Advertised as the best Alien Nation since Alien Nation, D9 is actually more like the best Dilbert Meets Robocop With Some Macek-ized Alien Nation Bits since Dilbert, Robocop, or Alien Nation.

Put another way, imagine if The Office met Robocop and the two wandered off and gang-raped Alien Nation before heading home to throw up in the bathtub and pass out on the floor.

Seriously. Gibs. Best film mecha since the ED-209. Lots of good stuff - my only real gripe is the "Body horror," in which the according-to-io9-"LOW"-budget shows up - feels like trying to pull a few Dead Alive scenes from a Cronenberg perspective... and while it's gross enough, it feels like a cinematic trainwreck. As a plot point, teeth and fingernails feel more like like producer-mandated on-a-budget gross-outs than part of the process. Out of place in the face of how well everything else is handled.

The social commentary here isn't race-related, in my opinion - it's not a meditation of black-on-white or skin-on-exoskeleton. It's a meditation on the "value" of middle and upper management. The Prawns have neither, the humans have both - and both are complete assholes. Gloriously incompetent assholes.

As social commentary, it's a step in the right direction.

As mecha design, it's the sexiest thing since the Guges and the best shit-your-pants design since the ED-209.

Otherwise... go read the reviews. Or watch it. Out of this year's Big Screen Scifi, it pushes forward (or Forward Back - see Robocop comments above). Star Trek and Terminator hold the franchise line - D9, being new, also had the balls to be good in a number of ways.

Dilbert. Robocop. The "value" of the PHB in the Modern Urban Environment.

DVD? I'll probably buy it.

Sequel? I'd definitely watch it.

If only for the gore.

THE GIBS. Did they hire Verhoeven as a consultant? The gibs, man. The gibs.

Much love for the gibs.

Originally posted as a Facebook Note. Post started life as a facebook update/comment/post/whatever, though that input blank started to choke after the first paragraph.

Previous, SPELLED CORRECTLY WITH A REAL KEYBOARD**:

knows that talking about work on FB is roughly equivalent to telling all of your sig. other's friends and family how they perform in the sack. Not only does it abbreviate the relationship, nobody wants to hear about it. You want to talk about work, use LinkedIn. You want to *bitch* about work, use IM or IRC. Your career will thank you. *I* will thank you.

(end that bit)

Seriously.

Back in '69, I didn't have a care.

On the one hand, reports are trickling in about people getting fired for facebooking. That's bad. On the other hand, anything you tell the world with regard to what you're doing oughtta be framed in the context of just how awesome this particular moment of your life *IS*. Doesn't matter how you feel about it- you cant the camera at the right angle, almost every job is Crucial.

You wouldn't be paid for it otherwise.

On the gripping hand, the morale in my workplace is so poor that reading work opinion - even INFERRED work opinion - outside of work is just TOO MUCH. What I'm doing is one thing. The projects I'm working on are one thing. The noise I'm required to filter out in order to accomplish my tasks.... well, through facebook, they've bled out of the workplace and into my browser. That I feel compelled to rant as a result should serve to underscore the severity of the issue more effectively than griping about the situation itself ever could.

I'm not specifically referring to coworkers in this context - I'm referring to the general concept of pissing and moaning about work through Facebook.

My coworkers aren't the only guilty parties here - I read friends bitching about work on FB, I think two things: first, "you idiot." and second, "the 'ignore' button is riiiiiiiiight there.....".

FB IS NOT PRIVATE, PEOPLE. Everything you say here, you say to the world.

Act accordingly.

I'm not a case example - not by a long shot - but for frack's sake, that isn't the point. Who you are IS NOT who you THINK you are - To the world, you are what you TELL the world.

And I'm telling the world that The Job implies a certain amount of professionalism with regards to these so-called "social networks."

LinkedIn and your Sig. Other are the entities you inform about Work. Exalt to the former and unload on the latter. Facebook is the focal point for the entities you tell about everything else. Your cat. Your new video card. You cut yourself shaving this morning. The mailman left your mailbox open and your bank statement is mush. The girl (or boy) you wait for the bus with might have looked at you That Way but you're not sure- advice?

Repeat after me :

This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for killing, the other's for fun.

IRC, instant messaging software, social networking web applications - they all have some kind of equivalent of "/ignore" - and the thing is, that command is invoked by the offended party. Not the world. Not your boss. I can willfully cease to listen to you on Facebook (or AIM or IRC or any other digital medium), but that doesn't stop the people that you don't want hearing your angst from turning on, tuning in, dropping by.

This is the internet. Everything you say Can And Will be used against you.

Keep that in mind, please.

For your sake... and for my sanity.

Separate the planes. Keep your work at work and share the rest with whomever you choose to - these days, making a clear distinction between the two is healthier than eliminating any number of vices from your diet.

Compartmentalize. The 10.5+ OS X Dictionary.app states a particularly vivid example - an example that is particularly applicable in this instance.

End rant.

Resume bed prep.

* Qualified : I am - and am likely to remain - deeply foolish. I just happen to have a good amount of sense with regards to the Method of Separation of Church And State and a basic concept of how that extrapolates to the Separation of Social Life and Work. My ability or inability to move on said planes has no relation to my ability to perceive said relationships.

In some ways, it's a lot like being able to perceive the merits of Renoir's sketchbook, with my own capabilities comparatively restricted.

** This orgy of exhausted pretension (sp?) started life as a horribly-spelled iPhone post. Transition to real (tactile) equipment and the rest of the post results. The horror, the horror.

Finally sneezed until I broke something. Around sneeze 220-250 on Sunday, shooting pains down the left and right arms, across the shoulders. Every sneeze since (many, explosive) feels like multiple jabs with thousands of dull pins. Right arm is perpetually "off" (not pins and needles, but feels like it's just come out of it... only it's felt that way all day).

This has happened before, though it's been a very long time - last year or the year before, possibly.

The internet is full of "OH THAT HAPPENS TO YOU TOO?! WHAT THE HELL IS IT?!" with no clear indication of what the problem is beyond the possibility of a pinched nerve. The proposed disorder is a wash, as I have none of the other symptoms (notably - headaches).

When I sneeze, it's with all the force and gusto of a small hand grenade. The force equivalent of being punched in the head, only without the bruising. This used to be a voluntary choice - I found in my teens that going for maximum effort would reduce the number of sneezes from half a dozen to a dozen "hah-choo!s" to two or three "GUH-FFFFFBLAAARH!s" so I stuck with it. I don't think I could "baby sneeze" if I had to these days - an allergy-related sneeze is a full body convulsion.

Allergies have by-and-large left me alone this year, until yesterday. I'd had a couple of bad days in June and July, but the 23rd seemed bound and determined to make up for the weeks-long pleasure of unoccluded sinuses. A weeks worth of regular sneezing in three or four hours, after which the pain started.

Given that kind of perpetual involuntary physical abuse, it was only a matter of time until something went blooey.

This should abate with the pollen count - if it gets worse or starts to accompany regular garden variety daily sneezing, then something's definitely busted.

Yes, I have health insurance. No, that doesn't mean I can presently afford the co-pay for a doctor's visit... especially when I'll probably walk out with at best advice to buy some claritin and at worse an MRI or something. My ability to work is not impaired, just... irritated.

"Watchmen" would be 310% better without the "soundtrack." I'm hard pressed to think of a movie with a louder, more relentless, even less appropriate and more shoved-up-your-nose song "selection," and I'm drawi...ng a blank. I might have been able to swallow it if Manhattan hadn't sounded like HAL 9000.

That said, it's clear Snyder knows how to handle Rorschach, and doesn't know what to do with Manhattan. The relative satisfaction is... polarizing.

Points for improving the ending.

Strike that. Points for seriously improving the ending.

Points off for the soundtrack, the sex scene(s) (one faithful to a point, the other so relentlessly pointless that it deserves to be its own isolated DVD chapter - you can drop a couple of minutes right there without affecting the plot at all). Points off for not casting David Bowie as Ozymandias.

Points off, again on the soundtrack, for using Wagner for the Vietnam sequence. It was good once, and only once. That scene was so definitive that Flight of the Valkyries is used to specifically evoke that scene (see Rawls using it to humorous effect in season three of The Wire). It has the effect of watering down the entire segment, the same way Nina and Hendrix-covering-Dillon effectively piss all over the scenes they've been slathered over.

There are, to my ear, some serious pacing problems with Manhattan's backstory - things drag when they should zip and zip when they should drag... this is more obvious with the monologue than the visuals. Manhattan's "re-manifestation" made a permanent impression on me, and I've always seen it a certain way. A way that bears no relation to the rapid edits and bored monotone soundbite the movie reduces it to.

Points off for the really horrible Nixon makeup. The FX department can give us a wooden Doctor Manhattan 9000 and a great Rorschach mask, but instead of an Old Nixon we get some kind of Nixon Caricature Deathmask. All of io9's whining about Watchmen's budget vs. gross and they forget to mention that the production apparently spent more on Max Headroom's weird ears than they did on Nixon's face. Hell, they could have hired Frank Langella and saved themselves all kinds of embarrassment... while snagging an actor with the requisite gravitas in the process.

So.

Watchmen?

Points for casting, by-and-large. Nixon's makeup artist being a notable exception. Dan Dreiberg, Rorschach, Rorschach's shrink - all slam-dunks. Ozzy works but that come-and-go accent* and body language just screams David Bowie, which in turn makes me wonder why David Bowie wasn't cast.

The age makeup sucks, the sex sucks, the soundtrack is as horrible as it is inappropriate, I skipped the intro sequence after suffering ten seconds of it, Rorschach rocks and the ending is a massive improvement over the original. Assuming we accept the ending as existing in the same relative spacetime as it does in the book, and assuming we overlook the reappearance of the Wooden Nixon Deathmask, the unnecessary sex and the horrible, horrible soundtrack.

One of the things I love about comics - I can head-score them however I like.

Is it the book? No. Not by a long shot. However, Watchmen-the-movie ejects many of the sludgier, more awkward parts of the story entirely, drastically improves the ending (they had to do something after The Incredibles swiped the entire plot, didn't they?), and is reasonably well cast.... I'd say exceptionally well cast, but that would imply every character nailed, and that isn't the case.

Worth watching once? Sure. Especially in a user-controlled format that enables you to skip the completely superfluous and/or irritating bits (the aforementioned title sequence, sex sequence).

Second time around? Read the comic. Use your imagination to give it the movie ending.

All of the win, none of the fail.... and more importantly, you'll be left with a vague sense of satisfaction, instead of a screaming urge to gib whoever okayed the soundtrack. The horrible, horrible soundtrack.

If you're going to watch a recent Hero Movie a second time, I'd say go for Iron Man or The Dark Knight. They're shorter, there's nothing left out (relatively speaking), and more importantly, Iron Man saves its offensive audio for the end credits and (if memory serves) TDK is completely lacking in fingernails-on-chalkboard "music."

Probably thanks to a rider in Michael Caine's contract.

Final verdict: Of the various Alan Moore works to be adapted to The Big Screen, Watchmen has suffered the least.

Which is not to say that it hasn't suffered, mind you.... but it's no LXG, and it isn't the steaming pile of autofellating bullshit that is the movie "version" of V For Vendetta. Watchmen is fairly entertaining... and with some quick, surgical razor work to the so-called "soundtrack," that "fairly" would be a "very."

Still, hoping I don't get an angry call from my aunt for loaning my 15yo cousin the trade paperback. Hell, the movie was gorier - by a long shot - and he's seen that, so.

* I may not have been paying the strictest attention but I swear that accent disappeared for an entire scene. Confused the hell out of me, that.

 = 

 = 

One time, before I was born, this country wasn't just cool. No. For one shining moment, it was awesome.

Since then we have talked ourselves to death, and buried ourselves in our own confusion.

Vietnam and Watergate proved the public prefers Reality TV to Progress.

Democracy in action - in lieu of progress, we get Virtuality and expensive plans to ship crew to the space station on Russian rockets instead of celebrating The Fortieth with, say... a Manned Landing on Mars.

Or the moon, even.

The NASA of Eisenhower and Kennedy (and Johnson and Nixon, but only as an afterthought) is the NASA everyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s wishes they could have tuned in to.

Our generation has a Space Truck* servicing a Space Telescope. As awesome - and as phenomenally sophisticated - as that is**... our dads got to watch NEIL ARMSTRONG AND BUZZ ALDRIN LAND ON THE MOTHERFUCKING MOON.

No matter our achievements - in this respect, we will always be jealous of our fathers.

(and if anyone can throw me the in-line CSS to vert-align the = up there, I'll buy you a drink.)

P.S. - So dad... where were you and what were you doing on 20 July, 1969? You were more there than I'll ever be - I'll be twice the age that you were when - if - we set foot on the moon again. My kingdom for a taste.

20090717.18:49 : Unpublished earlier due to dissatisfaction with content; republished (and slightly expanded) at xeno's prompting.

* And NASA is planning on shelving the Space Truck and replacing it with.... nothing. There's a whole bunch of stuff we can do with the shuttle that we can't do with Improved Apollo Capsules. The only reason we can't have both (by which I mean an Improved Space Truck that wasn't designed by a committee wearing bellbottoms and an Improved Mini Cooper) is because Congress thinks the F-35 needs two engine options, the Army thinks FCS might actually stop being a money pit some day, and oh yeah, the Entitlement Programs (SS and medi{care|caid}) that are on track to collapse before I'm old enough to need 'em. Less than 20 Billion a year is PEANUTS compared to the money we're pissing away on everything else.

Fuck Goldman Sachs. In the ear.

