It seems to be a WTF day across the board. Turns out there's a Bollywood "Remake" of Fight Club (check those promos out), and a sequel to - of all the things that never needed one - Bambi.

Damn, man. That shit is foul. Probably easier to draw than the old costume, and definitely embodying everything that sucks about Marvel in one over-inked splash. My face, it hurts. My inner fanboy, it wishes Ellis* would get the fuck off of the Hero boat and do some more Transmetropolitanesque work.

12:20 < mdxi> looks like he's got some pretty bad rickets there
12:20 < solios> yeah.
12:21 < solios> McFarlane's anti-anatomy totally killed spiderman**. Since then everyone feels compelled to [make spiderman some sort of rubberized ball of skeleton-free muscle].
12:22 < mdxi> also, i just noticed the big hook coming out of his butt
12:34 < solios> yeah, that's some creepy shit.
12:34 < solios> it's too Doc Oc for my liking, honestly.
12:34 < solios> it's like someone was all DOOD LETS REDESIGN DOC OC MAKE HIM LESS OF A FATASS AND PAINT HIM UP LIKE IRON MAN and someone said "hey, that rocks."
12:39 <@bda> When they should have said 'lol u nub fag'.

Image ripped from Newsarama, which contains, in one convenient index page, an excellent list of reasons why I stopped hurting myself with superhero shit after reading Watchmen.

< Devi0us> wow. at a quick glance, that pinky is misleading

And there's that.

* Ellis has nothing to do with this rant other than the fact that the last time I bothered to check he was writing Iron Man. This is especially annoying to me for a large number of reasons I'll hopefully never bother to get into here. The realization that people like Ellis and Gaiman and Moore actually need money to live - and that they'll do things like a run on Iron Man or 1602 or Tom Strong in order to eat and make mortgage payments is one of the reasons I still have a day job.

** Sales-wise, it made McFarlane and made Spiderman incredibly popular for awhile. It's the McFarlane-imitation that kills it for me, among other things.

My first doctor's appointment since 1999 is Monday, February 6th at 10:20 AM.

He's going to have a grand old time with me.

T+1:13............PLT..... Uhoh.
T+1:13.......................LOSS OF ALL DATA.

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

-Virgil I. Grissom, after the Gemini 3 mission, March 1965

Pittsburgh is choking on testosterone. The locals are practically drowning in the shit. I hate them. I hate their disease. Millions of years of evolution and they regress to shit-flinging apes at a moment's notice. Their selective provincial patriotism is just as annoying as their sudden insistance on thrusting it in the face of anyone who needs to leave their house.

It's some kind of aggro-retard leper colony.

The best part? The collective testosterone-orgasm has made me physically ill. It's not the guns-and-fireworks-and-running-around-shirtless or the screaming or the bathroom-accessory waving or even the opportunistic lifesuckers. It's the fact that there's going to be at least two more weeks of it.

I need to move. Preferably to a city that's had its shots. Philadelphia doesn't seem to be anywhere near this degree of rabid, narrow-minded or neanderthalish about the Eagles... but Philadelphia actually has a lot of other things going for it. Pittsburgh doesn't. The locals know it and they're clinging to the one thing they do have with the sick desparation of a junky who needs something - anything - to live for.

Now they've been thrown a bone and rather than act like adults, the city has, as a whole, decided to drop its pants and do the potty dance.

Kids these days.

Update (through Daily Rotten) : My low opinion of these primates is justified.

My firearms fu will never equal that of my father - I went for computers, a world in which this week's Uzi is Always And Forever next week's musket. In context, Winchester shutting down would be the same as losing Sun or SGI or another of the Big, Historically-Relevant-But-Struggling computing pioneers. There are, you could argue, only so many ways to make a saleable-to-the-masses boomstick. It sucks ass, but there's more to it than press releases and technology. There always is.

That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

-George Orwell

For anyone else who has the 0 mhz problem, it turns out that Sonnetcache will fix OWC boards.

This comes as no surprise - a lot of Sonnet gear is rebranded from other people - their gigabit ethernet cards are Realtek and their SATA cards are more expensive purple versions of Seritek cards. I noticed that the Sonnet boards on OWC are the same specs as the OWC boards, only more expensive - so I figured it was worth a try*, and hey - yay! - it works.

