The horror ... the horror.


I now officially renounce my status as a member of the human race. I cannot abide being associated with a species this stupid.

Here's something that I find ridiculous. It's when you're on a forum or something and you end up having a disagreement with someone. I find it stupid when said person starts to say how your arguing with him violates his 1st amendment right to free speech. It is dumb for a couple of reasons.

1. This is the Internet, an international forum. It is not the United States. What do the forum members from other countries think of your constant parading of U.S. policy?

2. Merely disagreeing with someone's point of view is not squashing their right to free speech. It is almost impossible to do anything to thwart one's right to free speech short of sending a crippling virus to that person's computer or tracking him down and putting a gun to his head. Seriously, if you think your rights are being violated simply because someone said something mean or contrary to you on the internet, pray you never have to know what REAL discrimination is like.

"Everybody is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage." ~Winston Churchill

This is something I wrote yesterday morning. I was going about my usual business when I had a thought that made me laugh, and it materialized into this chapter of a gay romantic comedy. I wrote it purely for fun, and am undecided whether or not I should pursue it as a serious project. It's not my usual genre or subject matter, and I have no idea if it's actually good or not. I thought I'd post it here and see if it amuses anyone.

The story is R-rated and contains some dark humor. It is also a very rough draft that I just wrote, so there may be uncorrected mistakes.

( Gay Comedy Pilot )

Finally got an update on the status of my new PC. I had decided to spend some of the tax money on a new PC. I'd toyed with the idea of building it myself, but I concluded that it's not every day I get to spend this kind of money, and it's too valuable to risk blowing my investment because I screwed up during the building process.

I shopped around for manufacturers and settled on MaxForcePC. It's a relatively new business, but after talking to Max, on the forum and over the phone, as well as reading tons of praise and recommendations from HardForum, I decided to go with them. Here's the parts I ended up selecting.

Cooler Master Centurion 590
Corsair VX 550W - SLI/Crossfire Capable
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8500 3.13GHZ
MassCool 8W553B1M3
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R
Super Talent DDR2-800 4GB (2x2GB)
Samsung HD103UJ 1TB SATA2 7200rpm 32MB
Samsung SH-S223Q LightScribe 22X Dual Layer DVD+/-RW SATA Drive
EVGA nVidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB
Microsoft Windows XP Home W/SP2B

Cost is just over $1,000. I went with XP because I hate Vista with a passion, and see no point in adapting to a new OS that is on the fast track to being replaced anyway by Windows 7.

It's in stress testing at the moment and should be shipped to me in a few days. Max was even kind enough to provide me with some pics of my new PC in assembly.

( Pics of my New PC )

A few years ago I saw some youtube videos about classic video games, and from that moment on I decided that what I wanted most of all was my own retro video gaming room, with a collection from all of the consoles I grew up with.

My first console was an Atari 2600 that my dad owned. My dad used to be really into video games in the years before the industry crash of 1983. After the Atari 2600, though, he lost interest. I think the last game he really played and enjoyed was House of the Dead for the Sega Dreamcast. My mother also loved to play Crazy Taxi on that same system, and she is by no means a gamer.

After the Atari came the Sega Master System, where I fell in love with games like Zillion, which has a theme song that is stuck I remember fondly to this day. I also played my first RPG on that system, Miracle Warriors.

After that came the NES, and there are simply too many great games I fell in love with to count. If I had to name the three that stick out the most in my mind I'd have to say:

Shadow of the Ninja: I remember this game mainly because this is the game that taught me how to use pattern recognition. My brothers and I would play it constantly, but we just couldn't beat the final boss. No matter how hard we tried, none of us could get to those end credits. Then, one day, I figured out the pattern. In a burst of inspiration I went through the entire game alone, my brothers and their friends watching, and came face to face with the evil emperor. I impressed everyone by not only defeating the final boss, but doing so alone and without even being touched. It was my first real gaming achievement, made all the sweeter by the fact that I had an audience.

Shadowgate: This game gave me nightmares. Horrible, terrible nightmares. Really, I had to sleep with the lights on after playing this game for the first time. Back then we had no internet, so I must have ran into just about every gruesome death in this game as I blindly fumbled across through trial and error ... and error ... and error.

