Just Roll A d20 For SAN Now

Okay, when did Wheeljack land on Earth and nobody told me?

Awake.

Less than thrilled about it.

Wednesday's training for GE Tower: entered building stairwell at floor 29, went down all the stairs and exited in the first level of the basement.

Thursday's training: entered building stairwell at floor 29, climbed to floor 32, went down all the stairs and exited in the first level of the basement.

Today's planned: enter at 29, climb to 36, then down to basement.

Building is 44 stories high. If possible I intend to add 4 floors of up travel each workday. This may not work evenly on all floors as some of them are rented all by one company and thus block off access to the stairs unless you have a security card to get into that company's area, but I will manage one way or another. I do not intend to start running these until I can climb all 44 at a walk and come down all 44 + basement at a walk without stopping. I may have to be careful about that as I do not wish to damage my knees. If it turns out a fast walk to the top will do, then yay for fast walking. My athletic motto is "I have nothing to prove"; the important thing is that I finish under my own power, not that I finish at a particular time or rate. This is a new athletic activity entirely and therefore the only important part is that I can pull it off at all.

I do not intend to do it with a proton pack on, but I may add the use of my 12-pound bike chain to the regimen at some point....

Some traditions ought to be upheld. When a gift-giving occasion arises, and young children are involved, the aunt or uncle who lives far away ought to give the noisy, large gift; that is simply How Things Are Done.

My sister asked that my parents and I get her children musical instruments. She suggested two.

I sort of had to choose this one.

Way, way back many centuries ago, I have a dim and misty memory of a movie- it may have been Lucas- that at one point featured a kid running into a room full of people who couldn't have been more than sixteen and shouting, "$PROTAGONIST is trying to kill himself!" Immediately after, the camera cut to an image of $PROTAGONIST.... trying out for the football team despite being a pudgy, weedy nerd only barely inside the age limit.

In that vein, I have just signed up for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society's "Climb To The Top" event. On February 28, 2010, I'm going to be joining a bunch of other lunatics at the GE tower at Rockefeller Center and attempting to climb 66 floors in one go. It's a fundraiser event, so people can donate or sponsor me or whatever if they want, but the page for the event has my actual name on it, so I'd rather pass the links to individual interested people via email.

For now, all I can do is quote Peter Venkman. "Somebody tell me when we get to twenty... I'm gonna throw up."

I've played all the way through Dragon Age: Origins for the first time, and I'm impressed. If I can bring myself to be more of a bastard (I have trouble playing the bad guy, or even wanting to), I may play through again to see how that works out. In the meantime, though, I need to find some screencaps from the PC version, because I want an icon of Caridin; there was just something about the way he said, "May you always find your way in the dark..."

Dear Spammer:

I read the webcomic Something Positive.

You used the subject line "HELLO NEW FRIEND" in your email.

WHO LET FLUFFMODEUS NEAR THE INTERNET.

Is it just me, or does anyone find LJ's new Love Without Boundaries fundraising virtual gift outright creepy? I know they're trying to convey the sense of vulnerable children being cradled safely in the palm of someone's hand, but I went to a Catholic high school with a decidedly strident anti-abortion* instructor whose idea of educating the students on Why Abortion Was Wrong usually involved extremely graphic color photographs of terminated pregnancies. As in, she kept a stack of anti-abortion pamphlets full of those pictures on the windowsill of the junior year theology classroom, right where you would probably see them if you had to get up to get a tissue to blow your nose. Thanks largely to her, the sight of a child small enough to fit in the palm of someone's hand- no matter how whole- pretty much just rings the bells of DON'T LOOK AT THE PICTURES for me now.

Thanks a lot, Sister Beatrice.

*To her credit, I think she was also anti-death-penalty and anti-euthanasia, among the other elements of Catholic 'seamless garment' theological issues pertaining to the value of all human life. Unfortunately, that got drowned out by all her other issues and insistences.

Huh. Whaddya know.

Apparently sharks read Stephanie Meyer's "Breaking Dawn".

I... okay, I don't know how you came up with that correlation, but...

Apparently their 'you liked X, therefore based on the responses of other people who liked X, we're gonna guess you'll like Y' algorithm involves a whole lot of people who liked the movie Let The Right One In, who also liked the TV show Generation Kill. Because that's why Netflix thinks I'll like Generation Kill.

