• Day 3

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Day 3. Due to an altercation between Winston and Cthulu, Christmas has been cancelled.

    Or not. Seriously though, cats who are unfamiliar with one another often don’t get along, and after two days and two nights of exposure to one another, my own cats have felt threatened enough to threaten my sister’s cat who unfortunately, is blind.

    I often wish I was semi-telepathic so I could at least let my cats know that there’s nothing wrong, and they’ll be home again as soon as the floors are finished.

    And my toilet, sink, fridge and stove have been re-installed.

    So yeah, it might be a few more days.

    Oh, and last night, I saw Alex Kingston in an episode of NCIS. I still can’t see her in anything without thinking “HEY! it’s River Song!”

    Which kind of makes me a geek.

    And proud to be one.


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized

  • Day 2.

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Day 2. The cats are experiencing mood swings. Or maybe this is normal behavior, and it is I who am experiencing THE FUCKING MOOD SWINGS! I may never know.

    Just waiting for the call from the floor-installing people to let us know it’s okay to go in and move all my crap from the bedroom to the living room so they can get in tomorrow to lay down the flooring in the other rooms. It’s been a whirlwind so far, and I have so much stuff, we’re not entirely certain we’re going to be able to get it done. I have confidence that we can do it, but I’m not certain how long it will take or what aftereffects to expect once the furniture, appliances and other garbage has been moved.

    Still, it will be nice to have a new floor.

    Although the cats will still be driving me mad. MAD I TELL YOU!


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized

  • Another Update!?

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Well, I’m currently updating from my mother’s couch, since my floors are being torn up and replaced with something that isn’t carpet.

    I’m also having a monsterof a time updating my blog, since my tablet’s ability to select text is based entirely on my own hanf-to-eye coordination, which is pathetic.

    I think it’s just that I’m not used to updating on a tablet, and an inexpensive one at that.  I’m so used to the tactile feedback of a keyboard that I really can’t type well on a touch-screen.  So I apologize for the lack of eloquence in my writing, but it’s all I can do to keep from making horrific speling misteakz.

    We’ve pretty much gutted the apartment; toilet, stove, fridge and bathroom sink so that A) the flooring guys can get in to do their job, and B) we can get new equipment to replace the outdated stove, toilet, fridge and sink.  It’ll be like having a whole new apartment, except that all the holes in the walls will still be there.

    I’m also jonesing for Warcraft, but as my addiction is to the Internet as a whole, I’m also set with my parents’ cable connection.  Though my tablet doesn’t seem to agree with their WiFi…  Probably has something to do with the fact that it’s a cheap tablet…

    More later!


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized

  • I’m back!

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    It’s been a while since last I wrote in my blog for a number of reasons: I haven’t had all that much inspiration to write in my blog for one; for another, I’ve been working on a role-playing game system which my friends seem to enjoy; I’ve been playing the new World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria, and of course, I’ve been off-planet for some time, fighting Zur and his mighty Kodan Armada while a Beta Unit masqueraded as me so no one would suspect my involvement.

    My inspirational deficit may be linked to the fact that up until recently, I had been deluged with political ads, sucking my life and spirit from my body. As such, what remains of my soulless husk shambles hither and yon, as though seeking cerebral sustenance. I spend my days mindlessly working and my nights foraging through the realm of dreams for a reason to poke and prod my keyboard as thoughts meander from my mind onto the screen.

    As far as the gaming system I’ve been working on, it’s not entirely completed, though I have a pretty solid base. It works similarly to True20 or Mutants and Masterminds, though with a twist: Instead of comparing an attack roll’s success to a chart, damage is a combination of the roll of a d20 with appropriate modifiers plus a fixed damage value based on the weapon used. Add them together and bippity boppity boo, you’ve got your total damage. Subtract armor and the resulting amount of damage is subtracted from your Health…

    Sounds pretty simple, though I had originally envisioned a system which would fit on a 3×5 index card in its entirety and still allow for playable options. Now it’s 65 pages long, though I should point out that this is with the list of playable races and their characteristics.

    I feel the game has come out really well, though I still need to work on character classes. There are a lot of them in a branching tree structure, allowing a player to direct his character down one of a number of paths, usually based on a defensive/balanced/offensive template. Things have been going slowly of late, but I’ve got a vacation coming up, and I hope to work on it some more…

    The World of Warcraft expansion, Mists of Pandaria is pretty neat, despite the fact that there are pandas in it. Not that I don’t like pandas… I just think Blizzard could have concentrated more on one of the already existing and established races such as Murlocs or the ursine furbolgs.

