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Entries for June, 2006

June 1st, 2006

The Hathor Legacy

The Hathor Legacy is a site about women on TV and in film (subtitle: the search for good women charachters). I've been reading it for the last couple of days, and it's very interesting.

Oh, all right. I'm reading it for the Fight Club articles.

But the rest of the essays (?) are pretty good reads, too. I mean, it doesn't take me two days to read the--three, is it?--Fight Club ones. Really.

I just wish they didn't seem to like Alias so much. I'll spare you my rant on it, but that show sucked.

rurounibug ; 01:31 AM|fine, ignore me

June 4th, 2006

phones

The phones at my folks' place are, to put it politely, fucked up, yo.

Phone calls don't get in, and for bonus frustration, everybody's handphones are off. I'm just grateful that the old standard-issue 'veronica' voice-mail greeting has been changed from 'telkomsel veronica' to 'please leave a message, beep'.

Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. How irritating was that thing?

All the trouble is despite--or maybe because of--the multi-line system/splitter/thing-er that my dad installed a few years back in a fit of gadgetry love. It's a whole new phone experience, I tell you.

me: Is Mom home?
Adek: I'll transfer your call.
me: WTF?
phone: bibibibi bi bibi.
me: Hold music. Nice.

So today, after trying for hours, I finally got lucky. Sort of. Because my seven year old cousin Jovi, who lives with us them picked up.

Jovi: Who the hell is this?
me: It's me. Put ibu on.
Jovi: I'll transfer your call.
me: Don't you dare. Just call her. And be quick about it.
Jovi: Okay.
Phone: bibibibi bi bibi

Except that Jovi doesn't really know what he's doing, so after putting me on hold and failing to actually transfer the call, he hung up on me. And didn't tell anyone I'd called.

I'd been trying to get through since six.

The next time I'm home, that kid is dead. He's probably not even aware I'm taking grudge notes.

rurounibug ; 12:31 AM|7 replies

June 5th, 2006

single occupancy virtual world

It bugs me how everything is MMORPG* these days. Or, at the very least, has a play with friends function.

Please. If I wanted to hang with my friends would I be playing video games? You can't even be anti-social without needing friends and a work-together attitude to be so, these days.

Sure I can see the draw of it: subscription fees, expansion sales, and so forth. And for the players, you get to walk around in a world much bigger than what your off-line RPG offers, plus theres the novelty of most of the charachters you meet being a fellow player.

Of course, the actual role-playing in these games tends to be pretty minimal, at least as far as I've seen. A long time ago on Ultima Online, I kept running into Dennis Rodmans. Dragon slaying Dennis Rodmans. Now theres sticking with the setting! What Everquest playing college friends I had were all about the stats: "I have a sword of blablabla and my charachter is level yakyakyak and I have GPs** coming out my ass."

And of course, in more recent games like World of Warcraft, you reach a point where you need about a bazillion party members to get anywhere at all. Do you know what that means? Yup, co-ordinating a bazillions players' schedules. That and no solo-galivanting.

But for me the clincher is: Lack of coherent storyline. As far as I can tell, in MMORPGS you complete missions, or jobs, or quests, depending on what your game of choice calls its in-game objective. You know, "retrieve tigerbalm" or something.

There's no real charachter, whose backstory you slowly uncover, no over-reaching plot that you see more and more of as you progress. No devious schemes that suddenly unfold.

Well, okay. Devious schemes, check. But if in offline RPGs we take the scheming as a plot twist, I suspect in MMORPGs theres a large propensity for it to end up as a LiveJournal name-calling war.

Honestly, I can deal with games where you can ignore the online function--where that getting together aspect is just for bonus hurrahs--but games like Neverwinter Nights . . . it has a single player storyline, but one thats repetitive and inane. (How many times can someone steal the Waterhavian creatures before someone gets a clue and sets a decent guard? Many, many times, apparently. And why does it take so long for them to be boiled down into the serum--or whatever it is--so they don't get stolen yet again? I don't know. Nobody knows.)

Correction: Repetitive, inane, and boring.

I don't want to go head-to-head, online, with my freinds, I don't want to work together to save any world, even a shiny Final Fantasy one, and I don't see why every 'epic' size game world immediately means we must all frolic in said world together, to the point where it become necessary to do so to properly play the game at all.

(Unless you like re-capturing Waterdhavian creatures over and over and over and . . . . )

Give me ye olde 'linear' RPG any day.

And keep my freinds off of it.





*Massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Noob.
**Gold Pieces. C'mon. Catch up, would you? While we're at it, HP is 'Hit Points', what in old fighting games is known as 'life'. Conversational use as seen in episode four of 8bit theatre.

rurounibug ; 05:21 PM|5 replies

June 6th, 2006

apocalyptic intervention

Happy 666, everyone!

