bytex64.net

What he says: Hey, anytime you need something, just let me know.
What he means: If you're looking for a booty call, I'm your man.
What she hears: I'll be your bitch and do your bidding to the detriment of my health and sanity.

Ok, maybe that's a bit harsh, but I've got to keep those emo muscles flexed, eh?

To Chrissy: No, nothing happened. I just got done reading a webcomic that had a main character I particularly identify with (gee, that's never happened before...). Made me a bit depressed about my (nonexistent) love life. Also: CITIZENS DEMAND MORE PICTURES.

And that webcomic is none other than Questionable Content. It actually really good, with good art (lately) and a storyline that actually flows somewhere. That talk they're having? It's been in the making for freaking years. Not even Fred Gallagher, master of the persistent crushing romantic dissapointment, can claim that. It's quite enjoyable, and sometimes has sort of an American version of that quirky humor that I like about Scary Go Round.

For those not in the area, central Illinois is now buried in 6-12 inches of blowing, drifting, unstoppable snow. The kind that you cannot bike through. Believe me, I HAVE TRIED. So right now, I'm eating a couple of beef 'n' bean chimichangas, and sipping a hot chocolate (made from Mom's mix. Thanks, Mom!). I'm looking forward to crawling under the covers and waking up sometime in February.

I've heard it said a time or two lately that we're headed for another dot-com bubble burst. I don't think so. I think the dot-coms know what they're doing (which is, most of the time, getting bought by Google). No, if there's one area I've seen a ridiculous amount of time and effort being poured into, it's blogging.

Blogging is the fashion today. You can tell this by the sheer number of made-up words that have been spawned to label it. Words like "moblog", "vidblog", and the ever-infuriating "blogosphere". (I mean, seriously. "Blogosphere." What the fuck?) People are praising blogs for their ability to bring free speech to places where it doesn't exist. People are denouncing blogs for bringing "mobocracy" to the Intertron. Blogs are the hot item right now. If you want to have a face on the internet, you need a blog. I mean, heck, even Google has a blog.

So what? Just a waste of webspace, right? Well, yes, but here's where it gets stupid. Lately, articles have been showing up on the news sites I frequent about how certain bloggers make upwards of $100,000 a year on their ad revenue. So, akin to a blind faith in the Tooth Fairy, millions of people believe they can, too. Preying on this new trend, slightly more intelligent people have created the idea of a "Pro Blogger", and will gladly point you towards ways you can start making six figures from your informative and entertaining peat moss blog. Don't believe me? Take a gander at ProBlogger.

I'm sure there's people out there trying to sell the "tools" to become a professional blogger, and I think that there are enough idiots out there for that to catch on for two or three minutes. But eventually, the whole idea will collapse under its own inflated worth, and the internet will move on to the next shiny thing, which I'm sure will be just as stupid.

An aside about stupid internet fads

Blogging is hot shit now, but while thumbing through my old stuff, I realized that I was ranting on the internet as early as 1998. Of course, back then I was still a proto-user, and the web was still too bright to be seen with my newly formed eyes. I mean, my index.html contained such unspeakable shite as 'window.open('index2.html','data','');', '<p align="center">&nbsp;</p>', and '<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0">'. I was a very naive kid back then, but I did manage to find a way to vent my frustrations into HTML that I was sure no one would ever see. (And was probably correct. Not even the WayBack Machine remembers my website.) Now people do the same thing and call it a "blog," as though the term somehow ennobles the act. Please, people, get over yourselves. It's just a webpage.

December: "Hahaha! You like that? The cold? The snow? The ice? Did you fall on your ass? Ha! That's right. December is back in town, and you punk bitches ain't seen nothin' yet. I've got a whole new 'tude, and January better watch out, 'cause I'm not sure one month is enough for all of it. Yeah, I bet you liked the warm November we just had, right? Well there ain't gonna be none of that from here on. It's going to be cold as balls, 'cause that's the way I like it. December's in town, motherfuckers."

Well that's what it felt like, anyway. I woke up this morning, in my hermetically sealed room, and stepped outside to be greeted by... snow. And slush. And ice. The full brunt of winter, in my face, and without warning. Bastards.

I've been feeling kinda bleh lately. I don't think I'm sick, but I'm loading up on grapefruit juice just in case. I've got a game to write for a project that a friend of mine is doing, and so far, I've got squat. I just can't get motivated, and I don't know why. The game is going to be awesome. Maybe part of it is that I'd really like to be doing less coding and more playing the game. But of course, unless I code it, I can't do that. Maybe I've finally burnt out on the tedium of OpenGL. Maybe I'm {not getting enough,getting too much} {vitamin C,salt,sunlight,nookie}. *sigh*. I dunno.

