Month: July 2005

IRA says armed campaign is over

‘Nuff said.

Of course they haven’t mentioned all the organized crime they’re involved in so who knows if this is just smoke and mirrors or if it’s an actual attempt at peace in our time.

Okay, going to blame Shane for this one.

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 78% Hardcore Junkie (61% – 80%) While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What’s that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don’t get a repetitive wrist injury… The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Quiz Me!

And so I have now finished the latest Harry Potter book, or rather I did at around midnight last night. Thankfully, even though I knew the outcome (due to the idiocy of some people) the book was still quite enjoyable and thoroughly satisfying. It wasn’t the destination that mattered, but the journey to get there that made it all worthwhile.

No I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read the book. I have a little more self-control than that. Not much mind you, but enough to save you from having a crappy reading experience. While we’re on the topic of spoilers. Yes I do know who the half-blood prince is. No, it wasn’t what the idiots spoiled about the book for me. It wasn’t who I was expecting mind you and it was a nice surprise, though in retrospect, I should have seen it coming based on other plot points within the book. Ahh well, hindsight is always 20/20. What can you do.

Other than that, the plot took a number of fairly predictable turns and things that I’ve been expecting to happen since about book two finally came to fruition. Thankfully there were also a number of complete surprises for me as well and so it wasn’t always a book where I’d read something and say to myself “well finally!”. It’s one thing to subtley foreshadow something and then spring it out as a surprise later on and another entirely to blatantly telegraph it to the world and then beat them over the head with it when it does happen. For the most part Rowling falls somewhere in the middle. She strays a bit in either direction depending on the plot point but nothing that isn’t forgivable.

Anyways, I don’t really have much more to say beyond it was a good read and now I just have to wait until the end of forever for the last book to come out.

*twitch*

After devouring HP last night for a mere two hours I’m now on page 186. Sadly due to the idiots I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I already know what should happen at the end of the book based solely on the prologue and opening chapter. I say should just on the slim chance that Rowling has a curveball waiting in the wings but I sadly doubt it. Ah well, such is life. It’s still a very enjoyable read as is.

Anyways. I’m off to see if I can sneak in another couple of hours reading before my wife notices.

Ta for now.

Okay, I admit it. Joss Whedon is my master now.

Sci-Fi has started re-running the Firefly episodes again and I’ve become hooked just after one episode. It’s unique, different and it’s given me lots and lots of ideas for a decent gaming campaign. I am a geek of the highest caliber.

To top all of this off, I’ve now found the latest Serenity Trailer and am looking forward to it even more than my weekly shower.

Now, if you’ll all excuse me I have to go devour the latest Harry Potter book that finally arrived today. Go me.

So tonight I thought I’d wander over to the Games Workshop site and see what’s new in the unaffordable, but extremely cool looking, world of the Warhammer hobby. Initially I went to see how much it would cost to replace all my Citadel paints that I donated to Trevor before I left. Apparently a complete set of all 66 paints comes out to be roughly $200 US. Yeowch. I’d totally forgotten just how much of a money sink the hobby was. *le sigh*… and I was so looking forward to getting back into painting stuff again.

This feeling was of course amplified a thousandfold once I started snooping around at some of the new miniatures out there. I stumbled onto the Bloodbowl miniatures page and was greeted with a plethora of team choices. I knew they’d added more teams and rules but the amount available was stunning. I was particularly impressed with the completely new 2005 human team. It’s truly the first time I’ve been pleased with the way the humans look. I’m sorely tempted to pick it up as a supplement/replacement for my scratch built humans. Of course I’d also like to pick up some of the lizardmen, Ogres, amazons and the other new stuff as well just cause they all look like they’d be fun to paint.

Which brings me full circle back to not having any paints. Ah well, one of these days I’ll have more money than sense and will be able to waste it all on frivolous toys like this. Anyhow, it’s now officially much too late and I should be in bed before my incessant keyboard tapping wakes the wife from her slumber and I get in trouble (I’m good at that :P).

Okay, I think I’ve finished with all the tweaking and testing I can do for the moment. I’m not 100% happy with how everything looks currently but the rest will have to wait until I get my computer down here and I can seriously start to fiddle with matching up the blog’s stylesheet with the one I’m using on the rest of the website.

Namely this will involve seeing what things look like using the font that I initially designed the site around and then determining if the blog can be modified to incorporate it or if the website will have to change and incorporate the blog’s fonts. I haven’t quite decided yet.

Before you ask, the font isn’t on this computer and I’ve been unable to locate it on numerous websites, (it’s Papyrus btw). I have a free version on my computer but all the versions I’ve been able to locate online here are commercial only. I’m not going to sweat it though, I’ll just wait until my comp arrives and fiddle then. There are other things I need to be doing between now and then that take precedence anyways.

If you were paying attention (and I’m sure one or two of you were) I pulled the link to my Amazon wishlist off the Sidebar on the right and incorporated it into my Profile. That way it’s out of the way and I don’t look or feel as needy/desperate. Plus there was a place for it in the Profile so I figured what the Hell. That cleans up the links section leaving just a link to the archive at the bottom of the page and a link back to the whole framed part of the site for those one or two random visitors that show up just at the blog via whatever non-traditional means.

