Dream of Waking

I don’t think I’ve mentioned recently that Descendents’ Somery is musical perfection. I’m sure Katie’s still waiting for the day when I outgrow this CD but I think she’s going to be waiting a very long time.

I live with spam. I’m a spam magnet. I’ve been getting smarter about who to give my email address to and where to post it and I’m still swimming in spam. I’ve tried two ways of combating spam.

First was Popfile. It’s a middleman that goes between your email client and your email server and resides on your computer. It’s platform independant so you can use it just as easily with Outlook as you can with any other obscure email program you can come up with. You get to it trhough a browser based interface. It’s sole function is to sort email so you can go crazy and classify every email you get into a hundred different categories or it can be as simple as spam and notspam. Combine this with a simple email client filter (Popfile has the option to mark emails by their classification) to kick out everything Popfile labels as spam and you’ll never even see it. In the beginning it takes some training to get going but after that you get very few false positives. It’s rather effective. The drawbacks are that it’s a middleman program so when your email stops working, it’s one more step to troubleshoot and obviously if you don’t watch your trash you could easily miss some false positives and the browser interface isn’t as simple as an integrated email client solution.

My other option was just that, Mozilla Thunderbird’s built-in spam filter. Once you turn it on it’ll put mail you mark as spam in the folder of your choosing. Marking spam is built into the client so there’s no middleman. It’s all very easy to set up and get running. Unfortunately it’s either entirely too precautious about false positives or it’s simply not very effective. With Popfile I’d go days without seeing a piece of spam slip through the cracks, with Thunderbird’s built-in filter I’ve been kicking out spam on a daily basis if I’m lucky. If I’m unlucky (and this is often the case when I come back from retrans), half of the mail that ends up in my inbox is unmarked spam. Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Maybe a quarter of my mail would be unmarked spam but it’s easily a lot more than Popfile would let slip past.

I’m going back to Popfile. Thunderbird’s spam filter is easy enough for mom and pop and Popfile definitely isn’t the easiest solution but it works well and in hindsight is well worth the effort to get it running. I am doing one thing different though, I’m dropping all my categories for two, spam and notspam. I never found myself with a need to have everything so organized.

Sidenote: In typing this, I typed “Popefile” at every occurance of “Popfile”. If I could get the Pontiff to sort my email, I think he’d do an okay job.

Apparently the internet doesn’t want anyone to see my boring pictures yet. Flickr sucks and so does FTP.

Today I ran a couple miles for the first time since getting to Iraq. It really sucks.

I really have nothing to say. I miss Katie.

Edit: Okay, I do have more. I’ve been goofing around with more plugins. Notice the new Now Reading section on the sidebar. This is something I tried to get working earlier when I misunderstood the concept; I thought it was just a widget when really the widget was the easy way of making the plugin work. It’s up and functional now and I hope no one relied on any of my “permalinks” because I had to restructure them. Sorry. They’re good now! As you can plainly see I’ve finished Frank Herbert’s Dune and I am halfway finished with Hardcore Zen. Next up will be Robin Hobb’s The Farseer Part 1: Assassin’s Apprentice which is almost an intimidating read because it’s the first of several fantasy novels Robin Hobbs has written. The Farseer series is only a trilogy though. If the first part is good I’ll get the other two and then I’ll see about the others. I don’t think I’ll be reading the rest of the Dune books but you can read my short review of the first one from the link in the Now Reading section. I’ll put up a short review for everything I read and I’ll go back and review the stuff I’ve already read sometime in the near future while I can still remember what the books are about.

The first time I heard The Dresden Dolls was when Katie and I went to see The Smoking Popes and were spending the night at David’s place. I wasn’t enamored by what I heard but it was enjoyable. I’ve been trying to listen to more new stuff than old stuff so I went looking for Dresden Dolls CDs. I know Katie owns their first one but that wasn’t readily available so I got their new one, Yes Virginia. From what I understand it’s two people, the female on piano and vocals and a guy on drums. I listened to it at work which was a mistake because I wasn’t paying attention and with only two instruments the songs really blended together. The vocals are pretty good even if the lyrics don’t really have a lot of structure and the music is good for being a two-person band. The dubbing is fantastic, I could’ve sworn the bass notes from the piano were coming from a second piano. If I had to compare The Dresden Dolls Yes Virginia to anything it’s like listening to a stripped-down, female Ben Folds Five minus the guitar.

Retrans yet again tomorrow so next I’ll up a ton of pictures. Flickr is too unreliable out here so I’m hosting them myself.

