Blackmoor Vituperative

Today has been a very good day. I have hardly coughed at all, and my ribs are not hurting anywhere near as much as they did yesterday. I put the last coat of clear lacquer on my steampunk nerf gun (photos of that are forthcoming, once I assemble it). I had lunch with a friend (Greek food, yum!), and we chatted about our respective IT projects. The client that bounced a $2000 check to me has promised to pay that and everything else they owe (knock on wood). Best of all, I put in a full day working on a project for a new client (not the one that bounced the check), doing work I enjoy a great deal.

Everything’s going so well!

I got my start in computers by writing small applications in Basic, and then Visual Basic. In the late 1980s, I wrote a program that backed up selected directories by copying them, zipping them up, and writing them to floppy disks. In the early 1990s, I wrote macros to integrate PGP and Microsoft Word. I also wrote a reasonably popular dice-rolling program (I was one of the first few thousand people to do so). However, I got my start working in IT by doing web design. My friend Nathan told me about NCSA Mosaic in early 1993, and within two months of the release of Mosaic, I was creating web pages. (It still amazes me that the web took off like it did — I just thought it was a neat toy.)

I eventually migrated from what I call “front end” work (the part of a web site people can see), to “back end” work (the stuff behind the scenes that actually makes a web site work — setting up databases, writing scripts, managing servers, and so on). One reason for this is that I am not a graphic designer — I am simply not an artist. Another reason is that as more people learned how to do “web design”, I could maintain my value by doing something more difficult (difficult for other people; not necessarily difficult for me).

However, the number one reason I moved away from web design and toward back end work is because I had too many web clients who made my job difficult. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But a lot of them. What do I mean by “difficult”? I mean this.

I have been unemployed for a full year, subsisting on freelance and consulting work. As of this moment, all of my job leads have led nowhere.

Time to redouble my efforts and find some new job leads!

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward!

Meeting with a client this afternoon. Hopefully, it will have positive results.

It will be a while before I know anything about the job with the company that helps nonprofits organize fund-raising events. That’s not the only job lead I have, so I am pretty optimistic, in general.

I am still coughing, but far less often than I was, and more often than not it’s more of a vigorous throat-clearing than an actual cough. I will be glad when the cough abates entirely: my ribs and chest muscles are so sore.

Class officially started yesterday. I think this semester is going to be great. I am actually interested in both classes.

This is my second attempt to modify a Nerf Maverick for steampunk costuming purposes. (My first attempt was in March 2010.)

I will eventually post all of the photos of this process online, but this blog post is specifically to address the color scheme. Rather than paint over and over until I like the colors, as I did with the prototype, I have decided to use Photoshop to try and apply different color schemes to see how I like them.

This is a photo of the gun with most of the parts placed where they are supposed to go, with the base coat of satin black.

This is what it would look like painted solid gold.

This is what it would look like painted solid brass.

This is what it would look like painted solid caramel metallic.

This is what it would look like painted solid copper. A friend of mine says this makes it look like it’s made of chocolate. Chocopunk!

This is what it would look like painted solid steel.

Color scheme 01. I don’t like the gold on the decorations. I thought that I would.

Color scheme 02. Base color is gold. I think it looks garish.

Color scheme 03. Brass with a lot of copper highlights. I like this one.

Color scheme 04. Brass with a bit less copper. I like this one better.

Color scheme 05. Black highlights on the slide and frame. Not too bad.

Color scheme 06. There are things I like about this color scheme, but I think it has too many colors. I do like the black on the grip.

Color scheme 07. I kept the black on the grip, and simplified the color scheme a bit. Still not quite right.

Color scheme 08. Black on the grip, simpler color scheme, and the flourishes are not highlighted at all. I think that this is the scheme I will use, but I will sleep on it.

Color scheme 09. Copper slide, and the decorations on the slide and frame are highlighted. I think I like scheme 08 better.

Color scheme 10. Black grip, black highlights, some more color on the cylinder.

Color scheme 11. Same as 10, but with caramel frame and slide decorations.

Color scheme 12. Something different: black frame, brass and copper highlights.

Color scheme 13. Same as 10, but with copper frame and slide decorations.

