User Friendly the Comic Strip - The Daily Static

http://www.userfriendly.org/
If you're in IT, or know anyone in IT, or have friends who date IT workers, or....


...Well, anyway, it's damn funny.

Ctrl+Alt+Del

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php
Control+Alt+Delete in this case = Teh Funnay, We Want It, as opposed to BSODOMGWTFROFLBBQPWNZORED

Penny Arcade! - A Wrench, Descending

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic
If you don't know Penny Arcade by now, well, you're long overdue.

Sluggy Freelance

http://www.sluggy.com/
Webcomics! Learn them, love them, support them!

...Flee from Bun-bun!

General Protection Fault--The Comic Strip

http://www.gpf-comics.com/
Webcomics! Learn them, love them, support them!

Cheap Cheffery, Just Because

Right.

Now, I personally like vegetables, in most varieties. Properly prepared. But at heart, I am a carnivore. For this reason, I mostly spend the bulk of my cooking time on making the meat, and treat the veggies as somewhat of an afterthought.

So, appreciate this, because it probably won't happen again for a while.

YOU WILL NEED:

Cut vegetables. While fresh is always best, frozen "stir-fry" variety veggies are acceptable.

About 1/2 cup of Manischewitz Blackberry dessert wine.
About 1/2 cup Regina Red cooking wine.
About 3 Tbsp. butter.
About 1/3 cup of cherry juice.
About 1/2 cup lemon juice. It can be bottled, but NOT concentrate. Don't want to go all tart.
About 1/2 cup sugar.

I say "about" because this makes a bigger quantity of this sauce than you really need for two people; adjust proportionally for the number of people you're going to have, and the amount of veggies you want to cook.

In a small saucepan, combine all of the liquid ingredients except for a splash each of the lemon and the red wine. Add 2 of the tablespoons of butter. Put the saucepan on medium heat until the butter melts in, stirring often, and then slowly add the sugar to taste. Err on the side of tartness; the veggies are semi-sweet as well.

Once the sugar is stirred in and has dissolved, lower the heat to Low, and leave it.

Prepare a large, steep-sided frying pan, or a wok, with the remaining butter, wine, and lemon juice, and set it on medium to medium-high heat. Once the butter has melted, add the veggies, and treat as a stir-fry until the vegetables just begin to crisp; then pour the sauce liberally into the pan. The idea is to have the veggies nearly covered; turn the heat up a bit - to medium-high, but not high - and let it simmer a minute or three, stirring constantly, to soak the sauce into the veggies.

Once the veggies are at your desired crispness, remove the pan from heat, and let stand or 3-5 minutes before serving. You can serve it with the sauce, or strain it off; I personally prefer "with," just because the sauce is quite tasty, but it's certainly up to you.

The veggies should be light and crisp; the sauce compliments a stir-fry blend (usually broccoli, carrots, water chestnuts, snap peas, baby corn, and peppers) quite nicely, although I will warn that if you use frozen veggies, it might behoove you to rinse them off before using them, because the amount of ice will water down the sauce quite a bit as it melts.

The most expensive ingredient of this is the Manischewitz wine; it'll set you back about 8 bucks, but it will also last a long time if you use it for cooking instead of guzzling it right down like it was something from Boone's Farm.

The rest of the ingredients COMBINED cost less than the Manischewitz; you should be able to make this pan out into a tasty meal - or at least a bold side - for a whole family, for about $16.

No reason not to EAT like you have good taste, even if your wallet leans you towards Wal-Mart brand.
Enjoy!

Construction!!

Right; bear with me, as my page goes through changes. I'm gonna be trying out templates, monkeying with CSS, generally messing with things, to get the asylum a bit closer to feeling like home.

I liked the old straitjackets; the new ones seem to fit well, but I want to make SURE.


[*edited to add: I may actually stick with the base Skyline theme, now that I think about it. This looks awfully close to what my old template looked like anyway, lol.]

OK, Y'all....

