My New Closet

I moved. I was living at Spauldo's place, in the basement. The basement was bliss. I loved the basement. Alas, Spauldo moved back to that black hole of a state, Oklahoma. So I moved. I moved to wanker's place, which is an efficiency. An efficiency is like, one room, generally L shaped. The kitchen is on one side of the L, and the rest of the place in in the other part, with the bathroom finishing out the square. It's tiny. Tiny like there is no place in the whole apartment where you could play darts without somebody saying you were cheating and standing too close. It's me, Wanker, Tara, and Wankers 4 year old son, Dyllan. Tight quarters, but it's all I could do until I get a full time job and can afford to get my own closet. Wanker is super cool for letting me crash here, tho. He saved me from having to go back to (shudder) Oklahoma.

Security Shoes

So I have a new job, kinda. I work 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. Cleaning floors at a discount store place. Feh. I dustmop half the store while somebody else does the other half. Then one of us grabs the big battery-powered self propelled floor scrubber, and the other one follows him with the propane-powered noisy ass buffer. Oh, and somebody vacuums the shoe area. Feh, indeed. This brings me to the topic. The first day I was there, I heard 'security shoes' come over the PA system 12 times. 12 times in 3 hours. As if the Worst Hits Of The 80's radio station they play wasn't bad enough. Feh.

current music: Nothing. I mention this because I only brought my computer over to this new place to help wanker get his cable modem working, and I have no speakers.

Has anyone else noticed?

Did you ever notice how there is just about *always* some major holiday around the corner? Not actually physically around an actual physical corner, mind you, but around an intangible corner, a few weeks away. I mean it was easter, now it's mother's day, then it'll be, shit, I don't know, yom kippur or some shit. I don't actually know when yom kippur is. But what I'm saying is that I think the marketing scum that rule the earth and keep us all under their greasy scaly thumbs have decided that certain holidays are more important so as to keep that "seasonal" isle full of the same overpriced garbage that the same people buy every year. I'm really disenchanted with the commercalization of the holidays. Easter has lost all it's original meaning to most people. Easter and christmas are deeply rooted in christianity, yet they center around a fucking rabbit and santa claus, rather than like, I don't know, jesus... I'm by no means a religious person, but I think that if you build a holiday around the death and subsequent ascension into heaven of the central figure of your religion, and 2000 years later people celebrate it by eating chocolate bunnies and buying lots of green fakey grass - something has gone wrong with your holiday.
On another note, I've decided, only just now, to implement a new feature in this ever-increasingly bloated journal type thing of mine: the word of the moment.anytime I post, I'll come up with some random word I like and make that the word of the day, and link to it on dictionary.com or something. Let's start things off at the bottom and work our way up.

word of the moment: Nadir. Nadir means the lowest point, it's exactly the opposite of zenith, and it's what I'd name my electronics company. And it sounds like a presidential candidate.

current music: "drone" by autechre. It'd from their "peel session" album. I like it. so there.

FUCK YOU ALL!!!

I'm angry. pissed, even. I got this game, x2: wolverine's revenge. I saw it and went "hey, a game where you get to bust some heads as wolverine - cool!" and I got it. Now I hate it. I hate it mostly because of the fact that if you don't do something right, you fail and have to start the level over. I was in this underground base thing, turned on an elevator, and a whole fat gang of bad guys came in. well, I was in poor health, and I figured I'd just run thru them and straight into the elevator. And No. see, if you do that, you get treated a cutscene where this one guy, who you could turn into a sloppy joe in a coat, waltzez in and takes 5 seconds to shoot out a control panel. Game over. restart the level. Seems you *must* fight all these assholes before you go thru the door, because if the door opens before you shred everybody, you lose. So I exited. and I likely won't go back, because idiotic script setups like that irritate me to no end. anyway, Yeah, I'm done.

current music: "slaughtered" by Pantera. Panfuckingtera, for when you are *really* pissed.

what in the name of...

Ok, so These People are goddamned weird. It's a circus, like a real travelling circus, and about half of them are a band. The band plays, well, circus music. Only not. It's kinda hard to describe, I mean, they play classic circus music, but with these bizarre lyrics and stuff, and I just don't know what else to say except go there.

Maybe Tesla Does The Astro.

