| LAN Happenin's |
[Aug. 24th, 2008|08:48 pm] |
Chris just went to a LAN at Pi's and it was pretty great. There were so many people there was a serious seating shortage. What's really great is that there wasn't Counter Strike the whole time. I got to play three RTSs! And one of them with people who were actually better than me at it! Jacob seemed stressed out at this one, though. I don't think he played anything at all, except Take Jasmine into his Bedroom and Close the Door III: The Frozen Throne.
Chris moving out has stepped into high gear. I feel weird about not having a place to go back to that's mine. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but in the mean time I have this nagging sense of insecurity.
Chris and Jacob played tennis today. We may invite some of you to come play with us in the future. You have been warned. |
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| Food meme! |
[Aug. 17th, 2008|06:08 pm] |
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.
The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
Wow! There were so many entries that I didn't know what they were! I suppose Chris still needs to learn a lot about food. |
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| Long Overdue Update |
[Aug. 11th, 2008|02:56 pm] |
So, I got this Facebook notification for a group that someone from my hometown of Clearlake created to commemorate someone from there that had died while serving in Iraq. I didn't recognize the guy, so I decided not to join. I was dithering around more in Facebook, when I found a note that was posted to the group, which announced that the soldier's funeral will be attended by the Westboro Baptist Church, a group that pickets funerals for Homosexuals. A group that is apparently willing to gay-picket a veteran's funeral. The depths some people plumb to...
In other news, hi LJ. We haven't talked in a while. I've been trying to find work. No luck yet, but I've still got avenues to try. I'm concerned that I wont be able to make the rent this month. I really hate to have to ask this, but I may soon require some of you guys' couch-surfing resources. I assure any potential host that I am very unobtrusive and compact. |
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| Rape? Rape. |
[Jul. 19th, 2008|01:38 am] |
I just watched the film Immortal (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314063/). A visually interesting picture, but way the hell too silly for the emotional weight it thinks it has. I wish it had enough exposure for someone to be able to satirize it, as there is some righteously spoofable material in there.
In digging around in the failings of the film's writing, I identified what I think is one of it's bigger errors: trying to make a god a protagonist. Gods, for one thing, don't tend to fail at things. Without that potential a story's urgency is inevitably weakened. One of the reasons why "guy wakes up and makes a cup of coffee" isn't a big narrative genre. Also, gods (and Horus is no exception here) have a habit of operating on bizarre, inexplicable motivations beyond the ken of us hu-mans. For supporting cast this is fine, but doing that with the hero leaves a fat, stinking pile of don't-care directly in front of the story that I find hard to look around.
The film also prominently features what I like to call a "Magical Negress" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_negro). Magical Negresses have physiological attributes, frequently of alien origin (but are really hot, go figure) that enable their bodies to be used for unique, mystical purposes but who are themselves devoid of agency. They exists to be limp, vacuous tools for the story's big, strong men, be they Space Bruce Willis or Sexually Felonious Big Bird. Additionally, the experience of said use never provides a significant barrier to living happily ever after with the person that used them.
To think there was once a time when science fiction was progressive. |
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| Couple of Things |
[Jul. 17th, 2008|11:17 am] |
Chris has exciting (not really) employment possibilities:
-A post office job at $20/hour
-UMS "multitasker" (which I presume works out to be more of a nihilotasker)
-Stealing the jobs of deported immigrants at Sun Valley.
I want to get rid of a few items with possible commercial value. They include music CDs, mostly anime soundtracks, a couple of Christian fiction books in hardcover and a small collection of comic books, about half of which are manga. I'm trying Tin Can for the comics and Amazon for the CDs, but I'm not confident I will encounter success in either place. I'm open to suggestions as to other means of non-wastefully disposing of said items. I'd like to be compensated if that's possible, but I'm also willing to give them away to people who would appreciate them.