Flying Warriors: I remember being very much obsessed with this game as a kid. Objectively, this game is below average in quality, the story is awful, and the it can get cheaply hard at times. But still ... it has martial artists who turn into super-heroes to fight the armies of darkness. To me, as a small boy, this game was dripping with awesome for that reason alone.

I used to play my NES games on a combination TV/NES that my dad bought.

Unfortunately I don't have any remnants of my childhood with me. I lived with siblings, who were all very irresponsible and disorganized. They left game carts scattered all over the place. For some reason they didn't believe in returning CDs to their cases, so all of my old Dreamcast, PS1, and PS2 games are damaged beyond recognition. Also we moved a lot, about once every 2-3 years, so a lot of that stuff I was forced to leave behind. My idiot sister had taken the old NES/TV, ripped it in half, and disposed of the NES part of it. Not it's worthless. God I hate her for that!

It really is a pity. One of these days, when I have the space and the money, I'm going to try starting up a retro games collection as a hobby.

It's been a while since I wrote a post of actual substance, so I thought I'd write about what's been going on.

I'm recovering from the flu. I spent about 2 days sleeping with a high fever. I'm better now, though I still have a bad cough. My brother Walter had visited recently also. We mostly just talked about stuff and played Yu-Gi-Oh. I actually had to blow dust off of my cards, I haven't used them in so long. I forgot how fun that game was.

My writing is going very well. The project I'm currently working on is almost finished. I'm 19 chapters in, and have 54,618 words written according to my word processor's word-counting tool. I'd say that's roughly two-thirds done. It should be finished soon. Then comes the editing, which will take a couple of months, and finally I can start looking for test readers and shopping it around to publishers. As I might have mentioned, after working on my first project, Dark Kinship, practically forever, I'd decided to scrap the project and go for something less ambitious to get my foot in the door. I can edit and re-write the whole novel from now until the Rapture, but I don't think it's the kind of project a publisher will be willing to risk for a first-timer with no track record.

I may describe the project in more detail in a later post, but right now I have a sort of superstitious feeling that if I talk about it too much before it's done, I may jinx it. Less talking, more writing.

Speaking of talking about writing, it does bug me sometimes that I can't talk to anyone about what I'm doing. There are two types of people in my life. Group one simply doesn't care, and group two is waiting for me to grow up and do something "real" with my time. Over the years I've pretty much gotten used to it, but there are some moments when I think "gee, I wish I had someone to read this chapter I just finished and tell me whether or not it sucks," or "I wish I had someone to bounce story ideas off of."

I do take some comfort, though, in reading this passage from Party of One: A Loner's Manifesto in which the author describes how the people around her, one relative in particular, pretty much ignores any part of her life that has to do with her writing.

• A relative of mine does not read my books. A stack of them stands obelisklike on a dresser, rising in height as years pass but never budging, as the sun fades the varnish around them in neatly damning oblong. Their titles and my name gleam on bindings virgin with that sleek, never-cracked crispness. The books make sticky sounds when parted from each other, like cries of protest.
  
  The person whose dresser it is makes a point of buying my books when they come out, and of mentioning buying them. I bought it! Yet during the months and years when I am writing one, the person with the dresser forgets what it is about. I tell the owner of the dresser at the outset, then again when asked--say, a week later. Then all is forgotten and the asking stops.
  
  The person with the dresser can remember many things that have nothing to do with me and books. Details of conversations with the postal carrier, with shop clerks, with strangers at Bargain Barn. The person with the dresser asks how I am, what are my weekend plans. The neighbor's nephew had his fourth birthday and got a wind-up dog. My books might as well not exist.
  
  ... That the person whose dresser has a stack of my books on it has never read them--not even a single line by means of subterfuge, I loved the part about the cannibals!--might shock you. Would it shock you if I said nearly everyone else I know is that way, too?
  
  Granted, I do not know so many people, but nearly none of them ever ask me about writing. Not a word. How would they feel if I never mentioned their pregnancies, their children? Writing is practically all I do all day, every day, yet they talk about daycare and holidays and that asshole in the accounting department. Like the person whose dresser it is, they ask how I am but the question is general. As if how I am could be any other way than how I write. They ask how is my husband.

