Yes, we were down all weekend.

Yes, we're obviously back up right now.

Some of you might have been reading long enough to remember when we moved from Myrmid to Fuitadnet after just such a situation. We've been very happy with the service here since 2003, but honestly, there have been a lot of little things adding up lately that make this weekend the final straw. I don't want to be Leafycausted.

Stay tuned for more news. We have a plan.

So, my right eye got scratched last Wednesday and didn't heal back smooth, so I couldn't see anything in focus. It wasn't like my standard nearsighted problem, because I could kind of see everything, but it was "haloed." Anyway, to make a long story short I finally got the Optometrist yesterday, and she gave me a prescription for some eye drops that were supposed to start healing it within the week.

I started taking those less than 24 hours ago, and now my eye is already back to perfect vision. I'd like to thank my burning eye-drops of pain and my mutant healing factor.

So far the reading this semester has been much better than last semester. I've read two books this week, going to be four next week. I'm actually upset that I don't get to spend more time with them. I'm having to read some very interesting books, like Stripping the Altars, like a graduate student, which is a very specialized form of reading that involves a mixture of skimming and very, very in depth reading. It's hard to explain. I guess the easiest way would be to say read the first and last few sentences, then decide if you need to read the whole paragraph.

I wish I had the time to read most of these more closely. I get 90% of them this way, though. It's a shame that the time requirements of graduate school force this upon us, but even the professors note that this is how you have to read them.

So much for Apple Computer.

Long live Apple Incorporated.

You have the joy level of a megalodon in a tar pit. That's ok, more for the rest of us!

I had one helping. And if you want my true opinion of it on Jux, by all means, keep pushing :p

You all had several helpings! Admit it, it was delicious!

(Actually, we started using cream of mushroom, and switched at some point due to a shortage of cream of mushroom one night. Food is ever evolving!)

Actually, I could tell because it didn't taste at all like Stroganoff like I make it (which is to say, awesome). Now I know why. It's not Stroganoff.

Also at 11: Graeme could not tell that it was Cream of Celery soup instead of Cream of Mushroom, only that it was delicious. I wish I could take credit for the awesome dish, but Betty Crocker and Sarah jointly collaborate in its creation.

In other news, I made an awesome faux chai latte out of hot cocoa mix and orange spice tea today.

Today your taste buds, tomorrow the world.

It's true.

This just in: Nobody wants to play ping pong with me.

Today's fun fact: Beef Stroganoff requires a mushroom sauce. It is impossible to make it without this.

Star Fox Command is pretty fun, however, Star Wolf fucking suck.

Trying to get one of their endings after getting about half the endings to the game with Star Fox is an exercise in frustration. My lord, they're all horrible but Wolf himself, and even he sucks compared to most of Star Fox. It's terrible!

Right now we're only 3 days away from Kenny's one-year Assiversary and only 3 months away from Jux's 5 year anniversary.

Think about that. I can't believe we've been doing Jux since 2002. It certainly doesn't feel "new" anymore, but it doesn't seem that old either. Then again, we started it my second semester of my freshman year of college, and now I'm working on an MA. One of us has even gotten married in the interim. I guess that's a pretty big span of time.

Other than these past two days at work, I've been playing videogames pretty consistently since Christmas, as is my custom. It's great!

Christmas this year was actually really good despite the breaking of traditions, which as you know is something I despise if it can be avoided. Especially at my favorite time of year. This year was the first time that everyone wasn't living in the same house on Christmas, so Vivian and I slept up in Jasper on our air mattress Sunday night in the spare bedroom upstairs. I was still there waking people up at dawn on Christmas morning: 24 Christmases and counting! It was good to have Vivian there and part of the family too.

Speaking of Vivian, she made some delicious homemade pizza last night. She/We have been steadily working our way up the pizza chain since we moved to Kennesaw in July. I've identified a few stages:

Stage 1: Pizza stone, pre-shredded cheese, Ragu pizza sauce, pre-made crusts.

Stage 2: Block mozzarella replaces shredded cheese.

Stage 3: Frozen dough replaces pre-made dough. Pre-made sauce is no more; now we roll our own sauce, baby!

Stage 4: Real mozzarella (the squishy kind!)

Stage 5: Make your own dough. We reached this stage last night.

I also noticed yesterday that my bottle of Axe Kilo shower gel is at least 7 months old, and stil has a few months to go before its out. When I first started buying the stuff I was put off by it costing as much as 10 bars of soap, but damn, it has staying power!

On a final note: Twilight Princess is now the best Zelda ever. I beat it a few days ago and I'm patiently waiting for someone else to do it so I can discuss the ending with them. It deserves a sequel of its own!

My car was a solid block of ice (frost) this morning.

More thoughts to come!

Christmas is my favorite time of year. After Christmas I usually get a brief bout of post-Christmas depression as I realize it's all over and it'll be a whole year before it comes again.

It's not happened yet this year, but I can feel twinges of it. I'm going to try to create a Christmas in July, I swear.

Merry Christmas!

Join the Christmas discussion in our forum!

Christmas is my favorite time of year. Which is why I'm sad (by which I mean angry, since that's usually how I express sadness).

For the first time in 24 years (actually, longer, but I've been present 23 times so I can only personally verify that many) my extended family's Christmas Eve celebration has been cancelled. The reasons aren't that important since they're beyond anyone's control, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.

Some of the best times of my life have been at my Aunt Sandra's house on Christmas Eve. It always reminds me of the ending of It's A Wonderful Life...I really feel like I belong and am loved by a large number of people. I certainly love them. A few years ago it stopped being as good as it once was because my father, who's usually a good man but pulls some stupid bullshit like this now and again, stopped going. It wasn't quite the same after that, but still good.

I'm going to miss my Aunt Sandra, Steven, Jeff, and the lot this year. I really don't know what else to say. I was really looking forward to it this year because it's the first year that I purchased all the gifts for my extended family on my own. But now I won't get a chance to give them to them in the proper setting.

I can remember playing the X-men board game waiting to open presents with Jeff and Steven. This year...I don't know what we're going to do. Make a turkey up in Jasper and try to salvage something, I'm sure. I'm trying to think of something we can all do as a family that will make it feel "right" even without all the people there. Maybe I'll bring the Wii. Whatever it is, we have to do it together, otherwise it's just not the same.

I just wish I knew what that thing was, and I wish I could stop feeling like 2005 was the last time we'd ever have a Christmas Eve.

Inside are two AMC gold passes. Let me explain why this is important to me.

After five years of working at the library they'd acknowledged my experience and skills in a few different ways. I was the go-to guy with all kinds of questions. I was paid over $2/hour more than any other part-timer. I got a lot of random gifts from friends there every Christmas, a $10 gift card here and there, and it was good. Everyone there knew (at least during Joan's tenure) my abilities and respected them, if not necessarily me. Most of them knew what I'd done for the library system and that, despite my joking, I am actually pretty good at customer service despite being somewhat unbending on regulations compared to others.

You know what never happened? My bosses might praise me and trust me, my coworkers may have come to me with ever question, but I never got any of the "public" accolades. Those were too political and always went to the people who worked "in the back." No one ever hauled me up in front of the entire library system and gave me any recognition for going above and beyond. Within the people who actually worked with the public I was a premier player; within the system, I was respected but not praised.

That's why this is important to me. I may work for a soulless corporation now, but my group is great, just like at the library. I've carved my own niche again. I write and update our internal process documents; I'm the go-to guy for knowledge, again. My boss gives me tons of special projects. And today I was called out in front of the group and given this for my work on the AlphaZone, a tool that everyone in my department uses every single day, including my boss' boss. Not only that, but other groups are starting to use it too. It may not be much, but considering I'm still just a contractor, and the fact that it was given to me on the floor in front of everyone as an official acknowledgment of my efforts, skills, and talents, I'm proud of it. Some of you who get $10,000 Christmas bonuses are probably laughing at me getting movie tickets, but I know they came out of my boss' own pocket, and I know how little money she has of her own.

This little gesture means more to me on a personal level than the flexibility they've given me with my schedule, the sudden raise they gave me in July, or any of the responsibility they've given me over special projects. Because this means I'm more than respected among the whole group; I'm appreciated.

Cook Islands has been the best Survivor since Amazon in my opinion. I don't want to spoil who won because Vivian hasn't watched it yet, but the final four was perfect, and the choice between the final two was exactly as it should be. The winner was likewise perfect. This is the season that rekindled my interest in being on the show at some point.

I can't wait to see how they're going to pull off the next season though, with a tribe of plenty and a tribe of starvation. How the hell is that going to balance?

Pointless numbers update:

The fifth PS3 has been sold!

In the spirit of making up numbers like NexGenWars, I have put Jux into the fray!

Xbox 360: 8,034,694
PlayStation 3: 4
Wii: 4,202,101

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST FOLKS!

I plead temporary insanity!

Monkey ball is the worst when its controls decide not to obey my calculated jostling. Wii Tennis also evokes this strange phenomenon, but not due to control issues--it's simply a very competitive sport!

I was a bit surprised, myself, and have set out to adjust accordingly ;)

My Wii component cables are here!!!!

But here is Jasper, where I'm stuck for the week, and my Wii is in Kennesaw :(

The best part of the Wii so far (outside of Twilight Princess)? Watching Travis regress. Wii Sports and Monkey Ball make him freakishly competitive. The quickest way to notice this is by listening to the amount of profanity. It's been forever since Travis has screamed "FUCK!" "SHIT!" and such like that. He takes it in good spirit mostly, though. Even he laughed when we joked that Monkey Ball was a battle for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place...with Travis hauling up a solid #4.

After being stumped at every Blockbuster in town, Peter just *bought* Raving Rabbids last night. Much fun was had. It's what Super Monkey Ball should have been, if Sega hadn't fucked it up with a pointlessly bad control scheme for half the games.

I made a post yesterday about the first semester being over at Grad School, thanking my undergrad professors Dr. Voogt and Dr. Scott for helping me. You see, according to the transfer students (some from places such as Georgia Tech) GSU's history department is "punishing." Were it not for my good grounding in historiography and research, I probably wouldn't have survived as well as I have.

In other news: Christmas Shopping Completed. All Systems Nominal.

On Survivor:

Yes, we all know survivor is my secret shame. It's been posted here many a time, so let's revel in it one more time before moving on.

Now then, I think this is the best season of Survivor in a long, long time. Yul is playing exactly as I would play if I was out there. He's also the most honest person to ever play this game. Did you notice how he said, in front of everyone, that he could predict Jonathan? And then when someone confronted him on it, he said roughly: "Yes, that's what I said, although not in the connotation you're suggesting." That's honesty baby, and not the kind of bullshit honesty everyone else who has ever played this game has pretended to give a shit about. I also like how he tacitly admitted that he told them what he told The Boob Trio in the way he told them because of who they are. He might not like Jonathan, but that doesn't mean shit.

A word on Jonathan: He may be an ass, but he's playing a good game. A damn good game.

Since it's so exciting to be able to say this; "Wii! We got our WIIIIIIIIIIII!!!! OMFG I'm completely ecstatic! Zelda will be my personal sexy princess!"
Oh, also...there's my feature, ready to be loved by you, the readers. Don't ever scorn it!

Thanks my friend Wade at work, I now own Sneak King and Pocketbike Racer, all without having to ever step inside a Burger King myself! Braving their horrid food was more than I could stand.

The funny thing is, as much as I wanted these games (and want Big Bumpin'), I don't even have an Xbox of any sort yet. I plan to get a 360 sometime next year. I just wanted to make sure that I got the pure awesomeness of Sneak King before it disappeared.

Until then...Wii Sports, Twilight Princess, and Excite Truck will just have to be enough to last me until Christmas. Shuckszilla :P

The DaFrito Code

This is my first "feature"ish type post, so might as well make it super special by announcing the first ever Jux-Giveaway.

Prize
2000 Wii Points or $10 cold hard cash (yes, you get penalized for not having a Wii). Prize may change due to how long the code stays hidden.

Rules
Just figure it out. I don't expect anyone to figure out the answer anytime soon. Rules may change at any time. Hints may be given during future posts (perhaps there are hints in previous posts). Beware of red herrings.

Regulations
None?

Eligibility
Eligible participants must be human-being who is currently alive. Participants must have an email address. Participants must have a way to collect said prize (either a mailbox or an open hand if you live close enough). Even Jux-Staff can try to crack the code (only I know the answer).

How to Win
Email me the answer bbqfrito@juxentente.com along with a brief summary on how you uncovered the answer.

The DaFrito Code

Apologies for the lack of updates. Work on my second seminar paper and Thanksgiving have eaten up most of my time lately. That and playing Wii Sports with Viv, Peter, and Travis.

I just turned in my rough draft on the historiography of the origins of World War One. I know how much I've bitched about historiography in the past, but doing a paper on a subject I'm actually interested in the field may have driven me to like it. I've always been more personally fond of the writing and analysis side of history than I have been pouring through microfilm looking for a tiny blurb of a primary source (although that's fun too), and that's what historiography is all about.

I'll probably wait to post my World War One paper until I've completed my final draft. Next Monday my final draft of my research on the perceptions of British working men during the American Civil War is due, and that will be uploaded as a feature then. I'm giving a presentation on my findings on that topic in about an hour and a half. This is my break between classes.

George St. Pierre'd

12:30 AM

After watching George St. Pierre kick Matt Hughes in the crotch region a couple of times Me, Graeme, and Vivian went to go Wii hunting. All three of us thought it would be easy to find a Wii since Nintendo had shipped a whole lot of them.

3:00 AM

Three Wal-Marts, a Best Buy, and a Target later, we decided to give up. While traveling home I decided to check my local K-Mart just to see what was going on there. While driving by I saw a Jeep and a white car sitting there along with one lonely tent. I parked and approached the white car. He was number one "in line" and was waiting there since 10:00 PM. He explained that I was number four for about six Wiis.

6:00 AM

The hours pass. Two people show up wanting Wiis; we tell them of their lucky fortune and we all talk about politics, life, love, and video games.

6:45 AM

Fifteen minutes to go! Number seven strolls up with a friend or two. We explain to them that they should probably go home since they are only getting six consoles. Number seven replied "I know, I work here". I thought to myself "They must all work here and are just waiting to go to work".

7:01 AM

An old lady opens the door. We all orderly walk in, take a right, and head towards the electronics section. No Wiis to be found! We send number five to the front of the store to find that old lady and ask her where the Wiis are. They are at the front desk area!

7:05 AM

Mad rush to the front occurs! Number six notices that there are only five Wiis. Much to her chagrin, the old lady explains "I already sold one". Number seven is nowhere to be found. Needless to say we all wanted to kick that guy in the crotch region a couple of times.

Long story short. "Wii GET!".

I also got a Wii at launch! I went to Best Buy upon rumors that they had 168+ in stock. I had driven by the night before, but there was a tent village outside. It didn't look like 168 people, however, so I decided to get up and go out there before Best Buy opened at 9am.

I got there at 8:15AM, and the vouchers had already been passed out. One of the employees walked up and gave a few extra out to people in line, and then cut the line off 5 people in front of me.

Not willing to give up that easily, I went up the line and started shouting "Anyone want to sell their voucher? $20!" (Some people had sold their vouchers earlier) I was laughed at initially, but then someone came out and offered his to me. Someone from the end of the line shouted "$50!!" and my benefactor briefly considered this before shrugging and selling it to me (woot!). Then I waited a bit longer until a dedicated Best Buy employee personally escorted me through the whole process and checked me out. I got a Wii, Zelda, Trauma Center, and an extra Wiimote along with a 2000 Wiipoint card.

Peter brought his controller over tonight, and Travis D., Graeme, Vivian, Peter, and I all played for a bit tonight, beating each other senseless in Wii Sports.

There is finally something to do in Cobb/Cherokee county. Wiiiiiiiiii!

Costco.com'd!

Although we failed to find a Wii in our hunt with Peter last night, he secured one from K-Mart this morning. My plan to get one from Costco has also succeeded. Rather than venture down to their warehouse, since they told us yesterday they weren't getting any in today and not that many at all anyway, I ventured forth to their website. No Wii was listed. Luckily, I knew the product code, and entering it summoned up the "limited supplies available!!!" of the Wii + Excite Truck + Zelda bundle. $339.99. Hell yeah.

After shipping and tax it comes out to essentially the exact same as if I'd bought the console and those two games anywhere else at launch. I have to wait a week or so for the standard shipping to get it to me. I have to buy a Wiimote and nunchuck. But I've got my receipt right here, and best of all, Costco means lifetime extended warranty. Including refunds on the shipping costs.

So, yes, I promised myself after we bought the Lancer that I wasn't going to get a Wii at launch. I caved. There is no excuse. I think I might give one of the games (Excite Truck) to my mother to wrap up for Christmas or something, though.

I have fixed our RSS generator to strip tags out of the preview(title) field.

Sorry Ars Lounge!

The best news this week!

The rough draft of the first draft is done!

Tomorrow I have to edit it, perhaps reword things, as well as finish my bibliography and see if I can track down a couple extra sources to verify a few things (it never hurts to be too careful), but for the most part, the paper is done.

Of course, I have a first draft of a paper of almost equal length, this time on the historiography of the origins of the First World War, due in two weeks. But I'm trying not to think about that one so much.

After my spending my first break at work doing nothing but editing the various styles in the document until they were all set to "auto-update" (which doesn't actually do anything) and "add to template", I finally, finally, got the document to stop changing its font to Verdana and its footnotes to random formatting.

I am 9/10s of the way through the labor meetings in Lancashire, and I'm just over halfway done with the paper itself. My first draft is due Monday, and that's no longer looking nearly as terrifying.

Oh my fucking god. I'm a third done with my paper, got all the way through the labor press tonight, but Word has never given me this many problems before. I am about to pull my fucking hair out. Here's a list of the problems it's given me tonight:

1. Refused to let me do a single indent. It would let me do none, two, three, four, etc. But not one. Had to close word and start over.
   
2. Defaulted footnote text to 12 point Verdana. (should be 10 point Times New Roman) I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.
   
3. Defaulted body text to 10 poitn Verdana. (should be 12 point Times New Roman) I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.
   
4. Replaced all "Footnote Text" formatting with "Footer" formatting, at random, so that all new footnotes are misaligned with the older footnotes. I can convert new footnotes to "Footer" formatting, but it refuses to convert any footnote back to "Footnote Text"
   
5. Closed the document and reopened to have all footnotes, which were in Times New Roman 10 point when closed, to be in Verdana 10 point. I have never used Verdana in an academic document in my life.
   

Fucking. A.

Progress is painful.

To add insult to injury, I'm now sick.

A bit more progress done. I'm through with Palmerston and Gladstone, other than what I plan to touch-up during work tomorrow. Tomorrow night I plan to start working on the general thoughts of the labor movements at the time, like the rallies and such. My paper still feels a bit confused, but I think I'll be able to stream line it. My main confusion is still with the "research versus historiography" problem I'm having conceptually.

Google Docs (formerly Writely) is something I'd played around with before, but when I started work on this paper in exile I figured I'd see how it did on something larger than a note. Long story short, it fucking sucks ass. I'm sure this has all been written about before, but this was my first attempt at using it as a real word processor. Why can't I set margins on pages? Let's not get started on footnotes. My original plan was to upload my work to Google Docs so I could make a few quick changes if I needed to while keeping an online backup. But since it seems to have a vendetta against intelligent formatting, it's back to uploading a backup to Jux and keeping my thumb drive handy at work.

On a vaguely related note, I finally picked up my GSU id ("Panther Card") today. That means I can stop doing all of my database research through my alumni KSU account and actually use the library of my current home institution! Huzzah!

I was supposed to get at least 10 pages of my seminar paper done by now. Instead, I've done two. But, I've decided to write it like I wrote my senior thesis, and do it in chapter sections. Tomorrow I'm doing the entire section on the British elites (Gladstone, Palmerston) during the American Civil War. Following that I'm going to do the Labor papers, Labor meetings, and the American responses to the plight of Lancashire.

What's due next Monday is actually just the first draft, but I will be graded on it, so it's still important. After that I have the first draft of a paper I've not even actually started on due the Monday after Thanksgiving. But, since that's a historiography paper rather than a true research project, it's much simpler to write.

I actually dislike writing historiography papers usually, but I've had to do so many this semester that my British Perceptions in the American Civil War research paper is actually going to be part historiography, because that's just the style of writing and research I'm doing right now. I guess I'm getting used to it. It definitely adds something to my more comfortable research writing, but I still dislike doing pure historiography, and I hope to get away from it next semester.

The continuing saga of the Jux redesign, for those not following in the forum, has reached the point where we have three templates for the new pages up.

The 3.0 mainpage.

3.0 Features page.

3.0 Members page.

We got Zero. More candy for us!

Two groups of trick-or-treaters. Two.

I can't believe it.

Hello Jux readers and random web crawling bots; I am bbqfrito (AKA Peter Rosconi), and this is my first News post. I am the new guy around here so feel free to visit the forums and post how awesome you think I'm going to be. I will post feature(s) soon for your reading pleasure.

Anyways, what I really wanted to say was: I'm Here! Happy Halloween.

Another year, another attempt at moving Halloween to the weekend by stupid parents fails. How I love it! We were fully intending to tell anyone who stopped by to come back on Tuesday.

I'm excited about living in the apartment complex on Halloween. It means that we'll get trick-o-treaters! It's been two Halloweens since we had any. No one is brave enough to go down to our house in Jasper.

What a day yesterday. At 6:55am my girlfriend Vivian calls me, telling me that her car has broken down on the interstate, is smoking, and she's got it off to the side of the off ramp. It sounds like the belt on her power steering snapped again. Another breakdown, just a month after the last one; my morning is off to a good start.

My mother, being closer than I was, picks Vivian up and takes her to work. Meanwhile, my rudely awakened brain is churning over what to do about this. I run all that's happened through my head. In the past month:

1) The belt on the power steering/alternator has fallen off twice, and the pulley has been "fixed" twice.
1b) Stranding her both times.
2) A wheel bolt randomly sheered off on her right front wheel.

I work in Alpharetta and/or Atlanta depending on the day of the week, and she works in Canton. This means I'm always at *least* a hour from anywhere my girlfriend is going to break down during the day. I've had it. Her old piece of shit is too undependable in general to keep. It has to go.

I go to work and spend four fucking hours on a conference call, while looking for cars at Carmax and emailing back and forth to a sales agent there (I can't talk to him on the phone, because I'm on the conference call...for four fucking hours). By the time I leave work early to pick her up from work and try to get her car limped back down to Carmax, I've got her approved for financing and a car or two in mind to look at. The approved for financing thing is a big deal, because she's a first time car buyer. This means the interest rate kinda sucks, but at least she can finally start building credit.

After picking her up I hit up the Advance Auto Parts for a belt and head down to where her car is trapped on the interstate on ramp. Due to the fact that it's actually on the ramp, I have to overshoot her car and loop back up the interstate to even get to it. The first thing I notice when opening the hood is that the belt is the wrong size. In my rush, I failed to notice that they gave us the belt for the other of the two sets of accessories. Frustrated, I head to the nearest Advance Auto Parts about a mile away from her stranded car, swap out the belt for the one they were supposed to get us, and head back to her car again.

