Goin' Ape

Saturday, May 29, 2004

Thief 3

I got Thief 3 the day it came out, and I've been playing it pretty religiously, as time and freedom allowed. This game has EVERYTHING. They have transcended mere gaming and created a thieving simulator. In first person mode I can see my feet and hands and body. Everything can cast a shadow. Guards carry torches sometimes. Cats yowl and alert guards. There are three speeds to move in that make varying levels of noise. The lockpicking is fairly intuitive and makes it feel more real. My favorite part of the game, though, is that guards have varying levels of both age and girth, and their speed and stamina are based on these factors. So a healthy, pious hammerite will chase you for three minutes, but a fat old drunk guy will chase for about twenty seconds before he doubles over out of breath. You actually have to hit guards on the head now, as opposed to hitting them anywhere from any angle to knock 'em out in the last two games. Between missions, you can wander through a large city and mug people and break into houses at will. If you listen to people talking and pickpocket them you can find out where to sell stuff, buy stuff, steal stuff and basically thief it up. You can also mug people. If you stand in front of them with your knife out, they'll drop their valuables and run away. And if there's a guard in your way and you want to have some fun you can trick them into fighting various street toughs that wander around looking for trouble. I'm gonna go steal an opal now.

posted by Matt 3:37 PM // |

Ev-ry... bo-dy... touch this elephant (with dynamite)

My hair looks awesome in the morning, these days. So good, I'm going to refrain from showering for the time being.

The Roots rock me to an eargasm.

posted by Ben 10:34 AM // |

Friday, May 28, 2004

Post-mortem report

So I went back to my high school and had a pretty good time of it. I nearly went into convulsions when I stepped in the front door. It smells the same. A lot of places have a distinctive odor that you don't notice if you're used to it. After being subjected to it for 6 years and then away from it for a year, I finally began to notice it. Weird.

Saw a few of my teachers - it was good in that respect. Forgot to get my bloody yearbook though. Had coffee with my old friend Carm, and subsequently got to my study group meeting 20 minutes late.

The funniest part about my visit was this one teacher who I passed in the hallway. Last year I wrote a really inflammatory article about our school's annual "Coffeehouse" production and how it had gone awry. My article passed the principal's desk (as everything that went into the newspaper does) so I was immune to disciplinary action, but this teacher in particular took offense, being the Coffeehouse director, and called me into his office for a good hour of yelling and namecalling. He calmed down about it later on, and I figured the matter was behind us.

When I passed him in the hallway, I said his name, tried to make eye contact and nodded, as is my fashion. He obviously saw me, as I was the only one in the hallway without my prison garb on. Yet he completely ignored me. I fucking loved it. Confirms my suspicion that on top of being an asshole and a moron, he hasn't got a shred of class.

Well then, back to work. And by work I mean fiddling around doing nothing much, reading Slashdot, etc. Oh, by the way, the fruits of my labours can be viewed here - the software I wrote generated all that colourful table data.

posted by Anonymous 2:05 PM // |

Thursday, May 27, 2004

Nuh uh, no fucking way.

The Dune movie was the shiznit. Gold, from start to finish. The shields were awesome, Patrick Stewart's skullet was awesome, the navigators were awesome, everything was fucking awesome. The miniseries was okay. But don't you fucking knock the movie.

posted by Ben 9:29 PM // |

"The rest of you can look it up when you go home"

I have no doubt that Kevin J Anderson et al are indeed fucking Frank Herbert's corpse (though to be fair I haven't read any of the new books but I'm familiar enough with the "works" of Kevin J Anderson to hazard a good guess). But let's not kid ourselves, there was something wrong in the state of Dunemark far before Kevin J Anderson got his grubby hackish hands all over it. Dune was brillant. Dune Messiah was okay. Children of Dune was pretty mediocre. And x random sequal after that was crap. Come to think about it, the Dune movie was pretty damn bad too. If it was serious it was awful and if it was camp it was a disgrace to Herbert's book. Excellent idea about punishing Kevin J Anderson. Although he might be crazy (evil?) enough to like the written vomit he spews out. So maybe we should replace that with horsewhipping?

Leo, that was the funniest one yet (though "Eat The Fetus!" retains its charm). You should definitly leave the last 2 panals untampered with, and see if they'd excpet the first 2. If not you can change it a little bit while retaining the orginal meaning (Like in Mean Girls how the studio forced Tina Fey to change her "Is your cherry popped?" to "Is your muffin buttered?").

