The Cynic Gazette

A lot’s been going on, so I’ll give a quick update. I have a lot of new pictures up, some of me, some of Meg, some of bands. Have a look and if you like ’em you can subject yourself to an afternoon of me taking pictures of you while telling you to look natural and stop smiling like an idiot. 

I never write anymore, mostly because myspace bugs me, so I’m moving the blog offsite. It’s not pretty, there’s not a ton of content, but www.Cynicgazette.com is definitely there. So go bookmark it, grab the feed (note to self, set up RSS feed) and enjoy me in non-myspace format. So that’s new too. You’re going to start seeing posts here telling you there are new posts there for a little while, but that’s not going ot last forever. And if I can ever dump these out and move ’em over there, well, super.

New roommates are coming soon too. The era of Mike’s and my dual-throned rule over Parkville is slowly coming to an end. In a few weeks, we cap off 5 awesome years of living together and having a great time. Even though he’ll be down the street, I’m going to have a hard time dealing with it, but it’s time. And I have a good reason.

Most of you know already, but in case you don’t, Meg and I are moving in together! She’ll be moving into my place in April, and as much as I’m going to miss living with Mike, I can’t wait to live with Meg

So that’s the skinny on me. Pictures, blog, girlfriend moving in. And I had my wisdom teeth out recently too. I would have mentioned that earlier, but this is about new stuff, and not about having less old stuff.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall Meg

Moving to wordpress is something that I’ve been meaning to do for the better part of my blogging career, and you think that with web development as my career, my side job and one of my hobbies, I’d actually make some progress from time to time.

Well, it’s taken me just under a month to delete the “hello world” post and write something more meaningful, and while the word “meaningful” is debatable at this point, it’s better to have something than nothing, and this run-on falls under that umbrella. So horray for that.

Unlike the old cynicgazette from the days of old, and the myspace blog, I’m departing from the I-wish-I-was-Dave-Barry thing a little bit and I’m going to be as geeky as I want. I want to be able to geek out about photography, talk freely about web stuff I think is cool, bash pseudoscience crap that gives me a headache and … well, do the I-wish-I-was-Dave-Barry thing.

I’m going to note new posts here in my myspace blog until I set up a script to do it for me, but for the most part, I’m done blogging there. I’ll beautify this place soon enough, but in the meantime you’ll have to deal with it looking a little rough. Sorry. Think of it as a kickback to Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify, simplify” thing. You know, when he wasn’t going on about the damn bean farm.

On that note, I’m going to run down to Wholefoods for a congratulatory snack. It’s the most web 2.0 place to eat ever.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall blogging, me

…there aren’t any. Not as such by design, I just haven’t gotten around to it because I’m a pretty busy guy. I’m not against doing anything, I just haven’t really thought about it much more in-depth than “I’d like to have pizza at some point.” Currently the only thing I have planned for the weekend is to go to the motorcycle show tomorrow, and probably a little happy hour with Meg and her work pals today. 

So there you go. 

Oh yeah, I want to go to coldstone at some point too.

So, umm, yeah. Sorry for the anticlimax. Something will probably happen tomorrow night, and I might just call that the birthday night out. Or I might just hook up the VCR on Monday (actual birthday) and see who wants to come over and watch The Leningrad Cowboys Go America (I’m not kidding). We’ll see.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall me, yummy

Dear People of the MySpace dot com,

I’m out of here for the week, so happy thanksgiving (unless you’re American Indian), enjoy your turkey (unless you’re vegan), tell your family I said hi (unless you’re not seeing them), take a big gulp of wine (unless you don’t drink) and have a great weekend (unless you have to work)!