** Don't get me wrong here. Big HST fan. Much bigger MAN ON THE FRICKING MOON fan. 1080i video of a galaxy being sucked up the asshole of a black hole is bullshit compared to the thought of an astronaut making a snow angel on the moon. Odds favor snow angels on the moon over shooting human poop into a black hole in my lifetime.... or they would if the people we've put in charge of the country's wallet would MAN UP AND GO THERE.

Seriously. Repeated attempts around seven on Friday and a couple of times tonight have all met with a busy signal. I know the immediate family has a gift for gab, but this is excessive.

19:33 : From busy signal to answering machine. O_o Will try for a more substantial (read: two-way) conversation early in the coming week.

(note to self : call earlier next time!)

20:58 : Hahah. Dad called me back (an hour and nineteen minutes ago, according to the call log). Mission Accomplished!

... and it turns out the A. Bertram Chandler compilation I picked up at Eljays last weekend has a Grimes story he hasn't read in it! :O

I just realized that I'm older than my dad was when he married my mom.

I've known that bit for awhile - I just never really thought about it.

The real zinger is I haven't had a date since I was my mom's age when she married my dad.

That, I think about a lot. The time it's been since I've dated, that is - not the age correlation (took four tries to spell that right) thing.

Dad - 1950.
Mom - 1955.
Momendad - 1978.
Me - 1979.

My excuse (which is real, valid, documented and totally pulled out of my ass so mom doesn't think I'm gay* and will continue to hope for grandchildren) is I've been busy with ATC.

Really busy, apparently.

I'll be 30 in 9 days and I'm wondering if I can voodoo up a date. Though I doubt Giant Eagle deli turkey would impress Papa Legba as much as a recently-very-alive chicken... and if it did, I'd use it to cure my insomnia. 2am and I'm not even a little bit tired, gotta be up for work in six hours. Priorities get a bit jumbled this time of {night|life}.

On the off chance... how does one ritually sacrifice deli meat?

Is there a form I have to fill out?

* I'm not, mom! It was a joke!

This weekend my phone pulled a trifecta - ran out of battery, ran out of minutes, went BOOP! and died on me as a friend was halfway into giving me his current location.

So, money to refill the minutes, which I won't have until Friday.

Today, Apple drops the price of the current gen iPhone from Gastronomical to Reasonable.

This Pay-As-You-Go thing worked in the pinch I needed it for... but it's a real hassle to refill, and the finite nature of the beast is such that I use it only for drunk dialing or the very rare call home. Cost for refill minutes vs. cost of a Real Captain Kirk Flip-Phone from any provider but Verizon, vs. the 100$-200$ down and 80$/mo for two years for the iPhone.

Chicken and egg - I don't know how much mileage I'd get out of such a device because I've never had unlimited access to such a device. I never made long distance land line calls because the fees were annoying. I never make calls on the burner because refilling it is a pain in the ass.

Bills out the ass right now - but if I get off of that ass and haul the garbage I have in storage out of storage, it's damned near paid for. Or in the case of a flip-phone, more than paid for.

Apple or Star Trek?

I'd throw in an "or silence," but I've hit a point in my life where that's becoming less and less desirable.

What I really need from a phone is the following:

1. The ability to place and receive phone calls.

So the iPhone is overkill. But it comes with a lot of other funky bits that make a Day Out Without Internet less.... itchy. Better to have and not need, or something.

Addendum - the iPhone interface is the big attractor. Not necessarily the forty trillion "it's a smartphone! it's an n-gage done right!" features. Every mobile I've ever used has an interface designed from the ground up by Complete Retards. I pay a lot extra to run an OS that isn't the bastard child of Motif and CP/M, so I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of paying for a phone that was designed by somebody who gives a shit about the experience.

Saw it. Loved it. It goes to eleven.

Literally, if not figuratively.

Disclaimer : I've watched every single episode of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY (that hurt), ENT (that also hurt) and The Animated Series. I've seen all the movies. I've owned action figures. I've read piles of books. I sleep on Star Wars sheets, but that's another story - the point is, I could have just as easily spent my youth (and adolescence and adulthood and 30s and so forth) sleeping on Uhura instead of Leia.

I haven't learned Klingon. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

I've steeped myself in Trek long enough to have a deep sense of loathing or disappointment (depending on the movie/episode/series) for the Berman/Braga tyranny. As much as I dislike Abrams and his progeny - Lost, Cloverfield, etc... Star Trek is good. Like, actually good.

Steeped as I am, I'll admit to a certain amount of confusion on my part:

It's either actually a good movie, OR I've been so thoroughly disgusted and sickened by the B&B assrape of Treknuity that I'd give anything done by anyone else the highest score possible. Their involvement in the TNG movies and the fact the TNG movies are all seriously weak sauce can not be a coincidence. The B&B era is Not Star Trek. It's sci-fi for the kind of people who Tivo Lifetime. The kind of people for whom Mind of Mencia is dangerous, cutting edge television. The Scary Movie crew could do better.

Clear the Neutron Blasters for firing!

Without giving anything away, I can say this - I welcome the 11th Trek. It's the best Trek film since The Undiscovered Country... which was the best since Wrath of Khan. To compare 11 directly to 6 or 2 would be unfair for a litany of reasons - but it damned sure blows 1, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 straight out of the water. It's deliciously, deliriously FREE! of the B&B POISON. It could be two hours of Spock singing karaoke in a shuttlecraft and it would still be better than the B&B era. The bar has been set low. So low that a drunken slug could fall over it and still be the Best Trek Since Six.

And yet, despite the standards having been torpedoed down to the level of American Politics, Star Trek 11 is good. Not good as in "better than the fifteen years of anal leakage that precedes it." No. The good kind of good.

Maybe not excellent. Maybe not awesome. But damned sure entertaining - entertaining, and (for the most part), respectful to the Right And Proper Trek that it draws from.

B&B tried for over a decade to destroy all that was Good And Holy about Star Trek. Star Trek 11 is all that is Good and Holy about Trek, giving B&B the finger.

Verily, I approve.

I liked it. Go see it. Decide for yourself.

It's not only farm animals.

... a breathalizer attached to the login box.

Think of all the time that would save!

... to develop a three week production and recreation schedule that can work with a two week pay cycle.

To clarify : Work is a three week rotation and has been for a very long time - five on, two off, four on, one off, seven on, three off, repeat. Pay is fortnightly. The "offs" are nice, but that "seven on" ? That Monday is BRUTAL.

I need to figure out how I can meaningfully augment that subsistence wage and continue to make meaningful, non-glacial progress on ATC.

Ram-assing around like I have been for the past ten years has resulted in incremental progress... but also an unclean floor, wearing dirty laundry all too frequently, and a massive email inbox, months and in some cases over a year old, that I still need to catch up on.

Might want to add blogging and DCR to that never-ending list of things I don't do enough of. Two comics projects stopped to redo the only thing I've ever actually finished, a basket of pushing-30, haven't-had-a-date-in-five-years neuroses, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In other news, the main drag of Bloomfield may not be very exciting, but it smells great.

It did today, anyway.

Postscript:

168 - week
===============================
49 - sleep (average, typically 48-54)
40 - work (37.5 paid)
5 - work commute, rounded up
11 (approx) "wind down" time (now)
5 - wake up time (work, unpaid - shower, packing lunch, etc)
5 (approx, depends) - chores (groceries, laundry, booze)
===============================
6-20 - "going out" (time in theater plus transit plus "drunk dialing")
===============================
33-47 - time for art (ATC, freelance, other), eating, smoking, masturbating*, watching TV, spending too much time alone, everything people call "life."**

If only I could buy groceries and do laundry through amazon. :P And by groceries I mean deli - I don't see half a pound of beef getting to my doorstep in useable condition, even with a Prime membership.

* That's technically filed under wind down time. But, yanno... sometimes I'm feelin' saucy.

** I may have more "free time" than you do right now Dad, but I'd kill for some OT. I won't trade you commutes, but I do envy your paycheck.

Last update : 20090310.16:21

Craigslisters contacted: 8

Replies: 5
- Replies that smell funny : 1
- Appointments made : 4
-- Places not looked at due to communications snafu : 1
-- Places looked at : 3
--- Places lost out on : 1
--- Places that will get back to me : 1 (did, best move-in date moved back)
--- Credit check / rental applications filled out : 1
--- CCRAs paid for & delivered : 1

Credit check passed, lease filled out, checks written, utilities switched over (my name is now in the Equitable Gas system - ew, ew, ew!). One to three weeks for internet, move-in scheduled for Wednesday night, giving my Thursday in full to get everything set up, fully vet the plumbing, etceteras.

Oh yeah - it's in Bloomfield. The place won't win any awards but it's more space than I need... and only marginally more expensive than my full wad of rent and utilities when I was at Carey Way.

Further bulletins as events warrant, of course.

For the quarterly bout of whinging, this one's remarkably less emo than previous ejaculations. It would appear that the near-elimination of sucralose from my diet is beginning to pay dividends.

High Fructose Corn Syrup : Anal leakage, running the entire scale from "misting" up to "hurricane," depending on volume and duration of exposure. During peak saturation (approximately 2001), I was changing underwear (and outer-wear) twice a day. Like you needed to hear that.

Aspartame : Headache, joint-ache, and a general mental "wooziness" accompanied by the total obliteration of short term memory. Symptoms equivalent to a finger of whiskey and the non-puking aspects of the flu, simultaneously. The last time I exposed myself to this vile TURNS INTO FORMALDEHYDE FUCK YOU RUMSFELD shite was during a pepsi/iTunes promotion. The work water fountains are even more disgusting, and I wasn't about to give Apple my credit card information. To this day, aspartame-induced buys remain my only iTMS purchases.

Sucralose : Anxiety. Symptoms vary depending on intake - a sugar free Sobe Adrenaline Rush will induce anxiety to such a minimal degree that it mixes in with the rest of the "buzz" whereas a No Fear (whatever they call it, that's the brand name) sugar free rents my brain out to Baikonur for rocket testing. I swear, the top of my head's going to blow clean off. As the side effects of aspartame are disgusting and the side effects of sugar deeply diminish my work capacity, this has been my "artificial sweetener" of choice for the past two or three years. Which explains a lot, really. The local minimart regularly runs out of sugar free sobe and has yet - EVER - to run out of the No Fear variety. Now I know why. Odds are pretty fucking fantastic that a sucralose reaction is a big factor in recent mental difficulties. The question is : what to replace it with?

Sugar (specifically sugar-based energy drinks - Red Bull, Sobe, etc) : Feels like my teeth have been dunked in sandy acid; a sludgy, rickety "high" of tunnel vision followed by a rapid plummeting crash into synaptic molasses. Energy drinks like the Mountain Dew branded "Amp" or the sugar-friendly version of Sobe Adrenaline Rush* taste gritty, leaving an "unclean" feeling in my mouth, followed by the aforementioned rickety pep. For Emergency Use Only.

Caffeine : Focus and a degree of pep, until it wears off.

Ritalin, Adderall, other prescription amphetamine salts** : Same as caffeine. Lasts about twice as long and after awhile I start to feel like the nerves in my thighs are starting to itch.

Starbuck's Doubleshot Espresso : Yes, it's a Starbuck's product. Fact is it's the only drink that provides Awake and Go without Grit, Drip, or Rocket Brain. The fact it's a pain in the ass to get my hands on whereas the rest are legion... well, that's medical america for you. As that google-proofed philospher dude said back before they put the dead guy on the stick - consider diet.

Regular Coffee : Makes my sphincter sneeze and drizzle like it's got hay fever. Yeah, you needed THAT visual. If I liked spray-painting the walls with my ass I'd still be drinking the stuff.

I'm sure Chuck Palahniuk would dunk your brains in an orgy of anal and neurological delights. Burroughs would get hung up about the rectal mucous and obsess about that and venusian invaders for an entire book.

I'm neither. I am, in fact, impeded. Diet informs and this here is a question of extent. Deprived of my SAUCE would I be Mister Rogers, Dave Lister, or Dick Cheney? How much of who I "am" is a result of chemical stimuli or more relevantly my "improper" reaction to said stimuli?

Prinny, dood.

My chief consideration, as always - there's never enough daylight. If I could subsist on four hours of sleep I damned well would. I will be on some kind of upper until I either spontaneously combust or calcify. Or both. Picture that.

* Both the "amp" and the sobe probably use hideous amounts of HFCS - I don't have empties here to check. Not the point. Point is they taste gritty, not yummy. And they impact accordingly.

** Last actual exposure to prescription-grade amphetamine (or amphetamine of any kind, actually) was in 2006. Example provided for context.

From The Orlando Sentinel :

CAPE CANAVERAL – NASA administrator Mike Griffin is not cooperating with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, is obstructing its efforts to get information and has told its leader that she is “not qualified� to judge his rocket program, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

Griffin’s resistance is part of a no-holds-barred effort to preserve the Constellation program, the delayed and over-budget moon rocket that is his signature project.

From Nature :

When one member of the team, who are meant to smooth the transition from Bush-rule to Obama-rule, told Griffin they were “just trying to look under the hood� Griffin replied:

If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar. Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.

We don't want to look under the hood, Mike. We want your head on a pike as a warning to future pork-happy ego-ejaculating administrators that pride is only acceptable when your project works.

At a glance, the best thing that could happen is that Obama fires Griffin, cancels Constellation, and replaces it with DIRECT - an on-paper system that reuses a large amount of the STS technologies without the need to develop a second booster.

We need to get off this rock, in a meaningful way - and Mike Griffin has proven he's not the man for the job.

A comment on this kotaku article, which became long-winded enough to merit preservation:

The internet-as-a-newspaper has several major advantages - not just adblocking. :)

I live in Pittsburgh (a drinking town with a football problem) and if the local media isn't ejaculating Steelers or Penguins coverage all over the top front then it's Doom And Gloom about the airport or public transit. There's far too much sports coverage and the comics page hasn't been worth looking forward to since Calvin & Hobbes ended.

