Dream of Waking

I love Firefox. I’ve added and changed so much crap around on it that it doesn’t remotely look like the vanilla installation. Currently running extensions:

Flashblock
BugMeNot
DownThemAll
FasterFox
SomethingAwful Last-Read
Sage
NoScript
Deepest Sender
Reveal
Adblock + filterset.g updater
FoxyTunes

I won’t go into all of them because they’re pretty self explanatory but Sage is my RSS reader, Deepest Sender is my blog poster (I haven’t actually logged into my own website for a week now except to make the last entry and that was because it involved a picture), and Reveal is a crazy tab and history viewer.

I’ve also determined the purpose of RSS feeds. It’s so that I can use an in-browser feed reader (like Sage) to read the headlines of websites I don’t feel like visiting and then decide if I want to visit them based on said headlines. I really can’t discern any other purpose for them.

It’s getting late and I should sleep but I really want to play some Oblivion before I do so.

Whoops! I was too busy playinig Oblivion.

I had some weird dreams last night. My great-grandmother (deceased) had gotten an enormous house that was located where Katie’s parents live (but it wasn’t their house, it was on top of where their house would’ve been) and has willed it to Katie and I and I was in some kind of hurry to get to it before someone else in my family stole it from us.

Then I was at my parents’ house and they were saying goodbye to someone and Lauri’s boyfriend was there and I walked up behind him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and put him in a rear naked choke until he was spasming on the lawn and I just stood there and watched.

I don’t know what the third dream was about but it must’ve been something good because I woke up with a raging hard-on that made it very difficult to go back to sleep.

I brought two PS1 games back from leave with me because we have a PS2 and I wanted to bring games but not games I’d be devastated to lose so I bought Space Hulk (which I haven’t played, but it was only $6) and Robo Pit. I brought Robo Pit because it’s an arena robot fighting game and I thought my competitive roommates would enjoy it. Well that was an understatement. Allmon started by beating Hice repeatedly, then he went on to get every weapon in the single player game, beat all the special robots, and now he’s trying to get ranked number 1. He’s been playing it for easily three hours now with no signs of stopping. And he talks smack to the computer-controlled robots. It’s a freaking riot. And it’s horrible.

Alan Thicke, brutal orc warrior turned brutal orc crusader, is now making his way from the hamlet of Chorrol to the far away town of Anvil. Fearing no creature, he makes his way across the wilderness in search of dungeons and caves and their treasure hoards.

This game is incredible. People in the towns talk to each other in passing, people move about from place to place and tracking someone down can be a pain, as in real life in a world without cellphones. The phyics take over when you kill something and once I was fighting a flying imp in a cavern tunnel and when I dealt the killing blow, the force of it threw the imp into the tunnel wall and it’s body bounced off and landed on the opposite side. I’m convinced that if I take a skull out of one of the dungeons I can play golf with it with my trusty mace.

I’m only level 2. I’ve only been to that one tiny town. I’ve found a house that I can buy and a place to buy a horse. This is going to epic.

I’m totally tired already. It’s only 7:30pm here and I’m ready to rack out already. This morning I woke up at 5am. My internal clock is totally screwed up. Up is down, blue is red, red is black, the sky grows green green grass and the dust I walk on is just clouds.

And isn’t it great? Instead of sitting at home and enjoying life, I’m back in Iraq, whining. Oh well. At least I’ve only got a few more months left. This place sucks.

I got to play it for like thirty minutes before Katie’s TV show was over and then she noticed the disc was missing from it’s fine packaging and confiscated it. But those thirty minutes were oh so good. I killed rats, snuck up on and backstabbed some goblins, hacked a goblin witch to death, and lit a zombie on fire. At the very beginning some jerk in a jail cell across from mine was taunting me and I can’t wait to get back in there and hack him to death. I think this small taste is going to make me nuts.

I’m drinking tea out of a cup that got too much soap in the dishwasher and not enough rinse and it tastes just great.

I’m anxious. Very anxious. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is being released today, I can pickup my copy at 5pm. I called up Gamestop this morning and they said they’d have it in at 5pm so I dropped in on them, reserved a collector’s edition copy, paid it all off, and did the same for Metroid Prime Hunters for DS to be picked up tomorrow.

I’m anxious because Oblivion is the sequel to TES: Morrowind, the game that single-handedly destroyed three months of free time. I might even leave the game packaged up until I get back to Iraq for fear that I’ll spend more time killing monsters and exploring dungeons than paying attention to Katie. But can I even resist that? I’ll have to at least open it. Check out the neat collector’s edition goodies. I mean, I have to open it. I have to be able to pack up the discs. I can’t just throw the whole box in my bag, that’s a waste of space.

So I’ll open it. And not play it. I’ll just let it sit there. And wait.

In an effort to continue to mangle what used to be a pretty standard looking WordPress-powered website, I’ve found a plugin that lets me add a Last.fm tracker. I put it on the sidebar to the right. Gawk and wonder and marvel at what I listen to. Even though it makes the page load slower because it’s pulling that tracklist from Last.fm.

