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Before I forget to mention it: if I've said anything to you recently that was neither entirely whimsical nor just a response to something you said, chances are that you matter a good deal to me, and it would be a knife through the heart for me if you were to die tomorrow.
posted on Monday, March 31, 2003
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My conscious mind had better be getting some freaking sleep, because it's sure as hell not doing anything else useful.
posted on Monday, March 31, 2003
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Do you know what time it is, kids? It's time to write a PAPER for AP GoPo! Oh boy!
posted on Sunday, March 30, 2003
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And now, a post in which I can whine a bit. I slept terribly last night. At least, I slept terribly for the few hours I was actually asleep. I don't think I got more than two consecutive hours of rest. I don't know why, either - maybe I'm just picking up insomnia from my friends or something.
So I slept terribly, and I really did not feel like going to church this morning (I had a headache by this time). I said so to my dad, and he said I didn't have to go. About twenty minutes before the time to leave for church, he changed his mind and decided that I was, in fact, going to go to church. I didn't have that much time to get ready and I was only half-awake anyway, so I was ready maybe two minutes late. We got to church about a minute late and my parents were all mad at me for it. For crying out loud.
On a somewhat more encouraging note, my parents apologized to me last night for trying to make me go to that youth group thing. Hopefully they actually meant it and didn't just regret it because they'd made asses of themselves to no avail.
posted on Sunday, March 30, 2003
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Some interesting commentary on gaming culture can be found here. Don't worry, it's not so gamer-ish as to be unapproachable for an outsider - it explicitly states it's not a site for gaming technology or game reviews.
posted on Sunday, March 30, 2003
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A rare beam of truth shines of out of the murkiness of Trevor's blog; The Man Who was Thursday is a stupefyingly worthwhile read. I'd heard of Chesterton, but I doubt I would ever have read the book if Deus Ex hadn't contained excerpts from it. One of several thousand reasons why that game is the best ever.
Everyone should know what "normal mapping" is, because it will so change their lives. It's what's creating the folds and creases in cloth, in addition to wrinkles in skin and the like, in these screenshots from Deus Ex 2. It works by adding height data to each texture pixel - the height data isn't taken into account when rendering a surface, but instead when the surface is being shaded. Without a lighting system as comprehensive as theirs, they'd never pull it off. It's truly an elegant way to get top-notch visual quality.
By the way, just to avoid starting a major blog war - I was joking about the murkiness stuff. And off-topic-ish-ly, the gerund is ridiculously simple and not worth dedicating a whole chapter of Wheelock's Latin to. And, just so Trevor knows, he can eat my flak shells. And he'll like it, or there'll be l33t shock combos to follow - the kind where I don't have to stop and sit still while I set off the shock core, because of my mad skillz.
posted on Saturday, March 29, 2003
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Meh. I'm not sure there's actually anything worth posting about, except maybe this.
posted on Saturday, March 29, 2003
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I know I didn't get an entry in last night, but it wasn't my fault...
Colonial Baptist - the church my family goes to - was having a youth group thing last night (basically a thing at which people hang out and eat junk food and play pseudo-sports). I've been to that thing quite a few times before, and I hadn't enjoyed it that much the last few times. Plus, I wasn't feeling extroverted to any degree last night. So, I decided (reasonably enough, I thought) that I wasn't going to go (my parents had to go and set up a volleyball net there or something).
Apparently my decision was not at all reasonable, because my parents got rather upset about it. First, they said they'd like me to go. I said I'd rather not. Then, they said they wanted me to, and I pointed out that it was an entirely social thing, and that it would be ridiculous to try to force me to go. They subsequently tried to force me to go; I refused; my mom blustered and made ludicrous generalizations while my dad became darkly sullen and forbade me to use the computer any more that night (hence the lack of bloggage). Then they left to go and set up the net at the church. I think I mainly read Chekhov while they were out.
After they got back, I was trying to talk to my dad about it, because I figured that any reasonable human being could look at my side of it and see how intolerable it is to be forced to go to events where the prime purpose is to amuse one's self. My parents' main motivation, according to them, was to get me more involved in the church. I almost feel sorry for them - even if I'm not an entirely lost cause, it won't be them that bring me back to believing. It was around this point that my dad asked if Trevor has "poisoned you with his cynicism," which first amused me, and later amused Trevor when I told him of it (as he has written). Actually, he seemed more than amused in a way which I'm not sure I care to think about.
So Trevor and I talked for a long time, until one or both of us had to get off the phone at like a quarter past eleven. Since I wasn't at all tired I went out for a walk. One can really find some interesting things if one just walks randomly off the road into some unknown area. I discovered an ugly man-made pond, which was fenced in by houses in such a way that it can't be seen from any normal path. I also discovered how to get to the base of a large cell tower (maybe a third or half of a mile from my house), the red lights of which blink through my window at night. No, they don't actually blink, I guess. They just come slowly up to full brightness, and then fade back down.
