:: Journal : Book Reviews : Wii Reviews : ARSC Newsletters : YouTube : Links :: September 20th, 2006 - Vending Machines: Murphy's Law Incarnate Comments [374] Most individuals understand Murphy's Law as something to the tune of "if something can go wrong, it will." Simple, yes, but it's a bit deeper than that. I'm sorry, but a post hoc citation of Murphy's Law when it rains during your fancy dinner date won't buy you any brownie points. Go smoke a pipe on your big leather throne and die of cancer, you pseudo-intellectual cliche. Anyway, growing up, I always wondered who this Murphy fellow was and why we are still hearing about him. Surely he didn't create a Law out of nothingness, with no meaning, just so unoriginal people can repackage it again and again at increasingly discounted prices. I mean, I could have created an UltraMuffin's Law that states "we will eat bird tonight" just so, any time I find myself eating a Cornish game hen with my comrades after another victorious battle, I can assess the roundtable with a peculiar glow about my face as I say, "UltraMuffin's Law," causing everyone to laugh their asses so completely and violently off their legs that I'm forced to wipe a tear from my eye. Is that supposed to be funny? It barely passes for an observation, and that's just because I feel sorry for it. It wasn't until my Software Engineering course, taught by Knoke the Friendly Ghost, that it all started to snap into place. Murphy's Law actually has an application, as something to keep in mind when you're thinking about cutting corners. Without it, while you're programming, you might not think twice about a problem that has a 1/1,000,000,000 chance of occurring. Regarding modern computers, however, including home PCs capable of berserking through 2,600,000,000 instructions per second, those odds are not as safe as they sound on the surface. If you want to come out of it without looking like another jackass in a sports coat who reads Beowulf every fourth day of the month, try this little Murphy module on for size: "if something can go wrong, and your processor has more cycles per second than seconds left in your life, save fate some time and take a bath with a hair dryer." Your CPU will become comparatively faster. Overclocking to the very end! So my question is this: Who missed the boat with vending machines? If we've already established that 1/1,000,000,000 is unacceptable, if not on the radical outer fringes of acceptability, why is there a big-ass machine near the staircase at work that takes my money and fails 2/3 of the time? I know the gatekeeper to my BBQ Corn Nuts has moving parts and all, but I'd entrust my life to that rusty Zipper ride at the fair over a vending machine any day of the week. Besides, vending machines only have two moving parts: 1) a spiral, which, as far as I'm concerned, should retire with a box of Depends and some Raisin Bran if it can't spiral correctly anymore; as well as 2) gravity, and I've never seen gravity fuck up more than three or four times. It's ancient technology. Although the particular vending machine I have to deal with at work has a little freezer inside of it with delicious frozen treats. The freezer door pushes out temporarily, allowing a Choco Taco to fall through the crack, and then closes again. In theory. When things go wrong with the little freezer box, it is simply spectacular, like the time an ice cream sandwich got lodged between the freezer and its door, and when all was said and done, there was cream all over the floor. How primitive. I might as well be begging a cave-painting of a buffalo for sustenance. Moreover, what's worse than dying of starvation with your lunch dangling six inches away behind a plexiglass window is the suffocating understanding that you are now obligated to make a scene. You can't just stand there and take it. That 6-foot beast with the twinkle in its Reese's teeth not only disrespected you, now he has your goddamn dollar. What are you going to do? Hit it? Yell at it? No. We live in a civilized world. A world ruled by unjust machines lurking behind every corner. Bend over, take it, and hope to God you never end up in a prison cell with one of their kind. They'll tempt you with Hershey till you become their highway, where no Breathsaver will undo what they have done to you. September 16th, 2006 - Conflict, Correspondence, and Carnage... Comments [50] A Wikipedia war is being waged! If Don, my cubicle neighbor, is reading this, he already knows his name will soon be mentioned. Whoops, too late. As you should know by now, I work at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC), which "is part of the Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Program and the University of Alaska Fairbanks." Its website can be found here. On March 29th of 2006, a Wikipedia user who goes by the name of AKMask created an article for ARSC, ostensibly with the best of intentions. On August 9th of 2006, Jer took it upon himself to correct processor-count inaccuracies in the "Hardware" section of the article. With the article now in ARSC consciousness, Jenn, our Public Affairs Coordinator, on August 28th of 2006, decided to correct sweeping, subtle and not-so-subtle, inaccuracies throughout the entire article, to render the textual content of the article correct as opposed to correct's irresponsible half-sister, incorrect. For two days, all was well. Until, on August 30th of 2006, AKMask turned back the clock to the primal, crude days of August 9th. We ARSCers, fueled by full tanks of rich Colombian coffee, activated by the cold glow of our LCD monitors, became agitated. A hive of bees, assaulted by a petrified cluster of ancient falsities flung haphazardly through the wiki air during our daily feast upon the nectar of Linux. Rather than launch an endless reversion battle, Don, on his own time, sent a lengthy email to AKMask picking apart his stubborn contribution to demonstrate that, at most, the lesser halves of two of his sentences might be correct. Four days have since passed and Don has heard nothing but resounding silence. In the meantime, AKMask's user page has provided an endless supply of quality water-cooler talk. I give it my highest recommendation. I don't know if anyone noticed, but my website disappeared for a day or two during the middle of August. One would think that I would be the first to know why my domain stopped working out of the blue, but no, no I didn't. Right when my subscription was set to renew, no less. I have emailed iPower, my hosting company, enough times to know that they rarely know what's going on. It's a mixed bag, really, because I end up learning what they ought to know in the process of doing their work for them, like the time I found the GPG executable on their web server by poking around with a restricted subset of common shell commands through PHP system calls, because, in addition to not having a shell account, customer support flat-out gave me the path to a nonexistent file. So, if they choose to act like quasi-professionals, I will respectfully treat them thus: Subject: Did my domain not get renewed? Hello, I've received several emails from iPower saying that my subscription would automatically renew, just as it had done the past two years around this time. It doesn't look like it actually renewed, though. At least not the domain name aspect of my subscription. I now get "Server not found" errors when I try to visit my domain at www.ultramuffin.com . Several days ago, I used a link provided in one of your emails to change my credit card information to a new credit card. I double-checked the new credit card information as I entered it, so I'm fairly confident it must have been correct, but I currently do not see a charge for my iPower subscription on my card. I'm not sure if this is because of a delay in my credit card report or if iPower has not charged anything. And to make matters worse, I've been playing Geometry Wars: Evolved a lot on my friend's Xbox 360 and I'm just getting worse and worse. I keep smashing into these diamond shaped things that don't really pose any significant threat, and losing all of my lives with like four bombs left over. This isn't terribly relevant to you, but, truth be told, Geometry Wars: Evolved is frustrating me a lot more than my lost domain at this point, but I need my domain back so I can bitch about Geometry Wars: Evolved on my website. Many thanks in advance! Save my glorious berries! -- The Muffin The other day, I was talking to Jer in his new cubicle when I started to hear some industrial music blasting from the cubicle next-door. "Whatcha listenin' to over there, Eric?" inquired Jer. Indeed, I wanted the missing piece to this puzzle as well. If there was some sort of Monday morning gothic rave revving up in the basement of the West Ridge Research Building, I needed to be the first to know! The music had that perfect gritty, trippy, echoey buildup any fan of industrial music comes to expect before the beat starts-a-thumpin'. So, imagine my surprise when I walked around the cubicle wall and saw Eric, in his Mac Support role, messing around with a Mac PowerBook. "What is that?" To which Eric replied, "The hard drive's dying." You're shitting me. This speak volumes about my taste in music. And if that weren't disorienting enough, I realized later that day that I had heard that song before. The death cries of the dying hard drive emanating from Eric's cubicle mirrored the opening seconds of the song "Heliopause" by Not Breathing. Observe. Near the top of the list of things that piss me off is a recent trend I've been seeing in anti-drug commercials lately. In fact, it's the whole anti-drug television spot enterprise. Mix ½ cup creativity with 1 cup arbitrariness and you've probably whipped up a little anti-drug public service announcement of your own. Whenever I see one, I'm overwhelmed with joy that I've never consumed an illegal substance, not because the advertisement was effective by any means, but because I can know without a hint of bias that I happened upon 15 seconds of unabashed propaganda. Some drugs are worse than others, but they all have the potential to do harm. My problem is that, when drugs are harmful, their negative effects express themselves in a number of very complex ways, none of which, in my opinion, can be adequately illuminated through a 15-second public service announcement wedged between The Man Show and Star Trek. So, instead of being treated to a coherent, well-reasoned argument for staying away from drugs, our televisions receive broadcasts of car crashes, rabid dogs, computer effects of surreal physical abnormalities, gross generalizations accompanied by clear-cut villains, and talking socks. Basically, a bunch of fabricated, horrendous YouTube videos with marijuana smoke blown over the top. I don't have to be reminded that, if given the choice, I would prefer not to become involved in an automobile accident. If that's the case, it would seem marijuana would be the least of my worries, considering I drive on ice for seven months out of the year in temperatures that would finish whatever job the accident started. It's a battleground out there! Quit preaching to the choir or give it more than shock tactics to sing about. The kids who listen with logic are the ones worth saving. Or, if you manage to keep a teenager off of drugs with CG, congratulations! He will make a Nigerian prince very happy someday. I swear I'm not any more angry than I used to be, which is to say, not very angry at all. It's just that angry prose writes itself, and I felt like updating my website, and not, at the same time. As such, I feel inclined to mention that I have not yet touched on that trend in anti-drug commercials mentioned in the preceding paragraph. I can't stand commercials that try to paint the picture of a pot-head's lifestyle. Even more intolerable are commercials that show me what I, as an upright citizen who has abstained from both drugs and alcohol for my entire life, do in my leisure time. Apparently I skateboard and go off-roading, camp, hike, climb mountains, kayak. Imagine that! Living a drug-free life is like living in Alaska! Should it come as any surprise that the only people I know who do such things are gargantuan pot-heads, running around like chickens with their heads cut off to "live life to its fullest"? Where's the commercial for sitting around in one spot for hours at a time, talking to friends about random funny thoughts that barely make sense, and eating junk food to no end? That's right! Boy, those druggies sure have it made. I could have sworn those are the things I like to do. I'm not sure I'll ever live life to its fullest so long as I walk away satisfied from nonsense such as this... To: Feelin' Groovy Marr™ From: Atomic Microwave Date: Aug 26, 2006 3:12 AM ---------- [ In regard to this Final Countdown video ] To: Atomic Microwave From: Susie Sunshine Date: Aug 28, 2006 11:31 AM ---------- who are you? and what are you smoking? ...but it doesn't bother me one bit. I sure as fuck don't want to go kayaking. September 10th, 2006 - If this is an idea, I'll never run out of them... Comments [230] Here is an empty bottle of Extreme Watermelon flavored All Sport body quencher. I found it while I was cleaning a bunch of empty soda cans off my shelf to make room for my old college books (my Fundamentals of Logic Design book is still in its wrapper. How did this happen, Professor Bracio?). My options were either to hold on to the books or sell them back to the university bookstore for six packs of Big Red chewing gum a coupon for 10% off a UAF sweatshirt. Finding this All Sport bottle with the cap firmly in place was something of a fluke. Say what you will of my housekeeping habits, this bottle is approximately six years old. I've been distracted. This empty vessel of Extreme Watermelon is not "something like" six years old. It is exactly six years old, and I'll tell you why. In 1992, Coca-Cola launched a product called POWERade to compete with the undisputed king of thirst quenchers, Gatorade. Pepsi soon followed suit, introducing All Sport to the masses. During the summer of 2000, the summer wedged between my Junior and Senior years at Lathrop High School, my dad awakened to the fact that he liked Extreme Watermelon flavored All Sport more than anything else in this world (probably because he had not yet discovered online poker). I tried it too, but did not find in it anything but a particularly funky interpretation of watermelon. Like watermelon Jolly Ranchers mixed with chlorine. However, as this particular summer fell together, my dad caught Extreme Watermelon All Sport on sale one day, near-clearance prices, at Fred Meyer and bought all they had to give. Over 40 plastic bottles of this formula found residence in our dining room, the room, not the kitchen nor its own table mind you, where dining occurs twice a year but sits neglected in uppity cedar vacancy, next to a bunch of expensive dishes no one will ever use, otherwise, so these bottles' rent was cheap. Like I said, I was never a huge fan of the stuff, but I drank it anyway. I must have drank about 15 of those 40 bottles over the course of the latter half of summer 2000. Soon after, Pepsi bought Gatorade (a whole lot of Gatorade; the whole company, in fact). Pepsi sold off All Sport to some no-name company and All Sport has never been seen since, in grocery stores or otherwise. My Extreme Watermelon consumption went from 0 to 60 and back down to 0 again in the course of two months. My story doesn't need a point because I promised nothing. But if it had a point, it would probably be that all of my memories of Summer 2000 have been chiseled into a tablet, a tablet forged of watermelon funk. This empty Extreme Watermelon All Sport bottle is a time capsule. When I unscrew the cap and take a quick whiff of the bottle's voided innards (haha, ewww), I smell Summer 2000. I smell absolutely everything that took place during that time down to absurdly insignificant details. Oliver Sacks wrote a case study, "The Last Hippie", about a man who developed anterograde amnesia after a tumor the size of a grapefruit destroyed his frontal lobes. This man was forever trapped in the '60s. Strangely enough, however, he seemed at times capable of forming traces of new memories through smell. Can the olfactory bulb help one reach long-forgotten memories that are otherwise inaccessible? Here is what I smell inside of this empty bottle, in spooky detail: Auto Duel My old game, or "abandonware", phase was at its absolute peak at this moment in time. But I didn't feel content playing all the wonderful (crappy) games I grew up loving. I wanted to dig deeper. I wanted to play the games teenagers were playing while I was five, to put myself at the forefront of early personal computer adoption if only at the console of a virtual Commodore 64 for a week in August of 2000. Z-Gouki, a fellow who lived (or even still lives, probably) in Fairbanks, whom I met through playing Starsiege: Tribes online, whom I still have not met in person although we both live in a town that's only six miles wide, recommended I try this game out. It's a car battle RPG. The player wins battles and earns money to upgrade his car. I played it for a few afternoons but only won one battle. For shame. Good games don't need good graphics, but I had yet to discover that older-than-shit games lose their novelty after a couple hours. And clunky controls don't age like wine. They age like meat. Jerky meat, in fact. Large jets taking off nearby... Some runway was shut down somewhere. I can't remember the particulars because I never knew them. But jets started taking off and landing at the military base across the river from my house. It was so loud I couldn't even hear myself screaming bloody murder at the top of my lungs, and Kapuni, who lived a mile away, and I would complain over Tribes about our mutual ear pollution. As should become obvious as you continue to read this entry, I played a little too much Starsiege: Tribes during this particular summer. I think I was averaging about 80 hours of Tribes per week. I was living more in Tribes than on Earth at this point. Also, this was the summer right after I blasted through the book Dune in a week after procrastinating for so long in my high school Advanced Composition class (what reading, or Dune in particular, have to do with composition, I will never know). 