| God bless our armed forces! |
[Nov. 3rd, 2007|08:57 pm] |
Hooray Navy!
I didn't see the Purdue-Penn State game but some shaky officiating did not help Purdue, apparently. Oh well, misery loves company. Espcially company it can get away with kicking gleefully.
The only thing I feel stupid about now is thinking Charlie Weis would take Notre Dame back to the elite level. |
|
|
| RIP Max McGee |
[Oct. 21st, 2007|01:45 pm] |
I didn't get to see too many Packers games, living in the Chicago suburbs. In fact being in Chicago sometimes meant a Packers game would be viewable everywhere except in the city. But I still had a radio set to WTMJ. And in a way the Packers weren't worth listening about, objectively, for a lot of the late 80s and early 90s, but I managed to avoid the twin frustrations of that and spotty reception.
Probably because of Jim Irwin and Max McGee, and with Max McGee's death I realize how even the blowout losses were good times. There was finding out about Brett Favre including when Reggie White injured him. Being home from vacation meant Jim and Max and I can't remember if I muted the TV for a Packers game to listen to them but I hope I did once. When the Packers made the Super Bowl, I wished I could hear Jim and Max announcing it, but WTMJ did not reach to the East Coast. I got to, years later, for the highlights with the Green Bay Packers Greatest Hits 1992-1996 CD. I remember how I worked hard to record their call of Yancey Thigpen's drop at Lambeau that clinched the NFC Central in 1995, how I enjoyed listening to the ESPN radio summaries because they'd have some play calls or even an interview from the Packers game, when I was on the East Coast.
This morning I finally got to see McGee's Super Bowl I performance in color. That must have been a great time. Even more than the blowout losses and last-place "Battle of the Bays." |
|
|
| How I wanted to verify an issue today |
[Oct. 12th, 2007|05:01 pm] |
Ok, ok, I'm cranky today.
"This may not be actually responded to, but any trivial error X Y reports which requires testers to verify extensively, he can go sit in the Unix lab that is hot because we have too many machines there. It's worth it to close an issue erroneously just so I can make it feel like I am shutting him up. It's obviously not going to happen in real life. If only X were as descriptive about how to sift through the logs as he is for WHY THAT WITTY REPARTEE HE ENGAGED IN LAST NIGHT WAS EVEN CLEVERER THAN YOU INITIALLY THOUGHT." |
|
|
| Gore won?! RECOUNT!!!! |
[Oct. 12th, 2007|03:58 pm] |
Gore? The Nobel Peace Prize? Are you ----ing KIDDING me?
"to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
His work may be potentially important, but when I look at the former winners, there's nothing in there about the environment as it corresponds to peace. Maybe it's a new direction.
But it took these guys 5 years. And yes, Gore split it. But this stinks. I mean, he's a better choice than Bush for about anything, but it's just inappropriate. And it's just, he was such a frontrunner in 2000 with his DLC act, and I don't trust his full turnabout when he says "Now I can say what I didn't before." I've seen people fake it for far less.
I say this as someone who lives well below his means and gets tired of the sort of rants that still make ME feel I'm not doing enough. In a way, we all aren't. I think the sort of actions he suggests can potentially be useful. But I just don't see nations coming together on it, yet. Most had already signed the Kyoto accord.
This is inappropriate unless of course there really hasn't been anyone else that deserved it more. Then we're all screwed. |
|
|
| Another lousy poem |
[Sep. 11th, 2007|10:24 am] |
But fun to write, as always.
The homeless march in step, too.
The ones downtown, they have a cost of living.
That fusty uptown bargain mart by the church
Where less enterprising folk sleep at night?
Low-end clientele. Best to hit Starbucks.
Four within three blocks--no eviction if they rotate.
The guilt trip into the most expensive brew.
Payment for tackiness. Then there's the tip.
Still feeling beneath even the minimum-wage fools
Pissing their whole day's extra pay here
Instead of some seedy pub.
Overpay all at once. That's more efficient.
NO SMOKING, the sign says, being kindly
don't-ask-don't-tell. Smoking fucks over
Cell phone jabber. So does body odor
That covers whether they bum smokes or not.
Still, exercising their right to overpay
Takes the guilt off panhadling.
Which they need to get back to.
