11:50 < vai> fagbot: band names 6 is also Tenesmus
11:50 < fagbot> okay, vai.
11:50 < solios_> ?
11:50 < vai> painful spasm of the anal sphincter along with an urgent desire to defecate without the significant production of feces

Lasar found a nifty perl script that builds .dmg files on the command line - totally essential if you need a crontab and resource forks. One of the #215 cats noticed that intramuscular injections using standard length needles don't work on a nation of lardasses, today's NN2S links to a rant that {in}directly points out why Emo sucks, Penny Arcade's RSS feed is still fucked, and there's a site devoted entirely to Princess Leia's metal bikini.

Fancy that.

Jolie wrote me a letter. It showed up on the 22nd, and true to form I filed it in my notebook, unopened, and put it off reading it for almost a week. It was the first physical entry into a brand spanking new Mead Five Star. The second being the Watchmanesque "radioactive" sticker I put on it tonight. The sticker rode around for almost a week in the same pocket and is now on the front cover for the duration.

A letter, yo. Hand written on special (read : not loose-leaf or notebook) paper, startlingly legible.* With the envelope and the stamp and the return address and everything. I got something in the mail that wasn't a bill.

And it smells good. It smells good and handwriting says more about a person than Arial or Geneva or Times New Roman or Comic Sans or Lucida Grande ever will. A handwritten letter is everything email isn't.

<3 letters.

Jolie++

* Reading your own handwriting is analogous to drinking your own urine - though mine is so improvisational at times that it's given me an edge in decoding the writing of others. I think it helps that Jolie's handwriting is a weird blend of cursive and print elements, the way that mine isn't.

Write about heat and then tell Icarus
He got too close
Sucked in the engine of holy ignorance
How could he know?
No such excuse for those who come after him
- Carbon alloy

I've heard say:
"The printed word and the paper it's printed on
- Not worth anythin'. In the time that it takes
To write about doing it, it could be done."
I say 'no' in the oldest formula:
"Fuck this, and fuck you"
If it's good enough for Geoffrey Chaucer
It's OK by me too.

Latent energy in lines of lettering
- One dot a full stop
Swing on a phrase for fresh mobility:
"Mud chokes no eels"
The past and the present, the cheque and the counterfoil
Fill in/tear off
Prop up a point with some lines from the library...
This week's maxim:
"In for a penny, in for a pound" - Information

Shriekback : Care : Lines from the Library

01:16 <@_Lasar> asddfds
01:16 <@_Lasar> http://ppac.deadcityradio.org/
01:17 <@solios> it's awesomest in firefox.
01:17 <@_Lasar> I need to get that microphone
01:17 <@_Lasar> Does it BLINK?
01:17 <@solios> yup
01:17 <@solios> :)
01:18 <@_Lasar> Shit on me, indeed it does.
01:18 <@_Lasar> The background should be animated.
01:18 <@_Lasar> Rotating.
01:18 <@solios> I know. :|
01:18 <@solios> I haven't gotten around to it yet.
01:18 <@_Lasar> With a white frame in between.
01:19 <@_Lasar> Just for the epilleptics.
01:19 <@solios> XD
01:20 <@_Lasar> <e> Look, it's Pisspowera*erk* *thump*
01:20 <@_Lasar> Which is how PPAC gets fans.
01:20 <@_Lasar> It just kills everybody else, until there is nobody who's NOT a fan.
01:21 <@solios> fkjshgjk
01:21 <@solios> YES.

The Jawa Report : Iraq Gun Porn : What's being used in-theater and what the soldiers think of the stuff (src=xeno). That the M-16 still sucks isn't news at all (too many moving parts that are too small - compare to the AK-47), though I'll admit that the resurgence of the M-14 is something of a surprise- that gun is oldskool.

A recent Defensetech post supports the Jawa Report with regards to the M-14, and mentions that the Marines are going back to M-151 jeeps for mortar (hey look they fit on the fucking Osprey), and loads of money is being dumped into updates of the Huey and Cobra helicopters.

So Iraq is now fueled on Vietnam-era technology, with better night vision and the occasional laser-guided bomb. If it ain't broke, etc.

I'm watching oldskool Doctor Who - which is more of a For Entertainment Purposes Only kind of fiction than anything serious, but that's not the point - and the last episode of Season Eight (Third Doctor stuff) is all about the Daemons.

Unfortunately the writers read just enough Golden Dawn and/or Book Four to fuck it all up horribly. I'm talking Weapons Grade Awful here. I mean, yeah, Delgado's got a bitchin' beard - one of the best in television - but, fuck, man. If you're going to kick it hermetic, either MAKE IT UP or DO IT RIGHT. Don't be a fucking asslick and try to make up shit based on or even remotely smelling like GD or B4 processes and procedures. Mixing lame with legit doesn't produce a ghost of legit*, it produces a cube root of lame. We're talking Lone Gunmen pilot degress of lame here - anyone who knows the actual mechanics gets pissed right the hell off and everyone else is both none the wiser and worse off for it.

Monkies!

* If you're going to take a shit on Book Four, have the decency to make it look like you've done more than skim the fucking index. Admittedly, that's just about all I've done with it - but it's enough to get a feel for Proper Procedure, which is more than I can say for Sloman or Yetts (or possibly their editor). Write What You Know, etc.

