All Good Things...

Due to simple lack of funds, Shadow's Bastion has been shut down.

I won't say I am overly happy about this as that site took better
than six years of my life working on it.

Will I build a new site someday? Maybe.

Will it be Shadow's Bastion 2.0?

I really don't think so. At this point I am unsure of what I may
do in the future in regards to a website.

Turkey Tuna Salad

Don't scoff until you try it.

The other day I decided to make a bowl of turkey salad using
a can of white meat turkey and politely screwed up and got
way way too much mayo in it and needed something to thicken
up. Then I remembered I had a few pouches of tuna I was going
to rotate into my Bug Out Bag later and said, Why not?

Beleive it or not, it was pretty damned good too...


The recipe...

One can of turkey, all white meat
One pouch or can of tuna, your preference
One medium onion
Enough pickle to be about the same mass as the onion, the
kind of pickle is up to you. (I like Kosher dill but I'm
loony,)
Two hard boiled eggs
Mayonnaise and mustard to taste (Usually enough to bind
the other ingredients together)

Chop the onion, pickles, and eggs finely and mix with the
other ingredients and stick in the fridge until it's cold.

Serves... Phffft, I have no idea!

The mustard is an optional ingredient, I like because it
offers a nice tang to the salad.

Pimento Cheese and Ham Spread

I noticed the price of Pimento Cheese spread a few days
ago and decided it was getting a bit too high for my liking.
And I love this stuff!

So I did some experimenting the other afternoon...



These measurements are approximate..


4 ounces of Velveeta or equivalent
1/2 cup of finely shredded cheese, I prefer Mexican style
3 tablespoons of sliced or finely chopped pimento
3 tablespoons of finely chopped jalapeno pepper (Optional)
3 Tablespoons of mayonnaise or salad dressing
1 can of chunk ham

Warm the Velveeta until soft in a microwave, about 1 minute
if it is cold, don't let it melt completely though. You want
it just soft enough to make stirring it easy. Add the finely
shredded cheese, ham, pimento and peppers, and mayo and stir
it's until well blended. Then refrigerate until thoroughly
chilled.

If you want it creamier, you can add more mayo this will
also make it a little easier to mix.

And I have no idea how mnay servings it makes. LMAO

The Darkest Hour

The darkest hour is not a time of day. It is a matter of
perspective. We all have our own dark hours in our lives.
These dark hours are the times when we look at our lives
and feel all is lost. Hope is what keeps these times at
bay. Hope for a brighter tomorrow or a second chance.

Hope is the one thing you should always keep with you. Without
hope there is no life. There is an old maxim among survivalist;
The rule of threes. It states you can't live three seconds without
thinking, three minutes without breathing, three hours without
shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, and
three months without hope.

No matter how well trained you are, no matter how much equipment
you have at your disposal, if you give up you die. Every situation
is different but all have that common thread. Take the time to
fully access the situation and look at all possible outcomes. It
is all too easy to let yourself become fixated on the worst case
scenario. I am not saying that you should purposely ignore the
worst case, what I am saying is that if you focus on the worst
outcome, you can do yourself more harm than thirst, hunger, injury,
or exposure can by leaving yourself open to unneeded mental anguish.

It is easy to take this attitude when sitting in comfort and safety
at home. You don't have to deal with listening to your stomach
growling while you are hunting, fishing, or foraging for something
to eat. Or think your tongue is three sizes too big because you
are out of water and really want a drink. That is why they call it
survival. You may be saying to yourself, Well, gee, that was real
encouraging! It wasn't meant to be encouraging, it was meant to
make you stop and consider what gives you hope in better circumstances.

So ask yourself, What gives me hope in my day to day life? A better
job, seeing your children succeed in their own lives, seeing a
wrong righted? These are the things you should focus on when it
looks like everything has gone straight to Hell. They can act as a
distraction from whatever a situation has thrown at you. I recall
reading a story once about a man that had found himself in the
middle of the desert with minimal supplies and little water. He
managed to walk out of the desert not because he was a Rambo-esque
survivalist. He walked out of the desert because at the time he
was going through a rather nasty divorce and told himself quite
firmly that he'd be damned if he was going to die there and let
his soon to be Ex get everything without a fight!

Whether it's happy thoughts that give you hope or something that
makes you want to eat barbed wire and spit thumb tacks that gives
you hope, use it. The ultimate rule to surviving is never give up
and never let yourself lose hope.

One of those odd side projects…

Sometimes I get bored and start digging through my rather extensive
list of bookmarks that I have saved over the years and clean out
the dead ones and explore places I had forgotten about. One such
link was to a free host I was playing with a couple of years ago
while trying to redo the old Steamroom.

