2001-07-17 - 10:07 p.m.
#82: No Need for More Reports on Recent Events
Note to self: Yes, it's brand new layout time for my journal, and I've decided to go with a slightly complicated Sam and Max look! I also took a decidedly too long a time to finish this webpage design at a total of 12 hours.... From midnight the previous night to 12PM the following day (meaning today) when I finally collapsed in bed exhausted from having to code in HTML in notepad. And that time doesn't factor into account how long I took to take images from the Sam and Max adventure game and editted them to look neat. The upside of all this is that I've learned a couple more tricks to add to my HTML coding l33t skills, mostly to do with tables and adding backgrounds to them and making them look neater. The downside is that I've learned that Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer are BOTH still pain in the asses when trying to code HTML for either one and making the results match. Fortunately, I only had to work with tables which looks almost the same on either system, but the amount of pain I went through sifting through all the parameters and defining them was probably too much effort wasted on my part. Next time, I'm just going to write a page directly for use with Internet Explorer and that's that. @_@ Next time, I'll also probably write a less image intensive page. I'd have to say that this is one of my most bandwidth chugging webpage ever, and I'm not too proud of that.... And I'm not too proud of the fact that after all the work that went into it, I'm STILL not happy with the look. Specifically the menu on the left hand side, which needs a bit more work to make it align with the text better, but which would require re-editing the images to make it all come together perfectly. Grrrrrrrgh.... Well anyway, I'm satisfied with the look and that's that. But I guess I could have made the background image a bit smaller.... Aw, hell. @_@ I'm still tired, and I'm babbling. Bad combination, really. As to how long this layout will stay up, I think the timeframe: "forever" springs to mind readily. Unless I find more piccies of a certain Warren Ellis created character....
Whew. Quite a bit happened this weekend. Not quite run off my feet, but I WAS kept rather busy and on the move (more or less). I have a lot to write in this entry, and some thoughts to convey, so if you're an idle reader.... Skip this entry and go to the one where I tell the story about how I was almost castrated on my high school camping trip back in Australia. Oh wait, I haven't told that one yet. I guess people are going to have to wait for that one with bated breath. (eheh. castration. lovely topic)
Anyway, first of all on Friday.... I had my first ever LAN session over at my house! Well, first LAN session ever, period. Started at about 2PM and went all the way to about 5AM the following day. The final tally for the evening was EB, Josh, Kunfei, Matt and Nick; though EB had to leave early, getting a ride from Matt to Howick, who had come late. We played a game of Diablo 2 and its expansion (after spending nearly 2 to 3 hours trying to find the latest gameplay patch and then getting a technical patch that would allow me to play without a CD since I "owned" the cracked version. ahem) which left me a little confused as to my objectives and who I was meant to be fighting, since Josh, Kunfei and Nick were obviously old hands at the game and knew a lot more than I did. So had to have a running tutorial commentary from EB, which was very handy for picking up some of the nuances missed by first time gamers. I think I'll have to play more later as a solo effort, if I want to learn more.
In any case, we spent a goodly 2 hours or so smacking our way through the forces of Diablo before taking a break of downloading anime off each other over the LAN. Well, mainly downloading off Josh, really. ^^;;; Picked up episodes of Angelic Layer, Noir, Digi Charat: Summer Special and almost all of Ayashi no Ceres except for 18! Which is a fairly nice haul indeed. Was briefly tempted to download Gravitation, for the sole purpose of saying: "Hey, guess what? I have some episodes of a shonen-ai (boy-love anime) series, wanna see and have your eyes bleed out of their sockets?" but the side effect of having my OWN eyes bleed made me decide against taking such a rash action. Strange how we, as males, can tolerate or even have fond fantasies of two females disclosing their secret to one another, but the reverse does not apply. I think it's because of the excess of body hair on males. Body hair. Ewwwww. Still, the males in Gravitation are drawn in a highly female manner, so it's.... not.... so.... bad.... I guess? My skin still crawls a bit, though.
