| I have nothing to say |
[Sep. 27th, 2009|09:26 pm] |
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While I could go on at great length on several topics (some current, some obscure, some only of interest to me), I really find I have nothing much to say. Life goes on: sometimes I feel good, sometimes I feel bad. It matters little ultimately. |
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| A Purge |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|11:44 pm] |
I have experienced my emotional quota for the year. I just saw "Up" this evening; I laughed, I cried, it was exhausting. If I had not been restraining myself from weeping openly, I would have been in a state of awe (actually, I was able to do both which was very confusing). The people of Pixar are in possession of a peculiar and potent power. They provoke in me (your mileage may vary) an intense sense of nostalgia, tragedy, irretrievable loss. They can bring a room full of people to their metaphorical knees in a matter of minutes. And it is not some trite, passing thing; it lasts. I have been sighing constantly for several hours now.
Oh, I am too tired to go on any more. I will return to my own cold and emotionless existence tomorrow. Ugh... uh... *sigh*
The beginning of that movie, the introduction and the montage (primarily the montage), is quite possibly the saddest and most beautiful thing I have ever* seen.
*Until I see something better. |
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| the joy of being an adult |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|10:53 pm] |
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I had a brilliant idea a couple of days ago: I decided to buy bacon. Yes, bacon! I was eating a fried-egg sandwich, and I thought "gee, this would be better with bacon. I can buy bacon.". It seems a small thing, but I often forget that I can do whatever I want now. I just have to remember to want things. |
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| Pride Ko |
[Jun. 8th, 2009|12:46 pm] |
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I have recently acquired a digital camera, the first I have owned. It is just a point 'n shoot as a digital SLR body is still not in the budget. Who knows where this might lead? I'll be on Facebook next, and then *gasp* I'll get a cellphone. This is a slippery slope ending in a big greasy pile of anonymous consumers. As appealing as squirming around in that mass of warm flesh may sound, how will I be able to differentiate myself in such a place? No, becoming such a herd beast is too horrible to contemplate... until I get a new Tilley. |
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| Guitar Hero Video Strip-Tease |
[May. 30th, 2009|12:08 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  hopeful | ] |
I can now confidently say that I am acquainted with a genius of astounding... um... something. No ordinary man would come up with (let alone implement) Guitar Hero Video Strip-Tease. It was astonishing, and like so many astonishing things, it is difficult to explain to those who were not fortunate enough to witness it, but I will do my best:
( The truth of it and other news )
In still other news, here is something cute just for those not brave enough to look under the cut (who knows what you might be missing), though I suspect many of you have already seen it:
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| I am whole again |
[May. 22nd, 2009|09:51 pm] |
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Sweet-Ass is risen. My BIOS chip went bad, so I had to send the mobo home for repair. When it came back, I pulled a major oopsie and managed to wipe my drives when attempting to reconfigure my RAID setup. Ah well, a fresh install of everything alleviates some of the embarrassment. Back to work at last. |
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| The Aporkalypse Cometh |
[May. 4th, 2009|09:31 am] |
No, I didn't come up with that 'aporkalypse' thing. The internet is far more clever than I.
I got to use a truly awesome sewing machine this last weekend. I went over to Tom's place to make a hakama on saturday. He laid out the pattern pieces and did most of the cutting. Then he led me to the heart of the machine, the chamber of unspeakable wattages. Seriously, there were two sewing machines and an iron in there. The *iron* made the lights dim when it turned on. The machine I was using could suck fabric faster than I can run. Seriously, you just twitched your foot and the needle would just become blurry. You couldn't really tell it was moving; it just went all blurry and the fabric just got sucked through. It was so sweet! The feed dogs had a little trouble on the thick, lumpy parts (more than 10 layers, doubled up seams, that sort of thing). Ah, but its neighbor, which had an inappropriately cute name, would sew through a half-inch of anything. Seriously, whatever you could fit under the foot would come out beautifully stitched, and if you weren't careful, it would be beautifully stitched to your hand. So fun.
And I have just seen this which is terribly, terribly awesome:
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| click here!?! |
[Apr. 3rd, 2009|06:22 pm] |
Ugh! Blech! Those two words, possibly more than any other pair, really irk me. They are redundant. It's a link! Of course you're going to click on it. What else would you do with it? Massage it gently with your toes? Open a can of spam with it?
It's a like starting every paragraph with "READ THESE WORDS", or affixing a tag to door handles that says "GRASP THIS", or comprehensively labeling stairs with "STEP UP HERE".
When making something to be used by other people, one of your goals (unless you're a sadistic fuck) is to make it easy to use. This means it should be obvious to the user what things are for and what they do. A link that says "click here" doesn't tell them anything. It's LAME. STOP IT! Just tell me where the link goes or what it does or something useful.
