I have decided that Al Gore is using the Global Warming for his own personal gain. It is not the fame or millions of dollars that he is funneling into his pockets by owning the majority of the UN approved carbon offset company. It is not the political power he is trying to maintain in the face of stupidity. Not even the unshaven, unbathed, freaky environmentalist women who want to do a Clinton on him ... OK maybe he doesn't want that one. No it is none of these. The reason that Al Gore is fighting against Global Warming is that he is secretly a Palladium Algor Frost Giant.
He obviously came through a rift from the Palladium universe and found the world to be far to hot for his artic skin. He found he had no useful skills that would be able to support him on this world. He went Through a metamorpheous to become a human and began a career as the closist thing to an evil warlord as he could: A POLITICAN!!!! He found that his skills at giant English and giant journalism kept him in the lower bracket of monsters. He sucked at fighting and did not have the brains to be a mastermind criminal.
He attempted to create a massive communication network to control the minds of the Earth, but he found it had already been made. So he found that before he could bring his brothers over he had to become president and casue tempratues to lower throughout the world causing massive poverty and starvation in the poorer countries. Once the human population was gone his giants could come over to proclaim him emporer. This is how sucky great and stupid Al Gore is.
Killing babies throughout the world for decades: Al Gore the Algor.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Street Fighter Chun Li
So I am watching the CN and a commercial for Street Fighter the Legend of Chun Li comes on. Now the other Street Fighter movies sucked a lot. I feel bad for even paying for it. The Anime one was so bad they made a gay sex spoof of it that I saw at DragonCon, it was sadly funny. These are very good reasons to completely skip the movie, however the best one may be what they did to the star.
In the game on of the best reasons to play Street Fighter 2 was that the one girl character in it was actually pretty good looking. Chun Li was a cute Chinese girl that you would not mind looking at for hours at an end.
In the commercial she is shown in a completely black outfit. This was not what the the character should have been. She was the sterotypical cute Chinese girl that game players would want to see. Sure there is sexism, but it made you notice the character. If they did not have the character it would be sexism. If they made her look ugly it would have been sexism. it would have been sexism no matter how you look at it, but at least Chun Li would have kick the asses of anyone who said it was sexism. Take that NOW losers. Make this blog into a sexist blog so that it can be noticed.
But there may be reasons for not making her look like that. If she is investigating the death of her father she should not be going around like a festival girl. The black works well for the skulking in the night. I assume that they will put in a scene where they put her in the traditional outfit as a joke on the regular game outfit. I mean if she was in a fighting tournament she would be laughed at until she began the beatings.
But oh well. I will just have to wait until I can find street.fighter.the.legend.of.chun.li.torrent to be able to see how it was. And besides I always thought that Cammie was the hotter girl in the game.
In the game on of the best reasons to play Street Fighter 2 was that the one girl character in it was actually pretty good looking. Chun Li was a cute Chinese girl that you would not mind looking at for hours at an end.In the commercial she is shown in a completely black outfit. This was not what the the character should have been. She was the sterotypical cute Chinese girl that game players would want to see. Sure there is sexism, but it made you notice the character. If they did not have the character it would be sexism. If they made her look ugly it would have been sexism. it would have been sexism no matter how you look at it, but at least Chun Li would have kick the asses of anyone who said it was sexism. Take that NOW losers. Make this blog into a sexist blog so that it can be noticed.
But there may be reasons for not making her look like that. If she is investigating the death of her father she should not be going around like a festival girl. The black works well for the skulking in the night. I assume that they will put in a scene where they put her in the traditional outfit as a joke on the regular game outfit. I mean if she was in a fighting tournament she would be laughed at until she began the beatings.
But oh well. I will just have to wait until I can find street.fighter.the.legend.of.chun.li.torrent to be able to see how it was. And besides I always thought that Cammie was the hotter girl in the game.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Steampunk Dead?
I have been going about reading some of the steampunk blogs and sites that I have not been at since my computer died hideously. One of them, Voyages Extrodinaires, had an article on the rise and current death of steampunk. To many of the core followers of the movement see the embrace of steampunk by the mass media and "fringe groups" as the harbinger of doom for the genre. Personally I just cannot see that, and think that the supposed core followers are just sad gits.
