Author Archives: Kier

About Kier

I've been on the web since about 1994. I have a background in a lot of things, including a five year stint as a journalist and over a decade of helping people get their message out to the world. I write on a number of subjects--everything from relationships to personal development to politics and every day life. I hope you get something worthwhile out of it.

So… I bought a house…

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I’ve been living here for five years now.

My lease was coming up for renewal in August, so I was going to ask for another extended lease and ask about an option to buy at the end of that.

The properly manager emailed me as I was getting ready to send that suggestion. “Your lease is up in August and the owner is looking to sell. Are you interested?”

Well, yes and no. But mostly yes.

That was back in late February. We spent some time going back and forth before we got an actual price. It was just good enough (and exceptionally good by most normal measures) that I could manage to make it work with the mortgage guy.

It’s going to be tight, budget-wise, but I’ll also not have to worry about moving.

And not moving was really the biggest driver of this.

Are you excited?

This is a totally unplanned purchase. I had a plan to get enough together to consider a purchase in the future, but, right at this moment, this was something very tough to make work. It’s been more or less pure luck that I can do this at all.

No, I’m not excited about this. I was excited about the other plans I was working toward for this year and next. But in order to make this work, I had to cancel all of those kind of big, kind of time-connected plans (they aren’t things that can just be rescheduled and still have the same meaning or impact).

I am fully and completely appreciative of how positive this situation is, overall. But the choice to do this was driving by practicality… and an absolute dislike of having to move.

But people seem pretty insistent that I should be excited. They’ve argued with me about it. Trying to convince me that I’m totally wrong about how I feel.

Please, don’t ever do that to anyone in any situation.

Believe people when they tell you how they feel. Accept it.

If you don’t, they’re going to stop being honest with you about how they feel. They may even stop talking to you altogether.

You have no actual insight or understanding about what’s going on inside someone else unless you actually listen to them. Their mind and heart is not your mind and heart. Good relationships are built on that understanding.

It’s just fine to be excited about the positive developments in someone’s life… and this is 100% a net positive development. So I’m fine with you being excited… just, y’know, don’t expect me to be excited in the same way (or at all). I’m still mourning the plans that had to be killed to make this work.

On a deeper level, this was never going to be anything other than a bittersweet event, even if it was something I’d planned for. Buying a house just for myself was never something I considered. It was always “supposed” to be a team effort and a shared adventure. Another one of those big “firsts” that’s just never likely to happen at this point. I’m still trying to be completely okay with that.

What’s next?

It’s time for my annual TableTop Day game event. I’ve been holding off on sending out the invite for that until all this house stuff was a “for sure” thing one way or the other. So that will be doubling as a preliminary housewarming party. But it’s not going to be quite as lavish as my Spring event usually is.

There aren’t a whole lot of renovations or other things that will be able to go on. The money just isn’t there for that. Yet. In another few years (or if I win the lottery), I’ve got a lot of plans.

There’s a lot that needs to be done in the yard. And I’ll be doing some of it anyway, since that was already in progress and it’s all just me doing manual labor (and I’m still somewhat capable of that).

Inside the house, maybe some paint here and there to change up some colors. Maybe some fixture updates here and there (if I can budget them in).

Mostly, though, it’s going to continue to be business as usual.

Except now I’ll be able to finally get rid of all those boxes I’ve been saving just in case I need to move again. (And everything that I was keeping around just in case the owners ever asked about them for some random reason.)

Most importantly…

The Durosian Empire is now officially landed… about a quarter acre and a nice, with a solid “castle” on it, in a nice quiet cul-de-sac in close proximity to all the important things.

Great things will come of this… once the coffers are refilled.

State of the Empire, 2019

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Doing some digital housekeeping, as is common this time of year…

I own 41 domain names.
2 of them need to be transferred to someone else (eventually).
9 of them are kind of active (they have webspace allocated to them).
2 of them have been updated in the past year with actual content. (Posts back in January of last year saying, more or less, “Really, more stuff coming soon.”)

I’m hosting websites for 7 friends/family.
I haven’t charged for any of them since they were built (because, really, I don’t need to and none of them are a resource drain for my hosting account).

I don’t build websties for people any more on a freelance basis, but I’m always happy to offer advice, suggestions, or review of people’s ideas or potential hires. (I’m more than happy to stop you from wasting money on someone or some service that you’re looking into.)

My day job is building websites. (Note that I’m not a designer–the best I can do normally is make something that’s not eye-bleedingly awful… anything better is pure luck or me implementing someone else’s work.) I burned out on website building nearly a decade ago at this point.

I seriously need to refresh my semi-active sites.

I have numerous other ideas (some even using some of those domain names) that I really should do something with.

