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December 2007 Posts December 31, 2007
Why We Began Blogging states,
 I honestly wish it was possible to write heroic comics without fantasy fulfillment. But despite an obvious theme of being single male human amongst a group of sexy elf warrior women, the webcomic Outsider is well done.
December 28, 2007 Remember the other day when I mentioned I love those little flashie online music makers? That I could play with all day? That make repetitive techno-like music? Well, I could now carry one (via)
As solo gaming is the only way I play these days, and Marmy and I are once again (as we ever are) resurrecting the latest game post-holiday, I thought this link to One-on One Gaming was worth a read.
December 27, 2007
I don't believe I have anything to blog today but that for the first time in my media experience, in watching Juno last night, I saw someone just browsing a blog and it didn't really have anything to do with the plot any more than seeing someone read a newspaper at the kitchen table does.
December 27 07 December 25, 2007
Merry Xmas people. I hope you get at least one toy under your tree because without something to play with on Xmas morning, how can you call it Xmas? Me? Orange Box !! Silk Screen Kit !! Oh, and a somewhat cunning hat.
December 25 07 December 24, 2007
Two things of note, in my head: OK, so the guy who does Fake Steve Jobs is being sued... er, approached by Apple Lawyers. He is being completely transparent with his meetings. But what if this is just part of the fiction that is the blog?
December 21, 2007 December 20, 2007 December 18, 2007 I swear, I could play with this X-Mass JukeBox all day and still enjoy the repetitive music it makes.
Once in a while they'll say 'I hope Mrs. Claus isn't going to be upset.' You have to be discreet and kind and say 'Oh no, she'll be OK. You can sit here, but only for one photo.'"Didn't CSI just do an episode about people groping Santa ??
December 17, 2007 Man this Internet thing has everything. Like video instructions on using that plastic strapping tensioner we have at work.
Given that I had a hunnerd bucks to throw away, I would toss it at FigurePrints and get Marmy her Level 60 char.
In general I don't like this time of year. More recently, I have begun to loathe it. I want to go to sleep on about Dec 10 and wake up sometime around Jan 5. It's not the commercialism or the crowds or the busy-ness or the faked cheer. For me, it's the assumed feeling that I will feel happier during this proscribed time period. And that's not by outward forces but my own psyche. I feel i should be more happy. I should be able to take in some of the other people's cheer and adapt it to myself.
Alas, it has been depleting more and more often over the years. Working right through the season for the past few years contributed to it but I don't know where the rest went. I used to look forward to things like xmas cookies, walks in winter snow, snowmen, xmas cards, etc. I remember joyful things like movies on Xmas day with Shawn, drinking Port on Xmas even at the Dawsons, turkey dinner at my Aunt Geedie's house, having the orphans over for Xmas day dinner (by orphans i meant any friends who were stuck in town like us and had no family) and other little things. But I can honestly say that nothing really does it for me right now.
Oh well, I know I will get damn fine cookies, an incredible Xmas day meal from Marmy and lots of love. Hopefully I can squash the Grinch inside of me.
December 17 07 December 16, 2007
Walking in the stormy winter weather? Fun. Getting conked in the head by a blind idiot with a snowblower? Not fun. Stupid fuck was blowing ice & chunky show off his deck and didn't even look to see if people were walking by.
December 16 07 December 14, 2007 The Machine Girl has "japanese school girl" with a machine gun implant but, yknow, I still prefer a girl with a sword.
I do love me some creative model kit building, especially considering many of them of self-created kits.
I was going to say that this tennis court would just make me pee my pants but the last line of the first paragraph of their post pretty much sums it up.
Wow. I can really see myself becoming addicted to making plushie designs. The problem is, I couldn't sew them together. p.s. i think the girl narrating the video has a PhD in cuteness, or is at least working on it.
December 13, 2007 Hey marmy, I know you are not drunk or divorced but you are covered in cat hair so maybe i should get you Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split ??
It's a common paradigm that if you have a volunteer book drive, someone will fill the shelves with the old text books they found useless and, if they took a few moments, knew everyone else would find useless.
