| Bugs |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|04:32 am] |
Before the pictures you can already see, a little foreword.
Down the street from me resides a Citgo brand Petro-Express. This gas station is of the enormous 20-pump behemoth variety, and is additionally a day-round establishment.
This of course means they must have the most powerful blue-white halogen lights possible to illuminate all of their nice and tidy white concrete.
During the night this has the unexpected side-effect of attracting some of the largest and most beautiful insects I have ever seen, probably because they can see all that light from miles away.
Yesterday night I encountered a three-horned beetle as large as my thumb. I wish I had gotten a picture of it. Now however I think I'll start taking more pictures of the bugs I find down there, seeing as how I think they're really neat.
This first couple is of a wonderful brown moth I found lazing on the photon-rich rock. ALSO: Rolling Rock Beer Bottle Cap included for proportion reference. Otherwise these pictures wouldn't really mean anything.
This last one is the most beautiful, and sadly I only managed to snap one picture of it before the camera's puny batteries failed on me. This is of a higher resolution because I felt it nessicary to more preserve the image quality.
Tomorrow night I shall visit again with a slightly fresher camera.
Other than that, John's been back and it's been wonderful to hang out with him once more. The day before yesterday I came over, we smoked a bowl or two with Scott Whitener of whom I have not seen in quite some while, it was really fun. I didn't know midgrade was capable of giving one a dank-like high like the one I experienced then. John tells me I just don't smoke enough. After that we went to see if Ruptured Moon was open on a Monday and they were not. We did other things between Scott's and Ruptured Moon, but I can't remember exactly what they were. I wonder if John can refresh my memory?
After I saw him I went to work for a couple hours and THEN after that I went to hang out at Kati's house. She had new rollerblades.
The next day I saw John again and we found Ruptured Moon to be closed again as well. I got my very first parking tickets in my life (one for parking facing the wrong way on the wrong side of the road and one for being outside the white parking lines/in the road), each for five dollars. I'll pay the office in person with the tickets, which are now serving as bookmarks in John's copy of Burning Chrome of which I am now reading.
The next day was Kati's birthday. I never actually wished her a happy one, but it was quite obvious that she was having one anyway with or without me. Later in the night I went over to Sid's house, had birthday cake, brought Kati an archive of Jay Naylor and a picture of a younger Me in a suit and bowler hat. She adored it and I have lent it to her so that she may hang it somewhere in her house, as I have hung her picture inside mine. I hope she hasn't neglected it. Sid also has two new kittens, Fig and Sir Isaac Newton, which are, as most kittens are prone to being, superbly cute. They are also very tenacious; little balls of furry white light.
I talked to Alex today and he said that Ruptured Moon was indeed open, some of his friends had been there a few hours previous. Strange.
Anyhow, I think that is it for now. |
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| High Koo |
[Aug. 2nd, 2006|11:22 am] |
Firetruck goes by
Attempting to fight flame
Oh wait just a wreck |
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| Lost and/or Stolen |
[Jul. 28th, 2006|03:08 am] |
So I was wicked tired when my dad got back from Charlotte with Emily today. I gave her a bearhug, my brother exclaimed, "okay you can let go now."
I told my dad I couldn't put my computer together without thermal paste. He told me I should go over to Mike's and ask him for some. I said I was really tired and fell asleep.
My dad went out with Emily to do errands after that, including pick up some contact paste from Mike, our Computer Guy.
He gave him a tiny pocket of it, which is all i really need anyhow.
And then my dad loses it. He lost the paste somewhere, and couldn't find it again. So he went to Best Buy to get some from there (Mike by that point had gone home for the day) but they wanted $11 for an enormous tube of it and didn't sell small amounts. So he said he's going to go to Mike's in the morning and get some more.
Honestly I would have gone myself. But I was at one of those points where even if you say you'll do something, you fall asleep no matter where you are or what you're doing.
When I woke up they had made chicken pie together, Emily and my Dad. It was really neat, but I didn't see much of what was said.
ALSO: my computer's motherboard has a firewire port on it! I bought this motherboard with the intention of having to install a networking card, a sound card, and other things. Instead I overlooked what had pretty much become standard on modern motherboards.
Egads, to think I was working for the longest time with such a 1999 attitude about computers.
