Cabin Log '07

Sunday, Monday, and today I have spent my days at the hunting cabin that my father is a member of up at Stephen's Point in Susquehanna County. Naturally, I take my laptop up there not to be far away from my "high-tech" electronics, and because there's no internet, I'm stuck to writing up little journal entries in Microsoft Works. These entries are filled with bitter feelings, light feelings, and pure ranting. And well, a little bit of day-to-day activities. So get ready as this entry may blast you away due to the length. Yes, I do get a bit carried away.


Monday, July 2nd, 2007: 12:04 A.M.

If you were to ask me my ideal vacation spot, I would not respond with the beach, any city, or any foreign country, but rather I would proudly accentuate my passion of coming to the hunting cabin that my father owns a membership of. I have mentioned this cabin multiple other times in my blog entries, and also wrote entries from the cabin like I am now, but I thought I would try to open this up in some fashionable and anti-boring way. Sounds more like a sixth grade thesis statement to me though.

My day today was rather fun and eventful. Before I even left for my hunting cabin, I logged into Runescape for a few minutes to see what it's like to be an ex-member and what it's like to have f2p status again as I have been a member since October 2005. Nothing really changed, thankfully. I can still operate the skill cape to do the emote, and well, I'm happy that I can at least do that. For the past week or two when I did have members, I did nothing in members. I had more fun in f2p where my now permanent home is just chatting with the locals, reporting rule breakers, and doing my skill cape emote every now and then to make somebody's day. However, I can't stand the fact that nobody believes me in that game. What do I mean? The other day I stated to somebody that I was an ex-member (which was not true at the time but I considered myself one as I no longer took advantage of member-only benefits) and that I could still wear my member items and operate the cape. Well he bashed me over the head left and right and called me a liar. I was actually offended by his lashings, even thought it was a simple statement as "liar", as I was trying to explain to him that ex-members who wear their items upon the loss of their membership can still wear the items for decoration and operate the skill cape. But no, he didn't want to hear a single word of it and I believe I ended up leaving the world in disgust. Like I previously stated, the one main reason that I left Runescape in the first place is due to the negativity of the community. But lately, while sitting around thinking at home and even today at the cabin, I have come upon the realization that I did not leave this negative community at all. This community are the very people who compose the human population of the world, and wherever I go and wherever I run to hide, I will be terrorized by the evils of Earth, and the simplest forms of evil are verbal attacks. Even in World of Warcraft, you have those people who run around, not giving a damn at all to the person they're dealing with, and will offend that person as if they're nothing but a computerized NPC. And look, we can see that in the real world. Do terrorists care who they kill? Well, they do -- they care that they kill the proper target. They don't get a damn about that person's life, their family, their feelings, their contributions to society, or whatever else you can think of, they're heartless, cold-blooded, and seem to be a programmed robot coded to be a killing machine. And I swear the other people of the world are programmed to be a bunch of jackasses who like to rip everybody's souls to shreds and throw them in the insinuator. And I think the world is getting worse. Now like the tides of the ocean -- the high tide and low tide, I hope that this may just be a phase in history and that this is the low tide, and within a few years the high tide will roll in bringing more prosperity and peace and humbleness. I better stop where I'm at. It's weird to say that I can go on with such a rant over a video game, but I guess video games are good for you in the end. If you're logical enough to reason, you'll see that video games just open you up to the greater horrors of the world, and the biggest surprises come in the smallest of packages. Many people may run to games to escape reality, but only some people realize that reality chases them into the game.

