DCR is now broadcasting.

For the last month it's been wired to a private audience on a need-to-know basis (see here and here). There's still a few kinks to work out. Regardless of warts or level of finish, there's no way I'm going to get DCR to an ATC level of polish while it's still the last day of September, so here it is.

The choice of date will eventually have some significance.

Until then, enjoy.

Firefox users, rejoice! Finally, someone has done something about all that annoying flash crap on the internets! Hallelujah!

(src=ejp)

23:08 <bda> I know nothing of Bauhaus.
23:08 <solios> proto-post-punk alongside Joy Division.
23:09 <solios> Joy Divsion became New Order after Ian hung himself ; Bauhaus split up - Murphy went Solo, Ash did Love and Rockets.. then they noticed they make more money as Bauhaus.*
23:10 <solios> there are no goth/industrial webcomics.**
23:10 <solios> so I've got to do it. :P
23:10 <solios> (better that than porn)
23:10 <bda> ha.

* I'm probably screwing up my Scene History here (and leaving out Tunes on Tail), but I think the above is more or less accurate. And for those of you paying attention to these sorts of things, yes, I used an Electric 6 lyric as the header for a one-sided about Bauhaus. I'm going to hell.

** I'm assuming there's at least one or two floating around, but I've either tried to read them and failed, or I haven't found them yet. Note that I'm more of a Mad Max Headroom industrial gutterpunk than one of those Voltaire types (fashion, etc).

Today's Penny Arcade and the conclusion of the current Something Positive story arc are both zingers.

SP vastly more so in my opinion, but it's so rare that PA Goes There with the serious that it bears mention.

I'm going to shut up before DCR turns into websnark. Back to waiting for Appleseed Volume Five and for 4chan's /d/ board to not be down, dammit.

Bryan redid the morg front page. Verily, I like it.

23:49 <solios> wow, I've got top billing. o_o
23:49 <solios> (morg)
23:50 <bda> You're the only person who actually does shit.

The "iron city overload" for DCR is a twist on Clock DVA's NYC Overload, off of Man-Amplified. While Pittsburgh is broadly known as the "steel city", "iron city" has nice Sister Machine Gun connotations; while the local use of "steel" is synonymous with Organized Sport- much the same way the swastica is synonymous with the Nazi party. "Iron" also happens to connote Iron City Beer - some of the foulest shit to ever be served in a bottle. That it's claimed to be the "signature beer of Pittsburgh since 1861" by the brewer's web site ought to say something about the locals.

There's a reason the beer drinkers I know prefer Yuengling (or Real Beer - the kind you don't see on billboards).

A breakdown of Red Cross spending - makes United Way's strongarm tactics look positively honest.

Makes me glad I contributed to relief efforts my way.

[16:51] > PORKTEST
[16:51] <rjbs> oink
[16:52] > MOO
[16:52] <rjbs> no, that's a cow
[16:52] <rjbs> that would be BEEFTEST
[16:53] > point.

Obsessive Compulsive Development : Taboo (src = eric) : A small Safari degayer which injects a warning dialogue when closing windows full of tabs or quitting the application (useful, missing since 1.0, go Apple). Paste a line from the site into the command line and Safari suddenly stops whining like a kid about to piss his pants about software downloads.

13:26 < solios> anyone know of a way to disable that goddamned $THING MAY CONTAIN AN APPLICATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111 (bounce bounce bounce like a fucking five year old about to wet themselves)!!!!!111 bullshit that safari does?
13:26 <@ejp> don't download applications
13:27 < solios> ...
13:29 <@ejp> solios: http://www.ocdev.com/
13:29 <@ejp> google it yourself next time, bitch.

Seriously, folks - missing OS 9's much less slappable methods of drawing user attention to misbehaving apps here (crashing, mostly).

08:02 <@ejp> I wonder if we're ever going to be able to buy 4/6/8way motherboards.
08:03 < solios> no.
08:03 < solios> quad for servers, sure.
08:04 < solios> imo we'll see dual dual-core boards first.
08:04 <@ejp> we already have those
08:05 < solios> SEE?
08:05 < solios> we'll see them first!
08:05 <@ejp> o_o
08:05 <@ejp> you're a fucking prophet, you know that?

15:21 < vai> solios: JEDI SHEETS?
15:22 < solios> also Empire.
15:23 * solios > *
15:23 < solios> fagbot: doot for having sex on Ford, Fisher, Hutt
15:23 < fagbot> HMMMMMM now let me THINK -- a FOUR-LETTER WORD meaning "GAYNESS"
15:24 <@ejp> indeed
15:25 < vai> fagbot: botsnack :)
15:25 < fagbot> :)
15:33 < vai> I have cordorouy sheets :P
15:33 < mdxi> i can't even imagine that
15:34 < vai> they're for winter.
15:34 < solios> hippy.
15:35 <@ejp> I have flannel sheets.
15:35 <@ejp> they're AWESOME
15:36 < mdxi> i have flannel sheets
15:36 < mdxi> and cotton jersey sheets
15:36 < mdxi> and high and medium thread-count woven sheets
15:36 < mdxi> but NOT cordouroy
15:36 < vai> cordorouy++
15:37 < mdxi> why can none of us spell that word?
15:37 < mdxi> CORDUROY
15:37 < vai> cor-duh-roy.
15:38 < mdxi> kohrdeur'oigh

One of the goals of DCR is to document what used to be here - the short-lived IDM scene, Metropol, Laga, the Next Generation, Oakland Beehive, Pollinator, etceteras.

Archeology, after a fashion. Cultrual necrophelia is outside, 'round the back. The line starts behind Rod Stewart and have fun sucking at the Now, fucko.

From the standpoint that these things are not here. Culture slumped and it's on us (resident imports, possibly locals) to build it up and make it Awesome again. We could sit here and whine about how good it used to be, but that's easy and it wasn't, not really. Easy sucks. Life is hard, I've got my spine I've got my orange crush, helmet.

No lead to follow (flailing about).

Remembering I still need to lay in "viz" (wallpaper dump for those who use it, not me [running 10/4 'Aqua Graphite' all machines], DCR sketchwork etc.), 'solios' (seriously) and some other stuff, still curious as to how page/archive navigation for DCR comic is going to shape up - will need to be at least partway into the 'break' (tentative) micro-arc before there's enough material to get serious.

Anyone who's followed ATC since incept remembers just how many interface iterations that went through. DCR (site) is effectively mercury (blog) information design with comic inserted. If it ain't broke etc.

Still reading jerkcity archives (obvious, amused).

Stream of conscious (so easy) aside, DCR information design isn't perfect, will need at least two more storylines to de-kink, etceteras, and said warts won't be effecting launch time, regardless of useability issues.

Removal of index.html slated for first or second strip of Finals or last day of September, whichever comes first. Still need to write 'finals' but unlike ATC it doesn't need to be fully functional beyond a basic working outline, of which I already have several key components.

Things I can't do with The Dualist that can be done easily and appropriately inside of DCR:

Pencils. Think Blade of the Immortal only not nearly as tight. I have a solid idea as to how/where I'll be using this and won't spoil it with further exposition. // flashbacks, anything that needs soft shading, etc.

Pencil-And-Ink ("unfinished" inks) - wondering if it'll look as good on the screen as it does on paper. I don't mean "using pencils for shading", I mean simply not doing the eraser pass. // Could be useful, will certainly require some experimentation.