    The biggest problems I have with the game at this point are minor gripes based on game play rather than significant concerns. They’ve changed the game significantly with every expansion, and as such, every time a new one comes out, there will be a large number of people who complain endlessly about the changes that have been made, complaning that they’ve made the game “unplayable.”

    Unplayable to the complainers, I suppose, but I still have fun with it. I’ve made up a couple of new characters since the expansion came out, including a Pandaren, and I have to say, that aside from the toony appearance, unrealistic physics and lack of any true sense of immersion, the game is still one of my favorites.

    Of course, I’m not as much a connosuer of games as my friend Dave. He’s much more of a gamer, and thus is a better judge of what games are “good” or “bad” or just “a fucking waste of time.”

    So anyway, that’s what’s new here.

    Oh yeah, I just cleaned my bathroom.


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized 📎and tagged

  • April 1.

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Yes, I’m back. And none too soon. It’s April 1st, one of our best national holidays, known far and wide as April Fools’ Day. The origins of this holiday allegedly go back to ancient times when the year began in Spring instead of Winter. As life began anew, the people would celebrate new beginnings on or around the Spring Equinox, and by doing so, would welcome the new year, much the way the ponies do in Equestria as they wrap up winter.

    However, as the Christian religion became more and more prevalent (again, this is allegedly, for we really don’t know), the Church began to usurp what they viewed as pagan religions by creating their own religions which took place at the same time. By offering worshipers food, drink and entertainment, the church sought to draw people away from such celebrations as Yule, beltane, Samhain and Midsummer. The church created the holidays of Christmas (to replace Yule), Easter (to replace Beltane), All Saints’ Day (to replace Samhain) and the Feast of St. John the Baptist (to replace midsummer celebrations such as Litha.

    Again, while many scholars believe that this was the church’s intent, others suggest that the Christian holidays were independent of, and not chosen to subvert, the pagan celebrations. Personally, my irritation with Christian and especially Catholic dogma leads me to believe that the intent was certainly there.

    In any case, the church (again, allegedly,) moved the New Year to January. However, people still celebrated the new year in April, and were thus laughed at by their Christian contemporaries for being “fools.”

    I should point out however, that Wikipedia specifically says “The earliest recorded association between April 1 and foolishness can be found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392). Many writers suggest that the restoration of January 1 as New Year’s Day in the 16th century was responsible for the creation of the holiday, but this theory does not explain earlier references.” This from the third paragraph of Wikipedia’s April Fools’ Day entry.

    Either way, April Fools’ Day is usually “celebrated” by the playing of pranks on people such as filling a friend’s boots with shaving cream or filling an employer’s office with balloons. Some pranks are harmless, while others such as the egging of houses or toilet-papering of trees can be extremely annoying and difficult to clean up, and of course, the perennial burning-bag-of-dog-poo-at-the-front-door, which can result in a biohazard situation.

    I don’t “celebrate” April Fools’ Day, as I have both been the victim of pranks, and have played pranks on others which I thought would be innocent jokes, but which turned out to be more harmful than I initially expected. Putting the phrase “Caution: your computer is infected by a virus” into the batch file intended to start a game on one of my high-school computers wound up causing a small panic as the administrators barred all access to the only two IBM PCs in the computer lab for a week, looking for a virus that wasn’t there.

    Although in retrospect, making administrators panic over nothing is, while not harmless, one of the most noble and valorous forms of pranks one can pull. If they’re stupid enough to panic rather than utilizing logic and seeking a solution, they deserve to be panicked.

    This obviously doesn’t work on the scale of local, state or national governments, as even placing Saran Wrap® over the President’s toilet seat could be viewed as an act of terrorism. And toilet-papering the White House will get you a one-way ticket straight to Gitmo.

    So anyway, happy April Fools’ Day, and I hope to update more often than I have within the last few months…


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized

  • And a Bag of Heads

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Over the past few months, I have been in three weddings, in two of which, I was a groomsman; attended a baby shower (my second ever); took two weeks of paid vacation (yay!) and still had time to prevent my cat from destroying Manhattan Island in a poorly conceived attempt to dig a trans-Atlantic tunnel connecting the Bronx with Lisbon, Portugal.

    Needless to say, the tunnel was stopped well short of the 3,430 mile (5,520 km) goal, and the tunnelling machines were returned to their proper owners to be utilized in some plot for world domination to be dealt with by James Bond and the good men and women of MI-6.

    And my blog has probably just been flagged by Her Majesty’s Secret Service… Hi guys! Love the Bond movies! Hope you beat MI-5 in the inter-departmental Rugby match next Spring. (No, really. They take their Rubgy and Intelligence seriously.

