Someone discovered the Temporal Anomalies site this week.

Actually, it might have been last week.  He read so much of it that he must have spent several days working with pages from the site.  Then he posted comments, and questions, to his own blog, and dropped me an e-mail inviting me to respond.  I did.

That has in fact been a substantial part of what I have been doing today.  It didn’t help that I had written several hundred words when a storm came through abruptly and knocked out the power; I used the blackout time to do some grocery shopping, and returned to start afresh.  I also decided that since I was uncertain exactly what LiveJournal’s response posting system would permit, I would do the answer as a web page on my own site.  Thus I tossed the pieces I’d already composed into the framework of pages for that site, finished the rest of the response, and tossed it on the site under the title Response to Vazor’s Time Travel Questions, and posted the link to his blog.

There is more work to do with this–the page is on the site, but it’s not really incorporated into the site; I have to decide in which section to include it, and then add links on other pages to connect it appropriately.  For the moment, though, I’ve done too much, and have too much more to do to mess with it, so I’m just going to leave it as it is.

–M. J. Young

I have been pressured by several people who want to know when the blog will return.  I have wondered that myself.  Can’t you, they ask, write the blog without talking about the people who don’t want their lives made public?  No, I can’t, really, because the blog makes my life public, and they are part of my life.  There’s not much I can do about that.

Well, there is, really–I can stop talking about “my life”.  The point of the Blogless Lepolt, ultimately, is to let you, the Valdron/Multiverser fanbase, know what is happening with forthcoming product.  It is incidentally to let what might be called the Mark Joseph Young fanbase know about my other creative work being produced outside the Valdron/Multiverser stable.  In all this time, it has also been a place for talking about what has been in the way of producing such work, and thus the events and distractions of my personal life.  Part of that was because I was writing this every day, and I wasn’t getting anything done every day (or sometimes even every week), so I had to say something, and I felt I had to explain why there wasn’t any time to get something done every day.  One of the comments noted that this was something of value to him, to have some understanding of the conflicts that prevented me from writing so much.  That, though, is the part that gets personal–and thus the part that has to go.  Similarly, since I’m not going to be explaining why things have not been done, I will no longer be writing the blog daily–there will be posts when there is something to post; it won’t always be much, and it won’t always be very informative, but at least it won’t be about the progress I did not make.

It will also move that last blog post off its prominent position on the front page of this site, which will make me feel a bit better.

All of this suggests that I have something to tell–and indeed I do.  As I have been typing, I have realized that there is more than one thing to tell.

The impetus for resuming is that there is a new page in the Bible Studies section of M. J. Young Net, On Sabbath.  The brief story behind it is pretty much stated on the page as an introduction.  For those curious as to how someone who has always “regarded all days the same” justifies being part of a Seventh Day Baptist church which very clearly “regards one day above another”, there’s some insight into that there.

As I was typing, though, it occurred to me that I did not mention having made progress on the Multiverser Triple Play:  Horror.  I did what I am hoping will be the last text edits (and neither Jim nor John have commented on them, so I’m feeling fairly secure in that hope).  That puts the ball in the court of our art director.  He, however, takes an extended visit to family overseas every summer, so he might not get to the artwork as soon as he would like.

There was a third thing that came to mind while I was typing, and that is that Collision, the band, now has its own MySpace site.  There’s nothing there yet–not even a picture of the band, and no music–but it’s a start.  I had been thinking it was a necessary step, but that I did not have the time to do it and we weren’t really ready for it, when Baxter asked me about it.  He and Brittany have been overseeing it (I’ve not yet even had the chance to log in to the editing page–but I’m not particularly good at maintaining MySpace sites), and it’s progressing.  What do you think–should our lyrics be posted there somewhere, somehow?

Anyway, that’s the situation.  I will post again when I have something to tell.

–M. J. Young

I did not really get enough sleep last night; however, when I returned to bed this morning I was antsy.

