Descent into Reality

Salvation

2004-07-14T09:44:13Z

I think life is out to make me look like a damn fool. I whine about not getting signed up for those exams, now I did (not for all, but better than nothing). I bitch about not getting that receipt - and now they tell me I don't need it after all.

If I wasn't so goddamn happy about those problems being solved, I'd kick God's ass for making me bitch without good reason.

Gatac

GRAR!

2004-07-13T14:46:59Z

This day was like a rerun of DS9's "Let he who is without sin", only with me instead of Worf, bad weather and no eye-candy girls. And much like the episode, it sucked.

Let's recap. I should have signed up for the semester exams last Friday. Emphasis on "should" because it didn't happen; that's not exactly a disaster, but it makes things difficult. What bombed it was me trying to get a certificate that I passed a math course on that Friday. Talking to a secretary, she told me that the certificate had been typed up (she'd done it herself, she recalled), and that it was in an office upstairs. The office was, of course, only open on Tuesdays to Thursdays. Asking her if there were any people I could talk to instead since I needed that certificate rather urgently, she said no. So, well, I was fucked.

Different problem: I needed a receipt from a dentist because I'm getting two wisdom teeth extracted on Friday (which sucks in itself, but let's not go there). My normal dentist went on holiday pretty much the second I realised I needed this receipt, so I went to the vacation stand-in they referred to on their answering machine. There, I was told that the doctor wasn't in, but only she could sign that receipt. So well, two strikes out of two, and I decided to take a break.

On the afternoon tour, I started with the university office again - and this time, the guy was actually there! Joy! Well, until he told me that he did not have my certificate, and that someone else must have it. Which pissed me off royally because that means I could have gotten it on Friday, and signed up for those exams, and...well, suffice to say, I was not happy with that. But better get that certificate - I went to the guy he'd told me of, whom I'd talked to before on a different matter, so I was certain this should be easy. Only now that guy wasn't there, and I'd missed him by 15 minutes. At this point, I became rather angry and had to fight down the instinct to shout up the building. I was pissed. So, anger pulsing in my veins, I went to the dentist again. The tram ride helped to cool my temper a bit, so I was pretty agreeable when I arrived there. Then, things really went south; not only did I embarass myself *twice* at the reception, first by failing to produce my wallet with any degree of switftness (it just wouldn't come out of the pocket it was stuck in), and then not knowing my mother's birthday from memory. I could have shouted, but fortunately, I had my cell phone, so I called her quickly and asked. Grr. Having done that, I spend 45 minutes in the waiting room doing exactly nothing while insipid pop music blares through the speakers. Finally, it's my turn.

And the dentist tells me she can't give me that receipt, and that I should wait for my normal dentist to get back from vacation, which is only at the end of the fucking month. So, not only am I not taking any exams this year, I might also get rejected at my apointment on Friday, which took a long time to get there and is the only convenient time in the foreseeable future.

Did I mention I'm angry?

ARGH!

Gatac

The downward spiral

2004-07-08T08:52:07Z

Sometimes I think I'm going to explode any second.

I'm a lazy guy. I'm a forgetful guy. And far too frequently, that means I procrastinate, do things by the seat of my pants and generally skid by. I seem to put myself into situations where I need to pull off daring and tight-scheduled plans to keep going. Up to now, it has worked, because I'm a harmless-looking guy - people seem to notice that I need some slack, and thus I often get away with things when I should have my ass kicked, like missing deadlines. But I'm playing the game, being lazy and then going into deep hacking mode where I frantically catch up on what I was supposed to do, turn it in and get away with it. Along the way, I casually lie and stall for time; I foster ignorance in those around me in task-related matters so that when I give lame excuses, they will nod because they don't know better. But on the other side of the coin, I often get into these no-win scenarios due to honest mistakes or just plain miscommunication, i.e., not my own laziness, and thus, there's this huge house of cards that I'm trying to keep up AND make it look easy, because I don't like relying on other people. Sometimes I think I subconsciously create problems just to solve them. It seems I thrive on jumping from one crisis to another.

Yet, as I'm sitting in my little foxhole waiting for the barrage to stop so I can dart to the next one, I wonder why I'm putting up with my own laziness and the stuff the world piles on me. I wonder whether I shouldn't trash my ambitions and find a job that pays me enough to get through life, and then lose myself in the soothing monotony of the daily grind, far away from responsibility or crisis managment. Or maybe just collapse one day and spend a few months in a hospital recouperating. Or go back in time and kick my own ass.

The problem is, of course, that I'm a very pattern-like guy. I have my habits. Monotony is good, I can deal with monotony. But still I seek the thrill of thinking on my feet. It's like James Bond let the bad guy get away and then, with the Doomsday Clock at 1 minute to Midnight, decided to finally do something, just for kicks. I don't like this stress, it's bad for me. Still, I crave it. It's my drug. Maybe I have some sort of Victim syndrome ot something, I don't know. All I know is that I want this bullshit to stop, that I want to be on schedule, on top of things, and no nasty surprises.

But change is hard.

Very hard.

(I do apologise for the whining, I just needed to get that off my chest.)

Gatac

Writing woes

2004-06-18T17:25:42Z

I just realised that I will never write an explicit sex scene.

Why, you ask? Mainly because I think most of them are either entirely gratious (Get a clue, people: if I want meat, I turn on my TV after 11 PM and watch the phone ads) or extremely sappy; in both cases, as unerotic as they come. A multiple-paragraph, detailed description of people playing "Hide the salami" is about one of the things I just can't ignore in a story. There's plenty of other ways to suggest intimacy, affection and love, and even if you want people having sex, you'll find that a good implication usually is shorter and works better, dramatically. Add a good aftermath, and we can figure out ourselves where it leads.

