Malaclypse the Seeker

12:57 pm - New from SyFy: Warehouse 13

http://www.scifi.com/warehouse13/

Premise: After saving the life of the President, two Secret Service agents find themselves abruptly transferred to Warehouse 13 --a massive, top-secret storage facility in windswept South Dakota that houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government. The Warehouse’s caretaker Artie (Saul Rubinek) charges Pete (EddieMcClintock) and Myka (Joanne Kelly) with chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal activity in search of new objects to cache at the Warehouse, as well as helping him to control the warehouse itself.

My thoughts, in rough order:

1) This looks vaguely interesting, I might be compelled to check it out.

2) I wonder if Steve Jackson & Co. have heard about this yet, and how pissed they are?

3) Neat, one of my fictional personas is screaming at me.

09:37 pm - Everything old is new again

It's that time of the decade, which means that Discordian Sky has had another makeover. Goodies include a cleaner layout (or at least I think so), some new artwork in the Art section including a raft of 2d stuff, since that's been my focus for a good while, and couple old/new projects in Discordian Sky Press.

Things that need to change: At some point I need to figure out a way to reduce the footprint on MalWiki and (especially) FenWiki. Setting up a small wikifarm *might* be the answer, but I can't tell 'cause all the documentation on wikifarming goes right over my poor english-major head. :P Research continues, though.

Oh, of some small note, I got paid for a web dev project! It was small and (too) cheap, but what the hell, money's money, yeah? Here's the site if you want to feast on the glory of my cheapass CSS skillz.

11:12 am - [HOLY SHIT] ABCs "Impact"

Look at this shit:



This makes Armageddon look scientifically accurate. Dear Xenu, I want to strangle everybody involved with this project.

12:02 pm - It begins...

Sean Breen, Thank you for ordering tickets from MovieTickets.com!
Your Movie: ...........  Star Trek: The IMAX Experience (PG-13)
Showtime: .............  7:00pm, the evening of Thursday, May 07, 2009
Theater: ..............  AMC Highlands Ranch 24
                         103 W Centennial Blvd.
                         Highlands Ranch, CO 80129

03:21 pm

Anybody know of a good used bookstore in the general Littleton/Centennial/Greenwood V./Highlands Ranch area? I've got around 100-150 lbs of books I need to unload.

10:24 pm - Question of the evening

Does it hurt my atheist street cred if "Jesus Christ Superstar" is the only Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I actually like?

06:39 pm - Requiem for a shitty adobe building

KASF 90.0 FM was housed in a shitty little adobe building that had been squatting on the east side of Richardson Ave. since time began, where it might've been housing for the terminally broke-ass student once but was quickly repurposed to house the campus rentacops and the radio station. The building showed its age: the floors were wooden, and probably would've rotted in a wetter climate if not for the micron-thin layer of varnish the builders stuck on. The walls were all stucco and cheap paint, covered with decades worth of promotional stickers from the radio station and generations of lousy independent bands. The broadcast booth itself was a tiny addition to the back of the original building, without any functioning heat or A/C and the broadcast tower stuck in the ground less than three feet outside the studio window.

Picture this: It's midnight Saturday in December in Alamosa. The San Luis Valley is by nature a pretty dry place, rain falls on the San Juans or the Sangre range to the west and east, so it doesn't get much snow. It does get cold, though, cold like only a high plateau in the Rockies can get. All the sane people are in bed or in the bar en route to going to bed. And there I am, on the station's porch bundled up like Scott of the Antarctic hammering on the door and waiting for the DJ ahead of me to remember that there's another guy in the booth after him & open the freaking door.

And there I am, effectively all alone in this shitty adobe building with only the transmitter to keep me company or keep me warm, blasting out vocal trance and bad Japanese pop into the frozen aether. I do this for four hours, then before the break of dawn I sign off, shut down the transmitter and retreat to the lobby to catch some sleep before my next program, the Sunday morning blasphemy hour. (No, really. I never officially called it that, but mildly satanic hair metal and recordings of pagan rites, right in the middle of services.) The shitty adobe building had one thing going for it: in the lobby was The Most Comfortable Couch in the Universe. It started out as a normal couch, but years of tired college students flopping on it had turned it into the perfect place to catch a couple hours of sleep at 4am on a Sunday morning so you didn't sound like a complete retard on air later and/or cause an incident with the FCC. I'd be mostly asleep for a few hours, then about half-awake for two hours when the whitest white kids on campus would come in to do their Christian rock show from 6 to 8. That was something burned vividly into my skull, if only because I'd swear that one time they played a Christian rap song that used clips from the infamous anti-abortion movie "Silent Scream." I don't remember any of the lyrics, all I can recall is hearing a backbeat, somebody screaming in falsetto, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner. I'm still not sure I didn't hallucinate it.

Anyway.

That graveyard shift at KASF is something I'll remember fondly for the rest of my life. The combination of the booth, the cold, and the Most Comfortable Couch iin the Universe were something special.

Yesterday, as I heard from a friend and another former KASF DJ, the old KASF building was torn down. The shitty little adobe building where I spent so many weekend nights my junior and senior years is no more. The radio station still exists as far as I can tell. Even back during my senior year they were making noises about moving the studio to a location somewhere in the student center, so that comes as no surprise. Losing the old building is a bit sad, though. Everything changes, and the college isn't the same place it was when I left.

