Yeah yeah

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Posted by Tim on August 21, 2008 – 4:57 pm
Filed under Blogroll, General Stuff

It’s been a little while and I forgot to make with the words. I really don’t have much to say. I’ve been trying to keep myself busy by picking up PHP again. I’m also just trying to sharpen my photoshop and design skillz. I’m about to start building a wordpress theme for the entire site. A unifying theory if you will, maybe I’ll try to incorporate that idea into the theme.

Lets see, I started my turn as DM with our D&D group. First game could have gone better but I’m getting used to keeping track of all kinds of stuff during combat agai, and I’m playing the healer so I have to keep up. But it is a bit of a pain to stop, focus on my character, then go back to running the combat.

We’re planning on doing some vocal tests this weekend to see if I can hack it as some kind of singer. I think I still need to work on it, but I could say that about a lot of things. I have no idea what is in store for me for this and I have to say that even though it’s only going to be Carl and I working on this, I’m a bit intimidated.

On the Pit

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Posted by Tim on August 4, 2008 – 4:48 pm
Filed under Blogroll, General Stuff

I meant to post about the Origin show over weekend, but I got side tracked. It was a good show, I’m not so much into Death Metal as I am into Black and Doom, but it has it’s moments. They mainly come at the shows I think, it’s amazing the prowess these guys show when playing. Most of the night I was watching the bassists of the various bands, they were making me very jealous. For instance the bassist for Origin was just playing with his hands but it sounded like he was using a pick. Carl, who went with me to the show and is also a bass player, was amazed by it as well.

The whole show was awesome except for two points. The first was a band that played around the middle of the night. I don’t know who they were or if they were local but they were not playing in the right place. Their singer was not appreciated at all, and frankly I hated him as well. Nothing else was wrong with the band, they weren’t bad actually. But the vocals were all wrong. It’s the first time I’ve ever been at a show and seen the crowd turn on anyone on stage like that.

It’s a weird thing about this music that the vocals could be wrong. And it’s difficult to explain. There are many and varied vocal styles that are usually attributed to various branches of metal. You may have heard of the “death grunt” which is typically how you describe death metal vocals. If you don’t listen to the music it would be very hard to really tell the difference, I imagine, between good and bad. The singer for this band had one sound, and it always sounded the same. And to make his performance worse he kept doing this damn thing where he and yell something and the guitarist would respond. Every fucking song. It all sounded the same. Ugh

The other shoddy point to the night was the assholes in the mosh pit. I already don’t like moshing, mainly because when you are 6’8″ you tend to be target number one. So I stay away from them for the most part.

So Thursday night I went and stood in front of the stage for Origin. When they started I became part of the ring for the pit. Usually there is a little bit of pit etiquette (I can hear the confusion over etiquette for people throwing themselves into other people), but it was out that night. Usually you can stand near a pit and only get one or two sweaty dudes crashing into you. I literally had little short sweaty dudes thrown into my back. 3 times I’d say. They hurt and they are disgustingly slimy.

There was another dude that kept getting in between the first and second row and then would just start flailing around. He almost didn’t walk out of there that night. It’s one thing to run into the outskirts of the people around the pit, it’s another to do it in the middle of people who are just watching. It’s hard to imagine people getting pissed off at stuff like this at a metal show but it happens. It wasn’t just Carl and I, there was about 10 other people who were tired of this dudes shit. And while I am mainly a pacifist I wouldn’t have felt bad for headbutting that jackass.

So mainly a good time, overall an A- for the night. Although it does sound like I hated it above. It was good times for the most part.

So I talked about two weeks ago about implementing a new way to show the web pages stuff off. I did get the new system in a while ago, I just kept forgetting to say something about it. I really like it, I’ll have to use it for clients sometime. The only thing about it is that it broke my lightbox script. So I need to figure out what the incompatibility is from. Probably just something small, like variable name being using multiple times.

Alright, I’ve got to start getting ready for D&D. Out.

Long drive

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Posted by Tim on July 30, 2008 – 4:02 pm
Filed under Blogroll, General Stuff

I had an interview today, for a quality control position. It’s a new position at this company, so if I do well it could be that I write the protocols and stuff for quality checking sites.

But that’s in the future. If I get the job I guess what I do is get a big list of work, sites that need to be updated, things that are no longer functioning and need to be fixed. Regular crap that goes on with running a site, except I’m examining a couple hundred or so. I don’t know if I’ll actually be building any, that might also come later. Seems to be a ground floor type of position, which I’m very cool with. I’m sick of not having steady work and more importantly steady pay. Oh and medical and dental if I pass a 3 month trial period.

