merry fucking christmas

My original post for this space was taken out back and shot, so I'm cobbling together some random things from the last couple days / week(s) for some kind of update (read: filler).

first off, and most amusing to me personally: one of my former drinking partners has started taking medication to wean themself off of the demon booze. this is hilarious. so now, every time they take a drink, the medication makes them want to throw up. oh please modern science, get that weak shit out of here. i've been drinking with this individual many, many times, if throwing up was enough of an impetus to "stop", that stopped being effective loooooong ago.

second, i have been advised that it's not my taste in women that is wrong, it's that i am an awful fucking human being. personally, i'd say it's about 50/50, but it's not like my judgement has been all that spectacular, so what the hell.

i told my little sister my plans for christmas day, and she was torn between an utter lack of surprise, and obvious, naked disgust. she's known me for over 20 years, she should know better than to ask me shit like that.

fuck off 2010, you were a terrible damn year, here's to 2011.

Do not do this

Ok fuckers, I didn't think this was actually going to be necessary, but be advised:
Whereas my phone is a piece of shit (a), and I occasionally do things which will render me unresponsive (b), if you shoot me fifty text messages in a row (c), I will find something you love and burn it.


(a): I have this fucking thing. Out of the three cell phones I have had in the last 14 years, it is, by far, the worst one out of the lot. Every part of this phone performs worse than it has any right to. The feature that prompted this goddamned post is the phone's lack of a setting to auto-delete text messages, coupled with it's extremely small internal memory for such. It holds 140 messages at a time, in and out. After dicking around with it for a while, it will now automatically delete the oldest incoming message when I get a new one, but will not free up space if I'm trying to send one out. This is horseshit. My last phone held 180 in, 180 out, and would auto delete the oldest message as needed, and gave me the option to lock messages that I didn't want purged.
Other 'features' include a substandard camera, the inability to see any of your contacts' information when you're not in service, shitty reception, short battery life, and the worst sound quality ever. Seriously, using this thing as an actual phone is about on par with getting ear fucked by spastics.

(b) I do occasionally sleep. Also, my phone gets shit for service in a lot of places. Even better, it can't figure out timestamps with any degree of accuracy, so I will occasionally get your replies 'before' a message I sent to you, in which case the phone doesn't alert me to an incoming message. Or, I'm busy and not answering my phone.

(c) Seriously, do not send me a shitload of 'hey!' text messages. I hate this more than people leaving me voice mail. I will eventually see your call or message and be in an appropriate place to respond. If I have to manually clean a bunch of shit off my phone because you're acting like fucking navi, I will burn something you like. Patience is a virtue, do some deep breathing exercises or something, I will get back to you at some point.

this probably isn't a good sign

I had a dream last night, and actually remembered the fuckin thing. I am going to babble about it for a bit here, so if that bores you like I imagine it would to most rational people, feel free to skip the rest of this nonsense.

The exact details of the dream aren't important, but the part I found interesting is that the whole situation would be probably categorized as "pants shitting terror" by a lot of people. Ever present threat of extremely messy death, kind of a zombie movie / Terminator 4 crossover. It was a fairly long dream, I do recall several conversations, and what seemed to be a couple days worth of stuff happening.
And I was enjoying it quite thoroughly. Not giddy, but just calmly having a pleasant and relaxing experience. Hell, I remember being briefly pissed off when I woke up and it wasn't real.

Yeah, I'm not sure what I think of the fact that my brain apparently interprets mortal combat as a stress free vacation.

go away rapist

So, I'm pretty sure I got roofied last night. And that's awesome.
As far as I can tell, it can't have been deliberate, and I just ended up as a victim of circumstance due to my refusal to waste beer. Got bored at the house, went for a walk, got a sandwich around 9. Ipod ended up dying on me after a couple hours, so I decided to head home, and to stop at the local bar to see if Ed was working. He was, so I stayed for a couple hours talking with him and one of the other regulars. This I remember quite clearly. Got hungry again, and split a pizza with the girl there. At this point, another guy showed up at the bar. He was already half drunk, and at this point, I am 3 beers and a shot into the evening. Me and the girl decided to leave shortly afterwards, and I knocked back her unfinished beer. Walking out the door and lighting my smoke on the way home were the last things I remember until several hours later, when Scott found me on the bathroom floor, unable to respond in any meaningful fashion except to whisper "go away rapist" repeatedly after he checked my pulse and kicked me to try and wake me up.
This is, of course, not going to change my behavior in any way shape or form. Also, I am pleased that my aversion to being raped is wired into my system on a very basic level, and that as far as I'm aware, I got roofied and didn't even get lucky.

