Dentists Make My Cheek Hurt

I had to go to the dentist after school today to have 5 cavities on my right side [4 on the top, 1 on the bottom] filled in. God, now that the anaesthetic has worn off, it hurts like a BITCH! I hope it feels better tomorrow. But guess what? On January 10th, I have to go back in to get the other damned side filled in [4 cavities]. Bah! My mother didn't get me an appointment in 4 years, so I guess that's what happens.

At first, though, the numbness resulted in the right half of my face being completely dead. My girlfriend found it quite funny, as did her mom. Eating is WEIRD, man. I basically couldn't use my right side. I mean, I couldn't even feel the food that was ON the right side.

So I went on Patrick Stump's website [http://www.patrickstump.com] [ex-singer of Fall Out Boy, one of my favorite bands and vocalists] and he uploaded two versions of a song from his February-bound album called Soul Punk. The song is called "Spotlight," and the versions are renamed "Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia)" and "Spotlight (New Regrets)." He wants people to listen and vote on which they like more.

I chose "Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia)," as did most other people [it's about 60-40 in the voting right now]. It's less electronic, and... I dunno. Sounds less solo artist-y, which for some reason I don't care much for.

Calc homework. >_<.

So I now have this class, independent reading. Essentially, read a book every 2 weeks and do stuff about it. My first book:

Courtesy of my girlfriend. It's about Bill, who hikes the Appalachian Trail, and his adventure along the way. I've only finished chapter 1 so far. She says it's good, so I'll take her word for it. Suggest some good books? [they CAN NOT have been turned into movies.]

CALCULUS, BAAAHHHH

Allow me to reiterate.

Look at this crap.

FAR from the worst stuff we've had this year, and I know it's only 7 problems, but you have to think about them.

1. The sum of two nonnegative numbers is 20. Find the numbers if:
1.  The sum of their squares is as large as possible; as small as possible
2. One number plus the square root of the other is as large as possible; as small as possible

Death, I tell you. I just had to circle it past a certain point. Our teacher doesn't like explaining things to us. Yeah, AP Calculus teacher, and he just gives us the VEEERRY basic story, and lets us run into all of our little problems on our own.

God, Sometimes I Hate Football.

Packerfan here.

There hasn't been a close game this season that we've won. Besides, arguably, the first Vikings game.

Fucking hell. God damnit.

Explaining the Burst of First Posts

So yeah. I come out of nowhere and have like 6 posts out of nowhere? Well, that's because before I was using Tumblr. However, I grew weary of the site, how to find other blogs, who it was geared towards, so I switched over.

I literally just copy/pasted the ones I have on Tumblr, save a couple I'll have to post myself.

So anyhow, here I am, on Blogger, now. I like it more here anyway.

While I'm here, enjoy a comic about our favorite Minecraft character.

XD. God, I love and hate those guys.

Steam Can Only Burn You [Why Steam Blows]

You know what? I feel like doing that Steam rant right now. Two quick posts in a row.



Steam. Valve’s little baby. Good god, now I hate this service. Let me explain for those who don’t know.

Valve. They make video games. Good ones, too, like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, etc. Their computer games can’t just be installed. Even if you buy the CD. They have a service called Steam, for which you make an account and it keeps track of all of your installed Valve games, and you can buy and download games through it. Sounds alright. But like I said, you can’t just install a game, even from CD. The CD just tells Steam that you bought it, and allows you to download it from the internet. So me and the other… was it 36?… dial-up users are completely shafted, because we have to DOWNLOAD the entire game. Yeah, that could be anywhere up to 4 gigs in size. Which would literally take weeks.

I just opened up the calculator. 4 gigs at 2.5 kilobytes/second would take you between 19 and 20 days. Fun, fun.

So that part sucks [the good part: the CD is no longer needed to play the game. That’s about it.]. Also, Steam automatically checks for updates to the game. And if there is one, you can’t play it until you get the update. Well, guess what? Updates must be downloaded, and can be quite large. So until you wait out the download, you’re shafted.