My one gripe with the job is that it’s about 30 miles away, up the 5 in Encinitas. So it’s about a 30 minute drive in good conditions, probably more like 45 minutes to an hour during rush hour. Bleh. The hours seem somewhat flexible, a number of employees come in around 8:30 so it might be alright for me. I don’t do so well getting up early, definitely a night owl. All in all, I do hope they call back, I think I could do well here.

So our current D&D storyline is wrapping up probably next session, I got talked into running the next one. I’m kind of looking forward to it, but with some trepidation. I still don’t think I know the system as well as I’d like to and the current story is a purchased module so it’s got most of the rules for encounters and other stuff in it already. I also need to borrow a monster manual so I can set up encounters.

Aside from all that though, I’ve never really thought of myself as a good DM. I tend to railroad players into areas because I know whats going on there. I never did improved stuff very well. But the system so far seems easier to deal with. In 3.x D&D there was the CR system for encounters. I think it was designed by a mathematician and required a few years study at Harvard to fully understand. On more than a few occasions I screwed up monster levels and just killed the party outright. That wasn’t so fun. Although for one story I did work it into a cool event that everyone kept asking me to run again.

Maybe I’ll just buy the next module, I don’t know that I want to do that though because so far the story is almost non-existent. You can always see the weak stories because there is usually very little attempt to role-play on the player’s part. I’d like to kind of kick start that again.

Origin at the Jumping Turtle tomorrow night. They are supposed to be really awesome live.

Okay, enough from me for now.

Nerdprom ’08

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Posted by Tim on July 28, 2008 – 11:25 am
Filed under Blogroll, General Stuff

Made it to Comic-Con last weekend. I’m really glad I went, I had a lot of fun. For some reason I’m surprised about that and I’m not really sure why. We were only there for 3 hours or so, and we didn’t meet any celebrities. We did see a bunch of semi-famous people. I saw Brian Posehn walking around, which cemented my theory about the Comedians of Comedy tour ending in San Diego last weekend to get a free trip to Comic-Con. Also saw John Cho and Kal Penn from the Harold and Kumar movies. They were standing up at the top of the Warner Bros booth giving an interview. I was standing below it waiting for a friend and couldn’t figure out why the hell everyone was stopping and taking pictures of the backs of the two guys standing above me, I just didn’t recognize them at first. The other person we saw was the cheerleader from Heroes. Again, hordes of people stopping in the middle of a crowded aisle to get a picture of someones back. I got some dirty looks when I just pushed through and walked directly in front of all of them. I don’t know how many pictures I ruined, but the hatred in their eyes was all I needed to see to know I did the right thing.

I think this was my first trip where I actually bought comics. In the past I had pretty much just gone to buy Magic: The Gathering cards, to be in the Live Action Role-Playing games (holy shit, I just cemented my geek cred on the internet. What have I done?), and to just be lost in a giant crowd. Some things I was looking for was Batman: The Killing Joke, which is supposed to be a bunch of stories about people who could potentially be the Joker. They wouldn’t ever come out and say, the Joker is this guy and this is what happened, but they can come up with possibilities of who he might be. It was highly recommended by Blair Butler on G4tv and damn, it’s scenarios that are supposed to be so messed up it creates a true psychopath, how can I pass that up. I was also looking for the first volume of Hellboy, jumping on two summer band wagons. But it can’t be a bad thing that the two movies have gotten me back into comics, well maybe bad for my wallet. Anyways both were really expensive, The Killing Joke was $40 at the one place I found it, and I found a really nice Hellboy book for $50. I was willing to spend some money but that was a little much, so I passed.

What I did end up buying was 2 books from a Deadpool and Cable series. Deadpool is probably my favorite character ever, and his writers are always excellent from what I’ve seen. He’s one of the few really grey characters in Marvel I think, he’s just a mercenary with a sarcastic wit and some super powers. So when I saw those two books sitting on the rack there was no hesitation and I just snatched them up then went and asked about the other books. The booth I was at was excellent, their website is torpedocomics.com. The site is stocked pretty well, unfortunately they only have one of the other books from the Deadpool/Cable series on the site. I’m hoping that they’ll update it with the leftovers from the con this week. When I grabbed the books I didn’t see that it was only issues 7-12 and 25-29, I can’t read them out of order either. The story won’t make sense. I did flip through them though, and I really can’t wait to be able to get to them.

So that was pretty much my Saturday, Sunday was an easy day. Helped my pal brew a double IPA, can’t wait to taste it. If I had the chance to drop everything and work for brewery, I totally would. I’m not an alcoholic or anything but when you drink good beer it’s like tasting and being one with a moment in time. Ask anyone who loves good beer. Or go to a beer bar and watch someone come in and order their favorite beer, sit down and take that first sip and just kind of zone out for a few seconds. Maybe I’m being overly poetic, but damn it I love beer.