Also! Awesome C&G: http://www.catandgirl.com/view.php?loc=625
Lately I've been boiling over with video game/roleplaying/general game design ideas that I would really like to post about and discuss in an internet community. I don't know of any good forums or blogs for such things, however. Anybody run across anything that might be worth looking into along these lines? |
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| Hey Internet! How 'bout some opinions!? I hear you're usually good for those! |
[Jul. 11th, 2008|10:47 am] |
Hey there, LJ! I want you to help me decide something! I'm trying to decide what the best film released in my birth year (1983) is. For those of you too lazy to go to this url: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_in_film, here are my candidates:
A Christmas Story
Christine
The Dead Zone
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Star Wars 6: Battle on Teddy Bear Mountain
Sudden Impact
Videodrome
I note that I have never seen Sudden Impact. It is included because it is a film starring and directed by Clint Eastwood, which are on average better than the weaker-than-expected field that was being released while I was figuring out that whole breathing air thing.
Feel free to suggest other films, though! I've only seen maybe an eighth of the list on wikipedia. |
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| Merry Renee's Birthday Eve! |
[Jul. 5th, 2008|05:41 am] |
Happy Independence Day everyone! I hope you enjoyed celebrating the one blood-soaked insurgency against foreign domination we're allowed to like in the United States! I know I did!
Tried finding somewhere to see the fireworks on campus. It was pretty much a bust. The endeavor was foiled by locked doors to the BSS building, an overcast sky and lots of tall trees. On the upshot, for the rest of the year we get overcasts skies and awesome trees.
I would like to see Tiffany and Brian and their derivative works while they're in the area. Gimme a shout if any of ya'll's down. |
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| Stuff and Things |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|09:15 pm] |
I've gradually been accommodating myself to social networking sites, mainly Facebook. I'm starting to find it easier to get actual use out of them. Still, it is an uphill battle trying to pull out the meaningful communications from the constant torrent of Lil' Green Patch requests and lolcats. Right now I'm trying to figure out how to set it up so that when a message thread is progressing in my Facebook inbox it e-mails me for the first message, but not for every post in the thread. This afternoon I had ~20 messages in my Yahoo! from one message thread. I wonder how people with actual social lives keep this kind of glut manageable.
I had an interesting game of Escape Velocity going the last few days. In EV, like most PC-RPGs, there is a non-linear wanderin' around part and you can discover linear narrative portions. I ran into this narrative that I usual hit upon at some point in the game where I am asked to find the homeworld of the Vell-os (telepathic people enaslaved by government spooks all Babylon 5 style). Now usually when I get this mission I wind up banished from federation space (I was referring to this in my last post). This time, and I'm not sure why, could be entirely random, I wound up developing psychic powers and getting enslaved by the above mentioned government spooks (note to self: Visiting Vellos=Bad News).
The game reflects your enslaved status with some pretty harsh restrictions. Your ability to return to that wanderin' about mode is more or less impossible, with your main means of maintaining your finances cut off and your ability to get a decent ship or upgrade it virtually nil. You're even blocked from aborting any of the missions in the narrative line. Now, I'm sure some people, especially fans of more modern PC-RPGs, would call foul here, and complain that you should always be able to do whatever you want. I think the designers made a good call with the restrictions. They made me really, really want to see the tables eventually turn. It was a fascinating instance of the rails being used to good effect in service to a narrative theme.
In other news I wrote up a design for a simple fencing simulator. My main objective is to incorporate proportion of motion into the game, something of great importance to any martial art but that is, to my knowledge, missing from all games concerning hand-to-hand combat (with the possible exception of Wii Boxing). Also I hope to get a chance to play around with old SNES style 3D techniques. |
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| Outer Space Shows are for Children and Stupid People |
[Jun. 16th, 2008|06:54 am] |
So I had this game on my harddrive for four, four and half years that Eeyore tried to get me to play once. I just barely kept the game when I moved over to the new system Pi set me up with earlier this year. I decided to start playing it a few days ago, mainly because I have only a few other functional games on my machine, I've played Starcraft more over the last year than held human eye contact and Stronghold: Crusader, while a serviceable LAN game, just isn't good enough to play against the CPU for hours.
So I picked up EV Nova, this simple little flying-around-space game, something I've been ignoring for a long-assed time. Over the last few days, I think I've been playing it for more hours than I've slept. It was a shockingly addicting game after I spent a little time with it. It's essentially a PC-RPG, but in space, and far enough away from Medieval Europe and the D&D clap-trap that's stunk up the place.
