The Satirical Rogue

I have been forced to turn off open comments in posts. Sorry.

However, you can register easily, and this filters out all the spam (130 in the past four days).

Sorry for the boring post. It’s been a rough week. However, things are looking up. In the near future, I will be attending a baby shower (for which I will be late if I don’t wrap this up quickly), a Thanksgiving dinner, a bachelor party and early next month, another frickin’ wedding. I’ve had too many weddings. Too many. I may not get married at this point, just because I don’t want to do another goddamn wedding.

Then again, if I wind up meeting the girl of my dreams, I might want to get married, in which case, I can invite all of my friends, who will like me, be sick and tired of weddings. Then I can mess with their heads by announcing my wife’s pregnancy and that they are all invited to the baby shower the following week.

Or maybe I’ll just have a group of Roman slave-whippers beating people at the reception. That might just do it.

But it’s a happy day for the bride and groom, so I’ll try not to fuck it up with the explosive cockroach launchers.

I turned 40 today.

It’s a major milestone on my way through life to the inevitable, yet long-off destination of rejoining the circle of life and becoming worm food.

A morbid thought, to be sure. Especially upon the anniversary of one’s birth, though my sense of humor does run a little more toward the aberrant, as can be seen in both my Deadjournal entries as well as my LiveJournal postings.

I reported in my last entry that I had been experiencing computer problems and indeed, I had thought my computer had reached a point far closer to Death’s door than I, but it turns out that my fears of a moribund motherboard, a graphics card giving up the ghost and a PCI-X port passing into PC paradise were unfounded. No, instead, it turned out that the memory simply had to be removed and re-seated…

So apparently, Alzheimer’s disease is conspicuously curable in computers by the simple removal and replacement of the malfunctioning memory module.

Ah, alliteration. I adore your alluring appearance upon the asphalt of my attention. An Apician apparatus alluding to no affront against anyone, attempting only artful avocation in amusement; the articulation of an Anglish ancestor. I am aroused by your amaranthine appearance, aggrivated by your anointed acclaim, angered by the awkward arduousness of your application. I am ambivalent before your awesome approbation. Allow this asinine advocate of your ambrosial arride to accoy your agony. Abide my affection and accommodate my adulation.

But don’t call me, “A.”

Oh, and before I forget. I recently acquired a program called ComiPo!, which is a system by which a person such as myself with absolutely no artistic ability whatsoever (damnit, the alliteration is attempting to access my acumen again!), to create what is in effect, Japanese style manga comics.

I really like manga and its unusual, appearance. There’s a sophisticated simplicity to the art style that makes it sastisfying to see… (God Dammit!) And now, I have the capacity to make rudimentary and relatively revolting (is there an “off” button for alliteration?) comics which allow me to express my unusual and non-sequitur form of humor in a graphical medium.

If you’re interested in seeing the product of my wacked-out imagination, you can find the comics here, indexed by “volume,” though in no way are they in any consistent form. I just threw things together to amuse myself, and if you are also amused, which I hope you are, you can let me know either at my usual, unstated (as this is a public forum) email address or at jador@satiricalrogue.com. Which you can either cut-and-paste into your email program, or click on the link. Or write it on the back of a self-addressed, stamped envelope which you can then place upside-down in the oven and crank the heat up to 450° Farenheit. Though I would not advise the latter of these options.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my day off. I’ll probably just make some more comics or something…

Still awaiting a new power supply for my broken computer… Thank goodness for the laptop…

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to occupy my overactive mind with other things, such as cleaning my apartment. Not that doing so has been a great success. Instead, I’ve simply managed to move a mess from one location to another. Perhaps I should start throwing away things I don’t use or need any longer. Like that cold fusion reactor my cat built out of my hot water heater. I don’t need that.

Strangely, my lack of access to online games such as the aforementioned Vendetta Online and World of Warcraft has not driven me completely insane, nor has it caused me to descend into internet withdrawal as I suspected it would. Instead, I find myself attempting to do things that I would not normally do were I immersed in battle with bloodthirsty enemies.

