Bored. Uploading screenshots.

Kwali and Arahwen farming at night. The sun is overrated.

Fendic arrives at Elrond's pad. Took a nap, moved on to Eregion.

Aurrok is trying, but Nalshara appears to be pointing at a distant rock.

Double flirt! Maethur and Ahryslan share a moment between kills.

The robot invasion has begun.

It's official. They have infiltrated our society. There's no other way to describe this video.

That kid clearly has tiny robot brains individually operating his hands. The wild, random head thrashing is his primary robot brain glitching out as the compute cycles that should be dedicated to his human mimicry programs are monopolized by the hand-brain music software.

Think I'm crazy? Maybe you're one of them.

Unapologetic history nerd.

I'm all history-geeked out about my birthday gift from my dad, D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II by Stephen Ambrose. I've just started re-reading Douglas Adams' The More Than Complete Hitchhikers's Guide for the first time in years, but I think I'll have to put it off. This book is five pounds of paperback World War II awesome, 655 pages complete with pictures, glossary, appendix, end notes, and index.

Coincidentally, yesterday I replayed the D-day level of Call of Duty 2, where you assault Pointe-du-Hoc with the U.S. Army Rangers. When I pulled my new book out of the gift bag and randomly flipped it open, the first thing that caught my eye was the phrase, "Pointe-du-Hoc." So I'll get to read about the actual event in much more detail than what I've seen about it on the Military Channel and History International.

I don't know why I find it so fascinating, but I do. Shut up. Don't judge me.

I think I've settled on a desktop.

Completing my Boring Post Trifecta, here's what my desktop will look like for the foreseeable future:

Windowblinds theme is Rapture XP, Rainmeter configs are MKG Plus and Black and Red, and the wallpaper, I found on Deviantart. "Darkness" by Amystikal.

Anyway, Jenny just got home from school. We're watching NCIS. Or at least she is, as I'm headed off to bed. End of post starts.... now.

Roll-style updated.

Okay, so now this is how I roll:

I found that wallpaper on DeviantArt months ago, but I replaced a Deftones album cover with a pic of Jenny. I changed the Rainmeter fonts. Running WinAmp instead of Xion. Moved the two quicklaunch areas a bit. Oh, and the weather changed, apparently. It's "fair" now. Yeah, I'm bored.

Still, looks decent, no?

This is how I roll.

Now that I have a 21-inch CRT, I have acres of desktop space to play with, and numerous resolutions to choose from. So I've been playing around with some relatively advanced desktop customization to take advantage of my hardware. As of ten minutes ago, my workspace looks like this:

It's a combination of Windowblinds 5.51, Rainmeter, and Xion. An hour ago, it looked completely different; as I said, I'm still trying to settle on something I'm comfortable using all the time. I tend to waver between an austere, minimalist feel (as shown) and a much more organic, stylish, natural look (like the one I had set up a few minutes ago). I'll probably end up with a couple of configurations that I can quickly switch between.

By the way, if you're still reading this self-indulgent pointlessness, congratulations, you're me.

RPG attempt 4.0

I have a long and brief career with RPG video games. It's never been a genre I've been attracted to, it's just something I've dabbled in. So here's the rundown.


First there was Sword of Vermilion, a Genesis RPG I bought almost two decades ago for reasons I forgot almost one decade ago. I remember that the music was awesome, but at a certain point I hit a wall where I needed to level up way too many times to continue the story quests than I had the patience for. I'd already bought Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and my friend had Sonic & Knuckles, so fuck this RPG shit, it's ring-collectin' time.


I didn't play another RPG for nearly ten years, when Garrett left Panzer Dragoon Saga in my possession for a while. I loved that game, and actually played it through to completion at least three times. I didn't know at the time that it was one of the most rare and coveted US Saturn games in existence, but I understand why. It was a very linear game, but the atmosphere, exploration, and action (real-time combat) hooked me immediately. It helped that I owned (still own, actually) Panzer Dragoon 1 and 2.


Roughly eight years later, I picked up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. via Steam, a first-person RPG/shooter. I played it pretty regularly for a couple weeks, but the slow pace killed it for me. I'd spend half an hour walking around for two minutes of combat, then another hour of walking to buy an upgrade, which would let me walk for another hour to get somewhere I'd spend 20 minutes looking around for a specific item I could bring back to some lazy fuck two hours walk away, and that constitued a quest. I'm sorry, but that's not action/RPG, that's just time-killing, and I do that at work five days a week, nine hours a day already. Call me when you've got something interesting to do, OK, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers? Also, enough with the fucking acronyms. I played this game for weeks, and I still don't know that the title of the goddamn game even stands for.


Which brings us to today. For Valentine's, Jenny and I went out and shoveled down some Italian food, then went shopping. I bought her a nice blouse, some nice earrings, and The Sims 2: Apartment Life (which was nice). And I got Fable: The Lost Chapters. Which is not only nice, it's one of the most awesome and addictive games I've ever played. It runs great on my PC, has tons of depth and replay, looks fantastic, has an amazing score, and is accessible enough for me (still an RPG n00b) to understand everything and kick ass/take names, while still presenting enough of a challenge to keep me on my toes. If this keeps up, I may end up spending what's left of my tax refund (after bills) not on a PC upgrade, but on an XBox 360, just so I can play Fable 2. Then again, I may blow it all on booze and cheeseburgers. Either way, WIN.