    So anyway, I haven’t updated in a while, and I felt I should at the very least let my readers (both of them) know what’s been happening in my life of late. First, the weddings in which I was in attendence were quite nice. One was held in a church and featured red tuxes, Christian music and pizza. The other was held in a ski lodge, and featured blue tuxes, loud music, pizza and taxidermied animals… Okay, that was just in the lodge. And they were just in the lobby, not in the rooms. The dead things were kitsch, but if they’d been in the room, they would have crossed the line from tacky to tasteless….

    The baby shower was nice too, and it is my fervent hope that once the baby is born, my cat Shishou does not teach her how to make weapons-grade plutonium from items commonly found beneath the kitchen sink. Had that problem with the neighbor’s kid, who now glows green at night and can rotate his head 360°, but no longer has the ability to move his eyes. We call him owlboy. He’s really nice, though he spends all night hooting and glowing. And we haven’t seen a rodent in months…

    I’ve also been working on two minor projects. One, I’ve been attempting to get my computer room cleaned up to some extent so I can actually find half the shit I have in here, and two, I’ve been shredding old documents. My shredder apparently has a habit of overheating and shutting down for short periods of time. And my bank prints my account statements on heavy paper which is more like very thin card-stock than paper. So I have about two years’ worth of bank statements to shred, and my shredder keeps getting indigestion. Maybe I ought to take my remaining sheets over to Absolute Data Destruction or give them to the Foot Clan to deal with…

    Need to do some Christmas shopping, but us bachelors usually wait until the 24th.

    Thankfully I got this guy paid off…

    ‘Cause he doesn’t take checks, and his interest rates are a killer.


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized

  • The Weekend…

    Posted on by avatarJador Comment

    Oh, what a week it’s been…

    It’s been more or less a vacation, but as with most of my life, the weekdays are pretty much grind while the weekends are hectic as hell. I spent most of this week cleaning up various areas of my apartment, making a dent in the massive disarray of clutter in which I live. I managed to clear out much of my computer area, thanks to the fact that I had to bring most of my computer equipment up to Dave’s place for Tim’s bachelor LAN party. When I brought the system back, I simply cleaned out the clutter and put the computer back one piece at a time. I even dusted the sides of the desk… And I rarely dust.

    The bachelor party was a success. We did the typical LAN party, playing a variety of games including the classic, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the predecessor to World of Warcraft. We did Unreal Tournament 2004, which is one of our favorites, thanks to the “Onslaught” mode where instead of killing each other, you cooperate with friends to capture objectives, ultimately destroying your enemy’s “power core.” And of course, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, in which Tim’s character was a wookiee with dual purple lightsabers.

    Then we saw the movie Immortals, with which I was somewhat impressed from a special-effects standpoint, but disappointed with the mytho-historical accuracy with which the characters were portrayed. It isn’t like Wolfgang Petersen’s Illiad-based film, Troy, in which there are no gods, and Achilles isn’t really immortal, he’s just really, really really good at fighting. Instead, Immortals takes the view that there are gods, who watch over humanity, but rarely interfere.

    Although they take a few liberties with some of the characters, like Hyperion, King of Crete. Apparently based on Minos, the Cretian king associated with the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, he was said to be a Heraclean King, despite coming from Crete. Lysander, who in not just mythology, but history, was the Spartan general who defeated the Athenians at Aegospotami in 405 BCE. In this movie, he’s not even Spartan. He’s just a jerk.

    And of course all the funny hats. The priests wear funny hats, the gods wear funny hats, the oracle and her handmaidens wear funny hats and even King Hyperion wears a funny hat. There are other complaints I have about the film including the Minotaur, the Epirus Bow and the nature of the Titans, who are not massive, godlike creatures, but are instead violent, primordial beast-men.

    All complaints aside however, the movie was visually stunning. The battles are extremely well done and there’s enough blood-spatter and body parts for the whole family. Theseus comes across as a real hero, not just one of the typical heroes of Greek Mythology who tend to be overbearing and crude. And of course, despite the funny hats, the gods are portrayed as people, not just haughty, overbearing entities who want nothing more than to be worshiped.

    After the movie, we went out and played pool, and I got a lesson in how to hit the ball. Several of the people there had a great deal of experience in playing pool, and I got a basic course in how not to suck. I even made a pretty nice shot, sinking two balls in one. Beginner’s luck, I’m sure.

    And then I went home and set up my computer, then fell asleep.

    And now I’m posting on my blog. Next: Laundry and recycling. Then I need to vacuum, dust, box up the corpses and figure out what to do with the rest of my vacation…


    📂This entry was posted in Uncategorized