Gulp that latte. Can't miss rush hour. |
|
|
| screwed up poem |
[Sep. 7th, 2007|10:37 am] |
It's not any good but so what?
No porn allowed, say the blue-blazered cocksuckers
Who talk of their kids during lunch break.
It's their break too, quiet-boy.
They bore you? Their kids grow up faster
Than they go up the corporate ladder.
You, just another book.
So listen up about their change of realtor,
(It wouldn't disturb REAL writing,)
But listen more carefully to other peons
Asking of something you gave two shits about
When they only gave one.
Momentarily fooling you you give twelve.
Oh well, it pays your salary.
And the cocksuckers' too. |
|
|
| this&that. |
[Aug. 24th, 2007|11:59 pm] |
Yesterday the power went out for a few hours at home. I've no idea for how long as it was out when I got home. As I walked home from the bus I said, great, power looks like it's back on--oh wait--a few blocks down, not so bright.
Apparently many people in the N/NW suburbs have it worse. All I had was myself to kick for dropping my keys and glasses where it took me a while to find them. Oh and I had no flashlight too.
Today I was disappointed I didn't get as much done on FAQ rewriting. The reason was probably that I'd had such steady progress writing especially when I was working out.
One of my more recent journal entries mentions wanting to write 5k/day on weekends too and I have been doing that. The next step is actually putting it all together. I had a few "bridge" ideas that put separate things together and they work well--enough for me to yell briefly when I figured a few of them.
At any rate I am procrastinating FAQ rewriting with "real" writing and too often it is the reverse.
Another small procrastination was turning up these two old books with a quick Google search. They're nothing terribly special but I did enjoy reading them the first time, and now. I found it just writing up stuff I wanted to remember and googling it. I'm still surprised how often it works...I shouldn't be. Though sometimes it still almost feels like cheating doing/learning so much so quickly. |
|
|
| -click- |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|05:50 pm] |
Today I went up to Sam's Club again in Evanston. I took some time off from work. It's not hard to get to via bus. I have to switch before the end of the brown line, then eventually the bus goes north on California which turns into Dodge. The main problem is that my hand-cart is a bit small for me and I have to lean to one side to push it properly. But I always fill it up with enough good sales from Sam's and the adjacent Food4Less.
But on the way back I noticed Mather Park, which reminded me of Mather High School. "Gee," I thought, "where is THAT?"
Less than one block down of course. I'd always assumed it was at some weird intersection. We'd played them in chess once. I didn't realize the two high schools were so close. Having only one for the entire suburb often made me feel there must be a huge area just south of Evanston with no high schools whatsoever. Oops. It seemed rather far away for some reason but now I know why we scheduled an out-of-conference match with them. Our coach never explained this to us. He did a great job of organizing but it is human nature to sucker people into thinking the logistics are even more complicated than they'd guess, even taking that into account.
I've seen this before, such as kids getting on the bus around 3 PM as school let out for Amundsen(<1 mile away) or Lane Tech(on Western.) I'd located other high schools via Yahoo Maps. But it is still a shock to find one the 3rd or 4th time you go down a certain bus route. You look for different things each time, I guess. It'll happen again.
I groaned and snapped my fingers for a few seconds, causing a few people to look at me as if I'd completed an obnoxious cell phone call spanning several minutes. But I don't know, figuring this out often makes me want to try a new bus route to get half lost in and find new things with. |
|
|
| Proposed car commercial |
[Aug. 18th, 2007|01:04 am] |
Cut from 18 year old dweeb reading fantasy novel by bus stop to kids whooping it up in a MegaGuzlorz, bumping some crap music from some lousy artist who'll be forgotten in a year who has a CD with only 2 songs that are palatable even to goons with short attention spans. They drive past and spray him with water and run a red light and are about to crash. But they rip through the space time continuum into another world and wind up running over a dark wizard who is about to cast a spell that will give him a thousand year rule over a fair land where the babes are hot. A wise old man approaches them with a pot of gold.
Then the kids realize there are no gas stations to keep the MegaGuzlorz running so they pick up the first hot babes they find and reverse the machine. It jars back to the current universe where the Escalade has trashed a hapless Ford Escort. The nerd reading the book gets up and yells "I know your license plate!" They knock him over and also a bike rider who pulls out a notebook. Then they rob the poor schleps for gas money. Hey, they just turned down pure gold.
