Land of all things Moskwaesque

So my roomate is moving out this month and he happened to be the one with our house FiOS account. We call Verizon thinking it will be this simple procedure of getting it moved out of his name into one of the other roomate's names. Hmmm, not so much. Seems that's not possible with a bleeding edge technology like FiOS. Apparently, the process of crossing off one person's name and inserting another person's name in the same place has become incredibly convoluted with the advent of fiber.

Here's what Verizon idiocy dictates we do. We have to cancel the service under the leaving John Doe's name. We then have to wait until that service cancels out and frees up the mystical "port" back at Verizon's palace at the end of the yellow brick road. Then we have to call back once said service is canceled and the port is free to tell them, oh by the way, can you give me back the service I had already been paying you for, only Joe Smith is on the hook for it now.

This is with out a doubt, one of the most ridiculous things I've encountered in some time. What brain drain at Verizon thought the brilliant way to keep customers paying was to make us jump through crazy hoops (while not having internet) just to maintain the service we already have? And force us unfortunates trying to keep our service to call multiple times and go without service in between these magical port freeing and unfreeing dates. The port should not need to be freed, it should be instantly and easily transferable to a different name.

Similar experiences with Verizon wireless is exactly why I jumped on the iPhone band wagon. Shame to see their customer service sadism continues with FiOS as well.

So I read today that apparently your average USian reads one book a year. Now, I am not a fast reader and probably consume in the range of 20 or so books a year. Given this there are 19 other people out there who don't have to read jack for an entire year. They can hang out on the beach, drink, smoke out, while their fellow outlier is propping them up, making them feel smarter.

I guess that's okay, and if I do run across the illiterates on the beach, I can only hope that rather then grinding me into the sand, they'll stop a moment, recognize through their depressant stupor that I'm the one keeping them free to do as they want so they don't have to bother with that processing words crap.

Oh, and this year has actually been a good year in the book world. If you're going to read anything, here is your list for the next three years of your life, The Last Wish, Generation Kill, and Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist. As much as I liked all of them I would highly recommend the third. It's a book written for teens how they actually talk, rather than how their parents or Harry Potter wished they'd talk. Or if you're feeling really daring read all three this year, and know that somewhere out there, two more people can lounge on the beach because you've done your part.

My first attended roleplaying con is officially over. Four days of gaming ten to twelve hours a day, each day waking up earlier than I do to go to work. Tis crazy, but overall worth it. Got to play a bunch of systems I hadn't tried and here's how the games stacked up.

1. Buffy. What can I say, without a doubt the funnest game I played there. Definitely helped by a great group and flexible GM. Playing the bratty teenage Slayer Mae was a blast. Stealing a car from a priest, telling your mother your watcher/teacher wants to molest you, having your boyfriend try to convince your mom you're on drugs, riffing with another player on a continual series of witty puttdowns for the watcher from her majesty's island. Good times all around.

2. Savage Worlds. For the most part this was a fairly straighforward Vietnam War shoot-em-up. But little touches of the system, like the flaw that made me charge down a blind hall when I heard a woman scream for help, made this game soar. Each of our soldiers had a sense of character that elevated this above rolling dice.

3. DnD Silent Tide. Compelling modules, even for low level characters, can be written well. It especially helps to have an excellent DM who can give the NPCs unique and believable voices. My hats off to her, as immersion wise, she was the best game runner of the bunch we had over the four days.

4. Cyberpunk. Not so simple snatch and grab. Got to hollow some people out with a barrett sniper rifle so you can't beat that. Overall, most impressive bit was the open ended nature of this scenario. We had the mission to grab an asset alive at a high security hotel conference. I felt confidant the GM would have played the game well no matter how we approached the mission.

5 and so on. Mostly a bunch of hit and miss stuff not worth mentioning. If you like games, roleplaying or board or anime, I would suggest going to a con at least once. Definitely an experience.

So, I'm back in Illinois and Michigan this week visiting family. Going to see my last remaining grandparent and play the "do you remember me" game. The last time my parents and sister came out to visit, my grandmother hit on my dad, that being her son. I believe it was traumatizing for all parties involved.

Anyway, should be interesting and strange at the same time so big thumbs for that. Later this week, I will be attending my first roleplaying game convention. Please feel free to step back with appropriate awe. I went to a general con once when I was a teenager for a few hours at around 2 in the morning. I was not impressed.

However, I'm much more looking forward to this one, even if Anne Bowman won't be making it out ;). For one thing I'll get to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, for those who are unaware, Buffy actually has a roleplaying game based on it. I will be some kind of whitehat investigating the hellmouth in Cleveland. Even if it sucks it's going to rule!

In fact it will be wall to wall super dork funtime hour for four days straight. With any luck it will hark back the summer I spent after senior year, gaming with my buds in a friend's basement before having to run our separate ways off to college. Since it's those same high school buds I'll be meeting there it should all fit together quite nicely.

Stop whatever you are doing, go online and find the nearest theatre playing Walle and go see it. Walle is without a doubt one of the most brilliant films I've seen in a long time. More than mere eye candy, though beautiful as it may be, it has something meaninful to say about where we are and where we might be going. It harks back to the best scifi of the 60s.