Ballpoint Ink. Dude you can totally get the entire grey scale out of those cheapass Bics. (offserver example) // motion?? (along these lines // panel one)

Ballpoint Ink (Pilot), Unlike Bics, the Pilot pens I use either squirt out black ink or they're dead/about to die. All by itself, this produces the 'ink sketch' effect (ATC example), which works well if you know what you want. Ink Sketch Whitehouse is quite a bit more bishi than his strip-to-date self (stfu). // hangovers, drugs, potential for Steadman or McKean -esque line fluidity (as if. re: acidwork, etc- single-pass Pilot ink sketch, no doubling-over).

// DCR "style" (main) is as defined in strips to date (reveille), won't be switching to any of the above on a permanent basis and if you want color there's ATC, dig it. // Use above for instances, possibly entire scenes (mostly just to get it down) most likely entire strips or sub-sequences; should be good to mix with Existing Method but don't go nuts (ballpoint panel pencil panel sketch panel == strip == no.).

08:26 <@bda> Televison science fiction + computers = ignored.
08:27 < solios> BSG hasn't done anything overly stupid with 'em yet.
08:27 < solios> which puts the show light years above just about everything else ever.
08:27 <@ejp> B5 ignored them completely
08:28 <@bda> nod.
08:28 <@bda> They just had little crystals.
08:28 < solios> the more sci-fi I watch, the more I class trek as fantasy.
08:29 <@rjbs> TNG computers were mostly reasonable.
08:29 <@ejp> someone still needs to explain why the 12 colonies have a fear of 90degree corners.
08:29 < solios> and yeah, b5 did a good job of ignoring all the stuff that made for gayness.
08:29 <@rjbs> They just didn't have a good constant level of capability, but that wasn't a huge deal.
08:29 < solios> rjbs: trektech is annoying in other ways, though.
08:30 <@ejp> note to self: when building a space ship, keep all voltage higher than 12v AT LEAST 50' from all personnel.
08:30 <@rjbs> I guess.
08:30 <@bda> Heh.
08:30 <@rjbs> ejp: yeah, like everything ever implies that your cell phone can be virused to electrocute you
08:31 <@rjbs> solios: I think Trek culture is more incomprehensible than Trek tech.
08:31 < solios> yeah.
08:31 < solios> wearing carpet samples and not having money? puh-leeze.
08:32 <@rjbs> well, there are replicators, but some things can't be replicated
08:32 <@rjbs> but not generally interesting things
08:32 <@rjbs> just, like, money
08:32 <@ejp> LIKE LOVE
08:32 < solios> hah!
08:32 <@rjbs> well, and Spice
08:32 < solios> ejp++
08:32 <@rjbs> by which I mean dilithium
08:32 < solios> and anything useful.
08:32 < solios> like guns, etc.
08:32 <@ejp> guns could.
08:32 < solios> also, the lack of bathrooms on the enterprise D is extremely disconcerting.
08:33 <@rjbs> nanites
08:33 < solios> my dad and I rationalized it as efficiency of replimat foodstuffs.
08:33 <@ejp> and no anuses.
08:33 <@rjbs> never discussed is the severe gassiness of all future humans
08:33 <@ejp> go go genetic engineering
08:33 <@rjbs> because their waste is transformed into farts by nanites
08:33 < solios> hm.
08:34 <@ejp> man. you think there are problems with global warming now.
08:34 < solios> the farts could be used to heat the enterprise.
08:35 <@ejp> in space, no one can hear you fart.
08:35 < solios> thank gid.
08:36 <@rjbs> s/could be/are/
08:36 <@rjbs> it's also why they can bring themselves to eat crappy replicated food or Klingon cuisine
08:36 <@rjbs> they can barely taste it over the flatulence
08:36 < solios> this would explain why methane breathers don't need separate atmo compartments.
08:37 <@bda> You guys are such nerds.

I currently have 49$ in the bank, 40$ of which has the pleasure of being my source of food between now and Friday morning. Speakeasy just shut me off for being 30$ "past due." - coincidentally the same amount my roommate owes me for this month for his share of said service.

Last time they just yanked it right out of my bank account - but since I have yet to plug my new debit card number into the interwebs, they can't. That info doesn't work anymore.

This sucks for obvious reasons, and rocks from the standpoint that the last time they did this, my account went negative and has yet to fully recover.

Why can't this shit be bimonthly? >:|

More importantly, why do companies always do this shit to me 2-4 days before I have the money, and never when I have the money? :P

==============

Update, 20050920, 0055 : Worked something out with the roommate. After an hour or so on the modem (waiting for him to come home), DCR ACTUALLY LOADS IN SAFARI.

w00t.

Hey, look at the hooks
on your pants makes you wanna dance.
I say yeah yeah,
I say yeah yeah.
There ain't never a catch, all you got to do is snatch,
do the velcro fly,
do the velcro fly.

You need just enough of that sticky stuff
to hold the seams of your fine blue jeans.
I say yeah yeah.
I say yeah yeah.
There ain't never a catch, all you got to do is snatch,
do the velcro fly,
do the velcro fly.

-ZZ Top, Velcro Fly

The song cropped up on the xenopod while transitioning from Oakland to Birmingham. That drum loop is damned catchy. Vastly out of place sitting with the rest of my music library, but I'm always willing to make room for Awesome.

It's a rocking track. Probably less so if you haven't read The Waste Lands.

Sputnik seems to be pulling a charge off of the USB 2.0 PCI card mounted in minerva*. I say "seems to be" from the standpoint that it's displaying the battery charge animation - the last time I did this, it Didn't.

The odds I was smoking crack with the original assessment are pretty good. Though Sputnik's had a few bits of teething oddness, I have a history of being fabulously wrong on occasion - almost always involving technology or concepts I'm not completely up to speed on.

Also, my kit is often as prone to mood swings as I am.

* Minerva is a g4 Digital Audio I bought earlier this year and have been beefing up a piece at a time. She still needs a modern processor and eventually a drive transplant from my current home box (2x150g SATA drives). If Tritton ever offers mac support for their USB 2.0 SVGA adapter, I'll just buy a mini and be done with it.

Hit goth night with Xeno last night. Dave wags my old debit at me and asks if it looks familiar - turns out I had left it at The Upstage. He seemed a bit put out that I'd had the thing cancelled, but hey - I noticed it was missing Sunday night and was unwilling to wait until 10pm Monday night just to confirm what was, at the time, a hunch.

I followed Proper Operating Procedure and destroyed the thing this morning.

 

I own Empire AND Jedi sheets. How cool is that?

Slightly more detail on the Jedi sheets here.

"This whole 'being an adult' thing is really taking a lot out of me."

To xeno, somewhere between brushing my teeth and passing out.

See previous, etc.

From here, courtesy of xeno (emphasis mine):

Adrenal fatigue is a collection of signs and symptoms, known as a “syndrome.” It is not a readily identifiable entity like measles or a growth on the end of your finger. People with adrenal fatigue often look and act relatively normal. They may not have any obvious signs of physical illness, yet they are not well and live with a general sense of unwellness or “gray” feelings. They often use coffee, colas and other stimulants to get going in the morning and to prop themselves up during the day.

They have intervals of confusion, increased difficulties in concentrating and less acute memory recall. They often have less tolerance than they normally would and are more easily frustrated. When the adrenals are not secreting the proper amount of hormones, insomnia is also one of the likely outcomes.

