Once the sheeple get involved and it is mundane, then everyone is an expert, every dumbass who has some money thinks they understand the point, or that they even *have* a point.

With body modification, any man who got an earring or any person who got something pierced other than ears as little as 20 years ago was a little bit off. military and criminals got tattoos. But as it got to be more accepted it all got…

cleaner

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I personally like not having hepatitis. I can appreciate the sterility of a clean and well run shop. But it also has turned everyone into pussies of a sort. If you don’t do everything the way the hive mind says then you’d better already be at the forefront of new creative techniques, otherwise you are just a dumbass tard. To quote a response to a post in which I was defending a girl’s choice to do things with her own body the way she wanted -

“however, if you’re just being a retard on purpose, you make the rest of us look bad.”

really? wow. When did what I did to my body ever have anything to do with what other people were doing to theirs?

Why the hell *would* you change your body if you were thinking about what other people thought? That’s an even scarier proposition when you consider the fluctuation of norms within a society. I’m curious - any of you who read this. Why *do* you modify your body? is it purely aesthetic? is it because all of your friends do it? is it for a spiritual purpose, or some other extravagant or mundane reason?

I’ll start - I put holes in and ink on my body for two reason. One - I do like it aesthetically. This is why I like shapes better than things in tattoos. I always love the look of a well drawn line - not so much for some band or movie. More importantly, it is a way for me to personally show mental dominance over my body. a 4 hour session of tattooing or sticking piercing needles through your dork may be easy for some people. For me it isn’t, but it is like my own personal gom-jabbar. I do it for me, and while I am pleased in a narcissistic sort of way if someone appreciates it, if someone *doesn’t* like it I’m not affronted.

So, how about you?

I found a nice deal on geeks.com

Rackable Systems Dual Opteron 246 HE 2.0, 4GB RAM and 120GB IDE drive for a nice price ($130 sweet) and got it within 3 days.

So now all of my sites and Diane’s are back online and happy with the latest stable versions of all software and I even upgraded WordPress to boot.

You just have to do these things every once in awhile so you don’t get tooooo crusty, ya know?

The last two months out of school have flown by. Yesterday I got my diploma in the mail.

Aw yeah - Summa Cum Laude bitches! Wasn’t even sure if they designated honors at WIU…

Still don’t feel like I learned much - but I am starting to do some research regarding a master’s program of study.

Since I’m in wind-down-and-don’t-give-a-crap mode I’ve been playing a few games as well.

First off I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering again. I can finally afford to get enough card to build more than one or two decks at a time and I’m finding that an abundance of cards actually makes the process more difficult! But I’m having fun and have actually got Dot to play now and again:)

Second thing I did was picked up the Orange Box and played Portal. Wow, that’s the most fun I’ve had on a puzzle game since Myst! Unfortunately it is rather short, but I did play an evening ofHalflife2 as well and that was fun.

Sunday night I went to my friend’s house and we played M:tG for about 5 hours, then he showed me Hellgate: London. It is open beta and man - this game is pretty. Basically a Diablo-type game with a bit of MMO thrown in (MMO common areas, and instanced adventure zones, like in Guild Wars). Hellgate: London releases on Halloween and I intend to play the hell out of it for a week or two. One thing that makes me happy to be alive right now is how the download of the installer went. Yesterday morning at 8am I saw I had my key to get into beta. 4.3GB download… So I set it to Download and went to take my shower. By 9:15 I had downloaded and unpacked the whole thing. Yay CDN and Dual Core processors!

Ok, back to work!

Since the last time I went to Comic-Con in San Diego, then Defcon15. Had a much better time than I expected, and after a rocky start, was able to talk to and meet a whole bunch of really cool people.

School is still progressing nicely. I have 1 month of my IT Management class left and I just started my Capstone class. It looks like it will be a fun end to the curriculum. Oddly, though they are supposed to be the last 2 classes you take, I’m the only one in my IT Management class who has taken all of their IT classes, and one of 3 people taking the Capstone that it is their last class. I guess the order doesn’t as important as they claim. For anyone interested - Western International University has an IT curriculum that is a bit of a joke. I learned things here and there, but for the most part, could have taught the classes. I’m told they have just overhauled the whole program, so I’m curious how that will play out.

In other news, I’m playing less WoW these days, and more EQ2. I like my little evil fairy - the graphics and game complexity are a lot better than WoW, but I’m sure I’ll keep both accounts active and neglect them both:). Haven’t been invited to play on the Warhammer Online Beta yet, but the elves were just revealed. The game still looks pretty bad-ass.

Yesterday was our 2 year anniversary, we celebrated with a weekend up north last weekend. We’ve decided to just celebrate on Labor day weekend each year. This time we went up to Jerome Saturday morning and ate at the Haunted Hamburger (which does not have a bacon and cheese filled meatloaf on the menu, no matter what Rachel Ray says) and walked around, then went up to Sedona and got rained on. We stayed the night in a cozy Bed and Breakfast between the two in Page Springs and had a nice breakfast served by the hosts. On the way out we went through Camp Verde, along the 260 and took the Rim Road all the way to the Young Heber Hwy. Driving down through Young we stopped at Alice’s Restaurant (yes, really) and got everything we wanted (exceptin’ Alice) then looked around at the area.

My hope is to pay off the revolving debt and vehicles in fairly short order. After that getting a plot of land, maybe 1-3 acres, up north where it is cooler, but not in a touristy place that will explode with population. Getting a bit of land and having a round house delivered in Young seems pretty do-able, but there’s a lot of logistical and financial planning involved. I’m wondering if it’s time to lay out our goals, and talk to a financial adviser.

