Pneumonia sucks. Bedrest sucks. Daytime teevee sucks. Patch day sucks. April fools day sucks. Your mom sucks. Starbucks Coffee sucks. SNL sucks (again). Evaporation sucks. There is no gravity, the Earth sucks. Coughing sucks. Sinus pain sucks. Boredom sucks. Winter sucks. Snow "storms" that lay down just enough snow to make it slippery, but not enough to use my snowblower suck. Fans suck (and blow). SNL still sucks. Drugs suck. People suck. Ducks suck. Hair sucks. Superbad sucked. Gravy sucks. Dehydration sucks. Money sucks. Dickheads with loud car stereos parking in the lot next to my house blaring music at nearly midnight suck. You suck. APRIL FOOLS. ; )
posted by: Skeeve @ 11:53 PM
Friday, March 28
Zero's Friday Five
Lately, my free time has been taken up by entirely too much World of Warcraft and entirely too much Rock Band. So, on this week's Friday Five, I'm going to sort of merge the two by taking popular Rock Band songs and giving them a World of Warcraft spin... See if you can tell me which songs I twisted. Are you ready? Hey! Ho! Let's go!
1. Dark Portal Star, by: Deep Epic Item 2. When You Were Level 30, by: The Defias Brotherhood 3. Brass Bar In Guild Bank, by: The Players Pretending to Be Girls In Real Life 4. Wanted Dead or... Dead, by: Thrall Jovi 5. I'm So Diseased (For 90 Nature Damage Over 20 Seconds), by: Silverleaf
Now, twist up your two favorite hobbies! Except you, Zung. Somehow I don't think making puppets and rubbing yourself on strangers will mix very well. :)
Didn't I warn about this last week? But no, everybody gets sick and bombards me with germs, and so y'all get stuck with this poor excuse for a blog. Dammit.
Jim Croce - Time In A Bottle 1972 James Joseph Croce,(January 10, 1943 -- September 20, 1973), popularly known as Jim Croce, was an American singer-songwriter. Croce and his song-writer Maury Muehleisen died in a small commercial plane crash on September 20, 1973, one day before his third ABC album, 'I Got a Name' was to be released. The posthumous release included three hits, "I Got A Name," "Workin' At The Car Wash Blues" and "I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song." "Time in a bottle" was written for his newborn son, A. J. Croce. The song was part of the album "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" that reached number 1 in US.
Lyrics: If I could save time in a bottle the first thing that I'd like to do is to save everyday till eternity passes away just to spend them with you
If I could make days last forever if words could make wishes come true I'd save everyday like a treasure and then again I would spend them with you
But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you wanna do once you find them I looked around enough to know that your the one I wanna go thru time with
If I had a box just for wishes and dreams that had never come true the box would be empty except for the memory of how they were answered by you
But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you wanna do once you find them I looked around enough to know that your the one I wanna go thru time with
posted by: Skeeve @ 9:20 PM
Friday, March 21
Zero's Friday Five
Stay up super late tonight...
posted by: Zero @ 11:01 PM
Thursday, March 20
Odder than Artifice undergoes a title change?
Far too many people have been coming down with The Bug lately (You know the one I mean; whenever one of these things hits the general populace, all you have to mention is "that thing going around" and folks know what you are talking about, no matter what iteration of the fever/nausea/aches/pains/intestinal distress/monkey fleas/cold sweats/coughing/dizziness/whatever potential combination is in force) and I'm pretty much calling veto on the whole thing. Now.
No more being sick. It makes all y'all pathetic and cute in the sad kinda way, and all the energy in the world seems to go in the toilet.
Plus? I'm tired of having to do the receptionist's job in addition to my own. Yes I am.
I put up my remotes tonight. All of them. There's a new sheriff in town.
I picked up a Logitech harmony 880 on ebay for a damn good price. I've been eyeing them for awhile since we decided to buy a new HDTV with our economic stimulus package, and I heard what a pain they were for most basic multi/uni remotes.. the Logitech remotes connect online, and download from a list of drivers that are constantly kept updated. The other thing I really liked is the ability to set up a program, where you say:
To watch TV. Turn on AV amp. Set AV AMP to CABLE. Turn on TV. Tune TV to aux in. Control all volume with AV amp Control channels with Cablebox. Cablebox always stays on.
Then I have one button, with a little picture, that says "Watch TV", or "Watch DVD" or "Listen to Radio". Like so:
One button turns it all off too.