Part of it is that I’ve been thinking I’ve got to make a change in an arrangement of one of the Collision songs–I’m demanding too much of my bass guitarist, and if I want to get the six core songs down I’m going to have to take some of the riffs from the fifth on myself so that I can push him to learn the sixth.  Thus I was lying in bed trying to make sense of riffs in my head–where are the notes on the fingerboard, on the staff, in that nebulous tonal recognition center in my brain.  After lying in bed for half an hour locked into this, I got up, set up the coffee for later (which I should have done sooner), and picked up a guitar.

Fifty minutes later, I was satisfied with that and had run through a few other guitar parts, and decided that I was no closer to going back to sleep than I was when I got up, so I might as well find my glasses and start my morning.  That’s not to say I’m not tired; only that I’m not sleeping.

It also occurred to me that I did some work I neglected to mention.  Sunday night, after doing the weekly file backup, I created a new specials page, uploaded to the site for the M. J. Young Net site, complete with a descriptive banner.  It announces throughout the site the availability of the new books Faith and Gaming and Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1, which hopefully will help sell the books.  Meanwhile, I also did a fair amount of updating of the pages on the Multiverser site, but have not uploaded these.  The changes include adding links to our other Cafe Press storefronts, the new Game Ideas Unlimited store and the long-neglected Nagaworld store in addition to our standard Multiverser merchandise.  I also did the work to launch the announcement of Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 on the Multiverser site, but am awaiting a banner from our art director before uploading all of this.

So I did a fair amount of web work, but it doesn’t all show yet.

If I’m going to make this early rising thing work, I’m going to have to get something done, so let’s move to it.

–M. J. Young

Yes, I missed a few days. It was technical difficulties–I was perfectly healthy, but could not access the Internet from my computer. Of course, there is a close link between technical and financial problems–generally most technical problems can be solved with sufficient money, but there was not sufficient money at the time to solve this one, so it took a few days to scrape something together.

I’d like to tell you all that I accomplished in my down time, but actually I did not accomplish all that much. I wrote a song. I started it late last week sometime, and kept poking at it, and by Wednesday I was putting the final touches on a lousy recording (the vocals are terrible because of the rush) so that I would have it to play at the Collision rehearsal–which did not happen, because Baxter was sick and Brittany had car trouble. However, I really like this song, and am hoping that they will want to include it in the band’s expanded repertoire.

I also poked a bit at the Multiverser web site, but became frustrated when I couldn’t get some code for table cell background images to work right, and abandoned it. I had intended to get more pages ready for upload, but wound up making some minor changes to the pages already present and barely starting another, none of which have made it to the site yet.

I did get my mother-in-law to the bank; she provided a loan which was a major factor in getting us up and running again. Since late last night, when contact was reestablished, I have been trying to catch up–and thus am working on a Saturday to make up for the lost time.

So I’d better get to it.

–M. J. Young

The big deal, if there is a big deal today, is that last night I completed the recoding of the Martial Arts in Role Playing Games site, and managed to post it on my web site, available to all. I expect to add a new category to the Multiverser support site (which is here), which will include this and a few other links to useful but unofficial materials. I’m still considering what ought to be included in that.

I also did a bit of editing on my Romans notes, but the fact that I had to take my mother-in-law shopping put a pinch on my time today. Here’s hoping I can get through the rest in a timely manner, and get some sleep tonight.

–M. J. Young

The stockholders meeting went reasonably well; congratulations to Jim Denaxas on being re-elected to serve another three years on the board of directors. Our present secretary, Joshua Martin, was nominated to run against him, and would have been an excellent director, but Jim has a track record with the company since before its beginning, has been very supportive of all we have done throughout that time, and has never failed to do what needed to be done to make things work. It’s not that I doubt Joshua would have done as well, but that I know Jim has done it all already.

It incidentally marks ten years that the company has existed.

