fine whine

So much for the great website re-do. Today on my wife's whim (hers, not mine!) I picked up a Playstation 2. I'm gambling on the price going down after that big electronics show (E3) and I'll be able to hit up Circuit City or Citibank for the difference. Timing is everything, really.

Timing mattered more for my choice of games. I wanted Madden and Dynasty Warriors, but satisfied with older, familiar versions, I got (and will heartily enjoy) DW3 and Madden 2001, not the recently released DW4 or Madden 2003. I also picked up DW3: Xtreme Legends for twenty bucks, but I want to get my feet wet again with some classic Xiahou Dun and friends before I learn any new wrinkles.

Anyway, I've got to go play. The little red light beckons me closer...

So I'm restyling my website (not the blogs but the main site itself), and I'm trying to do it in pure CSS. CSS, for the uninitiated, is a standard for laying out web pages. The concept and specifications have been around for years but the major browsers are only now really supporting it well. My IE5's no good at it, but it renders okay under mozilla derivatives. For windows, I heartily suggest using k-meleon. It's fast, free and rather quite standards-compliant.

A bone of contention many people have with me is that I am rather unwilling to declare favorites. I have no favorite ice cream, movie, color, or sports team. Ranking never was a strong point for my opinions. However, today I was struck with the realization that I do indeed have one favorite: My favorite pair of jeans is my beat-up Levi's 579s. So there, I picked one.

Oh and I'm restyling my main site. Seeing as I haven't really changed it in the last two years.

I know that coincidences happen completely by chance, but that doesn't make them seem less remarkable. I just finished watching the Director's cut DVD of Requiem for a dream, which was written by Hubert Selby, Jr. This may not seem like a big deal to you, and some probably already knew that fact.

The significance is a little more to me, though, since I just checked out The Room, also by said Hubert Selby, Jr., from my local library, based on a 'recommendation' from Andy Kaufman. You see, in the book Is this man a genius? by Julie Hecht, the intrepid author gets Andy to reveal his favorite book, The Demon, again by said Hubert Selby, Jr. The library didn't have The Demon, so I grabbed the first one they had. I haven't read it yet, but after the movie I think I'll read it sooner.

The movie's quite good as well. It's not a light watch, and in fact I had to throw in some Benny Hill just to recover—which is where this entry's title originated, as graffiti on a wall. Somehow it seemed fitting.

Anyway, I wanted to blog the link for Amoeba Proteus, the computer graphics company (director) Darren Aronofsky co-founded for his films' effects. Requiem had a hundred digital shots, and they didn't want to outsource. Their technical prowess in film should speak for itself, since their website certainly doesn't. Effectively three whole pages (including a Quicktime demo reel), the site offers very little in the way of information about their projects and accomplishments, other than their titles and brief mention of an upcoming animated feature. Not quite ketchup fodder, in my opinion. I found more interesting information in this indiewire interview.

Not that I know anything about dry ice or fog machines, but an idea occurred to me and I think it's pretty cool. What if cars were equipped not only with air conditioning but a hopped-up fog generator, such that the whole cabin would be cooled and the floor to about knee level would be fog? I assume that, given condensation and density, etc, fake fog is cooler than regular air, and would thus create a comfortable environment. Also, what would be niftier than opening up the door after a long drive and having the fog lazily gush out onto the pavement?

And in other news, in some form of guerilla action at work, today I printed off a bootleg barcode to replace one that was unreadable, which the powers that be had difficulty replacing. What would that be considered, sabotage or thinking-out-of-the-box? Or something in between? I'm guessing it probably went against some policy or other.

Also, NPR did a story this morning about Desert Combat (previously mentioned mod for Battlefield 1942). A week ago I'd never of it, and now NPR even talks about the game. Go figure.

So I haven't updated this blog or ketchup for three days. I have prepared a number of excuses to explain this horrible horrible tragedy.

First of all, the keyboard on my laptop (which is my main connection to the internet) has been quitting on me lately after a randomly determined time. All of a sudden I'll just be down to my trackball, since the touchpad gave out long ago, and though I may be relatively proficient in the use of the On-Screen Keyboard, I'm not a fan of typing sentences with it, let alone whole blog entries.

Also, I've been busy. The center stickers on my cheap wheels fell off, and I had to pick up replacement ones. I've got a bigger-than-usual backlog of library books to deal with. My VCR's not working right, and I'm not yet willing to take it apart.

Most recently, though, I've had other things to do. Today and yesterday I was involved in a LAN party, which was quite fun. We mainly played EA's Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod. So basically it was a bunch of geeks playing soldier in the first Gulf conflict.

It was a lot more fun than I had expected. I'm not a big first-person shooter fan, and BF1942 is, at its core, a FPS. Yes, tanks can be driven and planes flown, but there is still an inordinate amount of running and crawling to be done. It's not going to replace GTA3 anytime soon on my system (particularly since I don't have a good enough system to run it) but I'd definitely play it again.

Anyway, part of the fun was coming up with intriguing nicknames. At times the server was filled with sophomoric anatomical taunting, childish name calling, and worse. For my part, I tried to be clever, striking gold with a one-two punch of "BugblatterBeastOfTraal" (which surprisingly few 'got') and its followup "TraalThePrettyHorseshit" (which was timed precisely to when my team was complaining). Another nerdy reference was "Set Me Up The Bomb". Better, and less geeky than those, was my apt description of my gaming skills and a play on words: "an army of one half".

That said, I'm catching myself back up. You have been warned.