| I'm finally starting to wish I had a car again. |
[Monday, November 16th, 2009|6:07 PM] |
Saw a sign on the bus, and just doubled checked it with the Metro website.
1) They're raising the fare yet again. *sigh*
2) They're doing away with the PugetPasses, meaning I now have to get an ORCA card. *double sigh*
I didn't want to have to get an ORCA card. With that, I now have to worry about making sure the bus driver has the fare set to one-zone every time I get on/off the bus, so that I don't get overcharged for a two-zone fare (which is a very real possibility since the 266 going into Seattle in the morning and coming out of Seattle in the evening is a two-zone fare if you ride the whole trip, but I only ride it from Redmond to Bellevue in the morning and back again in the evening, which is just one-zone). Very annoying. But if I'm going to get an ORCA card, I'd better do it now while it's free, because as of Feb 1, 2010, they're going to start charging $5 for them (apparently in addition to whatever value you put on the card itself). Also, another reason I need to go ahead and do it now is because they won't be selling any more PugetPasses after Dec. 14 at all. The only bright side, I guess, is that I won't have to buy a new PugetPass every month anymore, for what it's worth. I just have to keep this ORCA thing charged up with credit or whatever. *weary sigh*
So, yeah, they're once again charging even more for inversely proportionally crappier service.
Oh, and while I'm ranting about the buses and crappy service... they put up a new time table on the pole at the stop where I get on the bus on the way home from work. They've never had a time table there before recently. And, of course, the times on this time table are completely different than the times that the Trip Planner gives for that same stop and those same buses. The times on the new time table on the pole are far more inconvenient for me than the previous Trip Planner times (which I'm guessing are now out of date). Not, of course, that this really matters, given that the buses never show up at the correct time for either of those time tables. *deep inhale* *huge sigh* |
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| Oh, EA. |
[Wednesday, November 11th, 2009|8:51 AM] |
It looks like EA is burying Pandemic, as well as whatever remains of the decrepit, shambling corpses that used to be Maxis (good thing Will Wright jumped ship when he did and on his own terms, I guess) and Westwood Studiosthe Command and Conquer team, among several others.
All I can say is that I wish this were a startling thing that was completely out of the blue, shocking due to its rarity. However, this is Electronic Arts here, after all. I'm not in the least bit surprised by this news, because, hey, this stuff happens all the time with them. Mostly, I'm just annoyed and saddened by it.
Count your days, Bioware. It's only a matter of time. |
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| This whole Modern Warfare 2 thing. |
[Tuesday, November 10th, 2009|12:51 PM] |
Apparently, this is the big thing in gaming right now and has been anticipated for months? I don't know. I haven't really been following this game. It doesn't interest me much at all.
However, I have to say I was amused by these related things put out by Mega64 and The Onion.
And.... yeah. That's about it. |
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| Headphones died. :( |
[Sunday, November 8th, 2009|12:58 AM] |
My good headphones died on me just now, after a little over a year of being awesome. The left side went out. For now, I'm forced to use some crappy ones that came with a pack of AA batteries. It sounds like listening to stuff through a tin can, in comparison. As such, I just ordered three pairs of these. Why three? Well, I was going to just get two pairs, because I wanted to have a spare for when this situation comes up again in the future. And it will come up again eventually, as it always does. However, ordering two pairs from Amazon without the super saver (free) shipping, for which only two were not eligible, being less than $25, cost only $4 or so less total than buying three pairs with super saver shipping. Also, I got the JBuds instead of the Coby this time because those are still sold through Amazon directly rather than some crap third party. I figure that if there is a difference in quality between the two brands, it'll hopefully be fairly unnoticable (or maybe even the JBuds will actually be better, who knows). At least, relative to the difference in quality between the Coby and the tin can Duracell headphones, anyway. >_>
In fact, rather than using these tin can headphones at all, I think I'm just going to bring my speakers back to the computer from the bedroom tomorrow. I'd previously moved the speakers into the bedroom a few months ago, so as to try to play music and such during the night, but that didn't really work out too well, so they've mostly just been sitting unused. |
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| URGH. |
[Friday, November 6th, 2009|8:08 PM] |
| [ | Tags | | | music, phone, rant | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Redmond, WA | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Vivaldi's Concerto no. 1 Spring | ] |
Since I got home at around 6:00pm, I have received a phone call pretty much every 30 minutes, almost to the second. Same old song and dance: answering machine picks up and they immediately hang up. I just reduced the time until the answering machine picks up to 2 rings instead of the previous 4. I also changed the ringtone as well, because as much as I like Vivaldi's Concerto no. 1 Spring, it was driving me absolutely bonkers repeatedly hearing the first bit of it in that relatively crappy ring tone format over and over and over and over and over and over. |
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| For Dwarf Fortress fans... |
[Thursday, November 5th, 2009|9:35 PM] |
...or perhaps those who maybe wanted to be Dwarf Fortress fans, but couldn't get into it due to the ASCII graphics and for whom mere tilesets weren't enough...
Check out Stonesense.
This doesn't appear to actually be ready yet, but when it is, this may get me back into playing it again. |
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| Linguistic Pet Peeve |
[Thursday, November 5th, 2009|10:40 AM] |
Various abuses and misuses of "lol", such as:
- ending almost all of one's sentences with "lol" as though it were a valid replacement for a period. It's not. It's really not.