As I was looking over their list of features I saw that their auto-
installer had quite a nice selection of content management systems
like a newer version XOOPS and PHPNuke. So I figured, why not?

Their auto-installer only allows three uses a day but… lol

So far I have the following installed and am playing with them
as I have time to spare…

XOOPS

Ok, this one is a little superfluous but as it is one of the
newer versions of XOOPS it let me see how well my modules work
on the more current versions. All of them work perfectly BTW.

Joomla

Some of you might remember our old friend Angel from Angel’s
Grimoire. The last version of The Grimoire was based on this.
I figured I might take a look at it’s innards and see how it
worked. (Euuuww… website guts!)

PHPNuke

A lot of sites use this and looking at it so far, I am pretty
impressed by this version. It’s a lot more comprehensive than
the version I looked at when I was trying to pick a CMS before
we changed hosts.

Drupal

Another one that impressed me with it’s newer release. The admin
panel is a lot more user friendly for a newbie to Drupal now.

PHPWebsite

This one I can’t say much about yet, as I only just installed it
an hour or so ago…

Postnuke

The funny thing is that Postnuke has been discontinued by it’s
developer. Whether or not anyone picks it up is unknown.

And don’t ask me why the links have extra backslashes, that’s just
how the installer set them up.

As I have fifty (yes 50!) MySQL databases from the free host
to play with I may see about using all of them up just for laughs.

On a more serious note, I have been thinking about getting a copy
of Legend of The Green Dragon to install there as well as a kind of
precursor to installing it here, if it will work on this server
that is, I read at the LoTGD site that it wouldn’t work on GoDaddy
servers for some reason or another. So, I might just say
“Aww, f*ck it!” and open another free account just for that if it
doesn’t turn out to be some complicated pain in the as to install
and set up.

I noticed that they also offer a free “reseller hosting” package.
I am considering the idea of getting one and offering free hosting
for websites.

Why?

Uhhh…

Cuz, it’d be like, cool and stuff… ?

Mind you, I do tend to have more ideas than a centipede has legs
most of the time.

Can you tell I am feeling better?

Sunday afternoon ramble

Yah yah yah, another one of my rambling blog entries so read at
your own risk…

I stumbled across a couple of articles the other day and posted them
in the forum that struck me as showing the extremes we have in the
U.S. One about a man who entirely gave up money and is living quite
happily in a cave and the other about yuppies paying hundreds of
dollars for clothes and hairdos that make them look like they are
“poor”. So, looking like you’re flat broke with an iPhone jammed
in your ear is fashionable?

Mmmkay…

After I posted these two I started looking around the site I found
them on and then it struck me,I was looking at a yuppie magazine.
One of the other articles I passed up was discussing going on a
“recession splurge”. In this case blowing money on stuff like
$100 bottles of scotch… Not to enjoy but merely to get drunk
on. (If I read the article correctly that is.)

And there are people in the states that wonder why people in other
nations act like we’re all idiots. Gee, I wonder why they might
get the impression we’re all rich materialistic whining slackwits.

Moving right along…

Today I got an email that made me kinda shake my head in wonder.
It was basically an invitation to join a new social networking
site for gamers. (As a general rule, I have little use for or
interest in social networks.) It would have been nice had they
taken the time to look around The Bastion before typing it up
though. They started out with the erroneous statement that they
noticed I was a member of several gaming webrings.

No.

The Bastion belongs to two webrings. beast’s Anarchy ring and the
one I made. Neither of which are gaming rings.

I tried to register an account there earlier just for laughs but
when I tried to finish the registration process it told me my
session had timed out, after spending all of ummm.. five minutes
typing up the profile information. Maybe I’ll try again
later… or not.

I’ve also been pondering doing a few odd things around the site.
Like, taking the store offline for about a month so I can do some
“renovations” to it. Right now I have quite a few odds and ends
scattered around the net and they aren’t selling due to our lovely
economy and I have been seriously thinking about moving all of it
to The Trading Post to get it all under one roof so to speak.

I’m still slowly adding new game modules to XMD but haven’t had
much time (or energy) the last couple of days to do anything major
yet.

Speaking of lacking energy, I am slowly getting better. One thing
I never heard anyone mention before about chemotherapy is that it’s
side effects last a good deal longer than you might care for. In
my case, a general lack of get-up-and-go. However, as I said, I am
improving. The fact I have the energy to write this blog entry is
evidence of that. Maybe in another couple of months I’ll be
back to something resembling what passes as normal for me.