Enter the internet. I can get my news from sites and services that actually report on issues I'm interested in (I don't give a FLAMING SHIT about what Ben Rothenberger had for lunch - I'm more interested in Al Franken's fight for the Senate, and you're going to have to dig deep in a Pittsburgh paper to get any indication that there's a stated named Minnesota anywhere on the map), I can read comics I find amusing, articles on subjects I'm interested in written by writers whose prose is digestible... and most importantly, I can elect to NOT consume anything somebody else thinks I ought to be reading.

While there's been some praise of Gawker/Kotaku in this thread, I think the company is suffering from the same form of USA Today-itis - too many low-content gossip-blithering articles shot up for quotas, paychecks, ad revenue, trying to get the commenting base incited so the sales people have better figures to flash at potential advertisers. Not enough BBC or Guardian grade articles, by a long shot.... but the beeb and the guardian are more broad-ranging with more employees and far less targeted at highly specific demographics. They're also Old Media news services with an old media attitude and an old media attention span.

I like the Old Media attention span, and I hope they keep it - and that New Media (Gawker et al) eventually learn what this "attention span" thing is and learn to embrace it - which is possible, as this article indicates. Until that happens, Gawker continues to be a jumble of bubblegum sound bites with the occasional bit of thought-provoking prose sticking out... just like USA Today, only with comments. Just like Slashdot, only without comment moderation.

One day the news media will evolve to a point where we the reader can have what we want in the way that we want it. For those of us who need something to do in between adderall doses, the future is now. For those of us who want All Articles All The Time - those of us who'd love to declare the Death Of The Sound Bite... that time is still a ways out.

This victory alone is not the change we seek.

--President-Elect Barack Obama, 2008.11.04

Reservations - deep, The Economy could be Vita Severin-grade reservations - throttle my politics. I'm not the only one who won't drink the kool-aid, and I think that's a good thing. The cult of personality scares me about as much as the man's support for the patriot act, and the sooner the new government gets down to business and shows its true colors, the better.

I am not Herbert.

I am, however, giggling like a schoolgirl at Alaska's re-election of Ted "Corruption is a series of tubes" Stevens.

Hah. Hah-hah. HAH!

Hah.

Update, two weeks later - turns out that after an extensive taxpayer dollar-burning recount, Stevens actually lost.

On the one hand, I'm kinda bummed - Stevens was one of my favorite regulars on Republican Party Reservation. On the other, juuuuuust enough of this country is sick of the Order Of Things, and that's cause for celebration.

On the gripping hand, we have yet to see what this "change" we've voted for actually is.

Still holding off on the partying. Till February, at least.

Went to goth night. Listened to a beautiful curvy girl gripe about how she didn't have an "industrial" figure. Her backstory was almost identical to Jolie's. Jolie has almost the same figure and does industrial just fine, thank you. Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the fact that she's Frank Frazetta's wet dream. Assuming she had an enormous tiger and enormouser broadsword, accessorized. Jolie is Ab-Fab in camo with combat boots and a leopard print martini glass.

I miss her.

Raspberried a kid who seems convinced that a freshly minted friday night all ages in the ashes of Metropol can take on ten years of mostly positive inertia. Wake me up when your voice drops, spiky.

Staring thirty in the face, this morning I stayed my vitriol at a Jehovah's Witness trailing tiny chilren-shaped shields - kids don't deserve Adult Rage, period - and promptly THBBBBBBTed it all over the aforementioned Hot Topic overdose less than twelve hours later.

Boundaries. Mores. I'm older than you, bigger than you, drunker than you, and Nemesis was a Shriekback song long before some ego-laden "dj" appropriated it for a club night. It was a Gameboy port of Gradius when you were in diapers. Your blank stare says everything I need to know about your night, you uneducated twat.

Bumped into Kevin on the bus ride back to south side. He doesn't look like his DCR appearance - he looks like a baby-faced Ben Sisko, and he's seriously thinking about going back to school to get an "adult job," whatever that is. Kevin's an ex-marine audiophile turned comics artist whose been paying the bills doing things well below his talent level for a long time now. His definition of "adult job" has been informed accordingly.

Mike repatriated, but I haven't talked to him in awhile. Context would be reading his blog today and bumping into Kevin tonight.

For one hot second, the three of us were roommates. Farscape, Season Two. Whenever that was.

I've figured out more of ATC in the last six weeks than I have in the last six years. It remains unlike anything, aggressively.

I have no time to work on it, as I'm doing commission work for money. Money that's being shat straight into the gaping maw of bills unpaid.

Unpaid, escalating.

Maybe I'll throw up before passing out.

Hopefully I won't.

Specifically, this Tuesday or Next. Major hurdles, both of them.

I overslept today, bigtime - alarm was set for 8, which would have gotten me to work comfortably late if I hadn't slept clean through it and woken up around one. I've been getting by on 4.5-5 hours of sleep a night for the past several weeks, only getting a Good Rest here and there, and after working the weekend (always a drain), my body seemed to have had enough. Since I got something to the order of 10 solid hours of out time, I should be in a better position to do this 9-5 thing for the remainder of the week. Starting Tuesday, of course.

This didn't prevent me from getting some work done, fortunately - the Beehive wifi allowed me to fire off some much-needed email and start doing some equally much-needed research.

Tuesday - not this coming but next, the 16th - is coincidentally when the Covad tech will be showing up to Give Me Mah Intarnets. He'll be there sometime between 0800 and 1700.... which is a really long, painful time to be sitting around. But there it is - internet back on in a little over a week.

I still have to pay off the electric, pay phone, pay this month's broadband (service cutoff is usually the 15th, so I'll have to pay my bill before I have internet), and pay rent/security deposit. Since my old landlord has yet to cash the rent check I dropped off on the 22nd, finances look a lot more comfortable than they actually are, so I'm starting to stress out about that... fortunately, the roommate responsible for the rent handling is being very, very cool about it, so I'll be able to break up payments and essentially pay rent three times over a period of six weeks.

Financial assrape should ease by late October. I hope.

See subject.

Speakeasy says it'll be two weeks for a flipover of existing services. Something about Verizon updating their records and it taking forever, as according to the speakeasy overmind my line is at my old house and has DSL. My line is at my new house and has no DSL. This is a problem.

The Guy then tells me they can send A Guy out to run a unique (non-Verizon) line to the house for broadband, waving the usual $90 installation fee, saving me $5/mo. Oh, and they'll drop that extra IP since I'm not using it for anything, saving me another $5. In theory I can then tell Verizon where to stick it and save myself a base $26 (+$40 spread over two months for the switchover fee), thus having sweet sweet intertubs at $45/mo instead of (approx.) $90/mo. Same speed, features (80 isn't blocked, no 250g Comcap) at half the effective price.

They tell me they can do this within the next two weeks.

Oh, and there's a line in the email that says the new line will be "associated" with the phone number. Before I got the email, I asked The Guy if I could tell Verizon to fuck off and he said yes, I could. I am assured of this.

Still, one more point to stone cold clarify.

Gas is on. Second hot shower in just over two months is scheduled for tomorrow morning.

I can has pencil sharpener. Fuck if I know what happened to my old one. I think it gave up and died awhile back but I don't remember throwing it out.

Two weeks. Without porn.

Gas should still be Go for Friday. Not in my name, fortunately.

Power at the old place is off. Final bill to be mailed to new address. Phone has been switched over - a $40 privilege. Dialtone expected Friday afternoon, followed by a call to the ISP for them to do their mojo. Won't know how long that will take until the phone's over. I'd have shut off Speakeasy and gone with Verizon DSL but for the fact that Speakeasy's already billed me for the month.

All the calls have been made. The last thing on the current To Do list is to fill out and file the COA form for the post office. Maybe they'll let me do one for my sister, too.

My stuff's been mostly unpacked and largely set up. Wiring with regards to the internet is the last major issue to resolve, and there's no need to think on that until it's time to figure out where the modem lives.

At present the only problems with the new place are a marked lack of garbage cans (merrily biding their time in Steve's car) and the fact that none of the nice big windows have screens. No screens means huge crazyass MOTHRA SIZED INSECTS marching around like they own the place. Moths the size of my cel phone; some weird species of beetle I'd never seen before. Crazy. Fall/winter will solve that soon enough.

My old place was surrounded by hippies. The new place is surrounded by ivy, a weird old dude who wanders around shirtless while chomping a cigar and apparently picking berries or something, and cute girls. Lots of cute girls.

Verily, an improvement in all aspects.

Move Number Fifteen (counting all couches) is Out. Still working on the In. The new place is kind of a hole but is more than workable for our (yes, our - I'm no longer a solo operator) needs for the near-term.

We had no power until this afternoon, which means tonight I have to set up my alarm clock at the very least so I can make a meeting at work tomorrow. Gas is go for Friday, so I have two more days of cold showers ahead of me. My first hot shower in over two months was Monday afternoon. I can (and will) deal.

I've been "slacking" (read : moving*) on getting telephone transferred. It looks like I'll be canceling Speakeasy and "downgrading" to Verizon DSL. This should all either be Done or In Progress by Friday.

Gridlock as a web-facing server is Gone and probably won't be coming back. The web sites have been transferred to Germany. Kudos to _Lasar for hosting!

I still have to contact my previous landlord and get the keys back to him. And I still have to get my Bag O Sammich Materials out of the fridge at the old place. And I still have to maneuver the contents of my new room around into a position that will allow me to start setting things up. I still need to turn the power off at my old place and I still need to inform a few people that my housing needs have been met.

Much thanks to mom, dad and Martin, who helped out bigtime on my end. Also to Dave, JD, Ella, and everyone else who pitched in on the Owens end of things.

Oh, and the bathroom in the new place has a bitching view of downtown. Jpegs to follow.

* Mornings and afternoons on my own materials and logistics; evenings helping my new roommates with their (much larger) volume of stuff. For the past three or four weeks, with most of the heavy lifting being last week. My "me time" (read: ATC time) has consisted of blearily staring at the intertub for a few hours a night in a coffee shop. Very much looking forward to internetting from home again soon.

Points:

00. Some people are ridiculously good at this moving thing. I should be - I've done it something like fourteen times - but I'm not. Probably because I've been at my current place for a good five years or so and have had time to really settle in and build up some inertia. Some of the bad kind of inertia, really. Over the past couple of weeks this bad inertia has been soundly beaten about the head and dragged off to juvie. I'm not out of the woods, but the woods, they are starting to thin. While the situation is sub-optimal it's very far from shitty - it's an Apocalypse - not the Apocalypse - in the original uncover, reveal sense of the term. Limit one per customer per stage of {his|her} life.

01. Need to be out of my place by midnight August 31 (a Sunday), leaving me Labor Day to setup wherever.

02. Wherever is still up in the air, unfortunately. I'm aiming to tenant on with a couple of friends who are looking to buy a house (as opposed to rent one), but there are a lot of options and apparently all of the sexier ones still need some degree of work. Nobody really knows how long this process will take or where it will lead. My guesstimate is six months - three to find, three to renovate to habitable levels. Anyone who's ever done any kind of renovation or construction work (or commissioned said) would probably have a more realistic estimate. With the house an unknown, the amount of work and the time it will take is also unknown.

03. So I need a temporary place for anywhere from three to six months. Maybe longer. Month-to-month would be preferable but that can be really difficult to find.

04. I have some money (by my measure a lot, but y'all know just how fast the stuff burns these days), thanks to a person who's a lot better at managing the stuff than I am - you know who you are and you know how grateful I am ;) - so at the moment, money is a reasonable (read: responsible) non-issue. The where and with who (as well as the how much) are the fuzzier parts of the equation. The parts that need to get glasses, or something.

05. So, need a place. The guys I'm throwing in with may dig up something. The tone of the discussion has been along the lines of "uncomfortable enough to kick us into finding a place, but comfortable enough that we don't kill each other in the process." (paraphrased) They have an Emergency Fallback they can use if they absolutely have to, but they're not reaching for the ripcord just yet.

06. I don't have an emergency fallback. For temporary (read: more temporary than the five years or more I spent in my current location) housing, my coworker has an apartment with a living room slightly larger than the fricking death star. In October. Maybe. Expensive but affordable if I'm a good boy and treat my liver with the respect it deserves.

07. Leaving September as this big gaping "uh." that will need filling this week.

08. I have one Emergency Couch on deck that will cover me for a day or two tops. It's there if I have to, but it's incredibly short term, so I'm loath to make use of it unless absolutely necessary. The owner of the couch is an incredibly nice guy - the sort that makes you wonder if you haven't stumbled onto the set of a sitcom or feel-good movie. I'm a generally murkier sort of character - so much so that thinking on this scenario always breaks off into flashbacks of Edward Scissorhands.

09. I have received offer of a "futon in a basement" for unknown duration, also assumed to be temporarier than the temporary I'll need before I can go longterm again. I'll be engaging in liver abuse while hopefully finding some answers to this possibility on Saturday.

10. I could always get a Shitty Studio or a Shitty One Bedroom. Lease length is an issue there, as well as other factors like total cost, location, and the ability to move into it in a timely fashion. If I have to go 10, then I can hopefully make use of various couches/futons as the details are sorted. I'd obviously prefer 05, or perhaps a time travel device that will allow me to work September while sleeping, say, all those hours I burned in the summer of 2000. All that sleep ought to be useful for something, right?

