Ramblosaurus

retch @ 2009-06-26T15:55:00

2009-06-26T22:56:45Z

Now THIS is a movie review!

...
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
...

Awesome ad

2009-05-22T01:21:43Z

I'd have to run out and buy a 2600, if it weren't for the fact I own a few, plus a 7800 that is capable of playing all 2600 games as well. :)

retch @ 2009-05-20T13:20:00

2009-05-20T20:22:02Z

Eh...

Your result for The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?)...

The Manga Geek (QLBM)

Quirky Liberal Beta Male

First of all, we can't help but notice that you spend an awful lot of time reading Hentei. Other than that though, you have a gentleness around women they find attractive. Seek out ones as quirky as you and you're golden.

You are more QUIRKY than NORMAL.

You are more LIBERAL than TRADITIONAL.

You are more PASSIVE than DOMINANT.

When picking a date, consider: The Rarity (QTAF), The Renaissance Faire Wench (QLAF), The Librarian (QTBF), or The Emo Girl (QLBF).

(Image from Flicker, unknown album and subject.)

Take The Social Persona Test (What kind of man/woman are you?) at HelloQuizzy

retch @ 2009-05-19T17:01:00

2009-05-20T00:02:22Z

O.O

well, um... yeah.

retch @ 2009-05-14T15:05:00

2009-05-14T22:08:04Z

There are a number of planes that the Museum of Flight up in Renton, Washington that I REALLY like. The museum is one of the things I miss about living in Renton. The following 2 planes are intensely cool. They are the M-21 spyplane (a CIA plane based on the A-12 precursor to the SR-71) and D-21B drone that it carried.

Oh yeah, despite the fact it STILL looks like it flew out of the future... 1963.

Mother Ship

Drone

Update?

2009-05-13T23:47:22Z

Dear Livejournal,

I'm sorry that I don't update you much anymore. Microupdates on Facebook are easier and read by more of my friends, more frequently, so I've been pretty infrequent about keeping things on here too. Sorry about that.

You might not have heard, but I met a really neat woman recently. Things progressed apace and we have been dating now for several weeks and I'm quite smitten with her.

She's smart, funny, sweet, beautiful, strong, sensuous.

She climbs things, this has lead to the answering of that age-old question, is smooching more fun in a tree? Turns out, yes. What do you expect, we're monkeys! She dances (ack, I have to learn how to do formal dancing), she has a motorcycle, she makes neat food. She has robot servants, and a spring loaded rodent sidekick! She likes fannish shows, Whedon, etc. She reads science fiction amongst many other things. She plays! She dresses up, she pushes my boundaries and I'm really really enjoying getting to know her.

Also, she's a dragon. :)

retch @ 2009-04-21T17:17:00

2009-04-22T00:27:33Z

Hotdogs + Spaghetti = Awesome

Weekend

2009-04-20T23:34:22Z

Friday:
Work was excellent, very productive, we got a ton of stuff built, I've got a group of folks doing implementation work for me (yay corrupting CS folks and turning them into baby designers) and trying to come up with process steps for them to follow to create large swaths of items for me was interesting. :) It has proven very effective in generating a ton of items quickly, with any luck a bunch of crafting recipes will go in this week. :) Next I've got the algorithmic redesign to set them on, I've got the bones fleshed out for them to duplicate from.

After work I went and climbed at the gym, had some good climbs and enjoyed myself despite being a bit worn out from Thursday already. Climbing multiple days in a row is still fairly hard, but I do feel like I am getting stronger. :) Afterwards I went over to Alpine Butterfly Lodge (ABL) to hang out with Dawn, we stayed up way too late chatting but it was really fun. I'm a bad influence, I keep getting her to stay up WAY past her bedtime.

Saturday:
Saturday morning I was up mildly bright and early and met up at CDC (Casa de CuPanda, no we don't have a website, though I really should, wonder if we should just do that on Facebook to gain all the benefit of a social networking site...) with calyel to go ATVing. Her friend Crutch was a neat guy, a systems engineer at a defense contractor, works on one-off radar acquisition and identification hardware, which seemed like a pretty neat space. His ATVs were big, and cool, and fun to ride.