80 hours of Tribes per week and a head full of Dune? If you busted open my 17-year-old head, I bet astronauts would have floated out. So, you can understand why I'm not terribly eager to get myself involved in World of Warcraft. Experience bonus for not playing the game for days at a time, you say? So I can pay $15/month to not play the game? Fuck you, WoW. Listening to generic techno/trance music... I was really into the idea of free, independent music. Furthermore, I was very much a fan of trance music. Back then you wouldn't have been able to get this through my head, but presently I believe trance to be a genre as generic as country and emo. But even crappy music can hold a special place in your heart if you listened to it many times, many years ago. So, as it was, I spent a little too much time listening to both Chasing Alien by Expanded Galaxy, downloaded straight from mp3.com, and Evil Comes by some unknown MOD artist. MOD, you see, because MOD tracks predate MP3s, and if you're going to be spending your summer moments consciously playing 15-year-old computer games, you most certainly want to be listening to MODs. Eating microwaved enchiladas every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner... That shit was good! I remember staying up until 11:00am every morning and concluding my day with three enchiladas over the roar of jets. You would have thought Mexico was at war. Don't be droppin' no napalm without the tortilla chips to go with it. The Screen Savers Back before G4 swallowed TechTV whole to produce a cornucopia of excrement ripe to offend with the richest of odors, before G4TechTV, before even TechTV in fact, there was ZDTV. Summer 2000 was when ZDTV first started calling itself TechTV, replacing a rotating red cube as their logo with several dots within a circle. GCI Cable took TechTV away from me for several years shortly thereafter. For no other time in my life do I have such fond memories of leaving the TV on for hours at a time. I couldn't NOT learn so long as my television was tuned to this channel. This was back when X-Play was called Extended Play, before Skeletor herself first graced the screen with a skull the shape of sexy (fuck you too, Ian) and Jessica Corbin over at The Screen Savers was the woman to watch. Before Martin Sargent got his own show and was held at gunpoint to partake in unmitigated douchbagery, but would instead drop in on The Screen Savers from time to time to offer up his own brand of irresponsible computer tips. I miss TechTV, and I know I'm not the only one. Now, whenever I smell Extreme Watermelon All Sport, the old-school Screen Savers theme song starts playing in my head as Leo and Patrick cruise down the streets of San Francisco, and I just know I'm about to learn something new that will keep me occupied for days at a time. I'd be willing to sacrifice the scripted, soulless exoskeleton of X-Play and its skirtless Skeletor to see G4 vaporize and dissipate into the cruelest layers of the atmosphere. That fat funny intern dude who shows up in every X-Play sketch is carrying the show at this point. Castle Wolfenstein Nope. Wolfenstein didn't start with Wolfenstein 3D, but I was learning this for the first time. Wolfenstein 3D was based on Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, games developed in the early '80s which were kind of like top-down and side-scrolling games at the same time. Apparently when you look straight down at a human being from above, you see their entire frontal section. I don't think these games were designed to be beat, try as I might. But then again, Castle Wolfenstein isn't really much of an arcade game either. So what is it? The levels and screens are all basically the same thing. There's nothing new to look forward to. It's just a whole bunch of bland blocks and awkward controls with nothing else coming. Once again, this is true to the real WWII. Why do I have such great memories of this game? I can tell just by trying to explain it that it must be a terrible game. And my six-year-old memories feel like they must be at least fifteen years old. Nostalgia is the least rational force in existence, and nobody seems to realize how it affects them. So what the hell? I'm stuck with an empty bottle of All Sport I'll never be able to throw away, lest I lose this scent forever. The exquisite scent of chlorinated watermelon. Now for something completely different... and I apologize if my rants sound pretentious and lacking f-bombs at the same time. If you want monthly-ish updates, you will listen to what I have to say! The thing that bothers me the most about American Idol and the like is that the people who watch American Idol religiously have no business deciding what America wants to listen to. Why? Because these are the same people who come home and watch TV for five hours every night, who won't listen to music unless there's a television show or movie to go along with it. Maybe they'll listen to music occasionally in their car, but this is usually confined to mainstream radio or "Now 27" compilation albums. About a year ago, I kept seeing commercials for a local radio station marketing itself as "music everybody can agree on." No doubt, that little tag line made sense to most people who heard it, but to me, that's not what music is about. Frankly, I would find it shocking if the same 10 or 20 flavors of the week elicited the same emotional response across the board, if everyone found what they were looking for in whatever songs were being spoon-fed to them at any given point in time. Actually, I wouldn't find it surprising at all, provided these people find no use for music outside of killing time in their car, which certainly seems to be the case. Some people like vanilla ice cream and white bread, after all. What irks me the most is when people accuse me of listening to obscure music just to be different. It's not my fault. I'd still be listening to Nine Inch Nails and White/Rob Zombie if it wasn't for their wholesale abandonment of industrial music. And where the hell did Gravity Kills go? That band was incredible. You heard it here first, fashion achieved perfection with the advent of black jeans. Granted, most people can enjoy generic music to some degree. I will listen to the occasional pop song, usually for the unique beats and strange melodies provided by the talents of the producer, not the puppet reciting the makeshift lyrics. But how many people recognize this as the tip of the iceberg? Why take the cherry when you can have the tree (horrible analogy, but I personally wouldn't mind having a cherry tree). Why not explore music that doesn't shape itself for the lowest-common denominator? Music that is more than "I'm sad, I'm confused, I'm heart-broken, but at least I look hip." If you listen to any song enough times, it will start to sound familiar (except for any song by Slipknot, which, as far as I'm concerned, is white noise with rubber masks). This is not necessarily the same as liking it. Think of all the commercial jingles that have embedded themselves into your subconsciousness over the years. And I know you like to accuse the record industry of putting out albums with "one or two good songs and the rest is filler." Guess what, bucko! Those "one or two songs" are probably just as crappy as the rest, you've just listened to them 40 times already and have some memories associated with them. So what happens when America gets its wish and votes its favorite "idol" into stardom? It gets an album full of fluff. More "music everybody can agree on" without the nicety of the "one or two good songs" that would usually be the prerequisite for buying the album in the first place. You get an album that sells by the millions and gets played one or less times in every SUV in America. You get a "Wow, she has such a beautiful voice! When does American Idol start again?" A singer who is never spoken of again until his or her next television appearance. You voted for the singer who sounded the most like what you've heard before, and that's exactly what you got. Pat yourself on the back; it took scientists decades to clone a sheep. Now go watch more TV. And again... Dear Other People In Alaska, As a person who is now 23 years of age, an increasing number of people I meet live in Alaska because it was their decision. Nice. Welcome aboard! All that I ask is that you realize some people may live in Alaska for reasons other than "Alaska." I grew up with a multitude of people who despised this place. It was par for the course. Hundreds if not thousands of the students attending my high school bitched and moaned about Fairbanks endlessly. I saw one student wearing a custom-made t-shirt that stated simply, in no uncertain terms, "I hate Fairbanks." He was hailed as a God among men. He would have been crucified in any other city. Those of us who didn't complain about Fairbanks (e.g., me) simply knew no better, unable to conceive of living in a place where it can be dark and warm out at the same time. As I grew older, I started to realize something was horribly wrong, that the reason I felt so drained and apprehensive during winter had everything to do with winter itself. But, as they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The one thing I hear time and again is that the people in Fairbanks are friendly. How could we not be when we are united against a common enemy, the winter? Furthermore, nothing gets those creative juices flowing like a little bit of insanity. I don't care where I live, but I like the people here, and I think I kind of like the winters in an abusive relationship sort of way, too, and I'm usually the woman. If I didn't have horrid winters, I'd feel flat-lined, boring, like I was on Zoloft. I watched a documentary about Paxil. Stuff sounds freaky! People of Fairbanks, I have a point! Don't for a second assume that I know anything about Alaska. Don't for a second assume that I'm familiar with the surroundings of Fairbanks. There's nothing out there but wilderness, and that's not why I'm here. I got my fill when I was a child, before I knew right from left. Sometimes it sounds like I've been living in a cave, but I can assure you I've just been living in Fairbanks. Yes, I actually find computers, reading, and writing more enjoyable than hiking or fishing, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. Just because I'm alone doesn't mean I'm bored. I like conversation more than activity, more than most things in fact, unless you have nothing to converse about, in which case you'll probably find me back on my computer doing my own thing. If you want to go kayaking or mountain biking or climbing or hunting, so be it, just leave me alone. This state lost its new Alaska smell when I was six, but now it serves a more practical purpose... to help me do whatever it is that I do. And whatever that is, I think you're reading about it. As an aside, why would anyone even read this site? I don't know that I would. Sometimes I feel like I'm shitting a yellow turd on a black canvas and smearing it across five pages. New Geometry Wars: Evolved high score: 1,167,035 as of a couple weeks ago, written on a blank "Grocery List" page ripped off of ThunderChunk's refrigerator, and initialed by the man himself. The front page of this website is approaching 200kb in HTML alone. I say fuck it. It needs to be bigger. Visiting my website should be an investment. August 8th, 2006 - More random happenings Comments [239] Ian dropped by my cubicle the other day and accused me of neglecting my website. Fair enough, but this summer has been nothing but distraction. Distraction from what, you say? Good question. In fact, I don't think these are distractions at all. I think the past five years of college have been a distraction, and by now the student life has so utterly and ruthlessly ingrained itself into my DNA that I'm having trouble adjusting (and clearly I learned nothing from Biology 106). Unproductive evenings make me uneasy, though usually if I'm left to myself I just sit around thinking about being productive, reading things on Wikipedia, daydreaming about all the wonderful things I might conceivably be able to do someday, but waiting to become sufficiently bored to take initiative. This here is the trouble area! Something about the 24-hour daylight in Alaska makes everyone want to hang out 24/7... or maybe it's the fact that school is not in session. Everyone is happy! So am I! I'm just conflicted! Twice as happy, because I'm enjoying myself now and I know I'll be enjoying myself come winter when everyone else is bored, stressed, and depressed. I'd be in the midst of a summer-long manic episode if I weren't so goddamn tired all the time. Jer thought I was crazy when I told him I like to go home, stare at the ceiling, and think about all the wonderful things I can do without actually doing anything, until it happened to him one day! See, I'm not crazy! You people and your 21st century, with your cellular telephones, laptops, PDAs, Blackberries, strawberries, Xboxes. You and your multi-tasking! If anyone needs me, I'll be in my room anti-tasking. It looks kind of like meditation, except instead of clearing your mind, you let twenty things pull you in ten different directions, and you sit there motionless with a vein shaped like a lightning bolt pulsating in your temple and blood sweating from your forehead. Congratulations on the wedding, Jer. But speaking of the 21st century, I finally bought the parts and put together my graduation gift computer. I waited until July 24th, the day AMD dropped the prices on their CPUs to compete with Intel's new Core Duo processors. The Athlon64 X2 4200+ dropped from something like $398 to something like $196 in an instant, and later that afternoon it was on an all-expense-paid trip to Alaska to wrestle some polar bears and club a few seals before seasonal affective disorder sets in and it becomes a slave to the bottle. I put a GeForce 7600GT in there because I refuse to pay more than $200 for a video card (I'll just wait a few years and upgrade, or downgrade to the Voodoo3 3000 like I did earlier this year). It's currently set up to dual-boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 6.06, and it seems Ubuntu is so user-friendly you can't even do anything worth mentioning in the terminal without installing things that didn't come on the CD. I'm thinking about running back home to Fedora Core. I thought the 400W power supply that came with the case was dead on arrival, and, in a rare impatient moment, braved my way to Geek City, one of the local computer stores I've avoided like the plague due to high prices and mildly elitist employees. I especially didn't want to go to Geek City because my high school Chemistry partner, whom I couldn't stand, has worked there so long that he appears in their television commercials regularly. There was even a commercial from Geek City's rival mocking them with a fake "Nerdtropolis" commercial within a commercial, and I'm fairly certain the mock "Nerdtropolis" commercial was making fun of my old Chemistry partner specifically. But it was Saturday, and MSNBC was starting to rerun the programming block of prison and homicide documentaries I had been watching while beating my tool-less ATX puzzle box into submission, and the local computer stores were starting to close. Hence, I set foot in Geek City for the first time. This is no city I'd want to live in, to be sure. Immediately upon stepping through the front door, I was standing at a desk with some dude staring at me blankly like he wanted to sell me a bucket of fried chicken. The merchandise shelves reached for the roof. This was not retail! This was some miniature back-alley warehouse. I wove in and out of the dark aisles, in the disenchanted hardware forest, for no more than 30 seconds before Jesus clipped the corner and said, "Can I help you? ... Oh, hey Craig!" It's my Chemistry partner, and he looks like the Son of Man! He recommended a cheap but reliable 550W power supply. CoolMax rather than Antec. He then shed his blood into a grail and offered me "the true power supply, the power of everlasting life supplied through God's grace. I am." To which I responded, "I ain't drinkin' shit, Brad. Give me the CoolMax." Truth be told, he was quite helpful. And then the guy at the cash register took note of my Blue Man Group t-shirt and informed me that the Blue Men are 300 people. "The three Blue Men are 300 people, you say? Give me a little room here. I need some oxygen to take this all in." Basically, all three Blue Men are John Malkovich. It turns out the other power supply wasn't dead; the particular outlet I had it plugged into wouldn't supply enough... power, I guess? I took a year of Electrical Engineering courses and I still don't know how electricity works. I don't know if Topsy Tervy Land takes back opened power supplies, but I don't really care to find out. I'll stick with the CoolMax in case I ever try this SLI gimmick. Counter-Strike: Source is the same Counter-Strike I know and love and haven't played for several years. Better graphics, actual physics, same angry people blowing off steam after a hard day's work at Sam's Club. I used to be one of you, my brothers. I had Sam's Club listed in my work history on my resume when I applied for three computer jobs over the course of July. Sam's Club and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center with nary a year between them. Pat, the 'front-end' manager and Grade A douche bag at Sam's Club, said he would start me off at $9.00/hour if I came back the following summer. It was an opportunity of a lifetime and I blew it. But, returning to the present, I got a job! I am now a User Consultant at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. I work in the same cubicle where I had been working as a student... with the plastic pink flowers in a heart basket (came with the cubicle) and the marker-board that has said "Zach" on it ever since Zach, the summer intern, left Alaska last August. Now I just need to learn all the things I never knew about ARSC's high performance machines. That is to say, I need to learn everything about them, because I've just been fiddling around with PHP, Perl, and MySQL over the past two years. These things have nothing to do with supercomputers. I've spent the past three days learning the basics of MPI for parallel programming, which is something I've always wanted to learn, especially now that I have a dual-core CPU at home. I'm also gearing up to spend the upcoming long, school-less winter learning OpenGL so I can try to make various crappy, simple, and experimental games filled with massive explosions and stat tracking. I haven't taken the time to play single-player Half-Life 2 yet. I started a game and wandered around for a couple minutes just to test out the framerate (great!). But in Counter-Strike: Source, I was thrust into a large custom map that happened to have some of that good ol' HL2 water I've heard so much about, off to the side as an afterthought. To add atmosphere. It was breathtaking. I couldn't stop giggling as I walked and swam and splashed in the water, a moment I hoped would last forever, until a Counter-Terrorist crept out of nothingness and shot me in the face. My new high score in Geometry Wars: Evolved as of Saturday, August 5th Wednesday, August 9th is 866,510 1,097,750. Frankie's is 716,295. Kiri's is ~330,000, but she's playing for two. I think I'm going to go ahead and renew my website hosting subscription on iPower, but this time I'm gonna go with their new $4/month plan which, due to heavy competition in the web hosting market, has become exactly what the $8/month plan was one year ago. 3gb webspace and such. Too much, really. I have exactly two more pages to go before I finish The Jesus Puzzle book I've been reading very slowly since March, and then I'll probably charge into the appendices. Why else would they be there except to be read? Good book. I want to read my new "Beginning OpenGL Game Programming" book from cover to cover just to see what happens when you read a programming book from cover to cover. I predict a sappy green fluid will start oozing from my ears and eye sockets to indicate that the knowledge vs. time threshold has been savagely violated. God knows nothing of the sort happened in college. I get to have my fingerprints taken again for another government background check to kickstart my new job. I like the fingerprinting process because women are 25% more attractive in frightening blue uniforms and they have you wash the ink off your hands with Fast Orange® hand soap, soap that ate so many oranges it was pissing out its ass for a week. I recruited another friend and coworker, Frankie himself, into the cult of 3.5 hours of telephonic neurosience. 