11. I've made a couple of massive, massive garbage drops over the past few weeks. My old roommate Ben swung by last night and scooped up some shelving and some other odds and ends. Mom came down today (<3) and rescued a bunch of stuff - CDs, the better part of a decade of backups, old role playing manuals (not the bought kind, the "I wrote these in my spare time" kind), my AIP art bag, clothing, etceteras. We even managed to make a run to Goodwill to drop some stuff off. She'll be back this coming weekend for some more stuff - hopefully just the stuff Jen left that she didn't get to, but if worse comes to worse, some computer hardware and the ATC production noteboks and artwork. The landlord has agreed to arrange a sweep and clear for the remainder. I assume he's realized that given the volume of crap and just how much of it isn't mine, he'd probably be stuck with removing it anyway. While this is worst-case true, I'm trying to offload as much as I can through other methods first.

12. Progress on The Five Person Mess is being made. Sometimes it feels glacial, sometimes it feels like huge chunks of The Wall have suddenly Floyded away. It's eroding, and at an acceptable pace - assuming I don't blow up and go catatonic for a few days.

13. I've set my Newtons and associated kit aside for Martin.

14. While my Mission Critical Data is not backed up (390 gigs to DVD-R? Don't have the time, don't have the time!!), it is mirrored. I should have enough time to cook off the less critical stuff this week while performing other tasks. The the full 50-spindle and the empty 50-spindle the media will spool onto stare at me accusingly. Stare, they do, with those ghastly ethereal eyes.

15. Gridlock is going away this coming week. Thanks to an offer from _Lasar, the major hosted sites won't be. The major hosted services, however, will be Gone for the foreseeable future.

16. Which leaves September, lurking in the pale moon light.

I solve that, I can start thinking long term again.

Thanks to my coworker John V. :

Second Life Computer Remanufacturing apparently does pickup. I hope they do pickup, as I have untold hundreds of pounds of silicon that need to Go Away, and no easy way to make it disappear.

Furnish A Start will, according to John, come take away a bunch of the furniture lying around.

Vietnam Veterans of America (Clothingdonations.org) will apparently take almost everything else.

Any and all of which are better than dumping the entire contents of the house into a dumpster. A good chunk of said contents belongs in one, but the fact there's still stuff lying around that would be useable to somebody other than me has been rankling at me for awhile... and now I can Do Something About It.

Wednesday was the last day of a work, production, and recreation routine that began in 2003. A pattern of inertia I couldn't see any way clear of has been effectively obliterated.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

I've crossed out the Depression stage on the Kübler-Ross Model and should have some idea how effective Bargaining will be on Acceptance shortly.

(time passes)

The answer is "a bit, but not very." Which in the best of all possible worlds gives me a hell of a lot of time for solving the problems I've been effectively not dealing with - but could potentially leave me dangling in a bad way if things go badly on other fronts (read: moving).

As always, it's easier to deal with a change forced upon me than it is to force a change upon myself.

Left to right : Jason Bannister's Vaio, my Powerbook G4 12", and the original "phat" Nintendo DS, all in front of Nick McClay's ginormous Asus.

A big brick of headsorting, cut short by life stepping in to do some of it for me. Benefits of blogging from a coffee shop, etc.

Most writers I know, all over the world, do the best they can. They must. They have no choice in the matter. All artists are specialized cells in a single, huge organism, mankind. Those cells have to behave as they do, just as the cells in our hearts or our fingertips have to behave as they do.

We here are some of those specialized cells. Our purpose is to make mankind aware of itself, in all its complexity, and to dream its dreams. We have no choice in the matter.

And there is more to our situation than that. In privacy here, I think we can acknowledge to one another that we don't really write what we write. We don't write the best of what we write, at any rate. The best of our stuff draws information and energy and wholeness from outside ourselves. Sculptors feel this more strongly than we do, incidentally. Every sculptor I ever knew felt that some spook had taken possession of his hands.

Where do these external signals come from? I think they come from all the other specialized cells in the organism. Those other cells contribute to us energy and little bits of information, in order that we may increase the organism's awareness of itself - and dream its dreams.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Address to P.E.N. Conference in Stockholm, 1973
(published in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons)

My sister called me about a half an hour ago, give or take. Maybe more. She's finished whatever the Navy calls MOS training down in Mississippi, and is now an E4. She will be managing stores for VFA-213, aka The Blacklions, an F/A-18 squadron out of NAS Oceana in Virginia. Before they were given F-18s, VFA-213 flew the F-14. Before that, the F-4 Phantom. At this moment she's passing through Pittsburgh en route to San Diego for something or other. I didn't catch it.

In a couple of months, VFA-213 - Jen included - will be deploying to the Persian Gulf aboard CVN-71, the Theodore Roosevelt.

She's excited.

Jen returns from her something-or-other in San Diego on the 18th, a Wednesday. She'll be in Pittsburgh for a couple of days, then back home for a couple of days, then back to the USN for considerably longer. She'll be here for my 29th birthday, a Thursday. She says this is "perfect!" and I agree. A band in the courtyard outside is playing jazz and things seem to be going pretty well for the both of us.

I'm excited.

From NPR : French Families Adopt U.S. Graves in Normandy :

Eight years ago, a French couple founded an organization that adopts graves of American servicemen who died during the Normandy invasion of World War II. The volunteer group encourages French families to lay flowers on the graves when the Americans' own families can't do it.

src = xeno

If there is a more honorable overseas observance of the U.S. Memorial Day, I'm not aware of it.

xeno's already blogged #loc's live 'coverage' of the Phoenix lander descent here. One of the chief joys of the internet is that an event like this can be shared with interested parties around the globe - in this case Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Germany. Four people in four different cities in two countries watching a lot of very bright people who did very well in math wait with baited breath for a chunk of metal the human race flung into space to hopefully land successfully on another planet.

Which it did.

At one point during a break in events, one of the media staff interviewed the head of JPL. I mentioned that he should have said something to the effect of "Mars landers keep failing because we keep trying different things instead of going with what we KNOW works." Seconds later the guy went on to say that Phoenix's descent/landing design is, in effect, an evolution of the Viking program. This makes perfect sense to me - until space reaches a point where it's become recreational, it's probably best to go forward by evolving what works.

It may have been seven minutes of terror for mission control, but I can state with certainty that it was a terror - and exultation - felt round the world.

Marsholduhr courtesy of _Lasar.

From this Science Fiction & Fantasy Media article:

Although there were doubts about whether Paramount would obtain the rights to Frank Herbert's science fiction classic Dune, it does look as if a big budget movie with Peter Berg directing is going ahead after all. This will be the second big screen adaptation of arguably the greatest SF novel of all time [...].

Most promising of all is that the producers are apparently looking for writers to create a faithful adaptation of Dune. In David Lynch's 1984 adaptation there were numerous differences with the novel; some would probably go as far as to say that the plot was mangled. While I thought there was a great deal to like about Lynch's version, it would be great to see a big budget, big screen version that was faithful to the text.

Of the three existing versions of Dune, the Sci-Fi miniseries is a steaming pile of unwatchable shit, the Alan Smithee cut of the Lynch version is passable but not as good, and the Lynch version is - to date - the definitive adaptation. Yes, it makes a lot of changes to the story. You're not going to bring Dune to the big or small screen without making at least some changes. The Lynch version does a lot of things right that the Sci-Fi version butchers - for one thing, if the dialogue isn't entirely accurate, it is at least appropriate and preserves the overall tone of the book. For another, the actors aren't only well cast, they can actually act.

Dune is (obviously?) one of my favorite books, so I'm hoping this third attempt doesn't turn out to be a third strike. I'm also hoping it's successful enough - and accurate enough - to pave the way for a similar treatment of Dune : Messiah and Children Of Dune. The fantasy genre has already had its most loved standard-setting trilogy adapted into a license to print money - it's time to give science fiction some of that high budget lovin'.

Postscript : In my opinion, Dune is the six Frank Herbert books. Brian Herbert is a charlatan and Kevin J. Anderson is a hack. They are raping Frank Herbert's intellectual remains and I can't endorse that. It make my brain twitch.

You'd think a guy who apparently has his shit together more than any other presidential candidate wouldn't be dipping his whick in automated astroturfing.

Still, it beats Hillary's The Issues Are What I Say They Are approach, and stomps her Entitled Bitch attitude towards dining. "It takes a government to raise a child" apparently extends to "It takes a staff member to tip the waitress."

#loccon 07 summary here.

Shoot 'Em Up : Awesome. Ninety minutes of bullets, carrots, and explosions. Sweet stunts, some fairly unconventional use of traditional action movie tropes, and minimal exposition. Verily, I enjoyed it.

Dellamorte Dellamore : Still awesome, though not quite as mind-blowing as I remember it being when I first watched it way back in '97. Easily the best surreal/zombie film out there.

The Jan-Michael Vincent's Hair & Earnest Borgnine Hour : Season 2 was tactically deployed as "filler" before during and after other video. The modified Bell 222 is still awesome, the theme music is still awesome, and the writing, effects work, and most of the acting are still balls-to-the-wall stupid. Borgnine is awesome (he's fucking Earnest Borgnine for fuck's sake!), but Jan-Michael Vincent looks like an Evil Universe version of Don Johnson. I think it's the hair. All of the hair, actually - Airwolf represents a broad spectrum of the worst of 80s fashion.

The Hudsucker Proxy : Xeno somehow made it through the last thirteen years without even hearing about this movie, so something had to be done about that. You know, for kids.

The Big Lebowski. This isn't 'nam. This is #loccon '07. There are rules.

Die Hard 4 (aka Hackers 2) : Sticking in Kevin Smith still doesn't save the steaming pile of bullshit that is HollywoodOS or the rest of the so-called "script," though it seems that it was the producer's intent to use Smith as some kind of nerd-shield to stave off any richly-deserved technical criticism. There's some sweet stuntwork - McClane knocks a guy out of a helicopter with a fire hydrant, then kills the helicopter with a fucking policecar , and that was pretty sweet. The bit with the F-35 was also sweet from the violence perspective but doesn't say much about the JSF - a couple of missiles, a shitload of machinegun rounds and you still can't kill the target, but you've wrecked huge chunks of freeway? Great violence, but still. Xeno and I plodded through this turkey just for Bruce Willis and the stuntwork. The rest of it is trope-heavy disposable bullshit that drags down what used to be one of the finer action franchises.

Various Team Fortress 2 trailers : The "meet the ______" bits are fantastic. Nice to see an FPS go for the cartoon/stylized look and pull it off.

First Blood : Still the best Rambo movie. Best story, best message, best direction, most believable stunts and action. If you want your First Blood with a bit more of a Spaghetti Western kick to it, be sure to check out Seraphim Falls.

Salvaged:

Melville : Moby Dick
Crichton : State of Fear
Remarque : All Quiet On The Western Front
Jung : Man And His Symbols
Vonnegut : Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Strunk & White : Elements Of Style
Varley : Persistence Of Vision
Doyle : The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes (facsimile edition)

All dinged, "annotated," weathered, coverless, or otherwise unuseable as library stock.

Sunshine : It's good, it's decent, it's amazingly derivative, it's good, and then it's suddenly a zombie movie. In space. The Icarus exterior borrows heavily from the Pegasus and the Discovery; the interior looks like someone tried to build a Nostromo from parts purchased at a Sharper Image sale, and the space suit looks like it was designed for a Jidoon. It all hangs together fairly well if you're willing to overlook the usual production tropes that drive scifi nuts up the wall, and the cinematography is gorgeous - particularly the transit of Mercury and the docking and departure scenes. Definitely worth watching, though it's a coin toss as to rather or not you'll actually enjoy it. I did. But I'm hardly unbiased - I enjoy most well-produced science fiction, with a few noteable exceptions.

I enjoyed The Simpsons Movie a hell of a lot more than I enjoyed The Transformers, even if Transformers had better previews. The Simpsons was fantastic from start to finish - the only bad thing about the movie was the trailer for Alvin and the Chipmunks, which was terrifying. Possibly the worst thing I've seen this year.

If you haven't seen Meadowlands, then don't waste your time. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and implied tension, signifying nothing. The ending rips off Cemetary Man and does so quite badly - badly in that it's obvious that this was supposed to be some sort of mindblowing revelation. Still not sure why the brits think eyeball length bangs are so great, but I'm pretty sure that britgirl taste in haircuts is centered in the same part of the brain that allows them to tolerate Oasis. If you want a better version of whatever it is the production team was trying to achieve, go watch The Prisoner and Twin Peaks and blend them together in your head. You'll get better results, and better characters.

The Company is shaping up to be The Good Shepard, only with post-ww2 Europe and Michael Keaton in place of the Bay Of Pigs and a constipated-looking Matt Damon. The production has a strikingly similar feel to it. I do so wish that filmmakers would realize that you can, in fact, deal with a convoluted and complex subject like counter-intelligence without resorting to moody audio and nonlinear editing.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles takes a giant shit on the Terminator franchise. Summer Glau as robo-River does nothing to save it. What's missing from the pilot? Everything that made T1 and T2 great. What's it got? Robo-River and terminators disguised as high school teachers. I'm not making that part up - and trust me, I wish I was. If I could unsee one thing on this list, it's a tossup between TSCC and Meadowlands.

bda is right again : Brick is good. The protagonist reminds me of Adam, though I think it's more his jawline than anything else. Brick is well cast, well written, and very well shot. Out of everything on this list, it's the one you'll most likely have to actually look for, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

TMNT : Much better than I'd expected. Bonus points for Patrick Stewart, outstanding production design, and turtles with New Yawk accents. Hopefully it rakes in enough to earn a sequel.

While I'm still looking forward to the Battlestar Galactica TV Movie this fall, the trailer leaves my pants dry. The threat of more webisodes might have something to do with that.