The intergral joke isn't funny and it's more of a visual thing. I guess they figured that the intergration sign looks kinda like a S (An S from Titus Andronicus maybe?) and followed by e, x and y it spells a word! Engineers love that shit.
SKULE07 4EVAH!
No.

posted by Jacob 6:12 PM // |

The dreaded day cometh.

Firstly, some shout outs. Leo/Sam, the Seamus thing works, I guess. Particularly for me, since the only Seamus I knew was a drunkard math teacher who slept in his class while he was supposed to be teaching it. Matt, thank you for the lovely mental image I have of a necrophiliac B-line sci-fi writer having his way with Frank Herbert's last remains. Jacob, that Aqua guy was kind of scary-sounding in the English version; I'd hate to hear the Dutch.

So, the day I've been dreading for the past year hits tomorrow. Well, later today, considering it's 3am. That day is the day I go back to my high school. The reason? A teacher whom I really liked and who seemed to like me a fair bit is having a baby soon. Her baby shower was actually 2 blocks from me, so I went do deliver a gift to her and found out that everyone had already gone home (at 9:30, WTF). So I'mma head there tomorrow to give her this gift and wish her and her offspring well. It's an especially significant thing because she lost her last pregnancy due to a miscarriage quite late in her pregnancy, which obviously had a rather traumatic effect on her. She was one of the few people at that school upon whom I'd honestly never wish ill; the news of her miscarriage made me very sad indeed. This time, things seem to be going perfectly, and so with her little one on the way very soon, I'm willing to risk a "bad trip" down memory lane to see her and give her my regards, and some bath toys.

I hated that place with such passion that it makes my stomach churn just thinking about going back. I think I honestly may have a nervous breakdown or some sort of psychotic episode walking through the hallways again. But, if I'm there, I might as well swing by the office and yell "GIMME MY YEARBOOK FOO" in my best Mr. T voice. I do get to have coffee with my friend Carm, whom I haven't seen in a whole year.

The prof who runs the study group I attend got Slashdotted today. His paper will probably be complete mystery-speak for anyone not intimately familiar with software development, but let me assure you it's cool shit.

Work is wonderful. School is going well too. I think I'm turning over a new leaf for this second run-through of Calculus! - tonight is the first time I've actually had a Problem Set done before the day it was due. The 1/chair dchair joke is horrible, Jacob. Funny, but oh so nerdy. And I don't get the e^(y^x) joke, but it's an engineer joke so I'm going to assume it's stupid until proven otherwise.

The horror of revisiting my high school begins in less than 6 hours. 6 hours until I start involuntarily reliving my 6 years of incarceration. I must sleep, if I can. If things go badly, you'll all come visit me at the asylum/hospital/funeral parlour, right? Right?

posted by Anonymous 2:31 AM // |

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Yeah Pt. 2

Howard Withers was the lamest name I could think of off the top of my head. I'm going with Seamus Maurin. It has SeAMus right in it. Perfect. By the way, Darmok backwards is Komrad. Interesting, no? Maybe Kane Darmok could be the evil capitalist one and Komrad Enak would be the evil communist one and they could have awesome fights where kids read and also learn about the writings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. (In true Marvel form where a guy is getting slammed against a wall and his word bubble has a half-minute speech.) Sam, you do this as a comic and I'll do Roller-Hands.

posted by Leo 8:51 PM // |

Post-Pourri

OK, first of all, it's spelled "Darmok". The single K is what makes it cool (this applies to both the first and last names). If you don't want to use that name, I've got plenty of other aliai to use. Deiter vos Kremlin, Crash Killjoy, Lintonius Rex, Seamus Maurin and Piotr Vandrake all come to mind.

In other news, today was both my first and last day of telemarketing. It wasn't as mind-numbing as I thought it'd be, but my inability to sell anything to anyone ever proved to be somewhat of a liability. I was havin' some fun in there tho, dialin' up strangers. My only real regret is that I didn't copy down any of the name & address info of the people I called. A guy could have alotta fun with peoples phone numbers & postal codes...

In any case, I made a few bucks, so I can prolly pay off a few pople. I think I'll start with Ben, cuz he's been waiting the longest, plus next week I'm havin' a garage sale, so I can make a few more dollar$ offa that. If anyone who lives near me has anything they wanna donate to said sale, (you know, the kinda stuff you'd sell but would not yourself set up a sale for) feel free to drop it on buy my house. I can prolly set up some profit-sharing thing... or something.

posted by Sam 7:14 PM // |

Kane Darmoc

I think Kane is the better name, since it is more obviously fictitious. And Howard Withers? Where did you get that from, anyway? That's a terrible name to give a main character. A guy who calls himself "Kane Darmoc" is far more amusing telling stupid stories about martian chicks than a guy named Howard Withers. Also, perhaps Sam's character should have a mullet, since mullets are an obvious sign of poor judgement, bad taste and dangerous insanity.