As usual the biggest pain in the ass was checking ROM revision. My MacOS 9 fu is getting rusty - I expected a stripped down Classic system to actually boot. Oops. Also, it turns out that OS 9 will boot in the presence of a Radeon 9600 - you just have to force-quit on desktop to clear the ATI Video Accellerator extension, as it's shitting its pants... and you'd better get your monitor rez right on the first try for the same reason.

NOTE : If you're one of those assholes who uses Classic applications (like I do, Every Single Day), it seems that Photoshop 5.5's AltiVecCore extension totally hates this thing - I had to pull it out of Photoshop's extensions folder for the thing to start behaving properly. And by properly I mean "not crashing eight seconds into a file open." Pity my shading and masking technique can't be done with Photoshop CS. :P Update : It can, actually. It's largely a matter of turning off all kinds of stupid-by-default settings. Turns out CS is shweet for quite a few things... but for every :D there's a Brand New Stupidity, such as obfuscating the location of the 'new view' function.

G4 Digital Audio. Came with a 60g maxtor drive, a Superdrive, the zip drive, and 512 ram. I bought the machine in early 2005 and have been aquiring parts for it here and there since.

G4/1.4ghz with 256k l2 cache and 2meg L3 cache [up from 733/256/1]
Radeon 9600 64 meg AGP 4x [20 Apple trinitron @ 1280x1024x60xmillions]
Radeon 7200 32 meg PCI [15" Apple multiscan @ 1024x768x75xmillions]
Sonnet SATA board
      250gx7200rpmx8meg cache Maxtor : Minerva : OS drive
      250gx7200rpmx8meg cache Maxtor : 250 : Data dump
Internal IDE bus
      NEC 16x DVD {+|-}R**
      Zip-250 (YAY!)
      120g Seagate data dump
160g Seagate drive in a Venus DS-3 firewire enclosure
1g PC-133 SDRAM (2x256, 1x512)
FIDDYSIXKAYMODEM
Gigabit Ethernet

* Also worth a try would have been saving the extra couple of hundred bucks for a mini, but hey - the only thing I wasn't spanking the mini on was clock and everything else would have been a big step backwards. I got needs.

** Also 48x CD-R, 32x CD-RW, 8X DVD+R DL, 8x DVD+RW, 16x DVD-ROM, 6x DVD-R DL, 6x DVD-RW, 2m cache and it works with Toast 5.2.3 and OS X 10.4 no problem kthks, 40$ at newegg, squirt-squirt.

Doing a few Not-Quite-Real-World objects that'll be used in both ATC and DCR. Plenty of reference for the monitor and the S-Deck, and I've learned a lot about splines, sub-object material editing, smoothing groups and reflection mapping. And the front end is even reasonably accurate*.

Much like the QAR, I'm aiming for a couple of objects a day over the course of a couple of weeks - and I wind up spending a lot of time on stuff that's just not going to be all that visible.

But hey, it's the thought that counts.

* The backs look fine, until you notice that the RCA and S-Video plugs are three different sizes. :P

Sex
Impulse
Negation

Funny, the things that pop into your head unbidden.

After Clone Wars, I watched Hardware (1990). After this I'm probably going to get drunk. I'd invoice Dragorn, but the fact of the matter is that I'd made that decision well before watching Hardware. The movie was pretty effective at removing any doubts about this decision - I'll give it that.

The soundtrack has Ministry and Public Image Limited. Robocop had vastly better religious imagery and PTP.

Robocop also didn't turn into a bitchingly incoherent mess at the fifty minute mark.

The director was fired after one day of shooting on The Island of Dr. Moreau (not the first Jungle Epic in which Brando couldn't remember his lines).

There's a reason for that.

  

  

Worst use of a fractal in recorded history.

Bonus points for people on being fire and not realizing it. Double bonus points for Iggy Pop, Lemmy, and Grade-Z acting. Would have made a bangup story arc of Total Recall 2070. Serious bonus points for Drone Sunrise. Also being based on a 2000 AD comic. Boo to the writer and editor.

Looking like a cross between SuperPatriot and the lameass Big Bad from Virus ? Priceless.

