Category Archives: Entertainment

Puppies!; Deadly Rooms of Death; Wallpaper

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Well again I completely skipped making a post yesterday. I have no good reason for it, so don’t ask. Not that anyone ever really asks me anything about what I write here anyway. My wife does get on my case on occasion for missing posts, but beyond that I am the only reason that I continue to do this. I guess I kind of knew that going in. I figure if I just continue to write things here, eventually I will write something that someone will find in a search and then maybe become a reader. I think that my Shadowtwinian Reign may take a bit longer that earlier anticipated though.

After a lot of thought I have decided that the way I can drive traffic to my site is to play on the weaknesses of the average person. So, perhaps if I were to put up a couple of beautiful puppy photos I could lure some unsuspecting people into my web. Here is my first attempt.

Isn’t she so cute? Of course she is, what a beautiful little puppy! I should here mention that the whole demonic green eye thing is not what she really looks like, most of the time anyway. I have been snapping away happily with the new camera, but I have yet to read the owner’s manual (which is thicker than a lot of novels that I have read) which would surely tell you how to get rid of the green eye thing. Hell this camera has so many features that I am sure I will never know what a good two thirds of them are. Oh yeah, if you click on the thumbnail you will see all of Zelda, and Warlock looking on merrily. The thing that is hanging out of her mouth is, in fact, a pig hoof. The whereabouts of the rest of the pig are currently unknown. Also I cropped the hell out of the photo, then saved it at 50% image quality so that it would come in under 100kb. If you want to see it full size/quality you will really just need to come to my house, or pay for me to get a broadband connection so it wouldn’t take me ten minutes to upload the thing at full size/quality.

You can never go wrong with puppies.

• One of the guest columnists over at DII.net had an interview with the creator of this little game called Deadly Rooms of Death or D.R.O.D. for short. I know that link is currently dead, I assume that the influx of traffic generated by being linked to on such a prominent site pushed him way past his monthly bandwidth limits. I was able to download the game before that site went down, and I found it at least a bit amusing to play. It is like a lot of puzzle type games that I have played on the pc before, pretty simple to figure out, minimal graphics. But, it comes with an editor.

So after having played a dozen or so levels in the game I figure what the hell, I am gonna make me a Dungeon. I took a scrap of paper to draw a quick layout of how I wanted the rooms for the first level to look. Mostly just for the doorways going in and out. Then I started to make “JoeBob’s Dungeon”. I only made the first level to it, and I think it is about ten rooms. One of the rooms currently just has a big block formation that spells the words “Cake Walk”, as I didn’t want to take the time to figure out another puzzle to put there, but wanted to make sure that the level clear thing would allow you to move on. It was a lot of fun trying to come up with unique little things to throw onto the boards to make them make you think, yet easy enough that it wouldn’t take you an hour to figure it all out. I did hit one snag with it, as I discovered while trying to play my new level all the way through. One of the levels that I made was unbeatable. I was able to do it while I was play-testing it, since it let me choose where to start, and I always started right next to one of the enemies so that I could clear the board before it was a horrible mess of bugs. The problem was that when you came in through the only door you could it was possible to clear all the bugs, but the spawners would put back so many of them so fast that you were not able to kill them without getting cornered. Without actually playing it you really wouldn’t know what I am talking about, so long story short, I had to eliminate a few of the bugs and a couple of the spawners to allow a player to get at least one of them killed before the new bugs would spawn.

Wow, I believe I have reached an all new low in content. Talking in length about a game that no one has ever played, on a board that I created so there is no way anyone could have played it…Now for something completely different.

• When I gave my Mother her new computer on Sunday, she was excited by the fact that the previous PeoplePC wallpaper could now be something different. I told her that I would try to download her a better picture for her desktop, and that is just what I have been trying to do, the thing is that all of the pictures that I have found which match the specifications are .exe files. That could mean that they are simply packed as .exe files with winzip or some such program, but I don’t want to take the chance with mom’s pc since she certainly doesn’t know how to fix it if something goes bad.

What I am looking for is a really pretty image of a unicorn and pegasus together. The image size would probably be best at 800×600 as I am sure that is what her screen area is set as. I found one such image at a pc wallpaper site, but after downloading it the file would not open, siting an ‘unsupported start of file marker’ or some such. If you happen to know where I can simply download a .jpg image such as described without having to sign up for weird porn email from here to eternity, please send me an email.

That is all for today. I may actually make a post tomorrow, even though it is my concrete day off, just because I have a feeling that a topic is going to present itself. I am basing that assumption on something that happened today IRL and I really beleive it could make for excellent bitching material. That being said, if I make no post tommorrow, don’t be disappointed.

Puzzles; PC; Left-Handed Whopper

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Well there was not a post yesterday, it was late, I was tired, I have a couple dozen more excuses, if you really want to hear them. As always, direct your complaints Here.

The thing that was actually occupying all of my time last night was trying to find a good example of one of the puzzles that I completed in the Sherlock Holmes game, the game that I have mentioned a bit about in the last few days. This was the single most difficult puzzle that I have ever done in any game. It was not that the puzzle itself was hard, it is that it gave you absolutely no directions at all. You are sitting there with a bunch of tiles of two different colors, and a blank graph. There are numbers around the edges of the graph, but nothing that made me say, oh, I need to put so many of this color here, and the other color there.

Searching by the name of the game on Yahoo, I was able to find a page that linked to many puzzles that are like it. The one that I found that actually had a really good description of how to do the puzzles, as well as a tutorial was found at Conceptis Puzzles. The puzzle in the game was not nearly as tough as the ones that you find on this site, with the exception of the fact that you go into it without a single clue as to the rules of the game. After having seen the demo for the “pic a pix” puzzle, I was pretty easily able to solve the one in the Sherlock Holmes game.

Then, for some reason, I was taking to solving other ‘Conceptis’ puzzles, just to make sure I could. I don’t know what it is with me, any puzzles that are just simply Logic puzzles seem to consume me. If I were to leave that puzzle unsolved, hundreds of thousands of other people would solve it, the universe would not go out of alignment, yet I feel compelled to do it anyway. Hopefully this obsession won’t have the same fate as the obsession with the Lights Out game from tiger toys, where I was so obsessed with it that I made a version of it in java, which can be found Here. I must also note that it took me almost an hour to find the link to that damn game, and it doesn’t look anything like it did when I was playing it back in ’97 or so. I bet the puzzles are all still the same though, and my java-based game has all of the original puzzles, as well as the original hint moves for the first twenty-five boards. My programming of it is a bit lacking, but it is really quite faithful to the original.