By this point, it's 6:30pm. I told the Carmax guy I'd have her car limped down there by 6:45 or so, which is obviously no longer happening. I open the hood again and try to get the belt on. While I'm doing this, unfortunately after I'm already oily as shit and have grass-stains on my ass, I notice that there's a greenish fluid everywhere that's a bit more than would be normal for condensation. Remembering her "smoke" from earlier, I sigh, and look for what I now know must be there. And there it is, a blow radiator hose. A tow truck is called.

Right about this point the stress gets to Vivian, because she has a bunch of trash in her car and is stressed already by everything that's going on, and suddenly becomes desperately afraid that if they see how trashed her current car is they won't sell her a new one. So while I'm on the phone trying to get the tow truck lady to agree to just have the driver pick it up and drag it to Carmax without us present, so that we can go ahead and get washed up and down there to start test driving cars and looking around in general, Vivian is frantically trying to clean her car. She's obsessed. She also gets bitten by an ant. This is the exact low point of our evening.

Once we're back in my car and driving to Kennesaw so I can get the title to hers and change clothes, she calms down. We grab the title and head to Carmax; at this point, it's 7:30pm.

To make the rest of the long story short, she test drives the 2003 Hyundai Sonata that I liked from the website, and the 2004 Mitsubishi Lancer with only 34,000 miles she liked from the lot. After I assured her that all Mitsubishis aren't crap (the car we just had dragged down to Carmax was a 1995 Mitsubishi Galant with 126,000+ miles on at least two engines), she settles on the Lancer that she likes better. We get her car traded in for the pittance it's worth, put down the down payment, sign the papers, and now she's the proud owner of said Lancer! We also got the extended warranty through Carmax, so it's covered bumper to frickin' bumper for 5 years and/or until it has 100,000 miles on it.

We finally escaped Carmax at 10:30pm. The salesman we had was nothing but nice to us, considering he got off work at 8:00 and was still there when we left. I actually have nothing but good things to say about the experience, the price they gave us on her old car (which wasn't even running when it got there; they still listed it as "mechanical condition consistent with age"), the price we paid on the new one, or the crazily cheap price on that extended warranty.



More pics at my website. Most of them were taken by Carmax, since I couldn't take very good pictures in pitch darkness last night with my camera once we got it back to the apartment.

Of all the weird things I've ever seen...

Our mail just ran on Sunday. The mailman showed up in his truck, in uniform, the whole works. It was so strange that I actually briefly considered that I was the one who had forgotten what day it was. The running theory amongst Vivian and I is that perhaps he took an unscheduled and unannounced day off yesterday and decided to make up for it today. It's the only thing that makes any sense at all, unless our mailman is really, really stoned or something.

Battlestar Galactica might just be the best TV program ever. The jump-in jump-out tonight was so awesome I cheered. And Tigh saying "Not all of them..."

Fucking. A.

Forum Now Fixed & Bot Free.

Keeping with the theme of progress this week, I have implemented a rogueish trick to keep the bots out, yet still enable new users. The forum is now bot free and looks to stay that way, as they futilely try to solve the unsolvable verification image.

If you decide to register on the forums, pay attention to the verification image, or at least the instructions beneath it.

Oh yeah, and if any of you savvy hep cats out there have RSS feed readers, I have also successfully gotten the abandoned RSS Feed project working.

RSS Feed

We are, in effect, on fire today.

[Jux Entente System 2.1 Login]

Login: ZenZagg
Password: ********

Loading Subsystem OS...
Feature Poster...online
News Poster...online
All Secondary Functions...online
All systems nominal.

---

*** LEVEL UP! ***
Your character has learned skill "PHP"!
You gain 777 EXP!

---

...I'm such a geek.
Features are fixed, and I have gained an understanding of the system, so I can subsequently maintain it until we upgrade.

Phoenix Down, indeed.

Cowboys from hell!

Since posting the semi-autobiographical, semi-random rambling features in the forum, a lot of good stuff has actually happened with regards to the people mentioned. I think I'm going to do a full update on stuff like sometime soon.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaardcore!

(Update coming)
(Feature poster 3.0 still not done)
(Shakira)
(Shakira)

I barely even remember being SilverSwd at this point. And yet, sometimes, I still think of Crossed Reality as my "new name." Very rarely, but still sometimes.

I want to get away from these nicks altogether, but at this point there's so much inertia that it seems almost pointless.

If you want a sneak peak of what might be coming, check out this scratch pad of the next Jux Entente design.

There's another new feature posted temporarily in the forum.

Eras of BFFs!

Bloody excellent news!

Work has begun on the new Jux 3.0 backend that will fix a lot of the problems that have developed over the past months that are slowly strangling the site. Originally, as Travis posted below, we were going to move in and inhabit the corpse of Kenny's code and try to keep it running, and reanimate it to do new things.

We've now eschewed that. Unlike the 2.0 transition, the first version of 3.0 should be completely transparent to you, the readers. I'm working on a bunch of visual changes and new ideas that will take place in 3.1, but the priority for the moment is getting us completely functional again.

Until then, new features are going to be posted in the forum. I think I'm going to go through a semi-biographical period for awhile.

For whatever reason, "...to be loved" by Papa Roach has been stuck in my head for days.

The best part is, it makes me want to go rough people up! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Too bad the band really fucking sucks.

Vivian's asleep on the couch again...she really needs to go to bed earlier.

Indeed, Jux is not going anywhere; and is on the upward function of the bell curve as we both adjust to our respective "busy lives".

Also, as an addendum to Graeme's post below, I'll clarify the reluctance to drag out my past: Often, my entire consciousness is one continuous pool reaching back to the foggy depths of my recollection. I live every minute of my life every minute of my life. So things are constantly changing--it's a bit like trying to catch a drop of water in your mouth under a waterfall.

So if I were to try and drag out and put to words and sections my past, I would (in theory) effectively live through it all over again. Contrary to that, however, I think it's a bit naive to think that the experiences and lessons I've learned since then will be of no help to filter through it all. Things change greatly with time and reflection, so perhaps I will make something similar soon.

And now for my words on the Kenny thing: He did an awesome job with the site, and he worked hard to give it the functionality that it has now, which I won't forget. He always had funny insights to things, and interesting ways to look at the world. I hate that things had to turn out the way that they did, and in a way it feels like we've lost more than just a friend.

It's been over 8 months now, and we've been through the 5 Stages as it seems, so we've accepted things as they are--we realize our old friend is not coming back. It's been made clear that Kenny wants nothing to do with Jux anymore, and that's his decision to make. I wish him well, and hope that he achieves all that he sets out to achieve in life. Thanks for showing me Visual Basic all those years ago.

I am apparently unique in my obsession with not losing touch with people, and in not wanting to forget my past. Travis isn't touching my challenge put forth in the "feature" (yep, our site backend is still broken) on the forum with any length of pole. That's fine. I can accept that I'm weird, in that I'm a very sensitive asshole.

I have accepted the fact that I have way too much to do, now. I've replaced confusion and stress with abject terror. I might end up dropping the one class I have that I dislike greatly, and take the slower path (2 years to degree rather than 1.5) until I can get a GRA and survive better without having to devote so much time to work. I actually like my job at Verizon okay. It's not all that intellectually challenging, but it's easy, and varied. The past three weeks my boss has had me doing web design work, which actually gave me the opportunity to use some of my basic design ideas for Jux 3.0, albeit in a very basic, unattractive fashion.

Kenny thought this site would die without him. We haven't really struggled with him leaving in that way at all. What's happened to Jux, and what I'm fighting to prevent from completely consuming it, is the fact that Travis is a time vortex and I am completely insane.

Let me explain. On Travis' part, he loses most of his free time to...free time. Instead of a schedule Travis as a unified pool of "time" that he pulls from whenever he feels it to be necessary. While efficient, and flexible, it does lead to deficinces in the upkeep of most ancillary things. It also makes him late a lot, but that's not important.

On my part, I'm completely fucking nuts. I somehow think I can work 24 hours a week (down from a full 40) at Verizon, plus go to school for another 12 a week, not including all the hours I have to spend reading, writing, and researching, and have a meaningful relationship with Vivian, and keep myself mentally sane with a hobby or two and my friends. Not to mention driving up to see the puppy. Where the hell does time for Jux fall in that picture?

Honestly, it oftens falls into quick "mental breaks" at work. The same thing used to happen at the library. In a weird way, my job at Verizon has helped bring Jux back from the brink. While I can't assure you that my old satirical writing will be back anytime soon, I can say that I plan to bring more of my academic writings to Jux, as well as more biographical stuff. Not only that, but Travis is reverse engineering the backend, so that we will finally have a working solution to site problems again.

At this point, Jux is over four years old. We aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

At the very least, I'm too lazy to remove the automatic payments for the hosting from my credit card.

I am currently working on reverse-engineering the site's back end, so far I've got the database down pat; next is the php, which is not writing features to html anymore, hence the broken link below. :)

Fuck that link below. The feature is posted in the forum for now.

I'm house-sitting in Jasper for the rest of the week, and let me tell you, it feels weird. Part of it is probably that there's no one else here, but for some reason, this place doesn't feel that comfortable to me at all anymore. I wouldn't think that after just two months being gone I'd lose the "home" feeling from here, but I have.

Stuff is in different places. All of my stuff is gone, and my old room is completely empty other than a DVR and a computer. It's great to see and be around Sadie again, but she has a different leash.

It's still home, but now, it's more of a "home place" I guess. Being outside is the strangest part of it all, really. This is a change I expected to happen, having experienced it before with the house on Oakdale, but it's not one that I expected to happen quite so quickly. Just strange overall.

I think at work tomorrow I'm going to work on a feature about the last three "epochs" of my life. It's become clear to me now, after my earliest suspicions around April, that I am officially in a new era of my life. I think I'll chart the last three eras (a history starting in 1998), or maybe four (a history starting in 1996).

It would be a fun, if perhaps depressing and weird at some points, diversion at the least.

Well, my birthday is done. Graduate school continues to absorb my time. At work, I'm now redesigning the intranet staff webpages instead of scrubbing packages, although that's a temporary job.

What else to discuss?

The weekly game night with Scott, Travis, and Peter is going really well. I'm not sure if we'll transition into Warhammer or just keep doing the mix of boardgames and videogames we currently adhere to, but it's a pleasant night out with "the guys" and so I am happy that it continues in what appears to be a healthy fashion.

It's been eight months since Kenny decided to be an ass and fuck over Travis and I. I'm not being polite about it any more, because even if I had done any of the bullshit he says I did, he would still owe us both better, especially Travis, who hasn't actually done anything. The whole situation just pisses me off, and people always ask me about it. I guess I should put the full story up on Jux at some point now that it looks like this is going to end later rather than anything that could be considered sooner.

Good news everybody! I've survived my first two days of Georgia State/Downtown Atlanta. It looks like I'm going to have a ton of work to do this semester (3 15-20 page research papers, 6 5 page papers, three books a week, 5+ presentations), but other than that the classes seem alright so far. My anxiety at driving around down there in the depths of hell is gone, too. Today I have to leave work early to go to an orientation meeting at 4:00, but after this week I should settle into regularly working Wednesday-Friday full days, and going to school Monday-Tuesday. I'm looking at the possibility of working a half day on Tuesday, because the money would be nice, but I'm not sure if I'd have the time, honestly.

I saw Snakes on a Plane on Friday, and then again on Saturday. In an amazing move, I was so pleased with this movie that I had actual tickets both times! And then I got the soundtrack!

I'm not sure if this movie will ever be topped. Perhaps when I am an old man there will be A&E specials on it.

It's always good when you start the day with an email saying your cousin with hepatitis may have developed cancer as a result of his treatment. Considering he got the hepatitis when he was a kid as part of a blood transfusion when he had cancer that time...hoy.

Also, driving to Georgia State terrifies me, and yet, I must do it. And they still haven't sent me my damned parking pass!

After a harrowing battle with Comcast's MAC filter, I finally have my home network back online.

The apartment is still in packaged disarray but the living room, bathroom, bedroom, and office are starting to look nice.

Also, installing two replacement Domain/Active Directory/DNS/DHCP servers on an existing network is loads of fun-13 hours to be exact.

REPLICATION COMPLETE.

Whooo! Text I wrote was just on SquiZZ. If you were listening at 5:53 or so and heard Bodi read the email about the guy whose first CD was .janet, that would be me baby!

Beards are itchy. I wonder if I can keep this up. (Pictures to come!)

Lauren apparently got remarried. Who knew?





Seriously, someone better fucking tell me who knew this.

After this weekend I can safely say that I am officially done moving people for awhile. Including myself.

Now then, bring on the resurgent NERD HERD.

We've not started poking around inside the site generators to figure them out yet, so for the site redesign I've been trying to change the look using just the stylesheet, while being unable to change the actual page code at all.

So far, I've made progress, but there are a few things that seem to be impossible. Making that menu to the left of this post lay horiztonal rather than vertical, for example. It's really easy to do that...if I could edit the page code.

There have been some necessary changes made tonight to certain parts of the site. Mostly behind the scenes.

Discussion begins on Jux 3.0. The 2.0 framework was built and maintained by someone who is no longer here. There's not much we can do with it, really. Our choices are have someone else learn it inside and out, or rebuild. Maybe it's time for the change, and we'll rebuild. We'll see.

My network of chatters at work through Gmail has expanded to include Scott and Peter as of this week. Considering how slow work has been, this is actually pretty important. It keeps me sane.

The best part of Gtalk is that it saves logs automatically in your Gmail account. It is this feature, and this feature alone, that makes me want to move from AIM to Gtalk as a primary chatting client. I might do it soon. In fact, I like the logging so much that I have uploaded my old logs to Gmail in the form of emails. All the way from the IRC days, in fact.

Logging is my favorite chatting feature, all the way back to my IRC days. The only things I don't have logged are the two (three?) years that we used AIM as the client, not just the protocol, and it didn't have autologging. I only have a few sessions saved from those days. But the things you remember to save are usually not the ones you actually need to reference later. Take, for instance, the conversation that led to the Kenny thing. That took place on a portable client. AIM Express, to be exact. No log, and it's very noticable.

Homemade pizza time!

Happy birthday, Ancient Old Man Travis!

Cable update: It's Alive!

Also, we moved my gigantic desk and my main computer yesterday, so...They're Alive! I'm posting from FitzSheba 64 again! BLISSINATE!

Comcast Update!

So they rolled out on Tuesday, and apparently the tech they sent out was either completely incompetent, or the fuckers did more damage than they meant to. He claimed to me that he tested every line in the place, and my cable never came back on. Fucking. Wonderful.

So as this moron is leaving Tuesday afternoon, he says that because he's a fucking dumbass, someone from "Maintenance" (I guess that's the next level of Comcast tech up in the dogpile) will be out within 24 hours to finish the job.

Then he calls me back. 24 hours won't work. How about fucking thursday at fucking 5-8pm? Do I have much choice, shitstain? Nope? Then bring it.

Yesterday was Thursday. No one shows. No one calls. At 7:50pm, I call Comcast. The appointment is in the book, the CSR verifies, but she's not sure why no one bothered to show. A $20 "on time guarantee" is deposited into my account (Hey! If I can keep this up, I can turn not having cable into a positive cash flow!) Then she puts in a ticket to dispatch to find out why the fuck no one showed up. Someone should call me "in 10-15 minutes."

At 9:30pm, with no call, I call Comcast back.

The new CSR tells me that dispatch closes at 8:00, so he's not sure why the previous moron told me I'd be getting a call back that night. Unfortunately, the soonest time he has available for an appointment is Sunday from 11 to 2, BUT, dispatch should call me back in the morning. For reals!

It's 10:34. So far, no call. These fuckers have until noon before I call them back. And so fucking help me, if no one gets out there until Sunday, they're refunding ALL of those damned "setup and installation" fees that obviously did so much good, or I'm getting Dish fucking Network, apartment or no, and fucking Bellsouth DSL.

I fixed it.

Something inserted a index.htm in the forum directory. We should update our phpBB ASAP.

Something dumb happened to the forum mainpage.

Until we figure out WTF happened, please use http://forum.juxentente.com/index.php to access the forums.

Alright, so after a week and a half of benevolently appropriating an open wireless network for my internet needs in my new apartment (who the fuck changes the SSID, but leaves the router with the default password and no WEP encryption? What the fuck?) our Comcast digital cable, internet, and digital voice was hooked up Friday night by the best tech ever. Really nice, did his job well, played with our cats, fixed the wiring in half the apartment...the whole shebang!

Twenty-four hours of gentle cable bliss were to follow. The TiVo, freed from being able to record nothing at all, suckled upon the breast of the cable box and restored us with such lovely programs as Mythbusters. A good time was had by all!

And then, at 10:30pm last night, it all went out instantly. Was it the digital box? No, the TV in the bedroom, hooked up straight to the old analog cable, worked fine. The whole apartment was out. I call Comcast, the soonest they can get a tech out to me is Tuesday. Fucking A'. But at least our service is refunded through then.

Today, having nothing better to do really and not feeling like actually leaving my apartment complex, I strap on some shoes and wander around to see if maybe I can find and fix the problem. And then I see this.


Some fucking asshole, apparently pissed off that the Comcast guy turned off his free ride when he was here, has knocked the entire fucking cablebox off the wall trying to break the padlock! Once inside, he has completely removed the hookups to our apartment (not pictured: I looked inside, and our apartment is currently hooked up to Jack and Shit). They've moved the cables to their apartment's hookups. To add insult to injury, they removed even the loop cable going to our apartment, which does nothing with the live cable is removed (seriously, what the fuck you cocksucking shitstains, are you that stupid when it comes to wiring or did you just think it'd be cute to leave a fucking piece of labeled coaxial cable hanging on the box? "No one will ever fucking know where it came from! We're so clever!"). Now, seeing as all the older cables are orange, and the only stuff on the truck that the guy had on Friday was black, and also seeing as the black live cable is the only one in the entire box labeled with a "digital voice" tag, I could easily fix this thing, maybe. But being the nice guy I am, I don't want to accidentally fuck up the service of someone who's actually paying for it. So I tell the office what happened after calling Comcast and telling them that the whole damned box is hanging off the building. The soonest they can get here is fucking Tuesday still, but "luckily", my dad was laid off last Friday, and the unemployment office is right down the street from my new place, so I don't have to take a day off work to be here for them!

And, I'm sure that whoever apparently thought a Comcast truck was here to install live cable to an empty apartment, and thought that no one would ever know what they did, will soon face at the very least a nasty letter, because they were took fucking inconsiderate to go buy a splitter and some coax at Wal-Mart and steal cable the old fashioned fucking way.

God Damnit.

Still busy, still unpacking, but as of yesterday, Vivian has her car back. So praise glory at that!

The housewarming party-thing was actually very nice. Peter brought cranium and we played it repeatedly, including my awesome greenhouse charade. It was nice to see Brett again, and Samantha coming all the way in from Athens was awesome. It's too bad Scott couldn't come, but it was alright.

Also, Costco is fucking awesome. My apartment is fully stocked with damn near everything on the cheap, and I don't mean cheap stuff. We have awesome tupperware and the like.

Also also, my TiVo is here. But my cable and my real internet won't be in until Friday. So, right now, it's mostly just a pretty box.

I feel mostly dead. (Nearly) all my stuff is here, but none of it is unpacked or in the right place. I've been moving all day. Vivian and my mother are on the way back with a dining table and two cats. I've discovered free internet being provided by a fraternity of some sort. I'm going to be good and nice with it, because my connection won't be hooked up until the 21st. That's a long time to be without the net. Too long, really. No TV or phone service until then, either, as they're all being provided by Comcast.

Overall the move went well today. I'm strongly considering taking half a day off tomorrow to combat the OMG STUFF that still has to be done, like buying groceries and such, but we'll see. Pictures of the new place will come as soon as I get my digital camera and my real internet connection. I don't want to leach the bandwidth of these poor souls.

My real computer isn't even here yet...just the Shebintosh (MacSheba G4!). She serves whenever she is called on, and she serves well.

IMAX...in 3D!

Not to get anyone's hopes up, but I am currently working on a feature for the first time in awhile. I'm not sure when or if I'll finish it, but I think I'll like it, if I do.

My iPod is really dead and must be repaired. Since it happened I've been using my dad's 1 gig iPod shuffle at work, since he's never touched it once. I've nicknamed this creature "Blast Capacity." Currently it serves me well.

I've been taking interesting approaches to building musical playlists lately. Nothing worth going in to here, but it's quite...spicey.

Tomorrow: Superman Returns...on IMAX!

Let me tell you about my week last week!

First, my dad offs the Mazda 626 in a blaze of glory by deciding to ram it into the back of a dump truck on Monday.

On Friday, my iPod decides to commit suicide. The first and only time it's ever dropped anywhere, and it lunches itself on soft carpet after a two-foot fall. It must have landed just the wrong way. Do I have the money to repair it? No, but I'm going to anyway.

On Saturday Vivian's car's engine seizes. It has to be replaced. The mechanic says there was no oil in it, but that has to be a symptom and not the disease, as I checked and topped off the oil the day before.

Also on Saturday, dad bought himself a 2003 Mustang GT convertible to replace the Mazda. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

However, I have to move in a week, and Vivian's going to be paying off the car a lot longer than she thought, because we have to drop a rebuilt engine in it. At least it'll come with a warranty and run a good damn while longer, at least.

I miss talking to Samantha. I can never reach her lately. She was all over my life in early college, at the same time I was simultaneously trying to remove Rebecca and keep her. I was thinking about that era of my life, the pre-Jux college era, yesterday, as I cleaned out my chest of drawers and looked and my old pictures. I need to call Sam again. She has my work number but hasn't gotten to me yet.

Speaking of Rebecca, if you're interested (or if you're Rebecca!): I've said my piece, and I've received the answer I was looking for and expecting. She knows where to find me if she wants to talk. There's no hard feelings or anything, I just have other things to worry about, and I'm not going to be the only one keeping up contact. It doesn't make sense to me, it never did actually, but I don't like to let friends slip away. If this is what it is to be, then let it be so. I hate it when anyone I was close to fades away, but life is life, and shit happens. I guess Rebecca bothers me because I never reached a conclusion with her that I was comfortable with until now.

Housewarming party on the 15th, remember!

For the four of you that didn't know:

On Saturday, July 15th Vivian and I will be having a combination housewarming/moving party at our new apartment in Kennesaw. Everyone is invited. Contact me via email or phone for more details. At the start of the day there will be the ritual "moving of the damned heavy desk" plus whatever else hasn't been moved earlier in the week. Later on that night is the "chill in the new place while not destroying anything lest Graeme kills you" portion of the fun.

Hurray!

Last night was the second time I've watched "So You Think You Can Dance?" with Mom and Vivian. And liked it.

I'm not sure what this means.

(P.S. American Idol is still one of the worst shows ever conceived.)