As their condition worsens, it lays the foundation for other seemingly unrelated conditions such as frequent respiratory infections, allergies, rhinitis, asthma, frequent colds and a number of other health problems such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, hypoglycemia, adult onset diabetes, auto-immune disorders and alcoholism. These people may appear to friends and family to be lazy and unmotivated, or to have lost their ambition, when in reality quite the opposite is true; they are forced to drive themselves much harder than people with healthy adrenal function merely to accomplish life’s everyday tasks.

I wouldn't say it fits like a glove, but it could be a potential explanation for my issues with boozahol, the fact I've gotten half a dozen colds since I quit smoking, General Blood Sugar Issues, etc, etc. And I'm still phobic about doctors for reasons I'll go into at a later date.

21:22 * solios wonders where the hell xeno's at.
21:22 < solios> he's navigating northeast pittsburgh AT NIGHT. :P
21:23 < vai> lean out a window and yell "BEER!". He'll find you.
21:23 < solios> XD
21:23 <@bda> ha!
21:27 < solios> there's a problem with that.

The problem is that the window is to the right of my desk. This picture was taken in the spring of 2004, though this parking lot was clear of obstructions until early 2005:

These days it looks something like this :

Two fenced-in construction trailers that'll be here until some point in 2007. Wunderbah!

Blisters. Got 'em in some damned inconvenient places. They're wincy things when you're doing day-to-day whatever, but when you're out for a stomp, they shut up and get with the program after a quarter mile or so. It's like they know that their screams fall on deaf ears.

I've cut back on boozahol. Consequently, the nights that I do go out have become weird. Likely something to do with the razor-thin karmaline of the Dead City Radio project tilting in and out of favor like sailcloth in an uncertain wind. Turns out one of the security guys at The Upstage is dating Autumn, friend of Faith, whom I knew during The Darkness. Hadn't seen either of them since the Roman Room was open and !sucking. A dubious Blast From the Past that brings to mind the sort of unpleasantness you'd find lurking beneath a Lynch film. Gooey.

Then a lot of Eyes Wide Shut stuff happened, then a lot of stuff I can mostly remember but either don't want to or shouldn't. Then I passed out. Then I played snoozebar tag.

Now I have a few hours to kill and it's hot and time for a shower.

Hopefully I'll be reasonably !hungover by the time xeno gets here - the amount of misfiring and packet loss my head is experiencing right now leads me to believe I've blown a router somewhere. Undesirable.

Oh, and sugar free Red Bull is complete ass compared to sugar free Sobe Adrenaline Rush. The SAR actually does something - the Red Bull just tastes funny and goes down like aspartame-scented battery acid. Gross.

On a vastly happier note, my replacement debit card showed up today. :D!.

A few points after almost a week of iPod useage:

(a) The headphones hurt a bit. Not in the "my ears are ringing" sense- they hurt in the "wow, these are surprisingly uncomfortable" sense. Sound quality still spanks my Sonys, new headphones are still a priority, gotta pay bills first etc.

(b) The fact that audio adjustments made in song info seem to be both copied over and double-pumped is odd. Godflesh tracks Suction and My Own Light are still quieter than everything else in the iTunes library even after volume adjustments - for these tracks to be skull-splittingly loud on the iPod is entirely unexpected and finds me scrambling for the volume controls while parkskwirls give me funny looks.

(c) I've been listening to Godflesh a lot (big surprise, that.), and the podphones have given me a new appreciation of Hymns. The album has a nice rolling, rattling signature "crunch" to it that calls to mind the basslines of a couple of the less whinier Korn tracks I've been subjected to- though a quick comparison leaves Korn sounding wimpy and emasculated beneath the skull-wrenching THUD of Godflesh. You can keep your pussy "I've got issues, mommy!" Hot Topic grunge-metal, kthx. I'll stick with the tectonic rock golem orgy that is J. Broadrick And Friends.

(d) Guilty pleasure : Informatik's hilariously awful cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song. While industrial-bands-doing-mainstream-covers is a great way to showcase the shortcomings of the genre, this track is just totally above and beyond the usual Cleo-comp crapfest. It transcends.

(e) Battery life on the iPod mini is TEH AWESUM.

(f) Silence is still preferable to poddage at a few points in the Golf Course Loop. Sputnik's a damned spiffy people-filter, but there aren't any people at certain places in the park... which is exactly why I spend hours stomping around the place, sweating like a maniac. I've taken to using the iPod as a sort of first-stage booster to rocket my bitchass out of Natural History, through CMU or Flagstaff Hill or Phipps and out into The Quiet - at which point the Reality Filters have done their job. Cut in the boosters, ignore the screaming of the blisters and Enjoy The Silence.

It's Bryan's birthday for about another 45 minutes, and there's no way I'm going to get the Viz section templated and up in that kind of time, so here's the finalized version of my gift to him:

See these two entries for context, and this website for patterns and Whoscarf knitting instructions (!).

I originally pencilled him with his current brush-cut, but it just didn't click - hence the longer hair, which (if memory serves) roughly approximates some form of haircut he's had at some point in his life. I think.

There's a full color version of the figure, pre-composition - I'll upload that and everything else into viz (which doesn't exist at the moment) at Some Point in the future. The pose is very loosely based off of the Jacques Louis David painting of Napoleon, which is where the title/meme comes from.

I hope Bryan likes it (even if the proportions are a bit wonky- he Disappeared right around the time I started shading and as such I haven't had the opportunity to "proof" the image.

(a) I'll take down the silly little index.html "plug" a few strips after the reveille micro-arc. Since DCR is a strip as well as a blog, I'd like a bit of strip buffer before it's "opened" to the General Public.

(b) In response to offline observations : Whitehouse isn't a self-insertion. He's the bastard son of William Bennett and Andrew Eldritch, with a mix of other DCR characters that have meatspace analogues.

From Eric and Ryan : Sure E2c Sound Isolating Earphones ( Amazon ). The obvious downside is the list price (the used and reseller prices are an improvement, though still a bit high for my tastes- the kind of people who spend >100$ on mobile headphones are just as irritating as the kind of people who think name-dropping The Mars Volta gives them cool points- it doesn't. If you know fuckall about fillintheOgilvie and think your poseur-prog leanings give you some sort of conversational superiority, it's time you stopped hanging out in a fucking goth club, bucko.), but both Ryan and Eric speak extremely well of the E2cs, so.

My Sonys have long since lost covers and pads and have no bass; the iPod earbuds are pretty decent but they hurt like a bitch after prolonged use.

Yet another in an endless series of hardware upgrades, to be budgeted in sometime between October and June.

11:20 < ejp> they live inside your ear
11:21 < ejp> think babelfish with a speaker up its ass

18:45 <@rjbs> bda: doing exciting things tomorrow?
18:45 <@bda> I sure hope not.
18:45 <@bda> Why?
18:45 * rjbs consults iCal again.
18:46 <@rjbs> because it's your birthday
18:46 <@bda> Oh.
18:46 <@bda> Right.
18:46 <@bda> No, nothing planned.

Woke up, showered, spent nine minutes on hold and naked with PNC, being forced to listen to muzac versions of Phil Collins while the guy I eventually got ahold of confirmed that adding a work phone to an existing address wasn't a security flag and that yes, I could cancel my card and yes, I'd have it in 5-6 business days and yes, that's a burn.

