Still, I wanted to take a moment to note what I’ve been up to, and what’s in the cards for the next while.

“Lobster’s a Bisque!” – Steve Garland

So I’ve been buried in Stage Management 101 since January. I first got the chance to run the ASM (assistant stage manager) spot with Jaime on Jobsite’s recent production of boom! which was amazing amounts of fun. Jaime gave me an excellent foundation to work from in terms of what Stage Management is all about, and Xylina has helped me refine and put that cat-herding into practice now that we’re working on Dead Man’s Cell Phone. Every day I go in, I learn something new. I’m sure I still have a lot more learning to do before I consider myself truly capable as a Stage Manager, but I really enjoy the hell out of the challenge. Being able to work with so many awesome friends in the area is rewarding in ways that have precisely nothing at all to do with money.

It’s not a job I’ll ever make a living at, but I am very happy doing it.

That said, man, when you mess something up… hoo.

However, errors are in their own way self-correcting – at least, if you give any kind of a damn about the process at all.

Aside from the fact that you don’t want to let your friends down, you really don’t want to throw them out of whatever head-space they need to be in as actors by failing to hold up your end of things. So, in my case, I’m perpetually looking for ways to improve things. Could I shift things faster? Can the marks on stage be adjusted to clear up confusion? Would a different prop altogether help increase immersion? Can I re-write the ASM notes to make things more clear? The more I turn the production over in my head and examine all the parts I’m involved with, the more things I find that I can improve on. It starts small, and continues to build, with every day teaching me something more.

And all the while, I’m building memories with friends – old and new.

How cool is that?!

So, yes. Busy – but rewardingly so.

Along the way I’ve also gotten the chance to break out my wee baby DSLR camera and take a few promotional shots for the show. Obviously, there’s a lot in terms of technique that I could improve on, but having only taken one college class on it (which was focused on 35mm film SLR photography) I’m OK with my efforts. I’d really like to get a separate light meter and some different lenses, but that will have to wait for later.

Anyway, since many of you won’t have the chance to see the current production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone that I’m involved in, I figured I’d link up the reviews and previews, which include a couple of the photos I’ve taken for the show:

• Review: Tampa Tribune (Kathy L. Greenberg)  [new!]
• Review: Creative Loafing (Mark Lieb)
• Review: St. Petersburg Times (Marty Clear)
• Preview “On The Radar” Creative Loafing

Also worth reading if you’d like to understand a bit more about the playwright:

• Why Stageworks, Jobsite, and theaters all over the world are doing plays by Sarah Ruhl

Of course, if you are local and would like to pick up tickets for the show, you can score them on the Straz (formerly TBPAC) site. If you’re thinking of coming by tonight (Thursday 6/10) you can even land tickets for half price using the promo code JEAN.

And that brings me to:

Good grief!

The next project on my plate is graduating to full Stage Manager on the upcoming production of Dog Sees God, which is both terrifying and exciting at the same time. In a way I’m glad I’ve had the chance to work the shows I have. boom! had a small cast/crew, Dead Man’s Cell Phone clocks in at double that, and Dog Sees God will see those numbers increase again. So far, so good, though. I am armed with notes, coffee, and an open mind. I’m sure it will be much like the two before it: tough but rewarding.

From there, I’m slated to assist David in the next season as SM on Mindgame, reasons to be pretty, and The Taming of the Shrew – assuming I can prove myself as equally awesome and capable as Jaime and X, anyway. (Those are some seriously big shoes to fill!)

So what about all those other pokers in the fire?

Essentially, I’ve had to put my music podcast, Radioactive State, on temporary hiatus while I focus on learning the responsibilities of the new job. As much as I could probably bang something basic out, I’m working 7 days a week at the day job, and 5-6 days a week at the night job. Add to that, Dragon*Con is coming up, and that means more work for that as we plan panels and the like. I can only say that I’m really glad that I opted to not travel for E3/Fan Faire/etc. this year, as I think my head would have exploded.

