Okay, I can't really bring myself to write an entire stream out of this (especially insofar as I try to at least keep enough dignity so as not to turn my page into a series of whiny rants about my personal life), but, well, this has got to be the toughest year I've ever dealt with.
Now, I think this suspicion has been running around my brain for awhile, but, for those of you who haven't heard, here's the event that finally tore it:
Douglas Adams is dead. Poor bastard was only 49, and he had a heart attack. This was Friday, May 11, 2001.
Incidentally, for the sake of continuity, I will point out that I'm writing this at 12:30 AM, so, by my usual dating scheme, it's actually still the 12th. However, I had already dated several pages in the Archive (yeah, I uploaded the March-April archive) with "01.05.13" before I realized this fact.
I also remembered this time to add the page for my BBS to the sidebar...now that it's been down for like weeks.
Anyway, I'm going now. I really wish I could say more about Douglas Adams, as his writing meant the world to me, but dammit...I'm still mourning.
A longéd-ass new Stream and a new Life.
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Caught a test screening of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
For those of you who missed it, there was a much-publicized (at least in the corners that publicize this sort of thing) test screening of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in Arizona a couple weeks back.
And for those of you who've really been living under a rock, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is (purportedly) the last flick of the series, and it comes out in August. More pertinent information can be found at viewaskew.com, newsaskew.com, and moviepoopshoot.com. What I say here won't be anything you can't find there...I'm not big on massive spoilers, boys and girls.
And for those of you who've really been living under a fucking bigass rock, Jay and Silent Bob are the recurring characters in Kevin Smith's View Askew series. Now go away and don't come back until you've rented (or, better yet, purchased) Clerks, Mallrats, and Dogma. (Chasing Amy is optional. Toss it in, if you'd like, between Mallrats and Dogma...it's got a few good bits, and it makes a couple of the scenes in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back a lot funnier, but...well, you'll see what I mean. ...Also, you might want to give the Clerks cartoon series, available under the title Clerks: Uncensored, a glance; it rocks.)
Anyway, J&SBSB fuckin' rocks. ...Not as cerebral as the other four, for the simple reason that Jay is the center of attention, and let's just say he doesn't have the linguistic acumen we've come to expect from View Askew heroes. ...Nonetheless, the movie rocks cock (or is it knocks cock?); it's not inferior to the others by any means, it's just...well, it's exactly what you'd expect from Jay as the hero. ...And Jay proves remarkably charismatic, too.
All this to say...you wish you had my mad skillz.
For a truly sporadic and stream-of-consciousness feel, I'm writing this part during the last five minutes or so of the work day. Because when I go home, I'll probably want to shower and then play Dreamcast. As it is, I'm protracting the bejesus out of this update. Yeeha.
At least I haven't succumbed to LiveJournal. Brent has. He's also evidently geared up toward saying some really nasty things about SotN. ...How is it that he can refer to me as a slug-brained asshole for my taste in video games but if I say something along the lines of "Anyone who has never seen The Jerk should not be allowed to reproduce" or "How in the name of all things holy can you possibly think that Zelda 1 is better than 3?", he will take it extremely personally and bring it up in a surly fashion for months thereafter?
...He's not going to speak to me for weeks after I post this.
Just for purposes of transition...it's now about forty-eight hours and forty minutes later and I'm home. Yeeha.
Anyway, yeah, so, I linked Brentai's LiveJournal, but I'm not changing my links page until, y'know, more than a couple members of the Holy Trinity are actually...doing anything. ...Which is kind of a shame, because Brent and I have discussed a kickass motif for the next update, too.
Bought a Dreamcast...I figured, hell, a day's pay (...I'm working ten-hour days, mind you...) for a pretty good console, a couple Sonic games, two controllers, a memory card, and Jet Grind Radio...why not, right?
Anyway, needless to say, I'm digging it. ...And it's so well-hacked, too. My recent experimentation with a cdrecord and a couple emulators has shown me the true power of a Linux console to make a Sega console play games from a Nintendo console. If you're interested in Dreamcast emulation, give DC Emu, but remember, as always, that emulation is only legal if you own a copy of a game, and whoever tells you you can keep a ROM for twenty-four hours is a fucking idiot.
The funny part is that I mainly added that last disclaimer part so this would be appropriate on a college server, when in fact I think I managed to phrase it in such a manner to make the situation much worse. Oh well.
