Author Archives: Shadowtwin

Gay marriage; Dinner with relatives

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

In a fashion that is quite unlike me, I am going to do a news item here today, I am then going to comment on it, and it is also political. I hope I don’t sound like the uneducated oaf that I really am.

The article can be found Here. The center of it appears to be about gay marriage, but the actuality of that I think may be far different.

Bush’s call for a gay-marriage amendment came as the president sought to regain his footing after he was thrown on the defensive about issues ranging from his Vietnam-era military record to missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news – web sites ).
“After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,” the president said.

Answering Bush, Kerry said, “All Americans should be concerned when a president who is in political trouble tries to tamper with the Constitution of the United States at the start of his re-election campaign.”

“I believe the best way to protect gays and lesbians is through civil unions,” Kerry said. “I believe the issue of marriage should be left to the states”

What Bush said is just absolute crap. I mean honestly, if one must ‘Ammend’ the constitution to say that it is illegal for gay people to marry, that means that the constitution must be ‘changed’ to make that into a law. As for the part about “after more than two centuries of American jurisprudence” (which is a word he obviusly had to look up), exactly what ‘jurisprudence’ is he talking about? To my knowledge there have not been a lot of cases in court over the last two-hundred years that involved gay marriages. Even if there had been, I don’t really see how he could be trying to use that as a point today. I mean if you want to go back over the ‘jurisprudence’ of this country, you must also keep in mind that the people in Salem killed a lot of innocent people based on the testimony of three children who were being spoken to by spirits. Had the courts used that as a precedent, I think that the ‘Son of Sam’ would not have gone to prison for his killings, since he was being spoken to by the spirits also.

The judicial system, much like religion, place way to much on what has happened before, regardless of the validity of it. After all, it did take an ‘ammendment’ to abolish slavery. If they had just gone by what was written in the constitution we would all still either own, or work on a plantation in the South. Were they correct in adding this ‘ammendment’? Hell yes. Should there have been a need to? It seems so. The problem is that humans are keenly aware of now, but not so aware of the future. When those guys were hanging out drinking ale and talking about how the nation would be when they were in charge I am sure that they missed a few details along the way. But, homosexuality is as old as the constitution for sure, and probably goes back to the beginning of human history -to the time long before man actually understood how to conceive, and as such were likely just looking for any warm spot to put it.- And yes, that means that homosexuality pre-dates the bible, and that being the case I am not sure how one could use any biblical or judicial means to try to battle the sanctity or legality of it.

What comes into mind now is the religious nuts who will say that GOD made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. As per my previous statement, that is utter bullshit. Without going into an atheist lecture, I will just say that human life pre-dates the bible’s EDEN by at least 50,000 years. So if GOD did make adam and eve and put them there, he was putting them onto a happily populated planet that likely already had rampant homosexuality and did not see a thing wrong with it. Fast-Forward to the time of the Greeks, there was a lot of homosexuality there, though no marriage, just like a teacher/student relationship with benefits (for the teacher at least), and this was still the status quo. In fact, the more I think about it the HOMOPHOBIA (I mean sanctity of marriage) didn’t really come into being until well after the founding of the United States. If it was that big an issue when they wrote the constitution, don’t you think they would have thrown something in there about it? We are talking about the same people who said that the control of the militia over land, water and sky would be in their control(two hundred years before flight was even thought about). Yet, butt bashing somehow didn’t make it on there.

I have gone way off topic here. My point is that you should not try to use ancient documents to try to validate your point of view (I used to enjoy mentioning to christians that the bible states that in order to atone for your sins you must spill the blood of a sheep on an altar unto god. – they are quick to point out that when the blood of Jesus was spilled it was for all of our sins- but what if I was taking that book as literal, and I hadn’t gotten that far in the book yet? Boy, I would have been embarassed.

The reason that I quoted four paragraphs from that initial article is that I am now scared for the direction of our country. We all know that Bush is so right-wing that he has to have some tether to keep him from falling off, but when the leading Democrats are opposing same sex marriages what the hell are you supposed to do? This year will be the third time I have cast a vote for the President, and the first one didn’t really count. The last two elections I did a sort of “lesser of two evils” approach to my selection, and it worked wonderfully, except the elected president is still living on a ranch somewhere while we have a Kook in the white house.

The Gay Marriage issue just hit at the wrong time. I am sure that if this was not an election year the republicans would have gotten something slipped through congres to make it just go away. Now, the Democrats have to not want gay marriage also, and that is unfortunate. I try to believe that an elected leader would be more likely to do what is right for the majority of the country, the sad fact is that the majority of the country does not vote. The people who do vote are the very rich, very right- wing conservatives that I would as soon kill as look at. Thus we end up with tax breaks for the very, very rich, while at the same time raising taxes for the ‘rich but not quite as rich’, then giving a tax break to the welfare families…and tripling the deficit. As much as I hate Clinton, and also keeping in mind that he was in office during the technology boom, we had a budget surplus while he was in office, but we weren’t just running around the world looking for countries to declare war on while he was in office either. -countries that the U.S. could destroy, then give huge contracts to Bush’s oil field buddies to repair at a 500% inflated cost- ‘Hiel Bush’

Well, not a lot really happened today. I woke up, went to work, and busted my ass to try to get close enough to done with all of my work that I would be able to get off at 4 so that I could make it to dinner with some of my relatives. That all went as planned, thankfully.

I mentioned in yesterday’s update that these are people that I have not seen in at least fourteen years, and one of them could not even remember me from my father’s/her brother’s funeral. It was not icy at all though. We, my family, seem to be blessed with a really great sense of humor, so after it had all been silent for a minute or so someone just started to speak. It was an anecdote from long in the past, and involving my father, and happened long before I was born, but after that, it was like it was just yesterday that we had all done this last.

