it can wait til later.

so today i was waiting at a light on shelburne road and my check engine light went on, along with a flashing cruise contol light.

and they just HAD my whole engine apart and everything, so i figure (as does my mechanic) that it's something in there form the taking apart and putting back together that's causing an error message, but they want me to bring it in for a couple of hours.

and i'm all, like, is monday to late for that?

because the world is ending on sunday and i don't want to spend more hours than i have to NOT being in it.

meanwhile, i don't think i posted for you the video of us playing spelling games in thornfad heights.

i am still recording things, still editing videos, still playing in the little world i love, noting that the end of the world is coming. sunday. it ends sunday.

the staff at tiny speck would have been in their rights, once they knew it was over to simply pull the plug on the servers and let the world go dark.

but glitch wasn't just some goofy game. it was a wild and audacious experiment, a dream of a new way to do something silly and beautiful and awesome and sure, they hoped to make money with it, but instead of just pulling the plug, they're giving us an amazing sendoff. they are taking the trouble to put out the cool stuff they hadn't shown us yet, because they're proud of it and they love it.

today they rolled out some sweet new stuff that you would only think is amaaaaaazing if you already know the game, but let's just say that in the game we are all hopping-up-and-down-on-one-foot excited.

i also have another tour video for you, and i'm working on some other things.

these things write themselves

there's a pattern to the traffic of spam comments. i like to read them as part of an exercise in which i read the spam comment in the context of the post to which it attached, and pretend it is part of an actual conversation.

i was going to write a little post on that and i'm sure i will later but yesterday i got this really excellent spam comment and i just want to post it  in its entirety, only without any of their links.

i don't think i could make this stuff up if i tried.

About author:Of course, everybody has a world, and number is just one part of it And everything will go for the better They use the words seems to help brain cells to send and receive messages/content/Medieval-Education It has a student population of over 32,000 students, of which over 9,000 are graduate students As we continue to make our products more readily available to the public, marketing and promotional activities like the Dolphins Promotional Program become more and more importantYou'll uncover numerous including various kinds National football league jerseys Though a nation produces bulk Chicago Bears jerseysOnce you have purchased the wholesale NFL jerseys from china, you'll be flabbergasted with the quality of these jerseys
On our website, customers will get the widest selection of cheap authentic jerseys NFL video games appeal to countless spectators each supporting on the list of teams on the field and parading approximately in their shades and NFL jerseys emblazoned together with the logo of their team But deep speed would be lacking in the starting lineup He's also got the Broncos believing by themselves Every single jerseys carries the new England Patriots logo on each one of the sleeves

things fall apart

so, in the middle of the car repairs, i was working on my glitch videos and my desktop computer (a middle aged but still fairly current mac) suddenly crashed.

and i did all the reboot stuff and got to disk utility and learned that my disk image couldn't be repaired but that i had to reformat my HD and do a full restore.

this right here is why i have some large external backup drives that back me up every hour.

but that restore, well, that's a LOT of files and the computer's estimate for how long it would take was 54 hours.

what???

54?

so i called the guys at the service department of my local shop to ask if they had a faster magic way and they said that if i was transferring the data with time machine and firewire, they couldn't do any better.

so i hunkered down and had to use only my laptop. it's a good machine for what it is (my car machine and my backup) but it is SLOW.

but this morning i woke up and my restore had finished sometime in the night, at least a full five hours ahead of schedule. so i have all my files back and everything runs just fine.

car, computer.

yeah.

digital hosting

who knew?

tonight i had a party in my little glitch house.

i know, it's just little toon versions of people coming to my toon house, but it is fully as exhausting as a RL party.

one of the things about an online party is that guests in different timezones will show up. so while i;m winding down my day, my european party guests are having a lovely lunchtime and the aussies are bright and shiny and morning-y.

which means a little digital party can go on for a long time.

open letter to vimeo

dear vimeo,

i love your videos. really, i do. when you send me notes about staff picks i want to rush right off to put them in my "watch later" queue so i can remember to watch them later.

but the thing is that you log me out nearly every day, and then when i hit that little button that says "log in",  it doesn't work. i guess i could log in with facebook, but facebook sucks and i don't use it.

so i'm concluding that you do not actually want me to be able to log in, else your login button would be functional.

until you fix that, i'll be watching youtube.

love,
flask

chevy malibu

can i tell you how much i hate this car?

i'm driving one as a rental.

my own beloved car (an '06 subaru forester) is in the shop. i took it in to get snows put on and to have them look at my headlights.

it turns out my headlights need replacing. and, oh by-the-way, the head gasket needs replacing. and the water pump. and the timing belt.

and the clutch.

and the head cylinder.

and yeah, the left-side light that lights up the rear license plate.


at over 111,000 miles, one might expect it to need a few things replaced. the good news is that with this wok done it'll probably go another 90,000 miles.

we hope.

meantime, i am driving a chevy malibu and while there's nothing so terrible about it, it has limited visibility and it's nto built to carry gear and i hit my head getting in and out, and i'm not especially tall.

i hate it.