Me, I want fewer webisodes and more Babylon 5. Voices In The Dark is a solid addition to the B5 universe (and a hell of a lot better than Legend Of The Rangers), the DVD extras are great, the new CG is fantastic, but the two stories on the DVD don't feel like the one-offs JMS claims they are : they feel like they're setting the ground for a potentially larger story. I want more B5. Much more. I hope the Voices DVD sells well enough for Warner Brothers to give JMS more money. A lot more money. Money hats, even.

And Flash Gordon (2007) will sterilize you. It will probably also give you brain-AIDS.

Notice a pattern? It's even more exaggerated when you realize that around 450 of the 2007 images are Martin's Airshow and B-17 pictures. So, why the dropoff?

1. The Upstage closed. Not only did this brutally destroy my so-called "social life," it also means I now have to take a bus to get drunk, and to get home from getting drunk. More time on the bus means fewer drunken photosafaris, which account for a good deal of the 2005 and 2006 image banks. The area of Pittsburgh between The Upstage and my house is practically devoid of pedestrian traffic, so it was great for this sort of thing - the area between any other bar and my house, on the other hand, is a veritable glut of meatsacks. Meatsacks who drop their pants or wag their middle fingers if they so much as smell a camera.

2. The intent for much of the non-drunken 2005 photography was to gather material for Dead City Radio. DCR quickly burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp - and since I've been focused on The Dualist for the last year or so (to the exclusion of all else during the past two months), DCR hasn't been moving - which means there hasn't been a need for additional location photography. DCR is what spurred me to try out iPhoto, actually - I need a shot of the Strand Theater and didn't feel like coordinating Preview against a few dozen directories of jpegs. Turns out I don't actually have that shot and will need to manufacture it tonight or tomorrow.

3. With the exception of additional Allegheny Center location shots and some supporting bits for downtown, I've shot the hell out of everything that's convenient to shoot. I got those bits out of the way early.

4. Given 1. and 2, I spend more time staring at a screen generating large amounts of pixels than I do making friends, drinking, getting out, etceteras these days. The upside is that I can now actually pay the damned bills. The downside is that there's no new fun/funky photos, no new friends, and a persisting low-level emotion that can only be described as a 40-30-30 blend of a sense of acomplishment, total soul-searing loneliness, and a vague sense self-loathing.

I need to do something about that, but I can't really afford to. Not without skewing a few timetables. The only good thing about this is that my current third-shift schedule keeps my nose at the grindstone instead of the bar.

Another yay thing about third shift - with some pre-planning, I should be able to do daytime/morning shots of any DCR-critical location. A dozen or so trips to 'gheny and downtown should give me enough. If it doesn't, it'll at least serve to get me away from the desktop.

Footnote: iPhoto does an amazing job of sucking ass at a few critical things - it's more steps than it should be to add "keywords," it still doesn't apply "title" changes to the filename for some reason, and - most annoyingly - in album view, it thinks "2" comes after "19." Even worse, it thinks "149" comes before 15 - a state of super-retardation that makes sorting sets of more than 9 images using the application's auto-numbering function an exercise in patience. The app can do what I need it to do - but it does it like a half-blind hippy who can't pull his lips away from the bong long enough to do basic QA testing.

Oh, and if you leave the "add ColorSync profile" tickybox checked, you won't be able to open any of your iPhoto'ed images in a Classic MacOS version of Photoshop again. Programmers these days.

Life On Mars is fantastic. Go watch it. And wish along with me that there were more than sixteen episodes. Gene Hunt is my new hero.

If you liked the first three quarters of season 2 of Twin Peaks, you're going to love Meadowlands. All of the repulsively dysfunctional soap opera without even a ghost of the {mystical|initiatic} undercurrent that made the middle of Twin Peaks worth slogging through. A young cross-dressing special needs Robert Smith wannabe beating off to a hambeast with a superiority complex the size of Rhode Island might scream OMG TEH KEWL to some people, but to me it feels like the writers overdosed on David Lynch and managed to miss the point entirely.

Maybe I'm missing the point - the show seems to be equal parts influenced by The Prisoner, so there might be something more to it... but three episodes in and it feels like someone threw an X-Files production team at an arc of Guiding Light and then edited out the monsters. It's got enough bleh to irk me, but it also has Ralph Brown. Ralph Brown is awesome, so I'll keep watching for him and hope that the soap opera dies down and the drama ratchets up.*

The "doing something other than sitting on my ass staring at a monitor" I alluded to in the previous ATC post involved lots of sitting on my ass staring at a screen, actually - I took my sister out to see the Transformers movie. It was everything I expected - it was Big, it was Loud, it was Gorgeous, it was camp and it was shallow. Fuck, all porn - be it naked girls porn, naked boys porn, guns-and-explosions porn or giant stompy robots porn - is shallow. You're going to this movie to see big honkin' robots pounding the crap out of other big honkin' robots, and the story does what it can to accommodate. It ain't Shakespeare, but it is entertaining. Especially if you like the "find the continuity flaw" easter egg hunt - there's a bunch, and a couple of them are huge. Like, Death Star huge.

There's more to report on, but this started off as an ATC page post and I still have to upload that. So.

* Which it did, about ten minutes later.

From the Orlando Sentinel by way of xeno:

NASA devoted much of its final briefing today (which ran from 10:45-11:30 p.m.) to problems with three critical Russian computers on the space station. As explained by NASA station program manager Mike Suffredini, the ISS has lost its "propulsive capability" after these computers mysteriously crashed Tuesday. Only one working computer is needed to command jet firings, but despite repeated attempts to re-boot, none of the trio has come back to life.

Oops!

10:16 < mdxi> "The lights, the fans and, thank God, the potty, all those things are working," Suffredini said.
10:16 < mdxi> (on ISS computer failure)
10:17 < mdxi> note for future designers: don't design a 6-way redundant system which actually fails when two nodes die
10:17 < mdxi> and further, don't hook your oxygen generator up to it

Man, democrats are good at the Spineless Waffling thing. John Kerry's laughable attempt at a presidential bid (remember that personality transplant after the DNC?), now this. First Carter goes off on the Bush administration, calling it the "worst in history" (src=bda and really, it's hard to argue otherwise). He then later recants, saying he was comparing the Bush admin's foriegn policy to the foriegn policy of the Nixon administration. The Bush Administration response? Hand-print "Carter" into the "______ is irrelevant." madlib, photocopy, distribute.

On the one hand, I watched "wild feeds" (satellite uplinks of raw footage transmitted from local affiliates to networks for editing) during the summer of 1996, so I've seen firsthand exactly how the media will twist what a politician actually says into what the media wants him (or her) to say. On the other hand, unloading Nixon is seriously, seriously weak.

On the gripping hand, it's politics. It's bullshit. It'll continue to be politics and bullshit until enough americans get sick of it.

Ever try to make a lazy man care about something? There's nothing like an activist to turn a civilian off to an otherwise valid cause.... and it's hard to actually care about politics when your "choices" are fervently advocated by people you can't stand to listen to.

Read ATC's April news posts.

That's where all the interesting bits are right now.

Man, I called that one. (src=rez)

Don't look if you like surprises. Given just how amazingly uneven the new Doctor Who has been, this little "sneak peak" has certainly helped allay my ph34r.

If only it would allay the SINUS PRESSURE OF DOOM that currently has me half deaf and whole stupid. And wide awake when I need to be up in ninety minutes.

The Second Happy Time : Creepiest article title, ever.

See also the list of attacks on US soil and east coast shipping, and notice how they almost never get mentioned on the {Hitler|History} Channel.

From MSNBC :

The latest Newsweek poll shows that 91 percent of American adults surveyed believe in God [...] Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact.

That indirectly explains the contents of the "newspaper" rack at the grocery store checkout, among other things. Makes me wonder what the Saudi Arabian equivalent of The National Enquirer or People is.

So, mercury's header graphic wound up on a russian server, which somebody is in turn re-using as a partially-cropped blog header. Makes me wonder what other bits of mine have been appropriated.

gg, internet.

At least he links to ATC.

Impact is finished. 47 pages total, 23 of which were done over the last six weeks. Which is why I haven't been blogging, making noise about PPAC or DCR, etceteras. Cranking out a page every two days takes a lot more effort now than it did back in the halcyon days of Reentry.

I still need to finalize the script for Subversion (Chapter 8 Actual), but before I do that, I need a breather. Time to catch up on other stuff, etc.

Last night was my first Something To Be Desired shoot in a few months. The scene(s) will be in Monday's episode. From the sound of things, Karl will be back in some form for this season.

A snip of the environment from the final scene of ATC Chapter Six (which is actually Chapter Seven). Four days from final concept doodles to an environment that does everything I'll need it to.

Unfortunately, I didn't plan far enough ahead to have layouts for the next scene done by now, so there'll be an indeterminate wait between Right Now and More Pages.

The postit (which will probably never be camera-legible) says "badge lv. 4+ (jiggle it!)."

I think the last few posts have more to do with biochemistry than anything else. Otherwise, the fact that I'm Completely Fine tonight would make even less sense than it would otherwise.

(riiiiiight)

At least I'm not deleting posts, like I did back in the Bad Old Days. <3

• ATC book 3 has a draft script weighing in at around 115 pages for seven chapters. If all goes according to plan, the book should enter pre-production in Q3 or Q4 2007. It's a lot shorter than The Dualist, which is a Good Thing™ . Less total modelling, and vastly more shot/environment recycling means that this one should be produced much faster than The Dualist.
• PPAC 14 is still in production. Hopefully that'll be finished at some point in the next couple of months.
• Dead City Radio has a fairly complete outline and is on deck for a rewrite. I'm not proceeding with the story until I have a complete script for the rest of Chapter One, and hopefully all of Chapter Two. DCR should be about six chapters, and will hopefully be shorter than book 3. DCR is Book One, The Dualist is Book Two, and so forth.
• Despite huge amounts of pre-prep and outline work elsewhere, I still need to finish layouts for the current chapter of The Dualist, and I still need to get the script together for the final chapter. It's written, it just needs to be tweaked and layed out.
• ATC 'downtime' has been put to use on page renders - this means that the scene that's been slowing everything down should be done before the month is out. The remainder of the chapter will render a lot faster, I promise.
• Produced in 2006:
  • 61 pages of ATC.
  • 98 pr0n pieces. 101 if you count all four pages of the short comic as individual entities.
  • 12 full PPAC albums, two comp albums, and four tracks for the next album. Approximately 120 tracks.

Also, haircut.

Specialist Robert Heckrote - the youngest of my high school {Vice Principal|Dungeon Master}'s four kids, has been awarded a Bronze Star.

Heckrote’s medal is particularly rare. A Bronze Star for Valor, it was presented for his actions on Aug. 23, 2005. While he was serving as a rifleman in a security detail during a military operation, the soldiers came under fire from snipers and enemy soldiers wielding AK-47s, according to a medal citation read during the ceremony.

Two U.S. soldiers assigned as trainers for the Iraqi army were shot, and Heckrote positioned his vehicle to provide cover for the fallen men. He then exited his Humvee and administered first aid to those injured.

“Specialist Heckrote, with total disregard for his own life and welfare, displayed an immeasurable amount of valor,” said Sgt. 1st Class Douglass Francke. “(He) displayed a true genuine quality of selflessness and valor, instinctively.”

“I just followed directions,” said Heckrote, a Liberty resident. “I didn’t think much about it.”

\m/.

Hellraiser(s) : Capsule reviews.

Hellraiser : Really bad acting. At least when it comes to the speaking parts. "They're coming to get you, Margaret Barbara*" is Shakespeare by contrast. Bad acting on the part of the humans (the cenobites are fine) is more than made up for by incredibly strong-for-the-budget visuals. Gooey.

Hellbound : Hellraiser II : Just how many horror movie sequels pick up in the nuthatch, anyway? The stop-motion bits on the Channard cenobite have aged - otherwise, probably the all-around strongest in the series.

Hellraiser III : Hell on Earth : The dumping ground for all of the one-liners that didn't make it into Hellraiser II. Lots of fun cenobite bits, some good Pinhead backstory, some good lines, some good scenes - an entertaining horror flick, though not as strong as II.

Hellraiser : Bloodline : France. In SPAAAAAAAAAACE. Bonus points for combining the mandatory "horror franchise attempts to add depth with a Largely Backstory Movie That Tries To Explain Everything" (which is always bad) with the mandatory "__________ In SPAAAAAAAACE" installment (which is also always bad). Two birds, one stone. A smelly, poop-covered stone somebody kept up their ass for a few years. It's an Alan Smithee film, for good reason: there's far too much France, and not nearly enough "in space". Front Line Assembly (or one of Bill Leeb's nine jillion projects) sampled all of the good non-cenobite dialogue a few years back - aside from playing "spot the sample" and the bits with Pinhead and his pet dog, this movie blows almost as much as Hellworld. The cenobite bits are watchable; the rest is, as the IMDB review says, an "incoherent mess."

Hellraiser : Inferno : Jacob's Cenobite Ladder. Strongest of the "somebody took a script for a horror/suspense/whatever film and tried to twist it into a Hellraiser" movies, in that it's a watchable piece of psychological horror. Otherwise unrelated to I, II, III, IV and VI.

Hellraiser : Hellseeker : Second best of the "not really a Hellraiser" Hellraisers. Ashley Laurence reprises Kirsty Cotton (with a whopping six or seven lines and maybe ten minutes of screentime, tops), though the movie would work just as well with a different deus ex machina.

Hellraiser : Deader : It's well shot, fairly well acted, and well directed. Pity about the rest of it.

Hellraiser : Hellworld : I Know What Bad Internet Game You Played Last Summer. The worst thing about Hellworld is that it could have been a fairly entertaining pile of genre cliches if it had just dropped the Hellraiser license - the use of which is fucking awful. Seriously - this is just another teen/college horror thriller in the Friday The 13th / Night of the Living Dead formula, with no real bearing on (or relation to) the rest of the series.