210 minutes of radio lecture given by a godlike Indian, encoded into a single 37mb MP3 at 24kbps mono. Perhaps comparing the quality to a telephone is optimistic. It's more like someone was shuffling about in the dirt wondering what his purpose was in life when it suddenly began to rain and a fusiform gyrus bubbled up from the mud. Then he jammed the gyrus into a series of tubes and it showed up on eMule. Here, take it! But the rule is you have to listen to at least 20 minutes before you give up. And one of the five lectures in the middle of the MP3 has trouble playing on most players. I took enough Computer Science courses to know that this is voodoo, pure and simple. And the old legless black man (Dave) who bought my 1983 Cadillac Seville last summer showed up at the door yesterday with a new black truck. He sold the Cadillac to a 14-year old kid who got into an accident two days later. The car was impounded and the kid is in juvenile hall, and the car title is still in my name because Dave never took care of the paperwork. Furthermore, the dude who runs the impound lot knows who the car belonged to originally, my late neighbor George Walton, because he was with George when he bought the car 23 years ago. If my life were a movie, I'd call it Snatch. June 4th, 2006 - College is over! Comments [49] Okay, so I've cleaned most of the rust off this website. Apparently I'm a college graduate now, although nothing has really clicked or snapped yet. Your grades come in after the graduation ceremony, so you're presented as a "graduation canditate", thus the whole ceremony is just a staged display of uncertainty with 1000s of parents in the seats and bleachers. Then my grades finally did come in, not that I really had much to worry about, and I did graduate! But reading things online never seems like a big deal. And now supposedly my official diploma will be coming in the mail sometime in the middle of June. I bet it's gonna feel like junk mail, like being pre-approved for a credit card. I keep thinking of summer as something that needs to be exploited before going back to school in the fall. I've lived like that since I was six years old. So, I figure I won't feel like a full-blown graduate until it's -20 degrees and I'm not in or between semesters of school. And now I don't have school as an excuse for not doing the things I've always wanted to try, such as NaNoWriMo. "NaNoWriMo is a forum exclusively committed to the timely production of crappy novels." We'll see how that works out. Electrical Engineering 443 took about 80% of my time this last semester. Most of the time it felt like it was the only class I was enrolled in. I want to USE processors, not MAKE them. Speaking of which, my parents are getting me a new computer as my graduation gift. Ima float around newegg.com for an afternoon and pick out the parts, but for some reason I can't even force myself to do that right now. I seem to have no interest in replacing my six year old Compaqtrophe computer/dust/tape hybrid at the moment. But rest assured, there is much Counter-Strike Sourcing over the horizon. I don't think I've updated since ThunderChunk got his Xbox 360. If you or any of your friends have an Xbox 360, make sure to download Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved from Xbox Live. My high score is something like 716,000 785,650 as of June 5th, 2006. ThunderChunk has reached something like 1,400,000. It's a modern-day Robotron 2084 (maybe not so modern. Certainly less modern than Smash TV, which itself is 16 years old) with black (orange) holes and the fabric of spacetime trampolining in the background with zips and zaps and three cans of AMP Energy Drink lined up in a row in front of you. This is what happens when it gets out of control. Keep in mind, the person in the video only got 2 million. Last I checked, the highest score online was about 20 million. The Xbox 360 has a triple-core CPU. Now that I've taken EE 443, I actually know what triple-core means. It means the first 3.2 GHz are used to draw outlines of baddies on the screen, the second 3.2 GHz are used to calculate perturbances in the sequential flow of time resulting fron the glowing goatse holes sucking in too many squares, and the third and final 3.2 GHz are used to generate the lifelike artificial intelligence, so the blue (or white to my mutant eyes) diamonds float towards your ship, the green squares shy away from your bullets, and the wormy sperms continue to do their sway this-way-and-that thing as to cause you maximal distress. Trust me, I'm a college graduate. We are blessed with technology. Brian Greene would excel at this game. Figure 1.1 I've continued to play Dig Dug here and there throughout the semester since I was afraid to involve myself in anything more complicated than crushing Pookas and blowing Fygars (when I need the cash). Still improving (Figure 1.1), thanks in part to Ed's Dig Dug Page. I emailed Ed praising his wonderful page, and he emailed me back. He's a cool dude! And although I haven't been playing Wolfenstein 3D, I've been thinking about it quite a bit. In spite of their automatic warnings (Figure 1.2), GameFAQs accepted my review of Wolfenstein 3D: Figure 1.2 Wolfenstein 3D is a classic by any definition of the term. What sets this title apart from other WWII simulators is its eye for accuracy. We, the gamers, are not subjected to gratuitous gore, grenades, and rag-doll body-flopping super-imposed over history for the sake of flaunting the newest computer technologies. Instead, we get a textbook depiction of the horrors of WWII as synthesized by the Nazis and their countless unspeakable deeds. Indeed, this game should serve as proof to elementary school teachers that select video games can provide an enriching supplement to dry lectures. To begin with, the levels of Wolfenstein 3D simply ooze atmosphere. The developers went to great lengths to re-create the infamous castles of Nazi Germany in painstaking detail down to the bizarre idiosyncrasies of Nazi architecture. By this I mean the flawless, patterned placement of blue bricks throughout all of Hitler's fortresses. It is a scarcely disputed fact that Nazis were master layers of blue bricks, as supported by page 237 of the Mariner Books re-issue edition of Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim: "We shall cleanse the afflictions of the Volk and produce a race of blue brick laying super men. Hail!" Throughout your trek across history, you'll traverse tight corridors atop uniform clay floors rendered spotless by the intense radiation of anti-Semitism. It's all here. You may notice the realism falter a bit when it becomes clear the same two or three Nazi flags keep repeating themselves, perfectly hung against the Aryan bricks, throughout each level. However over-the-top this appears at first, advances in carbon dating and DNA analysis have proved not only that Nazis did actually exist in 1943, but that amidst their abuses of genetic propagation, they stumbled upon a rare mutation of the inner-ear gene engendering their race with an unprecedented sense of balance. It follows that such a race would exuberate their alien abilities in any of a number of incomprehensible ways, be they existing beyond any sub-Aryan notion of 'stairs' or hanging Fuhrer Flags here, there, and the other place as if they were product placements for Pepsi. The Allied forces, however, must have had a warped conception of space bars, because, every so often, slamming the 'bar down incites some sort of 16-bit pelvic thrust, sending an entire section of six-foot-deep blue-brick wall back in a moment of passion while the ominous sound of two spoons scraping a cinder block accompanies its passing. In fact, the curious abundance of these sliding sections of wall and their telltale carving reverberations have led many historians to speculate that each Nazi castle, under dire circumstances, could pull off an Optimus Prime and transform into a giant swastika as part of a collective effort to metamorphose the surface of German earth into the charged pole of a celestial hate magnet and receive blessings from the transcendental Space Hitler looming in the night sky. Notwithstanding the minor discrepancies between 1940s Nazi Germany and Wolfenstein 3D, this game captures the essence of segmented Space Hitler walls by planting within their nooks a King Tutankhamen's serving of gold cups and crosses! Yours, not technically for the taking, but more for you to frolic over in elation as your peripheral vision blinks the color of piss and you start experiencing auditory hallucinations of Vishnu chanting "bum bum BUDDADUM!" It's like Cub Scouts all over again. For its time, Wolfenstein 3D had a fair selection of enemies. It has the requisite grunt enemies: living, breathing pawns standing around aimlessly ready to shout at you and then die shortly thereafter. It's got your blue guys with machine guns who theoretically yell out "Schutzstaffel!", although in practice it sounds more like they're reciting a very fast hip-hop piece. Fellows dressed in white who don't have a clue. Three-armed soldiers! You heard me. Mutants? Yeah right. Germans are gambling folk, and it looks like some bets were lost to Josef Mengele. And dogs. These are the least animated dogs I have ever seen, to be sure. Stumble into a room with one of these guys and it's like being attacked by a three-page flip book about a blurry squirrel struggling with epilepsy. For the record, dogs bark and dogs squeal. I'm fairly certain when dogs die they don't make the sound of last Saturday's waffle iron mishap while my pants were in the dryer. And just like the conclusion of the real WWII, in Wolfenstein 3D you are faced with a boss in the final level of each of its six episodes. I won't spoil them with details, but Episode 1 pits you against a tank dressed as a human, or a human dressed as a tank. Governor Schwarzenegger as raised by a gaggle of geometric cubes. A colossal entity of pure evil that shouts in tongues about good days and chocolate pudding. At risk of ruining the surprise, I'll simply inform you that he will turn you into the pudding he so desperately craves. Try as you might to evade his Gatling guns, you are caged like a dog in his rectangular lair. Defeat him and you will have earned that which man has sacrificed himself for for eons: to run into a brick room with the far wall painted the color of outside. It's starting to feel like Dark City up in here. Jennifer Connelly is hot. Buy or rent? Buy. You can't put a price on education. My birthday came and went. Knoppix Hacks is what I got. This book is great. We talked quite a bit about live Linux CDs in the (awesome) Intrusion Detection course I just finished and it made me appreciate how cool they are, for fixing computers in particular. I used one of the 100 "hacks" in the book to ALMOST boot back into the Windows partition of my dual-boot system that I fucked up in the boot-loader two years ago and have been locked out of ever since. I say "almost" because I think, somewhere between two years ago and now, I completely FUBAR'd what might have been salvageable of the partition, not just the bootloader. At least I can get to the data. Anyway, I also read some of this book on the way down to Anchorage to visit my brother and ended up fixing his computer with the CD that came with the book. Everyone has a vague idea that Knoppix is cool, but this book explains 100 reasons why! Especially if you want to learn Linux without committing to it. The Introduction to the Bible course I took turned out to be very worthwhile. It wouldn't have been if any other person had taught it. I couldn't figure this guy out during the first half of the semester, but he really let it all hang out during the second half of the semester. He used to be a pastor, but he didn't hesitate to talk about his problems with the Bible, churches, and his marriage. Then there was the classic day someone asked, "What does the New Testament say about masturbation?" To which he replied, "It seems like most Christians interpret this wrong. Let me put it this way: has anyone here not masturbated?" and then he left a 20 second pause while everyone looked straight ahead but didn't raise their hands. One of the Baptists asked nervously, "Could you maybe have phrased that question differently?" Insanity. I would take the course again in a heartbeat. The course also provided me with enough information to know that the author of The Jesus Puzzle, the book I'm currently reading (very slowly), is not just pulling stuff out of his ass. The Jesus Puzzle has more quotes from the Bible than any other book I've read (perhaps even more than the sections of the Bible I read for Bible class? Eh?) and stuff about Platonism that would be flying right over my head if it were not for the Introduction to Philosophy course I took two semesters ago. It also touches on primal religions and syncretism, issues that came up quite a bit in the Religions of the World course I just finished. I'll bitch and moan about college all I want; it seems I got the most out of courses that were not part of my major. Badonkadonk, Nickel (thanks to Jer). December 27th, 2005 - I'll Add A Title Later Comments [428] There's only a few reasons why I haven't updated in a long time. First of all, school sucks, especially when bullshit freshmen classes (Anthropology) give weekly quizzes to make sure you're keeping up on the reading (reading I would have never considered doing if there had not been a very real 40%-overall-grade threat involved). Second, there was the little issue of Philosophy, where I could get by without doing the reading but chose to read the material because the stuff is awesome! That class was great! Best of all, I now know the big names and ideas in philosophy and which famous philosophers interest me the most, so reading their work will be pursued at a later date. After the buttload of books in my basement dissipates by their own accord. Reason 2.5: contrary to what you may presume, I'm actually a very slow reader. So reading about Anthropology and Philosophy every week is enough to bring all things fun to a screeching halt. Finally, as this website has progressed, every entry has seemed more and more like it needed to be a project, a production! So, maybe I need to reestablish my roots and ramble incoherently without bringing a thesaurus into the picture. Maybe not, who knows, but that's all I intend to do this time around. I was watching a show on The Science Channel entitled "The Science of Christmas." This show documented how candy canes are made, except for the bend. Apparently the means by which a candy cane acquires its bend is a trade secret. It also talked about efforts to breed and then clone the perfect Christmas tree. And just in case there were any uncertainty remaining that we were abusing science, this television show purported to explain how Santa Claus delivers gifts to 842 million homes in a single night using Einstein's theory of special relativity. That is, assuming Santa doesn't get caught up in Earth's mid-regions and end up in WMV format on Al Jazeera's website. After generations of highly selective breeding, these Christmas tree farmers hope to discover what they have deemed the 'Super Tree'. Once found, they will start mass producing Super Trees via cloning so they can sell the exact same tree to every customer from each year to the next. Here's my chance for some sort of obscure Brave New World reference, but we'll leave that kind of thing to Tom Cruise. There is no problem with this. I'm just wondering if it's really necessary. My family already has something kind of like the Super Tree. It's made of metal and we store it in a box under the house for 11 months out of the year. If you people are gonna bring genetic engineering into the equation, do something worthwhile (tobacco plant with firefly DNA). Hells yeah! Fuck presents, that tree would BE Christmas. Speaking of Al Jazeera, I watched their documentary, Control Room. It's worth a watch. Al Jazeera doesn't seem half as evil as we're led to believe in America. If you want proof, look no further than this Amazon.com review from R. Smith: Everything said by many of the reviewers here is true. This is an intelligent and eye-opening look at Al Jazeera and the propoganda arm of the American war in Iraq. It offers an alternative view of Al Jazeera, one at odds with the "Mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden" characterization perpetuated by the Bush administration. Blah blah blah. The real story here is the transcendent hottietude of Al Jazeera producer Deema Khartib. Her big brown eyes - sparkling pools of liquid intelligence framed by shiny jet-black hair - taunt the viewer from behind sexy-librarian glasses while painfully full lips enounce informed and erudite political opinions through sparklingly white and perfect teeth. And one scene (perhaps overlooked by many but scrutinized repeatedly by your faithful reporter) gives brief but undeniable confirmation of the shapeliness of her posterior flesh pillow as she leaps from her chair and hurries out of a room. Sure, this is an informative and entertaining documentary. Sure, it's a unsettling look at how our government uses and abuses the media in its war effort. But most importantly, this is a tantalizing, throw-your-pants-around glimpse at a top-shelf twenty-first century Arab hottie, one that underscores the importance of stabilizing Arab world and integrating it into the global community - so that we can have access to their women. And if that weren't enough, if my Christmas presents are any indication, I must be some sort of liberal. Which is strange, I never sat myself down in front of the mirror and decided on this. I guess that's the reason I've been so attracted to tie-dye tshirts over the years and, to an even greater extent, glowing fucking Christmas trees! Super Tree! I wonder if they can make it buzz like a bug-zapper too! I received the following items for Christmas: • The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty • A Little Matter of Genocide by Ward Churchill • The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin • Philips stand-alone DivX player (yeah, I know, welcome to last year) This marks the second consecutive year I've received a book about genocide for Christmas. Not sure what's up with that. The most polished of my three Philosophy take-home final essays can be found here, though I will not force you to read it. It's about Deism! I haven't updated my "Search Phrases" page in about a year, but my stats page has encountered the new undisputed lord of strange. Someone found their way to my website by searching for the following: gravity is not an issue for mccauley caulkin. mccauley caulkin travels through the universe as mccauley caulkin pleases. Whenever I see something that is either blue on a red background, or red on a blue background (like text on a website), reality distorts before my very eyes. As far as I can tell, this is the last remaining mystery of my protanomaly color blindness. Whenever I encounter such an intense blue/red contrast, things seem to shift back and forth in a state of flux. I never really understood what was going on until about a month ago, and I never had a way to describe it before then. Assuming I'm looking at a blue website with red text, if I focus on the text, it is very dark (blackish). If I look past the text, it gets brighter. But if I'm trying to read the text, it jumps back and forth between dark and bright red, as if every time I move my eyes just a little bit, my vision has to reestablish focus, thus making the text appear as some sort of red strobe light. I tried to explain this to my cubicle neighbor at work, Don, but ended on a rant about a blue/red box of toothpaste. Some off-brand toothpaste comes in a dark blue box with bright red dots on it. Very odd, to be sure. But I noticed, and this was several years ago, that if I shook the box from side to side, it looked like the bright red dots were sliding around on the box like little red air hockey pucks. My brother is coming up to Fairbanks in early January for belated Christmas visiting. He asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I gave it to him straight: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. I installed xmame on my shitty computer and downloaded Dig Dug. I finally figured out how to play that game for points and I'm eating it up. Current high score: 76,700. I can do better. Good grades this semester. For next semester, I'm signed up for the second semester of Electrical Engineering (the "God help me" semester), Intrusion Detection (Computer Science), and two Religion classes, of all things ("Religions of the World" and "Introduction to the Bible"). Both Religion classes are night classes, one on Monday, one on Tuesday. I know I'm going to regret this, but I'll only have one class on each of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Then I'm done. Graduated. I'll either work where I am now, ARSC, or it's back to Sam's Club for me, where I will employ my Mathematics minor to make improper change and fetch Marlboro Reds for old hags who smell of the kind of antiquated perfume that reminds me of those old Looney Tunes cartoons where Daffy Duck stretches like taffy. That's the reason people think Steve Buscemi looks weird, because the uber creepy character who appeared in the old Looney Tunes cartoons looks just like him. Jarface was pretty good, Aeon Sux, and Harry Potter 4 is really confusing if you haven't seen Harry Potter 2 or 3 or read the books. Harry Potter looks like he can drive now. Drew and I smuggled McDonald's double-cheeseburgers into the theater. Each bite radiated the scent of capitalism outward several seats in each direction. And this was clearly not the smell of corn that had been popped. As if the movie wasn't distressing enough. I haven't had a haircut since I last updated my website, so when I wake up in the morning it looks like I have moss on my head. My dad wanted a book that explained how the Bible came to be, so I went on an Amazonic adventure to find an objective and captivating book on the subject. Alas, these types of books seem to be separated by testament, but I did find this one here: The Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew by Bart D. Ehrman. It's kickass. I read half of its reviews on Amazon.com and many of the 'Search Inside' pages. It explains, in depth, all of the known noncanonical books of early Christianity. It also talks a great deal about Gnostic Christianity, including their philosophy and all (God creating himself piece by piece, an illegitimate malformed god being born, malformed god creating material world ignorant that he is not the true god, Jesus being the bringer of secret knowledge that will help us escape the material world, and a longing by Gnostic Christians to separate the Jesus from the Christ). Strange stuff, nevertheless interesting insofar, inasmuch, and oftentimes as the 'Search Inside' pages can illustrate. I also used my dad's gift as an excuse to order the first two "The Maxx" graphic novels (to qualify the order for free shipping). The Maxx was the only comic series I got into as a kid. Free shipping and it showed up in four days during the busiest time of the year. A winner is UltraMuffin. Bottle organ. October 25th, 2005 - Take a Bite Out of Crime Comments [259] To whom it may concern: DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, Bonkers? Did it end there? How can I know for sure when the sheer craptastitude of Bonkers forced me into early adolescence. Whatever subtle lessons Disney managed to slip into our phosphorescent after-school snack companions, you may rest assured they are now hard-coded into the minds of many hopeless 20-somethings. And to think, if I had spent a little more time over on NBC absorbing the lasting and ubiquitous Saved by the Bell broadcasts, I would have apprehended the world's true injustice. Slipping off the solid foundation of sixth grade into the dank pit of seventh, my trials and tribulations rarely involved ducks, chipmunks or bear pilots. No, it was a cruel jungle socially constructed into continental cliques by the feeble and uncaring minds of perpetrator and victim alike. Jocks, nerds, preppies and cheerleaders. It was more real than I ever could have imagined! If for nothing else, more time spent bathing in the universe of bell saviors would have provided me a glimpse into the peaking career of Bridgette Wilson. Mortal Kombat seems to have been the final nail in the career coffin for this shining young star. My questions are as such: 1) Who was this mysterious Launchpad McQuack figure and how did he collapse the chasm between DuckTales and Darkwing Duck? 2) How did human beings break through the Disney cartoon membrane and dominate the universe of Bonkers? 