Okay, so I just took one of your standard online tests. I answered honestly. The results were so funny that I simply must post part of it. Check my fake livejournal for the full thing.


You scored higher than 99% on Eccentricity
You scored higher than 99% on Confidence
You scored higher than 99% on Kindness

That's pretty much exactly what I would think would happen. I'm insane, arrogant, but I'm not likely to roll right over you unless you give me a reason to.

I'm going to make a feature about this tomorrow and include a bigger and better version of the video, but until then, check out tonight's stupid human tricks on YouTube!

Sadie goes flying!

As cool as that cascade effect in the post below is, I am trying to fix it. In fact, I may have already!

I have not forgotten my obligations, but it has, as always, been busy. Working a full 40 hour week in Alpharetta while trying to get stuff ready to move is a bit of a hassle, to say the least.

All of the major shopping is done for the apartment though, with the total cost of what we didn't already have coming to $231.40, which really isn't bad at all, since that includes:

1. Nice dinnerware (2 sets of service for four, thus equaling service for 8).
   
2. Cambridge Silversmiths flatware with the "Madison" finish (again, 2 sets of service for four).
   
3. A set of stainless steel cookware from Target to get started with.
   
4. A set of Libbey bar glasses (16)
   
5. A set of Farberware knives and block.
   
6. A Dirt Devil Dynamite vacuum, since Erin is taking the one we replaced at the house with the Hoover Fusion (which I love, but damn if the thing isn't expensive).
   
7. Lots of little things not worth mentioning.

Still a few other little things to pick up, but we're mostly set.

Speaking of toys though, Travis and I bought Air Hogs Aero Aces on Sunday based on the recommendation of Ars Technica, and damned if those things aren't a blast. Unfortunately mine broke mysteriously (one engine is now kaputt) while sitting perfectly still with nothing touching it, so I have to take it back and exchange it before I can continue annoying the hell out of dragonflies. Until I get one in the air again I do not feel like a complete human being.

On a penultimate note, my 40-pound "it's not a damn bean bag" LoveSac was delivered today right after I left for work, meaning it's sitting on the porch at the moment. When I get home tonight I shall see if the GameSac is worth the price I paid for it.

On a final note, Jennifer, my boss, who is living in our house on Oakdale and taking care of Vivian's cats, was in an accident on Friday that totaled her car and left her pretty shaken up. She's okay, but she's not been at work the past two days, which is a bit distressing. Vivian's going by to check on the cats tonight, though, so I'll find out more then. She's a very nice lady, and down to earth, so I hope she's not too affected by this. I mean, accidents happen, it wasn't her fault, and the only casuality was a Saturn.

Vivian just moved in with us to live out the month, and the cats went to my boss Jennifer for the month. Hurray!

Start with something in your new major to keep it interesting.

Also, speaking of colleges...guess what arrived today? That's right.

Blagh.

I need to figure out what classes to take when I register again.

Registering for classes at GSU now...feels weird. GOSOLAR is very different from what I've used before, better in about half the areas and worse in the others.

I'm sorry I don't post here much anymore. Jux feels sort of empty without Kenny. But it's in his hands now whether he ever wants to be our friend again.

Today (yesterday) Vivian and I selected an apartment in Poplar Place in Kennesaw. It's about five minutes from where Travis is. It's being held for us, but no lease yet, as we have to actually see the thing before I'll sign anything. All things going well, our current move-in date is July 12.

I moved in to my own deskbicle today, comlpete with computer, chair, phone, pens, highliters, and two boxes of paperclips! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo

First, the Kenny update, for those following along at home: I emailed him, which is pretty much the only thing left I can do, and he's not replied, which is what I expected. I don't know what else to do at this point.

Now the good news. Today at work was awesome, and you want to know why? For just over a week I have been toiling in the hell of "Business Casual." While it's essentially the same thing that I had to wear at the library, I actually felt the need to tuck in my shirt and wear a belt at this place, as it was required. And despite doing it for five years at the library, I never really liked it.

Well today, for the first time in Verizon history, they announced a "summer dress code" that goes so far as to allow shorts and sandals! While I still can't wear any of my arsenal of t-shirts, I can now wear jeans and my boots or Birkenstocks every single damn day to work! And no belt! And if it ever switches back to "winter dress code", I'll be gone anyway!

The weekend flew by. I was finally doing my real job today instead of filing, which was nice, but still...

The apartment search is on in Kennesaw. Part of me doesn't want to move, but that's mostly just because I hate apartments. It's not like I have any choice though, so there you go. I'll live.

I'm going to email Kenny either tonight or tomorrow with my full side of the story and try to talk to him. His cellphone is disconnected (it was his from PA anyway) and I'm still blocked from his AIM, so this is about the only thing left to do that I can think of. If he doesn't want to listen he won't, and there's nothing I can do about that. In fact, I'm pretty sure he'll delete the message without even looking at it.

So far I've spent two days doing nothing but filing (only one papercut!) for 6-8 hours a day with just a smidgen of general training, or maybe the lovely vacation of sitting at a photocopier for two hours. Luckily tomorrow I actually get my desk/cube. By next week they'll be done flogging my library/having a brain experience in organizing and 6 months of back paperwork will be properly put in order in Data Integrity.

The frame for my diploma has come, but no diploma yet.

Thinking about going to Georgia State in the fall is a bit weird, like I can't focus on it right now. All I'm thinking about now is that I have to call my handler at Sapphire tomorrow to ask her how to completely fill out my time card and fax it to them (it's a weird shape, but they must have it faxed!) tomorrow. The other new guy from Sapphire is nice, we spoke for awhile today. He's also going to ditch Verizon in fall for graduate school, although he didn't feel the need to announce the fact ahead of time like I did. It's interesting.

I forgot to mention that I start at Verizon tomorrow (today), and that my advisor at Georgia State just emailed me to let me know that I'm in.

I get the strange urge to work at AppleCare suddenly, after reading that blog about the guy who just quit, and had one of his coworkers come in wearing nothing but a bathrobe and flip flops for months with nothing said. I had no idea that Apple corporate culture was still in "Revenge of the Nerds" mode...but I'm pleased.

*sigh* I just have to wait until I have tenure...

The great Job Search is ended. I start at Verizon at some point next week, after I sign the papers tomorrow and get a drug test.

Sean Paul's Trinity + Tool's 10,000 Days in one playlist == a disturbingly accurate portrayal of my mental state!

So, Kelley blasted me on AIM while I wasn't here suggesting that I'm setting it up so that I look like the victim of the Kenny situation here on Jux. I don't think it's that way at all, personally, but let's look at this. I'm certainly the "victim" of being ignored, something Kenny cannot claim as I have tried to contact him. Kenny is the "victim" of the perceived slight that originated this situation.

While I can be accused of sometimes making things seem more black and white than they might be, I don't think it's the case in thi situation. I've tried to explain myself and make amends, and Kenny ignores me. I don't consider myself the "victim", but I'm not going to lie about what I think on here either, as that serves no purpose. I don't think the post below says anything other than that I'm frustrated that we can't just talk about this.

Searching for jobs you don't want update: In the past several days, I've applied for underwriting and claims specialist jobs at Liberty Mutual, Allstate, and Esurance. Why so much insurance? Hell if I know. I think it sounds like interesting, if soulless, work that I wouldn't mind doing for awhile, but wouldn't mind leaving behind to continue my actual career either.

School update: Graduating technically sometime this week, I'm not sure when. My transcript is already updated to show my degree. 4.0 my final semester, President's List and all.

Kenny update: Still not talking to me. Depressing, now that I have time to think about it. All of this just because he misunderstands something. What's fucked up is that he doesn't want to know what actually happened. 11 years of friendship apparently mean nothing to him. I'm not going to write him off, because I've made that mistake before when someone does something this fucked up to me and regretted it, albeit several years later. Still, five months of sulking over nothing without even an explanation.

Searching for jobs you don't want sucks.

It would be easy if I was searching for something to do long haul, but I'm specifically after something I won't mind doing, but also won't mind dropping in 6 months or so. That's pretty fucking difficult.

Driving to Athens today reminded me of one important thing about Georgia: no matter how much we grow, there's no place in Georgia that's greater than 20 minutes from the middle of ass fuck nowhere, with rusted signs and Camaros sitting in front yards.

The below was a successful experiment to see if I could still ramble on about nothing like I used to. I can. Huzzah!

I think I just realized that the best story ever written using the themes I use best has already been written by someone else.

However, I also think I just found justification to continue my second novel that I abandoned about two years ago.

Also, I bought new boots today. Yesterday actually, I'm just still awake. The pair being replaced I bought for the dance I never went to with Rebecca back in November of 2001. I've lived in two houses with those boots and worked almost all of my years at the library. I was wearing those boots in Rome, Pompeii, Florence, Siena, Venice, Sorrento, Naples, Pennsylvania, and of course Montepulciano. San Franciso.

I lost Rebecca in those boots, met Vivian in those boots. Founded Jux in those boots. I watched Kenny disappear for reasons only he truly understands in those boots. My puppy has only known those boots.

I could have done a retrospective like this when I changed watches for the first time since fifth grade back in 2004, but I didn't. Why?

The boots aren't dead yet. They're still going to be worn every day. But they're worn out, for sure. And over time my new pair will replace the old in more and more activities until they've become completely daily wear.

A lot can happen in five years. Especially if you're the kind of idiot who dwells in his past and never forgets a single part of it.

Did I mention that I have one paper to turn in on Monday, and after that...I'm graduated? Done? Finished?

Well, with undergraduate work anyway.

I was informed yesterday that my senior thesis is likely to be used in later classes.

That's kinda sorta almost awesome, I think, maybe.

You can tell I'm real sure about this.

REPUGNANT SLIME

Royal Philips...what kind of backwoods fecal-cut HeroinMethCrack are you smoking!? I don't think I would blame anyone for resorting to piracy if this brand of "legitimate" TV viewing came to fruition.

Are you also patenting the leather belt-straps, catheters, and eyeclamps that will keep us forcibly in rapt attention and awe of the advertiser's sweet, sweet, enchanting ambrosia?

"FILE SHARING IS KILLING OUR BUSINESS!"
No. Corporations and lobbyists like you and your ilk are responsible. I honestly hope you succeed just so you can fail spectacularly and end these fruitless pursuits to make us pay for things we are already paying for, and make us rent the things we already own.

The broadcast flag, analog downsampling, captive audience programming, and the general dilution of consumer rights will only end in a backlash so fierce your revunues will hang themselves from your bottom lines. There's only so much you can trick Joe Consumer into believing he's supposed to take before his pocketbook overcomes his ignorance.

It's going to be an interesting few years.

With my thesis finished and only a few more papers to do before the end of the semester, I've been thinking about Kenny again.

I was thinking about Kenny while walking to my car and all that's changed in my life in the past six months when I decided to call Rebecca for the first time in a long while. It wasn't so bad. She'll be back in Canton soon.

That's...about it for my day. The first draft of my paper is on Jux if you care to find it, and I'll be posting my final draft as a feature.

I'm in a staring contest with the last two pages of my senior thesis, the conclusion chapter. I know what I want to say, I know how to say it, I just can't summon up the energy to actually do it after working on this thing for days (well, months really). I'm going to play a round or two of DDR and finish this bastard.

Sweet, sweet vindication:

Q: Why is it that some people can smell dead ants, and some people can't?

A: I'm a bit unsure of your question. I'm not sure if you're referring to the smell of dead, decomposing ants or an ant that has just be killed. I assume you mean the latter.

Ants have a substance they produce called formic acid which is unpleasant to most animals. This acid provides safety from many predators since it is disagreeable when eaten although flickers are an exception and are especially fond of ants. If you kill an ant, especially if you crush it, the smell of the formic acid is quite apparent. I never knew that some people were unable to smell this substance but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that for some people, they simply don't have the physical ability to pick it up. Maybe it's a little like being color blind but in reference to smell not color.

-- John Wiessinger on December 15, 2003 at 12:21 PM

Q: Do ants have a natural scent? I have little black ants invading my home that have a sweet smell to them.

A: Ants have a variety of secretions that are used in defense, offense, and communication. Crushed ants may smell of formic acid but this is not a sweet odor. Most animals don't like the formic acid and avoid ants although flickers are noted for feeding heavily on them - they must like the taste.

-- John Wiessinger on June 10, 2003 at 04:34 PM

I really can't write even semi-Fantasy stories. I like them, but I can never make them go where I want to, like I want to.

I've got some ideas, but mostly I've got frustration.

On Saturday I finally cracked and went insane, ranting and raving about my printer (a beloved Canon S750 that I had simply beat to death printing manuscripts) and how it was impossible to get anything out of it that looked even semi-professional with all the lines and blotches the thing would print. I had no choice at the time but to print everything necessary for my GSU application as best I could and send it off that morning.

That afternoon, though, I recieved from my parents a new Brother HL-2040 laser printer. I finally have a damned laser printer. In exchange, I turned over the S750 to them to replace their ancient and decrepit (and frankly, broken) DeskJet 722C that came with my 333mhz Pentium II back in 1998 or so. My printouts are now crazily crisp and fresh.

I'm sure the Canon could be fixed by replacing the print head and dusted really well, but I print out so much as a student and a writer that an inkjet just really doesn't make much sense anymore. I bought the Canon because it had very fast text printing and cheap ink costs. I left it in greyscale most of the time to save color ink that I never really needed to use anyway. The thing wasn't a photoprinter and was never very good and printing them. Besides, I can either go to Walgreens to print out photos with their dye sublimation printers or I bought my sister Erin a photo printer two years ago for Christmas. I've got it covered.

Opera Browser For The Nintendo DS!!!
More Info: Here

A Scary Thing Happened - A Coloring Book For Kids From FEMA!

Dear God, my poor feature! Why, server, why do you think me rather delicious?!?

I hope it's bulimic...

Grad school update: Application to Georgia State complete, final admissions packet going in in a few days when my recommenders get me their letters.

Emory is a no-go, although they at least sent me a semi-personalized letter saying that they had far more applicants this year than normal, and that many otherwise qualified students couldn't be accepted because of that.

Erm, drat. I approved it, but it didn't show up in features. The server ate it. That sucks.

Okay, it's a few months since anything happened on here. So I made something. It took an extremely long time for something so small (an hour), so you'd better laugh at it, or I'll skin you naked!

Okay, I'm pretty sure now I've just flat-out gotten better at DDR. Tsugaru was in DDRMAX2, and I've [i]never[/i] been able to beat it on heavy. The exact same song is in DDR Extreme, same steps and everything, and after practicing it four or five times and failing I just beat it and got a B rank.

That feels gooood, let me tell you. I could pass Maxx Unlimited on Heavy (if I was lucky), but I could never do Tsugaru. Now it's done. Yeeeah.

I was thinking today about the old web. Back in high school I used to read Daily Radar every day, for example. It's been five years since Daily Radar was shut down. Hardly anyone remembers it now. So very sad.

My semi-intensive DDR re-training has me up to 90% of my old skillset, plus I've picked up a few I didn't have before. I need to get my full endurance back, still, but instead of practicing on songs I was good at before I'm only doing them to warm up and then hitting shit like Kakumei. Works great. This time, I'm shooting to be able to get at least a C on Maxx Unlimited on Heavy. Pipe dream? Maybe. But I'll try.

Baby Bush toys.

I'm only mad that I didn't do it first.

I've been playing DDR for hours. Despite my lack of any money incoming, I finally broke down and bought Extreme (not 2).

I've been in a very bad mood lately. No job, Kenny's still mad at me for what is essentially (if I understand Kelley correcting) a gigantic misunderstanding, graduate school has become a pain in the ass that may be an indefinite pain in the ass, I didn't get to see Samantha while she was in town for Spring Break, for the first time in a long while I don't have any money...

It's frustrating, and extremely so. There's nothing I can really do about it but try to keep this from becoming senioritis and affecting my ability to do school work. One of my classes is already done, another doesn't meet anymore, so that's at least a little okay.

Or maybe it's Oaky. Like a tree. Very, very oaky.

Actually, I can tell you that the number in the title is (0.2776).

Just in case you thought I'd forgotten, the fourth segment of Counting to Zero is almost done. Telling you the title would give a small part of the plot away, but I will have you know that I'm listening to "Otsegolectric" by Static-X a hell of a lot to get into the mood for much of it. That's a clue.

Nothing in life is harder than accepting that there will probably never be another Chrono game.

Then again, maybe it's for the best. Chrono Cross was good, but it lacked some of the heart of the original.

However, the least Square could do is stop preventing people from remaking the game. I used to love Square, but lately, since the Enix thing...meh.

Being without a job is interesting. I have a week of beard growth for the first time ever, really. And...not much else.

I mean, Vivian passed her license test and is driving on her own now, which is awesome, but my spring break was personally spent doing jack shit nothing.

Yes, yes you are.

I use that thing every chance I get :D

A couple of years ago a Best Buy tech left a Fluke multimeter at my house during a job, and never came back to get it despite us informing them where it was. So I gave it to Travis, who seemed to be on the verge of drooling over the thing.

Now I know why. I was looking through the Craftsman Tool catalog for 2006, and the very cheapest one of those things goes for is $149.99. Damn I'm a good friend.

It's official! I am jobless! Hurray for free time!

Booray for the small student loan I'm going to have to take out.

I may have just done one of the following three things:

1) I may have quit.
2) I may have just transferred myself back to Canton
3) I may have just called the administration's bluff about cutting my hours again.

I'm just not sure which one yet.

The new mac minis are dead sexy, I must admit. If only they had AMD chips inside.

So, no UGA and no Madison. I'm pretty much done, then.

flogeibiput

Battlestar OMG +++

Now that the nerd reply is over, I will calmly state that Battlestar kicked all kind of ass tonight. Even more than last week, which contained serious amounts of kickage.

I'm sorry, but no one can claim to be even vaguely civilized when they're rioting over a fucking cartoon.

This is worse than that whack-job priest in Florida attacking a stuffed Pikachu with a sword during a sermon. None of you, not a single person involved in this stupid Mohawkmud (please don't kill me) controversy has even the vaguest grip on what I like to call "reality." If you put this much energy into making money, you could have bought the papers running the comics by now and stopped this.

From Edmunds:

"Slated to make its public debut in two weeks at the Geneva Motor Show, the Mazdaspeed 3 — or Mazda 3 MPS, as it's called in Europe — shares one key ingredient with its larger performance-oriented sibling, the Mazdaspeed 6. That's the turbocharged direct-injection, 2.3-liter, four-cylinder engine that delivers a whopping 274 horsepower and 280 pound-feet of torque.

Anticipated price tag: Well under $25,000."

I do believe my next car has been decided for me, since I was already 86% set on getting a Mazda 3 to replace my Grand Prix.

So where is Counting to Zero going?

I'd by lying if I said I had no plans for serious moral ambiguity, but I'd also be lying if I said I knew exactly what I was saying at this point.

Other weirdness: I've developed a fondness for Filter extremely recently, although right now it only applies to certain songs.

Why is this weird? I've hated that band for years. I blame Will Hankinson for only playing the bad songs, or something. SquiZZ has set me right, as they did on Korn.

I worry about Kenny.

Let's get a few things straight.

Point #1: The Underworld movie series is a waste of film

Point #2: The Underworld soundtrack series has now brought us not one, but two Danny Lohner/James Maynard Keenan collaborations under Puscifer and now is the only way to get the totally fucking hat new Lacuna Coil song "Our Truth" early.

Graeme: Confused.

In a weird turn of events, Rebecca contacted me today AND I bumped into Steve, my roommate from Italy, at random in a hallway at Kennesaw. It'd been two and a half years since last we spoke. Weird.

I just drove to school during an honest-to-goodness snow storm. And then I walked to class in it. And the snow is already sticking to the ground in places on campus and such.

This is a first. The driving and the snow on campus, I mean. Not snow.

Introducing Vivian's new car, as of yet unnamed, a 1995 Mitsubishi Galant.

To go with the myspace rant I posted minutes ago below: I called a "How's My Driving?" number for the first time today.

So I'm driving down I-575 here in Georgia to Woodstock, when this dumbass dude in a beat up old Maxima starts tailgating me while swerving back and forth talking on his cellphone. I mean, he's right on my fucking bumper, and he's obviously not paying too much attention to which direction his car is going in. I finally manage to get into the left hand lane away from this idiot and get up to speed. He follows me, and sticks right on my ass.

Right around this time the highway opens into three lanes for about a quarter mile with a truck lane to the right. Suddenly I see out of the corner of my eye a piece of shit old white Ranger flying up this lane, obviously hauling ass for all his four-banger is worth to gain those three car lengths. The lane ends and the Ranger gets back into what is now the right hand lane.

Only, this isn't good enough for him. He immediately swings into my lane. This is a problem because my car was currently phsyically occupying the space his truck seemed to desire. I swerve over to the side a bit and start to slam on my brakes, but wait! There's moron boy on the cellphone behind me! I pray he's paying attention and brake anyway to avoid flying out into the grass, and the truck barely squeaks by. Moron boy behind me drops his cell phone in shock and awe and managed to avoid adding to his collection of dents.

But wait, what's this! Lo, Ranger Fucker has a huge bumper sticker! My word, could someone be so stupid as to try to run someone off the road while having a "how's my driving?" stick plastered on their ass?

Yes, yes they could. So sweet was the justice I could taste that I whipped out my own cell phone, breaking my own rule about not using it while driving, and called the fucker in.

Without swerving.

You would think my problems would be over at that point, but you'd be wrong. I nearly got rear-ended AGAIN not five minutes later on a 25 mile per hour road when the Econoline business truck behind me apparently ignored the turn signal flashing on my car's ass, as well as the one on the car in front of me. How do you nearly skid into another car on a 25 mile per hour road? Gah!

Unfortunately I made my turn in such a haste I didn't get the phone number off of that truck.

And now, to satisfy the crowd that calls for profanity in rants: fuck shit piss jesus hate mother dog hell yuppie cunt magnet.

What the hell is with people and the trendy website du jour? Livejournal? Myspace? Facebook? Friendster?

Really, I just don't get it. I don't have to keep inventing new places online to hang out with my friends. First there was IRC, then there was AIM. Simple.

I don't have to create new places to meet people in real life. I just act like myself and they gravitate to me because I am, quite simply, the greatest human being to ever live.*

Perhaps this is the most interesting thing to ever happen in the universe. Geeks have become so cool to normal people that they're trying to invade our territory. Dumbasses on myspace trying to create some sort of "webblogpagejournalbookface" are just as rediculous as the 98-pound freshman trying out for football to get cheerleaders. Jesus.

* This could be a small exaggeration.

Will Fix Computers For Sexual Favors

Thousands of geeks are going "why didn't I think of that?"

I think this chapter proves without a doubt that just because you've read previous versions of this story doesn't mean you have any idea what the fuck is going to happen in this one.

Adding to this week's "Block o' Weird", I just had a dream where I married Samantha. Except Samantha was the princess of some kingdom or another, and it was an arranged marriage. So there you go.

