Just now I ordered my Christmas gift for myself: a shiny new computer, part by part, from Newegg. I did so now instead of in a month for considerations of shipping and price deals.
My initial estimate early last month was, everything considered, about $1100. Newegg, with the help of the extreme discount of Windows 7 for college students (hi Laura), knocked that down to a grand total of $878.82.
I love economizing.
Old and Busted: Dual-core AMD Athlon 64x2, 2 GB RAM, Radeon X 1600/1650, 300W power supply, 19" monitor.
New Hotness: Triple-core AMD Phenom II X3 720, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, Radeon HD 4770, 600W power supply, 23" monitor.
The one I'm using right now is called MOTHERBRAIN.
My recent Megaman marathoning took a Youtube detour and landed in a big pile of this.
Fun fact: A couple episodes of that show were so terrible, they inspired me to write screenplays. Of course, back then I thought screenplays and fanfics were the same thing.
Edit:CURSE OF THE LION MEN. This is the one. The one that made a childhood me think, "Even I could write a better episode than this."
" [...] The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that "marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman." But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:
"This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."
Architects of the amendment included the clause to ban same-sex civil unions and domestic partnerships. But Radnofsky, who was a member of the powerhouse Vinson & Elkins law firm in Houston for 27 years until retiring in 2006, says the wording of Subsection B effectively "eliminates marriage in Texas," including common-law marriages. [...] "
Subbing has been slow. I would consider going into every teacher's lounge and sneezing on the donuts, but no diseases are brave enough to attack my mighty sinus.
So I've been writing a little but mostly playing a lot of classic Mega Man in my down time.
God Tier: 2
Awesome Tier: 3, 7, 9
Okay Tier: 1, 4, MM&B
Dull Tier: 5, 6
JUMP JUMP SLIDE SLIDE Tier: 8
Now it's on to the X series.
My goal: Not having enough time to finish it all because I'm too busy actually working.
Tl;dr: A 10-year-old boy refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance out of concern for the rights of homosexuals, which, under that flag, are largely not respected.
The kid lives in Arkansas.
Had he lived here, and were I his teacher, I'd have given him a laundry list of political books to read and electives to take in middle and high school. He seems like exactly the sort of insufferable little civic-minded nerd who could benefit from a tug along the correct direction.
One Harry Potter book down and I'm already having dreams about it.
I was a student teacher in Hogwarts, or perhaps its American equivalent. I was in Ravenclaw and student-teaching a computer class. The computers were not unlike miniature versions of the thinking machine Hex in the Discworld series, intelligent magic devices enough like computers to be recognizable as them. Each one of them, like Hex, operated by millions of ants running through glass tubes.
The teacher seemed to have left me in charge. I don't recall the conversations I had with the students beyond the fact that I had some. Suddenly the computers started acting strangely, as computers do, except they started affecting not only computer programs but the emotions of the students. Whatever it was I said, the computer malfunctions altered my words in the students' minds to make the students think I was insane and secretly hated all of them. Their reactions to me and whispers about me told me this.
I quietly reasoned out that the students' programming was being altered. They were young and still at a stage when they could accept programming about how people and the world are. Something in the magic computers was doing it. Likely a virus.
So I sat down at the teacher's computer and started typing terrible, esteem-shattering things about the virus into the equivalent of Wordpad. The computer virus, a fungal infection which had spread between all the ants in the system, came out on-screen and started arguing with me in a separate text window. The virus looked like the Deus Ex Machina from The Matrix Revolutions, but made of black ants on a white background. I textually abused it with horrendous insults, which makes me wish I had remembered a single word I had typed. It soon lost all control of itself and disintegrated Giygas-like.
I stepped away from the computer and the students seemed to be acting normally again, except for one boy, who pulled a knife on me and wondered very aloud whether I wouldn't be better off dead. I fought him off, which wasn't hard, but he managed to cut my hand. He fell to the floor and a bunch of ants spilled out of him.
I told the students to stay put, that I was fine, and was just going to get the teacher from wherever he or she went. The dream ended somewhere in the halls as I pushed through a wave of students who moved around me not unlike ants.
Not all my dreams have a plotline. I've been wanting more that do. They tend to be the best.
Dr. Tom Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, has exercised a personal hold on a bill which would provide benefits to disabled veterans and their caretakers.
Today.
He has stopped the bill in its tracks, he claims, because he wants to know for absolute certain where the money to pay for it will come from.
As if that were an excuse.