3) Is there a way to microwave Pizza Pockets to attain a uniform heat ratio throughout each crusted gem? To my recollection, Launchpad McQuack was the only individual to contribute a recurring role to both DuckTales and Darkwing Duck. The proof is in the puppet, a Mr. Terence McGovern, governing the voice and actions of each McQuack instantiation from a transcendent sound booth forever two steps beyond reach. Clearly, DuckTales and Darkwing Duck were universes regulated by distinct fundamentals. Case in point, Gyro Gearloose employed his intellectual agency to freeze time in the DuckTales realm. We saw nothing of such a phenomenon in the Darkwing domain, which was infested by a unique band of villains and shady caricatures surely birthed of an incapacitating fever or an improperly ventilated rubber cement ordeal. So how did Mr. McQuack arrive where fate had not placed him? Was Gyro Gearloose responsible. If so, shall we scorn him or thank him? The significance of these monumental questions has not faltered since they first arose over ten years ago, a molten red glow piercing through the fog of daily life that manifests itself incessantly to silence charged inquiries. Next, why were there human beings in Bonkers and how did they get there? It would be foolish to pin the blame on Gyro Gearloose for this blunder, for there were no human beings in DuckTales to transport. We are left only with speculation, though the human predisposition to imperialism likely implicates a nexus. Disney's quality control held steadfastly to animal/human segregation in matters of an animated essence. Though I have yet to arrive at any form of conclusive claim, I have thoroughly submersed my thoughts into the bizarre cornerstone of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Here, I suspect something of a dual-edged revolt laced with ulterior motives. The back-story of this film has proved elusive, devoid of presence even on the DVD's special features. The most recent scenario to have engulfed my thoughts is one of an oppressive people, the humans, exploiting a backlash of the oppressed, the cartoons. The humans stifled toon rights with an iron fist, intent on instigating a revolt that would subsequently break the human/toon membrane. Once this revolt had been realized, after the turmoil had subsided, the two beings lived together in symbiosis for a time, with a snapshot of this existence constituting the relatively tranquil context of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. With the human/toon membrane penetrated, however, the humans were given free reign to invade the cartoon world where they would proceed to police the toons and defile their sanctity. With the cartoon world sufficiently soiled by these insanitary beings, after-school cartoons ceased to be fun and the Nintendo generation collective was forced into premature adolescence at the disturbing realization of it all. Finally, were Pizza Pockets actually engineered to be cooked in a microwave? To be sure, there were indeed microwave instructions on their packaging, though I found these guidelines to be severely flawed in every sense of the term. To sidestep confusion, I am not talking about pizza flavored Hot Pockets, but the bite-sized bulbous pizza envelopes of yesteryear that could overcome a dinner plate only in armies of fifteen. Pizza Rolls, technically speaking, but rolls manifestly unable to roll. Something more akin to pockets. Two minutes? If that means two minutes on high, someone deserves to be fired. This time and temperature would render the little pizza packages suitable only for a foray into napalm-based ballistics. One minute? A failure of utmost quantity residing at the other end of the pain spectrum. And to entertain the notion of a so-called 'medium' temperature is to bring into being lukewarm pizza abortions able to incite emotions barely distinguishable over the threshold of disappointment. I came to heat the frozen pizza globules for three minutes on high, only to hurtle them into a freezer for an additional minute before consumption; this conjunction bringing the morsels into their closest possible proximity to an actual item of food, something of a crusted ice-cube full of pain-free cheese and pig bits. I am at a loss to identify who this letter belongs to. Who will heed my call and share my concern? Well, amidst these fading memories of after-school cartoons and Pizza Pockets I can think of but one address to rule them all. So Detective McGruff, I leave it up to you to piece together this puzzle. Included with this letter are several items to give you a head start. They include: - Gyro's thunder, inscribed as seen through the bay window of my living room - a potential Eye of the Queen - a theater ticket stub for the film Drowning Mona - a torn United States $1 bill with serial number L77914611E - an unused orange glow stick banded three times with a Sharpie - an illustrated note card carrying our questions and Mr. McQuack's last known whereabouts And last but not least, a lawn-variety "Beware of Dog" sign. I know you have it in you Scruff ;) Good Luck! Paco Wiltshire Also, Atomic Microwave videos here and here. October 15th, 2005 - God, Brains and Prison Comments [53] Yo! Unfortunately, there's nothing interesting to be said at this time, but that never stopped me from typing in the past. I'm taking four courses this semester: Anthropology 100 (Individual, Society & Culture), Philosophy 102 (Introduction to Philosophy), Computer Science 411 (Analysis of Algorithms) and Electrical Engineering 341 (Digital and Computer Analysis & Design). The former two courses are just fluff to bring me up to the status of a full-time student. I signed up for the Philosophy 102 course because it's taught by the best instructor this university has to offer, Joseph Thompson. Computer Science 411 is just another math course disguised as computer science, with mathematical proofs by induction swarming through the homework assignments like little Thursday night gnats. Electrical Engineering 341 is surprisingly straight-forward, though exhaustive exercise in Boolean algebra and tedious 00110101 pencil-to-paper bombardments. The labs ruin any fun that it might have been, messing with wires, little black chips like the ones I used in Space Station Silicon Valley to manipulate aloof sheep, and color-banded resistors that happen to be the next thing in line to call attention to my deficiency. The first day of this course, the instructor presented a brief history of electrical engineering, mostly about CPUs and such, but concluded the PowerPoint show with a photograph of a neuron connected to a microchip... YES! And surely you've realized by now this man must be German. The only effective way to talk about connecting brains to computers is with a German accent. Speaking of which, I've just finished listening to the 3.5 hours of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran neuroscience lectures entitled "The Emerging Mind" at work for the third repetition. Good stuff there! Programming with a neuroscience soundtrack is the only way to be, especially when it's sandwiched between a Black Eyed Peas album and the new KMFDM album. After all, if I never mixed the Tang powder with Mountain Dew, I never would have seen the walls melt away whilst chewing on undisolved sugar nuggets. Here's some interesting reading for those of you who are bored: phantom limb, prosopagnosia, synaesthesia, aphasia, temporal lobe epilepsy, hemispatial neglect, schizophrenia, psychosurgery. Also, I subscribed to a brand new magazine called Scientific American Mind after seeing an advertisement for it in the original Scientific American. Surveys, studies and brain scans abound, but only four issues per year. Philosophy is interesting. We're making our way through the "four branches" of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics. Dr. Thompson is most intense, as always, and there's a strange fellow who comes to class with a sub-sandwich every day, seems a little slow, but also seems to know everything about philosophy, theology and quantum mechanics and is quite vocal and cynical. I'll admit it, every class needs someone like him. However, when he got into a debate with Dr. Thompson over whether "numbers are real", he produced the example of a "giant foam-rubber seven"... I consider this something of a philosophical hit below the belt. Also, apparently the letter I wrote to Wonder Bread a year ago had a lot to do with process theology and pantheism, things closely associated with Baruch Spinoza. I just felt like saying his name because I took the time to memorize it for a test. Yeah, so suck it. If Baruch Spinoza were alive today, he'd probably be harassing Wonder Bread through electronic mail as well. The Ball Park letter remains a steaming work of nothingness though. And if Voltaire were still alive today, I'd probably be calling him up to go bowling right now. If you're a skeptic aspiring to get your Jesus on, consider attending the Alpha Course led by my parents at "my" church, the First Presbyterian Church of Fairbanks. I've seen bits and pieces of the VHS tapes that are shown during this course amidst my travels to and from the burrito oasis (i.e. the kitchen). The idea is that they lure a bunch of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics off the street with promises of free food and open discussion, and somehow convert attendees to Christianity through the VHS tapes and aforementioned discussion. Jesus can't afford DVD. The closest thing to God I've ever experienced is when I watched a brain surgeon lecture through a webcam about suffocating your brain with french fries. God damn, that guy's sense of humor was dark as oil. But before attending an Alpha Course, consider reading these: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6. It seems difficult to have faith when living in the Google age. Right now, I'm reading You Got Nothing Coming: Notes from a Prison Fish by Jimmy A. Lerner. It's about a white-collar worker type person who landed in jail after killing a man in some variety of overactive self-defense, and his experiences in jail. I'm not very far into it yet, but this book is a lot funnier than it should be. Here's some quotes for you: "The cinder block next to my steel cot is a mural of misery and enigmatic engravings: LORD PLEASE LET ME GO TO THE LIGHT is somehow carved into the gray wall. Directly above it is a somewhat less spiritual sentiment: EAT A HOLE YOU'LL SUCK A POLE! ... I'm still trying to figure that one out." "All the white boys looked like they came from the same inbred trailer park community where breakfast is an intravenous shot of methamphetamine followed by a Hostess Twinkie." "Seven feet tall, at least a quarter ton of flab and bad attitude wearing filthy gray boxer shorts the size of a circus tent. An incongruously tiny cornrow head formed the apex of this mammoth. ... It was as if God, in a playful mood, had taken a giant spatula and slapped the behemoth's body together, piling one layer of jiggling lard on top of another. For six days. On the seventh He either rested or just ran out of enough clay to shape a full-size head." September 4th, 2005 - FMV: The Forgotten Era of Video Gaming Comments [54] So it's finally happened, retro-gaming has become a fad. For the longest time I seemed to be the only one obsessed with that wondrous gray nostalgia box from the '80s. Now you can walk into Fred Meyer and find various t-shirts with NES controllers on them without even looking terribly hard. What happens when an underground obsession rooted in ancient pop culture circles back into pop culture once again? Should I be happy or sad? Happy, I imagine. It's nice seeing my generation's baby sitters plastered over $20 t-shirts factory-made to look fifteen years old. But if you are not moved to tears each and every time you hear that quivering theme song from The Legend of Zelda, as if you've found religion reflected off of a golden cartridge, you have no right to wear such apparel. But this was not meant to be about the Nintendo Entertainment System. I want to talk about another side of retro-gaming. A darker side that, if given the choice, maybe we'd all choose to forget. I am here to make sure that doesn't happen! It is time to remember FMV games, the most splendid and baffling direction the gaming industry has ever taken. Double Switch? Sewer Shark? Slam City with Scottie Pippen? No, you won't be seeing any t-shirts branded with these titles from the SegaCD renaissance. But why? Developers keep trying to push the limits of realism in video games when all they really have to do is look back to the fateful days of 1992, a time when video games WERE real. Fur-shading? Bump-mapping? Real-time shadows! Yes! It was the real deal! The gaming industry peaked in 1992, and ever since then it has been devising increasingly complicated ways of pummeling itself into the ground. Nintendo, Sega, and upcoming contender Sony should have just thrown in the towel and redirected their efforts into figuring out how to make Texas Hold'em more fun than a flaming piece of shit lying sideways across a Thursday night pre-calculus homework assignment. FMV: full motion video. A genre of game defined by interaction with pre-recorded video clips. A genre that never had to struggle with the dastardly notion of in-game cameras. A time when color was a luxury and the best games could be identified by their quintessential "mud with faces in it swirling around in an unwell digital toilet" aura. Gone was the mistake of giving the player freedom. Sega knew that allowing the player choices was analogous to pointing a shotgun at his foot and letting him pull the trigger. Eliminate the concept of choice to maximize the fun. Sound? CD quality. But recorded through a microphone dipped in caramel to soften the fidelity with sweet caramel lovin'. Plot? Written in the snow on smoke break. Poseidon will preserve the greatest plots through the night. The industry will never again know such efficiency. It should have snowed that night... Sewer Shark In Sewer Shark you play some type of city worker who flies a spaceship through a sewer made of 17 pixels in order to make left and right turns and shoot at things a 2nd grader drew in with a broken yellow crayon. This game was included with the second revision of the SegaCD (the one that hanged off the right side of the Genesis like a tumor). Sega packaged this game with the system so each proud new owner of the SegaCD could pop it into his $229 machine, hit Power, and think to himself "I think I just made a very expensive mistake!" The first thing that struck me as odd about this game was that the compact disc was translucent. In the weeks preceding my SegaCD adoption, a man named Ryan Stephenson who worked at Box Office Video showed me that you can tell if a CD is damaged by holding it up to a light. If you can see any light through the CD, it is useless. Being that Sewer Shark was the first compact disc of which I could claim sole ownership, the first thing I did as I took it out of its jewel case was hold it up to the living room light. Out of the disc's entire 12 cm circular real-estate, the only thing keeping this game from being a musky window to my living room ceiling was a bold "Sewer Shark" logo actively synonymousizing itself with the term "useless". The goal? Live long enough to be called "rat breath" instead of "dog meat", and so on and so forth. Should you crash, you will be rewarded with a firebomb of relief punctuating the longest four minutes of your $229-less life, clearing time to contemplate the hole in which to throw your next $50. The intermission between Corey Haim's careers at TGI Friday's and Red Lobster... Double Switch So, I don't keep a mental inventory of Corey Haim's movies, but certainly his motion picture career was virtually non-existent by the time this game came out. One day, after finishing lunch, a TGI Friday's customer left a note for little Corey alongside his tip, reading: "I will make you a star again Corey. Love, SegaCD." ... and the rest was history (albeit obscure history). This game was a clone of Night Trap. I never played Night Trap, however, because by the time I acquired a SegaCD, the media was painting Night Trap as a serial killer simulator. In Double Switch, the player controls an elaborate trap system inside a mansion, represented as an MS Paint abnormality in your control panel, with tiny blurry candy dots symbolizing bad actors with hidden agendas. That drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket was even in this game, playing some sort of creepy handyman who occasionally talked to the camera. About a third of the way through, the traps started to resemble something out of a snuff bondage film... and then a mummy somehow got involved. I never found out what this was all about because, by Act II, I felt small creatures in my skull sorting my brain cells into ellipsoid piles like spare change. This game is hard as bricks! I like to pretend Corey Haim just kind of disappeared into this mansion of Double Switchnitude when he departed the face of Earth. That's the only way he'll get any respect out of me. My god, this game was a trip. If a landfill had buttons... Slam City with Scottie Pippen What do you get when you combine one-on-one basketball with FMV, four compact discs and an endorsement by Scottie Pippen? One weird mess, I can assure you. This game had something to do with playing basketball to rack up respect points. Sounds kind of like an RPG, doesn't it? What could you use your respect points for? To progress to the next opponent (i.e. disc). Four discs, four opponents. I forget who or what these opponents were exactly, but one of them was a woman (FMV + women, the only thing that made any sense), and it would be logical to presume Scottie Pippen to be on disc 4. That's all it was. They added depth to FMV basketball by incorporating a single RPG element, the element of killing rats and bunnies that all look and move the same for 10 hours just to move forward in the game. There's probably about eight minutes of total video in this entire four-disc game. This seems especially astounding considering the video of SegaCD games was the technological equivalent of QuickTime movies so small they would only be able to cover a human thumb nail after spending a night on the town. Oh wait, I