- saying "llllloooooooooooooooooolllllll" or "lololololololol" or something similar, as if more l's and o's somehow provide more emphasis, rather than simply making the user of this look incredibly retarded.
- using permutations of it, such as "lawlz" or "lulz".
- saying "elle oh elle" or "lawl" or something similar in actual oral conversation, even when done so ironically.
Though I (try to) avoid it myself, even in ironic usage, I have no real problem with others throwing the occasional "lol" into informal (textual) conversation, but much more than that leads to me simply ignoring the transgressor, and maybe pitying them a little bit. |
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| Dragon Age: Journeys |
[Wednesday, November 4th, 2009|10:49 PM] |
At first, I only started playing this flash game tonight mostly because it unlocks some items in Dragon Age: Origins. However, now that I'm into it, it's actually a pretty cool game in its own right. I've been playing it since I got home from work this evening, and I still haven't finished it with the mage character I started with (there's still the warrior and rogue characters to play through with as well, which is required for one of the unlocks for Origins). I would say that even if you have no interest at all in Origins, I'd still recommend Journeys by itself, especially considering it's free and all. |
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| Referendum 71 |
[Wednesday, November 4th, 2009|4:11 PM] |
Looks like Referendum 71 is inching its way toward being approved. While I don't personally have a horse in this race myself, I still voted yes on it, and I think it's a good thing that it will probably pass, assuming some 11th hour shenanigans doesn't come into play and the thing actually ends up dying.
Still, the fact that the referendum gained enough signatures to appear on the ballot at all is kind of a loss, in and of itself. |
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| The Sims Horror Movie |
[Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009|10:22 AM] |
This would have been slightly cooler had it been released a few days ago on Halloween, but even so it's still pretty funny.
Thing is, they (as in EA and 20th Century FOX, not CollegeHumor) are apparently actually making a real Sims movie, or at least were at one point. It might have been propitiously axed, for all I can tell. |
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| ChristWire |
[Tuesday, October 27th, 2009|11:59 AM] |
Found this today.
Okay, I have to confess, in the little bit of time I've spent looking it over, I honestly can't be sure if this site is merely another satirical site like The Onion, or if it actually is horrifyingly, stupefyingly real. I'm leaning toward the former, but there is still the possibility that this is the latter. Poe's Law and all that.
Seriously, just look at some of these. There is no way that this site is real... is there? I mean it seems so over-the-top that I'm 99.9% sure it's fake, but there's still that nagging 0.1% doubt. Is there just something completely obvious that I'm missing here that clues more observant readers into the fact that this is definitely just satire and not all too disturbingly real? Well, until I know otherwise (and I've seen little more than speculation via Google and no clear evidence that can definitively say one way or another), I'm going to go with it being fake. Still, even if the articles themselves are stealth parody, I also tried browsing some of the comments underneath them and... wow. I doubt (all of) those are mere trolls.
In either case, this site is amazing, in its own way. |
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| Mass Effect 2 |
[Friday, October 16th, 2009|10:47 AM] |
Mass Effect 2 is apparently going to be released on my birthday. Sweet. Of course, I probably won't actually get it until some point after that anyway so I guess it doesn't really matter.
Well, I guess I could spring for release day delivery or something, if I really wanted to get it that day. Or I could *ugh*shiver* actually go to a local store and buy it, but I haven't bought a video game from a walk-in store probably since I got some DS games way back in May of 2008, and that was only because I was in North Carolina and away from a computer at the time.
And this, of course, is assuming the game doesn't get delayed or something, which is entirely possible, perhaps even likely.
In any case, it's probable that I'll still be playing Dragon Age: Origins (which apparently releases on November 3) by that point anyway. |
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| The Sims 3: Alice and Kev |
[Thursday, October 15th, 2009|4:26 PM] |
The story of Alice and Kev has apparently come to an end. I had forgotten about it for a time, due to it being on hiatus for a while there, but went back to it today and saw that it had ended a few days ago. Kind of sad. |
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| Flu |
[Sunday, October 11th, 2009|1:26 PM] |
Turns out that this wasn't just a mere cold but was the flu, though not of the porcine variety. Not that that distinction really matters all that much because even the "regular" flu was enough to shut me down for most of this past week. I'm pretty much over it now, but even into yesterday I was still feeling lingering effects. Let's just say that, for me, last week was full of epic fail. Hopefully next week will be better. |
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| They're editing the Bible now. |
[Tuesday, October 6th, 2009|9:05 AM] |
Just a quick thing before I go back to bed. Found via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) korby.
The Conservative Bible Project.
As the title says, it looks like they want to "fix" the Bible in order to remove all that icky stuff that supposedly got snuck in there by the heathen liberals, so that it will be more properly conservative, like God apparently intended all along. Granted, it's not like this is the first time the Bible has ever been edited or rewritten, of course. It pretty much happens every time someone gets a mind to retranslate or "modernize" it. But usually they at least pretend not to be so blatantly, abjectly political about the whole thing.
Yeah, I know I'm breaking my self-imposed moratorium on making politically related posts by, well, making this politically related post, and maybe it's just the sickness weakening my resolve here (yeah, I'll blame it on that), but this is just too much. |
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