The dinner really went quite well, I even ended up with like three magazines about the London Bridge (the original one that they moved to Lake Havasu), and as it turns out the guy who moved that bridge over here is a Great Uncle of mine. So where is my paycheck?…

At any rate, I have spoken to these Aunts of mine only on rare occasions since my dad died. I had not seen either of them since 1990, but it was like we had never been apart (with the possible exception of the fact that the last time I saw them I barely had pubic hair, now I have gray hair, one gained a lot of weight, one lost a lot of weight, okay so you could tell by appearances that it had been that long, but the minds still work the same.)

What really surprised me was how well my mother was getting along with them. These are my Father’s siblings, yet they still had the stories to tell -which no one else at the table got- and they laughed like teen-agers. I found that surprising only because it had been more like 20 years (not counting dad’s funeral) since they had seen each other.

My wife was able to get involved by poking a bit of fun at me, which I don’t mind, and it got her into a conversation where it would have been her around damn near a dozen people that she didn’t know. I have long said you have to pick one that has both the mind and the wit – I actually believe that what I said was that you have to make sure she has the mind at the top and the elevator to get it there- at any rate, my relatives were hugging her at the end of the night.

If I had the kind of charisma that I could walk into a room and people would just gather around me, I might use that power to an evil end. Actually, I would definitely use that power to an evil end, I would just have to go on-line and see what ends are available for that particular power. If the powers don’t have x-ray vision I might not even care.

As it turns out, one of the relatives lives in Mesa (which is only about 45 minutes from here) and we were getting along quite well, to the point that he was setting up jokes and I was knocking them down. If he is this close, I am sure that we could -combined- sucker some of the other 5 aunts/uncles down here to at least say hello. I guess I will find out on the 6th of May, as yet another Uncle will be in the area and he wants to spend a day with me and the other guy in question. I want to get my brother (who is a year older and another 45 minutes away) to come up for what is turning into a boy’s day out kind of thing. The Uncle (who is really only a few years older than I am) is trying to make us go play golf, which I have never done and who knows I might like it.

The dinner went well for all involved. Unless my wife is just lying to make me happy, but, as previously stated, she knows how to get into a conversation, then take it over, then start issuing sub-conversations for you to work on as a group. Well, she didn’t do that, but if it had gone on longer, she likely would have started assigning tasks. That’s my woman.

Clocktower 3; Relatives

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well, I had a run going for a while where I was actually doing an update every day, even on days when I got off work late, and may have been better off to not do one. Then just out of nowhere I miss two updates in a weekend. Not that it really matters, I mean I am not sure if there is any point to this site at all, I guess if anything it is just sort of a watered down journal, I mean it is not like I am going to put anything too private up here, just in case someone actually does happen to mis-type an address badly enough that they end up here.

There were two major driving factors in why I missed doing an update yesterday, the first is another video game that the wife bought for me. The game is ClockTower3, I also went and found a trailer for it, but it is a download thing and I don’t want to link to it from here, but let me say that the trailer is really pretty cool, if you have the time to do a quick google search for it (clocktower 3 trailer). It is not the type of game that is for everyone. There are a lot of movie sequences compared to how much you are in control of the character. But, when you are in control it does make your heart pound a bit as you are trying to get far enough away from the killer to hide. I really like the game, though I may be the only one on the entire internet that does.

This game might work better as a movie, but that would require removing choice, and making it into a movie, which was not the goal. The artwork is beautiful, the cut-scenes tell the story, and it is just your goal to stay alive and reveal it all. I played the first ‘Clocktower’ and it was a bit cheesy with the cartoonish graphics and inability to use certain objects when you really need to. The third installment of this game is really cool. I doubt that there is any replay value at all, unless, of course, you just want to see if you can beat your previous best time to find your way to the end.

Meet the Relatives:

Through the random fluctuations of time and space, it has become possible for me to have a dinner with my dad’s twin sister, and one of my other Aunts tommorrow night. It was really quite a production to get all of the schedules set to where we could meet at a restaurant at the same time, but we overcame that obstacle and will be dining tommorrow night at roughly this time.

These are people that I have not seen since my dad’s funeral (back in 1990) and I can hardly remember a few of the people that are going to be there. I am happy about the thought of seeing them all again, but unsure as to how much I will enjoy it. As I said, these are people that I have not seen in more than a decade, and even back then we didn’t exactly exchange secrets. Dad would take us to visit these people just long enough for us to learn their names and then we were gone.

I know that we seemed to visit his twin sister a lot more than the rest of his sisters, but I don’t know why. Similarly, I don’t know if some of the other siblings had something against my father that they will continue to hold against his offspring. Perhaps this is why families just do not get together as often as they should. Your family is, after all, a part of your heritage, a part of what makes you be, well you, really.

After dinner tommorrow, I may be able to offer a bit more insight into this, but for now I am just not sure enough to venture an opinion.

Math; Unknown Gender

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

No update yesterday. God was said to have rested on the seventh day, so I tripled his run! This megalomaniac thing is really fun…

I went ahead and finished formatting all of the poetry to actually be able to load today. This might not mean much to you, but it does to me, I completed a project! I can’t even remember the last time that I ever completed a project that wasn’t work related. I did complete this one though, and that gives me a bit of spirit about completing other site related projects. Of course I am all out of steam for completing such projects for the day, so I will just blab on about various crap.