Ok, so a few things.
One, I have been jobless since I moved up to the great state of illinois (best way to mispronounce it: "illinwah", like it was a french word), and I might be getting me a job stocking at the local wal-place, but they won't start interviewing for 2 weeks, and I kinda sorta really am entirely desperate to get a job right the fuck right now, if not sooner. So a friend of mine (Wanker) calls up and says "you want a job?" and yeah, I kinda do, as stated. So I'll probably start doing this other job in the next couple days. I'll be on a floor crew at a store. I'll be one of the guys working the various brooms and machinery at the store at 3 am. I used to be the other people in the store - the ones wandering around looking like some kind of seedy zombie who might shoplift or eat your brains if you blink. That job is only part time, tho. 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. feh. Work is money, and money is good money.
Another thing - I played red faction 2. it's really really really short. Like short. Like I feel like I played a fucking demo. Seriously. I downloaded it (yeah fuck you too), unzipped it, installed it, played it, and fucking beat it - inside of 24 hours. Actual playing time was like 8 hours, maybe 10. that makes me sad. Somebody expects me to pay 50 bucks for 2 cd's worth of 8-10 hours of gameplay. and it's a first-person shooter, so no replay value, really. Things like this just piss me off. I played the demo for thief 2, and it took me like 3 hours the first time thru. A 3 hour demo. And I kept replaying that demo, trying to do things differently, take different routes. I played the freelancer demo, and it was an average demo, but after the demo missions ended, you can play for a really long time in kind of a free mode, where you can trade goods or play random jobs (you play a freelance space pilot). People who make games take note: I'm not about to pay you 50 fucking dollars for a game I can finish in 8 hours. Most of my jobs, I don't make 50 bucks in an 8 hour shift. On a similar note: while Piratizing© red faction 2, I saw metal gear solid 2 up for download. But No. Metal gear solid 2 comes on a dvd, so the download is *eighty* 50 meg files. for the small version that fits on 5.2 gig dvd-r media. Y'know, if I was to desire that game, I'd buy it. No way in hell am I going to download 5 gigs of one game.

current music: Well, to begin with it was "astro" by the white stripes, which contains the topic as a lyric. but then it was "psycho drama" by ultraviolence, "my heat goes boom" by snoop dogg, "this means war" by busta rhymes with ozzy osbourne, "dope boy fresh" by T.I., and finally "blackout" by method man and redman. took me a while to type this one out.

Part the second

How to tell if you have an exceptionally large vocabulary, part the second:

If you use the dictionary as a spellchecker, you more than likely have not only an exceptionally large vocabulary, but superb spelling abilities as well. I mean, you kinda need to be able to spell pretty well to crack open a dictionary to check yourself.

In other news, you better check yourself before you wreck yourself, fool.

current music: well, "uviol" finished right after I made that last post (like 2 minutes ago), and since then, I've heard the original leadbelly version of "black betty", and now "duchess" from the video game alice is playing. the music in alice was done by chris vrenna, who is associated with nine inch nails. The music from alice is fairly disturbing. think victorian children's songs, if they were composed in a nightmare. the whole thing sounds like a music box forged in hell. Oh hey, now it's some band I've never heard of playing "(sic)" by slipknot - live, and poorly.

How To Tell

How to tell if you have an exceptionally large vocabulary, part the first:

If you use the term "pyrrhic victory" during normal conversation, and the conversation isn't actually about the term "pyrrhic victory", your vocabulary is exceptionally large, perhaps unnecessarily so.

here's a scenario where someone might use the term: (note that I will flex my mighty vocabulary muscle a bit here.)
Usage of the term "pyrrhic victory"
"So, I was playing warcraft 3 against a friend of mine, and he was obviously better than me, but my forces were holed up in a well-defended position, and I controlled most of the gold mines on the map. I decided to play it as a war of attrition, sending small parties of high-damage units to force him to waste the rest of his gold defending against me. Little did I know, he had amassed an army in a remote corner of the map, and he caught me unawares with a full assault. I still had adequate defenses to hold him off for a while, and I was able to generate a good number of defenders, so I fought him off pretty well until he managed to cripple my forces with a clever flanking maneuver. I still had enough fighters and defenses left to make it a hard fight, and although I knew I was sunk, I did my best to make sure his victory was a pyrrhic one."

Ok, kudos if you understood every word in there, double-kudos if you've actually said "pyrrhic victory" at some point, triple-kudos if you thought "hey, warcraft 3 doesn't allow large enough armies to build an effective flanking attack." and uber-kudos if you corrected my grammar as you read.

current music: "Uviol" by autechre. man, those guys like giving songs names nobody can remember.

Do You Know

Do you know how much it sucks to have a camera and an intense desire to explore a new environment while taking a plethora of pictures of stuff you've never seen before, only you don't have a car or money? I know.