I'm doing a DDR tournament tomorrow. Why? Free admission. It's also a "no experts" tournament, which makes me something like the best of the worst if I win... How could I pass up such a dubious distinction? Oh, and $50 for first place. }:->

I saw this on digg today: Depressed? Swim with dolphins. The following hilarity ensued:

Me: Here you go, you need DOLPHINS.
Jen: yea! like, fifty of them
Me: Haha. UPS guy comes to your door: "I've got a delivery of... dolphins?"
Jen: haha i wish
Me: That would be cool. If your living room was underwater, and you just had dolphins for no apparent reason.
Me: Guests would come over, and you'd be like, "Oh, don't mind the dolphins," as though they were a normal housepet.
Me: And they'd get in the tuna...
Jen: haha
Jen: then i'd damn them to hell
Me: Then they'd look at you with those large, glassy, intelligent eyes, and you'd be like, "Aw, I can't stay mad at you guys!"
Me: Then, group dolphin hug.
Jen: with flippers
Me: See, that just sounds anti-depressing. :)
Jen: and then i'd probably drown
Jen: haha
Me: Haha.

Quick, if you order your dolphins now, you can beat the Christmas rush!

I like to check the BBC news site since it offers a little bit different perspective compared to what I get on Google News. Today I got sucked into the "Health" section, and found these gems:

• Male sex hormone easily triggered. This just in: DUH.
• Love is the drug, scientists say. Might as well face it, you're addicted to love.
• Sex hormone 'higher in single men'. Further breaking news from the DUH department: Single men are horny.

For those of you too lazy to read the articles (and I can't really blame you), I've selected a few choice quotes from each one. Now, we're all responsible adults here, so please try to think about these in a mature manner. If you need me, I'll be somewhere else, chuckling to myself.

From the first article:

The researchers say their work is the first time that hard evidence has been produced in this way.

The second article had this:

The research also suggests sex is booby-trapped to make partners bond.

"So your body goes all out to make you bond with your partner and that makes love highly addictive and the withdrawal sucks."

No funny quotes from the third article, but hey, "booby-trapped," eh? Pure genius.

So Jen and I were vegging out watching Cinematech last night, when this rather bizarre game came on called Façade. It's a very different type of "game" than most people are used to (unless you're a fan of the Hugo's House of Horrors series). The game involves you and two AI actors acting out a drama. The two AI characters, Trip and Grace, are apparently having marital problems, and you get stuck in the middle. You may have heard about games that are "non-linear." In most games, this means that at any time, you can stop fighting evil and raise Chocobos. In this game, it means what it means: that the course of action is determined by you, and can end in many different ways.

Whoever was playing the game for Cinematech took this open-endedness as an opportunity for hilarity, saying lines such as "You look like a young JTT," and "How do your pants stay up?" (The cel-shaded characters have no visible belts and such, just solid-color clothing). After seeing this, we immediately started downloading the game (which I forgot to mention is freeware). An hour and a half later, we installed it, only to be greeted with a screen saying "Facade requires at least a 1.6GHz processor." Jen's laptop? 1.5GHz. Bastards.

So I'm at home now, with a couple of significantly faster computers, and I've gone a few rounds with Trip and Grace. (Oh, by the way, it generates a script of your game so you can go back and review it) I was playing as "Amy." Some of the funnier moments:

GRACE
Amy, (annoyed sigh) Trip is sometimes so...

TRIP
Oh, we're talking about me, are we?

GRACE
What?

TRIP
Grace, even though you're now a creative director at work, and even though you redecorate the apartment all the time, the truth is... you're not an artist.

GRACE
Uhh...!

TRIP
I'm sorry, you're not.

GRACE
Amy, uhh...

AMY
What you need? A threesome.

TRIP
Okay, Amy, I think this evening is over, you've got to leave.

TRIP
There's only so much you can expect to put up with, you know?

(AMY picks up the white wine bottle.)

(Trip opens the front door.)

TRIP
We'll be fine -- just go.

(Trip closes the front door.)

AMY
I'm taking this.

AMY
woot!

In this one, I'm Adam.

(Adam knocks on the front door.)

TRIP
I know I know -- (interrupted)

TRIP
Uhp, he's here!

GRACE
What?! You said he's coming an hour from now!

TRIP
No, he's supposed to be here now!

GRACE
Trip...!

(Trip opens the front door.)

TRIP
Adam!!

