It seems ridiculous to me that Bush can get away with even trying to resurrect the phrase “compassionate conservative” – after the last four years, unless he’s talking about his compassion for big business, he should be laughed straight out of town. Of course, our idiotic, complacent, braindead media will let him get away with it, just like they’re not going to bother to comment on the mockery the RNC has made of veterans with their little purple heart band-aids. It’s pathetic. How one single group of people can be so consistently sub-human is totally beyond me.

Orange pie piece, some random crap, Blue pie piece, straight to the center, “Sports” question = “what add-on to The Sims lets…”

That sequence let me beat the ever-loving crap out of Ei-Nyung in Trivial Pursuit tonight. (20th Anniversary Ed.)

Oh yeah!

Music I’ve been listening to recently:

Area 5/from the Rez soundtrack (PS2/DC game) – my favorite piece of music from a game that was full of pretty incredible music. I’ve played through Rez probably 25-30 times all the way through. Sure, it’s a relatively short game, and can probably be beaten in under an hour, but it’s a great experience, and this particular piece of music is set to a level that’s an abstract summation of the process of evolution. A great piece of synaethasia, which is basically what the designer was aiming for – a complete audio-visual-tactile experience. Great stuff.

Such Great Heights/The Postal Service – Reminds me in some sense of New Order, which is sort of weird. This particular song has some *fantastic* lyrics, and is apparently available for download from the band’s website. Google it, I’m sure it’s easy to find, and worth the time it’ll take.

Don’t Mug Yourself/The Streets – UK hip hop. This is from Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner’s first album – but it’s his best song to date, and OPM’s much better than A Grand Don’t Come for Free, which is a bit too high-concept at the expense of the music. A Grand… has a couple excellent songs, like the one about the breakup of his relationship – can’t remember the name – but OPM has a lot of really good, laid back sort of day-to-day hip hop. Guy’s got a really wacky, off-kilter and apparently sloppy delivery that works really well with the garage feel of the music.

The Last Straw/The Flobots – maybe it’s on flobots.com, I don’t know. If it is, grab it. I’m amazed I know one of the guys in the band (housemate in college) – this song in particular is fucking fantastic, but they have another one, Simulacra, I like almost as well.

American Idiot/Green Day – I thought these guys forgot how to rock out, but I was clearly wrong. A great little bit of protest-y rock, and it’s classic Green Day. I was swimming at some point last year with my old housemate, and he knows Tre, the drummer for Green Day. We ended up swimming in his lane, which was really weird. Apparently recovering from some injury or another. It was weird. Middle of the day, and he’s there, kicking with big fucking gold Elvis glasses on. Gotta love it.

Inner Universe/ Origa/Yoko Kanno – the theme to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. A weird mix of Russian/Latin/English, but it works really well. Show’s worth watching, too, if you like Shirow Masamune’s somewhat unconventional style of storytelling. The animation’s really well done, and the writing is *very* similar to the Ghost in the Shell comic book – NOT the movie, which I found to be overly pretentious and dull, despite being quite beautiful.

Right.

Weird thought about this blog. I tend to blog proportionally to the level of immediate contact I have with people. If I talk to a lot of people in a given weekend, or something, I tend to have much less desire to write. But it’s sort of strange, in the sense that I’m not explicitly talking *to* anyone when I write stuff here. Every once in a while, someone will leave a comment, but I think there’s probably maybe five or six people at the most who even know this page exists. So it’s a little strange. Like talking to a wall, except periodically, for some strange reason, the wall talks back.

“I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment. Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes.” – George Bush, 1990

Now, say what you will about whether you think Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard by having his family pull strings. That’s really tangential to the point here. Bush touts his TANG service as essentially equivalent to Kerry’s Vietnam service, and says basically that he volunteered, but they weren’t accepting pilots of his type of aircraft, or some other crap. But look at that quote. Read it. He says he wasn’t willing to shoot out his eardrum. He wasn’t willing to move to Canada. So, instead, he went to the TANG. Does this sound like he was willing to go to Vietnam, and TANG was how he could go? No. It sounds like he absolutely did not want to go, nor was he willing to go. But unable to mutilate himself willingly, or unwilling to even move to Canada, he ended up at the Air National Guard. I’m not saying I would want to go to war – you’re damn well sure I don’t, and I’d move to Canada in a heartbeat if I was ever drafted. Hell, I’d move if a draft was even instituted, much less if I was personally drafted. But the point is that Bush touts this as honorable service, of similar quality to Kerry going to Vietnam.

Read the quote again, and tell me if you think that’s so.

Every day George W. Bush is President is a day that could be better.

If it were up to me, I’d throw the bum out of the White House with my bare hands, and dump him in the middle of Iraq with a can of Coke and a pointy stick. Hell, if he’s too scared to go before a committee without Cheney, I’ll even give him Cheney, as well. Maybe give Cheney a pointy stick, too. But they’ll have to share the can of Coke. I wonder how long they’d last? Maybe they’d be smart about it, and poke each other to death before the Iraqis realize who they are. I kinda doubt it, though. Cheney might be smart enough to realize what would happen, but I suspect Bush still thinks he’d be greeted as a hero.

