Feeling sorta crappy lately, but notta new there. Everything's sort of plodding along. I went to the game day at the Panera this past Saturday and it was a pretty laid back affair. Nothing all that exciting and I held up pretty well. I think I've really hit on something that helps out a lot. If I just don't sit, I don't have as many inflammation problems. At least that's the way it seems at the moment. It's hard to tell since everything goes in cycles and it's incredibly hard to figure out if things are getting better, worse, or just fluxuating up and down.

I've spent the past few days watching Deadliest Catch. I've caught a buncha episodes here and there but I've never had the oppertunity before to see complete seasons in order. For instance, I never knew that each season covers both King crab and Opilio. I had always figured that it was one or the other. The only thing slowing me down is the rate of the download. It started at a fairly good clip but ever since the third season, it's been inching along at a crawl. It'll likely be at least another day before the files all finish and I can see the last season.

The show's pretty amazing really and it's a pity that they weren't able to capture more of the rally style of the old days. When it was the days of every boat for itself, I'm sure captains made all sorts of sketchy decisions in trying to maximize their gain. No wonder so many people have croaked at this profession. That's not to say there haven't been deaths since they've moved to a quota system, but at least now the captains know they can hide out from a storm or take a break without risking their income. Not that they do much of the latter now, but at least they know that the crab is still theirs, even if it takes a little longer.

It's impossible to watch this show without wishing for a seafood dinner. I'd love a mess of snow crab legs and I don't think I've ever even had king crab. I'm pretty sure I've never even seen a crab in person that's been anywhere near the size of some of the monsters they pull up.

Oh, I made another political icon btw. I chopped bits from the most recent JibJab animation and spliced it together. Not exactly the easiest thing to do working with nothing but MS paint. One of these days, I've really got to learn how to use photoshop.

I haven't been able to find a torrent with the 4th season of Hell's Kitchen so I went to streaming video instead. I made an entry a while back about the new advent of streaming video and how it was the new, hot thing. At the time, the main benefit was that it exploited some anti-piracy laws which say that you have to actually obtain a hardcopy of the work in question for it to be piracy. If a video streams to you and you never actually possess a copy, some felt that it was a good loophole. Not to mention that since they can pipe ads to you that you can't avoid, it's also the medium which the big media companies are most likely to back. I've already seen companies that will sell you copies of tv episodes for a couple of bucks and the site I used to watch the last season of Hell's Kitchen embeds 4-5 unskipable ads per hour-long show.

I spent most of the day watching along and I just finished the season finale and boy, am I pissed. This is the first season of Hell's Kitchen in which the best cook and most experienced individual didn't win. I had commented in the past that I felt the show was too full of fucking talentless donkeys. I almost felt bad for Gordon Ramsay in having to pick from suck a pathetic lot. There was one ridiculous asshole this last season who is supposedly a sous chef cooking for 15 years who couldn't break down a fucking chicken correctly in 5 minutes. Out of the 8 pieces you should get (2 wings, 2 thighs, 2 legs, 2 breasts), this mental retard only managed a score of 2, the wings. Seriously....WTF? Even I can breakdown a chicken better than that and have in the past. These assholes must be absolutely useless deadweight once they're actually employed at one of his restaurants. Still, I figured he at least got to choose from the best of the worse and if nothing else, it was only a 1 year contract and the salary isn't even covered by him so he could always just have them sit in a corner with their thumb up their ass for 365 days until they can be dumped.

That being said, this season Ramsay inexplicably picked Christina. I mean, she's cute and everything and I'd much rather boink her than Petrozza, but it was clear that he was the better and more seasoned chef. I've been wondering if maybe Ramsay didn't pick him because their styles don't match. He's a nice, sensitive guy who doesn't feel comfortable yelling at people and destroying them. Ramsay is like a pitbull who will go for your throat and then take a shit in your mouth after he's done mauling you. It was clear that Christina could be taught to be an aggressive animal, but Petrozza was probably too old and set in his ways to ever become a Gordon Ramsay clone.