All of this school work is giving me a very strange sort of writers block. I just can't seem to get anything to come out on paper like I want it.

What a day year so far.

Paralyzing school work? Check
Good friend acting crazy? Check
Semi-random dangerous car repairs? Check
Less money? Check
The triumphant return of grad-school anxiety? Check

Well, the vibration in my front wheel that I thought was a thrown wheel weight turned out to be separating tire tread! After the horror of that revelation set in, I purchased two new tires at Canton Tire and Wheel. Once again they went above and beyond to treat me nicely. They were perfectly willing to let me drive off with the tires without paying, content that I would come back and settle later. I paid then, but just the willingness to trust me had I not had enough money on me (I did drive in thinking it was a much cheaper problem, after all) is quite astounding in the car world. This isn't the first time they've done something like that for me, either.

Progress report: Still a'coming.

Five classes plus work plus longer travel time than ever before really, really fucking suck.

This is just one of those things I can't resist. Work continues on my third installment in the series for Jux, delayed greatly by stupid school and stupid work, but above you can see the work-in-progress cover for the first collection, which will encompass (I believe, at present) the first six stories. I'm debating having story six availible only in print form at first. I'm not sure if I'm ready to take that step, yet.

I'm likely to change the font on that cover, but that's the basic design and color scheme I've decided on. With luck, I'll actually bother to put my name on the spine.

The last mission of Advance Wars: Dual Strike is a real cast-iron bitch, let me tell you.

Hung out with Scott and Travis (+ Vivian later) on Friday night, where multiple bottles of wine were consumed and board games played. Also, for the first time since god-knows-when in high school, we played truth or dare. And never-have-I-ever. Fucked up, I tell you.

It was weird without Kenny there, though. Apparently he told Kelley, who also hates me now, that I threatened to have Vivian kick him out if he let Kelley come over. Since I never said any such thing, my continuing confusion and weird detached sadness over the whole deal continues. I'm blocked from speaking to him on AIM, and I doubt anything better would come of me calling him. As I told Travis, this would be a lot easier if I was pissed off at him too, but I'm not, so I just have to sit here and wonder what the hell got into him that made him leave overnight.

Combined with the school schedule from hell that is driving me out of my home, and working in Woodstock now, times are not overly pleasant here in Hefner land, but I'm making the most of it.

Another day, another octopus.

Napping with my puppy, thinking about what's wrong with the world and what's right.

Quantum entanglement on a chip.

Nothing like quantum mechanics to make you go "Holy shit, awesome!" and "wow I'm dumb!" at the same time.

Bwarrr harr harr harrrrrr. Yarrr, the Kennesaw, she be a fine ship.

There's a very good chance I may be moving to Kennesaw. Stay tuned.

I had to drop my easy-as-cake CSIS 2300 free elective for a required easy-as-cake Sociology 2105 course that I somehow missed (actually, I misread the catalog as saying that one of my lower division major requirements would cover it, a mistake my advisor apparently also made).

The only real difference is that my intelligence will be slightly less insulted, and I have five classes I have to actually be present for rather than four and an online course.

We're reading Everything's Eventual for our first assignment in American Pop Culture. Stephen King. Bwahahhahahahahahahhahahahahahahhah
*gasp*
ahhahahahhahahahahahahahaa

I just beat Shadow of the Colossus, a game that everyone else on the internet was shitting themselves over. My review is not quite so rosy.

It's a beautiful game once you get out into the world, and the Colossi are outstanding, so why the hell is the temple so ugly? The textures are so bad they remind me of the caves in the first Tomb Raider.

Other than that, I thought there were a lot of tedious parts. The game is essentially 16 boss battles with travel time, and the travel time is the problem. Yes, it's great that it's a huge seamless world. Maybe I'm just not fit for serene traveling.

I don't know, maybe it's not the traveling. Something just felt missing. The ending makes it abundantly clear why the story doesn't start until the very end of the game, but lacking any real motive for killing these guys, while old school, just makes the experience feel hollow at first. I spend the first two-thirds of the game, which I was very excited about playing, trying to convince myself to keep going, that I had to at least see the ending.

Overall I give it a 2 out of 4. The idea itself is awesome, but it needs something just a little bit more "spicey" to get it going. The game is fun, the atmosphere is nice, but it just didn't completely click with me. I'm glad I played it, but I doubt I'll ever play through it again.

And that's my mini-review of the game a lot of people want to call the Game of the Year. Right now I say Resident Evil 4 for that.

I'm not trying to cover anything. We really don't know where you are or why.

Impressive work trying to cover your ass, ass.

I wasn't going to post anything about this at all on Jux until everything got settled, but since Jux also serves as a historical record, note that Kenny moved out of Vivian's house on Thursday in something of a rush, for reasons not entirely known. Travis and I don't know where he is or what he's doing. We're concerned.

And that's all that's going to be said about that, here or in the forum. Jux is neutral ground.

Well, damn. That book ended 60 pages sooner than I thought it would. George R. R. Martin used one of my own favorite tricks against me!

The problem with the story I'm writing is that it is not, by nature, epic.

Reading A Feast for Crows while trying to plan it out is very, very bad.

Coming up [title subject to change]:

As Far From God (1.0083)

I was looking through the Narchive trying to find a quote to reveal how much better life is now than it was in 2002, when I discovered this one:

"And my day was made last Monday when my friend Rebecca asked "And this is what the game looks like when you're playing it?" when I was showing her Resident Evil on the GameCube. My response: "I am playing it.""

The REmake was definitely a beautiful game, and it still is. I'd forgotten about that exact moment, but I do remember it quite well now. It's not quite as memorable as when I was showing Samantha Silent Hill 2 and she jumped sky high and screamed when a nurse game around the corner with a pipe in her hand, but it's an interesting memory just the same.

Speaking of dinner in the post below, we discussed Ashleigh Gay. I miss her sometimes. Dozens of people have contacted us after googling their names, and if you do that, do me a favor and contact us, alright? It's been over a year since the last time I even had word of you, much less spoke to you.

Speaking of both Rebecca and people not speaking to me, I've pretty much given up on ever speaking to Ms. Traylor again. Vivian will be happy about that, but it strikes me as a bit sad, since I don't like to let friendships die. I've done my part in trying to contact people over the years though, and I'm not exactly a hard person to reach. Any person reading this website can find at least two ways to contact me at any moment, and my cell phone number hasn't changed in five years.

I'm pleased to say that even though the weekly Mage night fell through, I no longer feel disconnected from Mr. Scott Hankinson, something that bothered me for years. He's doing quite well now, with jobs and girls and all the things that make life interesting.

Part of me really wants to go to Madison later this year, and part of me really wants to go to Emory. I don't want to leave these people behind. I'll have Vivian and Sadie with me, but it's not really the same as having all of my friends around. Sure, I'll come and visit, but it won't be the same. New friends will be found, but I'm running out of people who can look at me and go: "I remember him when he was a loser and we used to sit on the roof of my parent's house and talk about girls."

Why this should upset me I don't know, but I'm a man who values time invested.

This week has been awesome. A good chat between friend, a dinner with those beloved, a good book to read, a place to work without the evil eyes looking down upon me, all the time in the world to play videogames...it's even a warm winter.

Life, as they say, has been good so far in 2006.

The best thing about today?
My mother just moved the hell outta' my (& Keni's) place!!!
FWEE!!!


*Mandatory dancing*

Alfonso, my third-best friend from my new Animal Crossing town and the only one I'd taught to say a new phrase yet ("finarfin"), just informed me that he's moving away on New Year's Day. On the one hand I'm sad. On the other, at least they tell you ahead of time now and spend a day packing boxes, rather than just disappearing like in the GameCube game.

I kinda miss my GameCube town playing this new one. Frighton doesn't have nearly as many interesting people in it yet as Canton had. Maybe I'll get lucky and Alfonso the Alligator will be replaced by Boots the Alligator, my best friend from my old town.

So long as Peanut doesn't leave.

Yeah, that's how I spend my break at work today. Playing Animal Crossing.

I find it interesting that I can get responses from people I know only online, and then barely, than I can from people I used to be good friends with.

For this I blame two things. First, the majority of my actions in the year of our lord 2002.

Secondly, most people are dumb.

So yeah... I've been missing. For some weird reason I recently had found myself in the middle of some alternate universe with giant glowing feline heads.
Feature soon, baby, I promise. Have I ever lied to you? Don't say that... I love you, baby. Don't make me put lye in your foot lotion again, baby. You know how much money that stuff costs. Now come over to daddy and give me some sugah!

My word. I just lapped people in an online Mario Kart match.

That feels goooooooooooooooood. Especially since I'm using the slowest Kart in the game. Boosting all over the place for the win!

Dude, I've got a few extra wireless cards. You can have your router back, and I can set us up the bomb network. (Posted from my little brothes PSP: the most annoying text entry system ever.)

So, my internet has been down for two days. This all started when I discovered that my router is completely incompatible with the Nintendo DS. I have another one that is compatible, but unfortunately it's at Vivian's place, and they're using it. So I'm faced with a delimma:

1) Buy a Nintendo USB connector even though I already own a compatible router.
2) Make someone else buy a wireless router.

They changed the drifting in Mario Kart DS purely to annoy me, I'm sure. Blue sparks should be boost, not orange! Why reverse it? Why?

Oh yeah, I got my blue Nintendo DS. Expect a full haul list to appear in the Forum Juxarium soon. Here's a hint: vidyagames.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Nothing like coming home to the smell of burnt circuits. My computer will be out of commission for awhile. Mew.

Ping?

(I'm still here :)

I just finished I Met Myself Today (0.2981) less than five minutes ago. The bad news is, I'm tired as hell, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to do an edit on it. Thus, while not the weekend release I hoped for on the forum, it will still be put online within 24 hours or so.

This one is 23 pages long, just so you know.

And now in a special PDF-edition that looks much better than web formatting: Counting to Zero (0.3745).

I fixed a few typos in it as well.

Fiction Writing grade posted: A (that was a given)
Medieval Europe grade posted: A (*cackle*

I may have struggled, I may have worried, but I beat you, semester from hell. I kicked your fucking ass. I laughed at your pain.

Yeah, so for the first time ever I have a B (almost certainly) in a German course as opposed to an A. But I'm pretty damn sure you have to be fluent in the language to get an A in one of Frau Smith's 3000-4000 level German courses. I was in there with [i]native speakers[/i].

This 3.75 insures my graduation cum laude. That's all that matters.

The semester from hell is over. Long live the semester from hell! No more ridiculously difficult German tests!

I just found out I made a [b]98[/b] on my final in Dr. Voogt's World Since 1945, a cast-iron bitch of a class. This catapulted me into an A from a high B. I'm stunned. I love the mad Dutchman, but he's the hardest grader in the department, perhaps besides Dr. Scott. To give you an example, here are the grades I have for that class:

Final Grade: A-
Test 1: 82
Gaddis test: 79
Test 2: 90
Gaddis review: 86
Final (Test 3): 98

This makes the second time I've gotten an A in one of his classes. I could cry.

As I cackle evilly, I know that the holidays are really here, and I am cheered. Classes ended yesterday. I have two days of finals next week, but after that it's just me and my last semester at Kennesaw State University, ever.

Kick if you must, but my steel-belted, titanium reinforced posterior will parry any futile attempts at buttock soccer.

I typed the damn thing, and yet I still keep reading that as "threats are coming."

Not to disappoint myself, I've decided to announce that I will be kicking Travis' lily ass at some point in the future.

Treats are coming.

Sorry about that brief double-post. My internet connection here in the Social Science building is very flaky.

Such a fun time. What have I been up to?

I just finished writing a five page research paper. Five pages is normally jack shit to me, buy unfortunately I had to write this one in German. This was my last big project for the semester, though. After today when I do my presentation on it I'm more or less home free. Just finals left.

All of my Christmas shopping is done as well, other than my mom, who is being stubborn about choosing something. I think I finally figured out what I want to get her, though. Some of them are going to be great surprises, some of them were picked from lists. I can post nothing about what I've chosen right now though, obviously.

Last night I finished my two-week reading project as well. I'm now up through Storm of Swords in the Song of Ice and Fire. I love this series. It moves like a glacier (or so it seems, although three years have actually taken place), but the characters are very deep. Best of all, people die with reckless abandon! Why is this so good? Because it gives actual tension and fear to scenes involving danger. And scenes of utter complacency, too. You never know when you're going to die at random. Just like real life.

There will be a feature tonight or tomorrow. Sorry about the inactivity. Everyone on Jux has a lot on their plates right now.

So...how're you?

Rome ended tonight until 2007 or so.

Man, all I have to say is :(, and the reason for that came entirely out of left field.

You are the children of a dead planet, earthdeirdre, and this death we do not comprehend. We shall take you in, but may we ask this question--will we too catch the planetdeath disease?

Lady Deirdre Skye
"Conversations with Planet"

Pat Robertson is one of the worst human beings alive on the planet today. I'd say he's worse than that couple that kept a teenaged girl trapped in their bedframe and sold her for sex on the internet.

I would also like to call out Dave from Oklahoma City as one of the worst people on the planet. Fuck you, Dave.

Definitely improving. One shot per eye this morning to get them in, and it only took two minutes to get them out just now.

I just took my contacts out after getting to work, having worn them since 8:00 this morning. I set a new personal record for removing them, taking 7 minutes total. 6 of those minutes were spent with my right eye, which is so much more difficult than my left for some reason.

Putting them in is pretty easy, though, so at least there's that. But once they're in I don't want to face the prospect of having to remove them again. I don't even notice I'm wearing them, so I'm wondering if I even need to go through the adjustment period. But doctors know more than me.

They're awesome, though. As I told Travis, due to the fact that glasses are never really clean and such, it was like going from 480i to 1080p. Astounding difference.

Dear Jux,

I'm wearing contacts now.

Love,
Graeme

On the one hand I'm pissed off, because I just got to campus and found out my only class today was cancelled.

On the other hand I just had the easiest registration period ever (unless you count the emails to the head of the History department that allowed me to add the senior seminar without the prereqs). I typed in the numbers, they added, I was done. So simple some of the patrons that come in to the library probably could have done it.

Unfortunately, I'm now stuck in the student center until it's time for my eye doctor appointment. Fucking joy.

And now for something completely different: I am experimenting with OpenOffice.org 2.0 right now. So far so good. There are a few things about it that irk me, but that's more my perceptions of how things should work after using Word for god knows how many years than actual bugs with the program. What really bothers me is only having a "print" or "web" view; I prefer the "normal" view. Oh well. Also, I can't seem to change the default margin size.

I've decided to write my next story entirely within it though, so we'll see how that works.

Arglebargle is a really cool word.

For everything else, I say: "This, too, will pass."

Arglbargl...

I quit. Jux is over.

So...how are you liking your weekly updates, j0?
Did I spell liking properly? Who knows? Not me! I never lost my troll.
On another note, who wants free kittens? Preggers is about to expolodx0rs!

On Saturday I felt it coming, and took my jacket out of my car.

Yesterday it was fucking cold.

Today, I am wearing that jacket for the first time. It's true. Winter has come. On the one hand, I fucking hate the cold. On the other, this means that Christmas is coming, and I love Christmas like my dog loves chewing on your damned hand.

I just totally owned at least the majority of Medieval European History midterm, thanks in small part to the fact that started playing Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion over the weekend. It's a great way to help yourself remember little things like Limitanei ;)

I only wish I'd gotten to play it yesterday...such withdrawals...

Vivian has been trying to post things for a while now, but she forgot how. Sorry about my lack of features....they're made and ready, only stuck in their computer prison.

Man, I really need to write something here.

It's unfortunate what has happened to Jux updates, but something really had to give. I take five courses for the first time ever next semester, which will interfere with work even more. But then my undergraduate career is finally over, a full year after many of my friends.

Fuckers didn't have to work though.

"You idiot, did you think I was going to check out before you?"

I <3 Relm.

But not as much as Kefka. That guy needs a statue built in his honor in New York somewhere.

It seems I am increasingly exiled to Woodstock.

Is it permanent? I know not.

Wow. Yeah, okay, I'll have to fix that one later when I get home.

To make matters worse, when he paid for his copies he spit on his hand to get out a dollar bill. What the fuck? I had to take it very carefully indeed. I thought about spitting on the dimes I was giving him back as change, but decided that might not be in the best interest of continued employment.

This message brought to you by the fact that I really, really hate it when deaf old people scream in my face. For example:

IS YOUR COPIER NOT WORKING!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!??!++++!111!!1o1neneoneoneone

Disenchanted much?

Yeah, I stopped the German on here. Not because I don't want to do the German, but because I don't have much to say at the moment. I'll start it back up tomorrow.

Oh my fucking god, I've got it! It's been bugging me since I saw Serenity, but I finally know why Kaylee seemed so familiar!

She was in fucking Space Cases on Nickelodeon! That's right! Hah!

Mediocre movie. Worth seeing, not worth paying to see.

I hate my professors this semester. Really, really despise.

Yeah, I've been under a bunch of stress, but one of them is new at this crap and is pointing out stuff on essays that no other professor ever has as a problem (using contractions is suddenly, magically bad? I didn't think this was 10th grade lit class, my bad!)

Yeah, yeah. Arg and all that. Not a big problem, just annoying. There's plenty of time to correct all this crap.

Geek night just had the largest monopoly Free Parking jackpot in recorded history. $3,982.

Yes, you read that right.

So after watching Advent Children twice in two days, and playing Final Fantasy X-2 for awhile tonight, my latent nerd has been reactivated despite Square's best efforts for years to kill it. (XI? What the fuck man?)

Best party ever:

3-person (FF 7,8)
Terra, Yuna, Celes

4-person (FF...lots of them)
Terra, Yuna, Celes, Squall (Lionheart > X Cut)

5-person (FFIV)
Terra, Yuna, Celes, Squall, Tidus

7-person instant-switch turn-based (FFX)
Terra, Yuna (X, not X-2), Celes, Squall, Tidus, Cloud, and Mog just because he's cool.

So, yeah. This is perhaps working now?
It's been very broken and frustrating lately.


Will this mean regular updates? I can't contain my excitement.

Advent Children is the single greatest example of fan-service in the history of mankind. The story is pretty nonsensical and pointless, but it's awesome to see a Final Fantasy style fight in real time with a big budget. This is the real Final Fantasy: The Movie...now let's just hope that they make one out of a better game.

Still, Tifa and Yuffie are totally awesome, to this day. Cloud was much less annoying here than he was in the game.

But to repeat a point from above, with all of the FF7-love going on (hell, even Final Fantasy X-2 was part of it), there sure as hell better be some expansions on Final Fantasy 6.

Gestern hatten wir die Party. Sie war sehr spaß, aber Kelley wurde verletztet. Wir spielten "Red Rover." Zufällig schlug ich sie in ihrem Auge mit meiner Schulter. So, jetzt hat Kelley ein schwarzes Auge.

Ich muss heute viele amerikanische Geschichte lesen. Morgen habe ich ein Test.

Just in case we have any new readers seeing this site for the first time....

We actually are a primarily english-speaking website! Honest! ;)

Ich habe jetzt drei Lettern von Empfehlung. Bald muss ich meine Anwendung ausfüllen. Jedoch, ich weiße nicht meine GRE Kerbe.

Dieser Nachmittag haben wir ein Geburstag Party. Es soll sehr spaß ist. Wir will sehen.

Ich denke, ich will ein tägliches deutsches Journal schreiben. Hoffentlich will es meinen Deutsch verbessern.

Tag muss ich Vivian zu ihre Uni fahren. Dann, Battlestar. Huzzah!

I'm deep.

No, seriously. I was just mentally revising the Church of Graeme doctrines for the first time in awhile.

Deep, baby.



Actually, I'm still stunned by the one thing that has ever happened to me that has left me unbalanced for more than, say, a month*. Stupid grad school. Relationships with friends, family, and girls are easy to separate myself from and deal with (although sometimes the modifier eventually should be added to clarify the statement), because I can always fall back on the one thing that I've had my entire life, my mind. I may not be the greatest at math, but I can attack the social sciences like few others, and I have achieved a large degree of control over my physical urges and emotions, sometimes through hard practice.

Can I immolate myself? No. But I'm cool under pressure and I deal well when presented with a crisis.

But this scenario is questioning my intelligence, or at least my academic value. None of the worst emotional crisises I've faced* in the past have managed to undermine my control like that. Those were over the top assaults; overwhelming but not sublimely destructive. This is a unique experience, and one I'm only slowly dealing with as I clear one hurtle after another, knowing there's always a chance I'll trip on the next one.

*(See entry: Ryann Frye, Rebecca Traylor; year 2001.)

Well, it looks like the staff writer news poster is broken. But the writer features apparently work!

On a lighter note: the new Chinese place here in Jasper is so good I think I gave birth to Kelley's triplets.

To quote someone on an online forum I frequent:

"How long did it take for the US congress to re-convene in order to vote for Terri Schiavo?

How long did it take for them to make it back to Washington to decide how to help from a national fucking disaster? Why on Earth did we not see a Congressional aid bill passed until FUCKING THURSDAY?

I've been mad at our government for quite a while. I'm no fan of Iraq. I don't particularly like our President. I don't care for a lot of the things that our government does. But this is the last goddamned straw. My hands are quite literally shaking with rage over what a clusterfuck this situation has become. My only comfort lies in the fact that others seem to be feeling the way I do."

Estimates of 40,000 dead, and it took five days for even basic help to arrive. And it's still not enough.

Let's impeach the fucking president.

So did I. Same accident.

Yeah? Well I spent an hour and a half in traffic today, instead of the usual 35 minutes, because of some accident.

So right now I'm purposely not posting here or on the forum because of what's happening with gas prices, New Orleans, and everything else.

There's enough bottled rage in humanity to seep into groundwater, destroying several ecosystems. No need for that anywhere.

Shit, why should we help the people still stranded on rooftops? THERE'S FUCKING FREE DVD PLAYERS EVERYWHERE! I'm looking at you especially, Mr. Badge.

And the motherfuckers who manufactured a gas shortage here in Atlanta by freaking out and filling up drums of the shit, driving prices up to $6.00 a gallon in Midtown, you have fulfilled your own prophecy.

Way to fuck it up for the rest of us.

Well, I take the GRE on Friday.

After just taking a practice test again, I'm officially afraid again.

A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH...RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.

MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER. AT
LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL...LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY
DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL.
PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD
FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE
BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE...INCLUDING SOME
WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY...A
FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.

AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD...AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH
AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY
VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE
ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS...PETS...AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE
WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.

POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN
AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING
INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY
THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING...BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW
CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE
KILLED.

AN INLAND HURRICANE WIND WARNING IS ISSUED WHEN SUSTAINED WINDS NEAR
HURRICANE FORCE...OR FREQUENT GUSTS AT OR ABOVE HURRICANE FORCE...ARE
CERTAIN WITHIN THE NEXT 12 TO 24 HOURS.

ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET...DO NOT VENTURE
OUTSIDE!

So sayeth NOAA. It's the end of the world for New Orleans...if you pray, pray for the thousands. Otherwise just hope against hope.

