08.30.04
Posted in Home Life at 10:57 pm by Beau
As I’ve procrastinated the summer away and fell short in the creativity department, there have been no invitations to my own national convention where I’m going to re-nominate myself for four more years of me, me, me.
As part of my own national convention, I’ve taken the week off of work to stay well away from NYC, the RNC, and all those other pesky letters. I was also boycotting NBC and the Olympics but they’ve timed themselves to finish just as my week was beginning so I can go back to just not watching TV rather than making a non-political political statement in saying I’m boycotting them.
Worst Job EVER Award: Whoever those poor, Greek schmucks were who had to ‘plant’ over 100,000 stalks of wheat in that “Follow The Yellow Brick Road” spiral at the closing ceremonies last night, only to have them mowed down in the space of about one minute. I mean, were they high? It must symbolize all those weird throwing sports where you know the athlete has been practicing all day, every day, for the last four years only to get up and have about five seconds of Olympic glory as he throws something…and then it’s over. Four years of practicing for that? 100-man hours to plant wheat that’s going to be trampled in ten seconds? WTF? But I’m boycotting the whole thing so what do I know?
The real reason I took off this week, besides trying to avoid being dead center in a terrorist attack, is that I have a mondo marketing audit paper due next week. And I’m a procrastinator, remember? I love how I’ve called up every marketing person I know to really, loudly bitch and moan about how miserable and torturous my marketing class is this term. I try to insert, without judgment or malice regarding their chosen profession, my complete disdain for marketing, reiterating my general belief over and over that marketing is total bullshit only to have them agree with me.
As I’m off work and home alone for most of the day this week, my current dress consists of new cotton boxer shorts from WalMart® in a size, according to the packet, four sizes bigger than what I wear in a comfortable jean but which, if they were any smaller, would compete for that leather jock Jeff bought me for my 26th birthday back when I had a 28-inch waist. Of course the fly is permanently open and my dick keeps flopping out but as it’s just me, I’m feeling OK about it, even though I’ll end up sewing them closed eventually. I did manage to actually shower today as a way of trying not to be the schlub I’m going to end up being by late Wednesday afternoon, however the 100% humidity we’re currently toiling under has made my attempted personal hygiene inconsequential at best. Even the kitties are getting skittish around me, unsure as to what I’m doing home, why I have a moist, flustered appearance, or why I’m interrupting their afternoon naps, especially Tink who, unbeknownst to us, sleeps the afternoon away on top of the TV cabinet behind the center speaker, in the 8-inch space between the top of the cabinet and the ceiling. To say she was un-amused at my rousting attempts with the jingle stick, trying to coax her to come down and play would be…rather understated.
The benefit to having some extra time this week is that my unjustified, unapproved spree through my Amazon wishlist last week netted me a cadre of good reading, which I’ve decided I’m doing, regardless of how much marketing text I have yet to read or audit left to write. In the space of a day, I’d devoured and extremely enjoyed Alice Hoffman’s new endeavor, Blackbird House, which rivals her other favorites of mine, Practical Magic, and The Probable Future. Next up is Life of Pi, and then onto The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, followed by The Lives of Shadows, and City of Saints & Madmen, which came as a referral when I was looking for a new tome by Mark Danielewski who wrote House of Leaves some years back but who hasn’t written shit since, unfortunately.
So come to my convention this week. I’ll cook awesome, Americanized Indian fare for you, culled from the September issue of MS Living and ply you with cheap, carbonated apple cider-flavored soda (WalMart® special along with the cotton boxers) while we try to question buying the new Bjork album simply because her hair looks like a jellyfish and she’s spilling boobage out over her corset.
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08.28.04
Posted in Home Life at 10:29 am by Beau
As is the usual case about me, I typically trail behind the rest of the world in some way, spiritually, economically, socially, sexually, by a range of years. Socially, I always feel about three to four years behind everyone else and when I get particular ‘ah-ha’ moments, it’s quickly followed by a realization that everyone was there way before me. I don’t utterly fall apart about it, but it does take the glow of self-realization and actualization down a notch.