I am watching the American Godzilla movie, arguably the most widely reviled monster movie ever made. It has some serious problems. For example, they continue calling Godzilla “he” after they discover that it is pregnant. That’s just stupid. Additionally, the female romantic lead, played by Maria Pitillo, is both monumentally dim-witted and morally reprehensible, yet we are supposed to sympathize with her. I think not. The pacing is sluggish — the entire middle third of the movie should have been left on the cutting room floor, in my opinion. I also did not like the way they killed Godzilla at the end. The real Godzilla would not have gone down that way (it reminded me of the pathetic way that Mace Windu died — “like a punk”, in the words of Sam Jackson). And, most damning of all, the design of the monster’s head is just ludicrous.

However, it does have a lot going for it. The early scenes in which ships are destroyed without actually showing Godzilla are really effective. Even the design of the monster itself, aside from the head, is pretty nifty, and the shots of it moving — running, swimming, and so on — are really well done. The cast also has its strong points. Jean Reno is brilliant, and Hank Azaria, Vicki Lewis, and Doug Savant give solid supporting performances.

So, is American Godzilla a great movie? No. It’s not even a great Godzilla movie. But it’s not as bad as people say.

So many interesting things are happening. My new classes start on June 1: CCJS 105, Introduction to Criminology, and CMSC 230 Computer Science II. After I finish these two classes, the rest will all be upper-level (300 and 400). I am currently 36 credits away from my Computer Science degree. I have been debating whether to get a minor in Criminology, but that would add six credits to what I still need. I am not certain that it is worth it.

I had a great job interview today, with a small marketing company that helps nonprofit organizations (and, less often, for-profit organizations) organize fund-raising events. They say that I am one of the “lead candidates”; I have a second interview scheduled for next week. I have high hopes for this. Working for a small business, helping make the world a little bit better, and still working in IT is pretty much the trifecta of what I would like to do for a living.

In other news, I picked up all five (yes, five — I was surprised there are this many) Return Of The Living Dead movies on Ebay for $21 including shipping. Not a bad deal! I think that is how I will be spending my Memorial Day weekend. I have seen the first one (which is great), and I think I have seen the third one, but the rest are unknown to me.

And I am still coughing, but much less frequently, and less forcefully, then I was.

I had a little bit of free time today, so I whipped up a couple of dynamic affiliate links for DriveThruRPG, a very cool source of gaming PDFs.

The script can be called one of three ways. One way creates an affiliate link to one of the five newest items added to DriveThruRPG, the second creates an affiliate link to one of the five best-selling items, and the third creates a random link to an item on either list. I considered animating the affiliate links, so that a different item would appear every few seconds, but to be frank, animated advertisements annoy me. Actually, I do not care for advertisements at all — I hide them, as a matter of fact.

Does this make me a hypocrite? Maybe. However, these are not just advertisements — they are also news. For that reason, I think they are useful, even to people like me who routinely hide ads.

It’s my intention to add these to this blog and to RPG Library, the gaming community site I maintain, but I do not really expect to see much revenue from these. I mainly created them as a service to the gaming community. For that reason, I added a variable so that other people can replace my affiliate ID with their own, if they would like to use these on their own web site.

So check it out. If you have any questions, let me know, and I will try to answer them.

Update 2010-05-25: I added some error-checking in case the description field in DriveThruRPG’s RSS feed contains some bad tags. It doesn’t actually do anything with the errors, but it keeps the script from failing.

Update 2010-05-25, part 2: I expanded the script to be able to handle any of OneBookShelf’s sites.

In case you missed the Lost series finale, here it is:

As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!

With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends. Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well, and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled?

Case in point: The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?

I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. We all know it, and no one wants to say it. Well, I am done with the charade.

Babies are stupid and ugly. No one’s baby is “beautiful”. No one’s baby is “smart”. They are misshapen, shrieking lumps that can’t read or write or tell what is edible and what isn’t. Not only that, but they smell bad: a combination of poop, stale sweat, and spoiled milk.

I don’t mind if you bring your baby to a movie — you are the bad parent, not me. But if it makes noise, I can and will ask you to take the ugly, stupid, foul-smelling creature outside. Having a baby to take care of does not give you special permission to ruin a movie for 400 other people. You chose to have it: we didn’t. We didn’t bring our barking dogs and pneumatic wrenches to the movie, did we? Why do you suppose that is? Think real hard.

That goes for anywhere else in public, too. If you can’t keep your larva quiet, keep it somewhere where it isn’t causing a nuisance for everyone else. Home, your car, or wherever: just not near me.