I absolutely love The Prisoner. Introducing me to it was easily one of the most important parental moves my father ever made - up there with exposing me to The Marine, Aliens, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, A Midnight Clear, as significant and far-reaching as his decision to expose me to Heinlein when I'd barely mastered Seuss, and quite easily as heavy and over-my-head-at-the-time as the Air Force documents he gave me to look through right around the time I was coming to terms with hormones and driving (years away from my eventual failures in both venues).

Number Six was one hell of a role model. And if it wasn't for him, I'd be Just Another Drone. I would have caved, see. But I didn't - my dad showed me what spine meant on a day-to-day basis and Patrick McGoohan showed me what having a spine means - what keeping a fucking SECRET means - not on a day-to-day basis but in situations far more abstract and unlikely- and I've been in plenty of abstract and unlikely situations since I've left the nest. Dad- consciously or otherwise- inculcated a strong moral sense into me, both by example and through media... and while I appreciated the experience and ordeals of the soldier, it was the ordeals of Number Six that I identified with - he wasn't a guy following orders or carrying out a mission... he was a man struggling to resist the business end of a system that he may or may not have risked his life to protect and enforce.

Number Six was, in my opinion, Punk Rock. Patrick McGoohan as Number Six was everything I could have ever possibly wanted in a role model.

He still is, to the maximum extent that any fictional character can be.

Given all of this, it's only natural that the idea of a remake of The Prisoner in todays entertainment climate would make me sick, angry, and somewhat irrational.

The target audience thinks it's going to be shit, or thinks it shouldn't be made at all. I firmly agree - having seen what's happend to TV sci-fi since Berman introduced tits to Voyager, and since the Cold War is fucking over.... I just can't see a 21rst century take on The Prisoner not sucking shit through a tit-plated straw. Especially since the PR blip goes to hemorrhoid-inducing strain to stress the producer of the new version, mentioning McGoohan only in the context of having starred in the original and making careful mention that Liberties Will Be Taken.

Thanks assholes. Fuck me in the ass a little bit harder and tell me to think of England, why don't you. If you want to dig old British sci-fi out of the mass graveyard in the wake of new Doctor Who, give us some fucking Blakes 7 - it can be easily adapted to the Now, and you can do it without pissing off anyone who ever saw past the props and effects of the original run of The Prisoner. Everyone who knew what McGoohan was getting at. Blakes 7 could stand an update. Max Headroom isn't just screaming for one, it's BELLOWING at the top of its lungs from the front row. Talk to Matt Frewer and GET ON IT, chop-chop.

Fucking with The Prisoner is like taking a giant steaming shit on the grave of a much-loved relative. I don't care what your intentions are - there are some things you just Do Not Fuck With.

What next, a remake of Outland starring Rob Schneider as O'Neil? Maybe a remake of The Last Starfighter starring the fucking Wayans brothers as Alex and the Beta Unit, Will Farrell playing Centauri and some pop-eyed CG-insert as Grig? A live action GI Joe?

Keep shitting on my childhood until there's nothing left, assholes. I'll pay for concepts that could use a re-cut, an update, or a continuation - I have a hard time visualizing The Prisoner needing or benefiting from any of these. At worst, an update could very well make it less of a mindbender... and making it less of a mindbender would be diluting or destroying the very thing that it does best.

Bad monkeys, BAD.

Side note: I should probably create an "I'm drunk and I have a KEYBOARD!" category. It would theoretically solve more problems than it would create, or at least excuse the overall attitude of posts such as this one and my "review" of Quake 4.

noun.

An electric circuit that cuts off a radio receiver when the signal is too weak for reception of anything but noise.

There are other definitions, but DCR has something of a radio/telecommunications vibe to it. So.

Obviously I need to make some decisions about what I'm doing with DCR-the-comic. Fucking weekends aren't nearly long enough to jam in all of the other stuff that needs doing and time seems to compress when the days get shorter. Right now I'm thinking along the lines of at least a week off - of ATC AND DCR - while I work on other stuff. Stuff that needs doing (commissions, etc).

If anything, I need enough null time to get bored enough to do some serious long-range planning- this seat-of-the-hangover thing just ain't cuttin' it.

I played the game using a Radeon 9200 (shut up), an Athlon multi-gigahurt-something-or-other and a gig of ram. Win2Ksp4, DX9, peaches and cream. Ran at 640x480 low quality because I CAN. Naturally the game did the nightvision thing right off the bat. I wound up making an alias to the application and set the following in the Target blank:

"C:\Program Files\iD Software\Quake 4\Quake 4.exe" +set com_allowConsole 1 +disconnect +seta r+renderer "ARB"

The first + makes the console ~ instead of the damnass multikey shortcut, the second + skips the damnass splash screens and the third + gets rid of nightvision at the expense of the game looking like it takes place on whatever planet the aliens in the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" come from.

You gamer monkies might tell me that a Radeon 9200 is balls for Quake 4 and you're right. When I have enough money to buy my own Intendo (or possibly a DreAMDcast) it'll have a real video card. Until then, I make do.

1. The game is short. We're talking less than twelve hours from install and driver updates to roll credits. I'll admit I used the god code but I figure if they didn't want people to use it they'd pull a Halo and have no cheats at all. :P As a comparison, it takes me two sittings to do Doom 3 (with the god code, of course). I should note that I think things like health are an annoyance - I logged a few hundred hours on Tetris during my misspent youth and I can assure you that those hours would have been seconds if I'd had a life meter and the fucking blocks were shooting at me. I'm playing this thing to have some fun and health management is only part of that whole "fun" thing in multiplayer, thank you. If you're going to be killing me at least have the decency to make it turn-based so I can plan for it. My reflexes aren't what they used to be.