72 hours and counting

So, I get at least one question a week that I consider to be pants-on-head retarded. This isn't unusual, because my dumb ass went into a highly specialized field where 90+% of the population is only vaguely familiar with the rudiments of the equipment used to DO my job, much less actually perform any tasks related to the field.

I try to be understanding about this. I really do.

And the universe rewards me with email like this:
"I have your link on our site (_________________/resources.html). There is no scroll bar on the right to access more info. How do I get that?"

I decide to break this down.
1) yes. They do a have a link to our site on that page.
2) I'm not sure what the fuck he's talking about for the rest of it. There IS a scroll bar on the right, due to the page being rather long, and having a lot of information on it.

So. As far as I can tell, he's asking for something . . . that's already there? Not to put too fine a point on this, but I don't work for his place of business, so whatever happens on his site is not really a concern of mine. Forging ahead, because I am a fucking idiot, I send him a reply asking for some clarification. Which nets me this reply:
"If a page has more information on it than can be shown on the screen, there is no arrow on the right hand side to allow to move down the page to see more info."

Uh. Ok then. I'm not editing these to be a cocksucker, these are two separate email messages in their entirety, from someone with english as their primary language.
Fuck it, I'm done here in a couple days. I'm ignoring anything else this guy sends me.

The Checklist

i will do all of these things. having a bucket list is for chumps.
currently accomplished:
3.) Drink a fifth of hard liquor, by yourself, in one day.
4.) Dance like a fool in front of a large hooting crowd.
8.) Embark on an impromptu road trip.
10.) Extravagantly overtip a bartender.
11.) Walk up to an attractive stranger way out of your league and buy him or her a drink.
12.) Conspire an afterhours at your favorite bar.
16.) Get drunk with your father.
17.) Fight a good fight.
18.) Visit the source of your favorite beer, wine or liquor.
- hell, i moved there.
19.) Drunkenly watch the sun come up with your best boozing buddies and a bottle.
21.) Hit a dozen bars in one night.
22.) Try at least one hundred different drinks.
24.) Juice on the job.
26.) Give a hobo twenty bucks.
30.) Go on a fishing trip with your pals.
31.) Eat the worm.
33.) Steal some booze.
36.) Experience absinthe.

texts from last night

my phone edition. with commentary.

"wshoto2!"
no, i have no fucking idea what that was supposed to be either.

"i'm already drinks."
yes. yes you are.

"stop texting me if you're going to be an asshole."
hahahahhahahhahhahaa!
no.

"ha ha fuck the kids"
seriously. fuck those little motherfuckers.

"a couple girls from ______ say hi. i'm drunk and forgot the0r names again."
those were deep and meaningful relationships you bastards.

"i'm too opera to drinks on the porch"
i . . . shit. i don't even know if you can disagree with this.


also, drinking good beers with one of the whitest people i know, who happens to be a successful gun dealer while watching sheltered suburban frat boys head bang to a gangsta rap song espousing the merits of guns, money and booze? meta-hilarious.

re: care, and the wording of wishes

1) after further dicking around with my phone, i have found that i can get and send email with it.
2) a handful of people at larp have been telling me for years that i need to become more active on the email lists since no one knows who the hell i am outside of the midwest.

result? i am now trolling the clan while drinking beverages in a variety of locations.
a somewhat more careful wording of the original wish might have been "be sober, and speak with others in the clan without referring to them as worthless pussies, possibly bringing up various subjects of interest to the clan."

this would be a kick ass band name

the homosexual steamroller.
never thought i'd be saying this, but thanks jerry falwell! i am going to start a new group on rockband when i get home, and it will be motherfucking FABULOUS.

new show, old comics

i stumbled across this xkcd comic on garfield a while back, and i kinda want a poster of it. hell, even making fun of garfield for being banal merchandise driven tripe is played out by now.
and then today, i saw this. now i'm wondering how many other dark as hell garfield strips are in the early years that i've forgotten about.

on the t.v. side, heroes season 3 is about the most infuriating thing i've watched since 'attack girl's swim team vs. the undead'. i'm willing to accept a certain amount of comicbook logic and the resulting retarded decision making, but the whole thing just feels hastily thrown together with the unwritten assumption that all the characters have suffered massive head injuries. there are only a couple people around who don't immediately take the very obvious WORST FUCKING OPTION in any situation, and the writers have the balls to hang the plot tension on the problems that those same characters created by insisting that they had to do these stupid, stupid things. examples follow, so if you haven't watched, don't bitch about having sub-par t.v. spoiled for you.