The reason this bugs me is that most sex scenes I've seen spent ages on describing how two people moan, whereas the emotional buildup and fallout of it was nowhere to be seen. Do people run around having cheap sex with people they hardly know? That's gotta be a load of shallow personalities. When your story has people have rampant sex for no good reason with impeccable endurance all night long with nary a word afterwards, you're just doing text-based porn. That's not what I *read* for.

In short, please keep both your hands on the keybaord when you handle intimacy. Both you, me and the story will be better off for it.

Gatac

Sam Fisher's illegitimate son

2004-06-14T20:29:09Z

While looking for things to blog about, I thought back to something that happened to me on a Sunday a few months ago. Well, something I did a few months ago, to be more precise. Something which, to my constant amazement, was a bad idea with good execution, as opposed to my usual style of brilliant ideas with horrible execution. It's also made more bizarre by the fact that it involves physical activity (though I've had my share of weird things happen to me while in motion) and took place after Midnight in the weird transitional period between my Army time (another time, folks) and the beginning of my studies at university. (Well, I actually missed the first three months of my studies at U, but another time, k?) It was a weird time of having nothing to do. More rational people might have become really bored and gone crazy, gotten a short-term job to earn some cash or even prepared for U by studying what I had missed. (Hah. As if.) I, on the other hand, was in my psychotic mode of boredom, in which my mind truly decouples from the remnants of common sense that keep me in check. The sort of boredom when you lock yourself into a room, are really, really damn creative and talk aloud on the off-chance that you're the focus of a reality-TV style entertainment program for higher beings.

To get to the point, it was 1 AM in a cold winter night when I ran out of consumables in my room and began to scour my surroundings for something to drink. I had a few options, outlined here:

A) Drink water from the tap. That would have been extremely easy; in fact, it never entered my mind until much later. It would have taken ten seconds to procure a glass of water. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. But it wouldn't have been a good story.
B) Go through the kitchen, sever rope holding door closed, get soda from balcony. Short explanation: our kitchen door can only be opened from the inside, but our grandmother lives next door and we have a shared balcony, so she needs to get in from the outside. In the third storey, break-in has considered unlikely, so we settled upon this little patchwork solution that involved a small rope to hold the door closed. Going this way would have required replacing the rope and letting people notice my excursion, but that was still too easy.
C) Go through another bedroom, get soda from balcony. I was not totally irrational at this point - stepping through a room with sleeping people and letting icy air into that room would probably wake somebody up, and I realised that I was the only one who didn't have to get up early next morning. No go.
D) Do something crazy, possibly influenced by playing way, WAY too much Splinter Cell at that time.

Guess what I did?

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of playing SC - it's stealth action in a way that, dare I say it, defines the genre. Metal Gear Solid kicked off the trend, and Thief came first, but SC got it really, really right for me. My obsession with the game was the concept of perfect stealth - being a true ghost, only killing or stunning people you really, really couldn't get by. I became pretty good at it, though I never went as far as the perfect stealth guide on GameFaqs suggested was possible. (Killing only ONE guy in the entire game, and even then only because the game's scripting depended on it - that's what I call obsessive gaming.)

Anyway, in looking for a way, I felt the need to, ahem, get rid of some previous drinks. In the bathroom, my look was at once drawn to the rather large window. It had caught my sight even when we moved in here sometime in 95/96 - it was circular, with a diameter of perhaps 80cm and hinged horizontally in the middle. I always thought it gave he whole room a bit of a nautical flair, which was probably appropriate for a bathroom. Anyway, I did some quick mental math and came to the conclusion that I could climb through the window and get my fix that way. Faster than I typed up this paragraph, the decision was finalised, I slipped into a sweater and began my latenight acrobatics exercise.

First, I needed to get up to the window. For that, I had to remove some stuff from the top of the bathtub, which thankfully was permanently installed and nothing but rock-solid. I was soon on top of it, and opened the window. The cold breeze that hit me caused me to reconsider briefly, but hey, coming up with the plan was the worst part, right? Execution would be easy. So, I first did what I had learned in my Army days - head first, then just roll through and slide down. I realised quickly that the window was a good bit smaller than the one we had on the obstacle course, and not falling into sand also turned me off the idea - after all, the soda was right by the window, and I'd rather not fall into a bunch of bottles, or their carrying case for that matter. Rethinking, I stuck my right foot first, ducking below the precariously balanced window, coming to rest in a sort of weird riding stance on the windowframe. (Again, solid construction in my favor.) Then, my right foot inched forward, trying to find purchase on the floor below. This, in the winter, on stone tiles, with only socks on my feet. Needless to say, my plan was nearly foiled by my cry of surprise, but I was used to hardship, pain and cold stone surfaces. I swallowed it, then slipped completely down, knowing that I had to act fast.

I finally extracted myself from the window, located the soda bottles and grabbed two, just to be safe. It began to dawn on me: how would I handle extraction? I contemplated the kitchen again, now that I could just untie the rope and close the door from inside - people would still notice, but I wouldn't have to replace anything. Still, that felt anticlimatic, and with my feet approaching the temperature of the stone floor (read, very low), I decided that if I could get out through the window, I could get in. This required the use of my hands, so I needed to get rid of the bottles. I couldn't leave them behind, so I leaned through the window and dropped them into the empty bathtub, where they bounced around some before coming to a rest. This, incidentally, was the loudest part of my operation, and went totally unnoticed - it's not hard to be stealthy when nobody is watching/listening/accepting any sensory input whatsoever. This didn't solve my problem, though, and revealed the big flaw in my plan: I did not have a suitable step to reach the height of the window from outside.

