The Dreaming
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.
We don’t care anymore
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!
I’m messing with stuff.
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.
Scarling
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.
The Emo Song
I can't not proliferate this link. It's too funny.
Primarily I'm just doing this so I don't lose it.
Nothing
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.
And I’m back and Darwinia
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, I’m gone, I’m here again
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.
Two
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.