Jesus Christ, this is scary.

The birthabration went well. There was an awesome lunch, and awesome Battlestar, awesome gifts (including Deutsche Pokemonspielkarte!)

Try new Coca-Cola Zero! All of the horrid aftertaste of Diet Coke with none of the burning acid overtaste!

Commuting again every day leaves me with just this to say:

Woodstock is the aborted fetal tissue of Georgia society.

That is all. My birthday is tomorrow, and I will be greatly aged again. Hopefully I'll settle in to this new schedule soon and I won't feel like I'm going bat-shit crazy anymore.

And so here we are. School, work, et al.

We're back to Mage. It took four years, but I've apparently come full circle, only this time all the cute couples are doing a lot less note passing and a lot more fucking.

On the other hand: God I love that game.

Those people after the $50 iBooks in Virginia apparently were beating each other to death to get them.

Awesome.

I need Tungsten to live....

TUNGSTEN!

Spaghetti Juxion!

Kenny will be working 1 mile away from me!
We will be dominating North Atlanta!
(I am the red balloon, he is the green one.)

So yeah, basically all of my cards that are worth playing with are gone. Alas and woe.

You know what sucks? I miss the mid 1990's. Ever since the girls reawakened the sleeping giant, it's been craving some real CCG/CDG action. And except for neo-Magic, which appears to be more kid's game than anything now, nothing survives.

I didn't really realize how long it had been. Nine years since I last played Magic. Jeeeeezus.

Graeme has taken over the front page again with all 6 posts, so I am posting this random stuff.

Graeme struck him a heavy blow.
Those librarians envy him his good fortune.
Kenny asked him a question.
That farmer teaches them mathematics.
Those students promise her a delicious dinner.
Travis lent her a lot of money.

This story has been brought to you by the Random Sentence Generator

There was a turtle crossing I-575 on my way to work this afternoon. He was about halfway when I went by.

I really hope he made it.

They took my Serra Angels :(

For the record, Pokemon is a hell of a lot like Overpower.

I used to be addicted to CCGs. I was awesome. I went to the regionals. I still have all of my cards (unless Will and Scott really did steal some of my magic cards; I never checked, and if so, I really owed them to them. However, if you still have my Vesuvians...those I'd like back some day ;)

Anyway, so Vivian and Kelley like the Pokemon CCG. And they got Kenny to liking it. So, naturally, I started to play it with them. This resulted in a moment of "it begiiiiiiiiiins!" addiction. I have fewer cards than any of them, and I consistently win already. I'm still hoping to wean them on to Vampire: TES.

One thing is clear: the magic cards lurking in my closet are not to be disturbed. I stopped playing/buying magic cards with Alliances in 1996. To disturb the beast lurking in that closet would be...disasterous. It simply must not be done.

I logged on to WoW for about five minutes tonight.

Yep, I'm cured for the moment. No desire to do much of anything. I just got bored and wanted to try it.

Sighness.

It's been an exciting time lately. Kenny's moved back, after all, and such things resulting in partying ev-er-ee-day.

Meanwhile, I'm doing something very un-Graeme like. I'm freaking out and second guessing myself. Grad school is a terrifying thing, you know. There's only one school in GA I really want to go to, and if I don't get in there, I'll have to go away. Go away to a good school of course, but still away.

Away in a year, after Kenny just moved down. It's frustrating. Sure, it's not like I'll be gone forever. It's not like I won't come back a lot. But it's still frustrating that there isn't a single fucking decent history school in the state of my choice.

I really need to look into schools in the Carolinas and Florida, probably.

This venting courtesy of Discovery International.

BAH! The previous link died; their search function is crappy.
You shouldn't have to whip out your HTML editor to CONCOCT a working search query link.
Anyway, here you go:
The Rise And Fall Of A Popular Application.

Kenny's home!

Oh MAN did I just get a flashback...
The Rise And Fall Of A Popular Application.

Aneurism (Purposefully misspelled) was a program that I wrote for myself when I was playing a Zelda-based MMORPG called Graal. It basically enabled you to have text scroll over your head in-game, and/or create command macros. I gave it to a few of my close in-game friends with the explicit instructions not to give it to anyone else. Boy was I naive...

The fascinating thing about this adventure wasn't really the program itself, but how it exploded in popularity in the community without my knowledge, became a prt of the vocabulary, and just as quickly was dropped as if it was diseased (due to a post in the last thread in the link above). You can read my frantic attempt to stem the tide, but alas, I was months too late.

Herein lies the lesson that I learned about using example code willy-nilly with no regards to what else might be inside: Programmer beware.

I coulda been a contenda! It coulda been the most popular program in that community! But alas, Aneurism was slain in its youth, and the Gold Edition I released containing none of the extra text, and scripting didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public opinion. The scarlet letter T (for Trojan) had already been sewn onto it. *sniff* I miss that little program.

BENGAL TIGER!!!

The true question is: which of the four times you took statistics does it remind you of?

Also, Battlestar last night? ++

York Peppermint Patties remind me of statistics, because I would always eat one in class. Somehow, I can still enjoy the taste. Isn't that strange?

Not sure if anyone noticed, but the url for the forum has been changed to http://forum.juxentente.com so update your bookmarks and whatnot. Unless you are lazy like me and use the link in the Jux Menu that is.

Open request: If anyone out there has any idea what the hell happened to my Mage: the Ascension book, please tell me.

My new hardware came today. That means I will be missing for a few days. Goodbye!

The actress who plays "Boomer" on BSG is wearing a shirt that says "Please don't feed the models" on this sneak-preview interview show thing.

Storms again for the last two days here in Georgia. Last night the library was struck by lighting while I was there, twice. We had to call the fire department. (Very) long time readers will now be saying: again?

Yep, again. While I was there. Whenever the building catches fire, I'm there.

In other news, another week of weather like this (Hello, Emily) and Woodstock might finally wash away.

Also, it looks like the news archive has a rogue italic tag floating around somewhere. It must be found and exterminated soon.

I was 1337 h4x0r3d!!! Somebody was impersonating me, so we had a cool hacker duel. I kicked his bum totally hat-like and made his computer explode in his face, then deleted all of the grafiti. </fiction>

I have no idea what the Kenny madness below me is all about. It didn't appear until I clicked on the "feature post" button.

Most of the world around here is underwater, including the interstates and Six Flags of all things. Damn you, Dennis. To make things worse, there's another unrelated massive thunderstorm here right now that re-flooded everything that managed to get dried out. Power was off in Kennesaw until 10:55 this morning...just in time for me to take my massive 3-hour film test. Joy!

Well I'm getting a $30 video card to replace my dead one. Its a Geforce FX 5200.
I'm also finally upgrading my hard drive. 30GB => 160GB. It won't make up for my lost love though. RIP 6800. *cries*

History is more than what you take from it. History is what you fail to learn.

Our new forum (see left menu pane) is a JUGGERNAUT. As of this news post, there are currently 200 posts from 9 users in just a few short days.

What are you waiting for, get in there!

I think I'm going to create a new feature with all the members of Jux picking who they would most likely be if they were dropped into either the DC or Marvel universes today.

If it was Marvel, I get the strangest feeling I'd be Dr. Doom.

Well, it's temporarily over.

Kenny's subscription to World of Warcraft is canceled. He's looking for a job.

My subscription to World of Warcraft is canceled. I miss writing.

Vivian's subscription to World of Warcraft is canceled. It wouldn't be fun without us.

Our characters will still be there, and I'm sure we'll play again after the next big content patch/expansion hits. But after playing the game non-stop for over 7 months, the longest I have ever devoted to a single video game in a stretch in my entire life, it is time for a break. I want to write good features again. I want to get to work on my second novel, and start submitting my first to agents, again.

This is perhaps the best news in the world to the good people in this thread.

Apparently, many things are broken on Kenny's computer for absolutely no reason after his time in Georgia. What this proves is that members of Jux are apparently not allowed to take vacations without lugging along their towers.

Forum is operational! You can find the link in the Jux Menu to your left. I decided I was lazy, so we're using phpBB. I encourage anyone who reads Jux with any regularity to sign up for our forums! Currently we have just a general forum for random discussions that like to occur, and a feature feedback forum where you can tell us what you like or dislike about specific features or features in general, or just to tell us we are lazy bastards that never post any features anyways. Also, don't bookmark the forum yet, because the url will change as soon as the subdomain works properly.

London appears to be exploding.

No, we aren't dead.

Travis is married, Kenny is still in Georgia, and both of us pale bastards are sunburned from yesterday's all-day adventure at White Water with Vivian.

Pictures of the wedding, kickball games, and various other things will be posted soon. Kenny is also working on a real forum for us based on PHPBB, because we finally realized we're never going to write one by hand.

For at least another week or so, much Smash Bros. action will be had. Hurray!

Wedded.

*pulls string*
*cracklestaticcrackle*
The Troll Says:
GGnanaaaaagggggrrrmf!

Wondering about the lack of updates? Fear not, for Mr. Kenneth "Kittay" Knapke is currently in Georgia, and we are preparing to marry a weird looking monster of the troll type to a miss Sara Gancarz this weekend.

Also, hookers may be involved.

Shh...I think we're alone now.

(Two of hearts!)

New Proto-Forum!

Quizzical Mavis.

I'm the exact opposite. I want the slickest GUI I can find, which is why I love MacOS, even though I still mostly use Windows. I do like having the command line there for when I need it, but for the most part I don't want ever to have to dirty myself with typing when I could just use a mouse gesture for something.

That being said, MacOS is sometimes so simple to use it's frustrating just because you do more work than you have to. At least, if you've already been corrupted by more complex (to operate) OS's. I will never get used to dragging a program to the trashcan to uninstall it, I don't think. Actually, you can drag and drop damn near anything in MacOS. Don't get me started on disk defragmenting under OSX either.

There are several desktops avaliable for linux that are very beautifully polished, unless of course you mean the configuration methods. You will rarely ever find one of those desktops on my system. The unpolished ones are just so fun! For example, I use evilwm. This beautiful window manager has no buttons! It just puts a thin one pixel border around my windows. No icons or menus either. To run a program I have to type it into the command line. The only reason I would ever buy a mac is for the non-x86 hardware, and then I'd install linux on it. I suppose it is good to give windows some competition on their home-field though.

I heard some fun speculation about how it will enable them to directly compete with Microsoft on the X86 platform.

I know I would try MacOS on my PC; it looks more fun than linux could ever be (yes, I know its OpenBSD based, but still!) It's got the polish that the linux desktop market has yet to achieve for me.

When I type stuff in here, it magically appears on the front page again!

I should use this power to do nothing but bitch about politics and Apple moving to Intel. My life is over now that the binary code that runs it will be decoded into a different set of internal processor instructions. Processor instructions that were forged in the fires of Mount Doom!

Seriously though, Mac fans will get over this. They adjusted to having processors from IBM, didn't they? If you remember the 1980's at all, that's probably a bigger shock in retrospect than the Intel thing.

Don't forget to check out the Proto-Forum!

When that image above works, you'll know we've fixed the problem preventing me from posting Viv's new feature.

We appear to be fully functional.

Battlegrounds = LIVE!

Awesome feature, Graeme!

My ribs still hurt sharply, I think you bruised the bone!
We need to get body armor and have full-contact kickball this Sunday.

Yes...yes indeed.

Well, we've been down awhile, haven't we? For the sake of filling in those that didn't know, I'll copy the updates I gave in our semi-pseudo-faux-forum.

May 31, 2005

We're being moved to a new server to fix a problem with our Ensim control panel that was preventing us from doing much of anything, such as backups, uploads, etc.

It was supposed to be a seemless transition. I suppose it is not.

June 4, 2005

What happened was that our ENSIM control panel just died, along with many others at Fuitadnet, back in mid-May. The support staff decided the quickest and most painless way to fix the problem would be to simply migrate everyone's data to a new server with a properly working manager, rather than try to fix the old one while keeping everyone up. This was supposed to be a seemless move.

However, for whatever reason, our DNS record did not update. I've had fuitadnet refresh it three times, and the third time is the charm. If you check right now, Jux is finally functional again. Part of the problem was that I couldn't receive email while Jux was still down, and part of the problem was...I have no fucking idea.

It's going to be another day or so until everything is back up and running. The main page is fine now, but our subdomains still aren't, and this is likely something I will have to reconfigure by hand (or else is a further problem with the DNS servers). I'll have the new IP address of our ENSIM manager by tonight, but the staff page isn't working yet, and that means it'll be at least another 12-24 hours before I can update the website itself.

This is not something I took lightly, nor something planned.

June 5, 2005

Staff subdomain still down. If I could get in touch with Kenny I'd try to restore old /staff/, but I can't do that right now. I think he's reformatting his computer for linux or some shit, and I don't really want to call his house unless necessary.

I'm optimistic about being able to update by tonight, still.

And that's where we are now. Our main domains aren't up yet, but we do have some access to our news and feature poster scripts, as you can see, so we're back in semi-business.

Lots happened this past week when we were down. The first real kickball game of the season was held, despite nearly being stopped for rain. A feature on the outcome is coming. Team Hannah won by 5 points, 19 to 24. Team Hannah consisted of: Hannah Bobo, Samantha Boylan, Travis Rosenbaum and Peter Rosconi. Team Graeme was Graeme Hefner, Scott Hankinson, Kelley Sosebee and Vivian Rath.

Given another full inning, we would have trashed them.

Also, when it comes to WoW, I now roll with an epic mount. Just thought I'd mention that.

Finally, my school assignment for the summer is to watch Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest and the Birds. Lucky fucker = me.

Yipee. Server problems!! I kludged it up a bit, so we can actually update now. I want it to be fixed, but we are working on it. Maybe somebody will do something entertaining to keep your mind off of our problems. That is funny! Meow style.

My puppy likes to watch midget boxing on the discovery channel.

New Proto-Forum is up! With Proto-Feature Goodness! Go check it out! Make with the commenting! Make scrapbooks! Exclamation!

I'm working on something serious to post here, actually. It seems only fitting to me, really, that since Jux was born of RO, it can be put into hibernation by WoW.

I think the funny is dead in me.

I'm not sure if my humour died, but after reading that feature several more times, I still don't get it. I think we need a special edition with artist voice overs on a two sided dvd. And it should be packed in a case that shoots fireworks when it opens. Also, I am seeing Starwars tonight at midnight, so bite me.

KENNY, NoooooOOOOoooO!!!!!!!!

Vengeance will be mine!

Feature delayed: Graeme is mad at a bad puppy.

There's a new feature coming tonight. He's a lonely lettuce.

For those of you not in the know, today is the first kickball game of the new season. I plan to do a feature on it after it's over. This summer is going to involve a lot more kicking of balls than last summer. Oh yes indeed.

Also, there might, might be a minor surprise coming.

Yarr, says I.

Saved by the Bell: The New Class

From left to right, that's Vivian (Viverz, myself (Baetina), and Kenny (Kaith). Not pictured: Canada, Rob.

I should post a feature tonight.

More about WoW: There are some crazy trust issues in this game. Being a non-healing class, and being designed as a character to deal crazy damage and not much else, requires that I trust Kenny's new priest alt with my life. Earlier today, we were fighting 6-8 Dragonmaw orcs, and my health was draining like mad. I had to ignore it, and trust that he would keep me alive if I kept him alive by killing the damn things. It's like that falling test, only different.

Thank God today was the last day of classes. I am glad to get a nice long break before classes start up again.

On tuesday.

Finals are over, praise glory!

The following is so disturbing it just had to be posted:

(14:14:30) Kenny Knapke: i totally raped my stat final
(14:14:35) Kenny Knapke: imagine me and 2 girls
(14:14:42) Kenny Knapke: so i slit one of the girls throats
(14:14:53) Kenny Knapke: and put my penis up the hole so that the tip is sticking out of her mouth
(14:14:59) Kenny Knapke: then i make the other girl make out with the first one
(14:15:08) Kenny Knapke: and they both like it, even though they are unwilling
(14:15:11) Kenny Knapke: and 12
(14:15:20) Kenny Knapke: that is how badly i raped that exam

Finals completion status: 66.6%
Grade on soul-crushing research paper: 95

Finals completion status: 33%

This semester is the worst for finals, ever. My head asplode.

Get it while it's hot!

New Protoforum. Photo Quorum.

Murfreesboro.

CENTURY!

Research paper is almost complete. Finals next week.

Jux restoration, huzzah!

Food Tip Of The [Indeterminate Time Duration]!

Kroger's "Preferred Selection" (or whatever it is) Two-Bite Brownies are AWESOME.

<Group Chant>
BRING BACK YOUBEE!!
BRING BACK YOUBEE!!
BRING BACK YOUBEE!!
BRING BACK YOUBEE!!
</Group Chant>

Feeling much better today. It must've only been a 3 day illness. Maybe I somehow ingested Alien Space Milk Eggs, with benevolent Alien's that killed my left faced hurt sickness. We will never know, until they burst from my chest. Also, isn't it good to see some action returning to Jux, news style? Perhaps we will start making features again soon too! We can only hope.

I just got another one, and the same thing is there. I'm guessing it is dried milk bubbles from processing or something similarly innocuous.

I fear random organic-looking colonies of somethings in my caffeinated beverages...

Ack! To Kenny: It sounds like you have a pinched nerve. Get to the medical center.

It's been a weird few days, I know. Updates have been prevented. I had, and still have, a ton of classwork to do this week. Tonight is German night, as such. Not only that, but Vivian had something of a nervous breakdown in the end of last week, and I had to work all weekend. I'm at work right now, actually.

So what else is new? For those of you who didn't know, I have to start applying to grad schools this summer/fall, which means taking the GRE sometime this summer. My list of schools to apply to is growing, but I'm currently sure on only five or six. Let's list them!

Come Fall 2006, Graeme will likely be living at:

Columbia (Pray for me)
Stanford (More prayer)
UC Berkeley
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Penn State (Wouldn't that be weird?)
Georgia State (Last choice, because I would hate going to school in Atlanta)

Dude, you need to make a doctor's appointment ASAP. That could be a number of things, and I want you to be around for the wedding! You still have insurance, right?

I am sick! I have what I like to call "Left faced hurt sickness" in which the entire left side of my head/face hurts. It starts in the left side of the brain with some extreme pain. Then my left eyeball starts to hurt as if it were going to pop. Then it goes into my left ear which feels pain deep inside. Now the left side of my jaw, throat, and tounge have joined in. Only the left side of my tounge though, the right side is fine. I am not sure what is causing this mysterious illness, but I do know that it is extremely painful and difficult to think while I am in it's control. I plan to revolt and overthrow my suppressor soon though, so watch out illness! *pain*

And for the record, having to write a gigantic research paper over the next week and a half, as well as spending all of yesterday working on an essay that had to be written in German, is perhaps one of the worst ways to spend your time in the universe.

I can't wait for summer. Sure, the first few days will probably be mostly World of Warcraft, but after that, we might get some shit done around here.

"But, Graeme, what happened to our awards feature?"

I'm getting to that. In the meantime, all I have to say about last night is..."TARREN MILL ASPLODE!"

Holy shit. In the span of the past few hours, Adobe has bought Macromedia (eh..) and GameStop has bought Electronics Boutique (Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!)

Chew-ie!

"Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has made available the band's new single, "The Hand That Feeds," as a free download for Apple's GarageBand application. The song, which weighs in at a hefty 70MB, features multiple tracks that you can easily tweak. "For quite some time I've been interested in the idea of allowing you the ability to tinker around with my tracks -- to create remixes, experiment, embellish or destroy what's there," Reznor says. "After spending some quality time sitting in hotel rooms on a press tour, it dawned on me that the technology now exists and is already in the hands of some of you. I got to work experimenting and came up with something I think you'll enjoy."

Totally. Fucking. Hat.

One of the worst things the Mario Family can do to you besides a "Green Thumb", is a "Green Shell"

Oh man, that is so awesome. I'm speechless.

NEW PROTO-FORUM - Find us a goot hat!

Yet another question for all of my fellow WoW'ers out there:

Two man sunken temple run?
Yes, please!

[Alligator Hisses.]

By that, I mean, I love all of you juxers.

It's only fitting that World of Warcraft is sucking the feature content away from this site, at least temporarily (and no matter how long it lasts, it's still temporary), considering how this site was formed, and how long it was between our first and second features.

I love you like only a father can, j0.

Werd.

Upcoming World of Warcraft patch:

Shapeshifting into an animal form will now remove polymorph effects.

Hell yeah! No more spending time as a sheep when some mage tries to run.

And now that Travis has stopped speaking from the future, we can return to our normal operations.

...8:25? What the hell was that?

Let's leave Natalie out of this.

Woohoo! DrgCurve with northern flavor!

The feature below was supposed to go up yesterday, but I collapsed when I got home from work (damn you, spring forward!), and so it is a day late.

But we still have a new guest author, pilfered from our Totally Hat guild. He spends most of his time as a tiny, tiny little drunk skeleton.

The new ProtoForum(tm) is up. You can post if you want to. You. Can. Leave. Your. Friends...BE...

Actually, take your friends too. We love company.

There's one less great man in the world. Karol Jozef Wojtyla, or should I say John Paul, I disagreed with most of what you believed, but I had the utmost respect for your bravery and the way you said it.

Go to your GMail now!

Terri Schiavo's Blog.

Yeah, we're all going to hell for it, but you know you laughed.

TUX'D

I am now $150 poorer because of having to dress nice.

Travis just became the first person to wear a tux to my wedding. Yarr!

You know, I feel bad for not making a feature, but if it makes you feel any better, last night the reborn Totally Hat guild, plus some pickups, managed to take over and hold the Horde city of Splintertree for almost two hours. We also caused the only true standoff I've ever seen in a videogame at the very end, with several high level horde firing warning shots through the gate, and us firing back, but no one willing to charge in (or out, as it may be). Finally they were reinforced, but we did not give them the satisfaction of beating us. We hearthstoned out, losing only Kenny in their desperate charge to attack us before we got away.

After my three-day marathon of the new Battlestar Galactica, all I have to say is...

But I liked Boomer!

I have no idea what the hell that was that kept us down all day. The panic button seems to have fixed it, though.

Also, my ninja RAM is here. FitzSheba 64 is complete!

That should have been "which is when."

Memory problem: Can't force 3 PC2700 DIMMs to run in dual-channel in any way. Also, the A64 memory controller really dislikes odd-numbers of modules.

Solution: Bullet has been bitten. Graeme will live with 768mb until Wednesday or so, which 1 gig of new PC3200 pyscho ninja-RAM arrives.

Then I'm overclocking everything.

Maybe. (Hey, half of my shit is warrantied against damages caused by overclocking. How cool is that?)

I'm posting this from...FitzSheba 64. Other than one niggling little RAM problem, she's totally functional. I prefer to say she's at 90% of optimal.

Do you know what this means? A feature or nine tomorrow!

Wow. As far as features go, this month has really, really sucked.

I blame society.

Way to hog the front page! Actually, I don't really have anything to say, so its okay with me.