but i'm driving along and i see this little bubbly thing in the middle of the top of the dash and i think maybe it is some kind of light sensor and i wonder what THAT might do. i speculate that it might auto-dim some lights or something, so i toss my hat up on over it.

huh. that's kind of cool.

here's the video.

this is what 60 looks like

ok, i want you to know the reason i am posting nearly exclusively about the last days of glitch: it's because most of my non-glitch playing time is spend editing video and stills to document the game and to just plain save the memories of it while i still can.

so stuff about glitch is what you're getting, wich is probably tedious for those fo you who do not play glitch, but for those who do, it's like a blankie, knowing that we're all scrambling to put together something we can save and look at and listen to because when those servers shut down on december ninth, that little world will go dark and all that will be left are the pictures and recordings.

anyway.

glitch has a level cap. a lot of games do. in glitch that cap is 60, and i was never a level grinder, although by the sheer volume of time spent playing i leveled pretty high, just as a byproduct of playing.

some people have parties even to celebrate it, but i celebrated mostly the way i celebrated every other leveling up i did: i gave out a round of drinks to everyone present in the street where it happened.

what i did differently in this case was i put on a nice outfit and went down to cebarkul and played my conch triumphantly to everyone there.

i didn't mention at the time why i had done this and quite frankly putting on an outfit and handing out stuff isn't behavior that's all that unusual, so i don't think anyone even noticed.

the reason i recorded it is that when you level up there's a cute little kazoo noise and i thought that since this was the last time i'd ever level up, i wanted to save the memory of what that looks like.

the sad thing is that about an hour after i leveled up and logged off for the night, they made the announcement that the game is closing. i came on the next day to find people making their goodbyes and i was confused.

then i was bereft.

today i edited the video so i could post it.

tour of ur: uralia

this will come as no surprise to anybody, eh?

 i am still shooting the tour videos and working an a mapping project, along with making some screenvid of game play.

here's the uralia tour.

the landscape of uralia is hard to capture because it is so deep and weird.

it's also usually crowded in cebarkul.

but this is what it looks like, along with the uralia soundtrack.

tour of ur: underwater regions

i spent a lot of today editing video of a tour of jal and samudra, as well as just playing glitch and enjoying it while i still have it to enjoy.

samudra is a new underwater region similar to jal and accessible only from jal, so even though in its current state it has the default music for all streets, the groddle banjo theme, i believe that if it had been released properly and not post-closing announement it would have shared the jal soundtrack and so for this reason i have paired them.

tour of ur: naraka

i'm working on a project of making some little scenic tours of the regions of ur accompanied by the soundtrack of those landscapes rather than the game sound.

here's the region of naraka.

rock fans

in a stunning surprise move, i told you i would have pictures and video for you soon, and here are pictures and video.

one of the split rocks

thanksgiving day at john and ellen's orion asked how john splits the rocks for his wall and john said "let's go spilt one", which is a way cooler anser than a simple explanation.

and it's totally awesome for me, because while i often take pictures of people doing interesting things, i really hit the jackpot if people talk while they're doing whatever it is i'm shooting video of.

and john doesn't just split the rock; he shows the tools and explains the process, which is GOLD to me.

more of the inside of the rock

so john's building this rock wall at the house and he's using glacial erratics fome his field and woods. when he splits them open, some of them are very interesting if you like rocks and stuff.

...which i do. and apparently john's a big rock fan, too.

so here are some of my pictures of the rocks and my video of the splitting.

drill holes

feathers and wedges

busted.

it just isn't thanksgiving

it just isn't thanksgiving without video of whipped cream being dispensed into a dog.

later on i will have video and pictures of rock breaking, because it's never a dull moment with us.

NOTA

None Of The Above.

do you remember that movement for political reform? ron paul used to back it, you know, in the days before he got in bed with the whackdoodles.

he still makes sense on some things.

i haven't heard his retirement speech yet, but i heard some excerpts and he makes some good points.

anyway, the idea behind None Of The Above is that this should be a choice at elections. there are a number of proposals with different mechanics, but the general idea is that if None Of The Above wins the majority share in the election, the whole thing has to be done over with new candidates.

when i first heard about this ages ago, i remember opponents saying "you can't do that!!! it would cost too much to redo elections! it would be mayhem!"

well, not after the first time.

the first time NOTA got the majority vote those guys running the parties would finally have to sit up and take notice and provide real choices.

as long as they know they're still going to be in power, they don't have to provide real choices. they just have to mount enough theater and go through the steps.

if we make them uneasy about whether the demmicans or the republicrats will be able to retain their mutually agreed upon positions at all, they'd have to be concerned. they'd actually have to DO something.

and nobody would be able to shrug their shoulders and say the system is too entrenched for there to be change.

likewise, if the voters have NOTA as an alternative and do not use it, that will function as a mandate for business as usual. it will take away a lot of the excuses out there.

next time you see the proposal, endorse it.

nationstates: a report from the glitch diaspora

glitch isn't closed yet, but the players are out looking at other games and reporting back.