We didn't really play many games for a LAN: instead we just chatted a bit, watched a couple of random anime episodes off each others computers (Icchan from Angelic Layer is indeed EB. Now if only he'd stayed around long enough to see himself in anime....) and, in Matts case, tried desperately to get the network card working. A situation which I commiserate with, since I had the same problem when I first tried out Kunfeis borrowed network card on my computer. Nasty. We broke for dinner, which was a nicely simple and delicious meal of laksa, wherein the task of making the meal was: dumping beehoon noodles into bowl, select ingredients to put on top of it, and then add a generous helping of hot laksa soup on top of it to give it that kick we so love. Apparently it was a kick which was a bit much for some, but I think we all enjoyed it since we went through two large packs of beehoon noodles in our devourance of it. I think I ate too much at a standing of four bowls though. ^^;;;
After that.... More anime dnowloading, several brief games of Unreal Tournament Assault, where Josh, Kunfei and I discovered that the AI controlled opponents could kick as much ass as we could and more. Actually, we lost several matches rather pathetically. @_@ Took another break to eat some cheesecake that had been leftover from god knows which anime night that was here. All because Josh was hungry and kept pestering me for cheesecake. The man drove me to insanity! Speaking of which: on the personality disorder test for which Clara gave a link from her journal, I rated high on four disorders and moderate and low in the others.... Which makes me (so far) the second most mentally unstable person in the AAC. I say second most mentally unstable, because even though I managed to hold my own against heavyweights EB and Finn (I'll leave it up to them to take it as a compliment or not ^_^) I was mushed out of first place by none other than the cheesecake man himself: Josh. So it was probably a good thing I decided to break out the cheesecake when I did. You never know what those crazy people might do under duress. Being held at bay for so long from the temptation of cheesecake, he might have even snapped! @_@ Then again, a little bit more of "Time for.... CHEESECAKE!" and it might have been ME who snapped and ends up in a small padded cell somewhere. Lucky for all involved I'd say. O.o
Anyway, the LAN was about as busy as the weekend got for me, though the rest of the weekend had perks of its own as well. Saturday was devoted mainly to catching up on sleep due to the lack of from the LAN, and in the afternoon I devoted most of my spare time to burning a whole bunch of anime CDs for my friend Thomas who wanted to trade with somebody else overseas for a whole bunch of stuff. I saw the Bakuretsu Hunters TV series somewhere in his list of wants, so I was pretty happy to help him out with the number he wanted to burn.... 20 CDs, of which 4 coastered. Grrrrrrngh.... Stupid CD writer being a silly little munchkin. Late afternoon saw me looking through Claras blog and finding a journal sized rant, which took me a little by surprise. I won't sum it up here since, well first of all, I'd probably sum up only the major areas of interest to me which wouldn't really do it justice; and second of all you can read it yerself if you follow the link up there. See? Good. ^_^ The concept of "gray area" choices is probably one which we're all familiar with as we grow up, thanks in large to the amount of freeflowing information we're exposed to as we graduate from child to teenager and so forth upwards. The concept allows us to see the world as a myriad of choices: not that of "right" and "wrong", but several degress of those components mixed together with a big dollop of "maybe". In many ways, this is an improvement over the concepts of right and wrong presented as a child and taught subconsciously: parents good, strangers bad, with pages of annotations that stem from those two rules that severely limits ones interaction outside of home (gee, that sounds familiar ;-). On the otherhand, these subconsciously taught rules (and perhaps other factors) may also cause us to limit ourselves when presented with grey choices. And hence grey choices can be bad as well.
When we're young, the world is black and white. We choose to do things the way we were taught to do, as children our capacity for imagination and play are unfettered by complex concepts of morality. We simply do things that are rewarded and not do things that are not rewarded. Our goals as children were cut and dried: we're selfish little bastards who'd do anything to get that pat on the head, that sweet in our pocket or that smaller childs head down the toilet to flush.... Well the last one is an extreme case. BUT we can't really apply those same rules when we get older and the world is revealed to be a far larger thing than we first expect. We know we can't always be rewarded for what we do when the world is made up of so many different choices.... So for some of us who are less decisive and confused by this new system of thinking (myself included) we become paralysed by what life has to offer. And instead of trying to seize it, we put both sides (or more!) to close scrutiny until we succeed in placing ourselves onto the path of less resistance. Which so happens to be atop that great fence upon which philosophers of elde perched and preached to the masses while choosing neither side. Yes, it's GOOD to able to see both sides of an issue and be able to argue for them both effectively; but at the same time don't get too comfortable otherwise you might find yourself as a permanent fixture. Much like me, really. ^_^ Evaluating choices is a sign of a smart mind. MAKING those choices is the sign of a wise one. Well, something of that nature then. Gee, do I get to call myself smart? I dunno. ^^;;; For one thing, if I were really smart, I wouldn't have accidentally summed up Claras rant just now. *sighs* Ah well, just wanted to word it in such why that applied to my own situation.... I wonder how true it is, really?
