Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in LOAF's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, August 31st, 2008
12:29 pm	Abandon in Place I recently happened to view my Livejournal while logged out; apparently when you aren't you then the world wide web magically converts it into a machine for selling penis pills and Democrats. I don't have many standards - and the ones that do don't make much sense - but I really dislike advertising on the internet. So, goodbye to all that... I set up a Blogspot account (http://banditloaf.blogspot.com) which I can use until it turns out it's secretly selling people chest creams and Republicans. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
10:06 am	CNN has added a tiny 'T-Shirt' graphic button next to their website headlines. Clicking on it generates you a page selling a t-shirt with that headline and when you saw it. The 21st century is awful. This is the best one so far: 6-legged Kitty Named Hex Needs Surgery. In the near future the most embarassing social situation will be to walk into a room and find someone wearing the same news headline auto-shirt, but with an earlier "I SAW IT ON CNN.COM" time. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, February 15th, 2008
8:19 am	Dear Superthread, My, it's been a long, long time. Star Trek delayed until summer?! This setback is most bitter. It's probably good news for the quality of the movie... but it just doesn't seem right. Star Trek movies are like drinking cider and going to the beach: things you do in the winter. I rewatched Terminator the Show last night, as I often do on Wednesdays. Some praise: whoever wrote Reese's dialogue has an extremely rare gift for writing futuristic slang that flows correctly. This is something that nearly every other show ever made is extremely bad at (the same does not go for John's lines about chess, which were awful.) I really like that the show does a great job of making you wonder if pretty much every character is a Terminator - and then not revealing any of them as such. BattleStar Galactica does this poorly and in the opposite manner - suddenly revealing that main characters are Cylons with absolutely no foreshadowing. CNN's front page is linking me to the worlds most sensationalistic story about the space program: http://www.wesh.com/news/15298911/detail.html The Soyuzes have guns onboard them?! What a shocking news story which everyone has known about since the late 1960s. I will grant them that removing it may lead to a much more interesting news story (cosmonaut crew eaten by wolves.) What is the plural of Soyuz? The used game store in Olney has the limited edition of Perfect Dark Zero for $20. I almost bought it to get the happy crab gamerpic that's on the bonus disc. My Xbox being broken was enough to justify my not wasting money in the saddest manner possible. Re: New Star Wars theatrical Clone Wars CGI movie - do we wait in line for this? I'm not really sure how it will work. I'm moderately excited, though. I did enjoy the Indiana Jones trailer, although on various practical levels it bothers me (Area 51 on the box, going back to the Ark warehouse which was essentially a joke from the original... I'm really learning to hate continuity in my old age.) I assume this movie involves aliens, which will really only be amazingly great if they change the style of the film itself so it's like a 1950s sci fi b-movie instead of a 1930s action serial. I very much enjoy the media's new obsession with superdelegates, mostly because it's just another layer to the grand historical irony that is the Democratic Party this year. The party was (ostensibly) founded in protest of exactly this type of situation, when the Presidency was given to Adams despite Jackson having won the most votes (and, of course, just the idea that they might nominate an African American candidate compounds this - since the alliance which founded the party was half based on the idea that it would protect slavery.) Frosty and LeHah and I are doing some work on the DRAFT CHRIS campaign; as long as I find the energy to put into it then it may end up being an amazingly effective project. It's Valentine's Day at work and there's candy and cupcakes and stuff everywhere. Free food is one of the great benefits of working for a school system (the other is health insurance, and the third is that I can walk to a store that sells little pellets that you put in water and they turn into airplanes.) (Comment on this)
Friday, February 1st, 2008
8:26 pm	La Xbox est morte. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
10:33 am	Dear Thread, I'm sorry for not writing for several days. I had a lot of meetings and work and also I'm extremly lazy. This post will contain everything you missed -- and more! Schools were delayed two hours because of rain today, but it didn't apply to administrative offices. So instead of a story about how I spent two hours making the worlds finest breakfast sandwhich, you get some meandering bit about dreams. My morning routine lately has been to get up around 3 AM and move over to my chair. I flip through the various late-night TV shows that have been Tivo'd and then switch on VH1 and fall asleep again for three hours. Normally I'm kind of half asleep, able to realize that I'm hearing that Love Song song thirty times an hour but not able to do anything about it. Today, though, I fell into some unusually deep sleep where I felt like I was trying to swim out of my own consciousness to wake up in time, and that it was impossible. I was also absolutely certain, at the same time, that I was having an IRC conversation with Trelane about how we had to agree to buy more Legos. Did this actually happen? Various things: Surfer girl was nice enough to reply to my reply; she says Wing Commander X (hey, lets call it that) isn't being done at EA Austin... which still leaves Vancouver as a possibility. I hope, I hope, I hope... I asked her for more information, but I'm not entirely sure how far she'll go. I finished watching Torchwood, and I enjoyed several of the episodes a lot more than I expected; still, it's basically X-Files except with lead characters who are all intentionally unpleasant. On the plus side, there's not some year-long lag time for re-airing new episodes in the US like there is with Doctor Who, so at least I can go right into season two. Charlotte and I watched the first half of the Doctor Who season last weekend and we'll probably watch the rest this weekend. And when Captain Jack shows up I'll know exactly what he was doing for thirteen hour-long adventures beforehand and she won't. I also rewatched the first episode of the Terminator show (Tivo tivo'd the HD version of the pilot) and I like it more and more. The internet has pictures from Starship Troopers 3: http://www.starshiptroopers3.net/index.php?go=photos&PHPSESSID=3cc4dc15dffd20573d1f75e51d4b62c1 SST'Pol is pretty. There is a surprisingly good Borders coupon today, 40% off a DVD box