I do it to Myself

Some times I just want to say sorry.  But I know that it is too late.  I can't because it won't change anything.  I knew that I did it as soon as I said it and it was out.  Things changed because of it.  But I deserve to be shut out.  It is that feeling that you get when the person that you like has blocked you on FaceBook, or the friend that you value above all others has stopped returning your calls and is mysteriously never home when you call. Perhaps you don't know what that feels like?  Maybe it only happens to me.

I still want to die.  I could not express it when I was seven, but if I knew how to then, I would have.  It has never really changed for long.  I want to tell her that.  The one that made me feel that I had a reason to live but it was not really there.

It is 3 o'clock in the morning.  Never kill yourself at three, wait until noon.

Game system Magic Ideas

Strike when the thought is hot.

Magic system for the world of Caranus, the world that I would like to write about one day.

Clerics, priests and shamans all contact the spirits within the world.  There are five levels of spirits.  It is about scope.  There is the smallest level it is one thing like a tree, a sword, a building.  The next level  is bigger like a stand of trees, the Oak trees in the forest, a neighbourhood, or a village.  The next level is broader again, like one aspect of a God's interest, like travelers, or a forest, or a city.  Broader again is the fourth level, like the purview of a whole god, like Zeus, god of lightning travelers etc., a nation, or all the forests in a region, a whole army.  The last level is the broadest, one of the Goddesses and her two consorts, the world, all trees, everything of one type.  

Each level of mastery of essence allows each spell to be augmented in a few ways, each two levels of essence allows a breadth level to be added, each level adds two additional bonus dice, a time of the effect, or each level adds other spell effects.  For example an essence five character when they casts a spell could give themselves or on person twelve bonus dice for an instant, or they could give a small group, five people, a six dice bonus for each action in a battle, or a spell that adds four dice to a single person for day.

.         Time.          Dice.       People.          Breadth     Cost               Mixing

0.      Instant.      2.              1.                        One.          1

1.        Action.       4.             5.                       One.         2

2.      Scene.         6.            25.                    One.        4                        

3.      Hour.           8.            125.                  Two.         8.                      5

4.      Day.            10.          250.                 Two.         16

5.     Week.          12.          500.                 Three.       32.                  25

6.    Month.         14.         1000.                Three.       64

7.   Season.        16.         2000.               Four.         128.               125

8.      Year.          18.         5000.               Four.        256

9.    Big year.     20.      10000.               Five.        512.              625

10. Permanent 22.      Everyone.             Five.       1024

Breadth can be many things, it can be about asking or channeling levels of power of the various Gods.  It can also be about mixing aspects of worship.  It costs magic points in addition to the effects.

So each level of essence that a priest has they can cast a spell that any combination of the above.  Magic pool is essence level x will power meaning some spells may require ritual casting with more than one caster or extended casting times.

Example, priest of a War with 5 essence and 7 willpower could cast a spell that lasts an hour, gives a 4 dice bonus on five people for (32) magic points and cast three simple (1) spells before they need to rest or 17 action length 2 dice blessings (2) or heal 4 level four injuries (8) and so on.  Or he could cast a multi disciplinary spell that affects five people with three effects (6) which heals 2 health levels (2), and gives a one time instant attack bonus for 2 dice (1) and leaves the party as rested as if they had a five minute break (1) +(25) total (35)

Greater essence and willpower increases the magnitude of the spells and the number of spells that can be cast.

Divine spell casters must focus on raising their essence primarily for their casting ability, but they need also raise their abilities and attributes that are associated with the Divinity that they gain their powers from.  They have two favoured abilities and one favoured attribute plus they are favoured in essence.  Favoured grants a -1 experience modifier to the cost per level.  Abilities cost three times the current level to raise, Atributes cost five times the current level Essence also costs five times the current level

Sorcerers, conjurors, and other types of non-spiritual magic users use a similar hierarchy of casting ability.  They use elements in their magic, but not all elements, some are in opposition and can't be used without great penalty.

The elements are:

Water   •     Air

     •                  •

Earth    •     Fire

There is also an additional direction that a Mage can chose from: Life and Death.

