-30- has been traditionally used by journalists to indicate the end of a story. The expression "No 30" at the end of a page (or a transmitted submission) signifies that the story isn't completed, and the recipient is to expect additional material. This helps to avoid inadvertent truncation.

Alcohol is an asshole.

That is all.

Boraxing the various nooks and crannies has sent the roaches off to tastier climes. Worked at Allegheny Center, works here - or seems to be so far.

The new problem is centipedes.* While the roaches got in from various holes in the base of the east wall, the centipedes seem to be coming in from a crack next to a vent (or worse, through the vent) on the base of the west wall.

mdxi recommends DryDex Spackle, which is probably a lot less potentially flammable than the sealant I already have on hand.

The holes in question are mouse-capable, so I do need to patch them at some point.

* Since I boraxed I've seen one roach and stomped the bastard. Given the results (white gunk as opposed to the usual roach-colored gunk), I'd wager it had a stomach full of the stuff. Since I vacuumed I haven't seen any.... and since I've vacuumed I've seen two centipedes. One "regular" sized, and one finger-sized battleship centipede that was likely out looking for the scout. The fact that they like to waltz around on the walls and Stop when the lights are turned on makes 'em a lot easier to swat.

22:07 <@solios_> anyone here ever drank a pickle shot?
22:07 <@solios_> (if it involves gatorade, you are excluded)
22:20 <@ralfiboy> solios: no to pickle shot, but i have these in the freezer. http://www.bobspicklepops.com/
22:22 <@solios_> O_O
22:22 <@solios_> whoah.
22:24 <@ralfiboy> they're interesting - i dunno if i'd say they were good.
22:25 <@solios_> my thoughts on the pickle shot
22:26 <@solios_> my boozaholic frontier has been pushed further back... but it's kind of like the spanish conquistadors discovering New Jersey.
22:27 <@ralfiboy> nice. :)

Spring has sprung. Weekend before last it was a whiteish centipede thing squirming around in the drain. This past weekend it was ants in the bathroom. This morning, this monstrosity.

Slow moving, fortunately. Slowed further with dish liquid and crushed with a glass.

I fucking HATE bugs.

Top of tonight's to-do list : clean the sink. Starting with a serious application of boiling water. Good thing it's garbage night!

Update, around 3pm : According to this site, that's an Oriental Cockroach. >_<

Update, around 1am the next day : I HAVE THE CLEANEST SINK IN TWELVE SYSTEMS. Pity the fucking drain connects directly to fucking R'lyeh.

Three days in and gridlock has fallen off of the internet already. While everything was working fine when I left the house around 0815, the machine proved unpingable from work on my first try, about 90 minutes later. As it's also unreachable from elsewhere, Something Went Blooey.

This could be any of the following:

1. Theft/Robbery (something I'm more paranoid about now)
2. Power failure
3. DSL Modem lockup
4. Gridlock lockup
5. Failure between Gridlock and the rest of the internet
6. Some other form of witchcraft

2-5 have all happened before. 2 a few times - it may be 2009 but it is definitely not The Future, and outages Happen. 3 was grossly frequent when my sister (and later Randy) was assraping my line on Carey Way, and was a significant issue in the interim living space. It was also an occasional problem when I was just minding my own business - spooling two or three youtube videos would be enough to make the modem throw up at times. As there's no WAP on the line, a locked up modem, if that is the problem, could be a result of operations on gridlock. 4 has happened once or twice, and is usually a result of 3. 5 has happened a couple of times, though if that's the problem it's lasted longer than usual.

I'll know what the problem is when I get home. If it's in the 2-4 range it's fixable. If it's something else, I'll be offline again until further notice.

Whee!

15:59 - a call to Speakeasy to confirm I'm up and running and to make sure my old service is shut off branched into "did anything go blooey?." The nice lady confirmed that my circuit is live, which knocks 5 off of the list.

18:20 - bleah.

Three day weekend. Woo!

Verizon, brain trust that they are, somehow failed to do the work they were supposed to do yesterday. Whatever it is they need to do, they have to do it before Covad can swing by to give me DSL Without Telephone. The next time Verizon feels like coming by to do the work is the 27th.

Three day weekend without internet. Crap!

===========

Update, 20090323.09:12 : The honeymoon is over. Friday through 10pm Sunday evening was fantastic (excluding the hangover I got from barhopping with Xopher.tm). Then my upstairs neighbor came home with company, turned his gangster rap up to airport levels, and proceeded to be a complete and total asshole for the rest of the night. Where "the rest of the night" is turning it down from "hear it clearly*" to "hear the bass clearly" after knocking on his door at 00:15 monday,** then continuing with the THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA until some point after I passed out, which was around 02:30.

His "excuse" for this behavior is that Monday is his only day off. I get that. What I do not understand is how or why he feels this gives him the Divine Right to blast his shitty music at nightclub levels at 11pm on a Sunday night, urinate off of the second floor balcony, and carry on like Bloomfield is a cul-de-sac on the South Side.***

As I was promised Quiet by the property manager, and Quiet is why I took the place, and Quiet is what I had until last night, and I'm here for a year... if this happens again, the situation will be Dealt With. Somehow.

