Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in psyckogod's LiveJournal:

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Monday, January 28th, 2008
3:17 am	I must oblige my OCD Damn, it's been a long time since I updated this thing. Well, I've been thinking it might be fun to kick the lj along again every once in a while, and I'm gonna start with a list: All the songs I've references in post subjects since I started this. Think of it like a Psycko's Playlist Primer, '05-'06 edition. 1/7/05: "Crazy Train"- Black Sabbath "Demon Speeding"- Rob Zombie 1/9/05: "Enter Sandman"- Metallica 1/10/05: "Diary of a Madman"- Ozzy Osbourne 1/11/05: "Mother"- Danzig 1/14/05: "Dare To Be Stupid"- Weird Al Yankovic 1/20/05: "Mr. Brownstone"- Guns 'n' Roses 1/21/05: "Feel So Numb"- Rob Zombie 1/23/05: "We're Not Gonna Take It"- Twisted Sister 1/26/05: "The Unforgiven"- Metallica 2/5/05: "Age of False Innocence"- Blind Guardian 2/7/05: "Droppin' Plates"- Disturbed 2/15/05: "Rock and Roll All Nite"- KISS 2/21/05: "Hey Stoopid"- Alice Cooper 3/1/05: "Invaders"- Iron Maiden 3/10/05: "Teenagers From Mars"- The Misfits 3/12/05: "Turn Up The Radio"- Autograph 3/22/05: "Black No. 1"- Type O Negative 3/24/05: "Cum On Feel The Noize"- Quiet Riot 4/16/05: "Dream Warriors"- Dokken 4/25/05: "Bad Religion"- Motorhead 5/21/05: "Secret"- Adam Sandler 5/24/05: "I Turned Into A Martian"- The Misfits 6/7/05: "Dio"- Tenacious D 6/13/05: "The Wall"- Pink Floyd 6/24/05: "Eleanor Rigby"- The Beatles 7/1/05: "Holy Diver"- Dio 7/4/05: "Monster Mash"- Boris Pickett 7/11/05: "Burning The Cross"- Mercyful Fate 8/1/05: "March or Die"- Motorhead 8/15/05: "Kung Fu Fighting"- Carl Douglas 8/16/05: "Ride The Lightning"- Metallica 8/21/05: "Science Genius Girl"- Freezepop 8/25/05: "Danger Is Go"- Powerman 5000 9/5/05: "Eat It"- Weird Al Yankovic 9/13/05: "Bang Bang"- Nancy Sinatra 9/17/05: "School's Out"- Alice Cooper 9/20/05: "Desecration of Souls"- Mercyful Fate 10/8/05: "Real American"- Rick Derringer 10/10/05: "The New Shit"- Marilyn Manson 10/14/05: "UHF"- Weird Al Yankovic 10/18/05: "Amish Paradise"- Weird Al Yankovic 10/21/05: "London Dungeon"- The Misfits 10/22/05: "Spider-Man Theme"- from The Electric Company 10/29/05: "Dream Evil"- Dio 11/2/05: "The Devil Went Down To Georgia"- The Charlie Daniels Band 11/7/05: "Rock 'n' Roll High School"- The Ramones 11/26/05: "Bohemian Rhapsody"- Queen 12/2/05: "The End"- The Doors 12/10/05: "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer"- Elmo & Patsy 3/10/06: "Never Know Why"- Ozzy Osbourne 3/17/06: "Save This"- Denis Leary 4/3/06: "Won't Be Coming Home"- Ozzy Osbourne 4/17/06: "Breakin' The Law"- Judas Priest I'm really surprised at how scattershot this song list is. Monster Mash and Kung Fu Fighting?? I didn't even know who did those songs, I had to look up the artists just now on Wikipedia! Rest assured: Future song lyric subject titles will be much more wholly METAL, in keeping with my tastes these days. Stay tuned. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
1:07 pm	Good news, everyone! Yesterday I signed the lease and coughed up the security deposit for my own spiffy brand-new swingin' bachelor pad! It's a studio apartment at a new city-funded complex downtown, still under construction. Is it true it's only three hundred a month? YES. Is it true the complex includes its own laundromat, courtyard, ballroom, and other groovy things still to be completed? YES. Is it true I'll be moved in by sometime next month and available for ladies to come by and meet the Captain? Emphatically YES. Still no word from the apartment manager whether I can get started on installing the Psycko-Cave. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 11th, 2006
1:52 pm	That pinky needs to get its act together, seriously I've only just recently taken advantage of a price drop to become part of the Guitar Hero crowd, and it is great. This is the first big-peripheral game I've bought in perhaps ever and there is a feeling of inner bliss that comes over me in the midst of holding my axe between my rock-and-roll-dispensing hands to shred my way through great rock anthems like Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water", Megadeth's "Symphony of Destruction", or ZZ Top's "Sharp Dressed Man". My only problem? My damned pinky finger. I don't know if any of you guys use your pinky fingers to play video games very often- maybe you like to do some kind of spider thing with your hands, whatever floats your boat- but my little pinkies are not part of my usual video gaming crew. They're not committed to the video game fingers group. They aren't affiliated with Union Brothers Thumb, Index, and Middle. Now, as per playing this game, on the easiest setting Ring Finger had to get involved. Usually it's just my support guy in back of the controller, but here it has the essential position of the 'yellow' fret key. And this setup worked fine once the finger had some training- Ring pulls