At least that trumps his previous famous statements of how abortion doctors should be executed, and how some Oklahoma high schools are crawling with lesbians.
I got called in today after all. I sat and read parts of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Sorcerer's Stone while a bunch of middle-schoolers sat and watched a PBS documentary about recipients of the Medal of Honor.
It's November 11th, of course, and it was a Social Studies class.
November 11th is important, as I've quoted before:
" I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is. "
~ Kurt Vonnegut, from the prologue to Breakfast of Champions
Just a short notice to dredge up not one but two old stories.
Thom Hartmann, a man who ought be read, wrote something explaining how 1). the Ft. Hood shootings can be arrow-pointed directly back to things done by George W. Bush, and 2). Bush placed casting himself as Superman ahead of getting shit done, thereby deserving every condemnation available in every language.
Granted, the second point is like saying cubes have flat sides, but it needs to be restated and reexamined at least once every few months until the end of time. Nevar Forget.
The House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill. It passed by a vote of 220 to 215. One Republican voted for, 39 Democrats voted against.
The bill has a public option, and essentially forbids health care denials. It requires everybody to buy health insurance, and provides subsidies to middle- and lower-class people in order to buy it.
It also prevents those subsidies from being used to pay for abortions. That bit was squeezed in at the very end to get a few more votes, and what the hell, it worked.
If the House version of this bill was the very last one we'd get, we'd be in okay shape right now. But the House is not the only obstacle it must pass. Next comes the Senate, where Joe Lieberman waits like some vast predatory bird. Lieberman is, in this respect, the final boss of the Senate. He cannot be defeated by conventional means. You cannot comprehend the form of his attack.
And as the article up there says, it could be next year before a final bill gets to Obama's desk.
"An Army officer opened fire Thursday with two handguns at the Fort Hood military base in an attack that left 12 people dead and 31 wounded. Authorities killed the gunman and apprehended two other soldiers in what appears to be the worst mass shooting at a U.S. military base."
That second sentence resonated in some very dark, very cynical part of my stomach.
My brain took over once I learned that not only was the shooter an army psychiatrist, he was due to go to Iraq and was "upset about it."
I imagine an army shrink is in a unique position to know the mental trauma of soldiers thrown uselessly into the Mesopotamian sandpit for literally nothing but corporate gain. He must have been afraid.
Now, were it me, I would've simply taken my dishonorable discharge and fired no more than a loogie on my way out. But not everyone can be reasonable when afraid.
Working one day out of four this week is making me stir-crazier faster than I anticipated. I'm starting to turn to my older video games for time-suction.
And none of them appear on this list of which five games made 500 Japanese men cry the most. Here, I'll spoil it for you: Final Fantasy X is at the top.
Having not played it, I can't say I agree or disagree. I've known how it ends for years and years. Was it really worth being at the top of a list of saddest video games, not saddest Final Fantasy games?
And while I'm asking questions: Mother 2 is in fifth place. Was it really more tear-jerking than Mother 3, which is absent from the list? And what is Clannad, exactly?
I wonder what the list illustrates more, the sensibilities of men or the sensibilities of Japanese.
On the whole, the Zelda series has wrenched more tears out of me than the Finals Fantasy. Twilight Princess got me at the end. In Ocarina of Time, the tears were less sad and more cathartic. And long before that, back on my cousin's gray brick Game Boy, Marin singing and fading away in Link's Awakening reduced me to a blubbering mess.
It's too bad that more games aren't built around toying with players' emotions. They tend to be more memorable that way.
Edit: Oh. Clannad is a visual novel in the thread of Kanon and Air. Japan sure loves its moeblobs.
Fascism, the corporate whole-ownership of nationalistic government, is threatening to leak into the Internet.
That statement is not hyperbole.
There are talks going on between the United States and others in South Korea to put unprecedented new restrictions on copyright and intellectual property.
Under the planned treaty, which had to be illegally leaked because of a form of copyright restriction called "national security," every bit and byte of user-generated content must be actively and aggressively monitored for the slightest illegal usage.
Every second of video on every movie-sharing site. Every GIF and PNG and JPEG on every photo-hosting site. Every word on every blogging site. All of it, scanned for infringement of copyrights. And every instance punished by suspension of internet access for the household in which it happened. That is what the treaty, to which no civilian user of the Internet has agreed -- or even seen until it was illegally leaked -- will do.
I've said before that I can't stay mad at Obama. And even now I'm not mad at him.
That is only because I have no proof that he himself, and not the grotesque thousand-headed chimera he's currently riding bareback, wants this treaty to happen.
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