1) nathan remembers he's a fucking senator and decides to do 'stuff'. this stuff is, obviously, setting up a gitmo for superhumans and a paramilitary unit to do blackbag / snatch & grab operations on anyone with a power. despite HAVING A POWER HIMSELF. see also, his brother, mother, father, daughter, and several close associates. he seems genuinely confused as to why the rest of them think this is a Bad Idea.
later on in the season, he decides that he must Do Something to Stop This as it is Wrong.
IT'S YOUR FUCKING PROGRAM JACKASS.

2) peter carrying a gun, ever.
dude, you're not going to shoot anyone, we all know you're a giant pussy.

3) peter and matt taking turns pointing a gun at danko's head, then immediately realizing it's a shitty idea to execute him. well, no shit. 5 minutes of thinking about these things called 'consequences' would have eliminated about 2 1/2 episodes worth of air time for those two though, so i guess acting like retards on screen is the price they had to pay to get their check that week.

4) claire and everything she does. in short, her dad noah agrees to work with nathan to round up superhumans in exchange for claire getting a pass and not going into a cell for the rest of her life. a condition of this is that she not run around like a goddamned superpowered idiot.
claire then spends several episodes whining about wanting to be 'normal' before deciding that it is a better idea to fuck with the agents rounding people up and smuggle other supers to safety. so, 'not' normal. she stashes one of the supers in her house for a couple days. yes, the house that is being watched by agents. who know what this guy looks like. no, they don't even bother to shut the fucking shades or drapes. yes, the agents suspect that she's hiding this guy. the episode 'exposed' is a complete clusterfuck of mouth breathing stupidity on the part of everyone involved, and caused me actual physical pain to watch.

so far, the only upside to season 3 has been watching sylar destroy people's asses. i don't even care that he keeps switching sides, i'm just hoping that he gets to kill most of the main cast by the end of this nonsense.

another entry into the "this should surprise no one" file

lo and behold, after a month of harassing people and getting no response via email or phone, it was finally discovered that the company i was told to use for a service that we absolutely require can not, in fact, perform said service.

as opposed to the extremely helpful and punctual company specializing in this area which i was forced to tell we will not require their services.

next week's project, of course, is me going to the original place and set up installation dates and changeover to their service now that i have proven, once again, if i do a couple weeks research on something this is a more accurate method than "boss picks company name out of a fucking hat".

a conversation from the apartment of infinite horrors

n: "so, having just one beer is like getting a handjob from your sister. yeah, you can do it, but if you're getting anything out of it, there are serious fucking problems there."

a: "mgd 64 is like getting a handjob from your brother."

n: "because it's fucking awful?"

a: "because if someone gives you one, you gotta finish it yourself."

n: "and you're not going to respect yourself for that."

blurb of the day

courtesy of mr. destructo:
"My favorite part of the Sin of Onan — besides, basically, its being free, low-impact and awesome — is knowing I just Early Aborted something like 20 million people. Fuck, I didn't even give those poor sonsabitches a chance. Think about it: every time I jerk off, that's an overachieving decade of Stalinism served on tissue paper. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm getting kind of hard. If this keeps up, today's premature death rate is seriously going to be maoing my zedong, if you know what I mean."

sentence of the day

re: samuel l. jackson as mace windu.
"Mace Windu is a boring old man with no personality who does not even so much as raise his voice during the whole trilogy, let alone call someone a motherfucker."

teachers

semi-ripping off a topic from lj's question of the day: what teacher(s) did you have that inspired you and why?

i have three.
1) mrs. willing, my 7th grade science / homeroom teacher. she realized early on that i had no business being there, so she let me fuck around for the entire class period, and read / do whatever i wanted so long as i wasn't disrupting the rest of the class. i am sure that the fact that i'd read and learned most of the text by the end of the first week of class had something to do with this. i didn't find out until a couple years later when my mom got drunk and let it slip, but she was also the teacher that told my parents it would be a good idea for me to skip 5th and 6th grade. (small grade school, all teachers knew almost all the students.) she let me read this book instead of doing my math homework for a couple weeks, sleep in class, got me into the nerd science & math olympiads, etc. basically, she let me go at my own pace, and introduced me to a lot of much more interesting stuff when the rest of the class was spending a week learning why whales are mammals.