This entry started as a one-sided IM conversation with Matt. I’m looking for a quasi-simple RTS. I have MechCommander 2. That brought back memories and begged the question; what happened to the MechWarrior series?

I’ve never seen MechWarrior 1. Enthusiasts such as myself believe MechWarrior 1 never really existed outside of FASA Studios. The series really begins with MechWarrior 2, the standard by which all big-robot games are judged. MechWarrior 2 in comparison with the rest of the Battletech universe was almost as shallow as they come. Two factions, both clan, and about twenty mechs equally available to both sides. In terms of available source materials at the time (There’s more than two clans in the universe, there’s a whole other faction that developed before the clans, and there are way more mechs, some available only to particular factions) it was lacking; in terms of gameplay, it was 100MHz of Pentium gold. For the time, the graphics were blocky but a big step up from sprites and the sounds were fantastic. Almost every button on the keyboard did something and some of them were pretty useless but it was great. I can never forget all those times I’d get into a fight way over my head only to hear the alarms going off and that female voice telling me just how quickly my mech was falling apart. “Warning: critical hit, right arm. Warning: right arm destroyed. Warning: ammo explosion…” and so on and so forth until you’re standing there with one leg and the ejector throws you out the top and you watch as your enemies pummel what’s left of your mech and it explodes. It was overwhelming. MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries introduced the other side of the conflict, the Inner Sphere, and the mechs they had. Lots of mechs.

MechWarrior 2 came out in the Windows 95 era where developers were halfway developing for Windows 95 and halfway for DOS. I played all my MechWarrior 2 in DOS. By the time Mercenaries came out it was firmly lodged in Windows 95 territory. MechWarrior 3 was released during the Windows 98 days. It was an improvement on everything MechWarrior 2 had. Probably the biggest improvement was they graphics. The first mission showcased what had come with MechWarrior 3; weather effects (the first mission takes place in the rain), more detail in the Mech modelling (such as when your “foot” came off the ground, the “toes” hung), a gritty texturing job (compare original Star Wars trilogy to the prequels), and everything was beautifully 3D accelerated. It was basically the best thing since MechWarrior 2.

Then came MechWarrior 4, well into Windows 2000 support days. Let’s give MechWarrior 4 it’s dues; improved graphics again, improved modelling. But the graphics are shiny. Like bright, bold mech paint jobs and neon colored lasers. And FMV. What, are we new to the CD-ROM era here? Why did the story need to be conveyed by poorly FMV? MechWarrior 4 tried to save face by releasing a new version of Mercenaries which thankfully ditched the FMV but didn’t lose the purple or bright yellow and orange mech paint jobs. Did I mention that the controls were simplified too? MechWarrior 3, granted, reduced the number of useless buttons but MechWarrior 4 can be played entirely with a 5 button joystick. That’s awful. I want a simulation, not an arcade mech game. Microsoft is so concerned with details in their flight sim games, why can’t we get the same concern for MechWarrior. Those paint jobs were the real dealbreaker though. Who wants to pilot a mech that looks like Barney?

Microsoft needs to quit sitting on the Battletech franchise. Look at Steel Battalion for X-Box and follow suit for PC. I want a dark, gritty, PC MechWarrior game that has to be played wth a keyboard and joystick because there’s so many buttons to memorize. I want Microsoft to treat MechWarrior like it’s Battlemech Simulator 3049 and please, leave out the psychadelic paint jobs. Sunny-day yellow doesn’t scream “80-ton walking death”.

When you read those annoying bulletins everyone loves to forward you, you can now rid yourself of the annoying friend who sent it. There’s a “Delete this friend” button at the bottom of every bulletin now.

We’ve been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering here in the commo shop in Iraq. Well not actually in the shop, in our free time, but we’re playing. There’s a theme deck from the last set called Izzet Gizmometry. It’s an annoying deck in the right hands and I’m the right hands for the job. I’d love to explain but it’s way too nerd for me right now and I’m tired.

I feel like I should have more to say. Oh wait, I’ve got pictures but I’m tired so I’ll put them up later.

I don’t think I’ve ever done one of these about relationships so I’ve stolen it from Krista’s myspace:

1. Would you make a fool out of yourself in public if it meant you were making your partner laugh?
I’ve always sacrificed my dignity to humor Katie.

2. Would you prefer the lights on or off during sex?
Uh, I think low lights are okay. I don’t need spotlights or anything.

3. Do you judge people solely by their musical preferences?
No but some people seem to think I’d like them better if I knew exactly how crappy the music they enjoy is.