its weight. But now I'm on Medium, trying to work my way thru power chords and practicing hammering on notes so I can get more classic songs in Career Mode, and that blue fret key needs the pinky for it. And that little bastard is all like "drop me a blue solo" and we handle it nicely, but then we get a pattern of notes from blue all the way over to green and back and it fucks up all our rhythm! Never mind the really difficult songs where we've got to have super-speed just to snag every note! That pinky is encroaching on our rock and roll unity! Does anyone have any advice for dealing with lazy pinkies? Because it's starting to affect stalwart Union Brothers Ring and Middle with its slothful attitude. Thumb and Index are just about fed up with this whole thing. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 7th, 2006
12:49 pm	Uncle! Frickin' UNCLE! I don't know what causes it- social stimuli, violent video games, or bizarre combinations of our brain chemicals- but if you get at least two guys alone in the house together with nothing to do, we can come up some impossibly cool and self-destructive games to play. Yesterday my friend Craig and I were hanging out at his apartment and weren't in the mood for watching movies or playing board games, so we decided on the old classic: Submission contest! The rules of the game are such: We take turns putting each other in agonizing submission holds as seen on our favorite professional wrestling programmes, and then the person in the hold tries to outlast twenty seconds of it. If he taps out or cries something like "uncle!" or "I give!" or "I quit!" or "Holy SHIT that HURTS FUCK FUCK LEGGO!", the person who put on the hold gets a point. If the victim lasts a whole twenty seconds, the holder gets no point. So we go ten holds each and see who has more points by the end. Here are our tallies, with the person's name and the holds he put on the victim- each is marked with the name of the hold, an S for Submit or an NS for No Submit, and final point number. We had times of submission marked too, but I honestly can't remember them. Plus they're embarrassing. Craig: 1. Full nelson, S 2. Ankle lock, S 3. Figure-4 leglock, S 4. Partial sharpshooter, S (partial because I was tapping out before he'd even fully locked it in- the sharpshooter's like my Kryptonite. It SUCKS.) 5. Half crab, S 6. STF, S 7. Armbar, S 8. Camel clutch, S 9. Double armbar leglock (for lack of knowledge of its proper name), NS 10. Modified torture rack, S Me: 1. Full nelson, NS 2. Ankle lock, NS 3. Sitting armbar, NS (my second-most painful hold, and nothing) 4. Crippler crossface, NS 5. Boston crab, NS 6. Surfboard stretch, NS 7. Tarantula, NS (the Tarantula is the worst hold in my repertoire, and still nothing!) 8. Bow & arrow lock, NS 9. Triangle leglock, NS 10. Sitting arm stretch, NS (also for lack of a better name) So what's all this tell you? One, that I don't have a very high threshold for pain. Two, Craig is TOUGH. The Tarantula alone would've defeated ten lesser men! And three, the submission contest is even more fun than it sounds! We know we're onto something good when we spend half the time lying on the carpet in severe pain and laughing about it. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 29th, 2006
2:17 pm	All those years swirling down the drain... So this past Wednesday I woke up feeling- how do we put it? A little off-weather. A little under the color. A little sort of outs. I tried drinking water, lying down, taking medicine, nothing was doing the trick. And- astonishingly enough- walking across town to work in the summer heat to push carriages didn't help much. After about an hour I went in and told my manager in no uncertain terms that I had to leave so I could go home and die writhing in pain, or something like that. And that night- agh! The shamefulness! Let me explain: Having fortunately grown into a healthy young man who's rarely stricken with illness and thus capable of downing food combinations that would fell a lesser constituted person, it has been...about eleven years since the last time I've hurled. Eleven long and strong years spent honk-free. And that night- woefully- my streak came to an ignominious end. Whatever ignominious means, it certainly ended that way. The hell of it was, the streak-breaking cookie toss was self-inflicted... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 15th, 2006