2) mr. z, highschool english / writing teacher.
z was the opposite of mrs. willing and spent most of the semesters i had with him undoing my incredibly shitty schoolwork habits. z knew how well i could do if i decided to put some effort into it, and didn't let me coast or half-ass my way through anything. if i put in enough effort to get a c, even if that would have been an 'a' paper for anyone else, i got a fucking c. he raked me over the coals in grading, taunted me in class, and made me work harder than any other teacher i'd ever had. when i took my placement tests for college, i tested out of english. spent the next couple years taking 400 and 500 level college language and english courses that looked interesting as filler. thanks z.

3) dr. susan haller. computer science professor in college.
spent 4 years telling me to drop out of the major and basically go fuck myself. was completely correct to do so. turned me into the fucking dr. doom of writing code. laugh at me will they? i will DESTROY THEM ALL.
for what it's worth, i'm still not great as a programmer, but i will be damned if i'm going to stop working on something until i get it right.

i somehow missed this by a couple weeks.
yes, this makes me feel old.
still, bonus points for rolling out on the town with a copy of erich fromm instead of 'shoes quarterly', and for the smoke tucked behind the ear.

it is finished

finished bonus features for new site widget. i am a better programmer than i remember. javascript and php can still blow me.
been doing a lot of stuff for random games lately, both larp and tabletop. i feel dirty.
ideally will be caught up with errands and bullshit by tonight. just the idea of that is pleasing to me.

"Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." - cormac mccarthy

next time, just call the fuckin ghostbusters

the boss lit some herb nonsense to ward off evil spirits in the office yesterday, and walked around smoking all the offices and rooms. today it still smells like cigars and superstition, although slightly less oppressive.
i am pleased to report that my office apparently required three applications of magic anti evil smoke.

tech wizardry

finished a new app this morning. spent the last 3 days working on the motherfucker of all datasets and abusing everything i ever learned about algorithm optimization.
and now, our site has a widget that renders several other websites obsolete. there are two companies that i know of who have teams of people busy working on equivalent applications, and they charge a lot of money for access to them.
i knocked this thing out in a couple days, by myself, and ours works harder, better, faster, and stronger. also, it's going to be just another free feature on our site.
this is why i am such an arrogant dickhead about my job.

porch 101

the last week has cemented it: my front porch is about the most educational place in milwaukee. if you've wandered by in the last week, there were discussions / lectures on general relativity, probability, firearms, property management, comparitive religions, literary analysis, logic, foreign policy, and rock history.
i am pleased to have a diverse set of lunatics regularly holding forth on advanced topics while drinking, as it provides a nice contrast to the bros in our building who just get wasted and toss beanbags.

motherfucking friday

cue theme music for the messy death of social norms, sobriety, and anything positive in my general viscinity. i am going to break things and spend a statistically significant amount of time as a drunken raving lunatic, as per usual. brian left a new weapon at the apartment, and it seems wrong somehow to not use it to ruin property or people that do not belong to me.
also, if my dryer is not fixed by the time i get home tonight, i am going to throw a baby into traffic. i don't even care what species, so long as the parents are watching. i have cut a check for rent including working laundry facilities, and i will not tolerate a reality that does not conform to the money => good-services model.
if the hobo is on my porch tonight, i am going to glass that motherfucker. hobo a.j. has returned with the decent weather, and has set up camp in our neighboorhood. i am not even the only person who is kicking him off our property, but the magical wicker couch is a compelling place to sit, and so he returns every couple days only to be yelled at and prodded on his way. this week has been almost as much fun as a brick to the teeth, so we are now resorting to grievious bodily damage to get the point across.

small world

just found out that brother justin from carnivale was played by the motherfucking kurgan. and that's awesome.
now i just want to see something, anything, get made featuring clancy brown, christopher walken, tobin bell, and tim curry. and then no one will ever sleep again.

a few unrelated things

- survived the apocalyptic flooding in glendale, shorewood, whitefish bay yesterday. normal commute home from work: 10 minutes. yesterday? 2 hours. streets with over a foot of water on them, abandoned cars, the freeway and about 1/3 of the streets closed completely, all in the little prius that could.
- took an umbrella spoke to the eye, papercuts on eyelids are annoying.
- best sentence of the day so far: "Also considered one of the more practical/lazy wrestlers in the near century-long existence of pro wrestling (counting the carny days), while every other wrestler was coming up with new crazy risky moves to finally put their opponent down, Randy Orton was the one man to go 'Why don't I kick him in the head really hard?'"

