Ramblings

Cuppa Crimson

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I’m always on the lookout to try different teas, and last year TeaLyra’s Cherry Goddess became a fave. It’s a pure fruit and herbal tea made of cherries, cranberries, and hibiscus to name a few items. Both sweet and tangy to the palette, and damn good mixed with some sweetened frothed milk and some almond extract to make a maraschino cherry latte. I’m also thinking about trying it with equal parts lemonade to make a cherry lemonade tea during the summer. I already like drinking lemon/limeade with black tea, and lemonade tastes good with almost anything… so why not?

This tea was one of the gifts I gave to my best friend for Christmas last year. She wrote me back recently, and I laughed when she told me her hubby calls it “vampire tea” when brewed for too long. It’s funny because I always kinda had that thought anytime I drank the tea, or anything red going back to red flavoured Kool-Aid… which this tea actually tastes like a healthy version of, oddly enough.

Now I can’t help but wonder what a vampiric tea party would consist of.

What I’ve Learned About Masks & Allergies

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(Note: Not my art.)

When I was a kid I remember having seasonal allergies every spring and fall, though back then when I didn’t understand allergies I always thought I was just sick all the time. When I was first introduced to allergy medicine I was happy to be able to breathe! what I didn’t know was the side effects for being able to breathe. I always wondered why I was so tired afterwards, and years later I found it was the allergy medicine that kept knocking me out, or it would make me feel loopy. Within the last year I’ve almost completely stopped taking antihistamines, and the only thing I’ve done differently is wear a mask everyday. It makes me wish masks were a thing when I was little, it would have been nice to breathe without feeling like I’ve been doped up to the point of wanting to hibernate all spring, and I do like ninjas so it would have worked out. 😛

I have to walk by a wall of flowers every morning, and around this time of year it usually burns my throat if I don’t hold my breath. Thanks to wearing a mask I just have to endure just the aroma. I remember the Easter lilies were so potent that I would end up in urgent care, but with my mask it isn’t nearly as bad. We should of had them as an option a long time ago, for allergy and flu seasons.

I don’t think masks are a replacement for allergy medicine, but I know for a fact that I’m not spending nearly as much money on it as I used to thanks to wearing them. I think I’ll be wearing them on my outings when the pollen count is high. I’ve only needed one shot of nasal spray, and that was all the way back at the start of March!

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words… but I only have 406 of them.

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President John Adams was always known for his epic swordsmanship.

Looking back on history can be more fun than people might realize. I was browsing my RSS feed during a break today and came across this article about American History as told during Japan’s Edo Period. It was quite a fascinating thing, looking through all of those pictures from a whole other era. This needs an anime or manga adaptation, make it happen and I’ll be on it like a bum on a bologna sandvich.

It’s funny to think that there was once a time when Japan wanted to remain closed off from the rest of the world, but at the same time they were fascinated enough to draw depictions of what they thought we were. The depictions of past presidents are astonishing… They had no idea about our culture, anything. There wasn’t much of a way for them to do so either given their strict rules about entering and leaving the country. As a result we have these artistic depictions of what life would be like in the US from the perspective of someone who has never set foot outside of their country or had any access to current events of the time.

This is both beautiful and terrifying to think about… considering I know people who feel that everyone should go back to their (dis)respected countries and stay there. Oddly enough that only seems to be reserved for folks that have skin tones of the spicy or chocolatey variety… I never see one white guy say to another to go back to Finland or England (though that would be amusing). I’m looking at these pictures, and thinking about quite a few of my co-workers or some of the neighbors that feel we can wear blinders to the rest of the world and be perfectly content with it. Hell, some of them don’t even understand why I even have international friends. I never thought that living in the 21st century, where anyone with even a cheap phone can talk to someone half way across the world, and even in this day and age we still have people that would be even the slightest bothered by the smallest speck of indifference.

Of course I would expect conflicts, especially from people that want to buy things from other countries because its cheaper… everyone seems to be all about their own home team until coins are involved.

First Open Thread Of 2016

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The new year has been pretty boring. Work has been pretty steady, and every day off I’ve had so far has been too friggen cold for me to go out and wreck the town. I got out of my PJ’s, took a shower, and got back into fresh PJ’s to give you an idea. So I’ve been pretty much staying in bed and playing. I decided to play a little bit of Half Life: Blue Shift on the Steam Controller today with a custom config someone wrote. I’ve also been working on my latest video project, which has forced my hand at trying to remember all the in’s and outs of Source Filmmaker. Goes to show I really need to get back into animating, I’ve really gone stale. I forgot how to copy animation sets and had to lookup a tutorial. DERP.

The other day when I wasn’t feeling well I decided to venture off into a game called “Life Is Strange” which I’ve been meaning to play. It’s one of those choose your own path type story games, and the protagonist has the ability to rewind time. So if you don’t like how one particular situation, or if you messed something up you can just rewind time. I made it to episode two before I decided to take a break from it. So far I like it, this game gives me the feels at particular situations.

And the protagonist… I know I’ve seen her somewhere before.

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Yesterday was a good day.

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Woke up yesterday to an auction for a laptop, unfortunately I lost… Decided to shake it off and wander into town to do some errands. It was nice n’ sunny at least. Finally scheduled a hair appointment at a new place, hopefully it goes well next week. Also made a deposit then went out for some sushi that I owed myself. It was called The Samurai and it had cucumber, some tempura prawns and it was topped with crab and a spicy teriyaki sriracha sauce.