As everyone and their brother know, I’ve come into gaming late in my life. I certainly don’t have the time, money, or energy to compete with those pesky 13-year olds so prevalent on the systems now, but I’m comfortable that I’ve found a unique little niche for my OCD superhero fetish and have something to occupy myself now that I’ve given up TV. Little did I realize when I purchased my very new, very expensive desktop last year (thanks, Mom!) that a sub-standard, proletariat video card had been installed. I only found out after a first round of games I’d been purchased last spring failed to load or display correctly. I couldn’t even find the product on the company website, it was so obscure. I have no doubt that video card was the technological equivalent to generic Cheerios®, all bland and packaged in a white box with plain black, block lettering spelling out: substandard video card.
So while my current game, City of Heroes, did load and while I can play it in its immersed 3D environment, I kept getting warnings that I needed to upgrade my video card drivers, which I did, to no discernible effect. Then I started asking around about upgrading video cards and what that would entail and how one goes about doing it. I got a lot of mythology and some very wrong answers about having to simultaneously upgrade my system memory at some astronomical cost but eventually, with some research on the net and basic trust in my own skills, I set out to upgrade. The real question I should have been asking myself was why, other than to play those other games, would I upgrade since CoH plays fine? I dunno, honestly. I imagined a cleaner, crisper, smoother, transitioned page and 3D graphics that really blow me away. But I didn’t have anything to base how bad my current graphics were behaving, so my logical assumption, and the basic theory I apply to the rest of the world is, it’s always, always better somewhere else or with some other product or some other service or some other person than with what I have right now. It’s total the-grass-is-always-greener mentality but it’s driven me into situations at times that validate that assumption and so I go on. How Jeff and I have remained together after almost 10 years with that as my guiding force escapes me.
As my recent history can attest, I don’t know much about the world of computers but I know enough to be very dangerous to myself and to anyone who thinks I know about computers (Hi Nikki!). I knew enough to know that video cards can be upgraded and my research pointed me, finally, to the Radeon® 9600XT series of accelerators. Honestly, I wouldn’t know whether that card was any better or any worse or any more worth the money than any other card but its statistics looked impressive. I’m taking a marketing class right now and am fully aware of the significance and impact of using meaningless, unverifiable stats in zingy graph charts to unduly influence the stupid and simple. The price, of course, was outrageous too, especially when I think that there is no way to quantify any perceived benefit from the old card to this one. The only way it could even come close to being cost-effective would be if the characters popped off the screen and gave me a free-hand job any time I logged on. But I bought it anyway, pessimistically relived that I could return the damn thing if it didn’t work or more likely, I couldn’t get it installed correctly.
The caveat with me and computer systems are, I have no training, formal or otherwise. I do some reading and try to apply my intuitive powers of understanding regarding whatever I’m trying to figure out. I generally understand the depth and breadth of computer knowledge to be so deep and wide that I, as a health care professional and supposed ‘people person’, have no hopes of understanding or applying anything I read or learn about computers in any discernible way. That being said, I have, on occasion, opened the system to do upgrades. On my old system, I read up on memory upgrades and successfully double my capacity and running environment. This was back in the day when I was so scared about static electric discharge that I stripped down naked and worked on it on the bare wood floor of our apartment, hoping the anxiety-produced sweat wouldn’t bead up on my forehead and drop onto the motherboard, shorting it out.
So I open AMBR the other night, locate the old card, remove it (after having removed the drivers first since, uncharacteristically, I’d read the directions first) and replaced it with the new Radeon® card. It snapped in just perfectly but when I went to hook up the auxiliary power supply (as every manual on the product I’d read indicated I needed to), there was no place to plug it in. I searched the board over and over again but honestly, that four-pronged male to female connection just didn’t exist. So again the pessimism prompted me to just finish up, close the casing and be done with it. If I had to revert to the old card and drivers, nothing really lost and I’ve lived with bruised ego from these kinds of blind jaunts into areas I have no conceivable business messing around in enough to know it doesn’t mean I’m anything but just stupid. I can live with that.