10:38 am	It's a special layer of Hell What is it about toothaches, this special brand of sneaky maliciousness they have, where you can go about town doing your business and feel fine all day, until just when you've gone to bed and are trying to sleep? Then the pain starts? The jagged agony? The interminable awful ache? And then you get up and go take some pain-reliever ("Extra Strength! Fast Acting, Long Lasting! May Cause Liver Damage!") and then once it kicks in, you feel okay for maybe twenty minutes, then the pain starts back up again just as you're about to nod off and you could swear it's worse this time? As if it's taken your effort to anesthetize yourself as an insult and doubled its efforts to hurt you in retaliation? And then you have to decide to call a dentist (or in this case an 'oral surgeon') to make an appointment for some stranger to reach around in your mouth and dose you up on painkiller before he cuts into your gums to pull your rebel teeth? And charge you like a grand for the efforts in total? Only you certainly don't want to spend the money you've saved up for a swanky apartment's first month rent/security deposit, and your workplace got rid of their dental plan years ago because they found it to be something beneficial to employees they weren't legally required to have, so you may have to enter into some kind of debt over the next several months of your life just to be free of this ravenous brand of terrorizing pain? Well, that would certainly be bad. I haven't had to go through anything like that lately. Why, if I did, that'd just be sucky times for me, huh? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
11:36 am	Karma on the swingback? I sure as hell hope so! I am typing this so as not to jinx myself ironically, but rather, in hopes that my friends' positive energy will feed me and bring me luck, and a measure of karma coming back my way- in the sense of me maybe getting something good out of trying to be a nice guy in the midst of all the bullshit I've had to put up with lately. I am currently in the process of applying for a studio apartment at a brand-new city-funded apartment complex downtown. The rent is very affordable on my current monthly income, there's a list of fancy little amenities in both the apartment and the complex as long as my forearm, and if I get it I will finally be able to GET OUT and be my own boss! I have finished the form. I have everything I need to get the background-checking/processing/squeezing me out of first month's rent & deposit ball rolling. I just need to call up the nice leasing lady and do the hey-how's-by-ya routine. It is my ardent feverish hope that one of my next lj posts will either be confirming that I have moved into this new place or am about to. Hope: It's What's For Brunch. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
1:15 pm	They're calling it a cure The other night I went to go see X3. And after seeing all the trailers and all the hype, just let me say... Eh. Meh, really. It's like instead of calling the movie X-Men: The Last Stand, they should've called it STORM: THE MOVIE. STARRING STORM AS PLAYED BY HALLE BERRY! SEE STORM SHOW RESOLVE IN THE FACE OF MAJOR CHARACTERS BEING REDUCED TO FIFTEEN-MINUTE CAMEOS! MARVEL AT STORM'S HAIRDO! SEE HER DO STUFF WITH LIGHTNING! STARRING HALLE BERRY AS STORM, CO-STARRING HALLE BERRY AS STORM, WITH A SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE BY HALLE BERRY AS STORRRRMMM! also featuring cameos by some other x-men probably I read gjohnsonkoehn's lj post on the movie; I knew I should have stayed for the end of the credits, god damn it! I probably will end up seeing it a second time for this. Or just wait 'til DVD. Don't get me wrong- the special FX are awesome. It's worth seeing the movie just to see Juggernaut's 'human bowling ball' routine. And it's interesting how top SFX scientists managed to use the Phoenix look to make Famke Jannsen look scary and creepy, as opposed to her natural state of being totally super hot. And Beast kicking ass. And Iceman fully ice'd up. And you will believe a man with giant feathery wings can fly. So, there's enough geek-out moments to make me like it in spite of high expectations kinda lowered. Who's got their fingers crossed for Superman Returns? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 17th, 2006
11:43 am	Breakin' the law, breakin' the law! Well, I beat Kingdom Hearts 2, after about thirty-five hours' worth of play stretched out over two weeks or so. It's a pretty good feeling. There's some contentment here- but, to see the bonus ending footage for Kingdom Hearts 3, I've got to complete Jiminy's Journal, which means completing everything there is to do in every world. Kind of a tall order. Right now- I've got to beat that %@&#ing Sephiroth! I'm not kidding around here. Be prepared when you face him, should you play this game. He will fucking END you. These RPGs got me to thinking about character classes. That's an interesting bit, isn't it? Like how all the Final Fantasy games had their characters in these set types of skills and specialties. I wonder- if I was going to go on a save-the-world quest with fantastic new powers and weapons, what skill set would I be? And who would come with me? That part's easy- my AUG peeps, natch. If I were to guess what skill they'd be- I might be totally off on this, but this is the stuff I sometimes think about at work: Pyre's totally a Dark Knight. He casts the insta-Death spells and poisons and quarters enemies' health, plus he has a sword that's all big and black and spiky. Ribo seems like he'd make a great Alchemist. I'd come crawling to him midst-battle and- maybe he'll mix me up an elixir. Maybe. 