set. It's only good Friday and Saturday... I'm hoping I'll be able to get one or two of those missing MST3K sets tonight: http://www.bordersmedia.com/coup/coupon40dvd0131.htm Speaking of which, I ordered the single disk of Giant Gila Monster that they're selling online (the movie that replaced the rights-violating one in the reissued Vol. 10 set.) It was pretty nice of them to make it: http://rhino.com/store/ProductDetail.lasso?Number=437116 I know I promised I'd make LeHah a copy of my crazy rare set, and I will... someday. Big week for comics, in that there were three that I bought instead of none (Jack of Fables, Futurama and the last Y the Last Man.) I'm not sure what to think of the end of Y. It was alternatively very satisfying and expectedly disappointing -- sometimes for the same reasons. I didn't especially need or want to know how succesful society without men was down-the-road... but then I'd criticize any other series for not including that kind of coda (looking at you, Voyager.) I guess the biggest issue I have with the background story is that everything seems to have worked out just dandy, and in fairly short order. One of the cool things about the series was that it was good at revealing things you wouldn't think of, but that immediately made sense (ie, the ISS crew would be stranded in space and unaffected by the plague, the Australian silent service would still be able to function because they have female sub-mariners, etc.) -- and "then everything was okay" isn't one of those things. ... but then the very end of the book lives up to that sort of hidden-in-plain-sight reveal, exactly. You get a narrative parallel and some implied Shakespeare that you immediately realize you should have known would be the end of the story to start out with, but didn't. And that's that. I eBayed a bunch of Star Trek figures (the SDCC exclusives from last year, First Contact Data) and I'm two away (Season One Picard and Riker) from being entirely caught up. POLITICS: What the hell, man? History is going to make fun of us for letting a Presidential election be decided by the media. They sell giant chipwhiches across the street and they're incredibly expensive. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 28th, 2008
4:02 pm	Allright, this is the brass ring. Yes, something big is coming. No, I don't have enough details. One half of me would rather just be a fan and deal with whatever shows up... the other half wants to make damn sure that the backstory created by projects like the movie and Arena continues to be respected. There's all sorts of possible groups doing this thing -- EA Mythic, who recently aquired Prince Thrakhath's head... Bioware Austin, with Wing Commander veterans... EA LA, following up on the C&C relaunch... or Vancouver. I tell you that, if I were on my death-bed tomorrow and the President of the United States should tell me that a great game was to be designed for the liberty or slavery of the franchise, and asked my judgement as to the ability of a designer, I would say with my dying breath, let it be Sean Penney. I've known a lot of Wing Commander veterans in my day, from Chris Roberts on down. I respect Captain Johnny and Adam and everybody else more than I can properly express -- I owe Mark Day more friendship than I can ever repay... but Sean is the man to do this. No one has ever gone out of their way to care about the fans than he did on the last title. I wish they'd treated him better, and feel badly about myself as their leader over it. Allright, that's that. I had a pretty sad weekend. I spent all day on Saturday helping my mom (missing the tournament! I'm sorry! I would have been a better emcee than Chris) and then much of the day on Sunday helping my dad replace broken pipes. Someday I'm going to get a weekend where I can just sit in my chair with a bottle of Scotch and some M&Ms for two days... someday. AD says Feeding Frenzy 2 is coming out in the spring and that it has exclusive yBox minigames. Whoop-woo. Still, has anyone actually checked off which games *actually* came out before the end of 2007 as promised at that Microsoft event? Because I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a big pile of those Live Arcade titles yet... Playmates is doing the Star Trek movie figures! And I figured it out before the rest of the internet! I hope 2008 is like 1994 all over again. I accidentally exploded a printer cartridge today; there was magenta *everywhere*, like a beautiful purple snow on a horrible purple planet. Actually, none of it got on me somehow. It was just on the rug, and the table, and the printer. I coated my hand in tape and sucked it all up. They have invented a new kind of Snickers that has caffeine in it. I recently tried the Mint Three Muskateers and wass *immensely* disappointed. Way to spring dark chocolate on me, jerks. The week ahead will be long and pointless. I want to eat a chipwhich. And a root beer. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 25th, 2008
12:15 pm	Hello Superthread, Work was busy this morning! The first third of the day just flew by... now, I imagine, it will slow to a halt. Very occasionally I have odd blackouts where I can't remember going to bed the night before, and last night was one of those times. I remember sitting in my chair watching The Jerk with Trelane... and then I woke up in my bed without my comforter (it was still by the chair.) I woke up very early and watched the first two episodes of Torchwood. I'm not incredibly excited about it at this point -- more adult != more sex, in my mind. It seems to suffer the same fate as all mid-level spinoffs -- you're most excited when someone is making a passing reference to the original show that you love. I think a good way to measure the end of our sociological shift is by watching advertisements for pregnancy tests. As soon as we start having ones with actors who are excited that they aren't pregnant then the gig will be up. Has someone created that test before? It seems familiar. I have some good posts in that awful 'BWS status' thread. POLITICS: On McCain - Americans don't reward hard-fought veterans with the Presidency; they elect generals whom they consider celebrities. Jackson, Taylor, Harrison, Eisenhower, etc. They also all have badass nicknames, which John McCain does not. Amazing new fact: Von Braun actually wrote a science fiction novel about a mission to Mars in the 1940s. "Project Mars: A Technical Tale." I need to read this book. This just in: Season 6 of Combat! is coming on May 27th - so clear your calendars for that Friday. I'm going to try walking to the grocery store at lunch; what treasures will I find? What mysteries will I unlock? Maybe a new kind of Oreo? Or a talking octopus clock? Only time will tell! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
