Dream of Waking

That’s how much hull strength I had left on my Hercules Heavy Assault Fighter at the end of the final mission of FreeSpace 1. I really let those Shivans know what for! It also occurred to me that my Banshee anti-shield lasers would be useless in subspace. Shields don’t work in subspace. Next, Silent Threat, the expansion!

I have to go back up to retrans tomorrow. Retrans sucks.

Google “1-32 CAV”. Whose Myspace profile comes up first? Mine.

I just wanted to let you know. Your fighter wings can’t stop me. Your frigates can’t stop me. Your destroyers and your cap ships can’t stop me. My wingmen are cannon fodder about as much as you are. Put me in a bathtub with afterburners and a single MX-7 laser and I’ll still wipe out your whole fleet. Your numbers mean nothing to me. I’m death incarnate on wings of fire.

This stuff isn’t cool. This is Myspace. This is about to become Ya’llspace if we don’t put our foots down! These are not cool new people.

Www.yallspace.com conspicously unregistered though, better hop on that one!

I just emailed my mom a bunch of pictures so I figured this would make a good opportunity to cut-and-paste the descriptions and make an entry! Pictures beyond…

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Katie’s trying to help me rebuild my MP3 collection so she ripped two Rilo Kiley CDs and I just couldn’t not download them. It almost pains me to say I’m enjoying them. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve never not liked Rilo Kiley, it’s just that I didn’t have the CDs, they’re Katie’s, and never bothered to rip them before I left.

Is it weird that I still kind of keep our CDs seperate? Mine go on the right side and hers go on the left. All too frequently I’m moving random CDs of mine back over to my side and I never seem to find any of hers on my side. Why is that?

So how was my last retrans excursion? Hot. It’s over a hundred degrees out daily so all you can do in the afternoon is sweat or sleep and I end up doing both. No games this time. I read more A Game of Thrones which is turning out excellently, I’m now up to date on Fables which is an outstanding comic, I finished reading the Sandman comic series, and I got a good start on Transmetropolitan, which is also great. It’s too hot up there to do anything but sit around and read.

Port-a-johns are basically the only thing to crap in, here in Iraq. They’re everywhere. Porcelein toilets are a rare sight indeed. So everyday someone has to collect up all the poop out of the port-a-johns. Enter the Poop Truck. It smells. It stinks up the whole area wherever it goes. It’s utterly necessary. So in tribute to the poop truck, I’ve decided to make it a unit of measurement. My only unit of measurement. Since it’d just be silly to apply the Poop Truck to solid matter, it’s basically only used for liquids. Now I have the dilemma of when I’m reading the back of my macaroni packet I have to do conversions. Two and a half cups of water? How many poop trucks of water is that?

I already mentioned that we were playing D&D here. Well the game went down in flames tonight and I can’t blame the DM; it’s the players. I’m not going to blame any one of them because they all committed the cardinal sin. Once my character was dead I decided I was done with the rest of the shoddy players so I told them they could resurrect me long enough for me to give them all the finger because I’m done. So what do they do once they get their survivors resurrected? Go back and loot my corpse. Hope you enjoyed it shitheads. I won’t be playing with any of them ever again.

It’s looking more and more like my shelf of heavy D&D books are going to do nothing but collect dust. I don’t particularly want to run my own game with a group of strangers and the only games I can find are infested with the very definitions of albatrosses on the neck of the table-top community. This is very disappointing. I was looking forward to dropping the $120 to get Monte Cook’s Ptolus but now it looks like so much waste that I think I’ll stick with trolling Hastings for used D&D books and picking up on book sales.

In other stupid news I’m listening to Hawthorne Heights. Oh god, why am I doing this? I had to. The Emo Song made fun of them. I got curious. It’s pretty bad. I listened to one album at work and couldn’t tell when one song ended and another began. Now I’m listening to a different Hawthorne Heights CD and it sounds just like the one I was listening to at work. How do bands like this get record deals?

“Meh” is not a word. “Meh” is not an emotion. I cannot stand the word “meh” when it’s used as a way of describing emotions and it’s oh so thoroughly used in nearly every amateur video game review. The graphics were just meh. The gameplay made feel kind of meh. Upon completion the ending I received was merely meh. I will not tolerate “meh” any longer. The second I catch a “meh” in anything I read, I will from then on discount the person as a moron to be compared to the likes of those who use “u” instead of you, everyone who “LOL”s, and those rare few who feel the need to “ROFLCOPTER!”.

Do your part. Be an English language nazi. Remove “meh” from the fake internet dictionary.

Super-emo post replaced with emo music post. Everyone wins!

My favorite Bayside song. Makes great for misery music. Enjoy!

Bayside – Blame It On Bad Luck (5MB)

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While spending another ridiculously boring two days on retrans, I decided to listen to a couple of Misfits covers I’d downloaded. Two of the best were Lemonheads covering “Skulls” and some band called Aerial M covering “Last Caress”. They’re both real light acoustic covers of two of my favorite Misfits songs. I’m going to play them at work tomorrow to see what kind of responses I can get with subtle acoustics and a light voice singing “I want your skulls”.

And I’ll stay up all night thinking about it.

Do you ever wonder if you’re the only person in the world like you? Do you ever wonder at how much easier your life would be if you’d just give in and quit fighting the world and it’s expectations and it’s vices and it’s desires?

I won’t. I won’t ever give in. I won’t ever change. I’ll never look for the easy way out. I’ll never look for a way to end the pain. I don’t want a way out. I don’t want an end. I’ll stubbornly suffer through every excruciating minute of this worthless life. I’ll stab my own heart out again and again until there’s nothing left but a hollow rock that’s just going through the motions of keeping me alive. In a pointless uphill struggle, on ice-slicked stone, in hurricane winds, I will never stop climbing. I’ll keep fighting it as my feet give way, my kneecaps shatter, my fingers break and splinter, my arms are torn from my body, and there’s nothing left to keep me from sliding off. Death may be my only escape. All for nothing. For no god, for no religion, for no ethical code, for no philosophy, for no reward, for no penance, for no reason.

