Hash bang test. http://kotaku.com/#!5755399/gears-of-war-for-kinect-an-on+rails-shooter-says-source

If I had kept my Blogger account up to date, I would have GMail by now.

I've got Movable Type. I'll do something with it maybe.

Justin Timberlake didn't suck (much) on SNL last night, which was surprising. The usual case when SNL has an athlete or musician hosting is that they can't act and aren't funny so the writers give them some limited roles in which they can't do a lot of damage; for example: playing as himself/herself. Incidentally, I don't like to see Justin Timberlake play himself.

Turns out I was wrong about Maddox's popularity because if you examine the details on xmission, you'll notice that 87% of xmission.com traffic goes to maddox.xmission.com. Never mind what I've said then, now or ever. Then again, all these stats are culled from people who use the Alexa toolbar. Casual Internet users aren't as likely to be using Alexa as much as more well versed users (who have no privacy concerns). This obviously skews the results somewhat and wouldn't pass muster a scientific poll. Fark.com, though, is still inexplicably in the top 1000. Well, not inexplicably. Just sadly.

"They are soldiers of a dancefloor and their weapon is groove."

I'm starting to like C-SPAN. It's weird because I don't have cable. But Washington DC has a C-SPAN radio station that mostly just broadcasts the audio of what's on C-SPAN TV, sometimes with a fast-talking guy announcing who's speaking. I don't like the Congressional material as much as I like Book TV. The National Book Festival coverage was interesting, since I read a bit of Michael Beschloss's and Robert Caro's LBJ books two months ago. The Johnson tapes on Sunday are fun too. If you're ever in Austin, visit the Johnson Library. A security guard there yelled at me for running.

Our hearts go out to Roy.

David Wong sums up the Iraqi WMD controversy quite succintly:

SADDAM THOUGHT HE HAD WMD'S... says Time Magazine, stating that Iraqi scientists knew they actually did not have the weapons, while deceiving their leader by presenting him with "working nuclear and biological weapons" that were actually mock-ups made of old Sony Playstations and vials of oatmeal. A report due later this month on Iraqi weapons summarizes, "Iraqi engineers knew that there was no WMD program, though their superiors and the regime itself believed they did possess such weapons, which explains Saddam's extensive attempts to thwart inspections teams for over a decade, when in reality he could have given the U.N. free reign and held onto this regime. Meanwhile, George Bush and Tony Blair secretly did not believe that Saddam possessed WMD's, when in reality Saddam thought he did, when in reality he did not. American anti-war protestors, who believed that Saddam may very well have had WMD's, but pretended they did not in order to have ammunition with which to attack Bush, were really correct about Iraqi's WMD program but not due to any kind of evidence because Saddam himself didn't know." Meanwhile, U.N. inspectors are investigating allegations that materials sold to the Iraqis as plutonium was actually a fraud perpetrated by a crazed old inventor looking to develop a time machine.

David Wong is now my favorite Internet humorist, edging out, um...Matt Caracappa I guess. By "now", I mean since 2000. And by "Matt Caracappa", I mean that X-Entertainment guy. I'm drawn to Wong's low-key, sort of straight faced style (you know, like Kevin Nealon compared to Jimmy Fallon). Somethingawful's style, on the other hand, has caused it to turn into crap over time (the writing at least). It was fun for a while, but when every writer milks the exact same article formula over and over to the point where you can't differentiate their personalities, it gets tiring and repetitive. There's a good piece now and then, but they get lost in the daily toilet-humor filler. The staff of Whatever-Dude update less frequently, but they post more intellectual articles that are actually about things. So, I'm not sure why I ended up analyzing my reading habits when all I planned to do was point to a NEWSSKIM story. Hmm.

I'm linking to a story about Johnny Rebel. I hope I don't get kicked from the Internet.

What's cool in Japan? Would you believe a capella music and big black men?

Just to reiterate for Will "I haven't seen the Star Wars Kid video" Smith: Here's the original and all the remixes. Also, way to stress Star Wars Kid to the breakdown limit. Seriously, I didn't think the video would cause that much humiliation for the kid. If it had been me, I would have been bragging about it. But I don't have those kinds of moves. Also, it would be a nice story for a college application essay if I wasn't in college already. $2600 and an Ipod isn't a bad deal either. I've never really seen the kind of social stigmatization and humiliation as portrayed on TV and Dr. Phil at my public high school. Maybe French-Canadian private schools are different in their social structures. C'est possible, non?

I downloaded Mozilla Firebird today and when I checked to see if this site looks right in Mozilla, the main table was about 500 pixels wider than it should have been, thus screwing up the layout. It seems that when Firebird encounters an unbroken link text that's too long to fit on one line, like the one at the end of my aim spam diatribe, it just widens the table in to make the link fit. Internet Explorer merely cuts the link up into two lines and keeps things looking the way they should. Way to suck Mozilla. Update: Never mind. It seems that Internet Explorer does it too, only it sometimes breaks lines when there are certain characters in the url.

Let's not forget Batman: the Dark Knight Returns, the best Batman anything ever. I don't have to read No Man's Land on my computer anymore either.

They've got Kingdom Come too, also in YFIC despite EVERYTHING. Watchmen is on order. Sweet.

I've just found out that the public library has Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2 and Inu-Yasha mangas (under YFIC of course despite the frontal nudity and martial arts sex comedy [at least it's not JFIC I guess]). This and Ghost World. Too bad I already slogged through all of Ranma (fan-translated for the second half) on eye-straining CRT and less so LCD. I need to search the catalog more.

No offense to anyone I know who makes anime music videos.