Oh, and the other thing.... Friendships and maintaining them. Feeling guilty about not maintaining is a good way of getting started on actually recontacting them.... But like the bit about gray choices, don't get too comfortable with the feeling of guilt. It's like good intentions, you have the intention to do something right.... But then you think that the thought itself is good enough, so you don't actually do it. You know? So use the guilt as a springboard, rather than just settling in place and feel good feeling guilty.... This is really hard to say, but I've been here before and used a pretty cold way to handle friendships with which I haven't had contact with a person in several months or years.... Either feel guilty about it and use that guilt to get back in contact with the person, or don't feel guilty about it and forget it. Because if you're going to feel guilty and not do anything about contacting your friends then.... Well, it's pretty useless, isn't it? That sounds really cold when I put my way of thinking to paper, (or the electronic form at least) maybe writing it down was a way to potential change it? Like, now that I know what the problem is, I know how to attack it? Maybe. Or maybe I'll just continue to be some kind of emotional parasite by feeding off my unsuspecting friends who don't realise I'm packing away their responses to me as a kind of euphoric drug to be taken in moments when I feel the need for some kind of memory requiring massive endorphin release. And then when I'm done with getting as much "data" as I can off them, I move along to some other unsuspecting people to become my friends to feed upon. But that's just pessmistic talk from me, and I got a good slap the last time I talked to someone about this fear I had of me being some weird heartless monster demon thing. It made us both feel better.... I guess you had to be there to understand. O.o And I seem to have lost track of the subject. Oh yeah.... If you have a friend and you want to get in touch with them just DO IT. Believe me, life would be a lot simpler if more of us weren't addicted to guilt, self-pity and the need to sit on the fence all the time. Guess who I'm talking about specifically here. ;-)
Whew. I haven't had a philosophical muse thingy in a while. So.... Now we're on Sunday. Sunday I had to go to a friend of my mothers to help out with some computer problems they were having, since I was the little computer genius in the local Church group and all. It wasn't very much, and I was frankly a little embarassed to have had to go all the way there: since the problem just involved using Internet Explorer effectively and printing out webpages. -_-;;;; Gawd, and I could get a SALARY for teaching people this sort of thing? Where do I sign up??? Anyway, on the way back from their place, stopped at Botany Downs for a while to pick up an optical mouse (yay! No more stupid hairs and gunk caught on the trackball!) as well as, to my amazement, a copy of Discworld Noir from Electronics Boutique. Up till then, I'd only heard of the game and read some reviews in UK gaming mags, and had never seen it before for sale on Australian or New Zealand shelves. So I snapped that up quite eagerly, to play it well into the night and the next day. It feels more complete as a game than the first Discworld games did.... I mean they were pretty good, but one got the feeling that they were just adaptions of the books into a game format. DN feels more like an original Discworld novel given game form. It's a bit hard to describe, but the main difference to this game from the others is that the puzzles are less object oriented and based more on conversations and picking up aural cues from the voice acting. Very neat.
Monday.... Did more CD burning and started on the design for this page at the stroke of midnight, to fall asleep at 12PM on Tuesday the following day. And at 4PM I received a visit from Kunfei who brought his machine over to test my Pentium III-550 chip on, which worked quite well indeed. If everything goes well, by tomorrow evening I should be the owner of a spanking 1GHz Athlon processor and a Windows98 reinstall. If everything doesn't go well, then I shall be a sad monkey. Actually, I'm pretty sad right now, thanks to the fact that I have to start burning and backing up everything on my hard drive RIGHT AWAY. Which is damned difficult to do when I have so many disparate elements stuck here and there at random.... I'll have to keep better track of the personal files on my system from now on.... I hope I won't have to wipe my hard drive because of this, it'd be really distressing. @_@ The amount of webpage authorisations I'd have to resign up for and the passwords I'd have to remember.... Well, that could break any man. Must hunt for piece of paper with all the important details on....