The steampunk or Victorian science romance has been with us for over 150 years. I like to think that the big start was with the first publication of Verne with Five Weeks in a Balloon. The balloon had a device that allowed to to generate hydrogen from water through electrolysis loosely making it a scientific adventure. There is Man exploring nature and conquering adversity giving it the sense of a romantic adventure of the soul. The idea that Africa will be the next basket of civilization after the fall if the United States gives us a steampunk dystopian atmosphere with an aura of hope around it that the Victorian society embodied. Just the fact that a person would only be limited to their ability to gather food and water for survival for the distance that their explorations would carry them is incredible for the time. Not having to go back for coal or other fuel while maintaining such high speeds would make me long for adventure had I been in the time period. Heck it makes me yearn for adventure now!!!
As the steampunk movement progressed very slowly it seemed that only the cream of the crop was presented to the consumer of the genre. We did not see the large amounts of crap and clutter that is produced when something becomes popular and everyone tries to latch on. This crap and clutter may be bad, but a true connoisseur can select the gold from the dross. For every 10 bad items that will be produced there will be that one glint of purity that will be the excellence that we look for. With so many people working in the genre the amount of gold will dramatically increase along with everything else. We just have to look for it.
This is the case of the Castle Falkenstein RPG. It was published to early and did not get the attention that it deserved. If it were released now it would have a number of additional gamers playing it now. The only thing that could keep it from succeeding for a while would be WoW. Perhaps if there were a MMORPG it might draw a lot of people. I truly hope that Atlus Online will be able to get the MMORPG players hooked on to something like reading Verne or some wild thing like that. They can even get it from Project Gutenberg for the fancy digital copy for their steam powered iphones.
WoW has drawn away to many pen and paper gamers as it is. I got started with Castle Falkenstein when it came out. I own every source book and run a game now and then. I have even gone on to create alternative rules for the game using dice to make it easier for new players. Not that anyone will ever notice my site Mot's Castle Falkenstein, but hey I needed to put it up there for my other player so I might as well make it available for everyone.
I go out to find new steampunk, Victorian sci-fi, Victorian adventure, and the like quite a bit. With the Internet I can find quite a bit and sort through to get what I like out. Those who complain about the acceptance of the movement by the Mass Media are just lazy or stuck up wanting staying with their individualism just like everyone else. I say share with everyone else you want to, let people decide what they like on their own, and keep your version of steampunk true to yourself. Perhaps the merging of genres will create something really great and freaky.
The steampunk or Victorian science romance has been with us for over 150 years. I like to think that the big start was with the first publication of Verne with Five Weeks in a Balloon. The balloon had a device that allowed to to generate hydrogen from water through electrolysis loosely making it a scientific adventure. There is Man exploring nature and conquering adversity giving it the sense of a romantic adventure of the soul. The idea that Africa will be the next basket of civilization after the fall if the United States gives us a steampunk dystopian atmosphere with an aura of hope around it that the Victorian society embodied. Just the fact that a person would only be limited to their ability to gather food and water for survival for the distance that their explorations would carry them is incredible for the time. Not having to go back for coal or other fuel while maintaining such high speeds would make me long for adventure had I been in the time period. Heck it makes me yearn for adventure now!!!
As the steampunk movement progressed very slowly it seemed that only the cream of the crop was presented to the consumer of the genre. We did not see the large amounts of crap and clutter that is produced when something becomes popular and everyone tries to latch on. This crap and clutter may be bad, but a true connoisseur can select the gold from the dross. For every 10 bad items that will be produced there will be that one glint of purity that will be the excellence that we look for. With so many people working in the genre the amount of gold will dramatically increase along with everything else. We just have to look for it.
This is the case of the Castle Falkenstein RPG. It was published to early and did not get the attention that it deserved. If it were released now it would have a number of additional gamers playing it now. The only thing that could keep it from succeeding for a while would be WoW. Perhaps if there were a MMORPG it might draw a lot of people. I truly hope that Atlus Online will be able to get the MMORPG players hooked on to something like reading Verne or some wild thing like that. They can even get it from Project Gutenberg for the fancy digital copy for their steam powered iphones.
WoW has drawn away to many pen and paper gamers as it is. I got started with Castle Falkenstein when it came out. I own every source book and run a game now and then. I have even gone on to create alternative rules for the game using dice to make it easier for new players. Not that anyone will ever notice my site Mot's Castle Falkenstein, but hey I needed to put it up there for my other player so I might as well make it available for everyone.
I go out to find new steampunk, Victorian sci-fi, Victorian adventure, and the like quite a bit. With the Internet I can find quite a bit and sort through to get what I like out. Those who complain about the acceptance of the movement by the Mass Media are just lazy or stuck up wanting staying with their individualism just like everyone else. I say share with everyone else you want to, let people decide what they like on their own, and keep your version of steampunk true to yourself. Perhaps the merging of genres will create something really great and freaky.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Military is at Least Honest
The US Air Force has released regulations and work flow process charts on how to deal with postings on blogs that are not complementary if the USAF. Now I can understand that the USAF needs to be looking out for people that are either confused or just plain lying about the honor of the air force. It is just very stereotypical of military mindset to have a flow chart of what a soldier is to when they find a post that they do not agree with.
