When things get complicated. I go quiet. Right now things are getting moderately complicated so I haven't been posting much. Here's a short update.

I tried near the beginning of this month to induce a radical change of habit by writing five hours a day. The first day I managed 2 hours, the second 1, I skipped the third, struggled past 1 hour on the fourth, and have been writing in 10min fits and starts for the past 2 weeks since. Ok, this last week I didn't write a single thing that I can recall. Today is Monday, so maybe this week will be a little better.

A while ago Blizzard decided the best way to make people civil towards one another on the internet was to make them sign their full names to any statement they made of the official forums. The idiocy of asking people to out themselves to a community that is notorious for immaturity, flaming, and ridiculous vendettas that sometimes span years and servers should be self apparent. I and enough other subscribers canceled our subscriptions and gave enough negative feedback that the decision was reversed within three days, but even so the thread announcing that reversal is going strong at 300+ pages. To put it into some context, the initial thread where the change was announced was locked as it approached 2500 pages. Considering it was open for only 3 days, that's 833 pages a day, 35 pages an hour, and about half a page a minute. This does not take into account that this is only discussion on the main thread. New threads were popping up every second and being deleted just as fast. Like many other posters mentioned, I've never seen any large community react so negatively and so unanimously about an issue on the internet.

Even though Blizz backed down my account remains canceled. I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to renew it. On the one hand, my mage has hit a dead end. There is no raiding in my guild to speak of, and I don't care to RP in the server I'm on. If I walked away from him now I wouldn't feel all too bad. I've given up on seeing the Lich King by the expansion, and no one even seems to be looking at the Ruby Sanctum.

On the other hand I've been getting a hankering for moving away from PvP and spending some time RPing again. For me this means going back to Sentinels, and while RP is a lot of fun, and a lot more creative than anything else I've been doing lately, it also is intensely time consuming. I'll just have to see how I feel when it comes time to pay again.

And, I'm moving out to Denver in a few weeks. That's the complicated part.

Wikipedia sometimes introduces me to fascinating things.

Juan Pujol

Another good link for posterity:

Rules for writing fiction, by writers, to writers.

Hitting 'next blog' up in the blogger dashboard is probably the most useful aspect of this little pre-fabricated blogging service out there. Sometimes you can stumble upon interesting things, like unschooling. I personally think this is a great idea, but requires a certain sort of family environment to be really effective.

June had 0 posts. Why? Because it was a terrible boil of a month and its end was an immense relief. July is building up slowly, but with a transfer request and college application pending things are looking up. Another difference: I struggled through The Education of Henry Adams all through June and finished it on the first of July, along with the quick read Taroko Gorge. Taroko Gorge was an early review book for librarything, and as a rule I am suspicious of anything free, but it turned out to be a decent book, and being able to read within five hours was a nice change of pace after the 2 month task of The Education.

I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle now, and anthology of his works that includes the novella The Last Unicorn. I used to watch the movie adaptation religiously as a kid, so I'm looking forward to revisit the story through the original telling.