The phone rings before I can unplug it and take it back downstairs to the isolation booth and it's the Student Loan Gods. Thank you for calling. You owe us 900$ can you make a payment? No? Are you sure? Are you sure you're sure? You suck, you know that? Yes ma'am, I do but I just cancelled my debit card, a client is MIA and I'm having Serious Financial Problems Right This Second You're The Cherry On Top (I would've said yes if you'd called last week thank you for not). Backdated forebearance expiring January. Bonus.

Off to the grocery store.

~75$ worth of provisions no I don't have a Customer Tracking Card do you take checks? Yes? Oh, see previous? Four to five days to "clear"? Awesome. Watch me get ready to shout now. Winding up for some Wolverine-styled muscle-straining antics when a nice neighborhood lady name of Janet injects herself into the conversation. She pays for my groceries (using the Customer Tracking Card, so hey - discount!) and I make my check out to her.

Stomp home.

Sock everything away and hit the laundromat. Decide I'm too grrr and argh and sweaty to worry about ATC at the moment, read Bester. Wrap laundry, change into the first clean clothes I've been within minimum safe distance of in six days.

Stink free.

Catch the bus.

Driver lets me off outside the bank, saving a ten or more minute wait wandering through traffic lights. Withdraw petty cash, stomp to work. Explain why I'm 45 minutes later than stated, summarize previous, realize I left my kit bag (cables for camera and ipod and my face. Art supplies) at home.

Never fear, for Chris has Curse of the Golden Vampire : Mass Destruction.

Crunchy.

Inform Chris of my Amazon purchase of Fall of Because (Life is Easy) and Techno Animal (The Brotherhood of the Bomb). Both of which should be arriving at work at some point late this week, alongside Substance, solidifying Amazon as the pangalactic used CD bin I've always wanted but have yet to stumble across otherwise.

It's a Broadrick week.

Breath.

Somewhere between The Upstage and ten minutes ago, my debit card went missing.

There's a possibility it may be at my house - albeit a very remote one.

Trying to save the freakout until then.

Update, 2223 : k, it ain't here. Looks like dinner's half a bag of combos, and it looks like tomorrow's grocery run is going to have to be done with a check. Assuming they even take those anymore. Gross.

A couple of weeks ago, Arvin - one of the guys I frequently drink with - mentioned that the local Apple Store sold refurbished stuff as well as the usual high priced first-cut Mac cocaine. Stop in and ask for pricing and so forth. Disclaimer, Arvin's an AS employee and is the kind of person that would know these things, etceteras.

To cut a long story involving Jason, the waterfront, Target not stocking pants in my size and Eides short : The Apple Store isn't next to a Banana Republic. It's next to a Rite Aid (it may actually be near a Banana Republic, but I didn't see one). It's disturbingly clean and looks like it was designed by Stanley Kubrick. There were a hell of a lot of people in it for 8pm on a Friday night, most of them college kids, the rest of them either employees or the sort of people who don't know much about computers (eg the so-called "Target Market"). Talk to Arvin about refurbs, start leaning in the direction of a 30 gig Photo but hey, look! A 6g mini, silver, refurbed (with warranty, etc.)- for the price of a 2g nano! Sold!

It was financially irresponsible of me - mindalteringly stupidly irresponsible - but after the hour or so of ROD STEWART and fucking SOUL ASYLUM (I hate that single, so very, very much- just thinking of the band gets that whinyass thing stuck in my head, makes me want to stab my brain with a fork) I suffered while pants-hunting, after the drooling inbred honkings of yinzers exploring the uses of public transit as a dating service, I found myself more than willing to pay anything to end that pain forever - anything at all.

Next time I stomp into Target to not find pants, I'll have Whitehouse, Joy Division and Gridlock to filter out the badness. I will have an easy and painless method of filtering out meta-corporate focus-group "taste" and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the thrill of victory gives me an erection. No sir.

No point in going into details - you've either already drank the kool-aid or you're thinking about it or you can't afford it or you think the whole fad is for fags or whatever. The iPod is a work of art, the interface is great, the learning curve is as close to horizontal as it's possible to get in a piece of consumer electronics, and just by existing the thing underscores just how horribly, skull-fuckingly retarded every non-Apple product designer on the face of the planet is. We're talking massive congenital neurological impairment here. Look at any Motorola product, any Sony product, and compare form factor, features, functionality and interface and you too will be wondering what sort of crack these high-paid retards are smoking. I hate the price tag on Apple kit but I'm still wishing they made a cel phone, since I have yet to find one that hasn't been designed by a special olympics team doped to the gills on PCP.

I use Apple kit because at its worst it sucks less than everything else on the market and at its best - and believe me, the iPod is easily the best example of Apple engineering - it points out just how bad all other product design is. Doesn't matter if it's software or hardware, kiddies - you pay that extra few hundred bucks for underpowered kit because the people that put it together actually care about what they're doing more than they care about making mortgage payments or getting laid or what's on O'Reilly tonight.

Straight up.

The only real downside is that the thing came with a USB 2.0 cable, which doesn't seem to want to charge from the USB 2.0 PCI board in my home G4. Grr. I'll need a Firewire docking thinger (MSRP : 30$) to get the maximum bang for the buck with my home and portable kit - in the meantime, Sputnik gets tethered at work. Both Arvin and bda have offered spares. It'll be cool if one falls into my lap, but I'm not counting on it. // Update - cables are like five bucks on ebay. Kids these days!

Oh, and those dorky white earbuds have better bass than my old rotted out Sonys. Bonus.

Front 242 US tour. With shows in Cleveland, Buffalo and Philly, they paint a nice big circle around the smouldering ruin of the Pittsburgh club scene.

SQUEEE!

00:00 < gothlios> my door key snapped off in the deadbolt.
00:00 < gothlios> in through the window.
00:00 < gothlios> phoner to a friend with a dupe.
00:00 < gothlios> at 230am.
00:01 < gothlios> because I'll be damned if I'm leaving a house unsecured while I'm at work {on Sunday}.
00:01 < gothlios> get that taken care of and tested.
00:01 < gothlios> pull the key-stub out with pliers.
00:01 < gothlios> take pix.
00:01 < gothlios> document the rent in my leg from the bike in the alleyway.
00:01 < gothlios> pizza in oven.
00:01 < gothlios> wait 10.
00:01 < gothlios> eat, collapse.
00:01 < gothlios> work, blog.

Thanks loads to Roy for actually being awake and available. And willing to put up with me drunk, pissed off and otherwise put out over the whole "crawling in through a window" thing. This isn't the first time I've had to do it, but it is the first time it's been a first floor window and not my fault (the last time it was my fault, I got in through a second floor window, but that was another house and another ((larger)) set of bruises).

When this roommate deadbolts the door, it takes a motherfucking RHINOCEROS to turn the fucking lock. I'm sure his torque is handy for jars and shit, but his lack of consideration for my vastly inferior musculature is rivaled only by my ability to blast 80s pop and power noise at the least convenient parts of his sleep cycle.

In the process of getting into Teh Haus, I forcibly dislocated a nickel's worth of skin from my left shin and smashed the hell out of my left elbow. The elbow smash is just now starting to make noise, and boy, that noise is grumpy.

Good thing my major design obligation for the weekend has been taken care of.