That aside, an altogether fine and enjoyable weekend.

* Of which I recognized Tom Petty at one point, and The Beastie Boys at another. The rest was a mix of hip-hop and loud obnoxious whooping and stomping around like the place is a race track for pony players. When it comes to noise violations, I actually prefer hip-hop. I don't know the artists, I don't know the lyrics. If it's music I've heard, then my brain has a funky habit of filling in what I can't hear. And in a situation like this, "can't hear" is preferable to "filling in."

** During this conversation, he had the temerity to say that the thirty minutes or so of me and Xopher.tm being obnoxious friday night had "kept him up." This after I let him roll at Maximum Motherfucking Volume for over two hours without saying anything about it.

*** If you want to be seriously obnoxious, South Side is the place to do it. All of the residents between 12th and 23rd are either deaf or busy being very loud very late themselves, so it's not like anyone is going to notice or care.

Looked at a place in Oakland on Friday. Too small to fit my equipment and my bed - I'd have to pick one.

Looked at a spot on the slopes today. It's fantastic - but I'm in a pool of candidates and will be advised of the decision no later than the 8th.

And about a half an hour ago, the owner of the current building stopped by to say he's turning off the water soon, and changing the locks tomorrow.

Hello, urgency!

Update, 20090302.12:08 : I'm living in a kitchen. I brought my bed, my clothes, and my laptop. Everything else I own, it turns out, fits exactly into my storage locker.

The kitchen is understood by all parties to be temporary.

The spot I looked at on Sunday re-listed later that night. Reading between the lines, I spent a nasty Monday of coming up empty on CL and other internet channels. And I found out this morning that the place I looked at in Oakland has already been snapped up... so being willing to live without my futon frame is a moot point.

The search has now expanded from "South Side and Oakland" to "Anything one bus from Oakland, except Carrick.*"

* I've lived in Carrick and exclude it for good reason. This includes anything on Arlington, as their idea of being "on the busline" is a 51a that runs about as often as STS service to the space station. The primary sticking point for South Side is I know the major bus routes and can do the hunter/gatherer thing without hassle. Moving to a new neighborhood means finding a new grocery store, etc.

Some time within the next two to six weeks.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

A halfassed but whole-hearted attempt to articulate what's been bugging me lately.

If I could put my finger on it, it wouldn't be such a problem now would it?

Post-script (pre-script, really) : This is less emo whinging for an audience and more an attempt to lay out recent mental malaise in a "concise" fashion. Fact is that this is one of those funky life problems that you'd have to have experienced - and conquered - yourself in order to armchair quarterback it.

I'd say I'm in a better spot right now than I was 20 hours ago when I wrote this (then unpublished it, then noticed someone had commented on a cached version, republished it and added this pre-script post-script). That's arguable. The fact is that by-and-large, 2008 has been a difficult year and until I can get at least some of this seemingly insurmountable pile of STUFF taken care of, I'm going to be a real piss-ass.

I've wiped the emo - it's safe in a text file. Mission accomplished.

So it turns out Pumpcon is this weekend. Not next. It's always been this way, and I've always had it in my head otherwise.

Still do, in fact.

If I just had ATC to beat on I'd pick up and go. But I don't - I have an enormous pile of commission work that can't wait and can't be done on my dangerously old powerbook.

So. No Philly for me. :(

Silver lining : the liver gets to play a home game this weekend, and the funds I would have used for Activities Dangerously Close To New Jersey can now go to other things, like pants. Pants and ram.

Crap!

20:37 <@solios> boiled down to the basics, re: the election:
20:37 <@solios> Obama wants to [push back] mars and give religion more money.
20:37 <@solios> McCain claims he'd like to balance the budget.
20:37 <@solios> who would you vote for?
20:38 <@xeno> me.
20:38 <@solios> well, yeah.

I'm liking McCain more and more - he's slinging the same old shit dressed up as the same old shit. There's a certain understated honesty to the fact that his campaign is owned by special interests and up to its neck in the cronies of the Republican Sith Lords. I expected that. Obama promised hope, the (overwhelming) disenfranchised swallowed it, and now that he's got 'em, Obama's back to Business As Usual. His backflip on FISA, which would have lost me all together if I hadn't read about the Constellation and Faith Based Bullshit first, is another prime example.

The man has proven through action that he has no interest in fixing this country. At least he's had the decency to do it before the election.

Unlike some people.

After what Bush has done to the place, the next president needs to be a miracle worker. Not a standard issue Say-Anything-To-Get-Elected type.

Bleah.

15:53 <@solios> So. Apparently a hive of wasps/bees/yellowjackets decided to winter in my air conditioner and are now waking up.
15:53 <@solios> Suggestions?
15:54 <@_Lasar> Uh.
15:54 <@_Lasar> Die?