It was a good walk, I suppose, although there were no stars visible. The way the clouds rushed across the night sky was rather interesting, though - the sheet of clouds didn't cover the whole sky, but rather had roundish holes. The clouds were lit up by skyglow, but the openings in the clouds were dark - so that it looked as if the openings might be the clouds, and the clouds the night sky. An odd contrast to how clouds are often darker than the sky around them (like they are sometimes at sunset).
I got back at about twenty after midnight, had some French vanilla ("freedom vanilla"?) ice cream and crackers with hummus, and went to sleep after reading in bed for an hour or so.
Things were good until I woke up around eight-thirty this morning. For the last few weeks I've invariably woken up earlier than I want to. As a consequence of that, I am more or less dead tired today. Not that it's a bad day for it.
posted on Saturday, March 29, 2003
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Life has been vaguely surreal for the last few days, not to mention slow. Some of us hung out after school today at the pharmacy down the road, which was entertaining. Then I listened to songs composed by Turlough O'Carolan, which did weird things to my mood. Aside from that, not much has happened recently.
posted on Thursday, March 27, 2003
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All these nights with stars swirling overhead, slept through because I have to get up on time the next morning. All these days full of sunshine and rain, most of which I spend indoors learning things I have no use for. These are probably the best years of my life, but a year is only 365 days long. Think about this: there are less than nine thousand hours in a year. Ten seconds flashed by while I wrote that sentence, and I didn't even see them go.
There's so much I love about life. Friends; music that makes me sad or infuses me with a sense of what's good in the world; walking in the rain or the night; the first real sunshine of the year; the dead, shining stars and the centuries between them.
I seem to have forgotten to put molar ratios and viral incubation periods on that list. Oh yeah, that's because I don't give a damn for them. Why do I even bother with school? Is it just because it's the easy way to do things, because people stay off my case?
I hope this is a case of fourth-quarter syndrome, because otherwise I'm going to be some kind of anti-establishment freak by the time I graduate.
posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2003
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The air is absolutely wonderful (and the sky is clear for once!). I plan on leaving my windows open all night.
... and with that, I'm going to bed.
posted on Monday, March 24, 2003
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Three and one to birth
One nine zero to license
Hannah annoys me
posted on Monday, March 24, 2003
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First day back at school after spring break, and it wasn't at all bad. People were far less zombie-ish than I expected; it didn't seem quite the typical Monday; maybe it was all the energy we stored up from all those long mornings sleeping in. There was still a certain reluctance in everyone's footsteps, but there wasn't any dread or uneven rhythm.
I would like to take this moment to point out that "rhythm" is a damnably hard word to spell right; I looked it up, just for all of you, so that this page would give a little less eyestrain. Be grateful, or Diana will materialize behind you and start telling random urban legends - and there shall be no escape!
posted on Monday, March 24, 2003
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Trevor informed me that the song Boys of Summer is actually by Don Henley, and that DJ Sammy's song was just one of several covers. Not a big deal, but credit where credit is due and so on.
posted on Monday, March 24, 2003
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Right now my favorite song has to be Boys of Summer by DJ Sammy. It scares me when I realize how much I like techno.
Being swamped by memories of swimming, riding my bike to the library, and reading Prelude to Foundation in the summer before seventh grade - triggered by the techno; happens every time I start to pick up on the mood of a techno song. I'm far too young to get this nostalgic, for crying out loud...
posted on Sunday, March 23, 2003
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There's the idiotic flow of society, and then there's the idiots who think they and their religion can survive by "going against the flow," or however you like to put it. So many Christians these days think that they're something special, that it's them against "the world." So they have their own rock music, and their own sports teams, and their own drama groups, and they wear T-shirts that proclaim how different they are, and how rad it is to be different from all the normal people.
History has lessons to teach, but a little thinking can teach some of them just as well. Cultures formed around religions stagnate and rot from the inside when they get too big. You might be able to pull off the "be different, be cool, be a member of whatever religion" thing if your religion is new, not obviously cracked, and has a small but faithful base of adherents, but when it's the biggest religion in the world there's no way that you can claim to be unique by being a member of that religion. However, religious higher-ups realize that Christianity is stagnating, and that many of those thousands of millions don't have any faith at all - so, even with a huge following around the world, those higher-ups are attempting to (with the possiblity of being different or some such rot) fan the flames in current members as well as make Christianity attractive to possible converts.
If one's personal spiritual life is less important than the culture formed around a religion, the religion is already going down in flames. Christianity seems to have entirely lost focus. My prediction is that there'll sometime be an inverse revival of a sort, in which many "Christians" will realize that they don't feel any need for the religion, and reject it.