* I suck. See comments.

Angel : A darker, more adult Buffy - same universe, same rules, some overlapping characters (Angel, Spike, and a couple of Andrew and Willow cameos). Enjoyable, though Season 4 does get a bit thick on the drama at times. Picture a modern day Shadowrun stripped of the overblown Gibson and Tolkien references and you're getting the picture. Rating : A

Samurai Champloo : I watched the english dub, which is just as bad as every other anime dub - it's not exceptionally bad, but it sounds like the same ten voices that dub everything else, which is a bit jarring. The music is great, the anachronistic feel is pretty sweet, the overall theme of "we're starving, we need money" is something the creator needs to stop flogging - it worked with Cowboy Bebop, but here it feels formula. It works, but it feels contrived somehow. Mugen's foul mouth is a refreshing change of pace, and the overall attitude is enjoyable. Ten points off for a recap/flashback episode. Rating : B+*

Hex : Boarding School Buffy on bonghits and ketamine. The production values are great, the show itself looks pretty good, and the slow (read : geological) pacing works well while waiting for work renders to finish processing. Despite the overall goodness, Hex sports some of the WORST hairstyles I've seen in years, and the theme music is a really sloppy edit of a Garbage track. Points off on both fronts. Like Ultraviolet, the other BBC supernatural thingy I've watched, Hex gets seriously hung up on priests, angels, and biblical whatever - another reason I enjoy Buffy and Angel, as both series are above crutching around on a mythos developed by somebody else. Points for the John Dee reference, points off for his daughter having the worst haircut, ever. Rating : C+

Battlestar Galactica : In the midst of a rewatch as a gearing-up for the beginning of Season 3 in October. Still the best TV-format Sci-Fi, ever. Rating : A+

* Would have been an A but Cowboy Bebop set the bar pretty damned high. While Samurai Champloo is pretty good, it doesn't come close to the awesome goodness of Bebop.

Project crunch time.

Five minute motion graphics CG and slideshow at HD 720p - pretty much done but the plasma display developed an electrical fault. Pause on compression testing, replacement part supposedly showing up at some point today.

Eleven minute multimedia (slideshow/video mix at HD 720p) narrative reconstructed - moved from After Effects to Final Cut Pro for rapid video development. This thing has to be subtitled, and the entire project is audio sensitive. Doesn't work well with the "crowded office" thing, especially when a couple of knuckledragers just informed me that they'll be drilling holes through the ceiling today.

Fucking good thing I'm third shift this week.

Well, sorta third shift. More like 8pm-10am, with the 630-10 thing being coworker interface and the rest of it being about the only time the building (construction) and office (people) is quiet enough to get anything done in the way of audio work. :P

Funny thing about noise isolating headphones and a screenfull of video is people think they can still interrupt you for whatever.

Overtime kicked in at 00:15. I'll be chugging on this thing until it's done, which is looking like a nice chunk of extra cash. Fingers crossed, and thank gid They made the mistake of taking me off of salary and putting me on hourly.

Wake schedule is usually 11am-3am. Last week and most of the weeks before it was more like 3pm-5am. Right now it's roughly 7pm-12pm.

Definitely digging this "no people" thing.

Saturday : Forget when I got up. Work, then Goth Night. Ride home from Tara around one, grab Jen and go to Cat On A Stick, then walkentalk until around three. Nap until 5am Sunday.

Sunday : Up at 5am. Zombie out at the rig until around ten, when I realize I'm not getting any sleep in this heat. Go to work. Get some work-work done, field a couple of photoshop calls from Jen. Pass out under my desk around four, and by "pass out" I mean "drop like a ton of bricks." Thud sound effect and all. Vaguely recall the phone ringing a couple of times - apologies to Jen for missing the calls, hope she got her Photoshop homework in on time.

Monday : Wake up under my desk at 1am. Sore shoulder but otherwise fine. Work on some work stuff, followed by PPAC* and other things until 9am. Bust out a work day. Sustain until around 5, when I start getting punchy. Punched out somewhere between 5:30 and 7 - 7 by IRC logs but I remember none of it. Pass out under the desk again.

Tuesday : Wake up under my desk at 3am. Realize I'm out of provisions, filthy-sticky, and generally bleah. Kick the internets a few times, raid the vending machines. Bus home at 0548. Today's high is supposed to be in the mid 90s. I'm out of shampoo and food, so I need to do a supply run but nothing is open yet. Dunno if I'm going to call off work, or what yet.

Appeneded, Tuesday : Watched half a season of Buffy, showered, provisioned, got back to work around three. Did some work-work. Napped from around seven to around eleven.

Wednesday : Worked on CG processing until around one or two. Back under the desk until six. There's a meeting around 0930, and it's one I need to be at... so it's probably a good thing I'm here to not miss it. The bank website reveals that the landlord hasn't cashed the July rent check yet. Oof.

Summer as usual.

* Finished the remix of Crust Requiem's "Channel Bouys," transforming it into Anal Bouys. Took some of the drum bits and built Brainreef. Found a midi file [midi downloaded from Safari or the Quicktime Plugin in Firefox won't drag-and-drop into Garageband, but midi downloaded using the Firefox contextual menu does - go figure] of Flight Of The Bumblebee and mutilated it into Hymenoptera. Remastered This Knife (Lacerated). Ripped my brains out with Pissmissile- too Merzbow for the current album, but it did the job of keeping me awake. Wombat mix of Glork (from Crooner). A big day for PPAC, all things considered.

I got cut off at the bar last night, after a lengthy run of DCR writing - Dave handed me my debit card and the receipt and said "You're done." I wasn't that slammed, but I was there quite a bit later than usual.

This afternoon, my sister found color laser copies of the first dozen or so pages of ATC, which had been made in the summer of 2003 for my then-future-and-now-past roommate Ben. These pages had been languishing in a polybag at a location neither of us lived at for a couple of years.

DCR writing deadlock + Booze cutoff + ATC pages on doorstep == time to get back to work.

Andy got bored recently and made this hilarious loop of bda.

The DCR comic now has comment logic, so you can now tell me to get my ass back on ATC with todays strip and all future entries.

And speaking of ATC, the Chapter Six cover is up, and the scheduled-for-deletion wikipedia entry has been sucked into comixpedia. Comic production resumes in August, which is when I'm assuming the animation I'm doing for work will be finished.

Oh, and I'm working on new PISSPOWERASSCHRIST tracks (three so far) and DCR instead of drawing porn. So life is, like, good. Or something.

Week in review:

[+] Extended fathers-day phoner with the MPU.
[+] Mom brough Jen back down to civlization on Monday (27.0000) and stuck around for dinner (Fuel & Fuddle) and ice cream (Dave & Andy's*). Good stuff, and made up for the freakout I had around the same time last year.
[-] The power company final noticed me right after said dinner. Annoyance.
[+] The 12" powerbook I bought (am buying, in installments) from rjbs showed up on Wednesday. Beautiful machine.
[+] Watched all of Blakes 7 season 4. The ending is one of the best ever.
[+] Got a space race victory (as the Americans) in Civ3 on the new powerbook. 2011, a few turns before knocking out the Manhattan Project. Great ending cinematic.
[+] Finished Chapter Five of ATC. \o/ Only eighty or so pages left.
[+] The discovery of Powerbook has rendered iBook obsolete. Machine tweaked a bit, updated, and handed over to Jen. She's already getting a ton of mileage out of the thing (lately as a DVD player).
[+] New boots from the MPU. Mail attempt on Thursday, couldn't make the post office on Friday or Saturday, picked 'em up today - dropped them off at home, still need to try them out.

* On rjbs' recommendation. I give it a five out of five.

22:16 < solios_> regenesis++
22:16 < solios_> that just SCREAMS season finale. :P
22:31 < solios_> ...
22:31 < solios_> that was odd.
22:31 < solios_> I just pulled a superdrunk cute little brunette in through my second floor window.
22:31 < solios_> she somehow managed to get stuck on the door awning.
22:31 * solios_ has absolutely NO idea.
22:33 * drusilla sleeps
22:37 < mdxi> ...
22:37 < mdxi> JPEGS

Lucas noticed that The Fanbase wants the original (read : undefiled) trilogy on DVD.. Nice bit of spin on the press release: finally, the Infernal Lucas Machine spits out something worth buying (link src=mdxi)- the Star Wars I know and love. Oppose the Star Wars I avoid and loath.

In other SW news:

22:25 < dragorn> wow. this is horrible. "Happy Jedi day."
22:25 < dragorn> "May the 4th be with you."
22:26 < dragorn> I think I just died a little on the inside
22:26 < Devi0us> wow.
22:27 < Devi0us> i'm going to have to use that at work
22:27 < Devi0us> that should kill any meeting i'm involved in

The wikipedia entry on OCPD reads like a pre-flight checklist.

[X] Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organization, bodily functions, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.
[X] Showing perfectionism that interferes with task completion (e.g., is unable to complete a project because his or her own overly strict standards are not met).
[X] Excessive devotion to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships (not accounted for by obvious economic necessity).
[X] Being overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values (not accounted for by cultural or religious identification).
[X] Inability to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value.
[X] Reluctancy to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly his or her way of doing things.
[-]* Adopting a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes.
[X] Showing rigidity and stubbornness.

* Cash, no. I'm Extremely Bad with money. However, I hoard data like a motherfucker- in fact, on the walk home I put a few minutes into figuring out how to archive and pry eight gigs of Classic MacOS apps out of my home directory. Eight. Gigs. Of Classic apps. Shit I haven't used in years but refuse to wipe because hey, you never, ever know. Oh, and two gigs of SGI freeware that have been riding along since Torg showed up on my doorstep, back in 2004.

The Shield (season 1 DVD box set) : Having watched seasons 2-5, it was nice to finally get some context. The cinematography is quite a bit different in the first few episodes, with some great shot composition. While The Shield is easily one of the best cop shows evar, the spastic steadycam work gets on my nerves after awhile... so the fact that it's less epileptic in season one is an added bonus.

Wild Palms (8$ on amazon) : I've called it "Twin Palms" by accident a few times, for good reason. It is a bit like Twin Peaks, if TP was incestuous sci-fi instead of occult murder. More like Twin Peaks season one as opposed to the strung out middle-class luke-warm weakass "weird for the sake of weird" that is the second season (or Northern Exposure or The X-Files). Wild Palms is decent overall, though Kim Cattrall's acting is so fucking awful that I'm left feeling the hammed up over-the-top melodrama was deliberate. Worth it for the William Gibson cameo and Robert Loggia. Oliver Stone was Executive Producer, which may mean something to some people. In my opinion, WP is the most watchable thing he's done since Platoon.

The Sopranos (season 3 and part of season 5) : Good, but not as much fun as The Shield, despite the boobies and blow. Makes me hate the shit out of rich people all over again.

Monty Python's Flying Circus (I've seen the movies and a handful of the sketches, but I just came off of a 35+ episode marathon, so.) : Highlights include the science fiction sketch and The Cycling Tour. Lots of good, lots of awful, lots of awesome. The Kids In The Hall continued the Good tradition, while Saturday Night Live has been keeping the Awful alive for decades.

Six Feet Under (seasons 1, 3, 5) : Fantastically good drama. Probably because I've got my own mental issues (which oscillate from mild to incapacitating), so I really identify with Billy. The gay drama bits are enlightening, while everything else runs from awesome (I love the future-client-as-intro bit) to awful (Ruth and Arthur made for good drama but was so not my scene that I skipped through those bits). Big fan of the "dealing with mental illness and psychological issues" aspect, and Claire vs. Art School makes me really, really glad I hang out with geeks instead of a galleryload of pretentous upper-middle-class shop-at-the-GAP motherfuckers who think menstruating on X-Rays, yanno, means something.

Space : Above And Beyond : A few decent concepts, some great characters, good set design and decent CG weakened by an oscillating sense of direction, unven writing, and the same "we've written ourselves against a wall, let's do something weird and call it a deus ex machina" that kept me away from the X-Files. It's a pretty entertaining series, though the repeated use of insubordination as a plot device (and complete lack of proper military consequences for said) gets tiring, as does the freshmen philosophical masturbation.

Oh, and the AIs look like Klingons with LED acne.

 

21:02 < solios> Wild Palms is pretty cool.
21:03 <@bda> Cool.
21:03 < solios> yeah.
21:03 < solios> kind of slow start.
21:04 < solios> domestic domestic domestic RHINO domestic domestic domestic party blah blah blah WETWARE TELEPRESENCE HOLOGRAMS HEY LOOK WILLIAM GIBSON
21:06 <@bda> hahaha.
21:06 <@bda> That's the best synopsis of anything ever.

Bought it on Amazon for eight bux after unsuccessfully scrounging around for a torrent for the past year or so. Even if it winds up sucking, David Warner's bits have already made it more than worth the price tag.

Initial impressions : the acting is very uneven (remains to be seen if this is intentional or otherwise), Robert Loggia rocks, and comparisons to Twin Peaks are appropriate on a surface level only.

I'm currently about two and a half hours in and will wait until I've finished watching the miniseries before saying anything else on the subject.

I recently finished watching the 13 eps of Crusade in the JMS-recommended order (see the bottom of this page), and have the following observations:

1. The Excalibur bears an extremely strong resemblance to the Kestrel from Escape Velocity, which in turn looks like a sexed-up streamlined version of the Liberator from Blake's 7. Given the theme of Crusade, I imagine any intentional design "inspiration" is more B7 than EV.