Soothing male voiceover, as the MegaGuzlorz sideswipes a bus: "Introducing the MegaGuzlorz. It could even help you do loser stuff you can't be bothered to do or dream of. The stuff that would mean you didn't DESERVE a MegaGuzlorz if you really tried it."
Soothing female voiceover as the bus spins over and breaks into flames: "No people cool enough to own a MegaGuzlorz were hurt in the filming of this commercial." |
|
|
| He Was Too Young |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|03:17 pm] |
When he was three, he was too young to bounce on the bed. He could get hurt!
But his parents didn't think he was too young for everything. They let him skip everything. It wasn't their fault the kids at school all told him he was too young to be let in on a secret. Besides, his parents started telling him he better be old enough to do certain things.
When he was ten, and his mother cavorted with the handyman who talked about his exploits as a teen, he was too young to understand things. Including why his mother and father didn't break up. His sister, three years older, got to hear.
When he was twelve, he was too young to know what sorts of teenagery things his sister did to get yelled at. He didn't need any ideas. He was too young to repress the right ones.
When he was fifteen, he was too young to sit down and listen to college budgeting and such. He was also too young for a driver's license like everyone else because he'd skipped a grade. He was still too young to hear the handyman's tale.
At sixteen his procrastination became serious and he knew there were books for that but he was too young for a book with a fortysomething guy in a suit on the cover grinning and pointing at him.
When he made it to college, he was too young to make his own food. He had to eat the greasy cafeteria food, which was the same as the greasy high school cafeteria food, but he was too young to learn to eat right.
When he was twenty, his parents divorced, and he was too young to understand why his parents divorced. Besides, he was away at college! He was definitely too young for a midlife crisis or for psychotherapy or whatever. He also realized that some time along the way he had grown from being too young to know about sex and too young to realize his parent's didn't have sex to being too young to know quite why his parents hadn't had sex in ten years. But for his life experience he was still too young to rage fully against the world, or at least to go to bars and let off steam that way.
He also hadn't asked his parents when he was no longer too young to go after girls, and he was probably too old to ask when things had changed. Anyway, he was too young to have a baby and too inexperienced to be able to control himself around the girls who lay in wait at the sort of college he went to, because he hadn't gotten the experience in high school.
He was also too young to complain about being old with or to his parents, or to understand what it was like. He soon realized he was too young to get a job with any real responsibility or money, or to be able to handle having so much money as people with similar grades got straight out of college.
Then he got a pretty good job. He kept at it. He went through a succession of managers--way older than him, not much older, about the same age, younger and then much younger. But he was too young to let up and too young to retire because of stock market risks blah blah or general burnout. After all he didn't drink or smoke, so he had several years more than everyone else around him to be too young!
Nevertheless he developed multiple ulcers and went bald early from the stress. He could have afforded hair transplants, but he was too young for that. And he was too young to complain about all he'd seen and felt without arousing suspicion. So, ix-nay on the ongtermlay ompanionship-cay. That's what came of reading too many books.
Laid up in a hospital with a mysterious illness he knew his time was coming. He was too young to play the foxy-grandpa routine that had gotten the guy in the bed next to him an "encounter" with a night nurse. Soon he saw a light at the end of the tunnel. "Why'd you always do this to me, Mom? Dad? Hey, it's good you're back together."
"We're only doing this because there's one thing we agree on. You are too young to know the details. If you'd lived longer like most of the family, maybe we could tell you, but you wasted our living-long genes. And when you die, you'll be too young to learn through all eternity. Sorry, kid."
And through all the questions he'd never asked, he knew he was too young to ask why he was too young about X, Y, or Z, and he was obviously too young to put it fully at rest. |
|
|
| The recovering weirdaholic |
[Aug. 14th, 2007|05:59 pm] |
12 step program
- Today I will not be weird!
- Today I will encourage a friend to be less weird!
- Today I will make fun of weird things people don't know I do!
- Today I will encourage a friend to laugh at someone weirder than we are!
- Today I will buy something mindless and conformist I do not understand the appeal of!
- Today I will make fun of weird stuff people know I used to do!