.         Time.          Dice.       People.            Mixing     Cost               Mixing

0.      Instant.      2.              1.                        One.          1.                      0

1.        Action.       4.             5.                       Two         2.                      1

2.      Scene.         6.            25.                    Three.      4                     2

3.      Hour.           8.            125.                  Four.         8.                   4

4.      Day.            10.          250.                 Five.         16.                   8

5.     Week.          12.          500.                                     32.                 

6.    Month.         14.         1000.                                   64

7.   Season.        16.         2000.                                  128.               

8.      Year.          18.         5000.                                 256

9.    Big year.     20.      10000.                                 512.             

10. Permanent 22.      Everyone.                             1024

Mixing is a little different from the Holy-men, when fire and earth is lava, water and air is mist and ice, water and earth is mud. Fire and water is hot water, Earth and Air is dust.  Life and Death add additional effects based on preservation and harm.  Death can also cause sleep when combined with air, earth and death can break things, death and fire burns things, fire burns things, but fire and death destroys, death and water poisons or burns like acid. Life magic protects things so life and air would among other things create extra dimensions, life and earth would creat servants, life and fire would creat protection spells and life and water would summon living things and living servants.  Death works better on structures and less well with living things, life works better on living things less well on things and less well on inanimate things.  The rarest of spells are the energy drain spells, because they are joint life and death spells, but they are also the most powerful allowing resurrection eventually.

Non-divine casters have one favoured Ability and Essence is favoured too, but they get a big break on casting elements.  Their first Element costs one times their current level in experience.  The opposition Element costs seven times the current level.  The other four Elements cost three times the current level in experience.  No element may be higher than the Essence level and no element may be higher than the First Element.  A Fire mage may have both Life and Death as well as the other elements, but they are always paired with Fire.  Life mages may have all the elements, but only when they are paired with life, they can be conjurors but never throw a fireball.

The third type of magic wielder are regular people.  Regular people have seven favoured Abilities, so for those seven, it costs two experience times the current level, but abilities can only rise to the extent of their Essence or five, which ever is greater.  When they have an essence score, they also get magic points which can be used to add dice to rolls or add successes in ability contests.  They may also buy levels in a single element as a Mage, at opposition prices (x7).  This will allow warriors to have flaming arrows and swords, stoney resisting effects, songs that carry far in the air or craftsmen shaping things with easy fluidity etc.

Don't look at what my Right hand is doing While I shame Russia with my Left

Every time you come to think that our government can't slip any further, it does.  I am talking the ruling Conservatives in Canada, where I live.  Conservative meaning as close as any Canadian Government has been to Fascist.  

Hyperbole you say?  No, I don't mean hyperbole.  The hallmarks of extreme right wing political thought is down on public education and loss of freedoms.  They try to control the populous like a strict parent controls its children.  These are things that our government has been doing in recent years.

They ended climate research, because it contradicted their own ideas about what the science should say, but does not.  They restricted the government scientists from speaking in public unless they first sought government approval, which was never given.  They did the same to government librarians.  Government libraries contain all the documents that the government produces including scientific research, especially climate research.  Last year this government then closed these libraries and this year, they closed many of these libraries and destroyed "redundant" information.  A lot of the "redundant" information was environmental research collected over decades.  We know this because non government people liberated some of the materials. The Government said when questioned about it said that anyone could have requested any of the research to be digitalized, all the public had to do was ask.  Ask if they knew about it from the scientists and librarians who were not allowed to talk to the public unless they were given permission by the Government.

They passed these measures in large bills called omnibus legislation, massive documents that contained close to a thousand individual laws tacked on to more innocent legislation.  Bills that people were all in favour of.  Nice laws that are designed to protect people, but have hundreds of unrelated subsections that should have been separate laws passed all at once with their majority on the House of Commons.  A majority of 41% of voters.

The most recent Omnibus Bill that they are trying to pass has nice words written on the packaging, Fair Voting, meant to clean up the elections and reduce voter fraud.  It is just a nice frilly package that cites a report that was made to show the problems with the voting system that we have, only last week the author of the report went to Parliament and  publicly revealed that the government was making up portions of the report to suit its desires, that they were misrepresenting other passages so that they could change the system to suit themselves.  