I'm also just amazed that people on reality shows don't make more of an effort to cover up their warts. I know you can't wear a mask 24-7, but at least try to self-censor some of the crazy. Jen and Matt were both mentally derranged on the show and it came across clear as day. You can talk about manipulative editing all you want, but these were the words and actions that kept coming out of their mouth. You can always try to mitigate the effects of editing by, well, not saying crazy psychotic shit. I'd love to find out where these two bozos are working and then heckle them at their restaurants.

Welp, it looks like someone over at MGM screwed the pooch again. I just finished watching a fabulous and complete version of Stargate: Continuum, the direct to DVD stargate movie that's not supposed to be out for another 3 weeks and change. Some of you might recall that I also got to see Stargate: The Ark of Truth early though in that case it was almost two months ahead of time but at least consisted of a yet unfinished version which didn't have all the shots and special effects added. Frankly, I wasn't impressed with The Ark of Truth, and I'm happy to report that Continuum does better.

Still, regardless of the script quality, I just don't see how the movie studios keep managing to leak these dvd's before their release dates. Many fans are happy to spend their money to support the series, but you can't expect them to wait when they know they can get their stargate fix now and for nothing to boot. At best, you can only hope that some few people will still buy the dvd after watching the pirated version. I, however, am not one of those people. I just can't see paying for it when I can get it for free. Not to mention that of all the dvd's I have bought in my life, I've only actually watched perhaps 3% of them. I still have bunches of sealed movies sitting around from a decade back. I'm just not one of those people who can usually sit through a movie more than once or who won't obsessively hit the fast forward button given the option. I can usually shrink most movies down to at least half the size by speeding through the boring parts.

Anyway, back to Stargate: Continuum for a moment. It was pretty spiffy for all that it was another time travel schtick. I love time travel episodes but it just seems that they've had too many of them recently. They're fun because you get to change everything and operate outside the box, but they have to be used sparingly. Since the finale to SG1 was also a time travel episode in effect, it just seemed too soon to do another one. I was really hoping for a giant space armada war instead, which is probably my favorite sci-fi trope. Almost all of my favorite episodes from various sci-fi series have been the ones where there are huge space battles like the Klingon attack of DS9 or the entire second half of season 4 of Babylon 5. I just love the idea of flying a space ship into battle and offloading lasers or phasers or quantum torpedoes at the enemy. Given a choice, sometimes I think that I would love to be a fighter pilot more than anything else. A ridiculous sort of dream but I can just imagine the thrill of it all. Besides, if all else fails you can always kamikaze the rat bastards and that sort of appeals to me too.

I joined a private bittorrent tracker a couple days ago and have been downloading audiobooks. It's pretty sad really since I must've had this particular set of books at least 2-3 times now. I used to have a huge collection of audiobooks that would repeatedly get mauled by harddrive crashes. It's only now that I'm trying to actually burn them to dvd in a systematic manner. The sad part is, it's harder and harder to replace what I once had. The only place I found Terry Brooks' The Word and the Void available was on a private tracker and it took me 4-5 days to join it. I was just sitting back, ready to enjoy the fruits of my labor when I realized that the files wouldn't play.

Gone now are the days where everything is a mp3. The damn files were in m4b format, something that iTunes came out with that can only be played on their player and has a DRM built in. Luckily, there are people out there who have hacked that and I'm in the process of trying to convert each file to a usable format. It's not hard now that I have the software needed but it takes forever. Dozens of files and each one will take 5 minutes or so to process. There's no way to schedule them ahead of time so I have to cue up each one as the previous finishes.

Oh well. It's not like I have something more important to do.