Can't people make themselves different without having to proclaim their uniqueness from rooftops, or dye their hair, or put on some tortured artist persona? Can't we be ourselves? Yes, I know that a great many of us are assholes deep down; but there's a difference between making an effort not to be an asshole and interacting with the world through a mask.
posted on Sunday, March 23, 2003
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I think my main (and only) gripe with spring break is that, except for Wednesday which was definitely a good day, the days haven't been good, or bad, or even mediocre - they've just flashed by without leaving any kind of impression and without making me develop an attitude towards the current state of things. The slang I've recently developed for this is that "my muse is down with a cold."
I don't know about other peoples' muses, but I like to think of mine as some beautiful Greek goddess, and the thought of her languishing in throes of nose-blowing pains me greatly - anyway, that's probably why my posts have been short and/or uninspired. Sometimes, not having any attitude towards life is a blessing, but that condition grows wearisome after a week or so...
posted on Saturday, March 22, 2003
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The zoo was okay. I really didn't feel like going this morning, but it was absolutely perfect outside so it wasn't all that bad. There wasn't really anything interesting about the zoo itself; it contained the usual stupid caged animals that you laugh at (birds and the like), the smart caged animals that you feel sorry for (gorillas, etc.), and the stupid uncaged animals that you try not to laugh at.
Did I mention the gorgeous weather? Bright sunlight, just-right temperatures, really great sunset too.
Only one more day of spring break. I'd say something like "Where the hell did all the time go," but I know perfectly well where it all went and I don't feel bad about having spent a great deal of it sleeping and splattering my foes over the walls of DM-Oceanic with shock combos.
Perhaps I should start on my homework. The only thing I've got to do, besides some insignificant makeup work, is write a research paper - I'm not complaining; most of my teachers were pretty nice about not assigning homework over break. No, I'm saving the complaining for eleven tomorrow night when I'm only just finishing up the first paragraph.
posted on Saturday, March 22, 2003
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Word is that they've had something like 200 people injured in Baghdad. I was listening to the news earlier, though, and a BBC reporter (nobody military or even from the US!) said that most of the injuries are from Iraqi anti-aircraft shells falling back down to the ground. Most news sources haven't even mentioned that; it seems like quite a vital bit of information.
It seems kind of heartless to post statistics about casualties and then talk about how they're good news, but I think that it's good news if things are much better than they look.
posted on Saturday, March 22, 2003
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My parents say that we're going to the zoo tomorrow. I haven't been there in a couple years, but still... the zoo? That's one of those things you need to do once every twenty years or so, and I don't believe I'm due for another visit for at least sixteen years.
posted on Friday, March 21, 2003
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Another extraordinarily lazy day of spring break. Wave 151 of Invasion in DM-Osiris2 with Instagib, a haircut, and reading some of Chekhov's short stories (they're actually not bad). Speaking of reading, somebody recommend me something to read; I haven't been to the library in a month or two because I haven't been able to find anything at all to read lately.
posted on Friday, March 21, 2003
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Going to sleep to the sound of steady, heavy rain in the very early morning and waking up to the same sound blurs the line between day and night. Morning is only marked by a slight rise in the amount of ambient light, and that small change is dulled by the monotony of the rain and the gray sky...
Sci-fi Book Club, or whatever you want to call it, convened at my house yesterday for the first meeting at that location. Thanks be to the gods for that; I hadn't seen any friends since the start of spring break. Anyway, it was a fun meeting - laziness, talk, a fight for possession of my treasured Icky Poo (I still haven't managed to get all of the strands of Hannah's hair off'f it), a bit of exploration, and silence of the non-awkward variety. Surprisingly, my parents left us more or less alone. I was telling Trevor earlier today that it seems like lately they've been nagging incessantly over the small things, like staying up too late or whatever, but not batting an eyelash at the bigger things, like staying out walking with two girls until one in the morning. They micromanage, but they don't macromanage. It's probably better that way than reversed, but micromanaging is nevertheless a pain in the rear.
posted on Thursday, March 20, 2003
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So, it looks like the ordinance is once again falling on Iraq. The ultimatum's expired and Bush is going through with what he promised.
I don't think I've mentioned before on here what I think about the war, probably because I'm so tired of arguing about it with other people. But I'm basically in support of it. I have no doubt that it's justified - I'm not going to even bother arguing that. If you must have some justification, go to this forum thread on EvilAvatar.com and search the text for the word "Rantage." Read his post. Now, we should be more or less through with justification.
I don't think, though, that the thought of invading Iraq would have actually occured to me as a particulary good idea. I understand that it's connected in some way to the war on terror, but the connections are, well, only connections - Iraq and terrorism aren't one and the same. I suppose that this is something like a general leeriness towards preemptive attacks. Nobody was even thinking about Iraq, and then, all of a sudden, Bush brings to the national dinner table the proposal of waging a war. The support for the war doesn't come from any new information, for the most part - we've known about his WMD programs, torture of prisoners, etc. for years and years. But it is odd to let the Iraq issue sit for a dozen years and then start dropping bombs again.
