Long time no post. I've been lazy, and it's 2 o clock in the morning, I'm practicing juggling (4 catches is my current best), and I was checking out metaquotes. Then I saw post, and decided I wanted to mention I just saw District 9. My friends who I invited along weren't really big fans, but I thought it was awesome in a new and interesting way. I look forward to seeing what Blomkamp can do in the future. Guy has promise.

So today is my birthday and I have absolutely no plans. It's kind of refreshing actually.

Loving the text messages when I woke up, and the messages on facebook. The ecards were cool yet somewhat creepy. And if I think somethings creepy, well...

Well, no plans other than a Sins game if the other guys don't bail on me. Again. In the meantime, back to working on my newest world building weirdness. Would make an interesting Risus game actually...

Oh, and apparently reinstalling the .NET framework did fix my computer! Huzzah! Of course, this is after I spent a day stressing over it, but whatever. It's all good now!
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"Okay, Seaman Sanson, this is your safety briefing," the rep said, grinning again. "Be aware that the platform you are using for entry is poorly constructed and may collapse. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience reduced air quality. Be aware that on the far side of the gate you may experience increased or decreased gravitational field. The far side of the gate may not be at ground level and you may experience vertical movement on exit. Upon returning you may find that you do not hit the platform in which case you will experience an approximately twenty-meter fall to ground level. The gate may not return to this same location at all in which case you may find yourself in any location in this universe or in any other universe. The environment suit that you are using is not warranted by the manufacturer for use in any nonterrestrial environment and, therefore, you are using it at your own risk. Do you understand this warning?"  -Through the Looking Glass (John Ringo and Travis Taylor)

Long time since I've updated this. I still check back, just never seem to have anything important to say. Figured I had enough to say today though.

First thing: watched two movies in anime club. Adrenaline Drive (which is hilarious in all the characters ineptness) and Old Boy (which has one of the most epicly magnificent bastards I've ever seen portrayed. Well played Korea, well played). Both very good moves, but with the first more comedic and the second darker. A LOT darker. Had a lot of fun with each, though for different reasons.

Second, I'm finally getting off my ass and writing an actual program. Well, bits and pieces of it. I'm sure there's a better way to write lots of the code (and possibly better languages...) but hey, I get to be proud of myself for figuring things out this way. I enjoyed writing a distanceTo function, even if it's somewhat limited. We'll see how everything else pulls together!
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Woo-jin Lee: Your gravest mistake wasn't failing to find the answer. You can't find the right answer if you ask the wrong questions.

So we're now in the middle of week two of Garage of Rock and all is well. Best news of the day is learning how to hook up the iPod to the machine. No more worries about whether my playlist will work correctly! Kind of wishing I had a partner though... maybe next semester.

Oh, and thank god for cue. Without it I'd be playing some wieeeerd PSAs. Seems like at least half of the good ones are expired though... Why don't those ever get thrown away?

Whoop - time for an ID.
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Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?

You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:

1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you.

Weapon can be real or fictional, you may assume endless ammo if applicable. Person can be real or fictional.

1. Chainsword. POWER FIST.
2. I Stand Alone by Jackyl
3. Cleric John Preston

In other news, I've been reading www.johndiesattheend.com/ and it's a lot of fun. Not something to read before sleeping, but definitely entertaining.
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“Hello?”
“Dave? This is John. Your pimp says bring the crack shipment tonight, or he’ll be forced to stick you. Meet him where we buried the Korean whore. The one without the goatee.”
That was code. It meant “Come to my place as soon as you can, it’s important.” Code, you know, in case the phone was bugged.
“John, it’s three in the-“
“-Oh, and don’t forget, tomorrow is the day we kill the President.”
*Click*
He was gone. That last part was code for, “Stop and pick me up some cigarettes on the way.”
(From John Dies at the End)

I just saw the Dark Knight at the 7:00 showing yesterday and it was BRILLIANT. As some of my friends know, I rate movies based on a two-axis matrix that closely resembles the D&D alignment matrix. it looks like this:

Good not Fun	Good & Amusing	Awesome
Decent not Fun	Decent & Amusing	Decent & Fun
Crap	Bad but Amusing	Bad but Fun

This is the first movie in the top right matrix for a LONG time. 300 was close, but belonged in the Decent & Fun category.

I love Dark Knight so much. Heath Ledger did a beautiful job with Joker, possibly the best I've ever seen. Sad that he's no longer with us to see his beautiful film so well received.