So a while back, chelledg recommended a book by Christopher Moore. I had meant to head over to a pyramid books (1/2 price used book place in town) and see if they had a copy but I kept putting it off. I don't venture out much and I wasn't exactly having a good stretch with the whole pain management thing. Instead, I decided to see if there were any of his audiobooks on bittorrent and after a week or so of sporadic connections, managed to snag two of them: You Suck: A Love Story and A Dirty Job: A Novel.

I just started listening to You Suck and it's been fantastic so far. My only regret is that it's the sequel to another book. I usually like to experience books in the order in which they're written. Partly that just makes sense from a story/plot point of view and second, it's always interesting to see how an author develops with time. I'm almost halfway through the audiobook and there's nothing I don't like. The writing is hilarious and the person they found to read the book is fantastic. Abbey Normal's journal entries are just perfect. The basic idea is that a woman, Jodie, is turned into a vampire and attaches herself to a slacker/loser, Tommy, who works at a Safeway with his insane stoner friends. In the first book, they form a vampire fighting squad and proceed to defeat the elder vampire who turned Jodie and in the process completely blow up a yacht and run off with millions of dollars in stolen art. The second book starts right after the first ends when Jodie turns Tommy into a vampire as well. It basically documents his transition and the problems of finding blood and acquiring minions. Toss in a good handful of crazed monkey love and that's been the book so far.

I'm currently bidding on a set of the books being sold on ebay right now. Assuming I win the lot, I'll be able to pick up the remainder on Amazon and they should keep me occupied for a few weeks. The audiobook version has been impressive enough that I'm even thinking about signing up temporarily to Audible just so I can pick up a few more and convert them to MP3's. It doesn't seem popular enough for there to be lots of torrents around. I was pretty lucky to have gotten the two I did.

You know, you'd think that a government counter terrorism unit would run better background checks on their employees. From the very first season it's been mole after mole after mole at CTU. It starts to get a little ridiculous that none of these people seem to be tested and polygraphed on a regular basis. If this show goes on much longer, the only person who'll be left is Jack Bauer. Everyone else will have worked for the terrorists at one point or another and gotten themselves whacked.

On a sidenote, I never thought I'd actually use this icon for anything other than sciency issues.

I'm around 8 episodes short of finishing season 4 right now and season 5 is being bittorrented as I type this. It's unlikely I'm going to get a chance to start it since Ubercon begins on Friday. I've got a full schedule of events to run starting at 4pm and the rest of the con will be pretty packed as well. I'm going to take the Flip Ultra with me, so I'll probably be posting some video of the con at some point. One of the things that always drives me nuts about running games at cons is I absolutely hate having to transport all the games I'm running back and forth. I really need to find some sort of carry device other than stuffing everything into plastic bags and hoping nothing rips. I could really use some sort of hugeass rollycart.

Lastly, I guess I should mention that I went to the DMV today and got a replacement ID. Don't you hate it when you find out you're theonly person who's actually following the rules? I went to the website and it said you needed a notorized statement that your id had been lost. I spent a chunk of time getting that done only to have the lady at the DMV look at me blankly when I gave it to her. Turns out most people just claim they lost it and their word is good enough. Feh. On the plus side, I was in and out of there in 15 minutes. I didn't bother to get the card laminated and just tucked it into the wallet for safe keeping. I'm likely going to need it when I go to traffic court on Tuesday.

So because jirel had been so keen about it, before I left for chicago I had set bitcomet to snag all the episodes of Who Wants to be a Superhero that were avaliable. The first three were waiting for me when I got back from gencon and I picked up a fourth over the past day or two. I finally got around to trying to watch it and I just had to stop and comment not past 5 minutes in.

These are the scariest bunch of addled losers I think I have ever seen. I know it's just the promo clip at the start and no doubt they're cherrypicking scenes, but man is it freaky. The fact that some of them were sobbing during the eliminations and delivering teary apologies for disapointing Stan Lee or referring to him as a father figure is just uber creepy. Already part of me is preparing for a mass-murder/suicide at the end of this whole mess when some nerd gets their dreams of being a superhero stepped on. I seriously hope that in addition to scoring points for the dressup and catchphrase part of the competition, that an in-depth psychological evaluation was also part of the selection process.

