Blackmail possibilities?
Blast from the past… while I still haven’t found my photo album (packed away during the last move), I did find some old black-and-white scans of some of the costuming pics. I’ve added them to my Costuming page. Sharp eyes will find lekythen, snidegrrl, yubbie, jdunson, and markush in some of the pics. The last one also has rubinpdf, but you can’t tell ’cause he’s in a silver helmet. “Cyberpunk”, “Cyberman”… close enough, right?
Web-comic thoughts
I am jealous of Barb and Chris’ upcoming cartoonist fame, so I went and found the old Artificial Intelligence strips Tom Monaghan and I collaborated on.
*sigh* It’s not that I’m not still proud of the work, it’s just that the jokes all seemed funnier back in 1987.
Spent today catching up on Mac Hall… that strip can be pretty dang funny sometimes. Even smiled at the Digimon porn. Bad Boys of Computer Science just didn’t do anything for me, though. By the way, if a hi-resolution version of “Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots” was on a t-shirt, I’d own three of them.
The artist of Mac Hall did a total conversion, “Marathon: RED”, for Bungie Software’s Marathon Infinity shooter game – some of the best bitmapped art that game’s ever seen. I was hoping to get the Aleph One:SDL version working to show meiran, but the Windows port is still just too buggy. Maybe next time she’s close to a Macintosh.
While digging through my files, I also found the digital file of my game card… yes, I am a card in the Star Trek Collectible Card Game. The original artwork is by Chris Impink, and alert people can see where I got my default LJ user icon from.
Law & Order
Went to court this morning over the license tags I forgot to renew. (Actually, there’s a *lot* more to that story, but it’s not worth ranting about here.)
So, I walked up to the metal detector (it did pick up my metal hip) and the police lady says in a monotone: “Please place in this tray any metallic items such as keys, change, nail implements, foil or foil cigarette packs…”
I start unloading my pockets so that I can prove that the beep really is my hip, then I realize she’s continuing: “… knives, handguns, rifles, grenades, machine pistols, assault rifles, anti-aircraft weaponry, portable nuclear devices, fighter jets, tanks…”
I look incredulously at her and she gives me a “Gotcha” grin. I had to smile back. Plus, once in court, I didn’t get fined or anything either. For a court appearance, this wasn’t so bad.
It is most unfairly nice outside right now. Sunny and warm but cool in the shade, light breeze, clear blue sky, one or two thin filaments of cloud for texture…
A less responsible person than myself would be out there playing hooky from work and enjoying himself right now. However, I am much more responsible than that.
… darn it.
Stuff
We got pizza for lunch, Humble Pie. But I accidentally ate a slice of the pepperoni pizza (’cause all the cheese was on top) and now my stomach’s badly unsettled.
The people who programmed the spell checker for this client weren’t real hackers… the spell checker doesn’t recognize the word “pepperoni”.
Someone is advertising miniature cattle in this week’s issue of the paper… I keep flashing back to the conversation about “raising albino lesbian micro-beefalo in a windowbox” that came up during kittykatya‘s Roanoke TFOS game from years ago. The beefalo weren’t part of the game, you understand, just part of our gaming conversation.
The Australian government, responding to the RIAA’s “we can hack your computer when we feel like it bill”, has said that such activity may make US executives criminals under Australian law, and expose them to charges and possible arrests if they enter the country. There’s more info here. Good for them! “Australia, Australia, Australia, we love you, amen!”
Hi to rubinpdf – say, do you think I could actually film the Commissioner Horton part this time?
Sigh.
If I shave with an electric razor, the skin under my jaw stays rough and stubbly, and becomes raw and irritated as well, to the point where I can’t wear a high-collared shirt without going insane.
If I shave with a blade, I get a reasonably smooth surface under there, but one covered with tiny drops of blood where the skin there is apparently just uneven enough to take a dozen tiny nicks every time. I can wear collared shirts, but they better be dark if I don’t want the stains to show.
I despise shaving.
Borgus Reviews of Literature
Finally caught up on my reading this weeked… finished re-reading “The Barsoom Project”, read “Idoru” and “Snow Crash”, and checked out some half-remembered passages in “1984”.
“Barsoom Project” is one of my favorite books – it’s set at a Disneyish corporation that runs incredibly realistic Live-Action Role Playing games in a pair of titanic Star Trek-style holodecks. (Paid for by the movie they’ll edit out of the footage, the home game cassettes, and the novels and tie-ins.) It’s three stories at once – you want to find out how the LARP will work out, who commited the act of industrial espionage that drove one of the last group of players insane, and what the game controllers will do when that player inexplicably pops up again in this run-through of the LARP.
“Idoru” is the sixth William Gibson book I’ve read, and the third in a row that I just didn’t like. In “Difference Engine”, “Virtual Light”, and “Idoru”, he writes of helpless characters who mostly stand around open-mouthed as the book happens around them. It’s kind of dull, and uninteresting… you finish the book thinking, “what was that about, and why would I care?” It’s a darn shame, ’cause “Neuromancer” was so good.
“Snow Crash”, on the other hand, more than made up for that. Excellent humor, interesting characters who matter greatly to the plot, intelligent writing, and intriguing speculation about the fragmentation of human language. I just told a friend that the story “begins with a guy who delivers pizza for the Mafia, and ends with a futuristic Ted Turner’s attempts to enslave the population of the world”. If this is the quality of the author’s work, then I am absolutely picking up “Cryptonomicon” as my friends have been advising me.
Finally, after looking at the portions of “1984” where George Orwell (as Emmanuel Goldstein) describes the method by which the Party came to power and maintains it, I have arrived at the uneasy conclusion that the world is still traveling smoothly in that direction, just a lot of years behind schedule. However, I can’t think of a dang thing I can do about it, so I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about it.
Oh yeah, and I finally beat a sub-boss in the fifth act of Diablo 2 that has been giving me serious trouble on “Nightmare” difficulty. So that’s good.
Catching Up
I’ve actually had a great deal to post in the last week, but I’ve spent most of the week unable to summon the creative juice to sit and really write the entries. I’m feeling a little more in touch with the muse this morning, so hopefully I can catch up a bit on some of the things that have been on my mind.
Today, here at work, I got my first piece of spam from “the widow of a rich African government official who would like my help recovering her funds”. Yeah, “lady”. That’s the one where some people end up broke, and others end up shot. No thanks.
Re-installed Diablo II on my machine twice last night. Cleared the backup files from my boss’s laptop (that’s another story) for space, reinstalled once, got all my old character files off CD, and had it running (almost) happily before I discovered I’d made a major mistake. I won’t go into details, but I had to clear the files and install again. When people bring their machines over tonight, we’ll have to ensure they all the latest patch installed, ’cause that’s the version I have to use to run the game under OS X. I’m looking forward to the game, though character balance may be a bit difficult, since Rain’s favorite char has progressed to level 38, and mine’s up to level 50… and we expect to have at least one complete newbie tonight.
Found out this week that the upcoming OS X 10.2 for my machine, retailing at $130, costs about half that if I’m a student or a civil servant. Hmmm…