The only way to avoid this is keep Steam in offline mode, which means it can’t keep track of your achievements and whatnot. Which is what I do. That way, it can’t check for updates to keep you from playing.

One convenient thing they tried to do was to make it so that it’s easy to install a game across multiple computers, by logging into Steam on the same account on the different computers. It would download and install whatever games you wanted that you had previously purchased. Cool and all, but not worth it, sorry.

Steam also offers an in-game friend service and such, providing chat rooms and voice chat, which is nice and all because it’s integrated into the game. They got that part right.

Wait, no they didn’t. Half-Life 2 crashes instantly on my computer when I have the in-game Steam Online service running. I have to turn it off in order for it to work. Sorry, strike 3, Valve.

So, Valve, you make some of the best games I’ve ever played, but you sure do make me suffer a lot to be able to play them. You deserve a Gordon Freeman crowbar to the face.

The Woes of Dial-Up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1AQcGGSec

Yeah, it still exists. And I have it. It sucks, and it sucks hard.

Let me elaborate. My parents are divorced. So you’d think that since that means two houses, that means DOUBLE the chances of ONE of them having high-speed internet. Yeah, well, not when one moves into the woods and one into the boonies. [Dad in the woods (he just got his first deer of the year this morning) and Mom in the boonies (my primary parent)] So, I don’t really use it anymore, but that’s because I got my wonderful Droid phone. I can use my phone’s internet on my computer, which is WONDERFULLY faster. 3G, baby. Not quite good enough for (most) gaming, but it makes audio streams like MySpace [or My_____ or whatever] Music possible, and YouTube videos…kinda possible. It’s become very nifty, nevertheless.

However, it’s still not good enough for some things. My dial-up download speed tops at about 3 kb/s, and my phone can go anywhere from 20 kb/s to 120 kb/s, depending on the day and time. This isn’t quite good enough for, say, updating games on Steam [stupid service in the world, I’ll do that post another day…], running large updates on Ubuntu, or for that matter, downloading any Linux distro. iTunes needs an update? Well, iTunes is a 90mb update. Not really great to do on either of those connections.

So basically all of these things pile up, and then I have my best friend, whom I shall refer to as Trogdor.



One of our favorite old videos, that was. He uses the moniker on various games [you can guess what mine is]. So anyhow, I stay over at his house occasionally and always lug over my wonderful computer so that I can mass-update basically everything. Anything high-speed that needs to get done gets done at his house. I did this just last night [which explains my lack of posting for the past 24 hours], and did quite a bit. Updated Ubuntu and upgraded it to 10.10, updated my Steam games [and now that I realize it, forgot to set Steam back to offline mode… crap. (I’m on my dad’s laptop because my computer is sitting on the floor, waiting to go back to mom’s to be hooked up.)], updated iTunes [which I like, by the way]… You name it. Watched some Pure Pwnage. Played some Urban Terror.

So anyhow. I am one of the 37 people who still have dial-up, basically. It’s not enjoyable in any way, shape or form, except for nostalgia. I’m a sucker for nostalgia. The ’90s = greatest decade ever. But now’s cool, too.

Anyhow… Yeah. What fun. Oh, and I showed Trogdor my Minecraft world. He was impressed with my Skyboat; it wasn’t as sketchy as he thought it was going to be.

DROID

So, I have a Motorola Droid. Great phone, by the way. I love it [although I do wish it had a front-facing camera]. And I thought I’d show a couple apps, the most relevant ones to this since it’s the first post like it.

Firstly there is gReader. This is a third-party app used to sync with your Google Reader RSS feeds and whatnot, viewable right from your phone. Some feeds can show the whole article on the phone, others just a snipped and you must view them in the browser. Not a big deal, really.



