Palshife Sakura

So apparently Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox360 and this is A Very Big Deal because everybody thought Squaresoft had gone Sony exclusive with the franchise, just like everybody thought it would be Nintendo exclusive so many years back.

Am I the only person that finds this underwhelming? Maybe I would care more if I didn't feel the Final Fantasy series had jumped the shark around game eleven and everything became about making the games as much like an MMO as possible.

Update:

Apparently the fact that Squaresoft wants to make money off of FF XIII by making a port of it for a console that's far more popular in America has made a lot of Sony nerds who bought the PS3 just for FF XIII all weepy eyed, and have started a petition to keep it exclusive to the PS3. Whatever makes them feel validated about dropping half a grand on a videogaming system, I guess.

So, I just finished Indigo Prophecy Fahrenheit and all I have to say is this.

Grandma should not turn into an evil robot of doom in a story about occult Mayan rituals.

FISA passed with a 69-28 vote.

Democrats voting in favor of final passage of the FISA bill: Bayh - Carper - Casey - Conrad - Dorgan - Feinstein - Innuoye - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mukulski - Nelson (Neb.) - Nelson (Fla.) - Obama - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb - Whitehouse.

Democrats voting against final passage of the FISA bill: Akaka - Biden - Bingaman - Boxer - Brown - Cantwell - Cardin - Clinton - Dodd - Dorgan - Durbin - Feingold - Harkin - Kerry - Leahy - Levin - Lautenberg - Murray - Reed - Reid - Sanders - Schumer - Stabenow - Tester - Wyden.

All Republicans present (McCain did not show up to vote) voted in favor of FISA. Could not find out the three who voted against it in addition to the Democrats.

Suddenly I feel as if, no matter who I vote for, I'm putting a noose around my neck, just that one is made of nylon, and the other of barbed wire. I fucking hate this game.

In other news, moot was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, latter loses credibility as a serious source of information.

The new picture is safe for work, but somehow I find it more offensive and disgusting.

Many comedians have acknowledged Hicks as an influence since his death. However, there have been some arguments made that certain comedians plagiarised Hicks' material and attempted to pass it off as their own, notably Denis Leary. To date IMDB still credits Hicks as an "uncredited" writer for Leary's No Cure for Cancer album. Hicks himself had a chance to listen to Leary's album No Cure for Cancer during his trip to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas during 1993 to report on the infamous siege. Upon hearing the album, Hicks was angered.

While he had laughed off similarities between the two comedians before, the albums' similar content (including jokes about smoking, Jim Fixx, and Judas Priest) and tone suggested plagiarism. In an interview, when he was asked why he had quit smoking, he answered, "I just wanted to see if Denis would, too." Hicks told an interviewer: "I have a scoop for you. I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did."

George Carlin died from heart failure tonight. He was one of my favorite classic comedians next to Richard Pryor. He kept me laughing till the end, always funny, always relevant. Thanks for the laughs, George.

A little something for the people who arbitrarily hate rap and country music.

So after reading about Adobe AIR for a while and in general being more comfortable with a home setup, I decided to give a few AIR applets a try. AIR's basically a bare bones web interface that runs small Flash applications, which is supposed to make it really good for simple Internet apps that do one thing very well, and are easily ported to other computing platforms.

The best example of this is the Pandora Desktop application, a direct link to the Flash application that plays the music on the website, which is useful for having it in its own user space and not cluttering up your browser's tabs. Twhirl is a cute little minimalist Twitter updater and notifier which I like to use when I feel like keeping low-key and not loading up Digsby.

My favorite thus far, however, is Snackr, an RSS aggregator that rolls feed updates across your screen ticker-style. Snackr is relatively unobtrusive, easy on the eyes, terribly easy to add feeds to, and mixes up the updates to all your feeds quite nicely, gives you a nice little pop-up preview of clicked items without opening up your browser, and surprisingly lightweight. Most importantly to me, however, is that it rolls up and gets out of the way and with a simple right-click, and that I can click updates and read them at my leisure.