4:29 pm	Yo Superthread, I just got finished with Thursday's five hour meeting. My brother tried to call me while I was muted. I'll bet anything he was trying to tell me the title for the next Bond movie: "Quantum of Solace." Some months ago we were trying to guess what it would be and so looked through unused titles where we found that very one... along with its exciting description: "Told in the style of W Somerset Maugham, the tale has Bond attending a boring dinner party at the Government House in Nassau with a group of socialites he can't stand." Now I'm *really* excited about this movie. As predicted, the comic book store did not have Starship Troopers. I did try to hint that I would like for them to order it for me, but the effort fell flat ("Do get the Starship Troopers book?" "Yeah, but there hasn't been one in a while." "I thought there was supposed to be one this week..." "Nope, didn't come in.") And of course there was, so I ordered it from the internet. Neither of the Star Trek comics was especially great, but both were passable. The Alien Spotlight Borg had neat art but a story that seemed unacceptably epic for a single issue of a comic book... I wish we could get small stories out of tie-ins once in a while. Year Four #6 was clearly another issue based on an interesting concept that just didn't really formulate into a story properly -- but at least it's the end of that particular series (every time I go to the store the guy complains about how much he hated the first issue of Year Four.) I would really like for there to be an ongoing Star Trek series again... I don't understand why we're subdividing everything. I ordered MST3K Vol. 7 from DDD because it was noticably cheaper than the others; I'm trying to decide whether or not I should pull the trigger and get the other four I need (a different company is getting the rights, and we all know how stupidly hard it can be to find these sets once they're off the shelves.) Gamespreserve.org now forwards (for me, anyway) to Frosty's beautiful splash image. If you haven't seen it in a few days, check it out -- he added a Defender spaceship to the top that looks fantastic (Defender will always be but a pale imitation of Gorgon Snoggle, for me...) I'm reading in the Rockville Library and then having dinner with my dad tonight; home lateish. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
2:59 pm	Dear Superthread, I don't have much to say, but if I don't write one of these every day then I'll lose track and stop doing them forever again. Comic book night tonight; it doesn't feel like such an accomplishment to make it through Wednesday, since the week is only four days long this time around. There's two Star Trek comics (Year Four #5 and Alien Spotlight: Borg) today. How in 2008 do you have a day when there's two new Star Trek comics at the store? Wonders never cease. There's also a new SST (#5), but my store never gets those in. I'm going to be out late every Tuesday and Thursday for the rest of the semester. That's kind of a shame, I like sitting in my chair at home. I wrote a short organizational theory for the GamesPreserve database and Frosty has the 'COMONG SOON' splash page all ready to go. No word from anyone else about the project today, which is making time pass very slowly. Tivo tivo'd the uncut version of Species 2 in HD yesterday while I was at work; where did it find it? The HD channels must be a lawless wasteland if they're letting movies with naked lady aliens broadcast wildly in the afternoon. Someday I'd like to have three cats which I could name Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. However, at present I have only one cat which is not named any of those things - so progress is minimal on this front. iGoogle's weather button is a lot more reactionary than any of the others I check; even the *government* doesn't know there's going to be a giant snowstorm tomorrow. Bioshock is on sale at Best Buy this week, so I'm finally going to buy it tonight. I wrote three Point of Origins today so that I won't have to think about them again until Tuesday or so. There's only 25 or so left to do, I should really just power through them. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
1:54 pm	Dear Superthread, What a busy day! The forums magically turned good again over the weekend and I had a mailbox full of Origin and GamesPreserve-related business. It doesn't feel like Tuesday; this holiday messed up my internal chronometer something awful. Silas put the famous Skunk video online here: http://jessecuster.livejournal.com/33675.html A new H&R Block opened downstairs and they dropped a box of Dunkin Donuts donut holes off at my desk to advertise. I'm slowly eating them all. They have an odd taste... a brown powdered sugar on the outside, but with an unusual level of crunch when you bite into them. I went to Joe's all weekend and we had some fun... and got some serious planning for GamesPreserve finished. That plus Frosty's actual work and Billy Cain's interest is making it seem a lot more real. I long for the day when we have a system up and running and I can just start plugging artifacts and documents into it. POLITICS: ... were entirely uninteresting this week. Some kind of upset that gave Romney South Carolina would have been interesting, but everybody knew that wouldn't happen. So instead, lets talk about an even more controversial, even more important issue: HD-DVDs and BluRays. Has anyone noticed that HD-DVD has survived a remarkable amount of the storm that everyone was certain would kill them? DigitalBits has gone from insisting Paramount and Universal were about to bolt to saying that maybe by the middle of the year they would be making BluRays too. Speaking of which: they announced a re-release of the MST3k Movie on DVD, finally. May 5th. Wasn't Terminator the Show good last night? It was. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 18th, 2008
1:52 pm	Hello Superthread, If you get an outfit, you can be a cowboy too. SPOILER WARNING There was already a bootleg online when I got to work this morning, but I decided to go ahead with my plan to go see the Star Trek teaser at lunch. We have so few goals in life, these days. And... I MADE IT! It took exactly (to the minute) one hour to leave work, go to the movie theater, see the Star Trek teaser and walk back. In short, I'm impressed! It did a wonderful job of teasing. As you've probably already read (or seen on YouTube), it's various space-related quotations (Neil Armstrong, Scott Carpenter, President Kennedy, Spock, etc.) over a series of shots of something under construction. As it moves along they jump further and further out -- it starts with a seemingly present-day man welding and ultimately reveals the saucer section of the original Enterprise. Tagline is something along the lines of 'The Future Begins.' It looks like the geometry of the Enterprise is unchanged - you see the saucer section and what I think were the nacelles... and it's clear from the shape of the bridge that the design is the same. The hull has textured plates, though, similar to the film version (... or the 'three years of adding little