Now maybe I can actually proceed to talk about my day, eh? After we arrived at the cabin, sorted everything out, and established ourselves, I went out into the woods in search of small sticks and other firewood to gather together for our future fire. Later on my father got the battery-powered handsaw and I obtained the wheelbarrow and we got a few loads of bigger logs that would ensure the length of the fire. While sitting at the fire while my father was finishing up weedwacking, I turned around as I heard a noise coming from behind me. I must’ve thought it was my father coming to check on the fire, so when I turned around to see a large raccoon walking slowly toward the shed, I nearly had a heart attack of surprise and excitement. I waited for the raccoon to cross the creek and enter the shed before I ran down to the cabin to retrieve my digital camera, which I wasn’t even going to take with me in the first place. I waited patiently for the raccoon to come back into view then, and when it did, I took tons of pictures of it. Then a bit later on I’m sitting there at the fire again, starting to read my book “Lord of the Flies”, when my father calls to me. He was sitting down on the dock fishing and was pointing at the field on the other side of the pond. I walked down to him and looked at there was a doe and its baby up in the field. Naturally, I ran in to grab my camera and I took pictures of them. The deer were there for a while and seemed to show no sign of fear or that they were threatened, as they clearly saw and the mother starred us down for a while. I thought the baby was quite hilarious. He was extremely jumpy and was running about the field hyper. I enjoyed just sitting there, watching him or her as my father reeled in a few perches. When it started to become dark out, my father and I sat around the fire, talking, eating marshmallows, and moving around every once in a while to avoid the smoke. We were sitting there when it was night and I heard an eerie noise pierce through the calm and chilly air. It was the loud cries of a pack of coyotes. I rarely heard coyotes make such a spine tingling cry, but this just creped me out. I sat there, however, in awe over the abnormal howls. I believe the only time I ever heard coyotes was once when I was hunting behind Jermyn just this last spring turkey season and we were walking into the woods in the morning when we heard them. Their cry, however, wasn’t as dramatic as these were though. Then a bit after this we were sitting there, as I listened to my iPod, talked with my father, starred into the fire, observed the fireflies, and the both of us were about to rap it up for the night, I heard, nearby in the woods, the sound as if a large tree has just fallen over and crashed onto the ground. Thoughts ran into my mind: it’s a bear, demon, UFO, etc. and I just had this moment. If you watch the ABC show LOST, you may remember the very first episode when the survivors were stuck on the beach, trying to rap it up for the night themselves around the burning wreckage of their plane, when the trees in the distant were being ripped apart and torn out of the ground by the monster. The survivors then just looked at each other and I think Charlie says something, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was a deja vu moment for me. My father and I looked at each other and in my head I said, “What in the bloody hell was that?” Well, I guess you can look at this situation in a perspective that we ran into the cabin faster. Meh, not my father. He was carefree and walking at a steady pace while I was booking for my life toward the cabin door. So in the end, today was a good day. I think the agenda for tomorrow is clay bird shooting, some more shooting, and my father’s friend who is also a member of the cabin is coming up. Then on Tuesday we’re going to head home, maybe go fishing at my great uncle’s cottage located on a private lake, and then at night go see the fireworks display in Honesdale. Sounds good, eh?

That whole rant I went on about before still bothers me, however due to the fact that I was able to rid myself of some painful thoughts by typing them up, I may be able to sleep peacefully tonight. It’s amazing how one can get so worked up over a game, but hey, I say that most MMORPGs aren’t a game. They’re a second life. And at some intervals in time, your second and first lives will clash, and mayhem will break out. I just think this is happening internationally now to everybody, but some are just too blind to see it.

Have a good one.

Monday, July 2nd, 2007: 4:31 P.M.

I have been relating to that rant that I have written last night and in the slightest way it has been nagging at me so much that I'm being forced by my sprit to be outside by the fire with my laptop just to type whatever I need to up.

I don't know what's bothering me more -- that whole thing about how nobody really cares about you over the internet and wouldn't care at all if you were dying of an illness or if your dog got hit by a car, or the fact that I have been focusing a lot on the future of the blog and, of course, the future of the blog authors who will shape the blog. Really, at the moment, it seems that only two authors actually write at the blog and this has been bothering me. I know in the future that I'll look back at much of these entries and grin, as many of my memories that I may have forgotten will be contained within them. I think the blog is more or less a gift to anybody who has the chance to contribute to it, and it's also a family. Lately, though, it seems like "cousin" Chase is gone off to France, "aunt" Jen went into hiding, and "brother-in-law" Joey went off to fight in the Iraq war. And something else has been bothering me. I know that the blog rarely gets visitors who actually care about the content that make up the blog, and when they accidentally stumble upon the blog while looking up a keyword in a search engine, they see that the blog has no "eye candy" or anything they're looking for, and they book off, hitting the 'back' button within five seconds. Sure, that's quite natural. Why waste time on a site that seems irrelevant to what you're interested in and looking up? Well, the aspect that bothers me is that this has been happening for well over two years, and in those two years I have made two wonderful friends who found me out through the blog, but in the end we walked away with hardly any regular readers. I know that the blog's content may not be of the type where people will flock to in order to observe and read it out. That's fine by me as the blog is more of a journal than a controversial or educational blog. However, I have gone on blogs/web journals where the person may write about their nephew going into the swimming pool for the first time and they'll receive four comments and they'll have the occasional few who comment him or her regularly (hence where I got the phrase 'regular readers') on almost every entry. That's not the case here at BFBv.2 though, and I still don't know why the blog never had a few interested readers. The thing I always hoped for at this blog was that because of the diversity of the blog authors that we would have a wave of diverse readers, sticking to only one or two authors and checking back regularly to read only their entries. But as far as I know, I don't think this happens. It would help if all five blog authors at least posted once a month, but you can't get everything I suppose. What this blog has to do is just keep on heading in the direction that its fate has planned for it and hopefully just from that, the blog can give birth to a few loyal readers. I just hope that this blog will be here forever. Honestly, I want to be forty years old and still have the ability to look at the entries of today. And you never know where us blog authors may be heading to in the future. Say, for example, I became a computer programmer at a well-known company -- for example Jagex or Blizzard. The blog may then receive a lot of traffic because of my occupation. Maybe Caitlin, being a schoolteacher, will advertise the site to the children she teaches. Then by word-of-mouth the blog travels around and soon it will be better known. Maybe Joey will be a famous musician and he’ll tell his fans about the blog. We don’t know -- we’ll never know until that day when it happens. But we must build up content now, build up a future fan base, and build up one of the best damn sites out there on the internet, or at least web journal.