This concludes the reading of the rules… Back to you Bruce.

I stumbled across this interesting link earlier today after randomly link jumping through various blogs and livejournals. It’s an interesting face morpher java applet that takes an image you provide and morphs it so you can “theoretically” see what you’ll look like in 30 years or whatever. It also has some neat artistic morphs such as what you’d look like as a Botticelli painting or Manga cartoon.

I didn’t overly care for the Age/Race/Gender versions of the crappy picture I uploaded but the artistic morphs were quite cool.

Here are some pics.

The Original Image (note this is about a 3 years old):

Me As A Japanese Manga Character:

Me As A Sandro Botticelli Painting:

Me As An Amadeo Modigliani Painting:

Me As An El Greco Painting:

The things I’ve learned through this.
– Firstly, I’m a creepy looking manga character. As long as I’m not starring in Overfiend though, I think I’ll be okay.
– Secondly, Botticelli thinks I’m fat.
– Thirdly, I really need to morph a more recent image and see how it looks and what’s changed.(If it looks cool enough, I’ll post the changes).
– Fourth and finally, the El Greco pic is my personal favourite because I look like a young Peter O’Toole which definitely rocks me right down to my socks. Once I clean up the image some, I am definitely going to use it as a replacement for the little wizard icon currently residing in the top right corner of the blog. It’s just that damn cool. Look Ma! I’m a work of Art!!!

Speaking of cleaning up the images. Sorry for the crappy quality with all the extra whitespace. These were just hasty screen captures I took and imported into MSPaint because I was lazy and in a hurry. I’ll clean them up with a real program later tonight and repost them.

EDIT: Fixed and fixed.

So the other day I got sucked in to the movie Eurotrip when it came on cable. I blame my wife for this as she was the one who started watching it. Needless to say it was actually funnier than I expected. As I didn’t see the beginning of the movie, the inevitable explanation of the song “Scotty Doesn’t Know” and it’s relevance followed. Ever since then it’s been stuck off and on in my head. This hasn’t been helped by the fact that the tune is catchy and my wife seems to have the same problem I have and we’ve been singing lines of it to each other randomly for days now.

Today though it’s taken on completely new and tasteless relevance. Today James Doohan died. That’s Scotty from Star Trek fame for you philistines. Sadly the only thing going through my head after I heard was the song’s chorus.

Scotty Doesn’t Know
Scotty Doesn’t Know
Scotty Doesn’t Know

Why yes, I am a sick, sick bastard. Thank You… Goodnight.

My Harry Potter has not yet arrived. I’m writhing in the pangs of anticipatory agony while I wait. Currently the latest information I have is:

2005/07/19    05:28      International item has arrived in the destination country

But what’s this you ask… didn’t Amazon and pretty much every other retailer on the planet promise same day delivery on the release day? Yes. Yes they did, but there were certain restrictions. For one, all the same day deliveries were limited to domestic orders only. (i.e. Books ordered from Amazon.com and shipped to a US address would arrive on time. The same for books ordered from Amazon.ca and shipped Canuck-side). I made things difficult by ordering the Canadian version and having it shipped stateside. I did this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because all the other books I have in the series are by the same publisher and this would keep the artwork and style continuous thoughout the series. Secondly, I really don’t know how many (if any) changes the US publisher has made and I’d rather have the complete book that the author intended instead of something that was changed to fit a certain market demographic). I’ve never really trusted Scholastic (the US publisher) ever since they decided that Philosophers were evil and naughty but Sorcerers were okay. Plus, let’s be honest, if I’m going to pay that much for a book I want my letter to dollar value to be spot on. Therefore I always want to order Canadian/UK editions of books because I get the extra letter U in all the words like flavour, colour and harbour and can can feel like I’m getting my complete money’s worth¹

Sadly though, a few halfwit children (read: teenagers that need a series of swift kicks to the head with a frozen boot) an that lurk on a couple of forums that I read regularly deemed it fit to ruin one of the major plot twists within the book. It won’t stop me from reading the book and I was expecting something of the sort to happen but it has seriously pissed me the fuck off to find out about it in such a fashion. Expect a full rant when I eventually get to page 606 or whatever the exact page number of the dirty deed is.

Anyone care to help me kick the living shite out of a few geeky teenagers using my rugby boots? I’ve got an extra pair around here somewhere with some really sharp cleats on them. They’d be just perfect for raking the living fuck out of these imbeciles.

Ahh well, I guess seething and hatching evil plots of sadistic retribution against a group of anonymous ignoramouses is what the internet is all about. Plus it’ll give me something to do until my package arrives besides working on my website and surfing porn. Yay me.

^1. According to comedian Eddie Izzard, the real reason Brits (and by proxy Canucks, Kiwis, Aussies, et al.) have the extra U in all their words is so as they can win extra points in scrabble.