December 13 07 December 12, 2007 I could be curmudgeonly and say the reason there are so many in-references in Pixar movies is because, well they are all animated so once you have a model you might as well re-use it any chance you can. I could be but you probably know i love that sort of meta self referential stuff in movies and believe that animators love it too!
December 11, 2007
Earth's spaceport was not like the ones offworld. Those were reminiscent of 20th century anime & futuristic paintings, all glass and curved steel. Earth's, or San Francisco's more accurately, was like the combination of construction site and bombed-out city, all angular girders and rebar, half-made walls and shanty buildings leaning too and fro on unintentional streets. I saw all those through the haze as we curved around in the shuttle from New Delhi.
The city around the spaceport was the last hope for Earthlings. Everyone else had eft. We dregs who dreamed of processed food and prepared clothing and free shelter offworld, hung around the suburbs of the one place to get off Earth, hoping to make a deal or find a connection who could put you on an outbound ship. It rarely happened.
As I walked the street I saw the leftovers, the beggars and the mixers. Hundreds of years of waste and experimentation, in science and medicine, had created a thousand mutant strains of humanity, warped and twisted. Most could do something, make light from their fingertips, melt wax with their breath or produce beautiful sounds from their warped larynx. Some were just twisted.
My brother had become a brilliant mind overnight but still carried with him his street values and tacky aesthetic. As I shuffled to him, crowded by his usual band of sycophants and paparazzi, and made to speak with him, his bodyguards immediately pushed forward to stop me and keep me from touching their creator. My brother calmed them with a smile to me and then I really looked at them. The bodyguards were copies of my brother, albeit fatter, more disheveled and lacking in basic hygiene, which was not saying much considering my brother.
"I thought clones were illegal?"
"They are when you make them better than yourself or ... someone else. Mine? Mine are barely human so most just ignore them. They do good thug work though, " my brother explained. We walked.
We passed out of the alleyway and into the street of shops selling dead animals, animals grown from genes stored in tanks, as the originator beasts had long become extinct. We pushed passed the pushers and the dealers, the pimps and whores and worse. We stepped aside for the marines, the skinny boys in their crisp white shirts and slicked hair who were slumming on a backwater planet while not mixed up in a war on a distant world. We passed by out onto the waterfront, a boardwalk filled with shacks and booths and people pretending to revel.
I took notice of a young couple, she heavy bellied with a kid and him looking weak and ineffective especially in the presence of the knife held by a street youth, a kid in anachronistic skater gear and unseasonal toque. I watched the kid take the young man's handful of bills and then stab him purely for the hesitation of waiting. I watched and watched and watched and it all slowed and then it moved back, the bloody knife pulling out clean and darting back into a pocket, time moving back exactly three minutes. Then I pushed a little at the kid... no need to knife the young man. Time uprighted and the kid shrugged and moved away with the handful of bills.
That was mine. My little effect. I could change small events and only my brother understood my crippling anguish. While I could make a small change in time, save a life, prevent an injury, the ripple effect in time always made things worse in the long run. I never knew exactly what would happen later but had the certainty that it would be much much worse than the thought of a young father to be surviving long enough to beat his pregnant wife to death with a rusty nine iron.
December 11 07 December 09, 2007
Hi mom; like my new doo? Ohhhh; I knew the Dave from the Vinyl Cafe was from Cape Breton but I never knew where. It is a fictional place called Big Narrows. I wonder if it's based on Grand Narrows, not far from my parents' place. I doubt it though as there are connections to Sydney and Glace Bay so I would say it was one of those spots between them on the highway.
December 07, 2007 This is one of those times where a Canadian posts about how dumb an American is and shakes his head. Yeah she is pretty much dumber than a 5th grader. No wonder this category is called Vidiots.
December 06, 2007 You know, Take TV is a neat neat idea but at $135, i would stick with the LT HD enclosure type thingy or like me, a cable from the PC to the TV.
Wondering how to Score a Wii This Christmas? Well in Canada, two places that always seem to have a couple in stock are Radio Shack / The Source and surprisingly... Shoppers Drug Mart, well at least the bigger ones with the digital camera centres.
