Well, in, call it three hours, I'll be gone. Gone gone gone. Off to London and Europe and Whir's place. Good times will be had by all.

Packing, for the record, sucks a lot. Especially when all my stuff was buried in piles all over the house. Especially because I played so much Battlefield: Vietnam that I didn't do anything until today. But oh well. Packed, and off we go. To about a 24 hour trip. That's going to be lots and lots of fun. Or not.

A few issues:

Anybody expecting to actually email me should probably use wolfee at onid dot orst dot edu for the moment, as it has a web interface I know I can check, as opposed to my alsherok account which I dunno about. I'll know better about the email situation once I get there.

If you want a postcard or anything, I'll be wanting a mailing addy. Regina's safe from this, my parents are safe from this. None of the rest of you are. You have been warned. ;)

I'm going to attempt to try and update this thing at least once a week while over there, more depending on what sort of internet I've got. We'll see. Also, picture uploading and such things as that. All depends on what there is available to me.

In any case, I will see the lot of you...later.

So, I guess I think it's sort of strange that I had to go to CNN to see this, considering I LIVE HERE, and all. Go figure.

I think in some odd sort of way, I'm proud of my state for this whole thing, but yeah. Benton County's approach to the whole thing is a bit strange.

Battlefield: Vietnam is worse than crack. Much worse. Nevermind that it makes me feel strange to enjoy a game based on this particular war, in ways that I wouldn't feel about, say, World War II. I'm not sure why that is, but whatever. At any rate, the game's fun.

So Cole, Whir, and I are all playing last night. Quite a lot, actually, considering we played a lot the night before, too. And it appears that Cole's the designated chopper pilot, because he's the only one of us who can actually do it, Whir's the designated sniper, and I'm that one guy over there with the M-60 and the LAW, who's job is to play hide and go seek with with T-54s and BTRs. And let me tell you right now, unless you've got a tank handy, BTRs are nasty, nasty suckers.

So anyway. It's like us three and a couple of bot flunkies on around 20 NVA bots. And there's a whole lot of Communist killing going on, such as in Quang Tri 1972, where we're fighting them in our one spawn point, their tanks and everything, and we're respawning and getting shot before taking two steps, and we at one point have to evac to a spawn point we stole, which meant we were without a spawn for a bit, and I was out of the game. Oh yeah. And I got to play hide and go seek with a pair of T-54s at the same time.

Or there's the whole Operation Hastings thing, where we leap in a Huey, drive it over top of their main spawn point, and eject, capture the spawn point, and then valiently attempt to hold off wave after wave of fanatical VC.

Or there's the couple of games Whir and I played on the exact same server settings as when the three of us played, and we barely scraped out a couple of wins with like 1 point and 3 points. Intense times.

Then there's me, who in an effort to be different, decided to play NVA for a while, on the off chance that their weapons weren't as sucky as I had remembered. They are, with the exception of the AK-47 and the RPG. Plus there are confusion issues. Like when you come around the corner, see a bunch of guys with red names, and you're like "DIE EVIL COMMUNIST SCUM!" as you spray the group with your...AK-47. Crap. Or that time in Hue, when I'm following this dude around for like a block, right behind him, and then he turns around and I realize he's got an M-16, so I quickly yank out my gun and shoot him.

Also on the "fairly bloody intense" sheet, another time in Hue as an ARVN trooper, who's gunning down lots of NVA with my M-60. Hear somebody shooting at me, turn around, and here's this guy right behind me blazing away. The 60's out of ammo. Ack. Pull out the handgun under fire, and empty the clip. He falls, right as time gets called.

Yeah. Fun game. Very fun.

Well, I didn't really, but one sec on that.

Let's see. It's been a while since I've blogged anything of substance. Got my grades back, and I did about like I expected: bombed the one class, barely passed the others, waded through my 407 class. That having been done, I'm on track to formally graduate in the spring. Life is good.

The orgy of computer gaming has succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, almost. There will be new Civ by the time I leave on Saturday, and I've played a whole bunch of other stuff, including the newly acquired Battlefield: Vietnam. It made me buy a new video card to play it, and I must say that so far it's been worth every bit of it.

On the off chance you have no idea what BF:V or it's predecessor BF1942 were about, think lots of people with guns online shooting at each other. In this case, it's in the jungle, and there sure are a lot of tanks and helicopters and things running around, which leads to a situation I was in, where I'm this tower dropping Communist infiltrators with my sniper rifle, listening to the Armed Forces Radio in the background, when I miss one of the Communist infiltrators, who runs up, leaps in my side's Cobra gunship, takes off, and promptly collides with somebody's jet fighter. Or the one where my and my guys are holed up in this temple, and there's NVA pouring through this door and dropping to my M-60, and there's this highly annoying PT-76 outside blowing us up.

