| The Lepidopterist |
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| 11:04pm 27/08/2009 |
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So to day I met a girl She recited poetry at me. It made me realize that I hadn't written anything in a while. So, uh, here goes, I guess.
I sit on the fire escape, and eat strawberries while downtown burns. The riots have been raging for nearly three months, and noone seems to be sure what set them off. I've heard the gossip of course. Some politician kicked a homeless child of ethnic descent. Some sort of flash mob prank blossomed into arson and violence. Jupiter was in the fifth house of some forgotten constellation with no name. The Antichrist did it. Jews did it. White Supremacists did it.
I did it.
Noone knows that, of course. But it's true. I made them start it. I made those kids fight with the police officer. I made him shoot one in cold blood. I made the two hundred or so witnesses react with more anger than fear. Me.
I absentmindedly gnaw on one of the berries. a little pulp and juice dribbles off my chin, falls between my legs, and drips into the alley below. I listen to the sound of gunfire and sirens.
See, people are easy. You don't even need to pull the strings hard. And the strings are everywhere. You've heard the thing about the butterfly in China, right? All you have to know is which butterfly to frighten, and you can wipe out a city halfway around the globe. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Butterflies rarely effect anything, practically speaking.
My phone rings. Caleb again. He's worried about me. He lives out in the burbs. He can see the smoke. Everyone can see the smoke. They all think the city is lost. I tell him it is. I tell him it was always lost. He laughs, a sad little worried laugh. He asks me to promise that I'll call him to give him 'status updates'. I tell him I love him, and that I'll see him this weekend.
What I am now, I call myself a lepidopterist. If I get much better at this, I'll call myself The Lepidopterist. People may well refer to me as a super-villain. Perhaps a hero will arise to stop me. Then I'll seduce him, and just as we'd be about to consummate our new-found love, a car thrown by a freak accident across town will smash through his bedroom wall, and kill him on impact.
More likely, noone will notice the girl in the Frankenstein-style labcoat with the Butterfly net, because she couldn't possibly be doing all these things, could she? Clearly she's just lost her mind as a result of all the terrible things happening.
I'm out of strawberries now. I lick the juice from my fingers, wipe my chin, and sit in the cool evening breeze.
That's about all I'm capable of right now, and I don't even especially like it. I'm fucking exhausted |
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| When you see it... |
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| 01:59am 27/08/2009 |
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1. Google in new tab.
2. Do a search for alpha-tsentr.
3. Shit bricks.
What is this? See the timestamp? That timestamp says RIGHT NOW. I had to pull a mild hack to see it more than once, but when I did? Different. If I've got to hack it to see it more than once, why is it different? This merits investigation. there's a fair amount of stuff this hooks up to, I'll leave it to you to discover.
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| Slow Money, But faster than playing games. |
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| 10:11pm 24/07/2009 |
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OK, so I've just discovered this site. It's called Prize Rebel.
Basically, it's another one of those sites that offers you various prizes for completing various surveys and offers. BUT! The differences here are what's important.
First off, The site has it's offers separated by what method, if any is used to pay for the thingumy. There are 31 pages at the moment of free thingumies, which is well over 200, and they add and remove them on a regular basis. Each one has a range of point values, which you save up for stuff.
The standard rewards they have listed on their site are aimed primarily towards children. There are game-cash cards for various online games, video game hardware, music, toys, giftcards for Target and Best Buy, and so on. But if there's nothing you like, you can fill out a custom prize request, and they'll get you fecking ANYTHING, so long as you have amassed the points to get the thing.
What's more, unlike every other service of the sort I've ever looked at, they tell you exactly what you have to do on any of the surveys or whatever in order to make it count, so you can do the bare minimum.
So, for 300 points, you can get a PS3, and sell it on craigslist, and get paid for a week's worth of work. In today's economy, the sales might not go as fast as you'd like, but it's better than the nothing I'd be getting otherwise.
Anyways, give it a shot, see how long it takes you to earn, like, 10 points. look at the cost of a Nintendo DS. Realize that it's only a few hours work away. Then dance. Because this is actually pretty awesome.
HERE'S THE LINK
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| Nothing to see here |
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| 03:28am 09/07/2009 |
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Move along.
OK, this is so's I can DL a sound clip that I need to solve a puzzle. gotta make a link, this is the easiest way to do it. Not useful to you, but that's OK. I use this for what I use it for. |
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| whee! |
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| 02:39am 21/06/2009 |
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this post brought to you by my spiff new PDA!
That is all. |
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| Kids. What do they do? |
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| 04:21pm 03/06/2009 |
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Get hit by buses, apparently.
Kids Get Hit by Buses is an Everett chiptunes band. They have one of the most fun stage shows I've ever seen, and are two of the most socially awkward-seeming musicians ever.
Also, they have a song called "Ed Wood"
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| Let's talk about what words mean, shall we? |
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| 05:05pm 29/05/2009 |
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OK kids. Sit for a moment, and listen.