Don't be dissapointed. It's only three. There's plenty of time for the rocks to start falling, the heavens to crack open and heavenly and/or demonic hordes to burst from the firmament and fissures in the land and flood the earth, saying things like "Lo!" and "Behold!".

Pleee~nty of time.

And they damn well better, 'cause it's the only chance I have of getting out of the dentist appointment I have tommorow.


ETA: It's now 12:37am--officially 6-7-06. I've waited patiently to no avail. Looks like I'll have to go to my freaking root canal after all, goddammit.

rurounibug ; 03:01 PM|5 replies

June 7th, 2006

Asian Girls on (US) Reality TV

I've noticed this on a couple of shows. Not that I watch a lot of reality TV, but it's summer break, and what else is a guy supposed to do?

Last season/cycle/thing of America's Next Top Model did it, and an early
elimination' round of the current So You Think You Can Dance did it:

Focus on how 'stupid' and 'out of it' an Asian girl is. In both cases, the girls' english seemed kind of shaky, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had been born overseas. The camera loves to focus in close to them while they look blank when they miss something, and then the audience can snicker condescendingly when they mis-interpret or mis-understand something.

I can get cutting someone out of a competition if it becomes obvious it's going to take a lot of effort to work with them, but I really don't like the enthusiastic nastiness with which these girls were treated.

I'm not talking about a racial thing. It seems to be more of a cultural/ethnic thing since fluent english speaking Asians and Asian-Americans don't catch the same crap.

Its like, if you're not yet fully assimilated--or can't fake it like you are--you don't deserve even basic consideration.

And it's not just on the TV. You college kids out there, just watch for the next time some international student can't quite follow the lecture, or get their english in order quick enough to answer a question coherently.

Just look around and count the eye-rolls.

rurounibug ; 10:13 PM|7 replies

June 9th, 2006

brain glitch number 3.5

When I post art to AI, I can't leave the computer until someone replies.

Pretty much like when you play freecell or solitaire, and can't quit until you win.

rurounibug ; 02:34 AM|2 replies

June 9th, 2006

opinions on things

On layout:

Punchier? Or just hard on the eyes?


On webthings:

Would it be completely innapropriate to use this image for an art/fiction site (original & fan), wherein the ratings may go up to NC17?

Or does it not matter either way?





I like it because my Bravenet ID (and hence URL extension) is 'scatteredlight'.

The other images I want to use are things like backlit windows with interesting iron work, halls with light falling though doors, etc. All black and white. I haven't done any pshop on those, though, and since they're all web stolen, I don't think I should use them as they are.

I like this one for the index page because it's a little more dramatic than a hallway, y'know?

rurounibug ; 09:38 PM|7 replies

June 11th, 2006

in which the audience gets to weigh in some more

Okay.

I tried it both ways and I don't think I got it right. I think I know which version I'm liking, though.

These are already altered, and are pretty close to how I would use them. They're bigger than this, but I small-ed them down to allow for blog table size. The site background would be black, so these pics would just sort of be part of it, without tables or borders around them or anything like that.

(Cut for my freinds list. Because I'm a nice guy.)

Opinions?
Is the rose-window use-able now? Or still no? I think it's starting to look more like fireworks, myself.

rurounibug ; 12:37 AM|4 replies

June 12th, 2006

I miss out on everything that matters

I'm missing the whole World Cup because every match I give a shit about, save one, is on ESPN or ESPN2 and I don't have cable. I'm avoiding AI's World Cup thread, because, frankly, I'm jealous. Everyone in Indonesia can watch all the Japan and Korea matches, and the US? The US has golf on TV instead! What the hell is up with that? Golf?!

It's World Cup time, dammit!!

ABC is televising one Korea game. That's it. I will watch it, but I will be sad, knowing that it's all I get unless both teams make the finals.

Is it pathetic that I've kind of been looking forward to this WC since the last one? I'm so dissapointed that US TV is being such a bitch about it.

And for the record? American football sucks. Yeah. And it's boring. Take that.


ETA: Anhi has just informed me that Japan lost their first game 3-1 to those fuckers from down under, the Australians. Damn.

rurounibug ; 03:54 PM|12 replies

June 14th, 2006

my babies are adopted

rurounibug ; 10:34 PM|fine, ignore me

June 16th, 2006

When did I become such a nerd?

Summer classes start on Monday. I am freakishly happy about it. I have become a school-loving dork. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I have memories of having been a jock, once.

And now I'm sitting here, looking forward to class and reading fanfiction. Sci-fi fanfiction, no less.

What the hell happened?