Getting l33ter every day. People still say "l33t," right?

So Jenny's old PC finally died a couple weeks ago. It was a slow, agonizing death, and we're all just glad it isn't suffering anymore. This weekend we bought Haley's old computer, and we're busy setting it up for The Lovely. Anyway, it's a little mini-ATX tower, and there's no longer any room on top of Jen's rig for the little 15" LCD monitor. Therefore:


Behold! My first multi-monitor set-up ever. And I'm already addicted to it. Forget the gaming applications, I just need the extra desktop space, and this is definitely the best way to get around a monitor with a max res of just 1280x1024. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to geek out for a while.

UPDATE: Two screens! For one computer! What is this, the future?!

Geek My Truck.

My dork cred just leveled up.

Coming soon to the back of my sweet '92 Explorer XLT: Gordon Freeman's automotive accessory kit.

Sometimes a loss is still a win.

Yes, I'm still a homer.
by AC - permalink

The new-look Griz lost their season opener Wednesday night, and I haven't been more encouraged by a loss since they were robbed in Detroit a few years ago during the Hubie era. They played their asses off, and could easily have beaten the defending champion Spurs were it not for some new team chemistry-caused turnovers, questionable time out management, and bad officiating down the stretch. I don't really blame the refs for the latter, as the Spurs are notorious for browbeating ref crews into giving them calls, and Wednesday night it was no different. The San Antonio Floppers Spurs left the Forum with a win, but the Griz earned a highly documented moral victory, taking an elite team to the wire. Not bad for the team with last season's fewest wins.

Darko was awesome. Rudy was solid. Lowry was fearless. Pau, Damon, and Miller showed why they deserve their new Team Captain badges. It was a terrific game, and the first thought I had when it was over was that if these guys play this hard this season, they're going to win a lot of games. This is a heavily-overhauled team, and the lineups that played Wednesday have really never played together before other than in practices. As the season progresses, they will only get better. If they started the season by nearly beating an elite, Western Conference powerhouse, they may be a lot better than even the most optimistic of us thought they could be.

Moving on, I have a lot of work to do this weekend. I tried to get way ahead in my web programming course by finishing my second test a week early, but I ran into a couple of doc-level sub-classes I've never heard of before. I'm positive we never went over this in class, and I can't even find anything similar on the web. I wanted to get this thing done because I have a huge amount of PERL to write, and it's incredibly time-consuming. I should probably be working on it now, but I'm just too tired. The only reason I'm up so late is I'm waiting to see a friend on channel 5 at 4am. She sent out a text message reminding me of it, and I made a mental note to TiVo it. Then I made another mental note to buy a TiVo, but I never got around to it.

I guess I'll fill the time with some gaming. Taking the advice of Koroush Ghazi of TweakGuides.com, I decided to move my cache file (virtual memory) to my secondary hard drive and increase it from 1.5GB to 2.5GB, and it seems to be working. I haven't run any really system-taxing games yet, but Unreal Tournament 2004 ECE and Call of Duty 2 (in DX7 mode) have been flying along without any hitches. I'm going to jump back into Far Cry and Half-Life 2 to see if there's any difference there.

Homework.

This page contains over 100 code faults.
by AC - permalink

My god, have I been busy. My web programming class alone is sucking up over six hours a day outside of class, just sitting in front of a monitor writing HTML. I actually had a dream about coding a style sheet this week. My long-lost background in web page design has been a godsend, as I'm way ahead of the curve in terms of concepts and basic HTML structure. The problem is how far things have progressed since I stopped writing web sites. Simple tags I still remember are now either redacted or style attributes of other tags, and much of the syntax is totally different now. The upside is that it's helping me in my programming class, which is starting to kick my ass.

Technically, it's called Logic and Problem Solving for Programmers. What that means is that now that we've moved from the basics and are now actually writing programs in PERL, I have to go through these steps that are really just bogging me down. Instead of just figuring out the objective and thinking in terms of the programming language, which I'm doing automatically, I have to write it down in "pseudocode," create a friggin' flowchart, and then actually write the damned program. I've got perfectly working bits of code here, but I'm working overtime trying not to lose points on the stupid goddamn flowchart I have to turn in showing how I planned out the program that I wrote -- without the flowchart. Essentially, it's writing the program all over again, but deliberately leaving steps out and trying to remember which ones not to omit. Bah.

I actually do enjoy the web programming class, though. I'm not doing much copy-'n-paste, as I've found the more I type out the code, the better I remember it, which means less referencing. We've been given our first test, a long list of required elements for a pre-defined site consisting of several pages, and I'm hammering it out fairly quickly. Unfortunately, it's due the same day as a detailed run-down of the elements I'll be using in my final project original site (which means I'm going to have to write most of it way before it's due), a huge lab assignment in the PERL class, and an exam in my regional geography course. This is going to be a fun fucking weekend.

On the geek front, it's nice having new episodes of Heroes to look forward to. It's the first time I've had a new, non-syndicated network show to anticipate since the last, sadly underrated Trek series was canceled. Sunday makes me happy with new episodes of Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil and Metalocalypse. Putting aside my loathing of Michael Crichton after his laughable State of Fear, I'm reading his '99 novel Timeline, which was made into a dumbed-down but somewhat enjoyable movie. I'll probably re-read the final Harry Potter book after that, and I'm thinking about diving back into Chuck Palahniuk's early books later. I think I've had time to heal after reading Choke four years ago. Maybe.