On today's Cheaper Than Food: the Ramen Break entry, yours truly eats up and sells out.

My sole New Year's resolution is to popularise the catch-phrase, "I think he was Moroccan."

I sure could use your help.

Friday night we played some Shadake, in which we cruelly betrayed all of our enemies, and led them to an icy grave.

( game summary )

Happy New Year everyone!

There's a clone of me out there somewhere who's a Komodo. I know you probably don't know what a Komodo is, unless you've been following the WARANTINE or whatever your favorite newsfeed is calling it. Take a space otter, and make them able to withstand ludicrously high temperatures -- we're talking 'sunbathing on Mercury' hot. To pay for this, their metabolism is hideously inefficient, and they're HUGE -- almost (but not quite) as bad as unmodified humans. They're also kind of fugly -- they were going for humanoid lizard, but they're right smack in the middle of the creepy territory. At least for me.

One of my sisters was in love with one, thus the clone. For a while, I was kind of embarassed that one of my clone-sisters was a one-off (and a horribly obsolete one-off at that; thermostat fields are expensive, but reliable, and even better at high temperature work than Komodos) but also kind of, well, interested in them, idly. Wishing them well? It's not like they're any *worse* than ordinary humans, aside from being naturally sterile since their genome was never popular enough to merit a fertility mod.

Well, that and their god damn evangelism. People *know* I was in favor of Komodo awareness. I hope none of them *remember*, after this stupid stunt on Haven they're pulling. It's not like the planet's even going to stay molten. Sheesh!

So I guess I just want to say -- yeah, they're tacky as all hell. But they're one-offs. It sucks. Cut them a little slack, okay? And if you can't, at least don't snicker and point and laugh at foolish space otters who've been quietly rooting for them for a few years.

last entry

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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Familiar, chapter 9

Previous stories in this universe are Space Otters:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/540642.html

and Glow Bugs:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/581586.html

Dramatis Personae:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/576866.html

I knew a while back, but I wanted to be fairly certain before I announced it. Yes, everyone's favourite digital snow-leopardess will be at Further Confusion 2010. (Yes, I have room arrangements.) Anyone looking to meet up with me who lacks my current contact info, let me know and I can get it to you.

I'll warn people beforehand that I have basically only one rule at conventions: I will not attempt to go to a restaurant in a group of more than six people. More than six and nobody can hear each other talk, restaurant service goes to utter crap, and the coordination difficulty isn't worth it. If I find myself in a group of more than six, I will get five people to go with me and if the remainder follow in a second party then that's awesome for them. I will try not to be rude about this, but I will be fairly strict about it.

Other than that, anything goes. If you have something special in mind you want to plan with me, now's the time to mention it so I can plan ahead. If you're running a panel (and I know several of you are!) then let me know the schedule and I'll try to be at it. I'll have my laptop at all times, including disturbing amounts of music and other stuff.

Oh, and I'm afraid that Kristy won't be with me; she has other plans. Nefarious plans.

So... my landline mysteriously stopped working. It won't send or receive calls. Not even a dial tone.

I can't call to report the outage, so I go to their website, click on 'request repair', and they ask me to log in to my account, which I don't have. Creating an account requires me to type in a security code which they'd be happy to send me by phone, at my account's (non-working) phone number. Or mail to me, in 7-10 days.

So I call customer service on my cell phone. $.25 per minute to be on hold listening to it alternate between aggravating advertisements and 'your call is important to us!' in a cheerful voice that makes me want to strangle someone. Fifteen minutes later, the customer service rep tells me that since I live in an apartment, they can't do anything. WTF?

I guess I have to talk to the apartment manager. Because they've been SO EFFECTIVE fixing everything else.

cleaning up the friends list for 2010.

if you get cut, sorry. no offense. if you want/need to discuss this or if you have a question, comment here. all comments are screened. if you feel ive made a mistake, let me know and ill work to correct it. thank you.


-Harli

p.s. im mostly cutting journals that havent updates in ages.

My iPhone is a little over a week old and I'm still exploring all the things I can do with it. I get the feeling they are in the category of items you never realize you need until after you have one.

For instance, I remember a time when I was a kid when we didn't have computers, or when they were fairly new for common home use, and not really having much of a use for it. Now, if I am away from a computer, or Internet access, I feel like I'm missing a limb. Microwaves, iPods and flat panel monitors are all in a similar category.

Do I absolutely need the ability to post blog messages remotely from anywhere, at any time? Not really. But it's COOL.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:NE 8th St,Bellevue,United States

Well, I finally got to join a gestalt. Four of them, so far! I don't get to *keep* the gestalt state, because I'm a horrible evil messed up person who'd ruin my gestalt mates, or whatever.

My boss claimed that the hive queen's solution was the one they'd been thinking of all along. If that's true, then I hate them for getting my hopes up. I wanted to be in a gestalt for real! Not just during work hours!