remember, the only reason I bought this game was because it had four discs. I mean, four discs, four times the fun, right? Bring it on! Unfortunately, I never made it to Scottie Pippen, and I think the street beat music blew out my tinker toy television speaker. This game also came with a mail-in coupon sort of thing to get a free "making of Slam City" VHS tape. Of course, I took the bait. This fifteen-minute VHS tape showed me how they recorded the eight minutes of video constituting the entire game. I hate you Scottie Pippen. As for the rest, well, they're not even worth your time. Sonic CD, Chuck Rock II, Lethal Enforcers? As far as I could tell, these were merely Sega Genesis games with CD music tracks to justify putting them on SegaCD. FMV was a mistake, but nostalgia tells me otherwise. FMV: the source of severe psychological conflict since 1992. July 18th, 2005 - An open letter to Crayola Comments [98] Dear Crayola, The thunderstorms are retracting, the dark clouds are parting, and light has befallen the land in unobstructed lavishness. Not two steps out of my front door, I hear among the neighbors' chatter a sublime notion of "pretty purple flowers" thought to be lying in a flower-bed where the blue flowers presently stand. Delusional though they may be, my neighbors' empty word, their false color, their "purple" seems to invade each of my waking days. I pray for the day that I don't hear its utterance, or for the day that I may pay it no reason, but this amounts to merely more frustration. It is inescapable, this meaningless token of artistic flare. But it's not just them, my partners of neighborly inhabitation. They are pawns in a movement thrusting itself infinitely through the formless years preceding my birth. Why are there two blues? Why do they choose to call it purple this time and not the next? How did they come to centralize on this wavelength, this wavelength that does not exist? Crayola, I shall discuss with you the little matter of purple. White is every color and black is the colorless color, this is known by most. Aside from these collective color states, purple is the only color with no wavelength to call its own. As a mock blue, why would it? The color spectrum does not support such nonsense as purple. It begins at violet and ends at red, and according to psychophysics, contrary to popular belief, violet is no more than a crippled permutation of blue. Yet, they are out there, assigning a host of bewildering names to static perceptions. Admittedly, the bud of my accusation may have sprouted from arbitrariness, but the ensuing evidence I have gathered clearly surmounts bare suspicion. Thus, I must confront you with my inquiries, Crayola: Where do you base your convictions? Why do you perpetuate this myth? I grew up with your crayons, Crayola. Interspersed with the childhood confusion as to whether your products are properly referred to as "crayons", "crans", or "crowns", I drew many a portrait of my family represented with sticks standing in line under a green sun. Yes Crayola, I am color blind, but not to be discredited just yet. You held my hand on my passage through the treacherous landscape of blue plums, black blood and an unpredictable assortment of color similitude stacked side by side vertically in a cardboard box. Your labelled crayons made accurate coloring second nature, provided I was able to remember color-name to object associations. But, greedy as any industry inevitably becomes, yours hungered for colors not allotted by natural virtue. Using a shameless ploy of introducing "unnamed" colors, you successfully obfuscated the ace you've held up your sleeve for millennia, the ace of purple, the great money maker. The advent of colors without names eclipsed your ancient name without a color. With this realization, I must revise my inquiries: Was the creation of purple motivated purely by monetary gain? By what means did you plant the seed? Being a protanomalous individual, I was primed from birth to intellectually accept colors and contrasts I would never be able to see. My sleuthing demands an ability to weed proper colors, though imperceptible to me, out from your enduring shenanigans. The hindrance of my long-wavelength cone cells shackles my perception of red to a faint bellowing of what could have been. Reds are black and greens are yellow, never always, but always sometimes. Purple, however, never ceases to be blue. Well read on literature elaborating the attribution of color blindness to genetics, I cannot help but think that something of this deficiency is a relic of unperverted vision. Being that purple has no wavelength, and I claim purple as blue, I call into question the legitimacy of purple. Furthermore, I suspect that Crayola stands not for color and colorful fun, but has indeed taken a dip into genetic engineering in times many eons past. You spiked the gene pool with some type of corrosive hallucinogen, enslaving mankind's descendents to an unstable half-reality of extraneous color for profit and power. This disease has come to dominate our species so that I, one of few who still see purple for what it truly is, am said to have the deficiency. Crayola, my assignment is clear as crystal; I will remove the spectrum's gangrenous appendix, that which you call purple. I've collected empirical data underlying each facet of this travesty. Though I would surmise that your affairs with purple are shrouded by deep complexity, I find myself dauntless in efforts to crack the code. I've cultivated secrets from the nerve to which you cater so whorishly, V4, the third cortical area in the ventral stream within the occipital lobe of the primate brain. This is where your shame lies. Realizing that the neurological capacity to experience purple, should it exist, may well hide within the depths of my tissue, I resolved to absorb a hearty ration of d-lysergic acid diethylamide through my untarnished receptacles of optical purity. As hypothesized, my subsequent observation of our solar star's glare, an utterly unadulterated onslaught of wavelengths stretching past the boundaries of pragmatic concern, held not even a passive influence of purple. Either this was proof of purple's fictitious existence or the acid had failed to bleed my wavelength/qualia translations to the atrophied portions of V4. Holding out for synthesthetic potential, I employed a recently-acquired Laibach album for sonic stimulation and incrementally increased its volume to the highest decibel. Paralyzed by the unwavering grip of this chaotic energy, I came face to face with whom I believe to be your immoral ally in such pre-genesis underpinnings of molested humanoid perception. Artificially shifting my qualia set had induced a disquieting, spasmodic visualization beaming forth from a party I strongly suspect to be the windowless solids with five dimensions, those unsettling entities hinted at by the H.P. Lovecraft / Abdul Alhazred duality. Indeed Crayola, you will feel it when I've struck a nerve. Motivated by a boundless deviation from manufactured realities, a restoration of my species to nameless yet destined times, I can assure you my resistance will be nothing short of valiant. In the constricted time afforded you, maybe you too can come to seize the error of your ways. Sincerely, Dr. Rupert Collins June 4th, 2005 - Mini Muffins Comments [140] I am more afraid of bees than I am of death I've come to terms with the fact that I'm going to die someday, painfully maybe. This doesn't bother me so much. I mean, at the rate I'm falling apart, would I really want to live forever? Plus, I'm bound to get bored somewhere along the way. I don't like bees. They are the suicide bombers of the insect world. Relentless, determined, committed to their cause (flowers and such). There are several reasons I can't stand bees. First of all, just as with any insect or arachnid, they're just freaky. Armored aliens inhabiting Earth, always behind the wall or around the corner. No way to avoid them. Second, also as with spiders, I can't stand the way they move. My mind simply cannot grasp their reasons nor their methods. A spider will just sit there until you blow on it, accelerate in ways that defy time functions, scurry across the floor at Mach 4 and then stop on a dime just to sit there until you bother it again. But spiders don't twist my shit rag like bees do, and there's a reason for this. No matter what a spider decides to do, be it sit there like a sculpture or breeze across the floor with a fluidity that would make a knotted ball of black yarn yearn, the spider must remain attached to a surface of some sort. This is the rule of the spider. My defense is the third dimension. When I see a bee buzzing around out in the open, however, not only does it float around anywhere it damn well pleases, I feel like I'm hallucinating as I attempt to impose reason onto the plasticity of its trajectories. Just take a moment to think this through, "Something is piloting that flying drunk chunk of buzz. These creatures have endured the trials of evolution and emerged on the other side equipped with the mobility sense of nine finned upper-case S's falling out of a zeppelin after a pina colada party." And that's really what it comes down to. I don't have much faith that bees really know what they're doing. Can you imagine someone flying a helicopter in such a fashion? They'd get their license revoked before lunch break. In spite of all the things that could have been done right, like making bees glow in the dark or taste like Werther's Originals, someone decided to draw a weapon into the schematics. A barbed saber that shoots poison. So here we have a creature that puts gravity on pause to throw epileptic fits, knows exactly where it came from but not where it's going, shits honey, and will kill itself just to drag you along for the ride if you look at its flowers the wrong way. We have a name for these types of people in the human world: a threat to society. Earlier today, I was talking to my dad through the opened front door when something out of a sci-fi movie descended from above. Next thing I knew, a flying tank was staring me in the eye. It looked like three bumble-bees wound together with titanium razor wire sitting behind a cockpit. As I stood there calculating my next move, I finally understood something my Psychology teacher had said last semester, "Fear is the ultimate means of control because it clouds logic." And then I went upstairs to change my pants. I came out of my childhood believing that heads occur more often than tails 50/50 you say? Oh, I know the theory. And ask away. Provided I'm not heavily medicated at the time in question, if you asked me which side occurred more often, I'd reply "You're crazy. They occur equally!" A nod of approval can be so tempting at times. But deep down I know, if I'm ever in a situation involving some type of reward, I'll be damned if I don't pick heads. The heads side occurs more often. I can't give you exact probabilities here, but I'd wager to say heads occur 2/3 of the time. Don't believe me? Try flipping a coin three times. Do this now. Yeah? That's right. Math books are full of shit. Fast food restaurants are better than churches For some, the only appeal churches possess is the sense of community they bring. These people will try to trick their logical minds in any and all conceivable ways to further engulf themselves in an atmosphere of fellowship, chiseling their place in the tablet of monotony. Hey, I'm not saying community is a bad thing. All human beings need some sort of social playground on occasion, even the extremely weird and hopelessly flawed individuals. But we are presented with a conundrum. Social gatherings, by nature, will only attract people sharing at least one common interest. No organized activity can reach out to us all. Case in point: a dodgeball club. Sure, Christians, Muslims and Hindus alike can partake in the frontal-face nerf sodomization, but Brandon, the little lost boy who kicks chickens for aerobic exercise, feels a little left out and inclined to stay home the following week. This is where McDonald's comes in. It's wonderful, splendid, majestic food that does horrible, horrible things to your body. As I remarked to Drew the other day, every time I eat a McDonald's meal it's as if I've just swallowed a Jamaican and he's bobsledding his way to the toilet. McDonald's is an existential duality, one in which each and every depraved consumer feels out of place yet perfectly at oneness with himself/herself and the community at large. Everyone knows they shouldn't be there, but there they are anyway... and they'll probably be back again soon enough. No need to worry about fitting in, because not only does everyone sense their own aura of repulsion, they're keenly aware of the repulsion radiating from their fry-feasting comrades. You see, there are no standards at McDonald's. The golden arches are a capitalistic cry for unmediated variety. You needn't muzzle your free thoughts with a crucifix here, so long as you fork your money and well-being over to the crusted apple-pie overlords. So sit back, suck that triple-thick dairy-substitute EKG-linearization fluid through the clown-striped sewer pipe of a straw and realize that no one is there to judge you. You're taking a hit for the team, the team that will expend its last ounce of energy waving a collective middle finger to the healthy masses as it retracts its arm into a middle-aged coffin. We're all doomed! What's so bad about nightmares? I started wondering about this for the first time in my life about a month ago. "I can't watch horror movies or I'll get nightmares," "Don't let the kids watch this one, it will give them nightmares," "I don't want to go to sleep, I'll get nightmares!" I've never had a nightmare I wished I hadn't had. People have been throwing that word around like it's life's deadliest poison, and here I am eating nightmares up like popcorn. What could be better? They wake you up quickly, make you happy to be awake and give you something to ponder for the rest of the day. This is in stark contrast to the way I normally start my days: hitting the snooze button 14 times before pealing myself off the mattress like a sticker that's been dry-humping a biology notebook since ninth grade, then spending the morning hours thinking about coffee, Twin Peaks and firecrackers. May 25th, 2005 - Summer is here again! Comments [41] School is over. I love it. Now I can come home at 5:00pm every weekday and watch X-Play like a man with no purpose... the way things ought to be. I've been playing Shadow Man every so often, and I watched Cool As Ice. It was horrible. Not even as funny as I thought it would be either, just an overall waste of time. I worked full time last week, 40 hours. I torpedoed through this week as any programmer sliding along a PHP-lined summer Slip N' Slide should. Not just programming, but mingling with the non-student employees. The problem with office jobs is that social experiences are very limited. So, when you come into work on four hours of sleep and bump into someone in the kitchen on a quest for coffee, your chit-chat better come out like polished crystal or you'll be mulling over the awkwardness for hours to come. If only I could take my own advice. One middle-aged dude was like "How's the coffee today?" to which I replied "Oh, I don't know yet. But it doesn't really matter, I don't like coffee. I just like the way it makes me feel... like an addict." ... It's always apparent when I've said something out of place because out of nowhere the other party realizes he has a billion things he needs to take care of, none of which involve me or the kitchen. As I was saying, the 40 hours of this last work week went by in a zoned-out blaze. The reason for this? Right here: No no, I haven't succumbed to the anime craze here. I spent something like 16 hours last week at work trying to fix problems that those two characters up there created. It shouldn't have been that hard, but information on UTF-8 as applied to PHP and MySQL is scarce. My findings, in case anyone else runs into anything like this (and to add an especially esoteric paragraph to this webpage): you have to create a UTF-8 MySQL table, you have to send the command "SET NAMES 'utf8'" before entering UTF-8 data into the table, and then if a different script retrieves data out of the table, you have to send the "SET NAMES 'utf8'" command again. Then Apache web server will completely ignore your "charset-utf8" content-type meta tag like some sort of nine-year-old schoolboy hoarding his pungent rubber-gripped Shaq-ball, running along port 80 on top of a sheet of gravel in search of popularity. That "SET NAMES 'utf8'" command is an elusive one. After nearly an entire day's worth of searching to no avail, I found a page that stated the following: "If you've been doing a lot of searching on Google, and haven't been able to get things to work, this is probably the information that you haven't found. The command for this is: SET NAMES 'utf8';" I felt like hugging this guy and uploading pain to the internet at the same time. This is Digger the Dermatophyte. He is the star of the most disturbing advertisement I've ever seen on network television. Lamisil, you people have lost your minds. You can't just throw video clips of monsters tearing back toenails on TV. I'd rather see someone's foot being sawed off than even a CG representation of this toenail madness. The first time I saw this commercial I jumped out of my chair and fell sideways across my kidney. Such menacing fungus... I was eating Chinese food last week, cracked open my fortune cookie (at Panda Garden they use "Foookie" brand fortune cookies) to see what kind of vague meaningless musing bubbled up from the toilet this go around... Well, I'd say anything's better than my last fortune. Last time I cracked open a fortune cookie, the fortune went fluttering down towards the floor where my dog managed to eat it out of midair before I had a chance to read it. This did not bode well with me. Surely a normal dog would be able to tell the difference between a warped pseudo-cookie that smells like Froot Loops and a thinly cut two-dimensional sheet of bullshit tumbling down to the floor at an angle like a soiled snowflake with dementia (which in all honestly also smells like Froot Loops). But this dog is sixteen years old! She don't give a Foookie. Consequently, there's now a fortune dookie hiding somewhere out in my back yard... and I would wager than it doesn't smell quite like Froot Loops. So I cracked open my Foookie and found this: ... WHAT?! This isn't a fortune! This is a written threat forged in a futurelab to strike my core! How did they know I work? More importantly, how did they know that I'm more prone to unusual situations than the average Joe? Granted, this fortune might just as well have said "You're going to run into someone in the kitchen at work on your coffee quest."... because, as I explained above, there's no getting out of that situation alive. But I find this deeply disturbing. What happened to the days of "Your kindness is appreciated among friends and strangers alike." or "The window of opportunity draws near." How far do they plan to take this? How targeted can these messages become before everything falls apart? Truth be told, if I found that last fortune inside of a Foookie, I'd probably swallow a fistful of the closest pills I could find. This man has boobs. I'm sure we're all familiar with the "Way Back Machine" at this point. If not, head on over to archive.org and check it out. However, has anyone taken the time to see what else is on that site? My boss had told me there's a bunch of free live music from mostly no-name bands on there... I was bored enough to see what else could be hiding there. Score! There are two things worth mentioning here. First off, they have a ton of episodes of this show called "Net Café" from ~1996 (otherwise known as the year when we were all starting to get used to the internet... did animated GIFs or HTML frames exist by then?). Their first episode is about "Hackers"... they interview some people, it's pretty funny and interesting and nostalgic all at the same time. Episodes of Net Café can be found here. The other thing I found over there, the coolest thing I've found on the internet since the last batch of Shakira pictures, is a HUGE-ASS collection of video game "speed runs". Remember that Super Mario Bros. 3 video where the guy beat the game in 10ish minutes (with the help of emulator save states, but what can you do?)