The previous paragraph was exactly as far as I got with doing an update yesterday. I started to do a bit of a rant on a subject that I was even bored with, and at length just gave up completely. There is no reason why I have to do this on a daily basis, especially since my readership at current is about three people. I would like to think that my decision to not post yesterday was a good one in the respect that since I knew what I was going to post was crap I just did not post it. That was a real first for me. Normally I just go by a ‘good enough’ kind of radar, and what I had written yesterday fell well below that line. Will this mean that I won’t post absolute crap in the future? Not by any stretch of the imagination. But, I did have that brief moment of clarity..

Now for a bitch, then I am not sure where I am going to go with the last segment. I know the topic, but my opinions keep changing even as I am typing this.

1=1, 100-99=1
This is something that really irritates me, possibly only becuase I work in retail, but I would still find it irritating regardless of my profession. Like the little bold statement up there says, 1=1. That is, of course a very obvious statement, but for some reason that truth gets distorted when persons (who must be way below average on IQ) that I am teaching how to use a cash register get involved…I don’t even want to go into the complex 2=2 theory with them, or they might just have their head explode and die on the spot….Then I would have to mop it up….Anyway….

An average cash register will give you a total at the end of a transaction. The customer will be required to pay that amount. For my purposes I am going to use 1 dollar. So, let us say that the cash register says, “Total $1.00” -that is american, of course and I believe that even if the total were in euros or shekkels the point would remain the same- The customer hands you a $1.00 dollar bill. You type in $1.00 then hit the cash/tendered/received/whatever key, the drawer opens and it tells you to give the customer no change. End of transaction.

Now we throw in the screwball. Let us say that in the previous transaction the cashier hit the 1 key, then accidentally hit the ‘double-zero’ key twice. That would mean that the cashier had entered $100.00 in cash tendered for a $1.00 transaction. This would be a horrible thing, if not for the fact that the register tells you how much change to give back. The register would tell you to give $99.00 back, if you have even a bit of competence you would not give any change back, and that is what will usually happen when a trainee is faced with this situation. Then their logic gets fuzzy…

A typical trainee reaction will be, “My register is going to be $99.00 short because I hit $100.00 and he only gave me $1.00.” My stock reaction to this (the fact that I have a stock reaction to this is a testament to the ineptitude of your average high school graduate) is, “Did you give them any change back?” The answer is always no. So the till is in balance, but I have to spend way too much time explaining it. Sometimes they are so scared that they will show up short that they leave a note for the boss, just in case.

I think that the way I explain it is pretty simple, but if you know of a better way email me, since they just never get it when I explain it like this:

The total amount of the transaction was one dollar. If you type in one dollar, the register adds one dollar to your daily total. If you type in one-hundred dollars, the register adds one-hundred dollars to your daily total, then subtracts the ninety-nine dollars from the total that it told you to give back as change. 100-99=1, 1=1, any questions. It seems so simple….

I watched a show today on the “The Learning Channel”. The particular show was Incrdible Medical Mysteries: Gender Unknown . The link to that page is there only because that is where I found the title of the show. The sad truth of it is that I would really have liked to have seen the same show on PBS. This particular show was about transgender babies and how they grow up. The channel that I saw it on (I thought) was kind of spinning it in a bad way for the parents of children who have this affliction. PBS tends to show the actual facts without trying to tug at the heart-strings.

If you had clicked on the link for the Learning channel, you would have seen that there was absolutely no information there about this affliction, only a time that it was playing. That was all the information that I could find on their site about it. I fired up google, and my opinion about this matter changed quite rapidly.

My first impression (from the limited information that I got from the show) was that the children who were born with a partial penis and one testicle, as well as an ovary and a fallopean tube, could function noramlly as a male or a female. The sad truth, it seems, is that the testoserone from the testical makes the body incapable of producing estrogen. That said, it means that if the trans gender baby has a testicle, and you remove it, there will be no estrogen or testosterone. Net result would be that the baby would then have to take pills for life to balance their inner system.

Prior to finding that last bit of information, I was thinking that it would be more aesthetically pleasing for the genetalia to appear to be either male or female. Then I read a few pages from this site , and I kind of don’t really know which way to lean on this now.

After having seen that show, and doing a bit of cursory searching on the internet, I was thinking that it would be in the best interest of the child to make him/her appear to look like a him or a her. I had based my initial intention on that alone. Yet, if that child was allowed to grow up and live with a 4cm penis and one testicle, as well as an ovary and a fallopean tube, then make the decision for his/herself later in life…What would the point really be?

I suppose that if you were able to take your choice of gender that would make you feel more in control. But, if you were born with half of each gender how or why would you ever choose in the first place? Pre or post-operation you are going to be someone that gets looked at all too often in the locker- room. It is human nature to be curious about the unknown. I would like to think, though, that we are open minded enough to accept someone who is a bit different…

I place way to much faith in humanity though…

Morrowind; amusing acendotes

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

So I went ahead and spent a bit more time playing Morrowind tonight. I still don’t have a real concrete impression of the game. The graphics (as I stated in a previous update) are just awesome. It is by far the best game I have ever seen as far as graphics are concerned. The game play is a bit hit and miss though. If you happen to have an item in your inventory that you can use on something in the game world you can not equip it -I am speaking about locks in particular at this point- I have a lock pick which I must equip to try to pick a lock, yet, when I found a key to open a certain lock it would not let me equip it. When I tried to physically take the key from my inventory and click it on the lock, I dropped it on the ground…Through various guess and check methods I was able to find out that if you had something in your inventory that would unlock an otherwise inaccesible area it would do it on its own……..Way to go Mr. No Info Owner’s Manual……

After that minor set-back I charged in to the fight. I would tell you exactly how long the fight lasted, but my watch does not have milliseconds on it, and there were only about three of them that passed before I was seeing a screen asking if I would like to load my previous save. I am all for better AI to make the game more challenging and all, but I died before I could even see that S.O.B., and he was behind me, so I had to turn around -that means that I quit running- so by the time I caught a glimpse of the guy I was already dead.