For one, I’ve calculated my Schwarzchild Radius to some degree of accuracy. The number I came up with is 1.41851296900185761674761457142002 x 10^-30 cubic meters. This is actually a very small number. To put it in perspective, the radius of a helium atom (He) is 1×10^-12 m. The radius of a proton is about 1×10^-15. The radius of an electron (if indeed an electron has a radius, as it is thought to lack a substructure) is 10^-22m…

This means, that in order for my mass (which is approximately 100kg), to achieve the radius necessary to become a black hole, I would have to shrink to 1.4 (yada yada yada) x10^-30 m in diameter. This is much, much smaller than an electron, and indeed, smaller than most subatomic particles.

I say most subatomic particles, because I am not a physicist, and thus I don’t know for certain. There may, indeed be subatomic particles which are far smaller than this, but I can’t find any. At least, not lying around my apartment. They’re most likely elsewhere, such as in the core of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Where they make antimatter.

So yeah. They’re bad-ass.

Gotta go. My job needs me.

It seems to be computer problem day. My desktop crashed and won’t reboot, my laptop won’t connect to my wireless network, and I just made a payment on a massively multiplayer game which I now cannot play because my desktop gaming machine is out of service.

I’m not going to say “things could be worse,” because I just filled up my truck with gas, updated my iPod to iOS 5.0 and left my work vehicle at a local shop for an oil change and tire rotation… I don’t want to jinx myself.

Not that I believe in jinxes, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Statistical Clustering occurs frequently, but always in statistical clusters… I wonder why. Maybe it’s just my luck.

Other than this cluster of technological misfortune, I found a new massively multiplayer game, called Vendetta Online. It’s a space-based combat/trade/mining game, somewhat like EVE Online or the old game Earth and Beyond, which was one of my favorite MMOs of all time.

Earth and Beyond was simple, straightforward and almost cartoony in its graphics. However, it was immensely fun to play. EVE Online was also fun, but it seems to have been designed for people who have less time to play than most gamers. With EVE, in order to “train” your character up to the point of being able to use more advanced equipment and better ships, you have to “train” in real-time, one skill at a time, in order to advance. You might have to train for a few days (real-time) to use a better weapon, but if I recall correctly, you have to train for 30 days real time in order to be able to use a destroyer. That’s just using it, not necessarily being able to afford it or find a shipyard which sells it. Though those are relatively easy problems to deal with, just spend your 30 days mining and trading with whatever ship you currently use, and most likely you’ll be able to afford the destroyer at the end of the duration of your “training.”

Vendetta Online takes a slightly different tactic in that you train by doing, not by spending time doing something else. If you want your mining skill to go up, you need to mine. If you want your trade skill to go up, you mine.

The scenery is spectacular and the game play is simple and easily understood. The game isn’t choked with people who just want to go out and kill “n00bz” and the players are fairly friendly and willing to help even someone like me who tends to make stupid mistakes and misunderstand simple directions.

The game itself is also free to download. You just go to their website and download the game, and you get 8 hours (real time), of game-play in order to see if you like it. If you decide that it’s not your cup of tea, you just don’t play any more. If you do like it, it costs $10 a month to play. Still, that’s pretty much worth it in my opinion.

Of course, with my computer down, I can’t play at all. I had to use my notebook to update my blog, and since I couldn’t connect the wireless, I had to plug into the wall socket….

So that’s my life today. Tomorrow should be just as bad, but at least I have a Halloween party to go to tonight.

Now, for a costume…

The Challenge is my attempt to update my blog at least once per week, with three entries per week as my ultimate goal. So far, the novelty of the new blog is keeping me going, but it will eventually wear off, and I will be forced to resort to the less reliable means of pure tenacity in order to continue to maintain a set schedule of updates and entries.

