lukeyes' Friends

room and work update
Oh so as it turns out? (and after 2 separate trips to Ikea at the expense of large amounts of social capital) I actually DID have the missing bed parts, in my tool chest. I discovered them at the bottom of it while looking for a different tool. It's a good thing too because they stopped making them!   So, I've had my bed together for a week or so now. Two?

Also I got a TV. And... it's HUGE. 32 inch monstrosity, bought cheap from a friend who upgraded to projector (which I'm dying to do, myself). I told myself I'd never get another tube TV but here it sits, in the middle of my floor, because it's TOO DAMNED HEAVY to go on top of the table i intended as my TV stand. I nearly broke the backs of 3 men - two friends and a complete stranger from down the street - getting it down to my Basement Lair. Now I have to figure out what to put it on, and how to get it onto that.

Also, I need my Xbox back from Cindy and Derek! I loaned it out for the Rock Band Pixies Party cuz theirs is broken.   Finally I will be able to finish the last level of Portal!

Pretty soon I'll be able to take some pictures of the new place.

Work-wise, I'm in a holding pattern for a bunch of different opportunities, contract and full time. My cash reserves are holding out fairly well but I think I can only go about one more month like this before I need a real income.   One more month to really commit time to making my own game. At the moment I am looking at Sims Carnival Game Creator. It may sound cheesy, but it's from a project headed up by Rod Humble, so I'm inclined to give it a solid look. It seems like a good drag-and-drop tool to teach myself the higher level coding/scripting concept stuff. Kind of like GameMaker but with a better interface? (That's what I imagine.) Also a LOT like Gendai Games' GameSalad, which I'm also hoping to check out when the Alpha program opens.

Current Music: construction sounds, and sometimes Kylie

this old condo
Warning! Boring Condo Stuff ahead!

Why are frames so expensive? I am trying to frame a bunch of my old artwork, photos, and show posters because I thought it would be cheaper than buying someone else's artwork, but that is not necessarily the case. I've dropped more than I care to admit and I'm not done yet. But I guess 11+ frames is a lot of frames. STILL haven't started cutting the glass for my over-fireplace mirror... I really just want to be done with that already.

Next on the list for Fixing Up My Condo is shelving madness. We have lots of closets but we can make better use of some of them. And we have a hojillion left over wire closet racks in the water heater closet, left by a previous owner (mine now!) along with all the paint colors and enough floor tile to do the whole place if we wanted to. I've never pawed through those boxes, but I wonder if any of them have the granite tile used for our fireplace in them... that would be a big score, though I wouldn't know what to do with it.

I'm also hoping to go and buy a new couch set tomorrow or sometime in the near future. I realized the other day that this old black leather workhorse is 8 years old and kind of slanty and maybe could do with replacing. I'd like to move it into the guest bedroom if I can but Dan's monolithic old desk is still there... but he might be willing to trash it at Redmond's trash day on the 19th... it's all very complicated.

A weekend of geeking
I like to post these in the "Friday afternoon, tl;dr" zone, don't I? Yes, today is a Thursday, but it's effectively Friday... Ah well.

As you know I decided on very short notice to get away from it all to beautiful, rainy, Columbus OH this past weekend for Origins. What better than a weekend of gaming and gaming, a parade, and more gaming? :)

( Friday, travel and some games )

( Saturday, games and some more games and Mission: Caylus )

( Sunday, games and planes )

Monday morning the alarm went off and I got up, but only long enough to send an email to work saying (paraphrased) "ugh. coming in late" and then went back to bed until lunchtime. Hung over though I was, it was a fantastic weekend!!

deburring
Guide to Field Metalwork, #203: Drugstores, in addition to sometimes selling tools, invariably sell fine-grit sandpaper already bonded to small sticks for your convenience in deburring. I'm told they're intended for use on fingernails, but I haven't tried that application.

Current Mood: macgyverish

blargh
Reassembling my bike now. I am ~~pleased to note that it survived two flights completely unharmed~~ VERY SAD to note that it was completely unharmed except for one of the dropouts in the fork, which is bent just slightly too small to admit the wheel. It's aluminum, so I might could be able to bend it back, but I can't figure out how.