4. If you could ‘take back’ your virginity from your first partner, would you?
Saying yes would imply regret. I can’t say I’m happy with the first person I had sex with but I’m not going to regret doing it.

5. Would you ever start a relationship with someone who was still living with an ex for financial reasons?
What? If I were single, I’d like to think I wouldn’t complicate my life like that.

6. Do you need to know everything about someone’s past?
Am I insane? Yes. Eventually I’d like to be able to write their life story for them.

7. It is more worthwhile and satisfying to improve the world or appreciate the world?
Improve. The world’s a scary place and nothing’s going to get better unless someone tries to help out.

8. Do you feel you have a purpose or calling in life?
The world will turn with or without me. No.

9. Do you believe that dreams can be messages from a “higher level”?
That would require believing in a “higher level” that would send messages in the form of dreams. No one’s rattling around in my brain but me.

10. Would you rather have a great friend you could share everything with or a great lover you can’t really talk to?
What like a mute porn star? I’ll take a friend instead.

11. Is the male or female body the closest to perfection?
Well the male body certainly isn’t and the female body is so totally complicated that I think it requires a manual. so I think this ends in a draw.

12. Should a child who’s caught masturbating be punished?
No because he/she/it hasn’t done anything wrong.

13. Do you like kissing in public?
No but I don’t even notice I’m in public when I do it so it never matters.

14. Do you have a fetish that you would like to employ in your next relationship?
In a theoretical next relationship? No. In my current loving relationship? No.

15. Did America really put a man on the moon?
That’s a fantastic question. I’m torn between my belief that science can overcome any obstacle in time and the fact that human error is an enormous brick wall that plagues NASA.

16. Would you date someone significantly (9 years or over) older than you?
Uhh I don’t know. That’d be kind of weird I think. That’s almost a generation ahead of me.

17. Generally, in life, what makes you happy?
Katie, my computers, video games.

18. How well do you handle criticism?
Is it constructive? Because I hate when people tell me “you need to do this” and “you need to do that” and never explain why. But otherwise I take criticism rather well.

19. Would you like to date someone a lot purer than you?
I’d strike out this question because “purer” is rather ambiguous.

20. When fooling around with someone, do you sometimes have sexual fantasies about other people?
I can’t say I have because I tend to keep my eyes on the prize, if you know what I mean. I’m far too into the matter at hand than to start thinking about someone else.

21. Is it possible for full-figured women to be equally attractive as thinner women?
Duh.

22. You’ve just met someone incredible while out with friends, and (s)he’s been kind enough to cough up a phone number. How long would you wait to call?
In a theoretical dating situation I’d probably call that night because I’m a spaz. Ask Katie, I followed her around like a lost child.

23. Do you think the family of a murder victim should have any say in what punishment is given to the murderer?
Way to throw a total buzzkill into this survey. No. People wronged have different ideas of fair punishment than the objective justice system in place today.

24. Would you have a “Happy Button” installed on your body, connected to your brain, which would instantly make you very happy whenever you pressed it?
No but could I get a pain button with a dial that goes from hangnail to excruciating?

25. Would you rather know everything about your mate, or be regularly surprised?
You know, just when I know everything, Katie does something totally nuts and I’m surprised and I’m happy with that.

26. We are all human, do you judge someone for a past indiscretion?
I’m not very good at holding grudges. Everyone changes all the time. Just let things go.

27. What is sexiest on a woman or a man?
Curves with enough discretion so as to leave some things to the imagination.

28. Would you rather have your dream job or your soul mate for the rest of your life?
I’ve already found my “soul mate” so I think I’ll stick with her until she dies or gets bored with me.

29. Do you consider yourself sexually open minded?
As long as we make the distinction between “open minded” and gay. I’m pretty open minded on the hetero side but I’ve got zero interest in other men.

30. Should your mate also become your best friend?
If she isn’t there’s something wrong.

31. Would you rather marry a virgin or someone experienced?
What kind of question is this? Marry the person you love for who they are, not what they are.

32. Have you ever had a true one-night stand?
Nope.

33. Have you ever posed as a nude model?
Does taking pictures of my penis with a webcam count?

34. Would you prefer if good things happened, or interesting things?
Oh how I love to keep things interesting. I’m a glutton for punishment.

35. Is it better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all?
Yes.

Flickr is a free photo host. It’s a Big Deal, I think, and if you don’t use Flickr, you’ve probably at least visited it at least once. Now that I’ve got a digital camera, I’ve also got a license to photograph whatever and post it. I’m not lacking for space to upload pictures myself but putting them up on a site like Flickr would increase their exposure to the general populace. There’s plenty of people looking for pictures of us in Iraq and that’ll be my primary subject matter till I get home. There’s also all manners of plugins for WordPress to handle Flickr galleries, making it easier for me to present these pictures.
So the question; Flickr or no Flickr? Opinions and complaints wanted!