Of significance for three reasons:

1. My sister is lethally allergic to deathbug stingers. Like, GET THE ATROPINE! allergic.
2. I've never been stung. So given 1, I'm scared totally fucking shitless by deathbugs. Seriously. It's the one thing guaranteed to make me jump clean into the next room.
3. This is the first serious (read : deathbugs) pest control problem I've had in this house in the entire time I've lived here.

From the article :

[...] The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

If other bees and things aren't going anywhere near the stricken hives, doesn't it stand to reason that there may be something in the pollen as well?

My bet is it's a combination of factors, but I'm hoping for cel phones. I can't stand the things, but it ought to be easier to re-regulate them into a non-bee-killy spectrum than it would be to, say, get Monsanto or whoever to stop being stupid.

Poor bees. :|

Which is worse: thinking "I am completely IGNORED by my multitude of alleged friends - would any of them even so much as think 'what's up with him?' if I stormed out?" OR the realization that the answer to that question is an emphatic NO, THEY WOULD NOT. ?

That the former should occur at all is depressing - that the latter is a Fact Of Life is moreso.

I've never been able to find the line - let alone a comfortable region - between Having Standards and Meeting {Social|Emotional} needs, and the unfortunate fact is that the resulting mental anguish has proven fuel for naught but itself.

So. Do I hate you all for ignoring me, or do I hate myself for having no time for the mundane mopping-the-floors levels of friendship maintenance? Do I give up the perpetual loathing and unfulfilment that is my Reason For Being in exchange for a web of trivial but emotionally fulfilling mundanities, or do I continue to climb the Mount Everest Of Possible Fulfillment with my TEETH, on the off chance that accomplishment - no matter the cost - is its own reward?

Can I put that decision off until after The Dualist is finished?

[Insert rewritten Huey Lewis and the News lyrics here.] March through November of 2006 were pretty great - I felt good about taking it slow with ATC (oppose the overwhelming drive to get it done this year and the overwhelming low-level desperation regarding the quality of ATC, DCR, and everything else I've created), I was fine with Life In General (see previous perenthesis, replace creative bits with life bits), I was fine with people (absolute proof I was on drugs!). 99% of PPAC was created "under the influence." Life didn't get under my skin as much.

I let the prescription run out because I couldn't afford the stuff - 30$ every six weeks or so was a pain in the ass at the time, as was the Agony of sitting around Giant Eagle for forty minutes. Now the 30$ being burned on video games - something I wouldn't feel like sinking into if I didn't, yanno, need a diversion. What with sleeping, eating and paying bills leaving me with just enough money for laundry and nothing for going out more than, say, once a pay period. Nevermind new clothes, furniture, hardware, etc.

Lack of funds would be why I'm taking commissions now, which has turned out to be its own kind of hell. For the time being, anyway. If I get a few of those done, get caught up on bills and so forth, get The Glacier that is my inertia pointed in a "get another doctor's appointment" direction, then I ought to be able to afford to get back on the stuff. At which point I'll feel better about life being nothing but work and liver destruction.

The "other stuff" I mentioned previously happens to include vomiting.

Felt slightly odd Monday night - the "I'm coming down with something" sensation. Out for a few drinks regardless, go home. Start vomiting somewhere between 0130 and 0330 hours - no nausea, just a general indication that It's Time To Get To A {Bucket|Garbage Can}. Pass out on floor near garbage can with face in garbage bag. Wake up around 0800-0900, clean up mess, go to the bathroom for ventral vomiting with simultaneous dorsal vomiting - upgrade from garbage bag to bathroom garbage can. Retreat upstairs, consume and expell approx. 3 oz. gatorade. Consume .5 oz. gatorade and pass out until 1600.

At this point I'm seriously starved and dehydrated, feeling nothing. Refuel out of necessity, nap some more. Surprised it's staying down. Wake up again around 1900, meal and liquid staying down. Fortunately.

On the upside, the temperature broke 70 today, so the windows are open and the room is "freshening up." Possibility the disgusting over-heated sensation was just the Fortress Of Solitude taking in the sun, as opposed to a fever.

I've gotten stuck in a ~10pm-~3pm wake cycle. Not entirely sure how that happened, but it has a lot to do with bus scheduling and the fact that it's technologically impossible to do any work at home and I'm very, very not into meat-people right now.

Pic related.

Hope to be back to normal by this time next week - I like the idea of updating ATC and then going home to sleep. My sense of accomplishment prefers that to updating ATC and then doing work-work for another six or seven hours.

Courtesy of waltman in #215 : Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller to play modern, "updated" Hardy boys.

Yay. A celebrity the media insists I haven't had enough of and an actor I don't like taking a dump on a book series that I loved as a kid. I'm not sure which is worse- this or the casting information for the alleged Magnum PI movie.

Actually, eonline's fappishly fawning prose wins for "worse," but that's par for the course.

Also.

2007.02.17.14:03 : Also.

