Wednesday, November 26, 2003

I Hate My Fucking Job

So I had to come back to Crooklyn today at 11:30 to let the DSL guys in, and I told the other support guys where I was going and how long I'd be gone, and I even called in from home to make sure everything was okay, but when I get back to my desk I've got an e-mail from the fucking CTO that says, "Why have you been gone for 2 hours?" What. The. Fuck. It reminded me of working at Personnel Express, where you were supposed to check with someone before going to the bathroom because somone might fucking call your idiot "banker" and have to talk to his fucking voicemail, godforbid. FUCK!

This makes me crazy, too. Good thing the whole "slave" / "master" metaphor is the last piece of jargon on earth that might be confusing to people who don't know what they're talking about. Great job, fucking idiots, you've got everything covered. That article reminded of this, which was delightful.

Also:
Bug Review: i always thought [Tetris] was just a game
Nintendo Julian: it is a game
Nintendo Julian: but if you lose
Nintendo Julian: some russian guy dies
Bug Review: he'll die anyway

Blogger fucking deleted this post the last time I tried to make it so I copied it to the clipboard this time. Fuck you, Internet.

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Everyone's Got A Blog Now

Okay, I have a lot of things to blog about, but I couldn't blog them over the weekend because my DSL was down. I called the DSL people, and they said they would send someone on Wednesday, and then my DSL was working again so I called them and told them not to come but they said my upstream rate was not so good so they were still gonna come, so I went out and bought some short pieces of modular cable because the modem and the answering machine were currently attached to industrial-sized spindles of it, but when I was doing that, I broke the DSL again but I fixed it this morning but they are still coming on Wednesday.

Someone besides this guy has mentioned Cavalcade of Assholes, says Google. Unfortunately, my new friend seems to be slightly on the hysterical side.

Mer and I went games-shopping yesterday at GameStop. We'd gone in to reserve a copy of Final Fantasy X-2, but it turned out it was already out, so we bought it. We also got Super Bust-A-Move 2, Tetris Worlds, and a second PS2 controller. Unfortunately, X-2 seems to be pretty much a dancing simulation with serious Barbie's dream-house undertones. I guess that's not a problem -- Mer really likes it. For my part, I'm getting pretty into Super-BAM, but it comes with this Story Mode which is pretty fucking awful. This is what the venerable GameSpot has to say about it:
While each character theoretically has his or her own story, you'll notice they share many of the same story elements, often recycling the same video clips. The clips themselves are almost embarrassing to watch. While the PS2 could render these sequences in real time with ease, all the cutscenes are prerendered, and bad MPEG compression is constantly visible. The script itself seems like it was translated from Japanese in a bit of a hurry, with lines like "I am scared! I should be brave!" delivered by voice actors who apparently had no previous voice-acting experience.
FYI, that "I am scared" line is delivered right before Puzzle-Master Weepy transforms into Puzzle-Master Smiley. Tetris Worlds is shit.

Over the weekend we rented Raising Victor Vargas and Owning Mahowny. Quite a pair of gerunds. We haven't watched "Owning" yet, but "Raising" was pretty wonderful. I thought I had a good story to write about meeting girls in the city, but it looks like they've got it covered.

Fuck, I had this link to peep to Tom, but now I can't remember what it was.

So I'm pretty sure the Right thing to do with OpenRPG is to make it validate XML config and game files using an XML Schema to specify types, ranges, and defaults for values, but libxml2 doesn't currently support Schemas, only DTDs, and it's currently the most sophisticated XML-parsing library for C. So I'm currently a little cheesed-off on that front. I'm thinking of using libdbi for database independence, but it's really only for doing SQL abstraction. I'm pretty sure I still want to provide a flat-file option, so I might have to write a second abstraction layer. Also, users should be able to log in to the administrative console over the Internet; and maybe there should be a chat area, too? That sounds like it might be feature-creep.

