Andrew

Been awhile, eh?

I'm happily married now and everything is great on that front. We're still living in Fort Wayne and looking for a new apartment complex to call home because our current location is just a little scary and our neighbors are just a lot too loud and annoying.

For the Outpost people out there on my friends list, they've made me their chief. Iain and I are in the process of moving everything to a new server and getting rid (hopefully) of a lot of red tape and middle management bloat in the process. Of course if you care then you're probably already up to speed.

I decided back when we moved up to Fort Wayne that I wanted to learn how to draw in Photoshop. I'd gotten the hang of the program using a mouse, but my longtime interest in comics and webcomics coupled with the almost-success of a website that was hampered by the fact that people aren't inclined to read through a wall of text to get a joke prompted me to head to Best Buy and purchase a Wacom tablet.

Then I promptly forgot about it after about a month, only to pick it up again in December. I've upgraded to a new tablet and spent time in the learn to draw books, and this is the first I've come up with just by going off a reference:



That'll probably wind up as a more conservatively attired character model for the comic I've been scripting. I definitely need to keep up the practice, but this one turned out pretty good imo.

I'll try to keep this up more often. I just tend to get distracted from LJ for years at a time.

And in the news yesterday, everyone in the city of Boston is officially an idiot. Seriously, calling in the cavalry because of a cartoon advertisement? This country's level of institutional paranoia has officially crossed the line into "going too far."

I really despise screaming children in public places, and I recently found an article about an airline that took a stand and kicked a screaming child and her parents off of their airline.

If you're interested, you can read my ruminations over at the other blog.

Just a warning, this post will probably contain frequent reference to testicles, all in a medical context, so you've been warned.

Saturday night I was over at Emilie's house and had to go to the bathroom. I did my business and proceeded to put the equipment away when my hand brushed against something that shouldn't be there. I performed a simple exam on righty and discovered that there was a hard BB sized lump that I'd never noticed there on previous checks. (Incidentally, if you're a male age 15-40 then you're at risk for testicular cancer. I'd recommend checking it out at least once a month, you never know when you'll find yourself in a situation like this.)

The next day I went to the doctor and he had a look. The doctor informed me that it was probably just a cyst or something else that I needn't worry about, but he also wanted to be absolutely certain. I was scheduled for an ultrasound on Tuesday at The Imaging Center here in Muncie.

Now I have to say that I didn't think I'd be going in for an ultrasound for at least a few more years. And I definitely didn't expect that ultrasound to be on my nuts, or on any part of me for that matter. Still, better safe than sorry, so I went in for the exam. It took about a half hour and then I was out of there with the assurance that they would know for sure what was going on in about 24 hours.

Fast forward to the next morning when I get a call from my doctor's office saying that the Imaging Center called and wanted me to go in for additional testing. "Uh-oh," I thought to myself. "That can't be good."

So I call the Imaging Center and make an appointment to come in between classes later that day at 12:45. I arrive on time and promptly have to wait 15 minutes for the doctor to get in from lunch. He was a South African gentleman as far as I could tell from his accent, businesslike and not particularly friendly or reassuring in his bedside manner. The technician had already informed me that it's rare they call someone in for additional testing, and the doctor didn't help matters.

"Sorry, I just saw something that concerned me on the pictures and wanted to get a look at them live."

"Well who wouldn't?" I quipped. I thought it was funny.

So he went through the examination with the ultrasound machine with a bit of help from the technician. It seemed the doctor didn't really know how to use the machine all that well. That instilled me with a great deal of confidence. When he was done he got up and was about to leave the room without saying a word.

"Um, so what do you think?" I ask.

The doctor then assures me that he feels much better now. He was concerned over something, but definitely thinks it isn't cancerous. Evidently he was worried there might have been something else going wrong in my wedding tackle. He still managed to equivocate in that special way that only doctors who are trying to avoid a potential lawsuit can, telling me that he would have to go back and look at all of the pictures and make a final report before he could tell me anything for sure. The technician again assured me that I would have an answer in 24 hours.

I called my doctor's office the next afternoon to ask if they'd gotten anything from the Imaging Center. Nothing.

I called them again today and they said they had finally gotten the info back. It was just a cyst, nothing to be concerned about. They said they could refer me to a urologist if I wanted to have it removed. Seeing as how cysts are rather benign, they tend to just sit there minding their own business, I declined to have someone come near that area of my body with sharp pointy implements.