From the_least

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

WATCHING MOVIES DOES NOT COUNT!!!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total count: 24 read

This blog is live during a tornado warning. Sirens are blaring, and apparently a tornado has touched down in either Gardner or Spring Hill. So relatively close. Interrupted and then shut down the Senior awards assembly we were in the middle of. "Good" times. Driving home with sirens going off is kind of surreal.

More later.

OH MY GOD YES
THQ announces Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (PC)
And the screenshots! The quality is nearly Far Cry levels for an RTS!!!!

And this line here, "Purchasers of Soulstorm, the recently released third expansion pack for the original Dawn of War will also be able to participate in a beta test for the new game," makes me so very very happy!

And this from IGN:
"According to THQ, Dawn of War II will be built upon the Relic's proprietary Essence Engine 2.0, and will feature a fully co-operative multiplayer campaign. As for what races this latest chapter in the RTS series will offer up, we're left guessing, though the publisher has confirmed that the Space Marines and the Orkish green tides will be included. More information is promised in the near future, and as we get word from the Emperor, we'll let you know."
Emphasis added for sheer AWESOMENESS.

http://dawnofwar2.com <=Go here. See the beauty.
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<happyguy> guess what! i actually found jeans of length 30-34!
<trio82> you wear 30-34's? whats ur height and weight?
<happyguy> 6'3", 150lbs
<banished> youre 6'3" and you weigh 150lbs?
<banished> i thought you said you were american

This version of the ending for I Am Legend is about a million times better than the original, hands down. You must watch it for it is beautiful.

That is all.
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I thought I understood z-plurals: they indicate something which is both youth-oriented and extreme. So, while "tea cozies" are something cherished by old ladies wearing shawls, "tea coziez" are all the rage among adrenalin-infused, rapping, snowboarding youth who may or may not be wearing "shawlz."
-?

print "Hello World"

Good news and bad news today. First the bad: my 360 is dead. Deader than dead. It's so dead it's trying to come back to life from the other direction. But the nice thing is that my two year old console is going to be repaired for free! :D Microsoft, I may hate you some of the time but the fact that you take care of the Red Ring of Death has mellowed me out a great deal. Now only if you would accept the Emperor's Word and/or give me lots of money we'd be peachy.

On to the good news: I now have two new games (yay birthdays!) AND a full tank of gas (omg!!111). I got Army of Two as a gift from my grandmother, which is admittedly difficult to play without an XBox. Thankfully my friend wanted to play to so we spent six hours last night and this morning playing. We only stopped because I was actually falling asleep every few minutes. Makes it difficult to work as a time. The verdict on the game is worth the money so far, but may not last long. At least I can trade it in for some cash if the online stuff sucks.
The second game is Dawn of War: Soulstorm. Having now played all 4 iterations of Dawn of War, from the first game through the 3 expansions, I'm glad to say this is by far the best. The aircraft addition is worthless, but I'm really enjoying the Sisters of Battle. Nothing quite like having four squads of Sisters with five flamethrowers each. These are the most kickass 'nuns' EVER. Hands down. I annihilated the freaking NECRONS in two turns with these people! Good times.

Also just saw the entirety of Air Force One (before I just saw the last 30 minutes or so). Fun movie. I forgot Harrison Ford was in it oddly enough. I enjoyed it a lot.
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"If in doubt, throw more men at it!"
"Kasrkin Squad, ready for war."
(Kasrkin in Dawn of War)

Found this on a forum. Site is here

Personal Assessment

Highest ranking dimension: Individualist

You believe in the right of an individual to "be themself" in thought and deeds. You may have felt that what the country really needs is a politician with the nerve to tell people when it comes to controlling others, they should mind their own business. This may be because you enjoy a diversity of experiences and don’t get offended easily. It may also be because you’ve seen people be persecuted. Others may disagree with you because they feel a right to protect what they see as community values. When politicians of your type make mistakes it is often because they underestimate people’s need for stability and safety.

Second highest ranking dimension: Autocratic

You believe in strong leadership. You may have felt that what the country really needs is for someone to really take charge and break out of the inertia. This may be because you have strong opinions of which you are confident, and like to see political leaders who are like you. It may also be because you are suspicious of the ability of groups, especially large groups to make tough decisions. Others may disagree with you because they trust people less than they trust the "rules of procedure", because they have issues with authority, or because that they feel that "government just doesn’t listen." When politicians of your type make mistakes it is often because they try to fit a simple solution on a complex problem.

Combined statement:

Based on your answers, your ideal government is a "strong and silent" type that quietly protects individual liberties.