Say, it seems the brunching shuttlecocks have gone and dynamically generated the rest of my posts in blogger.

current music: "spondee" by matmos. matmos made this one album where the music was created from like, medical sounds. libosuction and lasik eye surgery and such. but spondee is different. I assume the vocal track is from some tape dealing with hearing or something, but it's weird. imagine a basic hip-hop sort of beat, with a woman speaking the following in monotone:
"sunshine. lunchbox. playground. raincoat. hot dog. oatmeal. railroad. ice cream. bathtub. pancake. eardrum."

Oh dear!

I'm nearly horizontal!

that is all.

current music: Uh, "come to daddy" by aphex twin, which I think I've listed here before. lemme go check...hmm. seems not. Although I have mentioned the song before, because it is a fucking great song. I listened to this acoustic live version of "symphony of destruction" by megadeth before that. Acoustic megadeth - now there's some weird shit.

hey, neat!

So I just went to blogger.com to maybe post or something, since various parts of the net are being real slow for some reason, and I noticed they had the radio shack motto on the front page.
Google (company motto: yeah, we misspelled googol, so sue us.) bought blogger, and there is a F.A.Q. explaining what it means to us, the end-users. The link to the F.A.Q. is "You've got questions, we've got answers.". I read this and went "Neat!" because I parody that all the time (Radio Smack: You've got questions, we've got a hot cup of shut the fuck up).
Anyway, I just thought it was neat is all.

current music: "Why does it hurt when I pee?" by Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa is (well, was) and odd motherfucker. And coming from me that means a lot.

Hmm.... meat.

Slashdot has a poll up: favorite meat. and I saw a couple funny funny funny lines in the comments.
ATTN: VEGETARIANS - CALM DOWN, THEY'RE JOKES.
"I love vegetarians. Some of my favorite foods are vegetarians."
"Plants aren't food - food eats plants!"

Also, "Cows would have a much longer life expectancy if they weren't made out of beef and leather"
I voted beef, but only because there wasn't an "all of the above" option.

current music: the Primus cover of "have a cigar", which is one of my favorite ping floyd songs.

I forgot.

I mentioned the escape key. I had that last post half typed, hit the escape key for some reason, and all my text vanished. fuckers.

Anyway, the thing about the swarm mentality of the A.I. in RTS games is that is leaves them open for certain tactics. In generals, the chinese have a unit that can convert enemy buildings to your side, and is camoflauged unless doing something. I'll sneak in and convert a power plant or something, to get the swarm distracted blowing it up - then I convert the headquarters and build a worker. that worker, if you can get it back to your base, is the greatest fucking thing ever. It builds the buildings it would have built for the enemy - only they are yours. You can have that bulldozer (or rebel guy) build anything the enemy can. I've had the superweapons of all three sides built in a single game. I love that. I'll build a usa airbase and amass a swarm of helicopters, then I'll build a gla war factory and have toxin tractors spraying the area around my base with poison. Another thing about the computer: it's dumb. I've had one infantry unit survive an attack on the enemy base, and used that infantry unit to blow up the enemy headquarters. For some reason the AI will sometimes ignore a single unit unless it attacks an enemy unit. I just wish these game developers would come up with at least semi-realistic AI. Now, if you'll excuse me, my rocket buggies are done building. Time to rush those fuckers.

current music: Wow. it was "People=Shit" by slipknot, which is a musical sledgehammer, followed by a song intended to aid meditation. it's all feng-shui and shit. That's random play for ya.

Fucking A.I. (and escape keys)

I just played a round of command and conquer: generals. Good game, but I have one gripe - the A.I. is fucking ruthless.
I played a skirmish round with 3 computer controlled players, who all had assault teams rolling across my base before I had any way to defend myself - before I had my fucking war factory built. All I had was a handful of infantry, and a few builders constructing my base defenses. the builders, construction sites, and infantry were trampled upon and burned. My measly infantry units were no match for the mighty chinese flame tank, which then parked in front of my goddamned headquarters and crispy fried my new builders as they came out. I lost horribly. I got stomped on. in 5 minutes. So I decided to get on here and complain a bit, as I am wont to do. See, there is a technique called rushing in real-time strategy games like generals and warcraft and such. Rushing means to build a large army of cheap units early on, then use them to mow down your unprepared enemy, who might be able to stop a tank or 2, but is helpless against a swarm of humvees. The problem with this is: the computer rushes. constantly. every time it builds a new unit, that unit make a bee line for your base. and every unit that trickles down the road attacks the same building, over and over and over, until it breaks, then the stream flows in a new direction. The only way to combat this is to build defenses immediately, quickly building up an impenetrable wall of rocket towers or whatnot so you can actually build your base up without having to constantly rebuild key structures. But. the computer has certain advantages over you that I thought I might list here:

1) The computer can see the whole map, all the time, and it knows exactly what you are doing, and where - from the first second of gameplay. I've had super-weapons hit tank convoys that took the long way around, and never got within sight of any enemies.
2) The computer doesn't need to use a mouse or keyboard to issue commands, and thus issues them instantly to multiple units. The computer can have 45 units scattered to hell and gone and have every single one of them bear down on various key structures in your base - at exactly the same time. This allows the computer to organize vast multi-spearhead assaults that outflank your defenses and tear them down just in time for the bomber run that wouldn't have made it anywhere near the target otherwise.
3) The computer is 100% effecient. there is never an idle worker or any wasted resources. The computer knows the radius of attack of every unit and can position them in an exact grid to provide 100% coverage.
4) The computer instantly attacks the biggest threat when fighting you, then it moves on to the next biggest threat. If your flame tank is wiping out those infantry, the next missile will strike that flame tank.
5) All that "ruthless" A.I. that is supposedly using strategy and cunning to outmanuver you also allows it to amass hard-hitting assault teams at the base before they rush your base, giving them a greater chance to punch thru.

Picture this: you start a skirmish against a computer opponent. You start off with your one worker, who you tell to go build a supply center so you can collect resources to start building. then you queue up a couple more workers. The computer already has as many workers as it is going to need queued up - they were queued up instantly, in the same instant that the first worker went to build a supply center. You get your new workers, who you tell to go build a barracks and a war factory or maybe a base defense. The computer will be building tanks before you get done with the barracks. Then, as you go to work on your second defense turret, and you have a tank building, and maybe some infantry - the first wave comes. You will die quickly if you don't drive the computer away. Sucks to be you.

current music: "kill you" by korn rad guys, korn.

Holy Crap!

Ok, so I needed to install realplayer. I hate realplayer, and real networks, and everything they love. But the website has morphed again, and I was able to download the free player within 2 clicks of the front page, and the links were fairly visible. Kudos to real. I still hate them, tho.

PIRATIZE© Your Life!

Yeah, you know how a couple days ago I mentioned that I used illegal methods to obtain music for free, even though that music had not officially been put on sale yet?
I do that a lot. But I'm sorry. Truly. Except for metallica. Fuck those guys. I used to be a fan. I bought every album from the black album to the s&m thing they did with that orchestra. The black album was the first cd I ever owned. Now, I don't mean to hurt artists when I download music. I mostly use my downloads to see if i like the album, and I do buy a lot of cd's still. But metallica, on the other hand, won't be getting my money any time soon. They stopped being artists when they started trying to get their fans arrested for downloading their music. I'll never give them another cent. Oh, I'll still get their albums, mind you - I just won't pay any money for them. If I can't download the music, I'll fucking steal the cd. Fuck metallica.

current music: "130 steps" by Badmarsh & Shri, which is this cool sort-of electronica duo. I say sort-of because Shri is an instrumentalist, meaning he plays actual instruments, so the music ends up sounding very organic and natural, since it is for the most part. By the by, I really enjoy these people, and I never would have heard of them if I didn't see the "dancing drums" album in mp3 format on an ftp. So there.

ST33L M0NST3R!!!

I have a desk.
'tis a large desk, to be sure.
It resembles THIS.
It is the vessel on which my immortal soul will travel thru eternity, because it is the only thing that will last that long.
It is also heavy.
hernia-inducingly, mind-numbingly heavy.
it forms a gravity well, and the moon will eventually crash into it.
but it shall live on.
and now it lives in the basement, with me.