We went up and down some cool trails, the park at Hollister is pretty neat. calyel and I went on a ride that was meant to be 20 minutes, but on our way back down we hit a section of trail that had been closed because a dirtbiker was down with a broken femur. The emergency medical patrol guy sent us back a different way, which ended up being VERY long. It was a ton of fun, and we want to buy an SUV, trailer and ATVs... :) I like the idea, something with 4wd so we can use it for going snowboarding as well. :)

After we got back I had dinner with Leyla, we watched some NCIS, then we watched Real Genius while she braided my hair, she did a great job which made me really happy, yay for friends being willing to help maintain my hairstyle! :) While we were watching Real Genius, Dawn called to invite me over to ABL to watch Bones with her and her sister. Real Genius was fun, and I realized that while I was never the caricature either character was, I was indeed more Mitch when I started college and more Chris Knight these days. :) Fun fun. So late at night I drove over to ABL, watched some Bones with Dawn and her sister, then kept her up talking and hanging out till way late at night again.

Sunday:
Sunday midday calyel met a group of friends for dim sum and Joy Luck Palace in Cupertino, a short drive from home. It was delicious and fun, and I showed pictures of Dawn to my friends and generally enjoyed myself. Afterwards I dropped calyel home, then went over to Planet Granite to go climbing with my friend Nija, and her friends. Turned out both her boyfriends knew people I know from work, though to be honest at this point I'm expecting I'm just 2 degrees of separation from anybody I am likely to meet in the techie/gamer/geek bay area crowds.

After climbing finished, Dawn came over for dinner with calyel and I, and we actually got to hang out at a reasonable time of night! The food was good, the hanging out was fun. Dawn and I had serious relationship discussions, talked about our selves, wrestled (calyel misinterpreted the sounds and we were amused), talked more, spent time together, and ended up agreeing that we were dating. :D

So yeah, I've got an awesome girlfriend who is smart, beautiful, sweet, strong, playful, silly, sensuous and wonderful. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm really excited. I want to see how things unfold. Getting to know her better should be a fascinating journey. I hope that my bad aspects don't mesh poorly with hers, hopefully I can defuse my own negative behaviours. I know that her and my good aspects go together well so far. :)

Dinner last week...

2009-04-20T20:22:10Z

I invited my friend Dawn over to dinner last week, with an Age of Sail themed email. It was fun to write it, and it had an incredibly fun result: she dressed up for dinner.

She looked amazing in the outfit, and it was really fun having her over to dinner. :)

retch @ 2009-04-13T01:01:00

2009-04-13T08:02:57Z

hmm, well, made more stuff, debugged more issues. More of crafting is in for Champions, but I found some more steps I need to remember to do. Lots of tweaky repetitive work that feels like it could perhaps be done better by a perl script...

Still, at this point I feel like I've got every piece understood in my head. Let's see if any of it fades by tomorrow morning, heh.

RIP Dave Arneson

2009-04-08T23:08:33Z

Apparently Dave Arneson has passed away today. Like Gary Gygax, Dave is heavily responsible for pen and paper rpging, many of the great joys of my life, and to no small extent the fact that I make games for a living today. This is sad news.

Snowboarding

2009-04-07T19:02:51Z

I went snowboarding this weekend and had a wonderful trip. My friend Van, her buddy Joseph, and I met up early Saturday morning to drive to Tahoe. Gizmodo was having an event at Northstar, with a discounted pass, and various sponsors demoing gear.

The snow was meh, but saturday wasn't very crowded, it was fun boarding with Joseph and Van, though on the demo boards they were so much faster than me it wasn't even funny, I need to get my board waxed and tuned. The last run of the day on Saturday was great, I finally felt like (on my 4th day of boarding this season) I was comfortable with my control, and wasn't feeling intimidated by a black diamond run. I wiped out massively on that run, a triple head over heels tumble, but I rolled back to my feet and continued on down the mountain elated.