It is actually a rather well done, if simple, flow chart with, I am sure, quite detailed and voluminous regulations to go with it. I feel bad that the AF has released that just to help their image, but they are open with it. The US government is significantly better than others on how it handles criticism and the rights of citizens to criticize it. The AF wants its people to tell the truth in a polite fashion with full disclosure of who they are.
Other organizations will either hide who they are or just lie about it. My Wife's third mother sent things to her from the Obama campaign that were criticizing other candidates (including the Libertarian FairTax). It turned out that all of the emails were a lie and the supposedly "third-party" website was owned by someone on the Obama campaign.
I am thankful that the USAF is far more honorable and honest in their press work than most countries and almost all politicians. I just find it sad that they seem to think that they will have people looking for blog posts that are defamatory to them. Perhaps they have a staff of hundreds of airmen checking all the blogs 24 hours a day. That is just a sad and pathetic waste of money.
It is actually a rather well done, if simple, flow chart with, I am sure, quite detailed and voluminous regulations to go with it. I feel bad that the AF has released that just to help their image, but they are open with it. The US government is significantly better than others on how it handles criticism and the rights of citizens to criticize it. The AF wants its people to tell the truth in a polite fashion with full disclosure of who they are.
Other organizations will either hide who they are or just lie about it. My Wife's third mother sent things to her from the Obama campaign that were criticizing other candidates (including the Libertarian FairTax). It turned out that all of the emails were a lie and the supposedly "third-party" website was owned by someone on the Obama campaign.
I am thankful that the USAF is far more honorable and honest in their press work than most countries and almost all politicians. I just find it sad that they seem to think that they will have people looking for blog posts that are defamatory to them. Perhaps they have a staff of hundreds of airmen checking all the blogs 24 hours a day. That is just a sad and pathetic waste of money.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Catsmas went well.
So I managed to survive Christmas with my family. Actually I like all but one of my family. I will not say which one so they can wonder if they ever read the blog ... not likely. We were not able to give many presents due loss of job and illness. We were able to get all the children something and at least a book for the others. That makes it OK. All of our friends agreed to not exchange gifts. That messed up one friend who always gets her presents ahead of time. She will however be able to give them as birthday gifts later.
Everyone else was generous with us. A number of gift certificates and clothing items. My wife got three hats which she needed. One looks very 20s so she can wear it during my friend's 1920's adventure game. I got a nice tea set with good tasting tea. My wife hates tea so it is all mine. Now we will eat all the chocolate and fruit that we got. Sadly we got no no monkeys as they are so delicious.
We both got sick this holiday and had to hide in the bedroom and cancel a plan to go to dinner at a family member's house. I have fully recovered, but my wife still feels bad. Hopefully we can go to her sister's tomorrow and hit the bookstore with our 5$ off coupon at Borders. We got 40% off one book and got a coupon for five off another. This is buy one get one free basically. I wish I had bought more to get more coupons.
I do plan to go to Costco next week to look at 1TB external hard drives. This way I can perform better backups of my laptop and have a place to store my torrents.
But we did not get a cat this year so it is not truly Catsmas. Ours ran out when my wife was in the hospital this year. I think she wants one, but I cannot think of a way to get one into the house. Oh well, I can try something next year.
In the mean time I will continue to work on my Castle Falkenstein campaign. I feel I will be the only one running any role playing games for the next six months. I will need to get to work on the next three adventures to keep up with everything. I plan to do a lot of planning to get real Victorian culture and history into the game.
Everyone else was generous with us. A number of gift certificates and clothing items. My wife got three hats which she needed. One looks very 20s so she can wear it during my friend's 1920's adventure game. I got a nice tea set with good tasting tea. My wife hates tea so it is all mine. Now we will eat all the chocolate and fruit that we got. Sadly we got no no monkeys as they are so delicious.
We both got sick this holiday and had to hide in the bedroom and cancel a plan to go to dinner at a family member's house. I have fully recovered, but my wife still feels bad. Hopefully we can go to her sister's tomorrow and hit the bookstore with our 5$ off coupon at Borders. We got 40% off one book and got a coupon for five off another. This is buy one get one free basically. I wish I had bought more to get more coupons.