Well, I’m off to class - still have a paper to write, so until next time…

Toodles!

The last few weeks have been full of work, fun, school and sick. Before I get into that, I need to share a few bits of awesome.

First - “Domino, Muthfucka!”

Second -  Zombies!

So, after all the usual pre-convergence drama, C13 turned out to be a wonderful time. We met a lot of new people and stayed away from any of the drama successfully. I traded a few club nights for sleep, and it was definitely worth it. I had a lot more fun that way. I know diane doesn’t like too miss stuff, but she went to a couple things without me and had a good time from the sound of things. Interesting thing about Portland, the people there are *really* nice. Like, Stepford nice. Like “we have a secret, but so long as we act nice, no one will look” nice (as in Hot Fuzz :). I’m pretty sure they put drugs in their tasty tap water as well because after we got back I got pretty sick. It had to have been withdrawal.

Going on two full weeks of sinus infection now, and I’d like to state, for the record, that I don’t like it.

The weekend after we got back I did the last two classes of my weekend intensive Asia/Pacific Rim Society and Culture class. I have a man-crush on Dr Werther’s brain. I took my European/Russian Soc. & Cult. from him as well. I’m quite sure I will never get to speak with him again, but he was a damn good teacher. With that class ending I now have 4 1/2 classes left.

• Database Management (started in May over 1/2 way through)
• Project Planning and Execution (just started)
• Evaluation of Application Software (July)
• IT Management (Aug)
• Capstone (Sept)

July and August classes will be interesting since the last week of August we’ll be in San Diego and the first week of August I’ll be in Las Vegas. Looks like Diane won’t be going to Defcon with me, but he will be going to Batsday without me instead Good for her - I think that will be a lot more fun for her anyway!

Kaneva has faded in my mind, much like MySpace - a neat toy, but not very engaging. Ourtbeat came into beta. A few issues with tab-indexing, but over all it works - not a whole lot of features are enabled yet, so it’s hard to say how cool or useful it will end up being. There are currently few enough users to not require any searching, but at some point I expect that will be enabled. As well as the 3D interface.

I was off sick for a few days last week and during that time I tried out the Lord of the Rings Online game. All in all, it is fun if a little to linear. I’ve started a few characters and it’s frustrating to only play the goody goody characters - until you hit level 10. At that point you can enter the only PVP area as a level 50 (max) evil character. Regular players can enter this area at level 40 and above. Instead of earning XP you get points towards better armor/spells and abilities. So, it’s a fun diversion from WoW, but I can’t see me playing it for years. The graphics are incredible but it just doesn’t suck me in like WoW and EQ1 did. Now Warhammer Online, OTOH, looks quite bad-ass. I hope they don’t mess it up as was done with D&D online.

Well, I need to get back to work - figured I’d better post something before I forgot how

Have a good week!

Oddly enough, within 2 days of making my last post I got contacted by someone to check out the site ourtbeat.com. The premise is similar to kaneva, in that it should be a social networking site with a 3d interface where users can interact with each other. The optimist in me thinks that this could be cool. The main difference between this and kaneva is the more focused user base. It should be a place for artists to interacts. Where they can display their wares and make contacts - be they musician, video producer, painter, graphic designer or any other type of artist. By having a focus, the site hopes to be able to avoid the vast wasteland of garbage that are myspace and kaneva profiles.

The pessimist in me wonders, with every persone who ever touched pencil to paper, or anyone with a cracked version of photoshop and frontpage, or any tweaker with a copy of fruity loops thinking they are an artist, what’s the difference? If there’s one thing an amateur artist knows not to do, it’s crush other people work. I think the big fear is that focus then being turned on their own work. Another fear is, since this is a very small development team making this, that it will be a virtual world similar in look and feel to Sociolotron, which is basically a 3d scrolling map with some paperdolls. Sociolotron looks like a reskinned 1987 video game. I hope the more modern engines available will mean that, even though the team is creating it from scratch, they have a decent library base to start from and can just skin it and create interaction.

I’ll wait and reserve judgement long enough to check out the beta, and at least see it go live.

As for Kaneva, four people signed up after my last post, but none of them stayed active long enough to do more than make a profile. Not a big deal really, there are a lot of different sites around to checkout and update. That I have received exactly one(1) message from someone that I didn’t already know that wasn’t a solicitation for raves and friending tells me a lot about the user base. People aren’t cruising around the site, looking for people to talk to, or even viewing the multimedia other users upload. Instead it is a great popularity race. I can hope that when they go live they reset everyone’s raves to 0, or perhaps rework that system altogether. For now, I’ll check it out every few weeks to see how they are coming along in development, but I’m not terribly hopeful.

Happy Hump Day!

You may be wondering what the hell it is, or why you should join, yet another vanity based social networking site. I beg of you, do it for me.

The concept is rather cool actually. Like MySpace, you can create a profile, upload content, message each other, leave notes, find friends etc. etc. Unlike MySpace, there is a 3D world that goes along with it. A rather interesting concept that is similar (but better in execution) to Second Life. What makes that cool? Any of your content you upload is viewable from within the 3D environment. You get an apartment, for which you can purchase a TV or stereo. Then you can watch and listen in your room. You can also invite other members into your home. If you create a community in the Web interface you can also treat this like a bar, nightclub, meeting room or whatever within the game.

All in all, a nifty Web 2.0 application that may or may not gather a huge following.

So why the call for help?

I am hoping that anyone I know who reads this is much more literate and intelligible than the people on there. I have found all of two people who could spell worth a damn. It also is a spamfest of “rave me” and “friend me” to boost personal popularity.

So come, join me - perhaps we can start a community that one has to take a simple grammar test to get in to… please?