Wow. This cool Server Culdrose Jacket is actually affordable when you consider the price of winter coats.
Regarding Betty Rosenberg, a noted librarian, she is quoted:
Rosenberg’s First Law of Reading: Never Apologize for Your Reading Tastes."And yes, I read BFFs and have enjoyed (up to a degree) even the Robert Jordan series. (via jeff)
Last night I went out to buy a sweater for the party tomorrow night. I am going to the corporate Xmas party. While I have a closet full of (somewhat threadbare) semi-formal wear, I always feel that the few events I attend require NEW clothing. Something fresh at least.
I did not care about clothing before... well before I moved to Montreal. I can remember stating to Marmy that if I was moving to a city I was going to have a language barrier in, I would have to be dressed better. Montrealers DO know how to dress. And I was making some money there, so I liked to at least look around. I was very fond of Simons.
Here in Toronto it kinda grew out of hand. No, not the purchasing of clothing but the actual desire to have "nice clothes". That was a combination of needing semi-formal for The Store and ... well, working with a bunch of gay men who complimented the way I chose to dress. Flattery is a great boost to the ego and to the clothing budget. Soon after, Marmy pointed out that my taste in clothing had quickly outstripped by budget.
That makes buying clothes very difficult now. Before this situation, I could easily make the rounds at Zellers, Walmart and maybe The Bay if I was feeling rich. Now, a walk through Eaton centre finds things I love (cannot afford) and things I loathe (my price range) and I have to hunt clearance racks and sale bins and outlet centres just to be even slightly satisfied. And considering the current budget added to Xmas shopping, last night was a rude & annoying awakening to how much it costs to look good.
We won't talk about having to now buy a size of clothes to cover my belly. *frown*
December 06 07 Is it just me or do some of the stills from Speed Racer look like the movie might have borrowed some of it's design aesthetic from current webdesign concepts?
December 05, 2007 Neat !! I always thought the ads for American Apparel were a little sleazy. It's not just me but they do kinda smack of the latest breed of porn stars.
I usually just delish this stuff but every so often, i should give verbal props to cd cover dezine that I come across.
I need an IDE version of this SATA Hard Disk Drive Cradle for all those extra drives I have sitting on a shelf at home.
December 04, 2007 OMG, he's the World's Saddest Pug and I want to hug him and squeeze him and call him George. (thanks ed)
You know, on the Internet there are things that are better left untouched. Some will make you angry, some will make you really really depressed. And then some will make you do things you shouldn't. And really, you shouldn't see the reference. No really, you shouldn't. Unless goatse was something you enjoyed.
December 03, 2007 You should say the title of this post in the same manner in which the announcer said, "Pigs in Spaaaaace," in The Muppet Show.
Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.Yes, NASA performed scientific experiments concerning people having sex in space. Or at least that was how they PR'd catching two astronauts wucka-chucking their free floating jigglies. IMO. P.S. that latter phrase is not something i will be using again.
December 01, 2007
How is this for funny? I was doing more digging on the Sympatico website about connection issues and came across an attentive CSR who regularly responded to the fact they were doing regular "network management". Yes, they are throttling P2P software but it is not all the time and only during periods they deem the internet is at a peak. I mentioned I was slowed 24/7 and she stated that this is not normal but would look into it. A few minutes later she comes back and says my connection is running at the speed it should be.
But what she doesn't know is that I was running another browser at tracking my speed. During the time she was running the "test" I watched the speed in downloading graphics double. Suddenly YouTube was playing videos without regular pauses. Suddenly a PDF being DLed came down at an expected speed. But Sympatico wasn't doing anything to my connection.
I went out and started an encrypted Torrent DL of "Reaper", an episode I missed. It came down at the usual (not completely speedy but normal) 45-75 kB/s. Before that, everything was coming down at 17-29 kB/s. Don't you love transparent customer service?
I am still gonna dump em. I am just hoping that they didn't wrap me into one of the 3 year contracts I heard mentioned, where they sent an email stating they need you to agree to a change in Internet Use Policy and when you clicked "agree" you actually agreed to the contract. Slimey bastards.
December 01 07 |