Also, hello there new WordPress version. Nice to meet you. I should probably really get familiar with you just on general principal.

Yep. I need more days in the week. Still. 😉

The State of the Empire

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Throne RoomThe last time I did one of these was back in 2011.

Back then there was a lot of wild change going on.

That wild change got a little out of hand and, well, it really hasn’t been worth looking at the state of the good ol’ Durosian Empire since then.

It’s pretty much been in steady decline, despite some flailing attempts at reclaiming some of its former (or, at least, planned) glory.

Most of those attempts didn’t last more than a post or two on most of my other web properties.

That, of course, led, to a lot of digital dust being gathered. (Not that this lack of follow-through stopped me from buying domain names for other ideas I had, mind you…)

In short, the last few years really haven’t been good ones when it comes to all my pet projects. So we’ll skip over the retrospective and focus on what isn’t, what is, and what I’m aiming for.

Gone But Not Forgotten

There are a few sites that just won’t be updated any more unless something really extraordinary happens. I won’t be taking them down, for one reason or another, but they’ll continue to gather dust.

How to Crush Without Being Crushed was a distinct casualty of time passing and things changing. There’s no good way right now for me to do anything worthwhile with it.

Presence @ Durosia.com, my freelance site, will also remain in mothballs. I learned the hard way that I can’t deliver freelance work when I’m working a day job.

My writing and gaming sub-domains for Durosia.com. Both of those were taken out by a patch I didn’t apply before an exploit got into the wild. Not that there was really a lot to lose on either of them. I may get them back up and running sometime later this year, but there’s currently not much point in that.

Moving Forward

There are a handful of things I’m planning on moving forward with over the next year. They fall into three categories: Projects, Events, and Interests.

Projects

The Searcher Journal, my metaphysical site, will be spun back up. Soon. Like maybe this weekend. I have a need to get back to some basics in this arena in my own life. In part to help recover from the past few years. In part to try to really figure out what I’m doing for the next few decades. So, Metaphysical Mondays may be returning very, very soon.

ToobTalk, my entertainment and review site, may get a little touch up and start getting new content again. I’ve been putting a bunch of stuff directly on Facebook (movie and show reviews, mostly short ones), so I may just try to get into the habit of doing those on my own property first.

Hat From Hell, my horror-flavored site, fell to the same unpatched vulnerability as a few of my other sites (was really too busy focusing on day job sites that needed the same thing done to worry about my own sites). I still have big plans for it, but need to put together a team and get content in order before I bother resurrecting the dead. Had hoped to get some of that done before the end of last year, but reality had different plans. We’ll see what this year brings.

Durosia.com, right here, will still be serving as the hub of everything else. I just need to keep it spinning. And touch up the paint job a bit. Tune it a little under the hood. Maybe extract all the really old blog posts from their hidden archive on a different platform and finally transfer them over here with the newer stuff.

Events

Every year for the last few years, I’ve hosted two board game events: International TableTop Day and Kier’s Spooky Game Day. Those will continue to happen, as people have generally enjoyed them and they give me an excuse to play at least some of the board games I’ve backed on Kickstarter.

I’ve been threatening to do some themed movie nights for well over a decade now. I want to get to at least two of them this year. That’s mostly just a question of figuring out when people are available. I do low-key “couch movie nights” on any Friday I’m not doing other things (those are when I watch movies I’ve never seen before but have been meaning to get around to). I may try to make those a little more structured (but still low key) and then toss a few bigger planned movie nights out there.

I really don’t have the venue for too much more than that.

Interests

I need to get back to getting out more. Or better at convincing people to come over and hang out. Either way, more trips out to movies, more impetus to get out to museums, lectures, and whatever else goes on out there in the world. More than just club nights.

Gaming, in general, is something I’ll definitely be doing more of this year. I’ve already been lucky enough to have a more or less stable Apocalypse World game that I’m running and a semi-regular Call of Cthulhu game I’ve been playing in. I will have at least one more game that’ll get pulled together for a new game coming out in February/March… that’s going to be a year-long commitment of a couple of sessions a month. And there are a lot of one-off/short duration games I’d love to run or play in. Most of that will likely happen through Roll20.net, which has served me quite well so far.

There are also a couple of interest group-like things connected to some of my projects that I want to get up and running. But those, as usual, hinge on people being interested and able to participate (preferably in person), so those won’t come easy. I’ll see what I can fit in, but, really, it’s all just more reason to get together with actual people more in settings where we can have actual conversations.

Roundup

So, that’s about it. Things have not been good. Some things are dead. Some things aren’t. And I’m mostly just trying to make some new stuff grow from the dried out husks that I have around here.

Guess we’ll see how that goes.