- Today I will be sorry, but some people really don't even try to be less weird than I did!
- Today I will encourage a friend lagging behind me to pick up the pace and be more like me!
- Today I will accuse someone normal of being weird, to make sure they are normal and laugh it off!
- Today I will string together questions regarding someone's weirdness!
- Today I will flip-flop and say, if "even" I can be normal, so can they, and "even" they can realize that!
- Today I will be cutting edge and commit to perform acts normal today but not five years ago--and keep up to date in the future! Normal isn't just a lable!!!!
|
|
|
| 5k/day |
[Aug. 12th, 2007|11:58 pm] |
This goal has been working pretty well--on weekdays at least. I haven't missed a day of writing at the very least 3 KB except in extraordinary circumstances(ie not going to work) and I have been averaging the above.
The only problem? On the weekends, not so good. I think one factor may be that I tend to read a lot and write up FAQs on the weekend, and another is all the shopping I generally do--but shopping doesn't take eight hours. I think it's just that there's no work work to expunge when I sit down before I go home and start sorting stuff out. At work, there's the extra fun of feeling I'm chipping away and stealing a bit of time, but at home no such luck. I guess I have to frame it correctly to myself, but it's good to have general consistency.
Cool book read today: Horseradish by Lemony Snicket. A series of sayings and fables turned on their head. I recommend reading it at your local bookstore because a book that thin doesn't deserve its hardback price no matter how good it is. |
|
|
| Mr Haystack and the two Asses |
[Aug. 11th, 2007|11:12 pm] |
Dear hackneyed old Mr Haystack the English teacher was always a relative favorite among students and faculty alike. In fact you got looked weird at if you said he wasn't nice and all. Saying he was nice was easier than doing anything nice, which was convenient. When Mr Haystack was young, he maybe should've gotten some teaching awards, but patronage ran rife and there were old teachers ahead of him who needed some sort of award because it would be embarrassing to go through a career without an award. And of course there were the teachers who had gotten awards for ten straight years, but they hadn't gotten worse, so it would be wrong to cut them off. It'd hurt their pride. Mr Haystack taught of doing things for the sake of doing things and I am sorry to say he never had students come back and give the general lecture about how you better not screw around in my favorite teacher's class, he gave me life skills and stuff that stay with me to this day, and you may not think so now but you'll either realize it soon or too late or not at all.
Haystack wasn't abrasive enough to transfer out of but wasn't an easy enough A to transfer into his class en masse. "Oh well, I have Haystack," they'd say, and he had a few missteps where he didn't give kids understood to be A students quite the right grade, and the curve sometimes made him push someone who'd probably understand down to a B+. He didn't get to teach those AP classes where everyone got an extra 1.0 on their GPA to go with a B average for the class--including the slackers or the give-up-niks who got a Gentleman's D for barely doing anything. Fs in AP would embarrass the school.
Then one year the Ottington Twins were each in a different class of his. They were destined to be lawyers. He made the mistake of jumbling up their grades a bit too much. He'd give one an A and one a C. Or vice versa. They didn't have many people to be competitive WITH at their level, and such a constant stream of imbalances annoyed them. They talked his ears off after school. Was he picking grades from a dartboard?
He'd been pushed around before by lesser students and so why wouldn't he let the Ottingtons and their parents push him around? During a surprise visit the principal turned up Haystack's notes where he fantasized about banging the Ottingtons' heads together, along with another one depicting the Ottingtons pinned to a dartboard of grades by their shirts. Worse, the drawings were in stick figures.
"Ah-ha! So maybe this puts the detentions you gave them in perspective! It's about the only thing you doled out equally." Haystack was on notice. Besides, nobody had wanted to say this for a while but they'd expected him to be sort of average and all as hires go, but that didn't mean fading into the background. Perhaps he would be better at being average at a less prestigious institution.
The next year Haystack got two of the worst cut-ups in the class. Jonny, the A student who cut others down with lots of class participation, and Jimbo, the B student who just cut the teacher down. Haystack couldn't figure who to discipline and how. The parent-teacher conferences resulted in Jimbo's folks accusing him of bias and Jonny's folks being upset Jonny's grades were lower than Jimbo's of all people. The classes degenerated into "Come on, we need someone other than Jonny or Jimbo to participate." Jonny and Jimbo would follow up with that--Jonny with how kids would fail at life like this, Jimbo with how even he was able to do it.