End! |
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| whew |
[Apr. 3rd, 2009|02:05 am] |
My Day:
Despite my best efforts to sleep in this/yesterday morning, I had to get up by 7:00. I then spent almost four hours shoveling wet mulch in the rain (for non-Seattlites,"rain" means cold, cloudy, and extremely humid). I then retired to my abode and did an hour or so of work. I then took a wonderful nap in which I dreamed (for part of the time anyway) that I was a woman, and I think I ended up seducing someone. Maybe I was reliving the rumor that the ShamWow! guy punched a hooker. That's all the romance I had time for, as it was off to Aikido for a couple more hours of physical activity. I then returned home to spend close to another four hours at work finishing something up for those darling people on the East coast (you're so cute; yes, you are). Now is fast approaching "very late" by my standards, so I will go sleep. Hopefully, I will have appeased the Easties, and will not be needed again until a reasonable hour.
Today qualifies as "productive" in the category of "other people's stuff".
It is always my goal to have more days which involve getting my own stuff done, but other people pay better, and shoveling mulch is just fun, so I don't complain. |
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| goats, but not really |
[Mar. 25th, 2009|09:18 am] |
Sometimes people sound like ducks.
I got awesome spam today from 'laudertrpt@bigcockpill.com'. That's "bigcockpill.com". Clearly I could have done better than fearthesheep. I mean, wow. It's like poetry, man.
AT-ATs: not just for xmas. |
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| booya! |
[Mar. 19th, 2009|05:09 pm] |
How do you spell "booya" anyway?
That's right, it's time to think out loud again:
( Transportation ) |
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| mundanity |
[Mar. 9th, 2009|09:04 pm] |
SDRS continues. I did a major rework of some class structure stuff which held up forward progress for a while. I may have to do it again, but any such future revisions will be quicker than this last. That is for the future, however. In the present (sort of "nowish"), the shop is online, and the weapons are filling in. They are all a bit hideously overpowered, but that's ok as I can just beef up the big roids later.
Try it
And in other news, here are a couple of slices of awesome cake:
(yes, it is feature-length. yes, it is worth it.)
it's like... the future.
Holy bottom margin, Batman! |
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| who is this walrus i've heard so much about |
[Mar. 6th, 2009|10:05 pm] |
Ha, I ended a sentence with a preposition just to stick it to the man!
Let's do some journaling, shall we? I'm not dead yet, though I haven't really been trying. I have realized that dying is one of very few things you can be guaranteed to succeed at. Everyone wins!
I am poor. My life is just so much soma. The former I am working on. The latter continues to frustrate me. Whenever I stop to look around, I cannot help but notice the same mistakes being made, injustices being wrought, and generally mediocre state of our modern civilization. It's not that it's actually and actively bad overall (hell, we've outlawed slavery, and that counts for something); it's just that we persist in doing things badly. We suffer from a perverse and chronic case of misplaced priorities. And there are people who champion and praise these backwards practices. And there are those who for lack of thought or attention, simply perpetuate them blindly. I would like before I die, to see humanity take a step forward. If we must be dragged kicking and screaming (which is likely), then so be it, but let us get to the work of the dragging because the situation is intolerable.
Read on at your own peril.
( Intolerable )
Governments should be run by engineers. They will, of course, need advisers with a better sense of morality and personal hygiene, but what we need are people who understand how to solve problems efficiently. |
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| ESCAPED MONKEY! |
[Feb. 19th, 2009|12:31 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | monkey | ] |
No, seriously. A monkey escaped. Ran right by me. It was awesome. I got to watch them dart the little guy.
Check it. It was great. The full explanation: I volunteer at the zoo. I don't usually work in the zoo proper though, I work in the rose garden adjacent to the zoo. Today, the head of the rose garden was out sick, so I helped out in the zoo. We moved some plywood over at the new penguin exhibit under construction. Then we were clearing some cut greenery from the southern edge of the African savanna when I see two keepers jogging in my direction, intently watching something over, hey, look, here comes a monkey! It just ran right along the edge of the bushes I was hauling brush out of. It was even better than the penguin exhibit (which didn't even have the penguins in it yet). The three of us hort folks just got back in the truck and waited as the area was soon swarming with keepers with nets and brooms, and after twenty minutes or so, the dart brigade came out (rifles and blowguns and syringes, oh my!). The little monkey was just hunkered down in the bushes against a fence not twenty feet from us. Anyway, they shot some darts, carried him out, and put him in a kennel. Best part:
Keeper returning gloves he just borrowed from us: Thanks. Uh.. Disinfect those... Yeh, they've got primate blood on them.
Who knew the zoo was such an exciting place to do gardening? |
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| damn my big, mammalian brain |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|09:30 pm] |
or not. I do like it.