Presently, if someone moves prior to an election and is not registered to vote in their area, the can come to the polling booth with someone who is registered and they can vouch for them, they can bring in proof that they live in the area and they can vote.  This new bill will scrap this practice.  Typically this practice flavours young people and people who move frequently, people who typically don't vote Conservative.  

Another aspect of the new legislation will mean that polling scrutineers, the people who police the polling stations and count the individual ballots will be chosen exclusively by the incumbent, meaning most of theses people will be Conservatives Party members.  The funny thing of the entire bill, is that the report was commissioned because of the many voter irregularities caused by Conservative supporters.  I say supporters because the identity of the people in question could not be established or who put all the data on a private laptop owned by a Conservative Party could not be precisely established.

Yet another change in the legislation was a measure that will definitely prevent fraud.  In that last few elections people were charged with giving employees money to donate to the Conservative Party to skirt the maximum donation laws, the change will allow anyone to donate a lot more money in future elections, so that they can donate as much as they want and not have to break the law to do it.  The maximum donation law was there so that all candidates would have approximately the same amount of money to put towards expenses so that a campaign would theoretically be about issues and not about glitzy television ads.

Another fix was to prevent the In-and-Out fraud.  In the last few elections some campaigns by Conservative candidates were lower budget than others and the Conservative Party transferred money to those ridings to max out their budget which was then used to buy National ads.  The budget of the national campaign is also regulated, so these In-and-Out frauds amounted to additional National funding that the other honest parties did not have.  This bill will now increase the maximum that can be spent on the National campaign.  Which works out, because after scrapping all the climate research and throwing out all the environmental data that has been collected, the Conservative Party can now legally accept millions from the Oils Sand extraction companies to spend on their future campaigns.

The writer of the report that the Conservatives are citing for every change that they are enacting, said that the legislation needs to be changed to reflect his true report, or scrap the Omnibus Legislation.  But, why should they, 41% of Canadians voted for them, a clear majority, if it comes up for a vote, sorry, when it comes up for a vote, it will pass unchanged.  Because as angry as I get writing this down and telling you, I won't arm myself and storm the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa.  I won't join a radical group and fire RPGs at the Prime Minister's motorcade, because this is Canada, and we won't risk breaking the law to save ourselves.

But the best part of this entire thing is how he, the Prime Minister is directing the public's eye away from the gradual dismantling of our democracy by pointing a finger at Russia and castigating them for doing the same thing.

Exalted Artifact Problems

I was talking back and forth with my friend about the rules of Exalted and concepts every time we play.  It is about realism and it is about inconsistencies.  One such in consistency is normal weapons compared to artifact weapons.  Obviously artifact weapons are better, but there are rules for normal weapons that are masterpieces and better, because lets face it some craftspeople are better than others and if extra time and better materials are used, better things can be made.  As such there are provisions made for fine and perfect weapons and that is where the discussion starts.  Perfectly made weapons made with magical materials are almost the same as artifact weapons.  So why have artifact weapons at all, is it just for the coolness factor of having a six to seven foot sword as wide as a person, which is the coolest thing to see, but having a perfect magical normal weapon that is almost as good?

Weapons have characteristics in game play, speed, accuracy, defensive value, damage and the number of attacks that it can make.  Speed refers to how fast you can ready the weapon after attacking, accuracy the qualities of the weapon that aid in hitting a target, defense refers to anything that would help parry another weapon and damage refers to anything that might increase the damage caused by the weapon.  Fine weapons would change one characteristic by one, exceptional weapons change three characteristics by one and perfect weapons change two by one and one by two.  In practice that means that there is a description along with the item, what makes the weapon so special: a war-hammer whose head is shaped like an eagle's head, with a counter weight at the end of the haft might account for a higher defense, weapons getting caught on the beak, damage from the beak and higher speed because the counter weight allows for a faster recovery time.  A thinner blade on a slashing sword might impart a greater accuracy and faster speed while a larger hilt guard, an increased defense.  

The system works for armour and for mundane equipment as well, fine chisels might aid with a bonus die to a specific task, exceptional chisels a bonus die to all tasks and perfect chisels a two bonus dice to all tasks with the tool. 