Just so you know, the Yahoo 360 blog migration tool is up and running; you can edit to change "yournamehere" to your multiply ID, and this will go straight to it:

http://yournamehere.multiply.com/journal/import/yahoo360

Also, Multiply just added a tool to invite all your Yahoo 360 friends, as well; it can be found at:

http://multiply.com/network/invite/yahoo360

Give it a shot; it might help making the transition a bit easier.

And of course, when you invite them, be sure to tell them you only managed it because I_I told you how. They'll all be so impressed they'll add me, and the seeds of my army of world domination will be formed!

Bwa ha ha ha!

Bwa ha ha ha!

Bwa ha ha haaaaaaa ha ha ha!

Halo 2

Rating:	★
Category:	Video Games
Genre:	Action
Console:	PC Games

Now before I begin, I want to say that this review is EXCLUSIVELY about the PC version of this game.

The reason I make that distinction should be clear momentarily.

I enjoyed the PC version of the first Halo title, but I noticed at the time that it seemed to have serious trouble utilizing graphical features that other contemporary titles had no problem with.

At any rate, despite having to turn off anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and specular lighting effects, I was able to run Halo: Combat Evolved with no real difficulty.

Fast forward a couple of years. Due to the long-ass delay between the console and PC release of Halo, it's only been a couple of years since Halo 1, and *poof* like a magical cloud of suck, there's Halo 2 PC.

Installing Halo 2 - on the same machine - was an annoying experience. The game scanned my hardware, then spit out a message that my machine didn't meet minimum requirements, giving a checklist of "reasons why not."
1. must have over 384 MB video memory - my card has 512.
2. must have pixel shaders version 2 - my card does.
3. something else also that it said my card had - right in the error mesage - but that it also apparently didn't count.

Right.

This bodes well.

Got it installed, launched it, and found that the only way to get a playable framerate out of it was to turn ALL settings to lowest, turn off anything that seemed like a graphical enhancement, and set the resolution to 800x600.

To give you an idea of the outcome of this, THE ORIGINAL HALF-LIFE looks better onscreen on this machine.

But this machine can run Prey, and Doom 3, and Half-Life 2, all of which look far better than Halo 2, at resolutions of 1280x1024, with most of the settings on, with playable framerates.

So, why does Halo 2 - with its utterly incredible lack of detail textures, lack of lighting effects, lack of pixel shading, STILL have to run in 800x600 to get a good framerate?

The answer is simple: the XBOX (and 360) dev kits.

See, the XBOX, and the 360, interact with their video hardware in a special, proprietary way. This is fine for the Xbox version of the title. However, the devs evidently decided it was time for a break, and since the whole game is written in C++ anyway, it would run on Windows just fine as-is, so they "ported" it over without changing the weird hardware interactions one bit.

Which means that for Halo 2 to look decent on-screen, you need a Cray supercomputer, and 2 X1950 Radeon cards in Crossfire mode. Or some such outlandish concoction.

Let me put it like this.

Chrome looks better on-screen than this.
Medal of Honor looks better on-screen than this.
Call of Duty 1 looks better on-screen than this.
Half-Life looks better on-screen than this.
Far Cry looks WAY better on-screen than this.
Prey looks A HUNDRED TIMES better on-screen than this.
Guild Wars looks a hundred times better and runs with full effects at twice the resolution.

I haven't played enough of Halo 2 yet to know, or care, about the story, or multiplayer, or any other factor; the PC version of this game SUCKS.

The XBOX version may be utterly brilliant. I don't know. But I can't recommend this trash to ANYONE on PC, simply because the graphics engine is so massively, utterly fucked up.

Tara meets Jimmy!

I shot this at the hospital when the docs finally let me give him to her.

James and the Giant Bouncy Chair

James, still a noob, trying out his bouncy chair.

Wiggling James

James is a very wiggly little boy. This is still true, even though this video was months ago.

James talking and cooing to the cam

It's pretty dark, but still cute.

James Sitting

My son sitting up, and then getting excited and taking a tumble. He didn't hit his head, but the camera angle makes it look like he did. I assure you he's totally unharmed. Well. Except for the inevitable trauma of having me for a father.