... archive.org has a collection of these types of videos for something like 400 games, ranging from old-school Nintendo to Xbox and PC. There's even speed runs for games that really shouldn't have speed runs, like Silent Hill 2, Fallout, Baldur's Gate and Morrowind. So how long does it take to beat Morrowind, a game that promises 100s of hours of gameplay? 14 minutes and 26 seconds, apparently. I've seen it. Lots of potions. Lots of things I don't understand going on there. I've also seen the Silent Hill 2 one, which is quite boring, as to be expected in a game with no real freedom. The Super Mario Bros. 2 one is pretty cool though. These speed runs can be found here. Also, I just saw Kevin Rose on G4 talking about quitting G4's TechTV-killing shenanigans to start making downloadable shows at systm.org. I intend to download whatever they give me... I just wish Leo and Patrick were doing this instead! April 23rd, 2005 - Unfocused and Irresponsible Consumerism Comments [91] Spend spend spend! I don't do it nearly enough, apparently! My body has built up an immunity to the hype. I am in control. Sort of. No. The vehicle of material wants is not something you should aspire to drive alone. Many years ago, something like six or seven, I decided I wanted to try to kill the impulse for buying stuff. Call it an experiment, or merely an entertaining thought; I never thought it would have worked. About a year after that decision, I found that I was spending a lot more time on my computer (which is saying a lot) and a lot less time thinking about things that I wanted (including new computers). I did it! I re-programmed the "want" center of my brain. Well, food is the exception. Food is in a class of its own, unmitigated by the logic of better judgment. All is well. Then along comes an abstract concept by the name of "credit." Back when I was working as a cashier at Sam's Club, I signed up for "Sam's Club Credit" to do my co-worker a favor by filling up her quota and getting a free phone card (which is still in it's wrapper somewhere in a dusty abyss) in the process. Of course, I didn't plan to use this credit card, but regardless, a week later I received a letter in the mail stating that I'd been denied for Sam's Club Credit. I'd been pushing these Sam's Club credit cards myself for hour after hour within the confines of my proletarian tobacco kennel. I knew how badly they wanted to give them away. They had to entice people with phone cards and basketballs to even consider signing up for the 18%-interest, plastic Schutzstaffel-economics token. And here I was holding a letter in my hands saying I'd been denied because I had no credit. This was a true kick in the financial balls. I had no option, I had to get a credit card and start building me some credit! Of course, these things tend to get put off indefinitely, so it wasn't until last January that I finally got a credit card from my bank. Before that, I had applied for an Amazon.com Visa in hopes of getting a free book or two every time I jammed a sharpened shower rod through my abdomen and started bleeding silver dollars. But alas, Amazon.com also chose to wizz on a paper towel and send it my way as an apology, padded with fluff, sprinkled with disappointment, and signed by a Xerox machine. But my bank gave me a chance! Hence, I now have to my possession a credit card plastered with mountains and snow-covered trees, an all-access pass to the realm of Alaskan consumer whoredom. Things were on the up and up, but an early omen alerted me to the fact that unspeakable things lay just around the corner. Excited about my shiny plastic rectangle, appreciative of the daring backdrop of a simple winter mountain, I showed it off to my parents to exude financial competence in a disorganized display of nothingness. Not more than two seconds after flipping the card out of my wallet, my parents were looking at it with shocked and amused faces. Shortly thereafter, my mom asked "Why did the bank send you a pink credit card?" The girl who had patiently dealt with my absurd questions and spacey nature during the application process advised me to put charges on my card every month to keep building credit. At this instant, the many years of progress I had made refuting materialistic wants and needs dissolved and trickled down my left leg into a puddle of Starbucks Caramel Mocha Frappuccino® as I felt myself once again birthing out of a cellophane uterus into the corn dog culture. This girl was suggesting... telling... nay-- ORDERING me to go out there to find stuff to buy. And she was highly attractive; those bastards played their trump card on me. This was going to be like having an allowance all over again! Indeed, things have taken a turn for the worse. Having killed off my susceptibility to hype long ago, I now find myself moseying around Wal-Mart in a daze, without a clue, trying to approximate the wants of my generation. When the disembodied voice of a vested $8.50/hour worker hails down from above, I listen to it as it delivers my desires. If candy is on sale, my purchase will be that of Skittles. If the Always-Low-Prices God expresses anxiety that the DVD bargain-bin is on the brink of combustion, I will walk back to my car that night with a bag full of Short Circuit 2 and a confused look on my face. And then there's eBay. But it's not just for the sake of my credit card any more. I'm starting to regress back to the mentality of a twelve-year-old. It all started with the Twinkies. My mom bought the movie Shrek 2 on DVD for some reason and it came with a free package of special edition, green cream Shrek Twinkies as part of the promotion. These Twinkies were given to me, and as I savored every last piece of golden-brown sponge tube infected with Shrek cream, I awakened to the fact that Twinkies were capable of filling the vast nameless void that's been brooding over my existence since the seventh grade. Reflecting back on my instructions from the bank hottie, I decided that it was my duty as a consumer to start buying a box of Twinkies every other week. As an afterthought, I realized it wouldn't be a bad idea to start taking vitamins regularly to buttress my health in the face of this all-out-assault. You can only eat three Twinkies in a row without a beverage before your esophagus morphs into a twink-laden vertical sponge organ, a scaled model of what happens to your arteries once a Twinkie approaches the proximity of your stomach. Thank goodness for Fuze's Banana Colada, a drink worth every cent of $1.69 if I have ever tasted one. Here, the scientists at Fuze have managed to combine the raw power of banana with the subtle coercion of colada. Take a sip, oh yes, you'll taste the banana, but where's the colada? The moment you decide to start casting judgments on him, Colada will burst through your bay window like a brick, hide your television remote under the couch cushion and wrap barbed wire around the meatloaf that's been sitting in your fridge for a week and a half. And the coffee filters? Yep. Gone. When you start hanging out around Safeway at 2:00am, you will meet some interesting characters. Like the drunk bum who walked up to Drew and I, pointed backwards and told us that some guy in a truck was hitting him with a long piece of rubber. "... What?" was our initial response. "A guy in a truck swung a hose at me!" This bum had lost his mind. I turned around to scoff at the thin air he had been pointing to, only to meet the gaze of a hooligan sitting within the sanctity of his truck swinging some sort of rubber hose in circles, grinning mischievously, screaming a contemporary Safeway-parking-lot battle cry in our direction. Indeed, we had all lost our minds by now. The bum wanted some money to buy a burger (alcohol). Drew gave him a couple bucks, and as we walked away, I heard the bum mutter "Well, that's a start." Into Safeway we strode, to examine their overpriced wares pitched every hour of every day save for Christmas. Not five minutes after entering the fortress, with Drew holding a container of orange juice and I a box of Twinkies, another bum walks up to us and asks if we were ready to check out. "Yes. Why yes we are. So what is it that you're about to propose?" He laid out his plan in full, "You give me what you want to buy and the money to pay for it. I'll pay for it with food stamps, and give it back to you. That way I can get money for my food stamps." We went for it, confused about the ethics of it all. We watched from a distance as this man paid for a box of ten Twinkies and a half gallon of orange juice with food stamps, making sure that he didn't simply run off into the sunset with our purchases. He lived up to his word! He gave us back out products, shook our hands, and we were off! Into the van we go, to eat our Twinkies and drink our orange juice. We look out the window to see the bum, the one Drew had given $2.00 to, walking towards the Safeway liquor store to see if it had opened yet... it was only about 2:15am by this point. After finding that it was still closed, this bum walked back out of the store and toward Drew's van. Drew started the van, we drove to the opposite end of the parking lot, and sat there for about ten seconds before realizing the bum had altered his trajectory to compensate for our movement and was once again heading straight towards us. We waited until he got near, put the van into drive, swung around the backside of Safeway back towards the other end of the parking lot, and bought some fries at the 24-hour McDonald's drive-through. Eating fries, we waited for the bum to get close to us again, and then drove back around Safeway to park at the opposite end of the parking lot. We did this for about half an hour, the whole while killing ourselves with junk food and bewilderment. This week has been anything but restful. Normally I drink coffee when I'm dead tired, but I'm getting tired of how jumpy it makes me. Maybe energy drinks are a bunch of hocus pocus, but this week I decided to see how well they worked. Monster Energy is the name of the game! I just don't feel right spending $2.00 on an 8.3oz can of Red Bull, so 16oz it is. Also, whereas coffee and Red Bull taste like different coordinates of the crap spectrum, Monster Energy tastes like something between bubbly gummy bears and unused baby wipes... which is to say, pretty good. So hell, if these things really make you die a slow death like some people seem to believe (I'm not arguing), they should not taste this good! This is bad! And listen to this tag line here, it made me proud to spend $2.49 on the drink: Tear into a can of the meanest energy supplement on the planet, MONSTER energy. We went down to the lab and cooked up a double shot of our killer energy brew. It's a wicked mega hit that delivers twice the buzz of a regular energy drink. The MONSTER packs a vicious punch but has a smooth kick ass flavor you can really pound down. So when it's time to unleash the beast within, grab a MONSTER and GO BIG! Once you're done laughing, try switching your mind to gullible mode and read it over again! That can be a pretty persuasive tag line when you've had four hours of sleep for three days in a row and want to believe anything. So, I drank three of these drinks throughout the course of the week before noticing a small warning on the can, "Drink responsibly, do not exceed three cans per day." I looked up all of the "energy" ingredients on Wikipedia in an effort to understand this poison. Research was inconclusive for the most part, since no one seems to know what any of these things actually do. They should throw magnets in there too, because I'm convinced no one knows what the hell those are all about. "Energy" ingredients include: taurine, panax ginseng root extract, guarana seed extract, carnitine, and the usual suspects, caffeine, sucrose, and glucose. I figure I'm safe because these ingredients will need to eat through the layer of twink lining my stomach before any ulcers can form. On my search to find out what was in this drink, as well as what it would do to me, I went to Monster Energy's website, to the downloads section, and found this: Somehow that seems to make everything all right. A couple weekends ago, I was at Wal-Mart walking past those damn quarter machines again. Inside of one, I saw a huge pile of smiley faces looking up at me. The machine said "High Bouncing Ball" on the the front of it. Well, as you might have guessed, I was in the mood for a high bouncing ball that day. I shuffled around in my pocket and produced a quarter with Massachusetts on its face. I knelt down to put the quarter in, shocked to find that there was no place to put the quarter. Underneath the pile of smiley faces was a blank red panel penetrated by screws. I will not be denied! Drew and I fumbled around with this machine like a couple of monkeys trying to figure out where to stick the quarter. This seemed to go on for hours before a girl came up behind us and asked me if I wanted the ball. I said "Yes, I want my high bouncing ball!" She said "Why don't you put the quarter in that machine over there?" and pointed to the left of all of the little quarter machines. They were networked and computerized! Foiled again! If this story sounds cute to you, I should point out that this girl was around 17 years old. But I couldn't be too down. After all, I now owned a smiling high bouncing ball... but it was a friggin ping pong ball! Not a bouncy ball. Damn those people! As if the green apple bubble gum wasn't bad enough! What the hell am I supposed to do with a ping pong ball? Well, take pictures of it apparently. My spending has continued down this spiral. I have reverted back to my old habits of buying old games. I didn't want to buy a PSP after seeing its cool demo video of Wipeout Pure, even after I realized this is what I'm supposed to want. Instead, it urged me to buy Wipeout 3 for Playstation 1. Good thinking Muffin. And then that reminded me that I wanted to buy Shadow Man for Nintendo 64, a game like Zelda: Ocarina of Time with voodoo and profanity. Nothing has any congruity anymore. At least I can take solace in the fact that none of my sporadic spending amounts to anything more than $20 at a time. In fact, I don't think I've spent more than $50 this month, if it weren't for that damn Colorama bowling. Check out the screenies! Then, just as I realized this had to stop, the dirtiest thought sprouted from the shady corners of my mind. What is the one thing that absolutely nobody wants or needs? What is the one thing that, if I bought it, there would be universal agreement that yes, I had just thrown my money into a vortex which benefits no one in any way imaginable. What is the one thing that shouldn't be on my mind when it's 4:30am on a school night and I am dead tired? The one thing that has no justification regardless of how you look at it... Cool As Ice Starring Vanilla Ice Yes sir! I have only seen about 20 seconds of this film, when VH1 showed a clip of it in the midst of tearing it apart. I knew, right then and there, that this film was my destiny. A film so treacherously bad that it simultaneously appears on IMDb's Worst 100 Movies list while receiving endless praise naming it the funniest movie ever made by man. A rare film that continues to be sold on eBay and Half.com for $18 because people simply want to laugh at it. This is the only product I've seen on eBay in which every auction lists how horrible it is as its selling point. But I didn't want to spend $18 for a VHS tape, and this movie (not surprisingly) has never been released on DVD. Nevertheless, there were auctions for a DVD version of Cool As Ice stretching out for eternity... Bootlegs! Someone in Asia decided to make a DVD version of Cool As Ice mastered from a VHS tape. This person is a true hero. So, sometime in the next week I will be receiving a sub-crap quality DVD of Cool As Ice in the mail with optional Chinese subtitles. As a reviewer on IMDb stated, Do what ever it takes to see this film. Beg, borrow, steal or even buy it. For all those who still wear Day-glo clothing or caps with polished metal logos, who still shave lines into their eyebrows or just consider themselves romantics, Vanilla will reinforce what you already know: You are Cool as Ice. I almost didn't buy it, but then I saw this picture and knew that I had no choice: March 16th, 2005 - The Many Faces of Sleep Comments [81] It is now spring break, and not a moment too soon. This semester has just made the transition from something that is manageable to something that is hitting the fan. But nothing about it is particularly interesting, so here I am with another list update! Because everyone loves lists! And when I use lists, I get to use this technique I learned about in Technical Writing called "chunking". How can you go wrong with chunks? Since my last update, a 23-pound lobster named Bubba died. Godspeed Bubba. I am on page 356 of the 504 pages of this Nazi Doctors book and it just got a lot weirder. The sun is coming out of its cave, and Drew was right, the French Dip at Quiznos is spectacular. The Many Faces of Sleep I have lived in this world for nearly 22 years now. These 22 years have afforded me a host of opportunities to experience the many faces of sleep: the eight hours used to recharge the body and soul, and the vast array of missed opportunities resulting from an otherwise healthy sleep paddle-boating in a river next to the power plant. I spend most of my waking hours excited about going back to sleep, and somehow, through forces beyond my control, I always wake up the next morning feeling like a chicken nugget. It's never natural. I come home with the intention of investing eight hours of my time into the sleep machinery, and what pops out looks like something that's been smeared across the backside of a fun-house mirror. A complete and utter travesty. And then the rest of the day I feel like I'm dragging along a 400-pound LSD baby in a little red wagon for sixteen hours to the next twilight of failed opportunity. For some obscure therapeutic reason, I felt it necessary to sit down and profile these ubiquitous moon demons. This list is sorted by difficulty of sleeping phenomenon, from easy to difficult. The Dorito-Breathing Dragon - Difficulty: 01 You don't even have to try to accomplish this, it just seems to happen. The Dorito-Breathing Dragon is a phenomenon that everyone has experienced at least four times in their life. The premise is simple. After the day has come to a complete end, after you have brushed your teeth or whatever it is you do after the day has wrapped up (you sick bastard), you turn on Adult Swim, get bored during a commercial break, find a crumpled up bag of Doritos under your pillow, and ingest. Please note, this works with an assortment of other foods that come in crunchy bags, but Doritos give an unparalleled effect. Other candidates are Cheetos, Funyuns, or these weird Honey Mustard and Onion sourdough pretzel bit things that don't belong on this planet much less water-sliding down my gastrointestinal track. Consume them by the mouthful. Consume them until you fall asleep choking on one of the brittle triangular corn-swords. When you awaken from your slumber, you will be breathing something that is not quite air and not remotely enjoyable either. The taste that kept you awake for ten additional minutes the night before has spent the past eight hours playing cricket in a sewer underneath a stink factory. For the next sixteen hours, you will feel like a walking sand dune of stale cheese. You brought this upon yourself, you piece of shit. The Crisis of Dawn - Difficulty: 02 This one is not difficult in the slightest, except that it requires a bit of preliminary planning and setup. Have you ever noticed how the morning of any big event seems rather nervous and terrifying, whether it be the day of a speech you have to give in a class or your first day of a new job? Obviously, sleeping lowers your psychological defenses. Now, if given the opportunity to ponder the big events yet to happen in one's life, most young adults would decide that marriage or having a child are the major milestones. Not me! I realized that death is the highest bidder in this category. Thus, to test this theory of sleep inhibiting my psychological defenses, I found a pad of Post-It notes that in all likelihood could have been pink, and wrote "You Will Die" on the top sheet. I placed this Post-It note on the side of my shelf next to my bed and proceeded to enter the dreamy land of candy canes and lollipops. When I woke up, I found a Post-It note of undefinable color trying to communicate an important message to me. As I read this Post-It note, I