 

Oh, and it has an SDF-1 flavored "main gun" that disables the ship for a minute after firing. The hows of this are explained in A Call To Arms (the setup for Crusade). The effect itself looks like a urine-flavored Death Star beam. Not sure how I feel about that - I like the turret beam cannons and the rack-mounted fighter launch features, but something about the "main gun" feels kind of anime.

2. It was odd seeing the Sheriff from American Gothic as a starship captain, but I got over it quickly - he's a good fit for the part.

3. The compositing is horribly uneven. It ranges from Decent For TV in some places to horrendously shitty in others, and it's frequently the latter - this ranges from the typical Doctor Who-esque would-be-matte-shots-20-years-ago with blue halos to weak audio design to absolutely needless (for example, the gym on the ship is the size of an airplane hangar, obviously a matte/composite, and everyone and all of their exercise equipment is tucked into one tiny little corner of it). These are more nit-picks than anything else, as the show was cancelled almost immediatly - to my understanding, TNT didn't even want to front the cash to finish post production on the episodes that had been filmed.... so it looks like corners were cut.

4. The CG ranges from pretty sweet (ships, hyperspace, etc) to fantastically awful (all character animation, one horribly crappy low-rez shot of a shuttle takeoff from a planet, in which the planet texture map might as well be a 32x32 pixel MS paint bitmap). Galen's homunculus looks like a Poser model. Physical props, however, are pretty damned sweet - the alien-in-a-bubble that eats negative emotions looks gorgeous.

5. There are two hitches with the JMS-recommended viewing order. The first and most obvious is the uniforms, which yo-yo a bit and are officially changed in the last ep of the JMS order. The second is that Lochley shows up and is introduced to Gideon after she gets picked up in a Star Fury, which is jarring from a character-continuity standpoint.

6. I dug the Franklin cameo.

7. The intro sequence is incredibly weak compared to the original B5 series. The upside is that it's a lot shorter, but the CG feels cheap and the music doesn't seem to fit. I slot this in with the compositing - why would TNT want to put up the effort to spitshine the intro to a show they'd already written off? It still spanks the shit out of the Enterprise intro sequence.

8. Galen's pretty cool.

9. Tie for Most Annoying B5 Thing Ever : Byron vs. Visitors from Down the Street, an X-Files parody episode.

10. (Pak'Ma'Ra porn)++

11. Despite the above-mentioned issues, the show has a pretty solid feel to it, builds nicely on the B5 universe, and would have kicked a hell of a lot of ass if it had gone its intended five-year run. Instead it got canned and a few years later we got the what-the-fuckfest of The Legend Of The Rangers.

Which Babylon 5 Character Are You?

You are Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova! Duty always comes first for you. You are all alone in the world, and you have terrible taste in men, so it seems likely to stay that way. However, for you, being good at your job almost makes up for it.

Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Awfully Livejournalish of me but I've been rewatching B5 lately and the quiz results (almost) fit.

There were two different quizzes on quizilla. I think the second one is slightly more accurate:

Which Babylon 5 character are you most like?

You are Vorlon Ambassador Kosh. People find it very hard to get to know you; you don't seem to follow the ordinary rules. If you ever came out of your shell, you would probably amaze everyone.

Take this quiz!

Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

Hopefully that's the end of blogayness, at least for awhile. :P

A very nice lady at the doctor's office stuck a needle in me for a few minutes Monday morning. All was good for about an hour and a half, after which a Death Star shockwave bruisething began to erupt in Mark 13 : Hardware slow-motion.

Apparently I bruise easily. That or something went exactly wrong. Whatever the case, it doesn't seem to involve nerves - the skin is slightly more sensitive than the surrounding flesh and reports normally on the internal diagnostics.

Not the best picture but I dare YOU to try and capture a not quite Requiem For A Dream grade needlebruise using a prosumer-grade CCD in your off hand under shite light. :P

My sister Jen turns 25 today. I hope she's less hung over than I will be!

The shit things about visiting the doctor : An empty stomach and Barry Manilow. Barry Manilow on The Ellen DeGeneres show. With paperwork I couldn't focus on.

That aside, Doctor Sestric is Ten Ninjas.

Ear probes, blood pressure cuffs and needles are a hell of a lot less terrifying when you're an adult. We spent most of the visit talking about blood sugar and mental health (shock.), and finished up with blood drawing (three ampules - blood sugar, cholesterol and something else) and appointment scheduling (call next week for blood results and show up in eight for another checkup).

Brain's still getting itself together after a very late breakfast.

My first doctor's appointment since 1999 is Monday, February 6th at 10:20 AM.

He's going to have a grand old time with me.

T+1:13............PLT..... Uhoh.
T+1:13.......................LOSS OF ALL DATA.

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

-Virgil I. Grissom, after the Gemini 3 mission, March 1965

After Clone Wars, I watched Hardware (1990). After this I'm probably going to get drunk. I'd invoice Dragorn, but the fact of the matter is that I'd made that decision well before watching Hardware. The movie was pretty effective at removing any doubts about this decision - I'll give it that.

The soundtrack has Ministry and Public Image Limited. Robocop had vastly better religious imagery and PTP.

Robocop also didn't turn into a bitchingly incoherent mess at the fifty minute mark.

The director was fired after one day of shooting on The Island of Dr. Moreau (not the first Jungle Epic in which Brando couldn't remember his lines).

There's a reason for that.

  

  

Worst use of a fractal in recorded history.

Bonus points for people on being fire and not realizing it. Double bonus points for Iggy Pop, Lemmy, and Grade-Z acting. Would have made a bangup story arc of Total Recall 2070. Serious bonus points for Drone Sunrise. Also being based on a 2000 AD comic. Boo to the writer and editor.

Looking like a cross between SuperPatriot and the lameass Big Bad from Virus ? Priceless.

 

A must-see for anyone who could stomach Cyborg, if for no other reason than the overlong slow-mo of the Linda Hamilton insert clubbing the botcorpse with a baseball bat. The movie definitely has its moments - as with my previous "review," I haven't spoiled the film by telling you about any of them.

It was entertaining - I've seen a lot worse, especially in the misuse-of-slowmo department. Thanks to Dragorn for pointing me at this thing. When I get home I may well watch the original version.

Everyone who gives a shit about Star Wars has already seen it. I haven't cared for the franchise since injecting the steaming pile of shit that was Episode I into my eyeballs - so I am, as usual, late to the party.

Summary : The animation is some of Tartakovsky's better work. I've never been what you could call enthralled by his style but in this case it works and we've got spaceships and lightsabers instead of preschool drama, so yay. For US television animation, it works. The voice acting, however, sucks ass. It's wooden, it's flat, it sounds like nobody involved on the speaking end actually wanted to be there and holy shit if you've seen more than forty seconds of non-shitty anime you know that the Japanese lead the pack, period. Sometimes it works, but more often it's ass - almost as bad as the Anakin/Padme scenes in any of the live action Star Wars.

Lots of large scale lightsaber battles, which got boring somewhere between the titles and credits of Episode II (the second Matrix movie managed to make "action sequences" boring and painful in much the same fashion). Threepio and Artoo are a total flashback to the 80s for anyone who watched the Droids cartoon, which is a bonus.

Oh, and there's this thing:

That right there makes it worth watching. There's a couple of moments that are drop-dead awesome but I won't spoil them for you. This isn't that kind of website.

Wtf : Grevious is a massively bad ass Jedi food processor in the cartoon. Somewhere between Clone Wars and Episode III he apparently smoked an entire FACTORY of Marlboros and moved in with the Golden Girls. What. The. Fuck.

Opinion : Shitloads better than Episodes I, II or III. But then, so is Weekend At Bernie's. I'd whip out the Krull comparison but believe it or not, I've never seen Krull. I'm thinking the betterness has something to do with the fact that Tartakovsky directed. He actually has directorial ability - something Lucas seems to have lost in his twenty-two years away from the director's chair.

I bumped into Kevin at The Upstage tonight. I haven't seen him since 2000 and I haven't seen him at Ceremony since 1998 or so.

We talked briefly about comics and Star Trek (the two things we have in common), and the present state of the relevant Pittsbrugh social scene. Turns out my situation isn't unique - all of his friends have Left and neither of us has the cash to follow suit.

One thing he said to me - shortly before Depeche Mode pulled him back to the dance floor - stuck in my head like an arrow: "It's time to leave."

Verily, amen.

I hate holidays. The good thing about The Big Ones is that society's blown so much effort on The Economy that it can't afford many extras, so the street is Just How I Like It.

The fifteen extras on duty were all jammed into the Crossroads, waiting on the clerk that had drawn the short straw. The Seven-Eleven in Oakland was closed, so food consisted of rationing a bag of Combos I'd left in the work refridgerator.

Slept badly and woke up around ten - too late to get to work on time if we were open - checked the website, noted that we weren't, watched some more Star Trek, showered, and proceeded to leave the house when my roommate made it obvious through noise that he was not only in for the day, but we were cleaning and he would be doing his part wearing a pair of briefs and nothing else.

Right.

At least he's cut. If I liked Manly Men I'd have no complaints. And he's paying half of the rent for an entire house sans attic. I pay the other half for said attic and a bathroom door bolt that my roommate throws like a fucking shotgun blast whenever he thinks I might need to shower or relax. Passive incidental things like this - combined with an internal groaning and general apprehension whenever I hear activity in the house - go a long way towards explaining why I spend so much time at work.

On days like this I'm ALONE at work. I need lots of Alone and it's been made clear to me that Alone isn't something you can get for 360$ a month. Alone costs more than that. I told my scantily clad roommate that while "we" might be cleaning this "shithole*," I would be heading to work to do paperwork. Paperwork that I'd been given the 15th, that had been due the 12th** and that I'd been told to hand in on the 24th.

Since nobody's in until the 27th, I figured I had a bit of leeway and I'd rather listen to the clanking of steam pipes than cringe at the possibility my co-habitant will once again misinterpret our presence at the same address as some sort of social obligation on my part. I went to work, got all of my paperwork-doing things together, and promptly - almost unwillingly - passed out under my desk for six hours.

I tried to do that yesterday, but reality got pissy with me. Today it had no complaints - I collapsed like a ton of bricks and was out like a light. Six hours on tile floor and I woke up feeling more together and with it than I have in a couple of weeks... which is still less together and with it than I feel when I'm operating at full steam. Wake up, do the paperwork, slip it under the required door and ponder what, if anything, to do next. Realize it involves going back home at some point and realize in turn that I find this about as appetizing as sleeping in a downtown dumpster.

The problem with holidays is that nothing useful is open - especially on Sunday holidays - and anyone available is either oozing from the holiday spirit guillotine or they're just as hung up about it as I am. No good.

I'm sure I'll find something to do. Then the month will end and a few days after that the Emotional Polarity will clear up and I'll be Fine until the second week of February, when I'll have every reason imaginable to get pissed off and depressed again. Maybe between now and then I'll be able to get some more comics work done.

* It is, and almost entirely through his efforts. See here for visual evidence of what happens when I refuse to clean up a mess I didn't make. On the upside, when I got home I took a look at the bathroom and it's cleaner than it's been in years. When he does clean, it's thorough.

** I was out. In fact, the 15th was the only day I worked in the period of Dec. 9 through Dec. 23. It wasn't nearly enough time off and I lacked the funds to actually do anything non-shitty with it, so I watched lots of Star Trek and failed to induce vomiting with alcohol.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

This round of Philly has been defined by Bryan sleeping while I couch out in the living room, alternatively surfing and reading The Stand, which I'm about a good 2/5 into. Rather than dick around with my ipod or whatever's on Athena, I've been listening to Secret Agent and Binary's Pow-Wow 2005 set, both of which are a huge departure from the usual sonic territory. Different town, different vibe. No need for the industrial-metal defenses here.

Went out to wawa earlier : neither of us felt like really being out, and there was one hell of a crowd in front of the target pizza place, as well as other general Halloween loudness. Turns out we're of similar minds on the whole "dealing with civilians" thing, so Bryan ordered pizza and we watched the director commentary on Aliens. There was much rejoicing.

Clocks are adjusted, alarms are set, and if SEPTA and the cabs aren't on strike tomorrow (one of which will be critical to the whole "travelling at least thirty blocks" thing) I'll be on the 1145am train out. There's a slight chance of rjbs if Bryan and I can manage the morning thing.

There'll be a couple more blog entries and another DCR between now and then, but I think it's reasonably safe to say that all of the excitement has cooled down. It's nice to have spent a couple of days chilling instead of making comics and drinking.

The only downside of the whole adventure is that I feel like I've secondhanded a case of Lucky Strikes. I'm used to two and a half to four hour shifts in smoky rooms followed by a break of at least sixteen hours, usually more - a four hour tour with a seven hour break followed by a six and a half hour run has left me hack-hack, wheeze-wheeze. That aside, Philly still gives off that clean, scrubbed-down-with-a-steel-brush vibe, in stark contrast to Pittsburgh's patina of I-showered-last-week-whaddayawant?! trailer park filth. Probably has something to do with the fact that the town isn't hemmed in by hills on all sides and the air actually has a chance to move around, or something.

Don't get me wrong, both cities have their clean bits and their nasty bits and I've seen plenty of both - but Pittsburgh is an unplanned dollop of asphalt in a river valley, and it looks like it. Philly is much less claustrophobic, and the openness and lack of a hilly horizon certainly feels fresh.

1. People dig the shirts. This has turned into a verbal agreement with Adam to do next year's shirts and some CDC shwag.

2. Apparently I'm loud. Or rather, LOUD. I have this on good authority from Evan and Bryan. Since I can barely hear Bryan even when there's no ambient noise, my only conclusion is that five years of headphones at work has caused permanent hearing damage. I've suspected this for awhile and take it as indirect confirmation. Less clubbing would probably be a good thing.... not sure how much of it has to do with the lack of nicotine in my system - I commented to my friend Ray a few weeks after I quit that I was having trouble processing parties because I couldn't sort the foreground noise out from the background noise anymore - some sort of head-filter took a shit around the same time the nicotine flushed. That or all the Quake broke my ears.