...Pee-Wee. I read a pretty good article over at salon.com the other day, regarding Reubens' starring role on You Don't Know Jack and its implications to his slow return to the Pee-Wee persona. First, let me comment on Jack: It's all right, but it's way too slowly-paced for a half-hour game show. They either need to pick one genre (stand-up comedy or game show) and stick with it, or expand it to, oh, say two hours (I did see Joel Hodgson's name in the writing credits...).
As for Pee-Wee himself...well, I don't think I even need to say how I feel about Pee-Wee. I think everybody likes Pee-Wee, and everybody but the media liked him a decade ago during that whole fucking debacle. I mean, really, if you can find me a guy who hasn't jerked off to porn, that's the guy I don't think should be allowed near children.
...On the plus side, CBS has paid its penance by not having a single good show since cancelling Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
I rather liked this little Adams tribute. The parodist went so far as to actually cover every verse of the original. ...Course, the chorus is flawed in that Zaphod does not rhyme with half odd (maybe While young Zaphod played it safe, odd/Prefect stared at the sky would work...), and there are a few other such quirks to the meter and rhyme, but I'd recommend giving it a read.
You're probably looking right at that picture of me with the Dew (and, special bonus: my laundry hamper, sporting a pair of my underwear right on top!) on the left. [Edit, 01.09.15: Well, you would be if this were still on the index page. On this page, it's probably up quite a ways higher. At least, until I get a whole lot more archive links in that sidebar.] There's a funny story behind that.
...I just realized I haven't had any Dew yet today.
Anyway...that supply of Dew (which I have just realized I haven't yet personally depleted any today) is the result of a system NAU institutes whereby you have to use up all the money on your meal ticket by the end of a school year, or you lose it. ...Well...I had $130 or so left in my account the week before I got off school.
There are more pictures of the excursion, but Brent has convinced me that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to put them all on my main page at once (and, having to suffer through 56K for the summer, I feel I must concur). So, while it may make the tale less epic, I will scatter the uploading of the pictures.
Also, the image is supposed to be exactly the same width as my contents bar. If you're using IE, it may very well not be. [Edit, 01.09.15: Well, it might well not've been if this were still on the index page. On this page, it's probably fine. At least, unless I add some really long link in that sidebar at some future date.] This is because Microsoft seems to think that devoting only one line to an E-Mail address, which I did not ask it to do, is more important than adhering to an explicitly-stated width, which I did. ...Mozilla and Opera conveniently bypass this problem by just conveniently sticking whatever portion of the line ChairmanCase@aol.com doesn't fit in the contents bar outside it, smack-dab on top of any other text that may be there.
I would just put a <br/> tag in the middle, except that makes something of an assumption about a viewer's resolution, browser, text size settings, window size settings, and whether or not he's got the sidebar up. In other words, if I arbitrarily toss in a <br/>, I'm the one spitting at standards. If I just leave things the way they are, it's Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla/AOL spitting at standards.
Mike Allred rocks.
Hey, I can go off on random tangents if I want. This section is called Stream of Consciousness. Ain't you never read Thoreau?
If there's anything English classes have taught me repeatedly, it's that Thoreau would've pulled B's.
I fucking hate American education.
I still think public schools are a good idea and Republicans, Reforms, and Libertarians (to name a few) are full of shit and live in a dream-world where discrimination does not exist...and hell, I work for a public school system (for six more weeks, anyway). But there's a big difference between saying a system has the right premise and saying it doesn't suck ass.
...Fucking Alex Chiu appears to've lost my fucking data. Fucker. So click the banner some more if you want to ensure that I obtain plastic things with magnets on them.
Anyway, as I was saying, Allred rocks.
Allred is a comic book artist. Who rocks. He's been into a bunch of underground shit in the past, but I, sadly, was not aware of him until just recently, when he (quite surprisingly, actually) scored a gig with Marvel. Anyway, he and Milligan have turned one of the dozens of Marvel titles beginning with the letter X and a hyphen (X-Force) into something actually both worth reading and worth looking at. Also, Allred's doing Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which I decided to pick up solely on the fact that Allred, God bless him, draws Spider-Man with the original, smaller eyes.
...MacFarlane is a rant for another day. My opinion of Spawn is somewhat lukewarm, and I fucking hate the big eyes on Spidey, but MacFarlane has proven a fuckin' saint in how he's conducted his business with Image and MacFarlane Toys. ...That and he's a local boy, so I feel somewhat obligated to root for him because of that.
Anyway. I think I may be out of material for now...see you guys when I build up enough steam to give a rat's ass about stuff again.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Games: Sonic Adventure.
Books: So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish.