She also talks about a friend who's had it a little worse than her.

• Angry people acted as if she were wresting herself away from them: stealing herself. They told her to forget the M.A. in creative writing which she had earned with honors and to get a real job. Marie was not actually alone. Her stories, full of love and roads and music, were the only company she sought, more than enough.
  
  She wanted to sustain this for a lifetime. The odds were against her. They always are, when loners say I'm serious about this. My life and my art are one. This sitting-at-the-keyboard-all-by-myself-all-day thing is not a hobby. This is what writing demands of writers: time. Energy. Courage. The fury of many and the rudeness of the rest.

A rather bleak outlook which I don't necessarily share. Much of this depends on environment. I've known a couple of people who had friends and family who appreciated their work, even encouraged it. However, I've had enough personal experience to relate to both cases.

At home, nobody talks about my writing. Nobody. They will politely nod and pretend to listen if I bring it up, but the look of boredom on their faces makes it clear that they'd rather be talking to somebody else. I once gave some people the opening chapters of my current project, not holding out much hope for a response. True to my prediction, when I asked after those pages a month later I was met with a blank stare. I found a copy of my prologue under some junk, covered in dust. They didn't even know what it was about. I wonder why I wasted the paper printing it in the first place.

My eldest brother had the most extreme reaction. He cornered me once, shouting that I was wasting my life and should do something "real" with my time. He used the words "you're wasting your life" with such a tone that you'd think he'd just learned that I was a heroine junkie or something. In his mind wanting to write books was the worst thing I could possibly do, and it could only end in misery and failure.

So when I start feeling down about stuff like that I read the above quoted passages and feel a little better knowing that I'm not the only one.

It's not that bad, though. As I said, I got used to it. I'm actually feeling quite excited to be almost finished with a project. I'm confident that this one will be become the "foot in the door" that I require.

I did a search for the word "Loner" on Amazon.com to see if one of my favorite books was available in Kindle format yet. I was immediately greeted with the notice "Did you mean: Love". Amazon also helpfully "corrected" my search to display Kindle books with the word "love" in the title.

For some reason I found that funny.

Speaking of Amazon, take a look at these Amazon Oddities for a good laugh.

The horror ... the horror ...

I have see, quite possibly, the most wretched abomination ever conceived by the hands of man, a thing so shockingly atrocious that it has scared my very soul for all eternity.

It is ...

Silk and Steel by Ron Miller. I dare you, I DARE YOU, to read just the two pages in this link with a straight face. In fact, tomorrow I'm calling my brother just so I can read this to him and see how much of it he can take.

And to think ... this was actually published. I guess there's hope for me yet.

I came across some articles which describe how Microsoft suspended a user's account because she identified herself as lesbian in her personal Xbox Live profile. This user further describes the harassment she endured from other Live members (she talks about how some went out of their way to "chase" her across games to continue the harassment), which culminated in the suspension of her account when numerous people reported her profile as "offensive."

Xbox Live's Major Nelson's blog post on the subject links to all of the relevant articles.

I first became aware of the issue of Xbox's policies on sexual orientation in profiles when reports first came of people being suspended for having gay-related words in their gamertags. One unfortunate fellow had his name banned, even though his real-life name was, in fact, Richard Gaywood.

Being gay myself, you'd expect me to accuse Microsoft of homophobia, but from my own experiences in online play, I can understand why they have such a policy in place. I don't see it as discrimination, but rather an unfortunate consequence of the way people behave online.

Signing into an online game for just a few minutes sometimes results in my ears being assaulted by a torrent of racist, homophobic, sexist, and otherwise discriminatory and demeaning language intended to insult and harm others. It's a sad fact about online gaming in general that a large number of people abuse the anonymity of the internet to demean and degrade others. I suspect that harassing other gamers is an even bigger form of entertainment for some people than the games themselves. It's immature, it's frustrating, but it is a fact of online gaming life.

