Recent Entries

Gah.

So apparently J doesn't understand the concept of 'no', and showed up to game tonight anyway. Almighty GM apparently doesn't care enough to actively drive him away, but I'm pretty pissed. J is a disgusting excuse for a human being, and dealing with him is starting to take the fun out of gaming for me.

PS

Dear Catalyst Games Lab, please stop taunting me with Unwired previews. It looks sexy and awesome, and you guys said it as going to be released in the second quarter of '08. And, well, it's the middle of June now.

Also, while many of the posts on Dumpshock make me wish I had a machine to punch people through the internet with (typical fanboy attitudes of 'because I like it, it must be right, and anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot), I am occasionally reminded of how awesome it, when I come across things like geneticists debating the method of expression of metatypes.

Solutions II

So, pre-genned characters were e-mailed out, and J threw another hissy fit, this time via e-mail. I'd repost, but it's not that entertaining and drama-filled for those who haven't witnessed some of his previous behavior (all of three people reading this, tops), and almighty GM apparently basically told him to GTFO. This totally makes up for being crazy understaffed again at work today.

Solutions

The managers came down from their offices on high and decreed that there shall be a firing in the grocery store this week. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the firee, but it was done, and there was much rejoicing through out the produce department.

In other words, Problem Child is no longer a problem, and apparently caused a bit of a scene on the way out, which I missed. Now if we could only get J to stop showing up to game, life would be good indeed XD

In brief WoW news, I hit Outlands on my mage this week, so in my excitement, I've been spending more time staring at my computer screen than I probably should, especially because Outlands is a pretty weird place, and the surreal is getting to me. On the other hand, Outlands also fulfills my desire to run instances all the time, because I can find groups for the Blood Furnace and Ramparts pretty much all the time. So I've run Ramparts four times, and Blood Furnace twice, in the last four days XD;

Life, the Universe, and a Meme

Work: Problem Child is still causing problems. Latest utterly classy act: going on a half-hour long rant about how immigrants shouldn't be allowed into Canada and everyone should speak goddamn English - while the really sweet ESL Chinese immigrant cashier was in the room. The whole department wants a firing at this point.

Gaming: We wiped again in SR (surprise, surprise). Current plan of action is to run a more story-based game, with pregenned characters, which everyone likes - except J (again, surprise, surprise). He threw a big hissy fit about the implication that the GM made better characters than he did (he does), and that he wouldn't be able to just run around killing shit all the time (which isn't entertaining and gets the rest of us killed), and we're all hoping that he decides to never come again. In Earthdawn, we killed the Horror that marked us all, and with the help of V the Illusionist/Troubadour Resistance leader, broke into the Imperial prision and freed our friends, who were not in very good shape at all (there was some nastiness with an eyeball >.o). But we have escaped safely and are now preparing for our next adventure.

Garden: Despite the cold, wet weather, my strawberries are doing great, and I will probably have my first crop in another week or two. My squash, on the other hand, which were supposed to be super-easy to grow and cold-tolerant, are looking small and sad. Tomatoes are an unknown right now - still hoping for some warmer weather out here.

Meme:
You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you.

Weapon can be real or fictional. Person can be real or fictional.

1) I'm going to go classic and say 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, narrow choke, loaded with buckshot.

2) This one's hard - I am an industrial music fan, and 90% of industrial music is suitable for kicking ass and taking names, but I think either KMFDM's 'Witchhunt' or Rob Zombie's 'Dragula' XD Probably Witchhunt if I had to pick just one.

3) Predictable, but Leon Kennedy, because he knows zombies and all sorts of cool Secret Service shit.

Work

I know I don't usually blog about work, but this last week has been crazy-town.

Saturday: We have a new girl in the department. We'll call her Problem Child, as that is what she is - shows up late, impossible to get her to do anything, wanders off and talks to people in other departments for half her shifts. She spent the first fifteen minutes of her shift talking on her cellphone, and I, not having had a good day up to that point, was a bit short with her about how she needed to get her ass in gear. She flipped out, and the ensuing rant included the line 'Do you wanna take this out back? I'll take you on'. Seriously, who the hell says something like that?

Monday: A Murphy's Law of days - one opener calls in sick, Problem Child calls in 'too stressed out to work'. One of the afternoon people thinks she's closing, and comes in two hours late. The closer himself is forty-five minutes late. The tubing of our cooler system pops off, and sprays water all over the floor. I slice my hand open with a box cutter (not very deep or anything, but it was pretty annoying). It was a laugh-or-cry day - we mostly chose to laugh.

Today: Saturday's incident is firmly in the hands of the managers, and I got a promotion. Small one, with no real increase in power, but it's nice to know that the managers think that highly of me.

We'll see what new adventures tomorrow brings...