Haystack started drinking more colored generic pop than ever. He let his food grow moldy and began to subsist on TV dinners eaten at 2 AM. He had to do something, but there would be a backlash either way. He went to the department chair, a younger fellow than him who actually claimed to be peppy. "Do what you feel best." "But I don't know what to do." "Well, we've always been" (the chair shuddered) "hands off with you. I'm sure whatever you do will be okay, since you know what happens if it isn't."
Haystack talked with other teachers. "You just do what you gotta do." "That'd get a bad grade in an essay." "Well we're giving motivations and we grade the essays now, we don't write them." He wondered if he should go to the principal next. The fellow whose makeshift shelf of motivational books had collapsed and put his foot in a cast? He'd be worse.
So eventually Haystack had a nervous breakdown after a Jonny/Jimbo argument. Even the kids who never spoke up agreed they'd never go all creepy like that. A few of them used to cry in junior high school, but they didn't do that crap now. The principal took Haystack into his office. "Stack," he said, using the nickname Haystack hated,"You've never been terribly giving on a person to person level but we have faith in your ability to care enough to sacrifice. Like how you stopped taking classes 3 credits short of the masters that would've given you a 20% raise. The district is going through a budget squeeze and you probably don't need all that pension or psychiatric care money you'd get if we gave you permanent medical leave. How's about you do the generous thing? Eh, boy?"
No, Haystack did not even want a going away party. The principal assured him they could have one, but it would be awkward, and Haystack had done a pretty good job of minimizing awkwardness by not being around people who felt awkward around someone who wasn't very social.
They took a minute to think of him at the English awards ceremony. The chair summed it up best. "Well, he was such a good guy, for someone who wasn't really anyone, except when he started trying to be himself." |
|
|
| Performance Enhancers Shocker |
[Aug. 10th, 2007|11:05 pm] |
This does not in any way reflect my opinion of the Barry Bonds situation, which probably inspired it. Sometimes you just need to get a story off your chest.
Dr. Bongo Manby Ph.D., 43, was arrested today on suspicion of taking illegal and excessive performance enhancers to improve his status among colleagues at his university and in his field. It was revealed that he had tested positive for certain omega-3 fatty acids only found in vitamin pills that had long been discontinued due to their effects on the brain. These acids, while spiking the user's intelligence long term, leaves him at risk of being a drooling mess well before the onset of old age, or possibly more depressed when his intelligence leads him past the work to be done now and into human nature. A raid on his apartment also produced motivational books chock full of received knowledge and time tested ways to force people to act friendly to you.
Dr. Manby was well known for his key contributions to solving one of the century's great unsolved problems. Yet many in academia were suspicious of him from the get go.
"His research was only average at best until a few years ago when he started getting all friendly too. He also had trouble getting along with people until then too. People's lives don't improve that quickly, unless they find a great business idea or buy a hot new car or stop drinking, no, not even smart people. But Dr. Manby did not even know how to invest his 401K funds, he took the bus to work, and he still hasn't traded up that dumpy wife of his," said Soren Dwipps, a colleague at Intellectual Tech whom Manby helped solve the big problem. "When he became happier and more focused all of a sudden without any serious life changes, I think we were all suspicious. But we wanted it to be true and ignored the truth."
Dwipps also mentioned that Dr. Manby's catch phrases made him seem like part of the crowd, but "Some of us have worked for years to give the catch phrases we use our own special meaning. I mean, there are clearly catch phrases only smart people can use, and then there are catch phrases that need a smart person to say it right. And here comes Manby doing it better than us one day all of a sudden and we're always hoping for that whiz kid or when it seems someone makes a big jump, we want to grab the dust trail. But we ignored the obvious. That he may have been cheating."
Dwipps fixed an extra strong pot of coffee. "Well, the bigger they rise, the harder they fall. If you're going to cheat, at least plagiarize or overwork your TAs or screw up someone's career with a whisper campaign. Anything but this."
