Wah! Suz and Bruce are picking on us!

I know I used to post a lot more frequently. Why less now? Partially it's a time thing -- when I lived alone and had no TV I didn't feel as pressed for time as I often do now. Dinner used to be some quick thing I did while reading or web surfing, now it's a small social event (and usually much better quality). And there are always episodes of some favorite show or interesting movies that TiVo grabbed... and while I don't always feel compelled to watch them, watching a little TV is still more than zero.

I've always just written when I have something to say... and lately I don't feel like I have a lot to say. I've been very introspective lately. I'm also keeping a lot to myself because I think it's the right thing to do.

I could write about recent adventures in Diablo II, but that's not what people want to read about here I don't think. Oh well. :) My ice sorceress mopped the floor with the Zakarumites and the Travincal High Council; lots of experience and lots of phat l3wt at little personal risk. I'm torn between staying there for a while and building up a couple more levels, and just getting on with the story and moving on to Act IV. I expect little trouble with Mephisto, but then I never had serious trouble with Duriel until this character either so you never know.

I too need a good hot shower to really feel right. Matter of fact, even if I want to relax in the tub, I still shower afterwards. Preferably with so much pressure I can practically lean against it. Hot water pounding on the back of my neck is what wakes me up on weekdays.

The EFF Open Audio License. I don't have much to say about it, except "hooray." I plan on updating the ID3 tags on my MP3s as well as putting an OAL notice on my music page. To which I have added a new track, not yet linked: "Drums of the Snake".

I'm not completely satisfied with it. The DR Bard enchante is a solo, which was supposed to be represented by the bodhran line in this track. But it gets a little too lost among the other tracks. The polyrythym thing with the shakers didn't quite come off as well as I was hoping, maybe I'll have to find something clangier like a tambourine or sistrum. Overall the track is too short. I think a quick revisit will help.

I was surprised when I first listened to it on my speakers at home -- with a decent subwoofer, that udu is a real bass monster. I want to use that to good advantage, without just sounding like a high school kid's $5,000 stereo in a $1,000 car.

Why can't people make decent Winamp skins? I have not found the perfect one yet. Most of them are too blurry, too busy or don't have enough contrast. The ones with neat visual designs usually have stupid names embossed on them. Right now I'm using "Blue Steel Revision" which is nice and clean and commits no major design sins... but when you minimize it into a tiny bar like I usually do, it looks like it doesn't quite fit, and the controls are very dim. Sigh.

Don't even get me started on the Egyptian themed ones. Those are inevitably made by people who just choose a few widely recognizable hieroglyphs, without having a clue as to what they mean, and using them as buttons on a grainy papyrus-ish background. It makes as much sense as having the letter "A" for Rewind, the letter "R" for Play, the word "life" for Pause, etc.

In my rapidly diminishing spare time I'm going to have to brush up on how to slice up images into WA skins, and roll my own.

Beware of sudden moodswings.

Thursday I lost it. I didn't yell or rant or pound on things, but I spent the drive home trying not to bawl (and failing). Nothing in particular happened to cause it, except chemistry I guess.

Friday, whatever I lost, I got back. Had a decent and satisfying day, left work in a cheerful mood despite wrangling with IGI (see below), and treated the roommates to pub food.

I will admit, the last year has not, overall, been the happiest as far as work goes. We've been doing this web redesign/rebuild for 8 months now, and before that I was assisting with the maintenance of the old site. I don't hate web design, otherwise I wouldn't have done any of this mess -- but I don't find the same challenge and joy in it as I do actually working on a game.

It's been a long dry spell, and the end of it is coming soon. I'll be going from building web pages into 3D graphics programming. From play.net 2.0 into Hero's Journey. I'm more than a little excited about that. ;) Meanwhile, every little thing that delays that day is another test of patience.

Oddly enough, Thursday went fairly smoothly and Friday JavaScript and ASP tried to thwart me at every turn. So while I sometimes think this project is getting me down on the large scale, there doesn't really seem to be any connection on a smaller scale.

I got fed up with Project IGI. I've been stuck on a particularly nasty mission, and not feeling very motivated to finish it. It keeps resorting to cheesy, dirty tricks. Friday night after work was the last straw -- I cleared out a two-room barracks, exited it, and the door closed behind me. And then it opened again and three guards emerged and gunned me down. I exited, uninstalled it and tossed the CD in the cabinet. Dangit, why'd the demo have to be good?

But I've been getting in much Diabloage this weekend, in anticipation of the expansion set. Reading several strategy articles on diabloii.net got me really fired up about the game again. At this point I have a Sorceress specializing in cold spells at level 20 or so right at the beginning of Act III. If I could reallocate some of those training points I would, but not much.

Nadesico is pretty entertaining. So is the next-to-last Trigun DVD. I found myself really listening to the soundtrack and getting into it... it's top-notch, lurching back and forth between bluesy twangy stuff and industrial (more in the original sense).

And at this point I'm either babbling or feeling like I'm babbling, so it's time to upload this puppy and go to bed.

Happy April 15th, everyone (or, for those who celebrate it, Happy Easter!) (Thanks Sluggy.) One more day to get tax returns in... hopefully nobody's getting gouged too much by the Uncle.

On the Buffy Test, I came up as Oz. Which I had to have explained to me since I don't watch the show often enough... apparently he never says anything. Heh.

I found good bottled tea... and even decent bottled chai. Seems a bit far-fetched I know, but Honest Tea's Assam and Kashmiri Chai are both good stuff, and I look forward to trying the other flavors as well.