Hint: Never, never discover the flaw in your masterplan when you're in the freezing cold at night.

In the end, I used my arms to hoist my body weight upwards, shifting my body position in mid-air in a sequence of movements I have never again been able to quite duplicate, until I finally rode the window saddle again. From there on, I slipped onto the bathtub, balancing for a few seconds that could still send me crashing down hard, and jumped to the ground, landing with my usual cat-like grace. (No kidding here, I really do a MEAN landing on my feet.) I recovered the bottles, closed the window, then slipped back into my room. To my surprise, the entire endavour hadn't turned the soda bottles into the fruit-flavored geysir I'd expected, though at that point I could've dealt with that, too.

Epilogue: Nobody noticed anything. When I casually told my grandmother in the afternoon next day, she looked at me with a mixture of bewilderment and bemusement - her brother had been infamous for doing a lot of such crazy stuff, though he played in a far different league. (Like escaping from captivity in WW2, which was a story that could've easily made it into a TV movie atleast had anyone thought to buy the rights to it. Whether it was a true story or not, it did credit to my grandma's brother for either being an escape artist or a man with a very vivid imagination - and I like to believe it was the former.) From there on, I told it to everyone seperately until it spread by itself and became the evening's topic on Wednesday. From there on, I've occasionally told it to select few people. But truth be told, I'm getting tired of always typing it up, since it takes some explaining, and atleast now people have no excuse to ask me to tell it again. Go here. Read this. If there's anything you still don't understand, ask me.

Interesting how the major factor of me working on my blog is me being lazy, hm?

Gatac

LEGO Addiction

2004-05-30T15:41:01Z

For the last few days, thoughts about recovering my LEGO collection from the basement have drifted in and out of my consciousness. An idea has formed in my head, rearing it's ugly head from earlier attempts. The project? A car. But not just any car. A monster of a car.

I actually had one some years ago. It was an abomination of plasticky nature, more like the retarded version of natural evolution from joining LEGO parts than acting on any sort of plan. The result was car-shaped, had steering and was - theoretically - powered. I say theoretically because if you want to include that last attribute, you'd better use it's brother-in-law underpowered. I fiddled with the transmission for weeks trying to get the bastard to move somewhat reliably, but all it archieved was rolling over perfectly flat surfaces, if the batteries were fresh and the stars were right. Climbing ability? Zilch. That baby was lucky to move down a slope. A true week-kneed dinghy of suckitude. But it had one redeeming feature: the modular rear. This also contained the only sensible (read: built after instructions) part of the vehicle, the detachable crane. (Or, as I called it, The Crane. Kwai-Chan would've been proud.) I had to adapt it slightly to fit my attachment standard, but it worked. In the end, I ripped out the motor and just left it in that state, which greatly improved it by lowering the bar of expectations. (As always in life, when you suck, it helps to redefine what 'good' is.) It was glorious. I was in the process of building a weapons module when gravity took it's blood toll. The car, with structural strength closely approximating zero, plummeted from a desk, rear first, and impacted the floor at ludicrous speed, disintegrating the work of about five weeks in the span of five seconds. The only good part is that the lack of structural integrity meant that none of the component parts were broken. I suppose I could have repaired the damage, but why should I have bothered? It's spine was broken, and I was not in the habit of rebuilding models which I secretly had wanted to dismantle and improve anyway. Unfortunately, the way in which the dismantling took place demoralised me greatly. I took it all apart and didn't want to hear of it any longer. Now, the only memory that remains of it is a photo I took a few days before it met it's demise. (Which is more than can be said for some of my other LEGO creations, but I disgress.)

Anyway, a few days ago, I was harshly reminded of it by an objectively completely unrelated comment. I couldn't get it out of my head. Before I knew it, I was already designing the next car. This time, there would be no cheap shots, shortcuts or half-assed solutions. Well, alright, I conceded the "use an uniform color scheme" part, but that's just common sense from my not extremely extensive parts collection. In any event, I got down a few design notes before I forced my brain into temporary shutdown of that thought process. I wanted the nonplusultra of suspensions, a pneumatic one - the original car had no flexible suspension to speak of, which always greatly ired me. Then, I wanted a combination of steering and power transfer for every wheel. I also wanted more motors, a more thought-out modular attachment system, stronger internal structure, and the ability to throw cool shit onto it and make it work. I knew from the start that this could require anything from four to six motors (as opposed to one for the original) - one for the pneumatic subsystem to drive the compressor, one as auxilliary to power any gadgets the modular attachments might have, and two to four for the locomotion system. I originally envisioned one motor per wheel on a four-wheeled chassis, but that was quickly dropped in my head. That would have made the car extremely power-hungry, and I'm fairly confident that two motors can do the job; my tenure as soldier also showed me that six wheels may be a better solution. So, the front pair of wheels would definately steer, the rear pair woul definately be powered, and the middle pair - well, I lumped that together with the rear one for suspension, which may not be a smart idea, but more economical, since it was already going to be a nightmare with the amount of pneumatic tubing I'd have to fit. If I could figure out how, I'd definately make all wheels steerable and possibly give it all-wheel drive, perhaps togglable. The front would be taken up by the compressor, the locomotion would sit in the lower rear (traditional for my designs, because I usually have a lot of space there), and above the drive, the port for modules should make it's home, perhaps for the bastard son of The Crane or my nice little idea of a mock Gattling gun. (Three-barrelled one, because they look the best.) Depending on my mood, I could even make a powered convertible module, which would use motor power to open or close the optional roof. Together with the pneumatic suspension in low-ride mode, that should transform my little all-terrain beasty into a nice little six-wheeled city cruiser, like an orc in a smoking.