Current tooling available to me:
Adjustable Crescent Wrench of Kneecapping, which is too large to fit between the dropout ends
Leatherman Juice, which is too small to get much leverage
Set of allen wrenches
4 butter knives

It's this or replace my whole damn fork, since it doesn't look like the dropouts come off.

Thoughts?

ETA: Fixed, through the perverse power of commerce and about twenty pounds of force. I should, by rights, not be able to buy a smaller wrench at 9 o'clock at night from a drugstore. But I did. So. I still need to go down to the bike shop anyway and get a second lock, so I'll show it to them and see what they say.

in which i stay home and don't even wash my hair
TMI: I suddenly understand why other women pay a stranger $60 to smear their chins with hot wax. The drugstore hot wax kit costs one-twelfth as much, but I - and I flatter myself I have pretty good eye-hand coordination - found it really tricky not to drip wax all down my front, and the drugstore stuff is sickly yellow and smells gross. Like bad imitation beeswax. (It's based on carnauba wax, not beeswax, which is probably for the best because beeswax has too high of a melting point.) I should find out if the Internet will sell me the nice-smelling purple variety.

I must squee AGAIN about my new hair product. Osis "mess up". My usual hair-goo is in my storage unit, and yesterday's hair salon didn't sell it, but I got something else that smells faintly like cologne, and is thick enough to tell my hair who's boss.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Ari who angsts about moving, babbles about art, and does not even admit to owning cosmetics.

GenCon
The game company I modeled for a while back wants to take me to GenCon this year, expenses paid. Hell yeah! August is going to be hairy. I'll need two days off from work - one to fly to Orlando (->Tampa) for the C14 fashion show and one the following weekend for this. I have a feeling I'm going to be very anti-airport in September, ha.

Speaking of which, "A Touch of Evil, The Supernatural Game" and will be released worldwide in September. It will retail for $49.95 and will be available online or in gaming stores, comic shops, and hobby stores around the globe.

I'll have some images to share later today. :)

PS. I think it's a sign of how much better I sleep these days (eye mask, ear plugs, Magnesium supplements) that I didn't even know we'd had some big storm until someone told me in class this morning. :p

Current Mood: excited

random bits of news
My cousin Cyndi left me a voice mail yesterday to say she's now engaged. *sqeee*

I'm looking forward to having my first paid holiday in quite a while.

FFXI wise, my summoner finally hit level 71. WOOOOO I can wear my Yinyang robe!!!!

Current Mood: pleased

i am really not good at taking it easy
Still sick. I left the house for three hours today and it was incredibly tiring. So glad I'm not working this week, but also going slightly stir-crazy.

I left the house for a hair appointment, because I got a trim on Monday that looked awful and left me with an uneven inch of hair to work with. I'm intimidated as hell to find something as girly as a hairdresser in a city full of them (I was just getting crew cuts at Acme Barbershop before and after I shaved my head) and

dymaxion's recommendation was booked until Tuesday.

Yelp and the memories on

nyc_for_free did provide, though. I tipped my new stylist the same amount as I paid for the entire haircut on Monday, because she is such a stupendous badass, and is running a wonderful little shop on the Lower East Side rather than working for a giant salon that's a little too full of itself. She's spent some time in Seattle. We talked about condo development on Capitol Hill, contrasted with development in New York. She asked how Bimbo's was doing. <3 Hair is newly cute, kind of pixieish, instead of helmet-like.

And then I got stuck on a malfunctioning F train, jury-rigged a route home, sat on the couch and woke up four hours later. And I want to go to bed again. Had the presence of mind to buy cough drops and put some water in the fridge.

Current Mood: sick

Design By Humans 20% off Friend-a-Thon deal
If you use my screenname "euphoriafish" as a promo code, you can get 20% off a t-shirt at www.designbyhumans.com until July 6th. I know at least one or two of you have considered ordering a Design By Humans shirt, so I thought I'd tell you that this week is a good time to do so.