00:09 -!- MyAss [443cf3c0@chat.efnet.org] has joined #pumpcon
Day changed to 10 Sep 2005
01:20 < MyAss> HUGHLUGHLUGH
01:20 < MyAss> HUGHLUGHLUGHHUGHLUGHLUGH
01:20 < MyAss> HUGHLUGHLUGHHUGHLUGHLUGHHUGHLUGHLUGH
01:20 < MyAss> *splat*
02:52 -!- MyAss [443cf3c0@chat.efnet.org] has quit [Quit: http://chat.efnet.org/ ]

 

Boxed up for shipping and in transit on the 54c. A garbage bag felt like a pretty gauche transit shroud, so I opted for my never-worn You know what your problem is? You're stupid. shirt.

 

In the Smithmobile and the last stop in Pittsburgh. The FedEx guy was pretty cool, and shipping was ridiculously cheap - I spend more on comic books.

Shipping weight : 11.65 lbs.

Pismo hits Philly on Monday and will be heading to Baton Rouge, Louisiana shortly after that.

Mike runs a blog about music.

I've just now noticed this. Somehow failed to see the "related" links for quite some time.

But then, I'm the guy who asked him "Who's Bob Ross, and should I care?" in the middle of an otherwise dead-quiet class, as, at the age of 19, I was completely clueless and felt I should know.

I - an artist - didn't know who Bob Fucking ROSS was.

Just imagine what other sorts of cultural "common sense" I'd missed out on.

Mike's the first guy I ever met who actually listened to neat stuff - whatever it was, it wasn't the shit pouring out of popular radio and it wasn't the Metal/Industrial (Fear Factory, Die Krupps, KMFDM) I was into at the time. During our stint as roommates, his taste and ready ability to discuss music had a formative impact on my otherwise nearly-blank aural palette. Mike got me curious about music at an "early"* age, and his blog is doing it all over again. The bastard.

Go read. J. Whitehouse and a lot of the DCR subtext wouldn't be what it is without him.

* For me. Life As I Know It having started roughly 8 years ago.

20:14 <@ejp> I wonder if this is related to my uncanny understanding of how maglites work that I found the other week.
20:14 <@solios> you found the other week?
20:14 <@xeno_beer> i want one.
20:14 <@solios> where did you leave it?
20:14 * xeno_beer stares at ejp
20:14 <@xeno_beer> GIVE IT BACK IT'S MINE
20:15 <@ejp> xeno_beer: what? I had nothing to do with a gnomechair
20:15 <@xeno_beer> no, the week
20:15 <@xeno_beer> i want it.
20:15 <@ejp> oh, no.
20:15 <@ejp> I found the knowledge.
20:15 <@xeno_beer> i am missing several.
20:15 <@solios> it's the beer.
20:15 <@xeno_beer> yeah, well, i'm missing that too

18:49 <solios> it's going to rock.
18:50 <xeno_beer> or suck.
18:50 <solios> that too.
18:50 <xeno_beer> and even then, it'll rock Past Tense.
18:50 <solios> yup.
18:50 <solios> wait.
18:50 <solios> no.
18:50 <solios> if it rocks it rocks.
18:50 <solios> if it sucks it's Awesome.
18:50 <xeno_beer> poit.
18:50 <xeno_beer> especially After.

Shannon Sullivan's Doctor Who Episode Guide. Covers 1963 through present - all 26 original seasons, information on the "new series", and all of the specials. Staggering amounts of production detail and light on the spoilers. Awesome.

Realized on walk through Shenley, earlier:

1. DCR (the comic) is about Before The Darkness. // or rather, attempting to capture / isolate specific elements that separate Before from After.

2. DCR is also about The Darkness. I realized a few weeks ago exactly how to say what I need to say and I can't say it in words. Power Of The Image, etc.

3. DCR isn't really about After The Darkness. The Dualist deals with that in certain ways. After The Darkness, focus shifts into something a lot less internalized.

In theory, anyway. This thing's got a mind of its own - all I do is pick up the pieces and put them together in a more accessible fashion. Boiling off the dross in the process.

1. NFI why Apple didn't push the dmg out to Akamai. 3.4 k/s when I dumped 4.9 onto a Windows box at 2450.0 two weeks ago? Kids these days.

2. I skipped 4.9 out of a general disinterest in podcasting. I don't do the podcasting thing. I can work and "think"* with music but I can't work and think with talking going on, and the icon's pretty glaring. So I stayed on 4.8, and did a "test install" of 5 on a spare machine. Podcasting can be turned off in "Parental Controls." Bonus.

3. The interface isn't Puffy And Sluggish anymore. Not only is it visibly faster on older (and current) machines, it gets rid of a whole bunch of unused chunkiness that was just eating space.

So the starboard head looks like this now:

Yes, ATC has character specific playlists. As well as two "Dualist" playlists. DCR is split into Metal and Everything Else, and the Godflesh "smart" playlist eats a lot of eartime.

4. The "shine" on the play display makes the song title harder to read, at least to my smeared-out eyes.

After a quick grab-and-poke, it's obvious that the text itself isn't any different - creating the impression that the output is layered "over" the display rather than "under" it. Goofy.

Oh, and apparently the "make folders in the Source pane" thing is new to 5. I didn't mention it previously because I thought it was one of those things I'd just totally failed to notice. I can't tell you how nice this is for iPod syncing and the like.

* In much the same way a GPU "thinks" about barfing textured and lit polys onto the screen. Heavy lifting in photoshop or FCP is a matter of sinking into a trancelike state where the work just flows. It ain't problem-solving- that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

11:30 < esch> solios: The Harry Potter iPod is the worst thing that's ever happened.
11:30 < solios> I thought Chacarron was?
11:33 < esch> Chacarron is the musical holocaust.
11:36 < mdxi> "[Steve Jobs] then trotted out Madonna via iChat from London (where's she's recovering from her recent birthday fall off a horse)."
11:38 < solios> o_o
11:39 < esch> Nice choice of words. (trotted)
11:41 < mdxi> that freakin harry potter ipod is $550
11:41 < mdxi> $250 of which is the audiobooks (available separately)
11:41 * ejp hugs his 40g
11:42 < esch> give me $250 and I'll read the fuckers to you.
11:42 < ejp> yeah, but you'd replace "wand" with "penis".
11:42 < esch> That's an extra $50.
11:42 < esch> pervert.

People scoff when I say I live in the Fight Club House.

"Live" is too strong a word, but it's easier to spit out than "watch Doctor Who, shower and sleep," so hey. Live it is.

Awhile back, my friend Sean lost interest in computing and moved. I wound up with a lot of his kit, thinking I'd have a use for it. Turns out I mostly didn't, which has made the basement one hell of a mess.

  

That isn't all of it, unfortunately. The USPS boxes are full of cables and equipment and there's a few more boxes of Keyboards And Shit in my room, along with several machines, all 68k and PPC, and all very much useless for any application beyond, say, old versions of Office and versions of MacOS that don't handle iTunes.

I try not to think about this mess. Mostly because I like thinking about other things and don't like the idea of hundreds of pounds of obsolete Cupertino emissions harshing my mellow.

Obviously I'm going to have to do something about it at some point - I've already given functional machines to Ben, Amy, Ann, Roy (he got two), Randy (also two but hey, one died), Ray, Drew (cursed him with a 4400), and Theresa. So the decent PPC kit has already been shipped out.

I'm wondering if ebay is worth the hassle.

Yes, those are Return of the Jedi sheets.

I reformatted and reinstalled Pismo last night, and became somewhat irritated when I noticed that the batteries weren't charging. At all. From Classic or 10.4.