Er, yeah. Hive queen. I've been gestalting with Insectoids. I'm pretty sure they've thoroughly brainwashed me, but since I'm brainwashed I don't care. Just remember to lock me up if there's ever a swarm that gets as far as Earth! If it comes down to hive mind vs hive mind, I'll probably be on their side.

Breaking a gestalt link isn't as bad as they make it out, but it's pretty bad. Thursday, I tried using the daydream sim to break up the gestalt state, and it was... a bad idea. Not for me -- it worked *great* for me. I daydreamed away the 'dazed and confused' period in a second or two (objective time). The drones were seriously fucked up by it, though -- their hive queen made me promise to never ever use that sim again, at least not while I was linked.

I sent a message to Hawkins about that, and got what looked like an angry form letter back saying that I should have read the readme file. It's the first time he ever wrote back to me! I feel so special!

last entry | next entry

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1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Familiar, chapter 8

Previous stories in this universe are Space Otters:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/540642.html

and Glow Bugs:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/581586.html

Dramatis Personae:
http://terrycloth.livejournal.com/576866.html

What the crap, people?

The year is 2009. We are in a technological, civilised world. We have people who work all kinds of jobs at all kinds of hours. We have people of all races, creeds, religions, genders, and so forth. Why the flying flip can we not scrape together enough Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, and other sane folk to keep even one decent restaurant open on this particular evening –on a Friday, for love of "Bob" – near the end of the year? Not even Chinese places are open. Not even Chinese.

Fail. Just... such friggin' fail, on levels I don't even want to begin to comprehend.

...I'm either too lethargic because life is so boring and annoying, or not nearly bored enough to want to make an entry.

I've been playing Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes some, but not as much as before because I got to a really annoying boss fight where the boss was only two columns thick and *moved* every few turns! And drained your health, and had a bunch of unfair attacks, etc. I eventually got past her, though, by loading up the insta-death Wraiths into my army and trying over and over and over until I happened to hit her with one. Now I'm stuck on a puzzle battle. >.<

I also found Gyromancer on the xbox -- I decided to hook the xbox back up because the chances of the exterminators wanting to come back to pry off the baseboards again are low (they basically threw in the towel, and told me to use steam on everything in my apartment, which hasn't worked so far), and that particular part of the furniture isn't that hard to move anyway.

Um, anyway, xbox leads to Gyromancer which is yet another puzzle-quest game, this one by Square Enix and Popcap. It's a lot more conventional, but still fun -- but unlike in puzzle quest or clash of heroes, the enemies don't make moves of their own. Instead they get a little bit of charge to all their abilities every time you make a move. This makes fighting through a bunch of tough enemies (that fill the board with rocks, say, or lock random pieces) in order to claim the geo-code that lets you add them to your team is a huge letdown, because why in the world would you *want* you own monster to fill the board with rocks and lock random pieces? There's also some other bugs, like how the turtle monster's power that's supposed to remove positive status from enemies removes negative status instead, including the very common negative status 'I have an elemental advantage'.

I figured out what was wrong with Torchlight -- I'd entered something into the 'startup options' AGES ago that didn't work, and apparently with the steamcloud patch it somehow made it act like the demo version. Removing that setting fixed it.

Oh, and I bought Borderlands for the xbox. I've been playing a soldier, and I don't think I'm very good at the game. The vehicles seem *way* overpowered, too -- one-hit-kills by running over anything, and an auto-aiming turret? I want an auto-aiming turret! Oh wait, I'm the soldier, I have one. Nevermind.

Otherwise I've been writing, cleaning, being extremely lazy, and eating way too much. Until yesterday, when I went over to start celebrating christmas with my family -- none of us are christians, really, but it's a tradition. I think they celebrate hannukah too, even though they aren't jewish?

Mostly what we did was drive up to Snoqualmie Pass and go sledding. MY GOD it was cold -- although I didn't notice the cold much once we got going at least, so it wasn't *that* cold. We started out on this tiny hill (because the main sledding hill was closed! They raised the price to $20 and closed the sledding hill?) for a while, then wandered off to this open sewage plant where the berm made a much more interesting and dangerous sledding hill. The sledding got bumpier and bumpier the farther on we went, and by the time Anna came running after us to call us back (she and the baby and mom were all waiting in the car, too cold to sled) we'd gotten to this really steep, slick hill with a bumpy, jagged hell of crusty snow and ice at the bottom that knocked us out of the sled almost every time.

But it was a loooong way from where we'd parked, and the 15 minutes we'd left to walk back weren't enough. Not while herding kids who kept insisting on (and being humored with) 'one last sled ride' at every hill along the way. @.@ I was worried we were going to get locked in and freeze to death in the cold, but it turned out that park didn't have an actual gate to block the entrance when it closed, just some orange traffic cones.

So we escaped, and headed back to dinner at... Applebees? Which was EVEN COLDER THAN THE MOUNTAIN. Jesus christ, someone needs to turn up the thermostat in there!

Remember Pretenders Transformers? The robots with an organic life form shell? If not here's a quick refresher.



Fast forward twenty years later.

... If you write it, they will come.