2. The weapons are completely Unreal Tournament. You might think that's a good thing, I think it means they all look plastic and chintzy and GI Joe. More importantly they feel cheap. Unlike Doom 3, the grenades are useable. The Dark Matter Gun (DMG) looks like a supersoaker. I thought the nail gun would be pretty kickass, but I only used it when I ran out of ammo for other weapons. This didn't happen often, despite Quake 4 carrying on with Quake 2's fine tradition of enemies that take for-fucking-EVER to kill with anything but the biggest damned gun you've got (and sometimes even THEN!). The weapons you'd think have alt-modes do, the weapons you'd think don't need alt-modes don't have them, and the rocket launcher allegedly has an alt-mode but I'll be damned if I could ever get it to work. I think the lightning gun takes too little to kill weak enemies and too much to kill slightly tougher enemies, and a clip-fed shotgun was a very nice touch. Still waiting for a Doom 3 engine flamethrower.

3. Holy fuck scrollwheels are nice. Too bad the game chungs and wallows when you're rolling through your weapons. I dunno if it's shitting its pants loading models or quivering at the thought of what you might do with them but damn that bit got annoying fast.

4. Strauss++

5. The stompy walker thing and the hovertank are cool. They have the same basic weaponry but it feels like the walker's machine gun is orders of magnitude more powerful than the hovertank's mg. Maybe because I had to hose down baddys on the off chance they'd give up and go home with the tank, while the fuckers had the decency to die quickly in the walker.

6. I hate the rail shooter sequences. I somehow managed to get through the first one after loading a quicksave seventeen or eighteen times, but the second rail shooter bit was so fucking frustrating that I skipped the level. The second rail-shooter is a lot like the button-mashing torturething in Metal Gear Solid - up until that point in the game, I was fine... then I COULD NOT FUCKING GET THE HAPPY ENDING ON THAT SCENE NO MATTER FUCKING WHAT BECAUSE I'M NOT FAST ENOUGH FUCK YOU KONAMI. k? k. It spoils it, you see.

7. Strogg Kane looks like a cross between Robocop and Tron. Only meatier, with a Halflife paint job.

8. The derivative bits don't stop there. Combine Halflife Robo-Tron with Unreal weapons in a setting that's initially Doom 3 Meets Quake 2 and all's well for awhile... then (post Tronifiication) BLAMMO! The industrial grit Stops Cold and the game feels like Halo mixed with Doom 3. No sign of Quake grittiness anywhere. Design-wise, the game feels a lot like Doom 3 play mechanics with Halo-styled squad bits, layered onto an OMFG GRITTY and an OMFG BLOO design. That BLOO fails to feel Strogg in much the same way that Bush fails to sound intelligent. Hit the second half - when you're all Master Chief Only Ugliered the fuck up - and just close your eyes and think of England. Only pretend it's the second half of Halo and it's not sucking for a change. It feels like Halo with Unreal weapons, dammit, and the Stroggified marines sounds almost exactly like the zombie marines in Doom 3.

9. This seems like a good place for screenshots. Here's the fattest thing ever and the creepy dude from the second season of Ghost In The Shell : Stand Alone Complex. Hell of a cameo, what with the lack of limbs and all.

 

10. Speaking of Halo and Doom, Quake 4 has a lot of the good shit from both games and almost none of the stupid shit. It's got Halo's checkpoint system, but it also allows you to save whereever you want (fuck you, Bungee!). It's got Doom 3's graphics, but the goddamned flashlight comes with a gun (blaster or machine gun) attached to it. There's only one enemy that teleports and it's in that part of the game where if it were Halo you'd be getting ready to choke whoever thought the Flood was a good idea. Compared to a rabid wave of fucking fungus, an Iron Maiden with locational issues is a breath of fresh air.

11. The marines (as a whole) rock. Good thing most of them are invincible.

12. THERE WAS NO "FIND THE BLUE KEY." Lots of running around using Strogg Powah to open shit up but none of The Usual - proof (along with that damned BLOO) that iD didn't develop the game.

13. Much like Doom 3's attempt to make it look like Hell was slowly consuming the Mars Base (which succeeded in one little section of an entry corridor that had a nice snotty crossfade between some wiring and some entrails and otherwise looked pretty blatant), the whole Strogg cybertechnology thing feels pretty damned forced at points - specifically, this is the second damned iD engine game I've seen an organic thingy jam flush into a wall without so much as a splatter/scar tissue texture around the border. Boo. Big chunks of intestines 'n shit are fine, the fakeass thunderstorm-in-the-heart-chamber-for-dramatic-effect thing was fine, but after The Protagonist gets back to base post-Strogging, the game abandons even the ghost of a pretext at organic-integrated technology. You might as well be on a fucking space station. It's there, don't get me wrong, but I'm one of those assholes who has an extremely powerful and disgusting visual of what this kind of thing could be (read : hard time telling where the tech begins and the squish ends) and Q4 either nails it, gets close, fails, or doesn't even bother trying - often simultaneously. Oh, and they're using limbless and headless torsos as some kind of power source. That's so fucking orginal it hurts.