fuckin probability

for what it's worth, i was actually pretty good at discrete math, calculus, and the little bit of probability i took in college.
came across the monty hall problem this morning. this is one of those weird things in math that gets a lot of smart people arguing and calling each other idiots. the setup for this is simple, and based off the show 'let's make a deal': you pick one of three doors, one has a car behind it, the other two doors have goats. the host, monty, opens a door, which has a goat behind it, and offers to let you switch which door you've picked. does switching doors help your chances of winning the car?


the fuck you solution is that, yeah, it does. by a lot. but only under certain circumstances that almost everyone already assumes.
eg: if monty opens a door at random that still always has a goat behind it, it changes the percentage of how often you win if you choose to switch doors. the solution above only works when monty will always open a door with a goat behind it, after you've chosen your door, and knows which doors have goats behind them, and always offers you the opportunity to switch doors.

now that i've got a handle on this, i'm going to take a crack at the two envelopes problem.

nintendo.

so, this comic made me look to see if this game was really a thing.
it is!
i'm wondering how many suicides and divorces are going to crop up in the sony offices this year.

yes please

since blogger's layout is being a pain in the ass.

this clip is giving me a strange sensation. i . . . i think it might be joy.

also: lennart green, card ninja.

wherein i fail to register any measurable amount of surprise

i am well aware of the irony in using google's blog service to write the following.

so, facebook has a new batch of privacy controls in place now. raise your hand if you think this changes anything. facebook already got caught, more than once, violating their own privacy policy for information on their site. as in, they are selling your stuff to advertisers.
rest assured: they are going to continue to do this.
THE SITE IS FREE. BANDWIDTH IS NOT.
and really, nothing's going to change. people are going to keep putting stupid shit on the site, along with enough information for anyone anywhere to identify them, and facebook is going to keep using all of that to pay the bills. employers are still going to be able to weed out applicants based on people having a bong in their profile pics, psychotic and abusive exes are going to continue to stalk their former wives / husbands, and zuckerberg is going to buy a new bentley and keep on thinking you're all retarded.
the company with all your information is not going to stop using it for their own purposes just because a press release said so. anything that goes on the internet never really goes away.
just sayin'

dio, and now this

between this and dio, the average height in the world has gone up by about 4" in the last couple weeks.

old school

just found graeme norgate's site. he apparently did all the kick ass music in videogames around the n64 era.
you can go there and download tracks from perfect dark, timesplitters, killer instinct, goldeneye, and the best mindless destruction game ever: blast corps.

fuck yes blast corps. any game where you can fit the instructions on an index card is a good game, when that card only has the words "fucking destroy everything with mechs and heavy construction equipment" is a monument to simplicity of design. that game was incredibly fun, satisfying, and brutally difficult. totally worth the $20 i paid for it sometime in the late 90s.

fuck you dell

dell has officially made my shit list as of this morning.
put in two (2) orders through their website three weeks ago. upgrading all the computers in the office, picked up 10 new inspiron machines. since their website was designed by diseased minds, the products that are displayed in any one category are different depending on how you reach that category while traversing the arcane mess that is their site layout. when ordering the machines, their fucking order system will not allow you to order more than 5 computers at once. so, two orders of 5.
fast forward to this week, when i get the first batch, and spend a couple days setting up the new computers. oddly enough, the second batch never arrives.
fortunately, as i am doing this for the office, i still have receipts and whatnot, so i check on the order status. dell, in their infinite wisdom has cancelled the second order.
i call their customer support line. their response:
"we have no idea why your order was cancelled. is that a problem?"

YES THAT IS A FUCKING PROBLEM. YOU CANCELLED MY GODDAMNED ORDER, DID NOT NOTIFY ME OF THIS, AND NOW I HAVE HALF AN OFFICE FULL OF PISSED OFF PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR 3 WEEKS FOR THEIR FUCKING COMPUTERS.

dell's customer rep was unable to resolve this issue. now i am waiting on a call from a manager some time in the next couple days to possibly reinstate said order. which will mean waiting another three fucking weeks. in what world is it ok to just cancel an order without notifying anyone? no email, no call, nothing. hell, it even says on my order that they didn't bother to send me any notification. goddammit dell, i tried to give you a couple thousand dollars. now you can go fuck yourselves, i'm picking these computers up from best buy, i don't have time to deal with this nonsense.

rip dio

brockway has the only appropriate response.