could feel the life being scooped out of me as if I were the morbid 32nd flavor of Baskin Robbin's glutinous freezer cream. A pinkish square paper with an ingeniously convenient adhesive strip had kick-started my day down a path of despair. I spent the rest of the day trying to find the justice in this. Why put us here if we can't stay here? I was there before I was born, but how can I possible go back? And then for an extra shot of fun, try thinking of having your arm amputated. The Crisis of Dawn should at avoided by all costs. The Sampler / Eins Zwei Tod - Difficulty: 03 Although this type of sleep has a difficulty of 03, I find myself taking part in it much more often than I would prefer. This is the type of sleep that is most commonly associated with college. The Sampler refers to the process of getting no more than three hours of sleep in a given night. In the past, I had come up with a theory that if you can't get at least three hours of sleep, you should not go to sleep at all. Over the last year, I came to doubt this theory (mainly because I just really wanted to go to sleep regardless of how long I could stay there), but alas, it's true. When your alarm goes off after two and a half hours of sleep, the obnoxious buzzing seems more like a suggestion than a command. There's no need to hit the snooze button because the buzzing never wakes you up in the first place. You proceed to sleep two to three hours past your alarm, with all sorts of disturbing dreams of red lights flashing, nuclear weapon silos crumbling and a huge iron hawk falling out of the heavens to grind your skull between it's large titanium molars. On rare occasions you'll manage to wake up on time, in which case you will be a zombie, some type of creature sunken eighteen inches into a perpetual pile of physical and intellectual quicksand, expending monstrous amounts of effort just to mobilize from point A to point B while your eyes burn with the sting of invisible banshees creating a whirlwind of salt before each successive step that you take. The Green Mile - Difficulty: 03 The Green Mile is the converse of The Sampler. The Green Mile is when you fall asleep at around 10:00 PM or midnight and wake up three to four hours later, fully rested, with unusual clarity of mind. The first time you experience this, you feel that you've somehow stumbled upon the Garden of Eden. And then you will discover, as we all have, that this is just a cruel joke. That "well-rested" hoax gradually deteriorates before your very essence. Determined to stay the course, you make a pot of coffee, throw ice cubes in it until it reaches lukewarm temperature, and guzzle that fucker down like it were strawberry-kiwi Gatorade. By the time the 4:00 AM reruns of Saved By The Bell bloom from the rosey petals of The Superstation, you feel like a yogurt-filled rubber band being plucked by Folger's twitch-liquid. Your eyes stop listening to your brain and start falling asleep on their own. Rays of sunshine penetrate through the blinds, kicking you in your spongy cranial web of pseudo-consciousness for ever challenging the unwritten laws of sleep. The time comes for you to leave the house, and so off you go, a ticking time-bomb navigating an automobile through morning traffic on a glistening sheet of ice. Cryogenesis - Difficulty: 05 This is another phenomenon that is not particularly difficult to accomplish given the right circumstances, but the effort required to recover or otherwise deal with this atrocity is demanding of higher digits. Cryogenesis is what I consider the last-ditch solution for falling asleep. The cold will kick your ass, regardless of what insomnia has to say about it. It's simple! Can't sleep? Is it winter? Open a window! Voila! But don't come crying to me when you wake up 14 hours later, blue, stiff and crawling out of your death-bed seeing each puff of your breath in abnormal detail. Be conservative in your love affairs with the cold, it can tear friendships apart. Case in point: one time while I was spending the night at my friend Jeff's house in 1997, he opened the window wide open just before we each fell asleep and the temperature dropped by 40 degrees to something like -20° throughout the night. It was at least twelve hours before one of us woke up. After we were both awake, we proceeded to hurl profanities at each other between bouts of falling back asleep to get up and close the window before we simply died beneath our respective blankets. Crawling out from underneath your blanket when it's -20° in your room is something of an Olympic-caliber feat. But it doesn't stop there. You'll find it impossible to heat back up for the remainder of the day. The cold has seeped into your bones and no warm shower or hot chocolate will undo your lapse in judgement. The Neurocinematic Brain Assimilation - Difficulty: 06 Have you ever fallen asleep during a movie? Have you ever woken up after a quick ten-minute nap during a movie not sure if you'd actually been asleep, and for how long? Most importantly, have you ever had one of these moments where you realized the movie you are watching somehow summarized your entire day in one scene in suspicious detail, though you cannot put your finger on what exactly happened? This is the Neurocinematic Brain Assimilation, and it's the reason why I don't try to stay awake during movies anymore. Movies are a lot more fun when they fuse with your brain to become one big question mark. This has happened to me through several movies. It's worth pointing out, however, that I fell asleep during these movies because I was dead tired, not because the movies were bad or boring. I've done this through Dune, Alien, Pirates of the Caribbean and Eraserhead (though Eraserhead is kind of like watching a dream to begin with). During the summer of 2003, when I was working at Sam's Club as a cashier, after seven straight days of work, and after having been awake for 33 hours the moment I got off of work on the seventh day, I went to the first showing of the movie Pirates of the Caribbean by myself. I sat in the back of the theater and fell asleep almost immediately. I estimate that I witnessed no more than 1/3 of the actual movie, the rest was filled in by thoughts of my day and just random thoughts in general. As a result, Pirates of the Caribbean is the biggest mystery of a movie I have ever seen in my life. Out of all the chunks of the movie I saw between long stretches of sleep, I cannot piece together what order they happened in. Moreover, I can't even tell you what parts were actually part of the movie and what parts didn't happen at all. You might think me a fool for spending $5.50 to go into a theater to sleep, but this was such a baffling part of my life that I would do it over again for 3x as much money. And I refuse to watch this movie again because such an act might unravel the incredible mystery that I like to think and worry about whenever I get bored. Choose Your Own Adventure - Difficulty: 07 There is a phenomenon known as "lucid dreaming" where you can supposedly take command of your dreams and do whatever it is you please. This has never happened to me. On the other hand, somewhere between sleep and not-sleep, I have stumbled upon a weird phase of existence I like to call Choose Your Own Adventure. Sometime when you're super tired or very worn out, try laying down with the intention of resting but not going to sleep. There's a one-in-ten chance that you'll fall into a Choose Your Own Adventure state of mind. You will not take complete control of your dreams, whether they are actually dreams or merely vivid thoughts, but you will be able to radiate tremendous quantities of influence over your sublime musings, which have now taken off at 800mph through a meat-processor of scrambled logic. I swear, if you can sort things out and realize what is happening before you either wake back up or fall completely asleep, you'll be able to conceive of ten new inventions, piece together the gaps in M-Theory, and solve the riddles of human consciousness in fifteen minutes under the shroud of this bizarre state of mind. Or you could be like me and waste it thinking about school and how much it sucks. But now in Dolby 7.1 with a featherless raven riding a Tonka truck through checkstand seven. The Great Alaskan 7:00 FM - Difficulty: 08 If you don't live in Alaska, try to stay with me on this one! In Alaska, especially in Fairbanks, we have some pretty messed up patterns of sunlight. In the winter, we will get down to about four hours of sunlight, meaning it's dark for the other 20 hours of the day, and pitch black for about eighteen of those hours. You can run wild with the implications, it's like a kaleidoscope of fun (or depression, whatever works for you). The bizarre part of this, besides feeling like you're living in outer space on occasion, is that you can fall asleep at virtually any time of the day and wake up in complete darkness. Now imagine being an individual who sleeps like me, with no organized flow or pattern. Sometimes I'll fall asleep at 10:00 PM, sometimes at 4:00 PM, sometimes at 4:00 AM, sometimes in two shifts, sometimes in three shifts, and all of these scenarios can play out within a single week. During the middle of December, sometimes I'll wake up in complete darkness and have no clue whatsoever what time it is, or subsequently, what day it is. One fateful night during the month of December 1999, I woke up in complete darkness after months of my sleep patterns bouncing around like a 50-cent rubber ball out of a Safeway quarter-crap machine. The power must have gone out during my sleep because my alarm clock and the clock on my VCR were both flashing some bogus time rounded off to the hour, there was a strange beeping sound emanating distantly outside my window, and my room had vibes of cold and isolation. I realized, as any grounded man would, that I had stumbled across 7:00 FM on the eighth day of the week, Yalisday. I felt a pressing obligation to do my chickenshit high-school physics homework, but at this moment I was no longer a creature of Earth, so why bother. The Life Siphon - Difficulty: 09 I don't remember the last time I had a flu, but I used to get them about once every year, and I would get them bad. I hesitate to use the term "hallucinate" because I never actually saw or heard anything out of the ordinary (for the most part), but when my fever sky-rocketed, there would be some obvious kinks in my thought process. One time while I was in high school, I caught the greatest flu of them all. It's never hard to tell when I'm afflicted with a very high fever because everything becomes terrifying all at once. Nearby objects seem to stretch out before me, and walking becomes nearly impossible. After contracting this flu of flus, after recognizing the trademark stretching of my living room, I psyched myself up for an hour to crawl to my room and into my bed. Have you ever heated up cheddar cheese in the microwave so long that it completely flattens out, bubbles, sizzles, turns brown and when touched, feels like it's 970°? That is how I felt at this moment. I slept what turned out to be 25 hours that night, I kid you not. I fell asleep at 7:00 PM, woke up at 8:00 PM and was confused that I could be so rested after only an hour of sleep, only to find out that an entire day had passed. Throughout these 25 hours of sleep, I recall waking up several times to try and figure out what time it was. I would stare at the digital clock on my VCR for tens of minutes at a time to try and decipher what the glowing symbols were supposed to represent. Indeed, the colorful little kinks were now sprinkling over me as if I were a very sick slice of chocolate cake. I remember one distinct time throughout the night/day when I was desperate for a cup of water because I was damn-near about to evaporate. I never got around to this, not only because I had little faith in my ability to walk at that moment, but because I wasn't sure how to politely inform the three Komodo dragons I believed to be under my blanket that there would not be enough water for them, should they want any. I made it to the bathroom sometime throughout the course of this horrendous sleep, was afraid to open the door to leave because I thought I was inside the stomach of a large lizard, and slept on the bathroom floor for something along the lines of an hour. When I finally made it back to my bed, I fell asleep and had nightmares about Tetris. However, this game of Tetris was played over a horizontal plane rather than a vertical one, all the blocks were very large and the same color, and there was a turbulent orb of bluish liquid observing the game from the north-east corner. The Quantum Coffee Nebulizer - Difficulty: 10 If you ever needed proof that coffee is just two brain aneurysms short of a methamphetamine, the Quantum Coffee Nebulizer will argue in your favor. There used to be a time when I thought the best path towards adjusting my sleep schedule was to consume massive amounts of coffee to stay awake until my desired time of sleep. I was a foolish one! As summer was just starting to begin one year, after I had officially been hired by the Institute of Broken Dreams (Sam's Club) and awaited my first day of work, I decided I should aspire to be alert and awake on this crucial nerve-racking day. Unfortunately, my sleep patterns presently constituted the photographic negative of a working man's day. Much as a man with little patience bangs his fist against a television to fix any of a wide range of problems, I proceeded to bang my nervous system with a drink that should by all means require a prescription. I drank a pot of coffee, twelve cups, within an hour. And then, of all the ungodly things that were never meant to happen, I fell asleep immediately. Moments later, in the defiled sanctity of my dreams, I found myself trapped inside a wind tunnel, one that stretched for miles in complete darkness. Whole galaxies and miniature black holes swarmed past me with bright brush-strokes of primary colors, often alternating between green and yellow as the third, never-elusive but always-indecisive prime color. I woke up every three minutes throughout the entirety of this six-hour nervous breakdown, and every three minutes I thought half an hour had passed since the last time I woke up. When all was said and done, after I had awakened for the final death-defying moment, I thought I had been sleeping for something in the ball park of three weeks. This has never happened to me again, and although this seemed like a highly efficient way to approach sleep, nothing about it oozed an aura of health. Speaking of health, I still have a slice of prime-rib meat-lover's pizza in the fridge to finish. February 19th, 2005 - Analysis of Crunk Juice Comments [48] Here it is folks, the McGriddle of the hip-hop scene. Although this album was released on November 16th, 2004, I just recently obtained it through a mystical means which shall not be discussed *cough* Russia! After two weeks of eight-hour physics homework assignments, I decided to take another stab at listening to music while I do homework. For me, this process of mishing music with mashing homework has a modest 20% success rate. It simply does not work with written assignments. The music just seeps into my head and, unbeknownst to me, rearranges words and sentence structure like a four-year-old jamming ambition into the square slot of Perfection. Next thing I know, the last three pages of my Ethics paper on Iraq discusses the finer points of cake frosting and how Saturday could one-up Friday if it smelled more like gasoline. Nevertheless, every once in a while I find that I am perfectly capable of enjoying music while I work on math-ish assignments. Since I have already completed the math requirements for Computer Science, as well as the additional class required for my Pineapple-Insertion minor (I picked up the "Declaration of Minor" form yesterday, I'm going to declare myself as a minor and hand out fire-flavored Jolly Ranchers during recess), only physics remains. But physics is a bitch, so there's plenty of time for music. After bombarding my audio sense with mounds of industrial music, I decided it was time once again to delve into the overworld of mainstream Big Macs and symphonic grilled chicken sandwiches. After contacting Russia, they beamed down to me the Black Eyed Peas album Elephunk. First in Ogg Vorbis format, but after discovering that the equalizer in XMMS doesn't seem to process Ogg Vorbis output, and that in the presence of bass-like vibrations, my five-year-blown-out speakers were erupting with strange orange fuzzy buzzes tuned to the Tang frequency, I opted for a more MP3esque alternative. Then, after giving Elephunk a good solid listen through and through, it dawned on me that this album would be far too distracting to perform concurrent thermodynamic calculations. So, like a dumbass, I said to myself "Well hey, what about Lil Jon's Crunk Juice (the album, not the actual juice)? That can't possibly be distracting." Moments later, I was locked and loaded, processing the ideal gas law in assorted configurations and sexual positions, the giant ship on my 80-pound physics book laughing as he had his way with me for hour after hour. I spent nine hours on the physics homework for this week, and every single one of those nine hours was also spent bathing in Crunk Juice, a resounding stream of destabilizing styrofoam coffee cups warping in and out of my consciousness on an endless loop. If Crunk Juice were a religion, I would now be the robed figure grinding against the backside of a podium chucking wiffle-ball-sized crack rocks at my subordinates. I am the closest thing you will find to a crunk scholar, and this would have never happened if not for physics. THE MUSIC As I was obtaining this album, I read some reviews so I could know exactly what I was getting myself into. People spoke of the XXX-rated lyrics, the energy, the chaos, the weird symbols glowing around them as Lil Jon spoke his gospel. To me, nothing this stupid can be XXX-rated, despite the language used. How long can an angry black man alternate between screaming "fuck" and "skeet" before it starts to sound like a bizarre form of Morse Code? I think I may have written "skeet" for the answer on three of my physics problems because after five hours of this nonsense, "skeet" started to sound like "seven". Admittedly, about half of the consumer-reviews for this album were negative, accusing it of being the demise of hip-hop or not hip-hop at all. It is the McGriddle. Something different, something fresh! It doesn't taste like beef or chicken because it's made of embryos and pancakes! And don't you dare eat more than two of them in one sitting. You'll be blasting bits of egg (or knowledge, as it were) out your nose and into the toilet before sun-down. We've all seen the Dave Chappelle skits, but you wouldn't believe just how hard he hit the nail on the head. There are eight Yeahs and two Whats on the first track alone, and the first track is only 56 seconds long. THE GUEST STARS Speaking of Dave Chappelle, the star power present on this album is just baffling. There is actually a 45-second clip of Chappelle's Show in one of the songs where Dave Chappelle is making fun of Lil Jon. It's not part of one of the skits, but is instead Dave on stage making fun of the word "skeet". So it's not a skit, it's a skeet. Somewhere in the middle of this Chappelle clip, you hear a big "WWWHAT?!?!" swooping in out of nowhere like a shimmering eagle descending to Earth to capture its prey. I have no idea whether that was Dave Chappelle's or Lil Jon's WHAT?!, they are exactly the same thing, and it came out of nowhere. Every hour of physics homework, when the album looped back around and that one particular WHAT?!?! came flying out of the speaker as a bat out of Hell, my brain went "Holy shit! Abort!" and all unrecorded physics progress dislodged from the think-zone and fell as a glob of thermal paste onto my TI-30X IIS portable calculating machine. The list of hip-hop/R&B/black artists appearing on this album knows no bounds. But I'll list them anyway! The ones I've heard of before, anyhow. Ice Cube, Usher, Ludacris, R. Kelly, Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Nas, and Ying Yang Twins. That's about 1/3 of the total number of guest stars. Which makes me wonder, if this album is the demise of hip-hop, how did they secure so many popular artists in the genre. I have a theory. Crunk Juice is a very stinky 75-minute outhouse with an incredible gravitational force sitting out in the hills just beyond