GIS results for 'The Wrong Kind Of Lonely'.

Missing : A drunk who hasn't been laid in two years or had meaningful sex in longer kicking his rage out Tetsuo-style.

I haven't had a FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE mad-on like this in years.* 100% certain it's worse than a bad thing for what passes as mental health these days, but damn if it don't feel good on some level.

* The hate-guns had a test-firing on Wednesday, when I stormed out of {Pegasus|Ceremony} shortly after realizing that I was, effectively, the ONLY single person in the bar. Staff excluded. Hate, hate, hate. Rage, rage, rage. Etc.

Nothing in the world sucks more than sitting in a bar filled with people you know, feeling totally fucking alone. Nothing like your ex girlfriend blowing you off for trivialities followed up by the jukebox playing the wrong exit music to DRIVE THAT POINT RIGHT THE FUCK HOME, THANK YOU.

Life can bite my shiny metal ass.

Fuck you.

Fun times:

The National Guard, used to maintain order during natural disasters and civil disturbances and the sole vehicle available under U.S. law to enforce a declaration of martial law, has previously been controlled by state governors. They have now been stripped of that control. Thanks to the JWDAA, Bush or Rumsfeld can now deploy National Guardsmen in American cities without obtaining permission from state governors.

They should get Hugo Boss to redesign the uniforms. Lend some class to the proceedings.

According to Reuters :

"The shuttle computers were never envisioned to fly through a year-end changeover," space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told a briefing. [...] The problem, according to Hale, is that the shuttle's computers do not reset to day one, as ground-based systems that support shuttle navigation do. Instead, after December 31, the 365th day of the year, shuttle computers figure January 1 is just day 366.

wtg NASA.

Cylons, circa 1980:

Wearing the same clothes for three days straight == gross.

Fortunately the Big Project wraps on Friday - after that I can decompress and start prioritizing the toys I'll be getting with the overtime monies.

Two weeks of this was fine. A bit of a drag, but fine - partway into week number three and I'm all DEAR GID MAKE IT STOP.

Which is why, I suppose, I don't work in the video game industry.

Earlier this week I was notified that I needed to clean out the tech dump so workmen could get in and install new taps on the pipes. Cleanout wasn't good enough - they wanted a good-sized chunk of the rear of the workpit as well. Okay, fine, no problem... thursday the back chunk of the tech dump was taped up with white plastic and nobody was around to do anything with it. I come in today and chunks of white have been replaced with black plastic and they've added an ET-styled "airlock" to block off access to the servers.

Oh, and the ET-styled "airlock" has a pair of Asbestos signs on it. Yay.

 

Further proof that today is One Of Those Days : my camera batteries died while trying to get better versions of the above shots. Specifically, attempting to illustrate the 10" gap the work crew left for server access.

Sputnik froze hard en route to Utrecht. Time of death : 12:11 EST. Reset brought up the Sad iPod icon, after which the device powered back down. Tethered to a mac, the device will start, display the Sad iPod icon, then proceed to charge for a few minutes (battery icon), after which it restarts itself and the process repeats.

The iPod does not show up in the Finder, Disk Utility, iTunes or the iPod Updater, which renders it completely impervious to any and all of Apple's recommendations listed in the iPod Support section of the Apple website.

Annoying.

Fortunately the thing is less than a year old, so the warranty should theoretically still apply.

  

Naturally, Ben ignores the basement (the door was, in fact, blocked off by his crap), and Brooke never bothered to show up to reclaim her stuff. Shock.

At least the smell isn't as bad as it was last time.*

I've dropped the ball in Ben's court, since I handled the mess last time. :P

* It still makes me sick. Just not as sick.

File photo : Where I usually sleep:

Where I'm sacking out tonight:

I've Power Napped in that slot a few times, so it's not like it's new or anything.... but it does make me wonder what the fuck I need a house for when all the house does is get in my way. Work at least pays me for the occasional inconvenience.

It helps to think of them as "during" images. Taking these in an "after" context is... disheartening.

  

The house is still loaded with shitstink. The major difference is that the downstairs toilet has been moved into the downstairs shower, the plumber is coming back tomorrow (sometime after eleven), my roommate is home, and my roommate refuses to turn off the heat. A house he lived in previously had a habit of blowing pipes every time the temperature dropped below forty - I'm assuming his disinterest in logic and my presentation of previously posted information is a response ingrained by experience rather than ignorance.

Regardless, Ben is immune to shitfumes. I am not. Especially when said shitfumes are coming out of the vents in my room.

Given the choice between sleeping under my desk at work, sleeping in a house full of shitfumes, or trying to make arrangements with anyone willing to sling me some couchspace at 0130 on a weekend, I've chosen work. I can't say I'm all that happy about it, but after a night of slinging screwdrivers* until I felt like Bob Villa I'm decidedly less drunk than I would have been on my usual poison. So I might actually be able to make something of this.