I too am pleased that good movies are being made that are not Fantasy or Sci Fi flicks. Ever since Return of the King I've been kind of pissed off on the whole "Fantasy Films" topic. And now they're making chronicles of Riddick, which is an obvious, shameless ripoff of the immortal Dune series. Somewhere, in a dark chamber far below the earth, Kevin J. Anderson and a plethora of Hollywood producers are fucking Frank Herbert's corpse. Again. And again. And again. I think I'mma go burn my copy of "The Butlerian Jihad." I hate you Kevin J. Anderson. I hate you more than words can describe. Oh, and R. A. Salvatore. I hate him too. They should be forced to read all their shitty books, over and over again, every single day for the rest of their worthless lives.

posted by Matt 4:26 PM // |

YEAH!

Jacob, good stuff. Any awfulism, or as Sam calls it "being an asshole" is New Awfulism. The "New" is just so it sounds more like a movement and less like "being an asshole". I would call Mean Girls the best SNL movie yet, because it had nothing to do with SNL [I've still got Jingle Bell Rock in my head]. Also, points to them for making that movie during the Harry Potter/Shrek fantasyopoly.

I finished the first draft of my script for Neil's mom's co-worker. Wow. Now I have to get the formatting software to make it an actual screenplay instead of a "creatively formatted" piece. (I'm being interdisciplinary). Then I have to get the script improvement program from my brain. (Damn, film student jokes just aren't the same as your math jokes.) Speaking of jokes, here is a comic I want to make, tell me if it is too risque for Excalibur. Each number is a panel.

1)
S: …And she was like, “Give it to me! Harder! Harder!”

2)
S: I was like, “Girl, just watch me! I’m a jackhammer!”. And she put her lips-

3)
L: Sam, stop right there. I haven’t believed a word you said since “I met these two hot Martian chicks.”

4)
S: If you didn’t want to hear the story you shouldn’t have asked how I got these bruises.

Also, Sam, I'm not using our names in this thing. I've decided I'm gonna "Gabe and Tycho" us. That way we can get away with more - like the above proposed strip. You can choose your own name within the realm of plausibility. I.e. -
Howard Withers = okay
Kane Darmock = Unacceptable

Aw fuck it, pick whatever you want.

posted by Leo 3:50 PM // |

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

I pity the wrong direction-giving' fool

In a rather ironic (coincedence is far too strong a word) occurance as I was reading your post Dave, I was listening to Aqua's "Barbie Girl" in Dutch. And in that version Ken (or Spenser as they call him) is one angry motherfucker. At the end of the song he starts spazzing out, "scream[ing] at the top of [his] lungs and sound[ing] like the fucking Tasmanian devil".

I had a fun weekend in Kingston, despite the fact that I went up for a floor reunion, and the floor didn't show up. Luckily, my roommate was up and there was a kegger at his girlfriend's house (also from my floor) on sunday night. They're mainly engineers, so when you paid they'd write the integral of e to the xth power y on your hand. I guess that's funny in engineeresque (although, I shouldn't talk as later on I had perhaps too much mirth at another integration joke, this one integral 1/chair dchair). I wasn't really being a New Awfulist, more Just Awfulist. There was this one girl who had an ugly red mop of hair who I callled "Carrot Top" the whole night. Not maliciously, that's just what'd spring into my head when I saw her. Then I had this long "conversation of lies" with some ConEd girls. I had guessed their names and what frosh group they were in (which is far better than some dude I was calling "Eric" all night). But I was pretending (i.e. lying) that it was no guess, that I had meet them at some Epsilon event. The problem (in hindsight) was that while I was elaborating and making the story more and more complex I didn't realize that they'd actually been to Epsilon events and I had not. On the plus side my chugging team only lost narrowly. Wait, that's not a plus. That means if I'd just been marginally better, we'd have won. Shit.

On another note when I arrived back in Toronto, I went one of my family's Family Movies with my sister and mother (where we ran into Neil and his family). We saw Mean Girls and I'd recommend it to all y'all. It was one of the funniest High School comedy's I'd ever seen and definitily the smartest. A lot of movies give away all the good lines in the previews but its trailer barely (bearly?) scratches the surface. There's an assortment of great secondary characters, one of whom the head of the "Mathlete Club", an Indian self-described "Math Enthusiast/Bad Ass MC" is worth the ticket price (If you were reverse scamming that is, definitly worth a few bucks to see em).

posted by Jacob 11:57 PM // |

Yeah cool kids! Boo dweebs!