Now all I'd need to do to get it out of my head is grab my LEGO, make plans and cuss a whole lot at the parts. It's hard to justify, but then, it's not like I'm doing anything that makes more sense.

So, leave your vote if you want me to attempt it.

Peer to Peer rant

2004-05-20T17:39:36Z

Yeah, it kind of had to happen sometime. Gatty illustrates his opinion on file sharing with an example.

I watch Star Trek:Enterprise based entirely on what I can download. Thus, I am able to follow the current third season with a lag of a few days while I wait for those who do get it on TV to encode the episodes and make them available. If I couldn't do this, I'd be missing one of my favourite shows. Let me make it clear and spell it out: I love Enterprise's 3rd season. It's gotten damn good. The trouble is, no station in my country carries it as far as I am aware. Not even pay TV. It's not that I don't get the right station; it's flat out impossible to watch on TV for me, no matter what I do. (Unless I emigrate, and I'm a bit unwilling to do that.)

So I download. I watch. I live, laugh and cry with my favourite starship crew, but I can not ignore where I got it from. Sure, sometimes the encoding is so good I can barely tell I'm not watching it from, say, a DVD. Other times, I can count pixels. I don't particularly like this. But what else can I do? It's either that or leave my favourite show alone, praying that maybe, MAYBE, it'll get picked up and run here in a few years. Or released as DVD. Tell you what, I'll buy that DVD set. I'll watch it on TV when it runs. But for now, I'll continue procuring my fix in this manner.

This is how I view file sharing. It's not about stealing for me. It's about getting what I can not get otherwise. I don't understand anyone saying that they're building a media collection just on downloads. I like to watch my movies on TV, I like the extras on DVDs, I love their quality. All of that can be addressed in some way, but let's face it: You can tell the difference, most of the time. I don't want a media centre PC in my living room - not yet, anyway. If I watch a movie I downloaded, it's once, because I want to have seen it - but anything I suspect I might want to keep and rewatch goes to the DVD list. Maybe I'm archaic that way, but I want to hold something, pop a disk into the player, then lean back and enjoy. I go to the cinema religiously. The movies I do happen to download either don't run here or are so old and obscure that I can't locate them anywhere else. Notice a pattern?

BitTorrent and Kazaa are not the work of digital devils. Both have saved me from frustration when I just needed to watch/hear something and couldn't for the life of me figure out where to get it. My music playlist changes far too infrequently to really warrant stealing anything I could just as well get from a store - because, ya know, I don't care for that kind of music anyway.

So, in my humble opinion, P2P isn't about flipping your bird at the Man, it's voting with your harddisk what should be remembered and what may be forgotten. More power to permaculture, I say.

*steps off soapbox*

The Great Unified Theory of Mystical Powers - Part One

2004-04-29T16:53:37Z

NOTES: This is something I've been toying with for some time - a broad explanation for all kinds of superhuman powers. Note that the base cosmology uses a lot of Christian symbols - I'm agnostic myself, but I felt that this should serve to explain what I had in mind.

If there are higher powers, is one good and another evil? That notion never made sense to me. Good and evil are very subjective, and nobody in his right mind would call himself "evil" - if you do something that you do not believe is justified somehow, why then? Sure, your reason may be "Because I want lots of money", but do you see yourself as evil? Unlikely. Most likely, you feel you're doing the right thing, that you're entitled to what you want. Are you evil? No, you've *earned* that money. From your view, everybody else is evil, because they're keeping the money from you.

So, the concept of a good and an evil power falls flat, because you ask "Good by whom's definition?"

I propose a creative and a destructive power. The creative power is what most would label "good"; it is life, light. Destructive, then, is "evil". It is darkness, death. So why not call them good and evil? Because it does not match up perfectly. Creative is also conservative, overbearing, stagnant, whereas Destructive is progressive, free, constantly evolving. Neither of the two is really "Good" or "Evil"; they are sides of the same coin, and attaching moral weight to them by calling them Good or Evil serves no purpose, because we can easily see that neither is generally more desirable than the other. Both need to exist and be balanced; tipping the scale leads to problems.

Still, for the sake of understanding, we will call the ultimate avatar of the creative force God and the avatar of the destructive force Devil. Both are beings of pure power; on the other end of the scale, we humans sit, completely bound to the material plane. Humans are not naturally creative or destructive. We are at the middle of the scale, and may tip either way, choosing ourself. *That* is free will - choice of alignment with the two fundamental powers of the universe. It is said that free will was only granted to us humans. Why do angels and demons lack it? Because they are amalgation of matter and force. The further up you climb, the less choice you have, but at the same time, you gain more power. Atleast, that's how I see it...God surely has no choice to suddenly become one with the Destructive force, because his very nature is creative. In any event, lack of personality=power. In celestial affairs, at least.

If we stipulate that those with superhuman powers are lightly touched by these forces, we solve a whole lot of problems. Their powers are so limited that their free choice is not really limited; but consider Superman - is it any wonder, under these assumptions that for all his power, he's really has problems wrapping his head around changing situations. His mind is rather unsubtle, you might say. All powered superheroes seem to have a more vibrant personality, but maybe that's because their freedom of choice is somehow limited? Perhaps.