So, Mom came and picked up her new computer today. I did my best to try to explain everything that they were going to need to know once they got it home, I even fired up the internet with it, and added AntiVirus.com to her favorites list. Then I figure I would go ahead and download AdAware6, I am pretty sure that the link won’t work, so the program is called “adaware6.0” and it is quite a usefull bit of freeware. It will get rid of tracking software like “gator” and “timesink”. I really do use that program on a weekly basis and it really speeds up my connection by deleting useless/harmfull crap.

I am left wondering why didn’t I do that a couple of weeks ago when I actually bought the machine. It was an office pull, after all. I mean they could have had a bunch of tracking crap on there, even some trojans, well, It does have an updated norton, so likely not. There could have been tracking software on it galore, though, and there was. I forget the name of the program, but it was described on the internet as being able to download code, and upload statistics without you ever knowing. That is a crock of stinky crap.

I have to run that “ad aware” program on my system pretty frequently. For the most part all I find are cookies that I get from visiting sites like DiabloII.net, where they aren’t really trying to harm your machine, but they have to pay for web hosting somehow. I am pretty sure that the cookies aren’t really a big deal, with the possible exception of your transfer speed, I notice that particularly since I am typing this on a modem connection. The real baddies that you can get, as far as information sharing, are the ones that you get when you download free games or anything else that you choose to download. Cookies are harmless to your system, but if you download something from that site there is a really good chance that there will be a virus in it, which is why I had to buy mom a new pc in the first place.

Why do I feel like I am trying to teach an internet 101 class? If that email came from someone you know and has an attachment, make sure you know what the attachment is before you open it. Most people do not simply send attachments to their freinds without descriptions of the attachment. “Safe attachment, open now” is not the type of message that I would expect anyone I know to send to me. If it says, “DJ beat his dad with a shovel for the first time today”, I would read that one, yet families differ. If you have never asked for or gotten, a really weird screen-saver from your family members, why would you think they would start to send them now?

So, I guess what I am saying is that you should never read your email, everyone is out to get you..

• I am gonna be damn near a month late on this one, but I read this story through a link over there at BlackChampagne, it was all about April Fools Day hoxes. I didn’t find the humor in a lot of them, but I am American and relatively young. Lots of the hoaxes that it lists were of the ‘Greatest of all time’ sort, and thus get lost to people looking at it with 21st century eyes. One did catch my attention.

The place that I stole this can be found Here. The story reads as follows:

#8: The Left-Handed Whopper:
In 1998 Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a new item to their menu: a “Left-Handed Whopper” specially designed for the 32 million left-handed Americans. According to the advertisement, the new whopper included the same ingredients as the original Whopper (lettuce, tomato, hamburger patty, etc.), but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees for the benefit of their left-handed customers. The following day Burger King issued a follow-up release revealing that although the Left-Handed Whopper was a hoax, thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich. Simultaneously, according to the press release, “many others requested their own ‘right handed’ version.”

I lagughed long and hard about this. Your basic fast food burger is always circular, if you rotate it 180 degrees, you are simply turning it a half a turn. The fact that anyone fell for this is certainly proof that some of us should not be allowed to procreate. If you can not figure out how to turn the hamburger with your own two hands, and thumbs, you may be better off dead.

As I said, I am young and American, the rest of the hoaxes may be more humorous to you if you are not from America, and, as such, can find the humor in what they are doing.

Sherlock Holmes game

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As promised, there will be a bit of something here today, whether that actually makes you happy or sad is totally at your discression.

I am going to talk about the game that I was playing that made me miss the update two days ago, but that I actually mentioned yesterday. It was a pretty good game, for the money.

In case you have not noticed by now, I am one cheap bastard. I will not pay sticker price for pretty much anything. I am the type of person that sees a truck has rolled over on the freeway and wonders what could have been in that truck that I could buy on discount. Of course we all have to buy things at full price from time to time, I mean when you need a toilet plunger you are gonna lay out the six bucks for it, regardless of whether you saw one in the paper last week for half that price. Sometimes we simply can’t be thrifty, most of the time we can.

I take that same view into life, movies, video games, hell everything, with the possible exception of food. Sometimes it is better to pay full price for food than to pay half price for food, then pay twice the price the next morning, if you get my drift. I think “cheap” was kind of bred into me, since I did grow up pretty poor.

Once again I have gone way off topic. My intention was to speak a little bit about this game that I picked up for under ten bucks at a Wal-mart recently.

The game was The Mystery of the Mummy, and is an adaptation of the story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Games that are based on stories are like, well, games that are based on stories. Kind of like movies that are based on books, but a bit different. The people who make the movies are trying to please the fans of the book at the same time as pleasing the average movie viewer. The people who make the games seem to be banking on the fact that ‘gamers don’t read’. That is certainly not a fact, but the game companies take a lot of liberties that would never be present in a movie, while I can not site one particular instance of it, trust me, it is all through the game.

The game in question depressed me for the fact that it made Sherlock Holmes sound like a high-pitched, whiny person. I, and I think everyone near my age, remember the voice/image of Jeremy Irons playing the character of Sherlock Holmes. The character, as portrayed by Irons, had a much deeper voice, and was really convincing as the cocaine using know-it-all. Of course all drug references are removed in the game, as well as the later adaptations of Doyle’s work.

This one will end prematurely. With luck, I will continue the discussion of that video game at a later date.

Lunch; Secret Window

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Today was a rather enjoyable day on the homefront. It is not often that my wife and myself go out and do things, which we did today. I suppose that the base reason for this is my agoraphobia, not that I think I actually have the affliction, but anyone seeing my reaction to large public places would surely think I did. It probably took me quite a while to become the hermit that I am, I don’t really mind going out in public places as such, I just try to avoid it when it is not necessary. I don’t think that it is a fear, or anything of that nature, it is more like a choice to simply avoid all the weird people doing weird things. Okay, I am going to change the subject here, as I seem to be digging myself an ever deeper hole.

The really strange thing about my not going out much is that the times we do, I really enjoy it. We never see the weird people doing weird things, we simply go out and have a little fun and then come home. Why, then, do I have this notion that I want to avoid all the strangeness out there? I gots no idea.

