Journals

Journals are crazy things. The true chronicles of a boy make an interesting story since I mostly write when I'm unhappy. But, it's interesting to go back and read. To remember those feelings and sometimes think, "WTF was wrong with me?" Ha.

But, while I was looking through things I found a story. A silly snippet of a smitten boy many moons ago.

Nighttime

Ghosts was written on my phone, so there are some typos I'll need too go back and fix. It's just this crazy story about crazy ghosts.

I finally went back and fixed the textos.

Orale ese! (Or an essay?)

A couple years ago I went back to school. I took an English class. I wrote some essays. This is one of them. It might make for an interesting read. Maybe?

A Beginning

This is an older story of mine. Well, the start of a longer story. I had a lot of thoughts about where this story would go. But, I didn't like anything I wrote that pushed the story forward. Maybe I'll revisit this someday. Maybe it will only ever be a beginning. I feel a little bad never writing of his escape. It's as if on his world he's still trapped, wondering where life will take him.

Whatever

No sleep tonight I guess. It's a bit unfair. So, I decided to write a story. I worry about the boy in my stories. He's not fairing too well. Maybe I need to write him a world with less evil and conflict.

Foolish

So, The Adventures of Hatman #52 was once my online dating profile (nearly 10 years ago). I thought I was being clever, silly, and fun. It was very Batman TV series campy, and I loved it. Apparently, women weren't nearly as amused. I received zero responses using that as my profile.

Maybe with comics being more mainstream, it'd be more successful these days. It's hard to say with how weird the online dating world is. It's a world where content is generally unimportant.

Style Update

I was playing around and decided to go with a new theme for my blog. The background reminds of The Downward Spiral cover art. And, I thought, "Fuck it." The theme is mostly the default, but I did up the opacity of the black to 75%. Maybe I'll modify things more later. And, maybe I won't. I did backup my toxic theme though.

So Tired

The story is a very rough draft, typed on a phone in the wee hours of the morning. Sleep is an elusive beast some nights. And, some nights your heart aches. And, you don't know whether it's real pain or some phantom pain. Some pain that says, 'Listen asshole! I got used to being around constantly and some nights you need to hurt again to feel normal.'

I'm tired. I might be broken. And, some days I don't know what I'm doing anymore. But, at least it's reality.

Wishing at 11:11

My relationship with Skye was awesome, terrible, happy, crazy, and heart-breaking. She made me a better person and showed me how to live life. She also had a supremely awesome Tarot deck and the most awesome bed ever (not in that way perv!).

One day I really fucked up our relationship and my repentance was a story. Well, not just the story, but it was a start. The relationship ended maybe a month after the story was written.

There's something about how the story is told that I really like. When it gets to the poem, it's just, I like it. It's a cheesy poem, but, it's mine. Besides, it's better than my moon one.

Bad Day

Hearts are stupid. They should learn to listen to brains. It doesn't even matter how much you try to reason with the stupid things. You thump your chest and say, "Listen mister! You stop hurting or I'll give you something to hurt about." But, you learn quickly that hearts don't respond to idle threats.

So, you live a life of distraction. You surround yourself with awesome friends to hang out with. The best thing is that you end up with many new awesome friends you didn't even know would be there for you. And, your heart celebrates this and it helps take away some of the pain.

You get to the point where you think, "Hey, maybe it's time to try my hand at the game of love again." You date some people. It's good. It's bad. You date someone you like. But, the whole time you're evaluating these new feelings. The last thing you want is hurt someone else, to rebound off them.

You're being a good person. You're letting yourself feel real feelings. You're letting go of the past. You're not latching on to the first person who comes along (for selfish reasons or otherwise). And, then you have a bad day. A bad, stupid day because it was a day that was important to the past you're trying to let go.

All you want is to stop feeling so miserable. You want to lash out at the person who caused the pain. You want to bury yourself in frivolous affections to forget how terrible you feel. But, you know it'd be unfair to act on these thoughts. So, you hold strong and wait.

Something Fun

I added another old tale of mine. It was something I typed up out of nowhere during a chat session many years ago. I was, obviously, quite bored and started typing a story into the chat. It was probably written in about a minute and I decided to capture it and save it to my computer. And, here it is back on the internet in full digital glory.

