General Blog

After I die, everyone have a drink to my memory, smile, think of some favor I did or joke I told. In other words, appreciate me. And, please, on some long weekend, crack open one of my books and enjoy it with my spirit. Find a scene, character or phrase you like. Smile. I would like to be cremated. I’d really like if my ashes (it’s more like grit) be glued into 50 model railroad gondola freight cars (I’ll look just like gravel or cinders). Have someone take me to a train swap meet and price me to move. That […]

Bruno Stachel: Chivalry? To kill a man, then make a ritual out of saluting him – that’s hypocrisy. They kill me, I don’t want anyone to salute. Willi von Klugermann: They probably won’t. If I die, do not get a memorial decal for your back car window, listing my dates and some slogan about always being in your heart or whatever. Don’t. It’s as tacky as dragging a tombstone about in public. If I’m killed on the road, bike or car, do not allow the state to put up one of those cheap aluminum lollypop signs with the “Drive safe” […]

…like Waterford Lakes. I hate this place. Absolutely hate it. The only reason we went is because that’s where Attack the Block, a super English invasion flick, was playing. So we had to go. Want to set this up like an ancient grudge, in literary fashion? When I used to drive out to Kennedy Space Center to work, I’d ride on the 408 long before this complex was built. In the morning fog, one would have to take a care lest one hit a deer. It was all wilderness out there. Now they blasted that all, the pine woods and […]

My brother just got some sad, sad news. His cat PD has cancer and will probably go to the great sun-warmed spot in the sky soon. I thought about that a lot on my ride home the other night. Came into the driveway and Mookie was looking out the window. I suppose it’s the realization of my brother’s pending loss that made me like Rutger Hauer watching Harrison Ford dangle from the end of a rain-wet girder in “Blade Runner” – I suddenly realized how precious life was. So after dinner, I paid special attention to my little girl, petting […]

After a quarter decade of not reffing, I was asked by a niece to ref an adventure for her college-bound friends, as detailed HERE. It was weird, it was confusing, and it was a lot of fun. The location: A recently-opened Imperial settlement called Communication Post Alpha (or “Compost”) – located on an otherwise inhospitable planet, at the bottom of a sheer 25km canyon, there lay an old republic colony transport crashed 2000 years ago. Its colonists, because of the local fungus forest and damaged reactors, have “regressed” somewhat apishly. The Imperials, finding a ready-made city in the grounded transport, […]

I was a pretty good ref a quarter century ago. I’d run D&D, Top Secret, Paranoia, and Superhero 44. But my favorite was StarWars, run off the old Star Patrol rules. Really liked that set – it was open-ended so I could fling out whatever throws and saves I felt like, without players tossing tables back in my face. I reffed it pretty much on a weekly basis through college and beyond, adventures which started on my custom world of Naolo and spread across the universe. My players and I went into some unlikely places in these games. I remembered […]

Michael Metcalf (who did the wonderful cover art for my soon-to-be-out novel Early ReTyrement, also finished up the map two weeks ago. It was like a Hollywood movie – I managed to close the deal and get the print safe on my aux drive before my entire computer went down. Anyway, have a look. The guy was nice enough that when best-buddy Jesse came up with beyond-last-minute-changes (i.e. after I’d paid and the the arrangement was closed) he added these changes in gratis. As always, he was a pleasure to work with and really came up with some very nice […]

In my last posting, I mentioned my computer had been violated and that even with all my efforts, it was running too slow and had been irreparably damaged. Took it over to Refresh Computers to have a look. They ran the full registry check and found evidence of hosts of bad programmers (all sorts of snarls and snags down there from years of installs and uninstalls). Still, even with all that cleanup, it wasn’t enough. I gave the order, turned and walked out (like someone dropping their pet off to be euthanized). However, got it back and she’s running as […]

Well, this has been a long and hard struggle. I’ve picked up a nasty virus, once that hammers performance, respawns, and redirects all web searches. God knows what else its doing. The other day, I contacted the highest-rated Orlando tech firm. How that rating (on thumbtacks.com) was determined, I don’t know. The guy said they were experts at virus removal, that they could make it all better, that they would tune everything and my computer would be “like new”. Elated, I gave them my old laptop and left with a glow of hope. False hope, it would seem. When I […]

To the horror of my parents, I’ve always been a socialist of sorts, a wandering spirit looking for the government supporting its members as members, where people don’t die under bridges or in shabby nursing homes. Before everyone trots out their tea party rhetoric and Fox and Friends viewpoints, let me say that this is pretty much a one-man debate, a personal deliberation. I’ll occasionally discuss the matter with my libertarian friend Jesse Markowitz, if only because he is one of the few people left who openly discusses things on merit rather than what passes for Yankee debates these days […]