The consolation prize : Most of the shit that's mine is stuff I've been meaning to toss anyway. Ben's stuff will wash off. Brooke got the brunt of the damage - serves her right for using the place as a free storage cube and forgetting about her junk (until she checks her email on Monday, I presume).

* This ordeal has induced illness. It sucks, but it's nothing major and I'm not pissing out my ass or puking my guts out. Yet. I'd love to call off on Monday, but given the choice between Work and spending the day cleaning up a mess in The House That Ben Lives In And I Sleep In is.... uh. Yeah. No. Just thinking about it makes me want to puke.

Turns out the only person in the rolodex who's awake at 4am is my landlord. While that's pretty convenient in and of itself, the house still reeks of bleached shit, and the basement looks like this:

  

Since my left boot has a split clean through the sole, there's no way I can wade into this (literal) shit to examine the damage further or attempt to rescue anything. The landlord says he'll send a plumber out in the morning - in the meantime I've left a message on the machine of somebody who knows my ex roommate, as she left a ton of shit in the damage radius and her number is conveniently disconnected. I have no way in hell to get ahold of my current roommate, who apparently decided to bug out rather than find the cause of the problem.

So it's four AM, and the only way I'll be able to get any sleep without drowning in shitfumes is to turn the heat off in the middle of winter.

Awesome.

Update, 30 minutes, a short walk, giving some dude directions to the minimart and turning the heat off (complete with OMFG DO NOT TOUCH PLZ I WILL DIE note) later, I've decided I'm going to Hoth it the fuck out in the batcave and deal with the devestation first thing in the "morning."

Not looking forward to it.

Update, 11.5 hours later, from the GLORIOUSLY CLEAN AIR* of work. I Hothed it the fuck out last night, managed to eat (no small task, given the air quality) and shower. The plumber knocked as I was enthermalling for Outside. He moved around a bunch of stuff in the basement and was setting up for ops when Scott (the non-Steve landlord) showed up, asked if the plumber was there, and left. The plumber cut loose and was continuing to work when I left a note for my roommate and split - I'm still nauseated by the shitfunk and somehow managed to get some of it on me. I gave the plumber the run of the place and told him to lock up after - he's done a lot of work for the houseowners (incl. a Lava Lounge ladies room rework), so I trust him at least that far. That and all of my shit is safe in my room.

The walls may be thin, but the insulation seems reasonably effective - the thermostat in the front froom of the house (worst place to put it, a straight line from the front door!) had fallen from 68 to 59 over the course of the night. A long way from 40, which is as low as the thing goes (aside from Off, which is where it's set at the moment).

* No sarcasm. I've been here for about forty minutes and not only is my headache gone, the air doesn't smell at all. Asbestos is truly superior to feces.

Wake up to the worst hangover I've had in awhile and my roommate puttering around in the bathroom. Hit the Fight Club toilet in the basement only to find that its last user - the guy occupying the real shitter upstairs - righteously clogged the hell out of it and never bothered to clean up after himself.*

A long story short, I should have pissed in the sink.

A longer story short, the house now smells like bleached shit. The source is in the basement and the heating system grabs it and blasts it into the rest of the house. It's suffocating.

Oh, and there was a dude pissing on my house when I cracked the door to ventilate.

A huge laundry list of additional shittiness today, but lungs full of the stuff is more than enough to make the news.

Addendum : My fucking basement is flooded. Huzzah.

* This is a Thing Ben has. He absolutely will not get anywhere near a backed up toilet. If he's responsible for the mess he'll simply close the lid and put an Out Of Order sign on the fucking thing, I shit you not.

Referencing this troll from Back In The Day, and not in the HAH HAH ROFFEL sense, either.

The culprit : 29,700 jpegs totalling 2.97 gigs. 29,700 files I don't need right now and can't really throw away, so they're getting Archived. The real number is closer to a million of the little bastards, but there were 29k on the first disk- the one I had to figure out the hard way.

Toast will take the files, verify them, and then promptly SPODs between verification and burning. No coasters, fortunately - but it just sits there shitting its pants. This is kind of forgiveable given the volume of data, but it's annoying because Toast workflow is a convenient, time-saving Drag -> Burn -> Verify, which is why we have several licenses of it at work.

With Toast being useless, the other "option" is Apple's Disk Utilitiy. Disk Utility doesn't do Drag -> Burn -> Verify for some reason (because it's for disk images, fucker - not 29,700 jpegs). The workflow is, instead, Create Image (sit and wait) -> Copy Files To Image (sit and wait), Sit There Until The User Tells It To Burn An Image -> Burn "session" of Image -> Verify.

For three gigs of "normal" (read : a few or a few thousand files, as opposed to a stupid amount of time lapse photography) data, Toast will squirt out a 16x DVD in a couple of minutes. Disk Utility obviously takes considerably longer.... and is considerably more of a pain in the ass when the goal here is to free up disk space, not take up more of it- I've got three gigs of free space on the video drive, and a few dozen on root; Toast makes the cleanup easier while Disk Utility only adds to the mess.... Toast would have done five of these in the time it's taken Disk Utility to do two.