It's some contest they're doing where the past customer who refers the most friends wins a laptop, and all the code-using friends would get a $10 iTunes gift card, but I don't really care about that. I just think their designs are on average more interesting than the ones at shirt.w00t, maaaaaaayybe even better than Threadless. They also pay up to $5,000 for a winning t-shirt design, if you're into that sort of thing. And I love my Squid Count and Forbidden Platypus shirts.

Looks like another weekend getaway in the planning
So the Star Trek Experience is closing in September. Looks like I need to make one last trip out to Quark's this summer. Hmm. Maybe I can plan a weekend with some friends... ;)

Low Carb
Since I'm stuck in this damn boot and don't really need carbs for anything, I've been on Lyle McDonald's modified PSMF again for the last few weeks. The first thing I noticed was how quickly my blood sugar leveled out. Energy levels are lower, sure, but they're even. Very, very even. I find that preferable in ways. Figuring out how to keep that when I start adding starches and sugars back into my diet is probably going to be challenging. But hey, when am I never up for a challenge? :p I'll be monitoring blood glucose closely for a while (post-boot) to gather data. One of my longer term goals is to increase insulin sensitivity for better overall health.

I've been doing a bunch of cooking lately, trying out different things. I have two new favorites:

* Bob's Red Mill TVP (textured vegetable protein)
* Shirataki noodles

TVP worked fabulously instead of bread crumbs in my turkey meatloaf "cupcakes," and has good amounts of protein and fiber. AFAIK, it's made from the more cellulose-y parts of vegetables (think corn stalks, etc). Apparently, it's some sort of godsend for vegans looking to increase their protein intake.

Shirataki noodles are perfect substitutions for real noodles in pasta dishes. The stuff I got from Whole Foods reminded me of sauteed mushrooms, texture-wise (slightly firm outer edge with an almost imperceptibly softer inside), and was made from tofu and Shirataki (Japanese yam) flour. Almost no nutritional value (few calories, few carbs, tiny bit of protein and fiber) so it's basically just all for the texture. It beats eating a cup of turkey spaghetti sauce by itself though.

Oh, and a good rice substitute-- grated cauliflower. I send it through the food processor and steam it just barely enough. I want to try this with some chicken tikka masala this week. I've just been eating it by itself with a little bit of garlic salt.

I'm enjoying the lessened water retention while I can; today I'm wearing a pair of used jeans that I got on eBay about a year ago and have never fit. I caught sight of myself in our lobby mirror yesterday and was appalled by how much the butt in my current "big" jeans sagged. So not cute. :p

Current Mood: busy

bleh
Day four or so: Am mildly ill, despite my supposed Immune System Of Doom, probably due to an all-new array of unfamiliar germs. Taking the excuse to hide in my apartment and not leave, dammit. I should get going to find breakfast, but two days of exploring leave me kind of wiped out.

Current Mood: hungry, skeered

wall*e
Chalk up another win for Pixar. This might be their best film yet. The detailing, WOW. The cute, there was so much. The heart, so warm and fuzzy. Truely a film for all ages, and the first G rated film I've seen in a very long time.

I can not wait to own this film.

Current Mood: happy

awesome!
Tonight was my monthly small group meeting at church. It was AWESOME. We had such a good and thoughtful conversation! I really, really like these people.

Tomorrow I'm flying to Colorado! This is also AWESOME. I get to see F! And Amy and Josh, and their little boy Elliot! So exciting!

Because of the trip, I'm not planning to be around on LJ much for the next few days, so if something earth-shattering happens, drop me an email, OK?

Personal Positioning
You know those stories of an author or filmmaker that creates something awesome but can't get it published because it's too hard to position due to its complexity/rambling/incoherency? Sometimes I feel like that thing that won't get published.

An Inconvenient Truth
Donated blood today. According to their records, it had been 8 years since the last time. Damn. Some great universal donor I am. :p They'll be back for me in September, heh.

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Been thinking a lot about climate change and ensuing global food/water issues lately.

Are gyms current-day vomitoriums of sorts? I mean, hell, before I hurt my foot, I was totally trying to burn as many calories as possible so I could stuff more beer & pizza in my face. It's not quite the same, but it seems kind of gross to me when I think about world hunger. Exercise for exercise's sake is a luxury...