I was going to go on more about other topics, but I feel like going back outside (I came inside while typing this because the battery was getting eaten up so fast). My father is frying up some fish and his buddy is up here now. I shall be off then. I’ll try to type up another entry tonight, hopefully aiming at my frustration toward the Runescape community. I can’t go on vacation and forget about things for a while...

Have a good one.

Monday, July 2nd, 2007: 11:46 P.M.

Today was a pretty superior day. It was filled with good tales, good laughs, and good thoughts. Ironic that the song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones came on the radio just now, as it seems to relate to a topic that I wanted to bring up. The topic is about how something simple can crush your heart because you know you’ll never be able to get it, but as the title of the song says, you can’t always get what you want. Bu what happens if it’s not a want but a need? Just that little element that when added to the story of your life, you’ll feel complete. Right now I just started a quest but the objective of the quest is unknown. There’s a blank there, and I have the whole world to explore in order to find the little yellow circle on my mini-map indicating the NPC that I have to travel to in order to complete the quest. But I can’t complete the quest. I have no control over the outcome of the quest. A higher being controls the quest and all I can do is hope and dream. I know it’ll never happen. For one, you have the thousands of outside conflicts and the unknown problems that could result if it were to happen, and then you have the preferences. You don’t know what the quest bearer may like, and it certainly isn’t me. And did what I just say make any sense? Nope, and I’m proud of that.

I don’t really feel any frustration toward the Runescape community, as I said I would have in my previous journal log. Really, at this point, I don’t give a shit if people think I’m a liar. As long as I know that I’m telling the truth, then it’s good enough for me, and I can use that against them if I have to. I just hate that people think they have to bother others. With me being a level 100 ex-member (which I have to say ‘x-member’ on Runescape as ‘ex’ is filtered) with a dragon axe and 99 woodcutting skill cape and a total level of 1610, people think they should ask me for money, items, to buy something, or to pester me and call me ‘noob’, ‘nolifer’, etc. And I hate that fact. Well guess what? I’m one of you now. I can’t go off to members if you bother me. I’m stuck with you, and if you bother me, I’ll bother you right back. Or I can take the alternative path and play World of Warcraft. Oh, that bothers me too. Some people don’t believe me that I play WoW. They have this way of thinking that if I played WoW that I wouldn’t even have a second glance at Runescape ever again. But Runescape will always be my home, I just moved away. There’s people that I love as a friend on that game and I could never just let it go. But it’s naturally healthy to move on to something new. I need to make new friends, explore new worlds, and adapt to a totally different gameplay style. And that’s okay. I’m learning. I need to know what elements a game must have for it to be a success so that I may one day contribute to the next big masterpiece, or maybe work for a current game company (I know I’m very redundant when I say that). But still, I have plenty of time to be on both Runescape and WoW everyday. I can go on to Runescape for a half hour to hour, and then WoW for the remainder of my online day. There’s no problem there, and it’s certainly not ‘no lifing’. Why should I stress out and do practical activities when I can chill out for my last carefree summer until I retire? And just being a part of two online communities does just that. In WoW I play to develop my character and in Runescape I play to just chat and report occasionally. Do I still have my olden goal to become a player mod? Of course. Of course. Yep, and that would be the happiest day of my life.

While here at the cabin, I was trying to conjure up some layout plans on paper, but I wouldn’t be able to be very effective unless I had an internet connection and could scan through other blogs. I want to make sure the new blog layout has quite a bit of eye candy so that maybe it would attract a new reader or two. I want to actually do a lot for this layout too when it comes to the planning of it and the coding. If I’m going to be a future computer programmer, I better learn CSS now than to have to learn it later in some college course.

I think I’m going to have a little snack and head off to bed. I shot some clay birds today and hit quite a few, but damn, I have a hard time hitting a moving target. And even afterwards I was shooting at the shotgun shells that were floating in the pond with my .22 rifle to attempt to sink them, and I only hit one while my father got a ton. I was flinching though when I pulled the trigger. I never, ever flinched when I shot the .22 besides maybe the first year or two that I started to use it. I mean, it doesn’t kick, make a loud noise, etc. I guess I’m either not used to shooting it as it’s been a while, or the fact that the water shoots upward like there’s an underwater bomb going off when you shoot into it startles me.

Well, have a good one.