my mental sieve...
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| Evil Wayne my mental sieve... |
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Friday, January 28, 2005 Slag Oh, it's been one of those weeks. Tuesday I came into work to find my shit-for-brains coworker had to use my computer. That's not a big deal. But he screwed with my chair. Readjusted the height and tilt. And what the fuck for? He needed my PC for about 20 minutes to print something. You know, it's not so simple to get it back to where it used to be. I've spent all week feeling that either I'm too low or too high. Constantly moving it up a bit or falling down a smidge. Mutherfucker, why would you mess with my chair? Yeah, it might sound petty, but jerkweed is like that. Brain dead. Seriously, it's not like he's driving my car and has to reorient the mirrors and seat. It's a PC. It's 20 minutes. If the chair isn't to your liking, suck it up, bitch! You ain't moving in. Yesterday we were out of wood in the house. I had to shovel a pathway from the woodpile to the window, something I haven't had to do for a couple of years. That blows too. The snow was just too deep to stomp out a pathway and it's going to stay freakin' cold. I was out there at 9PM last night making a trench *then* getting enough wood for the weekend. On the plus side, tomorrow is the !Zombie! game. Our first 2005 NELUG BrikWar. We're shooting rather high this year by trying to get six games in before 2006; one every other month. Lucky me, get's the first one. A nice untested scenario I came up a year ago. I have a pile of minifigs I have to go through and count up how many troll heads I have to use for flesh-eating undead (I think I have 18). Then I have to corral the townsfolk to use in the game and the weapons. I've just started sorting my collection too. I found these great drawers by Sterilte and bought a slew of them last week (in fact, I need more - I cleaned them out). One of them was severely cracked, but I didn't notice until a few days later. Luckily, the company is willing to mail me a replacement drawer. Go Sterilite! But I've only really just set them up and haven't gotten very far on the sorting front, so things are still a mess. Once it's done, I should be able to better use my collection, which is really just gathering dust, moss, and dementia at this point. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:52 AM 0 comments Monday, January 24, 2005 Blizzard So there was a little bit of snow over the last couple of days. 
Took Mike and me just over an hour to shovel out the driveway. It wasn't very heavy (well, the stuff the plows kick up isn't light), there was just so damned much of it. I didn't bother with the mailbox. I figure I can wait a few days for those bills. I finished my CivII game. I came in a consistant Third, and the vile Japanese—who were nothing but sneak attack artists—eventually took back their city I had captured about 400 years beforehand. I just couldn't get my technology off the ground and eventually had a sailing ship against their cruisers (I sank one!) I ended up with a 3% Civilization rating—Henry the Foolish. I miss the drama from the first Civ game where you got a couple of scenes (pixel art) of archeologists uncovering various relics of your civilization. CivII seems a little more technical in its summation of your rule. posted by Evil Wayne | 11:00 PM 0 comments Saturday, January 22, 2005 Civ II We have one of those give-a-book, take-a-book areas in the cafe at work. You know, based on the give-a-penny, take-a-penny system, which seem so wildly popular that it extends to just about every other communal system (except for the dismal failure of give-a-kidney, take-a-kidney). Anyway, the other day, instead of a book or audio tape, I spy a CD. And not just any CD, but a copy of Total Annihilation, one of the best RTS games ever made. I burned more time playing TA than any other game while I was working at Impressions. Awesome kick ass units, spectacular graphics (for the time) and a wide array of varied terrains to fight on. Hands down, my favorite RTS of all time. I don't need another copy. But, always willing to share the love, I quickly run through the index of people I know and Shaun's name pops to the top. 1. Fan of Warcraft—an RTS. 2. Likes explosions 3. Doesn't spend enough time on the computer. As I prepare the CD for mailing, I think that I should add something else. That one game - while a great game, it is possible he might not like it, and that might seem a little cheezy. So I find a copy of Civilization II, another hall-of-famer game. I mail it, thinking that if he doesn't find something interesting there, he must be brain dead. Then, I start thinking of Civ II. How you build your civilization from a single tribe. How you map the world, settle cities, develop technology through the ages and meet other civilizations. Trade, treaties and war. I think of some of the great games I've played and suddenly I'm regretting sending it to him. I get an email, in part: Ugh. I advise him to sprinkle some holy water on the package and set it on fire. I have no idea if he's done this, but his suspicious lack of email lately, leads me to some dark