On Sunday I went to go see Master and Commander with Emma and Mags. It's pretty good; very accurate boat sounds. Some guy almost invents the theory of evolution before Darwin, but is thwarted by some tricksy French privateers. There is a part where this albatross starts flying around the ship and the sailors are using it for target practice. Maggie and I were like, "No!" They didn't hit the albatross, but they did get the ship's doctor by accident.

I finished reading Red Mars this morning. Hermione Chalmers dies -- sorry, kids. I have not done one shitting thing at work today.

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Back On The Late Shift

Yeah? Wow, okay. Hey, thanks a lot.

So I don't have to come in to work early for the next two weeks. Having that extra hour and a half in the morning is great! Today I woke up before my alarm went off, fed the cat, vacuumed up about 10 lbs. of litter from behind the cat box, and then sat on the futon staring at a blank screen on the TV for 20 minutes.

I've been spending most of my free time working on OpenRPG. It's going to be a meta-server for massively-multiplayer online role-playing games -- so clients will log in to OpenRPG, log in to a game, and they'll get to play it, and it's great. What I'm trying to do though, is support dynamically-loaded client-side code among heterogeneous clients, so that the first time you connect, you download the client component to the game as compressed XML, and it's going to different depending on the capabilities of your client. Like, if you just wanna play using a text-base console, and whoever designed the game has written in support for that, you'll download a bunch of text descriptions instead of a whole bunch of 3D models. This 'client code' is really just going to be mappings between user-input and outgoing messages to the server and mappings between incoming server messages and client display actions. So you might type 'go n' and your client sends a request to move your avatar north in the server's model of the world. What's going to be difficult is maintaining the 'model-world' on the server side of the things. That's probably going to be where I get sick of this project. I've just finished writing the parsing system for the server console. Now I just have to make it do something. Oh yeah, and the whole thing has to be i18n-compliant.

Man, Tom's blog raises some VERY INTERESTING points. Like, heroism: What is it? What does it take to be a hero? If you're a firefighter and you save a bunch of people, you're a hero, right? What if you're some scumbag businessman who worships at the idol of Greed all day making sure that rich white people stay rich so that you can send your kids to expensive prep schools and renovate your kitchen? What if you're the same scumbag, but you read to old people on the weekends or some bullshit like that? Does that make you a hero? Or are you only a hero when someone crashes a plane into you? What if you're so pious and religious that you're willing to do anything to serve your fictional space-fairy of choice? Surely, that must make you a hero. This is my other favorite Get Your War On:



When I'm not worshipping at the idol of Greed or the idol of Hypocrisy myself, I'm getting all worked up over Final Fantasy X-2. That game looks like it's going to be great. Hey all you New York Hero Urban Professionals! Which do you prefer, Gawker.com or Gothamist? That was a trick question. It turns out you're all catty little homos!

Mild props again to SomethingAwful, the unofficial Jessica Lynch fan club:
A True American HeroĆ¢„¢, she is always accompanied by a crying eagle that sits on her shoulder draped in an American flag while the Stars and Stripes plays solemnly in the background. During her appearances [on a forthcoming sitcom called Cabbage Farm] viewers are reminded that although it is OK to laugh sometimes, we should never forget the great sacrifices made by great patriots that make the country what it is today and that freedom comes at an immense cost.

Mike is definitely a hero for posting these videos of an adorable kitten.

Mer bought this Best of REM album, and it doesn't have It's The End Of The World As We Know It on it. I mean. come on, I think REM's as full of shit as much as the next guy, but that's a pretty good song, right? Tonight I definitely want to go drink beer at Tom's house. I was going to go over there last night, but I thought I might be getting sick like every fucking person at my office is right now. For those of you who are fans of the asshole businessman-speak that goes on on the other half of the cube farm, try this on for size:
So when I called insurance company to send someone over to give the flu shots, I was like, "Hey, don't send us any ugly nurses over here! We only want your hottest nurses!" Ha ha! They're probably going to send the ugliest nurse they got, now. It's gonna be like some Russian bitch with a mustache!