'Fish seems like a total Black Mage, casting elemental spells and curses left and right. Tarry, on the other hand- is it just me, or would he make a great White Mage? I can completely see this. It may not be as 'cool' as a Samurai or a Dragoon, but a good white mage will save your silly ass after a WEAPON's finished pounding it into the ground. And as for 'Hide- a Bard, definitely. We don't put him out on the frontlines, lest he get his spoony bard butt handed to him, but he's got all the status-increasing and protective songs. As for me- I know for a fact I'd be a Gambler, if it counts as a class, which I think it does. Think Setzer in FFVI, Cait Sith in FFVII, Wakka in FFX, or Lady Luck in FFX-2. I LOVE playing gambler characters in RPGs. I can spin some slots to determine special attacks, I can roll a giant set of dice to seriously damage the enemy, and I beef up the party's luck just by being there. "Double your pleasure, double your fun, double your EXP after you've won!" Right on. That's my class. Finally- I can't believe it took me until last night to finally get a chance to watch The Warriors. This is the coolest, craziest movie ever! I want to be a Baseball Fury! (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
2:13 pm	I saw it happening like deja vu If anyone's looking for an explanation why they haven't seen hide nor hair of me for like five days now on AUG or anything, blame it on Kingdom Hearts 2. The four-year wait was worth it- it's approximately one hundred and eight times better than the original. Better! I've logged over nineteen hours now of battling Heartless, dueling with pirates, racing light-cycles, exploring treasure-filled caves, and in general rocking out Disney-style. And I can tell I'm still only about halfway thru, because I've hit that RPG plot plateau where everything's all strung out and confused and even the main characters don't know what the hell is going on. I could explain the whole Ansem bit to you, but it'd take like a whole 'nother paragraph. Last night marked the first time I've actually sat down and tried to use the computer in my sister's room. It's really cluttered so the only seating space is an awkward position with my legs spread in front of a TV tray with the keyboard on it- said keyboard also has a stuck up-arrow key and a backspace key you have to pound six or seven times as hard as you can to get it to go back a space. For the joke of it, I typed up a short segment in Wordpad where Vic and Vix are sitting around their living room complaining about how they'd like to do a fic, but with the uncomfortable seating and the ghetto keyboard, it'd just be too much of a hassle. Heh. Three cheers for a three-day weekend! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, March 17th, 2006
2:04 pm	I'm a goddamn human being! I walk erect! Happy St. Patrick's Day! I can't believe I don't own even one single truly green item of clothing to wear. Blue's actually my favorite color, but green is in second place. But not even a festively green pair of socks with which to celebrate my Irish heritage! I considered wearing my Hulk T-shirt, but decided not to for some reason. Three hundred and sixty-four days out of the year, nobody likes the Hulk- he's all rampaging around and ruining peoples' days when he smashes their houses and chucks their cars around fighting the Abomination. But suddenly on St. Patty's Day, he's the most with-it guy in town. Maybe I should buy some green body paint? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 10th, 2006
2:33 pm	They will never know why we rock I just read the new issue of EGM today and I'm stoked-pumped-PSYCHED! No, not for the latest Splinter Cell, Rainbow Six, and Ghost Recon games taking up the cover. Fuck those games! There was a new print ad for Kingdom Hearts 2, following the big-ass preview last month, and there'll be an official review in next month's issue. By which time I should be playing the game myself, after almost two years of waiting! Yes! New Disney worlds to visit: Mulan, more of Hercules, more of Aladdin, Steamboat Willy, The Lion King, Pirates of the Carribbean, and oh yeah, freakin' Tron! Confirmed Final Fantasy new guest-shots: FF6's Setzer, FF7's Tifa, FF8's Seifer, Fujin, and Raijin; FF9's Vivi, FFX's Auron, and FFX-2's Yuna, Rikku, and Paine- the Gullwings! This is one of those games none but the converted give half a crap about. That's okay. I'm enjoying the feeling of being in on something not many people are. Plus! March 21, Justice League DVD set finally hits! It's good to have little things like these to look forward to. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