conclusions. I certainly hope he won't hold it against me. For you see, my unrelenting dwelling on Civ II has finally led me to fire it up again. To relive some of the glory days of gaming. Now, I promptly loose 4 hours at a wack. If I had a vicious plan to deprive Shaun of valuable free time, even subconsciously, then the plan has utterly backfired and it is I who am sucked in instead. Damnit. posted by Evil Wayne | 11:40 AM 2 comments Thursday, January 20, 2005 Inauguration Day Back in the summer of 2000, Bush was in South Carolina doing a bang-up job pulling the wool over everyone's eyes. I remember thinking that Bush was going to win in November. That there didn't seem to be enough momentum behind Gore. It was disheartening then for a number of reasons, but it wasn't anything critial back then. The economy was still good; there was no sense of the horrors to come. I also remember saying, after the election in 2000, that maybe the best thing we can hope for is that by the end of the term, we would actually feel that we wanted him to have a second term. So here we are. And it's about the worst possible outcome. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:18 AM 0 comments Tuesday, January 18, 2005 It's Cold Outside Not quite the mutherfuckin' cold from last year (or was that the year before?), but it's still a night where I'm happy we have the woodstove. Crank that baby up and it's easily 75 degrees. My only regret is that I miscalculated how much wood we actually had left over from last year. Which is a lot less. I literally saw double rows over the Summer. I'm not sure why I saw that, but I know I spent most of the season not worrying about it. As a consequence, we don't have enough to get through the whole Winter. On the plus side, what we do have is finely seasoned. It doesn't take much effort to get it burning, which tonight is only about the third fire I've allowed. But it's not like we're going to freeze or anything. We just have to be conservative. And I've been doing a pretty good job of tuning everyone out when they complain about the cold around here. Put on some more clothes—it's all about layers people. However, when it really gets cold, I have to cave in and burn. Which is ironic because on warmer days (and I mean days when it's 32+) the stove is much more efficient. A few logs and it's 80 degrees inside. But when we're under Evil Wayne's Wood Conservation Plan, there will be no burning until it's below freezing, or we hit mid-February (because I got enough from there on out). Or hot sex is going to happen in the living room. So—as you can see—we just don't burn. :( posted by Evil Wayne | 11:02 PM 0 comments Friday, January 14, 2005 Christmas Pics I finally took the pictures off my camera from Christmas and New Years. And I probably wouldn't have done this if Tine wasn't looking for more image to send to the printer. I have no idea why I bothered to wait so long, but I think maybe there's nothing Lego related so it's been an uninteresting set of photos. 
But this pic of Tine at my parent's house had to be the funniest. Much more so, because neither one of us know why she's making that face. I mean, someone has to have just said or done something really stupid, but what? However, we're pretty sure who the offenders are, just no idea of the crime. 
posted by Evil Wayne |
1:55 PM
1 comments Thursday, January 13, 2005 The Fog Okay, what the hell is up with the freaking weather? Seriously, they're calling for it to peak at around 60° after midnight. It is January, isn't it? Hold on, lemme check... Yup, still January. It snowed yesterday and the temperature has been on the rise slowly all day today. This does some funky things to moisture in the air and the snow that's still on the ground. A mass of fog and really dense fog just rolls in and off the banks. The ride home was actually treacherous. I've never seen fog that thick. More than once, the road just disappeared from under the car in a bank of fog completely erasing any point of reference. I had to hit the breaks because it just felt like the car was going off into the ditch. It wasn't, but the absence of anything to focus on, to give yourself some sense of where, is just about the most disconserting thing I've felt in a long while. On the plus side, it looked very cool. Very moviesque. A swirling mass of light grey only illuminated in my headlights (some of the roads I take are devoid of streetlights, cars and God). The breeze would rip it up and push it into pools against the rocks and it would disappear down a driveway or sidestreet. Every now and then, there would be pockets that were fogless and it would seem like I had driven into a tiny bubble of reality. But then the car would drift back into a bank and it would just roll over the hood and the windshield and, I imagine, engulf the car, muting the lights. It took me an extra 15 mintues to get home because of the fog. Even in the driveway, getting the mail, our street was quite and it seemed like a horror film where I could be the last person on earth—right before the zombie hordes descend. posted by Evil Wayne | 9:39 PM 0 comments Monday, January 10, 2005 24 Obviously, I don't know what the whole season has in store