Today had an interesting zen. I had a really ok day.

Today had a girl’s smile, the tickle of booze in my throat, sun, shade. and cool water.

What more could I ask?

today’s search for a random term: hemp bra

Damn hippies’l make anything out of hemp. Saw one with a hemp dog one time, sweartagod.

God Damn it all.

yr. corresp. strongly feels he is living in a nazi regime.

What is being done to this man, and others like him is wrong. Not to mention a serious abuse of a legal process for a purpose other then its intent.

I’m sitting at home. I just had the funnest day!

Actaully, it was pretty fun, but it messed up my life plans.

I was supposed to be in a 40k tournament at this very moment. I am not. This is because I have only been up since about 2 pm. (it’s 2.17 at the moent)

Not those of you at fleener’s store may be saying, “that’s impossible, that fat fuck called at 9:30 to say he wasn’t going to make it to the tourneamnet.”

Well, fuck you, don’t call me fat. Strike that – call me whatever you feel like. Fuck it. No one could make me feel (or look) worse the Dirty Vicar did when he posted the least complementary photo of me ever. It’s as though he used the scientific method to find an angle to take a photo from that would make me look like the hydrogen inside me could go at any time and thus end the age of airships.

Any way, back to my fun night. A friend of mine made a split with his (now former) lady friend. SO we went looking for liquid pain. We found it. My pal had a 3/4s of a case of beer and I had half a bottle of gin (krootboy – that tonic you left over here is almose gone. Please buy me some more : ) topped off with the other 1/4 of a case of beer. We were, at the time, high in the hills on a campsite.  In the company of friends. Friends with cluttered cars. From which cars we began to throw things into the fire. Things like metal cans of PVC glue. Canned food. Lighter fluid. Etc. We were also busier then beavers chopping up firewood with an ax. In short, fire+large blades+Booze = trouble. But, no one is cut. No one is all blowed up. We muddled through. The drunken escapade alone would not have kept me from farting hot miniature death on my opponent’s armies. No, what did that was the coming home to find a fight with a lady friend waiting for me.

It really was my fault. She just wanted a little sympathy, and maybe some affection, you know? But me, I’m drunk. Real drunk (I am actually still slightly drunk. I am not looking forward to my dinner hangover)

So I jumped right in her shit, fucked up nicely, and proceeded to drain every other drop to drink in my house (excepting of course, three bush lites that have been in my firdge for several months – I’d sooner get in the lighter fluid.)

So I’m going all hemingway, and I realize that I’m out of booze. at eight in the morning. So. I spend an hour looking for my telephone (it was in the storage area under my bathroom sink) and call the store to tell them I won’t make it. I then drop like a box of rocks.

At about 1.45 I woke up. I drank sixty four ounces of gatorade, had a large ribeye, red-purple rare, and pirated most of the metallica catalouge out of spite (James, lars, that’s a joke – if you’re reading.  Which I know you are.).

I don’t like to drink. The same way quigley didn’t like pistols.

Every so often, one of my posts just shows up like the one belwo. I have no idea why.

I went and watched Pirates of the Carribbean last night. I realized something, watching it: Johnny Depp is a really good actor. He brought off a character that was little more then a quick personallity sketch with a swagger I don’t think anybody else could have done. He was cool in this movie.

The movie istself was pretty cool. It was grim and dark, with just enough humor to keep it from being a horror piece without being silly.  It’s truly a Disney fantasy movie for a slightly older audience, which is pretty cool.  I have to give a special nod to the sword-fighting scenes – the are well, well directed, cut from a few yards away so you can actually see everything the people are doing, and it looks like Legolas’ training for Lord of the Rings paid off – he and Depp appeard to do quite alot of their own fencing, and fewer stuntmen = less sharp cuts in a fightscene. So, bottom line, good moive. Had pirates, as promised.

I’m thinking about buying a new car. Well, a newer car.  It’s a black 2000 mercury cougar.  I picked it because out of all the sports cars I have found to be within my price range and proformance expectations, it has the largest interior. Plus, it’s really freaken’ black. Like “something Hotblack Desoto would fly into the sun” black.

A brief history of the cougar: for the better part of it’s production run, the cougar name was stamped onto muscle cars.  Then, in the late 80s and early 90s, they tried to make it into a sporty 4 door – basically, think of a cutlass Sierra with a really big engine. That really killed the numbers for the model line. Then in 1998-99, they introduced the current model, a six cylinder sports compact designed to compete with the likes of the accord, talon, and eclipse.

Despite being cheap, having few mechanical problems, having some of the best handling in the vehicle class, and probably the best handling under $20K, and looking like nothing else on the road, they didn’t sell well – mostly because the Fast and the Furious movie focused the sport compact market on Japanese import four bangers, providing one more reson to hate that effing movie, and the Cougar line is currently retired.

I drove it around town a little.  That was good.

I drove it around the loop road around our fair city. That was actually fun. 

Then, we took it out on a deserted, pitchblack, winding, deer-infested road and and ripped halfway to the end of the pavement at about 115 mph. (about 185 kph to our metric fans)  Now that – that was freaking dumb.

Now, I know, 115 mph is not *that* fast. There are motorcycles that, with a bit of tuning, can easily go twice that speed. THere are race cars that can approach three times that speed. But I haven’t driven a manual transmission in over a year. I have only driven a car this responsive a few times, and never at speed. Definitly not down a pitch black road infested with deer.  Lets just saw a few of those little brown bastards now know that the big black thing that lives on the long grassless place means them harm. 