details later' version of the original ship that's in the NASM gift shop.) The big issue is exactly what we're seeing. I'll argue that you can't tell where it's being built, but there is a significant suggestion that it isn't in space. I don't know (... or care?) if there's anything in the canon about this, but I do distinctly remember my father giving me a model of the original Enterprise when I was very young and explaining that it was so big that it had to be built in space. If that isn't something that was mentioned in an original episode then it's still certainly something that's been percolating in the collective consciousness of fans for forty years. At the same time, the original commissioning plaque definately says she was comissioned in San Francisco... so, who knows? Maybe they build the ship on Earth and put it into space in pieces... except before we think too much about this, I'm going to stop and say that the actual movie probably has absolutely nothing to do with the teaser. We're seeing the Enterprise being built because the movie is being built... it's no more part of the story than adding seatbelts to theaters this summer was part of Star Trek V. So, good teaser. Go see Cloverfield -- or wait until Monday for what will surely be a beautiful HD version that we can pick apart. Etc.: Today is payday, so I ordered the Torchwood DVD set. I guess now I'll be forced to actually watch it. I brought a small bag containing a wedge of Swiss Cheese for lunch today. It turned out there were free subs, but I had to turn them down because I was pretending to go to a nice restaurant while I ran to the movie theater to see 30 seconds of a movie. I found a great paragraph from Thoreau about fish, which I will now reproduce: "Shad are still taken in the basin of Concord River at Lowell, where they are said to be a month earlier than the Merrimack shad, on account of the warmth of the water. Still patiently, almost pathetically, with instinct not to be discouraged, not to be reasoned with, revisiting their old haunts, as if their stern fates would relent, and still met by the Corporation with its dam. Poor shad! where is thy redress? When Nature gave thee instinct, gave she thee the heart to bear thy fate? Still wandering the sea in thy scaly armor to inquire humbly at the mouths of rivers if man has perchance left them free for thee to enter. By countless shoals loitering uncertain meanwhile, merely stemming the tide there, in danger from sea foes in spite of thy bright armor, awaiting new instructions, until the sands, until the water itself, tell thee if it be so or not. Thus by whole migrating nations, full of instinct, which is thy faith, in this backward spring, turned adrift, and perchance knowest not where men do not dwell, where there are not factories, in these days. Armed with no sword, no electric shock, but mere Shad, armed only with innocence and a just cause, with tender dumb mouth only forward, and scales easy to be detached. I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crow-bar against that Billerica dam?--Not despairing when whole myriads have gone to feed those sea monsters during thy suspense, but still brave, indifferent, on easy fin there, like shad reserved for higher destinies. Willing to be decimated for man's behoof after the spawning season. Away with the superficial and selfish phil-anthropy of men,--who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that fellow-creature who alone can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they cry? It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries. Thou shalt erelong have thy way up the rivers, up all the rivers of the globe, if I am not mistaken. Yea, even thy dull watery dream shall be more than realized. If it were not so, but thou wert to be overlooked at first and at last, then would not I take their heaven. Yes, I say so, who think I know better than thou canst. Keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet." It is both a neat opinion and is full of individual sentences that I really like ("It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries," "Keep a stiff fin...", etc.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
9:17 am	Dear Superthread, I never thought this could happen to me, but... it turns out Tivo can force my HD inputs to have closed captioning again, so I can once again take part the sport of kings (making fun of mistakes in closed captioning.) It even lets me change the font and the size and the color and all kinds of crazy things. In response to your many cards and letters, I did indeed choose to order a calzone. I had to go to the bank last night to get ten dollars to pay for it. When I was younger my mom and I would go to the secret second food court at Columbia Mall and get calzones; they are an entirely happy food in my memory (I think the secret second food court was imploded to build a series of stores for selling crystal animals to the super- and ultra-rich alike.) The new Star Trek comic ("Star Trek the Next Generation: Intelligence Gathering #1") was okay. The art was very pretty but the story shows all the signs of having the same problem as several of the previous IDW miniserieses - being five or six individual 'episodes' that are tied together in an awkward manner. Either give us one long story or a bunch of separate small ones. I was so tired last night that I went to Dunkin Donuts and got a Mountain Dew. Since I haven't been drinking much caffeine at all I assumed it would go off like a firecracker and zap me back to life... but it didn't. Maybe the part of my brain that reacts to green liquid has rotted out. We went to Five Guys for dinner; I considered buying a used copy of the Perfect Dark Zero special edition so I could get the yBox icon with the crab... but I stopped myself. If it gets down to ten dollars maybe... ... but wait, I did do something horribly sad: I replaced the two Return to the Planet of the Apes discs in my ape head with the restored versions from the stand-alone release. Please stop me before I swap out the 2001 movie disc with the BluRay. I spent a while last night programming the new Tivo (now named Spicy Potato) what I liked; in the twenty four hours between getting its information and when I was able to teach it about myself it decided I was a diabetic. I told it to record all kinds of shows that aren't going to be on because of the writers' strike: The Office, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, ER, Terminator, King of the Hill, South Park, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Robin Hood, Pokemon, Degrassi the Next Generation and one secret mystery show. You know the one I mean. I also used the nifty new logic feature to make it Tivo Colbert Report and Simpsons without giving me dozens and dozens of daily reruns. Hurray for progress! I have a five hour staff meeting with limited breaks today (starting at 10:00), so I may not be able to take part in many of the usual Superthread activities. This is going to be a regular thing on Thursdays. I have the strongest urge to read Parade's End again. Re: Apple, Redbox and HD. Redbox could just rent BluRays using their existing model... or put big raw mpegs on regular DVDs like that Terminator 2 bonus disc. That is if any percentage of the market actually cared about HD content. And they don't. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
