Hurry to Meet Death Before Your Place is Taken

[ehowton]

I miss playing 12-hour overnight games of Starcraft in the NOC 4-days a week with unixwolf and leonardii. Those were good times. I miss playing Diablo II with drax0r in Mass and the many weekends of SMACKDOWN LAN parties afterwards in Texas. I miss playing Dungeon Siege with danzigfried every night for 14-months after hours in Wichita. I miss playing Star Trek: Elite Force with celtmanx and drax0r until the middle of the night on the weekends, even though drax0r would kick our asses. Odd, since I don't consider myself a gamer. But give me a good RPG and a couple of guys, and I'm up all night. I don't enjoy single-player games, and I don't like playing online, even against people I know. I like a LAN game, usually cooporative, where you and your friends can get caught up in the excitement and share in the exhilaration of victory and the sorrows of defeat. I enjoy being a Warrior, taking (or sharing) lead with another tank while my trusty Rangers begin bombarding my prey before I even lay a hit. I like sharing my gold and outfitting myself and my counterparts with magical items that assist in more powerful blows and more substantial armor. I share my health potions freely and love it when someone wants to play the mage - simultaneously protecting the entire group with spells and casting healing on players which need it most. You really don't know a person until you've gone into combat with them. A simpler time.

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Rec'd my two soundtracks today. Oscar by Elmer Bernstein, and Gorky Park by James Horner. I've never heard a better rendition of Largo Al Factotum (from The Barber Of Seville) than this one, and now I know why - it was conducted by Mr. Bernstein himself!

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As CLI is much faster than GUI over VNC, I learned how to mount .dmg images on teh max0r, which makes installing new applications quick and pain free:

hdiutil attach [filename].dmg

From there its a straight recursive copy into your /Applications folder.I was looking for an OSX lj client which could import Semagic's .slj file if I started a post at work on my XP box and wanted to finish it up at home.

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Wife had a conversation with the contractor for the roof the other day. That marks the third time he's been over. He starts work next week. The insurance check more than covers the work, even it it runs over. The successful completion of this project will make the wife happy. We saved some money by doing all our own inside painting. I had him provide a second quote to paint the whole exterior of the house. And for an additional $600, put siding on just the front of the house to increase its curb appeal for future sell value.

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It's midnight and I'm still at work. We're halfway through the Blackberry server upgrade which will allow us to automatically send the DST patch to all the devices. Running on the old application, it would have required my staff touch each and every device...by next Sunday. And because this is the corporate headquarters, the client is always traveling. We did the upgrade tonight because the power is going down Saturday morning. I'm shutting down all my servers at 0530 for the weekend work. I'm also a week behind now because of the virus on my DST patching plan. I'm trying to play catch-up before I get thrown to the wolves, and I'm running out of time. I also have paperwork to do from rebooting and patching my production servers this past week during the virus battle, but our online repository database is also down this weekend. I plan to sleep sometime between 0600 and 2100 today.



Slept seven hours from 0600-1300; then went to Barnes & Borders and picked up the Original Cast recording of The Man of La Mancha. The I finished my Balvenie 12-year Double Wood Scotch. Its much nicer than Sheep Dip, and I update my scotch review to reflect. I'm unsure, based on this week's activities that I'll be able to go to bed at a decent hour. That being said, I'm going to dust off my Dungeon Siege Strategy Guide and game tonight.

Comments

[drax0r.livejournal.com]

The elf in your avatar looks a hell of a lot like Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica.


Planescape: Torment

I absolutely adored that game. I played it through 3 or 4 times. I haven't played in years. I don't know if I even still have the disc. Sad sad.


Generally, I like my Black Isle-style games single player, but I did do the WoW thing in a semi-hardcore manner for a year and a half. That was good times, but I got really burned out and have barely looked at it in many a moon.

There's really only one game that I can play over and over and not get sick of: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

I just finished it for something like the 12th time. I even got my 5 year old begging me to let him do the last boss fight over and over.


I almost always played magic-users table-top and fighters on the computer. My Nameless One is nearly always a thief.

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

It's indeed Starbuck! I needed a portrait for my PnP elf paladin and am too lacking in artistic skills to draw one, so I used base images of Katee Sackhoff and Elrond's armour to put together something that looked relatively appropriate for the character:



My four-year-old demands his turn too when I'm playing games. He prefers WWII flight sims (obviously too many movies), but he is prepared to compromise by helping me drop Horrid Wiltings on Jon Irenicus in BGII. Of course, he is not very expert, so there are lots of reloads, hehe. :)

[drax0r.livejournal.com]

That's nice work on the elfification of Starbuck.


I've played Castlevania: SOTN enough to know the cheap ways to grind xp and the mobs that drop exactly the right eq so as to make my character super-buff so that I can safely turn my boy loose on Dracula without having to deal with reloads.

[celtmanx.livejournal.com]

She's dead Jim!!! She's DEAD!!!

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

Who's dead??

[celtmanx.livejournal.com]

NEVER MIND!!!!

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

But ... but ...

... I'm so confused!!

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

OMG, I just watched the episode and I now know what you mean! My girlcrush (one of them)! *tear*

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

I'm caught up too. There's bound to be an explanation. Was that the last episode of Season 3? See, it's a cliffhanger...it's just not real. Right?

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

I'm still caught up in shock over it. She can't just disappear off the show. No, no, NO! Perhaps we'll see Cylon!Kara being resurrected? Or perhaps this is her Mines of Moria and we'll see her come back as Starbuck the White. :)

I miss her already. *sniffle*

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

It was a powerful and heart-wrenching episode, and I agree with your assessment - she'll be back, we just don't know when or how. It broke my heart to see Adama's reaction, especially while he was still in CIC. Well played. I've always enjoyed the the dynamic between those two. There was only one part in that episode where I knew the line. Adama asked Starbuck, "What do you hear?"

I replied aloud to the television, "Nothing but the rain."

It was foreboding.

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

I was relatively okay up until the final scene with the Adama and the ship. That was when I cracked and started weeping pathetically. EJO acted the hell out of that scene: he always manages to amaze me even though I know how good he is.

Any upcoming episode of BSG is just going to seem so blah if there's no Starbuck in it. I mean, I'm sure she's not dead, but I'm going to miss her day-to-day presence on the show. Well, unless the character shows up in someone's mind wearing the same sort of sexy outfits that Chip!Six does, in which case I would have to spend a lot of time in my bunk. :)

[celtmanx.livejournal.com]

It's not the last episode.

[celtmanx.livejournal.com]

I was trying not to spoil it for you.

She is not a Cylon I am positive. She is still alive but captured by the psycho Cylon.

[ehowton.livejournal.com]

galinda822 has some fascinating thoughts on the whole thing...things I would never have dreamed of.

[melancthe.livejournal.com]

Oooh, now I'm curious: galinda822, do share, pretty please!