lucidfox

I like WordPress. Still playing with its features. It's intuitive and easy to manage, yet sufficiently flexible on its own right - not to mention there are a plethora of plugins.

For exactly zero people who care, rel="nofollow" has been disabled for external links. Also, public stats are now available (see sidebar).

In other news, here's my Ubuntu 6.10 frankendesktop, as Simbab puts it.

(From now on, premoderation is disabled. Comments, if any, should appear instantly.)

I never imagined I would ever use a stupid 4chan meme in a dream, but it sort of happened.

The dream was essentially a scene from Heroes of Might and Magic V, or at least it pretended to. After all, there was no scene in the game or the expansion where a bunch of heroes storm a Haven town with Markal inside – defended by Red Haven units, no less.

And how a laser cannon ended up just outside the town walls is beyond me. But in the dream, I didn’t bother. I ran to the cannon (I was in the assault force) and, charging it, barely breathing, shouted as loudly as I could (but it was still not that loud):

Imma… chargin… mah… lazer!!!

When the assault began, the cannon somehow transformed into an ordinary cannon. I shot some enemy troops out of it (swordsmen and archers). We made it past the Red Haven units, but then a horde of undead appeared. Realizing that defeat was imminent, I screamed… then our angels, having defeated the red angels, came and started pwning them, and I was teleported to safety.

In the end, I had a touching philosophical discussion with Markal, who was without his necromancer robe. Walking through a white hallway, hand in hand with me, he explained that he wasn’t that bad a guy after all, and that he had his own reasons for taking over the Griffin Empire. In the end, he departed, and I was left to look after the castle, alone, albeit with loyal angels waiting outside.

(Born out of a lengthy IRC conversation on #wookieepedia. I'm sort of trying to sort out things in my own head. See, I need everything I write to be technically accessible by somebody else. Otherwise, I just can't write a sentence.)

Whoever is reading this, look in a mirror now.

Don't have a mirror nearby? Stand up and find one. Or look at a photo of yourself. It should preferrably be something mundane, not forced, not one where you're posing or otherwise trying to create an impression.

Is this the real you? The way you imagine yourself, the image that encompasses your thoughts and desires? Would you expect this person to think like you, to have dreams like the ones you do, to have your interests - including those you don't tell anybody, sometimes not even the closest friends? The interests whose existence you sometimes refuse to acknowledge even to yourself, but which manifest themselves through dreams nonetheless?

If you really had a choice, and access to unlikely technology, and there were nobody but you... you would probably change into something else for those private moments. Something you envision yourself as. But there's the society, with its standards and demands, and sometimes outward intolerance and bigotry.

Before you exclaim "No, I'm not anything like that", think twice. We all are. In a sense, we're "roleplaying" in real life - assuming the role assigned to us by the society. I don't say if if it's a good or bad thing, but it's a fact.

And I'm afraid that the whole "struggle for Internet anonymity" may be an indication of a deeper problem. You see, if I were Clark Kent, I would probably oppose a law requiring all superheroes to reveal their secret identities.

Then there's the online identity. Some have multiple, but not really the point. It is not something you have to assume from birth. It is constructed. You define what you want to be online. There's still a society here, but it's a more tolerant society. You can afford be more open, and open in other topics than in real life.

That's probably why RPGs are so addictive. (That includes IRC as well, and even more so because the rules are more vague.) They allow you to be someone you want to be, as opposed to someone you have to be because of the circumstances of your birth.

There's obviously a "dark side" of your personality that only you dare to explore. Or sometimes even you dare not to. But when combined, these two (or more) identities are all that can be known about you by an outsider. Whether or not you want your real-life friend to know about your online identity, or vice versa, depends on you.

I, for one, while making the information publicly available (I have to. Domain whois. Duh.), prefer if people don't really dig into the issue, because, you know... LucidFox is LucidFox, and the guy whose name is written in the whois entry for lucidfox.org is not LucidFox. He's someone else. Both are me in a sense, and both are not me - also in a sense.

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You see, I never really got the Superman hype. A walking indestructible deus ex machina whose only weakness is unobtainium... Try selling that to a Star Wars fan, and they'll mock both you and the guys at LFL who thought approving this as canon would be good idea. From what I've heard, though, the whole Clark Kent premise is written rather differently to most superhero secret identities. Usually, there's the real person, and there's the mask. Think Bruce Wayne and Batman, arguably the most famous disguise of that kind.

Here, we have Clark Kent, who is a disguise, and we have Superman, who's also a disguise. To quote Wikipedia:

Many fans and Superman scholars believe there to actually be three interpretations. There is firstly Kal-El (otherwise known to fans as 'Smallville Clark'). Kal-El reveals himself only around trusted friends and family, particularly whilst on the farm with Martha, or in moments alone with Lois. He is a regular guy, brave, and moral. Kal-El then wears two other masks: that of the heroic Superman, and that of the bumbling and goofy Clark Kent (otherwise known as 'Metropolis Clark'). It should be noted that "bumbling" Clark is an act - it is not the real Kal-El. Therefore, there are basically three interpretations of the same person.

See, that's my argument against those accusing role-players of "denying their real self", because the observable self is also not the real self.

Or maybe I'm just bored and trying to find excuses while plain not making any sense.

After the article on Firefox, which was featured, why am I even writing this? What's the point? What is it doing on Uncyc, except relieving me of the necessity to keep it all in my memory?

No IRC bots for ya anymore. It attracted the attention of the tech support and they told me to stop it.

R.I.P. Window.

The Hitler stats are still available, though, for fun's sake.

This site being screwed up in IE wasn't intentional, but I won't fix it. Seriously, I don't want those stupid enough to use IE to visit my personal website (and tread on my dreams™).

This blog uses Lucida Grande as its default font. If you don't have it, you can download it using a link on the sidebar.

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