I do plan to go to Costco next week to look at 1TB external hard drives. This way I can perform better backups of my laptop and have a place to store my torrents.
But we did not get a cat this year so it is not truly Catsmas. Ours ran out when my wife was in the hospital this year. I think she wants one, but I cannot think of a way to get one into the house. Oh well, I can try something next year.
In the mean time I will continue to work on my Castle Falkenstein campaign. I feel I will be the only one running any role playing games for the next six months. I will need to get to work on the next three adventures to keep up with everything. I plan to do a lot of planning to get real Victorian culture and history into the game.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Python ... run It's a snake!!!
I just started to learn to program in Python. I can get by in Perl, so I thought it would just be learning the syntax. This is true except that the indentation rules were not clearly expressed in the Python tutorial that I was using to learn. Once I figured out the indent rules by if/elis/else statements were simple.
I plan to mainly use the language to automate the Free BSD (no need to buy a mac) Apache server. I may switch back to Perl if Python is to hard and cannot do what I want to. Since I want to put it on my resume. I am hoping to do some of my management of the Apache server using it for internal work. Everything else will be FTP into it. I am looking for a free URL translation service for my DHCP enable IP. Way too much to use a Comcast static for business class cable.
Most of the management of the Unix server will be handled by a combination of various sh, perl, and awk scripts.
I will update on my success on making Python handle Vista. I hope I can do something with it.
I plan to mainly use the language to automate the Free BSD (no need to buy a mac) Apache server. I may switch back to Perl if Python is to hard and cannot do what I want to. Since I want to put it on my resume. I am hoping to do some of my management of the Apache server using it for internal work. Everything else will be FTP into it. I am looking for a free URL translation service for my DHCP enable IP. Way too much to use a Comcast static for business class cable.
Most of the management of the Unix server will be handled by a combination of various sh, perl, and awk scripts.
I will update on my success on making Python handle Vista. I hope I can do something with it.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Castle Falkenstein Game
I ran a CF game last Saturday. Sadly two of the players could not make it, so I switched games on the rest of the game. The original game was to be a weekend gathering on the birthday of Enrico Falgori the famed CF opera singer. I ended up using a single player adventure for my wife and altering it to include the other 3 players.
They did well with the game. I think I threw one person when I had a Guild of Calamitous Intent handbook under their pillow. They had not seen the Venture Brothers, so they were real wary of the entirety of it. I just thought it was cool to put in, but I had wanted to put more sword fighting in the game. I put in a rule that caused the players to be in trouble if they used firearms in a fight with the guild. This way I can have more of a swashbuckling feel to the game while still allowing the players to use guns against non-guild forces.
I also introduced their guild assigned nemesis: the Night Baron.
They did well with the game. I think I threw one person when I had a Guild of Calamitous Intent handbook under their pillow. They had not seen the Venture Brothers, so they were real wary of the entirety of it. I just thought it was cool to put in, but I had wanted to put more sword fighting in the game. I put in a rule that caused the players to be in trouble if they used firearms in a fight with the guild. This way I can have more of a swashbuckling feel to the game while still allowing the players to use guns against non-guild forces.
I also introduced their guild assigned nemesis: the Night Baron.
The game only took seven hours with a food break. Very quick for our group. Had they known that the meeting with the Night Baron at the end would turn into a tea party they may have gone through much quicker. The group will travel back to Alexandria and pick up the rest of the group. Once that happens they will travel to Napels for Falgori's party. Most likely to be run in Janurary 2009.
And yes the Night Baron was taken from Detective Conan. I changed the outfit to white, but I just liked the look.
And yes the Night Baron was taken from Detective Conan. I changed the outfit to white, but I just liked the look.
Laptop Back Yeah!!!
OK, I just got my laptop back from repair. Thankfully I had an extended warranty from Costco. It took over a week to get back, but I did not have to pay for the replacement of two hard drives and the motherboard. I can handle a week of no PC for several hundred dollars.
I was fairly happy this time, but the last time it was horrible. Costco sent it to Micro Medics. They were awful. I am a network engineer that manages servers, I know what I am talking about. They were to replace the motherboard (video chipset) and one hard drive. The laptop has two and they knew that. They were told by Costco all of the problems from the ticket system that they share. This is what they ended up doing.
The replaced the motherboard fairly easily. The thing is a mess to get out so I will give them some slack for that. However, that is where they stopped. They then installed the OS (Vista Home Basic 32-bit) onto the 64-bit system that has Vista Ultimate. I sent them the system recovery disk for the to use. They did not even complete the restart and powered down by pressing the power button after the first load. When I started the PC I saw the Windows is starting for the first time message. This is really bad thing to see on a repair. If they did not run through the load and test functionality they should probably be fired.