and what the motivations of the characters in question might be, but: Didn't it seem sort of Rah-Rah Bush to have the Secretary of Defense and his son have a confrontation. The Secretary yelling that he has to protect this country and that he's doing something for the love of his country. Then, the son have the opposite viewpoint. That enemies to today were friends yesterday. But here's the kicker: the kid is portrayed as unwashed, uninformed (a "sixth-grade, Michael Moore education") and a pot smoker! I dig 24, it's on my list of must-see television. But you have to wonder how much input Fox has on the show. We know they outright lie and twist the truth to help however they can with the current administration - it certainly seems like another way in which they reinforce the viewpoint. How can this kid be on the right side? How can those viewpoints be taken seriously when that side is nothing but drug users, rebelling against the establishment? If they say it repeatedly, and show it repeatedly, it must be true. posted by Evil Wayne | 2:30 PM 4 comments Saturday, January 08, 2005 Headache I got a bad migraine yesterday. So bad, that I actually had to leave work. It's always pleasant to get a skull-splitting axe on a Friday and have to go and tell them I'm going home. It just looks so bad. But that's life. Well, it's probably not your life, but it's mine. I bailed on a half-day and came home. And it seems that the few times I've had to leave work it's be bright sunshine and melting snow. Which means driving home, dark glasses and still having to squint or risk having blood come shooting out my nose. I came home and slept a bit, but it never really got that full, deep sleep that helps put a migraine on the road to recovery. Instead, it was bits and pieces and the pain was always there. I can still feel it, slightly. Migraines always leave me with this sort of aftershock, a subtle reminder of where it was, kind of like a wound that throbs under the bandage. Anyway, I haven't had a migraine in awhile. Then last week and now this one. They come in clusters and usually when the weather changes (although Spring is usually the worst time for some reason). Not looking forward to anymore, because they seem worse this time. I get more nausea and now a little dizziness. Both of which seem to stick around for the aftershock shows. posted by Evil Wayne | 11:55 AM 0 comments Thursday, January 06, 2005 Congratulations Bill! You know, I'll be honest, I haven't spent a ton of time at this site. Not nearly enough to really gauge if they're being fair or just bashing conservatives. But Bill O'Reilly is such a dink that I thought this was too good to let go. O'Reilly: Misinformer of the Year! posted by Evil Wayne | 11:40 PM 0 comments Snow Plowing On my way to work today, I get behind a sander and a plow. Pretty much in that order. The sander went first, and then the plow immediately followed it. Is it me, or does that sort of defeat the purpose? The plow pretty much ripped up the snow the sander had just laid down on, thus negating a major portion of the effect of the sander. It's nice to see your tax dollars at work like that. The plow was one of those city, industrial plows, not those cheesy, Tonka-toy freelancers who don't want to scar their precious blades; which I'm getting used to around here. A plowed street really means it isn't as high as the sidewalk (not that I have sidewalks, mind you). When it snows in my town, you can pretty much forget about seeing pavement until it melts. But this guy was nuts, he was—I kid you not—ripping the snow right up to the curb, exposing the sidewall as he went with a fiery display of sparks. In several places, the embers were still glowing as I passed by. He sent a torrent of snow over the curb and onto people's lawns, cars and bushes. I watched one guy, shoveling out his drive way, leap back as he saw it coming. Presicion plowing in a 10-ton truck. Awesome. posted by Evil Wayne | 1:32 PM 0 comments Wednesday, January 05, 2005 Half Life 2 Holy shit. I've been spending as much time as I can here: 
So far, this has been the game I've been waiting the last 5 years for - Hell, HL1 was the last single-player game I completed, and -until now- the best single-player experience, ever. HL2 is so bloody immersive (which I'm told isn't a word, but I'm too lazy to look it up) - I completely buy into the environment, even if I can't crank up the details to Insane Mode. Even so, it looks so sweet. Every chance I get, I stop and see the sights, even if it prolongs the journey. I want to see everything. It only backfires on me when the enemy swams an area and I'm not paying attention. The downside is, I played so much last week that I totally trashed my sleep cycle. To the point I spend most of Thursday fighting off a migraine. And that sucks... And now, I can't really play for only 30 minutes. If I'm going to play, I want a chunk of time and I'm not getting that until the weekend. Oh well. You can check out some of the other screenshots here. I'll try to add more as I see the sights. So, is this an exciting enough post? Well, is it? Punks. posted by Evil Wayne | 10:15 PM 0 comments |
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