The Gizmodo after party was pretty fun, they had a buffet and an open bar, so we drank a fair bit, ate some nummy foods, some folks won prizes from the event sponsors in the raffle, then we dragged ourselves back up the hill to the condo we were renting for the night. It was good we had a place on site to sleep as it was a challenging hike in our state and we spent the next several hours crashed out on the couches before calling it a night!

Sunday was more crowded than Saturday, which was a surprise. The snow was slushy, and the lines on the front side of the mountain convinced me to head to the backside. That turned out to be a great call, I was able to do the black diamonds and have fun, the crowding was way less, I continued to feel like I was boarding well, even with mediocre snow. Van was a bit under the weather and spent most of the afternoon napping at the top of the mountain lodge, Joseph and I boarded together a bit then he went off to the park to do tricks. I then went into fast cycle mode on the backside which was really enjoyable, was looping about every 15 minutes for the last couple of hours.

So, it was a fantastically fun weekend of activity, and I had a lot of fun hanging out with Van. I definitely need to get myself better boots, I figured out that they are the cause of the soreness on the top of my right foot, and I know my control would be much better with boots that didn't let my heel move so much.

retch @ 2009-03-21T23:05:00

2009-03-22T06:15:09Z

Hmm, getting a bit peckish, should get some more work done then head home from the office. I wonder what non-junkfood snack material is around. We've got no shortage of junk here at work, but I'm back on controlled eating to lose weight, and I already was bad while helping my friend Diana (I really need to find out what her lj identity is) move: 3 slices of plain pizza and a can of pepsi. Now I haven't eaten since then, so hopefuly the caloric intake isn't too badly blown. We'll see in tomorrow's weigh-in.

Oh, perhaps partial protection is the fact that my newfound lactose intolerance (SIGH!!) meant the pizza took apart my digestive tract a bit. Here's hoping it impacted my ability to absorb nutrients from it, heh.

I've got pieces under construction I really just need to get into a flow state and bang out a few hundred items. Net time for that, a few hours... can I pull it off before I'm tired and need to head home to sleep? Waffling tomorrow on being slightly social vs. coming into the office and working. Already bowed out of my D&D game.

Thinking about my work needs, I think my preferred schedule for tomorrow is get up and exercise, at the very least a walk, preferably hitting the climbing gym with somebody, then come to work for the mid-day to afternoon, then help leyla with her bed pickup, a dinner break, then back to the office for the evening. If I do that and am focused I can get a lot done tomorrow (and at my preferred office density and time of day (or night rather) to do work.

Anyhow, time to bang out a bunch more items. :)

retch @ 2009-03-09T11:15:00

2009-03-10T00:00:15Z

Thursday night
got on line in position #9 at 8:15pm for the 12:01am showing of the Watchmen. Over the course of the evening, friends arrived, yay. :) We had 12 people total in our group at the end, the movie was good, though not great, a bit slow and long, very dark. I enjoyed it, and making an event out of it made it even better. I was home and asleep a bit after 4am

Friday
woke up around 8am, went in to work, decided against going to the company outing to see the Watchmen. It was good, I'd probably see it again later, but that soon I didn't feel the need, and I had plenty of fun work to get done at the office.

Went to the designer dinner at Cheescake Factory after the movie, it was fun, though it ran slightly later than expected which meant that Shannon, lorelai and I ended up at the rock climbing gym later than originally planned. It was good fun, lorelai got up on the wall and did some 5.6s, which was great, I made it up one 5.10a, and failed repeatedly at the very bottom of another, which was entertaining in the challenge, and Shannon had some good climbs too. Then it was home to pack and go to sleep.

Saturday
4am wakeup, ack!! Over the lorelai's place by 4:45am, we were on the road to tahoe by 5:45 or so. Kirkwood was fun, there were some good runs, and it was really nice getting to meet lorelai's friends. Yay for expanding circle of boarding buddies. :) lorelai and I left after the resort closed and made the drive back to the south bay, which was a lot of fun, it was nice getting to know her more, yay for new friends. :)

Once back in town I went over to Cisco and Saifon's to watch UFC, hang out, and talk about life, relationships, etc. Was good times and nice to spend time with my friends.

