in a browser for near-fullscreen editing). Skincraft has some great “base” skins. I exported one of them, and smoothed it up a bit in a graphics editing program, and used that as the basis for my skin. The hair and shoes were inspired by bits (hair) of jdk2k2′s “Stocking” skin and bits (shoes) of GameOver124′s “Stocking” skin, based on the anime character of the same name, from the curiously named anime: “Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt“. No, I had never heard of this anime before, and my minecraft skin is not intended to represent any particular anime character.
Privacy, Anonymity and Pseudonymity
I didn’t even know Pseudonymous was a word until the last month or so, and yet I’ve always understood the concept. From Poor Richard to Silence Dogood, Benjamin Franklin was a masterful user of Pseudonyms. Likewise Samuel Clemens is less well known than his Pseudonym, Mark Twain. From Stan Lee to Lewis Carroll, from Bono to Ringo Starr, Pseudonyms have been with us for ages.
Facebook doesn’t let you use a pseudonym, neither does Google+. In an era where online social networks are enabling political change and uprisings, so many of these online services are adopting an almost Orwellian approach to naming. You must use your real name, period. That can be positively dangerous for some people.
That’s a bit ironic, since George Orwell was also a Pseudonym.
Emilly Orr writes extensively on the subject, and her research into the specific Google policies regarding the issue. I can’t say I agree with Google’s policies, their position on the issue ensures that I will never create an account with their service under any name (I have no Facebook account either).
But this situation is creating a vacuum, a service that doesn’t yet exist. A “Come as you are, or as you want to be” google+/facebook clone could step into the spotlight now, and embrace the hundreds, nay thousands of potential users who don’t want to be known by the names on their ID. As the site My Name Is Me clearly demonstrates, there are untold thousands of people who want to be known by the name they chose, rather than the name that was given to them by their parents.
This particular issue affects me, because not only have I been known by a dozen or so names over the span of my lifetime, but quite a few of those names have been retired. It makes creating an “About the author” page extremely difficult.
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In other news on a similar front, it seems that at some point, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) instituted a new site facelift. And rather than tell anyone, they made it automatically sign every AIM user up for a “lifestream“. It’s just another twacebook, with a twist, you can coelesce all your various “feeds” and “timelines into one single hub page, and use that hub page to “write once, post many” to forward all your updates to twitter, facebook, etc.
That would be fine I guess.. and I can certainly understand the appeal of a “one stop” social networking solution. The part that bothers me is that I didn’t opt in to it, it’s tied to an awkward screen name I chose during the 90′s, and moreover, people have been “finding me” via my “profile” and have been IMing me every day. Random people, who for the most part can’t hold more than a 3 line, 12 word conversation, and since they don’t know me, don’t have anything interesting to say to me.
Why are they finding me? Because this lifestream service has been recording every single “Away Message” I put into Pidgin, since the service went live. That’s right.. every single “Upstairs on the Netbook” or “Playing TF2″ or “not feeling well, taking a nap” has been recorded, and published for anyone to see, and indexed for convenient searching.
I went through and firebombed the settings as best I could, so hopefully my particular AIM handle should not be showing up in search anymore. But really this experience has made me consider retiring my AIM account, which I have had for over a decade.
Exhilarating, isn’t it?
So I got the tablet, and it works exactly as I hoped it would. No buyer’s remorse here, no issues with it being “refurbished”.. frankly the thing seems (and smells) brand new. Not a single fingerprint was visible on the glossy buttons, and everything that should have been included seems to be there.
I played around a bit with it, and did a little doodling over at pixlr.com using their “Shaded” drawing pencil. The first couple of doodles were just jaggy lines and craggy rocks, but this third image seemed good enough to keep.
Reminds me of the “good ol’ days” writing and illustrating Star Trek fanfic for the U.S.S. Winter Solstice club newsletter.
Jumping through hoops
Well it’s been quite the rush of days, recently. Let’s see if I can’t get this blog caught up.
On Saturday morning (technically), I bought Minecraft. The next couple of days, I mostly spent tinkering around with that game. Learning how to play the crafting parts of the game, and generally having a good time with it.
Monday, I had my second Therapist’s appointment. I probably should include a little backstory for those of you who don’t know the story.