So I was testing a couple of Web 2.0 type plugins for WordPress and one of them was a plugin that auto-generated technorati tags based on the content of the entry. It’d only do it once you’ve saved the entry and didn’t do it retroactively so I’d have to go through every entry and re-save it to get the tags. I left it on, forgot about it, disabled it over some theme installations and didn’t bother to turn it back on. Well I just went through my stats for the site and apparently my April 1st entry about Slashdot’s “makeover” was one of the entries that got tagged and someone searching technorati found my screenshots because of those auto-generated tags. So I turned them back on. It has nothing to do with vanity, I don’t even really want a lot of traffic from people I don’t know, but in that case I was being inadvertantly helpful and that’s what I like doing. If someone wants to read my half-educated opinions, who am I to stop them?

This might sound ridiculous but I feel like this website is my own personal domain. Like the Dreaming is to Dream from Sandman. Like when I’m away from it it decays and withers and when I’m here I feel like I should be improving it. Sitting on that retrans hill just makes me crazy. I feel like I should be here, doing something, anything, than filling a slot on a mission. I’m just a body up there, I don’t know how to keep a retrans together should something happen. I’m there to make sure that if something happens to the radio guy help will come.

So the only thing I can do on retrans is try to catch up on my comic books and novels. I’m almost done with the second of three parts of the original “Dune” by Frank Herbert. I feel more motivated to read when I know I have other books waiting and I just got a box full of books Katie sent me. When I get back down to one book again, I’ll stop. And I’m caught up to Y – The Last Man and I read as much as I wanted to of Hellboy and I read all of Miracleman. Let’s muse on Miracleman for a minute.

I wasn’t prepared for this. It’s fantastic up to issue 16, Alan Moore’s last issue, and once Neil Gaiman gets it running again, it stops. I almost wish I didn’t read past issue 16 because it stops so abruptly due to the publisher going to broke that the series is totally unfinished. And it’s dark. It starts out dark and it ends on a high note (by ends, I mean issue 16) and it’s nothing but darkness up to that last issue. Miracleman is basically a superman, and a very thinly veiled rip off of Captain Marvel. He can fly, he’s invincible, he’s superstrong, and he transforms from a regular guy to the glittering superman persona by saying a secret word. He’s a product of old 1950′s comics but Moore didn’t discard his history, just transformed it into a far more sinister origin. It’s a bloody ride from start to finish but it does end with a glimmer of hope. I was totally caught off guard by how good the series is.

Now that I’m off the mountain I can go back to trying to make this website better.

Still stuck on Scarling. I read somewhere that Jessicka purposely uses her lower vocal range for Scarling to seperate it from at least the sounds of her previous endeavors.

It’s safe for me to say sunburns no longer have any effect on me. I’m thoroughly two-toned after setting up a tent yesterday (or erecting a tent, if you will) and all it’s doing is radiating heat and tingling.

I got my anniversary gift in the mail today. A pair of dogtags with “Don’t Freak Out” engraved on one. There’s a boring story behind it but it’s what I found myself repeating in my head over and over when I was on leave and any time I find myself sliding from calm and collected to OMGWTFBBQ. Katie is, in fact, the best wife ever. One day she’s going to get that plaque and it’s going to surprise the everloving crap out of her.

Also in the mail, mom sent me her old digital camera. I have no digital camera here so this is very handy thing. There are so many things I’ve wanted to get pictures of and now I can and get them sent home and whatnot. But she forgot to send the cable that transfers pictures from the camera to my computer so I’m going to have to try to borrow one from one of my roommates until I can get my own. But pictures!

So the “nonsense” category has become the “asides” category. I intended “nonsense” to be more or less where I dump links to be shared and stuff not worth more than a paragraph. Well now it’s even less important, as you can see from the previous entry with the less and the unbold.

I’m still messing with the theme. Also, asides and comments and whatnot.

I have a confession. I really like Jack Off Jill. It’s angsty screamy girlie music and I can’t get enough of it. Then I found out they broke up. Then I found out their lead singer had a new band called Scarling and hope returned. But they’re on a tiny label and when I remembered to look for any of their CDs, I’d never find one. So I pirated their latest CD if only because it’s the only way I could get it. It’s not Jack Off Jill and I’m happy with that.