Hope they saved the couch. Everything changes, but some things shouldn't be thrown out.

02:34 pm - [rez plz] The bricking saga continues.

Here's the latest staus update:

Since the Geforce card is close to melting, I've pulled it and am running on the video card native to the mainboard. It's not at omgwtfbbq super as a proper video card, but for what I want it ain't so bad. In the meantime, experimenting with my super-duper SATA-USB adapter cable has given me a little insight into the problem. It appears that my G: drive is unhappy and doesn't want to play well with others for some reason. The connection is at best intermittent; sometimes it'll load without problems while other times it just sits there sucking power.

The good news is, that drive isn't super-critical or anything, and pulling it off the mainboard seems to clear up the slow booting issue. The bad news is, it's my media drive with ~100GB worth of stuff (mostly mp3s) on it, and I'd rather not lose all of that data.

Not sure where to go from here, suggestions welcome, etc. I can safely say the box is ~75% unbricked at this point. Now if I could just get my iTunes library back.

08:57 pm - [rez plz] Half-bricked

Forward progress is being made! We're not sure how or why, but it's being made regardless.

The Professionals poked at it & didn't know what the fuck, but for whatever reason its now booting. Okay, fine. Whatever. On deeper inspection it turns out that the Geforce 7300 video card I have in there is overheating like crazy, so no more constant uptime until I can get it fixed or replaced.

Also, and of more immediate concern, I seem to be having silly bugger issues with the SATA ports on the mainboard. Specifically, I have 3 SATA drives attached, and only 2 of them are showing up. Totally not sure what's going on here. Could be heat bleeding off the video card, could be death rays from Mars.

Any thoughts on how to bludgeon SATA 2, 3 & 4 back into commission on an Asus mb would be appreciated.

12:08 pm - [rez plz] Still bricked

After consulting the oracles, and some suggestions from tangaroa (thanks Tang, btw) I've done some modifications to my computer and it is still bricked. Thinking it was a hardware conflict I pulled all the cards off my system one by one with no change. Windows and Ubuntu still refuse to boot, Ubuntu giving me the same error messages as from the last entry, Windows remaining stubbornly silent on the issue.

Suggestions from the peanut gallery? 'Cause right now, I've got *nothing* except maybe "replace motherboard," and that's not in the cards.

ETA: So I've finally decided to give in & take the silly bugger in for a Professional to look at. I can afford to let some tech-support monkey poke at it & tell he he don't know what the fuck. That's about all I can afford, but whatever.

In other news, my mother got a shiny new iMac. I am manfully resisting jealousy.

08:14 pm - REZ PLZ

So my computer seems to have bricked on me. Crashed hard at first (everything locked up, no BSoD), then on reboot it tries to go through the XP bootup sequence, but it locks up after the first boot screen & before it gives me a mouse cursor or a Welcome screen.

Tried booting from a liveCD (Ubuntu v. 14.xx IIRC) thinking this was a HD problem, only that didn't work either. Trying to load the linux kernel gave me these two errors:

[17179569.792000] MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC.
[17179570.180000] PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 1 of device 0000:00:14.0

...considering that's the most OS data I've gotten out of multiple tries to reset the BIOS and reboot, any of the million tech zealots on my friends list have any suggestions? I've gotta figure that the problems are connected somehow.

09:55 am

12:23 pm - Your Political Quote of the Day

From this New York Times column:

"If you really want to see a strange line of attack, take a look at the wolf ad. It cuts from Palin’s face to Obama’s to packs of wolves prowling through the forest, presumably in search of vice-presidential prey. Then comes the text claiming that as Barack drops in the polls,“he’ll try to destroy her.” Given Palin’s affection for shooting wolves from airplanes with high-powered rifles, it’d be more appropriate to have them cowering in their dens while she aims her machine gun from a diving Cessna."

03:49 pm - Pass the word

Sarah Palin is John McCain's pick for the Vice President of the United States. Now, you can help him vet her for the job!

Let us spread this wonderful site hither and yon, across all our friendslists.

10:26 pm - All the airwaves are full of passion and light

So. Barack Obama.

It's gonna be a hell of a fight, because McCain and the GOP braintrust won't go down quietly and they'll play as mean and dirty as they can. But I think he's gonna do it. I think he's gonna be President.

This feeling of "shit, maybe we aren't irrevocably fucked" is strange and offputting. But on the whole, I think I could get used to this thing they call hope.

10:30 am - [Fenspace!] [Story] First Impressions

This is a story all about how my life got turned right upside d-

*whack!*

Okay, I'll stop now. Sorry. Anyway, this is a Fenspace story. It's part of a larger story, but it's self-contained enough that I think you (the poor, gullible non-Fenspace LJ reader) should be able to follow it. It also contains cameos of various unusual persons. You know who you are, and you can complain in comments. --Mal

( In which our heroine enters a new world, we learn the dangers of mediaphilic AI, and a job offer is made. )

08:03 am - 31

[notation of continued engeezerment]

[obscenity]

[...leaves for Worldcon]

10:23 pm - Submitted without comment

11:04 pm - [Fenspace!] [Story] Bootup

This is... well, it's different. I was aiming for a hundred different goals and I've no idea how many I hit. This is an odd little character sketch based on some of my weirder speculations regarding the inner life of sapient machinery. Enjoy.

( A beginning is a very delicate time... )

11:16 am - nonsense post

My iPod just rickrolled me. :(

That is all.