I don't want to reveal story details because it's best experienced. Suffice it to say, this film impressed in many ways. For one it contained very little dialog. When the robots did speak most of the exchanges happened in single word back and forths. The story moved through the action on screen, played out against the tragically beautiful vistas the characters inhabited.

It's hard to fathom this story could have taken any other form. No amount of description could do some of the movie's most poignant scenes justice. The writer had to have incredible trust in the artists to make the scenes into what they became. I'm really glad that trust paid off.

Today I read about the joys of technology and the spiffy new body scanners they are deploying at some airports. To give a sum up, imagine taking off all your clothes, painting yourself in alluring grey body paint and standing naked in front of a security "professional". That's essentially what the body scanners do for you.

The security guy monitoring the scanner is behind a wall so you never see him and he never sees you, to keep things impersonal. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. I don't find it exactly appealing to have to flash a stranger my junk for the privilege of riding in a steel tube. I'd kind of like the oppurtunity to look the person in the eye who'll be seeing if I'm having a left or right hanging day. Plus if the security person turns out to be a chic... and hot (a big perhaps I know) I'll maybe consider sucking in my gut when standing in the nudity reactor.

At this time they are apparently picking people at random to be scanned. I wonder if it's less random when the high school girl's volleyball team comes through. The moment one of the bouncy blondes enters the reactor doesn't it become state mandated child pornography. Or is that only if you put two in at the same time and ask them to hold hands.

The other thing I wonder, mostly given that over 25% of American's are obese, is what duty at the reactor will be inside the subculture of TSA. Maybe your fellow protectors will consider it a riot to randomly select someone especially homely for you. Imagine being scanner guy, what he has to say at parties when asked what he does for a living. "Well Bob, I look at all of you naked to see if you're hiding a knitting needle that's too pointy." Naturally then, Bob will slap you on the back and thank you for keeping America safe.

Imagine a day at that job, immersed in a ceaseless line of pallid flesh. No connection, just object after object, the limbs of human beings, all the human parts you'd expect, things you don't really want to see. What does the world outside the box become for you? What must it be just going to the mall, walking through the crowd? Perhaps loud laugh guy is wearing an appropriately colored hawaiin shirt, his long nailed trophie wife stroking his ego. All you'd see is two gesticulating zombies, unaware that you know every goose bump and dimple. The entire throng of humanity this sort of undulating nude grey mass.

You've seen it all, what happens to the hippie grandmother who never wore a bra a day in her life, the car wreck survivor who has to keep a bag strapped to his abdomen. Maybe you'll even see the veteran, the one selected to prove everything is fair and random. With pieces missing, you'll witness, in skin wrote detail, the tragedy of his life.

You'll stare through that grey screen, at the fellow you aren't allowed to meet, and you'll feel a connection: the bond between you. Each of you have made your sacrifice to keep America great. You stare at naked people all day and he escorted Halliburton; until he hit an IED.

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-06-05-bodyscan_N.htm

So the WGA strike, kind of interesting, I support the WGA and their latest efforts to get what they deserve. Writers get $0.04 as residuals for DVDs and zilch for programming streamed on the net. They deserve more.

That being said, I saw a news piece in which a writer explained the current situation of media sales. He claimed Will Farrel's craptastic racing movie goes for $28.95 on DVD and that all this money goes into the pockets of the megabux media corps trying to stiff the writers.

This is disingenuous on several points. First, those 2895 pennies would be for BluRay, not DVD. Next, Amazon's price where he claimed to get his info had it listed at $24.95. And last, and most importantly, the megabux corps don't see anywhere close to that. All retailers have markup. So a media corps may see 50% or so of that after the disc makes its way through the supply chain. Still way more than the writer, but way less than this writer claimed was the media corp's take.

Which brings me to my point, no matter which side of an issue you are on it's kind of exhausting to be constantly lied to. It seems opinions and views can not be balanced, you have to choose this way or the other. We have given up truthful informed discourse for cat and mouse games of propaganda. Or perhaps we never had informed discourse in the first place and I'm just being hopeful and naive.

I watched the anime Paprika last night. I think the most telling metaphor is in the dream world, in which a young girl grows into a woman by literally devouring a man alive. Sure he was evil, but she still ate him.

Aw, brings me back to my tender childhood.

SOS Wheeljack




Shockwave's Burden



The Rude Awakening of Optimus Prime

I have random thoughts, like most of us. Today they happened upon the phrase, "I got stiffed" or "so-and-so stiffed me." I pondered the origin of this phrase and as with all things humankind I assumed the phrase had its origins in sexual banter. To which it occurred to me then, wouldn't getting stiffed be a good thing?  Like, "Jonathan stiffed me, and it was worth every single lost penny."  If we want it to have a negative connotation shouldn't it be "I got floppied," or "That bastard flacided me."