14. I cheated, so I can't judge difficulty, only annoyance - and I've covered that above. I'm glad the fucking pooper-scooper dudes from Quake 2 aren't around to hurl you all over the place, and I find it amusing that they've been replaced by an upgraded version of the supersoldier from Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Good to see the bastard pounding the floor for cheap Tesla effect as opposed to rubbing his ass all over it like a dog with a bad case of 'roids. It would have been nice to see modern versions of Quake 2 standards, like the four-legged tongue-dog things, the fucking TRAPEZOIDAL DOORS WHAT IS UP WITH THESE DOOM THREE DOORS, and hey, I liked the old Iron Maiden design as well and I don't see why we couldn't have both, dammit. Even the minigun dude would have been neat, but the Quake 2 boss and "Stroggs use organic stuff in their technology!" are the ONLY Q2 influences this game has - it pulls the rest from everything but Q2 - and while it all looks nice and plays nice, it doesn't feel anything at all like Quake 2. But Quake 2 had nothing to do with Quake 1 and Quake 3 was iD's answer to Unreal Tournament, so, uh.... yeah. At least Doom 3 was a straight-up remake. The Quake series is a really cool logo with a string of FPSsen hung off of it like some kind of spiky christmas tree. Consistency isn't exactly a hallmark here, folks.

15. The physics is cute, particularly when you're cutting loose with the DMG. Grenades and rockets don't seem to do much of a splash, so you've gotta hit the weaker enemies right to see any sort of Painkiller goodness - and the bodies don't stick around long (flatly contradicting story bits early in the game), so enjoy it while you can.

Waiting for the Mac version so I can do another assessment of just how shitty either OS X (in the "handling games" sense) or Aspyr's port is. Also multiplayer, especially since Quake 4 has done a vastly better job of handling a whole hell of a lot of enemies being on screen at once. I could have done with a couple of more hours of game time, and a hell of a lot less of the rail-shooter elements (two turned out to be one too many in my experience). Overall, I enjoyed myself - enough so that I'm writing this up at five in the friggin' morning, well after I should have gone home and gone to bed.

02:42 <@xeno> [ The above King Fat screener ]
02:42 <@xeno> vs
02:43 <@xeno> [ What blubberbutt looks like on a real Intendo ]
02:43 <@xeno> YOU PLAYED IT ON A GAMEBOY.
02:43 * xeno continues reading
02:45 <@xeno> in paragraph 13, it's because your rig sucks
02:45 <@solios> uh?
02:45 <@xeno> me I've seen an organic thingy jam flush into a wall without so much as a splatter/scar tissue texture around the border. Boo. Big chunks of intestines 'n shit are fine, the fakeass thunderstorm-in-the-heart-chamber-for-dramatic-effect thing was fine, but after The Protagonist gets back to base post-Stroggin
02:45 <@xeno> etc.
02:45 <@solios> dude, halfway through the game they get sick of being industrial and then it looks like FUCKING HALO.
02:45 <@solios> it's all blue n shit.
02:46 <@xeno> THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE RUNNING IT IN DIRECTX6 YOU WANGWAGON.
02:46 <@solios> 9.
02:46 <@xeno> the rig you are running it on can't even support an eigth of the texturing
02:46 <@xeno> no.
02:46 <@xeno> 9200 will not support 9
02:46 <@solios> sweet.
02:46 <@xeno> nor 8
02:46 <@solios> eh.
02:46 <@xeno> nor SEVEN.
02:46 <@solios> 9 installed.
02:46 <@xeno> yes.
02:47 <@xeno> which is also 8, 7 and 6.
02:47 <@solios> this is me caring:
02:47 <@xeno> for old fucks like you.
02:47 <@xeno> :P
02:47 <@xeno> oh, i care fuck all about the game. i looked at it and went oh look, it's doom3 with ducttape.
02:47 <@xeno> BUT.
02:47 <@solios> yes.

13:44 < xeno> THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS.
13:44 < xeno> Picard++
13:45 < solios> THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS.
13:45 < solios> AND THE NUMBER OF THE LIGHTS SHALL BE FOUR.
13:45 < solios> Not three lights, neither shall there be five.
13:45 < solios> fucking a supersampling makes a huge diff.
13:46 < mdxi> wtf is "supersampling" anyway?
13:46 < solios> it's kind of like a cross between standard anti-aliasing techniques and a Gunstar.
13:46 <@ejp> o_O
13:46 < solios> It also takes for fucking ever. :|
13:47 <@ejp> you just need MO POWAH
13:47 < solios> it increases the sampling area and makes things really amazingly SMOOVE.
13:47 < solios> as opposed to normal AA, which makes things Not Jaggy.
13:47 < solios> Smoove != Not Jaggy
13:48 <@ejp> mdxi: this is, of course, the highly technical explanation. I hope you can follow along.
13:48 < xeno> Smoove++
13:48 < solios> essentially it's a More Prettier feejur and I don't use it for most shots because it's honestly faster to over-render (render big with standard AA and scale) and mung it up a bit in PS than it is to sit here and wait the extre hour or seven that a good supersampling shakedown can take.
13:48 < solios> I can provide samples after five if you'd like a comparison.
13:49 < solios> (eg see what kind of a diff it makes)
13:49 <@ejp> DOWNSAMPLING IN PS MAKES THE BABY JESUS CRY
13:49 < solios> it does now.
13:49 < solios> the new version or next version or whatever hangs onto the original instance in case you upsample.*
13:49 <@ejp> o_O
13:49 <@ejp> that's not kosher dude.
13:49 < solios> so if you take a 1000x1000 thinger and shrink it to 350x350 and then decide you want it at 500x500 instead, it downsamples the 1000x1000 to 500x500.
13:50 < solios> all previous instances of ps would upsample the 350x350 to 500x500.
13:50 < solios> since they didn't retain the 1000x1000.
13:50 < solios> this is in fact a Really Sweet Feature.
13:50 < mdxi> isn't that what "undo" is for?
13:50 <@ejp> if I haven't saved the 1000x1000 as a seperate file, I deserve to be punished with Teh Fuzzy.
13:51 <@ejp> PS has a list of things that aren't undoable.
13:51 < solios> mdxi: yeah, and there's the history, but workflow isn't always like that.
13:51 < solios> I might decide I want Raven to be closer to the camera in frame, when I've been working on six other panels for four hours.