I used the Google to find out what the hell I was doing wrong, but found that you are supposed to get your ass kicked for a long time (20-30 hours by one estimate) before you can actually start to advance the story line (well get the quests activated that do anyway).

It was at the same site that I found that you do not get levels by killing things. You get levels by advancing your skills in …literally everything… Once you have increased any of your base skill levels by 10 points (that is, any skill that you possess that goes up by one point will take away from the 10 points that you need to get to reach the next level.) I have so far increased my acrobatics by about 4 points, my mercantile by 2, so I must be getting close. I would love to increase my killing with the weapon skill, but the thing is that, in this game, once you kill it, it is dead. Like forever, it will never respawn. You can’t simply quit and restart the game, ’cause it is already dead, and never comes back. That will ..hopefully.. be a very good thing later in the game.

If you had ever tried to play Everquest on a system as archaic as mine, I am sure that you would certainly love the graphics in this game. The fact that it is not an MMORPG, but just a cRPG may be the reason that it hit the market with a heavy ‘thud’.

They have made a world far too immense to take in or conquer with a single character, yet, that is the only option I see available. If you had the option of having friends lending their abilities in certain situations, this game would be a lot better. Similarly, if you had a single button that would attack with a single motion (as opposed to the attack happening when you release the button as it is now.) That would also improve the gameplay.

I guess the next few years will see which direction the company that made this game will go. They are certainly heavy-weights with the graphics, and I am sure that they are the first company ever to offer the mmorpg thing in a single player format -WHICH DOES NOT WORK- but they may make the next ‘Myst’ for all I know.

The Daily Bitch

The daily bitch today will not be an actual bitch, but two anecdotes. The good news is that neither of them involve my childhood and as such this should go pretty smoothly.

The First

This one will go about a sentence deep until you figure out the end, but I laughed long and hard about it. That was because the person involved told me, so if this is an urban legend of some type, just give me a call.

So, (I will call her Kay) Kay was nervous about a date that she had invited to her house. She really liked the guy, but was not entirely sure how he would take the fact that she had a child. She decided to open the bottle of wine a bit early – to calm her nerves-. She could not find a cork- screw, so she figured she would just break the neck off of the bottle. She went outside to break the neck off of the bottle -so that she would not stain her carpet-. Once she broke the neck off of the bottle, much of the shattered glass fell back inside the bottle. She decided that she would strain the wine through a cloth and still use it. She fastened a cloth to the end of the broken bottle, and poured the fifty dollar bottle of wine down the drain….Shortly after she realized what she had done and (even though she was blonde) thought that it was really funny and wanted to spread the word.

The Second I will leave the intro a bit short, just understand that I hate this guy….Anyway, I am walking down to get my mail one day, and I see this car. It must be like a ’72 or ’73 Ford LTD. The material on the top of the car has been eaten away by time and replaced by rust, the car has at least 3 different colors on the quarterpanels. If this is not a stolen car, it should be in the junkyard. It really makes the car the blues brothers drive look like factory quality…

Anyway, I was walking down to the post office the other day, and I saw this guy locking “The Club” onto that piece of shit. I laughed for a long time about that, I mean it is funny. Yet, today when I was telling one of our distrubutors about it, he suggested that the guy might be putting the club on the car to make sure that he doesn’t lose the club.

I had never thought of the possibility that your car could be worth less than your security decvice, but in this case, it was certain. I am not sure if that was the angle he was going for or not. I have a simple rule. If it sounds fake, or looks fake, it is likely fake. I guess he should thank his stars that I was not his insurance agent…

Meta; Child beating

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

So, I got off work late again today. By late I mean 8 p.m. which I know isn’t really all that late, but it generally does keep me from doing a damn thing other than just going to work and then coming home. Once home, I generally get on-line and check my emails and the such. Read a page or two and the next thing I know it is damn near 10 p.m. I suppose that I should have grown used to this by now, but I still haven’t.

Where I work is not really like your average job. That is, I generally know when I am supposed to show up for work, but I kind of only know ‘ballpark’ when I will be going home. Sometimes the shift is 9a.m-8p.m., sometimes it is 11a.m.-6p.m., and then just when I get used to it they change it. Frequently, people ask me how I have managed to work under these circumstances for so long, and I am not entirely sure if I really have an answer for that question. It is not like I make a boatload of money for working there, but, I do make significantly more than minimum wage. If I were to try to find a different job I would have to start back at the bottom again, and work my way to where I am now -where the chain of command goes Owner->Me->everyone else.- I will simply say that it pays the bills and leave it at that.

My site has a new reader! That reader is my wife, and I am quite happy about that, but I must admit that knowing that she was reading led me to re-read all of the past updates to make sure that I did not have too much profanity in them for her to be able to read them at work. The good news is that I can only find 3 instances where I used the ‘F-word’, I did not have to change a single past update -or I didn’t whether I should have or not- because of this, but I still have not changed the page layout on the original ten or so updates that will currently not load -or load incorrectly- on many systems. Like everything else, the more I think about it, the more I think I should. And, with that particular problem I am talking about having to change 12 or so files, though I doubt that anyone will ever be clicking back that far into past updates (with the exception of the FBI and CIA when the Shadowtwinian’s overthrow the government).

