MrHoatzin

Of course gaming is not the priority. I prefer the OS in general. If I can get games to run on it if I want them to, I don't have to pro/con the decision. I could just get a console if I merely wanted to play games.

Only thing that I did was get the Back to the Future game which installed some sort of directx update and then crashed to desktop a couple of times upon loading a new area with shadows set to high quality. I restarted at least twice yesterday between updating directx and it crapping out and it booted just fine. This was a documented game bug, btw.

I can't seem to uninstall Far Cry 2 because whenever I go to delete local content in Steam, it starts the game on me, and I can't see shit because the graphics card is way antiquated—but because it has been set up for the old card it doesn't put up a fight. I can hear that lovely diegetic menu flapping in the savannah ambiance and the billowing Civ-esque intro music, I can click around and turn pages, but I see nothing. UPDATE: Huh, scratch that, Steam now says the game is no longer installed, so I did something.

As a heavy-set fellow whose studio used to be in a Texas garage, I have gotten amazing traction out of dripping wet bandanas. Keeping your head comfortable makes the ovenness bearabler.

The screen starts out garbled during boot, so I don't think it is a driver issue. Scrobbs, I don't think I can justify a Mac Pro, and as I am likely going to be getting a crisp new Mac Book Pro from work, I don't really need a lappytop. Jesus, those acronyms are dense. Lemme read more carefully here... "W7 sec test VMs", that'll be Windows 7 something test virtual machines? What does "sec test VMs" mean?

I kindof want it to last more than two years... and I don't want to think about computers for a long time, frankly... Pull up a chair, lemme tell you a tale full of sound and fury and whatchamacallits and the like. See, currently in the house, in addition to the XP-running 8-year-old Pentium IV (which is now rebooting with the old Radeon9600Pro and looking forward to being demoted to TV box), I have a Thinkpad T30 which was the height of fashion back when IBM made computers. A few years ago, when formatting it to clean out years of grime that has accumulated in it, I unwittingly wiped out the partition that contained the customized Windows that that thing requires installed upon it to function. Lenovo wanted me to call them in Hong Kong and order a new copy of the OS over the phone. This I deemed to be too much bother, so I installed Ubuntu on it. It took me two weeks to get it to output to a TV and calibrate correctly the saturation output to the secondary video. But then it worked! It had only USB 1 so copying stuff to it has been a chore, but whatever. When Jaundiced Jack-a-doodle was released, some sort of kernel firmware change caused my wifi card to become incompatible with Linux. I spent another week or two dicking with rolling back the particular bit of firmware and recompiling Ubuntu, only to have Firefox refuse to initiate due to a resonance cascade on the dependancy front. So I rolled back all the changes I had made and I haven't connected to the internet with that thing in over a year. The third computer, the best thing that I have in the house, is PowerPC G5 Mac Pro that I bought from the company for $200 when we upgraded to Intel because Mrs. Kingzjester (Queenzjester?) wanted something that can run Final Cut. It is running Vanilla Leopard, two version old Adobe creative suite, two versions old Final Cut and, now two weeks ago, I downloaded Firefox 4 only for it to tell me it cannot be installed on this machine. So fuck all that shit. Except for that PC, all these were bought used. I am boldly breaking new ground and buying new. At the current rate of hardware obsolescence, maybe it will last me ten years. Unless, of course, Apple decides that it will no longer support computers that don't have iPanopticon For-Your-Protection Anti-Terrorism hardware-based-iOS architecture (preferences give you two options tops for each program, all file management happens through iTunes, Terminal access doesn't exist, you have to have a special $25000 dongle to compile programs, using the dongle breaks the warranty; bundles together with the SuperMagiCaliFornicationistic Mac Keyboard that has only 12 keys and a mouse that is brilliantly designed to have only half a button and to not really work, even after you spend six months getting used to its new paradigm).

Hmmm.... What is this shit? I can't imagine any of this will actually affect me, but it is fucked up and uncool.

m-MFQRhKq9I That wasn't necessarily comical—a little punny at best—pretty rad all the same; DJ Food & Ken Nordine. Also an excuse to post this fun photo, the accompanying excerpt and a link to the full article in Vanity Fair of all places. It was hard to pick just one paragraph, the whole article is quite juicy with outrage: Full thing is here.