 

A must-see for anyone who could stomach Cyborg, if for no other reason than the overlong slow-mo of the Linda Hamilton insert clubbing the botcorpse with a baseball bat. The movie definitely has its moments - as with my previous "review," I haven't spoiled the film by telling you about any of them.

It was entertaining - I've seen a lot worse, especially in the misuse-of-slowmo department. Thanks to Dragorn for pointing me at this thing. When I get home I may well watch the original version.

Everyone who gives a shit about Star Wars has already seen it. I haven't cared for the franchise since injecting the steaming pile of shit that was Episode I into my eyeballs - so I am, as usual, late to the party.

Summary : The animation is some of Tartakovsky's better work. I've never been what you could call enthralled by his style but in this case it works and we've got spaceships and lightsabers instead of preschool drama, so yay. For US television animation, it works. The voice acting, however, sucks ass. It's wooden, it's flat, it sounds like nobody involved on the speaking end actually wanted to be there and holy shit if you've seen more than forty seconds of non-shitty anime you know that the Japanese lead the pack, period. Sometimes it works, but more often it's ass - almost as bad as the Anakin/Padme scenes in any of the live action Star Wars.

Lots of large scale lightsaber battles, which got boring somewhere between the titles and credits of Episode II (the second Matrix movie managed to make "action sequences" boring and painful in much the same fashion). Threepio and Artoo are a total flashback to the 80s for anyone who watched the Droids cartoon, which is a bonus.

Oh, and there's this thing:

That right there makes it worth watching. There's a couple of moments that are drop-dead awesome but I won't spoil them for you. This isn't that kind of website.

Wtf : Grevious is a massively bad ass Jedi food processor in the cartoon. Somewhere between Clone Wars and Episode III he apparently smoked an entire FACTORY of Marlboros and moved in with the Golden Girls. What. The. Fuck.

Opinion : Shitloads better than Episodes I, II or III. But then, so is Weekend At Bernie's. I'd whip out the Krull comparison but believe it or not, I've never seen Krull. I'm thinking the betterness has something to do with the fact that Tartakovsky directed. He actually has directorial ability - something Lucas seems to have lost in his twenty-two years away from the director's chair.

54c graffiti (unretouched).

Some lovely evidence in this Unsanity blog post and this mailing list post to support the idea that Apple's badly-named Intel laptop and the new iMac are not, in fact, the bee's knees.

Key points : SSE is balls compared to Altivec*, which doesn't bode well for any of the Pro apps (or any form of video playback, among other things). The Intel laptop has lost a couple of features, the Intel macs use EFI instead of the BIOS (that's actually Good, but it means I'll be paying a hell of a lot of attention to the state of VMWare, VPC and so forth) and last but not least, disk partition maps for bootable volumes are Different (read: incompatible)- so while your binaries might be universal, your / isn't. Good job Apple.

Oh, and there's no Classic support (shock.), and none of the major productivity software is shipping Universal Binaries yet- so these things aren't going to be all that useful for at least another six months to a year.

In other words the platform is now a real mess. But hey, new iApps. Look at the shiny, try not to listen to the massive sucking sound coming from Cupertino.

As usual, the hardware will eventually "catch up" - and maybe in ten or fifteen years it'll be as responsive as it was in 1998. Until then, the world of computing is becoming progressively less of an "oooh, what next?!" and more of a "grit your teeth and bear it." - at least until the dust clears.

Some of the more vocal developer commentary is along the lines of "we'd rather be adding feejur support instead of dicking around with SSE optimization" - clearly The Mothership has convinced developers that performance isn't one of the bullet-points that people are looking for these days. Bummer.

* See the mailing list link if you think I'm being my usual opinionated self. SSE is a 1999 sequel to MMX, while Altivec (developed '96-'98 at Apple) is an in-house thing.

From the wikipedia entry:

Altivec as implemented on the G4 and G5 PPC processors can perform 8 32-bit FLOPS per cycle and SSE as implemented processors by AMD and Intel can perform only 4 32-bit FLOPS per cycle (x86s are also capable of 2 64-bit FLOPS per cycle using SSE-2, whereas AltiVec is not). The obvious implication is that SSE would need a clock 2 times the frequency of Altivec to perform the same number of FLOPS per second.