Like he said.

posted by Ben 9:50 PM // |

Good Bye Toronto

Big News! Today I recieved a hefty package address to OCdt Alex Meyers (OCdt = Officer Cadet, that's the lowest rank of officer, they aren't even commisioned yet), it was from National Defence. My first instinct was "Oh fuck I've been drafted!", but when I opened it I discovered that it was from Blackdown Cadet Summer Training Centre, where I had applied for a job. They've offered me a position as a Recreation Coordinator, basically making out of shape 12-16 year olds play sports.

If I accept (there is veery little doubt in my mind that I will) I leave June 20 or 21 and would return mid August. I may get the occasional weekend off but otherwise I'm there for the 2 months.

Looks like all the cool kids are out of the city for the summer, leaving the dweebs to wallow in their misery.

posted by Alex 3:34 PM // |

Pos. Avail: Sngr, Hdcr Bnd. Ht. grls, free $$, no tal/exp/skill nec.

Maybe I am starting a hardcore band. You make it sound like the best thing ever.

posted by Ben 8:59 AM // |

A rant about music: What the FUCK is wrong with kids today?

This is revision two of this post, started from scratch, because Blogger is a piece of shit.

Tonight, I attended a "musical" show. At least, that's what it was pitched to me as.

I was told it was going to be heavy music. "That's alright," I thought. "You can be heavy and not suck." Famous last words! What the fuck is wrong with people? My nerves are shot, not to mention my eardrums.

This show, entitled "Hardcore Havoc", was a bunch of angry white kids playing angry white kid music. Not in itself intolerable (at least not on an auditory level), except that on top of being stupid and ultimately pointless, this hardcore/metal/emocore/bullshit music was utterly intolerable to the ear. Each of the three acts I saw (they were virtually identical, plus or minus various token ethnic minorities for each group) consisted of completely indiscernable guitar, drummers freaking out so much that they couldn't keep decent time, and a vocalist who leapt around the stage like some sort of lower primate, screaming into a microphone a la Alexisonfire (shudder), usually doubled over as if puking while doing so, and sounding absolutely possessed. There were also people in front of the stage doing spin kicks, apparently adding to the violent theme of the music. It looked like a really lame circus act to me.

My complete bewilderment might be passed off as nothing more than an issue of generation gap, if there was one. These were all people my age, both the ones making the noise and the ones standing there nodding, as if this was technically proficient music that meant something profound.The first band (notable for their Fred Durst lookalike front man -- quite frankly, he made Fred Durst look like Mozart) had their guitarist break a string. One fellow standing nearby said "Yeah, their set didn't sound so good after he broke that string," to which I replied "I honestly didn't notice any difference." The guy looked at me like I part of a Martian invasion force and had just bitten the head off of an unborn baby.

A canonical list of some (but not all) things that were wrong with this show, from someone who acted as soundman for several major school events and fronted a rock band of his own:

The room was Holy Joe's. Those of you who've been there know that this place is smaller than most school gymnasiums. Thus, turn your fucking volume down to something below the "kill plants and animals" threshold.
If you're going to plug into the house sound system, don't fucking do it with microphones placed up against your amp speakers. Or if you are, turn your speakers down and let the sound system do the amplification.
If you've got that much guitar distortion, who needs the fucking guitars? For most of the show I couldn't make out a single chord/note. They might as well have hooked a fucking lawnmower motor up to the amplifier and nobody would've been able to tell the difference. This isn't helped by the loud amp speakers + microphones distorting the signal further as it passes through the sound system.
To all the hardcore bands' "singers": you are not musically talented. Go kill yourselves, now. It does not take talent to scream at the top of one's lungs and sound like the fucking Tasmanian devil. My only consolation is that at the rate these fuckheads are going, their vocal cords will be completely destroyed by the time they are old enough to realize that their music is shite.
A bunch of short kids doing pseudo-martial arts in front of the stage does not lend you street cred, nor does it make your "music" listenable.

I don't believe the degree of shittiness of that which I witnessed tonight. There's something to be said about subjectivity in the appreciation of music, but one has to be brain-damaged or an expert in the art of self-deception to call that musical. This sort of travesty makes me want to pick up my pad and paper and start writing music again, in the hope that I can somehow right the horrible wrong. For now, I'll just clutch my Matt Good tickets as tightly as I can and hope for better days.