My thoughts carried on and then I figured perhaps this simple phrase is both misogynistic and homophobic.  As the phrase generally applies to a monetary transaction and not getting paid, like "Billy stiffed me on the bill," perhaps it contains an assumption that the only folks stiffing and being receiving of the stiff are males in business transactions, because the fairer sex would never be involved in something so crass as funds changing hands.  If it is only males doing business, I, being a heterosexual male, would generally not want Billy's stiff and perhaps would be a bit disconcerted if he did perchance try to give it to me.  Hence the homophobia element.

Caffeine really is a wonder drug.

So, here's how it really went. On the first day God created the recumbent trike. Then, scratching his head, he had to figure out someplace glorious enough to be worthy of riding the trike across. So, after much consternation, on the second day he got working on that whole creating the earth thing.

That's my story and I'm sticking by it.

P.S. Trike courtesy of Greenspeed. Tike courtesy of Aaron & Kristina Cool.
 

Link be dead now.... weak. Insurance is evil. 

Hurrah for being the only first world country without socialized medicine.

Just finished watching the trailer for the new Transformers movie. I can only shake my head and curse the heavens that some fuckwit actually sold the rights to such a significant chunk of my childhood to a worthless hack like Bay. I'd wish his death but the movie is already in post so it wouldn't do much good at this point.

As a kid I was a tranformers fiend. I liked the toys a lot and the show was nifty but it's the comics that really took it home. I made my own transformers verse in my little playworld. I created an ongoing narrative inspired by the comics that I carried on for literally years as a kid. Progressively I'd form the chapters in my head and then play them out in my room in all their battled glory. Near the end of my great play the thermonuclear demise of Megatron destroyed the once great Cybertron and those who survived were left to fend their way among the metallic asteroids that remained. And what was left of Megatron still floated amongst these pieces of his planet, perhaps to one day reawaken and reign terror again.

I watch the trailer and I see Close Encounter reactions from us human folk combined with quick shots of robots who have a weird combination of shifting plates that are way too complicated to be necessary. I see a lot of slack jawed humies. What I don't see is a single distinct robotic face. No Optimus Prime trying to reach out to those he's determined to protect. No Megatron goading the military so he can fusion slag them for kicks.

In the transformer stories the humans inhabited the same world but their stories were either secondary or ran parallel to the plight of the machines. Mostly because the robots possessed all the range and depth the narrative needed. A misfit band the Ark had re-engineered so they could hide to survive on an alien world - none of them knowing if their old home, centuries since they'd left from it, even existed anymore or had self destructed in an endless war. The transformers had doubts, they had weakness, they had good and they had evil. The strange tragedy of their circumstance, their disconnection, their determination, despite their displacement, to continue on as who they were, either power hungry or doggedly protective, is part of what made their struggles so compelling and so human. Plus their changing shapes made them pretty flipping cool. I'm just so glad Michael Bay totally fucked that up making them appear like a bunch of godzilla machines.

Oh well, I guess I can always reread the comics and cross my fingers this one tanks so bad he's never allowed to make another movie again.

If every car that approaches you thinks you're batshit crazy or drunk they'll keep the fuck away from you.  You've got an entire lane within which to act like a lunatic.  Make the most of it.

Now think long and deep on this, and realize I'm only half kidding.

So the F.E.A.R. story I wrote awhile ago was mostly done in a day.  I never really cared for the ending but at the time I had to submit it and have it out there so I did.  Well, now I've had time to ponder and revisit, made a few minor changes along the way but also added an ending that I hope works.  So here we are again for those who dare read it.  My award winning Tunnel Trap, beter slicker faster cooler.

So a couple years ago I bought a 12" ibook. Overall, I've been pretty happy with it. Nice little machine I can take almost everywhere. Not the most powerful guy on the block but it works. Well, the one thing that has worked less and less is the battery. It started with a damn impressive over six hour battery life when I got it. Now it's down to fourty five minutes or so. New battery is like $130 so I'd been putting off buying one. Well, thanks to sony's engineering snafu of batteries exploding like cherry bombs my battery happens to be part of a glorious glorious recall. Meaning, I'll be back up to six hours battery life and have to pay a whole lot a nothing for the trouble. Sometimes life is good.

Life is an exercise in irony.  When we're overworked we want to shoot ourselves.  When we have nothing to do we want to shoot ourselves.  I curse you Tao!  I curse you and your profound understanding of balance that makes life magical!  I was supposed to go shoot a puppy today.  Not in a bad way but in a good way.  Cute dog hanging from a frisbee by its mouth while I film it.  Having frisbee thrown, running and catching frisbee perhaps with a cute little jump to go along with its overall cuteness.  I was looking forward to this.  I even happened to sort of snake the gig from one of our other shooters who also has nothing to do.  But alas, cute dog owner called up today and said he must travel his noncute self to granite falls so couldn't shoot today.  I was annoyed.  I even drove to work rather than biking in preparation for going out to the shoot.  sigh......  Some days fate kicks you in the balls.

Trike lust sated.  Now if only I could satisfy my digital camera lust then I could share its glory with the world. ;-P

Three grand trike lust.  Sigh....

I thought these were funny as hell.

http://www.ania.xibo.at/index.php?gallery=./animations

What one can do with some sheets of notebook paper and a few hours. 

Some of the stuff in the digital art section is pretty damn impressive as well.