As much as I realize that I work really well under the weight of self-set deadlines and a tightly-woven schedule of Tons Of Shit To Do, I’m also mature enough to realize there’s a certain point at which the overloading of my schedule becomes utter chaos, which in turn, makes me less productive since I rob myself of time to recharge the creative batteries due to over-working. Adding the heavy music hunt that I go through for Radioactive State into the mix would have been entirely too much.

Thankfully, I’ve figured out where that crucial crux point lies, and know myself well enough to be able to say “nope, I’m afraid I’m booked” now as opposed to saying “yes” every time someone asks something of me – or I ask something of myself.

Hooray for progress!

So, in short: Still here, still working, still alive. I am, as ever, damn lucky to have the chances I do. Even on the bad days when I’m grumpy and grumbly, I remember clearly how bad things have been for me before, and suddenly, even the most annoying bits aren’t so bad.

I know it seems odd to write a post about a car, but Squee was more than that to me. A culmination of years worth of wishing I owned an awesome hearse, combined with the right place at the right time, and hard work creating enough money to buy him.

Squee was my dream car.

Much like other people covet old-school mustangs, or other hot rods, I’d always dreamed of having a large, sleek hearse to call my own. That’s why when I had the chance to meet some other hearse owners in Louisville, KY, I jumped at it. When one of those owners took me to the place he’d purchased his beautiful ride, I thought I’d died and gone to car heaven. There he was – with steely grey lines and perfect chrome – just waiting for me. That was in 2001. I paid approximately $2,500 for him, and he had just over 42,000 original miles.

We’ve been inseperable ever since.

Today, I had to sell him to someone else. The good news is that the new owner is planning on rehabbing Squee and giving him all the TLC I could never quite afford to lavish on him. He won’t just wind up as a parts car for someone to pick apart and eBay, thankfully – which is what I was originally afraid would happen to him.

This makes my heart hurt just a little bit less.

Still, he was my baby, and as corny as it sounds, having to sell him is like losing some little piece of my youthful happiness. We took a lot of really awesome road trips together, and he was an amazing workhorse when I needed him to be.

I will never forget piling people in the back and taking him to concerts. I will remember many nights parked in front of Fuel, where so many people admired him. I won’t ever forget how much Jimbo from The Reverend Horton Heat gushed about how amazingly beautiful he was, and how he was thrilled to take a picture with Squee (and me).

I hope his future owner loves him half as much as I did, and takes him on all the adventures we never seemed to get around to. If he does, then Squee will be in good hands.

Ride on, my dearest baby. Ride on.

Know that somewhere out there, someone who once owned you loves you very much.

Of course, this really goes without saying. I never think my life is interesting enough to blather about, and I already have other outlets elsewhere for most things I do talk about that aren’t my life.

That said, the run for boom! is over with, and I learned quite a bit, with many thanks to everyone who was involved in the process. It was more fun – and hard work – than I had initially expected. I miss having them all in my regular life, but know I’ll see them all again soon as we work together on other plays – or at various parties, etc.

That’s the exciting thing that’s come out of this all, really. It appears that I did well enough that X (the other stage manager) is going to really focus and get me concretely trained in all aspects of Stage Management. The hope is that I’ll be able to take on a play of my own (perhaps next season) which is both nerve-wracking and extremely exciting at the same time.

Never let it be said that I don’t enjoy a good challenge where I’m learning something new.

So, yeah. Looks like I’m going to be set up as “co-stage manager” on the upcoming production of Dead Man’s Cell Phone. The intent is to give me a lot of responsibility and see how well I do with it while X is around to oversee the whole thing and correct any errors I make.

Maladrin is also the director on this show, which means I’m working with someone I’ve known since we were both teenagers. This makes me really happy, as we’ve always been good friends and he knows he can be as blunt with me as he needs to be. The lines of communication are solid there, which is really important to me.