What is this force, then? I believe it is not an imbued set of power or energy; it is merely the ability to draw upon energy from an external source and use it to generate effects we would consider to be magic, superhuman or mystical. Where the energy comes from does not ultimately matter; it could be Zero-Point energy or drawn from an alternate universe. We are also making the assumption that most things that appear to violate the laws of physics actually circumvent them. Let's start with some of the worst offenders.

Flight. Many superheroes seem to have the unnerving ability to navigate the skies. How do they do that? Well, the basic answer is simple: they somehow counteract their weight. This is not the same as negating their mass, which would affect inertia and generally be a pain in the ass to talk about, so we're keeping it simply. Weight is a measurable force acting upon every object in a graviy field, drawing it towards the field's center. In our case, it keeps us attached to the ground. If you want to fly, you need to cancel this force. The first (and apparently easier) way would be to generate a counter-force - the natural way most things that can fly manage to do so. This should not require much energy, but may be a problem in actual practice because of mass distribution - that might require very careful tuning and probably constant reorientation of the employed force vectors in flight. The other way to do it is more elegant, but requires a different set of abilities: cancelling out the gravity field of Earth. As said, that's quite elegant and shouldn't require too much fine-tuning, since the strength of the gravity field acting upon your body is pretty much uniform to any degree one should be able to feel when flying. However, requirements are something else - we do not know if it is at all possible, but it might involve negative mass, which could present interesting inertial problems. Note that, surprisingly, most superheroes do seem to display little inertia, judging from their agility in flight. In other times, there does seem to be inertia involved when the hero needs to brake himself - had he no inertia, he could basically stop in mid-flight. This represents another interesting problem in itself - inertial dampening must be possible, too, else Superman could be turned into goo every time he went full speed from zero. Both solutions present problems - the first one allows nearly arbitary placement of forces, which would point to a supreme level of control over kinetic energies, whereas the second one involves substances we're not even sure of about whether they can *possibly* exist at all. Or you can blame it on subspace. Your choice.

Perhaps more later, if you want to see it.

Exercising my Blog muscles...

2004-04-26T19:42:59Z

Actually, no. There's really not much to say, as of now. Other than that I'm running an FTP with some music you may find interesting. Let it not be said that I endorse piracy; it's just that quite a bit of this stuff is a tad rare, and I firmly believe that conservation of great music by spreading around a few backups comes before any commercial potential of CDs many music stores have never seen. (I'm not even sure if, for example, The Music of Command & Conquer is commercially available at all.)

Mail me if you're interested.

In other news...

2004-04-22T14:51:25Z

TO: University of Magdeburg
FROM: Gatac
SUBJECT: I'm blowing this taco stand!

--------------

Yeah, dear friends, I've decided to abandon my experiment. You see, after coming out of the army, I wanted to start my studies, make my Master's...and arranged it so that I slipped into the running semester. I missed most of the first semester this way, thinking that I could catch up and save a year. Well, I played fast and loose, chasing after it, but Elvis has left the building. I don't intend to chase after a dozen little threads of missed events for the next five years, so I'm going to call it quits while I have relatively little time invested. Granted, I don't gain a bonus year, but atleast my ass is covered, and I can begin in October with some knowledge of what awaits me.

Don't think it was an easy decision. It took months of contemplation. But I've finally grown the cojones to make it, and now that it's decided, I feel a whole lot better.

The proximity of demonic beings and small elements of bigger pictures...

2004-04-17T16:09:18Z

The cause of 12 hours of network outage in my humble abode? A badly configured software firewall.

Screw you, Zone Labs, I found your hidden "Don't mess up network" switch! So there!

Chronos lives!

2004-04-15T21:21:47Z

Now that the new rig is finally working, I'm gradually moving all my stuff over to it. Most of the required hardware transfers have been done, now it's just a matter of getting a bit more choice data running through the network. I hope I can wrap that tomorrow.

Also, just as a note, this is the first post made using Chronos. So there.

Militaria

2004-04-13T15:01:26Z

While Chronos and Zeus burn out their hard drives shuffling my media collection from the latter to the former (which, incidentally, doesn't preclude me from playing SC, but I'm in a blogging mood and watching TV), I'll tell you something.

Militaria. Me loves me military tech.

I'm a gun- and techbunny. I'm the guy next to you in the cinema who snorts during action movies because he counts bullets. I'm the guy you ask when you see a cool gun on a poster and don't know what it's called. Shucks, that goes for pretty much any military tech. So, you may rightly ask, how did it get this far?

My youth is to blame, of course. The 80s and early 90s were an interesting time to be young. The holy triumvirate of Knight Rider, Streethawk (short-lived as it was) and Airwolf got me into action. Hi-tech action. Of course, I also got my dose of early anime and James Bond, which further endeared me to all kinds of tech. Then, still early in my development, I happened upon a collectable "lexicon" of sorts, available through a magazine - fact files, if you will. The thing was a few years my senior, perhaps, because although it was marketed to a lot of children, it didn't talk down. No problem for me, I was a naturally curious guy and bookworm, I had all the time I wanted to read and understand it. I recall the first tech article in this lexicon - a few pages on the French Exocet anti-ship missile. I didn't realize it at this point, but these few pages sent me down a spiral of thirst for knowledge. I begged for (and occasionally bought from my allowance) everything about military tech I could get my hands on. Sadly, the magazine was discontinued after some time, but it was too late for dear little Gatac to pull his head out of the dark hole.