Yes, I'm a giant dork. In this case the dorkage has been aided and abetted by Terok Nor and Earthbound Timelords.

One of the better movies I've seen in awhile, despite frequent .nz dong early on. Feels a bit like a cross between The Stand, The Langoliers (the fiction, not the adaptations), and Primer. The ending rocks, and while it's not the "Planet of the Apes" zinger it's been made out to be elsewhere, it's still very satisfying.

While I prefer Shannon Sullivan's Doctor Who site, The Doctor Who Ratings Guide is loaded with viewer opinion - amusing that for every negative review of an episode, there's almost always a positive. This ain't Star Trek, folks.

For everything else, there's the Wikipedia portal and Outpost Gallifrey.

You'll notice I haven't mentioned the BBC site. That's because it's a Rich Media Monstrosity, lacking even the base useability of the Star Trek web site. It's pretty, but if you're looking for modem-friendly, well-organized, easy-to-access information on Doctor Who - especially the older Doctors.

06:14 < vai> eep.
06:14 < vai> Word mod o/u
06:14 < vai> An internal 'o' might be rendered by 'u'
06:14 < vai> sol.ius              ADJ    1 3 GEN S X POS
06:14 < vai> solus, sola, solum (gen -ius) ADJ [XXXAX]
06:14 < vai> only, single; lonely; alone, having no companion/friend/protector; unique;
06:15 < solios> \o/
06:16 < vai> latin++

Today at work, I took an ancient unused IBM deskstar and combined it with a completely unused 2ghz Athlon/1g of ram to form Powerslave, my first successful Windows 2000 install (nevermind having to download Intel NIC drivers on a separate box, or RAID card driver issues, or ATI drivers requiring DirectX or etc, etc).

15:52 <@ejp> you sir, are the god damned fag.
15:53 <@ejp> yes, THE.
15:53 <@xeno> o_o
15:53 * solios wins.
15:53 <@xeno> fagbot: doot Michael Knight
15:53 <@fagbot> SLOWLY LOWERING MYSELF DOWN TO THE TILE NOW
15:54 <@xeno> :D
15:54 <@xeno> < kelly> He...
15:54 <@xeno> < kelly> >.O
15:54 <@xeno> < kelly> EH.
15:54 <@xeno> < kelly> Er.
15:54 <@xeno> < xeno> Dan.
15:54 <@solios> he's the desktop on my ibook AND the mac mini.
15:54 <@xeno> < kelly> Oh.
15:55 <@ejp> THE GAYNESS! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!
15:55 <@xeno> I like how just dropping your name explains everything and now she's fine with it.

Some wit left a wheelchair on my doorstep.

Heck of a strange thing to wake up to.

13:56 <@solios> [ The Scotsman thing on "warp drive" ]
13:59 <@xeno> Switching off the magnetic field would result in the engine reappearing in our current dimension.
13:59 <@xeno> you know what would be great?
13:59 <@xeno> "Engage."
13:59 <@xeno> * engine disappears
13:59 <@xeno> "Uh, sir?"
14:00 <@xeno> it was based on a highly controversial theory that would require a significant change in the current understanding of the laws of physics.
14:00 <@xeno> so you need someone who understands them differently
14:01 <@xeno> invent the science you need, then spend 20 years or so raising a kid to grow up believing it
14:01 <@xeno> educate him in the proper fields
14:01 <@xeno> then set him loose designing the engine and have him conduct the test run
14:01 <@_Lasar> Then clean up and find another kid.
14:02 <@xeno> nuh.
14:02 <@xeno> well, maybe a herd of kids
14:02 <@xeno> if anyone is there that thinks/knows it won't work, it won't.
14:02 <@xeno> everyone on the project must have no doubts about the science