I'm not going to stop working out because I think the increased strength and endurance will make me more likely to survive a zombie apocalypse :p and I'm a selfish bastard like that but I'm going to have to find an approach to it that makes me feel like less of a resource-waster.

The whole American lifestyle is sort of freaking me out at the moment.

We started watching An Inconvenient Truth in my environmental science class and damn. I can't even think about the 2000 elections anymore without actually feeling queasy.

But what's done is done, and we have a choice-- try to ignore what's happening and continue with Business As Usual until it's really too late, or do what we can to help fix the damage.

"Every little bit helps", said the old woman as she pissed into the sea.

We can solve the climate crisis:
http://www.wecansolveit.org

Reduce your footprint:
http://www.myfootprint.org/en/take_action/reduce_your_footprint/

"Kinda" green better than not green at all:
http://greenliving.suite101.com/blog.cfm/every_little_bit_helps

Policy-makers who think global warming does not exist are deluding themselves and are extremely dangerous to the rest of us.

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And now for something completely different--

Emerging medical technologies:
http://www.medgadget.com

Current Mood: thoughtful

Monday yoga/gym
Dragged my sorry self to the gym last night. When I get home on Monday nights, I am just trashed out tired and sick of everything. Dragging is necessary to get my ass to the gym. But I made it, and got a parking spot, and all was well.

Did ten minutes on the elliptical, because that was all I had time for before class. I am experimenting with different speeds on the elliptical--the sign on the machine says that slower is the "fat burning zone" and faster is the "cardio training zone". I would think that cardio training would also result in fat burning, no? But last night I went slower, for fat burning, because usually I just go fast. (Or, as fast as I can personally manage to go, which isn't all that fast but which is improving.)

Yoga class was good. I like the Monday night class a lot. This makes three Mondays in a row now that I've made it. Yay.

the internet is a lot more fun from the couch
I have wifi! Thanks to all who suggested restarting the cable modem and letting it give its settings to the AP. I think that was my missing debug step.

Work done on TIGdb plus depression reminder
Why do I need to feel like I have value in the world? It's such a depressing desire.

Anyway, TIGdb is nearing 300 games thanks to Derek. I got a good number of things done these past 27 hours. The biggest thing were user reviews. It's definitely not as simple as comments. It's tied into the rating system, has helpfulness voting, and flagging for abuse. This was the first step towards more user content on TIGdb.

Along with reviews comes simple profile pages. You get a page with your bio, URL, avatar, and all your reviews. More to add later probably, but we're not trying to create yet another social network.

And since your account is slightly more useful now with a profile and everything, we now let you stay logged in like some people kept bugging us about.

We also have a simple game submission form that will help Derek and others fill out the database. Overall, I got a lot more done than I thought I would. Now we're starting to ask again "where to next?" We have some ideas, but not all of them are things to do now.

So since we're starting to get users interacting a bit more, and we're asking this question, I threw up a UserVoice page and added their Feedback widget to the site. You can suggest ideas or vote on existing ones, as well as just give general feedback.

For as much as I got done, and I really enjoy working with Derek, I don't feel as accomplished as I would have thought. I guess there's just other projects that are pulling on me, distracting these accomplishments. And some other things I suppose.

NOUNAI
I found this Japanese blog meme type thing where you type your name and according to your name you are presented with a map of what is supposedly on your mind. Here's mine:
テレサの脳内

If I'm reading it correctly, the outer ring is 休むの休, which would mean that relaxation/holiday is occupying my surface thoughts. This is accurate, since it's almost the 4th of July, I have a family reunion next week, and I've been enjoying not being in school anymore. I can't read the red character at the center, but I'm betting it's something more negative.

My full name gives much more interesting results, with friends and money as well as the relaxation and mystery character.テレサディレイシーリーの脳内

And if I type Tracey instead of Teresa, I get the same red character in the center but the outer ring changes to food. On that note, I think I should eat some pizza now. My stomach is in fact rumbling.