Anyway the reason I mention the firewire port is because it would be useful if I wanted to play around with film editing. John and Kenny do too. When we meet we should record everything. I have a camera at the moment that uses DV tapes, but the batteries are fucked and it has none of the things I need like Infrared and an illumination lamp. I think these things are critical to being able to record things, especially when the people described here always have most of their fun in the wee hours under cloak of darkness.
The ability to dump a bunch of video onto my harddrive and edit it sounds like one of the most amazing things ever.
OH SHI-
Thought. Me and Mike, back in middleschool, took my camera and went to fuck around. I think i still have that tape around here somewhere, I should review it and see if it is any good. Maybe with my newfound firewire port I'll find some editing software and try it out. |
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| Composure |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|12:13 pm] |
John says that I must get all the thoughts out of my head and into some medium that can remember for me.
Well personally I have great faith in the ability of my memory to hold on to things, I also think that people remember a whole lot more than they would normally think.
Any idea of mine that I come up with that is neat, I trust myself not to forget it. It's in my head, that's where it's staying, it's not going anywhere. It's not as if memories disappear, like air molecules inside my airbed or air in a car's tires. They stay in there, all that remains is to find out how one could unlock them. |
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| Fuck you AMD |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|11:17 am] |
So my motherboard has just arrived. I have to reseat my ram, cpu, IDE and SATA II. I have to find the right pins to connect those ever-important power and reboot buttons to.
I have to reseat the CPU. I have to reseat the CPU and I have no fucking thermal contact paste. No fucking contact paste.
One must always reapply contact paste lest one has one's CPU blow the fuck up.
I guess I must now wait for my dad to get back from Charlotte with my half-sister Emily so that I might be able to bum money off of him and take the car to Best Buy before it closes down so that I might be able to buy some thermal contact paste for my CPU.
Having my motherboard right now is kind of useless. |
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| USB Plugs, etc. |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|10:35 am] |
I've discovered that the way the USB plug and the port it plugs into are of really pathetic and stupid design. It's slot-shaped, and that means that if you're fumbling around in the dark trying to plug this shit in blind, you have a 50-50 chance of plugging it in the WRONG way.
This is unacceptable. The design can be more intuitive than that. Make it a V shape, or an S, or of any other design that is not rotationally symmetrical. This way it makes it incredibly easy to plug it in the right way on the first try.
However, even if you DO have a V shaped plug, the problem still arises that you need to line up their shapes in order to have a successful mating. What one would optimally do is use a design that IS rotationally symmetrical the whole way around. For instance, the port that one might plug such a cable into would be funnel-shaped, and the plug one might put into it would be cone-shaped. The two could be designed that they would link into each other using a slight pressure, as if a spring mechanism that grasps a nook or groove on the cone-shaped plug. Some pieces of audio equipment already use this kind of peg-in-hole design, but I feel the same thing could be extended to everything else that involves linking cables into electronics.
In Stand Alone Complex, the plugs that the characters such as Major Kusenagi use to link between com ports on the back of their heads are extremely easy to engage and disengage. Some pieces of the show revolve around the ability to connect a line quickly to some port. |
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| Bublood |
[Jul. 27th, 2006|06:13 am] |
So I have this little bubble of blood that has just popped up out of nowhere on the inside of my cheek. This has happened once before.
My brother has come into my room and stolen a lot of stuff. He stole my roach clip and basically everything else inside my manilla envelope which included my rolling machine and papers. If he returned it to dad I haven't seen anything of it for my dad would put it back in his desk and when I looked it was not there.
My brother has also taken to keeping his bike in his room while he sleeps so that I can't ride it. If I kill him while he sleeps then he won't mind me borrowing it again, now will he?
I was GOING to go riding tonight and listening to music. Sadly neither happened.
My motherboard will be here in a few hours. Hopefully I won't have to reinstall Windows XP and hopefully this motherboard won't be a dud.
My dad today was talking to me about this new vacuum cleaner he saw in a store. Apparently instead of using a dry foam filter it pushes the air it sucks through a tank of water. Meaning no dust to fly into the air, no shit to be disturbed.