Wuh eh wha zog now? The dude makes some really odd choices. You can never know what he's up to next and it feels like he makes a movie every couple of weeks. He's bored one weekend, so he grabs some Prelinger clips, spend $50 on iStock videos and the movie hits the theaters a week later. Or he shoots a documentary in 3D. Or a full on Hollywood flick with a proper cinematographer... based on a documentary he did two decades ago. Weird cat.

Neither. I had Texas thrust upon me, but I think a certain degree of Texanness I have attained of my own volition. I really like the cowboy artist archetype. I one-up it by actually being Serbian.

Oh, and that Dave Eggers thing is not really about the same thing. I haven't been obsessive about keeping it real with my art for a long time now, I let my art go where it needs to. And it is not an outwardly looking thing either, I am not anxious about appearing a sellout among my peers. It is some sort of personal sovereignty* thing. It's more a matter of me not liking to be told how to do and not do things, rather than a matter of keeping it real. The new clothes may not confer a degree of authority, but they sure make me feel smug. * I couldn't remember this word so I wikied the treaty of Westphalia. We make some really weird cross references and shortcuts in our minds.

As for the incompetent dude, it is really not his fault. I can't hold it against him. The other day I watched him fumble with a French press, getting too much water, waiting for 20 minutes for it to boil, then plunging it too soon and too quickly, spilling the coffee all over the counter... He seems to be constantly on edge somehow, rushing and anxious... He's probably in his late thirties, early forties, you'd think he'd have his shit figured out by then. I felt sorry and like an asshole for holding anything against him personally. The clothes do look great, and they're not anything I wouldn't wear otherwise when trying to look dapper. They just weren't hobo plaid seersucker shirts that are always wrinkly by design. This sort of thing, as opposed to this. My sister didn't push anything on me, she just navigated me through the right stores and dissuaded me from picking things that didn't really fit well, made me get a white shirt and a black shirt, that sort of thing. My objection to it is entirely philosophical and yet somehow on a somewhat irrational level. I don't want how I look to trump how well I do what I have been hired to do. A rational person would just game the system, give in to something as meaningless as dress code and pick a more relevant battle. I have yet to figure out how to get over this ridiculous thing. At some point I think I've figured it out, but then a few weeks pass and I realize I haven't. And you know, this is such a gentriefied, bourgeois psychosis! Kroms comes in here every so often and says something like, Here's some contraband vids, hope I don't get disappeared by the Stasi, see you guys later hopefully! and I am all I got promoted, but Whaaaa:\:\! Dress code! What the fuck is wrong with me.