So I ended up coming out of this one okay, no thanks to equivocating doctors who kept me on edge for the better part of a week wondering if I would have to have my right nut chopped off sometime in the near future (the typical treatment for testicular cancer). If you've made it this far then I'd like to encourage you to examine your pertinent parts, breasts on the ladies and testicles on the men, on at least a monthly basis. Thankfully it was a false alarm for me, but you never know when something might show up. Catching this stuff early gives you the best chance for survival, so make sure you give yourself that chance.

If you watch Comedy Central for any length of time then chances are you've seen the advertisements for Primeval a horror film that's due out this Friday. There's one interesting thing I've noticed about the previews though. They make it out to be your typical slasher film about a horrible serial killer, but the serial killer in this case is a giant crocodile. And none of the previews that I'd seen mentioned this fact.

Anyways, I wrote more about it over at the new domain. check it out here.

I suppose livejournal could be considered a blog. I never really thought of it as such though. I've been using my livejournal to keep in touch with friends since before the term "blog" became ubiquitous. The friends features make it easy to keep in touch with people who I may have otherwise lost contact with years before.

Having said that, I've decided to try my hand at running a real blog, as it were. I registered the domain for my favored nome de plume at http://www.daecrist.com and have gotten to work adding content. The first post deals with the impending release of what is sure to be the talk of the town tomorrow: the 8PM premiere of the CBS reality series "Armed and Famous."

I'll probably avoid cross-posting between the two. This has always been a more personal thing, and the new domain is more of an outlet for writing since I haven't been doing much of that lately.

So anyways, enjoy.

http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa07018_wz_wiiporn.2073d3ef.html

Chalk another one up to scaremongering and parents who aren't willing to do any parenting.

The lady they mention by name in the article seems like she has it together. It's these people who really bother me:

Other parents, however, complain that Nintendo's scheme is unsatisfactory, and that the Wii browser lacks a "cyber-nanny" or filtering function.

Like it's Nintendo's job to make sure your little darling doesn't use his new toy to "accidentally" get to porn. These new gaming systems connect to the Internet. The Internet has porn. If you don't want your kids to get into that sort of thing then perhaps it's a good idea not to download the web browser at all? The Nintendo Virtual Console is a standalone network that's completely independent of the bad porn mongerers out there on the scary Internets. If little Johnny suddenly wants to be able to browse the web with a cumbersome controller and no keyboard I'd be damned suspicious anyways. Be a parent and don't blame the manufacturer when they don't do your job for you.

Today when I popped onto the livejournal front page I noticed a featured community that was all about encouraging people to read fifty books in one year, much in the same way that events such as Nanowrimo encourage people to write a 150k page book.

It took me aback for a moment that there were people out there who needed to make a conscious effort to read fifty books in a year as opposed to just doing it over the course of a few months.

First off I'd like to apologize for slacking off on the journal. I was going well for a few weeks there and then dropped entirely off the face of the earth as I'm wont to do on Livejournal. I'm back now, huzzah and all that.

I finally went over to the Dark Side and actually purchased and Apple product. It's been a long time coming, but I was hoping that someone would come up with a viable mp3 player that would replace the iPod. That never happened so I spent my Christmas money that had been intended for a Wii on a new 30GB video iPod. Other than a downloadable version of the ever popular but extremely rare Sega Genesis game Toejam & Earl there isn't anything I'll be playing on the Wii until well into the next year. The console has an insane amount of promise, but it seemed silly to plop down the cash when there was nothing I'd play on it.

The iPod, on the other hand, has been quite nice. It's a vast departure from my clunky Dell mp3 player. Its chief advantage is that it plays songs that come in the proprietary iTunes format, so I can finally make full use of that wonder of modern technology. The Dell mp3 player was just that, an mp3 player. Other formats sent it into conniptions. Of course the down side to this is that I now have access to an unlimited number of albums and songs that I've always wanted to own and it's only a click and a credit card charge away. I will have to exercise a great deal of restraint with this awesome new power.

The syncronizing is also terribly convenient. I make playlists in iTunes and the songs are automatically added to the iPod if they're in the iTunes library as opposed to having to drag and drop everything into the Dell player and set up separate playlists by hunting through every song on the machine for the one track that I'd just copied over. It was much like searching for a needle in a haystack and became quite annoying. I've also discovered that all of my favorite NPR shows are available via podcast so I don't have to tune in at the exact time they're on to keep up on the latest news.