Anti-Aliased on top, then Anti-Aliased with Hammersley sampling. Not the best example (the Daedalus is a fantastic example) but it's the file that was open and test-rendering during the discussion.

As you can see, there's not much of a difference in the super-sampled version:

However, rendering time is orders of magnitude larger - which is why I only use it on stuff that Obviously Benefits from it, such as the Daedalus.

* I could be talking out my ass here. I remember the feature being discussed for either PSCS, PSCS2, or some future version. I agree with Eric and practice the "hang onto the original" method myself, as Photoshop is stubbornly refusing to gain anything in the way of performance with successive releases. I'll be flogging my copy of 5.5 until I can't find a PPC to run it on.

08:35 < solios_> Nov 17 VMS Epoch (base date of U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides), 1858
08:39 < mdxi> speaking of, yesterday evening:
08:39 < mdxi> <me> oooh, look how bright and orange mars is tonight!
08:39 < mdxi> <mars> *blinks*
08:39 < mdxi> <me> crap, it's a plane :(
08:39 < solios_> :|
08:39 < mdxi> <me> well then, that bright thing over there that's NOT blinking must be venus, because it's too white to be mars
08:39 < mdxi> <k> mars has already set anyway
08:39 < solios_> u = pwnt
08:40 < mdxi> <me> what*ever*, Little Miss Ephemeris
08:40 <@bda> Owned.

So apparently a few kiddies got into Andy's wallpaper stash and did that fun little bandwidth-leeching thing wherein they copy-and pasted the link to the wallpaper into their migente, xanga and myspace pages instead of doing the Right Thing* and transferring the document to their own webspace.

The wallpaper in question was a grossly unoptimized desktop I'd created in September of 2003, so it seemed fitting to suggest other material from the same year as a mod_rewrite replacement. Weapons grade material.

18:39 <@bda> [ xanga and myspace kiddies ] # Isn't that one of yours, solios?
18:40 <@bda> [ migente link ]
18:40 <@bda> Body {background-color: #000000; background-image: url("[ a file in kitten's wallpaper directory ]")
18:40 <@bda> Sure is.
18:40 <@bda> muahah.
18:41 < solios> oh, we gotta pwn that bastard.
18:41 < solios> bda: feel like doing a mod-rewrite to a wangbaby?
18:41 * bda adds a rewrite.
18:41 <@bda> haha.
18:41 <@bda> No.
18:41 < solios> :(
18:41 <@bda> No wangbabies on mnet.
18:41 < solios> it'll FRY HIS BRAIN.
18:41 < solios> doesn't have to be on mnet. :P
18:41 <@bda> There's three of them. :P
18:41 < solios> :)
18:41 <@bda> hmm.
18:42 <@bda> Ok. URL? :)
18:42 < solios> gimme a moment.
18:43 * solios has to tag it...
18:46 < solios> bda: [ about as NSFW as it gets ]
18:47 < solios> <3
18:47 * bda steels himself.
18:47 <@bda> hahaha.

Remember kids : stealing bandwidth is wrong. You might think it's easy and fun, you might think all the cool kids are doing it... but you get what you pay for. It's wrong and it's stupid, since it means all those hawt ch1xx0rz you imagine are drooling all over your myspace profile are now screaming in agony as their eyeballs are incinerated by weapons grade post-pop pr0n-oh-two-one-oh freakprawnz.

* Publicly using my work without my permission will irritate me, but by being a dipshit and doing it this way, you've given morg's bofh and me an opportunity to tell you just how much we love this sort of behaviour. Bad monkeys, bad.

18:54 < solios> what's the command to tail the apache log in realtime?
18:54 <@ejp> tail -f
18:54 < solios> I'm going to blog it this time so I don't forget.
18:54 <@ejp> "man tail"
18:54 < solios> o_o
18:55 -!- mdxi changed the topic to: <@ejp> "man tail"
18:55 < solios> ejp: pwnt.

16:14 <@xeno> !
16:14 <@xeno> WHERE IS TEH LOC.DCR?
16:15 <@ejp> same place the rest of DCR is*
16:16 <@xeno> no, dcr.org works just fine
16:16 <@xeno> loc. gives me a connection timed out.
16:17 <@xeno> huh
16:17 <@xeno> dcr has NEWS.
16:17 * xeno should probably go there more often than never
16:20 <@solios> you have GOT to be SHITTING ME.
16:20 <@solios> WHAT THE HEMMORAGING FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS FUCKING CITY.
16:20 <@solios> xeno: there was a power blink yesterday. I had to go home and fucking turn Gridlock back on.
16:21 <@solios> looks like it did it again. >:|
16:21 <@ejp> YOO. PEE. ESS.