The best part is, I have absolutely no clue about cars, where every other male my age seems to be an expert. Guess they're too mundane for me.

Of course, all this may very well have been the main reason behind becoming a soldier. I'll tell you of that another day.

Guess I was wrong...

2004-04-13T11:12:14Z

Fifteen minutes into enjoying my newest acquisition, the postal service rings again - express delivery! Yep, you guessed it. Diabolical people, making me choose between my new game and getting Chronos to work. Arg!

Needless to say, now we're cooking with GAS.

Situational Update

2004-04-13T10:08:23Z

No package. Grr, damn you, german postal system!

My consolation prize: Splinter Cell - Pandora Tomorrow. Hell yeah.

Easter.

2004-04-11T20:59:02Z

130 Euros looted.

Mission goals:

1) Splinter Cell:Pandora Tomorrow
2) An uninteruptable power supply. (UPS)

So, yeah. Will get back to making thoughtful and interesting posts whenever the hell I feel like it.

You know your day has been weird...

2004-04-10T15:55:25Z

...when you have just been told that the German Reich still exists, that it still has significant territories, and that the Federal Republic of Germany will be disbanded in a few months in favor of resurrecting the Reich.

So, yeah. That's it.

...is quickly followed by the second you have to complain again.

2004-04-10T12:26:17Z

Half of my delivery arrived. Spycraft sourcebook? Check. Motherboard? No dice, son.

I guess that makes me semi-happy.

It's Easter!

2004-04-09T10:16:57Z

So, I perhaps ought to select my state of mind about this holiday. Hm...

Perhaps sacrilegious? Consider this: Jesus was the original zombie. Makes far more sense (in my twisted, black black heart) for him to rise again as a tool of evil. All the eloquence he still showed? It's a trick, Matthew was a master ventriloquist. Ever wonder why the bible doesn't go into detail on what happened next? Because Jesus ate Maria Magdalena's brains, that's why, and had to be put down by a time-travelling Victor Van Helsing with a rather large spear gun. (Come to think of it, I'd read *that* version of the bible in a heartbeat.)

Or critical of consumerism? The sliding change from Christmas to Easter, to Summer, to Winter sales mode? Well, it sure does get on my nerves. But that's normal; all things are considerable more magical when you're young. Only later do you realize that those wonderful places you went Christmas shopping back in the days are now trampling all over your childhood memories with tacky jingles. Fact of life. Applies to every major damn holiday. And season. Come to think of it, when exactly is "normal season"? Wait, don't answer that, all those "seasonal offers" removed might reveal that the real, non-rebate/coupon-free prices are even more ridiculously high than what I pay now. Makes me shiver. Screw you, big business! From now on, I'm growing my presents in the garden, MYSELF. And then you corporate whores can kiss my biceps.

Or perhaps childish. Easter! Easter bunnels! Easter pwesents! I loves Easter pwesents, and fluffy bunnels! And I loves my Mum, and Dad, and Grannie, and my sis (a little).

Hm. Hard to decide. I think it's gonna be a mixture of all three, hold the cynism, and smile while I extend my middle finger to those who think I'm too old to worry about this stuff.

HAPPY EASTER !

While we're explaining this reality...

2004-04-08T21:20:29Z

I fancy myself something of a writer.

You'd be confused if the post ended here, right? Well, for your sake:

Some years ago, while I was playing Diablo 2 (*sneaky advertising! Pay me, Blizzard!), I somehow got it into my head that a modern day paladin would be the coolest thing ever. Mind you, at this point, I didn't know DnD at ALL, and was thus unaware of any further connotations of the term and the expectations one would place in such a character. I just wanted to merge 21st century lifestyle and technology with fantasy powers.

The result, called simply "Paladin", was the story of mob hitman Mark Simmons who died in a traffic accident after botching a job, and was resurrected with mystical powers to prevent the apocalypse. It was a spoof, juxtaposing both the self-righteous attitude of a D2 paladin with Mark's wit (or lack thereof) and the difference between a world of swords and firearms. Mark, of course, had to carry both, and every once in a while, would screw up a cool-looking move very badly, just to remind the reader that he's not your typical action her, even though he believes himself to be. So far, so good, hm? Just write a cheesy way for him to save the world, have him make corny one liners, and you can wrap this up pretty quickly.

Only I didn't realize how much some people liked it.

I felt obliged to carry through Mark finding all seven seals of the apocalypse. It included travelling around the world, and Mark got in his fair share of troubles. It was pretty clear that he needed a sidekick. Enter: Sharon. She started as a bit of an omnicompetent heroine (she first appears to help Mark land a jet plane, for crying out loud!), but things didn't click. I wanted to do some sort of relationship between the two, but I was lacking the dramatic leverage because I hadn't explained who Sharon was. So, killing a lot of flies with one strike, I made her a demon, forced Mark to leave her behind after a run-in with a sizeable police force, and stranded the Paladin in the desert, unconscious. If I'd wanted to end the story there, I probably could have pulled it off, but at that point, I was already too deep in it. I had Mark wake up and find his powers gone, disoriented, but still dedicated to stopping the apocalypse. Things suddenly worked a whole lot better, because I played it off his desire for vindication. A meeting with his former employer provided a much-needed equipment upgrade, and I showed off that although he had lost his heavenly powers, Mark still had a few mystical tricks up his sleeve. This continued to be a thread from thereon, with the underlying mystery of what had happened.

Enter Azuriel.