Out

I am the night

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Posted by Tim on July 23, 2008 – 4:42 pm
Filed under Blogroll, General Stuff

Watched the new Batman movie last night. I thought it was a really good movie. I’m glad they didn’t call it Batman: The Dark Knight though because the movie revolves around so many characters it would be a disservice to them. Overall I think Christian Bale was better in Batman Begins, but I think that had a lot to do with him not being the sole focus of the film. Gary Oldeman is of course gold as is Aaron Eckhart.

Heath Ledger. It’s been talked to death but now I have to beat this dead horse. I would really be surprised if he didn’t get the Oscar for Supporting Actor. I almost think he should be nominated for Best Actor. The movie wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is without that portrayal of the Joker. Anytime he is on screen you could feel the theater tense up. A lot of the things the Joker does seems to be just to see what people will do, how far they will go, and what they are willing to sacrifice. Which of course makes him truly terrifying because no one wants to be put in the position of becoming a monster. The best scene that highlights this is near the end of the film, on two boats. I won’t say anything more because I don’t want to spoil it for the Google bots that crawl around indexing my site.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about with these films is the difference between Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Heath Ledger’s. Jack Nicholson’s was almost a direct extension of the campy 60′s version of Batman with Adam West. Albeit through the dark lens of Tim Burton. It really is almost exactly the same except with more death. You’ve got crazy schemes to kill or capture the Batman and attempts to make money. Ledger’s Joker is just a dark reflection of the hero, which is interesting because Batman is already so dark. But the only way to do it is to just go over the edge and abandon everything. Batman won’t kill and wants to bring order, this Joker doesn’t care about life and only breeds chaos.

So yeah, good movie. Go see it. Preferably in IMAX.

Other big news. Oh, we have this get together in San Diego every year. You might have heard of it, I think it’s called Comic Con? Is that right? Yeah, google is telling me I’m right. Haha, funny jokes. Anyways, Comic Con is this weekend. I think I’m going to go, I haven’t been in a few years. Last time I went I somehow got into a picture of the Cartoon Network booth and was up on the Adult Swim site for a few months. My brief flirtation with internet fame. My going hinges on free passes though. Yeah, I’m a mooch. But if I have a friend that can’t use it because he’s working then it’s wasted unless someone picks up the torch. I usually miss all the celebrities. One of my friends got to stand behind Quentin Tarantino as he was pitching a fit about not being able to get a cold Coke. He also got yelled at by Patton Oswalt, Oswalt was just messing around with him though. I was there for that and just about pissed myself laughing.

Speaking of Patton Oswalt. The Comedians of Comedy are doing their last show tomorrow night. If you haven’t seen the Comedians of Comedy you should go find it. It’s Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, and Zack Galifianakis. It’s a lot of offbeat and dark humor, and it’s really dirty. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a ticket. Instead I think I might go up to the Jumping Turtle for some heavy metal.

I think we lost a member of our D&D group. Kind of unfortunate, but I think he’ll be happier this way. He doesn’t like our rigid rules of checking email on Mondays to find out what’s going on and we usually game at his place. He’s also playing our Warlord, the one bastion of healing. Going to make the end of this campaign difficult, and we’re so close to the end. Probably just a few rooms until we hit the Big Boss. Maybe I’ll just switch to Cleric and take over healing. We’ve got another Fighter so I don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal. He’s not really built for the task though.

I mentioned a while back that one of my pals and I were starting a band. Well that’s looking more and more likely. The drummer he knows is moving in like 2 blocks away from his place so we will be pretty close to each other. Well I’m not that close, but I just need to take care of the vocals when they are done noodling around. I’m looking forward to seeing if I can do it. The most singing I’ve ever done is in a karaoke booth, and Dio always ruins my voice. I came up with what I think will be an interesting art project for it, also makes things easier on me so I don’t have to worry as much about writing lyrics.

Honestly I don’t know what to sing about. I have some ideas but writing then singing them scares the hell out of me. I don’t even know if I could do it on stage, I’m already pretty reclusive. Not that I think we’re going to play live, I would have to be really confident about my voice. If it ever does come to that though I think I’m just going to get a monks robe with a big hood, hopefully so I can’t really see the audience. Also I guess I could take off my glasses. The worst part though is that I can’t drink any alcohol and then do the vocals I do, it just dries out my throat if I’m not careful. So no liquid courage for me.

I think I finally figured out the display I want for the Web section of my site. I’ll talk about that more in a few days, after I’ve gone through some stuff and hopefully implemented it. It’s really neat, and almost looks like something you would do in Flash. But I hate Flash and so would never willingly subject myself to making anything Flash related in my spare time.

Goodbye for now.