I mentioned above that I had read back through all of my previous updates, which I did, and I can tell you that I was quite happy with what I saw/read. I started with the first update, which was just all over the place, and ended with yesterday’s update. It appears to me that I am getting a whole lot better at keeping on track, and getting a point across, than I used to be. Like everything else on this site, that is open to debate.

I hope to get better at this sort of thing with every passing day. My goal is to be able to write this thing on the fly, then read it the next day, without my eyes rolling about any statement that I made. It is getting closer, but I do not know if I will ever get it just right. I guess time will tell…(I did notice that I have a habit of saying, “suffice to say”, that I found just a bit annoying, and I will try to break that habit, other than that though.)…

Child Beating

The first thing that I have to say here is that I was abused as a child, and I don’t think that any child should have to go through that. The second thing that I have to say here is that punishment does not equal abuse…If your child is playing with matches, and burns down your house, do you say, “That was bad, don’t do it again.”? I certainly wouldn’t, and I would like to think that the majority of the people in the world would agree with me on that point.

Children are literally like clay, they can be molded. If you teach them to fetch the newspaper, they will do it (even though that is a stereotypical dog’s job). Whatever you teach a child will remain with the child for his/her entire life. That has a double-edge though. If you did not teach the child something, they will do whatever they feel like doing in a situation (not having your guidance).

The first four years of a child’s life seem to be when all of these reflex responses are set, but they need to be modified with time. That is, when the child is four years old, you don’t yet need to teach him/her not to play with matches, since they don’t have the desire or the access to the matches. A few years later, however, they will have the desire and be tall enough to reach whatever cabinet the matches are in. In my experience, verbal scolding works from birth to about 5 years old, then skips a lot of years until it becomes active again in the mid-twenties -in the form of guilt-.

Sometime within that time-frame there must be spanking. If your child is seven, and has just burned down his second office building, it is time to try a tactic other than the, “I am disappointed in you” approach. The problem therein is that someone will try to say that you are abusing your child if you slap them on the ass.

Well my case study (that is, I have been watching lots of people with children whe happen into the store where I work) shows that the parents who give their children a hearty slap on the ass when they are doing wrong end up with far better behaved children. I am not talking about for the duration of the shopping that day either, I mean that I have seen them go from 5 years old to fifteen and they are well behaved.

Similarly, I have seen the parents who just say, “no, childname”, and have to do it over and over again over the course of the ten or twelve minutes that they are in the store. Is spanking better than ‘verbal enforcement’? YES. Does that necessarily equate to the child growing up to be the next GACY? Probably not, but it does equate to better behaved children, and the world is in lack of decently behaved children today.

I believe that you should slap the child on the ass on occasion, that will help the child to learn right from wrong. I can personally remember damn near every instance in my life where I got a spanking, but for the life of me I can’t remember the pain from it. I think that is the goal, to teach the lesson, and if I can remember what happened when I was 5 because of an ass-slap then I say, “Do it”.

I did open this whole thing up saying that I thought that punishment did not equal abuse. I will elaborate just a bit here. I do believe that it is okay to spank a child on the ass to teach the child a lesson. I do not believe that it is okay to bring a closed fist in contact with a child for any reason and that did happen -not to me, but one of my brothers- that is certainly abuse. Though the fist never touched me, I still feel that it happened to us all, in the form of fear. If that was what led my mother to leave my father for the sake of us I still don’t really know, but it was certainly the best thing that ever happened for Mom and us kids.

Why can’t I just have a damn happy story from my youth? First I am a thief, second I am from an abusive family. I definitely have to do research before I try to do another anecdote here.

Keyboard; Belly shirts

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Yesterday’s update was by far the shortest in the brief history of this site. There was no real reason for that, well there was, but I don’t want to get into it, so just believe what I tell you.

I thought that this new keyboard had been doing pretty well, and it has, but I am still having some issues with a lot of it. For one, my last keyboard tapered very slowly from the desk to the keys, this one is almost rounded on the way there, it forces my wrists to be higher than they usually are when I type, and it is a bit painful. Another involves the keys to the right of the letters. Instead of having the print screen, scroll lock, and pause at the same level where the F keys are, they are right down against the insert, home, and page up keys, then after the delete, end, and page down keys, the up arrow is right there touching the end key. I am sure this will not be that difficult to get used to, the only real problem is that when I try to hit the insert key, most of the time I get the print screen, since it is exactly where the insert was on my last keyboard. Similarly, when I try to page up I am getting the pause key, while when I try to page down I am getting the page up.

Makes me wonder if I shouldn’t have just gone ahead and bought the microsoft one, since if they continue to use their format, I bet all the other companies will soon start to do it as well -regardless of how non-sensical it is. As it looks now, I am literlly going to have to learn a new keyboard every time I am required to buy one. Makes me wish I had the means to just go buy about a dozen or so of this one so I would never need to, but, even if I had the means, I am sure that in two years there wont be USB ports on computers anymore so I would just have a dozen obsolete keyboards. Technology sucks.

The last thing about the keyboard that is giving me problems is that it is new. I am sure that everyone knows that when they are new you kind of have to really mean it when you hit a key. Once you have been using it for a few years just a gentle touch will get a letter on the screen, when it is new you really have to push down to get it. It doesn’t really affect my typing speed, as I am pretty quick in that respect, but it does affect my accuracy as I will often see that I am missing about every fifth letter, but by the time I see that I have missed one letter my fingers have already thrown up a few more. It is quicker for me to just backspace and re-write the few that I delete than to try to arrow key it back, then fix the typo, then arrow key it forward.
So, bear with me over the next couple of weeks as I am breaking this thing in, there will likely be a lot of typos, and as I have previously stated I do not have the ability to spell check. As I have also stated I do not proof read before posting. I fear that if I did proof read I would change everything all around, I think that would kind of cheapen the whole concept of doing this daily update in the first place. I am not entirely sure if it would actually be possible to cheapen the daily update itself, but I would like to think so.