I'm assuming Hunter actually needs the professed ability of the machine to remain functional at great distances from a 110VAC source, so this is, as they say, an issue.

It's a given that if you leave a powerbook unplugged for a few months, the batteries are going to discharge. If you've got 69 month old (har har. Thus spake coconutBattery) lithium ions, one of which had a ten minute charge the last time you used it, the other of which held for three hours, they probably aren't going to come back. Unless it's the power management unit (see below), you're looking at at least 140$. 280$ to replace both batteries, 320$ to splurge on a pair of the the 7200mAh "high capacity" versions. Pismo hardware doesn't allow for "battery reconditioning" software to work its mojo, and if I had a Lombard on hand (same batteries, but a logic board that allows for softwar battery recondition) I'd be cartoning that for FedEx.

It's also a given that NVRAM batteries typically have an active life of 5 years. While this isn't much of an issue for desktops (3.5v lion, looks like a third of an AA cell, roughly 12-15$ at 'shack), it's a 40$ replacement part. In the event that the PMU is fried and needs replaced? That's another 60$.

Cosmetically, the hinges need replaced. That's a whole lot of ebay and a shitload of work.

At the very least, the machine needs a new battery and a new PRAM/NVRAM battery. MSRP 180$. To put this in context, I paid 400$ for The Last Of The G3 iBooks, cherried up with some light case wear- a machine that's twice the speed of pismo and a hell of a lot lighter. Admittedly a sweet deal, but it underscores the fact that I got a whole new machine for twice the price of what it's going to take to make my old one mobile - which is still quite a bit less than what new kit is going for.

If Hunter can actually use it, I still intend to ship it to him - it's packed up and ready to lug to FedEx - but something tells me that this isn't exactly what he needs at this juncture.

===============

Update : Turns out that despite the warts, a working and portable OS X machine trumps a win98se tower any day of the week. Pismo ships out Thursday or Friday, FedEx.

I wonder how long it's going to be before I stop typing m e r - into the URL bar when I'm thinking "must.... post... to.... blog....".

I still think my iBook has the same keyboard layout as my powerbook, and your right hand is the one that you write with. They didn't teach that cute little "left hand forms an L" thing in my first grade, dammit.

You weren't allowed to print, either - despite the fact that most of the teachers did. Grades were docked, etc. Do as I say and so forth.

There's a reason people tweak out and have to go for training or classes or what have you when an OS or office suite or printer or $work_implement changes completely - they've stopped thinking about the process and are effectively wearing it.

Hangovers (for me, anyway) turn off the appetite drops the blood sugar shuts off the brain {and|or} does happy fun trancethings to the cognition, which is sort of drifting around on the verge of potentiality, half-drunkenly slapping against the railing.

For the moment, comments have been enabled for noise. We'll see how long this functionality sticks around - a comment-enabled ATC lasted about ten minutes.

Older and wiser, etc.

Since the general intent of the site is to scream "THIS IS PITTSBURGH!" and "I LIKE INDUSTRIAL SO I'M DOING AN INDUSTRIAL COMIC SINCE NOBODY ELSE IS DAMMIT!!!!" as loud as possible, I'm assuming that comments will eventually fit into this somehow.

Check one, check two. Check check, sound check.

12:07 <@john> can anyone recommend good rackmount power distribution gear other than APC ?
12:08 < solios> Belkin.
12:08 < solios> dunno about racking.
12:08 < ejp> blackbox stuff is always good
12:08 < solios> our idea of a "rack" at work is a fucking cart with a few towers thrown onto it.
12:08 < ejp> my "rack" is a metal/wood shelf system I got from costco. :)
12:08 <@john> "uh.. yeah, the rack... it rolled away"
12:09 < solios> I've got pix.
12:09 < solios> sec.
12:13 < solios>

12:14 < ejp> oh, those.
12:14 * ejp has 2
12:14 < ejp> but I wisely left the wheels in a bag. :)

Since I upgraded from a Pismo-series powerbook to a 900mhz iBook a few months ago, my battle-worn pismo has been sitting on my bookshelf, gathering dust. Waiting for a mission.

Then bda asked me if I had any spare laptops. His friend Hunter - a man I've met all of twice - is from Baton Rouge and is currently preparing to head down and help with cleanup and relief efforts.

And Hunter needs a laptop.

I initially begged off, since Pismo is battleworn and the hinges are floppy and deep down I'm a selfish bastard who's loath to give up kit for any reason, ever - especially when I'm emotionally attached to it. And that was that, for an hour or two.

Then I realized I couldn't stop thinking about the situation, and that the decision had, in fact, already been made. Hunter's the kind of guy who leaves a lasting impression.

Friday my old laptop heads for Baton Rouge by way of Philadelphia. Earlier if I can swing it.

The Pittsburgh section is technically online - it uses the same templates as noise and will be updated much less frequently.

The intent is to do "articles" and photo dumps - the articles are still in a hazy state of indecision and the photo dump element will need some more work before it's viable. But hey, it's a Start and it's Part Of The DCR Project, and a nice test of front page integration.

... is that while it results in the occasional manage a trois, memory hole, or other fun bits, it also - more often than not - results in incoherent arguments and bullshit like the previous post.

Oh, and it sticks to your ribs.

I find it vaguely disturbing that despite the overwhelming suck that is the disaster-of-the-season, my roommate's girlfriend and I would argue over the definition of refugee.

Etymology: French réfugié, past participle of (se) réfugier to take refuge, from Latin refugium : one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.

Scary thing is, she was right. My take was that NOLA is effectively Gone and the survivors need to go somewhere - they need REFUGE - whereas the technical definition specifies foreign country - so we're splitting hairs, but she's still technically correct - which means Jackson is, which means we've a few hundred THOUSAND "displaced Americans" who need food and water and blankets and shelter and medicine and assurances that this is as bad as it's ever going to get, ever.

I feel out of place, out of character- there's a woman with a husband and two children who I talked to on AIM a handfull of times years ago - she was a sysadmin for one of the casino-boats at the time - who is either dead or very much out of a job right now, with no way for me to get ahold of her.... she lived there and worked there and suddenly the fate of a person I've never actually met actually matters to me and I'm very much not used to this sort of thing at all.

Ah, the glories of adulthood.

Mr. Zubler was right - don't grow up until you have to. Once you go out, there's no coming back. Stay in the game long enough and eventually people you know start stopping - they stop being here - and there's a part of you that just never, ever gets used to it.

(...)

Side note, and not exactly news to anyone who's known me - blogging drunk, blogging with low blood sugar - and my compulsion to do such under the influence of either - would be why I have yet to "turn pro."

(1) Sister Machine Gun's 2003 album Influence rocks your socks. If you're one of those people who likes Nine Inch Nails and The Doors, you'll enjoy it. Quite a bit.

(2) Mercury has been End Of Lifed (EOL) and will no longer be updated. Snarky link to here as mercury blog entry 810. It's sticking around for historical purposes, unlike Revision (the old-old site), which was replaced with a splash quite awhile ago.

(3) I've been spelling Benadryl wrong. Holy shit this stuff rocks. I. CAN. BREATHE.

The rush of oxygen to my head is making me high.

Note to self : replace the "playlists" graphic (or text) with something a little more accurate.

ATC and DCR updates today.

Holy shit, etc.

Of course, the DCR bit isn't a "real" strip - I'll be cutting my teeth on one of those either Sunday or Monday, I think - which should give me some idea as to just how much of a pain in the arse this one's going to be.