There are a few pieces of speech that you seem not to understand, and maybe it's just that no-one ever explained them to you, right? It could be that you're not collectively a bunch of dim-witted troglodytes. It could be that the problem is not the steady dumbing-down of the human race. Maybe it's not stupidity. Maybe it's ignorance. Let's try to fix that, shall we?
First off, "addicting" is not an adjective. It is a verb. Stop trying to use it as an adjective, because it makes you sound like a retard. Let's examine some proper usages of "addicting" and the word you most likely should be using, "addictive" :
"I am in the process of addicting my girlfriend to crack cocaine, so that the bitch won't leave me."
"I am utilizing the addictive properties of crack cocaine to make her my ho."
In short, because "addicting" is a verb, nothing can be inherently addicting. Understand? Things may be addictive, or they can be addicting something to something else. The next time someone tells you that a game is addicting, ask them what it is addicting to who.
Second lesson for the day is a bit of modern slang: Easter egg.
An Easter egg is something small hidden within something else interactive, such as a video game or DVD, which is of little value beyond mild entertainment, and perhaps a small feeling of accomplishment for having found it. An Easter egg is NOT:
* a piece of referential humor, no matter how oblique, which is just. Sitting. There.
* a way in which the environment in a game behaves which you happen to find amusing.
* necessarily funny
please, if you're planning on putting together a list of Easter eggs for some piece of media, make sure that they are in fact Easter eggs, and not just jokes. Not every Easter egg is a joke. But more importantly, not every joke is an Easter egg.
Final lesson for the day is one for the kids. "Scene" people. Look: it's not OK to appropriate a subculture's name. You can't take the name for a group of people, and call a completely different group of people the same thing. Now, unlike our other lessons, I don't expect this one to sink in. In the case of scenesters, the damage is done, and I get that there's nothing we can do about it. But next time a bunch of you decide to try out some horrendous new fashion trend, simultaneously listening to the newest bullshit music, try to come up with a name for your group of tasteless fuckwits that wasn't already used by another group of tasteless fuckwits, OK?
I mean, It's clear I don't like either group of scenesters. So it's not as if I care all that much, but it causes difficulty in conversation with the few people of your generation I actually like.
OK, you've sat and had your lesson, now, do me a favor, take what you've learned, and DDoS www.addictinggames.com, OK? I mean, seriously. Do it. |
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| Update... and LINKS! |
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| 09:53am 27/05/2009 |
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OK, After getting to Washington, things have been a fair bit better.
I've still not found work, which is getting to be sort of worrisome. And if I'm being honest, I've not been making the absolute best use of my time in that regard. Evidence? I pirated WoW (World of Warcraft, for those of you who aren't close friends with the internet.) and started playing it. Sort of. I mean, not really. I've got a level 10 character, and I'm already losing momentum.
What Wow did for me, mostly, is reawaken my yen for quality machinima. If you're not familiar with that term, then I don't blame you. It's an art form with a fairly hefty limitation, and by and large, no mainstream recognition. Machinima is films made using footage from video games. Mostly, this is done with multiplayer games, using one player as the "camera," but other iterations are possible, especially when the games in question are things like The Sims, which have embraced the art form so thouroughly that a recent episode of nationally aired television show was shot entirely in The Sims 3.
Want a good example of machinima? Try the first real big one, Red Vs. Blue, made with Halo, and later, with Halo 2. Probobly it's now made with Halo 67, but I don't really pay attention to that franchise.
So anyways, I'm poking around the WoW machinima community sites, and somehow, I end up linking to this song, entitled "The Device Has Been Modified," by Victims of Science. ( . )
TDHBM is a musical remix of GLaDOS's clips from Portal. It's not timely, I know. We were all over Portal a year ago, but now? It's, you know, in the past, right? Well, no. It's not. It's installed on this computer. And it's installed on damned near every computer I've had more than two hours contact with in the past couple of years. And it's worth remembering, and revisiting. And besides all of that, what we're really talking about here isn't Portal, damn it, it's art (not that Portal isn't art, I mean, it's art, with turrets even, but not the art we're technically talking about).
Wondering why no instance of the name of the song is a link? That's because of the aforementioned machinima. Some brilliant person hacked the ASHPD (Aperture Science Hand-held Portal Device) into WoW, as well as a pirate hat with the Aperture Science logo on it, and made a kickass video. This makes for two awesome songs associated with Portal (did you think it was three songs? well, you were wrong. The secret one hidden in the sound files and never played during the game doesn't count). Victims of Science seem not to have much in the way of web presence, unlike Mr. Jonathan Coulton, who wrote the aforementioned other kickass song, along with about thirty million non-Portal-related kickass songs.
I'm not feeling like a graceful end to this post. So perhaps I'll end it with this: link, bitches.
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| 08:48pm 24/04/2009 |
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My pervious emo bullshit has been made private. That is all. |
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| Eviction! |
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| 06:08pm 18/02/2009 |
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OK, So al lot of you already know this and all, but eviction procedings have occured. There was a minute there where we thought we were going to be out on our asses the day of the procedings, because apparently they can do that in Chicago, but we've actually yet to be removed.