"Because Dio taught me, in part, what it is to be a man. Oh, he did not teach the rational lessons: He did not teach me morality, or responsibility, or restraint. No, Stanley, he taught me that being a man means sometimes ruining things in the most extravagant fashion possible. Because you can, and because it’s awesome. And Dio died today, so now I am going to ruin things. I am going to ruin everything, Stanley. For Dio.”

I took another bite of Danish; I would need the calories.

“But first, Stanley, first I am going to orally pleasure the receptionist – your fiancé – on top of the copier. I will set the machine for 666 copies, and if she has not climaxed by the time it’s finished making them, I will throw her out the window. I’ll be sure to mail one to you, buddy.”

brevity

i don't know why i like this format, none of this sounded any better in context.

"you're only here because your mom was too stupid to work a coathanger."

"that's the orgy pit."
'yes. where the send the children who are yelling, or knock over displays.'
"or for dressin' all sexy."

"i like how fetal alcohol syndrome is the new rape / necrophilia joke."

"nothing you say or do scares me, and i don't see you often enough."
'i'm having a party with a bunch of dudes in dresses, homos, and perverts. stop by.'
"maybe next week."

"plantation and slavery jokes are your department tonight, i'm taking care of necrophilia and incest."

alternate interpretation - Alien

re-watched 'alien' for the first time in a whole lot of years over the weekend. i submit, the movie as it is billed is not the movie they are showing us.

part the first: relative technology levels.
we have a highly advanced level of tech on earth, to the point where long distance space travel is commercially available, realistic androids can be created (and pass for human!), and computing power has come to the point where deciphering an unknown alien language can be done in a matter of hours.
the nostromo's landing craft breaks when they land the fucking thing. none of their video monitors work reliably, and the resolution sucks. the whole damn ship is rusting and falling the hell apart, which is a known issue because they have enough spare parts to fix some of the mechanical failures during the course of the film.

part the second: the crew.
oh jesus. this is where everything started going south for me. go watch the movie, and then point out any single instance, ever, in the entire film, where someone made a non-retarded decision.
mission paramters expanded? great, let's go check the new place out with no gear or training for such.
unknown biological agent just destroyed the hell out of one of our suits and crewmembers? let's bring that fucker onboard IMMEDIATELY. OBVIOUSLY NOTHING CAN GO WRONG HERE, AND FUCK YOU FOR SUGGESTING WE STICK WITH THE 24 HOUR QUARANTINE PROTOCOL. yes, the crew gets into a fight about whether or not to bring an obviously hostile organism onboard. the voice of sanity is shouted down, so they DO.

oh god the extremely fast and nimble hostile alien got loose. let us go look for it using nothing but our bare hands, and some glow-sticks. we have no need for protective gear, or to seal off areas, or even to SHUT THE FUCKING DOORS. this fails to get worse, only because the thing has already died. zero points for the crew there.
giant alien kills another crew member. the rest of the crew takes a leisurely meeting to decide what to do. they send it more food. again, no protective gear, weapons, tactics, backup, or communications apart from "run! run! it's coming! oh god it's right on top of you, don't run that way! *chomp*"

this is the point in the movie where i realized the short haired woman was a sociopath and out to kill everyone on board. she's done nothing up till this point but yell at people for following safety procedures, but during the air vent scene she actively hinders dallas and gets him killed.

at this point, the surviving 4 crew members have another leisurely meeting and decide not to go anywhere alone. the score, for those following at home, is alien: 3, crew: 0.

all four then go off alone.

only one of them is armed, none of them are wearing any kind of armor. which they MUST HAVE ON BOARD. the ship is a fucking tow ship / refinery, they have safety gear. hard hats at least.
a.i. goes nuts, 3 crew left.
two of those then head off, with one weapon between them. alien shows up, and the short haired woman sits down to scream. token black guy instead of incinerating her and the alien then runs up and gently shoves the super strong 8 foot tall acid blooded engine of space death.
things go poorly.
alien: 5, crew: 0.

the alien at this point is tired of killing everything, and goes for nappy time. ripley notices it, and takes 5 minutes to suit up, move it in front of an airlock door, and then shoot it out into space. the alien lets this happen without protest.