I think my favorite, though, is a story of Marechal's:

"It is nice listening to the music in helicopters... and in jeeps and such... it's so damn funny ... I was sitting in the brush sniping the enemy base and my brother drives past me with a jeep and you can hear "I fought the law, and the law won" blaring from there as he drives by, machine gun blazing, as he tears through the enemy village."

Yes Virginia, you can blare music from your combat vehicles. Super Sounds of the Sixties and Seventies, as it were.

And never mind that every time I play the game, I have this strange little internal moral conversation with myself over it, which I don't really have the words for, but will represent with this Penny Arcade instead.

Too, I finished Truman finally, after like 3 months or whatever. We went to visit relatives yesterday, and we all know how spending like 4-5 hours in the car gets you all up into reading exceedingly long books. So that's that. In other news, I have a huge stack of airplane reading, which lacks only Ender's Shadow to be complete.

"In a morning meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Bremer warned the Iraqi leaders that they risked isolating themselves and their country if they continued to snub the United Nations."
---The New York Times, 3/18/04

You say 'Ok. Some ramblings about Darwin, and that'll do it.'

Whir says 'Darwin? That guy wasn't right about anything.'

You say 'Poor Darwin. He gets so beat on.'

Whir says 'Well if he had realized that our entire existance was machined by a far superior alien race, I'd give him a little more credit.'

You say 'Squirrel aliens might have been a bit much for poor Darwin.'

Whir says 'True.'

So while I was home the other day, I shot a few pictures of the property. Enjoy.

This is from the front yard, looking up at the house. That's my car in front.

This is from the front deck, down into the front yard. There's a whole field down there you can't really see very well. On nicer days than this, you can see the mountains in the distance.

This is the back yard. That's my old fort there in the background, still choosing the proper moment to collapse finally.

This is from the top of the driveway by the house, looking down on the office and shop.

This is from halfway up the driveway by the shop, looking up to the house.

This is by the shop, over to the side yard and the neighbor's property.

This is from the foot of the driveway, looking up over the whole nine yards.

Some year, I'll put up interior shots. Mom has, however, forced me to promise to wait until she cleans. ;)

Die, you fucker. Die. All eventual 19 pages of you. Yes, that's right. You. Die. Diediedie. Diediediediedie.

Yeah. From now until about Sunday, there shall be enormous descent into an orgy of video games and CC2 mapping and such. And there will be much rejoicing.

Dammit, I don't see anybody rejoicing. Get busy!

So, as far as the whole paper thing goes, I think this email I just sent to Tali and Laurent about sums things up:

Tricksy paperses! We hates them, precious! We hates them! Filled with nasty quoteses and nasty citeses, yes precious. Nasty, nasty quoteses. *gollum* They hurts us, precious, yes they does. *gollum* The tricksy footnotes, they hurts our brains, don't they precious? Yes, yes precious, they hurts us. *gollum* But we'll make them pay, precious, won't we? Yes, precious. Yes we will. *gollum* *gollum* Hurty quotses and citeses and footnoteses. We'll make them all pay, precious!

It's due today, though, so with just a bit more pain, it'll all be over. And then I've got 7 pages for HST 335, and random tests for poli sci and Mythology, but oh well. We concern ourselves not with such minor speedbumps on the road to my getting the hell out of here.

On another note, it's the one-year anniversary of this blog today. For all the protestations I made to Whir before it went up, and all the talking me into it he had to do, this sure has worked out pretty well, I think.

Anyway. Happy birthday, blog.

So, I basically only have one thing to say about Kill Bill: ph34r t3h cute ones.

Probably only Whir will get that. Ah well.

So, the paper is almost done. I'm almost about to collapse, too. The darkness, it's beautiful...

*zonk*

Well, it's here. I'm now burnt out beyond all recognition. Sleeping 3 hours at a stretch, cannot focus on what I'm supposed to be doing...took me like seven hours to write three pages last night. The more and more I think about it, the more and more I think my decision to take time off after graduation is a wise one. I want this to end. I need this to end. I'm tired of term after term of sacrificing myself on the altar of academia. Oh so fucking tired.

I've got a lot to say, I think, lots of pictures to post, but they're going to have to wait for a day or so. Because by tonight I need to have my HST 335 presentation done, and have another five-odd pages of my HST 407 paper done.

And for you faithful blog readers, just think. This is the LAST TIME you'll have to spend weeks listening to me rant about how I'm burnt out and tired and cranky about the end of the term. It's almost over, now. Soon. Soon.

Yeah. So apparently this whole 6/6/6/6 sleep schedule thing is giving me some pretty screwed up dreams. I mean, they're not quite this odd, but.

Then again, maybe they are. I mean, the one where I get attacked by ninjas in my house and have to go all Kill Bill on them with a sword, that's not TOO odd, right? I mean, we all get attacked by ninjas in our sleep from time to time. These things happen.