TRIP
Hi! It's so great to see you! -- (interrupted)

ADAM
What's up penis wrinkle?

(Trip closes the front door.)

I'd like to show you Trip's face when I said that, but I guess you'll just have to imagine his disgust. :) If you've got the horsepower, I recommend trying it out. I haven't gotten too far with it, but that's mostly because my fingers slow down to about 15 words per minute in this house's glacial computer room temperatures. :-/

Now, I'm not an XBox fan by any means. I was just as aware of its "launch" yesterday as I was of the fact that basketball season is upon us (i.e. none). I'm pretty hardcore into the PlayStation camp at the moment, but I hold hope for Nintendo to capture our hearts again with the Revolution. I put launch in quotes up there because it's pretty clear that what consumers wanted was a rainstorm of 360s, and what they got was a light shower. Of course, it has been proposed that this is all a PR stunt, and Microsoft actually has ten bajillion of them locked in a warehouse somewhere, and they're holding them back in order to create some illusion that the 360 is some kind of uberconsole that everyone must get their hands on, when in reality it's just a handfull of rabid fanboys in their parents' basement salivating at the possibility of a HD installment of Dead Or Alive: Beach Volleyball.

I have to wonder, though, if this is the new shape of console launches, will Sony and Nintendo follow suit? I predict that in 2006 Sony will one up not only Microsoft, but also themselves, by releasing only three PS3 units on North-American shores at launch. Nintendo, not to be outdone, will ship no consoles, and only one suspiciously phallic controller to the U.S. For reasons nobody will understand, it will be colored pink.

In a bizarre twist, I'd like to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this, and believe there actually is some problem that's causing production delays. In fact, I'd like to hazard a guess that numerous recent reports of 360s "crashing like mad" may have something to do with it. My guess is there's some problem with the 360's design that was found at the last minute, and the ones that have left for the stores are the ones that were found to work reliably (mostly). Rather than admitting "oh, crap, there's something wrong with our product," MS goes ahead with a scaled back launch. While we sort of think that Microsoft is famous for selling buggy software, it's actually pretty rare for them to botch a 2.0 product. In any case, this is entirely speculation, and should be taken with an appropriately large grain of salt.

While waiting in limbo for my tires to be changed this morning, I did get a chance to play Call of Duty 2. My honest opinion: "Can't I get this for PC?" HD is cool and all, but if you're into the kind of games the 360 is sporting, I'm betting you've already got a PC sitting next to you that's more than capable of that kind of performance. Some may recall that this is the same argument I had against the original XBox. In fairness, though, I didn't get to try Project Gotham Racing, which I've heard a lot about, but haven't yet had an opportunity to try.

Oh, the tires? They're nice. Very nice. }:->

Ok, so it wasn't exactly 10,000 movies. It was closer to something like two and a half. But it felt like an eternity. Story was, Yan and I headed to the Union for ITG, returned some videos, and went back to his place for a while before heading over to Nancy and Jen's. I played some Rag Doll Kung Fu before Yan and I admitted that the only other interesting thing to do was to sit and watch Nancy's stack of downloaded movies.

We started watching in the middle of War of the Worlds, which was visually interesting, but sort of bleh. Of course, the martian invaders get the flu and die, just as anticlimactically as they did in the book. (For those of you who read the book... If you haven't, shame on you. Go read the book.)

Next we watched Elektra. Now, I'm not sure if you've read any reviews, but here's the stone cold truth: Elektra is a truly awful movie. I hesitate to say that this is because it's a faithful comic adaptation, since that might be a disservice to the original authors. Through the entire movie, it felt like I was missing something, but at some point I realized my senses were not deceiving me. This movie simply contains some of the worst acting of our time. It's as though every character in the movie was attempting to mimic the stock-stiff acting style made famous by Keanu Reeves. Here's a small sample of this movie's riveting dialog:

Elektra: I don't want you to be like me.
Girl: I do.

It's as though they made this movie as an apologetic stab at making Daredevil look good. Avoid at all costs.

The third movie was Guess Who, a remake of the classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It was OK. Bernie Mac is sort of funny, and Ashton Kutcher is... no, he's not funny. It's good to see that we can still enjoy movies that joke about racial differences. If we can laugh about it, it's not that big of a deal, right?

I wound up getting two Yokohama AVIDs for $125 shipped. Pretty good, considering some other sites were selling them for that much per tire. Hopefully I can get them installed before Thanksgiving, or else I'll be heading to the family get-together at 50MPH, the recommended top speed of my temporary spare. :-/

Also, to RedHat: WHY DON'T YOU SUPPORT REISERFS? Everyone else does. What's the deal? *shakes fist*.