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

The Strokes Are Fucking Depressing

I'm serious. Kill me or something.

Tom's blog is like a cross between Jackie Harvey's The Outside Scoop and Get Your War On. Speaking of the latter, here is my very favorite strip:

Have you seen my Book of Virtues?


Last night when I got home, I found the bathroom door shut and some plastic bag sticking out from underneath. I went to open it, since the cat can't go to the bathroom if the door is shut, and I found her in there, in the dark, clutching some pieces of bag. She had apparently dragged the bag from the living room into the bathroom so she could be with the bag and her litter box at the same time, but it most have hooked on the door and pulled it shut. She sulked when I took it away from her. There were pieces of plastic in the throw-up I'd found that morning, so it's not like she was doing anything good with it, anyway. She sulked more when I had to move the furniture around to change all the lightbulbs in the house, replacing them with low-wattage bulbs. She sat in her litter box and hissed.

I tried to make fish last night but failed miserably. I wanted to broil it, so I set the oven temperature to "Broil" and put the fish in the drawer underneath the main drawer. That is the broiler, no? Well, it didn't get hot. at. all. It was awful. Maybe I'll try again tonight.

When I got into bed with Mer, we had the following conversation.
"Did you staple the thing? The staple... is it okay?"
"What thing? You want me to staple something?"
"No... is the staple okay?"
"Yeah, it's fine."
"It's fine? What do you mean it's fine?"
"Hey, hey. Calm down, you're dreaming. You're asleep."
"No, I'm not. Why did you staple it?"
"Woah, I didn't. I didn't staple anything!"
"Bastard! That's so annoying!"
"Don't call me bastard!"
"Okay, sorry."

Is it a party foul to link to Blogger.com on your blog? They know what to do when your mom finds out about your blog.

From the New York Times Arts section:
One might expect that a woman with a privileged background who was educated at the Chapin School in Manhattan and Princeton University would have been sheltered from many of the hardships that "The Moonlight Room" unflinchingly explores --- the street drug Special K, buying guns, a teenager locked out of his own home blah blah blah
Yo, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't all that stuff NYC private school to a tee? Except for the part about getting locked out -- I mean maybe if the doorman on duty was busy helping someone with a suitcase and you forgot your keys or something, then it makes sense. Those kids from Collegiate used to steal my lunch money and use it to buy Advil!

I don't feel like writing anything else in the blog now. I don't know. It's very difficult for me to get motivated to do anything creative once I get home. Like every creepy young man out there, I have an idea in my head for a book that I may not ever write. I mean, there are lots of ideas every day that you get where you're like, "Hey, that's interesting. I'd like to write a novel or a story or design a game about that," but there's this one plot or ambient feeling that I've had for a long time that I want to work on, and I never do. I'm walking home from work or from Tom's place or wherever and I'm a little bit drunk, maybe, and there are dead leaves all over the sidewalk and I'm walking past the deserted basketball courts on Sterling St. or wherever and I think to myself, "hey, that would be fun to work on when you get home." But all I do is program the Christing box all night. Want to make your code i18n-compliant? Try GNU gettext.

Monday, November 17, 2003

I've Got You To Let... Me Down

Had a happy weekend, did you? I sure did. Mer and I found a slightly soot-stained loveseat at The Salvation Army -- it only cost $99.99. I make that much in about... okay, just made it... wait... wait... shit, I'm earning money too fast to show you. Here's one thing about money, though. I just bought some plane tickets to go down to visit my remaining grandparent in Florida (and Mer's papa and li'l gam'ma, too), and that is ex-spense-sieve. I don't even feel like paying that much to do this stupid thing which is visit old people. I just don't care, I'm sorry. It's four fucking days I could be doing stuff that is more fun. Christ, I hate old people like God hates the dinosaurs.