The short of the story is, the system whirred into life, the drivers were installed and there were no preemptive warnings about a failed card. It installed and apparently worked without any conflicts. I was anxious to boot up CoH (cause I was, by that time, totally into getting a free hand job) and see the wonderment that this totally unnecessary, extravagant, guilt-ridden purchase would bring forth. What I found was, my current, favorite character, The Yellow Hanky, was not yellow but blue. Not sad blue, but blue blue…like a blue blueberry. His skin tone was that off. Strange because the rest of the characters were blue also but the surrounding environment was completely normal. Defeated, I logged off, booted the computer off and went to bed, frustrated and with blue balls, hoping AMBR just needed a good nights sleep and everything would be ok in the morning. And it was, initially. The characters were normal colored the next time I logged on but other than that, the 3D environment seemed very similar, if not exactly, like before the new card. No new details jumped out at me, no new renderings or smoothness that I could see. Nothing. And then my character started turning magenta. Seriously. I watched as the skin tone color faded to magenta and then, again, turned blue. I was about to boot down again and just give up, take out the card, and get my refund when I noticed that in the game, it had become night time and a thought dawned on me. So I waited patiently as the night environment progressed in its ten minute cycle as it does, and as the new day’s sun broke over the edge of the city, my skin color faded from blue to yellow and finally back to normal. My very new, very expensive video card now supported the correct chronological lighting caused by day versus night in the game, something that I didn’t even know existed in the gaming environment.
I can honestly say there is no way that that single, identifiable upgrade in game quality is worth the price of the card. The fact that the card installed without any trouble or without me having a blood-gushing stroke makes me feel better in some, indescribable way. I didn’t have to starve this week to afford this card because that would have pissed me off and honestly, these experiences of mucking around in the actual system make me more confident (and thus, more likely to really fuck something up) that I can do these kinds of things successfully and not everyone can say that. So while I’m still years behind those pesky 13-year olds who could have done this with one eye on the TV and the other playing the game, I’m a little bit better for it, overall.
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08.26.04
Posted in The days at 9:07 am by Beau
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who developed the globally accepted model for grieving and brought the conversation of death and dying to the public, died yesterday in Phoenix after a prolonged illness. I can attest that she made a bigger impact on nursing in general and to my nursing in particular, than any other single person, except for maybe Florence Nightengale. Rest in peace.
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08.25.04
Posted in Geeky Heroes, Villians, & Comics at 9:32 pm by Beau
So I’m standing around Paragon City last night and who wanders by but these two hunka pixels, Leather Bear on the right and Bear Doc on the left (Me, The Yellow Hanky (!!!), is in the middle). Did a fucking leather bar just let out that I didn’t know about? We ended up teaming up as a group and I can tell you, heads were turning. Some chick even had the gall to make a comment about the amount of latency in the game. “Latency, Ha!” I said. How latent are three guy’s avatar’s dressed up like a Saturday night out at the Eagle?
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Posted in Home Life at 7:19 am by Beau
Good Lord. I just wrote out a birthday card for Jeff from the kitties. That’s totally, totally wrong, even though it’s done with love. And to make it more wrong, if that’s even possible, I made little kitty prints next to their names. SA-WRONG!
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08.24.04
Posted in Home Life at 9:58 am by Beau
Jeff as the Good Uncle – and because he got the ‘creative gene’ – has been working on designing the invitation’s for his nieces Bat Mitzvah in January. He came up with a novel idea of giving CD’s with music selections as the actual invitation. The quandary was coming up with a CD that suited the three identified groups being invited: the niece’s peer group, his brother and sister-in-law’s age range, and the grandparent’s age range. We settled on developing three different, age-appropriate CD’s of music, each from its own era, to reflect the different groups.
It’s obvious as the age range gets older, the music gets slower and more quiet. I’m finding that about describes the current direction of my aging, as it were. Not old, per say, but getting there.
