entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Albert Einstein is credited with saying something along the lines of, "Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once."  I have clearly transcended such mundane limitations:

• We are in the process of buying a new house (we plan to rent the current one)
• I'm in the midst of switching jobs (leaving Netflix and joining shopping.com)
• Both cars are in the shop today (and thus we are contemplating buying a newer one)
• I had to return my MacBook Pro to Netflix (which necessitated completing Portal 2 before my time was up), and my personal XP laptop hasn't been turned on in at least two years due to a bad CPU fan, so i'm writing this on my phone, which means i am contemplating buying my own MBP, even though i know that our funds first need to go towards home improvement and car repair

Oh dear.

Because i could not stop for death, i bought some to go.

What the world needs is a first-person shooter version of Dig Dug.

Working in the data center is like hanging out in Darth Vader's chest.

When i die, i hope to have a funny look on my face.  When the rigor mortis sets in, people coming to my funeral will say, "Wow, Mom was right."

You know the human race is a fucking failure when there's such a thing as a "blogging Lifetime Achievement Award".

Yo mama's so ugly, she can't masturbate anymore `cause her clitoris got a restraining order against her.

There is no 'i' in 'team', but there is an 'eat' and a 'me'.

Consider, if you will, the potential of Dr. Phil/Jim Cramer erotica.

Dear President Obama: stretching out a hand to Joe Lieberman should only happen when your arm fully extends as you backhand him across his Droopy face.

Thank you for reading.  Check back again in three years for more Twitturds.

I'm not a man who's prone to laughing at stuff that's supposed to be funny.  I will smile, even chuckle, but true laughter happens sparingly.  So when i tell you that there's some mad Englishman on the arse-end of the world who reviews video games in such a manner as to make me laugh hard at least once during the 3-to-4 minutes each review lasts, well, that's because he's one funny motherfucker.  Yes, i'm talking about "Yahtzee" and his work that he calls "Zero Punctuation".  His savaging of the state of gaming-based Webcomics paralyzed my diaphragm and left me gasping for air.  The fact that i'm reading the preceding paragraph in a Yahtzee-like voice in my head is proof that his style is pervasive and that my brain is irrevocably broken.

en_ki posted a couple of videos regarding the state of our civil rights when it comes to being visited by the police (plus a couple of apropos links).  It's well worth the 49 minutes that both take to watch, if you can spare the time.

divisadero embedded a preview to possibly the greatest videogame-based movie of all time.

Remember Liquid Television?  sanspoof linked to something that reminds me heavily of the best parts from that show.  As far as LTV goes, one short that always stuck with me was "The Running Man" (part 1/part 2); the haunting music in the final minute remained imperfectly in my memory, so that when i first heard Michael Hedges's "Spare Change", i thought it was the music they used in the cartoon (it isn't).  Although there isn't a performance of "Spare Change" on YouTube, there is a huge amount of Michael Hedges content there, and, well, thank god for YouTube, because now i've seen Michael Hedges play.  Unless you know tronpublic, you've probably never seen anyone play guitar the way Hedges plays "Silent Anticipations".

Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor.  He does amazing stuff.

Via warrenelliscom, a levitating, powered lightbulb.  Thank you, Nikola Tesla, wherever you are.

"It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the [Coalition Provisional Authority]."  Thank you, Microsoft Word.

"Just think about your options.  You know Coach isn't going to give you back your scholarship just like that.  If she finds out [that you're pregnant] and if you decide to keep it, that's gone."

I think i've gotten to the point where i'm sick of Civ4.

And it's not because i'm afraid to see what happens after Elizabeth planted a stack of 7 Redcoat and at least 13 Cavalry units (i say "at least" because the stack ends in an ellipsis) just outside a city i took from her some turns ago (which, in a strange coincidence, is named "Teoihuacan"; i am playing the Aztecs, so how did she end up founding a city with an Aztec name? way i see it, she was asking me to capture it!); i presume that after she's done with that, she'll probably go on to fully remove the rest of my presence from the continent she inhabits.  I hope i can delay her, sue for peace, and get on with maybe shooting for Alpha Centauri before time ends.

Anyway, the real reason i'm not playing is that i want to get a hold of my free time so i can get back to writing (both e&tg and the proto-novel) and reading (since i came back from Las Vegas and finished Pratchett's Thud! and James Rollins's Sandstorm, i've started reading a few pages of the following books but then stopped: Sideways, The Name of the Rose, A Fire Upon the Deep, A Confederacy of Dunces [reread]).

In other news, Kim and i saw Murderball last night and it was quite good.  Tonight we met vito_excalibur and had dinner with her and palecur and amywithani at the local Colombian joint (they were out of Colombian beer! WTF!).

But no writing tonight.  Now, bed.

During Costco Death March today, i saw the Ultimate Arcade stand-up unit.  Eighty-one classic games.  Great stuff.  But the price is outrageous ($2000 in the store).  You can buy old video games for $10; assume that price for ancient, if "classic", games, and the cost of the stand-up arcade is $810.  So is the hardware worth $1200?  Highly doubtful.  Why are these pinheads trying to gouge classic game lovers?  People will probably stick to their homemade stand-up arcades with a PC and MAME as guts.

As i Googled for something i'd written somewhere, i found something else i'd written:

like blooming flowers,
i seize your underwear thus —
behold! a wedgie

It bothers me that Civ still treats diagonal moves as single moves.  PYTHAGORAS, MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?  Updating the game and upping my RAM to 640MB improved things somewhat, although in the wonder movies, where the sound used to hiccup, both sound and video hiccup now.  Tomorrow, i'll probably try the third-party patch that mjlewis showed me and see how that does.

After about 48 hours of Civ4, i'll have to catch up to see what i've been missing.  I will say this: the so-called "minimum" and "recommended" system requirements, as far as RAM goes, are a joke.  The game sucks up 410 MB of RAM, and i saw it hogging over 700 MB of virtual memory after i exited the game.  When your stripped-down Win2K installation uses 180 MB of memory just sitting there, it's inescapable that you need a minimum of 640 MB, and you should really get a gigabyte in there to be comfy.