Whoa! Creepy Photo

What happened to the bottom of my photo? It's like a horror movie invited itself in. Talk about a weird digital camera glitch. If it turns out to be demons that swallow your soul when you view this picture on the internet, I'm really sorry.

Oh, and I swear I did absolutely no photo editing on that thing. I didn't even notice the photo was funky until it was uploaded to blogspot. I think it's the result of capturing the pure evil of Bank of America on camera.

Oh, and click on it for a higher resolution version.

Bank of America Sucks

Apparently Bank of America has started redirecting the Countrywide traffic to their website. Being a Countrywide customer (now Bank of America customer) I have to say that Bank of America's online service is absolutely awful. Not get your monthly statement in the mail? Want to view a copy of the paper statement online? Tough shit. All Bank of America is going to show you is that a monthly statement was sent on a specific date.

Since you can see how much you owe, all that's really important is being able to set up bill pay, right? You have your account number, but where is that all important address information? Prepare to do some hunting through their site which is filled with pages that give ASP errors. Speaking of which, the link to print a payment coupon is one of these broken links. That's right, even if all you want to do is mail your payment, you can't get to the payment coupon so they can easily associate your payment to your account. Bang up job guys.

Bank of America really should've looked at how easy and user-friendly Countrywide's site was. And, until they got their site to that level, let the Countrywide customers use the Countrywide site. But, no, we get to use a barely working site and are forced to navigate through the dark like paraplegic moles.

Seriously, what jackasses are writing the code and where can I send the hate mail? Even more importantly, who is the idiot that designed this unfriendly abomination? Worst banking site ever!

Goodbye GeoCities

Not sure if you know, but Yahoo! is cutting a few of their features. Among them is geocities, so while I realize geocities may be around a bit longer, I figured I'd make sure there was nothing I wanted to keep there. Plus, I wanted to give a nod to the original home of my rantings.

At first I had the idea of moving my old posts over to blogspot, but most are info about what I was doing to the site or info about Baldur's Gate 2. In other words, I don't see any reason to move anything over. Instead I'm just going to keep a screenshot.

So, goodbye geocities. You worked good as a free home for 2000 to 2002.

Bugger

If you'd have asked me a year ago whether Lindsey and I would ever get divorced I would've said, "No way!" Even nine months ago I'd have been certain everything was going to be OK. "We're just going through a rough patch."

But, it seems, hurt leads to hurt leads to more hurt. And, it's not as though we were at each other's throats. We got along and still get along well, which I think makes this all that much harder. I think it'd be much easier divorcing someone I hate.

What option do you have when you and your spouse's life goals don't match up. And, the ugly result is that your heart breaks a little bit every time you're together. Yet, you don't want to and don't know how to be without your spouse.

When she moved in with her parents in November, I think my heart hopped out of my chest, grew legs, and followed her there. For months I've been hoping somehow things would work out. (I think that's why I haven't really told most people that we were having problems, let alone that we were probably going to get divorced.)

So, I sit here with a computer screen to talk to. "Hello computer." (Makes me think of Star Trek IV, when Scotty tries talking to the computer.) So, I'll throw my thoughts out into the ether. Maybe I'll be lucky and they won't come back, instead of going over and over them every night. Some nights I think it's enough to drive a person crazy. And, perhaps I'm there as I'm now talking to illuminated text.

Toxic Themed?

Looks like my page was going for a blue theme and then was hit with radioactive vomit. The dark green areas are simply contaminated and the bright green are toxic. Hopefully your mouse doesn't mutate and end up with two balls. Or for the optical mice, two laser-eyes. Trackball mice are freaks and any mutation can only be for the better.

Auto-Play

While I understand people really, really, really want to share their music with others via the internet; I have to say that it's extremely annoying when music starts playing once the page finishes loading. It's even worse when the player is hidden (whether actually not on the page, or difficult to find), cannot be paused, the volume cannot be modified, and/or the player is so shoddy that pausing doesn't work.

And, it's not just that it's annoying. If I'm listening to music on my computer ( whether streaming online or playing local content), my music now has to compete with yours. And, if I'm singing at the top of my lungs then this can ruin the whole pretending to be a rock star experience.