America, Jesus and I love you and are thankful the Germans haven’t killed my people yet,

Joisey Vegas Mike

p.s. Thanks for emailing — I’m aware I spelled it like that. Now I know two of you don’t get my sense of humor. I’m so telling Baal on you.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall sarcasm

I felt so cutting edge Sunday night, with both fan-on-a-stick and superpillow! I also picked up a full-spectrum bulb for my bedside table lamp, went food shopping, got the cool LED tap-light (a cheapo one though, but still cool) and a bunch of hangers. I think I want to do drapes in my bedroom and start figuring out a dining room game plan. I sort of want to repaint my bedroom too… I was thinking of going with a darker blue, but I’m not 100% yet. I think it’ll look better with the floor and furniture, and some B&W prints on white mattes with silver frames would look really good.

Who’s distracted with workday ADD? This guy.

Review: New Superpillow

A little background — I’d bought one of those foam neck pillows from Blood Bath and Beyond about 2 years ago and it’s been the star of my bed ever since. The new Superpillow is known in the retail world as the Tempur-Pedic Neck Pillow (extra thick), and retails for $130 from Brookstone. It’s pretty firm, and it’s comfortable, with great head-neck alignment, but it’s a bit much when I roll over on my stomach, but still was nice for the first lay-down. My main problem is that every time I woke up I couldn’t help starting to think about how the pillowfelt and mentally contrasting it with Superpillow JR which was demoted to the other side of the bed. After a second night, I’m decided that it’s going back to Brookstone. The Extra thick one’s just too thick, which translates into extreme firmness. As a result, I wake up almost hourly and never really get comfortable. I’ll try the regular thickness and report back.

Review: Fan on a stick

This is my second fan-on-a-stick (my name for floor-standing fans), the 10″ 3-Speed Blizzard by Holmes. I gave my last one to Rachael last summer since her apartment turned into a furnace in the summer unless she resigned herself to signing over all her paychecks to the gents at BG&E. Fan-on-a-stick’s just like I remember it from my last one: holy shit, that’s a lot of air coming at me. It’s a little louder than your average floor-stand fan, but since it moves enough atmosphere to make the big bad wolf wish he had one, that’s forgivable. The only shortcoming is one I noted before — it needs one more extension rod, because it’s just level with the top of my bed. I emailed the manufacturer, but I think I might just make something, since I’m expecting their response to be any of the following:

1. just go buy another one, and use its rods, then you have an extra fan.
2. suck it
3. no, we don’t sell those, but here’s our catalog of fans so you can buy a taller one
4. we have them lying around but you can’t buy them 
5. they were all sold to a dildo company to be reshaped and marketed to girls who didn’t want to go out with you in highschool

Career Opportunities

*singing* …the ones that never knock…I’ve been toying with the idea of a new career lately, something completely un-computery. Like what, you ask? Maybe being an architect, since I’ve always have a knack for math and 3D modeling, and that whole creative thing. Maybe engineering, since it’s a great place for people into puzzles and problem solving, not to mention people with a knack for math and science. Or possibly a novelist, which I think everyone I know has suggested I delve into at one point or another. I was just thinking about all of the schooling and degrees needed, and how long I’d need to stay in the web game to fund all of that, and I think that might be a bit defeatist. Get a masters as a Nuclear Engineer, after 5 years of night classes, and a starting salary that would probably be half where I’d be 5 years from now doing what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll just try to get the freelance business booming again… write novels in my spare time, and retire early so I can walk the streets at night rambling about fans and pillows. 

Do you have to be good at math for that? Awesome.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall, Random reviews

MySpace has a button with which you can search by people’s display names. As of right now, there are 7977 people on MySpace who set their name to “McLovin.”

*sigh* 

I present the instructions on how to use a toothpick:

“Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.”

Joisey Mike 4th Wall myspace, Wonko the sane

Working at home on a Friday is a bag of dicks man, let me tell you about it. I’m in my pajamas (yay!) but I’m not sleeping (boo!) and there’s coffee (yay!) but it’s instant (boo!). Lunch breaks are great though, run through the shower, lay on the couch, watch porn and play PS3 catch up on the local news, and maybe break out big Vic and go for a ride.

