Category: People

November 29, 2004 /

Hi, Mom. I finally put up a permanent link to Anacrusis on the right side of the page (I think you are now the only person who reads the NFD front page, actually). That’s the place where I do the stories that you haven’t read yet. I promise there is not very much cursing in them, usually.

For the rest of you who read both notebooks, I should take this opportunity to state that while I endorse certain political ideologies, Anacrusis does not–except that, universally, it should be difficult for one human to kill another.

Somebody Fark this

November 25, 2004 /

Lisa came over tonight, and two things happened.

  1. We thawed some pre-cooked shrimp and, lacking cocktail sauce, attempted to make our own. You need horseradish to make cocktail sauce; we lacked horseradish as well. The ingredients we did have were ketchup, lemon juice and worcestershire sauce. We decided to attempt to make it, with something (garlic? cayenne?) substituting for horseradish.

    Extrapolation of how this went is left as an exercise for the reader.

  2. We played some Halo 2, the first chance I’ve had to play co-op and a lot of fun. At one point, near the end, we witnessed something so fantastic that it forced the two of us to drag out my vidcapping equipment and record it for posterity. This is maybe the most important thing I have ever done.

    Ladies, gentlemen, I give you: Headless, Breakdancing Master Chief.

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MP4 (4.23 MB)

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MOV (10.9 MB)

Screencap 1

Screencap 2

Screencap 3

Screencap 4

Screencap 1 Zoom

Screencap 3 Zoom

Post script: the above video formats are the only ones in which I can get a workable file size. If you can convert to .wmv, .mpg or .avi (and either get it under 10MB or host it), write me and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of the 30-meg source file.

November 13, 2004 /

You know, Java is great until you have to design a user interface with it. Then again, I could say that about pretty much any language that isn’t PHP (which just delegates UI to HTML).

I plan on never designing a non-HTML UI, so it’s a good thing I know a fancy boy UI programmer already. I assume he works for pudding.

November 12, 2004 /

The problem with doing research on any old thing that pops into your head, which I do, it’s neat, thanks to Google, is that you end up with sentences of which you understand maybe two words. To wit:

“Like myobatrachines, sooglossids have a ventrally incomplete cricoid ring, horizontal pupils, winglike alary processes on the hyoid, and a divided sphenethmoid. Amplexus is inguinal.”

From a page about Seychelle frogs. I mean, I understand “horizontal pupils” but that’s about it. As has been the case ever since I read Wuthering Heights, in high school and at gunpoint, I have this dark suspicion that the narrator is unreliable–that, in this case, the author of that page is just making up words to fuck with me (Kris Straub has actually done this). I mean, “sphenethmoid?”

Now somebody comment on my Livejournal feed explaining what that is, and how I’m dumb.

Requisite Boring Domestic Post

November 11, 2004 /

There’s this black stuff on a good long strip of the caulk around my tub, where it meets the tile walls. It is considerably stronger and smarter than me, and it never goes away. The last time it got this bad, I had to call building maintenance to have them strip up the caulk and put down new stuff; it was clean for a couple weeks, and then the black stuff started growing back.

This time, not wanting to be the guy who calls maintenance for every little problem, I took Maria’s offer of assistance and tried other solutions. We bought big strong scrub brushes. We used new and stronger kinds of tub cleaner. We tried a bleach-water solution. As a penultimate resort, we bought an evil yellow jug of ammonia, the only stuff that is guaranteed by science to kill mold and mildew.

Earlier today, I filled the tub with four gallons of hot water and two cups of pure toxic irritant and attacked it for an hour. I got almost all the tub and tile bright and clean, but the black stuff, untouched, just laughed at me with its thousands of tiny mouths.

I called maintenance. Everything tastes like ammonia now.

November 11, 2004 /

Oh, sure, Cody Powell may have a cool devlog and I don’t, but I know what it’s like to double-wield Covenant plasma rifles. Does he? Well, probably by later today he will. I’ve got nothing! My life is ruined!

What’s it’s like, incidentally, is that somebody thought up a way to make Covenant weapons useful.

November 8, 2004 /

Twenty-four hours ago at this time, I was still talking about the fact that I’d seen Bobby McFerrin and Savion Glover perform, live. Today, at this time, I own Halo 2.

I’d like to have Lisa, Flora, Allison and especially Ken (who turned me on to Halo in the first place) to play the latter with me; I don’t, as they are casualties of my own private diaspora. But I had Maria to go to the show with me, and DC to encounter there. I’ll have the Thursday Night Grandkids to kick my butt at Halo.

Sometimes I feel bad about marking time in my life by video games and concerts, but there are worse ways to do so.

October 22, 2004 /

Neat things!

  • JEDI COPS! I’d join this if I had any writing resources left. Maybe you should join, and tell me how it goes. The diceless RPG system they use, called the Karmic Cycle, sounds suspiciously like the luck-based system Ben came up with for Cosmos, last year.
  • Stephen has started a pending lawsuit. Oh, I meant “advice column.”
  • It’s unfortunate that the comic is apparently updated about as often as Xorph, but Pihakwa is so pretty I want to buy it, all of it, or somehow mark it with my scent. The gallery is sweet, too.