So not being hip to what kids are listening to these days, we made a cursory attempt at the top 10 listing on MTV’s TRL and other well-known compilation lists. We quickly became discouraged at the complete lack on our parts of being able to identify or acknowledge knowing any performer or group on those lists so turned, inevitably, to the niece, for guidance on the music she liked and would want included on her CD. She rattled off a list of what to me sounded like the various protein building blocks of DNA and other assorted, confusing musical groups that weren’t even on the top-10 lists we’d discounted. So Jeff took the evening and sorted through the list, downloading snippets to preview to get a sense of what we had to work with.
The conversation between us the next day entailed how we’ve migrated out of the cool, hip uncles into the realm of those parent-types who say parenty-things, the same parenty-things we told ourselves we’d never say.
“That’s what they call music these days? I don’t know what kids are listening to these days but it’s dirty. There wasn’t one song on that list that wasn’t explicitly graphic or degradating or racist. I fear for our future.”
We’ve seriously become those people, so now the niece gets a nice CD of appropriate dance tunes culled from our respective histories of gay-circuit party fare where everyone danced in unhinged ecstasy, avoiding the holes and fallouts of over-excited inhibitions.
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08.23.04
Posted in Movies at 7:33 am by Beau
Jeff and I both would encourage anyone who hasn’t seen Nia Vardalos’ “Connie & Carla”, newly out on DVD, to give it a whirl. When we saw it last spring, we were so utterly delighted at the funny, fanciful movie and fully expected the critics to rave and forgive her for the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” TV show, re-anointing her as the talented writer/comedienne she is. Our dismay came when horrible, scathing reviews came out about “Connie & Carla” and the movie opened to an abysmal $2 million the first week, there by cementing its demise and dropping it off the cineplex’s marquees by the following week. Except that it’s funny and charming and is all about drag queens; drag queen movies being neck-and-neck with my other favorite film category, existential science fiction.
And it’s got Toni Collette, for God’s sake. And it’s funny. And sure the message is obvious but it’s still a good, fun movie. So go see it.
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08.11.04
Posted in Geeky Heroes, Villians, & Comics at 8:21 pm by Beau
I’m playing CoH the other day on a stress-break from class-work (which, in and of itself, is a whole, long, whiny post about my complete and utter lack of understanding marketing, its significance, or its validity) and round-about got hooked up with another online homo hero. I knew it was a homo-esque meeting because the other hero was be-decked in a cool rainbow-smeared unitard and had sparkling lights dancing around him. That, and he was fighting homophobia where ever it appeared in Paragon City, according to his bio. As I was playing my Castro Clone character, all shirtless, buff, mutton-chopped and harnessed, we hit it off and teamed up to spank the villains skulking around in the sewers of the city.
At a break in the play and some time later, he left and returned asking if I my name was Beau. I was stunned. In this particular game, there is no personal identification associated with characters so I literally had no idea how he could possibly know who I was so I admitted I was and asked how he could possibly know that. He said while we were playing, a friend of his called and in the conversation, he told him about the character he was playing with in the game and the friend knew who I was, because…wait for it: the friend reads my blog. It’s one thing to get recognized on the street or some other public venue from a blog as so many have experienced (or more swanky, to get recognized after a steamy steam-room encounter like a very A-list blogger experienced a while back), but it adds a whole level of geeky nerd-dom to get recognized in a virtual multi-player environment using a character with no obvious connection to me or the blog.
Honestly, after the shock of it, I figured it was cool enough to make up for the multiple times I’ve been dropped out of a super-hero team in the game because the people I was playing with ended up being jerked off their computers by their pesky parents who were forcing them to go do their homework, or, as happened a few weeks ago, being forced to go down and eat their breakfast. That’s seriously fucked up.
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08.01.04
Posted in The Blog at 3:55 pm by Beau
Though I thought the Beau-on-the-mower header had been put to rest permanently, I found some awesome giftage in my mailbox today from Casey over at Ultramundane who thought I needed some movement in my life. So instead of making me look like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, he has me starring in “Speed 3: The Lawnmower Man”.
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