I very nearly said to him, "yeah, it operates on the same principle as a bong", but thankfully I didn't. |
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| BMXXX |
[Jul. 24th, 2006|01:52 am] |
It is with a heavy heart that I say I have kind of messed up my new, if tiny, bike.
I set the seat so that it was clamped just one or two inches inside the framework of the bike. Now due to my excessive weight I have bent the actual framework on the bike so that the seat leans back much further than it did before. This makes for uncomfortable riding and I worry about it bending more, although I don't see how it's possible since the structure that buckled has accordioned together.
I've also bent the handlebars inward, but a few bolt turns and it should be good as new. |
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| Monkey Children |
[Jul. 23rd, 2006|07:59 pm] |
I have such a fantastic story blossoming in my mind. It is about a band of monkey-like children, lost in, well, I don't want to say post-apocalyptic, it's beyond that. They're lost in a world devoid of adults and authority, and must make their way being creative with what little relics that are left over from the old world.
That isn't to say there's no one around. There's an antagonist to the story, a dreadful force of technologically advanced soldiers that treat these children as one might treat a hive of roaches encroaching upon their territory. Their weaponry could be likened to the phrase 'excessive overkill'. More on that later.
The children and their ancestors were once humans as they are known today, but they have grown around a concept known as retroactive evolution. That is to say, genes resorting to their more primitive nature in order to further survival. These children climb the broken urban structures with ease as their ancestors once climbed trees.
I don't want to write everything down right now, because my ideas for it are still circulating in my head, as if a rich pudding trying to find coherence in itself. |
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| Fish |
[Jul. 23rd, 2006|10:11 am] |
Every day living in Asheville amongst friends and attending a community college sounds better and better. I like the idea of using a bike as a primary mode of transportation. I like it a lot.
I don't know what John's doing though. I don't know if he'll summer in Hickory for a while like he planned, or if he's just going to move straight to Asheville and avoid Hickory altogether. I don't even know if he wants me living with him, he seems to have his set of roommates for the upcoming year already set up.
I don't know how I'd go about living with vegetarians, though. I hail from a household where bacon is essentially a foodgroup, and I don't know how kindly they'd take to me making their house smell of porkfat.
Maybe I can strike a deal and eat lots of fish instead. Breaded fish fried in bacon grease.
Uh oh. |
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| Asshole |
[Jul. 23rd, 2006|08:19 am] |
I rode over to Sid's house last night, and met this really homosexual person named Vick OR Vic OR Vicky OR Victor OR Victory. For lack of a better word to describe him, cute works best.
Vic slept with Sid up on his bed, and I myself with Kati on the air mattress on the floor below. It was all really fun up until the point that I realised I could not go to sleep when laying next to her. So instead I stayed awake, watching as no-light became dawn. I became weary but could not fall asleep. Kati, she kisses me, rolls over facing away from me, and falls asleep. From this position on her side, she did not move from for hours.
Now, I don't know about you, but when I am attempting to go to sleep I roll around like a pig. There is no end to my tossing, turning, and general limb-melee as I attempt to find the perfect sleeping posture. So. Behave like me and then try to sleep next to someone on an air mattress without moving. It was torturous. It was suffocating, trying to get to sleep and yet still remain curteous and not wake her. She's a third of my weight and I feel as if my struggles would make things rude for her sleep, so there I lay, trying to be as still as possible. It was quite some work.
And then, THEN dear readers, my fucking brother calls me from Rory's house at 7:30 in the fucking morning and demands that I stop sleeping, get on the bike, and ride back home so that I can give the phone to my dad so that he can call him back. This of course was just a roundabout way of having him get dad to give him a ride home, of which he had told him beforehand that he could find by himself. When my father DOES call back, he doesn't answer, and does not answer calls for another half hour.
I guess I should have woken Kati up and explained to her why I wouldn't be there when she did eventually wake up. I feel low for leaving without telling anyone anything. I know I'd want to be woken up if the person I was sleeping with had to leave. I love her but it doesn't show half the time.
I would be riding back to Sid's house now, but soon my brother would be back and he would throw a shitfit if he found his bike missing.
I told him I rode over on that tiny bike I found the other night.
The thing that annoys me the most, most of all, is that I cannot be an asshole to my brother in return for if I do, my dad isn't happy with me about it. Otherwise I couldn't give a fuck about his fucking greedy little world, but I am forced to anyway.