Costco called me back as I was determining how bad Micro Medics was, and they had Micro Medics send me a UPS shipping label. Micro Medics were not able to copy and paste my email address out of the ticket system, so they sat for three days on this. Costco was the one to get me a new box shipped. Micro Medics used standard ground on it.
Once I sent it back, they took over a week to work on this. I got it back with a new hard drive, but the OS was still Vista Home Basic 32-bit. The second hard drive was not even added to the computer using the disk management snap in. At least I was able to fix everything myself. A grandmother would have sent it back a third time. Micro Medics sucks a lot.
If you ever have to send anything into Costco to get repaired under warranty, ask them to send it to another vendor than Micro Medics. They have several that they use.
I was fairly happy this time, but the last time it was horrible. Costco sent it to Micro Medics. They were awful. I am a network engineer that manages servers, I know what I am talking about. They were to replace the motherboard (video chipset) and one hard drive. The laptop has two and they knew that. They were told by Costco all of the problems from the ticket system that they share. This is what they ended up doing.
The replaced the motherboard fairly easily. The thing is a mess to get out so I will give them some slack for that. However, that is where they stopped. They then installed the OS (Vista Home Basic 32-bit) onto the 64-bit system that has Vista Ultimate. I sent them the system recovery disk for the to use. They did not even complete the restart and powered down by pressing the power button after the first load. When I started the PC I saw the Windows is starting for the first time message. This is really bad thing to see on a repair. If they did not run through the load and test functionality they should probably be fired.
Costco called me back as I was determining how bad Micro Medics was, and they had Micro Medics send me a UPS shipping label. Micro Medics were not able to copy and paste my email address out of the ticket system, so they sat for three days on this. Costco was the one to get me a new box shipped. Micro Medics used standard ground on it.
Once I sent it back, they took over a week to work on this. I got it back with a new hard drive, but the OS was still Vista Home Basic 32-bit. The second hard drive was not even added to the computer using the disk management snap in. At least I was able to fix everything myself. A grandmother would have sent it back a third time. Micro Medics sucks a lot.
If you ever have to send anything into Costco to get repaired under warranty, ask them to send it to another vendor than Micro Medics. They have several that they use.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Starting Post
OK, I am starting this blog, just to rant and complain about standard stupid things. The main reason is to get my Castle Falkenstein Role Playing game some higher page ranking on the good ole' Google.
I am just trying to get higher on the search for "Castle Falkenstein alternative rules". It does not even show in the regular search for "Castle Falkenstein". With the blog I can discuss our attempts to game and what ever may strike me. Pretty sad and pathetic is it not?
My search for Falkenstein stuff was frustrated when a lot of the archived material was removed from a HDD when I sent in a lap top to be repaired. Fancy HP gaming lap top with 2 hard drives. The techs did not understand that HDD1 is the second hard drive, with HDD0 being the first. They then reloaded the OS on top of HDD1, noticed that it was not correct half way through and reloaded 32-bit Vista on a 64-bit processor.
I used a fancy undelete program at work to recover most of the information, but my anime in MKV and OGG was a loss along with some of my Castle Falkenstein stuff. I will be avoiding Mico Medics from now on.
Now I will start to back up to the web with the Castle Falkenstein web site. Please take a look at it. I would like to see Castle Falkenstein prosper even if the publishers only have an electronic copy available.
Check out the R. Talsorian CF website. They have to be good they have an Anime Mecha.
I am just trying to get higher on the search for "Castle Falkenstein alternative rules". It does not even show in the regular search for "Castle Falkenstein". With the blog I can discuss our attempts to game and what ever may strike me. Pretty sad and pathetic is it not?
My search for Falkenstein stuff was frustrated when a lot of the archived material was removed from a HDD when I sent in a lap top to be repaired. Fancy HP gaming lap top with 2 hard drives. The techs did not understand that HDD1 is the second hard drive, with HDD0 being the first. They then reloaded the OS on top of HDD1, noticed that it was not correct half way through and reloaded 32-bit Vista on a 64-bit processor.
I used a fancy undelete program at work to recover most of the information, but my anime in MKV and OGG was a loss along with some of my Castle Falkenstein stuff. I will be avoiding Mico Medics from now on.
Now I will start to back up to the web with the Castle Falkenstein web site. Please take a look at it. I would like to see Castle Falkenstein prosper even if the publishers only have an electronic copy available.
Check out the R. Talsorian CF website. They have to be good they have an Anime Mecha.
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