My dad starts a series of weekly classes for the month of April today, which is required by Medicare to cover his diabetes. Supposidly in these classes he will learn about eating with diabetes and other information he should know in order to properly “live” with diabetes.

I’m a little nervous about them myself. My father was never very good with education when he was in grade school, and I don’t want him to feel intimidated or bored or anything like that. In a way I wish I could go with him, but I can’t due to work.

I have an interview set up for a web design position. Though I realized I uploaded an older version of my resume layout, so that’s currently fucked up. I’ll have to fix that when I get home.

Things on the MUD are going great. I’ve been fleshing out a lot of theme with the staff on the forum. I expect we’ll be able to open up at the end of spring/early summer. My new builders are doing a fantastic job, and I have beta testers stopping by constantly to also offer ideas and are just anxious in general.

Money is a little tight at the moment, only because of having to submit the paperwork for the divorce, and having a few excess bills to pay. I expect it will be like this the majority of April. Perhaps this summer things will settle down a bit. Then again, I expect a better paying job will help out with that a lot too.

Or something along those lines.

That’s what some jackass from Cities of M’dhoria is now calling my MUD. And when Sativa and Graven find out, they are apparently going to sue us!

We’ll just ignore the fact that Advent has been up since 2001.

We’ll ignore the fact that Graven, Sativa, Wyare, and Delshara have all done work on Advent, long before I ever stepped foot on CoM, which was only for what 6 months last year? In fact, Sativa and Wyare -gave- me their prog code, to which I give them full credit for in help credits. And that we are technically sister MUDs.

We’ll ignore the fact that CoM is hosted on the adventmud.org servers, and that I regularly maintain any server issues and backups so they don’t lose any information.

We’ll ignore the fact that I still keep in touch with a lot of the staff from CoM.

We’ll ignore the fact that Advent is completely different from CoM, different races, different setting, no classes, no alignments, no levels

I emailed it to Sativa because it amused me, it’ll probably amuse him too.

Amusing fantasy name ramblings on my MUD:

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I was doing some research on Hyena’s for my MUD, and I was reading through the Wikipedia article which had some interesting facts I wasn’t aware of.

I was originally look at the Hyena as a pet to the God Murelu, who is our God of Deceit, Revelry, and Trickery. He created the Felarae which is a cat/human conglomeration. I wanted two hyena’s chained to his throne, as well as having several domestic cats like the Ancient Egyptians which would be considered a sacred animal. Also since hyena’s are known to sound like they are laughing, are very intelligent hunters, and seem to be more cat-like than dog-like, I thought they’d be suitable as a “pet” for the God of Revelry.

“Hyenas are also highly intelligent predators, even more intelligent than the lions (some scientists claim they are of equal intelligence to certain apes). One indication of hyena intelligence is that hyenas will move their kills closer to each other to protect them from scavengers; another indication is their strategic hunting methods.”

Whether they are more closely related to dogs or cats, no one seems to know for sure. They seem to be more closely related to the mongoose than anything. I figure if they are closer to dogs, it would be fitting for the God who created the Felarae to want them as his pet or slave. If they are more closely related to cats, then like domestic felines, they are another sacred being to the God Murelu himself.

As stated by zoo.org
“Many researchers consider hyenas the evolutionary ‘link’ between dogs and cats but more closely related to cats.”

One of his totems is already a snake, for obvious reasons being the God of Deceit, I think hyenas will fit in well.

According to a post on Top Mud Sites, my MUD has been chosen as the current spotlight MUD on MuWiki. Sweet, free advertisement that shows we’re already getting notice and we’re not even open yet.

Soon my precious…..soon….

My sister is having her 12th birthday party today at Ski Liberty in Pennsylvania, but I’m here at work so I wasn’t able to go. She’s being dropped off afterwards to stay the rest of the weekend with me, which is nice because I haven’t seen her since Christmas.

This month actually marks a year since she was paralyzed on her birthday last year. She still has some back pains, but she is still doing gymnastics, and loves showing off her cartwheels.

Tomorrow I will probably take her to the Grove for a Warrior Ritual. And then we’ll probably just hang out at my house, maybe go for a hike with some pictures to follow.

I heard from two separate sources yesterday that I have a small mob of people waiting to play my MUD. Two sources that actually don’t know each other, so I was pleasantly surprised. That combined with the 140 beta applications I’ve had submitted, I should have a fairly decent beta group to get things started. Hopefully they will all stick around while we fix and modify things.

I stayed up till after midnight last night helping Anthony have a smooth transition moving the Oceans Tide website over onto their server. Everything appears to be working swimmingly. Plus it gave me a chance to see the new “Duke” upgrade of Wordpress. Very spiffy, I think I might be brave enough to upgrade to it now.

So I talk randomly on here about my pet project, my MUD. A medieval fantasy based text role-playing game (like Everquest). My staff and I have been working hard to get the project open for beta, or at least alpha stage. It’s not there quite yet, but I wanted to give a brief look into what we’ve been working on.

You’re first met by our greeting screen where you are asked to provide a name for Isorian to scribe on your page in time. Isorian, Goddess of the Underworld, of History, of Time. She keeps record of the life and death of every mortal, she acts as the judge of all souls and the guardian of the Gates of Abystus, what we call our Underworld.

Essentially, just a name for the character you intend to play.

You’ll want to keep track of the stats of your character with your score card. It’s still being slightly tweaked, but an important part of your character none the less.

We’ve been working hard on finishing up the details of the world, such as the rooms and areas of the world you will be traveling.

Combat is fairly straight forward, we’re adding new skills and spells all the time. Afterall, the purpose behind Advent is to allow gamers a place to roleplay, not single out the gamers from the roleplayers.

We’re providing a very detailed helpfile system, so any questions you have are easily found. A few samples: Hamstring, Doorbash, Overpower.

So yes, I’m very happy with the work we’ve accomplished so far. I’m excited for when I’ll be able to open this baby up to the public finally. Feel free to check it out sometime. Just remember, it’s still under construction

My dad is so adorable.

He loves to bake up a storm during the holidays. Cookies, pies, cakes. He spent the majority of yesterday baking me pumpkin pies (yes plural). 3 to be exact. What the hell I’m going to do with 3 pies, I don’t know. But every year he also makes a disaster out of the kitchen, which I discovered yesterday as I was sliding on flour on the wooden floor. Apparently he had dropped eggs (which were cleaned up), there was flower and sugar all over the counter, a few things that had fallen off the table onto the floor, burnt drippings on the bottom of the oven. I can’t help but laugh. I don’t even bother going into the kitchen if I can help it during the holidays because he’s always making some sort of mess in there. But he enjoys it.

Christmas/Holiday Cards!: If you want one, email me with your address. Also let me know if you’d like mine to send one in return.

Had a decent weekend. Got a lot accomplished, which is a change, since my weekends have been somewhat lazy. Submitted the Groves quarterly report, held an online witan meeting (anyone know of a good online chat script?), started preparing stuff for elections next month, and have almost finished my Centaur village on my MUD.

I’m really proud of my staff on my MUD. They really do dedicate themselves to it, and work really hard. I don’t think I could ask for a better bunch of people to share building this game with. And when it opens into beta next year, I wouldn’t want a better bunch of people to run it with me. I really think this RPG could go somewhere.