Hopefully, you’ll come along for the adventure.

 

Forty Days In, Not Much to Show

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Old watches openSo, yeah, forty days ago there were 100 days left in the year. I said back then I had a bunch of things I wanted to accomplish. Some of it I wanted to have done by Halloween.

Well… I’ve gotten about half of it done.

No, that doesn’t mean that I’ve actually finished anything.

I’ve just got lots of things started and not quite half done. Each.

Including everything I wanted done by Halloween. (Which makes some of those things no longer relevant for this year.)

I’ve got sixty days left to polish off some stuff in some way or another… and I have little to no ambition to do so in most cases.

For example, it’s now November, which means it’s NaNoWriMo. I kind of want to revisit my former failed experiment of generating a story via Tarot cards. Of course, it’s now nearly midnight, I have work tomorrow, and I spent all the time I should have been writing doing other things.

Like reorganizing my closet.

Which, really, was something that desperately needed to be done–and still has a lot left to be done. But it leaves me wondering what the heck I’m avoiding regarding the NaNoWriMo project.

In my defense, it’s been kind of a crazy month, what with my grandfather passing away and having to run up to NY for the funeral. And then rushing back down to DC to catch a friend of mine’s album release concert tour stop. And the general work stress, of course. And all the new people I’ve been meeting.

Mostly, I’m just lacking focus, I think.

There I things I want to do… but nothing I really want to do.

I used to have things that drove me forward.

They’ve all been gone for a while now.

So, maybe… just maybe… by the end of next few dozen days, I’ll have something figured out that will carry me through the first hundred days of the next year.

For now, I’ll just keep flopping around until I find my way back to the water and remember how to swim.

Or maybe I’ll be tinkering with my inner workings. Trying to get things back into sync. Trying to find the right rhythm again. Getting things to properly tick… like fixing a broken watch.

Yeah, I like that better than being a fish out of water. Just having a gear or two out of place. Maybe a screw loose. Perhaps just an unwound spring.

In a World of Bad News

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Skull and BookI could go on and on about how utterly crappy today was.

Waking up to the news of the horribleness of that mass shooting in Vegas.

Ending the day with the news of Tom Petty possibly (probably) being dead (or soon to be).

All the other stuff that’s been chipping away at any chipper mood since back in November.

There’s no shortage of things that suck right now. Some of them are even more personal than the news.

So, yeah, I could go on and on about those things. I considered it. (Because, man, do I have things to say about a lot of it.)

But then I decided not to.

Why?

Because I currently have very little, if any, control over any of that big picture stuff that’s sucking.

And, in these last 100 days of the year (90 left!), I’m trying to focus on actually accomplishing things that I do have some control over.

Like following up on all the cleanup I did last week in my web hosting account by actually starting work on getting my main Durosia.com site cleaned up and moved to Drupal 8. (Not that it gets used for much… but it’s the principle of the thing.) And seeing if I can get Hat From Hell back up and running before Halloween rolls around. (Also updating that to Drupal 8… but not at all sure I’ll be able to salvage most of the content from the last iteration of the site–not that there’s a lot of content of note–since the database got corrupted somewhere along the way.)

That’s slow going, for sure, since while I can implement themes just fine (it’s kind of a big part of what I do all day), I’m not much of a designer at all. If you see an awesome site design on one of my sites, it means I got super lucky, hired someone else to design it, or found a really decent ready-made theme that I could do simple things like change colors on.

In short, don’t expect any radical changes in how either of those sites look (or, in the case of Hat From Hell, looked, if you ever saw it). It’s not going to happen.

Other little things since the last 100 day update:

  • Finally finished Neuromance… I was only sitting a couple of chapters from the end for a few months. That’s the kind of book that, once upon a time, I would have torn through in a couple of days. I read more slowly now than I used to. And less frequently. (Well, I read fiction less frequently… I spend all day reading articles and forums and whatnot.)
  • About ready to polish off my re-read of Everville… which I started well over a year ago now. It’s also spent a lot of time just sitting there gathering dust.
  • Still pondering doing NaNoWriMo in November.
  • Looking forward to the next set of sessions of the Apocalypse World games I’m running. I think both I and my players aren’t quite going as all in and hard as the game expects… everyone’s still mostly alive and there are long-term plans for infrastructure improvement going on. That’s not typical of AW games from what I’ve seen. But we’re having fun, so it’s all good.
  • Skipped out on a few events over the past weekend because I was either wiped out from work or engrossed in other things. This weekend is for going out. Next weekend, I’m hosting a thing at my place. October is a very social month, so I kind of needed that one extra weekend off before diving in.

So, yeah, small steps forward.

That’s better than nothing.

Definitely better than lamenting the state of the world.