Bollocks.

Good thing I'm on the clock. :P

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 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

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.

Yes, 2005 had its moments. ATC shirts, getting The Edit more or less taken care of, Pumpcon, getting DCR more or less "going," finally have a camera, etc.

All that aside, this year has been sucking like a vacuum cleaner since April or so - and it's sucked like Godzilla's vacuum cleaner on a kilo of methamphetamines since the Fucking Holiday Season got rolling. Maybe earlier.

Last weekend:

This weekend I "work." Everything in between was allegedly "vacation." If you'd consider a six day drinking binge with nothing accomplished to be a "vacation.*" Hell, I didn't even sleep well. Well meaning at all when it comes to last night. Go go gadget grumpy.

* Six days of almost meeting girls and getting completely tanked with all the characteristics of a waking nightmare. If I lived alone I'd have no reason or need to leave the house.

One of my mission objectives this week is marathoning every single Star Trek movie, with breaks where appropriate - to be followed by assessment and breakdown. I haven't hit that point yet but I'll be damned if Star Trek VII doesn't suck worse than V (or even I, for those of you who don't appreciate the Trek tradition of paying "tribute" to other successful sci-fi by ripping it off wholesale).

01:04 < solios> holy crap.
01:04 < solios> so, uh.
01:04 < solios> transition from ST6 to ST7?
01:05 < solios> ad Berman and suddenly they're shitting technobabble like it's going out of style.
01:06 < solios> ST1-6 were all plot driven goodness; this may as well be fantasy.
01:08 < vai> I canna feet anymohr dilithium oop my ass sir.
01:08 < solios> pretty much.
01:08 < solios> fuck, they've even got scotty spewing it. :(
01:08 < solios> I hate Berman.
01:08 < solios> he's an offense to all that is good and holy about Trek.
01:12 < solios> Scotty++
01:13 < solios> cuts from a gaping hole in the Enterprise B to a Fucking Goddamned Holodeck scene.
01:13 < solios> says everything, really.
01:14 < solios> Berman--
01:14 < vai> If humanity had things like holodecks, I'd doubt anyone much would have the initiative to fuck off into space.
01:14 < solios> fagbot: berman?
01:14 < fagbot> BOOBS MAKE A QUALITY PRODUCT. WE DON'T NEED WRITERS, WE NEED BOOBS! AND TIME TRAVEL!
01:14 < solios> fagbot: botsnack
01:15 < fagbot> thanks solios :)
01:15 < solios> (that's the plot of ST8, right there.)
01:15 < vai> ? boob and time travel?
01:16 < solios> yes.
01:16 < solios> Borg tits in the 21rst century.

Oh, and there's a "Reverse the Polarity" at 34 minutes. That shit got old back in the Pertwee era of Doctor Who - it was used up when we were playing golf on the moon but apparently Braga missed the sixties, seventies, etceteras. Hell, the fucker thinks technobabble is one of the things that makes Trek. Data's thoroughly punchable and though I haven't seen Insurrection since the theater run - I get to sit through The Horror that is First Contact before I inflict that on myself again - I think ST7 does a good job of underscoring my negative reaction to what was effectively a long, shmaltzy episode - lengthy bits of near-acting that are just incredibly Anakin-and-Amadala degrees of agonizing.

16:14 <@xeno> !
16:14 <@xeno> WHERE IS TEH LOC.DCR?
16:15 <@ejp> same place the rest of DCR is*
16:16 <@xeno> no, dcr.org works just fine
16:16 <@xeno> loc. gives me a connection timed out.
16:17 <@xeno> huh
16:17 <@xeno> dcr has NEWS.
16:17 * xeno should probably go there more often than never
16:20 <@solios> you have GOT to be SHITTING ME.
16:20 <@solios> WHAT THE HEMMORAGING FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS FUCKING CITY.
16:20 <@solios> xeno: there was a power blink yesterday. I had to go home and fucking turn Gridlock back on.
16:21 <@solios> looks like it did it again. >:|
16:21 <@ejp> YOO. PEE. ESS.

Update : Well, it was juice. AGAIN. Just like yesterday, I get home and my clock's blinking, claiming it's well past 5pm. A five-plus hour outage, which dovetails cleanly against yesterday's issues - someone or something or some sort of Massive Incompetence happened around two in the afternoon on both Tuesday AND Wednesday. I've taken the liberty of borrowing a crappy, completely unused UPS from work - one that'll serve as an emergency patch until I can get some real power management hardware.

What. The. FUCK.

Bonus Round : There was a "wtf internet?!" note from my roommate in the kitchen when I got home to kick shit back on.