Tech regents have already made steps for legal proceedings to seize Manby's part of the prize and donate it to the renovations of the Dwipps building. Dwipps has filed a lawsuit alleging all the money should be his. But one thing is clear, Dr. Manby's actions must be condemned, whatever they are. |
|
|
| Kitty pics are healing |
[Jul. 19th, 2007|09:10 pm] |
8 new ones at the top, starting with Pip on the mousepad(I may make more even later:) http://s29.photobucket.com/albums/c276/roscopco/ Apparently it even has an RSS feed! Oh wow.
Had my first stay in a hospital in a while. Tuesday I vomited and was unable to show up for work. I had an intense pain in the stomach area which didn't go away Wednesday. At work after 2 hours the pain localized to the lower right(which potentially means the appendix) and the doctors ran a bunch of tests which left them baffled in the best possible way--they couldn't find anything that needed surgery. I even had a TV in my "corner office" room which was good and bad. Good, because one of the first things I saw when I entered was that the Cubs had shellacked the Giants 12-1 and I enjoyed the Cartoon Network with a lot of shows I'd never seen before. The Adult Swim started to suck and I can't say I enjoyed Family Man or Aqua Teen Hunger Force as much as I thought I would, but maybe I was just getting tired.
The bad was that I was under doctor's orders not to eat and a lot of the late night commercials had tantalizing visions of calorie packed food which in my weakened state I was unable to resist without emotional pain. So I walked out to the observatory area past where the night shift nurses had their break food laid out, but then I stared out at Lake Michigan and it was actually more interesting than the TV to look at places I'd walked when I lived in my old Lakeview apartment. The place I was directed to, St Joe's, was just 2 blocks away. I'd frequently parked across from there and wondered what was in there. Well, I got a chance to look at floors 1 and 3 and 10. For the sort of experience it was, it was a good one. I hadn't been in a hospital for a long time and my experience of pre-meds was one of very bossy types who would backstab to get to the top and try to undercut others who can do better than they can. That may've just been where I went though--Johns Hopkins was a good university for the more cutting edge technology, and I suspect that attracts different personality types.
But what I found was how people worked together, at least on the surface, to take care of multiple common problems(patients' health and their worries.) How doctors delegated and how they had to delegate(I could learn from that) and in fact I noted how I 1) was able to pass something off to other people and 2) probably should whether or not I am at 100% on Friday. So that was a good exercise as the pain on my right side slowly disappeared. At the end of my time there(4:30 PM Thursday), I was able to eat a relatively soft meal, which I hadn't done since Monday night. I realized I hadn't eaten in 60+ hours, which is some sort of record, and the IV drip was a bit annoying.
And haha of course the whole episode meant 2 days without access to the internet(or the willpower to access it) and potential Potter spoilers. It's no secret they're out there. I've also almost sealed my Harry Potter predictions for book 7. I will post them Wednesday or so for amusement purposes only with a "how well did I do." Of course it will all behind a lj-cut tag. Even if it's not the best series ever & has aspects that annoy me terribly, it's the only one with years of buildup and the experience won't be replicated easily. |
|
|
| And now for something intentionally not funny |
[Jul. 5th, 2007|02:03 pm] |
I deleted my Windows games on Vista the other day. I thought it was really cool how Windows kept track of how many hearts games you'd won/lost, at least until I went on a losing streak. But maybe it was the realization that I was getting grouchy at Pip for no good reason that he was blocking my view of the Hearts game I didn't want to play anyway.
Deleting games after a bit of a binge on a new computer is like a tradition to me. I think, well, once more for old time's sakes, then I want to show in some vague way that I've improved over the last time, and it's a bit of rubbish.
Despite "losing" a few hours though I got through a lot more writing notes. I still have some stuff to look at from ten years ago and either it will be crackerjack stuff or I'll have improved a lot & found new ideas since then. Right now I'm rifling through stuff I am 90% sure I checked off on but I might as well go through it again and it is a fun sort of proofreading really. It seems every day I can fill up a page to write on and I'm really getting rid of a lot of distractions, or giving myself compelling reasons to ignore them. Sometimes I've worried I might wind up wasting a day off and that is no way to really prepare. I left a bunch of things on the table, and sometimes I look at the writing notebook with 200 sheets to read through and think "1 a day at the start of the year and it'd be cleared by now." But for the most part it's working terrifically well. I always wind up remanding some paper for later use(ie stuff for 1.0.1 versions of FAQs I may never get around to,) but I've got enough files arranged sensibly that I can slap stray information where I need to.