Words like "gay" receive a blanket ban because the vast majority of the time they are not used as a form of self-description, but as insults. Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time playing online has some inkling of this. Of all the reasons why I no longer play online games, that is on the top of the list. People are idiots in real-life, but in online games they're also racist, sexist, and homophobic idiots. It sucks all the fun out of the games for me, and the general immaturity level makes me feel like I'm back in elementary school.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the main reason why I personally don't play online. No, I don't mean it's because of gay discrimination. The general immaturity, belligerence, and active hostility of the people who play online takes what is, for me, a relaxing form of recreation, and turns it into an exercise in frustration. I simply don't want my fun to be spoiled by other people's negative attitudes.

There is a fine line between a healthy fandom and a mental disorder. That line is crossed by posting on internet message boards.

Today is my birthday, and I just turned 26. 2 + 6 = 8, which is my favorite number ... not because 8 is my birth date, but because the number 8 resembles the symbol for infinite.

So, yeah, I'm 26. I got a little money, which will be put towards my new computer savings. I decided I need a new PC since my current one is having trouble handling the tasks I do. My current PC is also roughly 5 years old, so at this point I'm half-afraid of a critical hardware failure. I already had to replace a dead power supply and had a close call with the hard drive.

I'm entertaining the thought of building my own PC, but I'm not confident that I have the ability to do that. I'll most likely get a build-to-order Systemax unit.

By the way, I have chocolate cake. :)

The Fios installation went smoothly. It took about 3 1/2 hours from start to finish, and the results are worth the wait. I ran a speed test before and after the installation using speakeasy.com.

Before Fios (using DSL):

Doenload: 2870kbps (358.8 KB/sec)
Upload: 737kbps (92.1 KB/sec

After Fios:

Download: 19705kbps (2463.1 KB/sec or 2.4 MB/sec)
Upload: 4572kbps (571.5 KB/sec)

Two words: Holy crap!

I just downloaded an HD video that would normally have taken me 2 hours on my old DSL connection in just 15 minutes. Also, the router Verizon provided me with seems to play nicer with my networked devices than my old one did.

I fiddled around with PlayOn, an application that lets you stream netflix, hulu.com, and youtube (among several other options) to your TV via a compatible device. I use it with my Popcorn Hour A-100 (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are also supported). The entire Hulu catalog on my television is amazing, to say the least.

Overall, I feel like a kid in a candy store today.

I heard someone complain about the game, Fallout 3. The source of the complaint was the "unrealistic" inability to kill children. This resulted in a conversation in which the participants cheerfully discussed child murdering and baby eating (you can be a cannibal in the game too), and I couldn't help but wonder "am I the only one who thinks it's a touch hypocritical to bemoan the lack of child murdering (and child eating) in a game, then turn around and get offended when people become concerned about video game violence?"

It's been said that if a person puts on a blindfold, walks down the street, and ends up walking into a tree, he'd blame the tree.

The world has never changed because someone complained on an internet forum, and yet somehow there are a large number of people who do just that, thinking that what they're doing actually matters.

I come from a southern family, and every new years my relatives come up here to celebrate the new years and cook up a ginormous new years meal. This year the new year's dinner consisted of roast chicken, collard greens, roast beef with home made gravy, chitterlings, black-eyed peas, pig's feet, wild rice with sausage, home made macaroni and cheese, rutabagas, potato salad, and vanilla cake topped with pineapple for desert.

That and enough champagne and spiked eggnog to make me sleepy meant I was out like a light for most of the day. I've been cheerfully eating leftovers for the past couple of days. I think tomorrow we're having ribs.

A new year means one thing: Tax returns are almost upon us. The time where I permit myself a single expensive indulgence to make up for the crappy gifts I got from my relatives (this year I got a T-shirt with a Uranus joke ... seriously). I'm thinking of getting either a DirecTV HD + DVR unit, or a Playstation 3. Out of all my audio-video components, my satellite TV unit (a standard def DirecTV DVR) is the only thing that hasn't yet been updated for the 21st century. I really want to watch science and nature shows in high def. Mythbusters in HD? Where do I sign up?

The Playstation 3 would complete my game console collection, as I have the Wii and Xbox 360. Plus I'd also be getting a blu-ray player in the same deal, which is a nice bonus. I don't know which one to choose. I want HD discovery channel, but I also want to play Metal Gear Solid 4. If I do get a PS3 it MUST be a refurb 60g unit (full backwards compatibility, extra USB ports, and card readers). Anything else is a deal breaker.