It would have been best if Bush Sr. had followed through originally, but Desert Storm was simply giving Iraq a sound whack for invading Kuwait. Clinton said that he felt Iraq was a definite danger to the US (it's true!), but there was no public support for anything like that and he didn't have the gumption to rile anybody up. Iraq probably should be given a slightly less forgiving whack sometime, and I'm glad Bush is finally delivering one. It's just been so long since Iraq was in the news that it seems like this war came out of the blue, when it's merely been on a back burner (the flame of which might have gone out entirely should another president be in office) for over a decade.
But now that it's been brought up, I think I support it. The threat that Iraq poses does not seem entirely real to me; then again, the attacks on September 11th seemed to be unreal as well - not unreal in the sense that I felt like this was too terrible to be happening, but unreal in the sense that there was a complete lack of connection between me and the burning towers I saw on the news. As I said before, I doubt that, if the idea of war with Iraq had randomly come to mind a year or so ago, I would have seen any reason to support it. I doubt that I would have pushed for a war on my own (no, I'm not jumping on any pro-war bandwagon; I'm just saying that I wouldn't have seen anything to start a war over beforehand).
But now that it's been brought up by the President (whom I believe to be substantially more competent than many think, and who is at least clear-thinking), and evidence has been presented, there's no way to reasonably oppose it. The justification is there. We can go and do this, and I don't think I'd feel bad about having supported it. The only uncertainty is some nagging part of me that asks what's been done that's worth starting a war over. I try to silence it with the perfectly reasonable answer that we don't want to wait until Hussein has a nuke, but it remains strident in a low-profile way... again, there's some kind of hesitation towards preemptive action which isn't bothered by the demands of logic. In most cases, that hesitation is a good thing - preemptive strikes on flaky grounds can quickly turn a "good guy" country into a rogue state. But here, I think the grounds are firm enough to support what Bush is calling for.
I'm still unable, though, to grasp what's going on in any fashion other than intellectually. Cruise missiles have already struck Baghdad, yet it still seems to be taking place in some alternate universe. Sometimes I wonder if humans are truly capable of grasping what's going on outside their house, or on the other side of the wall, or in a country they've never seen. Can anyone really have true knowledge of a thing they never see for themselves?
posted on Thursday, March 20, 2003
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A thousand curses on the overhauling of the Blogger code! Don't they know how to overhaul code properly? Debug extensively before uploading your loathsome changes, toadspawn...
...I didn't touch any of my Javascript! I didn't even edit my template, and still they insisted that I had non-standard ASCII, and some exception or another. Cheating bastages.
posted on Wednesday, March 19, 2003
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What's wrong, baby
Don't they treat you like they should
Did you take them for it
Every penny that you could
We once walked out on the beach
And once I almost touched your hand
Oh how I dreamed to finally say such things
Then only to pretend
I left you waiting
At the least could we be friends
Should have never started
Ain't that the way it always ends
On my life I'll try today
There's so much I've felt I should say, but
Even if your heart would listen
I doubt I could explain...
So here we are now
A sip of wine, a sip of water
Someday maybe
Maybe someday we'll be smarter
- If You Don't, Don't, Jimmy Eat World
posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2003
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I was still feeling really brain dead last night so I went for a walk from about eleven to midnight... it was a cloudy night, but the clouds were kind of hazy, and the moonlight made it look like a blue sky was barely visible beyond the clouds - all the weirder because the clouds were orange from skyglow. It seemed like some kind of artificial darkness, as if the sun had just dimmed instead of gone down.
It wasn't enough, however, to make me snap out of this stupor I've been in; going on former experience, if I'd actually been thoroughly conscious I would have felt the fact that I was alone much more strongly.
Oh yeah, and those Bradford pear trees stink from the angels' flats to the twenty-seven hells of Dai-zan when they're blooming...
posted on Tuesday, March 18, 2003
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What is it with vacation? I've been waiting for spring break for a couple weeks. Now it's here, and... it's boring. Shouldn't there be more to break besides not doing homework and sleeping in?
(there's a lot to be said for laziness, but it takes too much energy to say it all)
Hopefully, I'll at least see some friends sometime during break. Otherwise, it barely seems worthwhile, except for the extra sleep, which I really did need - and that extra sleep seems to have the side effect of making me a total zombie. On a happier note, something in the air triggered brief flashbacks to past summers, which is nearly always a good sign.
posted on Monday, March 17, 2003
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I just looked out the window and realized it was dark, as in nighttime.
Unnamed Bit of Wisdom: A watched pot never boils.
Chris' Corollary: Look away for a second, and it'll already have boiled over.
The Superbly Unified Law of Boiling Water: Don't.
Between absurdly long frag sessions in UT2k3, it comes to my mind that I'm not sure how much I like spring break. Then I tell myself I'd probably like this week substantially less if I had to go to school; and then I get back to blowing apart the avatars of fools in horridly visceral ways. The more introspective parts of my brain - indeed, all those involved in any kind of thought - have been dormant for a good half week or so and I'm trying to figure out whose fault that is.
posted on Sunday, March 16, 2003
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Somebody tell Hannah that "gray" is spelled... well, exactly how I just spelled it. Not "grey." Sheesh, how many times must I say that?