12:22 pm	Good Afternoon, Superthread, I'm sorry for not writing this morning; I had some work to catch up on since I was off yesterday. I just assumed these were like those Christmas letters everyone hates getting, but then people complained when there wasn't one yesterday. Per Frosty's acceptance I have added blonde to the mailing list. The great news is that Tivo works! Verizon gave me an 8 to 5 window yesterday, so I took the day off and stared at the driveway for nine hours (I couldn't stay in my nest, I would have missed the phone and doorbell.) I was pretty edgy by 4:00, so I called and an unpleasant woman told me she would check into the matter and call me back immediately. That hadn't happened by 5, so I called back ready to scratch and claw and go back to Comcast... ... but I somehow managed to get a friendly and competant gentleman who promised he'd stay on the line with me until I heard from the installer. He put in a request and we chatted for half an hour until I heard back on my landline. He was just starting his evening shift in Syracuse and was entirely open about the fact that Verizon isn't especially great with cablecards. The installer did, indeed, show up... and he turned out to be familiar with Tivos, much to my relief (I'd read some horror stories online during the long wait across Verizon's many scheduling screwups.) He was friendly and perfectly willing to let me explain what was going on when we had a problem... and he stayed until 8 PM trying cablecard after cablecard after it turned out several of the ones he brought with him hadn't been registered correctly. And it works! Glorious, glorious Tivo. I know, I shouldn't be so happy about a glorified VCR... but I am. Tivos are so nice and you can't really understand until you've had one. He's in the process of building his schedule while I work and tonight I will program back in all my viewing preferences (Tivo has been active for two weeks and has been crying like a starving kitten because there wasn't any information on which to base reccomendations.) He still needs a name; I'm leaning towards Potato, but maybe you folks can come up with something better. And that is that. While I was waiting I read the first Star Trek novel ever written, 'Mission to Horatius.' It's a 'young adult' book written in 1968, while the show was still in production. It was actually very pleasant to read a Star Trek story that didn't feel the need to reference anything else or serve some kind of political agenda. Which brings us to... POLITICS: I was very happy that Romney won Michigan last night; the media artificial hype definately impaired my judgement about that one. The results are the Democrats were amusing - how do you compel 230,000 people to show up for an election which doesn't affect anything to specifically vote against the one person running in it? ("Why would a reviewer make the point of saying someone's not a genius? Do you especially think I'm not a genius?... You didn't even have to think about it, did you?") I'm not willing to call South Carolina yet; something stupid could happen. I will note that a lot of media hype is crazy - there's not a tight three-way race at this point... Romney has won two primaries and come in second in two others, picking up delegates each time. He currently holds a two-to-one advantage over his opponents. END POLITICS! Tonight is comic book night, and the target is... the first issue of a new Star Trek: The Next Generation miniseries! I'll be home late, since I have to take the bus to Wheaton and will then have dinner with John. It's kind of a shame to have my mid-week break on a day after I was off work, though. I think next week is going to be big - there's at least two Star Treks and the last YtLM coming out. I brought lunch today! That's new! I have a foccaccio (Italian for bread with red and green stuff on it), a husk of the giant baby swiss and a little baggie of Christmas fudge. It's already noon, so I'm thinking maybe I can hold off until 2:00 or so. I do enjoy delaying satisfaction. I also need to commit/refuse to buying a calzone for the staff meeting on Thursday by the end of the day today. If I say yes then I'll have to go get money from the bank tonight... if I say no then I won't get a calzone. This is a tough job. Trelane and I are watching A MOVIE on Friday. If you want to join in the ordinary Friday evening celebration then you'll need to buy A MOVIE wherever movies are sold. I am debating whether or not to buy the Terminator movies on BluRay tonight; everybody is Terminator crazy! Or at least they should be. Lets enjoy this thing, people, even if it isn't the greatest thing ever. Unless the Star Trek teaser shows up on the internet before lunch on Friday I'm thinking I might go be one of those jerks who pays to see the trailers and then leaves on my lunch break. There's a theater three blocks from here and I could certainly get there, see the trailer and get back on my break. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 14th, 2008
10:42 am	Dear Superthread, If you can draw this turtle, you may already be an artist! Does anyone know how those comic book ads that promised vast armadas of toy soldiers worked? It'd be like $1.99 for a giant list of things. Were they incredibly tiny? Also, here's a missed opportunity: we could have done one of those 'look at all these prizes' ads in Star*Soldier... except with all the game's weapons and upgrades instead of RC airplanes and Vic-20s. I just got off the phone with Verizon. They are still screwing things up. I threatened to switch back to Comcast and they promised that my truck would know where to go tomorrow morning. Now we just need to pray for a competant installer (ie, one capable of following the simple step-by-step list for CableCARD installations Tivo provides for you; it's a fifty-fifty shot... if I murder anyone tomorrow, you will know why.) On the way to work there is a rental company called SELF STORANGE PLUS which has a giant neon sign. For several weeks the "STO" has been burned out, leaving a sign which says SELF RAGE PLUS. They finally fixed it, which was kind of disappointing. I'll go ahead and say it: I enjoyed the heck out of the Terminator TV show. I just wish I could have seen it in HD. Yes, I'm going to be that kind of snob for at least three months - deal with it. Also, apparently the regular sets are what used to be Stars Hollow on Gilmore Girls, so we should be on the lookout for that. POLITICS: The morning news was hopping mad that Hilary suggested that LBJ had something to do with making