2:40 pm	Epiphany Man! With the power to come to realizations about stuff! I finally saw a trailer for that V for Vendetta flick 'Hide (or Garnet, if you prefer) kept mentioning. I only just now saw why it looks to definitely definitely be worth my dollars. Flying daggers! Big Ben explodes! Hugo Weaving dressed up like a guy out of an Alexander Dumas story! Radical! All the best movies come out in the summer. It's almost not even worth going to the theater nine months out of the year. Speaking of 'Hide, if you're reading this: You know our fic characters, the V-family? They've never had a surname, but the other day, I was lying in bed in that half-awake, half-asleep, mentally open state and thought of the right one- Vicks! That way, Vix's full name is Vix Vicks! It's perfect! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 26th, 2006
4:54 pm	I aim to misbehave The day before yesterday I rented a copy of Serenity, sat down and watched it. Those who browse my friends list of lj's may recall this as the little sci-fi flick gjohnsonkoehn regularly creams all over. Pretty good flick. Made me want to watch the show. I can clearly recall many of my thoughts while watching: "This is an interesting movie. There's Caleb, Jasmine, and Hamilton right there. That Kaylee is cute as a button. I'd 'launch my photon torpedoes' into her. Those Reavers are something- it's like if you took the freaky zombies from the Dawn of the Dead remake, the ones who were all 'RRARRGH ARRR RARR' and running around, and then dressed them up like the bad guys from The Road Warrior, you'd have Reavers. What's going on, anyway? Some kind of battle or chase, I think. Wow, it crashed! I believe there's some Hollywood law that says all movies based on sci-fi television shows must have the ship crash. The Enterprise has crashed like five times. I can't believe that guy died! Isn't he one of the main guys? That doctor is really kind of annoying. He looks like a frat boy. No Dr. Smith is he. 'You stay away from my living weapon sister, you blundering bubbleheaded bucket of bolts!' And we're done. Good flick. I'd like to see more. Maybe I'm a browncoat in training. I've never seen the DVD set at Strawberries'. Maybe I could order it." That's my thoughts in a (large) nutshell. I guess Tarry's too good to reply to my e-mails. Fine! He's not invited to my birthday party! (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2006
2:31 pm	The peanuts are civilization! Threatener balanced the sack on the end of his foot, looking up at the spinning fan in the living room. Twitch and Twist looked guardedly at him, wiggling their fingers and balancing on the balls of their feet. Threatener licked his finger and held it in the air, frowning. "Windspeed okay...air-velocity normal...air resistance optimational...PULL!" He kicked the hackysack up into the fan and with a "BLURT-DURT-DURT!!", the fan sent the hackeysack spinning away. Twist dived for it, knocking over a lamp as she smacked it with an elbow, and Twitch spun in midair as he whalloped it with his foot. Psycko entered the room, ducking the hurtling sack, and brandished an open cardboard box. "Halftime!" he ordered. "Line up, you jokers! I got a Christmas present from Fish!" "She sent you a present?" Prism asked from the couch. "...Why?" "Because she's totally flipping rad! That's why." Psycko replied. "She sent me a hard drive! And some Linux! And a little fish pendant! And some chocolate coins and an Atomic Fireball!" "You gonna eat the coins and Fireball?" Buckshot called from the kitchen. "Unfortunately, chocolate coins are not recognized as legal tender, but they are chocolatey and delicious." Psycko nodded. "The last time I tried sucking on a Fireball, my tongue exploded and I had to piece it back together with Scotch tape." "Ahh, yes. The week of a thousand lithpth." Threatener nodded wisely. "That's why you're giving this to Pestilence so she can power up the nuclear generator in the basement." Psycko said, holding the tiny red ball between thumb and forefinger as he handed it to Threatener. "And don't put it in your mouth." "Don't foot it where now?" Threatener asked as he put it in his mouth. "-In your mouth!" Psycko repeated, waving away the clouds of smoke as the chunks of Threatener's head clattered to the floor. He pushed them aside with his foot and set the cardboard box down on the coffee table. He hefted out the bubble-wrapped hard drive, turning it over in his hands. "Are you going to install that yourself?" Prism asked. "Hmmmm. Me trying to put together computers looks like that scene with the apes from the start of 2001." Psycko replied. "But my sister's computer-savvy boyfriend put together that hard drive casing she has in her room with the old monitor and keyboard! He can help me cram this chunk o' bytes in there! Then all we gotta do is run a phone cord into her room and it's free Net access for both of us 'til I get my laptop! Fish is such a sweetheart. I've got to give her something in return. Let's erect a 500-ft stone statue of her in my backyard for all Axalonville to see!" "No good, cap'n. We used all the stone and masonry equipment last week to build that giant foot and drop it on Tarry's place." Twitch said. "Damn. That seemed a lot funnier after I'd had all those raspberry Smirnoffs." Psycko said. "Well, I'll think of something. And in the meantime, 'til we get it up and running- PACKING PEANUTS!" The human and assorted robots laughed and reached into the box, hurling styrofoam peanuts back and forth well into the afternoon. Thanks, Fish! You're the best. And Merry Christmas! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 10th, 2005