It seemed logical to have someone in Heaven for Mark to talk to, and the angel was originally a throw-away character to fill that position. Now, with Mark all alone, I realized he needed a new ally, and pulled Az from the reserve bank. For the next time, he made his presence known by providing money and plans, but it would take some time for him to be seen. Mark, meanwhile, seemed to regain some of his confidence - until he was captured by a mysterious stranger. Ooh, cliffhanger!

I introduced a new faction into the war: the Army of Mortals, an organization dedicated to eradicating all supernatural beings. Mark managed to escape their claws, learning that they were holding Sharon prisoner somewhere else. Meeting up with Az, the team's on their way to be reunited. In a crazy bit of total mayhem, Mark and Az manage to spring Sharon from an underground complex. Shortly thereafter, while breaking into a military installation to secure some more weapons, Mark is captured for a change. In the process of freeing him, Az and Sharon also free a young woman - Chrome. Chrome was kind of weird at first to write with, because her character had started out as reader suggestions. She was a sort of daywalker vampire who became an ordinary human under sunlight. To top it off, she was from the middle ages, and had been buried under the earth for a few centuries before being dug out. I realized at this point that there was a sort of semi-urgent background story with the apocalypse drawing near, and split up the team.

The main thread of the next few chapters were the adventures of Mark and Chrome in Italy. Here, working with Chrome, I began to seriously look into developing the characters a bit better, and we got out first look behind Mark's facade. Sharon got to strut her action muscles in South Africa...I felt I needed to remind the readers a bit of who she was, and her being a demon added to that urge. Consequently, she faced down a whole lot of firepower. Az, meanwhile, was off to Tibet. The mountains there seemed to provide a good opportunity to showcase a more Indiana Jones-like adventure of Azuriel, who had strangely endeared himself to me, to a degree that I feel today that he got a lot of the best comedic material - the normal awkwardness of being an angel got highlighted by him having no fashion sense and being unable to operate a pistol properly, though he more than held his own in combat thanks to his superhuman agility and martial arts skills. In any event, here I did something that I'd been toying with for a while; I killed him off. Not onscreen, but through a phone call to Mark. It was something of a small outcry amongst my readership, especially when the next chapters confirmed that he had indeed been killed. One could say our heroes had already lost at that point - there was no way they'd find the seal Az was looking for on time.

The final stretch took part over the last two days of the trip deep in the Brazilians jungle, where the final fight was said to take place. Here, I revealed the source of Mark's powers: He had become possessed by old Lucifer himself in his childhood. Note that my mythology works a bit different from what is considered canon; I gave Lucifer more of a tragic, rebellious feel, an archangel who joined forces with hell because he had been kicked out of heaven, not one who had been kicked out of heaven because he was evil. (Making sense?) Anyway, I gave Mark some backup by way of the Army of Mortals, introduced a new and much drier angel (Catariel) and revealed that Sharon had originally been sent to kill Mark. Catariel sealed her in a pocket dimension, but I felt that was an unsatisfactory conclusion to the tale. When the apocalypse did roll around, Catariel attempted a save by way of his mystical powers, but Mark interrupted the ceremony to free Sharon, confident that his love for her would see them through.

Long story short, the fight ran over pretty much anything. The AoM soldiers were anhilated without much resistance, Chrome got killed by a band of rampaging angels, and Mark lost Sharon again when Catariel killed her, revealing that he had been the one steering events up to this point. The angel proved very tough to kill, but finally, with a little help from Moloch, an ally of Lucifer, Mark managed to deep-six the traitorous celestial. With the fight converging on him, Mark asked Lucifer for help, and the archangel began pouring his power into the paladin. In what can best be described as a gargantuan burst of light, Mark/Lucifer promptly dispatched the rest of the warring angels and demons, leading reality to collapse around them.

Bad ending, right? So I thought, and thus came to a short council. I had Mark and Lucifer meet Metatron, voice of the Lord (Seeing how there's no actual entity God in my universe...) and let Moloch speak for the forces of evil. Turns out the whole apocalypse was a fight to determine the next incarnation of reality. Thanks to some sneaky arguing, Mark convinces both good and evil that he has won, as representant of humanity as whole, and that it's thus up to him to decide what happens. Long story short, he chooses to restore reality and have himself sent back in time to before the beginning of the story, hoping that the remains of his future memories will be enough to avoid the apocalypse this time. The story thus ends with Mark preparing for the hit that he botched at the beginning, realizing that he needs more weapons, and then going on his way. Setting up the sequel, I also showed Az, Chrome and Sharon transplanted into fairly normal human lives, and Mark barely remembering their faces, only knowing that he must find them and find out what's going on.

So, yeah, I pressed a pretty large reset button. My bad.

The sequel's coming, by the way. :)

The second you complain...

2004-04-08T19:44:23Z

Just got a note saying that the replacement mobo has been shipped off; if things go well, it will be here on Saturday.

Needless to say, this man is pleased.

Chronos

2004-04-08T15:38:05Z

There's a new computer in my room. It has been dubbed "Chronos", because it succeeds Zeus, and I'm wacky that way to do my references to Greek mythology backwards. Chronos is special. You see, he's the first computer I can genuinely claim to have built myself. I've had a lot of computers over the years, starting with a Pentium 75, and up to my current Athlon XP 1600+ - but they've all had a problem. They were pre built. I didn't pay for them, I got them as presents, and it was always about being economical, sensible - in a word, CHEAP. Well, not really cheap, but it was understood that I'd never gain a real performance monster that way. So what's a boy to do?