The one where I'm reliving the last little bit of KOTOR, slaughtering dozens of evildoers with the Force, well, that's a little bit odd, since I don't normally dream myself into video games, but hey, whatever works.

The last one, though... THAT was some fucked up shit right there. I mean, having your veins burst out of your skin, go into little blue spirals above your hand, then explode, leaving your dream self screaming in pain and bleeding to death, with a sensation astonishingly similar to real pain, well, that's just not NORMAL, dammit.

On the other hand, it MIGHT explain why I woke up having had a nosebleed. You never know.

Because I had some more fun with the digital camera.

Ye Olde Pet Rabbit:

Ye Olde Pet Rabbit Again:

And a shot of my entire room.

And as to the faintly visible Megatokyo strip on the wall...

Since I've been promising Cole I'd do this for like, as long as I've had a webpage, I guess now that I actually went and did it, I should go ahead and link it all for you. So, here is my collection of the Monroe D&D group's funniest home videos. Except they're not on video. They could be, I guess, but they're not. Oh well. Enjoy. I'm off back to bed. This paper thing is sucking the life from me.

This whole paper thing can go away now. It's become annoying. Well, except for how it allows me to dig up some really entertaining, yet offensive quotes from 1860 Northern newspapers, whereupon everyone uses assorted racial slurs and such.

Or, you know, there's always entertaining stuff like this:

"If the condition of the negro slaves of the South and the free negroes of the North be contrasted, we find no difficulty in determining where the comfort, happiness, and well being of the race are best preserved. In the South, as everybody is aware, the wants of the negro from infancy to death are supplied...the duty of this care by the master is not only a moral but a legal obligations, which is seldom if ever violated."

But really, you can't get much better than this happy little line from the July 4, Franklin, PA Repository: “The man who gives the orders had better soon come along or the nigger democracy of Franklin County will not know how to vote.”

They say, about the Democratic party. I mean, I dunno. That's just...odd. It's some other things, by our standards, but yeah. Anyway. Newspapers have changed in the last 140 years. And this is the, yknow, Republican newspaper. The abolition bunch. Screwy, I say.

NYT headline of the day: U.S. and French Troops Arrive in Haiti to Restore Stability

Why is this funny? I have no idea. I haven't quite pinned it down yet. But it is. Very.

Sorry if nobody but Whir and I had a clue what I was talking about last entry. I don't usually get to revel in my CC2 geekdom much, however.

Anyway.

7 more pages of the paper due on Tuesday. That's going to suck, but I'm a lot more prepared now than I was. It's still going to mean a lot of pain tomorrow, but I survived Wednesday, I can survive tomorrow.

Well, I sort of survived, at any rate. I went a little loopy there at the end, as the following email will show you:

(It is, I note, my tradition to send out weekly "It is now the weekend. We will do stuff." emails to Tali and Laurent. This is one. Written at, oh, 8am Thursday morning, at which point I had been up longer than I cared to think about.)

--------------------------

And thus it came to pass in those days that the university was in great peril.
Giant papers, some twenty pages in length, stalked the lands, devouring the time
and souls of the unwary. Midterms smote the helpless. Books marched past in
the dozens. And the students were much afraid.

But lo, there appeared a savior! For the weekend did battle unto the papers,
and the midterms, and the books, and they fled with great haste. And the
students were glad, and offered up great praise and offerings unto the weekend.

And there was much rejoicing.

So, yeah. I'm generally annoyed and whatnot at school just now, and I'm
thinking that needs to be solved. Like on Friday night, say. Like with a
movie, or something.

Until then, I suppose I shall just have to content myself with screaming at my
monitor, since the critical webpage I need for my paper due in three hours won't
freaking load. But fortunately, I have this stick. A big stick. A stick of
large proportions, as it were. And as the rhyme goes:

What rolls down stairs, alone or in pairs
rolls over your neighbor's dog.
what's great for a snack, it fits on your back, it's log log log.
it's log, it's log, it's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
it's log, it's log, it's better than bad, it's good.

...

Right. Sorry. Better now. Long night, you understand. And too much caffiene.
I know it's hard to have too much caffiene, but every so often you just have to
make heroic sacrifices, and such as that.

*kills goat at altar*

---------------------------

Right. So on another note, this whole England thing is fast approaching. And the time has come to Seize the Day. If you expect postcards or anything, you'll want to be emailing me with a mailing address. I promise at least one postcard, and if you beg REAL hard, multiple. ;)

Also for the record, I'm going to, at some point, put up a more in detail schedule of where I'm going to be and what all's going on. I don't know it all myself yet, but I'm working on it. Should even have airline tickets soon. Would've had 'em Thursday, but somehow they got grievously screwed up, and I was flying in on the wrong day. Can't have that.

Also, I must remind myself to post my passport photo at some point. According to my mother, I look like a terrorist. Thanks mom! ;)