Comfortable and quiet morning… Newt’s been more talkative the last day or three. After a gray, wet start, there‘s a rainbow outside now.
Monthly Archives: August 2003
Cracked 5000 pints in the vampire game. Current rank is “Legendary” (from Count)
Feel free to answer in the comments section if you prefer.
Ach, overslept this morning… I’m going to have to do that file-tranny tonight. 1.31 gigs transfer over the instant messenger. (the six episodes of neverwhere… the first one timed out at 30 meg to go. D’oh!) Isketch is a hoot, but some of the topics are *hard*. I’m glad that you’re allowed to skip the impossible ones. Even the comic-book ones had some that I’d never heard of… sixth-string run-twice books from the mid-70s. It’s much simpler to draw “Hulk Smash” or “The Human Torch.” I’d like to get a big goon squad to play online pictionary sometime. (Though I’m terrible at mouse-art… a wacom pad would make things a lot simpler.)
The morning constitutional and shower brought me some good energy, and I’m feeling pretty good.
Today is Danny’s last Day of his summer courses, so we’ll be able to get together Tomorrow and hang out a bit. It’ since to be able to goof off with him so much now, because when the regular school season starts up, he’ll be much more restricted in his visits.
Noticed a scammy-looking letter in my Box this morning, and I did a follow-up on it. It’s upsetting because I think that this would fool a lot of people that don’t know better. My rule of thumb is never follow links from inside an email regarding information updates, but instead to go to the main company site, and see if there are any banners or update questions there.
The Email I received (and have forwarded to Ebay for whatever legal action they would like to take part in) was –
Dear eBay Member,
We at eBay are sorry to inform you that we are having problems with the billing information of your account. We would appreciate it if you would visit our website [eBay Billing Center] and fill out the proper information that we are needing to keep you as an eBay member.
If you think you have received this email as an error, please visit our website and fill out the necessary information. That way we can make sure that everything is up to date! Again here is the link to our website. eBay Billing Center
***Please Do Not Reply To This E-Mail As You Will Not Receive A Response***
Thank you
Accounts ManagementAs outlined in our User Agreement, eBay will periodically send you information about site changes and enhancements. Visit our Privacy Policy and User Agreement if you have any questions.
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Clay-o-rama rules
COPS / nifty interfaces / Creatures.
Had a nice long gab with the Gray Pumpkin this afternoon about this, that and the other thing. Lots of fun chitty-chatting about an assortment of stuff, from gaming to kung fu to zombies to political stances. I’m amazed that I was the baby boy of the gaming group… he’s 39, Danny’s 40, Doug’s got to be in his mid-late 40s. I’m only as old as the girls of that gang. Gray and I have the most similar mental frequency of the lot, still. I’m surprised how much of those gaming times I remember, and almost as shocked how much I’d forgotten.
MIT’s Media Lab is a crucible of experimentation and innovation for students of media technology. Their work ranges from the amusingly baroque to the intriguingly clever. A couple of grad students there have developed the Audiopad, an interesting system for performing electronic music. Rather than explain further, let me just encourage you to go look at the video demonstration in either Quicktime (20MB) or Windows Media (11MB) formats. Then go read the project’s web page. I’d hate to see what’d happen if Newt got at those control-elements.
Last night was one of the more entertaining episodes of COPS… (Very little beats the one-legged cop chasing a guy down, however.)
Essentially, a haggard-looking woman with scary wrinkles flags down the cop. She’s really upset because she claims to have been robbed. After a couple of questions from the cop, the woman finally says “I just gave that woman over there $20 to buy crack cocaine, and she hasn’t given me anything!” She points across the street at another lady.
She says this right to the cop. The cop is sort of flabbergasted, and makes her repeat it. “Ok. You paid that woman $20 for crack cocaine, and she took your money and didn’t give you anything. And you want me to go over there and… All right. Ok. ”
The cop eventually shrugs and decides to follow up on it. He walks across the street, where the other woman is waiting.
The cop says, “That woman over there says she just gave you $20 to buy crack, and you didn’t give her anything.”
The second woman says “No sir, officer, I do NOT sell crack. I am a prostitute.”
Also got into Animal Planet’s “The Future is Wild”, though I view it a speculative fiction rather than sound science… mainly because we don’t have a lot of the variables in place to make even something that I’d consider an educated guess about what life on Earth will be like 100 million years from now. I did rather like the tunneling birds and land-squid, however. The art and movement of the new beasties is really amazing.