Sunday
Awake at 10am, out of bed at 10:40, over at James' by 11:30 to ride bikes down the trail to work. The weather was gorgeous, the ride was fun, and while the bits of me between my pelvic bone and the bike seat are sore, it was worthwhile, I'll definitely do it again.

BSG at John's house on sunday was good, the episode was neat, and I wonder HOW they are wrapping this up in two more shows.

A little bit of soul destruction for you

2009-03-06T01:32:52Z

The Watchmen reimagined as a Saturday morning cartoon

Enjoy. Yes, that is the sound of your soul shriveling.

Weekend wrapup

2009-03-04T18:48:35Z

Oh, I went snowboarding on Saturday, first time this season. It was at Northstar, went with my friend Shannon and her friend Nathan. It was really fun.

We got up at the crack of dawn, my alarm went off at 3:15, I was over at Shannon's before 4am, we were at the bus at 4:25. Most of the trip up, I slept. :)

The snow was mediocre, the midday crowds were huge, but I got back into the groove relatively quickly, even making it down one black diamond reasonably well. Mostly I was on blues with Shannon which was fun, it seems like we are speed compatible, which is good in a skiing/boarding buddy. :)

I was surprised how hard strapping in to my board was, lol. Clearly my core strength is down, I would get out of breath squeezing myself to reach the straps. I think I need new boots, my old ones just don't give me a tight enough fit to feel like I have enough control.

I definitely want to get back up more, turns out lorelai boards, so I'm expanding my circle of people to go with. :)

retch @ 2009-02-11T13:30:00

2009-02-11T21:38:25Z

The other day the guys from BaconToday.com contacted me in search for some barbecue bacon recipes. Of course I have plenty of great uses for bacon in a barbecue pit, but the longer I thought about it, the more I wanted to step it up a notch and clog a few arteries for those guys. Behold, BACON EXPLOSION!!! Here’s what you’ll need…

2 pounds thick cut bacon
2 pounds Italian sausage
1 jar of your favorite barbeque sauce
1 jar of your favorite barbeque rub

To kick off the construction of this pork medley you’ll need to create a 5×5 bacon weave. If the strips you’re using aren’t as wide as the ones pictured, then you may need to use a few extra slices to fill out the pattern. Just make sure your weave is tight and that you end up with a nice square shape to work with.

Um, yum! Kristina is talking about cooking it at one of our weekly gatherings for food and movies.

Hmm

2009-02-10T00:50:12Z

Well, just took a Myers-Briggs personality test, got different results than last time:

Your Type is
ENTP
Extraverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
44 75 12 11

Now it isn't all that strange really, I can flip the T and the P pretty easily given how slight that preference was, so it was pretty much me just feeling one way more than another on a couple of the questions today.

Yup, sure enough went back and redid 2 questions (one was about soap operas, so I reinterpreted it in light of my tendency to cry during movies, and one was one I had answered arbitrarily since I can sort of see either interpretation)

Your Type is
ENFP
Extraverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
44 75 12 11

which is more typical for me, though again, those last two I'm fairly middle of the road in general.

Stickybot climbing some surfaces

2009-02-06T18:25:07Z

Gecko feet, Van der Waal force, etc. End product, robot climbing walls.

25 things meme

2009-01-31T03:31:18Z

I'm not tagging anybody since many folks have done this already, but if you haven't, I'd enjoy reading what you would list. Cross posted from my Facebook account.

1) I filled this out partway once, but Facebook's javascript messes with Firefox's ability to save state and I lost it all.

2) I really do like these sorts of memes

3) I was born in Dublin, Ireland and registered with the American Embassy at birth. Yes I could theoretically run for President.

4) I used to post to livejournal a lot, but facebook in particular has clobbered my writing there

5) I've been playing D&D since around 1980 or so.

6) Even though I'm quite the extrovert, I'm fairly shy. At parties with people I don't know, I have to work not to become a wallflower. Kiersey temperament chalks me up as an ENFP

7) Before I started raving, I was scared/uncomfortable in large crowds. Now they pretty much don't bother me.