... Not that I've said it before or anything. But still.
posted on Friday, March 14, 2003
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Also, it's worth mentioning that spring break started today. Yeehaw! Nine days of R&R, not counting today. Perhaps during that time I'll devise a unique or at least original (and hopefully attractive as well) look for this page.
Continuing in that carefree spirit, go ahead and spam my school's principal with messages of appreciation and/or indignation at this whole "school" gig.
posted on Friday, March 14, 2003
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I was watching Part Eight of Anachronox: The Movie, and couldn't resist putting this part of the script on here...
Democratus: "Uh, sir..."
Boots: "Didn't I tell you to shut up?"
Democratus: "We're getting conflicting readings on a starship rapidly closing in on our course..."
Boots: "Spit it out, dewdrop, what's the problem?"
Democratus: "Either our planetary sensors are severely malfunctioning, or this is the biggest starship on record!"
Boots: "Then your records suck." It's all very entertaining (the script, voice acting, and cutscenes were taken from the game Anachronox, but the rest was done machinima-style). The series isn't complete yet - nine out of thirteen downloads have been released. You can snag what's already come out here. The storyline is good (if a little quirky), the characters rock... however, you will have to deal with the crappy graphics of the original Unreal engine. Plus, it's all in MPEG format, so the downloads are pretty hefty.
posted on Friday, March 14, 2003
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The batteries in my alarm clock are dying... did I ask for this? Did I?!
Well, at least this is a chance to toss out more of the inferior alkaline batteries in favor of the sweet new NiMH rechargeables they have. One wonders, though, what Energizer and Duracell will do once everyone's using NiMHs, because they last a long time - no memory effect to speak of. How will they make profits...?
posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003
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A worthwhile read can be found at Gamers With Jobs. Elysium puts out wonderful prose, and manages to get a point across at the same time. I suppose that's what odd people call "talent."
I guess you should understand that I have a non-traditional inverted inferiority complex, which means that, by and large, I consider a great many people to be far inferior. If I may steal a moment of honest insight, because I have serious doubts that any of you are reading this and will hold me accountable, I am an incredibly judgmental person. It’s a weakness that motivates me nicely, if only for the reason that I never ever want to be compared with most people. If I find myself in the minority on most issues, it is likely because in my opinion the minority probably have a little better insight than those who’ve lumped themselves in with the opinion of Skippy who runs the Mobil Station near 4th street. Of course, there are obvious exceptions, usually moral ones, in which I will agree with the vast majority that, no you can not poke a number 2 pencil through your neighbor’s ear when he leaves his barking dog out overnight, and no you can’t run Driving Instructor vehicles off the road for sport, but that should go without saying. I’m not suggesting I’m a psychopath, only that people are stupid. If you've read this far, go and read the article itself already.
posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003
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I should also take the time to note that Hannah now has a blog. Has had, I should say, for it's apparently been out and about for a bit over a week. It wasn't public until Tuesday, though... anyway, many thanks to Hannah for being a little less inscrutable, and congratulations for being (for a brief moment) the blogosphere's newest child. There's some conglomerate term for a blog's birthday, but I can't remember it now and amn't geeky enough to look it up so I won't bother with it.
Should the fact that I'm peering through a one-way mirror into other peoples' lives bother me? It does sometimes; it's bad enough reading the blogs of people I'm actually acquainted with, but reading strangers' blogs borders on outright voyeurism. And yet, it's fascinating... millions of people putting the intimate details of their anonymous lives where anyone with telephone lines can get to them. Trevor and I have briefly discussed the whole blog phenomenon a few times, wondering whether it's a fad or whether something in human beings enjoys baring one's soul to the world, shielded from actual contact but not from sympathy and understanding...
posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003
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I stumbled upon this blog a couple days ago, and there was something really, really weird about it. I stumble upon a lot of blogs on blogger.com's "10 most recently published" list, some of them interesting, many terribly banal, and nearly all forgettable. That one, however, seemed way too tangible and real to me, for the blog of a total stranger. I'm scared because there are people in the world who are like me in surprising ways, but more than that, I'm scared because, in all likelihood, I'll never talk to them, or see them, or recognize them if I should by some chance happen to see them.
The world is unfathomably huge. I don't have a problem with that. My main gripe is that the world is unfathomably huge, and all that surface area is stuffed with experiences I'll never have. Barren deserts, the insane bustle of Tokyo, a prairie filled with waving grass as the sun goes down - how could I ever see it all?
I was born on a foreign planet, blue and brown with the symbols of colonization spreading across tiny patches of land like a concrete fungus. It would be bad enough if this was a beautiful but uninhabited world - a thousand lifetimes would not be enough to appreciate it all. My planet, however, has billions of people as well. Doubtless, if I were to meet them all, I would find the great majority of them as memorable as the next can of Sprite. That leaves me with a small minority of, oh, a few million or so, who I might regard as extraordinary if only I knew them. Whenever this occurs to me, and I truly understand it, there's no room for anything in my mind except shock, awe, and, later, a raging sort of melancholy.