Actually, we've yet to hear anything about it beyond the original court order to appear (or not. It wasn't so much an order to appear as notice that a hearing was going to take place, and if we had a coupla hundred extra bucks lying around, that we could show up if we wanted to). No word at all from either the building owner or her drunken ape. So I don't know what the hell is going on. I guess we're supposed to have a notice of eviction posted on the front door at some point. But I'm not really sure about any of this anymore.
Dad was going to be shipping us "home" to Washington, but then he lost his job. I've not been able to get a hold of him since. 95% of our stuff lives at his place now.
Of course, what I'm really worried about is the cats. Does anyon want two of the most wonderful animals on Earth? Not forever, mind you, just until things get straightened out in Washington or whereever. They're like my children, except very few people claim to be allergic to kids, and most places don't require a deposit if you have kids, and also they eat kibble.
I suppose kids could eat kibble. I tried it once, but I didn't like it very much. I suspect that cats don't mind it because they don't know any better. Every once in a while I feel guilty for keeping them in the dark about the whole "real food" thing, but frankly, real food is expensive.
So yeah, to sum up:
* I'm nnsure about what the hell is going on with ANY STEP of us losing our apartment.
* I need someone to volunteer to take care of our assertively cuddly cats.
* Kibble does not taste good, and it may be mildly unfair to feed it to animals.
That is all |
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| OK, So here's the update |
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| 02:43pm 20/01/2009 |
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Life sucks. I haven't been able to pay rent since I moved here, away from a job, like a complete moron, simply because someone who turned out to be utter dead weight insisted it was "now or never"
Worse yet, since November, even my the eminantly hirable Sarah has been unable to find employment.
We're heading into what could very well be another Great Depression.
I'm leaving this library, and heading off to a US Air Force Recruiting office. That's the deal.
In the last Great Depression, people joined the military in droves, because it was a reliable and hiring employer, and one of the only ones. This WILL happen again, and I plan to get there before they stop bribing quite so effectively.
Let's be honest here. I have a shitty employment history. I've never worked anywhere on paper for more than six months. and it's becoming clearer and clearer that noone wants me to work for them. I'm going to die poor and alone if I don't do this.
That is all. |
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| Great Idea |
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| 08:50am 26/11/2008 |
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OK, Fuck it, how about we just be honest, and clump November and December into one month, call it "Christmas" and put up with the fact that I'm going to KILL YOU ALL. |
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| Stuff I've had. |
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| 12:30am 25/11/2008 |
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I had a full-on mental dissolution over the weekend. Breakdown style.
That's not important.
I just had a peanut butter and onion sandwich. Because someone in a book ate one, and I wondered. Turns out that my whole life while everyone else was enjoying two-ingredient peanut butter and something sandwiches, and I was wondering just what the big thing about peanut butter was when it was just so flat and sticky...
Well, Onions. Damn.
I never would have expected this, and now it's happened, and I'm half not convinced it did.
Now that's important.
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| Stuff and junk |
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| 07:34pm 28/10/2008 |
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OK, so our computer imploded recently.
I was a couple weeks without computer or internet.
Now I'm back. I posted three reviews yesterday (one lacks something... probably integrity, or something. I need to rewrite it.) And today secured hosting so's I can put it on it's own domain, because, let's face it: Blogspot is never going to do wonders for my search engine results, and besides that, I just found out it's entirely incompatible with the second of teh two ad services I want to use. I'm also working on securing a web designer, since I haven't screwed around with HTML since way back when we only had Web 1.0.
So, I'm thinking the current title, "Hasty Plays Games" is sort of bleh. Only problem is, I can't think of anything better. Maybe I will have after I've gotten some sleep, but as of right now, I'm open to suggestions.
Oh, also, the wonderful City of Chicago is going to steal my car sometime in the next couple of days. It was almost dead anyways, but it's going to be hell going into winter without an automobile.
I'm considering stripping it for parts, and selling the parts. The city can have the hollowed out husk. With the one tire they attached that damned boot to. Seriously. what gives them the right to seize private property in just this one case? |
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| For my Birthday |
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| 07:46pm 15/10/2008 |
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All I really want is for you to go to my professional blog, and click on the google ads found therein.
Maybe you could tell your friends about it. Get them to click some ads. Perhaps you could even post a link to it in your LJ? Ask your friends with LJs to do the same?
I work hard on the reviews found therein. Alongside the one to two hours I take to compose a review and post significant links, Each review has hours of gameplay associated with it, often detracting from time I'd actually rather be spending doing something else (admittedly, that "something else" is usually playing a different, previously reviewed game, but hey).
Thing of it is, none of this will cost you, or anyone else (apart from advertisers) any money, and I'll get the satisfaction of knowing that I've become just a little more successful at something I'm really honestly working hard at.
Did you miss the link to my blog up there? Here it is again.
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iaminyourhead's journal