Update : Well, it was juice. AGAIN. Just like yesterday, I get home and my clock's blinking, claiming it's well past 5pm. A five-plus hour outage, which dovetails cleanly against yesterday's issues - someone or something or some sort of Massive Incompetence happened around two in the afternoon on both Tuesday AND Wednesday. I've taken the liberty of borrowing a crappy, completely unused UPS from work - one that'll serve as an emergency patch until I can get some real power management hardware.

What. The. FUCK.

Bonus Round : There was a "wtf internet?!" note from my roommate in the kitchen when I got home to kick shit back on.

* It isn't. DCR is mirrorshades, LOC and Gravicon are gridlock. // DNS, however, is a gridlock and metaserver affair... so if gridlock's down, DCR can be a pain in the patootie to summon up.

idoru:~ solios$ ssh solios@gridlock
ssh: connect to host [ipv4 address] port 22: Operation timed out

I just paid the damned broadband bill, so it's either gayness on the ISP level (all systems normal according to their status thingy and I can ping the gateway from work), or one of the pieces of mail I haven't gotten this week was a termination notice for the power (wouldn't surprise me at all) OR the power blinked (possible, and if it took out the Radeon 9600 again I'mma be pissed).

This puts a dent in my evening, since I now have to detour and delay by at least an hour while I figure out what's up with the box.

Grr.

Update : It was a power blink. The second one in six weeks. No damage this time, though gridlock takes a million billion years to fsck and for some weird reason my switch had to be power cycled. Whew.

08:51 <@bda> http://www.plainparade.org/songs/ # ofmg
08:52 <@ejp> o_o
08:53 <@bda> "The Sixth Borough"
08:53 <@bda> RAGE
08:54 <@ejp> ?
08:54 <@ejp> I just see shitty indie bands redoing songs by *other* shitty indie bands.
08:54 <@bda> New York City has five boroughs.
08:54 < solios> "In short, Philadelphia is poised to be fucking huge. "
08:54 <@bda> Referring to Philly as the "Sixth Borough" implies that Philly is just a suburb of NYC.
08:54 < solios> CNN was all PHILLY MUSIC SCENE PWNZ this summer.
08:54 <@bda> Like say Jersey City.
08:54 <@bda> Which is obviously not the fucking case. :P
08:54 < solios> heh.
08:55 <@ejp> you sure?
08:55 <@bda> Yes.
08:55 <@bda> I am.
08:55 <@bda> Even with all the goddamn New Yorkers moving here. :)
08:55 < solios> heh.
08:55 < solios> dude.
08:55 <@bda> Only in Philly would TWO opening bands get booed off the stage at an NIN concert. ;)
08:56 < solios> everyone in the Pitt goth scene who's spent any length of time in Philly says [the Philly goth/industrial scene* is] a total fucking horrorshow wasteland.
08:56 <@ejp> we don't have a music scene here.
08:56 < solios> apparently the town is balls for industrial.**
08:56 < solios> my friend John has lived there for five years, runs a record label out of Philly and hasn't been able to play a single show there.

* We all know that I care fuckall for the Hipster horror show and that I find their music to be as agonizing as their wardrobe. Pittsburgh's music scene is just as viable as Philly's, especially since Philly seems to be basing its assumption of awesomeness on in the pretext of "any damned wanker with a guitar is worth seeing." The big difference is that Pittsburgh venues are so utterly tied to Organized Sport that playing a gig on a game night is a violation of city law. All Pittsburgh venues will show The Game, regardless of Organized Sport alignment or attitude. The fact that I have yet to see any evidence of similar behavior in Philly is certainly a reason to move there- it's possible for a band to bust out a set without being interrupted or overriden by the irregular bellowings of inebriated proles. Another advantage for Philly is that the place actually has venues, while Pittsburgh seems to be losing them at an average of one a year. Philly is getting Front 242; if a Pittsburgh promoter could even afford them they've got not place to put them.

** For as much difficulty as I have with the scenesters, my Pittsburgh Music Experience™ has always been a question of "Do I go to Ceremony or do i stay home and drink?" Staying home wins when I want to listen to Girls Under Glass more than Imminent Starvation, but I usually go out- mostly because I like the idea of a fence being between my drunk ass and very pretty, very underaged girlies. The idea of going to a "mainstream" bar/club night makes me nauseous- and whenever any blog or newspaper or whatever gets squirty about a city's "music scene," you can bet that they're talking about bands that are inspired by bands that are inspired by bands that are inspired by ripoffs of the bands Mike writes about and not, say, a bunch of Front 242 wannabes with iridescent hair and Hot Topic tags tangling off of their socks.

The Tektek Gaia Dream Creator, courtesy of Jolie.

I also made an avatar of bda using harboleon as reference, and was working on a cute one of drusilla when the server borked, so I made a second one when I got to work, twelve hours later. I also made one of Kate.

Vaguely amused that one hell of a burn turned into one hell of a slump, doing so with a deceptively liquid ease. I haven't drawn Whitehouse since I got back from Philly, and my usual production haunts - bars - have been camped, and not in a good way. Bald bearded assholes rubbing their egomaniacal opinions all over Birmingham like a bad case of genital warts, hormones striving for hookup through the verbal equivalent of interpretive dance in Oakland and the coffee houses are hipster wastelands that leave me thirsting for grenades or thicker goggles and better headphones. I've been drinking so much that I've developed a string of embarassing memory holes the way a thirteen year old acquires zits - unsightly and without even trying. I'm thinking it's these gaps - ranging in size from a few minutes to several hours - that keep me coming back for more, even though I know it's a bad idea.