I’m transgendered, and way back in 1996, I started hormone replacement therapy. I was on that program for about 5 years, when due to a series of unfortunate events, I lost my income, my therapy, my hormones, my medical coverage, and my apartment, and ended the month living in my van on the streets. It was a rough patch, and I did eventually climb out of it, with the help of some very good friends and loved ones. In the time since then, I’ve struggled mostly just to have food, clothing, and shelter. But now I’m at the point where I’d like to “get back on the transgendered wagon” as it were.
Unfortunately so much time had lapsed, that not only were my surgery letters “too old”, but at least one of the therapists who wrote my letters, has since retired.
So long story short, I’m having to start over basically from scratch, and “run the bases”. That means I have to go to X number of therapy sessions to get a letter for hormones, then get new tests and a new prescription, and then going from there, wait X months (again) before seeking surgery, and then jump through the hoops to get letters authorizing me for those surgeries.
Monday’s therapy visit was a formality, mostly to assume my therapist that I was “consistent” in my presentation, and to pick up a letter from her. That all went as planned.
So after that, I called Cheesius to see if he wanted to get together, but he had to work. So I caught the bus back to Springfield.
I stopped at Taco Time for lunch, which is really unfulfilling, and then headed out to Walmart to pick up some groceries. While I was there, I picked up a copy of one of those “Four Film Favourites” DVDs, namely this one:
Contact, Lost in Space, Red Planet, and Sphere.. $10.96 at Walmart.com
That’s right.. Contact, Sphere, Lost in Space, and Red Planet, all in one box. The price was great, and I loved three of the four movies already (Red Planet I had never seen). It was a great deal already, but I was super happy when I opened the box. Instead of the flipper discs I was expecting to find, inside were four individually labelled DVDs, one for each film. That was a pretty awesome deal.
Afterwards, on my Therapist’s advice, I stopped by Volunteers in Medicine, and began the process of signing up through them for health care. I have my intake screening appointment on Thursday.
Tuesday I spent mostly hanging around the house. Eating at Taco Time doesn’t agree with me, and to be honest, I was quite ill still after Monday’s lunch. So I basically kicked back for the day. I worked on setting up the blog here with a theme (you can read about that in the previous post). I also did a little bit of Minecraft in the evening, checking out Cheesius’ server, and picking a place to build.
Which brings us to today. Today I set about the arduous task of assembling all the paperwork that VIM needs to determine my eligibility. Being self-employed AND poor is a hardship, moreso when you don’t actually use your bank account to receive “income”. Since Kim’s printer is low on ink, I opted to save all the pages I needed to print as PDFs, and walk down to the library. 30 pages cost me $4.50, but now I have the papers that VIM will want from me, and I also have a library card again. 
According to FedEx, my Wacom tablet should be arriving today.. but I haven’t seen it yet, so we’ll see.
Meanwhile, I promised myself that once I got the paperwork printed, I could watch a movie and play some games, so that’s what I’m gonna do now.
My blog gets a theme!
I won’t pretend that it was an awesome theme out of the box. But it looked pretty promising. I had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the results the way I wanted. Mostly tweaking the fonts and such, removing the text shadow on EVERY PIECE OF TEXT… and trying to untangle the broken mess that was the widgetized footer. 
Other than that, it’s working nicely, and has a clean and simple feel, that transitions nicely for visitors coming from the main eclectic-randomness.com site. The same smileys I use on the main site are available here, as are the userpics which I’ve come to depend on.
Not too much by way of content yet.. but I may flow back in my older blog posts. But the goal at this point was to get the site “usable” and then I could add content as needed. And it definitely is there now. Now it’s just a matter of coming up with things to post 
Minecraft!?!?
Last night, after some minor fretting, I decided that I wanted to buy a copy of Minecraft. 
I had three key reasons that helped me make the purchasing decision:
- I’ve watched a lot of videos about Minecraft (usually linked to me by friends) and it looks like a lot of fun.
. - A few of my friends play, or have played, Minecraft. They sometimes go on about it endlessly, and a couple even have their own servers where they hang out with other people I know.. and I feel left out of the fun.
. - With all the political wrangling over the debt ceiling, and the announcement that Standard & Poors has reduced the United States soveriegn credit rating from AAA to AA+, and China’s announcement that “Your days of borrowing your way out of troubles are over”.. well I suspect things will be none-too-rosy for the US Dollar for the near future. Given that Minecraft is priced in Euros, well I figured I’d do it now, before the exchange rates react.
So I did it.