The new The Strokes album is pretty the good. Actually, I only really like a couple of songs: They are called "What Ever Happened" and "12:51". And yeah, they're the most likeable songs on the album, so that fact that I like them will come as a mindfuck to those of you who think I only like stuff that no one else likes and to those of you who think I'm not mature enough to like a song that isn't catchy. Listen, none of that's important. The important thing is: "The Strokes are the new Beatles." I just made that up.

I just found out that there is some open source project already called OpenRPG. I should'a seen that one coming, really. Mine's a better idea, though, anyway.

Did I mention that I beat Eternal Darkness: Ulyaoth's Electric Boogaloo? Well, I did. It's not as satisfying a game as it could have been, but it's great fodder for the upcoming movie Blue Stuff vs. Red Stuff vs. Green Stuff vs. Blue Stuff.

Tom has a blog now. Hey Tom, if you edit your "Template" on Blogger.com, you can add a link to mine. That way all the girls that think you're funny but not mean and he has a beard will read my web-page as well. Having people you don't know read your online diary is what makes the internet's cogs rotate. That and fixed-income securities.

Didn't something funny happen recently? I can't remember. The cat threw up on something write before I had to leave for work and I just left it because there wasn't enough time.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

The Tonight Show

This morning's entry was stupid.

I forgot to mention -- the other day, I stopped by Golden Deli on my way to work. Alex made characteristic small-talk about hot water in private houses as if he hadn't practically fucking killed a guy the last time I was in there. Then this guy comes in and he gets a coffee, he's wearing a trenchcoat and a pretty nice suit under it, and he goes, "Do you sell any sex magazines?" Alex is like, "No, we don't." So the guy goes outside and I can see he's sort of peekin' at the newspaper racks and the awning, and he's got a little pad that he's scribbling on. A few minutes later, he comes back in and hands the top sheet to Alex, and he's like, "Okay, give me these numbers." He was picking lottery numbers, somehow using the paper and the deli storefront, but he'd rather have used porn. Sick.

I'm on the Edward Roivas stage of Eternal Darkness. Anyone got any tips on how to beat the invisible thing in the basement? Like Mantorok's little brother, I'm all ears.

How bad does everyone want to see The Triplets of Belleville?

Left my fucking work in my home directory at work. Can't work on that tonight. More links:

The Christ-Fucking Early Shift Again

That's right. It's very early and it goes until very late. What a nightmare. Last night we rented Chinatown, which is always great, and Wonder Boys, which I hadn't seen. It is okay. I mean, I pretty much liked it, but there are some parts with the Robert Downey Jr. character that are a bit too silly for me. Maybe they could have cut him out and replaced him with more scenes with Katie Holmes, who was doing a pretty okay job in the movie, believe it or not. She kept the mouth-scrunching to a minimum, at least. Okay, here is something I was proud of noticing: You guys know that T.V. miniseries IT? (Is there any other version of Stephen King's IT? It's the only one I've ever seen at the video store.) You know how all the actors in it are just so depressed-looking and ugly that it looks like they're all amateur porn stars? Well, the blonde guy with the pony tail from IT, the main character pretty much, he plays Frances McDormand's husband in Wonder Boys. He looked like he had some serious suicide action coming to him after wrapping up IT, but I guess instead he's jus' chillin'.

The name Jonathan / Johnathan -- is it merely a contraction of the names Joseph and Nathan?

I'm planning and working on a game server similar to Arianne (I've given up on them -- they can't seem to get their act together). Surprise, surprise, it's pretty difficult. Especially since I'm doing it entirely in C. ROCK.

SomethingAwful++:
That night when the doctor got home he took his secret telephone out of the closet. In Iraq that had to have two telephones because of the secret police. One telephone was the one they normally used and it could only call certain numbers and there were always secret police listening. The other telephone was kept hidden and it could dial any number and the secret police would just hear a conversation about women's hats if they listened in. The doctor used his secret phone to call President George W. Bush in the White House and the doctor told him about Jessica Lynch. The President immediately rushed to Air Force Eight - the presidential attack helicopter - but was dissuaded from attempting to rescue Lynch by Robert Rumsfeld (Donald Rumsfeld's identical twin brother who is a commando). Robert Rumsfeld agreed to lead his ultra elite commando team "Special Ops Omega" into Iraq to rescue Private Lynch.