3. More interest in ATC than DCR; more "just shut up and draw!" as opposed to, say, feeling for the rendering conditions. That is, people want the story - hypothetically on a regular basis - and they'd rather it looked "okay" than "good." As a reader I identify and as the creator I'm not really sure how I feel. On the one hand, Bryan admonishing me in this capacity is validating.... on the other, I wonder if Shirow wouldn't have done all of GITS or GITS:MMI in full color if given the chance - how much of that was a creative decision and how much of that was a management call? The reality is, to paraphrase Bryan, "I'm going to read the page and flip the next one, I'm not going to spend twenty minutes looking at it." As that's ultimately what I read comics for, and as recent ATC isn't so much "shut up and draw" as it is "shut up and wait," I think the best thing to do at this juncture is to finish the planned scenes as planned and to angle a different approach for the third scene of Chapter Four and the remainder of the story.

4. Bullshitting with bda - instigated by the previous post - was quite possibly the most important conversation I've had in the past year. If I had friends like Bryan in Pittsburgh I'd never need to leave town, ever.

5. Given all of the above, it's looking like DCR won't be a break in the festivities - which isn't what it was planned to be, but is what I've been treating it as- an excuse to not work on ATC. Not good for either project. Definitely something I have to think about.

6. ONE shot of Jaegermeister somewhere in a VAST FIELD of whiskey, water, soup, food, cola and so forth.... four AM and a liter of water in my head, everything else behind me and I'm suddenly slammed with that ghost Jaeger aftertaste, no context left field BANG. Awesome.

There is always one thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

-- Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

13:06 <@bda> Fuck.
13:06 <@bda> I'm a goober.
13:06 <@bda> Lookit that.
13:06 <@bda> Goober.

Turns out the harblekyoob is about a ten minute walk from the train station. The Drexel nerdery is apparently where all the heat that isn't being used by CMNH goes and the bathroom is ..... interesting. In the paleobotany sense.

I'm fried but fairly functional (try saying that three times fast), and the fact I was a dumbass and boozed it up last night has jacked up my thermostat something fierce - I'm sure it'll settle down after gear gets stowed and I have a chance to walk around without 45lbs of ballast strapped on. I'd be gorging the Canon's CF card if I was at standard carry (eg no laptop, no duffel, etc, etc). Should get a chance to do that over the course of the weekend.

Sat next to some old dude on the ride in. The train was packed to capacity, full of cel phones and iPods and laptops, age range 18-25 and 60+, several women that looked like my grandmother and a guy that reminded me of Charles Kerault or some sort of "This American Life" analogue - a pair of couples sitting behind me chatting in soothing radio voices about this and that, perfectly at ease... making the Dookyweb-populated visualization of The Stand even more unsettling.

Almost as strange as my morg inbox, but that's a tale for another time.

Since I don't have any pics of my Male Parental Unit on hand, I improvised and exaggerated a bit, in part due to the volume of exclamation points and expletives that follow, in part because the avatar generator doesn't have anything approximating his haircut. I hope he doesn't mind.

I've performed a couple of small edits to the text, mostly name removal and exclamation/expletive reduction. I think it's worth mentioning that my MPU was a technical writer at some point in his career, and has been performing vehicle maintenance for the greater part of his life. I'm firmly convinced that my DIY attitude towards computing is hereditary, though at times like this I think it isn't "DIY" so much as some sort of geek-routed masochism. With the exception of certain Big or Annoying jobs like transmission work, dad's totally aggro when it comes to projectile weapons, vehicles, consumer electronics and pretty much everything else that's prone to breakage or wear. The fact that he's good at it doesn't keep mom from smacking the occasional deer... and personally, I think he'd probably be a pretty bored guy if he didn't have something to fix.

That said, he recently acquired a 1998 Ford F-150, and has this to say about it:

It's pretty obvious that the majority of those who buy pick-up trucks nowadays do so strictly for the status of it. These assholes prance around with a limp wrist waving a perfumed hanky while proclaiming that they are so fuckin' kewl because they have a pick-up fuckin' truck! And judging from the condition of my recently-acquired '98 Ford F-150, this is most indeed the case!

I recently swapped out the air filter. The old filter sure wasn't pristine, but I've seen a lot worse!

solios@gridlock:~$ fortune # sum up my weekend plz.
You will pass away very quickly.

The problem with not knowing what you want out of people is knowing what you'd want to hear if you were in their place. Unfortunately, that knowledge accounts for about half of my bar tab - and all of my hangover. I'm looking forward to Philly because it's a chance to be social with no {perceived} strings attached. Pittsburgh is just too damned small to get that kind of a natural high anymore. It's small and after the past few nights out it's feeling positively claustrophobic.

A world - a city, anyway - of possibilities expertly FUDed down to a Yes/No.

I. Am. EFFICIENT!

As part of the whole "remodelling and expanding Dino Hall" thing, whoever it is that's in charge of such things decided it might be a good idea to drain the air conditioning system. The taps for the Dino Hall AC are - you guessed it - right over my desk.*

The best part? It was supposed to be done at some point on Wednesday. Good thing I was off on Thursday - according to Smith, they didn't bother to unplug the hoses (and close the frigging window) until some point Thursday afternoon.

If Pittsburgh were in Texas, this wouldn't have been much of an issue. But yesterday was another one of those flat gray Blade Runner days - the kind of day that looks and feels like the bowl of clam chowder that's been sitting in the crisper since March.

High point to a mostly shitty week : sleeping in at home while my coworkers got to freeze to the tune of construction crew "competence."

* The BetaCamSP, SVHS deck and NTSC monitor used to be next to the window until the AC system decided to piss all over them a couple of years back. Hopefully modern - or maybe even 20th century - HVAC is part of the expansion/overhaul plans.

solios@gridlock:~$ fortune
You're currently going through a difficult transition period called "Life."

Yay for the last fourteen hours.

In addition to the previously mentioned list of Joy, I've heard back from OWC. The response to the RMA request was ambiguously worded so I requested clarification. I want to know exactly where I stand on this as I'll be shipping the dead card back to OWC on my own dime.*

Messy dream around 0700. Noteworthy in that the consciousness/squirt trigger still rings clear as a bell and that was the realization in-dream that SHE HAS NO SECRETS. Read what you want into that one, folks.

I've got my own theories.

General feeling-like-shit this morning, which I attribute to pummelling my skull with Gin and Thunderdome. Not a hangover but the general ooginess is amplified and I'm immediatly in a foul mood as soon as I get to work - they're draining the hall AC system and the taps are right over my desk, so there's hoses everywhere, the girl us headphone-wearers share the workspace with is thinking out her mouth again and the 80g firewire disk on my desk is making the asthmatic whrrrrrrUCKuck whrrrrrrUCKuck that the other five MacAlly firewire cases made before their fans (and their drives, if they were IBMs) died.

Looks like it's time for another round of kit dropping like flies, and fixing gear I've been ignoring for weeks. Fortunately that's a short list, unfortunately it's all work PC equipment. It's pretty gross - I did a drive transplant on a 1u furnace today and the manufacturers idea of "securing" the disk was sticking the thing to the bottom of the case with quarter-inch rubbery double-sided tape, then screwing an L-shaped bracket over the exposed electronics. People actually pay money for this kind of shit - what amounts to duct tape drive mounts. Unreal.

I'm fairly certain I can haul myself out of this one before doing any serious damage. Right now "serious" is looking like gas lines or transformers - the mindless rage that's been clawing at my head past week or so seems to be having a Tetsuo-like affect on my surroundings... and even if it isn't, the thought that it could be is as nifty as it is sobering.

On a positive note, I should mention that the main clincher for ordering from USCav instead of Target was Target's ship time of "two to six weeks" and USCav's FedEx option. We're talking ordering pants on Saturday and having them Tuesday morning.

* If I'm readiny my inbox correctly I'm good to go, though I'm not sure if they're going to smack any more charges on me when the item hits the OWC offices. Regardless of how well the RMA procedure goes, I'm still out the shipping fee, which is money I wouldn't be spending if Duquesne Light hadn't hiccuped around midnight.

Job pays crap but gives access to equipment I can't possibly afford. Job is not very demanding and pays accordingly.

Jobs that pay better do not have same level of equipment access. More demands, more bullshit, more drain, less time for comics work.

So, shit for cash, time for comics.

Not like I can afford to do anything else, really.

A brief disconnect and it feels like I've been out of the loop for an eternity.

Discovered Flaky Pastry on Sunday - it's a cute little DnDish comic and the jokes appeal to my tabletop gaming roots. Tasty. Sometime before this - I think I was still drunk from ceremony - I bought pants from US Cavalry. After three trips to Target and one to Old Navy, I was positively relieved to find that the pants I'm after exist at all - both stores and their web sites ascribe to some form of selective reality in which "black" and "cargo pants" simply do not coexist. Horrors.

Since neither store bothers to stock heavyweight black t-shirts*, it looks like I'll be buying everything but socks and underwear on the internets. Perish the thought.

Watched Sin City early this morning, fueled by Digiorno and Seagram's dry (lime!) gin. Amazingly good stuff on all counts - Digiorno is a bit weightier in the crust than Freschetta, Seagram's gin goes great with Seagram's gingerale, and man. If gin isn't cut with coca-cola, it smacks me upside the head like a garbage can. I enjoyed Sin City quite a bit, though I'm fairly certain that having read a shitload of Frank Miller comics** helped. It's easily the most faithful translation of a comic book into a motion picture that I've seen, and makes the recent Marvel onslaught look like gaudy focus-group revisionism. Which is what it is, really.

Fortunately the hangover is more of a hydration thing than an OH GID THE PAIN flulike symptoms slog. Bonus.

Woke up on my friend Randy's couch and eventually made it home, after which I cruised to the bookstore and picked up some King - From A Buick 8 (138 pages in thanks to laundry) and The Stand, "uncut and expanded," which I'm saving for the train to Philly at the end of the month.

I'd link to the gin, since it's magic happy fun gin, but Seagram's - like several other boozahol vendors - has a lameass age-check flash thing in place of an actual website. Boo.

* I mean black with a black crew neck. Old Navy has black shirts with gayass grey crew necks, and Target has packs of shirts which, on occasion, might containe a black shirt - but never a pack of black shirts. I WANT to give these people money... why they're being complete assholes about it is beyond me. Maybe Hot Topic bought up all of the stock.

** Dark Knight Returns and the Sin City graphic novels, with a smidge of 300 thrown in. Electra is the sort of thing I instinctively avoid, and I was never really into Daredevil.

solios@gridlock:~/video$ fortune
You are number 6! Who is number one?

solios@gridlock:~$ fortune
You definitely intend to start living sometime soon.

Since the Arbies was closed last night (:-|!), it's been pizza Saturday and Sunday at 3am... which in turn means pizza Saturday and Sunday at 3pm.

Salty as hell but infinitely preferable to the food-shaped pre-diarrhea served at Tom's Diner, which is the only thing open in the south side at 3am on a Weekend. I'll review the place for the Pittsburgh section at some point - at the moment it's enough to say that the only thing the joint has going for it is that it's almost never, ever closed.

While looking at Chapters Three and {what there is of} Four in the Art Institute lobby, my sister - who I hadn't seen in almost four years, who was in the process of getting the I'm Gonna Be A Graphic Designer ball rolling, had one question she asked almost immediately- "Why don't you market yourself?"

I didn't have a real answer for her. She asked again a couple of minutes later, and I still didn't have one. I'm bad at talking up my ideas, I'm bad at sucking up to anyone whose work or attitude I find inferior or lacking, and a bucket of icewater rockets down my spine whenever anyone tells me they've been following my work "for years," as this implies I'm still not (nor will I ever be) free of the Porn Stigma - were it an actual disease, it would be some form of embarassing stealth leprosy that would pop up at the least convenient times (meetings, sex, grocery shopping, etc). The Porn Stigma is usually subconsciously invoked by the strata of the ego that wants attention and knows, historically, that Invoking The Porn is the best way to get it in volume.

Funny thing, that strata. It's all about the quantity - not the least bit interested in the quality.

I think the main reason I don't "push" ATC is that "Twin Peaks versus Star Wars versus Max Headroom*" isn't really an accurate description and anything else takes several minutes to unravel and spit out. There's also the fact that ads cost money and I don't have any - and doing the cheap-and-easy things that will turn ATC into some sort of revenue generator involve a staggering compromise of aesthetics, attitude, and effort. It means putting shit on my sundae and right now that's not something I'm interested in.

In short, I suck at selling myself because ultimately, whoredom of any sort involves people. People dealing-with is why whores have pimps, musicians have managers, freelancers have agents and companies have lawyers. A dubious joy of being an independant web artist is that you quickly find out what your weaknesses are, and you eventually get a handle on which ones you can improve, which ones you can work around, and which ones are going to dog you to your grave.

For the time being, marketing is in the latter third of that Triumvirate Of Suck.

* That part is after The Dualist, which in turn is after Dead City Radio, and bears about as much resemblance to Max Headroom as The Dualist does to Star Wars.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

... 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.

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.

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interdictor's livejournal

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.

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.

Giddamn, I can't wait to get this thing on the air.

Mostly for the fact that music keeps triggering visuals, and ATC hasn't done that for awhile.

Live and direct.

Technically, it's canned and obfuscated... but this town isn't one for technicalities these days.

I haven't built a site from scratch since some point in 2003 or so. Forgot you actually need content to break in the templates. Oops.