Finished watching Firefly. I have a hard time imagining what was going through the Fox exec’s minds when they decided to run this show completely out of order, not show the pilot first, etc. So much of the quality of the show comes from watching the characterizations, that showing the episodes out of order would be like watching Babylon 5 backwards. It’s just totally pointless, and for a show like this, essentially the kiss of death. But it sounds pretty much like Fox fucked them from the start, so I’m glad that a different company (Universal?) picked up the rights to the movie. I hope Joss Whedon can get the rights to at least move the show to a network that isn’t going to tank them without giving the show a fair chance.

There are a few things that I almost implore people to see, or in the case of games, to play:

Anime: Cowboy Bebop

TV: Firefly

Movies: Equilibrium

Games: Ico, Gitaroo-Man, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Rez (PS2, PS2, PS2/xbox/GC/PC, and DC/PS2, respectively)

In most cases, they’re things that may not explictly be the *best* of their genre, but they’re things I really, really enjoyed, or thought were particularly interesting, and uniformly overlooked (except maybe Bebop, which has had pretty good commercial success).

So… yeah. What are you waiting for? If you haven’t seen Firefly – go get it. The show potentially has a future. There’s a movie coming out April 2005, called “Serenity” – if it hits a critical mass, someone will pick up the show – Sci-Fi, Universal, who knows. At the very least, they make a series of movies.

Right. Now go.

http://www.asofterworld.com – very much like http://www.explodingdog.com but with a different aesthetic sensibility. Ok, so they’re almost completely different, but have very similar styles of humor. I particularly liked http://www.asofterworld.com/ducks.jpg

10:25pm. Stuck around for the alpha build. Glad I did – ended up fixing two crash bugs at basically the very last minute, and someone else’s bug who was OOO for a few hours, speeding stuff up considerably. Good deal. Long day, but worth it.

So… yeah. Mobius broke his right dew claw tonight. Came in through the door with a bloody foot, and what looks like a finger bent out of position. Sort of figured it was like breaking a nail (not like, breaking a nail. Like, hitting your thumb with a hammer), but decided it’d be best to go to the vet anyway. $150 later, the vet had pulled out the broken claw, and wrapped up his foot. More or less what I expected, but I’m glad it was looked at by a pro, and not say, us with a Leatherman. Not that I’d have done that to the dog.

But yeah. All’s well, I suppose. This dog definitely adds a sense of adventure to our lives, every so often. Heh.

 

It’s sort of strange – I seem to be known as the “angry guy,” and that doesn’t really bother me, but it is sort of strange – I don’t find myself angry most of the time, I just tend to speak somewhat in hyperbole. Whatever.

But I did realize, a few minutes ago, looking at a friend’s LiveJournal, that there are very distinct groups of people that generally, I really can’t stand. One such group are MIT nerds. And I’m not talking smart, interesting people who like D&D and such – what the tradtional “nerd” might be – I’m talking MIT twinkie fucks. And they’re a distinct social category. Their mating call is something on the order of “LOOK HOW WEIRD I AM!!!”

It involves largely saying that their lives are more fucked up than yours, that you couldn’t possibly understand their worldview, then either cuddling with everyone, or shunning them and wallowing in some misery they’ve managed to come up with. It’s very strange, because it’s a culture in and of itself, from all manner of appearances. And it’s a culture that by and large appears to be founded on one-upsmanship of how badly you’re doing at life. Great. You suck at living. If you suck so bad at it, quit.

But the point being, I guess, I’m actually really glad about my life. I really enjoy the fact that by and large, I don’t have to put up with *anyone* I don’t particularly care for. I’ve got friends I’d take a bullet for, and I’d love to hang out with them. I’m *glad* I don’t live in a house where I have to tolerate “Friends of the House” that I hated. I’m glad I don’t have to listen to whiny assholes bitch about how they’ve been wronged, as they eat a dinner I’ve cooked. It’s *awesome*.

I see this as optimism, quite frankly. Sure, it starts with an intense dislike of a particular group of people, but the end point being I’m really, really fundamentally glad that they can do their thing. Far, far away from me.

Bug Count: 0

Game in PS2: Gran Turismo 3

Game in xbox: Galleon

Game in Gamecube: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles

Book: Jon Stewart: Naked Pictures of Famous People

Most Recently Watched Movie: The Princess Blade (rating: 4/10)

Most Recently Watched TV Show on TV: The Daily Show

Most Recently Watched TV Show on DVD: Firefly

Busy weekend, perhaps. Hard to say. Gotta stay late tonight for support, at work, but other than that, nothing really between here and alpha, except slews of bugs that are yet to come. Whee!