But, the biggest reason I plead with you to stop is because when I'm done being a rock star I don't always turn the volume down. So, let me paint the setting. I'm sitting at my desk surfing the internet. The only noise is the low hum of the computer, an ocassional click of the mouse, and the rare zipping sound of the scroll wheel as it clicks 3-4 times in rapid succession. Then I go to your page and a cacophony of sound erupts from the speakers causing me to jump and scaring the piss out of me.

So, please, please, I beg you, let me keep my piss until I'm ready release it. Just turn off the auto-play. That way, when should I decide to visit your site I have the option to listen to your music. Not only that, but if you blog about how awesome the song is (instead of forcing me to hear the first 30 seconds before I find a way to stop it playing), I might actually feel like giving it a listen.

I know, I'm a jerk. But, c'mon, I can't be the only person who feels this way. Can I? (Feel free to tell me off in the comments.)

And completely off-topic, do you know how hard it is to go from double-spacing at the end of a sentence to single-spacing at the end of a sentence?

Game Publishing

As a gamer, one thing that always sucks is hearing about an awesome game that can't find a publisher. You read the interviews and watch the videos and the game sounds awesome. But, because there's risk involved no publisher will touch it and the game becomes the dreaded vaporware.

The Idea
There needs to be a publisher that's funded by gamers. I know, you're saying that all publishers are funded by the gamers because the gamers by the games. This is true, but I'm thinking of a system where the gamer ponies up the doe before the game is completed.

Essentially, the gamers would be "shareholders" in the game. They would pay $10 for a "share" in the game plus $5 for S&H. For each share, the shareholder would receive a copy of the game once development was completed. One possible benefit of this would be additional sales could be split between shareholders as credits to invest in new games. This would allow the gamer to obtain discounted or possibly free games from good investments.

A Safe Bet
Gamers wouldn't simply be throwing their money blindly. If only 50 people were interested and willing to pay for the game, it'd suck for that money to disappear because not enough funding was obtained. Instead, the money would sit in a pool (sans a 10-15% publisher fee) until either enough money to develop the game was obtained or a specified amount of time elapsed. So, if the goal of $500,000 for development was reached, development would proceed. If 6 months went buy and not enough money was received, the gamers would either be refunded their money (sans the 10-15%) or allowed to invest in another project.

Funding the Publisher
I know the inability to refund 10-15% seems a bit harsh, but there has to be people working to ensure the developers are meeting deadlines. Someone needs to be working with the developers so that there's a game to play when all is said an done. There would be no greater crime than for you to put your money into this system and receive nothing in return because the developer doesn't have the game in a completed state. Think of it as someone ensuring there's a return on your investment.

There's always the possibility of a worst case scenario where the game is incomplete and all that can be provided is the latest build. In these situations, I think it'd be great if the gamer was able to receive a free copy of any completed game. Essentially, it'd be doing what was within the publisher's means to ensure the customer remained happy. Since this kind of system would require gamers constantly funding new games, it would be in the best interest to keep them as happy as possible.

The Hard Part
When you consider it'd take about 60,000 gamers interested and willing to "pre-order" a game to fund a $500,000 project (remember the 10-15% to the publisher) there's a definite question about whether enough funds would ever be obtained. When you consider even the online petitions are lucky to receive that number and they're free, it'd be pretty hard to get the first game off the ground.

Once the publisher had two or three games under their belt, I think it'd really start to gain momentum. There'd be proof that the games will be developed. The games would be extremely cheap for the gamer, but there is the risk that they wouldn't be good. And, the gamer would have a say in what games they want to see. I think it'd provide known developers with a means to develop the riskier projects.

Idiot!

Ugh! So, I leave to buy some groceries for the sugar cookies my wife is making and scratch my and my wife's friend's car in the process. (So, sorry about that Lindsay.) And, of course, it'd be her car that's scratched pretty bad and mine that looks like all it needs is some buffing. I'm so pissed at myself and feel terrible about it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it'll be something that I can foot the bill for instead of having to go through insurance. Because, car insurance is stupid. You pay and pay and pay for years without an accident, and then when you have an accident (the whole reason for insurance) they make you pay more. So, they recoup the losses they had by making me pay, defeating the purpose of my paying for insurance in the first place.

Instinct Browser Pwned!

Ok, already Opera Mini is awesome. It seems to load pages faster and the pages fit the screen much better. In addition, it looks like blogging works. My only complaint is the limited text input.