One other thing regarding computers and this site. I keep forgetting to change my why I’m mad today, don’t care and fun to hate things. Of course this doesn’t really matter so much at this point, since my readership is pretty much only me, I just fear that I may not get into the habit of doing them every day if I continue to wait until the rest of this is written. It was my goal to make them thematically linked to what I had written here, and since I never know what I am going to write here until I sit down and get it about 2/3 of the way done I can’t really change them in advance. If I do continue to forget to update them I will likely do them first and then try to make this section relate to them, but I think that would not work nearly as well, as I seem to write better with a blank slate than I do with a particular set of topics in mind. That being said, on to the bitching!

I was originally planning to do something about Ded Bob today. That has changed due to unforseen circumstances.

Belly Shirts

Belly shirts are a wonderful thing, if you can pull it off. There is the problem. While I was out recently, I noticed a disturbing trend… Low cut jeans with belly shirts are on the rise, as well as the relative size of people wearing them…

I saw about 10-12 women with the low-cut jeans and belly shirts on the day in question, perhaps one of them had the body to pull it off. There was one particular woman (that my wife and I spoke of later) who looked like she was, or could have been, 5-6 months pregnant that was going for that look. It certainly DID NOT WORK. Another woman who was going for this look was pulling it off, kind of, from the front, but a quick turn-and-look revealed what looked like an inner-tube hanging over the side and back of her low cut pants.

Mind you, I am in no position to bitch about fitness or the state of the body, but I did quit wearing half-shirts when what used to be a six-pack had somehow transformed into more of a keg.

If one wishes to follow a trend, one should choose a trend that is more suited to them. If one is anything other than a teen-ager, one should keep in mind that the little whores like “Britney” will not be remebered in about like 11 seconds. The ‘muscle shirt’ from the eighties lasted only about three years. Spandex made their run in like two years (though to this day I would swear that every overweight single woman that goes to the laundromat still wears them). Mesh shirts have also gone the way of the “Dodobird”. Todays fashion is tomorrow’s ‘faux-pa’.

My solution for this is simple: Become one with the Shadowtwinian’s. After that you can do as you please. I run a pretty loose religion over here, I am open to any input, as long as you don’t have 68 pounds of ass and gut hanging out of a pair of jeans and shirt that fit you back when you were like seven…

Morrowind

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

In the interest of keeping up my slothful nature, I have not done a bit of work on the site today. The reason for that is simple, ‘Morrowind’. It is not that I am totally into the game, more like I am trying to figure it out. One thing that I can say is that is has beautiful graphics (my machine is 466mhz, 256mb ram, Nvidia gforce 2). My system does not even meet the minimum requirements, yet the game really does look pretty cool.

I don’t really play a lot of games, other than diabloII, but I did do a short run on everquest. This game seems very similar to that, only you don’t have to wait for three or more hours for the monster that you are looking for to load. This game seems to me, after a few hours of playing, to forget to tell the player which way the story is going. These are things that you can find out if you talk to ‘literally’ everyone that you see as the game goes on, but I would think that the majority of gamers would rather want to know what to do next without having to jump through hoops (unless the hoops that we are jumping through result in real life threesomes).

At this, very early, point of gameplay, I will not offer an opinion. I will spend more hours on this game only because the game judged me poorly for trying to ‘steal’ an item. I wasn’t really trying to steal the item, I was just curious to see what it would let you do before it called security. I may have a further opinion on this in a few days.

Renaissance festival; keyboards

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I was not able to finish updating all of my existing pages with the fancy new SSI thing, but I got the majority of it all working properly. At least that all went well. One of the very first updates that I did on this site said that I was sure there was a way to update the navbar on a macro scale with a micro effort, and that is exactly what the SSI does. I am still able to continue to do all of the html in notepad, which makes me smile, but that navbar thing would have been death if I had to update every single page. That was the biggest factor in why I had always used frames in the past. I just did not know that there was such an easy solution available, now that I know I don’t think I will ever turn back.

Now for some personal news. I said yesterday that I was the jack-ass who didn’t have any candy or flowers for my love on Valentine’s day, and it went over about as you would expect…Not good. The agreed upon terms for my penance were a visit to the annual reneaissance festivel where My lady and I could take in the sites and sounds of the period (which is a bunch of crap since its all normal people watching actors, but still the point is there).

Last year my wife had to literally drag me to this event. This year I was a bit less reluctant, since we had acquired a really cool picture and a nice rubbing (of the symbol for a saint, in theory, but it just looked really cool) the previous year. I was a little bit more in the mood for that sort of thing this year, and it was actually quite a good time.

The same shop that we got the rubbing from the previous year was set up again, and I went ahead and got the guy going on another of the saints (how the picture of a bull with wings and horns can be the symbol for Saint Luke escapes me) and then went to look at the other wares. It is sort of like the state fair, with all of this cheesy crap that you would never buy if you saw it in Wal-Mart, but for some reason, in the heat of the moment maybe, you will go ahead and pay three times what it would cost you online to get the same damn thing. I guess there is a bit of sentiment involved with that as well, I mean if you were to buy some trinket online that will be just a trinket that you bought online. If you buy the same trinket at a festival such as this you will probably remember things that happened while you were there (good or bad) that make it seem more like a family heirloom than the shoddy piece of crap it is.