As sited in a Previous Blog, my wedding anniversary was last Wednesday, and it certainly did not get a celebration at all. We went out today to do something enjoyable to make up for the lack of being able to do so then. We decided on lunch and a movie, which is like dinner and a movie, minus the not getting home until midnight aspect of it.

My wife’s parents had given us a gift card for On the Border, which is an upscale type mexican restaurant that serves really yummy food. It is not exactly authentic mexican food, but the version of it that those of us who are not Hispanic have grown to love. Tasty, tasty stuff, and huge portions of it. Though at the prices they charge the portions had better be huge. The meal would have been completely free to us, had I not indulged in a beer once I had received my food. Perhaps it was better that I ordered that four dollar beer, as it would have seemed really cheap to try to put the tip on a gift card, IMHO. My wife left the tip for the meal, which was five dollars, even after I had offered to pay it, since that was darn near the price of the beer after tax. Oh well, tasty, tasty stuff.

My wife’s brother (yes, my brother-in-law, but it seems that I should give credit to my wife for having the family, since I never got so much as a call from any one of my relatives for the anniversary, let alone a gift) gave us a gift card to AMC theatres for the movie. The card did not have an amount printed on it, so my wife opined that it may not be enough to cover the tickets (her brother is only twenty, and not independantly wealthy) so I would make up the difference at the box office. As it turns out, he went above and beyond the call, giving a twenty dollar gift card. We spoke briefly of using the remaining balance to buy soda or popcorn, but eventually decided that one of us could go to the next movie for free if we didn’t. So we didn’t.

The movie that we saw was Secret Window. This movie has gotten really bashed in the ratings game, having only a 47% positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert has This to say. I think that Ebert does a much better job of describing the film than the people that reviewed it over at rotten tomatoes.

I don’t like Johnny Depp much as an actor, but he did do a very convincing drunkard in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He did a pretty good job in this movie as well. The novella, by Stephen King, that this movie was based on does not have really anyone in it. Just the main character, his (ex)wife and her boyfriend. Without character interaction there can be little dialogue, without dialogue you really don’t have any way to judge a character’s actions. Depp certainly made the point that the character was not ‘all there’ with his actions, most notably scrubbing his hands for way too long in one sequence.

It is hard to try to discuss an actor’s performance in a movie without giving away plot elements, that is what I am trying to do, so bear with me.

At exactly the point in the movie that I knew how it would end, they threw in the fiance of his (ex)wife. That was entirely too convenient to the flow of the movie, and thus, had no effect on the outcome. Had the editors put that scene further back in the screenplay, to give it enough time to fade from your memory a bit, it would have made the whole story a lot stronger. I think so anyway.

I am going to speculate that King wrote this little story while he was going through a little bit of a ‘Writer’s Block’. Like many King stories you simply must read the story to appreciate the screenplay. This is one of his stories (like most of his work) that I have not read. I am sure that it is extremely difficult to try to act out the thoughts of a character, yet Depp did it, and pretty masterfully I might add.

Johnny Depp just seems to have that touch, much like Tom Hanks, where he can act out any role and turn that movie into a blockbuster. Why that didn’t happen with this film is still a mystery to me. I think that the number one reason is that it is so similar to another King story called “the Dark Half”. Start telling the same story twice and even your fans may turn on you, no matter that the other film was released well over a decade ago.

The movie was pretty good on its own merits, better if you have never read any Stephen King. The ideas that he used may have been recycled, but they were recycled from his own twisted mind. Can one ever actually copy theirself?

Country Thunder

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Well, I guess I didn’t blog yesterday. I actually did, unfortunately both the index page and the archive page have mysteriously disappeared. That just goes to show that you should never break from a habit once you have formed one in doing this sort of thing. Usually what I do is write this, then upload the index page only. The next day I will then save the index page as the archive page before starting to write the next blog. Yesterday I saved them both at the same time and uploaded them at the same time. They were both working at the time so I figured it was all working properly. After I had deleted the old index page, I went to my site to try to grab a quote that I had put in there only to find that the index page was from the previous day. No problem, I thought, and I tried to access the archive page, not there at all.

I suppose it is possible that one of you still has it in your history, unfortunately by the time you read this, it will have been over written by this. Strange irony, that. It does beg the question, if I blog and no one reads it, did I really blog at all? The answer to that question is yes, or else I would have given up on this whole thing a long time ago. In the future I will just continue to handle one upload the day I write it and the other upload the day after, it has actually saved my ass a couple of times when, for one reason or another, one of the two uploads didn’t stay uploaded. I wonder if it is a problem with my server or my ftp client, but not enough to change either, just enough that I will be a bit more careful in the future.

I know that you must all be crushed about missing out on one of my blogs, so I will do a quick recap of what you actually missed. I spent a long time talking about the battle.net community, after having read a recent guest article over at DII.net, and then had just a little blurb about the impending Country Thunder festival. I may just go into that again, as it is only a few days away now, and the signs of it are everywhere.

Yes, I will go into that again. The aforementioned festival is the bane of my existance. I absolutely loathe Country music. I mean, hell, that is not even a good title for it. Most of the people who whine those songs have never been to the country. Sure they will whine about growing up on the farm, but that doesn’t change the fact that they likely grew up in some manicured little suburb and that the boots that they wear have never touched anything other than concrete and asphalt (perhaps a dance floor as well). I know a lot of genres of music are like that, possibly all of them. You have your “Gangsta rappers”, some of whom I understand are from the ‘hood’, while others are from the same ‘hood’ that a lot of us came from. Then there is the rock scene, where every band seems to claim that they were living out of their drummer’s van for a couple of years eating nothing but ramen noodles waiting for that one big break, while in reality they were just living with their wealthy parents in SoCal. That is the way of the musician, I guess I shouldn’t slight Country “artists” for that.

You may have noticed that I used the word ‘whine’ a couple of times in the previous paragraph. I did not mean that in a bitching sense, I meant that they sound like crying three year olds when they sing. Though that is more in the male artists than the female. This is one of the two things about the songs that really annoy me, the other is the combination of slide guitar and guitars that have a thing called a “b-bender” (which is like a whammy bar, but works on only one string of the guitar, the b-string, and makes the music sound even more like a crying child). I am pretty sure that it is not really healthy, but I actually begin to get angry when I have to listen to country music for too long at a time, more on that below.