It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but I’m excited about the challenge.

I also feel like my writing is finally shaking off its wintry coat, and with the arrival of spring, I’m really raring to go. This year I wanted to expand my writing out, and take my little musical side-project to a slightly more regular basis. While I did miss some time on Radioactive State during boom! I’m pretty certain I’ll be able to record those more regularly now that I have the bare basics down that I was so frightened of messing up. There’s so much more music out there to find and share – and music is such a huge part of my life, even if I’m not gifted enough to be able to sing or play it.

On that note, I’m off to attempt my hand at bocce under a warm sun.

Happy Easter, Spring Equinox, Ēostre, Chocolate Bunny Ear Nomming Day, or whatever you celebrate. <3

- Shazari on Flickr, used under CC

This is going to sound weird, but I need to gather 300+ bottle caps. You know, the plastic ones from 20 oz sodas or 2-liter bottles? Yeah, those. I also need them as soon as is possible.

Since I know I won’t drink 300+ sodas in the next couple of weeks, I figured I’d turn to you, my friends, and see if you could help us out – or help us out by passing it along to others who might be willing to send caps along. After all, I’m not asking for money or anything that many would value, but it would help us a great deal!

As to why they’re needed?

Well, I’ve recently started helping out with the Jobsite Theater group, which is a local not-for-profit theatrical group. Thanks to a combination of sponsored donations and ticket sales, they manage to bring some really great plays to the Tampa Bay area. They also have exposed audiences to brand new never-before-seen plays by promising new playwrights.  And much as I’m sure they’d love to, these aren’t folks who do this for a living. They have families and jobs and still manage to carve out large portions of their life for the joy of bringing good theater to the Tampa Bay area.

With that said,  we need caps to help create portions of the set for the upcoming production of boom! I don’t want to give away too many details on precisely how they’ll be used in the set;  it ruins the fun of seeing it. However, in exchange for your gracious donation of plastic bottle caps, I’ll post some behind-the-scenes photos out here of rehearsals; the Straz center; the cast; and things of that nature. I’ll also be keeping a running tally on how many we’ve received to date, for those interested. (Who knows, perhaps we’ll get buried in bottle caps within a week! It would be awesome – and greatly appreciated.)

So if you have a few stamps, a few caps, and would like to take part in this really strange but 100% serious call for help for a very deserving theater company, here’s where you can mail them to us:

As soon as I get 25 caps, I’ll post the first behind-the-scenes shot; so send those caps in and check back! (Or watch my Twitter feed.)

Thanks, everyone!

This has to be seen in its animated glory to be appreciated.

So, rabblerouser that I am – I captured the .swf file from the site and have uploaded it to my server to provide a stable, easily referenced version.

Here you go:

The original source of the image was SOE’s Quest for Antonia campaign from a couple of years ago, as seen here. (Thanks to @g33kg0dd3ss for pointing that out!)

There’s also another Evony advertisement portraying a similarly flashy-breasted woman, but I don’t recognize who this might be.

It makes me think of a Second Life avatar. I do not know if this is someone on-grid who would be really pissed off to find out that Evony has decided that she needed the Mardi Gras Party Bra treatment.

Both of these were captured on Twitpic.com, and are served by ad.yieldmanager.com, as shown by the capture logs on my machine, and in screencaps of the original sources. (I left the ones in this post in as well so you could see relative file sizes side by side, establishing source/time/filenames of the originals.)

clicky to embiggen

The worst part?  I can’t really understand anyone who would think adding a blinky element to a nice set of tits is attractive – even if you really like tits.

I mean, I like tits.

I do not, however, go out of my way to find radioactive or magical ones that could act as runway lights in a dark room.

Just sayin’.

Anyway, there you have it. Many thanks to @Kasul for catching this and giving us all something else to /boggle at Evony over.

You know, in case all the crap they’ve pulled with Bruce Everiss wasn’t enough to give you the opinion that someone involved with that whole messy “game” had quite possibly lost their minds.