One of these days I shall ride off and never be found again. |
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| A Bike Fit For San Andreas |
[Jul. 22nd, 2006|05:23 am] |
Last night I walked to Food Lion. This being three bells past witching hour, there was nary a soul about. No vehicles or velocipedes to speak of, the lot was utterly left to abandon.
I spied a bicycle in the distance. When I got closer it turned out to be a well-worn and dilapidated BMX-style streetbike. Something a child would ride.
That is to say, that didn't stop me from having fun with it. I was all riding down the hill of the parkinglot using my sandals to slide against the rainy asphalt steering my way.
To sit down on this bike means to have your knees come within a hair's breadth of the handlebars, steering becomes a precision dance of leaning and praying. To pedal while sitting is nearly impossible, one must stand up using the handlebars for leverage and pump their way as if climbing stairs.
The thing that strikes me as fun with this bike is it's raw simplicity: small, lightweight, tough, and with one gear speed. And take my punishment it does!
In other news, I wish to own a handgun for self-defense purposes. According to North Carolina state law, I must be 18 to own a handgun, but I must be 21 to apply for the permit to own/carry one. So it looks as if my time has not yet come. Unless I want to own one illegally, and that is a bag of vipers I do not wish to tarry with.
I have often thought about owning a weapon, and whether it creates more problems than it solves. I don't like them. They are depressing things, their use a mark of things finally having gone bananas. What I like is the fact that it provides me with a last-resort, an option left when all others are nullified. A real defense-against tyranny type thing.
It's not so much the fact that I want to own one so much as I want to know how to use one. I want to know proper safety procedure, I want to know how they work and why they work. Maybe I should find a firing range somewhere.
Also I found my rollerblades today in my brother's closet. He won't be happy that I was in there, but that is easily outweighed by the fact that I had so much fun finally being back on wheels again.
I should take Sid and Kati bowling or to the skatering or something. That's what teenagers are supposed to do for fun, right? |
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| In the FL to the WG |
[Jul. 15th, 2006|01:28 am] |
So Food Lion is no longer open on nights. They close at midnight and open again at 6am. My midnight maltball runs have come to an end.
Or have they?
Walgreen's down the street sells the same maltballs for fifty cents less. I was so ecstatic about it that i bought a box of whoppers, a bag of the walgreen's variety maltball, and some of those milk dudley things. So I didn't exactly spend less money than i would have at Food Lion, but i got more for the penny.
Tonight i wandered over there. A black guy about my age walked out of Walgreen's with some shopping. I had seen him earlier walking in that direction. He said hay and asked me if i had two dollars for him to borrow.
In return i said i didn't and then i asked him if HE had two dollars to let ME borrow. He laughed and held his fist out for me. I made a fist and touched his, and we parted ways.
I don't know why I remark on it, but I walked away feeling like i'd won something. |
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| On The Issue of Not Updating |
[Jun. 10th, 2006|05:17 am] |
I haven't found anything that was worth mentioning. Half the time when i think about writing an update I'm just totally cheered by my life being so utterly boring as to not even be worth mentioning. I think that's a run-on sentence.
Anyhow, this is not to say that I'll update more often, just when something that i feel is worth writing down has happened. |
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| I guess checking the smelly produce dumpster CAN be lucrative. |
[Jun. 10th, 2006|04:28 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Boards of Canada - Satellite Anthem Icarus | ] |
My friends, humble toe-rags, I present you with a sink, full of Pomegranate Juices.
And of course, in my frigde. GET IN MY FRIDGE.
Twelve in all, including the one i just had. Tasty, to say the least. |
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| Mohtah |
[May. 20th, 2006|05:24 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Deep Forest - Radio Belize | ] |
Looking for pot, preferably midgrade. Must be potty trained and will be given a good home.
Why the fuck aren't banks open on Saturday? As if the financial world stops moving when motherfuckers get off at three in the afternoon. I just want to take out ten dollars, but they only hand out twenties at the machine. What kind of bullshit is that?
I bought a copy of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory today. I couldn't torrent it because it has Starforce all over it, and even now I'm hesitant to install it's militant anti-piracy crap. Apparently Starforce keeps a stoop in your registry long after the game it was protecting is gone.