2:51 pm	Grandma got run over by a reindeer, walking home from our house Christmas Eve I've been pushing carriages as my primary job function for about a year and a half now, and there's something I always suspected would happen to me on the job sooner or later, and a couple of days ago, karma finally caught up to me. I was pushing carts at work and I got hit by a car. If this has never happened to you before, I can't really describe it. Imagine being smacked full-body by something very hard, very fast, and then somebody spins your whole peripheral view around you crazy-like before you hit the pavement like a sack of Nerf balls. The first thing I did was let out a real good, gutteral 'AARRGHHH!', and then mutter to myself, "Goddamn, it finally happened, I knew it would happen..." Then I just lay there on my side while a lady proclaiming herself to be a nurse looked me over and the driver called for an ambulance. My left arm and leg hurt, but I could move the arm without fresh pain and I could wiggle my toes, and I neither blacked out nor bled, so I knew it could've been much worse. Still- not groovy. I was taken to the hospital, where they gave me a tetanus shot, treated the nasty little scrape on my shin, and gave my leg a few X-rays to confirm that nothing was broken. I've already filed the accident report so's I can at least get enough workman's comp to cover the bills, and my manager was quite understanding of my desire to call out of work today. If I had to describe the way I feel as I limp around the house lately, it's as if I am a yummy chocolate center of stiffness wrapped in a crunchy candy coating of soreness. I haven't seen my schedule for next week yet, but that was the week I had set for my paid vacation. That's good, it'll give me some time to recuperate. And to think about more adamantly pursuing a less vehicularly dangerous line of work. I wish I could spend the time chatting on a brand new laptop, but I haven't had the opportunity to go into my bank and don my special 'need money' kneepads yet. So, how to spend the time? I bought a couple notebooks to catch up on creative writing. I'm trying to decide what I want to start with: Some writing for the Heroes version of Prism, including a briefing-style explanation of his mysterious origin, or the next segment of my long-in-production Western. I had planned to portray a town meeting in which Mayor Burke and his 'advisor', Boss Nigel D. Godwinn, appoint the new lawmen- the slick and civilized 'Snaky' Will Sterling, the blunt and bland 'Stone' Jonas Cranston, and controversially, the vicious 'Dead Man' Hector Toomes, the only con to ever survive a good old-fashioned Peaceful Valley 'hangin'-and-shootin'. Tough call. What do you think, Tarry? (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 2nd, 2005
2:33 pm	The killer awoke before dawn, and put his boots on I am beginning to highly doubt I'll ever see that hard drive again. And if I do, it'll be so long from now I'll have been able to save up enough for my own new desktop AND two laptops before the fact. Now that Joe Friday and the rest of the probation Gestapo have the evidence they need to cement their belief that my entire family is a bunch of pervs and child pornographers, they'll never let us have it back again. Why not? They already violated my privacy and then seized the hard drive, might as well keep it just to show us who's boss. I've done some mental calculations of my financial status. I regularly get significantly less than forty hours a week at work and make chump change per hour. Even if I managed to put in as much as a hundred dollars a week (doubtful), it'd still take me almost two months just to get up to a starting laptop price of like $800. I tried knocking over a bank, but it turns out they're really heavy. Ba-dum-tsh. Going all winter without home Net access is going to suck, but it's not too bad if I give myself other stuff to do. Case in point: I went to the library in Westerly, Rhode Island. If you're not familiar with this place, let me tell, it's pretty rad. They have a sizeable audio book and VHS/DVD section, including DVD sets. I borrowed the entire first season of the X-Files this past Sunday. I'm halfway into the fifth disc right now. I never watched this show on TV much, so being able to get in on it from the ground floor is pretty sweet. I wonder: In the history of this show, has Scully ever been right? I mean, entirely? Probably not, cause then it wouldn't be an X-file. It'd be a Mundane-file. And who wants to watch a show called that? (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 26th, 2005