You see, one of the things that's annoyed me to no end about Google's Web Clips gadget was its tendency to throw up notifications in my face, usually while I'm busy doing something else on my computer. On one hand, I'm glad to get RSS updates as they come, sort of. On the other, extreme irritation. I do not like to wrestle with my computer. Google's ability to catch feeds while browsing isn't that useful to me with the advent of Firefox's "Awesome Bar", so the switch to Snackr was easy, other than the fact that I had to copy/paste most of my feed URLs due to a lack of OMPL import/export support on Google's part.

Snackr isn't perfect, but so far I love it to death. Give it a go if you want to try something simple and a little different with reading your RSS feeds.

I'm a little surprised the Mozilla team didn't better prepare for the inevitable onslaught that'd result of them wanting to set a record for most downloads in one day with Firefox 3.0. Their download servers are still up, but the webpage to get it from is completely off the map. So have a direct link to the download (alternate link for those who Think Different). Here's one for you silly British types that like to throw in Us everywhere and switch around your Rs and Es, und ein anderer für die duetschen Sprecher. Thank SilverStar for helping me find out how to hack the URLs for the release candidates.

So, I just had Kasatka over for three hours, spending most of it doodling Okura, but also discussing chai, Coast To Coast AM, Half-Life 2, and music. She says I did very well for my first killer whale, but I dare say her helping me out was a big part of this. I hope to have her over again soon!

As well, I am quite pleased with how the drawing turned out. Just have to touch it up a bit, ink it, get it scanned and load it up in GIMP to paint it. I'm happy that the years worth of rust were so easily shed in an evening and I am confident this will lead to further drawing.

From time to time you'll see some rap and hip-hop show up on my Last.fm playlist. This is because I love any and all music that makes you feel, has soul to it, or tells a story. It doesn't matter to me if the person singing or creating is black or white, singing about the best day of their lives or the most soul-crushing depression, or even just being goofy and off-the-wall. To me, it is all creative works and expression of self.

So, understand, I get just a little bit pissed off when I see shit like this. I know furries are not unique in having such flawed or subtly racist reasons for disliking this subset of music. The way I see it, it's one thing if you just can't connect to a particular style, which I'm perfectly fine with. It's outright hate of it for reasons so utterly ridiculous makes me want to start knocking skulls.

"Rap isn't music. It's poetry for illiterate people." Yeah, sure, because rappers don't write, least of all poetry of any sort. Because gangsta rap is the only violent form of music that talks about death, sex, and the objectification of women. In fact, it is the only form of rap that exists. Screw artists like the Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Atmosphere, Saul Williams, and El-P. It's not like any subset or rock, least of all nu-metal, has borrowed in any way, shape or form from hip-hop and rap, either. In fact, they never, ever cross over.

What galls me is that the same people who hate rap have the brass to say in the same breath that they love techno. Both genres were spawned from the same primordial soup of electronic music and do not differ past tempo, and that hip-hop is somewhat more minimalist and has rhythmic vocals. They've both even abused the Amen Break to death. Listen to "Straight Outta Compton" sometime. All you jungle and breakbeat fans will be be weeping afterward, I'm sure.

Not all rap is good rap, granted, but shitty music isn't a problem limited to rap, and to suggest any of rap's pitfalls are unique to the genre, or to hold all other kinds of music blameless in their depictions of the darker side of humanity, is nothing but willful ignorance with a light sprinkling of latent hate for the brown man.

So, with some of the free time I have, I've been catching up on videogames and anime I'd otherwise not had a chance to finish, or thought of starting.

For videogames, I finally got through Super Mario 64, and I'm working my way through Majora's Mask (Project64's support of The Ocarina of Time is spotty to the point of being unplayable, sadly). Breaking it up with a bit of Punch-Out!! Mr. Sandman is such a pain in the ass.