What this can do is make ordinary items almost as good as artifact items and this seemed to be unfair to the person that in game had an artifact.  But there was nothing in the rules that said that artifacts could not vary in quality either. So this was a solution and it added other additional complexities.  Such as how the Solars, who had been banished from the world for nearly Fifteen hundred years could have artifacts, when all their best stuff had been swept away by time and caretakers of it.  Solar Artifacts are crude things with no skill or crafting, they were the among the first things that were crafted and were hordes in personal caches across creation as keep sakes and nothing more.  

The True Artifacts of the First Age were perfectly made and had other powers too, perfect artifacts would have the bonuses of perfect craftsmanship as well as the artifact bonuses.  

Another complexity would arise when a set of artifacts is captured, usually the owner killed.  The quality of the artifacts would depend on the family of the owner and higher quality goods would fetch higher resale prices, up to a point.  Higher quality artifacts might also mean that the relatives might be more willing to hunt down the new owners to recover a specific perfect artifact.  It would definitely make selling a very well known artifact almost impossible even and holding it down right dangerous as the family brings forth all its forces to recover a few valuable trinkets.

Green Economy Again!!!

I have not had much time to myself lately, as I am in Big Smoke again.  I enjoy being here, but it is not as easy as it was once.  My sleep is not quite as good as it had been in the past here, but that might be a factor of other issues.  The fact that I feel that my Big Smoke friends have been drifting further away.  I feel that I should re-evaluate them and demote them to acquaintance level.  Maybe that is what I should do.  One thing solved

The other issue has been that my friend that I have been staying with has been unemployed for a little bit.  I feel that I can say that because no one close to him reads this and because he is very close to getting a new job I think I can talk about it.  Amongst my friends, I have been unemployed more often than the rest, but since I live closer to the edge I have had a greater necessity of finding employment quickly, so I have been unemployed for less time than one or two of my friends.  But that said, I know the stress of being unemployed, however, he is married and has kids, so it is a little more stressful.  He has an employed wife which might make things easier and tougher at the same time.

His stresses come mostly because he is a transition male in our society, meaning he has been raised to be the primary wage earner for his family, but his wife is a close second.  He feels that in order to take care of his family correctly he needs to be able to take care of the financial needs of his family exclusively and unfortunately, his wife is of the same mind.  She has sacrificed two of her earning years to be on Maternity Leave to raise children and so is not nearly as advanced in her career as she could be.  She feels that she should be able to quit work and take the time to raise her children full time too.  And this is no longer a reality of family life in this age.  But it is her dream, it is both of their dream.  They are both smart people and so they have looked at the numbers and they have looked at them twice.  They know what the savings are and the costs are, but right now there is a lot of resentment because they can't do these things right now, because he is unemployed.  

It also helps that she hates her job.  The only thing that made her job bare able in the past was that she and my friend worked at the same company.  And that they removed her husband's position but kept her there is part of the resentment.  The largest part of the resentment is a familiar ring to anyone who reads what I write more than casually.  The economy is changing and the economic model that companies are using has yet to reflect these changes.  The model is of increasing profits every year.  What I mean is there is only so many dollars available for investment in the economy and most products in each sector are nearly identical, but the push is for steady continual growth year after year and these expectations are how bonuses and stock prices are valued at.  But since there is a limited growth potential, because the competing products are essentially identical, unrealistic long term and short term goals of growth are set and when they are not met share prices drop and bonuses are not paid.  

When in Canada for example, we have three large national Cell Phone companies: Bell, Rogers and Telus.  We have a few regional and small companies too, but they are really very small in comparison.  The market place is small, because it is Canada and we are right beside the United States and they have nine times the population as we do and a much denser country too.  Most of the population of Canada is close to the American boarder, but it is a very long boarder so expanding into this country has a very large price tag attached in investment for a small number of potential customers, so the Big Three Cell companies are the only real players for the foreseeable future.  Each company offers identical services, each company offers similar high charges and high prices and each company has identically crappy customer service, so essentially they are identical companies.  Each company expects to increase their sales by 10% each year, but the only way they can do that is to take business away from their competitors and by getting customers to abandon their land lines and get cellphones.  That last segment of the population is not very big at all.  There are new customers as young people are more likely to have cellphones than landlines, but that will change eventually when everyone has a cellphone.  And each company grew for ten years by 10% because of these new customers, but recently this has stopped to be the case.  Each cellphone company has an equal share of the customers but one year they did not make their expected 10% increase in business, they only got 9%.  Because they did not meet their expectations, they did not meet their expected profits so their shareholders are not going to be happy and the share prices of the stocks will drop, the company will not pay its employees a bonus.  But the company still earned profit and it did grow, it just did not reach the growth potential of previous years and why would they, there is no difference between the three big companies.  