4:04 pm	He will not go! We will not let him go! (Let him go!) Man, I bet the nice folks at the library are sick of seeing me at the Internet roundtable by now. I pretty much become a regular whenever my home access goes balls up for a lengthy amount of time. I mainly miss the Instant Messenger chats. Also, no time limits. Also wouldn't object to a fic or two, but you didn't hear it from me. Other than that, I'm coping pretty well on this front. If this had happened about three or four years ago, when I was Captain Internet Addict, I'd have already been found in a public bathroom stall trying to snort lines of crushed, finely powdered 56k modem off a small hand mirror. It's too bad about the IM, because I've still got creative juices trickling around my fantastical brain. You know what would make a cool story? I noticed there's a lot of theology flying 'round my friends list lately. I always found the subject matter pretty interesting, at least as far as classic gods, angels, and demons go. I've been kicking around an idea for a story about these three siblings in Heaven, whose wicked brother had been damned to Hell. And although he is apparently a bad guy, they love him so much that they want to bring him back to Heaven with them, right? Either he's a bad guy or he's been falsely damned. Like a divine clerical error, see? So they go on a quest to retrieve him. There'd be angels to avoid and demons they cut deals with, I'd take some of the classic ideas from anywhere from the Bible to the divine comedy, and there might be an overlaid Beetlejuice-style surreal afterlife if I wanted to be more weird and funny with it, right? I remember an Axalon post a while back with Fish's description of an angel. It was a freaky little sharp-edged thing that sounded like tinkling bells. Like a warped seraphim. It's an interesting idea, because while anyone can talk about how demons could come in all shapes and sizes, anywhere from big horned masses of muscle to little floating patches of bad karma, angels could be this way too. What if that little bells creature is a lesser angel? Or a less formed angel? What if there are flaming-sword broad-winged kick-righteous-ass archangels, or more human-like- almost to a fault- angels who speak with humans? Maybe the three siblings get a watcher angel's help to get out of Heaven, and from there the ball starts rolling. This definitely has potential. But it's not really my subject of expertise. There's others who could do this way better than me. Maybe I should go with the more surreal, modernistic outlook on Heaven & Hell. If there has to be weird comedy, flowing dialogue and little bits of gags and humor, I'm your man! This bears further thought. Which is good, because I'll certainly need something to keep my brain from freezing in my skull out on the lot tonight. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 16th, 2005
2:03 pm	Who are those two guys with fire in their eyes? Just this past Sunday I went to the mall with a friend of mine, it's our annual mall visit 'round his birthday. He picked up an armload of mangas, I picked up a copy of the Ultimates 2 paperback, Pyramids, and a copy of Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves. I've been playing it steadily and am most of the ways through the game. It's awesome. It takes the heist concept from Sly 2 and refines it into a truly memorable experience, as you go globe-hopping, assembling a gang of specialists for the Cooper Vault job. Both Tarry and I are big fans of the Ocean's Eleven, Italian Job type heist flicks. This was reflected in a AUG characters heist idea we kicked back and forth for a while. We got kinda stuck on trying to think up an original job, but I still fondly recall the idea. We definitely need to finalize a gang list. Going from just characters between us two, I thought up a pretty good gang last night at work. The Mastermind: Mandate. He's got a mind as sharp as all the spiny stuff on his body, and infinite patience to put up with the rest of these yahoos. The Fixer: Prism. His varied skills make him an ideal point man on the job, and he can galvanize the others into action. Plus he has enough connections to secure all the things they're going to need to pull this off. The Financer: Clockwork. How do you get to be head of an evil empire without lots of money tucked away somewhere? Mandate probably meets with the guy once a month for herbal tea and mah-jong. His assets will come in handy. The Wheelman: Hooligan. Clockwork's limey bodyguard is an old hand at getting the boss out of tight spots. He's good at the wheel and he's partially inspired by Jason Statham's Handsome Rob character anyway. Only he's not handsome. At all. The Demolitionist: Mindfield. I'm