Crazy obsessed nerd-geeks aside, it's certainly an interesting show concept. No doubt all the "normals" are deriving much enjoyment from watching the crazies run around in tights while other geeks at home are already stiching together their costumes so they can apply to be on the show for season 2. I can emphathize with this desire to be a superhero, though I was never interested in comic books. I used to have this reoccuring dream/fantasy where I was digging in the back yard as a kid and would find The Sword of Omens from Thundercats.



Alright, if you wankers don't stop laughing right now, I swear to God I'm going to pull this LJ over to the curb and boot all of your asses out.

Holy crap, it looks like some people actually made an actual sword out of The Sword of Omens and are selling it as a collectable on ebay. I almost wonder if I should buy it just to fulfill a childhood dream. Of course, I'm sure this version of it dosen't shoot those laser death-beams and if it dosen't have those, what's the point anyway? The idea of running around shouting 'Ho! Ho!' does have some appeal though.

Erf, that was a hell of a digression. Anyway, I think I'm going to get back to watching the first episode of the show and then finishing up day 2 of the gencon recaps. If I'm feeling particularly industrious, I'll see if I can knock off a chunk of day 3 as well.

---

My freaking god....

Gay guy
Fat comic book guy
Hippie granola nutjob
Delusional Kirk-like stripper
Steroid freak
Bestiality girl
Fat token minority woman (Holy shit! She's got crullers hanging from her belt!!!!!)
98 pound geek weakling
Token hot chick valley girl, will be the first to strip for playboy
Nancy boy with abandonment issues
Token minority man
and finally, a contestant selected from votes on the web. I might have to change my mind and figure that she's the most likely to take it off first. After all, she probaly had to take something off online to get the vote tally she did.

Well, the first 3 eps came off the assembly line and it's pretty sweet. The rest looks like it'll take at least another day and a half or so. What's really amazing is that this show might have had the best pilot episode I've ever seen. The next two were okay, but the pilot was perfect. The characters just pop and the storyline is excellent. Killed by a toilet seat from the spacestation Mir. 'Peanut'. Just fantastic.

Frankly, I can't even remember how much of this series I actually saw when it was on showtime. I remember bits and pieces of specific episodes but nothing really major about an ongoing plot other than the clearasil girl goes poof after the first season and some blonde shows up to take her place.

The only thing sucky about bittorrent is that sometimes you spent a buncha days and huge amounts of bandwidth to snag something that ends up being completely corrupted or unwatchable crap. After jirel mentioned Dead Like Me, I had a nostalgia moment and went to find some episodes. I finally got Season 1 only to find that not only did it not play, but it seemed to only display french subtitles. Since I've got just about every single codec in existance, failure to function probaly means that there's something wrong with the file itself.

I ended up loacting another torrent but it'll take at least 4-5 days to get it all, and that's if people keep seeding.

The 10th season of stargate sg1 and the third season of stargate atlantis have both just started this past friday. WOOWOO! I, of course, missed the episodes because of Dexcon, but thanks to the miracle of bittorrent, they're downloading as I type this. I'm really looking forward to this season, though that's really no surprise. A new galactic threat to face, big space battles, and more Amanda Tapping now that she's popped out the rugrat. What's not to love? The only thing that could be better is if Richard Dean Anderson came back for a full time role instead of just doing cameos.

WooT! Atlantis just finished downloading. The question now becomes whether I should watch it first, or wait till SG1 finishes too so I can see them both back to back. Oh decisions, decisions.....

McKay: "Their operating system is a mess. Good thing I remember DOS."

HAHAHAHA!

Vala: And if she takes after her mother she'll have a pretty good figure too.
Daniel: This is bad.
Vala: You're telling me. Origin is about to become much more appealing to the males of this galaxy.