ok, so we have a movie filled with absolutely moronic decision making by people who should know better. unless.
i submit: the nostromo's function as a tow ship / refinery is it's secondary purpose. in the future, earth has advanced to a point where space travel is cheap enough that regular jackoffs can get jobs on freighters, etc. there are still laws against outright killing the handicapped, but overpopulation has made it very attractive to simply put the less intelligent and productive members of society on broken down floating barges, telling the 'crew' that they're space miners and to bring back minerals and whatnot to earth when or if they find it. if the crew dies, oh well, we lost a ship that should have been decommissioned decades ago. if not, hey, resources that we're running out of back on earth. good job guys, here's a happy meal, now get back out into space.
and so, my point: 'alien' - tards in space.

yes, i know i'm late to the party

this is why i'm a shitty nerd.
i've just started fucking around with windows 7, which i really like. then again, i liked vista, so there's that. the way win 7 is set up though, points you towards using the 64 bit version of internet explorer. they do include the 32 bit version as well, but it's less prominent.
and of course: problems arise.

adobe makes flash, and distributes the flash player. i.e. does not come with this pre-installed. there is no 64 bit version of the flash player. to get that to install, you need to be running the 32 bit verison of i.e.
$5 to the first person who comes up with a concise explanation of that issue i can pass along to the people at the office wondering why they have to deal with 2 different i.e. shortcuts on their desktops. bear in mind that the people i work with do not understand the difference between outlook, internet explorer, and windows.

also, adobe? your fucking help file should not have this in it:
"I can't get Adobe Flash Player to work on Windows 7.

TRY THIS FIRST

This problem is related to the browser you are using. Try using another browser, such as Firefox from Mozilla."

you are snakes and liars. if steve jobs wasn't a bigger douchebag, i would hope he is correct and html5 renders flash obsolete.

quick clips

no context, no prisoners.

"you look like someone's gay ecstasy dealer."

"the ladies room has a fuckin staircase!?"

"well, tjgsat blows. wtf are you doing up therewz? free drinks are goodn things"

"i told you this place was a gay punk bar now."

"there are going to be a bunch of underage girls, beers, and transvestites."
-'i can't see what could possibly go wrong here.'

"if you had an inner child, i would rape it."

hillbilly trainwreck continues.

the westboro baptist church announced that they're going to protest at constance mcmillen's graduation. yes, this is the same girl who wanted to take her girlfriend to prom and the whole damn school lost their fucking minds.
constance? you need to get your ass out of mississippi. much respect for telling a bunch of rednecks to go fuck themselves very publicly, but there's no reason to keep living with all that.

also, best paragraph of the morning goes to driftglass:
"Because for most of my adult life, there has been no one on the Right or in the Center who was willing to drag these scum out into the light just keep kicking them over and over and over again until they stopped behaving like the spoiled, whiny imbeciles...or crawled back into their double-wides and left us civilized people the Hell alone."

edit / update:
looks like the hosting company of the beast destroyed our virtual smtp server some time within the last couple days. for an unspecified amount of time, our corporate website has been trying, unsuccessfully, to send out little things like account registration emails, password requests, and check statements. so, you know, nothing major.
keeping with their policy of assuming that i break things like this for fun, they immediately asked me what i did to disrupt the normal flow of operations. my response, as always, was "not a goddamned thing you mouth breathers, get your windows engineer on the line NOW."
in defense of my surly attitude, this is two (2) weeks in a row where they have ruined our website with their patches, and been unable to figure out why. today i spent a half hour arguing with an engineer that the mail we send out does NOT all go to the same address. hell, it doesn't even all come FROM the same address, why the fuck would a handful of different features all send TO the same email inbox?
for this kind of service, we pay mid four figures a month for hosting.

for Science!

this is relavent to my interests.
as a fan of science, blasphemy, and boobs, i'm sold. if this works well enough, i propose 'dickslap the pope' day, so i can be an active participant rather than an observer.

also, over the weekend i found a copy of dokapon kingdom for the wii at the local used game shop. i tried to buy this game twice at amazon.com and got fucked over both times. playing this is my new incentive to get shit done.

oh hell.

as a response, a few questions:

1) multiply these polynomials: (7x + 3)(3y - 1)
2) what is the chemical formula for table salt?
3) what year was the declaration of independance adopted?
4) please define a split infinitive.
5) explain why O(n)! is worse than O(n^2)
6) define and explain the purpose of mitochondria.
7) explain why john brown is a controversial figure.
8) name two components of the new deal.
9) contrast and compare: socialism, anarchy, communism, capitalism.

extra credit:
a) can you operate a shovel?
b) what color is ketchup / catsup?
c) what is the street value of one ounce (1 oz) of heroin?
d) on a scale of 1 to 10, how strong is your gag reflex?