But there is something that these companies can do to increase profits to the same as they had in years past, they can lay off employees.  And this works, mostly because most people do not work at peak productivity all the time, most people never work at peak productivity actually, so cutting back some of the workers and transferring the work will bring efficiencies to the company and since they are paying less people the profits are the same as years past and so stock prices remain the same and the executive that proposed the layoffs gets a bigger bonus.  The next year, profits are down again, because the products are still the same and there are less new customers, but expected growth targets are still high, so more layoffs occur.  

After a few years of this the companies begin to look different.  The people that were once working at 80% peak a few years ago have more work to do than they can possibly do and are getting behind, the customer service department has been outsourced to a developing country with a thick English accent that most Canadian speakers have difficulty understanding, but are a tenth the cost of locals and the products still have not changed, but the expectation of growth still exists.  Add to the mix that the current employees have job security issues because of the layoffs that have happened in the past, so despite being over worked they are not likely to complain.  But still the products have not changed.  The services are even crappier, the charges for their services have climbed recently.  Each company is equally crappy, but together they have a monopoly on the business.

There are two ways out of this death spiral for these companies, one which is they offer different products to steal product share from their competitors, but that is a limited prospect, because the products are transparent and easy to copy and so there is only one other option, reduce expectations of growth.  If the profit of a company is a 0% increase, that means it made as much money as it did the last year and this is the eventual end state of any mature company in a stable population where the product is unchanging and each competitor is offering exactly the same thing.

My friends never worked for cell phone companies, but this example works for many types of company models, computer sales through cell phones, fast food through travel agencies, coffee places through garden centres.

I am supposed to be writing an Exalted Adventure, but I had this on my chest to get off.

Anxiety

Where does this fit?  I am not sexually interested in people.  The conclusions about my life re: fetishes have changed my life and how I feel about people and what I am looking for.  I am not sure that it is all for the good, it is just there.  It has meant that a practice that almost all men engage in, but I did very little of has gone almost completely away: checking out the opposite sex.  My efforts to destroy my fetish have been fruitless, I have only tested them once, but it is not like there is much opportunity to test it anyways.  I really fear that this might be the end of that part of my life and my hopefulness of bachelorhood's end will never be true.  What I mean is that there is fear that I will meet someone and happiness will still elude me, that sexuality will elude me forever.  

I had my first anxiety attack in years last week.  Not full blown like I used to have but it has been close to twenty years.  All my anxiety attacks 

were about girls and this one was no different.  This one was triggered by the thought that a woman who I was talking to had changed her behaviour to avoid me, that was the thought.  I quickly found out rather than dwell on it, a change from all those years ago.  Of course I have been experiencing anxiety-quakes, little reminders of what happened.  I should also say that it was very mild as compared to the past.  In the past I hyperventilated and lost the ability to reason, something I would say would be very bad, this was not like that.  I just could not concentrate on what I was doing and my thoughts were coming at me too fast to concentrate, add that I was in a yoga class at the time.  One unforeseen side effect was that I was able to sleep before a long driving trip to Big Smoke, something I don't normally accomplish.  

It seems that I am attracted to passive girls, or is it that the women who respond to my ads are passive.  I am hoping that that will allow them to get to know me.  Which this contrary to what I said in the first paragraph, only it is not or I am trying despite my personal proclivities.  

This is the first time that I have not been anxious about being unemployed in the winter.  I have been doing more this winter than other winters, but then comes this anxiety issues.  It makes me think that maybe this winter has been worse.  Along with the anxiety came an avoidance of doing some of the things that I wanted to do, that I had been doing, or maybe it was a reaction to my last grandparent dying.  

I just don't know.