Too often, I forget that all those people outside of my sphere of consciousness have private thoughts, are capable of emotion, have free will. If you see me around, just... do something to remind me that you're alive, and that you don't exist just to react to me. Concerning those I never see or communicate with, though, I'm not sure what anybody can do to help...
posted on Thursday, March 13, 2003
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Still not done with homework - well, screw that, I need to get some sleep tonight.
The weather was gorgeous today - sunny and warm, etc. Terrible day for school. Spring break ought to be here now, by all rights.
Total lack of any kind of deep/rebellious/insightful thoughts today; oh well.
Side note: Trevor is having template issues. Somebody drop him a line and give him a creative idea for what to make his page look like.
posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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Epic's UT2k3 bonus pack was released last night! w00t!
Ten new maps, three new game types, new announcers, you name it - Epic and DE rock for all the free downloadable content. There's plenty of awesome user-created stuff out too, but bonus packs are quality.
Frag time!
posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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This is so hilarious that I couldn't resist linking to it. You'd better check it out pretty soon, because the auction expires in a few days.
Hopefully I'll have something more significant and less link-oriented later on tonight. Also, I'm finding that writing a brief account of my life is a heck of a lot more involved than I thought it would be... there's a lot of stuff filed away in the back of my mind that I had kind of forgotten; and once I discovered it, I felt compelled to write it down. Even in summary form, this takes a while and, on the combined scale of benevolence and longevity, resides somewhere between "ongoing process" and "vicious cycle."
posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2003
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The bastard called my elegant prose juvenile, by the tomb of Mephistocles!
There will be much pointing and laughing scathing exposition in the near future, as is mandated by Horus himself!
Following those links, I see that Horus is far more popular than is Mephistocles. Well, be danged if the old boy ain't made quite a name for himself in the world...
posted on Monday, March 10, 2003
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Trevor's changed his blog address and name - guess he's still getting settled in. Overload his hit counter at Abstract Reality.
In other news, Trevor is full of it. Here in the aforementioned blog, he says the following:
In other news, Deus Ex 2 is shaping up to be one hell of a good game. Its prequel is my favorite game of all time, so I'm really looking forward to the next one. Though none of the previews have been released by any of the major gaming pundits, the screenshots at least show that this is going to be one of the most beautiful games released to date. Well, somebody hasn't done their homework (or maybe he was actually doing homework and that's why he didn't notice), because there's loads of previews already out. Since all of my readers (at least, the ones that count) care deeply about Deus Ex 2 (the official name of which is actually Deus Ex: Invisible War), I've hunted down some previews, interviews, etc. which our erstwhile Ithildinar seems to have missed.
Preview at Gamespy
Interview with Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare at Gamespy
Interview with Warren Spector at Gamespy (Warren Spector is the genius behind Deus Ex)
Preview at HomeLan Federation
Preview at Gamespot
Screenshots at EvilAvatar There's loads of other stuff to be found, but that should be enough to prove my point.
Oh yeah, and since he mentions it, Deus Ex has potential to be an awesome movie. And I beat Deus Ex well before he did, so there. And Deus Ex is the best game ever... he's a poser to agree with me on that, because I thought so first.
And one other thing: what's this "I'm out for now. More tonight" crap, CNN or something?
posted on Monday, March 10, 2003
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I thought this was very much worth linking to:
From Gamers With Jobs, at which Elysium, Certis, and Sway write and draw amusing and informative things. It's not a bad site to check up on for gaming buzz, so if you're into that kind of thing, give it a click.
Oh yeah, something funny happened last night on my walk that I forgot to mention:
I walked on a golf-cart path for part of the trek back to my grandmother's house, and there was a rather big, serene pond in part of the golf course. The pond was edged by some rocks (to prevent erosion, I guess), and the water was so still with the starlight reflecting off of it and a bit of mist hanging above... I couldn't resist heaving a hefty stone in. What a huge, glorious splash it was. But as I watched the concentric circles spreading (hah, nice Karma physics), a big spotlight flicked on at a house a couple hundred feet away across the pond. It was very, very bright and it was illuminating me - I could tell this because it damn near blinded me, what with my eyes being adjusted to the dark. I cursed in shock, considered my options for a short instant, and dashed (while trying to keep a low profile) into the shadow of a fortunately large and bushy tree.
Crouching near the base of the tree, I peeked just a little around the edge of the tree, hoping fervently that whoever had turned on the light had also taken a few seconds to get from the light switch to the window. After about thirty seconds, the light snapped off again, without any hails having been issued. They've probably had teenage hooligans heave rocks into the pond before; I wonder what they would've done had they seen me. It's not like they could have taken a photo or taken down my license plate number or anything.