Martin Luther King's civil rights concepts stick. I'm not usually one to defend her, but... that's absolutely true. The first person to tell you so would be Dr. King -- who used to talk about how he cried and realized he'd won when LBJ gave his We Shall Overcome speech. I know Johnson was a sonofabitch, but... grrrevisionism. I have a meeting with Web Services today at 4:00 which I think is off at the Board of Education. I'm not really sure how to get there. I did not do anything exciting over the weekend. My mom wanted help running errands two days in a row, and so that's all I did. I almost finished watching the TOS HD-DVDs -- I'm getting lockups on one episode, so will soon begin the surely enjoyable process of getting a replacement disc from Paramount. The news is making a big deal about how Dubai declared it a national holiday because President Bush came to visit; does this mean that we will get the day off too if the President of Dubai comes here? We should invite him. Was Dubai where Scrooge McDuck went to compare how much money he had on a giant weighted scale with that other duck? I find it hard to believe that both of the worlds richest ducks keep I bid a dollar on one of those giant lots of CCG cards as basically a joke... and won it. I guess we can have some sealed starter tournaments. On Fried-egg night I had a long wait after work, so I went to the rich people toystore in the rich people complex across from my work. I got a tiny baggie of those little pills that turn into dinosaurs, except they were airplanes. Charlotte and I expanded them and found: a 777, a Saturn V (actually a V2), an X-1, a helicopter, a Cessna and a biplane. I'll get some more each week until I wind up with a zeppelin. Oh yeah: I read another chunk of the Martin-Marietta book and it left corporate-PR-ville on a fast rocket train. Now Martin is some creepy hollow man with strange mother issues. This week is a slow one for comics again, but a new ST:TNG series starts. That will be worth the long painful bus-ride to Wheaton. More Terminator tonight at 9:00! Google tells me they've actually shot *nine* episodes, so we can enjoy it for a little bit. P.S., should we add Blonde to the superthread? Somebody remember to ask her. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 11th, 2008
8:31 pm	Dear Superthread, Human Chicken turned out to be chicken nuggets and broccoli with MSG-water - I can live with that. There's one type of Chinese food that's literally just a box of chicken nuggets, though. My dad always gets it. I wish I knew what it was. Next week's staff meeting is Italian food, which we all know just gets better when it's shipped around for an hour in styrofoam boxes beforehand (much like how ice cream is better in space.) I actually have an astronaut ice cream sandwhich somewhere. I think it was a birthday present from when I was in grade school that I hid in a desk because I knew it was awful but also didn't want to offend anyone by throwing it away. Someday when you're all starving to death from society's infrastructure crumbling I'll be enjoying a rich warm-chalk-goo-based ice cream sandwhich. Then I guess I'll trame a giant atomic land-crab and ride it to freedom. Speaking of atomic death crabs: googling for SuperThread tells us that Los Alamos National Labratory is working on developing "SuperThread yarn." I am continually amazed that Los Alamos still exists... and am now even more amazed that apparently they make yarn. I went to a different CVS last night and they, too, had Creme Eggs on display -- not just regular but also Caramel and Orange flavored. I ate an orange one and it was surprisingly good... it tasted like eating a chocolate egg with some special kind of medicinal plastic goop inside. I also started reading a history of Martin Marietta in aerospace (my dad used to work there.) Most of the early stuff seems to be squeeky clean corporate biography about how Glenn Martin's mom was the only person who believed he could build his own airplane and about how very smart he was and right about everything and how he proved those darned naysayers (complete with completely improbable direct inspirational quotes.) I thumbed through the sources and found out the early stuff was entirely based on something published by the company in the 1950s but that the rest of the book wasn't - so we'll see how it goes. It's not like I have anything else to do after work. I watched Squire of Gothos this morning. I don't really have anything to say about it, beyond maybe noting that a character with a Byronic interest in Napoleon was maybe just charmingly eccentric instead of completely improbable in the 1960s. Also, the TOS-R people need to dial back the newly CGI'd planets somewhat - I don't *need* to notice how cool they are for deciding that two giant thunderstorms were flashing on and off somewhere on Gothos during each transition. Also, is it just me or do all the planets have a noticable lack of clouds? Kotaku picked up a CIC article!... from 2005. For some reason they were very excited that we had scanned the Wing Commander I blueprints way back when -- wait till they find out about the tens of thousands of other more interesting pages I've scanned. There's some small irony in there: when Chris and I went to EA Burnaby last year they'd found the same CIC update and printed out massive poster-sized versions of the blueprints to study in preparation for developing Arena. Now who's doing their research? Anyway, the really surprising thing is one of the replies: http://kotaku.com/343621/please-check-out-these-awesome-wing-commander-blueprints#c3658543 Why is EA shipping a full sized Kilrathi to Virginia? Do they realize that *I* live in Virginia? Or near Virginia? I'm going to e-mail Sean and Joe about this... (I will admit that I read Kotaku fairly regularly, since they're updated very quickly and I like having new things to read during the day.) What am I doing today? I need to write one Point of Origin update and possibly as many as ten. I think there are thirty left to do... you have to be in a special mood to get them right - or, as in this case, you have to have absolutely run out of the last twenty you did in advance. The objective of the moment is to find the uncut Japanese version of Milo and Otis - why don't people torrent things like this? All I've found so far is that the German release is called "Miez und Mops" (the poster implies that Milo is Miez and Otis is Mops.) (Comment on this)
