The Aerie
Despite bicycling into the wee hours of the year (as these days feel - there's something about a 4:30 p.m. sunset that makes the whole month feel like the dark before the dawn) I am still out of shape. This was made clear to me when I strained something in my back while playing Halo 2 on the Xbox.
Yes, I'm so out of shape I can pull a muscle playing a video game.
To be fair, it wasn't exactly the Xbox that did it - it was the squashy couch we have in the basement den. There are two ways to sit on this couch: 1) slumped back as if I'd taken too many bong hits; or 2) perched on the forward edge like a kid waiting for the bell to ring.
Well, I chose 2) in order to play the Xbox - it put my face closer to the screen, and was more reflective of he desperate posture of an old man trying to compete with the lightning reactions of heavily-armed teenagers. That position, elbows on knees, balanced on a forward edge with no back support, apparently stretched my lumbar vertebrae to, if not breaking, at least open rebellion.
So today I'm at work, sitting on a hot pad, trying to soothe my back into permitting me to stand and sit without groaning. So far no luck.
Aside from Xbox, I got some stuff accomplished this weekend. Most notably, I scanned in the original maps from the Scepter of Goth game that I ran in my first business. They were in dreadful shape. Having been created in the pre-computer - or at least pre-desktop-publishing - era, they were made of paper, inked with pen, and labeled by typing words onto mailing labels and gluing them to the paper. Almost all of the labels had fallen off, leaving vast sections of the maps blank.
I did manage to match a few labels up either from memory or by matching the shapes of the dried brown glue-stains they had left behind.
Also, through luck, I happened upon the e-mail address of someone who might know how I could get ahold of the last running copy of that game, which was operating until about 2004. It would delight me to no end to run a copy of Scepter on my own server, just for a laugh. I'd probably just recreate the database in a generic mud or mush, rather than trying to get the ancient and much-modified code to run.
It would be quite a laugh to run a copy of Scepter, with the town of Boldhome and everything, and then serve the documentation off of a Gopher server. Haw!
In addition to those chores, I also need to use this break between classes in order to put together a wikipedia page or two. I've never done that before, so it will be interesting to see how it works.
Posted by Albatross at December 4, 2006 3:18 PM | TrackBack