That brings to mind a quote from All Quiet on the Western Front, from the point when Baumer, Kropp, and Leer have just crossed a river and are heading to the house of a few young French ladies:
... All wet and naked, clothed only in our boots, we break into a trot. We find the house at once. It lies among the trees. Leer trips over a root and skins his elbows.
"No matter," he says gaily.
The windows are shuttered. We slip round the house and try to peer through the cracks. Then we grow impatient. Suddenly Kropp hesitates:
"What if there's a Major with them?"
"Then we just clear off," grins Leer, "he can try to read our regimental numbers here," and smacks his behind. Such a perfect scene it was last night. Ka-SPLOOSH, a geyser of water shooting four feet in the air; an instant later, the pattering tinkle of hundreds of drops rejoining their comrades, and a daring dash for cover to finish it all off...
posted on Sunday, March 09, 2003
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Trevor's blog has got me wishing that I had some Bradbury to read. I just got back from a long walk in my grandmother's neighborhood, and all I can think of is stars, asphalt, and sodium-vapor streetlights.
I'm getting so old, too fast... I'm only fifteen, and already I have to make an effort to keep from being swept away in the idiotic flow of society...
So many people, walking around with their brains off, thinking they're seeing some big picture, and I want to scream at them: Pay attention to the small stuff, and you'll realize you're not seeing any big picture at all; find the grand scale of things in a microcosm; find the Universe in Orion's Belt.
I don't want to go to college; I don't want to spend my whole life working at a desk so that I can pretend to enjoy my brief vacations...
Sometimes I think that if I followed my instincts, I'd go off and be a farmer, or something like it - something with huge, sunny, wide-open spaces in the daytime and stars chilling the landscape with cold illumination at night...
Why do I need college? Isn't there some way to fall in love with someone I can love my whole life, and live quietly and peacefully, and count the meteors as they hurl themselves into oblivion?
posted on Sunday, March 09, 2003
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Well, that explanation of who I am is going to take a while to complete - I'm covering a lot more than I initially expected. Plus, I'm at Nana's in Wilmington right now, and I forgot to bring my progress; so I won't be able to work on it this weekend.
As I said, I'm in Wilmington. This is a bad thing, because... well, I'm away from friends, nesting grounds, etc. At least it's a little warmer here...
I've got something of a headache, so I won't be much for writing anything witty, deep, or even interesting tonight.
So instead, I leave you with these screenshots from the upcoming game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost. Follow the links below, and remember to blink.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
This is what we call gr4f1x.
posted on Saturday, March 08, 2003
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Why have I almost entirely lost any work ethic I had?
Don't get the wrong impression; I'm not upset or anything. Well, there's part of me that's upset about something, but that's kind of seperate... this being a journal and all, I should probably write about it.
So a girl likes me. And I think that she's really cool and all, and I want to get to know her better... but she likes me. And I'm beginning to realize I may have led her on for a couple weeks without even realizing it.
I had kind of suspected that she liked me for a while, but I just thought, "Hey - let it float." I didn't think that'd be a problem, and in the meanwhile, I acted more or less normal around her. At least, I thought I did. Yesterday a friend (another girl, naturally, for they understand these things far better than I) mentioned that the girl likes me, and that she had been taking a lot of the things that I did - even physical contact of the most mundane kind! - to be flirting.
I think my mouth was hanging slackly open at this point of the conversation.
After a while, I closed it. Then, happy with my rediscovered motor skills but still astonished, I reopened it and poured forth speech. Incoherent speech, probably, for like a good friend she ignored it and told me exactly what I needed to know but didn't want to hear.
"If you don't like her, you should probably tell her, Chris..."
The girl who likes me is a friend, but I have no extra-special feelings for her at the moment. I can't even type that without it sounding stonehearted; how can I look into her eyes and say that to her face in any way/shape/form without wanting to shoot myself?
I talked to a third girl about the situation this morning. I was hoping she'd have some happy-ending solution. So much for that; I got the exact same answer from her.
I almost told her today, but I was too much of a coward to walk over to her, ask her for a moment of her time, and (in all likelihood) break her heart. She doesn't know, how can I tell her?
Anyway, aside from all that, life is quite good. My only regret right now (disregarding the above) is that there's a hell of a lot of good music in this world and I'll never be able to listen to it all.
I finally got Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American album, along with a bunch of other music. My parents are making me go legal with my music, but they're paying for it with my report card cash, so it's not at all a bad deal. Bleed American is one hell of an album, just as Jimmy Eat World is one hell of a band. Favorite songs on that album right now: If You Don't, Don't, Hear You Me, and, of course, Sweetness.
Maybe I'm losing my work ethic because I'm about three-fourths done with this school year and getting rather tired of classes, even the ones that I like...
Oh yeah, update from yesterday: I'm not sick, I was just tired and cold, thank the gods.