burntcombs (11:31:09 PM): how much for your soul?
Falling Blocks (11:31:19 PM): Paypal ok?
burntcombs (11:31:22 PM): ok
Falling Blocks (11:31:38 PM): What kind of exchange are we talking about?
burntcombs (11:31:48 PM): your immortal soul for ... 30 dollars?
Falling Blocks (11:31:51 PM): ok
burntcombs (11:31:54 PM): deal
burntcombs (11:31:58 PM): you know
burntcombs (11:32:03 PM): this means in the after life I own you
burntcombs (11:32:11 PM): and from the moment of the transaction on
burntcombs (11:32:13 PM): you are my slave
burntcombs (11:32:16 PM): you have no will
burntcombs (11:32:19 PM): for I control your soul
burntcombs (11:32:22 PM): and your soul is your will
burntcombs (11:32:28 PM): you will join my minion army
burntcombs (11:32:45 PM): for your first task I want you to walk to the coast and bring me some fresh seawater
burntcombs (11:33:00 PM): you are only allowed to eat things you find
Falling Blocks (11:33:49 PM): send to rot_j@yahoo.com
burntcombs (11:34:39 PM): I don't think you understand the gravity of this transaction
burntcombs (11:34:47 PM): by selling my your soul, I can make you send me the $30 back
burntcombs (11:34:50 PM): so we can just skip it
burntcombs (11:34:53 PM): and you can be my slave now
burntcombs (11:34:55 PM): so
burntcombs (11:35:04 PM): get your ass in gear and get my seawater
Falling Blocks (11:35:08 PM): Doesn't count without initial transaction.
burntcombs (11:35:45 PM): do you have some sort of reciet for me?
Falling Blocks (11:36:12 PM): We'll call it a verbal contract.
burntcombs (11:36:42 PM): no
burntcombs (11:36:44 PM): see
burntcombs (11:36:48 PM): I will send you the $30
burntcombs (11:36:57 PM): but what guarentee do I have that I'll get my soul?
Falling Blocks (11:38:21 PM): You'll figure out a way if you're as hot to trot as you say you are.
burntcombs (11:38:52 PM): you know
burntcombs (11:38:58 PM): I don't think I even want your soul
burntcombs (11:39:02 PM): god knows what you've been doing with it
burntcombs (11:39:02 PM): where it's been
burntcombs (11:39:08 PM): I don't think it'd fit into my master army
Falling Blocks (11:39:18 PM): Not so hot to trot then.
Falling Blocks (11:39:19 PM): hmm.
burntcombs (11:41:45 PM): no
burntcombs (11:41:50 PM): I'm just not about getting scammed
burntcombs (11:41:54 PM): you seem to eager to sell my your sould
burntcombs (11:42:04 PM): that's a sure sign that you are gonna take my money and run
burntcombs (11:42:19 PM): ran li
Falling Blocks (11:42:19 PM): How many people are in your master army right now? What kind of company would I be keeping?
burntcombs (11:42:29 PM): right now
burntcombs (11:42:31 PM): as of this minute
burntcombs (11:42:44 PM): there are 2
burntcombs (11:42:51 PM): my two ex-girlfriends
burntcombs (11:42:59 PM): one I own her sex
burntcombs (11:43:04 PM): the other I had surrender to me
Falling Blocks (11:43:17 PM): Dental plan?
burntcombs (11:43:29 PM): you seem to think this will be a game
burntcombs (11:43:32 PM): this is no game I assure
burntcombs (11:43:44 PM): you will be expected to work with out food/rest/money/teddy bears
burntcombs (11:44:01 PM): are you even in fayetteville?
Falling Blocks (11:44:29 PM): John Walsh had a show on this topic a few months ago I think.
Falling Blocks (11:45:42 PM): Fayetteville? Ha! Get yourself one of those soul-sniffing muskrats or something.
Falling Blocks (11:47:43 PM): I just heard "pornographic film industry" on TV.
Nightline ist die Bombe. John Ashcroft going after the porn industry? News to me. Thanks, Koppel (and correspondent guy who did the story).

http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=owned Maddox doesn't seem to understand that the 5889 ranking he was looking at is compiled from the hits on every single page on xmission.com. It's like a Geocities user claiming the ranking for his site is 418. Actual ranking for www.xmission.com/~maddox is 1.5 million, which is probably inaccurate since most people use his maddox.xmission.com address. It might be neat to think Maddox is getting more traffic than McDonalds, but that's never going to happen.

http://ciips.ee.uwa.edu.au/~morris/Year2/PLDS210/ds_ToC.html

http://www.google.com/u/virginiatech?domains=vt.edu&sitesearch=vt.edu&q=male+porn Hey, come on now. Shoo.

AIM spam:

Whats up sexy? :-) I just started up my webcam and was wondering if you wanted to come watch, its completely free, I work for donations :-). click here to watch my LIVE webcam for FREE i'll be waitin for ya with my pretty pink vibrator ;-) Hey there cutie, come check out my FREE webcam by clicking here now! Are you into Older Women? Watch as this toothless grandma gives a GUMJOB to 50 willing men!

I did a search on "AIM spam" in 2002 in Google and it turned up nothing. I did another one today, and found a trickle of information, mostly blogs complaining about it. Everyone who has ever used ICQ should know that it's a really great messengering program to use if you can tolerate shitloads of spam every day. AIM for the most part, had remained free of the stank that infested ICQ. For subscribers of AOL, though AOL's IM spam easily beats that of ICQ. When I got a free year of AOL with the purchase of my computer, I made the mistake of entering chat rooms with a screenname that I actually used. AOL warns against this and advises that you make a secondary screenname for chat rooms, because as it turns out, the second you enter an AOL chat room, bots put your screenname on ever single spam list in existence. As an added bonus to making the email account for that screenname completely useless forever, you are introduced to the brave new world of IM spam. I would get about one IM advertising a fake person's fake webcam page every 5 to 20 minutes. Back then, AOL users couldn't warn people (I don't know if they can now or not) so they could send at an unlimited rate. I basically received started out receiving all my spam from 2 or 3 bots. For the few hundred accounts they had, the names were basically the same prefix followed by a series of numbers like "JoeBob01" to "JoeBob99". I managed to block these for a while by simply blocking all combinations of names starting with JoeBob and ending with 2 numbers. That worked for a while until other names started spamming me. And I wasn't about to manually type in thousands of screennames. So I abandoned AOL's built-in instant messenger and switched to AIM. AIM was spam free for me until 2001 I think. Then it came on strong again. The warn function allows AIM users to limit the send rate of the spambots but that doesn't do all that much because the spambots have thousands of sn's. I found out that unchecking the "Allow people to search for me" checkbox in the profile menu reduced the amount of spam by about 99%. It still doesn't stop them all, of course. You have the option of setting it so that only people on your buddy list can contact you but that's creates a big barrier to communication with others. It seems that the only sources of these spams are porn sites pushing "webcams" and people selling fake insurance I think. Now that we've identified the problem, how do we resolve it? An ineffective way is to reply to the spammer. That has never worked. Ever. For example, one anime-loving web denizen suggested, "Max out your IM by iming back to them at 100x the speed. It's very fun and a sweet little payback for those who IM you spam." Do not follow this advice, as it just gives the spammers something more to laugh at. Wasting your time and effort talking smack to a bot is dumb. So how can we fight this "check out my sexy body at my free webcam! XOXO" menace? We know exactly who's sending these because the URLs point you to their sites. We could stop the problem at the source through a campaign of fear, like by sending them anthrax. (When I say "sending them anthrax", I mean sending the band Anthrax to play in front of the spammers' doors until they can no longer take the crappy music. How ya doin' Department of Homeland Security? Good? Good.) Method number 2 would be if someone could make a program that blocks all usernames with more than 3 numbers at the end. This will eliminate the majority of spam as well as messages from those stupid people who add numbers to the end of some popular generic name that a lot of people want to use. Another more effective tactic would be similar to the technique of blocking everyone except your buddies but less restrictive. Simply allow free communication with people on your buddy list but send an autoresponse to unknown screennames that contact you, telling them to respond with a password given in the autoresponse. If they do, the message reaches you. Otherwise, you are not bothered. Bots might eventually be made to adapt to this but it wouldn't be hard to botproof the password if they do. P.S. Has anyone gotten the netsend spam yet? Those are neat. I think they only affect NT and they're easy to disable so they're not much of a problem. Here are some links dealing with AIM spam that aren't exactly helpful (I'm not saying I'm helpful either) but exist nonetheless: Firebird sucks http://deanwelsh.com/b2/index.php?cat=7 http://www.ejshea.com/10may02.htm Mozilla sucks http://www.carpeaqua.com/archives/2003/04/12/aim_spam.php Internet Explorer sucks