Long story short, I found out what I wanted to know about the car. I scared myself rather badly, in fact.
I’m gonna have me one of them ‘sit-down talks’ with my banker tommorrow.

Did I mention it’s blacker then krootboy’s outlook? 

My internet service has been sporadic of late.  The company seems to feel it is something wrong with the modem, and they may or may not send someone to fix it. 

I’m getting my programming chops back – I may have some things for you little maniacs to play with soon. 

Once again, I have been up far to late running through the halls of a tumbledown citadel that was never real.  I found an old humor site I loved as a young lad.  I spent an hour digging through it, marvelling in a lost happy-sad daze, just glad something was still there.  The site is spatuala city, home of the really big button that doesn’t do anything.

I felt so strange after reading it, I sent the author this email: 

Hi.  This is weird – I’ve spent hours on your website, I feel like I know you well, but we’ve never met.  It’s a strange new world sometimes – is this an interaction made possible and boosted by technology because we wouldn’t have had even this without the net, or is an exchange dampened by technology because after all this time we should know each other? I don’t know.  I get off too far in the deep water sometimes.

I just wanted to thank you for keeping spatula city online. 

I’ve been off the internet for three years. 

Coming back, a lot of things I used to love are gone. Neeto-elito.org, the best, and perhaps only, hacker culture satire site on the web is one I miss quite a bit.  There are quite a few others. We aren’t even going to talk about the nasty thing I did to the first person who spoke to me right after I met my first java-pumped internet ad spy.  Not pretty, and carpet isn’t cheap where I live. 🙂

Anyhow, I decided it was too much lost time to get back into the computer industry. I got frustrated and decided I was pissed off and said to myself “hey, screw it – I quit.  I’m going to go back to work at whatever pays the most, throw out all my old unix manuals and pretend for the rest of my life that I never so much as learned to turned a computer on.”

I went as far as starting to take some of the speakers and other periphs of my computer and move them into a box with my old manuals and lists, a box with a dumpster destiny. 

Then I thought, “Hey – I’m boxing up the dream that was Rome here. I’ll give it one more shot.  If there is one person out there who still thinks like me, if I can fall back on one thing that was true and decent in my late high school and early college years, I’ll stay.  I’ll stay, and I’ll try to fix the mess that the internet has been turned into.  I’ll become a fighter for all that is good and right with distributed computing and a crusader against all those who want me to install triple-x movie players, enlarge my penpis safly ant ezily, or help them claim a Nigerian bank inheritance.  But what, what symbol of my internet childhood should I choose to look toward for this final test? What was ever a rock to stand on in the drowning well, a light in the ocean, a hand up from the gutter?”

So I looked.
I found.
I pushed.
It still did nothing.
I’m staying.

Seriously, I can’t thank you enough – the hour I just spent digging through old spatula city junk did help me make a serious decision to go back to college and fix my life.  You wouldn’t think anything so lighthearted and simple would ever change a life, but you made me laugh when I was young, and ten years down the road, you made a very different, very hurt, strange, sad person laugh again. 

I’m going to start a website to preserve internet culture.  It will issue a stamp of approval for sites with no pop-ups, no adware, reasonble or no fees, and good, long cultural histories on line. 

In short, I’m going to make a no-BS, no sell out search engine and directory.  You might not find everything there, but everything you find there will be something.  Also, the directory’s user and member lists will serve as a petittion for certain companies and governments to stop certain practices – is that an idea that interests you?
Also, is it something someone is already doing? Let me know your thoughts.

I had my computer partway apart. I was going to throw it away.  But now, I think I will be digging in my heels and taking things back.

I want to let you know that I will support anything else you are doing on the net (are you the owner of the big {chuck’s note to xanga readers – the owner of spatuala city goes by tuflower or twoflower online}tucows ftp/shareware sight?)  with an open mind expressly because I feel you went out of your way to be loyal to the internet as a concept and your users as people.

I’ve decided to make you an honorary reciptiant of the first Data-Disk award.”  It goes to those processes who, like my childhood hero, Tron, fight for the users. I don’t have a graphic for the award, or even an open website to link it too yet, but hell, this email will probably come back and force me to put more time into finding you anyway.

For the first time in a long time, a certain icon is gracing my desktop, one that lived on it for years – a sorry looking, pathetic little duck wearing a sign that says “will raytrace for food” {semi-inside joke, folks – read spatuala city –chuck}

–Thanks Again

I have to address something briefly that has been eating up a lot of my time.  It’s a small freeware game called decker. 

It’s a cyberdecking simulation loosely based on shadowrun’s decking system. It’s hella fun. 

You cruise this little icon thorough node after node, busting ass to find the piece of data or system access point you are searching for.  If you can’t do something, you might have to give up, jack out, and retry towmorrow with an updated deck. 

Your character devolps in skill as you program your own software and burn your own chips.  There is a black market menu you can buy things on at hugely inflated prices.  You hack into systems like “Me, Myself, and I Cloning” and “Noah’s livestock engineering.”

The levels are randomly generated, but they increase steadily in complexity.

The only thing that keeps this game from being one of those life destroyers is the fact that it has no real story – you are just a generic merc hacker out for money.

I’ve done something horrible just now.  I was cleaning my fishtank (my actual fishtank, it’s nota  metaphor this time) and I dropped one of my betas.  it was scary, but being a tough fish, he survived.

The horror of this incident has taught BIg Blue Fish to respect me as his aqua-lord, but it has only watered the seeds of rebellion that grow within the heart of Cindy, the fiesty young creature I intend to make his mate (they are both male, but I figure if I withhold food I can force them into “the lifestyle”)