There’s angst and no screaming. It’s almost mellow even. I could easily fall asleep to this CD. It reminds me of Nina Gordon’s songs with Veruca Salt. Jack Off Jill didn’t have stellar lyrics (google lyrics to Jack Off Jill’s “My Cat” and keep in mind Jessicka used to hang out with Marilyn Manson (pre Antichrist Superstar) around those times for a real mindbender) but they’ve matured in Scarling. The CD gets a little boring just before “Manorexic” but then it’s back to goodness and the title track is really really good.

Find a way to get this CD. Get two, because I’m a jerk who can’t find a copy for myself.

I can’t not proliferate this link. It’s too funny.

The Emo Song

Primarily I’m just doing this so I don’t lose it.

Is it bad that I spend two days sitting on a mountain and come back with nothing to say? I played a lot of an old Magic: The Gathering PC game and I watched the first episode of season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, and I read 25 issues of Y – The Last Man and the Brief Lives storyline of Sandman. I can read 25 issues of Y because (nearly) every issue ends on a cliffhanger, it has healthy doses of comedy, drama, and action, and it’s well drawn. Sandman is outstanding too but the stories have a definite start and stop. It hops through time. Y flows in a nice orderly fashion from one story to the next. Sure, it’s almost entirely made of 5-part sub-plots but one sub-plot leads into the next which ties the overall story together. They’re two different things and I like them both but I’ll finish the rest of Y before I’ll finish Sandman because it moves in a nice orderly fashion.

I’m still changing stuff. I like this layout because it takes advantage of my nice wide screen but it reveals that the shoutbox widget is broken so I disabled it for now. I’ll get around to modifying the emo out of it whenever I get bored.

Short trip right? No, it got cancelled. They didn’t have a way of bringing me back so it got cancelled for now.

So I started Darwinia and completely cleared the first three areas. Darwinia is the second game I’ve purchased solely through Steam. It had a retail release but I don’t think anyone carries it anymore, it’d have to be shipped out here, and I doubt Introversion Software would get as much of the cut of it. I’d heard about it before but never got around to seeing it in action until I played the demo (free, through Steam) while I was up on the mountain and it was outstanding. I played through it three times.

I think it can best be described as an RTS-lite with a hint of action. There’s a resource to collect but no buildings to “build” persay, you capture buildings with the same unit that does the resource collecting (the engineer). Only one offensive unit under your control and it’s under your direct control, it won’t move and it hardly shoots on its own. So far, there’s only three units to build and so far I can only have three units total. It’s a very simple game and the graphics are in a retro style, wireframes and lots of them.

The premise is ultra nerd. You’re a computer user who has found his way into the Darwin Research facility where a researcher has created a kind of artifical lifeform called the Darwinians. They live in Darwinia, have free will, have digital souls, and exist solely in digital form. As you “login” to Darwinia, it has just come under attack from a virus. The virus is killing the Darwinians and the researcher enlists you to help save them from certain destruction. Your units are the squad, an offensive unit under your direct control; the engineer, collects souls of destroyed virii or Darwinians, captures buildings, and processes upgrades; and the officer, the only unit that can influence where the Darwinians will go and do. From there, you use the squads to destroy virii while the engineers collect up souls to reprocess into new Darwinians and use officers to guide them to safety or objective tasks. Within the world are different areas linked by trunk ports and within the areas are islands linked by satellite dishes. You island hop with a squad to clean out any unfriendly natives, recapture the lost buildings, and replace the lost Darwinians.

The whole game screams “simple fun” and it’s got enough doses of nerd content (you’re in a computer, the Darwinians are AI life forms, you’re fighting virii) without a lot of the corniness that comes with nerd content to give the game a kind of grown up Tron feeling. You’re not fighting the MCP on a light cycle with a disc, you’re helping clear out virii that are threatening a unique artificial lifeform. The dialogue you get from the researcher helping you makes you care about what happens to your Darwinians. It’s also another indie game that I’d have never played, let alone bought, if it weren’t on Steam.

I’m here for a day and I’m gone again. Not the mountain this time, just another base for a day or two to turn some crap in. Yup, not a whole lot to say.

Oh but I’m playing Magic again. SGT La Forest brought back a bunch of premade decks and we’ve been playing every night. Even got two of my other roommates playing too and it turns out even more guys outside my shop will play if there’s cards.

Today, April 13th, 2006, is Katie and I’s wedding anniversary. I’m stuck in Iraq but I’ll be home for year three. This year kind of sucked but that has nothing to do with our relationship, it’s the stupid deployment crap. I’d just like to spend one full year of our marriage together and the Army hasn’t given me that. I guess I should’ve seen that coming.