This really isn't a proper journal with a brief explanation of who I am. Hopefully that gap will be filled tomorrow.
posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2003
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Wow, I'm tired. Hopefully I'm just cold and those aren't fever chills I'm feeling...
Today was pretty much an okay day. Very nice weather, although a lot of my friends seemed like they were as out of it as I was...
I need to get to bed before eleven for a change tonight, which means I need to work and don't have time to write much on here. I don't have much to write, anyway. It was just that kind of day.
I don't even feel much like I want to listen to music or play games, just sleep. Maybe get something to eat before I hit the sack.
posted on Tuesday, March 04, 2003
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In case you're wondering at this point of your readership, yes, I will continue to put random and mundane stuff in here. Read it or... or don't read it. Alright, so my slogans aren't at the mountainous peak of their potential witticity right now.
Still cloudy outside, but it makes for a different sort of walk in a Saturday mid-afternoon. A group and I found an neat creek and lake (somewhat near the same aforementioned friend's house), then some people got their respective senses of direction mixed up and nearly disregarded my impeccable directions.
We managed to all get home in one piece (well, one piece per person, I guess), though. Except for that unidentified creature we found among the shotgunned debris of the refrigerator and appliance cart (no joke), which was reduced to detached skeletal members by the time we found it... We carried the bones home in somebody's hat for later perusal. ...It was one weird walk. The forest we were in would have looked like a wasteland on the sunniest day of springtime, and the aqueous stuff was opaque and brown in true North Carolinian fashion. We would've crossed the creek, but there were no fallen trees we were sure of, and it being wintertime, the water was rather cold, and us being made of warm, pulsating, slimy flesh, we didn't want to get hypothermia and stop pulsating.
I just noticed that using "aqueous" and "opaque" in the same sentence sounds totally cool. W3rd.
There seems to be somewhat of an issue with negative feedback. The one person I know of besides myself who has viewed this site has provided naught but disparaging comments on my (so what if it's stupid) insistence on putting the word "stream" in more or less everything on this blog. Part of me wants to say: Hey! Whose blog is this, again? And the other part wants to admit: Yeah, I was planning on changing that. There's a third part of me, too, I think, but it's lurking sullenly behind my hypothalamus and no amount of neurochemical coaxing seems able to persuade it to venture out into the rowdy frat party of my consciousness. Eh, reading too much into that last sentence would probably be a very bad idea.
School tomorrow... sigh.
I managed to glimpse a few stars tonight before the clouds moved back in; Orion hung in the sky as he has for thousands of years, but I don't think I'd noticed before now that he has a sword as well as a belt and basic appendages.
Such tiny points of light, and still their power is such that they outlast every human - every human, each of whom came selfishly bawling into this world without the barest knowledge of death - and deny us the right to see their present, their now, and instead only allow us to see them as they were when our oldest ancestors fell into the dust.
The stars do not die easily, but do they ever know love, anger, lust, friendship, hope, or wonder? Would the stars look across the centuries and envy me?
Is that why watching the stars makes me so sad?
posted on Saturday, March 01, 2003
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So now it's like two in the morning, and I'm a little tired, but hey, everyone else is asleep so I'm not feeling lame for being a little tired. (This isn't likely to be entirely coherent.) Two entries in one day is probably a bit much, but my readers (heh, myself that is) can take comfort in the fact that I don't plan to often r0x0r the bl0gg4g3 in the middle of the night.
Oh yeah, had a great time earlier... the movie was quite good, but I'm sure I would have enjoyed the whole time substantially less had I been by myself. Happily, I wasn't by myself. This should be fairly clear by now.
Hungry. It's always awkward when you get hungry at someone else's house in the middle of the night. I mean, you don't know which leftovers are safe and which ones are doing more than their share for the evolutionary process. Ice cream would be okay, I guess... hopefully he'll have some.
Oh yeah, I've got some complaining to do. So apparently there's a girl (or multiple girls) who likes me. Good stuff, right? Guess I'm not a total dork. Except that I don't really want to know who it is. I don't, I don't, I don't - because it just messes things up to hear stuff like that too early on. So, if you're listening (and you know who you are), shove off, because I don't want to know who. Just... let things be.
This neighborhood gets some really freaky skyglow. On a cloudy night, the sky is just about frickin' orange from all the sodium-vapor lights around here. Stars are great, I could watch them all night, if I didn't get too lonely. Oh yeah, side note: unless you can handle extreme melancholy, do not listen to My Sundown by Jimmy Eat World while watching stars, because the stars are so beautiful you'll want to cry. Side note on the side note: the space program is worth keeping alive if only for this reason. Another side note on the first side note: this probably won't happen unless you can actually get a decent look at the stars wherever you happen to be. But, as I was saying. If you've got to have clouds, orange skyglow is a complete necessity...
Remember to update your drivers, boys and girls! But don't use that link unless you're running XP/2000, or the 3D Acceleration Fairy will come and punch great holes through your CPU .
posted on Saturday, March 01, 2003
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