My boss put in his resignation last friday. I got promoted into a Señor Developer from a mere Web Designer. This has somehow indirectly spurred two realizations. So this Life entry has one beginning but two ends. That same friday my new glasses finally came, so now I can see how blind I am (not very, but the world has all this texture that I have been missing for a long time now, and all the living things have aged overnight) and I look like a fat, Serbian Elvis Costello. I figured I needed to upgrade my wardrobe to look less like a hobo artist and more like my new responsibility. 1) My sister was in town for the weekend, and shopping is her super power, so she helped me find these clothes that fit me well and I ended up spending an obscene amount of money on a bunch of shirts and some neato pinstriped gray pants. So then I come to work this monday and I feel weird because I am dressed differently, all tucked in and pristine, have fancy new glasses on, the bosses are sharing all this strategy with me on where they want to take the web department and I feel like I have all this heretofore hedged authority to try some new stuff. And I am getting a little weirded out, feeling outside of my element, a little woozy, undercaffeinated (we had run out of real coffee and I can't drink the same stuff everyone else drinks here), then my wife calls me and starts in this official, distant tone, "Hello, I am calling on behalf of Potter-Belmar Labs for Stevan Zivadinovic…" and my head just asploded. I screamed back at her. It was a peculiar feeling of not being sure who I was any more. I understand how actors go crazy. 2) Now for whatever reason, this decision didn't come very easily to me. For years now the designer wing has felt a ridiculous pressure from higher ups here to be presentable to a group of hypothetical banker clients who could come to tour our offices ANY MOMENT NOW. One of the bosses would always say things like, "Don't dress for your job, dress for the job you wish you had." We've all been resentful to this charade, like spoiled children that we are. There is also a senior designer at the company, hired a couple of years after me, who is super incompetent. He doesn’t know how to use any of the programs (he makes things in Illustrator that are really better suited for Photoshop, he makes flash banners in InDesign and then delivers them to me to build an hour before it needs to go go live), doesn’t really grasp what a pixel is (every time I give him pixel dimensions he delivers something four times the needed size), his designs are underwhelming (or as I’ve heard them caustically referred to naïve), and he makes so many mistakes that no one really wants to have to proofread the shit he puts together for fear of catching the blame if they miss something (I think his first notable faux pas was when for a client presentation he took a screen capture of a website in a browser, but failed to notice that in one of the other tabs, clearly visible, he had opened yourLogoMakesMeBarf.com). He somehow lucked into the title of Creative Director at the previous place he worked, and then he got here and became a senior designer. It was always confusing to me that after firing summarily three or four people for making mistakes, they would keep this dude on in spite of the constant sloppiness and general underwhelmingness. Recently it dawned on me. They are keeping him around so that they would have a clean-cut designer to trot out in front of the clients. The boss lady practically said as much. In stark contrast to all the other, more competent designers, he is always clean cut, has no visible tattoos, and has a really, really fancy car that he parks in the front of the building. He had a Corvette that he ruined by driving it through a puddle (low air intake), so now he drives a Mustang. I think his father is some sort of architect, that shit cannot be bought on a designer salary. So basically, he was being kept around for show, surviving primarily as eye candy, competence be damned. And in picking out clothes that looked nice on me, that were stylish but somewhat uncomfortable, I felt like I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. Like I was selling out so that the bosses wouldn’t keep me in a closet forever, afraid that I may scare away some of the fancier clients with my presentation. I have never felt more like a woman. Patriarchy fucks us all.

Why do french people put spaces between words and punctuation ? I really don't understand it as it makes no sense … it just allows things to wrap weirdly .

D'ju guys miss the part where the whole video was a present from her parents? They hired some dudes who specialize in selling these sort of experiences to rich people's kids. She had nothing to do with the song herself. Or the video. Also she can sing, but they instructed her to sing in that weird register that they could then badly autotune... only so that she can be bullied by journalists or whatever those people fancy themselves to be.

9NOHFy1Arf8 Ok, fuck this culture. These assholes on a fucking morning show no one watches find it a splendid fun time to bully a 13-year-old as if somehow her weird song is reprehensible moral turpitude. Journalism everyone! I bet they sucked some politician cock in the next segment, for balancing with some levity. Christ. Also, finally a plausible explanation of how this bizarre cultural artifact came to be.

Apocalypse Now is pretty meaningless as well.

Gotta confess, both Moon and Source Code make for really clever generic names that are hard to torrent... Almost as difficult as three letter or lower names.

For every magical lunatic who talks that talk you have two dozen charlatans with delusions of grandeur who will waste your fucking time by being charming.

The other day someone told me I looked like Jack Black. Basically, people are blind.

They just announced the delay in a "fun" way. Hardly makes the delay a PR stunt.

HEY GUYS! Shit happens! Why does it have to be a neat tidy thing such as a PR stunt?

You want me to work faster on the comic that you admire and desire to read, but you'd only consider paying me if I did something else entirely, assumedly perverted? On a related note, my sister is in town through this weekend, so I dunno if I will get to do any Loboing. Sorry! Aww. I am being conserved! No worries, bbX1138, as long as the natural habitat is undisturbed, the majestic Kingzjester will roam the prairies... or you know, whatever.

Marina Abramović is pretty badass... but I don't know what that video was about... or how it is still on Youtube. Also, considering that she has lived in NYC for decades I can't believe that is her real accent and English proficiency. I should've totally worked harder at nurturing that kind of ridiculous accent. Alas.

Argh, wait, there won't be any until maybe Thursday. Bookmark the rss feed and sit tight. Alternatively if you want to sponsor me, to Hobo Lobo instead of whatever it is I do, I am sure we can arrange something.