I just watched Saving Private Ryan again. Incredible movie. Very powerful. It has its hilarious moments too. The funniest part though was watching with my dad and having moments where we go, "Is that Vin Diesel? I don't remember him being in this!" and "Wait... that was Matt Damon! How can I not remember this!?!" Funny how they did SPR first but I don't remember that at all. Kind of makes me wonder what else I've missed.
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Upham: What's FUBAR?
Mellish: Oh, it's German.
[he chuckles derisively]
Mellish: Yeah.
Upham: Never heard of that.

Lieutenant Dewindt: FUBAR.
Private Reiben: FUBAR.
Sergeant Horvath: FUBAR.
Captain Miller: FUBAR
Private Jackson: Y'all got that right.
Corporal Upham: I looked up "fubar" in the German dictionary and there's no fubar in here.

If all you do tonight is read one thing, read THIS. Its quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have read in a great while. I kind of wish I had that effect on kids. The closest I can come is with my little cousins.
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Black holes are where God divided by zero.
-?

Orange Box = True Awesomness.  I actually think Portal is a more enjoyable party game then Guitar Hero (don't kill me!). Team Fortress 2 is awesome once you figure out the maps. Half Life... well, at least my friend can get me through the story. Not that I have any competency at that game AT ALL.

And Universe at War does work. Its decent, but I haven't played for a while. I think its an awesome game and all, but SupCom Forged Alliances has completely and totally taken over my current online playing. I'm serious.

But the best part of recently: I've now run 3 small gatherings. Call it 7 to 10 people, two 360s, Halo 3 and some other good stuff, all in 3 weeks. Fun times. But next time? Someone else can handle the damn food.
Though that sticky on One sided VIP was totally worth it. A triple kill that wins the round in the first minute? PERFECT. (Also not replicateable)
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"The answer? Use a gun. And if that don't work? Use more gun." -Engineer, TF2 Trailer

Just now got the orange box. It's definitely fun, but I'm not sure that I'm enjoying HL2 or the episodes any more than I did on PC. Damn physics puzzles. They just keep coming and coming and...

Now Portal is good. Difficult in places, but awesome otherwise. The AI really does sound just enough off her rocker to make me wonder what exactly is going on...

And I also got Universe at War. Damn thing keeps freezing when I tell it to install from the autoplay. Unless I fix it, that's 50 bucks down the drain...
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Repensum est Canicula (Payback is a bitch)

So...Chanukah this year is kicking a**. Got a new video card (two GeForce 7950 GTs running SLI now!), Supreme Commander Forged Alliance (decent, not really great. yet to play mp though...), and to top the cake I got Call of Duty 4 for the 360. Beautiful game. Addictive. That stuff you hear about the ghillie suits actually working? Yeah, I've literally ran OVER ghillied snipers and not seen them. For reference, I have a big screen. Tell you anything?

The CoD 4 campaign has a moment at the end of "Shock and Awe" where the levels name fits perfectly: I was literally almost in (emotional) shock, which is rare for any shooter. Even Mass Effect didn't come close. If you want to use nukes after that little stretch you might want to get your emotions checked. Note that the effect is somewhat ruined when someone else talks...

Man, I really need to work on some writing stuff. Especially since I finally figured out what kind of tale deserves the name (or a character?) Paradox Jazz. Doesn't that just SOUND kicka**?

Also, Grosse Pointe Blank is an awesome movie. Everyone should watch it. It's simultaniously action-y, romance-y, and comedy-y (does that work?). Great movie, beautiful one liners. Absolutely beautiful.
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Debi: You're a psychopath.
Marty: No, no. Psychopaths kill for no reason. I kill for *money*. It's a *job*. That didn't come out right.

Just finished my first run through and by god it is GOOD. Total flight of the valkyries moment when you have the SA Arcturus fleet save the Destiny Ascension by the way... (yes, that was a partial spoiler, but by the point you know what all that means you'll be at the vid).

I'm just pissed that the one collection mission for resources ended up TWO light metals short! Everything else ran over! Damn thing kept me from my completionist medal :( I didn't get any ally medals either now that I think of it... Damn...

Just watched the movie Astronaut Farmer with my folks. Pretty fun movie. People should definitely watch it.
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Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

 

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics)

You scored as a Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)

You can change the world around you. You have a strong will and a high technical aptitude. Is it possible you are the one? Now if only Agent Smith would quit beating up your friends.

Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 81% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 75% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Moya (Farscape) 69% SG-1 (Stargate) 69% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 63% Serenity (Firefly) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 44% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 38% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 25%

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.