Ok, I think I’m done rambling for now. lol

Things you learn when the car breaks down

Saturday our pickup decided it was time to make a nuisance of
itself and stop cold on the side of the highway. We already knew
something was not quite right when it had trouble getting cranked
earlier that morning and was being a pain when we were out doing
some shopping.

At first we thought it was bad fuel filter but it checked out just
fine. This after I had to push it to a parking spot in the parking
lot of Wal-Mart… Oh joy. Funny how people will drive by gawking
like idiots when you are having car trouble.

After we got it cranked again we made one final stop before heading
home. At that point it seemed to have stabilized to a tolerable
level. It was still bucking and jumping like bronco to some degree
but at least it appeared to be able to get us home.

Nope.

About halfway home it decided it needed a break from all of this
running around. After fooling with it for a bit dad rolled his eyes
and offered a few choice words to the truck, the truck paid him no
heed of course. As we sat there throughly disgusted he ask if I had
my cell phone on me, I smirked. It’s one of the few items I don’t
leave home without these days. I whipped it out and tried to call
a friend that owns a wrecker. I got nothing. Then I looked at the
signal strength…

El ziltcho. De nada. I had two things, jack and sh*t and jack had
long since departed.

Naturally the truck picked a cell phone dead spot to take it’s
little break. I took a short hike up the hill we were under
in the hopes of picking up a signal. Again, I got nothing so turned
around to head back and give dad the wonderful news that we were
going to get some much needed exercise. In 90 degree weather. With
not a cloud in the sky.

So we started our little hike to the nearest town about 3 1/2
miles down the road. It struck me as funny at how many people
whizzed by us without as much as a backwards glance. Apparently
we are seedier looking than I had realized. We had just gotten to
the top of the hill as I commented on how generous the people of
Mississippi are when you are need when we spotted a white pickup
that had stopped up ahead maybe 100 yards. Then I noticed their
back up lights were on. Then I noticed the license plate; Florida.

It figures, a family from Florida on vacation stopped to help us
as residents of our own home state shot by like we were invisible.

They took us to the next exit which was within comfortable walking
distance of one of the local truck stops. After we hopped out of
bed of their truck and thanked them for their help I checked my
phone again…

Full signal strength.

Bloody naturally.

So I called the friend with wrecker only to discover he was halfway
to Memphis and wouldn’t be available for at least another hour.
No problem, there was another wrecker service I could call and
of course they were closed.

So we called home for my grandfather to come pick us up at the
truck stop. Luckily he was home and came to retrieve us in short
order. Dad asked him to take us back to the truck so he could retrieve a few things and he decided to give the truck one more
try.

It cranked.

Of course it cranked.

It could have done nothing else.

Celebrity watching

Over the last week or more I have had the distinct displeasure
of watching the media talking heads drooling over both living
and dead celebrities.

Mostly the dead ones…

Oh, where to start… ?

Farrah Fawcett? Micheal Jackson? Billy Mays? Ruth Madoff, yeah, I
know she’s neither dead nor particularly famous save for her criminal
husband’s efforts to make Ponzi look like an amateur.

As a rule, I generally don’t pay celebs much attention but it is
hard to ignore something when the news media wants to go on and
on about things when they have only a limited amount of information
to report. And as a rule they will and do gleefully beat a dead
horse until they are quite sure it will never get up again.

Farah Fawcett and Billy Mays got only the briefest of mention by
most of them. In truth I am rather surprised Billy Mays really
warranted as much mention as he did. I’m sorry but the man was
little more than a used car salesman that found out he could use
his same basic sales pitch on just about anything. Farah
Fawcett was, well, to sound sexist, a 70’s pinup model that managed
expand her career beyond being just a poster on teenage boy’s walls.

Now I move onto the proverbial dead horse they’ve been beating.

Micheal Jackson, the so called King of Pop. In the 80’s he was
actually cool but at some point he went from cool to eccentric
and from there into the realms of just plain weird. When I was
growing up, I was taught two very key things; “If you can’t say
something nice, say nothing.” and Not to speak ill of the dead.
Over the last few days the media has pretty much thrown those two
general guidelines out the window by putting every detail under a
microscope and telling us about things that have absolutely no
bearing on any of our daily lives. Have we become so shallow that
the media thinks this is the kind of critical “news” we
need to know about?

North Korea threatening nuclear war, Swine Flu, General unrest
worldwide don’t rate our attention anymore?!? So they need to
manufacture news and turn into a cheap paperback drama???

Mmmmkay…

Now I’ll ease along to Mrs. Madoff’s “plight”. Her husband got
himself room and board for the next 150 years, most of their
fortune impounded and soon to be redistributed to the people he
swindled and she has been banned from most of the ritzy joints in
New York.