The last thing about the music that I can not stand is the “Country Accent”. It is not an accent. If you go to Boston, you will hear people with that accent, similar in New York or any place you visit. The “Country Accent” seems to be an accent that one can be infected by while living anywhere in the U.S., it simply involves trying to sound like you have a southern accent when you really don’t, and the end result is that you really sound/look like an idiot. I don’t mean while they are singing the songs, I mean while they are talking. These country artists keep that twangy, weird accent while they are talking to reporters and on talk shows, it is just sick. To site a couple of examples, from the genre of music I listen to, of other artists not doing it, look at Dave Mustaine of Megadeth and Axl Rose from the tragically doomed Guns and Roses. They both had very distinct singing voices that you either loved or hated, but sounded damn near human while actually speaking. Dave Mustaine in particular, as I heard a radio interview with him, over the course of the thirty minutes of listening to him talk I couldn’t believe that he was the man behind that acid-like, gravelly (is that a word?) tone in their songs.

But wait, I was planning to talk about the festival…Here we go. Despite my best efforts to try to find the actual population of florence, all of the estimates that I find look exactly like This. There are certainly not 17,000 free people living in this town, as the 14 new home constructions in the last year should prove (I think they count the inmates for tax benefit reasons). I have heard the number 10,000 thrown around a few times to count the number of people in the 4 male and one female prisons here. That would make the population be 7,000, which I still think is about double the actual population, but I can not find the real numbers on the internet. What I can find is a total school attendance, Kindergarten to 12th grade, of less than a thousand. I think that would support my theory that the population is far lower, but that is merely speculation. The site that I linked to said that there are 2,900 women in florence, I believe that the prison holds about 500 of them, bringing the actual population to about 2,400 women. Then, assuming that the split of men to women is nearly equal, I guess there are about 5,000 free people living in this town. That is all speculation, but I bet my number is far closer than theirs.

Now, throw in Contry Thunder. I don’t know the numbers, and I can’t find them on the internet, but imagain a show like OZZFEST, that has as many die-hard fans, and runs for four days, with ticket prices starting at free at the shops in town. There must be hundreds of thousands of people that go to the show, and the ones who camp there will invariably come into town for things like ice, water, beer, soda and chips. Never do they buy anything like, well, you know, actual food, only the items that I listed. The entire town is in chaos for four days.

Florence has two Circle K stores, placed strategically directly across the street from one another(I say that this was strategic, ’cause why in the hell else would a company put two stores within a 12 second walk of each other?). Both of them bring in those ugly port-a-potty type things (four each last year) to accomodate all of the people that show up there to buy beer, ice, water, soda and chips, never anything else at the Circle K either, as I found out from conversations with the managers at them.

At any rate, when there are like say 50,000 people invading a town of 5,000 people, it is quite insane. The roads leading to town have been revamped since last year, but the rest of the town remains the same. There are barely two lanes on main street, and they are made with a patchwork of pavement that has two inch gaps in it every fifteen feet (that is quite literal, not cracking pavement, that is how they had planned it, back in the forties, also I think it is concrete, not asphalt).

It is a major economic boom for all of the stores and resaraunts here, of course, but it is also a bit much for any of us to deal with. We all, where I work, have to work pretty much from open to close to accomodate it. The people who deliver us ice, normally twice a week in the warmer months, have to deliver it sometimes twice a day during this festival. Also, the people who work at the various museums here in town have a large spike in traffic (I think that is the leading reason that tourism has been so much higher in the last year, we actually got a group from Germany in the store a week or so ago, when I asked why they decided to visit florence for their vacation, they said that they had found a link to the tourism board from the Country Thunder website.). Perhaps German children rebel against groups like Rammstein by listening to Country?

The only real problem with this whole thing is that I literally get angry when I have to listen to country music. We play country music, exclusively, on the radio while the show is in town. I don’t get angry like I am going to go and kill, or anything like that, it just shortens my temper and makes me not the frienly butcher I usually am. I certainly don’t think that there is a drug that could help me, if you dislike something to the point of anger, the only solution is to stop doing that something. If you don’t have a choice in the matter, I guess you should look for your happy place. I can usually keep from being too angry or disgusted by the music if I just replay some old Metallica album in my head. Yet, sometimes when the combination of the slide guitar and ‘b-bender’ hit, I can no longer block it out. (I must say, again, that I am sure that it is not healthy to hate something so much, but I do.) My only respite is to turn off the radio, or go far enough away from it that I can no longer hear it, which is difficult on the four busiest days of the year.

I don’t think I have yet killed anyone in a “Country Music” induced rage, but if I had, would I actually remember it?

TV shows

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Well yesterday was my weekly day off and either all of my readers know that by now, or none of them care. No one emailed to ask if I had uploaded it to the wrong directory, which has happened quite a few times, both me doing that, and me getting emails about it.

As I mentioned in my last blog thing, yesterday was also my wedding anniversary. It went about as well as could be expected when she got up at 4:30 in the morning to go to work while I slept until about 9:00 not needing to be to work until noon. I didn’t get home from work until about a quarter after eight, and she had to be in bed asleep by 9:30. I had left out a card for her before I went to bed the night before, and she left out two cards for me before she left for work, so it is not like either of us forgot the date, it was just not an opportune day for us to really make a big deal out of it. We will likely go out to eat and watch a movie on Sunday as a celebration.

We did both watch the latest South Park episode. It was not one of the funniest ones thus far this season, but there were still a few times when a normal person would laugh out loud. There were also a few times when only a sick, demented son-of-a-bitch like myself would laugh, but isn’t that exactly what we have come to expect from the show? I do wonder how any network would let a show (even if it is animated) get away with having a a child put a supposatory into another child, or let a child dressed like a robot give sexual pleasure to a movie studio exectutive, but if I question it, won’t it be banned? Best not to think about it.

•Watched the latest episode of Survivor just before I started to write this. It was sort of an introspective episode with not a lot happening other than the big ass reward/immunity challenge thing. I was extremely disappointed that they did not show how the picking of the teams went, as they were divided into groups of four before the challenge started. The thing that I found a bit interesting is that it really looked like the team that won the initial challenge is exactly the same four that are kind of the power people there right now.