Right now I'm a space Fed-Ex guy, doing a little cabby work and commodity trading on the side. I just got a mission that I know will banish me forever from the civilized sector of the galaxy to the lawless fringe, where big nasty pirate ships eat Fed-Ex guys for breakfast. My intentions are to save up before I complete that mission, get myself a nice middle-sized ship, slap "Moya" into the ship name prompt, and seeing where the galaxy takes me. "My name is..." |
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| Chris and Pi Went to Oakland |
[Jun. 12th, 2008|10:02 am] |
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I went to Oakland with Pi. It was a pretty awesome adventure. The highlights for me were the always incredible food, some great thrift-store shopping and Renee's awesome pigeon. The highlight for Jacob was watching a homeless guy in Berkeley puke into his hand and put it into his ear. Thank you so much for hosting us Warehouse-people! |
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| On Wikipedia Tonight |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|08:19 am] |
So I was doing some of my standard browsing on Wikipedia tonight. I decided to avoid my customary subjects of booze and killing machines for a broader subject. I picked Peru. I should know more about Peru. You should too, probably.
( Read more... ) |
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| Spring Break Statistics |
[Mar. 22nd, 2008|08:18 am] |
Piggyback Rides: 30.4m
Games: Pandemic(NEW!) Portal(NEW!) Guitar Hero(NEW!) Advance Wars Smash Bros. StarCraft Settles of Cattan Jeopardy! Bad Dog, Bea-Bea!(NEW!)
Rips Given: 35
Rips Received: 12
EtOH: 1552mL
Making Out: 6:21.7
Pit Bull Acknowledgment: 1.5%
Lols Given: 4.7 megarofls
Lols Received: 22.7 megarofls
Good ettin's: 244.8 kilonom^3
Crimes: 0
Accessories to above: 5
Personal Reassurances: 37
Bed time: 70:44:07.2
Crab Walking: 5.4m
Instances of Duncan Mentioning his Penis: 1.0$
There were lots of tall buildings |
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| Brawl Party? |
[Mar. 11th, 2008|06:17 pm] |
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Hey! I got me some new Smash Bros.! Our house has been blessed. Anyone down to gather for the purposes of playing it a whole bunch? I will be gone most of Spring Break, so I'm thinking either the weekend at the end of Spring Break or the one after. Hope to see you guys! |
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| Beyond Dominoes |
[Mar. 7th, 2008|07:13 pm] |
You guys, I have been watching US military and political maneuvers in the Middle East closely over this last year, and I think I've uncovered the leading objective that's been directing US strategy in the region. Save your copy now before the CIA guys in charge of editing Buffy the Vampire entries on Wikipedia happen upon my blog:
 |
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| America Out of the Toilet in '08! |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|08:10 am] |
I bought one of those travel folio Scrabble games like Renee has. I played a game to myself on the way up to the fencing workshop I went to weekend before last. I was hoping to get someone curious and then play a game with them. I started having a really strong game, however, and I forgot about my intentions of playing with anyone. I wound up with 682 points over 32 turns (with two bingoes: POTATOES and FRUITION). I was pretty happy with myself, especially since I hadn't played in a while before then. Then I dropped an E in the car. I was looking for the damn thing the whole trip, and I never found it. I can't believe they don't sell those things with spares, at least for a vowel or two. Ug. I 'm ordering a replacement tilebag ($4.10 from Hasbro's site).
In other boardgame news I played Scrabble and Chess with Pi, Stephanie and Allen while we all desperately needed sleep. Pi and I played pretty evenly on Scrabble. I think we took about the same number of chess games, too, though Pi was playing several simultaneously. I suggested we play staring-contest chess, by which I meant playing chess while simultaneously doing a staring contest, but which Pi took to mean a plain staring contest. I naturally lost, being the only contestant burdened with feelings.
Some of my own fun I want to make: I really like strategy games. Sean can tolerate strategy games, but I think he'd rather do something more creative (I largely take this from his insistence on playing hilarious phonies during Boggle). I would really dig on some kind of strategy game with a big creative aspect. I'm thinking something with drawing. Maybe something like Pokemon or Magic with drawing monsters? Something with drawing maps? Or maybe we could order a couple tubs of legos and play Mechton. Anywho, it's a thought. |
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| I Don't Get Networking Sites |
[Jan. 29th, 2008|12:44 am] |
I was taking a quiz on Facebook about recognizing video game characters (80% of which were in Smash Bros.; I suppose Nintendo is still hanging on to its lock on recognizable characters). I missed one in which I identified Mario's giant turtle nemesis as "Koopa" instead of "Bowser." This sorta pissed me off because I intentionally favored the character's original name, but then I realized I just AGed* and OJVed** a Facebook quiz.