And she has to live on a mere two million dollars now.

Take the time to reread that last sentence. Go on, two or three
times and let it sink in.

As I recall it, they caught her trying make off with a good chunk
of the loot herself, yet I heard one of the talking heads refer to
her as the “loneliest woman in New York”. We’re supposed to feel
sorry for someone that has more money than most people will make
in their entire lifetime and managed to avoid prison time?!?

Ok, I’m done…

For now.

Allowing guest posting

Allowing guests to post on you site can be a great thing in
theory but in practice, not so much. If everyone behaved
like adults and thought before they hit submit things would
work out just fine.

However, too many people seem to think that being allowed
to post comments anonymously gives them the right to be
incredibly rude and to bluntly show their butts in public.

I’ve tried several times to allow guests to post and every time
it has basically blown up in my face. Spammers and spam bots,
wannabe trolls and people that just generally want to give you
a headache seem to gravitate toward any forum, shoutbox, or
chat room that allows them the perceived cloak of anonymity
that guest posting creates.

If you have a particularly thick skin and don’t mind the extra
work guest posting might work out for you but I would strongly
recommend taking the time to give it careful thought before
you allow it on your site. After all, if people think they can get
away with leaving trash all over your site your job will go from
webmaster to garbage man, and just remember pickup day is
everyday.

Midnight madness… or ( the I am bored out f my skull entry)

Is it physically possible to be bored out of your skull?

I’m not sure but I just looked over and waved at myself.

So I’ll assume it is possible…

Or sumpin’…

At any rate…

I’ve gone all this time and not posted much of anything lately
and decided it was time to get off my butt and make some effort
at being remotely entertaining, as opposed to being remotely
viewed.

In a way I kinda fibbed about not posting anything, I have been
working on a little idea I had about updating the XOOPS modules
I have made so people using higher resolution monitors could play
the games with greater ease. Most game sites still have their
games set to 640 x 480 which is kinda tiny on newer computers
and would probably look like pure crap on the newer wide screen
jobs. I’ve still got an old fashioned CRT type monitor and run
it at 800 x 600 as a general rule. So I had the idea to start
adding higher resolution versions of the existing modules.
800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 to be exact. I checked them on my
computer’s highest resolution and they looked just dandy.

I’m still working on more of them but it is fairly slow going for
me still. i.e. I get tired fairly easy thanks to the lovely side
effects of chemo… no barfing or anything radically
gross just tired and losing hair. (All I need now is a bag of
cherry suckers, if you don’t get it ask someone over 35 to tell
you about Kojak.)

If you want to take a peek at the higher res games just click the
XOOPS Module Development link on the left menu.

Go on, you know ya wanna…

What?

Aww, shut yer face! You’d be pushing it too if you got the idea
at three in the morning too.

It occurred to me that I missed posting any site news last 25th.

Oh, well. Feces occurs. I doubt that it matters all that much
since I didn’t really do anything major last month anyway.

Right now I still have lots of ideas bouncing around that I
haven’t had the time or energy to implement or even really play
with, in no particular order…

Update the games in the game room using my higher resolution
games idea from XMD.

Take the time to strip out all the Google Ad code that is taking
up space around the site.

*bitch* *grumble* *complain* *wax sorely pissed*

I’ve been playing with the idea of opening a dedicated arcade
site using XOOPS as it’s base but haven’t decided if it would
be worth the investment of time and money yet. After all, I’d
have to buy a new domain name for it and hosting separate from
The Bastion and I am just not sure if I am up to fooling with
such a project just yet. That and I don’t have nearly enough
game modules made yet to make it worth the effort…

Which, of course, means I just talked myself into it…

*Shadows runs in a tight circle screaming and yelling like his
hair caught fire and his ass is catching*

Oh, what the Hell, While I have got the idea in my head I may
as well lay out a few ideas for it in advance (If nothing else
someone might read this and “steal” the idea, so I may as well
give them a decent framework, right? LMAO)

Proposed XOOPS based arcade lay out and general “floor plan”…

Forum
Integrated Flashchat
Site News
User Submitted Videos via CVD’s excellent Video Tube module
Links to other game sites (Hey, why not, right?!?)
And of course…
The Games!

The full gory details TBA…

Anything else? That would depend on how well it is
received in general.

When do I propose to do this? Damned if I know..

Will it have ads? Probably but only one or two small text
style block ads like I am using at The Bastion now. Most sites
overkill on the ads IMHO.

Have I lost what little mind I had?

Probably.

MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

*COUGH*

*GHAK*

Euuuwwwww….

I don’t remember eating that…

Errr…

Gotta go…

bye now.