The First Smart Thing Hillary Clinton Has Ever Said In Her Life!!!

Right.

So, because Americans are too stupid to wonder why Canadians and Brits come to the United States for medical treatment, and Cubans ride inner tubes across shark-infested oceans to get better medical care than they have at home, despite Michael Moore's horseshit, basically every candidate for Prez this time around is touting some sort of "universal health coverage" plan.

No mention, of course, is made of the fact that most Americans can't afford health care due to two root causes - government regulation and outlandish lawsuits.

At any rate, Hillary Clinton, like everyone else, has a health plan. Interestingly, it's very, very different from the ORIGINAL "Clinton Health Security Plan," which I was so interested in - always on the lookout for opportunities to debunk the bullshit artists - that I ran right out and bought a copy.

But more interestingly, explaining exactly how it would work led to Clinton making a statement that may very well be the single most intelligent thing she's ever said.

Not that that gives her much, aside from an astounding talent for stating the obvious, as you'll see.

At any rate, speaking to a public forum sponsored by several different HMOs, Clinton said on Thursday:

"People who are here legally deserve some better treatment and acceptance in the law than people who are not here legally. These are hard choices."

Right. You mean to say, even if you socialize the entire medical system - something that has yet to work in any nation in which it's ever been tried, despite the loud proclamations of its worth by those not being treated under it - you won't cover illegal aliens, right?

Clearly, not "universal," but good for you, Ms. Clinton. Goddamn right our taxpayers shouldn't be subsidizing the medical care of people who are in this country by virtue of the fact that they BROKE THE LAW.

A law-abiding, taxpaying citizen does not "owe" a criminal squat.

I will go a step further; I think we ought to build - we have plenty of undeveloped "public" land - any number of new prisons, purpose-built to contain illegal immigrants, and deal with them, when so identified, by slapping them in jail for a term of not less than five years, followed by deportation.

You'd be amazed at how fast the tidal wave of illegals would dry up, if you did that.

Still, however, the best comment in the article comes from Danny Diaz, spokesman for the Republican National Committee, who said:

"Senator Clinton encourages people to lead healthy lifestyles, which will occur as they run from her plan to socialize medicine, just as they did in 1993."

Bwa ha ha ha!
Bwa ha ha ha!
Bwaaaaa ha ha haaaaa ha ha ha!

OK, Now That's Just Cool.

Right, so there's this guy, Monty Oum, who is a 3d animator.

What he does with his free time is... more impressive than anything that I do for a hobby.

He takes characters - or more specifically, character models - from different games, and makes machinima videos featuring all of them in a single film.

So: from the fertile imagination of Monty Oum, I hereby share with you "Dead Fantasy 1," featuring characters from Final Fantasy - series games, and characters from Dead Or Alive. And a big, fat, intentional, "To be continued" at the end.

Enjoy.

You're Doing It Wrong! FAIL! (Extreme 360 Edition)

Right! So, we're covering several topics today, including literary errata, mathematical anomalies, labor unions, FOX, the RIAA, cannibals, and whatever else springs to mind. Because of this, I will itemize conveniently, and use links wherever possible. But I promise not to wax overly long-winded about any of them, so don't be scared.

• Literary Errata
• Mathematical Anomalies
• Labor unions
• FOX
• the RIAA
• Cannibals
• Drivers, both good and bad
• Star Trek 9
• Armed Gangs In Britain
  

First, the lighter stuff. Literary errata!

Mkay. When you publish a novel, not only YOU should speak the language in which the novel is initially being published, but the publisher should at some point have your work read by an editor, whose job is to prevent you from looking like you're pants-on-head retarded. I realize idiomatic usages are really challenging, and stuff, but work with me here. (And while I'm at it, feel free to expand this list by sending me your own submissions for dumbass things authors do over and over. I had a lot more, but they slipped my mind while I was reading the news; I'm sure they will come to me again with time, so this list will grow.)

