Dream of Waking

Well I get everything working then I’ve got nothing to say. Oh well.

I wouldn’t do it.

I was going to take pictures of my day and make an entry about Saturday in Iraq and I did take some pictures but a lot of stuff I did I couldn’t take pictures of. So it’s mostly “what brian eats on Saturday in Iraq”. I’ll still post the pictures but it won’t be anything special. Just more boring pictures.

Doom is still not boring. People are still making new levels for Doom. I’m currently trying to make it through a short partial conversion called Zen Dynamics. It’s insane. The weapons need reloading, there’s a bunch of new monsters, and there’s little health. It’s hard but I want to keep going just to see what else is in it.

I’m not particularly attached to my testicles though we’ve seen plenty of good times. I just think $30,000 isn’t really enough to justify missing one.

Okay I think everything works. Katie helped me plug some holes (huh huh, plug some holes) before my DNS itself could update so most stuff was working before I could actually get to it. I’ve got a pretty big entry coming soon so this is good.

I’m totally ready to come home now.

This might be working.

Okay so I’ve got my domain transferred and my new webhost purchased so I’m just setting stuff up right now. At some point I’ll make the switch and hopefully no one will notice the difference.

Go to davidlynch.com and see. Watch his daily weather report. Read his interesting questions. Download a ringtone or two.

I’m down to less than 30 now. That magical day couldn’t come sooner.

I’m compiling a list of all the things that got me through the deployment. It’s nothing like what other people should do to pass time or what not, it’s just acknowledging what kept me sane. It’s going to be some mega entry by the time I’m done though. A year is a long time.

Musically I’m in the damnedest mood. I’m alternating between Poison the Well and Fall Out Boy. Isn’t that horrible?

I’ve used this quick little guide from Lifehacker on encrypting email in Mozilla Thunderbird to setup keys for all my email accounts. The only one that really matters here is my “default” email account so here’s the public key for brian(lol)dreamofwaking(what)com:

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (MingW32)

mQGiBESUJqoRBAD+e591wpRWrtsbi3FA4Us433OxqdpoCTYpinMZO9JLLce7m479
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R2JdfEags9HLNdy8nuutZGsEAINuN56gPJUh72v8VAA3v/naWJ0MYeKijurKH4fM
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9rFjAKCnluHaFcHD56cv9BYykJ2rArH3EQCeOLRrSK+Lwuabd+43DCvEbFFk3KA=
=UvlG
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
I’ll update my “where to find me” page to reflect this. Note: I’m using an enormous 4096-bit key because I’m insane. Also note that this kind of thing works two ways. You can send me encrypted emails but I won’t be able to send an encrypted email back unless you set up something similar (as in, PGP and not something else) on your end too.

Bad news, kids. My host is going under by the end of the month. The good news is that I’m resourceful and I’ve got a new host and domain registrar lined up. So Katie and I are backing up our stuff and I’m getting the domain transferred so stuff might break for a time. I’m going to get the new host set up before I move anything over though so downtime will hopefully be minimal. I’ve got everything backed up so nothing should be missing when I do swap over though. Bear with me.

Holy crap. $17 well spent. It’s shorter than Sin Episodes: Emergence but it’s a different game and the atmosphere alone was worth the price. It picks up immediately after the ending of Half-Life 2 which I won’t spoil but I can safely say it kind of feels like you’re working backward through the end of Half-Life 2 through the first part of the game. There’s a couple new enemies, no new guns, but they do some neat stuff with what you’ve got such as one section where you’ve got little to no ammo and you’re relying on using your flashlight to point out zombies in the dark so Alyx can shoot them. Valve also did an awesome job of keeping the gameplay varied. At some points you’re sneaking around and conserving ammo and others you’re running and gunning and later you’re not using weapons at all, just the gravity gun and whatever is laying around you. The new (well, not exactly new but in greater use) HDR effects really add to the atmosphere as well. Sometimes the lights are so bright they’re blinding and everything looks really good under it. It also has a “commentary track” where while you play through the game you find little blurbs that will tell about the design process of Episode 1 and whatnot, which I haven’t gone through yet as I just finished the game for the first time but I’ll definitely be checking out on the second play through.

Now I’m stuck waiting for winter for Episode 2.

I spent the last three days at another base. This other base has a swimming pool and Pizza Hutt and a PX that isn’t run by a guy in my unit and actually has stuff I need in it and a bus line. It was like a mini-vacation. I did make the fatal error of bringing only one book that was almost finished (A Game of Thrones) and spent entirely too much time playing WarioWare Touched because of that. My cheap earbud headphones for my microscopic MP3 player also died so I had to get a new pair and that cost me almost as much as my player is worth ($20) and they fit weird. They sound much better than my cheap ones though.

Now Reading will be updated as soon as I post this. I need to add my Faulkner books and mini-review A Game of Thrones.

I don’t read Achewood regularly but when someone posts a strip or a link to one it’s always hilarious.

Tuesday night I had that dumb class and it lasted to a quarter past midnight. About halfway through I thought my brain my going to burst out the back of my skull. All of a sudden I had like the worst headache ever. As soon as the class was over I got out of there, got out of my uniform, and went to sleep. My brain wasn’t done when I woke up. I still had a dull pain in the same spot and every once in a while I had the thrill of a pulse of mindstabbing pain. It was fantastic. Today, the same thing. Dull pain and then bursting skull pain and then back to dull pain again. So I went to the medics. I was concerned I might be having a stroke or something. Nope, no such luck. I guess I pulled a neck muscle that runs up to the back of my head. No stroke, no aneurysm, no brain tumor. Just a pulled muscle.