Boston Rob won the challenge, of course. Now that Lex is gone there is no one there that can match his speed, dexterity and stamina. To be fair the final challenge, for individual immunity, was a puzzle challenge that required only intelligence. Now to be brutally honest. Two of the girls that were trying to solve this puzzle have children that are old enough that they must have been born while the mothers were in their teens. I am not going to go look at the profiles to see if that is true or not, I am just going to say that the average woman who gets pregnant when she is fifteen is not exactly a Rhodes Scholar, if you get my point.

The only saving grace is that it is now following a path that will lead to Shii Ann being voted next week. If you have never watched any of the other seasons of survivor, you should know that the second the votes become predictable, the game gets changed. They have always used new and unique ways to throw a mokey wrench into it in the past, I am expecting them to do something similar with the show next week. If Boston Rob actually wins the immunity challenge he will just have to start shooting the fish in the barrel. I am sure hoping that they will set up a challenge that will really show off the skills of Rupert and Big Tom, if there were an endurance challenge for them to hold a heavy load, say 50 pounds, in front of them, that would be where Rupert and Tom could really win, yet that wouldn’t be fair to the women. Hell, maybe someone should steal Rob’s beloved BoSox hat, maybe that is where he draws his strength.

I have no doubt that they are going to do something to really mix up the strategies with the players in the next episode. I don’t know how they are gonna do it, but I do know that each episode that we watch is actually three full days. I am sure that once they see that it is all getting a bit to predictable they throw in challenged that are geared for the strengths and weaknesses of certain players. That is why they call it “reality t.v.”, because there is nothing real about it.

• While I was writing that little bit about Survivor up there, I went to look for the official site. Once I got to google, a thought occured to me so I just typed in survivor.com. Now, what I thought I would get was the site for the still performing band Survivor, who had their only real breakthrough hit with the song “Eye of the Tiger”, which was featured in one of the “Rocky” movies. Not so, that site can be found Here if you really want to see it. I figured if that was not the site that it loaded that it would obviously be the official CBS survivor site (linked to above) which was also not the case. I am not going to put up a link for what you get to if you simply type in survivor.com because it doesn’t deserve one.

If you go to that address there are pop-ups galore. You feel like you are playing a video game trying to close them as fast as they come up. It tries to get you to download program files and likely gives you tons of cookies (unless you have your browser set to prompt for adding them). That site has been in business for about five years, while the t.v. show survivor has been going a couple of years longer, and the band was popular back in the eighties. This is where I am going to go well away from my normal views of government interference and say that there really should be laws about this.

I watched a show on PBS some years ago (so many years that I can not find it in their show listings at all). There is a practice called “cyber squatting” that people do. They find a name, or a term, or a typo for a name and register that domain. That is all well and good, right, but then what they do is put up tons of Malware, porn and other nasty stuff on a site that is likely to be hit by typing the name in the address bar. That is wrong!

I went to look for a solid example of this and found it in spades. I am not going to post any of the links, since I think this practice is simply atrocious. Just look at any college athlete who is getting a lot of press coverage, then type in that name .com and you will find these ‘cyber squatting’ parasites.

What they do is register that domain name, for less than twenty bucks a year, then put all of the scumware on it. They then offer to sell the domain name back to the person/company who has that name for 100-1000 times the price the registration actually cost. If that is not illegal it should be.

The question that I have is; CBS has a ton of money. They should know that a lot of people, a lot of children in particular, are going to type in survivor.com and expect to see information about the show. Wouldn’t it be in their best interest to go ahead and pay the person trying to extort them to make it so that parents won’t put the word “survivor” onto the list of things that their kids can’t look at?

Anniversary; Video Games

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Well I didn’t post anything yesterday. A quick check of my site stats shows that about three people actually know that. I assume that those are the same three people who are reading this now, so I apologize to the two of you, I am one of the three and don’t deserve an apology.

As I type this it is still April 13th, but by the time most of you will read it, it will be the 14th. Being that it is the 14th of April, that means that 139 years ago today President Lincoln was assassinated. 92 years ago today, the Titanic hit a glacier in the middle of the ocean and sank, killing some 1,500 people. Also, three years ago today I married my beautiful wife, happy anniversary!

Let that be a lesson to all of you to do a little research into the date that you choose to get married. The only saving grace about the day that we chose is that Lincoln didn’t die until a bit after 7a.m. on the fifteenth, and the Titanic didn’t actually go down until about 2a.m. on the fifteenth. All the more fitting that the fifteenth is also tax day. Still having the other things happen of the fourteenth just means that they will be on the news on our anniversary, so better just to not watch the news. Besides, we should be out having a romantic dinner, instead we both have to work, and vastly different hours, so we won’t even see each other much. Life sucks, let’s move on, shall we?

The reason that I didn’t write anything yesterday was because of a game that I bought. It is a year or so old, it is called “Schizm: Mysterious Journey”. It is another one of those Dream Catcher games. I enjoy to play them from time to time, they are trying really hard to copy the original Myst with every title that they release, and doing a pretty good job of it for the most part. You can pick up any one of their titles, except for the brand new ones, on their website for ten or fifteen bucks.

Anyway, I was saying that they try to rip off the original Myst and by that I mean that there is no character interaction, only a few scattered holographic clues. -This is why I assume that their games are so inexpensive, it is pretty obvious that they have simply recycled the same game engine for every one of their games. The user interface changes just a little bit with each one, but it is so close to identical that you know they didn’t actually have to pay anyone to go in and code a new engine.- The artwork in them is beautiful, well at least it was, they have been using the 640×480 display since their first release. They still use that resolution, despite the fact that almost no one has a computer that can display images properly in that resolution anymore. That means that what would/should be beautiful artwork is more like artwork that you can kind of count the pixels in on a monitor any larger than 13 inches.

Just for fun, I just shut down and plugged in the tiny little monitor that I have as a back up (which is right here because I was using it to try to troubleshoot problems I was having with the pc that I bought for my mom and have already discussed way too much to link back to it) and restarted. I loaded one of the saved games, just to look at the artwork on a smaller monitor, and as suspected it really was quite impressive. The animations still looked a little bit bad, like maybe they were rendered in 256 colors to save on disk space, the game has 5 cds and takes over three gigs of hard disk space -at maximum- for a game that will only take you a few hours to complete.