Hahaha!

Still trucking my way through the Babylon 5 episodes. I find that as I'm watching the series, there are all sorts of interesting little factoids that I missed when I caught the whole thing piecemeal. I've had to pop over to wikipedia or the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 a dozen or so times already just to look up more information.

It turns out that the entire series was conceptualized as a novel at first which explains why it has such a coherant and well-integrated plot. Everything was designed to have a beginning, a middle, and an end instead of just fumbling its way from episode to episode like most serials. There's almost no comparrison to any show I've ever seen. Even all of the various star trek franchises were, at best, planned from season to season, with a bunch of gaps in there for filler episodes or segways into new areas. At times, the person who wrote the season finale was not the same person who wrote the season opener for the next season, nor did they actually communicate. It was simply up to the new guy to take the plot threads that he had been left with and try to weave them into something that wouldn't suck like crazy.

Really though, you can't expect any series based program to plan out multiple-year storylines. It'd simply be too farging expensive as an initial cost. Not to mention it's a huge risk considering just how shaky the success of any tv program is nowadays, forget the fact that it's sci-fi on top of it. Think of how many shows get canceled nowadays afte less than a season on the air, and it's no wonder that studios are usually unwilling to invest that heavily up front.

Anyway, I'm around a third through season 4 at the moment which by my calculations puts me at around 64% of the way through the whole thing. I've been watching the episodes like I expect there's going to be some sort of massive final exam at the end of it. Oh well, I'll leave this with a Lorien quote that I've always liked.

We've lived too long, seen too much. To live on as we have is to leave behind joy and love and companionship because we know it to be transitory, of the moment. We know it will turn to ash. Only those who lives are brief can imagine that love is eternal. You should embrace that remarkable illusion. It may be the greatest gift your race has ever received.

I basically spent around 9 hours today running demos and whatnot. First at Little Shop of Comics which had their first ever game day and then at the Panera. Tired, tired, tired. I'm sure there are interesting whozits I could recap involving screaming kids and the like, but I'm too sleepy to bother.

On a sidenote, Babylon 5 is so spiffy. I skipped ahead to an episode in season 3 just because it popped into my head and I just had to watch the Marcus-Naroon fight scene.

I am a ranger!
We walk in the dark places no others will enter.
We stand on the breach and no one may pass.
We live for the one!
We die for the one!

Entil'zha Veni!

Well, I've finally got 3 seasons of Babylon 5 downloaded and I've started to watch the first season. I don't think I've ever watched the whole thing through. I caught it sporadicly when it was on tv and until now, I've only had the 4th season and bits and chunks of 3 and 5.

Based on a conservative estimate, if I watch the whole series from start to finish without a break, it'll take around 95 hours. Factor in sleep and whatnot and I figure it'll be weeks and weeks before I get through the whole thing.

---

I've just finished watching the first few episodes and I just have to say that what I love the most about B5 is that it was one complete storyline. It's fantastic about how statements in the very first episode like Londo's prophetic vision actually come true in the last season. It's great that Sinclair's little flashback of the line ties in perfectly, including the exact same voice clip when we find out more information later. It's nice to have a series that at least feels like it was written as a complete whole instead of built up like a patchwork quilt.

For a while, I was doing quite a bit of research into impulsivity and how it was affected by drug use. There are quite a few theories about whether impulsive people simply have a predisposition to try drugs, or that drug use makes them impulsive. It's one of those old chicken or the egg senarios and it's something that drug researchers pick at every once and a while. One way to get at the question perhaps is to give drugs to non-drug users and see if they become more impulsive.

There are all sorts of tests in this area including prepulse inhibition, delay discounting, time estimation, etc. One of my ideas at the time was to have people try to complete a series of tests on what was supposedly a very slow internet connection and give them something like a black box with a button on it they could push to try to speed the process along or something. Actually, there were quite a few permutations but they all involved seeing if people were more likely to not tolerate long delays.