if you cannot answer all most any of the standard questions, the extra credit section will help you to find a career after your parents get tired of you sitting in the house and playing world of warcraft all fucking day instead of learning something with the hope of becoming a reasonably educated and potentially useful member of society.

i have enough of a problem with homeschooling, since entirely too many people are borderline retarded fucks who shouldn't be breeding in the first place, much less responsible for the education of the next generation. this unschooling nonsense is going to lead to kids getting their education from the fucking internet. you can learn things on the net, sure, but without any analysis or critical thinking skills, you might as well just spend your time huffing glue.

full disclosure: question 5 is technically from a college course instead of high school, but it's a very simple concept and usually taught in first semester computer programming.

the extremely short answer

"no"

the question, and i get this a minimum of two times a week, is: "can you re-code your entire site and api to show the branding of our tiny agency when we steal your information to sell things to our customers?"

if you want a site that does all our stuff and has all our information, then code it your fucking selves, i am not hacking together a 40,000 line css file so you can send your paying customers directly to our site and do even less work.
i am not sure how much paint thinner you'd have to drink to think that this project would be simple, easy, or even desirable for us to do, but it is quickly becoming my least favorite question ever.

i know it when i see it

roger ebert says that videogames are not, and cannot be, art.
this bothers me a little, partly because i am becoming a huge fan of his writing, and partly because i am a huge fucking nerd and spent most of my childhood in front of the atari / nes / super nintendo. i submit that a) videogames can indeed be art, and b) they are the superior form of expression in that they are also interactive. a truly great painting, symphony, movie, or book, whatever response it elicits, is still a passive experience. you go to the show or museum, you observe and examine these things, and take away whatever response or emotion you will. and that's fine. art is all about drawing some kind of response from the, for lack of a better word, viewer.
video games combine several kinds of art and deliver a product that you are also in control of. look at the screenshots from anything square enix has done in the last few years, the music from castlevania going back to the 19 fucking 80s, or the writing and storyline of something like myst, and tell me that's not art. i will respond that you may go fuck yourself. games wrap visuals around a story, set it to music, and then let you experience it how you will. if world of goo doesn't count as art, then we're all screwed because language has ceased to have any kind of meaning.

tl;dr: serrano had piss christ, nintendo gave us navi. games is art.

72 hours worth of stupidity

i have been a responsible adult for nearly a solid week now, and i am overcome by a feeling not unlike ants crawling under my skin, driving me to commit vile deeds of an extremely biological and depraved nature. i choose to blame this on [server hosting company], where there is some kind of affirmative action plan in place mandating that they maintain no less than 50% of their staff as mentally disabled people.
to wit: they applied a patch to our server. the site immediately slowed down by a factor of 300 or so. when i called to find out whom to flay, their reaction was to ask if i had poorly re-coded the entire site overnight, and suggested that was where the problem was coming from.
no, i did not re-write and upload 400 pages of asp and sql code overnight just for shits and grins on our weekly patch day.
the problem ended up, naturally, being in a couple settings in some new software they uploaded, which they forgot to check and configure. it took many hours on the phone with multiple engineers for them to realize this.

i want, so very badly, to be able to do a completely shitty job all the time and still get paid for it. this cannot be that hard to engineer, as i have seen it from many, many internets and web development houses in this state. lightburn? you guys are still the magnificent bastard kings of this. no other place i've seen can get away with delivering a site over a YEAR late, and retain clients. whomever does your p.r. is not getting paid enough.

on a less tech related note: if you like anything brockway ever wrote for cracked.com, go get his book 'everything is going to kill everybody', it is hilarious.

this is the new place.

i spent entirely too long on lj. i was comfortable enough over there, inertia and laziness keeping me from bothering with switching to any new internets word type service, but over the last couple weeks their ad nonsense has been fucking my browser over, and making their pages take upwards of a minute each to load. 

i don't remember the last time there was anything on lj that was worth waiting for a minute of loading time to read. 

so, here we are. 

fucking arcane web dev. nonsense for the week:

if, in the fullness of time, you get ambitious and decide to have a nice css dropdown menu on your site, and that menu is directly above a omg kickass flash anim or movie, you may find that the menu is going to be a bastard and drop down behind the flash movie.

the fix for this is as follows: toss these wmode values into the batch of embed tags for the flash object. <param name="wmode" value="transparent">

<embed src="includes/flash-movie.swf" wmode="transparent"  .... 

wmode is not recognized by dreamweaver, so it's not going to help you with this one, but these will get the menu to behave and the movie to still play.