And it's odd how I dread the potential repetition of proofreading and procrastinate it with Hearts or Sudoku or whatever, which I've never played before. |
|
|
| IMPROTANT INTERNET QUI'Z |
[Jul. 4th, 2007|06:22 pm] |
Please answer the following quiz as earnestly and truthfully as possible. You do not lose any points for a wrong answer. Give yourself 30 minutes, subtracting one point for each minute you finish early or late, so as to equate with the time you spent getting to know about her. For most accurate results, take when around someone else who is chatting on a cell phone. Sarcasm on essay questions, especially impugning the person about whom this inquires, will be severely penalized. Answer questions in their proper order as some later ones may give away the answers to earlier ones. Point numbers are in parentheses.
( How much do you care about other people? ) |
|
|
| The Convoluted Martyrdom of Harvy Porter |
[Jul. 3rd, 2007|12:56 pm] |
Harvy Porter always wanted to read books about going to another world. He didn't have some messed up childhood where both his parents got blown up in some terrible accident and he had to go live with a fat cousin spoiled by his uncle and aunt. No sir, nothing ludicrous like that, and did his parents ever remind him of that! Harvy, who once cried of boredom on a road trip to the next state over, also had gotten hold of a map of the world and picked, at random, North Korea as a cool place to visit some day.
"You're really lucky you don't live in North Korea, young man. Children are starving there. Now eat your asparagus." Harvy didn't like asparagus. And his mother's cooking was terrible. But he didn't have many friends, either. He'd made the mistake of saying his friends' parents' cooking was so much better than his own parents' lousy stuff, and his friends' parents had sort of blacklisted him--and his mother too, who took it out on him with the silent treatment. His friends didn't think much of his culinary tastes, either.
But one day Harvy was lucky enough to find a tunnel to a different world still in its when-men-were-men phase. When food was natural--and terrible. He wasn't sure if he should realize that his mother's bad cooking had helped prepare him for this, or if it would not have made any difference anyway. Then came the prophecies. He was told he fit a certain prophecy, being part of a team that would save the world. "The most unlikely of unlikely heroes." He was quite getting talked up, even though he was too weak to walk in armor and never got the hang of horseback riding. He seemed studious and while he couldn't cast any spells, wizards trained with him a lot, knowing of so many alternate worlds where they guy who shouldn't be a dud casts the big spell at the right time. They figured, the less likely the hero, the more likely he would be able to save Nerdnia for good. Harvy had even been selected to join one of four magic houses and he had chosen the most ordinary one, the one that did everything all boring and was responsible for stupid charms like turning a 4 leaf clover into 5. So people thought his ways must be very subtle indeed.
But while the evil wizard trained to kill Harvy, a kid in Harvy's class found a new way into the fantasy world and actually started to learn the spells Harvy couldn't. His cell phone neutralized all surrounding spells and also had a queer habit of making people in the fantasy world start saying, for no apparent reason, "Yah. I'm on my horse." "Yah, I'm eating dinner in the throne room." And it left them stupid for five minutes afterwards. The effects were cumulative. Those rare people not affected tended to voice their displeasure, and the lucky ones were not heard.
One day the evil wizard finally gathered up the courage to kill Harvy. Harvy's classmate was a nuisance to be rubbed out later, perhaps at the victory banquet. All the greats would be assembled there. At first people thought they were just blabbering because that is what people do at victory banquets, but eventually even the silent guards started talking about the weather or the list of puppet shows this week, or even the appalling state of outhouses these days. Harvy's classmate, so frustrated at the babble(and his inability to participate, or call someone up he liked to babble so much) gained superhuman strength and burst his cords. A bunch of knights showed him their swords, he took them, and instead of the knights cutting him down, they felt compelled to talk about OH MY GOD all the blood! Then he came up to the big wizard, Moldy Vort, who started babbling about the ways he could kill the young upstart ruining his banquet, and all the spells--it would be so simple really!--but the best way would be to cast...the reagents were...but they were too busy to do anything just now...