* It isn't. DCR is mirrorshades, LOC and Gravicon are gridlock. // DNS, however, is a gridlock and metaserver affair... so if gridlock's down, DCR can be a pain in the patootie to summon up.

idoru:~ solios$ ssh solios@gridlock
ssh: connect to host [ipv4 address] port 22: Operation timed out

I just paid the damned broadband bill, so it's either gayness on the ISP level (all systems normal according to their status thingy and I can ping the gateway from work), or one of the pieces of mail I haven't gotten this week was a termination notice for the power (wouldn't surprise me at all) OR the power blinked (possible, and if it took out the Radeon 9600 again I'mma be pissed).

This puts a dent in my evening, since I now have to detour and delay by at least an hour while I figure out what's up with the box.

Grr.

Update : It was a power blink. The second one in six weeks. No damage this time, though gridlock takes a million billion years to fsck and for some weird reason my switch had to be power cycled. Whew.

Pittsburgh is a sequence of convenient habits. Second rate, settling for less because adequate requires the kind of effort that this town has been consciously engineered to circumvent. Easy to lose sight of the big picture, the target destination, between hangovers and the obligations tied to the dance around the basics of survival.

I know what I need to do to get out of this town, and I know what I want to have accomplished before I leave. Habits have optimized to allow a certain degree of performance, leaving the all-important human interaction element to rot somewhere between the Jack Daniels and the Coca-Cola. Social interaction in Pittsburgh feels like sloppy seconds, an inflatable doll. An asshole-inflected, testosterone-loaded emptiness pulling me away from things that need doing.

I've been back in town less than 36 hours and DCR (the comic) is feeling flat, I'm wondering loudly just how much work it's going to take to finish The Dualist, and Pittsburgh is feeling provincial, provincial, provincial. Drinking less (or drinking at home, away from the sucking) will get the tools I need to do this on my own into my hands faster, bring me a few steps closer to civilzation. It'll get me away from people that suck, and being around assholes is certainly a hell of a lot worse than being alone.

Cutting a ragey IRC rant down to a few lines:

1. USCav pants don't fit right. I've now lost something like 80$ total on clothing in the past two weeks.
2. Landlord finally gets me an updated lease, three months after the fact, and pressures me to pay "on or before the 5th" (as if I didn't already have enough financial problems!).
3. Roommate's GF is in the house. Which, since it's 50 outside, means the heat is on. Which means the house is a fucking SAUNA*, particularly my room. Yay.
4. As if on CUE, the power goes out....
5. ... killing the Radeon 9600 in Minerva, my G4DA.**

That was a shitty ten minutes, let me yell you. The assessment?

1. Biiig surprise. Incentive to get off my ass and lose some weight.
2. The rent amount is correct this time, so there's some incentive to sign. Paychecks line up properly for the next three months, so it's not as big of a problem to Pay On Time as it was earlier this year.
3. Roommate pays the entire gas bill. Fortunately.
4. Third time this year, I think. I need a UPS.
5. I've submitted an RMA on the Radeon, as it allegedly has a one-year warranty.

It's a damned good thing I bought gin on Monday.

* Ben likes the heat somewhere around Off. I'm partial to the 55-65 range in the winter. Natalie won't settle for anything less than 78. The thermostat controls and temp sensors are in the front room of the house, which is the coldest. I live in the attic and the fans, they never stop running.

** "Big deal," you say. And if I was driving an Intel or AMD rig, sure. A 9600 is drinking money in the Windows world. In the mac world, they're 110$ + shipping for a 64-meg model with DVI and ADC ports. If you want to ditch the ADC, you have to leave the 4x AGP behind. Moving up to 8x AGP hardware bumps your cost of entry up a few hundred bucks.

Why is it that whenever I get more than six or seven hours of reasonably uninterrupted sleep, I always have horrible, brain-wrenching nightmares? Usually of a social nature, I've had at least two "violent death" dreams (the last one obfuscated or implied) and at least two of the teeth-falling-out variety, both combined with said violent incidences into some sort of montage. Bleh.

Last time it was just one tooth - the previous one was the whole set. We're not talking fragmenting or fracturing or dissolving, but the whole thing sliding out intact. Tasty.

Lots of blood, of course.

Naturally, six hours of sleep or less and I'm dream-free. Lately this seems preferable, as the only thing my subconscious seems interested in is flogging me forward, kicking and screaming, whatever the cost.

Also, 333 keeps cropping up. Usually the time (13:33 or 03:33 am/pm), but also street addresses, store receipts and so forth. Nothing to do with the fourth century, I'm certain. This has been going on for a few weeks now, and I'm reasonably certain it's symptomatic of other events, pending and otherwise [Insert Pi rant and mutterings about causality here, follow up with autosuggestion and counter-suggest that it isn't a symptom of Some Silly Conspiracy so much as the backbrain screaming bloody murder that things are very out of whack, look harder it's obvious - change is instability etc.].

I currently have 49$ in the bank, 40$ of which has the pleasure of being my source of food between now and Friday morning. Speakeasy just shut me off for being 30$ "past due." - coincidentally the same amount my roommate owes me for this month for his share of said service.

Last time they just yanked it right out of my bank account - but since I have yet to plug my new debit card number into the interwebs, they can't. That info doesn't work anymore.