8) I've spent 17% of my life in World of Warcraft since it launched.

9) I loved my trip to Thailand so much I'm seriously searching for more opportunities to go back there. I'm exploring options for learning Thai.

10) I made some of the earliest e-commerce websites, back before the term e-commerce had been coined. If I'd been a few years later, I'd be very very rich, but I was into the web too early, got bored with it, and moved to my true love: games.

11) I love my friends incredibly deeply. If you are a good enough person to that I want to be friends with you, I will care about you a lot, and do my best to be there for you.

12) I spend my days making video games. This is not as glamorous as it may sound, but it is fun, even if it is hard work.

13) I love sushi, grilling steaks, homemade milkshakes, and the chocolate chip cookies that I bake.

14) I love bodysurfing, but don't get to do it much since the Pacific is less friendly than the Atlantic. I love Westhampton Beach.

15) I live many thousands of miles from my family, and I miss them a lot. My brother and I used to hang out talking for hours a day.

16) My septum is deviated. I don't know how it happened, but I suspect my last wrestling match in high school because it started with me getting a shoulder slammed into my nose and spending the entire remainder of the match on my back spraying blood.

17) I'm generally happy and positive. I've tried really hard to find a dark emo part of myself and still haven't come across it. Various tools were used.

18) Once I love somebody, I never stop. This can be painful, but on the upside, I have some very deep relationships in my life.

19) I went to college planning on studying Creative Writing and Physics and becoming a Science Fiction author. I wasn't going to do Computer Science because my dad has a PhD in that. I graduated with a degree in Computer Science, having taken no Creative Writing classes, and a single Physics class.

20) In the early 90s I, like many of the people into industrial music, discovered that there was happy sounding electronic music. My path into techno was through the soundtracks of euro-demos that I downloaded for my Amiga 3000 computer in college.

21) I love cooking for my friends. When I have a party I have to actively make sure I don't end up spending most of it in the kitchen preparing food.

22) I'm a social hub, I tend to actively connect lots of people. This is good, because it means I have lots of friends who I like, and who now like each other, but this means I'm very busy trying to stay in touch with everybody, and in fact don't have the time to stay as close to all my friends as I wish.

23) I like the idea of living in a high-tech co-op, a shared housing situation with a group of my friends. I recently met some folks who are doing something I had only idly imagined, renting out a giant mansion as a large group. It looks like it works well, and it is making me think about that idea again.

24) I'm a really physical person. I'm perfectly happy to crawl into my friends' laps and demand a backrub. I'm also perfectly happy reciprocating, and by all reports give very good ones.

25) My name means "Charioteer". It is not an unusual name in Ireland, though it confuses the heck out of people in the US. It is an old name, and lots of Irish kings were named Cormac.

retch @ 2009-01-28T12:01:00

2009-01-28T20:02:47Z

That's really cool. :)

retch @ 2009-01-22T02:45:00

2009-01-22T10:47:44Z

OMG, the hair, the costumes...
And to be honest, I love singing this song in Rock Band. And no, I can't hit that high note. Or the slightly lower one particularly well either...

Also I hate replicating content between facebook and livejournal, but lj gets glommed in as posts and isn't as good as using their appropriate posting type for bloggy type stuff like this... so replication instead. Meh.

Why the heck am I awake???

Internet!

2009-01-16T20:10:35Z

Woot internet at home!! :) Now I just have to get the wifi configured tonight for Leyla.

retch @ 2009-01-13T10:37:00

2009-01-13T18:40:43Z

If you like music, you must go watch this video. The comments in the Boing Boing thread are funny too.

and unrelated (aside from being posted about on Boing Boing) but funny as well

Orestes Pursued by the Furries

oops

2009-01-12T20:32:30Z

Hmm, just discovered the seam of these pants have a 1 inch rip down at the very bottom of the crotch. Unless somebody crawls between my legs they are unlikely to spot it, but still... I really need to take a bunch of stuff to a tailor to be repaired and reinforced...