What we bought there, this year and last, could certainly not be considered shoddy crap, but as I do not have a digital camera that is worth using I will wait until I have photographic proof to go into any more detail. Suffice to say that most people give up on their whole “gothic” point of view in their late teens or early twenties, our house has no images on the walls that are not of dragons, or fantasy (with the exception of an engagement photo and a wedding photo). We have our walls adorned with wrought-iron candle sconces, even a gargoyle on a pedastol guarding the entrance to the room where we have the computer. It is certainly not like S&M bondage type of crap, just that both of us seem to love images by Boris Vallejo Those images always have dragons and wizards and that is sort of what our home adornments look like…Almost completely forgot, we also have a queen size bed that has wrought Iron posts(about seven feet tall, and very dark green(couldn’t find it in black or navy blue) lace hanging from it(held back much like an open curtain is, with ties around the middle).

Okay, now that I have proven that I am a freak I can calm down a bit and get back to what I do best. I must Bitch On.

Keyboards:

Keyboards are a lot like assholes in a lot of ways. 1)you only like your own, everyone else’s stinks. 2)No one really talks about the good and the bad of them. 3)Once you know your way around it you would not likely trade it in on a newer model. 4)Like everything else, Microsoft is the biggest, and most useless. (take it for what you want, I am working for free).

On the way to the festival which I went on about above, I wanted to buy a new keyboard. The escape key had not worked on my previous keyboard in, oh, about three years. I had (what I thought) some pretty reasonable goals with the new keyboard. 1)it must be the split-v style. 2)It really has to have a double-sized backspace key. 3)The left, down, right arrow must all be in a row, with absolutely no deviance in the heigth. 4)The ‘insert’, ‘home’ and ‘page up’ keys must be in a single row above the arrows(and single sized buttons). 5)The ‘Delete’, ‘end’ and ‘Page Down’ keys must be in the same format directly below them. That sounds like a standard keyboard to me, but guess what?
You can’t get one like that anymore. At least not at OfficeDepot, Staples or BestBuy(which are not linked because they pissed me off). I am going to throw in a break here, before I start killing children.

It took me a long time to come up with this analogy, so please take a few seconds to read it:

There are thousands of manufacturers who make guitars. None of those manufacturers try to move the frets around on the guitar, because it is impossible. The tone can not be acquired if the fret is not in the right place. It is thankful that they are not able to do it, since, can you imagine having to learn to play the guitar again because some asshole changed the neck around? Why are keyboards so different?

Microsoft has the least logical and most difficult to use keyboards in the entire world, yet they charge double for them. Perhaps some idiots assume that Microsoft will make a better keyboard? All I know is that we had to drive around the out-skirts of Phoenix for a while to find any store that was stocking a split-v keyboard that was not made by Microsoft. When I finally found it, I paid 29 dollars for it, and will get ten back on a mail in rebate. I am not required to install any software to use it, it was just plug and play. The Microsoft version of the same keyboard requires you to use your disk space to carry their drivers for their inferior crap, and was 79.96 (sure I could have gotten it cheaper, but the name Microsoft will make me back away from any purchase).

Since I now have a site where I do not have to fear repercussions for my actions, I am finally able to say what I have said all along: “Fuck you, Microsoft”.

Valentine’s day; Jesus making your rental decisions

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

That’s right, it’s Valentine’s day. This is, of course, the day that amatuer lovers do their best to make up for an entire year of neglect with a box of Russel Stovers. If your wife/husband/significant other is good with that, you have done well. I, unfortunately, am not in that situation. I did like I do every year. I waited until the actual day so that I could go and buy some flowers and a card at the shop down the street. I have done this every year since I met my wife and it has always gone smoothly. This year, for some reason, it all went to hell.

There was a “view historic Florence” event going on in town (Florence is where I live BTW) and that meant that there were literally thousands of people in town to visit. That is in a town with a population of like 3500 so it was a big deal. Most every business in town stays open late when they have this event, since the people are here to see the historic buildings, and almost every building on main street is over 100 years old.

For some reason the pharmacy (which is also the flower shop here in town) closed down early on a day that was both Valentine’s Day and the Historic tour of Florence day. This is the one day of the year when the businesses here in town are guaranteed to hawk their crap for twice the normal price, why the pharmacy would have chosen to close early escapes me. There are two draws for their goods. One being the tourists who will ‘literally’ buy anything that has the word ‘Florence’ on it, and the other being that people who have yet to acquire their valentines gift will pay any price for a flower (since we wait until the last minute and pay double so that we can give our wife fresh flowers).

I always pick up a card at the same time as I buy the flowers, since I would rather wait in line once than twice. End result: I have no flowers, no candy, no card, for my beloved on Valentine’s day. I would like to blame the local Rexall for not being open late enough, but, I could have picked the gifts up earlier. I mean, the best gift to give your Valentine is always flowers that you have been hiding in the trunk of your car for the last three days, right? The outside temperature here has only hit 71(Fahrenheit) in those few days, but the inside temperature of the car has made me actually turn on the air conditioning since it was so damn hot. So, that would mean that I could not have realistically hidden chocolate or flowers in my car, but a card? Christ, I am going to buy next years card tomorrow since I feel like such an ass right now.

Why is it that I can always have a birthday present, christmas present, anniversary present, hell any present at all a few weeks before the day, but when it comes to valentines I am always last second? I blame it on the flowers. This is the one day DESIGNATED to give flowers. If I give flowers on say May 7, they are easy to get, and they are far less expensive than they are this time of year. I guess I will chalk this all up to experience.