I have posted a new SDRS build. If you pick the middle ship, you can try out another weapon, rockets! I am working on the store, so you'll be able to pick and choose from the whole set (well, the whole set of what has been implemented which is a partial set of the full set intended for the final release). Anyway, the sparkles are awesome. I also have the following bonus items in dev:
Personal Jesus (dies for your sins, extra life)
Monolith (full of stars, charges up your warp meter)
Dog is Your Copilot (dog in spacesuit with tether, effectively extends your reach for collecting things)
Rainbow Death Beam (a big, beautiful blast of colorful death streams from your ship)
Healthy Breakfast (repairs your ship... hey, if chicken can fix bullet wounds, why not?)
That's that.
In other news, Malcom Gladwell has another book out which sounds super groovy. Obama should appoint him to be like, president. That would be change, and I would wager that it would be effective change, too.
In still other news, there is a dumb little proverb floating into the verse that goes "No one every says, on their death bed, that they wish they'd spent more time at the office." True or not, let's assume (hypothetically, unless you prefer method acting) you're on your death bed. What do you wish you'd spent more time doing? Will you be found doing it tomorrow? |
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| Bad Software and the Kings of the Rotten Vegetables |
[Feb. 6th, 2009|01:00 pm] |
I do soooo love working with bad software. Nothing makes me happier than trying to wrest a simple behavior from a cryptically uncooperative class. Well, that's not true. I do also love searching for a method or property only to find hours later that it does, in fact, exist, and it does exactly what I want; it's just not documented.
So to all of you who make software, please, please... stop writing sucky code.
I write sucky code, but then, I'm the only person who uses my code. If you write code that other people use, sucking is unforgivable. This is the sort of thing that drives me from software development altogether. Don't make me try to find a new line of work... I'm not sufficiently motivated for that sort of thing, I'll just end up living on your couch, doing skeezy deals to earn a buck.
Today's widely known but well-worded wisdom: Meetings are special places where smart people act very dumb.
I have been distracted from SDRS, but I will get back on it shortly. Fear not, the rocks will perish... They'd better as I have too many other things queued up for destruction to stall out on some damnable space-rocks. |
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| toot |
[Jan. 25th, 2009|02:25 pm] |
I have a sudden urge to watch Charlie the Unicorn. Please stand by...
Ok, now I have to watch Adventure Time...
Ah, I feel better now. So what was I talking about? Ah, yes. I still don't like bars. Try as I might, I continue to find hanging out with people at a bar an unpleasantly boring and uncomfortable experience. I'm not entirely sure what I'm missing, but in truth, I don't much care. Speaks volumes about my lack of social tendencies. I suppose it's ok if there's a pool table...
I have rebuilt the Groovy Link (better, stronger, faster, whateverer) on FTS. It only does a random pick for now, but I'll add a page with the full list next. There's a lot of new stuff in there, so go nuts. I found it a dangerous waste of time, and I've already seen all that stuff, so consider yourself warned. |
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| sexy, sexy sparkles |
[Jan. 23rd, 2009|08:54 pm] |
Rock Shooter has sexy sparkles. They are so sexy... soooo sexy. Golden sparkles... mmm...
For those too busy having Obamagasms to have noticed, the National Film Board of Canada ("making Hollywood look bad for over 65 years") has begun putting their archives online. Yes, everything. Public money being used for the public good. Who would have thought it could be so simple?
And in other corporate media withering news, Monty Python has put all their stuff (yes, everything) on YouTube resulting in an increase of sales of their DVDs of 23,000 percent. Suck it, mongers of eternally restrictive copyright law.
In other news (again not Obama related), I have not been named as part of president Obama's cabinet, but that's not really surprising, and it's also a little Obama related. The illness is passing (yay!), and soon I will rise again and return to... doing stuff that I usually do... that I didn't do while I was sick. Wow. I just sold the kayaks that Krista and I bought back when we lived in that wicked-awesome house down Selkirk ways within spitting distance of the Hudson. They are off to wetter pastures than my parking space. |
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| whee |
[Jan. 22nd, 2009|07:54 pm] |
Rock Shooter update:
http://www.fearthesheep.com/host/SDRS.html
Nothing major:
-Tweaks to turning (best as I can manage with Flash keyboard input).
-HUD designed and in-place.
-Crystals.
-Warp charge (with no actual warp, hold W to experience).
-Other sundry assorted stuff I didn't write down.
I am curious for those few of you who have played my Rock Shooter games to know what your opinion is on weapon equipping. I have two possible schemes:
SCHEME A - Player can cycle through all purchased weapons while playing.
SCHEME B - Player can equip a single purchased weapon before launching. To change weapon, player must return to shop.
Yes, I am using my LJ as a development blog for my dinky Flash game. This is because I still have a cold, and other than my dinky Flash game, my life is a bleak wasteland (swirling, sucking, despair, etc. I'm not sure what the cold has to do with that...). Once SDRS is complete, I will make another stab at something more robust than Flash for development as I have some new resources that will get me rolling (yay, TIG). A couple more tries, and I may be able to do it. |
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| awesombama and history |
[Jan. 21st, 2009|09:48 am] |
this is the funniest thing ever*.
this, on the other hand, is just interesting:
*since the last, until the next. |
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