Here's hoping everyone else had a great Christmas as well, and a bah humbug to all of you out there who are glad to see the holidays gone for another 11 months.

I despise the library at the onset of finals week.

At the table immediately in front of me sits two young gentlemen who arrived and promptly began blasting music through their mp3 players so loudly that it could be plainly heard at my table and the table beside them. My only consolation is that they will eventually go deaf from playing their music that loudly, but it will be a slow road to deafness and I can't take much pleasure in eventual pain when what I really want is to inflict it in the here and now.

Sitting at the table behind me is a young lady who can't stop talking about some drama she's dealt with on the interweb and her extremely flatulent male friend.

To my left there is a table with three girls who can't shut up. They seem to think that talking in a whisper will be enough to absolve them of the sin of not being quiet when other people are trying to study, but they can't quite seem to grasp that a decibel is a decibel whether or not you happen to bring your voice box into the equation. They also won't stop laughing, loud and long, at every little thing they say, and they obviously missed the sign that greets students as they get off of the elevator admonishing them to "please put your cell phones on vibrate." You haven't heard Funky Town until you've heard it blasting from a tinny cell phone speaker in the middle of what's supposed to be a quiet zone while you're trying to study for an exam you have the following afternoon.

There is a study group at a table that's actually quite far from my own. That doesn't matter though. They're loud enough that I can hear everything they're discussing for their group project loud and clear. Nevermind that the library offers special rooms for people who have to do group work. Nevermind that they could easily have their gathering on the first or second floor, both areas that aren't "quiet zones." No, the only place to sit and do your group work is in the middle of a quiet area, and you have to do it as loudly as possible or there's no hope of getting an A.

Meanwhile I sit here, quiet, studying. The girls at the table next to iPod dumbass sit quietly rolling their eyes whenever the braying donkeys at the adjacent table start laughing about the cute guy they totally saw in class that day, because it really is funny that you saw him sitting there. He's totally been in that class all semester, and totally, like, was there today for a like review or some shit. Isn't that just wild? Isn't that the funniest goddamned thing you've heard your entire fucking life?

The library needs to come with guns. Silenced, of course.

I'm a bit of a bibliophile. As a result I have three bookshelves that are full and I'm quickly getting to the point where I need another bookshelf. The problem is that I don't have room for a bookshelf, perhaps when I move out. I've also been working on replacing my paperbacks with hardcover editions. They look nicer on a bookshelf and hold up better over time as well.

The upshot of all of this is that I had a couple of boxes full of books that had been sitting in the basement since we moved to the new house, as well as a bunch of books on my bookshelf that I never read, never intend to read, or have replaced with a hardcover. I've been meaning to take them to the local resale shop for awhile now, and tonight I put a few books into a box to do just that.

First sign of trouble:
I arrive and tell the lady that I'll take store credit for my books. They usually have something that I'll buy. She starts looking through my box and tells me that they'll only take regular sized paperbacks for Trade-In, and that I'll have to come back tomorrow to get cash for the others if they're buying. I tell her that's okay and to go ahead and figure up how much I could get for the regular paperbacks that I had.

Second sign of trouble:
The lady tallies everything and gives me a list that says "$1.48 Fiction, $1.00 Classics, $14.83 Science Fiction/Fantasy." I asked her what the total credit would be, and she tells me that you can only trade books within genre. Evidently the idea of just giving plain old store credit for books you want was beyond the capacity of this store. A bit peeved, I went and made my selections.

Third sign of trouble:
After I went through and selected two paperbacks from Fiction and Classics as well as three hardcover books from the Science Fiction/Fantasy section she tells me "this isn't going to work." Evidently she noticed the look of bewilderment on my face and decided to clarify: "you can only trade paperback books for other paperbacks, not hardcover."

At that point I was fed up with the hoop jumping. I told her that the whole point of me bringing those books in was that I was looking to get rid of paperbacks and replace them with hardcovers. I also let it be known that it was ridiculous that they wouldn't just give you straight up store credit for the books you brought in rather than making you trade like for like. The lady helpfully informed me that I could bring the books back tomorrow and see if they could just buy them for cash. I told her no thanks, and that I'd been convinced it was worth the drive to Half Price Books in Indy if only for the customer service there.