I find myself really bewildered on Myspace and Facebook. There's so many weird little buttons and operations. I kinda just wanna post messages and the occasional picture for my friends to view and respond to, but I don't know if anyone pays any attention to the more straight-forward stuff when they have all those lolcats and the jenkillioneth iteration of the Facebook application Spam Your Friends and Watch a Number Go Up.
*"Actually Guy"
**"In the Original Japanese Version."
SURPRISE! CHRIS LIKES ACRONYMS! |
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| My Presemester Funk |
[Jan. 20th, 2008|03:30 am] |
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I've been feeling really apprehensive about the future. I'm not confident I have a straight-forward path to the research jobs I have been aiming for, with my crummy GPA seriously imperiling my chances to get into a good graduate school. I don't have medical insurance. In a semester or two I wonder if I'll have any friends at all still living here. It looks like things could get pretty bad pretty fast and I don't know where to turn to. |
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| Readin's! |
[Jan. 19th, 2008|05:50 am] |
So, over the break I read a lot. One of the books I read was The Meaning of Marxism by Paul D'Amato. Another one was an anthology of Robert Heinlein short stories called The Past Through Tomorrow. Needless to say, there were some sharply conflicting ideas about the ideal future society in these two books.
In the last story of The Past Through Tomorrow, "Methuselah's Children," Heinlein gives two examples of functioning socialist Utopian societies that exist in an extraterrestrial context: the Jockaira and the Little People. Both are populated by alien species fundamentally dissimilar to humans, and whose arrangements are found to be incompatible with human nature.
I interpreted the two Utopias to be frameworks for criticizing socialism's fitness as a solution for organizing human society. "Sure, socialism can work, but things would have to be like this and this! Things that human beings can't or shouldn't do!" In the Little People's case this is a form of communal telepathy wherein individuality is erased, and for the Jockaira it means complete subjugation to benevolent gods.
Heinlein compares the Jockaira's state to that of domesticated animals. A similar analogy could be made to children, who are similarly cared for those much wiser and more powerful than they. Indeed, as my father once pointed out to me, children in our society do live in circumstances resembling socialism.
In The Meaning of Marxism, D'Amato brings up the "primitive communists," the pre-agricultural societies that achieved states of egalitarianism us living today can only dream about. I would have to suspect that someone of Heinlein's disposition would reconcile the accomplishments of the primitive communists by comparing them, consistent with his line of reasoning with the Jockaira, to animals or children. It's this accounting that most compels me to agree with D'Amato's ideals over Heinlein's. |
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| Game Magazines are Decided Poor |
[Dec. 21st, 2007|03:11 am] |
So I just got the latest Game Informer. This is the magazine that Game Spot makes its employees pressure their customers into accepting a free subscription for. Its a pile of thinly disguised advertisements that I read because I'm too lazy to find a better source for video game news.
Like many such publications, they like 'em some lists. Oh, video game lists. This issues is their annual big spankin' list, which promises to spawn many lesser lists. I was grateful for one such list, of the top video game character protagonists, as it verified the observation I've been making that video games have gradually converged on a single protagonist: a slightly scruffy, white, straight guy in his 40's who looks a little bit like Bruce Willis.
Seems that apocalyptic future has supplanted WWII as the RTS/FPS setting of choice. I read a little of the featured article for the FPS that EA is putting together based on Command and Conquer. I was especially amused with a section concerning the development team's efforts to broaden the series' setting. Their stated aim is to give the series a rich backstory like that enjoyed by Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. An aim they choose to accomplish by working out the historical minutiae of the setting and how their magic green crystals work. Yeah, I'm pretty sure people are into Star Wars and Lord of the Rings because of all the ancillary crap they've been collecting over the years about Bilbo's aunt's cousin's roomate's dog and what Sith Lords do on their days off.
For anyone reading who does manage to get ahold of a copy of this issue (Jan. 2008), check out the picture at the top of page 79. Yep, I'm not sleeping for a while. |
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