Well, it came to that. FitzSheba is desperately awaiting a transplant, already ordered from Newegg. The only main component I didn't upgrade was the RAM, since I just ordered a ton of that a few months ago, and my wallet is perfectly happy to use PC2700 at the moment even though the new CPU will support PC3200. Hell, I might just try overclocking it. It's high quality RAM, so I imagine that would work.

Beyond that, FitzSheba Mark II will be an Athlon 64 3200+ in socket 939 (awaiting dual-core goodness), with a PCI-Express 6600GT to back her up. Quite an upgrade from an Athlon XP 2700+ and Radeon 9600 Pro...both of which will be grafted on to Vivian's computer as soon as the RMA process on my Asus nForce2 board is complete. Actually, the Radeon will probably be added to her computer before that, if I'm not lazy. Which I am.

By the end of the week, I should be able to access my Jux work files and we can get back to business here. I'm sorry for the unexpected delay, good Juxers.

Another day dawns. As soon as I get home from school, I'm going to see if 16 hours with no power cord, no battery, and no other source of power was enough to actually reset FitzSheba's CMOS, and then I'm going to get back to the business of saving her life.

If all else fails, the price of a decent nForce 4 motherboard, Athlon64 3000+ in socket 939 format, and a GeForce 6600GT is $445. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Many hours of surgery, and yet, the patient is not yet conscious. The fight to save FitzSheba continues.

I'm rather curious as to how a computer can just die sitting somewhere for a week without being used, because I'm clueless. I've taken the following steps, but I'm still in the dark:

1) Verified that graphics card was working in another computer
2) Removed all expansion cards
3) Removed and tested all three sticks of RAM
4) Cleared CMOS & removed CMOS battery.
5) Visually checked for anything out of the ordinary.

So far, not good.

Many of you are wondering why I haven't posted the traditional "I'm back!" news post sooner. Well, FitzSheba was DOA when I got back. How something died in the week I was gone and the computer was off, I don't know. My preliminary report wants to suggest the graphics card, but it still gets power to its fan and such, so something is working. But I get no POST. All the fans and drives spin up, the keyboard lights flash recognition, but nothing happens beyond that.

I more or less ignored it and went about the other business of coming home today, but tomorrow, I'm going to have to fix this. Somehow, I think I'm going to have to wait and send away for parts.

Such is life.

I'm cold, and there are wolves after me.

The new edition of our PseudoForum is ALIVE!

Or is it Un-Alive? Only you can decide. We want to hear from our readers! Don't be shy, you can post anonymously!

Farewell, Juxers. I head forth unto PA now. I shall see you from there, perhaps, and definitely upon my return. Word to all of your mothers. Yes, even you, little James, who no one loves, especially not me.

Please stop reading my website James.

Today's VGcats is the funniest thing I have ever seen!

That is all.

INSANE packet loss (25%+), not sure what's causing it. I might try calling Level3 and reporting it, but I don't know if that would do anything.

That's weird. I lived on the same street, and I got awesome speeds from Adelphia while I was there, unless they were raping my connection because I was using bit torrent.

Sadly, I still can't, until we can figure out why Adelphia Internet out here is sucking so much...

I was getting <25KBit a second downstream yesterday!

Excellent! Come to the World of Warcraft Travis...coooommeee baaaaaaackk

Down here, we all float!

INNNNNTAAAAAARRRRRRNEEEEETTTTSSSSSSS
(w00t)

Don't forget Xenu.net!

You want proof that some people are crazy idiots? Do you need it? Fine. Have at it, Mr. Xenu.

I'm going to write a Juxtapositions feature either tonight or tomorrow. Be good Juxers, and don't let me forget. If I forget, a small child will die. Don't let that happen.

[FLASHBACK] (Today seems like a multi-media newsday)

Remember way back when, when I lost 30GB of data, when my hard drive exploded? I had started on a feature which showed the aftermath from my "feature characters" eyes. I was going to do a series of post-apocalyptic strips showing their journey through a barren and unfamiliar land. It was going to be awesome, I even made a preview image that for some reason I never released. Soon, I will have internet again, so here is a teaser:



Amazingly, Ding also survived the NTFS a'splosion, along with the Fiction Snips, and a few random other things. I seriously cannot wait until I have an internet-enabled PC again. Shuttling retrogames home on a flash drive is fun and all, but look at what's below this post!

The week from hell is grinding to a close. What does this mean? The neutral news is that the tides of change have come again, and I am once more leaving for PA on the 5th and returing the 12th, as opposed to Kenny coming down here. The good news is:


This is the way we roll now! (Not pictured: midget on demon)


Hot cat-on-cat action!

Okay, this really pisses me off. Why are vampires always portrayed as stunningly good-looking and amazingly well groomed when they can't see themselves in the mirror to groom themselves? You'd think they would look like me with sloppy hair and stuff, but no, it is always perfectly groomed. I have no idea where this came from, but it just sorta jumped out of my brain and into Jux.

DSL is back online.

The Graeme Anti-Money Capitalist Vortex Effect is now in play.

Adding insult to injury, I have the following to relate. When I first got home from school today, a minor storm had been through the area, and our phone lines had been hit. The surge protector I run the phone lines through gave up the ghost in this hit, but moms and pops wanted to be on the internet, so I direct connected the line, figuring I'd get a new one tomorrow.

Only, the storm of the century blew through tonight, as evidence by the brand new "speed holes" on my car, and apparently struck our lines again, killing two phones upstairs (mine, thanks to not being reconnected at all after the improv rewiring, survived) and...the DSL modem. So, here I am, typing this up on Shebintosh, connected at a whopping 45333 bps. I guess I should thank god for emergency dialup, but I'll thank him a lot more if he'll get my replacement modem out here tomorrow.

I figure World of Warcraft would still be playable, but their authentication server is being a bitch right now, so I have no way of finding out.

What a week this has been, let me tell you...I'm about ready to declare March "vacation month", wherein Graeme does absolutely nothing not required to sustain human life unless he finds it personally entertaining. What a dream that would be, no?

Here's to paying to repair cars!

Softballs. Hail the size of softballs. These things were as big as my hand. Not only that, but since I talked to Kenny, a second wave has come through. We had people pulling off the highways and running in, their windshields suddenly and violently smashed in as they were driving. We've had to herd all of our patrons into the meeting room twice.

Graeme just informed me that he was in a storm! Not just any storm, but a storm so evilly massive that it destroyed the internet. By destroyed the internet, I mean prevented him from accessing it at work. That is why I am posting this and not him. He told me there are massive hail things the size of golf balls. While nobody was hurt, to his knowledge, his transport vehicle, sometimes refered to as a 'car', looks like someone took a hammer to it. His windshield is fine.

Soon, I will have internet again!

Kenny and I are badass. Last night, we took down a level 58 hunter who tried to jump us. Now, 2 vs. 1 doesn't sound all that impressive...except, Kenny was level 40, and I was level 38. We are bad to the ass, my friends.

Further proving that I'm the bad'est ass'est person on the planet, my new cell phone unofficially supports mp3 ringtones. Because of this, my ringer is now the entire first verse and chorus of "Verse, Chorus, Verse". Oh yeaaaaaah!

I apologize for the lack of features lately. Blame a messed-up situation at work that's driving me crazy, being the sole caretaker of two attention whore pugs and a blind cat for the week (with some help from Vivian), and philosophy papers!!!!!!!1111oneoneone.

I could post another paper as a feature again. Would you like that? I thought not.

I also have the whole thing going on where I haven't been able to focus on any of my real writing for quite awhile. I meant to spend every Friday in 2005 doing at least something, but that's fallen through thanks to spending time with Vivian and driving everywhere in the Northwest section of this damned state doing history research.

But it tempts me...unfortunately, when I spend time writing on serious matters, Jux tends to suffer. I don't want Jux to suffer.

I need a 34 hour day.

Where am I, and where are my pants?

Yesterday I replaced my cell phone again. It is now even spiffier than before, gaining all the abilities I ever wanted from this thing, except in phone form and with a pretty good camera. Not that I really wanted the camera, but it's damn hard to get a good phone that doesn't have one nowadays.

I just realized this is the third cell phone I've had while working on Jux. Perhaps another accessories feature is in order.

Last night, Kenny and I single-handled took over the Sun Rock Retreat for a brief vacation. What's funny is that for some unknown reason, a bunch of level 20-25 Tauren kept trying to attack us and repel us. It was like a children's revolution, only with more smacking-down.

There is a news post editor. Of sorts. It's just not shiny. ;)

Anyway, your link is fixed.

We need a news post editor, or something ;)

I meant to put the http:// before the link, I swear!

I second Graeme in drooling over Google Maps, they never cease to amaze me. I spent a good amount of time just "driving" around my old neighborhood back in San Diego. That, combined with the in-map Local Searches (!!) make quite a powerful tool. Once they get it fully polished, I don't think I'll be going back to mapquest anytime soon.

After browsing the Narchive a bit, I realized today that Kenny and I have been playing WoW longer than we played RO both times combined.

Also, Google Maps is so frickin' sweet. All I've done so far is zoom in on my road, but the fact that I can do that, accurately, in this little shit burg is amazing.

Finally, I've decided to do an experiment today. Other than WoW and perhaps using iTunes, I will spend the next month (hopefully) using only *nix based operating system. MacOS X and Ubuntu running in a virtual machine, to be exact. I'm going to try to force myself to learn more about Linux if it kills me.

This may start today or tomorrow. Not quite sure.

There are fliers for an event called "CONDOMplation" littering this table. The scary thing is, I can't tell if it's some weird sort of teen health seminar (bleh) or a freaky sex party being thrown by one of the frats (BLEH!)

If you click on the "Series" link on the feature page now, you can see the early implementation of the newest addition to Jux 2.0. There's still a lot of work to be done to categorize everything, so don't expect the Picasso series to be complete anytime soon, but we're working on it. The Juxtapositions series listing is complete, however.

Travis is whipped!

In other news, in the past week we've had one of our most popular features in awhile, and perhaps the most hate mail I have ever recieved for a feature (mostly through misunderstandings)! I think we're doing great!

A new feature by the lovely Miss Mew tomorrow, and likely one soon by...well, me. A new site feature may be revealed when the stars aline, as well.

New Forum Posted

Hurry, loyal Jux readers, before Hannah and Vivian complete their plans to make Thomas run on pure estrogen. Maybe Iron Monkey will take care of it...

The person in front of me smells like ass. I fear his stench from a full two seats back. It fills the area, creating an unholy odor that can only be described as malicious.

So, how's your morning going, loyal Jux reader?

Holy shit it's February!

AAC Format? You know I could have emailed my sidekick an mp3, but noooo. AAC'D!

...SOON I WILL RISE AGAIN LIKE A TCP/IP PHOENIX! YOU JUST WAIT! *pets his precious, his sidekick*

"You're the only one who keeps this connection alive...you understand my pain; together, we will rule like KINGS!"
*bbzzzzttt* "ATTENTION!"
"Yes, vigilant will I be...vigilant will I be."

I'm with you. The world will be a better place when girls start playing video games. Zing.

The thought of this Penny Arcade strip actually happening makes me so happy inside, I think my heart actually decided to beat with empathy again. It won't last, but, dear lord, please let my children experience blowing into an NES to get the thing to stop flashing a grey screen.

Pretty please?

For a druid, I am one sneaky mother fucker!

More pictures of last night's exploits will be posted as a feature later today.

I was treated like a visiting diplomat by the people of Smyrna today. It's weird being lead around the town by the assistant clerk for no good reason. You want to see the library's archives? Good! Over here!

The Museum? It's thataway!

And then he gave me a mug, a nice pen, and a shirt. Seriously. At the museum, I got to spend an hour with the ex-mayor.

Smyrna is now the nicest place on earth in my estimation.

I appear to be on a roll lately. For reasons unknown, I somehow managed to hit nothing but green lights on Chastain today on my way to school. I realize most of you aren't from Georgia, and this may confuse you, so let me put it this way: I've been driving on that road almost every day for four years, and this is the first time that has ever happened. I almost entertained the notion that perhaps they had finally fixed the damn timers on the lights, but that went away quickly.

I also saw a car with European plates in the parking lot. What the hell?

It feels great to be posting via wireless again. I don't know how Travis can deal with not having an internet-enabled computer at his house, when I can't even stand to be without one at school. And the SideKick doesn't count.

It's seems Microsoft is going to be stopping updates soon through Windows Update except for those with legitimate keys. Except...hmm:

1) What about those lovely corporate keys I, and everyone else with access to google, can produce like water?

2) They're still going to allow you to update, so long as you use auto update.

Pointless gesture? Hurray!

Still, Microsoft should be scared. Now that I'm off a G3, I'm loving MacOS more and more, Knoppix is awesome enough to get me interested in Linux again, and Open Office has come a long way.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

You guys have failed to take into account buying, say, a DVD-burner for myself. I didn't get anything free out of that.

Well, unless you count the fact that it burns CDs at 48x instead of the 24x it was advertised to have...

I dont think they'll send the extra half gig... I think that next time his computer explodes/spaps/melts he will get an extra free upgrade. The more value he adds on his own, the more he recives when stuff explodes. Or perhaps since he is adding stuff to this side of the equation, more stuff will explode to balance it. We should keep a detailed record of any money he spends, what explodes, and what he gets out of it.

My puppy is so cute. She tries to stand on her back legs. So far she's up to 15 seconds or so as her longest. I usually give her a gummi bear as a reward if she does it long enough.

Oh...and MY NEW LAPTOP IS HERE HAHAHAHA.

OH NOES!
Now they will have to send you an extra stick of 512mb to balance the anti-money! ;)

16 degrees out means that Graeme is wearing thermal underwear and long ass socks. 16 degrees is fucking cold, sirs.

Also, to make Travis feel better, I decided to pay to upgrade FitzSheba to 1 gig of RAM with my own money. Shocking, same sirs, shocking.

It appears that Johnny Carson has passed away. As I have for so many people since this website started, I would like to say goodbye in this public forum.

I always loved it when you juggled that Buick, Mr. Carson. Farewell.

*looks at the features page*

Man, this month has sucked.

Yeah, I'm pretty much certain that the lightning strike earlier on Graeme's house created a rift in the fabric of Free Market Capitalism, right there in his room. Then, as he touched the highly charged, highly damaged electronic devices, the rift closed 'round him like a swaddling cloth, making him immune to such terrors as "money must come from me when seals club my stuff".

The Graeme Effect only affects Graemes currently existing in the multiverse. Since he is off the radar, so to speak, once electronic equipment is damaged, not only is it repaired, but the anti-money generated from the rift creates a vaccuum that must be filled. The only way to cancel out this displacement is to give the Graeme a brand new computer system of sufficient value to satisfy the imbalance.

The Graeme Effect remains a fascinating phenomenon, and we will surely keep you updated as events progress.
(Congratulations, you lucky rift-hopper, you. :D)

Speaking of things that are no more...tomorrow, you shall get the story of MacSheba, who is no longer with us.

Shebintosh...you have big shoes to fill.

I WANT MY...
I WANT MY...
I WANT MY INTARNET.

Working this weekend seems to have removed my feet and my will to live, just in case you were wondering.

It's certainly a strange month here on Jux, but with all but one of us starting school again, and with that one no longer having an internet connection (you heard that right, Travis is an orphan!), not to mention this World of Warcraft addiction thing when Kenny and I do have free time...it's tough, I tells ya!

My God...we're on Titan.

That's sexual harassment, and I don't have to take it anymore!

I dreamed Kenny and I were being chased by orcs and had to drop off a cliff, and this cute young healer woman found us in the water and flew us to town. She was human. Maybe she was Vivian.

20-hour no-sleep days + World of Warcraft addiction = Scary ass dreams.

Here we go. Time for me to post something that happened in class that I found funny, but that you will most likely not find funny and can't do anything about me posting it. So if you really aren't interested in my "computer geek" classes, you might not want to read this, unless of course you are really bored and have nothing better to do. Anyways, in this class of ~80 students, we were being divided into 8 groups. Being a hi-tek computer science class, we wrote our names on paper and put them in a hat. Now everything was going fine until he drew like the 13th or so paper and read it. "Badger, something, mushroom." At this point all of the students begin cracking up as if we were all in on some sort of secret joke. But we were oh so wrong. This guy just happend to be hip and cool and slightly sadistic. He says, "I'm hip, I'm cool, I'm slightly sadistic, I know whats going on." So he clicks his favorites dropdown menu, clicks the top link on the list which somehow happens to be this. He leaves it running for a half hour in the background just to teach us "don't mess with me." And that is my boring story for the week, unless something equally boring or funny happens.

My inner fears have come true. No one understood my last feature. I will weep softly into my palm, and contemplate how much I loathe my classes this semester, while cursing all of you.

So, who wants a $499 Mac?

I do! I do!

Guess what! I have 2 breaks of 2 hours each in my schedule! That means I will be bored inbetween classes which also means that there is potential for me to do features or make a forum for Juxiness. Unless I do homework during said breaks. Even so, I'll probably have time to do whatever. I think I'm going to do nothing for now though because I'm tired and school is lame. Blue.

So not only does the new game in one of my favorite series of all time, Resident Evil, come out right after Christmas when I have a stack of games taller than your mom to play, but it's also apparently one of the best damn games of all time.

Yes, I'm happy.

Happy, I say.

...Unfortunately, I probably won't be playing it until February, which is the very earliest I can be finished with my stack of games. And that's only if I play something else other than World of Warcraft for awhile.

I plan to start on Paper Mario tomorrow. Rome still calls to me, but I'm going to treat it like Civilization from now on: something I play, something I love, but something I only play when there's nothing else to do.

Pikmin 2's 100 or so items that I don't have yet are just going to have to wait.

I've got some nice screen shots of the first time Kenny and I managed to cross the world and meet in World of Warcraft, but they're quite big for web use, and they don't scale down well, unlike the RO shots.

Maybe I'll just post a sadie-style gallery.

Have I mentioned how mad I am that I still have a hugemo stack of games to work through...and Resident Evil 4 decides to come out?

Well, only a bunch of World of Warcraft, Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 2, and everything else left to go!

I'm coming to terms with the fact that I doubt I'll ever bother to get the other upteen billion pieces of treasure in Pikmin 2.

Rome: Total War, on the other hand...I will go back and play as the Greeks in a bored moment soon, I'm sure.

World of Warcraft: Soul Crushing. In a good way.

I hate you both! *racking sobs*

*looks forward to playing FreeSpace2 after work on his INTERNET-DEVOID computer*

*sniffle*

So, yeah...I'm level 8.

You whore! It's been sitting on my desk for almost two weeks, because I knew I would never play anything else if I installed it.

Now, thanks to you, I'll probably have to install it right now@$!@#$

Or tomorrow.

*must use willpower*

I bought WoW.

Jon Stewart wins, CNN cancels Crossfire.

I'll be damned.

I was working on a feature, but I just can't get it to turn out the way I want it to. I might post it later in a different form, or maybe I'll post it just to spite myself as it currently is.

January's been pretty slow so far, I know. It's the videogames man, the videogames.

Maybe I should do a feature on them! Ah-hah!

Tomorrow is going to be nerd fantasy day.

That is, without a doubt, the most horrifying story ever told to Jux readers.

Now I can't sleep at night, Kenny.

Wow. Every now and then you do something that makes you feel like a complete moron. Take what I did today for example. "Mr. Clie, meet Mr. Washer." Luckily, we had an extra one upstairs. It'll still take me a few days to recover mentally though.

Yes...the one-feature Feature page is quite creepy, isn't it?

Oh boy! I can't wait until someone posts a feature. Seeing the features page with but a single feature just makes my day for some reason. It'd be funnier if it were a crappy feature too. Leaving you with no choice but to read the crap. Eat it!

I would also like to point out that Wigu has ended, and this makes me very, very sad. He's going on to other projects, but Wigu is one of those few upper-Echelon web comics, like Penny Arcade, that are actually good. I've given them money good.

Hello 2005!

...let's hope nothing breaks!

Here it comes...wait for it...
Wait for it...

Post Christmas Depression!

Our MySQL manager still isn't fixed. Damn bugs hitting on the holidays.

Also, Rome: Total War is even more addictive than could ever possibly been imagined. It is crack on toast, with butter and heroin. At knifepoint.

*awakens from the dead*

So, yeah, here are a few nine reasons you won't be hearing much from me for...a while:

1) Our MySQL Editor still isn't fixed.
1) Pikmin 2
2) Rome: Total War
3) Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
4) Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
5) Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
6) World of Warcraft
7) Mega Man Anniversary Collection (Mega Man 1-8, plus extras)
8) Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
9) Katamari Damacy

And those are just the new videogames! Merry Christmas to all; enjoy the rest of the holidays, from your friends at the Jux Entente.

Happy Holidays everybody, and a Merry Juxmas to all!

I'm writing this now, because the reasons for the jubilation below will otherwise be impossible for future generations to understand.

Yesterday (early today really), about 12:45am, we were hit by a web worm that destroyed every html and php file it could find on our server. We were not the only site affected. Our databases were intact, but we had no way of using our tool against such an attack: the panic button. Because the panic button had been destroyed.

What followed was a crisis. I had a backup from Saturday, but was afraid restoring would overwrite the database. I called Kenny (on the phone) in PA to inform him of the problem. He didn't have copies of the scripts either. I waited for our host to say something, only to realize every other site had been affected as well, and that it was a brand new worm. Step A in getting Jux somewhat back was replacing the worm-generated index with our own, simplistic one.

Kenny and I then tried to hack into the ENSIM generated backup file to see if we could extract just the php scripts and restore the site that way. Unfortunately, the tarball ENSIM creates is encrypted, and we couldn't access it. At this point I renamed the database to protect it from being overwritten (I hoped) and attempted to restore from the backup for the first time. Nothing happens.

I then sent the entire backup file to Kenny, who also couldn't open it in any way. It's well into the afternoon now. I attempt to restore a second time, after Kenny deleted the entire staff directory. Nothing happens. I go to dinner to try to clear my mind, and hope that our host gets back to us.

When I got back from dinner, our host still hadn't contacted us about the tickets I sent in. There were a few more attempts to get around using the official restore, and I created a new ticket asking the host to restore from their backup if they could, since I was unable to from ours for unknown reasons. I ask the forum-goers on Ars Technica if they have any idea of how to break the encryption used by ENSIM. No one does.

Finally, I give up and try restoring from our backup a third time. An hour and a half later, after sending the massive tarball somewhere for the fourth time in the past 24 hours, I open the staff directory expecting it to be empty. It wasn't. The generators were back.

I pressed the panic button as quickly as I could, but several html files that aren't in the database had been destroyed as well; almost all of these are legacy pages. I uploaded all but three from my hard drive. These three files were ones that I had created on my iBook, which is out for repairs.

Two of those pages were restored by Google Cache, and the third from Archive.org. Thank you, my saviors.

Whew. I know I promised the last feature tonight, but after having been offline for almost an entire day and the work it took to restore this place, I think you'll understand. The feature will go up tomorrow. Hopefully, we'll still be here.