Wow. What was this kid thinking? He saw what happened in "Meet the Parents" and should have learned a lesson from that, because Hollywood tells it like it is. Too bad he didn't have Robert De Niro as the father of the woman he wants to marry bailing him out. I'm going to have to remember never going to use the word "bomb" in any context if I'm ever at an airport or on an airplane. I'm sure as hell never going to take a plane to Bombay either. If I see my friend Jack on an airplane, I will not greet him by saying "Hi, Jack" as another person did to bad effect. He should have learned a lesson from watching "Airplane!" (Surely!). I should also not mind that baggage handlers who have not been given background checks are allowed to break my locks and have the opportunity to steal my stuff with little risk of getting caught. Because I love America and I love John Ashcroft's lovable brand of fun-filled fascism.

If you liked "8 Mile", you should watch "Cool as Ice" featuring Vanilla Ice. How do you melt a girl's heart of stone? Just add Ice. B kool stay n skool.

"Gigli" is now the #1 movie on IMDB's bottom 100 list, edging out "From Justin to Kelly" for top spot. Great job. Gobble gobble. Four of the "Police Academy" (the last four) movies managed to make the bottom 100 as well. Of course, this means the moviegoing public has no taste whatsoever. Any sane person can tell you the greatest 10 films of all time are "Police Academy", "Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment", "Police Academy 3: Back in Training", "Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol", "Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach", "Police Academy 6: City Under Siege", "Police Academy: Mission to Moscow", "Pokémon the First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back", "Bio-Dome", and 1998's "Godzilla" with Matthew Broderick and Puff Daddy.

The Glock 18s in Counter-Strike piss me off. Why tease us with a Glock 18 if you're not going to allow us to fire it in full auto? Also, I'm not sure how terrorists would be able to get them as they are restricted to law enforcement and military and are not available to civilians. Leave it to the Canadians to mess things up.

Some AOL Instant Messenger screennames I have that I will never use: bagofdoom - Doom in a bag I guess doomsicle - Frozen doom on a stick? elliotgarfield - Obscure Richard Dreyfus winning an Oscar for his role as reference hoseythebear - Obscure Simpsons reference janeyhagstrom - Lisa's black friend. maxroboto - Obscure PWOT reference thesavagecurtain - Star Trek episode untolddamage - Damage that is untold

I'm going to get the links page up sometime because having "links" pointing to a broken link is dumb. Or maybe it's pseudo-intellectual-artistic-gay trash. Either way, if I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will not dispense this advice now, because I am not Ted Turner, nor shall I ever be.

Falling Blocks (6:19:02 PM): Have you gotten any netsend spam
Falling Blocks (6:19:03 PM): ?
isildil (6:19:25 PM): email spam or aim spam? not sure what you're talking about, cuz i almost never get spam
Falling Blocks (6:19:34 PM): netsend spam.
isildil (6:19:52 PM): well, since i'm not sure what you're talking about, i'll assume no
isildil (6:25:34 PM): wanna enlighten me as to what exactly you're talking about
Falling Blocks (6:25:42 PM): nah
Falling Blocks wants to directly connect (6:26:21 PM).
isildil is now directly connected (6:26:41 PM).
Falling Blocks (6:26:59 PM):

isildil (6:30:24 PM): glad to see you can find the silver lining in kids killing each other :-P
Falling Blocks (6:30:53 PM): Glad to see you can finally accept that Tolkien is gay.
isildil (6:31:24 PM): i will destroy you
isildil direct connection is closed (6:35:59 PM). Loose lips sink ships. So all ya sucka MCs, y'all best go chill.

I actually thought the video would make him cooler amongst his peers. Shows what I know.

Bob Hope has passed away. Let us all have a moment of silence to honor the spirit of Tolkien's gayness.

I'm either temporarily or permanently moving this site here depending on how this "WorldWideWebDAVID" debacle turns out on filebox.

I didn't like my Adam Ant compilation album much when I first bought it but I like it now. I wonder why. Maybe it's like what that Japanese ballerina guest judge guy said on Iron Chef about how tastes change with age. Only he was talking about how he didn't like some of the dishes because he was in his twenties and maybe would like them when he was forty after his tastes "matured". Anyways, back on topic, 'ballerina' would be the wrong word because it's only applied to females (even if the guy was a bit effeminate). I don't think there's a word for a male ballet dancer other than 'male ballet dancer'. You'd think it would be 'ballerino' but you would be wrong, stupid. Come to think of it, I've gotten even more off topic, and I can't remember what the right topic is supposed to be. The preceding sentence was a lie, though, because this is a written medium, and not a spoken one. So all I have to do is read a few lines up and I would know. Also, whenever I use hesitational language like "uh..." or something like "wait a minute, I take that back" or start to write one word but change it to another midword, like "peni...I mean, ah, vagina", I'm being a dirty fake for the sake of comedic timing or whatever. This is because while it is impossible to take back what you've said, it is quite possible to take back what you've written as long as you haven't published it yet. People like Dave Barry don't need to use this kind of crutch because they've actually got material, and English degrees. In conclusion, I'm not trustworthy and I covet my neighbor's goods.

stilleblomstre (12:55:32 AM): hi
Falling Blocks (12:55:36 AM): yo
Falling Blocks (12:55:44 AM): What up G?
stilleblomstre (12:55:51 AM): ran?
Falling Blocks (12:56:07 AM): Fo shizzle my nizzle.
stilleblomstre (12:56:22 AM): who is this?
Falling Blocks (12:56:40 AM): Adam Ant.
stilleblomstre (12:57:29 AM): riiiight
stilleblomstre (12:57:35 AM): just tell me when ran is back
Falling Blocks (12:57:47 AM): Ok. He's back.
stilleblomstre (12:57:59 AM): ?
Falling Blocks (12:58:45 AM): So, what's up?
Falling Blocks (12:58:54 AM): Sorry about that asshole just now.
stilleblomstre (1:06:15 AM): uh huh
Falling Blocks (1:06:38 AM): Have you read Ghost World?
stilleblomstre (1:06:47 AM): you are not the ran i know
stilleblomstre (1:06:57 AM): no but i saw the movie which suckedc
Falling Blocks (1:06:59 AM): Oh Jesus.
stilleblomstre (1:07:02 AM): sucked*
Falling Blocks (1:07:09 AM): The comic was good.
Falling Blocks (1:07:18 AM): I bought it yesterday at the library for $1.
Falling Blocks (1:09:12 AM): Ask me a question that only the Ran you know would know.
stilleblomstre (1:09:35 AM): who is this?
Falling Blocks (1:09:58 AM): Who else?
stilleblomstre (1:10:12 AM): i don't know
Falling Blocks (1:12:02 AM): You're getting paranoid. Monika didn't like the movie. She didn't like my Ebonics either.