That has been the focus of my attention over most of the weekend; even after the meeting ended, I had to clean up the premises some. Thus although it is true that I pushed forward on the pages for the martial arts web site and the Romans notes editing, I do not feel as if I did much else this weekend. It is already late in the day tonight, and I doubt I will do more than the basics, but at least the big step, the annual meeting, is over.

–M. J. Young

I still am not ready for tomorrow’s stockholders meeting, but I am a heck of a lot closer now than I was thirty-six hours ago. I have the meat, for one thing. Also, the notes are done. Someone mowed at least part of the lawn, but I do not know more than that because although they were working on it when I left the house on some imposed errands, it was dark and they were gone when I returned.

Yesterday’s schedule became even more shredded than it appeared when I wrote the Shred-and-Paste Scheduling blog entry about it, to the point that it was easily five in the morning when I got home, and it made perfect sense to stay up until six thirty to talk with our houseguest who is working on the car and make sure the youngest caught the bus. I was going to take the car through inspection, but I fell asleep and was chased to bed for a few hours. I’m coming to the end of tonight’s episode, I think, or at least I’m not going to be able to keep going too long.

Incidentally, the car went through inspection not exactly while I was asleep, but in the care of someone else. It failed, but I knew it would–someone had replaced a sideview mirror with a bit of reflective plastic, which is not legal in New Jersey. The engine light came on, too, and they won’t pass a car with the engine light lit. Then when it was being driven back from the inspection to its temporary home, it died. There is no word yet on why, although there has been some speculation that in fixing the top of the engine our mechanic managed to increase the oil pressure and knock out the pump. Anyway, he says to give him a few days to see what he can discover, which is fine by me since my alternatives are to pay to tow it fifteen miles to a mechanic who will charge me, or junk it. Then again, it’s not really my car so it’s not really my call.

I’ve a reminder note here that says I did some work on the martial arts web site. With the number of other things that are really pressing, I’m almost embarrassed to have done that; but it was something from which I could walk away at the drop of a hat, which is why I chose it. There’s still a lot of work to do for tomorrow–but I said that already, so I’m repeating myself and should stop doing so and turn my attention to what needs doing.

–M. J. Young

I am very happy with how much I accomplished on Saturday.

I set up enough of our new web site, Multiverser.org, that people will be able to find it and still find M. J. Young Net without too much inconvenience. There a few apologetic placeholder pages, a few dead links, and a few existing pages that need attention, but there is something there on which to build.

I also organized my notes for today’s directors meeting–a task which turned out to be of less importance than anticipated. One of our directors had informed me over a week ago that he was going to be out of town this weekend; one had a death in the family midweek and between the funeral and the visiting relatives anticipated being otherwise occupied; one did not make it for reasons that are as yet unclear to me. Two directors is not sufficient for a quorum, so our meeting notes were more a mental exercise for me to work through what I needed to remember.

I made an appearance at the funeral Saturday morning before church, and connected with the couple who were interested in the audiobook version of What Does God Expect? at the fellowship meal following Sabbath school to deliver the two-disk set for their perusal.

The meeting was not a loss, however, as the two directors present happened to be the vice president for development–me–responsible for product and product support, and the vice president for public relations–not me–responsible for publicity and promotions. As you probably can deduce, between us we split responsibility for website design and content, and this gave us an opportunity to talk about what steps to take next.

I also managed to pick up the 7dB equipment. I still have to decide where it will live for the present now that it’s here, but at least it’s not there anymore. Late in the evening I remembered to send the other four Quick Word radio show recordings, and even managed to listen this week, to hear the show myself.

Of course, not everyone was happy with what I accomplished on Saturday, and I got reprimanded for failing to do a few important errands, which I did this afternoon instead, so I’m not too terribly unhappy. I also remembered to update the autoresponder letter on the e-mail account for the radio show, so that people who write for information will get information immediately, and I can answer their letters leisurely.

So I’m headed into the week with a good feeling about the accomplishments of the weekend, despite the amount on my plate in the days ahead.

–M. J. Young