Hello children. I have come again to write more about my rather inane life, so as to provide further entertainment during your rare times of loneliness.
The weather of late in Kapiti can be compared to a teenage girl trying to cope with the first cycles of menstruation. The mood swings are rapid, spontaneous and incalculable, and alternate, with little variation, between warm and welcoming disposition and gelid, repellant neuroticism. (Okay, this may be slightly inaccurate; at least with the Kapiti weather there are a few moments notice before the rain man comes out to play.) Only half an hour ago (at 10:30am) were the clouds ganging up on us to pelt a few miserable raindrops at our concrete surfaces; now they are spreading apart and reconnoitring at random like long-lost friends. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps the clouds have their own esoteric society up there, that derives enjoyment from controlling the the flow of our joyous solar lighting. Ah, summer only waits for us round the bend, and maybe the cloud gods will feel more docile and kinder towards us then.
Rather than trying to explain why I've been regularly not updating my site for the last three years, month and half, for which in retrospect there is little explanation outside of lack of motiviation, I will start with the past three days.
On Saturday I brought (or "brang" as some may say) my modest PC along to a LAN party at my violinist friend Byron's father's house. It was in lieu of a traditional celebration of birth, but appropriate given that at least four of our congregation of five could fit under the wide umbrella of computer geek. Byron will be aged 18 years come this 20th, allowing him to legally purchase and consume large quantities of alcohol, and other things he would likely never think of.
As I mentioned before, the weather in Kapiti is rather fickle; it's now 11am and the clouds have conglomerated again to brood and generally irritate.
A LAN party, for those not familiar with the term, is a type of gathering of mainly males, who each bring their own computer and its necessary periphery, including a network cable and a pair of headphones, and connect them all to a network hub in order to play against (and occasionally with) each other in multiplayer computer games. It is, from a perspective, a very nerdy affair (hey, the sun has come out again). As this activity is designated to sustain for many hours, food and drink of the type usually seen round the top of the healthy eating pyramid is provided. By the end of some LANs there will be enough empty soft drink cans to form a fairly large pyramid.
"What's the point? Why not just play over the Internet?" you may ask. Well:
- I only have dial-up Internet access, and I will only have dial-up Internet access until I no longer live at home. Even on broadband, a five-player deathmatch in Quake III for example can turn ugly in relation to latency, and playing games over the Internet with lag just feels miserable and shabby.
- Gaming is a lot more fun when you're sitting with the people you're playing against. Consuming junk food and caffeinated beverages is also more enjoyable when with a group.
I decided to wear formal black attire to the party, as whether rising to the top of a scoreboard or failing to cultivate a score that isn't a negative number, both appear far more majestic and pronounced when wearing a black concert shirt.
Byron, Ciaran, Aaron and I arrived about 11 and we were all functional by about 11:30. The LAN kicked off with some Quake III deathmatch, in which I managed to hit the fraglimit in most rounds. We played Warcraft III, which I am barely familiar with, but the custom games made it more enjoyable. Playing 'vanilla' Warcraft III multiplayer effectively is dependent largely on multitasking ability and luck, both of which I rarely project.
My friend Kieran arrived in the afternoon, bringing our present, and I realised I was the only one without a name ending with R-schwa-N (yay for being the different one). Last year Byron became a fanatic of the Half-Life series (even more so than me) when he began working his way through Half-Life 2 at my place every Tuesday (I was having sleep problems and was usually fagged out after coming home so he had the computer to himself). It was a regular point of discussion for Byron, so it was blatantly obvious to Kieran and myself that he would be most likely lusting after the new Half-Life 2: Episode 1. We all pitched in to buy it for him, and his exclamation of joy was priceless. After some more Quake III and Doom (yes, Doom 1, co-operative, in ZDaemon,) and drawing to midnight, Byron started up Episode 1 and we watched with fascination.
It was the first time in over a year at least that I stayed up for an entire night without feeling tired. None of us slept at all - we spent a couple of hours during the night watching this random movie called Super Troopers, about the antics of this police unit on some random stretch of highway - the movie file was networked through to my computer, which relayed it to Byron's dad's shiny new 16:9 TV (ah, the wonders of technology). I put it down to the two cans (it's a maximum of two cans per 24 hours) of Red Bull and probably the equivalent of a bottle of coke. I wonder if those drinks temporarily slackened my vocal chords, because my normal speaking voice dropped several tones over the course of the night, and reverted to its normal pitch by yesterday morning. I can't really remember what else we did during the night apart from listen to my music collection of mostly metal. Half of a LAN is just the communal experience, late night laughter, chilling out, that sort of thing.
In the morning we played some team games. Having only five players meant that any team games would be stacked - but we played them anyway, because we're awesome and we don't have breasts. Some Capture The Flag was in order, first in Quake III, in which our team dominated until we re-stacked, then in Unreal Tournament, coming out on top in all but one match. Byron crashed on the sofa about mid-morning before I realised we'd passed an entire LAN session without playing Counter-Strike. Like Doom, Counter-Strike is a "killer reason" for having a LAN; if people start getting bored with the zeitgeist game, there's Counter-Strike to fall back on. I was at least adamant we were going to play Doom - I think it should be a crime not to at least salute the game that made LAN parties socially acceptable with a little old-school style, keyboard only deathmatch (or co-op as it was).
After getting home about midday Sunday feeling pretty flushed out and full, Mum announced that a barbecue was commencing at 2pm in the olde house of extended family in Wellington. No way, I thought, that's totally awesome. I could eat enough to last me until early 2007. "I might go lie down for just a few minutes," I sayt, knowing there was a good chance I'd fall asleep. I missed out on the barbecue. :(
Yesterday I was cast with the task of attending an induction session at the local New World. If all goes according to plan I should be starting my first paid job (that is, employed by a third party) on Thursday, doing the night fill. I'm so happy I could roast a dog.
Here ends my discourse, there is quite a bit more to write about but I will leave this for a later time.
Man, am I happy right now. Yesterday I felt like a nothing, Slipgate was down, my temporary account on another webhost had been DoS'ed, and nobody could connect to my webserver on my own computer for some strange reason. And I kept getting disconnected every three minutes. So I was practically non-existent on the Internet. Just got on IRC now and found out Slipgate's back up! Welcome to PlanetScragadelic, world!
In other news, I wasted yesterday thinking about doing stuff instead of doing it (which I'm good at) and today I have written about six pages of an HTML tutorial. It's on paper, and won't be up until the whole thing is complete. It could take a few months.
God damnit, I have homework to do.
Some retard thought it would be a great idea to do a DoS/bandwidth attack on PlanetScragadelic, so nobody could access SCiFT. So I apologise for the slowness, but until I find a decent webhost I'm going to have to host my site from my own computer. Means it will only be here during the day, and not often at that. Meh. Better than a kick in the pants.
Today our college choir sang for a group of elderly people, as we do every year. Hopefully it injected some colour into their otherwise dull lives. I thought it sounded pretty jutted and uncaring compared to last year. I guess everyone tried their best. Though the elderly group is getting older, and they are generally likely to blame our performance on bad hearing or something similar.
Okay. So I'm a slacker. Maybe you noticed that apart from the SCiFT page, no other pages are up. I'll make a deadline, say, next Wednesday EST. If all the pages aren't completely rewritten and functional by then, I will make another deadline and redesign the site yet again within an even shorter time.
For all those who are new to my site, welcome to PlanetScragadelic, previously known simply as 'Scragadelic', as an adjective, and previously known before that as 'the lonely world of'... something. Fully documented history to appear sometime soon! With pictures! That's going to require research! I like using the exclamation mark! You kick my dog!