Okay, I just checked that ponytail guy out on IMDB. His name is Richard Thomas, which is not really much of a porno name. The name of his character in IT, though is William 'Stuttering Bill' Denbrough: 100% porn.

Thursday, November 06, 2003

Everything That Has A Beginning Has An Ent

Man I've felt shitty this week. I think I got a bad breakfast sandwich or something at Golden on Monday -- I've had the fire-squirts ever since. Now let me tell you all of the fascinating things that happened to me:

I had made an appointment to see a dermatologist because fucking Christ and everyone is always telling me to get all these awful things that are growing on me checked out. So Monday was when my appointment was, so I walked over to Beth Israel on 14th St. at lunchtime. I'd never been there. It's really nice! You should go the next time you have an ambulatory disability or are dying of cancer. I liked my doctor well enough. He was very direct -- as soon as I took my shirt off, he saw the dry skin on the backs of my arms and was like, "Just so you know, that's blah-blah-blah. You'll never get rid of that, but you can put moisturizer on it if you like." He didn't think any of the moles on my chest were significant, but when I went to show him the one under my scrote, he said, "Woah, that's a wart." I'm like, "A wart? No way, I've had that since I was 7. It's a mole." He was like, "I'm pretty sure it's a wart. I'm going to shave it off." Why not, right? So he gave me a little shot and just... shaved it off, I guess -- I didn't really see, but I could feel him picking at it, which was a little weird. He also had to cauterize it. "It won't stop bleeding!" he said. The thing he used to cauterize it looked like a water pic, but apparently it squirted fire because all this smoke was floating up from my taint. I didn't feel any of it. Anyway, so now I've got this little star-shaped scar down there, and it still kind of hurts, but not very much at all. Don't get any ideas, by the way -- I don't have goddamn genital warts or something. This is the wart that you get when you are a little kid and have a wart on your hand and you play with your fucking dick all the time.

That night, when I was walking home from the subway, I thought I'd stop at the Golden Deli for some cider for Mer. They didn't have any, but what they did have was a big fucking fight between Alex and some guy who maybe works one of the night shifts there. Alex was like, "You come into my shop and say that to me? You want to hit me? Go ahead, hit me! I'll fucking kill you, motherfucker!" And the guy he was yelling at was saying to Alex's wife, "Your husband is very stupid. He is drunk. You see how stupid?" At first they were yelling at each other over by the gambling video game that doesn't give you any money, but then Alex started chasing the guy around the store while his wife tried to hold him back by his undershirt. He was like some kind of Bangladeshi Stanley Kowalski

Okay, so I saw this Matrix: Revolutions movie, and guess what -- I didn't hate it that bad. I mean, look, the cache of these movies is founded on the premise that you think the idea, "What if what I think is real isn't, like, real," is really groundbreaking. Come on -- I was already over that one before I even knew what a matrix was. There's even some proof that I read in Ethics about how it doesn't really matter whether the world actually exists the way you perceive it or not. My point is, if you are really disappointed about these movies, you are an idiot. But there are some pretty incredible images in this one, like horrifying clouds of those squiddy terrors just coming right at you like your worst Captain Eo nightmare. These guys know art direction. Oh yeah, and Hermione dies. Sorry, kids.

Links, links. Fuck, I can't remember now. Try this and this and, uh... this. My e-mail tried to send me that last one.

Oh yeah, and if you think my blog is racist, consider this: I am watching some PBS special about Muslim preacher-singers and there is some Arab guy wailing like a baby that came out of a hyena mating with a toucan while about a billion guys in white robes twitch and bow like the worst kind of retard, and I'm lovin' it. Just keep them the hell away from me and my kids.

Good thing Christianity is so dignified.