I bought Daniel Clowes's Ghost World for $1 at the library yesterday, and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six for $3. Fairfax City Regional usually has nothing but crap on its book sale racks compared to Chantilly, but I found these somehow. I didn't expect to see a comic book in there, especially an artsy fartsy Fantagraphic item. Ghost World was really good. Most significant comic read since that weirdass Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers fanfic. It's one of the few works I've seen that manages to derive humor out of the use of profanity instead of just being profane for the sake of being profane, and shit. I need to watch the movie sometime.

I've lost all faith in the criminal justice system.

Having a song stuck in my head doesn't bother me much. It only gets annoying when it's a song in which I can remember only a few bars of the melody and either a little or none of the lyrics to the song. Then it ends up as some indistinct voice mumbling (like in the Sims) over one or two pieces of the song repeatedly. So shut the hell up, B.B Rights. I only played Jet Grind (Set) Radio that one time!

I'm bad about going to the doctor. My first reaction to some sort of health problem will probably be "Hmm. Interesting. Let's see how this pans out." Judging from this, I will probably die young from something that's entirely curable if treated early. Living in a college dormitory definitely hasn't helped my overall health. First I developed an inflammatory swell on my right leg for some reason. Spider bite probably. The Hobo spider and Brown Recluse spider are the primary suspects based on not much research. It could have been a yellow sac spider or good old fashioned plague for all I know, so don't hold me on anything. It later developed into a "necrotic lesion" if you will, and then sort-of healed over into an off-color numb spot that's not exactly skin and doesn't appear to contain many nerve cells. On the bright side, we didn't have to amputate. Then I developed an eczema on my back in reaction to what? That little tag on my underwear? Well, I managed to get a topical steroid for that. And for the coup de grace, I banged up my head on a doorframe because I'm cool like that.

http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=%22april+o+neal%22+jumpsuit I found my crappy trading cards by the way. And "Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase is still as relevant as ever. AS EVER!

I haven't written anything here for two months but I've been getting some hits the past week from people searching Google for "nonnude". I guess I'm satisfied. After reverting back to 56k, I've started reading books.

I finally get the joke of the Chinpoko Mon episode of South Park after learning what chinpoko means.

Juan asked me what the point was in the previous post. There is no point.

Read this. Don't read the following. Some observations on Kite: If you haven't seen it, then this will probably make little sense to you. Contains spoilers. 1. Nature of the assassinations From reading what's written about the OVA on the web, some people seem to think that the killings done by Sawa were Akai's attempt at vigilante-justice against those he perceived to have gone unpunished for their crimes. If you actually pay attention, it's obvious that money is what motivates the murders. We are shown a clients list of people connected to those that were assassinated. The one on the left is the first target's comedy partner. The middle one is apparently a girl who was supposedly molested by the three old men. The right one is, Pruce Willis, twin brother of (bizarro)Bruce Willis. When Sawa kills the wrong brother, Akai tells her "you killed the client." (It should be noted that she is in fact telling the truth when she says Kanie gave her the wrong target. He either doesn't notice the difference between "my right" and "your right" when two people are facing each other or his anti-crossed eyes preclude him from knowing right from left.) There is no viable evidence that all the peope Sawa and Oburi killed were "bad" people. All the information Akai and Kanie give about the targets should therefore be taken with a grain of salt. There is no way of knowing, then, if the first person Sawa was forced to kill was in fact a child cutter-upper. She probably would have believed Mother Teresa ate babies and would shoot her in the face if Akai had told her so. This kind of reduces my sympathetic connection to the character a notch. 2. The director is either not a fan of Bruce Willis or is a really big fan of Bruce Willis. 3. Japan, despite being extremely earthquake-prone, has the weakest road system in the world. Apparently, Japanese roadways and tunnel overpasses are made of papier mache. The impact of two human bodies on an overpass shouldn't cause any type of collapse; neither should the impact of a small car on a road with a subway station underneath. Even if they did collapse--which they wouldn't--it wouldn't form a perfectly car-shaped hole. The animators have been watching too many roadrunner cartoons is my guess. The only explanation for this is that the economic downturn in Japan was worse than we thought and the government decided to strip existing roads of all metal framework. What did they do with all of this metal, you ask? Beats me. Maybe they erected a Tokyo Tower in every city in Japan to increase tourism revenue. Secondly, Sawa shouldn't have survived that fall. The scene of the fall lasted 14 seconds. That's the average time it takes for a human body to reach terminal velocity (approximately 125 mph). If an airbag has only a small chance of saving your life at that speed, a pissed off American bodyguard has even less of a chance. Of couse, the fall probably didn't last all of the 14 seconds, considering some of the scene could have been slow motion and repitition. Also, it would take 1,880 feet to reach terminal velocity, and the tallest building in the world is only 1,483 feet tall, so there you go(You could reach terminal velocity if you jumped from any of a number of TV towers but I don't know why you'd want to.) And since building connection bridges are perfectly collapsable instead of being rigid, who knows? Maybe it was survivable after all. Hell, that huge grenade blast in the bathroom didn't even kill her when she was laying 10 feet away. That's what I get for evaluating physics in anime: absolutely nothing. Stay tuned next week for "The Physics of Evangelion: Why Evangelion Blows". Lest I forget, we've also got another of our sympathetic connection reductions in this scene. Our protagonist kills a Hollywood action star (the wrong one), three bodyguards, and perhaps a dozen innocent bystanders (depending on whether you believe in physics or not), and what does she think about it? "Oh no! My earring's missing!" I think I'm in love. 4. How big is this damn operation? Wow. A twist ending. Basketball-loving girl shoots cat-loving Oburi with green assassin gun. Floor-laying Sawa hears door creak/footsteps, thinks it's deadly-hole-in-chest-having Oburi. Turns head. Smiles. Cut to black. (Shot in face.) The shot in face part is left open to debate. At least one person seems to think she didn't die, based on this poll question. And the results of that poll seem to indicate that most people missed the point of the movie. Sawa exploited into murdering people: "You go girl! You'll win freedom of your soul and body someday! We believe in you!" Little basketball girl exploited into murdering people: "Boo! Kill that bitch!" Anyway, the fact that there are other assassin kids out there indicates that Akai and Kanie probably weren't alone in their business. It's also possible that the two had backup plans in case they got killed (or did they?). Think Ghost in the Shell or Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Reunion". It's more plausible though, that there are others out there and they killed Sawa and Oburi to keep them hush about the operation. I don't think a fat pink-haired guy and a pervert detective would have the means to obtain weird colorful explodo-guns by themselves. The girl Kanie raped appeared to be an assassin as well because of the yellow uber-gun lying next to them on the bed (in the super hentai version only). Since neither Kanie or Akai use these guns personally, we can assume it belongs to her.

