Shelly’s new ‘do:
Apologies to you poor souls surfing at work who can’t see these images; my Web site is blocked by CyberSitter, SurfPatrol, and Novell Border Patrol…
Check out the hot goth chick!
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Tag Archives: pictures
It happened last Thursday…
So there I am, in my office, when suddenly I hear this godawful loud “BANG!” and the entire building shakes. It feels like the building’s been hit by a lightning bolt or a bomb’s gone off or something. I stick my head out the door, look around, don’t see anything, and go back to work.
Ten minutes later, i hear noise outside, I stick my head out the door again, and see this:
World of Warcraft Madness!
World of Warcraft is actually quite a lovely game. Blizzard has done a good job with the “look” of the game, not trying for photorealism but not cartoony either. These images (rather old; my character is significantly higher level now) come from a low-end video card without advanced texture or shader support; on a higher-end system, the visuals are even better.
I love the atmospherics; the environments they’ve created are both exceptionally diverse and quite pleasing to look at.
Relaxing with friends, and big giant space bugs…
Shelly and I spent part of the weekend last weekend with phyrra and nihilus, with Shelly and phyrra doing girl stuff while nihilus and I geeking out on laptops. The girl stuff involved hair dye, with very cool results:
Afterward, they subjected us to many hours of the TV series LEXX, which is, if you’re not familiar with it, a show about a sex slave, a dweeb, and a dead guy as they journey through the universe on a gigantic bug-like living spaceship that destroys planets and eats people. It features lots of brains and body parts, people being sawn in half, and the most gratuitous shower scenes outside of anime. I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the show.
Noted without comment.
The beach, Georgia, and urban decay Florida style
A couple days ago, Shelly and I went to the beach, and admired the sun setting over Clearwater’s urban decay. It was quite lovely (the urban decay, that is; Florida sunsets are always lovely), and the beach was utterly abandoned save for us.
My client–the electronics firm that wants to hire me and send me up to Atlanta–received notification last week that their venture capital funds had been transferred from the overseas VC group, so the move is on. Some of the principals of the company have been in Atlanta for the past several days, getting ready to sign the lease on the research and manufacturing facility they’ll be moving into; the place is nothing short of amazinf, a 33,000 square-foot, brand-new facility that’s completely gorgeous. Shelly’s been apartment hunting all week; we’re in the process of narrowing down the likely places to live, and we’ll be taking a trip up there in a couple of weeks to check out the places on the short list. phyrra and nihilus have volunteered to accompany us and help us look, which rocks.
On the one hand, not owning my own business is going to take some adjusting. on the other hand, the potential exists to make an absolutely obscene amount of money, and one of my contacts at another client (a large nationwide retail chain) is relocating to the client’s corporate office in Atlanta, so I’ll likely be continuing to work with him; since I’ll still have clients of my own in Atlanta, working for a startup is not as risky as it could be.
We’ve been spending a great deal of time with nihilus and phyrra lately, and not all of it has been playing World of Warcraft. 🙂 Spending the night at their house last night was absolutely delightful, and I’m really looking forward to continuing the trend. The friendships Shelly and I have been building with them and with S and her partner M, and the frienships we have with the Smoosh and other people in Tampa, are the most difficult part of leaving here for Atlanta; odds are good we’ll probably still be spending a great deal of time in Tampa even after the move.
Slay me with KY00T!
American culture and the N-word
There is a word a simple two-syllable word starting with the letter “N,” thatcarries with it literally hundreds of years of associations and ideas about the role of a particular subset of people in society. the word carries connotations of race, class, and even social status, and at one time was applied only to a highly specific group of people.
The N-word word carries cultural connotations in modern American society that are increasingly divorced from its original meaning. The racial and cultural assumptions behind the word are becoming increasingly blurred; nowadays, in some subcultures, people may refer to one another by the N-word even when it’s clear that the word in its most basic meaning does not apply.
That word, of course, is Ninja.
I bring this up because New year’s Eve was the birthday celebration of cyber_wolf_2020 and datan0de, and the theme for the party was–you guessed it–ninjas.
When ninjas go wild, it is a frightening thing. Continue reading
Toward a Unified Understanding of the Human Condition
For thousands of years, scholars, philosophers, artists, and religious teachers have struggled to understand the human condition. Elaborate theories, both moral and pragmatic, have been propounded to explain the bredth and diversiy of the human condition; everything from battling angels and demons to the hidden workings of the id and the superego have been believed to be responsible for the things we feel and the way we understand and interact with the world around us.
All of those ideas are wrong, as I realized while showering this morning. The human condition is varied but bounded, and it took Hollywood to give us a model that explains the diversity of the human experience while also showing us how it’s bounded.
All of life, you see, exists somewhere within the space delineated by the movies Reservoir Dogs, Being John Malcovich, and The Princess Bride.
Each of these three movies represents the extreme outer limit of one aspect of the human condition. All of humanity–all religion, all philosophy, all creation, all expression, all experience–falls somewhere within the space marked off by these three movies.
The human condition is not represented as a three-dimensional spece with each of these movies along one axis, because no part of the human condition can fall at the origin of such a space; that is, nothing within the human experience contains no relevance to any of these three movies. Instead, if some part of the human condition has very little, say, Reservoir Dogs in it, then it follows logically that it must therefore contain a great deal of Being John Malcovich, The Princess Bride, or both, as illustrated below:
The Christmas cat
So. We’re deciding if we want to keep him.
Cons:
– Pet deposit.
– Moving to Atlanta soon.
– Vet bills and other expenses.
– He’s very…talkative.