For reference, Let The Right One In is a Swedish movie, set in Stockholm, about a twelve year old boy who's got a bullying problem and a bunch of detached adults in his life, and the girl apparently his own age who moves into an apartment next door to his, who happens to be a vampire. Generation Kill, last time I checked, was a TV miniseries based on the book of an embedded reporter's experiences with some seriously kick-ass Marines. I'm not debating that I'm sort of interested, but now I'm wondering how many other people have the same 'bleak Swedish cityscape, young boy coming of age, child vampire!' / 'MARINES INNA DESERT' correlation.

At the request of a friend of mine:

Today at Ft. Hood, a shooter shot 12 dead, 31 wounded. Please, if you are in Texas and capable of donating blood - wherever you are - do this as soon as possible. Any bit will help, at this point...

Stolen from moonlup:

So many, if not all, of the characters we play are good men and women at heart. But in another world, where something went wrong, they become nightmares.

What's their story?

Ray Stantz, gone_byebye: When you get completely and thoroughly caught up in science as a young boy, you learn a lot, but you don’t really have time for other things. Ray never developed a conscience. He maintained a childlike sense of wonder and a burning desire to understand the universe around him, but the concept that what happened to other people mattered never really sank in. Columbia University was a bit scared of him, but they were happy to see him off with a Ph.D., especially since he promised he’d make regular donations from his big fat government paycheck. Anyone who asks about which bit of the government the paycheck comes from is told it’s the Bureau of Indian Affairs, now stop asking stupid questions. It is probably best if you don’t exhibit some sign of psychic powers in public in that world. Someone will find you. And then no one will find you.

Belar, alorn_bear: See ‘the life of his brother Torak’. Only with Scanda-Russian types instead of Arabo-Mongol followers.

Gordon Freeman, acts_of_gord: A childhood of competition with his older brother and a largely absent father left Gordon with the very strong impression that you couldn’t count on anyone in this life but yourself (despite his mother’s best efforts to the contrary). He developed a reputation for splitting his days between scientific research and biathlon practice. His goal was to get the hell away from people, and to be able to make them stay away if they tried to find him. The tennis ball cannon he built when he was six got hauled out of mothballs, dusted off, and upgraded into a homemade slugthrower, which got upgraded into … something else. Fortunately he got hired by a Washington firm, TF Industries, and put to work on railgun research before anything could happen to put him on the nightly news. When those idiots at Black Mesa tore reality a new one and the rifts started showing up all over the planet, he grabbed pretty much one of everything in the lab and started laying waste to anything that didn’t have red blood. It was amazingly effective. By the time of the Seven Hours War he’d carved out his own little fiefdom based on the promise of ‘do what I want and I’ll protect you from anything’, but the Combine were a little overwhelming even for him.

For a while, anyway. You can get a lot of weapons research done if you let everyone think you’ve vanished completely. And if you happen to drop a few rumors here and there about your eventual return, well, when you do show up with guns the likes of which God has never seen, is it really such a bad thing to capitalize on the way everyone assumes you’re the Messiah?

Medic, hands_of_blu: Took his papers from medical school and went looking for someone to hire him to let him do the research he was really interested in. No one knows how he got there, but his name and picture’s all over the really nasty research done by Unit 731. And no one knows where he is now…

The others are going to take a bit to work out.

Who here's seen the episode of "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy" where Mandy smiles and it destroys the planet? Because I'm thinking of it right now...

I didn't know there even WERE photographs of HP Lovecraft attempting to smile, did you?

Okay, I'm awake. An unusual thing on a weekend, but there you go.

The work week has been all right. We're getting the network in line, I'm doing mostly desktop support, and knock on wood, nothing has exploded so far this weekend. I'm down with that. Hopefully we can get other things handled this coming week and yell at the telecomm companies for not giving us the network connectivity they swore up and down we'd have by now. We'll see.

On the home front I have gathered a fistful of quarters and am pondering loading stuff into a bag and heading for the laundry place around the corner today, rather than going into the basement and using the machines there. I'd like to see if the laundry place has anything to recommend it over the basement. $1 wash, $1 dry is tough to beat, but if the laundry place can do more than 1.5 times the basement machines' capacity for $1.50 wash, $1.50 dry or less, it may be worth the hauling. Still won't be able to beat 'oh crap it's 11 PM I forgot I need clean pants' convenience, but overall.