not 100% sure, but I remember Mindy having a thing for things that go boom. Plus he was made for burrowing. He's got to be kept on a tight leash, though- he definitely seems like the guy who's going to screw up the plan at an inopportune time. The Techie: Pestilence. She mainly specializes in weapons science, but has been branching out into computers, propulsion systems, dabbling in explosives and RC gizmos. If Lightspeed's busy, then Pest will be ideal. The Greaseman: Two choices for someone to get in and out of tight spots- either Mayhem, the Enclave stickbug who can fold himself up in knots, or Pox, the bad conscience fairy from Cybertron Beta who's roughly ten inches tall. Give him enough booze and you won't even need to give him much of a cut of the wins! The Inside Man: Threatener. He has a superhuman ability- it may even be an unknown Transmetal II power- to get odd jobs fast and lose them faster. Given his lack of any other applicable skills whatsoever, might as well get him to pick up an entry-level job and 'misplace' the keys. The Flimflammer: They'll need someone to put on a legitimate face and pretend to be very important. Either Calamari, whose got 'my uncle can have you all in a ditch by this time tomorrow' cred and doesn't even know it, or Kodiak, who seems like the kind of guy who won't mind picking up some extra retirement funds. Of course, he'd be working with a bunch of Predacons... There's other spots to consider, but this is a small working list. We need a good pull to put together, then the story'd write itself! Also, forgot to mention: I've got a job interview with the local Movie Gallery tomorrow. This kind of work could be right up my alley. Wish me luck! I need all the good mojo I can get. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 8th, 2005
12:04 pm	No time for song lyric titles, Dr. Jones Once again, I'm using the library Internet access to explain why my dumb ass doesn't have a functioning computer THIS time. Here's what the deal is: Last night I went through probably one of the worst hours of my life, and it may become even badder depending on what it leads to. My dad, who I love very very much, made a bad mistake about five years ago- I don't really want to go into it, only tell you that it's not the kind of mistake you may be thinking of. Bad, but not THAT bad. At this point, he is a registered sex offender. I don't consider telling you this a breach of privacy, because you could easily just look him up at the website. So yesterday was a perfectly normal day, I put up a happy lj post and hung around enjoying my day off from work and we went to the mall and I bought a new video game, then not five minutes after we got home Probation shows up to make one of their random visits. Only this time there's a new guy with the usual guy, he is a hard-ass, and he wants to search the computer for porn. I think to myself, 'oh shit- I've got fics saved on there. Nothing else that I know of, though.' So he's sitting and searching and we're kind of standing around trying to be pleasant,checking MY mailbox and asking us "Who's this NikTaylor sending stories?" and me, I'm feeling more and more uncomfortable by the whole ordeal. I finally found out last night what that term 'skin-crawling' really means. Then, boom, there it is. The guy finds a semi-nude picture of a minor (I mean like 16). I've never seen it before. Neither has my dad. As it turns out, my sister's friends browse the Net at our home without supervision all the time, and I guess one of them has looked up this. Although it is not child pornography under the letter of the law, it still counts for my dad as a violation of probation if it's linked to him. The hardass guy said he was taking the computer, and I snapped. Totally lost it, screamed about how much I hate those probation guys- years of repression bursting out right there- and ran out the door. Pretty damn embarrassing and juvenile of me, but I never did that when I was a teenager, so I guess I was making up for lost time. When I walked back a short while later, preferring to be there to confront them rather than fleeing, I found they'd called a cop. He was just there to talk to me briefly and make sure I wasn't going to do anything else. And there's the guy walking out with our hard drive. My dad told me the story: They're going to take it to the FBI, it'll be searched to determine when this site was looked at, it'll take about two weeks, and we don't know whether it'll blow over or whether my dad could possibly go to jail for anywhere from thirty days to four years or who knows- it all depends on whether he's blamed for a picture he's never seen before and what kind of a judge he gets for the hearing, if he has to go to a hearing. With all the worries going thru my head right now, going without home Internet access for a couple of weeks is the very least of them. Here's hoping my family and I come out of this okay. (9 Comments |Comment on this)