The biggest push for this is my Mom. I had this old multi remote that she could never understand... We never had an AV amp when I was growing up. She'd constantly turn up the volume on the TV. ("Surround sound? What the hell is that?!?") Or turn things off and on without knowing what she was doing. And having to use 3 different remote constantly was not easy for her. (One for the cable-box as the old uni I had didn't have all the functionality of the real cable remote, one for the dvd player, again, limited universal remote functionality, and the the universal for all else.) Now, all she'll have to do to play a movie for the kids is put it in and press one button.
A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. - James Joyce (1882 - 1941)
Rarely does a game garner such attention and across-the-board lauding that I decide to purchase it before ever having seen screenshots, but in recent months, one such game arose. I speak of course of the oft-discussed Portal.
Put out by Valve, the makers of the Half-Life series (which, incidentally, I got a taste of in college and have always desired to more fully explore), Portal is being called a new step forward in the realm of first person shooters. I even read one article in particular that likened it to a feminist manifesto for the genre, what with the guns creating portals instead of destroying things, likening said portals to genitalia and the birthing process.
It was overthinking the whole thing a little, if you ask me, but was a fun read nonetheless.
As it is, I've signed up for my account on Steam, and I'm patiently waiting through the download process - that's right. Download. Skeeve bought me the Orange Box. It arrived, all plasticy and orange (as one might expect) with a disc and a key code. In goes the disc, up pops the install, typeitytype goes my keycode... and it does not install from the disc. So far as I can tell, the only thing the disc actually has on it is the install media.
What the hell, Valve? Seriously? I've got 18% downloaded, started well over an hour ago, and since I'm an unfortunately responsible adult with work and sundry obligations, I have to kick off to bed soon.
Woe and boohoo, I have to wait a whole darn day, don't soak your hanky on my behalf. But I wish I'd known. I'd have started the install hours ago, and right now I'd be testing out a Portal Gun and getting close to GladOS, instead of sputtering out my feeble flavor of vitriol on a blog page.
Work has been very worklike of late, and with a birthday celebration this weekend, and a incredibly short 4 day weekend, I've found that the best things in my life really are my friends and family. More than anything I look forward tot he times when I am crashed on the couch, surrounded by the boys, my beautiful wife and my friends who come by and play, eat and talk with us.
Upon reflection, if I won the lotto, I think I'd make this arrangement permanent...
A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, ways of making pots, and the technology of building arches.
I doubt that when Richard Dawkins coined the term meme he actually realized how far reaching it would extend, let alone how it would come to be embraced on the internet not as a sociological term, but largely one to cover the realm of viral ideas, jokes, youtube vids, and "what flavr can haz yu?" quizzes.
The idea of a meme, though, is backwards-compatible, not just through to the beginning of the internet, but to days far before. It describes the way and movement of something replicating, multiplying, filtering through a group and infiltrating other groups, until in the extremity it ceases to be a notable oddity and becomes a defining characteristic.
So it is with Dungeons and Dragons.
Almost without fail, the systems of today owe at least part if not all of themselves, ultimately, to the rooting soil that was Dungeons and Dragons, and it's creator Gary Gygax. He passed away yesterday, but a legacy lives on behind him in so many ways. DnD, of course, but also the many things that have sprung out of it - jokes both internal and external. Urban legends. Infamous campaign modules. Tee-shirts. Terming someone as a gamer.
Every meme starts small. Once upon a time, it started with a man, and a game.
Now we are a community, and "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in..." this community. The loss is felt everywhere among us - but the meme spreads and thrives independent of its point of origin. Every time we set down to game, a bit of him is there with us.
Looks like Blogger decided not to play nice for the most part tonight. But, it's working now, so nothing can save you from my Monday ramble.
Went shopping this weekend, and got stuff for the kids (It's the tiny Admirals birthday this week, so there had to be some presents and things.) and I picked up a new necklace for my pentacle. It's nice, real sterling silver... Not like my last necklace that blackened on my neck over the past few years.
Last weeks launching of Taken from real life and Odder than Artiface filling out the tkop-blog'o'sphere seemed to really bring about a buzz to you jaded lot. We shall try to keep serving up delicious cake... um.. I mean, keep putting fun on the front page. yes. That's it.
; )
Ok, off to bed now. See you tomorrow for a new installment of Skeeve In My Eyeball!
posted by: Skeeve @ 11:53 PM