All in all, it was the best "Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers" fanfiction ever. Most significant comic read since, uh, Watchmen. I like how it only tastefully implies the possibility of rodentia sex, as opposed to um, otherwise. I don't feel like writing too much on it, so this should sum it up.

Ha ha. That's what you get for standing next to Snoop Dogg and smirking like a retard.

I don't have access to Gamasutra because I didn't want to lie about having a game development job that I didn't have. I'm not interested in a career in game development, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in reading about it. I mean, I read National Geographic, but I don't want to be a geographist or anything. Brain Everest links to it on his cheese-lacking site, so I guess he's either a game developer or lied about being a game developer. I was made aware of this fact when I was waken from my slumber by Will and Eric's (primarily Will's) laughter at seeing the word "Gamasutra" on Bryan Seacrest's links page on Eric's monitor in Eric's room. "Ha ha. It's like Kama Sutra but it's Gamasutra!" I do get free access to Game Developer Magazine through ProQuest though. That's basically Gamasutra in magazine form, so I'm satisfied with my situation. I managed to meet this Brian Everett fellow a few weeks ago when he came to visit Eric Harlan, my good lawyer friend. We didn't talk or anything, but we did watch part of The Bat People on MST3K together. All in all, it was the best movie ever.

I decided to color Vash the Stampede yesterday, because I'm sick of staring at parts of North America on my desktop and because Star Wars Galaxies was down. This is the first time I've colored a black and white image and I think it turned up pretty well. As you may notice, Vash is in Red Coat #2, which has those hydraulic pump things. I like how it looks like he's angry at my desktop icons.

The hammering from the people adding paneling or whatever has given me a headache. I think this is about the second or third headache I've had, ever.

I gave Will Smith the key. Sorry, Tam.

Anyone want a Star Wars Galaxies Beta 3 activation key? IM me. Falling Blocks or RotJay. Maybe I'll give it to you if I know who you are.

Recycled stream of conscious content regarding videogames' implications in why so many kids are fat fucks these days: While a few hardcore old-schoolers might dispute it, videogames have a lot more depth and sophistication than they did ten to twenty years ago. When I was a kid with my NES and Intellivision, games tended to get repetitive rather quickly and the outdoors were generally considered to be graphically superb compared to Mario. As a result, I'd end up getting tired of Nintendo after playing a while and would go outside and do something. Oh, yeah. Games were actually hard back then too. Today, there are very few times when you would get frustrated enough to throw your controller and say "Screw Castlevania. I'm going outside." Today's games are more compelling. With the exception of RPGs, most games in the late 80s/early 90s were arcadey fast-action games without too much longevity. These days, games try to hook you with bonus items that can only be gotten by spending hours collecting stars, playing perfect missions, beating the game, and whatever. They've got better storylines, more versatility, and more replay value. Also, let's not forget that they look a lot better too. I would imagine it would be a lot easier for kids to stay home and play videogames all day without getting bored. I know that's the case with a lot of people in their twenties. So blaming obesity partly on videogames could be viable. Certainly more viable than blaming violence on videogames. Hell, if games did cause violence, at least kids will be getting some exercise while they're killing each other.

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After the DC sniper shooters were caught, I told Eric that the rifle used was a civilian version of the M4. He said something like "No, it was a sniper rifle, stupid." I think he knew it was a Bushmaster .223, but didn't know what that was. It's been a few months, but I would still like to point out that he was wrong.

The Pledge of Allegiance sucks. Teachers tell us not to write long run-on sentences because they're confusing and unfocused. Yet I had to recite one every morning in elementary school. Most kids aren't even taught what the pledge means. If the Pledge of Allegiance was crafted to indoctrinate children to blind patriotism for America, shouldn't they have come up with something simpler? Like "America GOOD. Commies BAD."

Recycled content regarding the state of manga: I think one of the problems with state of readership in American comics is that the comics just run on forever. The majority of Japanese mangas run for a few years or a few thousand pages and end. They are written by a single person with a story in mind, a story that eventually ends. Even most anime run for only 26 episodes. Most mainstream American comics, however, seem to be created with the intention of making a popular character and running on forever. Artists and writers are rotated around so there is rarely any real vision guiding it. They end up being predictable after a while (that is until they throw in those insane plot twists to boost readership. But even those get predictable. Peter Parker is a clone! Wait, no he's not! The other guy is the clone! Aunt May is dead! Ha! Gotcha! She's really been imprisoned by some villain for all these years! This important to mildly important character is dead! OMFG! He or she is alive again! Superman is dead! Superman is no longer dead! And so on!) The 10 to 80 year backstory also makes it rather hard for new readers to get into a comic. If someone wants to start reading Spider-Man for example, they're pretty much forced to start in the middle of something featuring characters with forty years of backstory. And even if they wanted to start at the beginning, the whole collector mentality in America makes it impossible to find early issues unless they want to pay hundreds of dollars over ebay. I think a lot of people are put off by buying 30 page pamphlets once a month too. It's kind of like buying a book where a single chapter is released each month. Though manga is usually first serialized weekly, bimonthly, or monthly in magazines, they end up being republished as a collection. It's more satisfying to gather your attention and read a few hundred pages of something in one sitting. Keep in mind that these are just generalizations. There are a lot of great story driven American comics out there. And some of them even have endings! There are also mangas that seemingly run on forever (Dragonball, Ranma 1/2, etc.) but even those end after maybe a decade when the author feels like wrapping it up. I certainly haven't heard of any franchises that rotate writers and artists. Pokemon manga maybe? In summary: Give us a good story. Let it end. Let us cherish it in our memories. Though I really wouldn't mind if Steve Purcell made some more Sam & Max though.

Did I beat The Neverhood? Crap. I forgot.

I taste blood. Maybe I shouldn't have bitten my damn lip.

I wish I still had my 1991 Swanson WWF trading cards. I had the whole set of 12 without ever having to buy TV dinners. Remember back when Shawn Michaels was part of the Rockers? Remember when Undertaker dressed like and undertaker? Or learning what Tatanka's name meant after watching Dances With Wolves? No. You don't. I don't care about that Isiah Thomas rookie card. Just the WWF ones. Maybe the Marvel characters too, as well as Junior Seau.

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What the hell happend to EvilDC? Not that I would care though. Because I don't participate in illegal file trading. Nope.