city limits. Rap stars cannot come anywhere near it without being sucked in, and then they open the door and see all the weird turds plopped down by 10s of stars before them, in various shapes, colors and aromatic poignancies, signed in blood, corn, and other things that dare not be named, and they say to themselves "Well shit, I can do that too!" Then they propel out their own dirty dignity nugget. We even get to hear Ice Cube, a man who starred in a movie named Barbershop, talk about everyone being afraid of him. CHRIS ROCK The reigning king of all things that don't make sense on this album is Chris Rock. There are three short tracks where Chris Rock seems to have washed ashore from his declining career to shout proof of Blackism in a voice 3x as agitating as I remember it being. He is on a mission to prove something, though, try as I might, I cannot identify exactly what it is. It's like that horrible moment that occurs every year on Thanksgiving. Everyone's sitting around in the living room smelling potatoes and the turkey in the oven, there's Christmas music playing, and McCauley Culkin is on the television. After hours of family warmth and story-telling, everyone sits around the candle-lit table to enjoy the feast of interracial friendship. And then the person sitting two seats to the left, whose plate is loaded up with the driest of white meat, cuts a little too deep. The knife scrapes across the plate, producing an atrocious soundscape of twenty hands molesting ten chalkboards, wailing Native Americans holding their dead children and turkeys gobbling into the graying horizon carrying the dead weight of smallpox-infected blankets. That sound, that cut that resonates through the spirit of Thanksgiving each and every hopeless year, that is the Chris Rock of Crunk Juice. At one moment, Chris Rock appears to be taking every measure necessary to ensure that he never receives poon again in his life, then he's talking about doing taxes in a club, and then he flip-flops back to the anti-poon sentiment. His voice has taken on a new type of complexity. At first it sounds like his vocal cords have started to decompose amidst impending career obscurity, but if you turn down the bass, up the treble, and run these tracks through Sound Forge's "Bitter Truth" filter, you can hear Chris Rock whispering "Dave Chappelle is what I should have been" as he rattles on with an endless string of unfunny sandpaper speak. THE WAL-MART FACTOR As I was contemplating how I might go about writing an assload of text about Crunk Juice, I entertained the possibility of presenting MP3 samples for you fellow readers to witness the brutality first-hand. This would have to be done carefully, no doubt. I checked out Amazon.com, only to find that they have samples strictly in WMA and RealAudio format. No thank you. Thus, I started harassing the Google to give me MP3 samples. After a multi-minute-long journey, I happened upon a damaged oasis of defiled gold, walmart.com. Wal-Mart, the store that refuses to sell albums with explicit lyrics, has 30-second MP3 samples of every track on Crunk Juice. I realized, of course, that these must be censored versions of the songs. My next thought was then, "How exactly does one go about censoring an album named Crunk Juice?" For one thing, four of the songs are named "Real Nigga Roll Call", "Don't Fuck Wit Me", "Aww Skeet Skeet", and "Bitches Aint Shit". Well, the answer, more or less, is to turn the songs into techno music, which comes close to describing the aftermath of some of the tracks. And check out the censored version of the Chris Rock track below. It's like listening to a battery being sucked up a vacuum cleaner while you're sniffing markers. FINAL VERDICT: It sucks but I like it! LINKS Chris Rock failing at humor (Wal-Mart remix) Bastardized Crunk Juice Samples Rare photograph of Lil Jon without shades Bad Dudes on Wikipedia January 29th, 2005 - Spring 2005 Classes: Part II Comments [147] Dear Journal, it's me, Doug-- I mean UltraMuffin. I've had exactly seven days of school so far this semester and it's already almost in full-swing. I have now had a physics lab and also Technical Writing. I was pretty dang nervous before my Physics lab because, well, you know how labs are. You walk in the door and choose a seat. If you manage to sit next to the wrong person, you must now endure 14 weeks of discomfort. Unless of course you are willing to make a bold move in the social game of chess, that is, pick a different seat next time, imposing discomfort onto the new person you chose to sit next to, knowing full-well you just forced one of their former khaki-brandishing lab partners to the front-line where they will point and plot against you for the 13 remaining weeks. Incredibly, I actually got lucky and seem to have fallen into a rather decent group. I've never had a group like this. There's no definitive group leader and there's no slacker either, we're all just doing our part to wade through this travesty of science without making it any less pleasant than it need be. And wouldn't you know it, this lab decided to kick off the semester by testing our patience, making our group, one of six, measure 28 steps on a staircase three times each. Woooo. It's like they reached into my head and pulled out my very notion of computer science and designed a lab out of it. I mean, why else would I be counting 28 steps three times each if not to enhance my programming career? After our part was done, while we waited for two of the other groups to finish constructing their ginger bread house and Lego pirate ship, respectively, my group sat around talking about how Calculus III can go fuck itself. And until someone proves that it can't, it surely can. I also had my first Technical Writing class. I have no idea how one thing led to another during that class, but somehow we all ended up standing around a campfire singing Kumbaya. I think this woman is some kind of nihilist, "I know you're here on Wednesday night because you want to get this over with. That's fine, I will aid you in obliterating The Man. But if you're planning to cross me, I'll drop your ass right now. Now form a flesh donut and spill your guts, my minions of English." That's pretty much what it was like. But it's perfect! This class is "oral intensive", which means we'll be doing plenty of presentations, but this weird touchy-feely bootcamp atmosphere she established over the course of two hours already has us feeling like a family. This crazy woman knows exactly what she's doing. Some 50 year old dude with thinning blond hair and a pony tail, whom I'd never seen before, crept up behind me on the way out of the classroom, started putting on a black knit winter hat, and said "Hey look, I'm Jay and Silent Bob's dad!" And somehow the social spiderweb this black widow had been spinning for two hours past made this kind of interaction completely and utterly welcomed, I conversed back to this unusual fellow briefly and without that typical sense of social taboos inhibiting my thoughts, "We should stick flagpoles through gorillas and herd them to the East in hopes of constructing a trans-Atlantic meat and metal gorilla bridge." I don't know what I was expecting when I stepped into Technical Writing class, but rest assured, it probably wasn't this. We were assigned to groups for future group projects and told to come up with names. My group's name is Ninja Pirates from Outer Space and surprisingly enough, that wasn't even my suggestion. This class would have been perfect if she hadn't told us we would be quizzed on our 100-page reading assignment. And psychology is cool! I forgot what it was like to actually be interested in the words coming out of a teacher's mouth. Of course, these words are not without anomalies. For some inane reason beyond the scope of logical explanation, our teacher started comparing psychology to physics. Even though I wasn't particularly paying attention, I could sense the progression into this strange oranges vs. apples intellectual jihad because I began to hear the undeniable sound of a $4,000 treadmill grinding against a frozen Butterball turkey, accented with strange scents of cinnamon and steaming sulfur. The teacher wrote a physics equation on the board to try and draw parallels between physics and psychology. He wrote "WEIGHT x DENSITY = MASS" and then hesitated long enough for the resident physics scholar to interrupt and correct him, "It's WEIGHT x MASS = DENSITY", to which the teacher replied "Oh, that's right!" (without a hint of sarcasm, I might add). Of course, I was already kind of zoning in and out by this time and it wasn't until five minutes later I looked at those equations and thought to myself "Did someone just smear a piece of lawn fudge on the marker board or has physics just been attempted?" It only took a minute to figure out what the teacher meant to write, but I spent the remaining 27 minutes of class trying to decipher the subsequent trainwreck claimed by a student to be a correction. And then I transcribed this weird mess down in my notebook so I could report about it later. This has proven to be a worthy endeavor. I took this class for fun and now I can't let my guard down lest I unlearn physics amidst the billowing funk of melted turkey. At work, I'm being taught how to set up the "Access Grid Node" which is like an access point for a giant global university webcam network. Basically ARSC's job is to set up a couple computers to project webcam broadcasts and remote PowerPoint shows onto a big screen, along with microphones and speakers so students can come in and listen and participate in lectures being given by some dude across the country. After it is all set up, one of ARSC's student assistants parks in this room for 1-3 hours to make sure everything's going smoothly. The cool part is, it appears that this Access Grid Node is used exclusively for lectures about the brain. A bearded fellow in Montana was lecturing to a bunch of graduate students through a $30 piece of technology more commonly known as the "Whore Tool", "The Eye of the Skank", or "RegretUSB" about strange brain disorders, and I actually already knew a lot of what he was talking about just by reading that V.S. Ramachandran book! They should have let me do the lecture! I could eat paste on webcam and tell everyone how fucking hardcore I am. January 21st, 2005 - Some stuff and some other stuff Comments [67] This semester is already shaping up to be pretty good! I don't even give a damn if it's good, just as long as it's not like last semester. I have yet to have Technical Writing, which is a one-day-a-week Wednesday night class, and I haven't had a lab for this semester's Physics class either, so perhaps I am speaking too soon, but I don't think either of them can break what I have going on here. First off, Physics 212: Well, it's going to be extremely difficult and suck an equally substantial slice of ass, but I knew this was coming since last semester, so that's not enough to ruin my buzz. Senior Project, well, I was getting a little nervous about this class (despite it being a "Knoke class", a phrase which has all the meaning in the world to Computer Science majors), because for this class we will be assembling into groups and using our mad Software Engineering skittlez to develop a piece of software for someone in the community. Therefore, our grade depends on the "volunteer customer" (cheap-asses) rather than Knoke so much. However, it looks like all the projects that survived after our elimination voting are projects involving dynamic websites and databases... the kind of thing I've been doing at work since May. What's more, these almost sound like projects that can be completed in several days rather than a semester... and we'll even be working in groups of four or five. Hot damn! There will also be weekly presentations of our progress on our projects, but everyone in our class knows each other so this is most likely going to turn into weekly practice in standup comedy. Maybe it will be harder than it sounds, we'll just have to wait and see. So, that accounts for three of my classes, but I am taking four this semester! The fourth being Psychology 101... woooo! I realized last semester that I need some additional credits to bring my total up to the required number, which means I have free reign to just throw darts at the classes I think will be interesting and/or easy. After doing a bit of looking around, there aren't a whole crapload of easy classes that sound genuinely interesting, so I'm thinking of getting a minor in Psychology with these credits I need to fill up. And that, my friends, will look weird as hell on a resume: "Bachelors Degree in Computer Science with minors in Math and Psychology". This was just a thought I had only half-considered before attending my first Psychology 101 class today. 100-level classes are supposed to be easy, but let me set the scene here. 80% of our grade is from tests, which, if this is like any other 100-level class I've had, means memorizing the PowerPoint slides he puts on the web and regurgitating this information back onto a piece of paper... this has always been one of the things I excel at. The other 20% of the grade is based on participation. That started my heart thumping because I assumed that it meant participating in class discussions. If I wanted that, I would have taken Ethics with the half-Indian, half-Dustin Hoffman, Dr. Swaztiko again (a course that should have mentioned "14 weeks of random humiliation next to a giant wall of windows" in the description). Avoiding humiliation seems especially pertinent in this class because it appears as though 75% of the 60 or so students are female. I haven't seen a ratio like that since I took Yoga. So, Psychology is the field of study that so gracefully balances out the Computer Science sausage-carnival. But, nope, participation has nothing to do with opening your mouth or even attending class necessarily, it means writing up a four-sentence summary of the reading for the week. Four sentence! And then on top of that, we don't even have to do 1/3 of this participation work... it almost sounded like the teacher was encouraging us to skip 1/3 of the classes and homework! I can dig! And then, I'm sure he was referring to the amount of material being covered and not the grading techniques, but he said "This is probably the hardest Psychology class you will take." ... I looked around the room with disbelief, smiled and relaxed! That can't possibly be true but I'll believe what I want for now! Also, this class gathers into the only room in which I've had a final exam on Saturday, the 4th-floor plaster-chamber of the Getz Saturday-morning Calculus special, giving the room a strange cozy-yet-malevolent vibe unlike anything I can describe in words. Have you ever flown in a Boeing 747? One of the most fascinating flights I've ever been on was aboard a Boeing 747. Assuming I'm remembering the right model number, the Boeing 747 has something like three seats on each side with five or seven seats in the middle. I was aboard a flight on one of these monsters during a long trip to Florida when I was younger. Rather than having small white televisions hanging from the ceiling as is typical of smaller planes, Boeing 747s have a projector casting rays onto the enormous bulkhead-wall in front of the thick center row of seats like a big-screen television. After our in-flight movies were over, rather than shutting off the projector, they turned on CNN. Did you know airplanes received CNN? I didn't! That's incredible! And for the remainder of the flight we were like a big, loosely-knit, happy family shooting the shit for a couple more hours, watching some news, doing some reading, chit-chatting at a comfortable pace, dozing off here and there. And it wasn't until a month ago when I was on the small airplane flying to Anchorage for Christmas that I realized, what Boeing has created with the 747 is not so much an airplane but more of a flying Saturday. Talk about technical achievement, that's astounding. Now if only those two movies had been The Wizard and Teen Wolf, I'd be flying to Florida every three months. The hearing in my right ear is turning to shit and fast! When the ear-doctor explained to me what otosclerosis is, he said there's no way to tell how quickly my hearing is going to deteriorate, it could be five years or 30 years. As it stands, I'm guessing somewhere more like in the two-year range. Merely thirteen months ago, I hadn't noticed a problem at all. And now the hearing in my right ear can best be described as a broken speaker. It's not simply bad hearing, it's bad hearing at select frequencies, so certain sounds sound drastically different in each ear. But it's also just plain bad hearing too. I've been trying to sit next to the right wall in classes to prevent people to the right of me from whispering in my right ear during class and thinking I can possibly get anything out of it. This is providing very little incentive for me to restrain myself from turning speakers up to unusual volumes, it's like a mad dash to get as much musical goodness into my ears before I can't hear at all! So the hearing in my right ear has been dampened for certain frequencies, this sounds strikingly similar to one of my other five senses! And all I have to claim for this nonsense is more motivation to learn about frequencies and why they're constantly trying to rough me up like a piñata! Next thing I know I'll wake up sometime in mid-April unable to taste strawberries or feel sandpaper. Then I'll just sit around all day watching repeats of Saved by the Bell with closed-captioning on and eat pizza Hot Pockets like clockwork. Because if anything screams health and tranquility, it's pulpy pepperoni-stricken curd acid oozing out of a bulbous envelope of brittle flake. I watched Napoleon Dynamite about a week ago. That is probably my favorite movie of 2004! I've never seen anything like it! Funny, that's for damn sure, but I think I might have gotten a bit of inspiration out of it too! The whole movie is like an invitation for strange people to stay strange, but I can't claim to come anywhere near that group of heroes. I guess there's not much else to say about it, just see it! Eight Ball Magazine is coming out with a book which I must buy. It's just a collection of 200+ articles that have graced their site, which I think are still on their site for free, but dang it, I need to support those people, and what better to have sitting on a coffee table. If you don't know what this place is, head on over to 8bm.com and look at their "Daily Bullshit" section. I think I discovered what has been causing most of my insomnia last semester and last night: ice cream! I thought ice cream and dairy products in general were supposed to kind of slow you down. This is not the case! Last night I was getting real tired but decided, hell, I want to eat 1/6 of a gallon of cookie-dough ice cream. After I was finished, I lay down to go to sleep and ended up essentially staring at my ceiling in the dark for five hours while my brain shot off the most profound thoughts I've been subjected to since my surreal venture into the Cthulhu Fhtagn particle accelerator of inquiry. I honestly lost it last night. I was convinced that I had permanently forgotten how to go to sleep, realized that I don't recall ever "knowing" how to go to sleep per se, concentrated on not concentrating, chaotic and meaningless thoughts zipping in and out like current through aluminum foil wrapped around a D-cell battery, and finally started wondering why I seem to like the show Tom Goes to the Mayor more and more each time I see it, which turned out to be the ultimate culmination of all insane musings before it, precluding my mind's explosion into a giant Spanish-speaking gummy bear. Fed up, I went for the last-resort/kamikaze method that had hitherto never failed in sedating me like a captive monkey pumped full of Xylazine. I opened my window wide, opened my door, and turned on two fans to get the air flowing. This brought the room temperature down probably to single-digit numbers in the positive range by the time I woke up for school two hours later. For one reason or another, I found an old hard drive sitting on top of a pile of magazines, two DVDs sitting on my dresser and a sock where my television remote had been... none of which had been in these respective places before I had fallen asleep. It was time to start a new day! I'm staying the fuck away from ice cream! << Newer Entries Archived Entries >> ultramuffin@yahoo.com © Ultrenial Muffiliciousness Enterprises