Indy 4

I think I'm going to end up being a dissenting and say I loved it. It's up there with the original three for me, and definately better than Temple of Doom (which I re-watched the other week, and then remembered why I had only seen it a few times - it's terrible). Loved the nods to all the previous films, and Harrison Ford, amazingly, has still got the touch.

( Spoiler time! )

Words

I bought the last two volumes of Transmetropolitan last week, and finally got around to reading them tonight. Awesome, as usual, and I have to give Warren Ellis mad props for pulling of an amazing ending. Endings are always tricky, and endings of serials exponentially so - this one was satisfying, conclusive, and not actually a total downer.

And it got me thinking - Transmet, on the surface, is a very cyberpunk comic. At it's core, though, it starts to transcend genre - it's a story about the power of words, and of The Truth. The Truth is not always good, and not always nice, but it's still something to strive for.

And coming in on a similar vein, an entry about the reasons and nature of blogging. I find a lot of what Sam says there ringing true for me - I blog, both to share my news, opinions, and tirades with the world, and to keep a record for myself. That record is seven and a half years long now, and still chugging along. I know I've been negelectful, recently - some of it is a habit born out of last summer, I think, when I had very limited internet. I got in the habit of not posting, and never really broke it. Life has also become somewhat routine as of late, which has far less potential for interesting or amusing things to happen, particularly as I tend to forget them when they do - work, for example, is good for at least one nutbar customer a week, the current one being the woman who insisted that our Yukon Gold potatoes were in fact overgrown White Rose potatoes, and she knows this because she's a horticulturist, and grows potatoes and writes for magazines. I did a great deal of smiling and nodding.

But I'd really like to pick myself up out of my journaling slump, and maybe get some new graphics up eventually.

Tales of the Real World

I know I haven't been posting much lately - pretty much all of my hypothetical posts would fall into two categories: 1) long introspective ramblings I'm too lazy to type up or 2) accounts of my daily doings, which can largely be summed up as 'same old, same old'. Still, I'll stick my head in and blather for a while, even though I really should be sleeping.

On the RPG front - I managed to actually get people organized for a Shadowrun 4 game I'm running. This is my first time GMing anything, so I'm really nervous, but I've got a great group of people - mix of SR4, SR3 and SR n00b players. We've managed to get through character generation, and the results are...interesting. I'll save that for another post, though, probably after we start having regular sessions. Earthdawn gets more tense every session - our Swordmaster escaped almost-certain death via NPC intervention, we set off alarms in the imperial dungeons, and now we're hiding out in a swampy ruined district in Vivane, helping a crazy old engineer try to dredge his failed flying machine out of the river.

I also bought the Wii version of Okami the other week, as I never got around to buying it for the PS2. It's absolutely gorgeous, and the controls are great - a little like Zelda as a Japanese fairytale. My only complaint thus far is there is a little too much NPC talking and not quite enough of me doing cool stuff. Also been playing Boom Blox, which proudly advertises itself as 'A Steven Spielberg Game', which makes me wonder if it was actually designed and/or produced by Spielberg, or merely endorsed by him. Either way, it's simplistic, but rather addictive - Jon and I played it for two hours straight tonight.

A Million Little Things

I know I'm going to regret how late I'm up tomorrow morning, but I couldn't sleep, and blogging is better than lying in bed awake. Term is over, most of my marks are back in - I did...well, crappily, to be honest, this term, although I didn't fail anything. My average is hovering on the the C+/B- line, which is a little disappointing, as it means most likely that I'll be denied admission to my first choice of major (cell bio specialization, which is full of cheating keener pre-meds), and will have to settle on general bio - I can take an almost identical course load, though. Of course, I could always wuss out and switch to Arts and get great marks, but while I love English (and get all As and B+s in it), I don't really want an English degree. Still, I really need to pull my shit together this fall - while UBC is actually a really tough school (Canadian students basically need an A+ average to get into my faculty), I'd like to have at least a solid B/B+.

In nerdy news, my little gnome mage in WoW hit 40 this week, which means I got my first mount ever - an Unpainted Mechanostrider, which is really cool, although kind of smokey. I'm also running my first tabletop game ever - Shadowrun, for Rosie, Justin, and Jon. So far we have a Japanese elf technomancer, a troll Predator fanboy, and a social chameleon, who will probably be changed because the party doesn't have an actual mage. I'm nervous as hell, because I have no self-confidence, but I'm also pretty excited about sharing a setting I like so much with friends.

Had a brief end-of-term party which was actually more of a sit-around-and-talk-about-Shadowrun party, because those were the only people who actually showed. If I want to throw a party in the future, I think I need to first make more friends, and then invite three times as many people as I want to show on the principle that two thirds of them won't, as this is a re-occuring theme for me. Or possibly I should stop trying to have parties and sit around eating chips and playing video games by myself XD; Yeah, I'm a bitter antisocial freak. This is why I love Transmet - I want to be Spider when I grow up (well, okay, except female and not a journalist).