8:10 am	As many people have pointed out in the last several months, I haven't updated my journal in a long time. So I'm going to start syndicating the roughly-daily long-format e-mails I send from work to the Superthread, an e-mail gathering of the great minds of the internet (and also Goku.) Here's the post from yesterday: Dear Superthread, I have a five hour staff meeting today, from 10 to 3! They are ordering Chinese food and I was again placed in the uncomfortable position of having to pick a crazy numbered meal from a menu. I know I figured out what the safe choice was the last time I had an office job, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. I picked "Hunan Chicken" because it sounded like human chicken -- and I'm a human who enjoys chicken. I woke up today and watched the second half of The Menagerie (TOS-R in HD!) The basic concept of using the bookends is very clever, but the practice wears thin over two episodes. Cutting back to Spock insisting that the only way to reveal his amazing surprise is to watch the rest of The Cage is tiresome the third or fourth time it happens. Especially because the story never does come up with a very good reason to hide why he's taking Captain Pike to Talos IV. (And also, why is going to Talos IV the only thing the Federation can execute you for? Getting locked up in an alien zoo seems like punishment enough... and if you escape then so what? The only reason to have a law like that at all is to prevent people from hurting themselves... and the fact that it's punishable by death kind of negates that.) I also tried out PIP features, which seems to be the only thing HD-DVD has going for itself at this point. They're pretty neat (and entirely pointless): there's a panel that appears in the extraneous widescreen portion of your picture that lets you call up screens of encyclopedia data and video commentaries and such throughout the show. Everything I predicted in yesterday's Future segment happened. I went to Microcenter to get another free 2GB memory card. I'm all ready to take 6,000 or so pictures without unloading my camera - so somebody plan a cross-country roadtrip without laptops. Actually, we should do that... I do really want to go somewhere in flyover country: http://www.cosmo.org/ For some reason, the "Kansas Cosmosphere" has some incredibly impressive collection of space hardware... including Gemini X and Apollo 13. There's also a Gemini in Oklahoma City. We could make a big loop around the middle of the country. I got home fairly late yesterday; we went to Fuddruckers, where they actually gave me a pink burger when I ordered one medium rare. I also felt sorry for taking advantage of Microcenter so many times that I bought Fish Tycoon for the DS... they've still given me more money for taking surveys about laptop buying preferences than I have actually spent at the store - and then you have to figure in all the free memory cards and coffee mugs. As previously stated, it was another slow week for comics... but I really like the Doctor Who Classic reprints. My brother didn't understand why I wasn't just waiting for the trade to read them, but they're a lot of fun. I really like the *idea* of having one or two comics to look forward to each Wednesday - it really cuts the week in half and prevents you from spending all your time daydreaming about the weekend. Also, lets face it: I probably wouldn't have bought the trade any time soon. The comics that are being reprinted are great, too -- they're a magazine serial from the late 1970s, and unlike current Doctor Who stuff they're entirely stories that are too spectacular looking to have been on TV at the time... so they're full of crazy elaborate robots and lava men and such. For those who missed last night's geometry, Trelane did the math and figured out that I'd need a 39.2" 16:9 TV in order to have one that's the same size as my current 4:3 one. Oh yeah: I found the first Creme Eggs of the season at CVS. They were the endcap for an aisle that was being broken down to become Valentines Day-based. Maybe they're left over from last Easter. I hate the fact that I'm sort of excited that there are Star Wars characters in "Soul Calibur IV." I don't even know what Soul Calibur is. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
8:09 pm	"My heart leaps up when I behold A [fish] in [a tube]: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! " - Wordsworth (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
6:31 am	Happy birthday, lemming23! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 2nd, 2007
11:49 pm	My, it's been a long, long time. As I mentioned last time, I graduated! I am not working yet. I would like to be, no matter what my parents may think... but I will admit that I haven't tried as hard as I could to find a job. I am perfectly happy, eager even, to settle into a regular life for a while. It will be nice to be able to pay off my debts and to have a little spending money to enjoy life with... in the mean time, however, I have had an impossible opportunity to fulfill a childhood dream: writing official Wing Commander continujity. I can't say much now (or possibly ever)... but the boy who memorized his Claw Marks statistics until the book fell apart and who brought his Privateer manual to school every day for a year would be proud. I've been very bad about keeping a journal. We've missed graduation, Christmas, a million jokes, a hundred funny news stories about sea creatures, a lot of gaming, a new Pokemon and at least one amazing adventure. I'll try better from here on out. That said, I need to record some of the behind-the-screens history of what I've been up to... Arena! As you can all expect, the announcement of Wing Commander Arena has been keeping me busy. I can now, finally, reveal (some of) the terrible truth: Chris and I have known about the project for almost a year, since it was in a very early design stage (and named 'Conflict'). At first glance there's some irony to the fact that the Wing Commander News team was legally unable to report the most exciting Wing Commander news in years... but it's actually a fairly common situation. We've been involved with several major projects in the last few years, most of which died crib deaths for various reasons. I've always thought it better that we suffer through their cancellations alone rather than let it hurt the community morale that we work so hard on fall apart. With that background in mind, we were happy but cautious when the producer for Arena approached us... ,,, and we've been incredibly happy with it -- especially with how much input we were allowed and how seriously our voice was taken by the team. For anyone worried about the new format of the game, I can assure you that your fears are unnecessary. I don't think the couple screenshots and the HD videos, however impressive, get this across very well. In fact, if anything they're *too* worried about fan reaction... we're a tiny percentage of the group who will buy this game on XBLA, and they've included us in everything. Arena is at its very heart a game designed to behave like the Wing titles you love... and it's absolutely soaked in continuity. From familiar ships to familiar weapons to a familiar setting... it's like coming home. I speak of all this from experience. A few weeks before the announcement, Chris and I went to Vancouver to take a look at the game and give them a first-hand 'fan' account. Electronic Arts flew me there and back to spend one