Juan had a Rosa Parks moment on the bus and gave a good argument against affirmative action. However, these days affirmative action is not meant to stop discrimination as much as it is to reduce the statistically disproportionate economic and educational differences between whites and minorities, to get the average minority out of their economic status quo by giving them preferential educational opportunities. On a side note, the military supports affirmative action. Martin Luther King Jr. did too, despite what Newt Gingrich thinks. A lot of people seem to think that the only type of affirmative action that exists in college admissions is racial. Well, that's not the case. Many university admissions give preference to low-income or rural applicants regardless of race. An applicant from a rural area of southern Virginia will have a higher chance of getting into Virginia Tech than an applicant from suburban northern Virginia with similar high school grades. The University of Michigan has gotten heat from President Bush for the 20-point bonus (on a 150 point scale) it gives to underrepresented minorities in its admissions process. Few mention that Michigan also give the same 20 points to any student from a low-income background regardless of race. 16 points are given to anyone from the largely rural (and mostly white) upper peninsula. Since the 20 point bonuses aren't cumulative, getting rid of the minority bonus would only affect middle and upper income minorities. A race-blind socioeconomic affirmative action is what we should be working towards. Changing the way we think about diversity would help too. Of course, class-based affirmative action is starting to get some heat as well, to which I say "shut up". But if we plan on getting rid of race-based affirmative action, we need to start examining the other types of affirmative action (only not called "affirmative action") that give preference to the privileged. How can those white kids who didn't get into Michigan know that it was a black kid who nudged them off the bottom of the list instead of some kid whose dad went to Michigan or some kid who plays lacrosse or basketball better than them?

Daylight Savings Time sucks. End it.

Except for links, all my buttons go to places now. Take that, Juan.

Star Trek incidental music shouldn't be listend to on its own. In other news, beach retreats suck cock Weekend at Bernie's style.

Star Trek is well known for its technologically advanced starships but I really wouldn't like to work on one. This is because Starfleet decided early on to cut all the R&D spending on personnel safety in order to focus on more important things like developing quantum torpedoes, analgesic creams, and a spiffy new uniform every four years. Let us review the various safety issues that could be resolved fairly easily. I will focus on Federation vessels but this problem is epidemic in all of the large spacefaring civilizations of the 24th century....[More]

My bedroom circa January. Click for java viewer.

12:46 pm. WTFIWTWIB?

Back yard at 8:38 am.

It snowed today. I saw a bit of the new "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" today. The first thing that disappointed me was seeing that Casey Jones was no longer a middle-aged insane person. Now he's just a normal youngster who wears a hockey mask. April O'Neal wears bland late 90's clothing and bears her midriff, never coming close to fulfilling the yellow jumpsuit quota. No longer a successful go-getting woman of the 80's, she's now a dirty new-age hippie of the 00's. She looks about six years younger as well. I was surprised the Turtles didn't get made into preteens. The new theme song isn't that bad--it includes the requisite "shell" pun--but doesn't have a strong distinctive melody that you can easily hum ten years later, which is a problem with most new cartoons (and video games), except maybe Pokemon. It's better than the 2nd theme from the original cartoon at least, which either stole its main chorus melody from the theme to "Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills" or vice versa. The Turtles have lost their irises, making them look closer to their original comic book versions than the first series did. I was glad to see that Michaelangelo still has his nunchaku (I normally call them nunchucks out of habbit, but that's not very Japanese of me and it promotes violence against nuns akin to dwarf tossing. By the way, instead of calling it "McDonalds", I say "Makudonarudosu".). He was given a grappling hook in the last few episodes of the old series because nunchaku are illegal in a lot of countries, and they wanted to make it easier to export without editing. That's one argument protestors could use aganst WTO-style globalism. According to IMDB, "in the UK, Ninjas and their weapons are a taboo subject, and several kinds of weapons are illegal to show on TV (Such as Katana and Nunchaku). To try and get around censorship laws, the show was marketed as "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" and the names of cerain weapons and places were changed". I had known previously that the nunchaku were edited out of the movies in Britain, but didn't know how they handled it in the cartoon. You see, the British don't like ninjas because Queen Elizabeth II had a stroke while having sex with a ninja aide and fell into a coma in 1953 shortly after her coronation. A lookalike temp agency owner was secretly hired to stand in. She later fell in love with the Queen's lesbian lover, Sigourney Weaver, and had a touching coversation with Ving Rhames while making a sandwich as a midnight snack. America, despite having its president kidnapped by ninjas and dramatically rescued by Bad Dudes, still embraces the ninja. Which just goes to show you the French are pansies. The turtles still manage to walk around unnoticed by wearing bad disguises; in this case, it's hooded sweatshirts as opposed to trenchcoats and fedoras. Overall, the new show is less over-the-top cartoony than the original, for better or worse (the answer is worse). P.S. I always wondered why the first NES Turtles game had their eye masks all red on the cover. It turns out that they were all red in the color covers of the original comics. Since the comic was black-and-white, it didn't really matter all that much.

American news channels are getting boring. Where's Robocop when you need him? The answer, of course, is nowhere. Because Robocop does not exist. Mind-boggling.

Juan Fodder.

Blogger was out again this morning. I thought being purchased by Google generally improves your uptime. Not that I have anything to post but it's annoying.

Merry Christmas.

War with Iraq has broken out, and as such, I would like to point out that Tolkien is gay.

Juan was mad at me for not updating for two weeks because apparently he has nothing else to read except his gay Tolkien books. I'm not one of those people who start apologizing for missing a day. I have no obligation to the three people who read this thing. You can all rot in hell for all I care. Maybe I can spruce things up by posting the results of pointless online personality tests. Or by writing bad poetry. Or dedicate this entire site to using the words "Tolkien" and "gay" in the same sentence. Anyway, bootlegs.

Mister Rogers is dead. Too bad I didn't watch his show, or else this might be somehow meaningful to me.

www.isonews.com has been taken over by the feds. Site owner David M. Rocci, apparently a VT student (look him up), faces 5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for selling X-Box mod chips. He gave up the isonews.com domain as a condition of his plea bargain. Isonews still exists, though. It's reachable through the direct ip until it finds itself a new dns. Rocci's the second person from Tech that I know of that's made Internet news lately, the first being Cliffe of Counter-Strike fame. Isn't that nice? Current music: Going through 4,400 mp3s starting with the ones that have been on my computer the longest and working my way to those Star Trek soundtracks that I downloaded two days ago. I'm skipping the 2,400 Bemani songs because I went through all those when I got back from winter break and I'm generally sick of Eurobeat. Currently on "Yoko Ishida - Para Para Max Vol. 1" at 38%. Oh wait, that's just anime songs redone in Eurobeat. Damn.

<Badfiles> Please remove files containing the word 'Johnny Rebel'!

DC kick redux. This time for "Johnny Rebel". Did a search on Google and apparently it's the name of a racist band whose repertoire consists of classics like "Niggerhatin' Me", "Coontown", "Some Niggers Never Die", and everybody's favorite: "Kajun Ku Klux Klan" . All I knew was that "Johnny Reb" was a nickname for Confederate Soldiers. My offending mp3 was "Johnny Rebel - Everybody's Dixie!.mp3", which is just the song Dixie. It may or may not have been performed by Johnny Rebel. I don't support racist music, in part because it's usually crappy hillbilly country or German death metal, but I don't support racism detection robots either. Hmm. Maybe "Dancing With Hitler" is the name of a band too. If not, it'd be a great name for a rock band. See? I'm a regular Dave Barry. Current mood: Dan Rather drinking a cool refreshing Pepsi. Current music: "Dancing With Hitler - Look at me! I'm dancing with Hitler!"

Forget Halo. This is what our would-be terrorist snipers should be training with, presuming they can't get real weapons training beforehand. Crap. This post probably won't bode well for my record in the Total Information Awareness Program.