Speaking of video games, we have Brawl, and it is awesome. I have been pimping out Jon's Wii, as it is set up here on my 'new' big tv (36" CRT, hand-me-down but still in great shape) - I think I might cave and buy some virtual console stuff for it, possibly after I buy another GC controller and a GC memory card to play some Zelda with.

Dude WTF

Okay, so it was thundering like fifteen minutes ago, and now it's snowing. Vancouver weather is so weird sometimes.

A Brief Rant

I want to make it a long rant, but it is already far, far too late to still be awake, so brief will have to do. I have an acquaintance. We shall call him J, because he's a privacy freak (and this is coming from me, a singularly cautious and paranoid individual) - people from the club will probably know who I'm talking about. J is, in short, an arrogant, judgmental asswipe, who is convinced that he is 1) God's gift to the ladies, and 2) The Shit. He is neither. He has managed to earn the animosity of almost everyone who has to deal with him, and I swear to god, if he says 'That's such a chick thing to do' to me again, I will hurt him. Because god forbid I want to actually get to know people on the internet (or in this case, in WoW), and use LJ to do so, which is apparently only women do.

Unrelated, but on a similar vein, there is really no good way to tell a friend that you would rather go into the wilderness and gouge your eyes out with blackened sticks than deal with his girlfriend. Because I really would, as said girlfriend is the bitchy, whiny, passive-aggressive, 'I'm a girl on the internet so I'm special, pay attention to me' female version of the aforementioned J. I've settled on trying to avoid her as much as humanly possible, both online and off, but Christ, does she piss me off.

Blood Elves and Earthdawn

Because I am a nerd, and feel like nattering on about RPGs of both the tabletop and PC variety. Although mostly the tabletop variety, because ED blood elves >>> WoW blood elves, and I feel like telling you why. WoW blood elves changed their name to blood elves because 1) a bunch of them died and 2) they lost the source of awesome magical power they were all addicted to. Now they sit around being vaguely arrogant and evil and making deals with demons. In Earthdawn, the blood elves are called that because they are literally bleeding, all the time. Why? Because they have thorns growing out from underneath their skin. Why? Because it kept them from having their souls eaten by extraplanar monsters.

Okay, storytime - a couple hundred years ago in the Earthdawn timeline, historians digging through the old records discovered that due to the rise and fall of magic in the world, they were due to be invaded by aforementioned big nasty extraplanar monsters, called Horrors. They also figured out a way of hiding from the Horrors, which mostly involved building cities underground and magically sealing them off until the Horrors left again. The elven court, however, being the arrogant SoBs they are, went 'Bah, we can do better than that! We're elves!'. They decided to magically alter their forest, the Wyrm Wood, to form a barrier to protect them. This worked for a while, but as the invasion grew stronger, the barriers started failing. However, the elves realized that while Horrors fed on Namegiver pain and misery, they could only feed on pain and misery they caused themselves - they couldn't feed on elves who were already miserable and full of pain. The elves' brilliant idea? Fuse their souls with those of thorny plant spirits, so they are in excruciating pain all the time. This actually worked, but the blood magic they used to accomplish this seriously warped both them, and their forest (anyone who's read the Coldfire Trilogy - the Hunter's forest? Yeah, it's pretty much like that). So, end result is that the Elven Court is badass and totally fucking crazy, which leaves most of the rest of the elves with some serious complexes - 'We have to honor them! They're the Court! But they're all insane! What do we do?!'.

Our Earthdawn game has been getting pretty epic lately, although I have the sinking suspicion we may wipe next session. We got involved in a slum turf-war while on our way to break two people (former party members) out of imperial prison. Unfortunately, it turns out that there are much larger forces at play than just a simple turf war, and we ended last session with the warren town we were protecting being surrounded by about three hundred city troops. Three of us are evacuating the town via a secret access to the sewer system, while the Swordmaster is about to engage in a duel to buy us time, and the archer is staying behind to back him up - they're almost certainly dead (although Isak now has a great deal more respect for the Swordmaster for facing death honorably, without fear - one of the big things for Nethermancers is to never be afraid, particularly of death). As for the rest of us - well, Isak has probably been Horror-marked due to raw-casting to keep from drowning (we escaped into the river, forgetting that none of us can swim), and this will probably end nastily.

Man, I love Earthdawn. I know I blather endlessly about Shadowrun because I ♥ cyberpunk, but Earthdawn, honestly, is a stronger, better fleshed-out system.

Assorted Updates

1) I am sick of being sick. Sinus infections (which I'm fairly certain I have) suck.

2) I have started the job hunt anew, because I'm sick of traveling an hour each way to sell overpriced produce to bitchy rich people. Particularly when a few of the staff I like have quit or been fired. So I went by the mall today, filled out an application for Chapters, dropped off resumes at both EB Games (selling my soul, I know) and Lush, and learned that Best Buy and Futureshop do all their applications online. So I'll see what comes of it.