But I have a couple of months to make this decision, so I don't have to choose right away.

One thing that annoys me in sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows, especially ones involving aliens, are the self-aggrandizing themes in which humanity is portrayed as the purest, most desirable trait. I particularly dislike stories where the characters take it upon themselves to supplant an alien society because the way humans do things is obviously so much better.

And have you ever wondered why aliens in sci-fi are portrayed so poorly? I mean, human society is large and varied, while the aliens in sci-fi typically have only one culture, one style of dress, one language, and come from a planet of the same name as their race. Do humans come from a planet called Human? Is there some kind of disease in the sci-fi community that attacks creativity? I mean, seriously, they can do better than that.

My favorite sci-fi books so far are the ones that don't involve aliens. Or, if they do, it is not a matter of either a) the evil aliens must die, or b) the aliens must learn how great humanity is.

I'm looking for sci-fi books that portray humanity as the flawed creature that it is rather than a paragon of virtue the rest of the universe had better look up to. The mere thought of another "humanity is great" message makes me want to throw up.

Persona 4. Oh my God, Persona 4!

Normally I try to maintain some semblance of detachment when reviewing something, but I find that next to impossible with Persona 4 for the Playstation 2. It's my journal, dammit, so I'll indulge in fanboyism just this once.

I love this game. If I could have sex with this game and bear its bastard children, I would. This game makes me want to write horrible fan fiction. This game makes me want to cosplay as my favorite character and attend an anime convention. This game makes me want to learn Japanese so I can personally fly to Japan and praise the people who made it in their native tongue.

Okay, so I went a little overboard there. Just read the review below for an overview of the game.

( Read more... )

I spent the better part of yesterday making Christmas popcorn baskets. Last year for Christmas I was given a popcorn pot, and since then I've been a bit obsessed with popcorn. I learned to make three varieties: kettle corn, cheese corn, and a movie theater popcorn recipe. I even bought the same oils, toppings, and seasonings they use in actual movie theaters. I put the popcorn in little Christmas baskets that look like Chinese takeout cartons, which I lined with wax paper. I'm giving some to the landlady (nothing says "don't evict me" like festive Christmas treats), and the rest will go to whoever shows up over here tomorrow.

As far as Christmas goes, I'm not expecting much. Yeah they're my genetic relatives, but they know so little about me, and I them, that we may as well be random strangers. Odd how you can grow up with people and still not have the slightest clue who they are. The difference between me and them is that they delude themselves into thinking that they know me in intimate detail, when the full extent of their knowledge seems to be "he likes video games." This reflects in the gifts they give as well, so I don't expect to receive anything I'll have any use for.

The reason I continued to celebrate Christmas after I dropped religion (after reading the bible and finding it highly illogical) at age 14 was because it was the one day of the year when my family wasn't fighting. We actually sat a the table and had dinner, said nice things to each other, and got along as a family should. It was also one one time when I was guaranteed to actually be included in conversation and family activities. In recent years it has become apparent that that was all a lie. We were never close, and our niceness on Christmas was merely an obligation. We behaved that way because we were expected to. We did it because it was "the season." There was no sincerity behind it. As soon as the day ended we were back to our normal, petty, bickering selves.

I now find myself questioning whether I should continue acknowledging this holiday. It all seems very fake to me. A billboard, a Sunday ad, a half-price sale at Walmart. As fake as the smiling faces on the ads for home theater systems.

As such, I wonder if this should be my last Christmas. Next year I can refuse to celebrate and specifically tell everyone not to get me any presents. I'll leave Christmas morning while the others celebrate and take the subway into Manhattan to see some sights (I've seen surprisingly little of Manhattan, despite being a born and bred New-Yorker). Maybe catch a movie, read quietly in the library, and stop at a cafe before heading back home. Or maybe I'll book a vacation for one someplace. I've always fantasized about waking up Christmas morning hundreds of miles away from anyone who knows me.

But that's all up in the air. I probably won't actually do any of those things. Suffice it to say, Christmas has lost all meaning to me.

Why is it that when someone thinks positive they're naive, but when someone thinks negative they're a realist? Do people think reality can only ever be negatrive?