The familiarity of the Dream Catcher games is kind of the reason that I enjoy them, once in a while anyway. Here is every one of them ever made in less than a paragraph. Game starts, short intro with voice-over. Start in unfamiliar territory, must look at everything. There are strange symbols all over the place, you have to write them all down. Somewhere you will find something that shows how the number system works (usually in the form of a pictogram or a measuring device). There will be 15 or 20 puzzles that you must complete, never very difficult, but enough to make you think. Then, after playing it for four hours or so, you complete the game and throw away your notes, ’cause there is ZERO replay value. That is it, every game they have ever made.

I have left out all of the detail, of course, but the games remain the same. It is the formula that Myst used and the formula that every company from here to hell and back has ripped off. I mostly enjoy them for the puzzles. The way that I look at it is that you are basically watching a cgi movie from a first person vantage and have to occasionally solve a puzzle to make the movie keep going. The stories are never really that compelling, or maybe they are and you just don’t think so anymore after having played so many titles that you can’t remember which story line goes with which game.

There is one thing in this game that was a bit irritating though. You have two characters that are there, but who can not see each other or touch each other, but often have to be in the same place at the same time to make an action happen. The game expains this away by saying that each person on the planet is somehow living in a different dimension? but all still there. Yet, when you put something down with one character, the other one can pick it up. That just didn’t make much sense. Some of the actions required that one person hold down a lever, then you switch to the other person to switch another lever. Just weird stuff. Especially when you have to make them both go through 15 or 20 screens and a couple of animations to get to the same place once you know what they need to do.

The puzzles in this one weren’t all that good. I was able to do the whole thing without looking to a walkthrough, with the exception of having to look at one when I had made a stupid math mistake that left me one click away from the right naviagational coordinates in one of the flying machines. I always check the walkthroughs later, just in case I missed any easter eggs also.

Now to really get bitching about it. All of these games that are supposedly set on other worlds have all of this advanced technology that is basically made out of sticks and tree trunks. Yet, there are generally only a couple of houses in the places that you explore. Am I to believe that somehow this civilization continues to survive with a population of like ten people? How do they procreate? How did they make all of the devices in the first place? What is the source of power for the flying machines, what is the source of power for the ones that can go up and down the rails without engines? Why are some of the devices made out of tree trunks and the like when others are made of obvious metal and plastics? If they can make a lens (there is always a lens, trust me) out of glass, why can’t they make windows to put into their houses? If they alone know how to run all of these systems, why didn’t they use them to get away before whatever catastrophic event took place?

I suppose that all of the last paragraph was pretty much retorical, you play the game to play the game. If you start to analyze the game too much (hell, at all really) you are gonna find things that just don’t make a damn bit of sense. The games are pretty fun to play once in a while, when you are really bored and even watching reruns of Jerry Springer doesn’t sate the boredom.

• Now the real question. How is it possible that I can buy this brand new game, five cd’s worth of it, for 10 bucks (it is a year old) while all of the music companies are still charging more for a cd than for a cassette? In a failed business venture a couple of years ago, I found that you can make a cd complete with a jewel case and front and back cards for about fifty cents. Well, that wasn’t counting the ink in the printer so I will bump that up to say fifty-two cents. If I can do it myself for that price I would think that any major music company would be able to get a much better deal by buying hundreds of thousands of the items, as opposed to the hundreds that I bought. I really believe that, at this point, it is probably more expensive to make a cassette tape than a cd/dvd because so few people are actually buying that type of media now.

The whole point of being a music star is to make your money on ticket sales. If you can not generate enough ticket sales to make you wealthy then you are not a very good musician/group. Of course, the publishers of the music are the ones that make the money, and also the ones that set the price, and also the ones who are pissed off about people sharing files over the internet (with the exception of Lars Ulrich from Metallica, who mistakenly thought that since Metallica’s music has sucked for the last decade people were downloading it instead of paying for it. No. Lars. No one is listening to that shit.)

The grand humor of that is that bands that are struggling to make it really want their music to be shared over the internet, while the bands that made it, then lost it, are pissed off that they don’t seem to have the power they did back in the ’80s. I bet that if a band like “Quiet Riot” got a song downloaded over the internet enough that it got some requests on local radio stations, thus leading to actual air-play, and resulted in a tour with their name back in the lights, “Quiet Riot” would endorse whatever file-swapping software had made that all possible. I can’t speak for “Quiet Riot” though, and I know from first-hand experience that their singer is just a total asshole who still thinks it is 1983 and he owns the world. (side note, I had no idea that Randy Rhoads was ever in that band, thank your stars that he did a couple of albums with OZZY later or his memory would be just as dead as he is.)

I did a bit of Roadie work for the now defunct band EisenBlakk (Roadie work being that Dwight let me go to the shows for free, even drove me there, and in exchange I just helped him unload all of the band’s equipment; a pretty good trade off). His band was totally cool, as were the guys in the band ‘Dirty Rhythm’, whom I met at a venue in Eugene, OR. at an Eisenblakk show.

Shortly after that brief arrangement, I had the opportunity to meet the guys from “Quiet Riot” in about 1991, bunch of assholes. On the other side of the equation, I also got to meet the guys in “Blue Oyster Cult” who were jovial, and just happy that they were still able to make a living by playing music.

This one went a bit weird, that is all for today.

Howard Stern

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Well it is Thursday so I am back to this after taking a day off. That is kind of a difficult thing to get used to. I have only been doing this for a couple of months but I have gotten so used to writing at least a little bit every single day, regardless of how tired I am, that it just seems odd to not do it on wednesday. In fact yesterday I really had the urge to write a bit after watching the latest episode of South Park but I just didn’t, no real reason why or why not.

I will probably talk about the South Park thing a bit at the end, but for now I have to first give you the test that was promised Last Friday. Unfortunately I can’t ask how many gallons of water lake Mead holds because no one took the time to figure it out and send me the answer. I promised a test, though, so a test there shall be. It will be just a single question and if you get the answer wrong you will be taken behind the barn and shot to death. Here is the question:

There are 40 socks in a drawer. Twenty of them are blue, twenty of them are white. Without looking, what is the fewest number of socks that you could remove from the drawer to be sure that you had a matching pair?
A. 2
B. 3
C. 21
D. 40

I like to keep my tests simple. If you really feel the need, go ahead and email me your guess. Perhaps I will award a pretty gold star like my teachers used to. Or not, such an easy question probably doesn’t deserve such an award. I did at least keep my word and put a test up on thursday. Pity I don’t have the time/inclination to dig out my javascript dictionary and look up how to do radio buttons, as that would look a hell of a lot more professional. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

• It has been some time since I have put any news up here and I really feel the urge to do it again today. I am just sick and tired of the FCC trying to impose the moral view of the religious nuts on the rest of us. They of course pick really easy targets when they do, like Howard Stern. Back in the news again after an unprecidented fine is proposed against Clear Channel so they dropped him completely. It is not like Clear Channel carried him on many stations it appears that his show only ever aired on six of the stations, but still it just sickens me.