Dagmar Budde, Die Goettin Seschat Wodtke und Stegbauer Leipzig, 2000 (Kanobos, vol. 2). Pb., 400 pp., ills. ISBN: 3-934374-01-8 price: DEM 65.

Neferu brought my attention to something I never expected... not just a book on Seshat, but a 400-page book at that, with a 2000 copyright date. The catch? It's in German.

I ordered it anyway. Nobody is going to translate this into English anytime soon -- it took eleven years before Hornung's work was translated and it's of much broader interest.

So it looks like I'll have to learn to read German, weil Babelfish Felsen saugt. Hee!

With this discovery, among other things that are going on in the background, I feel like... well, stuff is going on. Heh. It's an interesting time... things are heading upward, but in the dark.

While searches on "female vaccuum pumping" and "Rae Dawn Chong photo gallery" continue to (mis)direct people to my site, here are some new ones:

You people. Sheesh.

(I'm not posting the really lewd one. Gah!)

Steph and I agree: fast food is kind of depressing. Maybe we don't think so for the same reasons (she used to work at a McDonalds whereas I've been fortunate enough to avoid that kind of job), I'm not sure. To me, it's sort of an anti-celebration... a food factory where the employees just do things by rote and don't really care whether the food is any good, and where people go to eat not because they enjoy it, but because it's convenient and cheap.

Anyway, at lunchtime today after waiting several minutes for my order to come up and then finding a knuckle in my last Chicken McNugget, I was thoroughly turned off by the whole affair.

Thankfully after work today Steph convinced Jeff to drive us (in the big ol' Silverado loaner while his Blazer's in the body shop) to Tachibana for a nice uplifting Japanese meal. Having tried every other non-sushi item on the menu, I had misoyaki steak. Boy was it good. I'm gonna have to look for a recipe. The sauce is sort of grainy, sort of reminiscent of my mom's cheddar fondue, sort of nutty... overall unlike anything else I've ever had.

And then there was the tornado. And the hailstorms. And the lightning. And the flooding. Actually I kind of enjoyed it, a reminder of my old home and an impressive light show and display of power. I'm used to seeing that sort of thing a few times a month during the stormy season in Florida, and it only seems to hit around here once a year or less.

The damage tempers the enjoyment though -- according to the news reports there have been no serious injuries, but some houses have been split in half and others have had roofs destroyed and that sort of thing.

Speaking of tornadoes...

I sleep better with a fan blowing, for the white noise and the breeze and the coolness. I had a small clip fan that had served me well since I moved up here, but it burned out three weeks ago or thereabouts. With SqueakyCar down for the count I haven't been able to get to a store myself to replace it, and circumstances worked against me until Steph's shopping trip Saturday for soapmaking supplies.

Foolish me, I thought that a 16-inch fan with "aerodynamic turbo blades" would be just the thing. Sure it is... if I wanted to build a wind tunnel. It sounds like an airboat, billows the curtains up uncontrollably, and makes the windchimes bang like mad against the wall no matter which direction the fan faces -- and that's on "low". I pretty much can't run it higher than that or the noise is unbearable and the whole room is filled with... turbulence.

But I'm stuck with that or nothing until I can get out and get a small one. At least it'll be great in the basement. :)

This place sounds incredible.

After a couple more crashes I've given up on playing Black & White at home. It bogs down occasionally on the 733MHz PIII at work, so even if I could get it to run consistently on a Celeron 450 it'd still be on the uncomfortable side.

Worms Armageddon runs fine though. A little wacky cartoon violence to brighten my day. I created an "Overkill" scenario where the only weapons are bananas, sheep and baseball bats, and a "Fiery Death" scenario primarily using flamethrowers, petrol bombs and napalm drops. It's just too bad the computer substitutes throwing accuracy for flexible AI. Incredible how much trouble you can cause with a ninja rope and a baseball bat.

Found this while surfing this morning and thought it was pretty neat. Apparently the webmaster has to take a 3 day round trip from Bermi to the closest town with FTP access so he can update the site.

Peter Singer espouses charity... and not just the occasional donation, but all your household income over $30,000.

The general idea -- that it's ethically better to donate money to charities that save lives than it is to spend it on luxuries -- makes a kind of sense on a personal level, if it's not taken to extremes. But the numbers are bogus...

An American household with an income of $50,000 spends around $30,000 annually on necessities, according to the Conference Board, a nonprofit economic research organization. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world's poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000.

First of all, how many people are in that household? Sure, one single person with no extraordinary expenses can live comfortably on $30,000 (after tax) and won't suffer by donating everything above that. But a family of 4 including a college student? No way.

Ignoring the income factor then... where it comes down to being morally right or wrong, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that every penny you spend must be weighed against the number of lives it could potentially save. Singer says the money for a $1000 suit could have been spent saving 5 children's lives. By that same logic, a new Toyota Prius (a super low emission, highly efficient hybrid which you'd think would be a good ethical choice for a new car) is the equivalent of 102 childrens' lives. Ouch! At that point it doesn't really seem to matter whether a purchase is for luxury or utility, does it?

Ultimately what all this mess comes down to is the absurdity of arbitrary measurements of ethics. Is a person who donates $50,000, 5000 times more good than someone who donates $10? Is someone who owns a $40,000 car four times as "wrong" as someone who owns a $10,000 car? Is a wealthy person who donates the same amount as a middle-class person equally good or less good?

So much for all of that. But there's still a basic question looming here to think about: is a person who has more than "enough" money -- according to their own needs and standards -- ethically bound to donate the excess?