22:21 * ejp watches MS totally fuck this WMF thing
22:21 < solios> rjbs++
22:21 <@rjbs> MURPHY
22:21 <@rjbs> ok, bed time
22:21 < solios> what is WMF? I always misread as WMV.
22:21 <@rjbs> Windows MetaFile
22:21 <@ejp> Windows MetaFile.
22:21 <@rjbs> goofy ancient image format
22:21 < solios> oh dear.
22:21 <@rjbs> (jynx)
22:21 < solios> sounds evil.
22:21 <@ejp> oldass windows-centric vector format.
22:22 < solios> suk
22:22 <@ejp> still used internally a LOT by things like office.
22:22 < solios> and it got ka-SPLOITed?
22:22 <@bda> Yup.
22:22 < solios> pone.
22:22 <@rjbs> seriously
22:22 <@bda> We're pushing out the unsupported patch, apparently. :|
22:22 <@rjbs> people on the radio were saying, "So, don't look at images or open email. You'll be fine."
22:22 < solios> sweet.
22:22 <@bda> Unsupported, written by "some guy".
22:23 <@ejp> the next wave of STUPID
22:24 <@bda> Steve Gibson is not someone I would trust to plug in a toaster.
22:24 <@ejp> indeed
22:24 <@bda> Let alone determine where or not pre-release code "works great".
22:24 <@bda> s/where/whether/
22:24 < solios> hell, Vista "works great."
22:25 <@ejp> Steve Gibson is barely qualified to grunt and fling poo.
22:25 < solios> and he makes more money than you and me and bda combined.
22:25 <@ejp> our dicks are bigger.
22:25 < solios> yes.
22:25 < solios> yes they are.
22:25 <@ejp> I think you know which of these things matters more.

19:15 * y0shi was just looking at the back of his watch. apparently the "crystal" is really crystal. one big chunk of sapphire
19:15 <@ejp> yup
19:15 <@ejp> good watches are
19:15 < solios> neat.
19:17 < mdxi> salt is a real crystal. how come nobody uses that?
19:17 <@ejp> not hard enough
19:17 <@ejp> well, except for those awesome lamps
19:17 < solios> ?
19:18 < y0shi> and the fact that it's not clear
19:18 <@ejp> http://www.buyamag.com/salt_crystal_lamp.php
19:18 < mdxi> pretty sure all salt (where "salt" == "common table salt" and not "a salt") is the same hard
19:18 < mdxi> but it wasn't exactly a serious question
19:18 <@ejp> lots of bullshit(IMO) "health" stuff, but they're PURDEE
19:18 < mdxi> hah
19:18 < mdxi> wtf
19:19 < solios> PURDEE++
19:19 <@ejp> http://www.natural-salt-lamps.com/
19:19 <@ejp> better pictures
19:19 < mdxi> "As the salt warms up it will produce the negative ions, to help improuve the air quality and air born bacteria."
19:19 * mdxi stares blankly
19:20 <@ejp> I did say bullshit, didn't I?
19:20 < mdxi> yeah but...
19:20 < solios> yup.
19:20 < solios> PURDEE++
19:20 < mdxi> that's star trek grade bullshit
19:20 < solios> yeah
19:20 < solios> fagbot: ions?
19:20 < fagbot> solios: no idea
19:20 < mdxi> As the salt warms up it will attenuate your shield harmonics to eliminate harmful bacteria
19:20 < mdxi> AND NEITHER DO THEY
19:21 < solios> salt : good for the isolinear ODN manifold.
19:22 < mdxi> our all natural subspace warp baffle lamps provide a soothing glow and can produce timetravel when used improperly
19:22 <@ejp> they also get warm.
19:22 < y0shi> and annoy cats
19:23 < mdxi> here's a quick quide to what negatively charged particles do:
19:23 < mdxi> (1) stick to positively charged ones
19:23 < mdxi> the end
19:23 < solios> :o
19:23 <@ejp> the bible says evil is positively charged
19:23 <@ejp> THEY HELP FIGHT TEH SATAN!
19:24 < y0shi> actually, they stick to jews.
19:24 < y0shi> THEY HELP FIGHT STAN
19:25 < y0shi> oh wait. kyle's the jew
19:25 < y0shi> dammit

IT SUCKS BALLS, ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.*

This show is so awesome that the best it can do for a season opener is albino space Nazis.

Seriously, man. An entire bottle of Jack Daniels (750ml of Old No. 7, 80 Proof) and this shit still makes the Showtime take on The Outer Limits look like Shakespeare. NYPD Blue camerawork + inejction-molded turboslut + a captain who left all of his good takes in Quantum Leap and the best thing about four seasons of Amateur Hour is the non-stock shots of a Constellation class starship. Those were nice.

