Way back in the day when 9600-baud modems roamed the earth, I used to hang out on local BBSes a lot. I met a lot of very interesting people that way, including the first two people I ever dated. I know, I know; meeting people online? Well, the rub, of course, was that BBSes were fundamentally local, and for all the paranoia about “bad people” “online”, the big BBS-user gatherings (”get togethers”) were pretty safe places to meet people in real life who you already knew fairly well over the computer.

I can only remember a few of the people I knew from back then - Chebutykin is one of them, and one I’ve actually spoken to within, you know, the last decade. Some of the others, I remember their names, and not much more…

There’s one person I recall surprisingly well, considering that we never met, and never exchanged more than a few messages back in, oh, 1992 or 1993 or something like that.
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I have a deep and shameful secret: Back in the day, I used to play RPGs. I was never obsessive about it, but, yes, I did enjoy them.

“Back in the day”, I might add, was the misty days of yore when there was still “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” - and then later a second edition of the latter.

For people who’ve grown up on AD&D’s Second Edition - or the current incarnation, especially - ye olde red-box D&D must seem incredibly primitive. To be honest, it seemed incredibly primitive back in the nineteen-mumbles, and it was. Many of the game systems that came after were, in part, efforts to inject a small amount of realism into gaming, and the trend has continued into the computer era - Dragon Age: Origins shows how far we’ve come since the old TRS Forgotten Realms games of the 1990s.

I still can’t help but feel that a certain amount of realism is missing, though.
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As it’d be a bit hard to miss, if you’ve read the paper today or watched or listened to the news, a gentleman was killed last night after pulling a gun on two security officers at The Pentagon. The shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was a white American male.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not happy that Bedell wounded two guards and caused a great deal of mayhem and confusion. Nor am I happy about the people killed at Fort Hood recently. Or the people who died in Texas after Joe Stack plowed his plane into an IRS office there. Or the victims of the Holocaust Museum shooting, or any of the other incidents of late. I’m not one to celebrate pain and suffering, as a rule.

That said, a big part of me is happy, in a kind of abstract way, that these incidents have happened. And, in a way, a small part of me hopes that they continue to happen.
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I know it’s not a subject that’s of terribly high interest to everyone, but I figured I’d do a couple of paragraphs on properly fitting and fit-testing a respirator. This is not meant for people who are required to use one at work, but aimed at urban explorers, in particular - and anyone else who might have the desire to use respiratory protection in an avocation of their choosing.

The reason for this is simple - there has been a goodly amount of discussion in urban exploration circles on respirator (or gas mask) choice, and while this is a good thing, in that urban explorers are becoming more safety-conscious, nobody seems to be taking a particular interest in how to properly fit the damned things, thereby potentially negating the protection on offer.

So…
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I enjoy reading old newspapers, in large part because they provide a very visible demonstration of why newspapers today are dying. They also have their moments of unintentional humor, and the strange values dissonance that exists can sometimes provide some amusement, as well.

In today’s Saint Paul Pioneer Press, page “A2″ - the “Nation & World Briefing” - contains three advertisements which take up about half the page; there’s some lottery information, some contact information for the paper’s various departments, and then the following headlines:
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