A quick note, why it is down here I don’t know. Once again Flux, has helped me overcome a few virtual problems. Well, they were real problems, but in the virtual world. My only prayer now is that he never like needs a kidney and tries to look me up to see how truthful I was about that ‘if there is anything you ever need’ statement, yet by that time I think the Shadowtwinian reign will be in place, so I will be able to pick any of a thousand from my stable and order her to donate the kidney. (pretending to be a megalomaniac is fun!)

I actually have multiple bitches today. I am torn between doing all the bitches now, or saving some bitches for later. I know me well enough to know that I am gonna do just enough bitching to really get me in the mood to bitch, then I am going to go to bed, and in the morning I will no longer care. So, I must Bitch forth.(I think that might actually be an original phrase BTW).

First Bitch

Where I work I am sometimes required to receive applications for home rentals from people. When I am the one receiving them, there are a few questions that the owner of the said home would like for me to ask the potential renters. I do ask the questions, mostly basic like; “How many in your family?”, “Do you have any pets?”, “How did you find out that this house was for rent?” it is all that sort of mundane crap when I ask the questions.

One of the people who spoke to me about the house had a wonderful response to the ‘how did you find out the house was for rent?’ question. She said, and I will quote “JESUS told me to call.”

It is not my intention to doubt any religion, but, I would think that the son of GOD had a lot better stuff to work on than making sure that you got into a house. I could be wrong, and I may burn in hell, but, MY GOD, how can you possibly believe that? So Jesus just goes from town to town trying to hook Christians up with good homes? Making sure that the people who happen to live in the United States have beautiful homes, while totally forgetting about the fact that he has left the entire population of Africa to die from a horrible disease?

Back to the original point, though, I am pretty sure that it was the ad in the newspaper that made her call that number. Whether Jesus made her read that number is certainly open to debate.

Meta; eBay; Paypal

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Setting up this site has been monumentally more difficult than I had ever thought it would be. I still maintain that I am a pretty good html programmer, but the thing is that the language of the internet seems to have expanded far beyond my html understanding. I have used some other stuff like CSS in the past to help me to achieve my ends, but when I started programming JAVA I just did not keep up with the evolution of things. Also, I had never tried to set up a website from a base directory which would allow the use of cgi scripts. I did use cgi on the web pages, it was just hosted through a third party that had a really user-friendly layout, as such I am stuck here in the dark thinking that I may just be the least intelligent human on the face of the earth.

In other site-related news, I am no longer going to put the actual time (like hours/minutes) in the updates. The reasons for that is quite simple 1)It is easily a couple hours off by the time I actually get this thing posted. 2) Unless you live in the state of Arizona that is not what time it was posted anyway. 3)There are roughly three people in the entire world that know the address of my website, anyone else who sees that time stamp will be seeing it looking through my archives. 4) If you really want to know what time it is you would just look at the bottom right of your computer monitor (perhaps elsewhere if you have modified your screen settings).

Finally, with the site related stuff, I am not going to update any page other than this one until I have a better understanding of the SSI that I should be using. As it stands I have about 28 pages that will have to be altered, and that seems like a lot, but if I were to go ahead and start doing some of the other pages that I want to do, that number could double or triple over the weekend (when I have a lot more free time).

Wow, I think I just managed to get the point across that you should never view my site…ever. That was not what I was going for, but damn it, I made a point!

I have taken the liberty of breaking my typing into two sections, the first being my bitching about myself and my lacking ability at webhosting, and the second being this, where I bitch about pretty much everyone and everything for no damn reason. The purpose of the first section would be to get you to send me a pipe bomb, the purpose of the second section will be to get you to go ahead and send it to someone else.

Biggest Bitch of the Day:
eBay allows people to insert Paypal logos in their ads. But the logos that they insert are all provided by paypal. The end result of this is that I received a negative feedback from ladybug3603 for a non-payment, when the truth of the matter was that she had listed a paypal logo, with the visa/mstercard/disover/american express logos. I took that to mean that the seller would accept credit cards. She didn’t. I would have left the transaction without a sour thought, then she left me negative feedback…That pissed me off…(I have like a 98.8% ebay rating with over 240 transactions, so when I get a stupid one, them is fightin’ words).

Her explanation of it was that I should have asked whether she accepted credit cards. My response was that If you do not accept credit cards, why do you place words such as “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in your listing. Her response was that she had nothing to do with that being put in her listing. Now, I knew that she was lying, since she obviously did make an agreement with paypal to let them update the listings, but I took the high road and just sucked it up.

Every negative feedback (of the three that I have) is very similar. Why it is my fault that they put the quote “pay me instantly with any credit card through paypal” in the listing? And then when I will not pay any other way (credit cards limit your liability for fraud, and make it far easier to recover the money you did pay out, if you get shafted) they leave me negative feedback. I think that these sellers are all corrupt. They may not be ‘trying’ to screw you, but there must be a different motive for what they do.

Another eBay issue is the sellers that do not post feedback until the buyer does. I will not ever leave feedback for a seller that does not post feedback for me (as a buyer) when they get the payment. If they do not post feedback immediatly, that means that they are in fear that the wares that they sold you are absolute crap. They want to hold the feedback thing over your head to keep you from posting a negative for them, since they can reciprocate it. I must re-state that I will never post feedback for these sellers (even if whatever I bought was 200% better than advertised), because that is just missing the point. If you buy something off of ebay and yoy pay for it immediately, and you do not get immediate feedback do not leave that seller feedback at all. Even if you are very new to eBay and trying to get your numbers going, the only seller that you should buy from again is the one that left you feedback when he/she received your payment, all the others are either dubious or selling absolute crap that they mis-represent, don’t tangle with those folks.