“Superbad”
(A movie review by “Joisey” Mike”dor the Burninator” “Fuckin’” Craig Snyder)

Scott wasn’t foolin,’ this is the funniest movie I’ve seen in years. All of the scenes from the trailer and crap compared to the rest of the movie, including some scene that are the REAL versions of the watered down cut that made the trailers. You will laugh your ass off, and have new respect for anyone who doodles penises. Go see it. If you’re going tonight, I’d totally go see it again.

Viva Las… anyway.

I’m headed back to Vegas in September, the 7th to the … umm… crap. There’s never a calendar when you need one. Until the 15th. I get there on a Friday morning, and granted I’ll be working during the weekdays, the first weekend should be fun. I might do the hotel thing and make it a real vacation for the first weekend, but I’m spending the weekdays at my Dad’s place, working from there for a week. Should be fun times.

Rockin’ on Saturday

I’m really excited for Mike’s birthday show on Saturday; we’re going to see the Bouncing Souls and Lifetime — two bands that most of you Jersey mockers don’t know are from NJ. I feel like I need to say something: you should be fucking ashamed of yourself if you use the word “Emo” and you haven’t heard Lifetime. They invented the shit. I know I’ve stopped having rage fits whenever someone pouts in their myspace picture and says that Justin Timberlake’s ballads make them feel so emo, and yeah, I’ve stopped seeing red at the fact that that became the pop-culture hero of super-cool-underground-but-not-really terms. Anyway, I loved Lifetime when I was in HS, and they broke up when I was a freshman at Towson, and after starting to do reunion shows over the last year or two, they’re finally playing here. 

Code Monkey

This is the best song anyone in the tech field will ever hear. I think it might be my new favorite Jonathan Coulton song, even surpassing “Re: Your Brains,” because being a code monkey, I can identify. That’s something I won’t be able to do with “Re: Your Brains” until one of my coworkers turns into a zombie and tries to attack me. Although, if I get angry enough about people using the word Emo while I’m at work, I could become a rage-infected code monkey, and we learned during “28 Days Later” that rage-infected monkeys create zombies, which after I calm down, could, in turn, attack me. Then I’d be able to identify just fine.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall emo, Hardcore, reviews, Superbad

I just shiver-twitched (is there a word for this? maybe in the “Meaning of Liff”) so hard I almost knocked myself completely out of my chair and into the Gazelle. That means it’s blogging time! That, and I have workday ADD. Imagine that.

Spotlight on Urbandead.com

Good idea. Crap execution. The idea to have a text-only adventure with a colorful map is cool, but being limited to 50 moves is a little limiting:

shoot a zombie once – 1 move. 
walk to the left – 1 move.
go through a door – 1 move.
watch Rock of Love on VH1 – 1 move.

Five minutes later and you’re done until your moves refresh at a rate of one move every half hour, up to a total of — you guessed it — 50. So, it’s not enough interactivity to entertain me, since I wasn’t even able to walk around the block and kill a zombie in my first sitting. Next.

The 200 Shitty Comic Challenge

This is great; after being challenged by another webcomic artist, the guy who runs nedroid.com took a challenge to write 200 shitty web comics. Some of them had me giggling my ass off and it’s worth checking out. 

Frickin sports

Random funfact: I’ve NEVER owned clothing for a sports team I wasn’t on. So, luckily, a gun wasn’t held to my head to wear a jersey to the Raven’s scrimmage the weekend before last. Of course, there’s still bad blood brewing from a long time ago when I didn’t wear purple to a Raven’s game, but that’s besides the point.

So yeah. Pro scrimmages. They’re nifty. They’re like games where the players don’t care, nobody keeps score, they don’t kick-off, and you get really good seats. Well, upon reflection, they really are games where the players don’t care, nobody keeps score, they don’t kick-off, and you get really good seats. Oh and they stop serving beer after an hour. We still had the fun.