Random Scotto factoid – In grade school, I hated diagramming sentences. *Hated it* Ms Mickey, the teacher at the time was as cool as could be, but when I was obliged to do that on paper… or worse, go up to the black board, I could feel the pickle-puss hang on my face. At the time, it struck me as some of the most pointless stuff I’d ever been obliged to do, and though I recognize the usefulness now, I still really don’t like doing it. I wonder if it’ll ever get telegraphed? Some little kid will ask me for help some day, I’ll see what it is, throw off a “oh, that stuff again…” and give that munchkin an irrational dislike for it, too?
a year ago Signs movie, cancerless cigs, hellboy movie, scary bunny, 2nd wishes, Oz scary, zombies land on beach, Anna Nicole show hurt to watch
2 years ago – Oz quiz, Dictionaraoke, Day planning
3 years ago – Florida panthers, everglades restoration efforts, lj adds interests
Put the poodle back in the basket.
A few sites for positive change – None of them cost a penny but can help to do good works.
The hunger site – free food to the hungry
Breast cancer site – Help to fund free mammograms
Child Health site – Help save young lives for free
Rainforest Site – help to preserve our rainforests
Animal rescue site – Feed an animal in need.
Ok.. now that I’ve built up some positive karma, let’s whine a little about whiners.
In The Silence of the Lambs the egregious psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter explains to Agent Clarice Starling why he killed one of his own patients: “I simply could not endure his interminable whining any longer. Besides, his therapy was going nowhere. Believe me, Clarice, there isn’t a psychiatrist in the country who wouldn’t like to refer a few cases to me.”
That sums up how I feel about a lot of the journals out there. I’m glad that I have the easy way out, and can opt not to read them or even link. I feel that a few of the journals I’ve seen (none that I regularly read, though some certainly exist on my friends friends page) in passing are written by “professional victims.” I can’t help but wonder if a daily whiney / angst journal can be good, because they’re getting it out of their system, or if it’s a bad idea they’re feeding that sense of misery and isolation to the exclusion of any other feelings. I suspect it’s more often the latter. I do know that journals will sometimes have hostility, angst and melancholy in them… heck, I do it enough. The flipside, of course is the folks that write that way out of a desire for attention or coddling. “Woe is me, woe is me” loses a lot of its strength after hearing someone say it for a year.
The ones that complain and *only complain* deeply, heartfully about the most non-issues are what get me. If something bugs you, do something, and make a positive difference. The world’s a big place with plenty of room for improvement.
You bleed, Kirock! Behold a god who bleeds!
I thought blogshares would be more interesting than it is. (BlogShares is a fantasy stock market where web logs are the companies. Players invest fictional dollars on shares in blogs. Blogs are valued by their incoming links and add value to other blogs by linking to them. Prices can go up or down based on trading and the underlying value of the blog.) The site is very slow… almost to the point of not being playable. I’ll give it a few days, and see if it shifts in any direction, one way or the other.
I’m ranked as the 9th top player for august 2003 so far. (Scott von Berg 20726.49% growth -Rank: 4208, $104,132.43 current worth / $500.00 start of month)
As it stands now, I’ve only invested in my own… when you register your blog, you get 1000 shares of your own journal, but maybe I’ll expand outward to folks on my reading list as well. Starting with $500 virtual dollars, and the stock value of my site, my portfolio is worth $104,271.60 I set up a goofy little RSS feed (scotto_shares) that’ll tell me when / how the share value fluctuates. Oddly, since my journal can be accessed in three distinctly different links, via http://scottobear.livejournal.com, http://www.livejournal.com/~scottobear and http://www.livejournal.com/users/scottobear, it’s valued in three different ways, depending on investments. s.l.com is currently worth $49.91 each – 249.52 p/e, ~ is worth $34.42 each -172.10 p/e, and users is $19.62 each – 98.03 p/e
Looking at things, I see that chrishaas has already placed a bid on the most expensive of the available shares, but at no profit to me. He’d stand a greater chance of profit by bidding on public shares in the “users or ~” version. For simplicity of bidding, I’ve made those mentioned in this paragraph as direct links to the respective blogshares. If you want to play, I recommend the one that’s going for $19.62 each, rather than the $49.91. (Less than half price, with growth potential. I think the middle one “users” has the most growth possibility, because that’s the default listing.)
Other folks listed on blogshares that I might look into investing in (- (typed in to the search, many on my list haven’t been listed I’m tempted to post my reading list here, so that they get spidered) edbook (here), flying_blind (here), meredith (here), sweetalyssm (here) and tarpo (here). If anyone else sets up an account, or ends up on blogshares, let me know, so I can invest. 🙂 The above listings were spidered (many from my journal, I’d imagine), and aren’t officially “on the market” yet.
Of course, totally private or friends only-blogs aren’t tradable, nor are “non-indexed sites” as there’s nothing for the public to link to or track. Communities also seem to be out of the action, which is a shame, because I imagine the
Regarding the Vampire game… they’ve added a new element. Peacekeepers. There are flyers pasted up on many walls in the city, advertising “Peacekeepers Missions”. There are very small quite useless maps scrawled on the poorly photocopies scraps of paper, but the addresses are quite clear – the newbie mission is at Emerald and 67th, while the others are at Unicorn and 33rd and Emerald and 33rd respectively. It looks like ‘mission’ is used in the sense of a building, rather than the sense of a quest, but it’s not very clear at all.