Well, we're not totally back, per se. Still a few problems of weird origin. We're working on those, too.

Thank holy christ on toast, we're BACK!$@##@%#$@%^$%^%&$

It's time to hunt up some script kiddies.

I was planning on posting the final Ornament/Diary feature tonight, but the exact form it's going to take is still in doubt. It will either be still pictures with voice narration, or it will be the exact same as all the others. The conclusion will now be tomorrow, if everything holds true.

It's fifteen degrees here in Jasper. Come, huddle 'round the space heater with me!

Snow? In Georgia? Now?

What the hell is going on here?

You know, it's too bad Verizon has the best service and thus has me sticking to them, because I really crave a 7100t. It's like, a not-ugly SideKick that can work as a phone, isn't the size of a bar of soap, and doesn't make me look like a middle schooler!

Present company excepted, of course.

Can you believe it's only a week until Christmas? Six days until Christmas Eve? It's just now starting to sink in just how close it is to me. I'm working more than normal this holiday season, so while it's felt like "the holidays" for awhile, it's just now that it really started to feel like Christmas. And what a wonderful feeling it is, too.

Oh, and if you looked at the after shots of Travis's Christmas gift below, worry not...I took the before pictures of the setup, and they will be revealed soon enough. ;)

AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHH!!!!!!
Graeme and Vivian make the scariness.

New Proto-Forum, Phase III.
53 seems to be the natural limit for each comments page ;).

I want to be special too! So I am going to put my cool school project in ~kittyvertigo and link to it! Who wants to play tetris? Its kinda simple and crappy, but hey, its tetris!

Yeah, I forgot the Sly picture. Stand corrected, do I!

Yeah, but you used /users/zenzagg/. Graeme used /~crossedreality/. That might be a nice place to put a blog, if I didn't hate them so much.

Actually, another cute pet broke the main/personal barrier when I posted a pic of my kitten, Sly, in a newspost.
The Sly One

Yes, I used Picasa for the puppy pictures page because I am a lazy bastard.

In addition to the new feature, I've put a gallery of puppy pictures here. I'll update it from time to time, so check back. I was originally going to do a feature about it, but decided that that was a bit...much.

Of note: I think that's the first time any of the Jux members has ever linked something from their Jux "personal" space on Jux itself.

It snowed today! What with that and all of the lights and the big end-of-semester crunch, its starting to feel like the holidays. It's funny how it seems to begin later every year for me.

Ah, Firefox at work. Life's little pleasures.

Little Sadie (the current top candidate for her name. I've been calling her "Nasha.") is sooo cute, but sooo ugly at the same time. I've got more pictures, and I'll post them later. As well, she's an extremely needy little girl. She fell asleep on my feet while I was getting ready for work though. That makes up for peeing in the kitchen and my floor. (Don't worry, one's hardwood, the other I caught her in the act, and it's super-duper-scotchguard magic carpet).

My lap is... a home for puppies.

She was sleeping fine for a few hours, but my little puppy just got spooked, so now she's sleeping my lap while I type this. Is this what having a baby is like? If so, this is awesome. She's just a little bundle of trust, snoozing away in my lap.

Chris won! Whooooooooo!

In other news:



Click here for the ultra cute video!

There's a little bit of a problem with feature production. You see, the Survivor Vanuatu finale is tonight, and I completely forgot that when planning. I'll do my best to try to get a feature up around midnight, but it may or may not technically be on the 12th. I know you'll forgive me.

As well, it's entirely possible that the new pug puppy Terra, who shall be called Ms. Fat in colloquial English, could be arriving today. That would throw everything off, wouldn't it?

Joe's girlfriend had jumped all afternoon.

I had been laughing but I was working.

Cathy wasn't between the two mountains because Eleanor had skied for four months.

I had been playing but I was shouting.

Jackie wasn't at the company because Dave had talked from Monday through Friday.

Thank you very much http://www.manythings.org/rs/

"TRosenbach,", my latest spam exclaims; "Save 30% on these games!"

While I am not a Rosenbach, it sure sounds like an awesome last name. ROSENBACH!

It's amazing. I've sloughed off so much stress in the past few days that I still don't know what to do about it. I think it's coming off in layers. God, I love Christmas. I love Christmas so much, I think I'll be writing an ornament feature tonight ahead of my internal schedule.

I also can't wait to play videogames again on the 25th (24th?). It's been so long, I've sort of forgotten what it's like. I've fallen really behind this year on everything but expansion packs for PC games I already had, and Silent Hill. Too busy.

I also need to start writing again, but that's another matter.

Vivian is still shocked and awed, but getting better I think. She's going to get aid for the season, and then she'll (hopefully) be heading to Pickens Tech. So long as she doesn't spill the bananas.

Also, Gremlins rocks hard. Word.

SHHH!
- A concerned member of the Society for HandHeld Hushing.

One of those subtle ways you can tell you're advancing in a language is what you talk about to others who are also learning said language during an evaluation. A year ago today, I would have said something along the lines of:

"Hello! Where are you from?"
(Guten Tag! Woher kommst du...okay, no more German)

Today, I managed to have this conversation, which the teacher overheard in the exact wrong moment:

Graeme: So, is your penis the size of a paperclip?
Stole: No...my penis is the size of the table!

Let us not forget the fun we had playing with German profanity, too. Scheiße! Fickst du, ja!

Dear: Everyone I know,

Go here, and be amazed at what can be done with the stupid speech o' the internet when combined with Rammstein.

That is all.

I just wrote a flawless research paper and did the research for it at the same time, in about three hours of actual work. Sure, not waiting until the last minute might have been smart. But that wouldn't be a cool story.

In other news, it's hard to be in a good mood when someone you love is unhappy.

...which brings my high school love life into a much clearer perspective! (swish)

Until featuredom, you can check out our Proto-Forum: Volume II. Feel free to comment if you can; while it's fun in there by ourselves, it would be awesome to have participation by some of our readers.

So you want a feature, eh?

Sorry, I've got a research paper due Wednesday. The good news is that after that...I'm wide open baby. My next features will continue the ornament series. In fact, I suspect most features will be Christmas-based for awhile. Isn't that...Merry?

Well, it took six hours (of actualy work), but I have finally finished a 523 word German composition. Writing in another language is very hard, let me tell you. This one is twice as long as any I'd ever had to do before, but at least this time I get the feeling that I got to express myself a little more stylistically than before. Most of the time is spent looking up nouns I don't know, actually.

Edit: I am NOT fired.

Well, Vivian just got fired. The longer pointless rant that was here has been removed until I decide what we're going to do about it. Then it will be restored.

Yeah...funny, I thought you'd be taller than me after the surgery, but it seems I still have an inch or two on you.

I am glad to see your nose-job turned out so well Graeme!

Graeme last year: "I'm worried I'm not discovering new music fast enough. I'm just listening to the same old stuff."

Graeme this year: "Am I listening to too many new bands? Do I appreciate them like I used to?"

Yes, folks, I am fucked up.

Going once, going twice...Acclaim is being auctioned off, in true Enron style.

Today, I recieved packages from the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and Fed-Ex. If I'd managed to get something from DHL, I would have pulled a perfect coup.

There was supposed to be a feature today, but for some reason I feel dead. Two features tomorrow? Perhaps.

Hmm...I wonder if the members of Jux would help each other move bodies.

Whoa, it HAS turned into a forum hasn't it? Perhaps we are ready for the real deal soon. Or we could just keep this up, hahaha.

Don't forget our fake forum, where I just had a BANGLES IMPLOSION.

Dear God I hope you are right.

I am busy working on 3 major projects, so you probably won't see anything from me anytime soon(about 2 weeks). Then again, I've gone for several monthes without posting anything for you at all.

Anyways, today I was overcome with a wave of happiness that came from nowhere. This is a good thing, because stress is closing in and I needed something to beat it away with. Next time I may have to rip off the arm of a passerbyerer and use that.

I like how when I don't know how to spell a word, I can just fake spelling it oddly so that everyone thinks I did it on purpose.

New feature tonight?

Dear God I hope so.

This is the best shot I could get, but hopefully you can get the gist of it. It is 14kt gold, and has 1/2ct total weight with a 1/4ct solitaire. It was my Grandmother's from when she was a little girl. It's as old as me, my brother, and my dad put together, so it's safe to say there's no Shane Co., Jared, or Zales stocking another one of these. Grandmas rock. ;)

Graeme can provide a real camera.

I've found the VHS adapter, and after HOURS AND HOURS@$$!#%@!^ of searching for something that works in Windows 2003, I found ExperTV Trial Edition. Crippleware, but hopefully I can grab something useful out of it. We will see.

Graeme wants to see a picture of the ring, and I will try to procure one next time I see Sarah. It will be a 640x480 cameraphone picture though. I need a real camera again.

Yesterday was my turkey day, and there was much eating and family fun to be had. It was quite pleasant. I deliberately avoided talking about it before now because I wanted Travis's announcement to hold the top spot for an extra long period of time. Now that it has, I'm free to speak.

The holidays are upon us, my dear Juxers. This means that feature production will be sporadic and highly unanticipated. On the one hand, I have many family events coming up. On the other hand, I have lots of free time with school getting out and work closing. On yet a third hand, there's the whole finals and a research paper thing to worry about. From here to January, just like the past two years, things are going to be interesting.

You know, I say that every year. I'm sure you, the single entity I talk to when I imagine the average Jux reader, fully understands what we go through each holiday season. You go through it yourself. Grab a chunk of turkey for me, okay?

And now for the joke I've longed to make: "Yeah, she swapped his gobble."

Yes, I proposed to my wonderful fiancee Sarah Leigh Gancarz tonight (!!) after Thanksgiving dinner during a rigged game of "Gobble Swap" (it's a gift-swapping game). I made sure my "special" present got to her. She said yes!! :D:D

I also have video which will be in a feature coming soon.--as soon as I can find one of those funky camcorder VHS adapters.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

There's something I want to make a news post about, but it's Zen's job to make a news post about it, so I'm just going to sit here and twiddle my thumbs.

Well, we may have missed 2002 and 2003, but for 2004, Jux finally has an official Christmas ornament. I will be ordering them shortly for my own purposes, and I suggest you children out there do the same.

Features will return shortly, now that I'm on break from school and not getting ass raped by assignments that were all pushed back to a two day period. Hurray!

Also, the store is going to get changed a lot soon.

As you may know, we here at Jux are working on adding a forum to this website, for all of our foruming pleasure. Until such time as our own forum is completed, I present to you Zen's Journal, which we can turn into a forum! Hurray!

Actually, he created a fake livejournal for the same reason I did, just to post comments on the journals of other unfortunate souls. I guess we can spam mine into a forum as well.

So, I took the damn quiz at Person Price, and I ended up being worth $3,416,136.10. That's only about a million less than the ungodly saint who's in the lead.

Book reviews are the suck. I'd post what I'm doing at the moment as a feature when I'm done, but I'm afraid some pimply idiot in Wyoming would turn it into a professor as his own.

In other news, my throat has been hurting me for days, for no damn reason, with no other symptoms. Grrrrrr.

HAPPY HAPPY GO FIRESTONE.

First my anti-lock brakes fail last night and I slam into someone as traffic comes to a halt due to emergency vehicles cutting through traffic on I-75 (which means no real liability, thank God), and then today in my Dad's truck BOTH rear-right dualie-tires go boom.

Pics and adventure-fun by clicking the link (Sorry, I didnt think to take pics on I-75 last night, also it wasn't too bad.)

WWAOAOAAAGGGGRHHHHHHHH....

Yay for weekends.

Yes, obviously through no fault of Kenny, as a similar setup works just fine on my identical-version IE at home, as well as Firefox 1.0 (the browser real humans actually use) and all other Gecko derivitives. I'm assuming Safari, too, although I haven't tried it in awhile.

...everything upgraded,<insert> and through no fault of Kenny's, </insert>the preview button...

They've been rolling them out for weeks, but I've finally recieved my new computer at work.

For the past three years, I'd been tether to an ancient Pentium II and a monitor so old and dim that it was hard to see any detail in any photo. Plus it was set to 800x600 (a compromise resolution, since I refused to work with 640, but everyone else refused to use 1024) at 65hz. That meant eye death.

Last month we got a temporary replacement here at reference of a Pentium III Coppermine...good, but not great. Same monitor, too.

Now I'm typing this on a shiny new HP slimline computer. 2.8 GHZ Pentium 4, new monitor, new mouse, new keyboard, hurray. It's a lot nicer than the crap I was stuck with before. Granted, it's still not my home PC, but it's a start.

Actually, I'm ashamed to admit this, but I really like this keyboard. It's quiet and low pressure, with sensitive keys. It lets me type faster, although I'm not used to it so I'm doing a few more errors. Much like my laptop keyboard, after I type on it for about an hour or so I adjust. I'd love to have something like this at home. It even looks sexy, yet, traditional, with no media buttons I'd never use. Maybe I'll look into getting one from HP. But will it cost more than my current keyboard, which was a whopping $5? *shrug*

Naturally, even with everything upgraded, the preview button in our news/feature poster doesn't work on any of the computers at the library. Just brilliant.

At least you can grow one. At the rate my facial hair grows, I can have a full beard in two weeks, and a mustache in roughly nine presidential terms.

I love that "The Spaniard" that you are sporting. I think all the moneybags are from the money you are saving on razors right now; but soon--and suddenly--at age 49 "The Spaniard" is born with a vengeance. It is so tenacious that it is all you can do to keep it trimmed to the length shown here. After all, it has many years to make up for! ;)

I attempted to grow a 'stache once. Just like my earlier experiment with blue denim jeans, I suddenly became an extra for an episode of "Yee-Haw". Redneckalicious!

Graeme at age 50:



Notice the bags of money.

One more outburst like that and I'll bring back the Bush humor in spades ;)

Warning: The following message contains a political joke.

Fall sucks. For some reason the temperature can not decide if it wants to be warm or freezing. It's like John Kerry lost the Presidential Election and became a weatherman. Ba-zing!

Entropy is just reversing, nothing to see here. Move along.

So someone comes into the library today, and I recognize her as someone who used to hang out with Deanna and Rebecca a lot. Sure enough, she comes up to me and says "Hey, did you know Rebecca...something?"

Playing along, I said I knew a few Rebeccas, yes. "Do you mean Rebecca Traylor?"

"Yes, that's the one!"

And yet, that's all she wrote. Why she asked me if I knew Rebecca, if that was all she was going to ask me, I don't know. Maybe it was just a kinder way of asking if I was that guy that she used to see all the time but never knew or talked to. Strange people.

I challenge the validity of that statement and demand references! Bwheahehehaehaehaeha!

Classically Trained Villains stick with the traditional "Bwahahahaha!"
Neo-Modern Villains prefer "Bwehehehehehe."

The Jaded Villain's exclamation of choice is, of course, "Bweh."

Hahaha...
You know, for some reason yesterday I was thinking how it would sound to put the chorus of "Shock The Monkey" in place of the chorus of "Rock the Casbah"...that would be my rocking freakish contribution.

Jesus H. Mazda, it took me almost two full hours tonight to figure out which classes I need to register for tomorrow, and I'm still not entirely sure whether I'm going to be going Monday, Wednesday and Friday or Monday-Thursday. It's never taken me this long.

I blame Kennesaw for offering all the cool electives (well, electives for me) in the fall and all the shitty ones in the spring. Case in point: if I'd needed an elective in the fall, I could have taken Careers in Writing or Fiction Writing. Spring? Poetry Writing or Technical Writing. Those sound...pointless.

Oh well, assuming all goes well tomorrow when I actually register, I'll be one step closer to the finish line. My course hours keep going up. But since I don't take insane ninja classloads year round like Kenny, he'll still be graduating before me :(

while we're on that subject, I think everyone in the world needs to send letters to Zen. I'm not saying why, just that we need a massive "Rock the Zen" letter campaign. You can insert your own reason. Perhaps you want Zen to rock the bears. Maybe you want Zen to rock the casbah. Me? My rockin' Zen reasons are secret.

John Ashcroft has resigned.

These are tears of joy.

Hmm...it's a bothersome question. Am I agnostic, or am I a deist? It really depends on my mood. I've decided to compromise. Agnostic on odd days, deist on even. How's that?

This does have something to do with a feature I'm probably going to write later tonight, just so you know.

Just look at all of those beautiful features you have. This is truely the renaissance of Jux. I just want to say that that last one by Graeme is utterly brilliant. Make sure you follow every path! Especially the secret hidden one, but only if you are over 18.

Not sure what caused the dupe of One of X. The second one is real. I'd delete the first one now, but I want to leave it so Kitty can see it before I do.

Anyway, three new features today. Enjoy!

Yep, it's official. America hates the gays (look at all those pretty amendments passed!) and we're up for another four years of rule by the lowest common denominator.

Well, it's not over yet, but it is starting to look like I might need to move to Vancouver after all.

Here's to four possible more years of destroying American science, civil rights, global standing, and the environment! Hurray for assbackwardsness!

It's alllll Ohio...

Nah, it's ok Kenny, I was more poking fun at myself than you about the news poster. I got paranoid and encapsulated the newspost in a table so it would wrap, then added BR's, and it came out funky. You've done an awesome job on the site stuff, there will always be bugs/glitches.

And the disclaimer, the reason I said it is because since I don't like mudslinging, I feel at somewhat of a disadvantage when things get hairy. But yea, after thinking about it, we have a pretty balanced cadre of ideals between the three of us, so it's not that big of a deal.

It's not exactly unsurprising, but Travis and I have already failed to change the world, as Georgia is safely in Bush's camp.

Kenny...I'm watching PA ;)

I'm not entirely certain who is being "alsoed" by Graeme, because I do not think it is a stupid idea, merely an unnecessary one.

I also think a disclaimer would be stupid. This is an opinion/editorial/humor site. We're not even pretending to be objective about anything, and we are distinct people, so I think they can figure out that maybe we don't have one unified consciousness. If not, they probably don't belong here in the first place ;)

Alas, I realize the newsposter is not perfect. Also, I disagree on the disclaimer. We are obviously distinct people, except me because I don't actually exist, so it is obvious that our opinions aren't exactly the same. Thus I could say that "Anyone who votes for Kerry is a traitor." without people assuming that both Travis and Graeme have such views. Not that I'm saying people who vote for Kerry are traitors, that should be implied. Remember, I don't exist, so don't get all pissy. 0x17

And another disclaimer on the news poster page: Line breaks, while not visible in preview mode, do in fact carry over once you post. ;)

Well, I don't know. I was hoping on taking a Penny-Arcade kind of position on elections, posting a nice philanthropic "it's important that you vote, regardless of the candidate, because it's the only way we as a people are heard" kind of message, especially since this election is so close, making it impossible to avoid ticking off one half or another of our readers.


The fact is, most everyone who is voting has decided on who they are voting for, and those who haven't decided yet haven't researched the issues in full, and no amount of mudslinging in either direction is going to change that.



If you are registered, please, go vote. I have never voted before, but I am definitely sure that I am voting today. Just as a favor to our readers, perhaps we need a disclaimer on the top of any political commentary: The following does not necessarily represent or reflect on the views of The Jux Entente as a whole.

God I love A Perfect Circle.

Why am I so mad at Bush? Because I believed his stupid, lying ass. I also recommend checking out the Eminem video Mosh. Quite slick. Let's hope it's dated by the end of the year.

I will be posting some pre-election poetry by myself tonight, and then two features by the lovely Miss Mew tomorrow. Hurray!

I did something amazing today, or at least I think so. I read something in another language for the first time.

Now, I can "read" quite a few languages by translating the sentence into English in my head, which is a time consuming process. (German [decently well], Latin [okay], Italian, French, and Spanish [those three not so well], if you were curious) But today, without thinking, I read something in German. "At the end of the day, they go back to the city, because you're not supposed to live in the small garden houses in the Schreber gardens."

It took me a second to even realize what I'd done, and I was so shocked that I went back and re-translated it to English in my head, which I hadn't done the first time. The first time I just understood it.

It was a cool feeling. It was the first true time I felt like I had, just maybe, made a major step towards becoming bilingual. At least as far as reading goes.

And so, October passes with a wimper and not with its planned bang. I am sad.

Fear not...Turkey Day will reign! Until then, eat candy. It's better than any lame, rushed Halloween feature I could have done.

Did I mention my dad got a good job again, after being laid off by Lucent a year and a half ago? Being middle middle class was fun for awhile, but I'm glad I'm going to be upper middle class again. Hurray for privilege!

Have we saved Daylight yet?

Just got back from an impromptu trip to Gatlinburg, if you wondered why I was silent.

I'm starting to think that this Halloween animated Picassos strip is going to have to become a Thanksgiving thing. It's starting to look like I came up with the idea way too late to actually implement it :(

We'll see...features coming soon.

FUCK YEAH REDSOX MOTHERFUCKERS WHOOOOOOOOO!!@#@!$#@

...who the hell could have thought THIS?

Watching South Park tonight reminded me of an event from my own elementary school days. Back when I was a young one, our school mascot was the Buffington Blue Devils. Does anyone see anything wrong with that? Much as Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny, we had to vote for our new mascot. I don't really remember the choices, but I do remember the winner. We went from being the Buffington Blue Devils, to being the Buffington Bombers. Thats right, we transformed from being a little incarnation of evil, into being an airplane that blows the shit out of lesser countries. I never really thought of it back then, but nowadays, I am happy with the change.

So close Red Sox...so close...don't blow it baby.

For the past year or so, Campus Crusade for Christ has been using Chiller as the font on their fliers. At first I thought this was a mistake, but they keep doing it, which leads me to ponder a few things.

1) These people are revealing a little too much about their true motives.
2) Somehow, a mole has entered their organization, and is working overtime to bring down the evil empire of flierdom.
3) You have to be crazy to name anything having to do with Christianity a "crusade" nowadays. That's either just stupid on their part, or, when taken in combination with their use of the Chiller font, reveals their true goals to continue the genocide of previous generations. Crusade = bad word.
4) I just now realized that Campus Crusade for Christ as the name acronym as Cick Crotch for Christ. They're also just about equal in their level of sanity.

So...hurray for Chiller!

Compare
and Contrast.

I hate politics, about as much as the media that panders to it. I guess it's ok to dredge up mid-2003 news and dress it up all pretty again as if it just happened yesterday, for the sole purpose of political manipulation. It doesn't even matter if you've been planning this for a while, and been found out--you can still spin it like a top; surely people are too stupid to notice, right?


And it doesn't matter who's behind it. I would be just as ticked if it was the other side doing this. And it only gets worse every leap-year. ARGH!

It's interesting how not having to post a news post with every feature...cuts down on news posts. Imagine that. And yet, I think this is the most diverse main page we've had in a while, as far as authors go.

Can you believe the Red Sox? Can you beleive this series? Damn! I only watch baseball during the playoffs/series, and this is the most exciting I've seen since 1991.

So... what does it take to run ECHELON?

Disembodied Rat Brain Learns To Fly F-22.

Whoa.