That’s the screen showing the 4 feeds I follow. When one is clicked, in this case, Droid News…



And Voila, news right on my phone. Beautiful. I’ll probably get more feeds as I go along, but my 3 most frequent visits are right there now. I may add like… Sci/Tech on Google News or something.





EDIT: Here, there was the Tumblr app, but since I'm switching from Tumblr to Blogger, well... not needed anymore.


So now I can post from my phone if I need to, which is nice. I may post about more apps if any particularly awesome ones come up. Or if I need content and am coming up short. ^_^

What The...?

Is it just me or is this one of the most disturbing birthday cards ever?

Current Music Loadout

Currently, for whatever reason, these songs have been infiltrating my mind:

Fall Out Boy - “America’s Suitehearts” - I used to hate this song SO much. It was my least favorite on the album [Folie à Deux], but it has come back and kicked me in the face for some reason. Something about the chorus, it just seems so powerful. Especially just before the last one, the power of the Patrick’s vocals singing “Let’s hear it for America’s Suitehearts” with no other instruments. I dunno.

Foo Fighters - “Come Alive” - Another song I used to not care for, but this song builds up with such intensity that I just can’t help but love it. Foo Fighters have been my favorite band for 4 years now, and they’ll probably stay there for a looong time. I love Dave Grohl.

Wolfmother - “New Moon Rising” - First heard this when I went to see Due Date [good movie, by the way]. I’ve never listened to Wolfmother really, minus a few songs. “Woman” in Guitar Hero 2, and “Vagabond” in the soundtrack for (500) Days of Summer [another amazing movie]. Great song, though. Andrew Stockdale’s vocals are WAY strong. Great to rock out to, anyhow.

Toby Keith - “Beer for My Horses” - Not a recent song, really, but definitely a great one. The super-cool bluesy guitar riff is second only to Toby and Willie Nelson’s great vocals during the chorus. Just a badass song, really.
I could come up with a few more, but I think that’s fine for now, haha.

I try to keep my music tastes as open as I can, but there’s some music I just will never like. Gangsta rap is the stupidest shit on earth, for example. And Kesha. Ugh. She’s made some nice music, too, before she came out with drunk-piece-of-shit-trashy-whore music she came out with. I can’t stand that stuff. Is it catchy and not bad musically? Yeah, it’s alright musically. But the message, the lyrics… Ugh.

While I’m talking about music…




That’s my baby, her name is Elle. She is beautiful, and she sings like no other.

First Post and Minecraft

I’m gonna skip the intro and get into my first thing.

For those who play Minecraft, don’t you love it when this happens when you turn the corner while exploring underground?



I certainly do. I’m coming up like “Oh hey, Creeper, what’s up?” But then he’s all like “Hey yeah, so uh, remember how you were having a good time exploring down here?” I reply, “Yeah, it’s pretty fun, everything’s how I wanted it, all my stairways and stuff.” Until the Creeper is like “Yeah, so, uh, fuck you.”

That particular one I managed to get away from by climbing up a waterfall to my left.

And then was attacked by these guys.



So I had to kill both of them without a sword [my weapon of choice: the torch], which only took, you know, 5 minutes.

All’s been well since then. I found my first obsidian, too.



I REALLY found my first obsidian. The stuff takes forever to mine, I tell you, diamond pickaxe or not [there is no not; since it can only be mined with diamond…].

Oh, and if anyone who sees this and knows would like to tell me what those two peach-y orange-y colored things by the mouse pointer are, that’d be great. XD






If anyone’s interested in this game, http://www.minecraft.net is the way to go. This version [the cool one] costs 10 Euros for now [about $14], but it’s super worth it. And if you like it, follow this guy: http://notch.tumblr.com for updates and such.

So anyhow, Happy Thanksgiving to anyone who sees. :D I shall keep Minecrafting until I eat my bird.

CUT MY BIRD IN TO PIECES. THIS IS MY KNIFE AND FORK.

[Written on 11/25/10]