<!!*[•_•]*!!.NETMINEITOR.3> RotJ: TU IP VA A SER BLOQUEADA 3 HORAS POR COMPARTIR MATERIAL PROBABLEMENTE NEONAZI: boot\b00tella_billyidolisdancingwithhitlerusherandmyself.mp3

I got kicked from a Direct Connect hub for having an mp3 with "hitler" in the filename. Neat. It's kind of stupid for a hub to use just "hitler" as one of it's kick filters. You'd get kicked for having a file named "Elie Wiesel discusses why Hitler was a very bad man.mp3". If you don't know who Elie Wiesel is, go read Night. Maybe I got kicked for the "dancingwithhitler" part though. Because only Neonazis would want to dance with Hitler. Still, you'd get kicked for having "Elie Wiesel discusses why dancing with Hitler is a bad idea.mp3". Take a listen for yourself. Am I a Neonazi yet? Anyways, have a nice day and heil Nationaler Sozialismus und antisemitismus!

Court yesterday. Judge gave me 50 hours community service. Didn't talk much. Just explained the circumstances of events, received decision. Tim, on the other hand, tried a little bit of sweet talk (how he did 100 hours of community service through some George Mason organization) and the judge got a little pissed, saying something about justifications and such. Four hours drive to Fairfax, four hours back. Nighttime driving is more fun than daytime driving, mostly because there's less glare and visual information in general. It always feels like I'm going faster at night than at daytime even when the car's going the same speed. I guess it's because I mostly only see the road ahead of me at night, while at day I can see things in the horizon and relative speed seems lower. I don't really mind sitting in the car for eight hours though. I get to listen to NPR. Not that I can't do that while sitting at my desk, but I just can't bring myself to listen to the radio at home when there are other things I can do that use more than just one of my senses -- for example, those that use two and three. Kojo Nnamdi had a segment on nation building in Iraq after the US kills Saddam, which was interesting. He specifically asked the callers not to discuss whether we should be going to war with Iraq but to focus on how we would be restructuring the country in case the war does happen and we kill Saddam (and all of his children). Naturally, thirty percent of the callers ended up talking about how we shouldn't be invading Iraq. Snow was huge up there. Wasn't expecting the piles by the side of the roads to be so high. A lot of two lane streets ended up becoming one lane streets, with five feet of snow on each side. I'll have photos up later.

Going to court tommorrow. Wish me luck. Or wish me the maximum 1 year in prison and $2500 fine. I don't care. I hate you all.

Apparently, Fox News did eventually steal CNN's Columbia content. Which once again proves my theory: Germans love David Hasselhoff.

Can someone tell me why that table has six empty lines above it? Update: I fixed it. Blogger adds a <br> every time I hit enter, so I had to delete all the returns from the html code.

I'll try to get some content up for this site sometime within the year. I'm trying not to let this one get run down and dilapidated like my previous (lack of) efforts, such as My old AOL site, viewable through web archive. My proudest achievement from that one was the fact that it was the number one result Google came up with when you searched for "I like kittens". A point still relevant is my predilection for typing two spaces after a period, which doesn't show up on the web, which depresses me (mildly). I had an older site on Geocities that was dormant for about 4 years. It would have been 6 years, but I did a quick update pondering why Geocities hadn't shut it down yet after 2 years. Geocities finally pulled the plug on it last year. That one had the Hawaii Five-O theme song midi playing in the background and the picture of Homer and Bart which you should see to your right. I had a bigger image though, and I made the background transparent, as well as changing Bart's shirt color from blue to red. I don't know why it was blue to begin with. Was the Tracey Ullman Bart blue-shirted? Maybe a failed attempt to skirt copyright law? That site was mostly a shill for getting AllAdvantage referrals anyways. I only had 4 direct referrals total, but a friend I referred managed to get a few dozen, which trickled back to me. I made a total of just over $100 with AA before it went kaput. Pay to Surf has pretty much disappeared nowadays. That friend with the referrals is probably going to grow up to be the next Alex Chiu. Here's his latest moneymaking scheme. Apparently he just scripted this last night too.

Thanks to Eric's hyperbole, my relationship with the dissatisfied reader will drop. I, Bob Newbie, will only have a relationship level of 6 with him/her. Meanwhile, he/she will be in love with some gay guy and Fernando from across the street.

Eric's listing me as "simply hilarious" in his links. Way to put the pressure on me, you bastard. Suppose someone clicks here on the premise that this drivel is "simply hilarious" and they don't find it up to snuff (what does that phrase mean?). Their opinion of me will go down and I will be forever humiliated. Thanks a lot, friend o' mine. Some guy who is not cheesy is linking me now. So I've got strangers reading this internet log. Now I feel uncomfortable posting my innermost thoughts and secrets, so I'll post other people's instead: Juan has gay fantasies about Tolkien. There. I said it. But seriously, I'll send Juan a link, and he's like "Wow. You must spend all day randomly surfing the internet to find crap like this." To which I reply, "Yes, that is correct." Because everybody finds interesting websites and news items by plugging in random addresses into their browsers instead of going to sites that catalog such things.

Tell me if you hate it.

New look.

Apparently my template sucks. I'll start making one myself. Something Robocop.

Some pictures of the national zoo -- a.k.a. the free zoo. A picture's worth a thousand words, so this stuff should be worth about sixty-seven thousand. I'm too lazy to write about anything. I don't really do anything throughout a day that's worth noting, which doesn't stop some people from writing about their lives. But I don't want to talk about that hot pocket I had today or how Eric's guitar gave me blisters. River City Ransom might be a good topic, but I'll save that for later.

Try to guess what Juan's phone card number is. Uh, if you manage to get it right, please don't use it.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait, no one doubted that it was our moral responsibility to protect those weaker than ourselves. Now we find ourselves in the same position. Some say that Iraq has done us no harm and that we should leave Saddam alone. Yet we did not go to war twelve years ago because he assaulted us, but because he assaulted others. It is true, that as far as we know he has not directly harmed us, but he has consistently and systematically practiced a policy of genocide towards the kurdish population in the north, and has been shown to possess chemical warheads with the capacity to multiply his atrocities. Even disregarding the threat he poses to the rest of the world, his actions towards his own kurdish population cry out that this is a man who must be stopped. You may preach pacifism on your own, but to stand idly by while a neighbor is brutalized is obscene. Once again we must use our strength to protect the weak. What is this plagarism thing people keep talking about?