It is an AP story, but I read it Here. What I find the most disturbing is just how small the fine really is in comparison to how much money that station generates annually. No, strike that, what I find the most disturbing is that I am being forced to bitch about this, yet again, it is not like the show is being forced onto children in school. People who listen to the show have a thing called ‘Free Will’, I thought that Howard Stern had a thing called ‘Freedom of Speech’, guess I was reading a pamphlet from some country other than the good old U S of A. Stern had a quote in the article that I think was pretty dead on.

In a statement posted on his Web site, Stern characterized the fine as furtherance of a “witch hunt” against him by the Bush administration, which he says is punishing him for his criticism of the president.
“It is pretty shocking that governmental interference into our rights and free speech takes place in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s hard to reconcile this with the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave.'”

To be fair, I suppose Stern has probably pissed off a lot of people with his show. People in high places. I don’t listen to his show at all, I find it to be a tad gross, but I have caught clips of it when he is bashing other radio personalities like Larry King. If he doesn’t care about pissing off people in his own business then I have no doubt that he probably does say things that would piss of the President and his cronies. The thing is that the president is not much different than about 99% of the religious kooks in the US so Stern would probably be getting this same treatment if he never said a word about politics.

This all really should be moot. Why is he not allowed to say what he wants to say? If he is not using profanity, or describing beating children, or raping women, what the hell is so wrong with it? I have listened to Larry King’s show a couple of times and have found what he is saying to be as offensive, if not more so, than Howard Stern. Then there is Rush Limbaugh, that guy can throw around hatred for black people, call the lower class the “scum he wipes from his shoes” and I am sure that he has said a lot worse things that I have just not heard about. Where are the fines for those guys?

So, is the FCC basically trying to say that it is absolutely fine to hate people based on their race and talk about it on national radio, but you can not talk about a vagina? I don’t get it. If I had children, I would like to think that I would rather have them hearing about sex than hearing about how to hate black people. After all everyone has sex at some point. While only some very small-minded people hold a grudge against people who have skin that is a different pigment than their own. The people who have a problem with the subjects discussed on the Howard Stern show are likely exactly the same people who preach abstinance instead of birth control, while they have a pregnant daughter, two sons in the KKK and absolutely zero base in reality.

Maybe Stern is right, what he is saying is not any worse than what some of the right wing radio kooks are preaching and he is getting the bulk of the fines for it. Almost half of the 4 million dollars in fines since 1990 imposed by the FCC (if the article is accurate).

The article goes on to say;

Stern’s nationally syndicated show features graphic sexual discussion and humor. It appears on more than 30 stations — most of them owned by Viacom Inc.’s Infinity Broadcasting unit — and draws millions of die-hard listeners.
Infinity spokesman Dana McClintock said the company has no plans to take any action against Stern.

Whether Infinity has cajones or is just making sure not to sour their cash cow is not really all that clear. At least they have not decided to take his show off the air, mostly because it would be all but suicide for them to do so. I doubt that people who listen to the Stern show would ever listen to that station again if they were to willingly cut his show. Again, this all should not be an issue anyway. We all have freedom of choice, if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. That, I think, is how people like Limbaugh are able to get away with bitching about the plague that is ‘black people’. They believe it to be true, their listeners believe it to be true, and those who don’t want to hear it simply turn the dial. Yet, these Limbaugh-ites are exactly the same people that are making a big hubub about Stern talking about sex. The world is just going straight to hell.

To conclude, it is pretty clear that the FCC is only handing out viloations based on listener complaints, right?

Though the commission received no complaints from listeners to Infinity stations, it is looking into fining that company, too.

Your tax dollars in action. Fining people based on not having a complaint filed against them, but the possibility that maybe someone could have complained, but didn’t. I love this country (that was sarcasm, in this particular case).

Dogs; Terry Brooks

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Well the night happened, and the day came, so I guess I must type something here for your/my amusement. I spent a long time, after arriving home from work, typing an email that I may just quote on this page since it is about a subject that just really crushes me. That being said, I am going to discuss my dogs for a couple of minutes, then go off on whatever tangent I will invariably end up writing about.

I have stated previously that my wife and I are the owners of two ‘Vicious Pit-Bulls’, I always say that in jest since the dogs never do anything to show the vicious nature of the Pit Bull. The stereotypical Pit-Bull is a Junk-Yard dog that is trained to attack and kill anything that it sees, our dogs are trained a bit differently. I really believe that if someone were to break into the house while we were away they might use their base animal instinct to attack that person, or failing that, the fact that they both sound like the spawn of Satan when they bark would likely keep your would be intruder well away from our place.

The thing, the important thing is that we have total control over them. I am sure that it sounds a bit silly to say that, since I have previously written about one of them carrying undergarments and shoes out into the yard, but as far as their actions while we are at home, they jump when we say jump. They sleep in the room with us, and they are just cuddly little things for our amusement most of the time. Most of the time.

During a requisite ‘belly rub’ the other night, we noticed that Warlock, the older of the two dogs, had a couple of pretty serious half cut/half abrasion type of things on his hind legs. He was limping a bit also. Thing is that when he didn’t know that we were watching he forgot to limp, so we know that it isn’t anything serious. It was just the two of them playing and she got him, she got him real good that one time, and he has a bit of a boo boo that will take a while to heal.

They ‘play fight’ a lot, and it is very difficult to discern whether the battle is real or playful, unless you look at the happy, wagging little tails, that is. She, Zelda, is not fully grown yet and still has all of the energy of a puppy, Warlock doesn’t have all of that energy, but he is a trooper and hangs in there most of the time. Zelda does use some dirty tactics though, her number one attack is to get him off guard and bite his dick. Not to speak for an animal that has been castrated and has no voice, but, I bet you if he had balls he would be a very unhappy animal a lot of the time right now.