I might have lost my mind. After the failure of Diary-X I had to consider the worth of what was lost. A lot of memories. It’s no secret, my long-term memory is shot. Over the years people I knew have become ghosts that haunt me everytime I think I see a familiar face. Memories distort and fade away. It’s a big reason I continue journaling everything. I can go back and read old entries and just remember. When Diary-X died it took the first two years of my journals with it. I had no backups, I just always assumed that old stuff would always be there and now it’s gone.

So I’ve brought back those entries I made since Diary-X. They’ve all been imported and dumped into the “old” category before I consider delving into categorize every single one of those three-hundredsomething entries. And they’re almost all here, I think. Some may have been lost in some early blog-engine changes but I’ve got everything out of Movable Type and Livejournal. They’re probably an enormous mess but this is my land of Do-As-You-Please and they’re my enormous mess. Enjoy!

Yesterday Matt and Katie and I went driving around to see where we could still go, what was still open, and what was trashed. We brought the camera and got a bunch of pictures that I’ll be sharing as soon as Katie comes back from breakfast.

It’s insane out there. Both game stores are closed because of the damage, Springfield Game Store still being intact and Battlegrounds being nearly destroyed. In some parts there’s power lines and phone poles lying in the streets. There’s pieces of roofing or siding wrapped around the tops of phone poles. There’s two hotels that were pretty new that were almost gutted entirely. Power is out sporadically all over ther place. There’s lots of places I couldn’t get to just because I couldn’t get my car around the damage without taking it offroad and my saturn wasn’t made for that kind of stuff. It really makes me wish I had the polaris I use to tool around the base in Iraq here.

I saw the preview for this almost as soon as I got back in the states. I’ve read the hype. Awesome comic book translated into reality by those masters of cinema, the Wachowski brothers. Or should it be the Wachowski siblings, seeing as one is transforming into a female? Well they botched the end of the Matrix trilogy, why not hand them a work of graphic novel art and see how badly they can crap on that as well?

So I pirated the V for Vendetta comic books. The internet is a fantastic thing and Katie won’t let me buy the trade paperback until after the 15th. And it’s good, the story is a little simplistic when compared to other well-loved comic book miniseries’ but it’s well drawn, well written, and consistant.

The problem is that the trailer makes the movie look like an action flick along the lines of the Matrix. I think The Matrix is even mentioned in the trailer, though only to lend some kind of credibility to the Wachowski siblings. But V for Vendetta isn’t an action story. It’s a political message. The first volume (or the first three issues, however you look at it) have the bulk of the action with the last seven issues having little to no action at all. It gets more cerebral. Why is V fighting the totalitarian government? Who is V anyway? Yes, stuff explodes, people die but it’s not anything like the first three issues where people are dying on nearly every page.

So I’m probably going to see this before I have to go back. It’s getting released on the 17th and I go back on the 22nd so I’ve got some time to see it without having to fight the crowds on opening night. I just want to see how badly they can muck up this story. I rewatched the end of the Matrix trilogy yesterday so I have nothing but confidence in the Wachowski siblings and their ability to mishandle a popular franchise, especially one they didn’t create.

In order of usage…

• Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.1 – From reading my site’s stats it is obvious everyone already knows this one. Drop IE, get Firefox, find the extensions for Flashblock, Remove It Permanently, BugMeNot, DownThemAll, and NoScript, get a nice theme (I recommend BlackJapan because it’s a black theme that doesn’t look ridiculous), and enjoy the internet again. Seriously, between Firefox’s built-in pop-up blocking and those extensions I feel like I’m not being bombarded by invasive advertising as much as I used to.
• Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 – A free email replacement for those of us who have no need for the 800lb gorilla known as Outlook. It’s got extensions too but I don’t find any need for them, all it needs to do is download and sort email and it does a great job of that. It also has a builtin spam filter that probably works great but I have a different one that works in conjunction with Thunderbird…
• POPFile 0.22.4 – It’s a little confusing to set-up and it needs training to work right but when it’s up and running (which doesn’t take long at all), it works fantastically. It sorts and tags emails before they hit your inbox. It’s program and platform independant so it’ll work with nearly any mail program on nearly any OS that can run PERL. It’s nice because I have it setup to tag spam and I use a pretty simple filter on Thunderbird to kick the tagged email straight into the trash. I also set it up to tag everything else into categories like “myspace” and “my site” and whatnot for no particular reason. It’ll work with a sorting system as simple as “spam” and “not spam” just as easily.
• imeem 1.8.6 – A free IM program that supports AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and Google Talk, as well as it’s own IM protocol. I just started using it since I’ve come home and it’s easily replacing Trillian. It has a lot of social features and so far it’s not as buggy or hideous as trillian basic and gaim. Katie’s brother pointed me towards it because he’s working for them so I know it’s at least less evil than the alternatives.
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  Posted: March 10th, 2006
  Categories: Site News
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For a limited time only. I’m home and it’s great.

Planned trip to Springfield Friday. We’re going to a super-secret concert in Chicago Sunday night and won’t be back till Monday but other than that we’re probably going to spend a week in Springfield.