That or the fact that people are petty, blatant, transparent and intolerable when I'm sober, and are fairly enjoyable after I've had a few drinks. Unfortunately the gap between "social" and "memory hole" is a short one, and I've heard through third parties that I've a nasty habit of being a creepy bastard when I'm on the event horizon of cognition. What little I remember of these bits makes me all the more interested in forgetting them, more out of embarassment than anything else. Playing back memories of trying to hit on girls is strangely worse than the act itself.

The Beehive was a great "office" until too many bipedal leeches latched on, trying to suck me dry with their bullshit and their selfish need. The various bars have gone that route as well - that magical balance of knowing just enough people just well enough to guarantee that little of anything is going to get done.

Long story short - Out is where I do the planning for DCR. Usually on Friday or Saturday nights, but I worked this Saturday so I didn't go Out Friday. And I had approximately five minutes Saturday night before I had to get the defense screens up, which was enough time to warm up with some sketchwork of the next ATC set, but not enough time to do anything useful.

I need a breather, and not from comics - from everything else, since it's everything else that's stridently insisting that it is, once again, One or The Other- a vast and empty desert of production, or the steaming manure pit that any attempt to be social on my own terms invariably devolves into.

20:56 < zeroday> heh ok so in chinese the term "blue film" means pr0n
20:57 < zeroday> so type "blue film" into the translation engine at altavista, then search for those characters
20:57 < zeroday> instant asian pr0n.. this concludes our lesson for today

18:25 < junge> hello guys, how can I convert a txt file to .pdf file?
18:29 < mdxi> why would you *want* to convert a plain text file to a pdf? too much free drivespace?
18:30 < junge> mdxi: because I need to send it to other people. I want to keep the allignment.

solios@gridlock:~$ fortune
Time to be aggressive. Go after a tattooed Virgo.

22:08 * mdxi gets in an argument with #emacs over why you can't center a <span>
22:08 * mdxi has to explain the box model to get anyone to understand
22:09 < solios> O_o
22:09 < solios> why can't you center a span?
22:09 < mdxi> because spans aren't boxes
22:09 < mdxi> they're inline
22:09 < solios> O_o
22:10 < mdxi> only boxes can have their content aligned
22:10 < solios> so a div is a box?
22:10 < mdxi> yes
22:10 < mdxi> and a p is a box
22:10 < mdxi> and table parts are boxes in boxes
22:10 <@ejp> it's like you can't center em/strong/etc
22:10 < solios> yeah
22:10 < mdxi> and headers are boxes
22:11 < mdxi> muse mode attempts to center things in xhtml output by doing <p><span style="text-align: center;">
22:11 < mdxi> the style needs to be on the p.
22:11 < mdxi> i am trying to make them understand this
22:12 < mdxi> kudos for not using <center>
22:12 < mdxi> but...
22:12 < mdxi> apparently no one else has every TRIED it
22:12 < mdxi> because it DON'T WORK
22:14 < solios> I never used span.
22:14 < mdxi> it has its uses. that's not one of them.
22:14 < solios> since I could never figure out what the FUCK it DID when I was plonking with MT templates.
22:14 < mdxi> blah blah <span style="color: blue;">OMFG THIS TEXT IS BLOO</span> blah blah
22:15 < mdxi> arbitrary style application
22:15 < solios> well now.

Joel Trussell's video for Jason Forrest's "War Photographer."

Quicktime, around 28 megs, and the sweetest music video I've seen since Money For Nothing.

(src=captadhoc)

Side note : We're up to 10.4.3 and the Quicktime plugin save dialogue is still hardwired to / and is still limited to 32 character filenames. Go Apple.

14:35 <@_Lasar> What I'd love with strip-ish webcomis is an archive page that displays several comics at once. The clicking drives me mad, especially since all webcomics seem to be hosted on a gameboy.
14:36 <@solios> yes.
14:36 <@solios> DCR takes care of that.
14:36 <@_Lasar> Good.
14:36 <@solios> or will when there's enough story arcs to do useful data modelling.
14:37 <@_Lasar> ...
14:37 <@solios> what?
14:37 <@_Lasar> I think you are the first person evar (and probably the last) to combine the realms of webcomic and data modeling.
14:37 <@solios> hey, you remember how long it took to get ATC's interface !shitty.
14:37 <@solios> uh.
14:37 <@solios> dude.
14:37 <@solios> I'm an artist who goes to hacker conventions.
14:37 <@solios> I care about these things.
14:37 <@solios> :)
14:37 <@_Lasar> Yes.
14:37 <@_Lasar> Yeah.
14:37 <@_Lasar> I didn't object.
14:37 <@solios> :D
14:38 <@_Lasar> I just said nobody else does.

18:35 < mdxi> FRY ME TO ZA MOON
18:36 < mdxi> AND RET ME PRAY AMONG ZHA STAHZ
18:36 < mdxi> RET ME SEE WHAT SPRING IS RIKE
18:36 < mdxi> ON JU-PEE-TAH AND MAHZ
18:37 < mdxi> IN OZZAH WAHDZ / DONGS DONGS ^DONGS^

I'm one of those freaks who's managed to never, ever see a single second of Neon Genesis Evangelion. It's entirely due to lack of caring - I heard the thing had "strong religious overtones." I find "strong religious overtones" about as uninteresting as mecha, and bda's elusive writeup of the NGE movie seems to spell out pretty clearly that NGE is More Of The Same Genre Crap - minor variations on Gundam {Zero|Wing|Holy shit Seed is just Macross with a fucking find-replace, what a waste of time that was}, Gunparade March*, Patlabor, etc.** All of it's about as deep as Front Line Assembly (the canned Delerium rehash with remedial lyrics, not the five seconds of metal-industrial they accidentally shat out in the mid 90s) and the fact I seemed to be watching the same thing again and again and again would be why I've taken up Gin as an entertainment medium. Same lack of variety but it comes with the apathy and vomiting built in.