Also: How come none of you like puppies? Even when snuggled with a kitty and combined in an icon of awesome adorableness? I was anticipating at least a little ooh-ing and aah-ing, and maybe even a "That so kii-yute!"

My OTP icon is wasted on you. You people have no souls.

rurounibug ; 07:23 PM|3 replies

June 18th, 2006

original fic [blackbirds]--lucky at cards

This has been on ficpress for a bit. I forgot to say.

Lucky at Cards
PG13 for language.

This is the tentative, clumbsy beginning to what is supposed be something a little, you know, longer. Something longer that has a plot. And maybe an actual point.

Takes place sometime after What Lurks. Not that it matters much to the story.


Any comments on either story, especially regarding the charachters, would be very much appreciated.

rurounibug ; 12:26 AM|1 replies

June 21st, 2006

TMI about dentists

This update is for whining purposes only. However, feel free to comiserate, or sympathize. Cookies help.

You may remember my mentioning in passing the root canal I had, after the world failed to end on the date of satan, and thereby failed to save me from the endodontist.

(behind this cut, I whine at length)

The whole thing has left me something of a tylenol-popping (that shit'll kill your liver, btw) dental hypochondriac. I fear every twinge in the tooth-region is a sign of wisdom teeth coming in, or abcess, or infection, or just more shit going wrong, and I fearfully look it up on google, whereupon google assures me it is a sign of something horrible for sure, and proceeds to list all the ways dental problems can lead to lingering death.

rurounibug ; 01:29 AM|1 replies

June 22nd, 2006

excused absence permission slip

Still miserable.

And now miserable and out of popsicles. The only thing keeping me going was reading the Snapple Fun Fact printed on the stick. Oh, woes!!

I was going to go take it out on the kids over at AI, but people seem to be catching on the fact that I've recently been using them as an internet, text version of a stress ball.

Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. I am nothing if not friendly when vexed.

I think I should ban myself from the internet--or at least from replying--until this tooth problem rights itself. Rights itself. Yup. You heard right. Because I finally balls-ed up enough to call the endodontist, since logicly I figured she'd give me a round of antibiotics and wham! All better.

Nope.

I get, "If it's not better by Tuesday--" Tuesday!? Thats like . . . Well, todays Thursday, so, Friday, Saturday . . . It's a damn long time. WTH?

Listen, by the time I'm calling a freakin' dentist, I just want the drugs already. And what do I get? "Take an ibuprofin." Ibuprofin? Ibu-fuckin'-profin?

To be fair, I did admit that the pain was mostly gone, and that it was mostly the weird feeling of the swelling that was driving me batshit insane.

I wonder what it says about me that I handle actual pain better than mere annoyance. But see, pain you can take drugs for. There is no drug for obnoxious.


ETA: Actually, there might be. I'm considering alcoholism.

ETA2: I can't believe I used 'vexed' in a sentance. Maybe I'm delirious and don't know it.

rurounibug ; 09:54 PM|fine, ignore me

June 24th, 2006

it fixes everything

Bought more popsicles. The world is OK again.

I just wish I wouldn't keep getting the same Fun Fact on the stick. Number 88 (A ten gallon hat holds less than one gallon of liquid) shows up the most, followed by number 94 (Lizards communicate by doing push-ups). I feel a bit ripped-off.

The best fact so far is number 59 (Brain waves can be used to power an electric train), and I'm doubting the accuracy of number 68 (The longest one-syllable word is "screeched").

If I'm not better by Tuesday, I'll at least be a damn sight smarter.


ETA: #106 You would weigh less on a mountain than at sea level. Also, Pigs get sunburn (#61).

rurounibug ; 02:33 AM|2 replies

June 24th, 2006

kids and dogs

If you're over twenty and not a dog, you're not supposed to be able to hear this sound.

I'm 24, and I hear it loud and clear. I describe it as "Argh, my ears!" Some shops are supposedly playing it on loops to drive loitering teens away, much the way you can broadcast ultrasonic sound to drive away rodents.

rurounibug ; 02:41 PM|1 replies

June 25th, 2006

funny 'coz its true

What Your Underwear Says About You

You tend to buy new underwear instead of doing laundry. You're not afraid to lay around resting your hand in your pants.

rurounibug ; 12:30 AM|3 replies

June 29th, 2006

super

I know you all want to hear about Gay Pride day. For me, it was mostly about free condoms.

I have photos, but I'm way to lazy to load them to my comp, so in the meantime, I give you this:

Spidey is us. Batman is methodical, angst-ridden. No one else is this. [...] Superman is not just a comic book character. He is the embodiment of our wish to do good.

Discuss!


Also: Happy Birthday, Angelics_d!

rurounibug ; 01:12 AM|2 replies

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