It seems like a lot of spending lately. Drawing tablet, then a videogame… especially in a time of economic upheaval. But that’s really the point in this case. I could afford those items today, and not knowing what will happen with the economy, I DON’T know if I’d be able to afford those things later.
The tablet is a good tool to have, that increases my ability to do work, work that pays the bills.
Minecraft is an inexpensive “one time purchase” (not a subscription-based game) that has relatively relaxed graphics demands, meaning I can run it with ease on my desktop, and may even be able to run it on the netbook, in a pinch. While some games I have require an internet connection to play, Minecraft doesn’t. So if push comes to shove and we have to do without internet for a while, well that’s something to do besides drawing and watching movies and anime.
It also reminds me a LOT of an oooooold game I used to love playing on my Apple Macintosh SE/30 called Bolo.
In that game, you were a litle tank that could shoot down walls and enemy tanks and pillboxes, and you had a “little green man” that you could send out of your tank to go harvest trees. Trees you could use to build walls. It was a multi-player game, and it had a pretty decent UI as well. So playing online (via LAN) or offline, either way it was fun. You could build forts, and attack enemy forts, etc.
Anyways, so far I played Minecraft for a few hours. Survived the first night, and a few nights after.. built a few hidey caves, etc etc. Managed to make glass, find iron ore, make a variety of tools, etc. I watched a few tutorials first, just to acclimate myself to how the game works. Day cycles are very short, and nights are dangerous. You don’t have a lot of time from starting the game the first time, to dealing with your first night, so getting started fast is important.
So far it has INDEED been a lot of fun, and at just $21 USD, it won’t be hard to get my money’s worth of entertainment out of it.
I need a new drawing tablet
Several years ago, I was given a Wacom Whack ‘em! ArtPad II. It’s worked fine for me. But it’s connected via a 9-pin Serial connector, with a supplemental external power supply. My computer doesn’t HAVE a 9-pin serial port, and frankly the idea of searching out and testing one or several USB-to-9-pin adapters, all while trying to get this relatively ancient tablet to work with Windows 7 64bit, jugging drivers and whatnot.. it gives me a headache just thinking about it.
I’ve been trying to convince myself to get a new tablet, since I got the computer in 2009, but I always seemed to balk at the price. The one I had, had been a gift from a friend. I didn’t have to pay for it, and I’ve honestly only ever used it on a couple dozen projects. Paying the high price (upwards of $150) for a new one has always seemed a bit extravagant for something I rarely use.
Anyways, last night, Cheesius was showing me some pictures of the awesome DIY repair job* he was doing on his aging digital camera, and he happened to put his camera on top of his Wacom tablet when he took the pictures to show me his progress. When I noticed the Wacom logo, I was suddenly like “OMG you have a reasonably recent Wacom, what model is it, is it USB? how do you like it?”
(* – really though, it was an amazing camera mod, the battery case door was not staying shut, so he epoxied it shut, then dremeled out the front side of the battery box, to insert the batteries that way. It was like Red Green meets MacGyver, and I wholeheartedly approve. Awesome way to get another few more months of use out of an aging camera!)
Cheesius and I started swapping links back and forth, when I eventually came upon information on the Wacom Bamboo “Pen and Touch” (which, I was sad to discover, is not actually made out of Bamboo).
We were able to find someone selling factory refurbished models for essentially half the retail price. After reading the reviews, I realized that aside from one anomalous review, all of the reviews were generally quite positive, and even the one anomalous bad experience STILL said that the product worked well. While some indicated that the product itself didn’t meet their hopes, none of the reviews seemed to have any “DOA” type experiences with the fact that they were refurbished.
So I ordered one. Really, at $60 I couldn’t justify NOT getting one.
I’m looking forward to receiving it next week. There have been a lot of neat new drawing applications coming out, like livebrush, and the really awesome sketchy draw tool on pixlr.com. I’m sure there are others too, these are just the first ones I could think of.
Of course this tablet (can we still call them tablets?) isn’t an iPad or anything, it’s purely an input device… but it CAN do multi-touch, which means it can bring “the power of the iPad” to my desktop (or netbook). I’m not sure I honestly have much use for multi-touch, I’ve been using a mouse for ages and ages.. but I’ll play with it a bit.
Mostly I’m just looking forward to being able to use it as a drawing tablet. Sometimes, particularly when airbrushing textures for skins, it’s way more intuitive for me to use a pen, than a mouse.
@WinterVentura