there is nothing like glitch out there, but there arge games we might enjoy to a lesser degree and go together to some of them just so we don't lose touch completely.

one game a number of us are now playing is nationstates, which is fun if you like politics, a slow moving theoretical game, or diplomacy roleplay.

i am enjoying it, but it is not glitch.

have a look at my nation if you want. if you decide you'd like to give it a try and you'd like to play in the same region as me and the rest of the glitch diaspora, when you get logged in simply move your nation to the region of glitch.

ilmenskie miners

i am trying to parse out why we are so heartbroken with the end of glitch.

if you're following my story at all you know that i play a lot of games.

the thing about glitch is that it is a rich environment.

do you remember the first time you went into middle earth? or narnia? or hogwarts? or went through the phantom tollbooth?

i remember the first time milo left through the tollbooth and i felt as if i had lost that country. the message of the book is that you can find that country everywhere but still- you're never going back, not really, not as intensely as that first time when you inhabit the land.

and glitch was a  land that was rich and complex and had stories brewing in it that were created by the developers: artists, musicians, and a real team of writers, but it was also a story and a lanscape that was being created on the fly by the characters in it.

in most computer games a finite set of things happen, and you only are able to watch.

in glitch we were citizens of a world and characters in many stories, each of us living a story on the same landscape, but singular for each one of us.

my story was that i loved the lands. i loved the streets and my homes (i have had three) and i loved gathering and harvesting and crafting and going about my little business and seeing all the other little people and knowing that they represented real people out there, living their little glitch lives.

a long time ago before the Great Housing Reset i was dreaming of saving up enough currants to buy a beautiful little house in groddle meadow, and at the time the best way for me to make money was to go down into the mines.

so i wrote this song, and as part of our farewell to our world, a group of miners came with me yesterday to make this short video.

flexible flyer

not, this isn't about my sled.

i DO have a vintage flexible flyer, though. i have a sixty year old sled.

but this is not about that.

it is about my bike ride today.

if you are flexible in your thinking you can tell yourself that this is what you wanted anyway, or at least that this is acceptable.

this afternoon i was having trouble deciding whether to ride my bike or go for a run. i sorta didn't feel like riding all the way over the preston pond trail and i thought a run would just be simpler.

so because it's early enough in the season that i CAN still ride -because there's no snow cover yet- i got on my bike and i rode it all the way to the top of the preston pond trail and then instead of riding across and home i just turned around and ran the mile and three quarters home.

why, you ask, would i run a perfectly good bike? downhill?

'cause flat tire, that's why.

and although the shoes i was wearing have ankle support and recessed cleats, they're not really intended for running and when i was forced in the last quarter mile to run on pavement sometimes i sounded like some goofy half-a-horse loping along.

and they're not excackly cushiony either, so there's that.

and i passed a guy walking out with his rifle and by way of answering the question he hadn't asked yet i said "this is not nearly as much fun as it looks" and he was fixing to offer me a ride home but without even breaking stride i told him i was nearly home and we both kind of laughed as i went on my way.

it's the late fall backwoods duathlon, i told myself.

i do not have to decide between the run and the ride.

i get both.

games within games

as the world of ur comes to its end, those of us who love it are scrambling to save the pictures, the text, the music. this morning another player was looking for someone to play the ticket games so he could see and photgraph them, so i took video while we payed.

i hadn't played the ticket games since before the housing reset, so it was fun to go back and play them.



that was the thing about glitch: it was less *a* game than a platform on which a lot of games were played. it was rich and complex.

there are still some days left before the world ends, but already we are beginning to speak of it in the past tense.

we are in mourning and we are at a loss to describe exactly why it matters so much to us.

more of ur

if you're not a glitch fan, i'm sorry about this: from now until closing there are going to be a lot of posts about glitch.

here are my two videos:

the first one is a general tour of the glitch lands that i was preparing just for the heck of it to show you when the announcement came out and i stopped processing it, so it has no awesome sound and no captioning, but it will talke you through the different lanscapes, most of them.




this second one is my song "last farewell to groddle", which is a song i started to write when the housing was reset and i lost my little groddle cottage at 5117 estevan meadows, but then i was busy making my new groddle cottage at the new homestead that for all its flexibility and convenience did not have the placiness of my groddle forest or my groddle cottage homes.

anyway, when they announced the closing that idea for a song about farewell to groddle became my farewell to glitch and while i am at heart always from groddle, the bortolans and fireboggers all know what i'm talking about here.

maybe it is an imaginary landscape, but it is one that we all at least partly LIVED in. we hade hopes for it and we dreamed in it and it was unlike any "just" game we'd ever seen because of the richness of it.

so here is my farewell song.

farewell to groddle

you know i have been playing glitch.

i was preparing a video to show you, and some pretty pictures but thursday night the announcement came that glitch is closing.

it's not just a game to many of us; it is a place rich in our imaginations and the residence of part of our souls.

some of you live at hogwarts or in narnia or whatever fictional places hold your attention and populate your dreams.

today i wrote and recorded this song.

http://soundcloud.com/eflask/last-farewell-to-groddle-2

later on i will get you those pictures.