I'm still a bit surprised. Most resale shops will take things in trade, give you credit for your purchases, and then let you go on your way shopping. Had I known they were so ridiculous about trade-ins at this Muncie store I would have stopped shopping there long ago. Ah well, you live and learn.

Today was a good day.

I woke up at around 11 after finally getting to sleep at 4:30 in the morning. My internal clock was screwed up when I stayed up all night to go out in the wee hours of the morning on Black Friday last week. For the rest of the week I was stuck downing Mountain Dew in the afternoon to keep myself awake, but the caffeine was also a shock to the system that kept me up until all hours of the night due to my screwy internal clock.

I went down to Indy to meet up with the guys for a bit of Ghostbusting since we missed the Indy tree lighting due to Dustin being sick. There was a Christmas festival going on in Mooresville, their home town, but it was mostly over by the time I got there. We walked around for a bit, played Apples to Apples for awhile at Jon's house, and then I headed out.

I also had the pleasure of eating dinner at Johnny Carrino's with Bill and Rachel. I hadn't eaten there before and would definitely recommend it to everyone. It was nice to get a chance to catch up.

After that I went on a pilgrimage to the Half Price Books which was just across the parking lot from the restaurant. They had a hardback copy of 2010, a book that I have in paperback but I've been trying to slowly replace those with hardcovers, and Worldwar: In the Balance by Harry Turtledove. I loaned my paperback copy of that book to a friend years ago and never got it back, so it'll be nice to have a hardcover edition of the first book in one of my favorite alternate history series.

When I finished at the Greenwoold Half Price Books I rushed around 465 to their other location on 86th street near the north end of Indy. There I hit gold again. The last time I read through The Wheel of Time series in preparation for the Knife of Dreams release I'd been working on replacing my paperback copies with hardcovers from the local used book store. I also bought a copy of The Eye of the World at a book signing so that I could have a signed copy of the first book in the series. I was missing The Great Hunt and The Dragon Reborn, the second and third books and two of the more popular in the series that are difficult to come by because people don't want to sell them, and A Crown of Swords, the seventh book in the series. I'd found that in the used book store in Muncie, but by the time I got to reading it in the series it had been sold. I managed to find a copy of it at the store on 86th street though, as well as a copy of 2061. Now the only hardcover I'm missing in that series is 2001. The real gem was finding a copy of Stephen King's novella "Cycle of the Werewolf," upon which the delightfully cheesy Cory Haim/Gary Busey vehicle "Silver Bullet" was based. I was terrified of that book when I was a kid, and I've flirted with buying it over the years but could never bring myself to pay the $15-20 cover price for what amounts to a 100 page paperback book. Yay for cheap used book stores.

So over the weekend I saw a trailer for a film adaptation of the children's classic Bridge to Terabithia that's due out sometime next year.

Granted I haven't read the book since I was in 5th grade, but I don't recall any wild adventures through amazing fantasy realms with giant trees that are almost, but not entirely, exactly like the ents from Lord of the Rings and magical creatures that look like they were copied and pasted from the recent Chronicles of Narnia movie.

I recall a somber character driven piece that really got you thinking and had me bawling my eyes out by the end. The fantasy element was there, but only in the children's imagination. Either the trailer is misleading people about what the movie is really about in order to attract people who liked the LotR and CoN movies, or the movie was drastically changed from the source material to draw in fans of the LotR and CoN movies.

Either way, I don't see this one turning out well. If they're drawing in on false pretenses then people are going to have their hopes horridly dashed when they reach the big finish that the book is so famous for, and if it's been changed to be more like straightforward fantasy fare then it most certainly won't rise above the level of cookie-cutter ripoff.

This is an interesting read for the bibliophiles on this list:

http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm

I caught the first few minutes of Goldfinger on Spike TV last night. They're running a marathon in honor of the new film in the theaters.

At the beginning Bond is standing with a hot chick in a bikini by a pool when Felix, the American CIA agent, comes up to talk with him. Bond says "run along honey, this is man talk," and then pats her fondly on the ass as she smiles and walks away.

I found myself wondering if this was just a product of the time, or if Sean Connery gets away with that sort of thing because he's Sean Connery.

Is 22 too young to be a curmudgeon? Right now the idea of being professionally unpleasant sounds pretty damned appealing.