day with the game -- sixteen hours of flying for a day of playing the first original Wing Commander title in ten years was more than an even trade. Some notes, weeks later: * The Vancouver airport is amazing. It's all clear glass and nature scenes and art displays. I got off the plane, walked through a giant glass sphere and into a forrest with a waterfall and a pair of large wooden crabs. Unfortunately I didn't have the memoy card for my camera with me. * I made the mistake of telling the truth at customs -- instead of being a tourist, I was coming to help with a video game... but not being paid. They debated exactly what to call me for quite a while, and settled on something along the lines of "Diplomat, Level 6". * We got lost on the way to the hotel. I'd been in transit for ten hours and could barely stay awake... and Chris' solution for getting back on track (in a thick can't-see-anyone fog) was to drive entirely by GPS at maximum speed. We didn't die, somehow. * EA Canada is an amazing, amazing campus. Like Origin times a thousand. Incredibly professional and laid back at the same time, in so far as such a layout is possible. We saw their motion capture facilities where they do all the EA Sports things... a big hangar with a checkerboard floor of different kinds of sports fields. * Worthy of a separate bullet point: the cafeteria was called "EAt". (We kept our word and didn't photograph anything inside... but this tested our resolve) * We were absolutely blown away when we saw the Midway. They loaded up a level, Chris noticed the 'cuff' of the pants and said "that even looks like the Midway!"... to which they replied "it *is* the Midway!" (followed by a discussion of how they meant it was a Midway-class ship, and not *the* Midway...) * We handed out swag, like real professionals! We had a big box of hats and pens and patches and business cards to give out... and they told us we could have anything we want from the EA Store for our trouble. We observed more restraint, and wound up with a coffee mug (Chris) and an EA hat (me). * I will make two claims about the game, for future reference. One - I may be the first fan to recieve a Wing Commander Achievement. I don't know what it was for, as the descriptions weren't in the game yet... but I blew up Chris' Broadsword at one point and recieved the telltale ping. Two - I played a game mode cut from the finished product... it involved flying around and blowing up little space stations while they launched a series of fighters. It didn't have any unique "hook" and was removed... so sad. * I got to edit a bunch of the in-game text in Arena. I helped with the intro crawl and all the ship descriptions... and that's all I can talk about at this point. It was a dream come true just to touch it at all -- and you guys are going to be impressed. Chris and I sitting in an office in Canada pitching ideas for tiny Wing Commander references back and forth was quite an experience. * I drank coffee and did not spill it. Also, for all the universe complains about Electronic Arts' uptight corporate culture... but they were happy to break out beers for everyone when we kept working after five. It seemed exactly like everyone describes Origin in the 80s. * After our day at EA, we decided that a good souvenier would be a French copy of EA Replay. Our pal AD had told us about half a dozen different stores within walking distance of our hotel (which was poised over a giant Chinese mall, straight ouf of Blade Runner)... so we began to look for it. It took hours. Future Shop (Canadian Best Buy)? No copies. EB? Yes... but they'd thrown away the French manuals. The Sony Store? No copies. Toys R Us (in a mall)? VICTORY! Literally hours... * We went to A&W Root Beer for dinner. We bought "Teen Burgers" with our fruity pink Canadian money. * The United States Army airs recruiting commercials on Canadian TV. * When we first played the game, the main space station was a big monochrome affair... and during the day a new build was available for download -- and bam, it was instantly a giant green WC2-styled scene. The change was amazing... * The Kilrathi capital ship was originally blue. Chris said they should change it... and a week later it's different in the press screenshots. Which is too bad, kind of, because a blue Kilrathi battlecruiser was neat looking. All of these are asides, though... the true lesson is: Arena is a FUN FUN GAME. I am on the edge of my seat waiting to play it again. You guys who can sit around complaining are lucky... I'm suffering from *withdrawl*. I've described the 16-player cap shpi mode before, but I'll do it again. You have a team of eight people and you fly against a team of eight others. You have a large capital ship to defend... and another to bomb. The two capital ships fight a broadside in the center of the level... and you have to coordinate bombing runs, bomber escort and point defense all at once. You can't just blast your way through, either... because the team that has the tactics down will win. It's amazing. Chris put our pictures from the trip online here: http://www.wcnews.com/chrisreid/canada.shtml Well, that's that -- I wanted to get that down on e-paper... I promise I'll do a better job of updating for at least a little while. In recent weeks I have been doing some amazing things for Arena -- I can't talk about them yet, but WingNuts everywhere are going to be happy... and beyond Arena, there's a very bright future for the series. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
6:22 am	I've graduated and am on my way back to Maryland! I'll write more about that later, but for now here's a bunch of pictures from the Frontiers of Flight museum in Dallas. We stopped here yesterday during the drive home so I could see Apollo 7 -- my goal is to see all the American capsules someday (the Russians broke up many of theirs), but this one was especially appropriate since my history senior research project significantly involved the Johnson Administration's spin on this particular mission. It was a neat little museum, with a bunch of airplanes and lots of models. There are a bunch of pictures of the usual oddities behind the cut. For those interested, this message was posted using the free internet at the Comfort Inn in Lebanon, TN -- roughly eleven hours from home. Onward! The Apollo 7 Command Module! Apollo 7 launched on October 11th, 1968 and orbited the Earth for 11 days. It was the first manned flight of the Apollo spacecraft, which was significantly redesigned in the year and a half since the AS-204 fire. 7 was essentially the same mission that Grissom and company would have flown, had the accident not occured. The mission featured the first live TV from space, and was celebrated around the world for its broadcast -- behind the scenes the astronauts were very unhappy, as a cold had slipped through quarantine and infected all three while in orbit. ( But wait, there's more! ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)