This is why I simply cannot abide people who buy gold in games where buying gold is against TOS. Where do you really think it comes from? Even if they had nothing but bots farming it up in every single game out there, there’s no way in hell these companies can realistically supply the demand from people who want their MMO time to be easier. (C’mon. Easier? Really? I like harder MMOs. Perhaps I’m just an aberration.) So they invade people’s accounts, strip their characters, empty their banks, sell everything, transfer the cash, then leave the empty husk behind for the owner to recover.

Sure, I grok that everyone has to feed their family, but damn. Really? These people don’t aspire to make something more of themselves than to steal someone else’s stuff from a game? I can’t even imagine the ethical mindset of people involved in this trade. Does it ever make them stop and think that they’re taking someone’s time, not just their stuff? Do they really think this is a victimless situation?

For example, my friend Petter M. just got his account hacked in World of Warcraft. Now, knowing what I know of Petter, there’s no way in hell you’ll convince me that he’s ever purchased gold – he loves gaming way too damn much, and gold is crazy easy to come by in WoW. When he mentioned it to me, his concern? It wasn’t over getting the easy-to-get current level gear. That stuff drops like candy in raid instances that are easy enough to find groups for over and over. No, it was the loss of the 7/8 set pieces from Molten Core. Why? Because getting that gear, at level, with 39 other people who were all paying attention and had their shit together is a mark of Doing It The Hard Way. Things like that represent a very real investment of time and effort, and those pieces become sentimental to some of us. (This is why I say I like my games to be more difficult.)

Another friend of mine got his account hacked before and what did he want back? His Dungeon 2 set. Not because he’d ever use it again, but because attaining it in slow stages represented a spread of time when a small group of friends worked together to achieve something that was, at the time, very difficult. It’s also a chain you can’t run again, so once it’s gone, it’s gone.

I guess I will never understand gold buying – not the sellers, nor the buyers. I find the sellers to be of questionable to non-existent ethical fibre, and the buyers to be deluding themselves as to the real genesis of their purchased cash. Sorry if that seems harsh, but it’s how I feel about the practice.

Welcome to my blog.

This is why I do like microtransaction games. If you want something, you just buy it from the game company. The fact is that there will always be people who want a shortcut because they’re busy working people and would prefer to drop $10-$15 on in-game items to make their time easier, make them look cooler, etc. Trust me – the older I get, the more I realize how valuable time is. I really do. I have no problem with dropping cash to make your game time more fun.

I do, however, have a big problem with people making back-alley deals with third-party companies who employ shaky methods of procuring whatever it is you want. If you want to buy gold and items, great. Play a game that supports that by having gold and items available for purchase through the game itself, or their official partner. If you want a high-level character, play a game where you can buy one through that game’s market, above board and out in the open.

For example EVE Online has a brilliant set up – you buy a time code from CCP or another official partner, you sell it as a PLEX in game, another player buys the PLEX and gives you in-game ISK for it. You get a few hundred million ISK, they get 30 days of paid game time. In the end, CCP keeps both players, nobody gets screwed over, and ultimately, the money goes back into their coffers so they can fund more game development. It’s a win/win. SOE, for all that they catch hell, have a really great marketplace where you can buy pretty much whatever you want.

Like it or not, having those stores cuts down on the unethical shit people are doing anyway. As much as I hated the idea of stores going into EverQuest, I have to admit that’s what they’ve done – and I’ve got two big thumbs up for anyone hurting gold sellers’ bottom line, ultimately.

Anyway, to make this post have something of a point other than spouting my own personal bile about gold sellers, here’s how you spot a fake email for the untrained eye:

When you get an email that looks fishy (account changes, bans, etc.) look at the header. I’m using gmail here as I know a lot of folks have migrated to it, but the important thing is to see the full, original header.