Zelda has yet to be spayed and I am kind of wondering if that may be part of the reason that they seem to fight so viciously when they play. After a round of ‘play fighting’ we can usually find them both laying side-by-side on the floor, sleeping. Zelda certainly owns his ass though. He is probably in the seventy pound range (just judging by having to pick him up to carry him inside from time to time), it could be less or more. Zelda is about three quarters of his weight, but wins every ‘play fight’. She is a bitch. (Literally, she is a bitch by definition, and also she fights dirty so that just adds to the bitch description.)

My wife likes to buy them bones to chew on (I do too, since even as much as the bones cost they still cost less than new furniture) and that is when the real fighting starts. Treats and chew toys are always bought in equal quantites, one for each dog, but the dogs don’t seem to understand that, and will fight over one while there is another one, exactly the same, lying there untouched. Even if we put them into each dog’s mouth they will invariably start fighting over just one of them. I assume this is like the classic argument that children make about how the one glass has more Kool-Aid than the other.

While I was on the phone with my Mother the other night, the dogs got into what I am going to call a real fight. My Mother could hear the growling through the phone, her boyfriend could hear it also, and he was sitting ten or twelve feet from the phone that it was coming through. The dogs were both up on their hind legs (makes them stand about nipple height on a 5’10” man) and they were not pulling the punches. I did jump in to pull them apart, but I tell you that if they were not my dogs I would have run like hell. They looked and sounded like they wouldn’t care who or what they tore apart. It was quite a vicious display.

Knowing that they were both my dogs, I jumped right in there and pulled them apart, but don’t lots of stories about pit-bulls killing their owners start that way? Once I had them both by the collar, and smacked each of them on the snout, they calmed down. I guess if that huge black dog is yours, you know how well it is, or isn’t, trained and you no longer look at it as a huge dog, but the puppy that you raised. Everyone else will be afraid of the dog, because of the negative press, but they really are good dogs.

The one thing that the dogs do viciously attack is…Flies. Yes, the common house fly. Normally we never see them in the house, but the last few weeks they have been here and the dogs can snap them right out of the air and eat them. Also, they do enjoy cockroaches, but the chase them around way too much before they just let them die and leave the body for us to sweep up later. And the cockroaches only come out when it is dark, so that means lost sleep as the dogs sniff around at it for a couple of hours until I finally just get a tissue and throw the damn thing away.

After reading your email, I went to Amazon just to read some of the reviews for the magic kingdom series. The thing that I found interesting is that the first three novels in the series all get a customer rating of 4 or 4.5 stars, while the fourth book, the one that I only got a couple of chapters into, has five star ratings from all the customers. One of the customers said that next to the ‘Xanth’ series this was the best thing going. Why did this one get the best reviews when I thought it sucked so badly? Oh, I guess that you likely don’t go to write a review about it when you hate it then do you. And by the time an author is on his tenth or twelfth novel he probably has a following that would read a retaraunt menu that he had written and find it the best literary work of all time.

On a side note my wife came in as I was typing this and asked what I was writing about, after seeing the subject line she fired off her two cents that Brooks is just unreadable. I told her that your real beef with him was about it being so derivative of LOTR, she said that was funny since she read all of Tolkien’s stuff and never made it through a single one of Brooks, even though we have damn near every one of them on the shelf (in hardcover no less, gotta love those 5-7 dollar prices. Unfortunately that book store went out of business so now I have to shop through amazon just like everyone else.) So I guess that really does just show that everyone has a different opinion about what writing is good and what is bad.

Funny thing about that bookshelf of mine, I always wanted to have a bookshelf in my house, since that is one of the first things that I have always noticed missing when I visit other people’s houses. My bookshelf, though, has turned more into a book graveyard. Out of the probably 100 or so books on it the only ones that find regular use are the thesarus, dictionary and Bible (the bible just for reference when I am bashing it, I want to make sure that I have the quotes right and be able to site the book and verse), other than that we have some classics that get read, sherlock holmes, dracula and the unabridged complete works of Edgar Allan Poe to name a few. So about 8% of my bookshelf is ever touched and the rest of it might as well just be painted on the wall for all the good it does.

Yet, our dvd collection is used constantly, even the ones we don’t particularly care for get watched once in a while. Is that simply because you have to actively read a book while you can passively watch a movie, or do we (people in general) really hold a grudge against an author or a book that we would never hold against an actor or a movie?

Again, I have gone way off topic. I was intending to mention that Brooks had also done some books in the horror genre, I have never read any of them and was searching on Amazon when I found this link. It has nothing to do with his horror writing, but it does just go to prove that he readily admits that Tolkien was his main influence in the Shannara series. (I hope that link works).

Terry Brooks admits to ripping off Tolkien

With that, I think I am going to quit trying to defend him, and just remember his work with the fresh eyes I had a decade and a half ago. His work was the first that I had read in the fantasy genre and I really found it fascinating, knowing -now- that it was all pretty much ripped off from Tolkien can’t change the impact that it had on me in my early teens. Imagine if I had picked up that Piers Anthony novel and just hated it, I might never have read fantasy again. Instead I picked up Terry Brooks and became a fan of the genre. Knowing that I became a fan of someone who plagiarized (sp) someone elses’s work is a bit disheartening, but knowing that it is also the reason that I will be in line to buy the first edition of the Flux hardback should be enough to prove that his work had a profound effect on me.

Donnie

games

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Damn online video games have consumed too much of my time yet again. Not even particularly good ones, just the games that can be found on the free sites like Pogo.com. It doesnt take long before you find out that you have pissed the whole day away playing really lame little games.

I guess it is better that way, since I didn’t have anything really worth talking about in the first place, and the only feedback that I get about this site is from my wife. So is it actually more productive to piss away my time on writing this than it would be to piss away my time playing a game?

Someone suggested that if I want to generate traffic to my site I should go and post messages in popular disucssion forums with a link to it. That is kind of exactly the opposite of what I was trying to achieve when I decided to set this whole thing up. I told my family and friends of the site, of course, but was hoping that within a few months I might start getting people to happen upon the site that I had not practically begged to visit it. That has not yet happened and I guess I really should be grateful for it. I mean if I actually had more than two or three people that actually read the site on a day to day basis I would probably feel just a bit guilty for cutting it short, which is what I am going to do right now.

Right now I just seem to feel that wasting my time playing cheesy little on line games will be more productive than trying to continue on this train of thought.