21:09 < solios> I HAVE BENEDRYL
21:09 * solios chomps
21:10 < y0shi> i have rum
21:11 < solios> lucky you.
21:11 < y0shi> yep. rum & a comfy chair
21:11 < solios> :o
21:12 < solios> benedryl, water, doctor who and a semicomfychair.
21:12 < y0shi> my chairs fucking rock
21:12 < y0shi> ask mdxi
21:12 < solios> heh.
21:12 < solios> I only have the one.
21:12 * y0shi has 2 custom leather chairs + 1 ottoman
21:13 < solios> I want.... wtf are they called...
21:13 < y0shi> if i wasn't drunk and lazy, i'd take pics
21:13 < solios> a papasan.
21:13 < solios> they fucking own.
21:14 < y0shi> i always feel like im gonna break something getting in or out
21:14 < y0shi> + these have a lifetime warranty
21:15 < solios> rock.
21:15 < solios> my command chair was 80$ at walmart.
21:15 < solios> and it sits like it.
21:15 < y0shi> when the cushion wears out, they restuff it for free.
21:15 < y0shi> forever
21:15 < solios> o_O
21:15 < solios> you must've paid a pretty penny for 'em.
21:15 < y0shi> if it breaks, they come to your house and fix it
21:16 < solios> O_o
21:16 < y0shi> yeah. not cheap, but OMG worth every penny
21:16 < solios> :D
21:16 < y0shi> picked the style and the leather, and they build it
21:17 < solios> wow.
21:17 < y0shi> the warranty even covers "bodily fluids"
21:17 < solios> O_o
21:18 < y0shi> and even though they weren't cheap, they weren't much more than a leather chair at a normal furniture store
21:19 < solios> do they make love to your ass?
21:20 < y0shi> only if you aren't wearing pants... which i'm not
21:20 < solios> do they have a website?
21:21 < y0shi> http://www.leathercreations.net/

I hate getting a cold, because it always boils down to this : the cough goes away, the bodyache goes away, the cold sweats go away, the razorblades-in-the-brainpan goes away.... and the congestion and sinus pressure move in, put down roots, set up a foundation, colonize and start drafting legislation.

Ears won't pop. Head feels like it's underwater. Everything's distant and cognition has the consistency of a rubber butterknife. Production suffers accordingly and appetite is nonexistent - the sinus crush shuts off just about everything else, anesthetizes the grey matter and leaves the brain floating in a thick, soupy puddle of numb input, fuzzy audio and the ligering impression that my sinus cavity is crushing my brainpan in a mad rush to jack itself through the top of my head.

This has happened at least four times since I quit smoking, and it's always a spate of sunless, soupy, it's-not-air-it's-really-thin-water that triggers it. The liquid filth that is Pittsburgh air gets into my lungs and just doesn't bother to leave, since going back out into that thickass bowel-scented oatmeal this town occasionally calls an atmosphere is hard, man.

Last time, I put up with this shit for a week before Benedrylling it Away - since I'm grumping about it now and I'm five days in, I think the grocery store has just jumped onto tomorrow's hit list.

Bitch, bitch, bitch. :P

Alternatively: Glub, glub, glub.

It was easy to write it off as a large-scale Transmetropolitan reenactment until I tuned into a live feed from Baton Rouge.

Scaled version of 3.5 meg image from digitalglobe.com.

nola-intel.org
audio streams

irc.freenode.net : #interdictor and #interdictor-scanner

< ejp> () is crap they can't make out, [] is non-radio comments.

interdictor's livejournal

13:27 <@bda> Oh, I sort of did cfp.
13:28 < solios> ?
13:28 < solios> cfp?
13:28 <@bda> I decided to go with an "example list of possible topics" kind of thing.
13:28 <@bda> Call for papers.
13:28 < solios> ah.
13:29 <@bda> Example categories: Harrowing Stories of Social Engineering; Adventures on the High Information Seas; Bodice-ripping Android Romances; Macabre Tales of Software Sacrifice in the Deep Amazon.com; Noble Savages of the Noo-Sphere and a Plague of ePoker Spam.
13:29 <@bda> Example titles: 5h3rl0ck h0lm3z & the Founding of the Backdoor Skillz.
13:29 < solios> THIS ONE TIME AT BUFFER OVERFLOW CAMP
13:29 <@bda> A Tale of Tau Circuity.
13:30 <@bda> For Whom the Visual Bell Tolls.
13:30 < solios> you think about this shit too much.
13:30 < solios> I blame your time with Andy.
13:30 <@bda> The Big sleep()
13:30 <@bda> haha.
13:30 <@bda> :)
13:30 < solios> <3
13:30 <@bda> I bet no one would get "the Founding of the Backdoor Skills".
13:30 < solios> sounds like a porn.
13:30 < solios> hound of the baskervilles?
13:30 < solios> (sp)
13:30 <@bda> [ zing. ]
13:30 <@bda> :D
13:31 < solios> bonus.

11:43 < ejp> holy crap. so, a client was replacing toner in their ~$10k copier/printer/etc. they bought the wrong toner, so when it didn't fit they OPENED UP the old cartridge and POURED THE NEW TONER IN.
11:44 < ejp> needless to say, it was an entirely different kind of toner and the machine is now FUBAR.
11:50 < solios> ejp: wow.
11:52 < ejp> solios: it's awesome.
11:52 < ejp> it'll be a $500+ service call
11:53 < solios> worst I've seen along those lines was somebody managed to fuck up a toner reload on the AIP printer - the shit was liquid/powdery gunk, you slammed into place and twisted... which locked the toner bottle in place and released it into the machine.
11:53 < solios> only this genius botched the procedure somehow.
11:53 < solios> so the inside of the printer was magenta for a few months.
11:54 < ejp> yeah, the new one is bottles, not cartridges.
11:54 < solios> so they.... uh.
11:54 < solios> they cracked a cartridge.
11:54 < solios> and poured. in. the toner.
11:54 < drusilla> ...

The second of seven panels for the next ATC page is still rendering. In the meantime, I've done some tweaks and general setup to the comic section of DCR ("signal"), as well as some other under-the-hood what-have-you.

I'm at the point with DCR where I have to make the same decisions I'd have to make about any ATC scene, and it's going to take comics - lots of comics - to work out all of the kinks in the information design. Such as it is.

So that's that. In the meantime, DCR is about as good as it gets - until it's time to crunch viz or unload the Pittsburgh section. Thinking I should have the entire first scene of the comic done before I nuke the index.html and "officially" launch the comic and site. Which might take a week or three.