Tomorrow I get to go to another base for an overnight stay. I’m not really looking forward to it but it doesn’t matter. I’m counting days.

Broken bones and nasty cuts. Accidents will happen, but this time I can’t get up. Green Day’s “Pulling Teeth” is still great, 12 years later.

My sunburn has started to blister, officially making it a second-degree burn. I don’t really feel it but it looks bad.

I have a class at 10pm for some dumb crap that has nothing to do with me but since it’s connected to a computer I have to be there. It’s a load of crap.

Is it possible to overdose on cherry now-and-laters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Heemeyer

A day late but still not forgotten. When your government won’t fight for you, you have to fight your government.

I just finished Transmetropolitan. Overall, it’s a good series. It follows insane gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem’s return to The City for contractual obligations and ends up overthrowing the presidency. The series has its ups and downs though. I think the series really hit a low point at year three (of five) and I found myself having a hard time getting through issues. I mean some of them were really that boring. There’s a couple too many issues dealing with how messed up the people in The City are. I get it, it’s huge and humanity is lost in the shuffle. It really grabs you by the balls in the first year though and it picks back up in year four. Spider’s a loveable terrible character who’s violent tendencies and rampant drug use are just a means to an ends for him. It’s all about the story and by god he’ll do whatever it takes to get it. It’s a good read that focuses on the power of the written word.

I really should be sleeping but I’m in a thought-provoking mood.

I get paranoid sometimes. Sometimes I’m just struck with the inability to tell lies from truth or truth from lies so I don’t believe anything and I assume the worst in every case. I can’t blame everything on her but when it comes to girls a lot of my paranoia stems from Jen. She was playing a game of hearts and I lost or maybe I won but I couldn’t trust girls for anything for about a year. Even when I started dating Katie I tried to convince her that I’m not someone she wants to be with partially because I didn’t want to end up breaking her heart but mostly because I didn’t want to end up heartbroken myself. She stuck with me though and god knows she’s seen her share of my paranoia but I digress.

This deployment has really screwed with me. At first I was convinced that it was an elaborate exercise and that I was going nowhere. It was just a test. Once I was on the airplane and in another country it became a question of where I was. I’ve never been to Kuwait. I’ve never been to Iraq. The government could’ve dropped me anywhere, called it Iraq, and I would’ve never questioned otherwise if it weren’t for paranoid delusions of being dropped in some undisclosed location to fight a secret war for ulterior purposes. From there it gets to where I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. Does the government even employ me? Is the news I read real or created to put certain ideals into my mind? Is the United States really only as big as it is on the map? What defines reality anyway? How do we measure time? Does time even exist?

Reality and time are what really get me. What defines real and imaginary? What really makes something truth and another thing fiction?

I don’t really know where any of this is going. Don’t believe a single thing I say.

I spent four hours on a roof doing some dumb crap involving radios and not computers and now I’m medium-well. Tired.

Half-Life 2 Episode 1 is outstanding.

Ever. My wife is my editor. I should just get this thing setup so that when I write an entry, it emails her, she reads and corrects and approves. It’d save me time.

Pretty descriptive, right?

Started out good. I read another hundred or so pages of A Game of Thrones, which is outstanding by the way, before I got to come off of retrans, which is always a big plus. Then I get to work and everyone and their mother wants me to do something for them. Of course for the two days I’m up on retrans my work just piles up without me unless the SIGO decides to take care of some of the minor or ultra important stuff. So I spend the afternoon running all over the place, in the sun.

Later I find out that due to crazy circumstances I won’t be going up to retrans for a while, if at all. This is good news to me. I don’t mind not getting two days off if it means I get to do it in the AC and with an internet connection. I’d rather be working. It passes the time faster. I’m not ecstatic about said crazy circumstances but I guess they’re serving a purpose that works to my favor.

Work is over and I make note of the date. Today is June 1st. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 unlocks tonight. So I anxiously wait 10am PDT (9PM, in Iraq) and restart Steam appropriately. It’s still unlocking and downloading right now, at 11PM. I gave up on playing it tonight an hour ago but I didn’t want to do a lot of stuff on the internet so it could have all the bandwidth it’d need to download so I started kind of picking up. I’m packing a box to ship home and I decide, on a whim, to try putting my Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Disc 1 in my utterly unreliable TV/DVD combo player. To my utter horror, it plays without a single quibble. I am so thrilled. I can finally get on with my BSG watching. Now I have to find my remote and it takes me fifteen minutes and then I had to try to find batteries for my remote, which I spend ten minutes on before giving up on that and just starting the freaking show.

This TV/DVD thing has a bad habit of screwing up right at the climax of an episode, no matter what you’re watching and it doesn’t fail me this time. Right before the last five minutes it starts to choke. I cajole it into finishing the episode with a minimal amount of skipping and sound distortion and it was great. I once again have nineteen more episodes of BSG to entertain me. At one episode per night and figuring in some nights when I won’t remember to watch it, that’ll almost take me through June.

All in all, today had its ups and downs and I think I’m better off for them. Katie just reminded me that I just got a 5GB mp3 player off of Woot for $100 and that is freaking great even if I won’t get to use it out here.