• There is no such thing as a "beckon call." Someone might wait at your "beck - and - call," but that's not the same thing.
• "Continue" means "to go on." Saying "continue on" means "to go on on." I'm looking at you, Terry Brooks; no, I don't give a damn how many books you've sold, that's still seriously annoying, especially when it happens once every three pages.
• One my wife spots in romance novels often is "supple," used to describe the heroine's breasts. Supple means "flexible," which only applies to a woman's breasts if you can tie them in a knot with one another; I can't imagine this could be an attractive feature for a woman to have, so please stop using it.
• Contributed by Marie, and totally agreed with: "irregardless." Seriously. Stop using this. "Regardless" means "without concern for other factors." "Irregardless" means "the person speaking is an illiterate, drooling chimp."
• While I'm at it, "disenfranchised." No. You are enfranchised, or not. You may be "disfranchised," but you cannot be "disenfranchised," because of the meanings of the words. The "franchise" referred to is citizenship, or more specifically, the right to vote. If you HAVE the right to vote, you are franchised; getting there is "enfranchisement." If you do NOT have the right to vote, you are "non-franchised." If you HAD the right to vote but somehow got screwed out of it, you are "disfranchised."
  

Secondly, mathematical anomalies. Know why there are so many commercial buildings standing vacant? It's because the landlords can't perform basic math.

As an example:
Say an apartment is vacant; the landlord wants $450/month for it. A prospective tenant, after looking at the property, offers $400 per month.
The landlord, unable to do math, says no.
Now; while I grant that there is for any property some floor below which the rent does not recoup costs, bear with me here:
$450 - $400 is $50. $400 / 50 is 8. In other words, for each month the apartment sits vacant, the landlord will have to rent it out to a good tenant for 8 months to make back the money he could have made - at $400 a month - renting to the first prospect.
So, if it sits vacant for 3 months, it will take 2 years and one month for him to make a profit on that empty time.



There is a commercial building in town where I live that has sat vacant and unrented since we moved to Pennsylvania.
There is another which was previously a discount "thrift" store, until the landlord raised the rent so high they were unable to make a profit, and closed their business. It has now sat vacant for seven months; assuming that he was only charging them $400 a month for 5,000 square feet of floor space - which seems vanishingly unlikely - and raised it to only $450 a month - it will take him (assuming it rents at the new rate tomorrow and remains rented for the duration,) four years and nine months to make a profit on the rate increase.
Please explain this infinite genius of business acumen to me.

Thirdly, labor unions. Having already staged a walkout at GM, and now one at Chrysler, the UAW is planning a similar "bargaining strategy" at Ford.
Including wages and benefits, Chrysler pays approximately $75 per hour to its workers. WHAT THE BLUE FUCK DO YOU BUG-EYED CHIMPS HAVE TO STRIKE ABOUT?!?
The big three Detroit auto makers LOST $15 BILLION last fiscal year. Lost. Not in the sense of government "cutbacks" where they simply didn't increase a budget as much as they'd originally wanted to, but in the sense that at the end of the year, they had $15 billion less than they started it with.
This is not the way to guarantee job security; if the company goes bankrupt, you will have NO job. UAW is sabotaging its members, and no-one even seems aware of the utterly incredible short-sightedness of the UAW's actions.

Fourth; FOX. Dude. We know you own "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." HOWEVER, being as you've cancelled the show, denied any possibility of a sequel, and generally damaged your own franchise significantly through executive stupidity, is there any reason to take you seriously when you claim that public showings of the musical episode, for audience sing-alongs, is damaging the brand? Did this really require legal action? How stupid. If you have a legitimate complaint, it's that they're not cutting you in on ticket sales; there's no reason not to demand royalties, but in the proud, golden-goose killing tradition of Hollywood, you had to go and shut it down, thus pissing off the fans, wasting a source of potential brand income, and making yourself look like your only priority is irritating - rather than entertaining - people.