Then I came home and backed off the rest of my files so I could prepare for the new motherboard. So far it’s been pretty smooth, other than the front USB ports are acting strangely. I’m hoping it’s some driver issue. I still have a bunch to install. I’ve only covered the Win 7 install, some drivers and other refinements. I still have plenty of programs and organization to take care of, then I can install Fedora 21 and get that setup. I’ll probably be distracted for awhile. Not only with that, but with an auction I actually won tonight. 😛 I’m going to be the proud owner of an ROG G750JS-TS71. I also ordered a Samsung 256 GB SSD, and hopefully I can find a regular 2 TB drive later on for the 2nd drive bay. In the meantime I’ll rough it on the 1 TB.

So all in all I had a very relaxing day off, probably one of the better ones I’ve had lately. Oh, and I saw the new chatroom a certain someone made in Mumble… All I have to say was that I got more done on my mask today. One more coating or two and I can add some straps for my face.

I’m gonna go try to not dream about things relating to that set of stuffs.

Contemplating a revival of Comedy Night

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Once upon a time in the Myst/Uru community my group The Guild Of Slackers had a community thing called Comedy Night. In those days The Guild Of Comedy would dress up as the comedians and perform on a stage in the Guild Of Comedy Neighborhood (or The Blue Neighborhood if the act was rated 18+) and the person presenting the comedy audio would dress as the comedian. It stopped gaining interest during the first run of Myst Online. I’ve been stewing on this for well over a month now. I want to revive it, but not in MOULa.

Why? I’ve been in there a few times, and between the forums and the people who play in game themselves I doubt there would be much interest. That and quite a few people these days including myself are annoyed with the ancient voice chat system. We could stream it on a shoutcast server but it wouldn’t be as immersive, plus there would be those old sticks in the mud who refuse to listen to streams because you know… An audio feature from the early turn of the century is sooooo much more immersive than Speex or Opus codecs that are used in modern voice chat programs like Mumble, Vent, etc.

So where would I want to hold this? In the Garry’s Mod cinema gamemode.

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I’ve been watching my server for awhile now, and people have been gathering in there to watch all sorts of things. Sometimes it’s some pretty stupid stuff, but I’ve seen some people come in and have anime marathons (the latest one was a Deadman Wonderland), dance parties and one of my regulars held a movie night! So why not have a comedy night? There are lots of full comedy videos on YouTube, and YouTube is supported in the gamemode.

Of course you would have to own a copy of gmod to get on the server, but the map that we use doesn’t require any assets from other source games. At the very least they would need to have the cinema map and gamemode, and optionally download any playermodels they would want from our workshop collection. Then bam. Comedy Night in a nutshell. I don’t expect people to buy the game JUST to join in on this. But for now this seems like the best way to hold an event.

Due to my work schedule it won’t always be on the same day and might not even happen every week. But once I can get people to agree on one solid day and time we can have a few laughs.

Open Thread Ramble Scramble

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Hi! Still around. Although I’ll probably be around less next week since work is finally picking up a bit. $$$Cha-ching biatch!$$$ I guess that means I’ll be lugging my laptop around all week. That and preparing my own lunches instead of just random snacks.

It just dawned on me that I haven’t posted anything in a couple days. That’s mostly due to not having much to write about, and enjoying the epic awesomeness that is TV of teh internetz. Also I’ve been sorting/ working with audio and video. Same ol same ol.

Although this year there’s a bit of a difference. I’m actually off on Easter! I haven’t figured out if I should wish people a Happy Easter or a Happy 420… Of course I’m working on my birthday, so that’s nothing new. As if I actually plan anything for it. 😛

Well, time to rest for work. The sun is coming up and I have to keep the illusion that I’m a vampire… or something.

Early Morning Open Thread

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I wasted about 3 hours trying to compile a video in SFM. For the first two hours it wouldn’t compile a video due to a permissions setting, then the third hour was wasted rendering a video that it didn’t want to play. I got around it by rendering it again as an mov instead of an mp4. Even then it gave me a shit fit but at least Premiere loaded it properly so that I could encode it as an f4v. It still needs to be edited in with other stuff but the bulk of the next video is done. On the bright side my room stayed plenty warm due to my CPU and GPU working their arses off.

I guess now I can lie in bed and listen to the raindrops outside my window and fall into a deep sleep like I did last night.

Do you ever feel guilty about all the time you spend online? I don’t.

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I was asked recently by one of my elder co-workers how much time I spend online a day. One or two hours they guessed? Hah! I honestly couldn’t tell them (nor would I want to).

It’s kind of difficult to explain to some people that a computer is for more than just gaming or surfing social networking sites. You can easily look at my Steam stats and see what games/apps I’ve been playing and how much time I spend in them. But that’s not all that I do when I’m on here. I do a lot of things that can’t be done in just “one or two hours”.

If you couldn’t tell by reading my blog I follow a lot of things. Sometimes technical, political or whatever stupid thing happens to be taking place (making fun of Facebook like every other day). I have a lot of interests. I follow a lot of sites (RSS or not). I enjoy playing with HTML when I’m in the mood (phpBB would even fall under this category), I also like making movies in Source Filmmaker and Adobe products. I can easily spend several hours doing those alone! That and of course gaming. But even then that can be divided up too. Since I like looking at things from the gamers perspective and the server side perspective depending on the game. For example I like playing with and putting together servers because 1, it’s fun and 2, it’s a learning experience.

I also like looking at modifications and addons. One of the reasons why I liked doing You Can’t Do That On XBox was because I enjoy looking at what people create. Be it good or bad. People are always reviewing new games that are coming out or what game or DLC the companies will be releasing next, which is fine and good. But you don’t really get to see what people mod for PC games (although platforms like Steam have been doing a good job showing these things off in their own right). I’ve shown an interest in this stuff since the early days of DOOM. I still have some old custom WAD files on Floppy discs somewhere around here.

I can do all of this and still manage to go to work, go out partying, or any other real life obligations. So I’m pretty sure my digital polymath antics are not getting in the way of anything. Find your balance.