The cell phone blew up when the spell cast successfully, but the bad guys were all dead. Harvy had been incinerated and forgotten. He only participated in class when he had to, so why should he get to participate in the good parts of how he helped save Nerdnia? Anyway, his classmate had better teeth, muscles and a less whiny voice than he did, and he was able to push people around more. And the last time Nerdnia was saved, it was by a couple of kids who weren't such splendid physical specimens, which is probably why it needed saving so soon after. So people felt better about having him as a savior. Harvy never wanted to be memorable in class so why should he be remembered as the saviour of a whole fantasy world? |
|
|
| He Was No Child Molester |
[Jul. 2nd, 2007|12:30 pm] |
He knew about those creeps who went and molested 14 year olds on the internet. He was way different from them. Oh sure he was more educated but even if he weren't he was pretty sure he'd know better than to fuck around like that. And he hung out on an Internet gaming board, but all he did was deride 15 year olds for not being mature enough and 20 year olds for acting like 15 year olds with the occasional mock surprise at how someone's age could be so high acting like that. And he didn't give that "call me by my first name" crap. That was only for the least immature, who gained points smacking down the grossest stupidities on message boards. The only sexual talk he did was smacking down people who thought they knew about sex. He lived in a big metropolis and even would've gotten some good yucks out of Sex and the City if the babes weren't so hot. After all he sometimes laughed at the short haired chick's witticisms.
Besides it was the older people whom he really picked at. The guy who'd gotten married at 20 and divorced at 21(that loser, once a target of MILFs who wound up with a 17 year old, was put on notice HE might grow up to be a child molester.) The college grads who'd need to face the real world, or those struggling through college. The real world was waiting for them, and it was going to be rough. Of course he didn't offer any silly help--he wasn't even trying to be a sugar daddy. He always smacked down the truth. And when people misread him, it was either their fault for not reading what was directly out there or not reading into his stuff enough. Reading comprehension! Kids needed it, and so did people who still mentally were kids and didn't know it. It was more--hassling them for their own good than any molesting. Or stating how the people they looked up to weren't worth looking up to: pro wrestlers, pro football players. He never whined about them, though he did mention he was glad he didn't have the brain damage they did. He called them to look deep into their souls when they didn't come down hard enough on a 20 year old serial killer, and just because they weren't wise-guy enough to mention most serial killers were 40 years old, that wasn't good enough. Even bringing up 9/11 occasionally. 9/11 changed everything except enduring human stupidity and it even changed his own brilliance--helped him to focus it elsewhere.
No, he didn't play games that much, but given how personality-based the gaming message board was, did any of the really visible personalities? Besides, he had a job. Something those kids didn't know about. They deserved to know that he was jealous of their free time if not them. The least they could do is be jealous of his life skills if not him in return. |
|
|
| Consistency |
[Jul. 1st, 2007|11:35 pm] |
Well, last week was a pretty good week for writing stuff at work. 3,825 4,520 4,344 4,331 4,635 byte count. The minimum is up from last week, if the average is down. Probably because I've had fewer papers I really wanted to write up and my bookbag was less crowded. I know I've never had a streak of 10 in a row where I wrote something to a daily file, and I'm quite happy about that. Lots of times it was just taking 30 minutes before I left and, strange thing, I was in a good enough mood to kick off a few programs and tests before leaving too.
I won't get 5 daily work files this week though what with July 4th. (HA! Oh well.) I feel as if I've stopped making at least one excuse, but if you asked me what it was, I couldn't tell you.
Felt very successful on the gaming front, too. Broke 600 files submitted to GameFAQs and even submitted a box shot(Xyphus). It and Wrath of Denethenor got pushed through along with maps. While Wrath was a much bigger game, it really wasn't that hard. You just improved your character, got some information, and ran through.
( Xyphus mini-review )
The key thing I took from this, though, is that I know my FAQ and even my map aren't perfect. But I'm getting a feel for what, in general, is obvious or can be explained to other people and what's obvious ain't obvious, or what can be reformed later and is not that important.
Also I rehashed my 2400 AD maps so that they had some pretty good detail and organized things and sent 3 maps to GameFAQs. That does it for all my games, at the halfway point of the year(YES we're only 182 days through so far.) So now I may go searching for other games or, more likely, I may take a break. I have actual writing to do now after all. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ziyx's journal