Coffeemaker + 2 (little) bags coffee for $15. Thanks Gevalia. I normally don't drink coffee; not because I don't like it but because we didn't make it at home. And I don't like to pay for Starbucks employees' salaries whenever I get some water with ground beans. Might as well go for the $15 for a coffeemaker deal. Eric's got some bad words about my coffee. We'll add that to the 93% of all foods and drinks he takes issue with. What a Nazi. Will? I guess he's got no reservations with the sweet bitter taste that is Peruvian Organic. And Juan is South American so he's all over it like heroin. I've received complaints that the sleek black look does not match the kitchen's sleek white decor. I feel bad about that. Maybe I should have gone with the white. But my car's already white. Remember that Maddox article about the South African muppet with AIDS? Well, HIV technically. If the muppet had AIDS already, she'd be dead of pneumonia within the next two years. While I enjoy laughing at others as much as the next person, the premise of the joke doesn't work for me. Maddox asks why make a character with an STD in a show targeted to kids who don't know what sex is. I would ignorantly laugh along, but I've been forced to take a Humanities class. Burden of knowledge sucks. First off, let's look at the numbers: 5.6 percent of South African children ages 2 to 14 are HIV-positive and 13 percent of children this age have lost one or both parents to AIDS. Those 5.6 percent didn't get HIV by having unprotected sex (well, maybe a few 14 year olds). Just because you don't know about sex doesn't mean you don't know about AIDS. When everybody around you is dying of AIDS, you'll know about AIDS. But knowledge of AIDS isn't understanding of AIDS. As far as children's minds work, AIDS would be a very extreme case of cooties. Touch someone with cooties, you get cooties. Touch someone with AIDS, you die a horrible death. Social stigmatization isn't good for anyone. South African Sesame Street is introducing an HIV-positive character in an attempt to show kids that other kids with HIV aren't walking deathtraps.

Guess I should mention the loss of Columbia this past Saturday. Lots of coincidences abound that day: the two previous accidental deaths at NASA occurred on January 27 and January 28, shuttle with the first Israeli aboard blew up near a town named Palestine (though it's pronounced Palesteene), I was assigned a text about the Challenger mishap over the weekend for HST 1504. Of course, there isn't any significance behind any of these coincidences; don't let the retards tell you differently. I managed to be up to see the news channels pick up on this live. Waking up on Eric's bed (there isn't any significance behind that), I tuned to the news about 30 minutes after contact was lost but before they got video feed of the debris falling from the sky. The NASA channel was the first I saw that mentioned something wrong with Columbia. It's not a really good source of news though because all it shows is one static shot inside the control room. They did have a headline at the bottom of the screen saying "Breaking News: Columbia is NASA's oldest shuttle" or something like that. This must have been the second half of a headline. It was probably preceded by "Contact with shuttle Columbia lost". Of course, when you see only the last part of that headline, it doesn't look much like breaking news. Did NASA just recently discover that Columbia was older than the other shuttles? Or maybe there was an older shuttle but it blew up today, making Columbia the oldest. Anyways, Eric and I turned to CNN Headline News, where they explained that contact had been lost over Texas. A few minutes later, all the news networks except Fox News got video of the burning fragments streaking across the sky. The anchor on Fox News merely described it, saying he was watching it but didn't have the video feed ready for display yet. That means that he was probably watching CNN or MSNBC, who did have the video and Fox didn't have the original video without the CNN and NBC logos everywhere. Ha ha. Fox News sucks. MSNBC is the best newschannel in my opinion. Donahue is more entertaining than Connie Chung, mostly because Donahue often plays out a lot like Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer. Headline News used to be watchable, but they decided to change the look by reducing the actual video to 1/4 of the screen and filling the rest with colored gradients. It's like bizarro-Bloomberg, whatever that means. Anyways, on the issue of the actual topic, I've never responded to any media blitzing tragedies with actual grief or gawking speechlessness. My internal response is usually just "Shit. That's fucked up." Anything morbidly humorous is highly noticeable, like the NASA headline. Or on September 11, there was footage of people running from the dust cloud after the first collapse, and there was a woman just smiling into the camera like a fucking retard as she ran. And it makes you laugh. Like when you watch someone on SNL just start laughing uncontrollably, specifically Chris Elliott from the intro of an episode whose details I can no longer remember. After Columbia, Eric and I made some awkward jokes, silence fell in, and then we cried. No, that didn't happen, Juan. Psychological warfare.

I've finally started getting used to using ctrl+enter to add the www. and the .com to urls, but now whenever I try to do an autocomplete, I'll sometimes hit ctrl+enter instead of just enter, thereby fucking up my entire life. Thanks Eric. I unjustifiably assign all blame to you. I'm supposed to own colored pencils for Physics but I lost mine in ninth grade so hell if I'm buying them again; that goes for stamps too, at least until they increase the price. Dolly Parton says "cocaine" in "I get a kick out of you". Hehe.

Got an ad for this in my Yahoo! mail. Not as an email but as an ad on the Yahoo! webpage itself, one of the fat vertical banner ads. Flashed horribly by the way. It bills itself as a legal cable descrambler. Seeing as I hate Adelphia, I decided to give it a look. Upon reading the actual description, it is apparently nothing but a crappy 125 channel cable box. They try to catch you with semantics. What does a cable box do? It descrambles signals coming from your coax to something your television can display. Basically all cable boxes are cable descramblers. We're more used to applying the name descrambler to devices that illegally allow you to view channels that are picked up but are scrambled horizontally so as to be unviewable (audio generally comes through fine so I guess it's all the same to blind people). If someone came out with a legal illegal descrambler, I'll be interested. But this thing's just a normal cable box that you can own so you don't have to rent one from the cable company. Might be beneficial to people who have analog cable but probably not considering digital conversions or HDTV will make the box obsolete before you save $197--the cost of the box.. Of course, with Adelphia and its digital channels, the box won't work even now. Also, the website is just a single page with a field for zip code, name, and email at the bottom. This information is taken under the premise that they will check whether their box will work in your zip code. Upon further investigation, it would seem that it's probably a ploy to get your email address so they can sell it to spammers. No matter what you put in the zip code section, "The Global Universal Cable Box Will Work In Your Area!" Even if you somehow happen to live in an area where the zip code is "suck my cock", "The Global Universal Cable Box Will Work In Your Area!" I can't believe Yahoo! is giving ad space to this kind of stuff. Two years ago, I would have expected to find it only on some kind of pornographic site or a fake search site built for pop ups. The Internet economy's really gone downhill in case you haven't noticed.

Finished reading Watchmen yesterday. Most significant comic read since Dark Knight Returns. Now feel compelled to talk like Rorschach sometimes. Cut off sentences feel more efficient. No need to use "I", "the", "it"; only saves one to four letters per sentence but what the hell. Superhero comics tend to be dull because they're so cliched and lack human elements comapred to, say, manga or Frank Cho. Watchmen, while dealing with costumed heroes, portrays them washed up, retired, with personal problems. Rorschach is fucked up but cool. Nite Owl wants in Laurie's pants but she's preocuppied with big blue atomic god-man. Dr. Manhattan can't relate to Laurie because he's a blue superbeing. Etc. Dark Knight Returns, similarly, gave us a troubled, old, but nonetheless badass Batman. I really love the visual motifs that run through each chapter as well as the entire series. Love the bloody smiley faces. In other news, I started this weblog. Gives me something to do other than homework or Counter-Strike, which gets old really quick. Even fy_iceworld.

Test.