Furthermore, it blew my mind how many people were there to see this sad display of teenage angst and talentless chicanery. Lots of girls. Lots of ridiculously hot, stupid girls. Why? Why is this stupidity gaining popularity? Why isn't it found out for the stupidity that it is? Was I absent from school the day they lobotomized everyone?

This is my subjective, biased opinion, but quite honestly, I don't believe there are any two ways about this. I suppose it's possible that horse shit is a sought-after delicacy somewhere, but I'm not putting money on it. Certainly not the $7 I spent tonight to have my faith in humanity destroyed.

posted by Anonymous 2:00 AM // |

Monday, May 24, 2004

I... LOVE... LIVIN IN THE CITY

Worked today. It was great. Seven hours of nothin' to do. Hardly no-one came to the store, hardly nothing to clean or anything. Just sittin' back maxin' relaxin' all cool and all shootin' some b-ball outside of the school.

Of course, as nothing happened, I have nothing to tell you. But instead of ending here, having accomplished little, I will write a little poem about eggnog.

Yum, yum, eggnog
I don't drink it, it's true
Num, num, eggnog,
if you do, you belong in a zoo.

I'm getting a chance to do a hip hop dance tomorrow. Atly call me goddammit.

Funeral thursday. I feel bad about the death and everything, but looking at a preserved body makes me feel supersick. I am not afraid of mortality. Just what people will do with my body when I have no say in it. Like hospitals, same thing. For the love of nog, people, if you're around when I'm dead, just throw me into a fucking river, or something. I don't want no-one to get their visitati-ON.

(Trying not to mug myself.)

posted by Ben 10:42 PM // |

As True Today As It Was When It Was Written

If You Don't Start Drinkin' (I'm Gonna Leave)

I'm tired of puttin' up with your sober ways
Tired of lookin' at you through an alcoholic haze
You better change, I'm beggin you please
'Cause if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave

I wake up in the mornin', I'm hung to the roof
But I get no sympathy, baby, you're too aloof
You better change, yes, I'm beggin you please
'Cause if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave

Budweiser, Budweiser, Miller Light
Take a little hit, baby, it's alright
All a fella wants is company
Come on, baby, have a taste with me

Yeah, you say it's alright, baby, you don't care
But as soon as I indulge I get that icy stare
Yeah, you better change, I'm beggin' you please
'Cause if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave

Don't give me no more lectures 'bout stress and strife
This sobriety - this ain't my way of life
You better change, yes I'm beggin' you please
Well, if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave

Alright
Yeah, Budweiser, Budweiser, Miller Light
Take a little hit, baby, it's alright
All a fella wants is company
Come on, baby, have some fun with me

Yeah, you say it's alright, baby, you don't care
As soon as I indulge I get that icy stare
You better change, yes I'm beggin' you please
'Cause if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave
Well, if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave
Yes, if you don't start drinkin', I'm gonna leave

Also:

Ben: Yes. Yes we should.

posted by Sam 9:43 PM // |

Sunday, May 23, 2004

The Sheisty Times

All you can eat buffet Chinese Buffet for Fo'-niney-nine!? Wow. My dad sure knows how to pick a place that is both very tasty and depressing. I have a feeling this might become another filthy, cheap and awesome hang-out like the numerous others we attach ourselves to.

So I have this job digging up massive weeds in the rain. And today I have to feed this lady's cat while I'm there. I go to enter the house and realize that I STILL have the wrong key. She got her locks changed and I thought I had the most modern key but, no. So, careful to see there's no one on the street, I push open the window and jump in the house onto the chair, avoiding the glass table. I feed and pet the damn cats. I hafta leave out the window because of the way their door locks. so when you leave from the window you can't shut it all the way. It stays closed but liable to blast open with any strong gust of wind. Then the rainstorm began. I'm gonna go pay a visit and see if the house is okay. Mind you, to get caught tampering with the window at this hour would be even worse.

*Sigh*. It's just like Ali Callegarini told me - : "One day you're gonna end up a criminal."

posted by Leo 10:18 PM // |

Wowww.

Kegger tonight at Hector's. Last week I was getting far too drunk; tonight, not drunk enough. Stupid wheat beer. Anyway, there's nothing like being the fifth wheel with two (drunk) couples in a tent to remind you what a lonely bastard loser you are. I got kind of sick of watching and so I barbecued a bunch of shit once it stopped raining. BBQ is good. Sigh.

posted by Anonymous 1:44 AM // |

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