I think the epic Picasso Halloween Comicicular Series that's coming up shall be one of the Great Wonders of 2004, personally. It shall consist of one normal comic, and one monostrosity not seen since the days of this thing.

The novelty of Jux 2.0 has now worn off and life is returning to normal. What wonders will this show us? None I'm pretty sure.

VICTORY! GO RED SOX!

NEC Strikes Back with a 65 Teraflop supercomputer platform. IBM's current offering has 36...BUT, they hope to eventually scale it to over 100Teraflops.

Also, look at this:
GLOBAL LETTER MAGNETS

Actually, this is bug #2. Last night when I posted the first feature I noticed that I forgot to have it update the news page. The problem this time is that I forgot to have the timestamp contain bot the date and the time, so the features were supposedly both created at midnight. It should be fixed now though.

I posted that without noticing that Zen had already posted a feature, because we just discovered our first bug ever with Jux 2.0! His "new feature" announcement appears below Kenny's, which came first. That makes no sense at all...I'll withold my feature until later tonight when we can sort that out.

New feature up, mostly only for the geekish at heart. :)

Considering you said the same thing the last time the feature poster was updated, I think you can resist it just fine ;)

Feature coming just a little later. It's been awhile since we've had two in one day!

Yup! All hand drawn, except for the stick men/women which I stole from the internet. The internet is a good place to steal things from. The nice grainy textureing is thanks to conversion to gif. It is a lot smoother in the original format. I did those in The Gimp. Photoshop is a lot better in my opinion, but I did not have access to it at the time. Also the concept images were first sketched on paper during boring classes. I draw with a pen a lot better than I do with a mouse.

Did you draw that by hand??
They're...coming...for...me...too...

All this newfangled thingamajiggery is VERY attractive for random featuremaking. I am at work, can I resist it?

Well, I did put up a feature right before we upgraded ;)

I've got a Picasso comic scheduled for tomorrow as well.

What a waste. I do all this work and nobody has a feature ready to test it out. Well I will just have to fix that myself. I've had a few ideas floating around in my head recently, and I havn't really given you anything since June. This is going to be one of my better works, I can feel it already.

Wooo! Way to go Kenny!
Thiz ez teh Awesome!!!1!one11!

By now, some of you have noticed a few other changes to the site as well. The Features page has changed, and there's no longer an "our favorites" part to it. The Information Section is completely dead, and will be gone forever. The News Archive is now officially called the Narchive. There's a few thousand other little things.

But let's talk about something else cool. My DSL suddenly became over twice as fast this past week, as verified by Firefox, online bandwidth testing, and reports by the modem itself. I guess TDS upgraded its network or something. The one thing I hated about having DSL is now fixed. Hurray!

Guess what? You are now looking at Jux 2.0! Thats right, a brand new version of Jux goodness, just for you! The most noticeable thing you will notice are the "New Feature" notifications, which will save us the bother of making news posts that say "Feature up!" everytime we post a feature. Look at the new subtexts also! As with my previous work on Jux, most of the goodies won't be visible to you, as it is mostly "behind the scenes." Check out our change to css though! The document source is so much cleaner that I wouldn't be surprised to see The Narchive download in less than 4 minutes! I've probably forgotten something important that I've done, but if I did, I can't remember it, so that's all for now on the update to Jux 2.0!

There's a new feature posted, inspired by the horrible website below.

According to Kirk Cameron, I'm the worst person ever!

The best way to achieve closure is muuuuuuurder.

There's a new Papa Roach song that contains detailed instructions on how to get away with it, I believe.

So, Marty is no longer the boyfriend. I'm depressed and I have too many things around me that remind me of him.
This is hell. I can't even think clearly. I want my fucking closure.
I just thought you guys should know that.

Vivian's new comic is up, and I think it's her funniest one yet, and best yet, it's about Pikmin. However, as I told her, I must admit it's not the best Pikmin comic I've ever read. That title still goes to this little number at VG Cats.

Nope. But Vivian did a feature that I will post later today.

There's a new feature posted. That's 1. Will Graeme make it to two?

To make up for being a total asshat as far as features go this week, I'm going to try to post two tomorrow.

That doesn't mean I will post two, mind...but I certainly shall try.

When I said expect a feature today, I forgot about the presidential debates.

This one really wasn't as good as the past two. I doubt it changed many peoples' opinions one way or the other. It was nice to hear Bush admit he can't speak English, though.

CNN Headline. Spears: Call me Britney Federline.

I guess that would be a "no."

Also, fuck you winter.

School continues to trump features. I've got one on Canadians and one on Zombies in the pipe. Expect at least one to appear tomorrow, delayed from today.

There was a Porsche 911 Turbo in the student parking lot! THERE WAS A 911 TURBO IN THE PARKING LOT! I did a real double take, as soon as I saw it. If it wasn't for copious amounts of willpower, I'd be there still, drooling on the hood and waiting for the owner to come back and give me a ride.

Which, for some reason, reminds me of something that happened last Thursday that I never told you Jux people about. I was going to class, with my iPod on, when I see this girl with long pink hair say something to me. I pull off my headphones, and she says "here!", roots around in her bookbag a second, and then shoves a CD in my hands. After that, she walked away. There were a lot of other people around, but no else was attacked and given a CD.

It's for some local band whose name I'm not going to whore for free here. I can tell they're local because their CD lists a hotmail address to contact for booking. That's a dead giveaway ;)

I've not listened to it yet...maybe I should. But I'm scared, and I'm pretty sure it's going to suck.

I am feeling great, despite feeling like crap. Somehow I managed to get a 24/30 on my sadis... statistics quiz. Also I just totally destroyed my cse418 test. I love showing up without a "cheat sheet", being the first to finish, and still knowing that I completely smashed an exam. But enough about me, let's talk about you? How's it goin, good lookin?

Christopher Reeve just died.

Fairwell, my initial-mate. May all CRs find their way safely to heaven.

There's a new Halloween feature posted. Actually, the last three features or so have all been kinda scary, haven't they?

Okay, so I thought he won the debate too, but that's fucking nuts! That's a heavier bias than after the last debate, and I thought Bush did much better this time, even though all he really did was say the same stuff...while screaming.

New, highly random feature posted.

You need some wood?

First LAN Party ever, wooo!

NOOOOoooooooooo.......

Also, here's something to make you all feel old. Super Mario 64 is now almost as old as Super Mario Bros. was when it came out.

That's your depressing thought of the day.

For about the past year, I've been wondering if I've been losing the gamer in me. True, I've never been so busy. But why haven't I been drooling over games as much? Why do I no longer consume GameSpot like crazy?

I think it's the crap that's coming out. I was still 0wned by Silent Hill 4, after all, and Rome: Total War seems bitchin'. But I used to get every square game, instant like. Square doesn't produce that many games anymore. There's not been a new real Resident Evil game in forever. Although I haven't picked up Pikmin 2 yet, I got most of my first party games from Nintendo at Christmas and consumed them then.

Basically, I think there's been a slump this generation that no one has talked about. When the war started, everyone was trying to knock everyone else right out of the ring. Now that the focus has shifted to what's going to happen next, releases are less important. This is not what happened at the end of the last generation, what with the "Summer of Square" in 2000 and all.

Feature posted, but only in Kenya.

Word up, let's do our dance!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is awesome. The ending actually reminds me of the way I usually end my stories. Only probably better. Then again, I can't judge my own writing very well.

Also, Georgia is supposed to have a colder than normal winter. To that I say...GOD DAMNIT!

You know, I told Vivian this earlier this week, but I think it's worth letting the rest of the world know my plan. It is totally unfair that guys who have a lot of female friends have suckass bachelor parties because they can't come. I'm inviting all of my friends of the opposite sex to the bachelor party. There's only one caveat: They have to come either as Victorian gentlemen, or as strippers. If they come as Victorian gentlemen, they have to act like one. Ditto on the strippers.

Am I joking? I guess you'll have to wait a few year to find out.

Although I disagree with him, I would like to say that I thought Cheney did very well in tonight's debate, and I was almost touched when he put down his spin and quietly agreed with Edwards on gay marriage, going against his boss, by saying nothing at all. And Edwards didn't push him on it, or call him out on it either. Everyone knows that's a sensitive situation with Cheney, and seeing it not pushed in the debate really impressed me. Sure, ole Dick lied quite a few times...but not as much as his "boss", and he certainly was more convincing when he did it. A much better debater.

Of course, he knows English. That might help, Mr. Bush.

There's a new feature up. Are you prepared for it?

Can you do it without your Coca-Cola?

I'm starting to think our new Feature page subtext should be "Our opinions are backed by NUCLEAR WEAPONS."

You Forgot Poland!

That website is pure joy. It's amazing how fast popular culture is absorbed and turned into mush by the internet.

Speaking of which, whatever else you may say about the shows, the music in CSI is totally hat.

There's a new feature up, where I attempt to offend everyone who's language isn't English!

It's fun for the whole family!

Let's hear it for SpaceShipOne, and the fact that I'm about to go take a German test!

...I would love to go into space. They made it look easy. I wonder, is the SS1 project going to continue, and maybe make an SS2 to try orbital flight? Think of how cheap satellite launches would become (at least in comparison).

Also, I'm sorry I've had so much school work lately. I really want to do a feature tonight, and hopefully, I will.

Actually, I'm going to do something, whether it's good or not, because I don't think we've gone more than four days without posting a feature before in a new month. The last time we came close, Kenny stepped in. Hurray.

Newspaper photograph shows a pregnant, cigarette-smoking woman worrying about the effect of construction noise on her unborn child.

And people wonder why humanity depresses me.

I think I'm still alive... I think...

He doesn't want China out of the process. That's something stupid Bush was saying.

I watched the same debate in its entirety, and then pored over the transcripts. He wasn't that clear on means of getting to where he said he wanted to go. He was somewhat clear on what he planned to do, but not how. I can tell you that I will build a spacecar in 6 months, I can say how good it is for the spacecar to be built. But if I don't explain how I'm going to do it, what good is it to say I will?

I mean, how does he expect to "close the borders", how does he expect to get all these other countries to commit troops when they're spooked enough as it is? What specific strategies does he expect to utilize to do what we're doing better? Why in the world does he want to go back to solely focusing on Afghanistan? Why does he want to cut China out of the peace process with North Korea? How will that work? I mean he has a bit of charisma, but come on, these are tough issues. If I'm going to be sold on it, I need more than "such and such general thinks I'm the man for the job".

I don't know if Travis was watching the same debate, because I think Kerry was very clear on his Iraq plan.

I hate October. Let's get rid of it!

Yea, it certainly was an interesting debate. I do have to say, however, that Kerry is nowhere near innocent from dodging questions or any of the other "politician's tricks" that either side is throwing at the other.

For example, when Jim asked Kerry about "specifics, in terms of a scenario, time lines, et cetera, for ending major U.S. military involvement in Iraq", he still continued to attack Bush's plan without providing anything substantial other than "change the dynamics on the ground", make them stop believing we have long-term aims for them, and "close the borders". He also said something about guarding the nuclear facilities, but I'm not sure there was anything to guard there (I could be wrong, don't counter me on that).

And then he would repeat "my plan is better" over and over. His "plan" states only outcomes (which are admirable outcomes, don't get me wrong) but not a viable way to get there. Nothing specific.

Having done professional Lincoln-Douglas debate, I was impressed with Kerry's composure, and somewhat disappointed at Bush's performance. He let some inflammatory remarks get to him instead of shaking it off like Kerry did, and missed several opportunities to cream Kerry in some of the rebuttals. Live and learn, I hope.

Anyway, I think I'll do a full Juxtapositions feature on my analysis of the debate transcript either tonight or tomorrow night, because for some strange reason lately I have grown an interest in politics. ;).

Overall results of the debate, after some reflection?

Kerry ++

Seriously, what was with that pause where Bush just froze, staring at the camera like a deer in the headlights? It's like he briefly forgot to talk. Only it wasn't so brief. And let us not forget the day when "mexed missages" was added to the Bushish catalog. As a former Bush supporter, it was great to hear Kerry mention almost all of the things that caused me to leave his camp (no Patriot act or gay marriage ban, but we'll get to that, I imagine.)

This week of school has baked me, and that's why I've been quiet. Now I must watch a smart man debate a man who can't answer questions.

But, because I understand that you love us and are worried, I have posted a new feature by Vivian to tide you over.

Oh, and we're down to just visual tweaks on Jux 2.0...so it's going to be unveiled soon.

Are you watching the debates? Does anyone else wonder what questions George W. Bush was hearing? 'Cause they're obviously not the ones he's supposed to be answering.

Sometimes it's the little things that take forever to notice. Every classroom in Middle and High school had a door with a little window in it, and the window was reinforced by chicken wire, which is known to stop bullets and hammers with magical efficiency.

So, today, I was looking through a window door in KSU when I suddenly realized something...no chicken wire. What do you know.

Speaking of which, I had a really good feature idea for today, but I have a shitload of school work to do, and I feel like ass (headache...and headache medicine upsets my stomach). Anyway, feature production was appropriately halted.

My girlfriend is having unending problems at her apartment complex. I grow angry.

Damn Scott for getting the ancient song "6 Underground" stuck in my head. There's a funny story about that...which I can't type fast enough to tell before losing interest, due to feeling "bleh" as hell.

Oh, and Jux 2.0 is almost done. Really. There's a super-not-quite-so-secret working version of the site based on it. Just a few tweaks left :D

Oh goodness. I just now realized that kick does not begin with a c.

Feature posted.

Whew! What a night!
Ok, here is a writeup on my blog of our trip to visit HAL 9000.

Me, my brother Ryan, Peter, and Ari all went down to Kirk Wooster's place to check it out. It was very interesting and a lot of fun. I might still do a separate Jux feature on this, but this was much easier and I wanted to get it out before I passed out from exhaustion. Maybe if we can get a built-in blog or something *nudge, hint hint* ;)

Anyway, click on the images to enlarge them. They're not the best quality, but I didn't have Graeme's Canon to use, and I recently sold my real camera. They get the point across though!

Oh my glorious not worshipped God, A Perfect Circle's new single is Imagine, and they made it not suck!

Hey, don't look at me like that. I'm a huge Beatles fan. But that song, while catchy, is annoying as hell. Not so anymore. Now it rocks!

Can A Perfect Circle do no wrong?

This news post is brought to you by the number 2, and the fact that Kenny says that 2.0 might be finished as early as this weekend. No promises, of course...but the changes are getting closer. Part of why we're searching for a new logo. I like the triangle one below, so expect it to show up in some form, if not exactly as it is there.

Consideration for the new logo has now fallen onto this young man:

Salty, the Jux Entente Snail, was eliminated in the prelims. Poor Salty.

That Cyborg pony has nothing on my Cyber pony. Just look at its wimply legs, and lack of chomping jaws.

The HAL9000 is being auctioned off.

But that's not all--it's being auctioned off from Woodstock, which is like 5 minutes away from me. I called the seller and asked if I could check it out before it sells and goes far far away. He said "come on down!", so that's what I'm going to do, either tomorrow evening or Thursday. Graeme, Vivian, Sarah, Ryan, Peter, anyone in close proximity to me has been invited to come with me.

He will show us HAL9000 up close and personal, as well as show us the documentation/video(s?) that accompany it. He seems like a cool guy--he lives in an airport hanger and flies choppers. He says he's selling HAL to get some $$$ for a new helicopter.

I'll definitely be sure to post the details when we get back!

There's a new feature posted. It's actually the second of my Scripting History features. This one is about SilverMail.

So far as I can tell, I only have one other of these left in me, so don't worry about another showing up too soon...or too often. Until then, enjoy reading.

I just posted a Silent Hill feature that took me an amazingly long amount of time to create.

Please love it.

I'm going to try to have a new feature for you tomorrow, since I beat Silent Hill 4 last night. My final verdict? It was awesome. But all SH games are awesome. My rankings now go like this:

SH3 > SH4 > SH > SH2

The original would be higher, but it's starting to show its age. I actually think SH4 and the original are more or less the same quality. Silent Hill 3 still owns, devours, conquers, slaughters, and purchases ass with large amounts of cash, though.

She forgot the most important/noticeable feature when dealing with man-bums. The Ass Hair. It is everywhere!! I can't wait until Jux 2.0 is done and we can comment on features again, and most importantly, I can have a break.

The poo-splotch is the most insulting thing, in my opinion.

Just think! Soon, we'll be able to post these as feature commentaries again! Whooo!

:(¯¯¯¯)
I...don't know whether to laugh out loud or cry.. :O

Not to distract from the awesome-ass cyber pony below, but another person has seen fit to make fun of Travis in feature form. It's not me this time!

Have fun!

Ask, and ye shall receive. Cyber-Pony. I hope you appreciate that. I gave up good homework time to make it using pictures I stole from the internet.

Since it doesn't look like SH4's hold on me is going to end anytime today, I hereby promise to post another feature by Miss Mew (I've got three waiting in queue) if I don't post one of the three I'm working on. Which I probably won't. So there you go.

I want the systems check voice from the Mech Warrior series in my car. When I crank it, I want to hear it go through a checklist and then go "All systems nominal." That would be awesome!

Also, let's hear it once again for Kenny. Less than 12 hours after I made a random suggestion that we should have an RSS feed of the main (news) page for Jux 2.0, he had one more or less up and running, and tied into the new news poster. That's dedication to his non-paying job, folks!

Next time, I'm going to ask for a cyber-pony.

I have several features almost ready, but Silent Hill 4, and to a much greater extent class, work, and sleep, have kept me from doing much this week so far. However, do you remember those wonderful "Petitions of the Week" I did earlier this year? Some of them have some interesting things on them. From the Ban of Heterosexual Marriage petition:

55. (Melanie Mansfield) *dies* I can't believe someone had the guts to do this. WOOHOOO! Listen to the people, Gov. Bush!

Whoever you are Melanie, you're awesome ;)

I just saw the best vanity tag ever while pulling into the North Deck here at Kennesaw. It said, and I quote exactly:

"CDN EH"

So far, it's rocktastic, although not quite on the same uber-rock-a-mitigation-super-tastic-orgasm-good level as 3 was. Silent Hill 3 may be the best. game. ever., though.

Silent Hill 4 is here.

To Konami I say: I loooooooooove you.
To the USPS, I say: Fuck you up your stupid hick asses.

Well, Kid Radd is no more, as of today. At least this was a planned ending, announced well in advance. Still, it's always sad to see a webcomic go...especially when so many turn to shit. Alas. :|

Well, I bought a CD in physical form. To be fair, it's the first time in a long time I'd done such a thing...but I had to have Skindred's album.

The RIAA has earned a profit at my expense for the first time in a year. I feel dirty.

Miss Mew's other comic has been posted.

This one makes sense!

And now, to make up for being evil and posting such a tasteless comic, I'm posting a link to this thread from the Ars Technica forum, which happened three years ago today. Watch it unfold in people's comments.

It's still a horrifying thing to think about, isn't it? Don't think I don't respect the families and the magnitude of what happened. I'm just sick of Dick Cheney and President Bush making this into the biggest political poker chip ever. Must strike back.

The new Picasso feature is up. The real question should be: can I one-up myself next year?

I am now copiously angry with EBgames.com and the U.S. postal service. Normally, I would get my games from them the day they came out in the store. I've been waiting for Silent Hill 4 since fucking Tuesday. The earliest it can now get here is Monday. I'm tempted to go down to Wal-Mart, buy the game, and then stop payment on my credit card for EB and tell them to go fuck themselves, GameSpot discount be damned.

Ragrgr. This is the longest wait I've had for a Silent Hill game since the first one. Hell, Kenny got it before me, and I introduced him to the series. SOMEONE MUST PAY FOR THIS. I had this weekend all planned out to play it, too. Since I work next weekend, and every night this week, this sucks.

Once again, we've reached 9-11 here on Jux.

Two years ago, we posted a very somber replacement index.

Last year, I did this.

Tonight? Well...I say nothing ;)

Vivian sent me two more comics today, which postpones me attacking you with boredom again. I think people are trying to prevent me from posting the next in my mIRC series. Anyway, I'll post her other, more coherent comic later. Right now...I have no idea what the hell this one is about.


...enjoy the feature! Think of it as an independent film!

This ought to be a feature, but its really short. I just want to say that I am a hardcore gamer. Walking ~4 miles to get an RF modulator for a PS2 makes me so. I got dibs on a future feature titled "Legends of the Hardcore Gamer." It's mine. Nobody take it!

Posted.

I'm delaying the second boring mIRC feature to work on a super-happy-fun-Kenny's-birthday-feature! SOooN!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! :D

Guess what! Today is my birthday! Everybody sing!

The Ten Most Hated Men In Rock.

Damn straight. I hate Paul McCartney.

I just posted the first in a series of features that are not funny, and are probably only going to interest a few of you out there. It's about my mIRC sCR ipting past. Just let me get it out of my system, and we'll be back to the funny ;)

The next one may be up later today or early tomorrow. There will probably be about three. Until then...enjoy my feature on ServerCheck! The explanation for why I have to do this is in the feature, as well.

Thoughts from the morning:

1) Frances really IS a bitch.
2) The Floridians were clogging our highways again. This time, at least, they're heading south. I think they realized that Frances came for THEM, and they're trying to escape again.
3) For the first time in literally two years, I use an umbrella today. To celebrate the occassion, my iPod (on shuffle) randomly picked "Monsters in the Parasol" by Queens of the Stone Age. It was fitting.

Cheese.

Random surprising news of the day:

Did you think we'd forgotten about Jux 2.0? Expect the biggest changes to this stie you've seen since May 2002 to appear relatively shortly.

Actually, we're mostly keeping the same visual style, so there will just be a ton of little tweaks. Even the mainpage subtext is changing. Brace yourself.

Hahahahahaha.

PEPKE FOREVER!

There's a new feature up, based on an idea Kenny had.

Not only that, but you can see for yourself that the "Our Favorites" section is updated for the first time in 23 months.

And probably for the last time, too, since we're getting rid of it in Jux 2.0

Even though we (by which I mean, I) get in trouble for it all the time, I do tend to mention what I think about people on Jux without regard to the fact that it's being read by an international community, which usually includes the very people I'm talking about.

Well, I'm not going to do that today. I don't need the fucking drama. All I'm going to say is that in recent years, I'd been letting myself warm up again, slightly, to someone from my past. But then I read something they wrote today, and I realized something. They're the biggest fucking hypoCR ite I've ever seen. Worse than even our great president, Mr. Dubya. Sure, they're upset at the moment, but I've never seen someone prove they don't care about anyone but themself in such a definite way.

On the other hand, the position of "least favorite person I once had romantic feelings for" just flip flopped yet again. Hurray!

And now I'm so annoyed, that I'm FINALLY going to update the "Our Favourites" feature section for the first time since 2002. Sweet fancy moses.

Last night's feature has been lightly updated with a new (actual) picture of the Emperor of Awesome.

NOoOoooo... the red eyed lip peeling pic rears its ugly head!!! Foiled again!

If only I could find the irdu tribesman reverse ponytail picture I have of Graeme and scan it....mmmm fun! :D