23:36 * ejp & #bed
23:36 -!- You're now known as solios_
23:36 < solios_> goddammit.
23:37 < solios_> we can't go to bed at the same time it'll look suspicious.
23:37 < ejp> this is awkward.
23:37 * solios_ goes.... to the BATHROOM.
23:37 < solios_> yeah, that's the ticket.
23:37 < ejp> yeah, clean that shit off.
23:37 < solios_> will do.
23:37 * solios_ &
23:37 < ejp> *poof*

22:33 < solios> did two steadmanesque sketches of Whoscarf Harb tonight.
22:33 <@bda> O_o
22:33 <@bda> Steadmanesque?
22:33 < solios> Ralph Steadman.
22:34 <@bda> NX
22:34 < solios> loose.
22:34 < solios> [ the Fear And Loathing guy ] # I _WISH_ I could draw like that.
22:34 < solios> anyway.
22:34 < solios> two.
22:34 < solios> (a) Napoleonesque, scarf blowing in wind.
22:35 < ejp> bda: my advice? invade france.
22:35 < solios> (b) actionesque, some sort of kung fu pose, scarf indistinct but blocking off feet so I wouldn't have to draw them, cel in one hand, ipod in the other.
22:35 < ejp> in *summer*
22:35 <@bda> O_o
22:36 < solios> pick one. :P
22:36 < solios> harboleon is pretty easy.
22:36 <@bda> uh (a) please.
22:36 <@bda> harboleon!
22:36 < solios> bryaneau reeves, otoh....
22:36 * bda invades *Russia* in the winter.
22:37 < ejp> good luck with that.
22:37 < solios> well, if you _start_ in the winter...
22:37 < solios> (nobody ever has...)
22:38 < ejp> of course, bda is rather taller than napoleon. he was wee.
22:38 <@bda> harboleon needs not adhere to Napoleonic stature.
22:38 < solios> :D
22:38 < ejp> CHIBI HARB!
22:38 <@bda> ejp: DIENOW
22:38 < solios> XD
22:39 < ejp> it'd rock and you know it

My friend Ben is spending a few months in China. For all intents and purposes, China may as well be Mars, or The Matrix, or similar. Despite what you may have heard, the society is not without its benefits (emphasis mine).

< ben> oh I don't even try thinking of what's in the food
< ben> the hair soup/tree fungus dish was great
< ben> Oh!!!
< ben> Went to an all you can eat pizza buffet with chinese food
< ben> cool thing: the beer is all you can drink too
< ben> I didn't have any, as me no likey beer, but the guys who did said it was ok.

After the Goth thing, Anatomy Of The Ear continues. Here's a rundown of the first hour:

Skinny Puppy (love in vein), Front Line Assembly (iceolate), Leaether Strip (strap me down), Nitzer Ebb (at which point I call in out of a strong sense of moral obligation), The Prodigy remix of Front 242's Religion, Ministry (Just One Fix), station break, KMFDM (split), Hate Department, Nine Inch Nails (Down In It, by request), station identification, followed by stuff I don't recognize (!).

Doom.

16:49 <@esch> I love "Bela Lugosi's Dead"
16:49 <@esch> The title.
16:49 <@esch> IS IT A CONTRACTION, OR DOES HE OWN THEM?

Usually whenever I think to spin up WRCT, they're playing that damned hippy crap or some visor-and-tentpants rich kid's idea of "techno" but this time around, a scheduling gap isn't sucking.

I'd say this is a first, but this is the first place I ever heard Juno Reactor, so I know they occasionally let somebody with taste into the booth. I just never seem to catch them.

Until tonight, anyway- the last time I heard anything like this was in 1998.

Pittsburgh Radio and Television : more thorough coverage of the media spectrum than I could possibly assemble myself.

Still strugging with a FAQ-deployable Mission Statement that sums up the project beyond the somewhat vapid "This is exactly what it needs to be, and I am doing exactly what I need to do exactly the way it needs to be done," since that isn't a hundred percent accurate.

Months on the ladder. Scent memories.

Regardless, it's time I stopped blogging about nothing in particular and started actually blogging about stuff. Right? Right.

To that end I aim to get the last bits I intend to incorporate into the site all cleaned up and socketed before the end of the month. Which means having a few comics in the bag, and at least one or two "writeups" of local subcounteralt cultural refuges.

15:25 <@bda> How long was the fourth Dr's scarf?
15:26 < solios> hm.
15:26 < solios> at least 3.5 meters.
15:26 < solios> he can sit in a chair legs full-out with it wrapped twice around his neck, ends over his toes and the fringe will still splay over the table.
15:31 <@bda> [ reference ]
15:31 <@bda> Sophy is bored. She knits.
15:31 <@bda> I told her to make me a Fourth Doctor Scarf.
15:31 < solios> !
15:31 < solios> 3.5m.
15:31 < solios> :)
15:31 < ejp> I will require pictures.
15:31 <@bda> :D
15:31 <@bda> ?
15:31 < solios> it's gotta go two turns around your neck and still drag on the ground.
15:31 <@bda> Yup.
15:31 < ejp> of the bescarfed harble.
15:32 < solios> the scarf rocks.
15:32 <@bda> Well, we'll see. I doubt she actually has time to knit a ~twelve foot scarf. :P
15:32 < solios> :)
15:32 <@bda> I'd totally wear that shit, though.
15:32 <@bda> All trenchy.
15:32 < solios> hahah.
15:32 <@bda> With a giant rainbow scarf.
15:32 <@bda> Fuckin' A.
15:32 < solios> :D
15:32 <@bda> pwnt.
15:32 < ejp> PhillyPimp
15:32 <@bda> I'd weight the ends, too.
15:32 <@bda> ;P
15:32 < solios> heheh.
15:33 < solios> fuck.
15:33 < solios> my brain.
15:33 < solios> I just pictured you in mirrorshades twirling that shit like bolos.
15:33 < ejp> no thanks
15:34 < solios> dude it would rock and you know it.
15:35 < solios> now I'm going to have to draw it. :(
15:35 <@bda> haha.
15:35 * solios adds harb-with-scarf-fu to the list of things to do while ATC renders.
15:35 <@bda> :X
15:35 <@bda> Make sure you use the new 'shades. :D
15:35 < solios> gimme pix, j0.
15:36 <@bda> Head is shaved down, with trimmed beard.
15:36 <@bda> muaha.
15:37 < ejp> so...kinda of a Hellboy/Rasputin look.
15:37 <@bda> Only Irish.
15:37 < solios> so Spider without the tats cosplaying as Doctor Neo?
15:37 < ejp> ph34r
15:37 <@bda> solios: Head isn't bic'd. :P

Randomly stumbled over this interview with Harlan Ellison while looking for a quote of his for use with something vaguely DCR-related.

Excerpt (read the interview for the required context):

I don't give a shit for morality. What I have in my stories is ethics. Ethics and morality are very different cups of tea. I adhere to a very strict rigor of personal ethics and I demand it of those around me as well. Which is not to say that I am not flawed, that I don't make mistakes, that I don't out of either ignorance or misguidedness do something that is not as ethical as I would wish it to be. But when I learn of my mistakes, I am prepared to take the bone for them.

The main reason for that? They're big, and I still need to tweak the "extended entry" stuff. Better to thunk in some old, halfway-useable information than to sit here and fap-fap-fap until something long enough plops out.

So to speak.

Everything I need to know about the process, at least at this point. Mirrored from my original entry on the Secret About Box, which has been neglected due to my loss of interest in hardware-as-a-hobby.

Because efnet can't keep a connection for longer than a week without something somewhere breaking horribly:

12:55 < solios> how do I tell irssi to stop trying to connect to a server?
12:56 <@john> /help rmreconnect
12:56 < solios> I mean, /quit works real good and all, but there's got to be another solution.
12:56 <@john> or rather /help connect
12:56 < mdxi> do a /server to see the server list; it probably won't have the name you expect
12:56 <@john> look for something like rmreconnect
12:56 < mdxi> then /disconnect servername
12:56 < solios> hm.
12:56 < mdxi> prolly be RECON-1 or such
12:56 <@john> /rmrecdonns
12:56 <@john> /rmreconns
12:56 <@john> rather

I should note that I've been using irssi for a few years and just now thought to ask. :P