Unfortunately it's that time of the year where I get to Catch Up On Bills, get a few scary girls to lose interest in me with the overwhelming power of my ABSENCE, nose to the grindstone, get back to comics, less going out and all that jazz. I can't find Wild Palms anywhere and season two of Lost is sucking biker balls, so that leaves NGE. Bda's writeup aside, I know nothing about it (beyond the halfassed guesses and predictions above), so I'll be going into this as virginal as it's possible to get.

11:33 <@ejp> I've alraedy watched the first 10 eps of NGE.
11:33 <@ejp> eh
11:33 < solios> shurg.
11:33 < solios> it's anime, anifags are all OMFG! about it, there's GIGS of Rei porn on 4chan and I haven't seen so much as an anigif.
11:33 < solios> so.
11:40 <@ejp> *Rei* porn?
11:40 <@ejp> that's...odd.
11:41 < solios> not really, no.
11:41 < solios> I fully expect it to be dongs.
11:41 * solios shrugs
11:41 < mdxi> seriously. she's the obvious choice
11:42 < solios> especially since 21-24 are labeled as "directors cut" o_o
11:42 < mdxi> then misato and whatsherface in a tie for second
11:42 < mdxi> then the NERV controller chicks
11:42 < mdxi> then the blonde chick
11:42 < solios> I've only ever seen Rei and that redheaded chick.
11:42 < mdxi> then shinjii's mom
11:42 < mdxi> then shinjii
11:42 < mdxi> and that covers all the girls (HAW)

Further bulletins as events warrant.

* I actually liked GPM, and that had a lot more to do with the story/premise and underutilized psychoactive elements than it did the rockem sockem bits. Pity it went half a season and Stopped.

** Yeah, I just lumped a bunch of wildly divergent series into one overly-generalized category, "Mecha Drama." Why? Simple. It's easy to file NGE as Mecha Drama without giving a shit about the particulars. Escaflowne gets bonus points for being all of this run through a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook - I liked Esca because it was fun, a girl showed it to me, it's about as close to elves-on-motorcycles as I've seen, and DILANDAU IS MY SISTER!. Dig it.

09:53 < maarken> Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
09:53 < maarken> - Henry David Thoreau
09:56 <@waltman> school. marriage. ordination. cooking school. golf.
09:56 < maarken> see?
09:57 <@waltman> he was a wise man, that thoreau

14:29 < drusilla> hehehe
14:29 < drusilla> the guy who's "helping" his fellow students doesn't know what a screenshot is.
14:30 < drusilla> now he does,and wants themto print a screenshot of their Word documents
14:32 < solios> uh.
14:35 < drusilla> THE TIME HAS COME FOR BITCHSLAPPING
14:35 < mdxi> WAIT WAIT FIRST EXPORT THE DOC TO HTML ADN LOAD IT IN IE
14:36 * drusilla bitchslaps shawn for practice
14:37 <@ejp> no, you want to take a screenshot of their word doc, put that into word, then print it.
14:38 < drusilla> ejp: THAT'S WHAT THEY'RE DOING
14:38 <@ejp> oh. oh gods.
14:38 < drusilla> yeah.
14:38 < drusilla> you see my pain
14:40 <@ejp> fire. lots and lots of fire.
14:41 < drusilla> i have fire
14:41 <@ejp> but do you have *enough* fire?
14:41 < solios> no.
14:42 < y0shi> with a little planning, she will
14:43 < drusilla> i set the teenyboppers on fire.
14:43 < drusilla> their hairspray keeps them lit
14:43 < drusilla> i throw them at everyone else.
14:43 < drusilla> they then catch fire.
14:43 < drusilla> admist the panic, the room becomes ablaze.
14:49 * drusilla coughs
14:52 * solios markers 4.5 on the dry erase, waves it around and waits for the russian judge.
14:53 < drusilla> fucker.
14:53 <@ejp> fire++

Pittsburgh is a sequence of convenient habits. Second rate, settling for less because adequate requires the kind of effort that this town has been consciously engineered to circumvent. Easy to lose sight of the big picture, the target destination, between hangovers and the obligations tied to the dance around the basics of survival.

I know what I need to do to get out of this town, and I know what I want to have accomplished before I leave. Habits have optimized to allow a certain degree of performance, leaving the all-important human interaction element to rot somewhere between the Jack Daniels and the Coca-Cola. Social interaction in Pittsburgh feels like sloppy seconds, an inflatable doll. An asshole-inflected, testosterone-loaded emptiness pulling me away from things that need doing.

I've been back in town less than 36 hours and DCR (the comic) is feeling flat, I'm wondering loudly just how much work it's going to take to finish The Dualist, and Pittsburgh is feeling provincial, provincial, provincial. Drinking less (or drinking at home, away from the sucking) will get the tools I need to do this on my own into my hands faster, bring me a few steps closer to civilzation. It'll get me away from people that suck, and being around assholes is certainly a hell of a lot worse than being alone.

Flatter than the rest of the state, with the occasional cow and a shitload of trees. Foliage pics refused to take in focus without having the train window for context.