Fifth: ok, RIAA, we know as music fans that you hate us. Now, we have proof.
See, the RIAA has been suing fans over filesharing for several years now, claiming hundreds of billions of dollars of losses due to file sharing - a totally unsubstantiated claim, by the way - per year as a justification.
But at trial, Sony Records' head of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, admitted under cross-examination that not only does the music industry have no actual hard data on their losses due to filesharing, but the campaign of lawsuits is costing them a friggin' fortune. That's right; every time they make a claim of huge losses due to filesharing, they are straight-out pulling the numbers out of their butts; Pariser admitted that not only do they not know, but they have no way to know; and they haven't even stopped to actually make a serious attempt to figure it out.
So, take their attitude towards you seriously; they're willing to sue THEMSELVES into the poorhouse to keep you buying music on CD, rather than using the Internet.

Sixth: if you're an aspiring horror novelist, and you want to write a novel about ritual cannibalism, there's an amazing resource out there for your research: it's called a library. You're not supposed to kill and eat your girlfriend to make your writing more authentic. I hope they throw you in a hole, and then fill in the hole, you sick fuck.

Seventh, although ordinarily I would give you a smirk at claiming that an adult drives "like a three-year-old," in fact, a three-year-old from Wisconsin used his Big Wheel to prove you wrong; he came to police attention by following the traffic laws better than the other drivers around him, as he ventured out into freeway traffic. I've often said that most adults could be out-driven by a monkey; now we know for SURE that most adults can be out-driven by a three-year-old. That's just sad.

Eighth, casting is underway for the latest Star Trek movie. Ordinarily, as I am not a Trekkie, I would kinda shrug and make a noncommittal grunting noise; however, in this case, the casting director has such a clear case of "OMGWTF?!" that I almost feel morally obligated to buy tickets when it comes out. Let's be clear; I last saw a movie in a theater over four years ago, but this might drive me back to the theater: "Scotty" is being played by Simon Pegg - Shaun, from Shaun of the Dead - and Sulu is being played by John Cho, a.k.a. Harold, from Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
I have to say, "You're doing it wrong!!!" but I will, nonetheless, go see it, so I guess in a twisted sort of way, they're doing it right.

Ninth, after which I will quit while I am ahead, if you have a gang, and you have firearms, and you're in Britain, and you attempt to rob a pub and get pounded mercilessly into helpless retreat by an airborne barrage of bar furniture, ashtrays, booze bottles, and other missiles hurled by the crowd at the pub, by whom you are overwhelmingly outnumbered: YOU FAIL.

OMG OMG OMG IT'S ALMOST HERE.....

The final season of Battlestar Galactica, that is.

Without further ado:

...That.


The Awesome, It Hath No Limit.

An Astonishing "Blonde Dumbass" Celebrity Trifecta!

Normally, I am immune to the blandishments of the gossip rags, and even the allure of FARK.com's "Showbiz" tab.

But this week, I had to laugh, at not one, but three events.

All, oddly enough, were about "celebrities."

All three celebrities are blonde; female; young; and marvellously stupid.

To demonstrate, starting with the saddest, and yet "with-most-potential-for-recovery" of the three:

Britney Spears lost her kids. The custody judge, after considering all the factors and all the information, decided that Kevin Federline would be a better parent than Britney Spears, and granted K-Fed full custody.

Congratulations, Ms. Spears, you've been declared BY A JUDGE to be less able to care for your kids than KEVIN FEDERLINE. Your mom must be proud; oh, wait, as I recall, wasn't she on his side in the custody case? Ouch.

Next, comes, well...

Paris Hilton, who amazingly was dumb enough to go on the David Letterman show, as though there's anyone left in the country who doesn't know what Dave will do to them given the chance.

Here's what happened:

Sad to watch someone with so much going for them - errr, money, anyway - get victimized by such horrifying mockery of their own raving stupidity. I mean, after all, acting like such a complete clown should certainly not carry any consequence whatsoever, and certainly not the obvious disdain and scorn of humorists the world over. Fie on you, Dave! Fie!

And lastly, there's Jessica Simpson.

*Gusty sigh*

Jessica was in a movie recently.

I know, you haven't seen it.

That's because it's so magnificently terrible, so utterly without value, that no DVD production company will touch it; it has actually bypassed "straight to DVD" and discovered a new realm of retail ghetto-ness; her new movie went

Straight.

To.

QVC.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!