I called Sid and Kati and asked them if they wanted to come, but they didn't. So I went alone. I probably won't see them tomorrow either, and since that's Sunday I'll be waiting until next weekend. Gah.
Well, if they don't want to see me, I don't want to see them. |
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| Fuck RTS |
[May. 17th, 2006|09:40 pm] |
I've come to the conclusion that I can't play an RTS. Any RTS. I fail so miserably and fantastically at trying to play them that I'm just not even going to try playing them again.
BFME2 is uninstalled and all it's 14GB of image files is gone. |
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| Pixars |
[May. 16th, 2006|05:42 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Gorillaz - 19-2000 (Soulchild Remix) | ] |
Pictures of Yours Truly with his new Hair:
The images following this were taken using the macro lenses attached to the camera. They allow me to take pictures of things up close and capture an enormous amount of detail. I don't know if i was doing it right. These pics, however bad, are for Kati to make her feel better.
Foliage
Burned Something My Brother Left Outside
Leafs
Tar, Summoned Forth Using My Pal Sol
My Hand
A Dandylion
Clouds
A Macro Image of My Hair
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| Chips |
[May. 16th, 2006|03:45 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | The Dust Brothers - Chemical Burn | ] |
Yesterday I cut my hair. I was at work chugging along and my hair started to get in my eyes. So i grabbed the leather shears oft the table and went outside and cut away the bits that were bothering me. The end result is a hairstyle that is muchly uneven and vaguely Krameresque. I'll put up photos later.
I was really angry yesterday. At that point I hadn't smoked in about a week, and things were grating on me. The machine wasn't working well (the newmade clip would keep getting caught under the feed) and I ended up in a blind rage beating my hands against the die-cast metal. They're kinda bruised.
Anyway after work I went to take Alex to HIS work (trucking boxes at McDonald's) and he gave me a candle-tin full of half-burnt midgrade shake. It actually worked surprisingly well, I should thank him when I get the chance. It did wonders to assuage my irritation and anger with stuff, and even today I'm still feeling pretty good.
He called later on and told me that when he went to work he had to do all the trucking by himself. Figures he quoted were like 2300 pounds of french fries, one ton of hamburger patties, one ton of hashbrowns and breakfast crap...
Basically they go through a lot of food and McDonald's.
Anyhow I keep trying to get good at BFMEII and keep failing, the person i play against is lightyears ahead of me.
Alex is promising me an eighth of hydro for 25 bucks tomorrow, I'll believe it when I see it. |
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| QUAKE |
[May. 12th, 2006|05:33 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Les Jumeaux - Miracle Road | ] |
I am quite literally in such a frenzy over Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that I barely have any time to play my normal favorites.
The reason why I am so excited about this game is because they're doing everything right. The problem with having asymmetrical forces duking it out in combat is always a balancing problem. How does one make it so that all the completely different factors of both teams equal in might, even with both professional and amateur players playing together?
E3 is going on right now and the gents over at PlanetQuake have put together a high-res Shaky-Cam recording of what the actual gameplay looks like. One may find it here or on the paged linked above.
The player movement, sprinting, viewbob, and even the placeholder icons they used in the demonstration strongly smecked of the original WolfET, which I took as a pleasant surprise.
Gee golly, it's hilarious how Beefybong gets online and we circle-jerk in Ventrilo talking about ETQW. It's sad. We should be playing Battle For Middle Earth II or something.
My friends online are people I rarely talk to anyone about besides my other online friends, but I feel compelled to talk about them. Arguably I spend more time with these people online than I do with my friends in real life. The reason is because we all leave Ventrilo active and connected to our hangout server. Thusly it is not unusual for me to end up spending twelve hours at a time talking with these people, playing games. The people I know best, two brothers who live near Montreal, are known only to me by the names Beefybong and Cheesybong. I've spent hundreds of hours playing Natural Selection with them, and they are considered amongst my closest, if retarded, friends.
I wonder if it should be strange that I know neither their names in real life or even what they look like.
Anyhow most recently things have been chugging along, not much to report. I work occasionally (I'm a lazy fucker), and have been spending time with Sid and Kati the most. Things with them are fantastically good at the moment. I like where we're going with this. |
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