This sucks for obvious reasons, and rocks from the standpoint that the last time they did this, my account went negative and has yet to fully recover.

Why can't this shit be bimonthly? >:|

More importantly, why do companies always do this shit to me 2-4 days before I have the money, and never when I have the money? :P

==============

Update, 20050920, 0055 : Worked something out with the roommate. After an hour or so on the modem (waiting for him to come home), DCR ACTUALLY LOADS IN SAFARI.

w00t.

Hit goth night with Xeno last night. Dave wags my old debit at me and asks if it looks familiar - turns out I had left it at The Upstage. He seemed a bit put out that I'd had the thing cancelled, but hey - I noticed it was missing Sunday night and was unwilling to wait until 10pm Monday night just to confirm what was, at the time, a hunch.

I followed Proper Operating Procedure and destroyed the thing this morning.

"This whole 'being an adult' thing is really taking a lot out of me."

To xeno, somewhere between brushing my teeth and passing out.

See previous, etc.

21:22 * solios wonders where the hell xeno's at.
21:22 < solios> he's navigating northeast pittsburgh AT NIGHT. :P
21:23 < vai> lean out a window and yell "BEER!". He'll find you.
21:23 < solios> XD
21:23 <@bda> ha!
21:27 < solios> there's a problem with that.

The problem is that the window is to the right of my desk. This picture was taken in the spring of 2004, though this parking lot was clear of obstructions until early 2005:

These days it looks something like this :

Two fenced-in construction trailers that'll be here until some point in 2007. Wunderbah!

Blisters. Got 'em in some damned inconvenient places. They're wincy things when you're doing day-to-day whatever, but when you're out for a stomp, they shut up and get with the program after a quarter mile or so. It's like they know that their screams fall on deaf ears.

I've cut back on boozahol. Consequently, the nights that I do go out have become weird. Likely something to do with the razor-thin karmaline of the Dead City Radio project tilting in and out of favor like sailcloth in an uncertain wind. Turns out one of the security guys at The Upstage is dating Autumn, friend of Faith, whom I knew during The Darkness. Hadn't seen either of them since the Roman Room was open and !sucking. A dubious Blast From the Past that brings to mind the sort of unpleasantness you'd find lurking beneath a Lynch film. Gooey.

Then a lot of Eyes Wide Shut stuff happened, then a lot of stuff I can mostly remember but either don't want to or shouldn't. Then I passed out. Then I played snoozebar tag.

Now I have a few hours to kill and it's hot and time for a shower.

Hopefully I'll be reasonably !hungover by the time xeno gets here - the amount of misfiring and packet loss my head is experiencing right now leads me to believe I've blown a router somewhere. Undesirable.

Oh, and sugar free Red Bull is complete ass compared to sugar free Sobe Adrenaline Rush. The SAR actually does something - the Red Bull just tastes funny and goes down like aspartame-scented battery acid. Gross.

On a vastly happier note, my replacement debit card showed up today. :D!.

Somewhere between The Upstage and ten minutes ago, my debit card went missing.

There's a possibility it may be at my house - albeit a very remote one.

Trying to save the freakout until then.

Update, 2223 : k, it ain't here. Looks like dinner's half a bag of combos, and it looks like tomorrow's grocery run is going to have to be done with a check. Assuming they even take those anymore. Gross.

00:00 < gothlios> my door key snapped off in the deadbolt.
00:00 < gothlios> in through the window.
00:00 < gothlios> phoner to a friend with a dupe.
00:00 < gothlios> at 230am.
00:01 < gothlios> because I'll be damned if I'm leaving a house unsecured while I'm at work {on Sunday}.
00:01 < gothlios> get that taken care of and tested.
00:01 < gothlios> pull the key-stub out with pliers.
00:01 < gothlios> take pix.
00:01 < gothlios> document the rent in my leg from the bike in the alleyway.
00:01 < gothlios> pizza in oven.
00:01 < gothlios> wait 10.
00:01 < gothlios> eat, collapse.
00:01 < gothlios> work, blog.

Thanks loads to Roy for actually being awake and available. And willing to put up with me drunk, pissed off and otherwise put out over the whole "crawling in through a window" thing. This isn't the first time I've had to do it, but it is the first time it's been a first floor window and not my fault (the last time it was my fault, I got in through a second floor window, but that was another house and another ((larger)) set of bruises).

When this roommate deadbolts the door, it takes a motherfucking RHINOCEROS to turn the fucking lock. I'm sure his torque is handy for jars and shit, but his lack of consideration for my vastly inferior musculature is rivaled only by my ability to blast 80s pop and power noise at the least convenient parts of his sleep cycle.

In the process of getting into Teh Haus, I forcibly dislocated a nickel's worth of skin from my left shin and smashed the hell out of my left elbow. The elbow smash is just now starting to make noise, and boy, that noise is grumpy.

Good thing my major design obligation for the weekend has been taken care of.