Now this is interesting
http://io9.com/5013724/five-reasons-why-aliens-will-make-contact-with-the-japanese-first

Summary of the blog's points:
1. The Japanese government has already made some official plans in the event that extra-terrestrials contact Earth.
2. Japanese scientists sent a message to Altair 16 light years away and could possibly receive a reply as early as 2015, which is definitely in our lifetime.
3. There aren't nearly as many observatories looking for optical signals as there are searching for radio waves, but Japan has one of the few labs searching for optical frequencies.
4. Advanced AI technology in Japan might make it an interesting target for intelligent alien life.
5. If North Korea is really talking to extra-terrestrials already in real time as they claim, Japan might intercept their signals.

Weird, weird stuff. I hadn't heard about any of this. I would hope that first contact would be with Japan though, since out of all the world's cultures, the Japanese seem to be on average the most insightful and calm about interpreting and reacting to the behavior of other people. And they value scientific exploration. At least, they would be anything but impulsive and trigger-happy. And if the situation turned hostile, I'm sure the USA would step in with bombs and stuff later. Yay.

Of course, all this speculation assumes that an alien culture could tell the difference between the different cultures of Earth and they wouldn't just view us as we view hamsters or cats or something else with barely significant behavioral differences by breed. To say nothing of political borders. Or history, or varying attitudes about Japanese treatment of people who are not Japanese.

what good is the internet if i can't have wifi in bed?
Grrr. Efforts to set up wireless on top of my apartment building's network are failing, now that I've dropped $30 and had an Interesting Day in pursuit of a power brick for my AP. (ok, I sought lots of things, and attained all of them, but Interesting's the word for it.) Am tired of being tethered to this desk now.

It's a Linksys WRT54GL wireless AP. Am I missing some critical detail in configuring it? Connecting directly to the modem, I get an IP via DHCP, but setting the router to get its IP address by DHCP seems to be the bit that's not working. Alternately, is my building's sysadmin trying to prevent just this sort of shenanigan? Halp!

Current Mood: worn out

Changing Planet
Wtf. This year is the year for weird physical shit. I think I'm allergic to grass now? Rolled around at a park on Sunday and was itching horribly for hours, even after soaping up after I got home. Maybe it was just something they sprayed? Hopefully. Being allergic to nature is kind of retarded. :p

Wall-E was cute, and I found the message about the dangers of over-consumption fairly timely, but being a Disney movie, it will probably generate tons of useless crap, and that makes me feel vaguely ill. Just a little too ironic. (All that aside, I did enjoy the film. Pixar's art is good.)

[This is a good read.]

We are taking a first step towards energy efficiency. Tonight will be the last time I use our old washing machine. (Thank TPTB.) The new combo unit's arriving on Saturday. The old machines are going to go to these guys.

I'm going to try to shift some of my salmon consumption over to tilapia.

Ended up having to cut my Oblivion marathon short because the heat of the apartment was causing my computer to freeze up. Maybe I should finally get a working case fan. :p I tried fixing the old one, but it apparently hates me. We need to go through our bins of random electronic shit and figure out what needs to get recycled.

Are there any good survivalist classes nearby (Seattle area)? :p

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PS. If you visited ecorazzi.com, you will want to run a virus stomper. That site is all kinds of bad. I'm off to send them some bitchy email (from my spam account, of course). :p

Current Mood: thoughtful

books 2008: Stopping for a Spell, by Diana Wynne Jones, and failure on The Book of Lost Books
Stopping for a Spell was a cute book. It could have been subtitled "How to use magic to get rid of annoying people". Three short stories, about very stubborn obnoxious annoying people invading the homes of plucky children, who then must find a way get rid of the annoyances. Nowhere near her best work. Recommended for kids, but not worth it for adult fans.

I am also giving up on The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, by Stuart Kelly. A fascinating topic, but he's going chronologically by author lifetime, and I barely got past ancient Greece. We will never read the lost works of Sappho, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Agathon, Aristophanes, Xenocles, Menander, or Callimachus, who have all blended together into one giant playwright in my head now (except for Sappho, who I loved previously, and Menander, because apparently they found one of his plays and it sucked). I'm just finding that I'm not particularly interested in Kelly's style or his approach. There might be more interesting stuff as we approach the modern era, but there's just too many lost authors for me to really care about making it through. Maybe if he'd found a different way to organize the material instead of by author. I don't know. Eh.