I ran across Don't Shoot the Puppy which seems to have unintentionally illustrated what something like the task might have looked like. I know that I can't stop myself from shooting the puppy after a bit, and actually begin to actively loathe the little thing. Maybe some of you can do better.

Oh, and 46 gigs worth of Babylon 5 takes _forever_ to download.

Well, the burn session is on hold until I can snag a few replacement files. That's the problem with not having watched some of the things you're burning off. You don't notice the problems with some of the files until it comes time to do a final check and then you want to fix all the issues before making a permanant copy. I absolutely hate making coasters, either completely dead ones or just functional wastes.

Anyway, the Killer Bunnies Tourney went pretty spiffy today. At the last Panera gameday a girl and her husband were walking past and upon seeing that we were playing boardgames popped in. Turns out that they and their friends were all gamers and she started to squeal with delight upon seeing the KB Perfectly Pink booster. Turns out that KB is her favorite game. I of course invited her to the tourney/release event today and we all spent some time chatting about gaming-related things.

Kalai (KAH-lie. I thought it was some sort of hippie thing and when I inquired if her parents lived on some sort of commune smoking pot all day was told that it's actually hawaiian) and her husband (Can't remember his name for some reason. It's something pretty normal though. You know, like Mike or Jeff or Bob or something.) both showed up today and also brought a friend along. It also turns out that they're going to gencon too and wanted to get in on the TD run for thursday once they found out I still had spare tickets. That means our 'little' group is now up to 10 people and I have a total of 12 tickets. So anyone else who's seeing this and wants in, now's the time to speak up.

Other than that, I rushed over to the NBC release event but of course arrived too late to actually play. Boooo-urns. I did however pick up some of the promo cards which is always nice and got to watch and talk with Andrew the designer for a while.

Well, it's that time again. My harddrives have finally filled up to max and it's time to start burning the whole lot (or at least a good chunk) to dvds. I've downloaded Nero for the free trial period and I've spent a good chunk of the past 24 hours making copies. An oddity when it comes to either my computer or burner is that whenever I do anything other than just burn dvds, I end up making coasters. This means I can't have many other programs running and definitely can't go to any other window other than the burning software. This means that burning dvd's is a long and boring process where I set everything up, twiddle my thumbs for 10 minutes while the copy is made, and then set it up to go again. I'll be a bit scarce until the burning finishes, though I've gotten a good chunk of it done already.

I've already burned off:

Star Trek Enterprise S1-4
Stargate SG1 S9
Stargate Atlantis S2
Battlestar Galactica S1-2
The Shield S1-5
24 S1-2 (Discovered that I was missing S3 for some odd reason and S4 had a mpeg file in the middle of avi's. Waiting to snag a replacement)
Hikaru no Go
Fruits Basket
Ranma S1-7 +
Hale Noche Guu (Deluxe & Final)

Of the big stuff, all that's left is farscape and then a heck of a lot of odds and ends.

No.

Still waiting to hear back about the applications and dreading it.

Have a baby shower to go to this saturday which I'm figure will be pretty blah.

Trying to sell more crap on ebay but the blasted people there refuse to give me more of their money. Selfish bastards.

Still, STILL watching ranma 1/2. I'm up to season 6 at the moment with around 40 more episodes to go, 2 movies, and 12 OVAs.

Treasure tokens are shipping today. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for an ultra-rare.

Everytime I play Civ IV now I can't resist the urge to go into the world builder and create myself a modern tank in like 2400 BC. I then use it to roll over all of the barbarians and others who are pissing me off. Try to attack my city? Ha! There's a tank behind you!

Slap fights on the LJ snopes feed isn't all that interesting but it helps to pass the time.

Still reading pratchett books I just bought. 2 more until I'm completely caught up on everything out in paperback.