My former roomates (who got a nifty apartment along with the computer business they are buying) went back to our former home and retrieved all my (and their) belongings, and ferried them 500 miles up here in a 26 foot u-haul. all my furniture and whatnot was in there, including the steel monster (as I am prone to call it lately).
The desk and a large couch stayed in the garage, which is at-grade with the basement (the house is built into a hill). Normally it takes 2 people to move the desk, and 3 to carry it. I moved it into the basement, at great cost to my health. I fought it for a while, learned it wouldn't go thru the door upright, so I fought it onto it's back and fought it most of the way thru the door, until I realized that I needed to remove the door, since it was also too large to fit thru the door on it's back. So I removed the door (the only part of this ordeal that was easy) and proceeded to fight the desk back thru the door until I realized that it was *still* too wide for the space. so I pulled the leg off. See in that picture I linked to, how the leg is sort of a large square looking thing? well, it's a rectangle, and it is as deep as the desk, and the feet for that side are both attached to it. and it is attached to the desk via 4 nut-backed screws, 2 of which are very nearly impossible to get at, since they live deep within the bowels of the monster. but I prevailed, and re-attached everything, and now I'm sitting here in front of the old wooden desk, because I'm too tired to move the monster over here and transfer the computer to it, even though my 21" monitor is putting this particle board hutch thru unspeakable pain.

current music: "26 mixes for cash" by aphex twin. It's an album of his remix work done over the last 10 or so years. It's not out yet, but I PIRATIZED© it. I found it on a warez channel I was hanging out in on irc. that and the new megadeth double live cd, and the rage against the machine rare and live cd, and the (7 disc!) soundtrack of gta:vice city. tee-hee!

Dwarf jokes aside

Lord Of The Rings :The Two Towers is a pretty freakin' good movie. But. The first one (which, when acronym-ized into LOTR:FOTR, looks silly) had one "joke" at Gimli, the dwarf's expense. It was when Mr. big strong full height man chucked his stubby ass across a chasm, Gimli got all huffy and said "never toss a dwarf.". yeah, haha, really funny, let's get back to the uruk-hai, shall we? Anyway, that one dwarf joke excuses the dwarf "in" joke this time around, when Gimli asks Mr full height to toss him across another chasm so he can whup on the aformentioned uruk-hai. "toss me" says Gimli, regretting it before he even said it. That joke is fine, because it's a mildly funny reference to the mildly funny joke in the first movie. I'd let the movie have one more dwarf joke, that they're allowed. But no, there were something like FOUR HUNDRED more dwarf jokes. I might have missed some of the 'DWARVS ARR SHORT" grafiti scrawled on an orc's helmet or something, but there are still FAR TOO MANY DWARF JOKES IN THE NEW LORD OF THE RINGS MOVIE. At this rate, the next movie will be titled "Lord Of The Rings : Gimli Is A Short Dwarf And He's Short Ha Ha" I mean, Come now. How many times can you be funny making fun of short people? Like 7 times, that's how many. beyond that, you risk getting sued by The Altitude-Challenged Americans Network or something. There is one dwarf joke that isn't about them being short. It's about how dwarf women (also short) have beards, and can't be distinguished from the males, and are really ugly, but you'll never see them anyway, because they are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, where all women, and especially short ones, belong. Seriously, I don't see how they avoided being sued over that crap. It's not even funny. I am, by the way, not a dwarf. I'm 5' 8". So I'm not like, lashing out or anything.

current music: "Creepy Crawl" by Superjoint Ritual, which is one of like 40 side projects of Phil Anselmo, lead singer of Pantera.

Hey!

THIS is rad. qtvr panoramas done in macro. ever wonder what it would be like to live inside a flower or a box of screws? here's your answer.

Ich hasse Real

As if I didn't hate them enough - HERE is a link to a discussion on something I didn't even think of the last time I bitched about real.com's abomination: during the install of realplayer, you are prompted to opt-in for some truly useless spam about shit you don't care about and wouldn't read if you sought out a site that had that particular info on it, much less if it was bulkmailed to you. The problem comes when you realize there are *twelve* checkboxes, and you can only see the first 4 - but - the last 5 are checked. So those of you who didn't bother to scroll down will be bombarded by spam that you technically signed on for. Those worthless bastards. The next step, I predict, will be to make the free realplayer totally ad-served, meaning it will play an ad (loaded off some overloaded and slow server) every time you play a file, online or not. Man, I hate real networks more every day.

current music: "Feuer Frei" by Rammstein, which explains the german topic. I don't understand a word these guys say, but I like it.

Jackin' for beats

And even if ya down with my crew - I'll jack them too.

The news of my death has been pretty much spot on.

I am posting from the great state of Illinois. whee. I live in Spauldo's basement, which is cool. Not really a whole lot to say, really, except that I think you should go check out Homestar Runner Strong Bad is cool.



Current Music: "House of the rising sun", only it's the live version by oysterhead. Oysterhead being les from primus and the guy from phish.

Stuck in my head: "Jacking for beats" by Ice Cube, of all things... I remember liking the video, tho.