Hell, at least the TOS Gorn was real and had real physics, as opposed to this not-quite-right lagging-on-the-physics-and-obviously-FAKE crap. Nevermind the Nash Bridges fifty-cent Combustion explosions. Use a monkey-in-a-suit for toss-and-turn, it'll lag right. Spend the money you'll save on shit CG on whores.

Oh, and. Easily the worst theme {music|sequence} in history. No "Space, the..." - some Rod Stewart wannabe whining about how it's been a looooooOOOOoooong tiy-iy-yime Yeah, since he's gotten laid, apparently - the only thing worse than the themesong is fat Vulcans. WHY?! Give Braga a shot at The Two Towers and it wouldn't just be Elves at Helm's Deep - it would be a jiggling wave of blubbery pointy-eared Sensitive Guys on a burger run. It's been a long time since Trek has been free of the Braga taint. My balls, they ache. Production design is nice, but camerawork is inappropriate (it wouldn't be if it didn't suck- appropriate camerawork is unobtrusive, and good use of the steadicam is something the viewer won't notice until the second viewing at the earliest. This shit is all DUHR HUHR HURH LOOKIT MY JIGGLY CAM.), acting is a joke, and I seriously hope I can sleep this shit off. Ouch. Give these production faccilities to the Seventh Doctor. Better results in a fortnight or your money back.

Crew Breakdown : In a nutshell: Archer alternates between flat, archetypical, boring as hell and/or combinations of the three (his "character" seems to consist of some sort of supercollision between Kirk and the Braga-established Cochrane - worked on the warp ship and oh, hey, he CLIMBS! ROCKS! YAY!). Personality and passion are things Bakula seems to have left in his trailer. The vulcan chick does No Emotion about as well as 700lbs of pudding walks a tightrope and she looks like 300lbs of Botox jammed into a 120lb meatsack- I keep waiting for her to split and pull a Scanners but the budget's been blown on cheapass CG explosions of real sets- a clear indication I'm never getting any satisfaction from this woman. The ears look fine, the lips look fake, the acting matches the lips and everything in between can't decide. Tucker is great but he never gets a chance to actually be cool in the Traditional "Saves The Ship" sense - worse, the writers have him strapped to Vulcan Turboslut™ for some bullshit reason that just screams PAIN!!!! every time the two are on screen together. Oh, and there's a black guy. I guess he's named Token - this dude hasn't gotten much screen time out of the eps I've seen (a smattering of season 4), and when he's on camera it seems to be in a Foreign-Accent Guy's Bitch capacity. I'll assume there's some potential here but I just haven't seen any, and it's not his fault. On the upside, his performance is a hell of a lot more real than the shitlame flame CG.

Writing and direction doesn't allow for charisma or flow of any sort - ENT is clearly 9021 Jump Creek with transporters and aliens and it doesn't seem interested in being anything else - like, say... Star Trek. The dude with the foreign accent (seven episodes and I still haven't caught his name) fails to impress, Phlox sucks less than Neelix (Impressive, considering the fact that both are Bragastrosities, but to my understanding Phlox is The Alien Medic, while Neelix was supposed to be the "Breakthrough" Character.), Hoshi hasn't had a fucking thing to do in any of the eps I've watched (and neither her nor Vulcan Turboslut™ do a damned thing for my tortured, deprived hormones), and the rest of the crew has made zero impression. Set design is "realistic**" but with NYPD-Cam the sets are totally wasted, blurry fills to claustrophobic medium shots and closeups. It's all the shit I don't like about The Dualist, plopped into a TV series. Ouch.

Bottom line : I'm not sure why I'm wasting sleep time on this, but I got a blog post out of it.... without the appropriate means to mock, I can't see why you should be wasting wake time on it.

Summary : 90210 (with adults) + Dawson's Creek (with adults) + Showtime's The Outer Limits + the Nash Bridges CG explosives team + the guys that write Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris movies crossbred with somebody's idea of NYPD Blue In Space == Holy shit man. If this is on the tube, just take a walk.

Bad writing, bad direction, producers that are obviously tripping on either draino or their own egos.... pain, pain, pain. No wonder this shit got cancelled, no wonder I didn't bother to sniff it until now. Gross.