Probably need to get cat litter, too. That would require walking further, though. We'll see. Lunch first.

Ten thousand apologies for the lack of interesting material, but I did sleep late today and I'm still a mite groggy.

I really have no excuse for this. I went looking for clips from a 1957 production of Oedipus Rex to confirm what the voice of Douglas Rain sounds like when he's not busy being HAL 9000. I could not find any actual clips of Mr. Rain when he's not being HAL 9000, alas, but I did find these:

Oedipus in Eight Minutes (as performed by vegetables) (no, not the Veggie Tales crew)

"And AFTER that, I KILLED THEM ALL! Araaaaarrraggghhhasahahahhharh! AAARHGHGHGHGHGH! AAAAAAAAAARHRHRAAAAA!! *pause* *collapse*"




.... yeah.

In the great tradition of fannish commemoration of days that didn't happen, with the added twist of this one not actually having happened yet...

On this day, at 10:47 AM American Eastern Standard Time in 2077, the United States and Red China will be going to atomic war with one another. No one will mark or remember who threw the first volley; no one will care. It will last for two hours, during which time more energy will be released than in all previous conflicts in human history combined, and at the end of that time the world will be a much, much quieter place.

For a while, anyway.

But war... war never changes.

Dear superintendent:

I don't know when you put up the sign saying appraisers would need access to our apartments between 9 AM and 2 PM today, but it wasn't there when I got home at 5:30.

Don't blame me when you open my door and the sink's full of dirty dishes and there are boxes full of stuff everywhere that I haven't had time to unpack.

Thanks.

All right, so, I’m awake. Given that last night I finally beat Halo for the first time and made the mistake of listening to the soundtrack to celebrate- and combined with the fact that I’d had a goodly amount of coffee soda earlier in the day- I was in no condition to sleep when I finally got to bed. Stupid adrenaline. The fact that I’m awake now is a bit of a minor miracle, but I’m up and I’m functional and I’ve been on the job for more than an hour already.

And now, as others have done before us, ( we return to Wolfenstein. )

I have tested the first of two varieties of vegetarian marshmallow fluff in fudge. The Ricemallow kind is vegan and kosher parve and seems to work well although the fudge is a little squishier than I normally like (I like my fudge in nice dry bricks). Sets up okay without the use of a fridge, though. Recipe involves sugar, canned evaporated milk, butter, vanilla extract, the Ricemallow creme, and Ghirardelli chocolate chips. Pretty sure a kosher chip would work just as well, so it's possible to produce a respectable kosher dairy fudge.

Will be testing Toonie Moonie Organic Marshmallow Creme in fudge next chance I get to buy a jar- the site I was gonna get it from keeps selling out. Toonie Moonie is neither vegan nor kosher but it is organic, gluten free, and uses egg whites rather than anything that required actual animal death if that's a criterion for what you're willing to eat.

I will be working on my Wolfenstein review later tonight, possibly alongside my next Rise of the Fallen stuff for milliways_bar. But for now, please enjoy my rendition of The Second Half Of Last Night's Game Of Halo: Combat Evolved, Which Camwyn Is Attempting To Play Through For The First Time Ever.

HOW THE HELL DO I GET OUT OF HERE
SERIOUSLY, MY OBJECTIVE IS ‘ESCAPE!’
OH SHIT I JUST FELL DOWN TO THE LEVEL I WAS TRYING TO BYPASS
HAVE I BEEN THIS WAY YET, I DON’T KNOW
SINCE WHEN DO THE INFECTION FORMS HAVE GUNS
OH GOD I HAVE BEEN THIS WAY ALREADY
WHY CAN’T I JUMP UP ON THE BOX, SERIOUSLY
DAMMIT THERE’S A WHOLE SWARM OF RED DOTS BEHIND ME ON MY RADAR
WOULD IT KILL THEM TO PUT A DESTINATION ARROW ON THE GODDAMN RADAR
OH GOD THE INFECTION FORMS HAVE GRENADES NOW TOO
I DON’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I SAW A SAVE POINT
OH THANK GOD THE ELEVATOR
OH CHRIST THEY FOLLOWED ME ON BOARD
YAY LIVE MARINES
BOO JUNGLE
WTF TELEPO- oh hai 343 Guilty Spark.


... thenk yew.