PS3

I have a PS3 now. If you do, lets go online and kill each other.

Sudden one-word mysterious ending

Pancake!

Joisey Mike 4th Wall, Random zombies

Another case of workday ADD has taken a hold, so let’s review some of the hilights of my day. Oh wait, Emily (who declared me the guy who makes it cool to be weird) just emailed me, I’m gonna go read it. BRB. 

OK, I’m back. So, instead of taking screenshots of online textbook pages (oh, what fun!) I’m going to eat your brain. By eat your brain, I of course mean tell you about my day.

Random Insta-obsessions

Jonathan Coulton
Mike introduced me to his song “Re: Your Brains” the other day, so I did some research and bought the album it was on from iTunes. This guy’s great, the album, “Thing a Week Two” is part of his “Thing a Week” project, releasing a new song every week for a year. It feels like Ben Folds if you swiped his piano and gave him an acoustic guitar… really folk-rocky. And he does a cover of “Baby Got Back”, but that’s on a different album. I’m going to get it and see how it feels toe-to-toe against Richard Cheese’s cover.

Urban Dead
This massively multiplayer ***FREE*** browser based game has you as a survivor (read: living human) or a zombie (read: chainsaw fodder) in a city (read: cit… oh, right). I haven’t had the chance to play it yet, but I love the premise. From the reviews I’ve read, I’ve heard that it’s mostly text based with few graphic elements, which is cool since I was into oldschool Infocom games in the mid-80s like Zork, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Wishbringer. Never MUDs though. That’s worse than Magic: The Gathering. How’s this game different from a MUD? Shut up, that’s how.

It’s gold Jerry, Gold!

My favorite definition of the word chode from urbandictionary.com:    

    “A chode is a bunch of people that sit around and argue over the definition of the word chode.”

Quotes

Dating advice given:    

    “[15:46] kincaidKMF: I have a rule of thumb I ascribe to pretty strongly: don’t listen to anyone who hasn’t been on a date with anyone new in almost 30 years.”

Commenting on walking to Best Buy on my lunch break, even though it’s pretty hot outside:    

    “I’d like to think that my legacy, once I’ve passed into the great beyond, is to be known as the kind of guy who would walk to Best Buy. As long as it’s not that far. And open.”

On the phone to an insurance adjuster:    

    “So basically I’m the first person this week not to use the phrase ‘lord have mercy’ three times already by this point during the conversation? I’m not to likely to clutch my pearl necknace and say ‘oh, my heaveans’ either. It’s not that I don’t think pearls make me pretty, but I’m not into wearing necklaces.”

Summing it up with H2 tags

Well, I’m gonna go home now. I think the fact that I just promised to set up a wireless printer for a friend the next time I’m in Vegas means that’s enough computer’n for the day. Sing it with me now… “All we want to do is eat your brains…”

Joisey Mike 4th Wall, Geek, Random Jonathan Coulton, me, zombies

Work ADD:

1. I like Illustrator better than Photoshop lately
2. Why does every icon I draw look so “Web 2.0″?
3. I need to go to Home Depot for another outside garbage can
4. I want magic low carb nachos
5. I missed coffee. a lot.
6. I need a white LED taplight from Home Depot too
7. Should I buy myself a Macro lens or a Super Wide Angle lens next?
8. I have to put those teddy bears on ebay
9. I need to build a lightbox to shoot the bears before I do 8
10. What would be a new myspace name that wouldn’t have people email me asking if I’m ok?
11. TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIIIIIIIGHT!
12. While I’m at Home Depot I can finally get stuff to refinish my Guitar Hero guitar
13. It’d probably be a good idea to write down ’s 3, 6, 9 and 12. 
14. I’m going to start telling people how the new Harry Potter book ends, since I only read the ending and will refuse to read anything else.
15. Why is every hardware shopping item a multiple of three?
16. I’m going home.

Joisey Mike 4th Wall lists, me