09:43 <@ejp> fagbot: doot for solios's drunken "reviews"
09:43 <+fagbot> DUDE ARE YOU A FAG OR WHAT?
09:43 <@ejp> XD
09:44 <@solios> :P

* VOY is either As Bad or Worse, but I've never heard a glowing or supportive review of ANY Voyager eps. The only reason I've subjected myself to ENT is In A Mirror, Darkly, which is a Sussman/Coto attempt to hook ENT into the TOS "mirror universe," established by Jerome Bixby in the TOS episode Mirror, Mirror. Pull out the effects and "Darkly" is indeed what it hints to be - a grimy distortion of a higher-quality original. Had it been aired as an Outer Limits episode it would've been Best Ever.

** From what I've seen, the the Akiraprise looks roughly how I'd imagine an LCARS-free starship environment to look (however, I've never been on a submarine and I think any spaceship we see in my lifetime is going to have a Red October, Discovery or Leonov flavor). However, the transporter has an extremely Cronenberg feel to it. Shudder.

Those of you who sniff markup will notice that a vast amount of the redundant <div align="left"></div> has disappeared from root, pittsburgh and noise. That hunk of markup had been there since launch but the idea is that this is a year for getting shit done, so.

Spiffy, isn't it?

00:41 < mdxi> so ATOM finally has an RFC, which is good, because now i can parse it
00:42 < mdxi> it does *not* appear to have a provision for TTL anywhere in said RFC
00:42 < mdxi> which is really odd
00:42 < solios> what's TTL?
00:42 < solios> more importantly, is there any reason for ATC to have an Atom feed?
00:43 < mdxi> no. ATOM is another XML document type that does the same thing as RSS but isn't RSS
00:43 < mdxi> as far as i can tell, it exists to annoy me
00:44 < mdxi> and so bloggers can have a emacs/vi war all their own
00:44 < solios> ugh. I thought they had more than enough to fap about.
00:44 < mdxi> TTL is time-to-live, a concept found all over network-related places
00:44 < mdxi> it tell you how long a certain thing should be considered viable
00:44 < mdxi> in teh case of a news feed, how long until you should poll it again
00:45 < mdxi> olive assumes 3600 seconds if it can't find one, but it's weird that the whole spec should ignore it
00:48 < solios> huh.
00:48 < solios> so...
00:48 < solios> TTL would then be decided on the application end?
00:50 < mdxi> it is so far as i can see, in this case

I bumped into Kevin at The Upstage tonight. I haven't seen him since 2000 and I haven't seen him at Ceremony since 1998 or so.

We talked briefly about comics and Star Trek (the two things we have in common), and the present state of the relevant Pittsbrugh social scene. Turns out my situation isn't unique - all of his friends have Left and neither of us has the cash to follow suit.

One thing he said to me - shortly before Depeche Mode pulled him back to the dance floor - stuck in my head like an arrow: "It's time to leave."

Verily, amen.

Too many problems
Oh why am I here
I don't need to be me
'Cos you're all too clear
Well I can see
There's something wrong with you
But what do you excepth me to do?
At least I gotta know what I wanna be
Don't come to me if you need pitty
Are you lonely you got no one
You get your body in suspension
That's no problem problem
Problem the problem is you

Eat your heart out on a plastic tray
You don't do what you want
Then you'll fade away
You won't find me working
Nine to five
It's too much fun a being alive
I'm using my feet for my human machine
You wan't find me living for the screen
Are you lonely all your needs catered
You got your brains dehydrated

Problem problem
Problem the problems is you
What you gonna do

Problem problem
Problem the problems is you
What you gonna do with your problem

In a death trip I ain't automatic
You won't find me just staying static
Don't give me any orders
For people like me
There is no order

Bet you thought you had it all worked out
Bet you thought you knew what I was about
Bet you thought you'd
Solved all your problems
But you are the problem

Problem problem
Problem the problem is you
What you gonna do with your problem
I'll leave it to you
Problem their problem is you
You got a problem
Oh what you gonna do

They know a doctor
Gonna take you away
They take you away
And throw away the key
They don't want you
And they don't want me
You got a problem
The problem is you
Problem the problem is you
What you gonna do
Problem problem problem

Problem problem problem
Problem problem problem
Problem problem problem

-Sex Pistols : Never Mind The Bollocks : Problems