3) I bought more Transmetropolitan while I was at it, because Warren Ellis has made me into a corporate whore. It's so good, though.

4) Have begun cleaning up the garden out back - it's a mess, though, so it's a little daunting. Updates to follow when I actually get somewhere.

5) I really love Moon Guard - I made an alt there, because I'm insane and decided I wanted to try WoW RP, and it's apparently the RP server. And it's really refreshing, because I can actually leave Trade on with out wanting to murder people. The stupidity level seems amazingly low.

Computer Woes, Shopping Sprees, and Other Things

So, last week was not a good week for computers around here - Jon managed to get some sort of boot-sector virus on his PC, and in the process of trying to remove it, managed to fry his master boot record - any advice from the technically inclined here? He's got a new HD and reinstalled the OS (XP Pro), but the computer won't recognize the old HD as actually existing, so we have no idea how to fix it.

Oh, and then I spilled pineapple juice all over my laptop. Dead serious. Thank god it's a Thinkpad - the keyboard took the brunt of the spill, and everything is working pretty much as intended (I'm using it right now), although half the keys are now slightly sticky, and smell of pineapple. Such is life - hopefully with enough acquired dust in the keyboard, the stickiness will go away.

I also bought a ton of stuff over the last two days - I've decided to clean up and re-plant the garden in the back yard, because I love fresh veggies and it's a mess right now, so I bought a bunch of gardening supplies. I also finally bought a wireless doorbell (there are four doors between outside and my living room, so I don't hear knocks), and a water filter pitcher. I also went out yesterday and splurged, and bought three more volumes of Transmetropolitan, because this comic is amazing.

The weather has been nicer lately - still cold for spring, particularly out here, but it's bright and sunny out, and it's finally taking the edge off the anger and depression I've been feeling for the last few weeks. So that's good. I sat in the sun and chatted with Rosie and Julie for a while this morning, and that was good. Hopefully I can get things back on track now.
Computer Woes, Shopping Sprees, and Other Things

Two AM

There's something about two am that inspires me to go on long, epic computer quests, whether it be graphics-making, or a flurry of wiki-ing, or, as tonight, deciding to research and install some new WoW addons. I think it's that at two am, I'm sleepy enough to think that all of this is a brilliant idea, but awake enough to actually carry it out.

And then suddenly it's three am, and you realize you have to be up in six hours for classes. If you're a terrible person like me, you end up deciding to skip said classes to sleep in >.> The notes are up online, and I don't want to deal with people at the club just yet, as I am still too annoyed over elections ('joke' candidate didn't even vote for himself. Gah. I want to kick him in the balls, I think).

I Hate Mondays

So, election results are in. I lost to the 'don't care' candidate by one vote. The 'joke' candidate was one vote below me. My respect for the members of this club has sunk to a new low, I think. Particularly as I know already I'm going to end up doing all the position's work, because nobody else will, with none of the benefits, because I wasn't elected.

Victory!

Managed to get the file exports to work again, so I've cleaned out the old databases, installs, and HTML files (I had three different archive sets), and upgraded to MT4.1

In life-news, slowly getting burned-out by my work/school schedule - I like my co-workers, but the hour to hour and half commute to work and selling overpriced produce to bitchy rich people is getting me down. I'm going to look for a closer job for the summer, but it's frustrating not being able to get jobs in my field because I'm not Canadian (almost all the grants and work opportunities are limited to citizens or permanent residents).

I also went and bought comic books on Sunday - Volume 8 of Sandman (Brief Lives, my favorite story art ♥), and Volume 1 of Transmetropolitan, which is awesome and cyberpunky, and which I think I may go buy more of today.

I feel like I should post more, but it would probably be all 'blah blah blah, my life sucks' because I'm an angry, bitter individual. Perhaps there will be WoW-blather later.

Argh part II

Okay, so unless someone knows where I can find a zip of MT 3.34, the installation is unsavable - I can only find 3.36, and it won't upgrade properly. So tomorrow afternoon will be spent reformatting the year of files that aren't on the old-old install, and then doing a clean install of 4.1. Skuld, I'll format your files too, but if you want to save any index templates from the current install, you'll have to log in yourself, I don't have access to your's.

Argh

So, I installed Movable Type 4.1 the other day to play around with it. Unfortunately, it must share some key files with MT 3.34, because despite installing it in a different directory, it has borked up my MT3.34 installation. All the HTML files are still there, but I can't add new entries or access the export functions, nor can I edit templates other than the index. So I'm backing up the HTML and SQL databases and attempting to re-install 3.34 over 4.1 and hope it works. If it doesn't, well...I can still access my old MT 2.63 install, it looks like, and export from there. That goes up to March of last year, so it's not too bad.