In order to keep me true to this schedule, I invite my readers to bug me when they have not seen an update in a given week. By “bug,” I don’t mean “harrass,” but rather, “let me know” that I haven’t yet updated, and I need to come up with something to write about… Such things can include, but are not limited to… Updates, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Biography, Thought-Experiments, Research Note and Poetry.

Think of it as a random grab-bag of words into which you might reach and find a solid gold replica of the Taj Mahal one day and a plastic dog turd the next. Like the box of chocolates that Forrest Gump’s mother spoke of, you never know what you’re going to get.

Though you might want to have a wet wipe handy, just in case the prize inside is the aforementioned dog turd.

Progress continues in my creation of an online blog. Though I am rapidly risking the danger of blogging about blogging, and I don’t know how many people out there are really interested in this kind of thing. So instead, I will continue where I left off with my livejournal blog.

I tend to think about dimensionality in non-mathematical terms. For instance, many people believe that we, as humans, are three-dimensional creatures slowly progressing through a four-dimensional medium which we identify as time. Others seem to view us as four-dimensional creatures in a five- or six-dimensional medium; creatures which, as they pass through the fourth-dimensional medium, slowly change shape as we do when we grow from babies to adults, then to the elderly.

I’m a little more fucked-up in my view. I see us as five-dimensional creatures in a six-dimensional medium for which I have yet no name. Our five-dimensional bodies, in my view of the cosmic whosiwhatsit, move through the fourth and fifth dimensions, branching out from our births and ending in a finite, but immensely varied number of possible outcomes, each one being the end of a branch, perceived as “death.”

The possible outcomes, often described as “what-ifs,” are in my view, actual occurances of events which have simply happened on another time-line outside the one we now experience. For instance, “what-if” Kennedy wasn’t killed in 1963? Would events leading up to the moon landing, the Vietnam War and other such things have occurred? We usually refer to these other possibilities as “alternate time-lines.”

But suppose that alternate time-lines are not the only phenomena resulting from the branching five-dimensional view of our Universe? Suppose we can observe very small “perturbances” within our own time-line, which we currently can’t measure, as we don’t have the means or knowledge to do so?

Here’s one example of what I’m talking about. You wake up in the morning, realize you’re late for work and grab everything you need for the day. Wallet, glasses (if you’re myopic), watch (if you wear one) and various other items. Then, you look for your keys.

You are 100% certain that you placed your keys on the countertop with the rest of the items you need for your day. But they are absent. You look for them, unable to find them. Then, you notice them hanging on the key-rack next to the door.

There are people who believe that observation creates the Universe. In this example, the observation of the keys on the key-hook creates a “wave-function collapse” of probability. Thus the reality crashes down on you, and you remember that you put your keys there the night before.

But did you? Or is that just what happened in the reality in which you now find yourself? I call this reality a dominant reality because out of all the possible events which could have occurred, i.e. all the possible places your keys could be, the location of the keys within your dominant reality was on the hook. Even if you previously remembered that they keys were on the dresser, or the kitchen counter or even in your pants pocket, all of these possible realities are overwritten by the dominant reality in which your keys are on the key-hook.

This may sound like a load of bantha poo-doo to some, and in reality, there is no actual evidence of this phenomenon. It’s just an interesting philosophical idea. However, it might also explain deja vu, a memory which is left over from a subordinate reality. Once the subordinate memory and the dominant reality crash into one another, our brains can’t quite determine which is real, and deja vu is the result.

It could, of course, just be a glitch in the Matrix, and the black cat you just saw twice means that the Agents have bricked up all the windows in your building and cut the hard-line out.

Still, it’s an interesting thought, and it at least got me to update my new journal. Perhaps sometime, I should explain why I think the Universe is actually collapsing backward in time toward the big-bang, and that our view of a Universe in which increasing entropy is what is actually backward. While undemonstrated, this might explain why we remember the past and not the future. Much like we can see what is in front of us, but not what is behind, or memories might be a method of “seeing” what is “ahead” of us as the Universe rapidly collapses in on itself.

But right now, I have to get ready for a wedding. The main problem? Finding a wedding gown that will fit my ego.