For nothing.

I have to repeat this as I play Freespace 2. The Vasudans are not the enemy. I should stop putting their ships in my crosshairs. I should stop targetting the sensitive parts of their capital ships. I should stop wanting to destroy their fighters. The Vasudans are not the enemy.

When you spend a good quarter of the first game trying to wipe out the “Vasudan Threat”, targetting their ships are a hard habit to break. Especially when they annihilate a Terran capital ship with some enormous beam cannon in the first mission of Freespace 2.

So yesterday I spent the night at another base so I could turn in some computers I didn’t have the parts to fix myself. This kind of trip is always a good and bad thing. The bad thing is getting there and back. You can either take a helicopter and have to rely on public transportation the whole time, which is great except that the two places I had to go are nowhere near bus stops and it sucks having to carry a box of laptops around, or you can ride in a convoy which is an admittedly more dangerous route but when you get there you’ve got your own ride and place to lock up your crap. It was a convoy this time and a thankfully uneventful ride there and back so I won out there. I got my quick and simple tasks done with early and helped my driver get his stuff done and then we relaxed when we had nothing left to do but wait. One of the places we stopped at had a pile of books for free and I wasn’t going to take any because I still have three books to read and not a ton of time left but I browsed them and found three brand new (as in condition) Faulkner novels, one which I read in high school and two others I’ve never read so I grabbed those. I got like twelve hours of sleep and finished Assassin’s Apprentice and found out that Green Beans Coffee sold iced chai tea lattes. I had three over the course of twenty-four hours. I got a lot of pictures of stuff on the way back and arrived safely but sweaty and bruised at the knees and elbows from the ride. Even though I was in a vehicle with a lot of leg and head space, I somehow ended up knocking my knees on and elbowing every single piece of metal on it. Overall a not unpleasant experience.

I’m currently writing my Assassin’s Apprentice quick review.

Do you know what I hate? Bad news. Genuinely bad news. What’s worse is when I’m constantly reminded of it. That kind of stuff just really pisses on my whole day.

It’s about 2:45am here. I’m still awake. The alarm will go off at 6:15am. I’m pretty sure someone’s going to expect me to work tomorrow too. I don’t go up to retrans till Wednesday. But it’s okay, once I’m at retrans I can sleep all I want. I can sleep through the whole two days if I wanted to but that’d mean not watching Battlestar Galactica, which we can’t have.

I have some kind of weird bug bite on my leg (conveniently located right where I lay when I’m sleeping) that’s less like a bug bite and more like a pimple without a head. On Katie’s advice I tried to pop it. Now I have a swollen bug bite that’s more like a pimple that’s painful to the touch.

I finally found an Iraqi selling Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 & 2 bootlegs. This is fantastic news. Now as I swelter in the Iraqi heat on retrans I can stare at twenty more episodes of BSG. BSG has also driven me to recover the loss of my Freespace 2 discs so I can fulfill my space dogfighting urges.
What a day, what a day, what a day. I’m tired so I’m going to sleep early.

I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve been playing D&D with my coworkers for the last two nights. It must be getting pretty bad out here, right? It’s okay. It passes the time and they’re all rather clear on my stance how I spend my time at home, IE. I don’t even want to see any of them outside of work for at least three months. I don’t get it. They’re always up for Magic or Halo every single night. I need free time. Spending so much time with people really makes me crazy. I need time off from having fun with my coworkers.

Katie’s in Springfield, having fun without me of course. Jerk.

Might as well finish the video game – tv – music trifecta.

I listened to Tool’s Opiate for the first time this week. I don’t know what took so long. I’m a pretty big fan of Tool and have been for a while, I just never got around to paying $15 for a six song album. It’s short too, those six songs are eight minute long epics and two of them are live recordings, though the quality is really good. If this were the first Tool album I’d heard, I’d have been disappointed by every release afterwards with the exception maybe of Aenima. The songs sound nothing like you’d expect from any bands’ first album. They have a quality to them that doesn’t show up again until Aenima. In fact if I had bought Opiate when it was new, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed Undertow. It’s just not as good.

The best song on the album is “Jerk-Off”. I’ve listened to it two dozen times this week and I’m still not tired of it. It’s one of the live songs and Maynard’s talking to the crowd in the beginning and he sounds like such a freaking nerd. It’s as though I can hear the thick-rimmed glasses being pushed up but then the music starts and he’s a rock star. He’s got this insane ability to hold a note without screeching that’s impossible to find in male vocals.

I guess it’s kind of pointless to say “I am a fan of Tool and now I’ve heard an older album of theirs and it’s really good” because that’s not really relavent as to how well they do today. I just wanted to let everyone know how clueless I am. I thought I liked Tool when I heard Aenima.

This one’s kind of morbid and you’ll see most of my answers are basically the same.

If you knew you were going to die on at specific day at a specific time, what’s the last…
1. song you would listen to?
Alkaline Trio’s “Blue in the Face” probably. Maybe Eels “Dead of Winter”.

2. book you would read?
J.D. Salinger “Catcher in the Rye”, if only because it’s been so long since I’ve read it.

3. person you would talk to?
The easy answer here is Katie.

4. food you would eat?
Probably one of Katie’s homemade cheese pizzas. Peanut noodles if she’d make them.

5. goal you would accomplish?
Nothing. If there’s something I wanted to do so bad before I died then I should’ve done it already.

I guess none of those answers were really the same though it won’t really matter when I die or what I’m doing or what I’ve done regardless.