In Gmail, you can accomplish this by Clicking the down arrow next to “Reply” and then selecting “Show Original”

Then you should see a screen that shows the email in it’s not-prettied-up form. (Click for the readable full-size version.)

The important stuff to pay attention to is the following chunk:

In that bubble, you’ll see “received from”, an address, and an IP. The address can be spoofed, but rarely do they bother to spoof IPs. Let’s look the IP up:

That certainly doesn’t look like NCsoft. Just for the sake of argument, let’s look NCsoft.com up. (Easily enough done in Windows: Click Start, select Run, type CMD, hit enter, type “ping ncsoft.com“, hit enter)

112.175.197.14 is not 112.111.129.44.

If you don’t want to screw around with that, look at the next little chunk, which is generally easier, although is not always useful:

Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of support@ncsoft.com does not designate 112.111.129.44 as permitted sender) client-ip=112.111.129.44;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=hardfail (google.com: domain of support@ncsoft.com does not designate 112.111.129.44 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=support@ncsoft.com
Received: from fn1j.com (unknown [192.168.1.102])
by fn1j.net witch CMailServer 7.5.1 SMTP;

This tells you that Google went to NCsoft’s servers and said “oi, this yours?” to which NCsoft’s server came back and said “hell no!” The important thing is to look for the fail or hardfail. Other things will also follow that, like it returning that it does not designate that IP as a permitted sender, and occasionally, the Received, which is more often than not spoofed.

For example, here’s one I got from someone who wasn’t being as sloppy on their phishing email attempt:

Delivered-To: ****************
Received: by 10.216.25.145 with SMTP id z17cs540207wez;
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:21:19 -0800 (PST)
Received: by 10.142.250.18 with SMTP id x18mr544683wfh.169.1264069278879;
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:21:18 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: <>
Received: from blizzard.com ([58.22.162.19])
by mx.google.com with ESMTP id 2si2756078pwj.33.2010.01.21.02.21.17;
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:21:18 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 58.22.162.19 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of blizzard.com) client-ip=58.22.162.19;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 58.22.162.19 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of blizzard.com) smtp.mail=
Received: from WorldClient by blizzard.com (MDaemon PRO v10.1.1)
with ESMTP id pd50000000002.msg
for <********************>; Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:37:48 +0800
X-Spam-Processed: blizzard.com, Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:37:48 +0800
(not processed: spam filter already applied to initial list submission)
X-Authenticated-Sender: support@blizzard.com
X-Envelope-From: support@blizzard.com
X-MDaemon-Deliver-To: *******************
X-MDMailing-List: Account@blizzard.com
Precedence: bulk
Sender: Account@blizzard.com
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:36:15 +0800
From: “Blizzard Entertainment” <support@blizzard.com>
To: <***********************>
Subject: Battle.net Account – Password Change Notice

As you can see, Google didn’t get a definitive “no” and they’ve done a pretty good job of making themselves look official by cloaking the sender. Even though this email was faked, Google reported it as “neutral” so it’s by no means a guarantee. It isn’t until you note the bulk designation and cross-reference the IP address that it becomes crystal clear:

In short – be safe. Don’t buy gold unless it’s through something approved by that game company. Don’t fund people who make a profit screwing others over. Be careful about phishing. blahblahblah.

And for the love of heavens, don’t get between me and my coffee first thing in the morning.

–

Tools used:

• Spyber’s IP & Geolocation lookup tools
• DOS prompt
• Gmail
• My spicy brainmeats

Now, as to the reboot…

This blog is likely to contain a huge mish-mash of things. Sometimes I’ll just post pictures. At other times I’ll probably ramble on about whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time. I don’t promise that it will be the most interesting read to anyone but me, members of my family, and perhaps the occasional odd person. I’m also not going to edit myself as heavily nor fret about what I’m posting and whether or not it’s as politically correct as what I’ve written in the last few years.

It will, however, be honest.

It may suck. It may not.

Guess we’ll have to see.