Well, I have the name Ghost for a reason – of course, this isn’t it. Nonetheless, it seemed appropriate as I haven’t written on this blog in close to a year or so. It’s been shut down for a good while as well. During all that time I wasn’t writing on here the spam bots took over and got me blacklisted on Google for a time. After that I simply took the entire thing down. I was updating the forums at Broken Doll today and thought I should probably bring this back – if only to be able to read it again.
So what have I been up to?
Did I ever get Cassie back?
I suppose that is the first bit that needs to be addressed as, for the most part, it encompasses the bulk of entries on this blog, some of which have been archived for some time. For those of you who followed the story of drama, heartache and insanity of Cassie and I, well, I apologize for keeping the next chapter so long from you. I suppose it’s sort of like that wait between The Wastelands and Wizard and Glass if you read the Dark Tower series. I hope you will be happy to hear that we turned out alright in the end, or rather, the beginning. We started dating again sometime last October I suppose and things were really rocky at best. Couples really don’t stay together as much as they once did these days and the few who reconcile after a hard breakup usually don’t last. You still find yourself caught up in the old habits that made things fail to begin with, the old wounds are too fresh. Sooner or later they open up and once again you’re breaking up, this time for good – you finally realize that it’s for the best. This time there’s no crying, no scraping through the abyss of your own insanity trying to firgure out where you went wrong – you realize sometimes things just don’t work out. But Ghost/Ashe, you say, I thought this was a happy ending? WTF?
It is – a very happy ending. You see, Cassie and I did go through that, we did come to that point again and we did in fact break up again. It just didn’t work. We just aren’t very good at breaking up, you see. We’re actually great at being together – she understands me as much as anyone could hope to, I understand her as well as anyone. That’s not the point or the lesson, if there is one – the point is that we keep understanding. Things weren’t working, so we changed. Gods know I changed a lot last year, possibly more than I had in all the years prior since I was young.
I’m 30 now by the way – no I don’t feel that much older. I felt older and got into one of those elegiac moods that were completely inappropriate for my age every year probably since 16, but I did not feel old a week ago when I hit 30. I felt damn good. I won’t ramble on much more for now, but I’ll leave you with this: I broke the curse. For the first time since I was a much younger man I have not had a bad summer – it’s just the same as any other time of the year. In retrospect, there was probably never a curse to begin with.
A bad summer? Every summer? What the hell are you talking about?
Are you telling me all those games of SS2 were for naught? You lying, cheating SOB. NOBODY 4-hits me with Ukyo! NOBODY!
Haha yes I can still manage the 4-hit with Ukyo and yes I will still smack you and Hanzo down with it.
Hi Christopher,
Me and my crew are going to start to play the seven 13: cycle of existence tonight in Bogotá, Colombia. It could seem strange because by most of the signs the game is going down. The thing started almost 4 years ago, when I travel my first time out of my country. My crew and I were playing since 1996 and we have gone by several “crisis” (most of them mine) but we still are together and playing (not so often as the beginning). The thing is that “corporate game playing” started to bother me. We have not much time to prepare the game as we get older and there was a lot of rules and books that were there by the sake of the editor, not the players or the authors. This vision of mine was also empowered by free software and free culture movements, so I was looking for something similar. Most of the totally free (as in speech) RPGs had not the quality that would make my crew and myself to switch over them, so a middle point was the independent publisher and that’s how I found Cycle of Existence, Universalis and Sorcerer. Having played the last two, now we want to hack the game from the beginning and your game has the proper balance between self-containment and richness to start with it. May be at the end the result will be something that has the things that we liked more of this years of role playing. I think that when things are really important (and role playing is one) you’re not along and major undertakings are better in proper company. You have already done a lot by your self (and with your gaming crews) but now that you’re thinking in following another paths, what do you thing about passing the torch to your community of rol players, what about making the transition from an independent role playing game to a open source free hackeable one? You will be the first on making that in the rpg scene (people have already done this on software business with good results)… You don’t know where the seed of your creation is going to flourish… but I recommend to read “homesteading the noosphere”[1]_, and take a look on creative commons and it use in arts and education, before answering my question:
.. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading/
Thanks, Take care and… Walk in Balance
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