Taken from this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15816872/

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - A fourth high school student has died from injuries she got in when a school bus nose-dived off an interstate overpass, the police chief said Tuesday.

C'mon AP, I know you guys can do better than that.

My name is Andrew, and I'm addicted to Warcraft.

Well not really. I still go to the gym, spend time with my fiance, do schoolwork, and otherwise try to maintain a social life, but I did cancel my account this evening. I'm hoping for good this time.

Video games aren't a bad thing when taken in moderation. The problem with MOGs such as Warcraft is that there is no such thing as moderation. Sure you can do well as a casual player the first time you make the trip to level 60, but after that the game becomes one constant grind after another. If you want to do well in PvP then you need to have good gear. If you want to have good gear then you have to spend countless hours in the battlegrounds getting killed over and over or you have to be willing to spend 20-30 hours a week raiding in high end dungeons with no guarantee of ever getting anything worthwhile.

PvP in massive online games can be a fun thing. There's nothing greater than going out and testing your skill against someone else, but there's definitely a problem when a game is so gear dependant. In Dark Age of Camelot, for instance, the best equipment in the game could be crafted by players so that it came down more to skill than who had more time to grind and get bigger and better toys.

I bought a guitar last week. I think I'm going to spend my newfound free time teaching myself that, continuing the learning process on my piano, and finishing the book I've been working on off and on for the past year.

I get around campus on my bike. We live in a house that's a few blocks away from campus proper, and the bike is the difference between a five minute bike ride to the science building and a fifteen to twenty minute walk depending on pedestrian traffic. I've been riding my bike on campus for the past five years without a single problem. Sure there have been close calls, but I've always managed to keep a good lookout for idiots and avoid them.

Until today.

I was riding my bike down one of the main cross streets. It features the gym, architecture building, business building, and a few dorms. I'm riding my bike at a good clip down the street when I see her in front of me. A girl who is staring straight ahead listening to her MP3 player and completely oblivious to the world around her. She took a brief look to see if there were cars around and didn't cross the street.

Unfortunately, she didn't look again as I was coming. I thought that she was going to stay put, she had other plans. She took a step out into the street, right in front of my oncoming bicycle and far too close for me to have any hope of stopping in time. I yell for her to get the hell out of the way. She turned and looked at me with a mixture of stupidity and lassitude and just stood there staring at her two-wheeled doom bearing down on her at 15-20 miles per hour.

Seeing that she was too stupid to correct her mistake of stepping out into the fucking street without looking first I realized it was up to me to save us, but there just wasn't enough time. I swerved to avoid her, praying there weren't any cars coming up behind me that could clip me and make a bad situation much worse. We were too close though. I slammed into her side, and the force of the impact threw me off balance. Knowing that a good slide is infinitely preferable to being thrown over the handlebars I threw my weight into it as the force of the impact knocked me backwards. I think that the weeks that I spent learning how to fall in Judo club last year also helped a bit.

I hit the ground pretty hard, but I also hit and rolled with it to try and deaden the impact as my bike went skidding away in front of me. The fall knocked the wind out of me and knocked the chain off of my bike, but fortunately I was bundled up in a thick coat and gloves due to the weather so there were no scrapes or cuts. I quickly scrambled up, grabbed my bike, and got the hell out of the road before any cars could come along and really ruin my day.

"Are you okay?" Dumb bitch asks me as I'm standing there doubled over on the sidewalk holding onto my bike for support feeling lightheaded with stars in front of my eyes as I sit there croaking as my brain attempts to tell my body that it's okay to breathe again. I held up a finger to indicate that I couldn't talk. I'd thought that much was obvious from the fall that I'd just taken trying to avoid hitting the dumbass.

"I'm sorry! I'm late for class!" I hear dumb bitch say. When I look up a moment later to really give her a piece of my mind and demand her contact information should anything turn out to be more broken than it seemed to be at the moment she was gone. Gone. This fucktard just caused me to be thrown off my bike in the middle of the road, saw me standing there gasping for breath unable to tell her if I was okay or not, and she just walked away. I never really got a good look at her and couldn't tell if she was anywhere in the crowd walking along the sidewalk.

My only consolation is that she did get hit by the business end of my bike, and the back tire probably clipped her when I went into the slide. I really hope that she's in some sort of pain right now, because it's the least the stupid twat deserves for her stupidity and complete lack of consideration.