For anime, after revisiting Neon Genesis Evangelion (it's very much a love/hate relationship), I went on a Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG marathon from beginning to end, finishing this afternoon (god I love cyberpunk). I always feel weird after finishing a series that ends with such a strong emotional impact. I tried following it up with Azumanga Diaoh, as I was wondering what the big deal was about it, and found myself bored out of my skull for the following ten minutes before I gave up on it. Ape came to the rescue later on by introducing me to Oruchuban Ebichu (he linked me this episode, which got me hooked). Wasn't entirely surprised to find out that Hideaki Anno was behind it, or that GAINAX produced it. "I'm so fucked up," indeed. Still, I imagine it was a nice change of pace from serious stories and death threats from his fans.

I don't enjoy my free time anymore. I take sleep aids just so I can go to bed early and not have to put up with anyone's crap.

I am nobody, and I will be nobody until I make enough money or draw well enough. I really should just stay offline until my artist talent's up to snuff or until I get a real job.

Oh hell yes, this country has hope yet.

Obama '08. I don't care if I have to walk through wind and rain, I am voting for this man.

I don't think I mentioned it just yet, but I got name-dropped in Okura's webcomic. Dragons wouldn't fit so well with the story he's telling, so the next best thing was to have my name clacked up on the walls of some modern Atlantis. Color me flattered and grateful.

So now I am doing an art trade with him, and I'm nervous as hell because it's been years since I've drawn anything to completion, and I've never drawn a killer whale before. But doing the trade was the motivation I needed to stop agonizing about the talent I don't yet have, and to just shut up and draw.

I'm still going to the gym. What's more, one of the counselors there is getting me to change things up a bit, do stuff besides the bike and cross-ramp. The first session I mostly worked out my arms, and today I exercised my legs. They're incredibly sore and it feels like I'm walking on jello, but getting stronger is a part of losing weight I guess.

Oh, and the guy coaching me is so very gay. It won't be long before he's asking me if I want to hang out and maybe go to dinner or something. I'm sure not complaining. It's kind of nice to have people wanting you like that.

I don't feel like I've been taking my studies seriously enough, so around 9PM PST I'm cutting off my Internet for two hours. One to spend actually studying, the second for other personal enrichment, in this case, drawing. I write about it to make myself all the more committed to doing so.

No, it's not emo, just click and watch it.

What little time I've done telemarketing has taught me what a scripted call sounds like. This isn't much of a skill these days, given how telemarketing as a concept is dying out, but it still has its uses, surprisingly enough. Sales calls can come from the most interesting of places, but I never thought I'd be getting one from a Monster.com scammer. You see, before the 419 scheme became the Internet scam du jour, pyramid schemes ran rampant and wild, chain e-mails speaking promises of millions of dollars in your pocket if you put a dollar in five envelopes and mailed it off to five people obviously smarter than you. Any long-time Veteran of the Tubes can smell one from a mile away.

So when I received a call from a charming young lady that not only sounded very scripted, and very much like a call I got not a day before, my bullshit alarms started jangling. But I wasn't doing anything else the day she wanted to meet me, so I humored her, in spite of the fact that I've yet to hear of any formal interview being conducted in a Starbucks. But what my desire to "help and train people" amounted to was me selling life insurance and working as a mortgage broker, with the promise of bonuses upon bonuses if anybody I trained to do the same turned out to be great at schilling the same sort of snake-oil. All I had to do was take some tests and spend $99 to become a state-certified broker, and spend $25/month on special software that would help me perform the intense calculations required of me.

Simply put, it was the unholy love-child of the "work from home data-entry" and pyramid scheme scams.

Mind you, I already knew she was trying to sell me a pantload after thirty minutes of her drooling on about numbers with no clear idea of what my function would be in the company, and her neatly dodging a simple question I'd asked as to how a person could spend less on a life insurance premium and somehow get more than your average coverage. Then again, I didn't expect much out of a supposed subsidiary of Citigroup. I just had no idea things were so bad for them that they'd stoop to age-old tactics of swindling people out of their money, rather than the modern variants of credit cards and overdraft fees.

If there was any satisfaction to be had of this, it's the fact that it was an hour she didn't spend hooking some other poor slob, and the fact that I stood her up for the next day follow-up. I feel no pity or remorse for those who sell false hope to people.