Join the Military.

There's a draft in Germany. Yeah, sure, I could have elected to take a more civilian "social" job instead, but that would've made sense, and I'm not in the habit of doing sensible things. It's a story for later, so let's boil it down: Gatty sells his body and soul for nine months to earn cash. Cold, hard, solid cash.

The first victim was a laptop. Hermes, my boy. He's not the greatest either, but he does what I need to do in situations where I previously wished I had a computer. It's not like I'm going to compete in a LAN tournament of Half-Life 2 with it, or something in that vein.

ANYWAY...

Chronos arrived in pieces. That's quite all right, seeing how I'd split up my order between four different online vendors. This time, I was playing for keeps. Suck it down, economical! Kiss my well-endowed posterior, sensible! I put it together, swore enough to last a good Christian of comparable age a good twenty eternities in hell, and made a few sacrifices to dark elder gods that I am not going to explain further. Suffice to say, I did my best.

Naturally, it didn't work. Cue laugh track.

So I screwed around with it. Threw everything I knew about computers at it, and then some. Made more sacrifices to other dark elder gods. I was about ready to sell the soul of my firstborn when a cold shower got me back into a more realistic pattern of thought. With renewed confidence, I tested again, drew the cold, logical conclusion that the motherboard had a birth defect, and wrote the vendor to practice some euthanasia on it. So it got sent back, and I'm waiting for them to mail me a replacement.

Meanwhile, this shell of a computer stares at me, it's components strewn about my room in a configuration that minimizes the chance of my accidentally destroying them. It stares with it's puppy eyes, it's lifeless LEDs beckoning to me, asking: Why, Daddy? Why?

Because I was too damn stupid to play it safe, that's why.

EDIT: A friend has suggested that my usage of an old AGP card with incompatible voltage dealt the deathblow to the motherboard's FSB. Makes sense, though I feel kinda stupid for nuking it myself. Ah well, that's the price you pay for experience.

gatac @ 2004-04-08T15:50:00

2004-04-08T13:44:06Z

Perhaps my sleep patterns are at fault.

Allow me to explain, dear reader. For the better part of three months now, my day has been shifted about six hours backwards. Now, I am - theoretically - studying at an university, but here in Germany (explain later), there's large segments of free time between actual studies, which would usually be covered with practical exercise or exams - but having just started, none of that applies to me. So, gradually, I have woken up later and later, stayed up longer and longer, until I realised last week that I was nearing 4:30 AM and still awake. And, of course, not getting up before 1 PM.

That has a few side effects. Primarily, my eating habits are way off course. I regularly stumble into lunch straight out of bed, and I pretty much require a midnight snack lest I become too hungry to even consider sleeping. Of course, being an insomniac to begin with doesn't help, and neither does my habit of having my computer (from hereon referred to as "rig", or by it's proper name, Zeus) running 24/7. So, I have discovered a world of wonder that exists only late at night.

My midnight snacks are almost universally microwaved food from the fridge. Needless to say, this is at least six different flavours of unhealthy, but I've never concerned myself much with it. I could stand to gain some weight. (I know, I know, I'm a freak, not being a good little overweight young adult.) So, you tiptoe through the kitchen, hell-bent on not waking up anybody. You shower at 3 AM because you feel strange. You just decide on a whim to go to the balcony and watch the lights of the city blinking before you. And, of course, you chat with people from all over the world, because you're so out of synch with your own timezone that you land right smack in theirs. Hell, if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you try your luck as amateur cat burglar in your own apartment. Ordinary things, like flushing the toilet, or watching TV, are suddenly complicated, because you have to do them silently.

Night-time TV is a story in itself. Sex phone ads abound. I've seen them all, and my brain refuses to feel that there remains any kind of erotical aura around them. As far as my hormones are concerned, it's just a bunch of naked flesh, not particularly attractive and sometimes downright gross. The worst part is the repetition. I've seen the exact same TV ad and it's annoying jingle *four* times in one single ad block. Of course, it's not much better during the day when it's ads for some obscene handy stuff - ringtones, logos, oracles, the whole nine yards of prepackaged coolness, so that every one of those kids out there can feel individual and hip. Perhaps only be purposefully colliding my cynism with repeated exposure to this tripe I have truly learned of the desperation the customers of those services must feel. And now, I'm stuck with having shuffled sex phone line users and handy geeks into the same category. Meh.

All of that and I haven't even gone into what I really hate about handy geeks. So there. Keep complaining, I'm reloading.

gatac @ 2004-04-08T15:29:00

2004-04-08T13:23:20Z

So you're nosing around, hm? Think, "Hey, there's a new journal, let's see who's dedicating his connection time to adoring his cats, or mooning over that girl who's so rad, or trying to teach me of their new dark awesome god..." Well, I'm afraid you won't find that here. I don't do pets, I don't intend to make my love life (however miserable or enjoyable it may be) public, and I'm not in the business of promoting dark elder gods, not yet, anyway. So, you may rightly ask, what is this all about?

Whatever comes into my mind, I'm afraid. While I must agree that this is dreadfully mundane, I hope it gives you some insight into what kind of person I am, who I like, who I despise, who needs to die, fast, and how I intend to archieve my goals of widespread terror and my supreme rule of this dimension. So, why not donate your soul to my service?

It's tax deductible, you know.

So, is this all a big ego trip of mine? Sure thing, Cliff, that's what most journals are anyway. I make no pretense of being amusing, enlightening or even moving. Interesting? Well, that's for you to decide.