Today, the end of classes brought us the beginning Thanksgiving break. My buddy list sits mostly empty as many of my friends are either home or en route. *shrug*. Not that break means a whole lot to me. No classes for a week, but I only went to one this week. I'll get to hang out with my friends more this week. Maybe some VFS. Later, there will be massive amounts of turkey, pie, and explosions.

In the short term, I've got a decision to make about what tires to get for my car. I'm really leaning towards the Yokohama AVID H4s at the moment, since they're inexpensive and have great dry traction. The only thing that might compete right now is the Toyo Proxes TPT, which is similarly inexpensive, but trades a little dry traction for better wet performance. The deciding factor right now is that I can get the Yokohamas online for a great price without tax. Since they wouldn't ship 'till Monday, anyway, I'm going to think about it over the weekend. Why not go for the gold and get an "Ultra High Performance" tire? Well, one, I can't afford those, and two, it snows here. :)

I'm betting a lot of you have noticed a couple of freeloaders on your buddy list recently. AOL has figured you wouldn't be mad about having a couple of bot buddies (MovieFone and ShoppingBuddy) handy. Who knows, if they had simply told me about them and let me add them myself, I might have found them handy. But I don't appreciate the audacity of adding them for me. This is not the way to introduce a new feature. I would like to take this moment to suggest that you instead use Jabber, a free, open, standardized, and decentralized alternative to networks such as AIM, MSN, ICQ, and Yahoo!. I use it, and I will be constantly shaking my fist in your general direction until you do, too. *shakes fist*.

Right now I'm listening to the August EP by Tatsu (found on the excellent monotonik). It's what (I guess) you'd call "ambient techno," with a gently flowing sequences of sound that's easy to listen to while doing something else. I recommend it. In fact, everything on monotonik is really good for the techno-inclined. Best of all, it's all free. :)

See some of you in a week. As for the rest of you, I've got a tube of "Safe Start" fire starting gel and a lighter. Who's up for some fun?

"Travel back to Hogwarts as Harry learns of a new enemy... one he'll have to beat with his bare hands, again and again, until he's exhausted. Hidden within the Book of Endocrinological Secrets, Harry discovers that he was cursed from birth to undergo a hideous transformation upon becoming a teenager. Despite his best efforts, the transformation is well underway. He becomes plagued by hideous facial blemishes, unnatural growth spurts, and impure thoughts about Hermione. Harry will have to face his most devious enemy, yet. Will he have the courage to stand up to... Wet Dream?"

I was really trying hard not to put "Hairy Potter" up there. There's probably enough disturbing imagery and innuendo there to scare off what little readership I have, anyway. :-/ I don't really have anything against Harry Potter the story. I tried to read it once, and lost interest. I certainly can't fault anyone for enjoying a well-written book. I do take issue with the liberties J.K. Rowling takes with the english language, but I guess she's no worse than Lewis Carroll. My main gripe with Harry Potter is the ludicrous amount of merchandising that preys on kids' succeptibility to shiny objects. I mean, LEGO Harry Potter? What the fuck? I remember when LEGO used to do LEGO, and that was it. But that's another gripe.

Apparently there is a Harry Potter movie out today, and most of my friends are either watching it today, or soon. (Not uncoincidentally, most of these people also like Naruto.) I'm going to take this moment to make my official position clear: I don't give a shit. So nyah.

I don't know if I've mentioned Gokusen here or not... It's a show about a Yakuza princess who teaches a high school class full of bad apples. It's pretty good, and different enough from GTO to make it entertaining. I finished the first season lately, and am working on the second. So far, it seems to be a carbon copy of the first season, so I'm not sure if I'll continue.

Another show I've gotten on a whim is "Jigoku Shoujo." Literally, it means "Hell Girl." If you visit a certain website at midnight and type in someone's name, Jigoku Shoujo will take that person directly to Hell. In return, your soul also goes to Hell when you die. It's one of those slow-paced psychological shows that I don't really like... Something you'd find on Anime Unleashed at 4am. The animation is pretty, and it is suitably disturbing. Jigoku Shoujo herself is this little girl with a vacant stare and a black kimono with brightly-colored flowers on it. She sort of reminds me of Alice from the Sakura background animation on DDR.

Also, for any ITG fans out there, check out KaW's music over at ampcast.com. FYI: KaW is also Inspector K, ☺, KeeL, Banzai, and Symphonius. But not the same KeeL as this one, who, oddly enough, I knew about *before* discovering ITG. Small world, eh?