The Expedition Company… seems normal enough for vacations and getaways until you get to the part about the hollow earth expedition.
Nifty sounding drink that I’ve never consumed – Dead Lizard
Listed on Blogshares for the moment.
– http://scottobear.livejournal.com
Random Scotto Stuff – My first job for a large company (Taco Viva, Boynton Beach Mall, 1985, I think?) payed minimum wage, at the time $3.35 an hour. I made enough for gas a telephone line and car insurance.
Electronics Boutique paid a bit better than that, and for a while I worked dual-duty. The stink of EB and the Bookstore was that I was required to wear a tie.
When I started at the library, in high school, the wage was $4.42 an hour. That was part-time, and paid under $300 a month after taxes. Six years later, when I stopped working there, I was making just under double that. (Which was a good thing, because my first solo dwelling, a studio, cost me $330 a month in rent.) Happily, I found better pay being an assistant manager at a bookstore near my apartment and school.
Added some fun games to the Toybox…Plastic Balls!, Clay Kitten Skeet Shooting, Hairball Bowling, Hexxagon and The Pipe Game.
a crate full of sea lions and some hand lotion
Random bit of Curiosity –
I wonder why that never caught on in the states?
The Newest Cereal… Monopoly, Based on the board game. Basically Cinnamon toast crunch with marshmallows. That’s too sickly-sweet even for me.
Random Scotto Recipe- How to make fun putty
Looking into A Child is Missing. It looks like they do really good work, helping the police during the first few hours of the disappearance of a child / elderly / disabled person. They’re funded by donations and government grants. The home base is only about 2 miles from my apartment, too.
Sakes… what a little celebrity gossip-mongering list this is. Newest stuff in blue…Like all gossip, I’m sure it’s best taken with a grain of salt. Maybe a whole salt lick. (Orson Welles possibly the Black Dahlia Murderer?)
Omniglot: A Guide to Writing Systems -For fun stuff, see the alternative writing systems, including alphabets from Fantasy and Science Fiction. See your name in assorted systems.
Metacritic is a ratings accumulator not unlike Rotten Tomatoes (except that it covers music as well as film, videro/dvd, and games). Gigli is currently at 19, and falling, or “Overwhemiing Dislike and/or Disgust.” (0-19 is the lowest possible score range, out of 100) Right now, Rotten Tomatoes has Gigli at an average rating of 2.6/10, with only one positive review out of the 59 accrued so far. A decent movie is considered 60% or better… the current list is 2%.
Protected: sweetheart only post.
I'd like to pull the book out of my mind and open it here.
Dream elements… crushing a can of black cherry soda that was still full on a hike… I dump out the sugar-water and flatten the can like a hockey-puck and slip it into my pocket for safekeeping. I’m walking through a rainforest, and there are 3-foot tall mechanical geese everywhere. They’re made of clear glass and when they sing exotic plant seeds and bulbs shoot from their mouths and burrow into whatever they land on … dirt, trees, rocks, water… One faces me, and I catch some seeds on my chest and arms… the seeds penetrate into my skin, but don’t bloom back afterwards. A huge flock of parrots flies over head and the sounds of their wings is almost deafening as they retreat from a gigantic inky-black cloud that is swirling behind them, slowly pincering in and engulfing them. The mechanical birds fly up and feed on the cloud, going from being transparent to a deep, opaque crow-black. It seems to make them heavier, as they stop flying, and instead glide slowly back to the ground, lined up in formation, no longer distributing plant life (or shooting me, either.) Rain starts falling from the now-clear sky, and the surrounding plants are growing so rapidly, it’s almost like I’m shrinking, instead. The scent of ozone fills the air, and mixes with some sort of heady, sweet smell, like honeysuckle and oranges. I notice that though a great amount of water is falling, I’m not getting wet, even though there’s no cover overhead…a drowsiness surrounds me and I wake up, pretty comfortable and refreshed.
Dang, this week just blew on by. I can hardly believe it’s Friday again.
Fantastic Kate Bush resources via nomi –
rare mp3s – http://www.norbry.net/kate-bush/mp3/
Kate photos as a little girl.. http://home.att.net/~james51453/index.htm
How to swear in 113 languages.
a year ago – istockphoto, dead links, Shitou Xiqian, smiled at, fortune cookie, walkerbot, Liver Eatin’ Johnson
2 years ago – hungrybaby, New Apes move lame, wiseacre, Champions stats for the Shadow, Dwayne Dibley?, Poul Anderson passes away, LJ moves in space,
3 years ago – Everway character- wanders the storm path