The Captain

It's no secret that my friends and I are a bunch of irreverent pricks. We laughed heartily when we first saw the "FUCK CANCER" t-shirts. A week or so ago, I received a bulk message from Zazzle letting me know about their big Breast Cancer Awareness Month to-do. Unfortunately, these two ideas congealed in my poor little head, and this happened ... keep reading after the picture ... there's a good reason:





TFBC Men's T
Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle

Before anybody says it, yes, I know that this is completely tasteless. It's the most tasteless thing that I've ever thought up, as a matter of fact. That's saying something. The bottom line, though, is that the people that have seen it have loved it. On top of that, I promise to donate every cent that is given to me for this shirt to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. You don't have a guarantee that I'll do so, and I wish that Zazzle had a way for me to do it directly, but you do have my promise. If you don't want the shirt, or if you don't trust me to actually make the donation, then please, by all means, do donate directly.

Also, I have a ladies-style t-shirt available with the same image. Thing is, it costs about four bucks more than this one does.

I was just upstairs shaving. The sides of the devilock were getting a little bushy and all. At any rate, shaving involves staring at one's face for a good amount of time, and I finally figured out what it is that's missing from my face.

Titties.

Need to fix that.

Talking me through this
The last step's ahead of me
Holding the handle
The barrel's cold on my lips
Pulling the trigger
Releasing the pressure
All of my problems are now just a stain

So, it's been about five months here that I've been looking for somebody to gig with. Since I started, I've received a dozen or two requests for availability from local bands. Of those, zero called me back.

This past Wednesday, I saw an opening for a vocalist on the local scene forum. I responded to the post, and I just about pissed myself when I found out who it was that was in need ... local longtime death metal group Blood Tribe. They had me come out to their practice the next day. It went well, in my eyes.

They have two more dudes from the area to hear from. That's happening Tuesday. I'm back with them Thursday again. From the time that I found out to practice the next evening, I learned two of their songs with enough competence to perform them. Now I've got their entire CD pretty much down.

For a change of pace, I'm allowing no negativity into my thought process on this one. I've decided that I've got the gig ... I just have to wait for confirmation.

If you clicked on the link to their profile up above here, you'll see that the vocal patterns change up at some interesting intervals. Thus far, that's been the hard part of learning the tunes. It's also been a lot of fun, and it's even been a little convenient ... I have the album on my cheap little MP3 player, and the drunks singing karaoke at my regular dive last night were absolutely horrible, so I was the lucky bastard that got saved by the sultry sounds of hate.

Found me lying
Five whole days in my own feces
I rot away
Maggots writhe within my skin
Pale flesh
DEAD STARE
Sightless eyes and peeling skin
Bloated body that melts within
No ONE knows I'M here I lie in my own waste

So, like my last post said, the mom died a week ago this past Monday.

Since then, somebody has acquiesced to my request for a date (for tonight, nonetheless) and I've scheduled an audition with a local band that is in dire need of somebody to scream at a microphone. Save for the corpse, things are looking up (and she was the last time that I saw her, so that might even count).

Perhaps I was right to blame my parents for all of my problems :-)

Cynthia F. Walters, 54, of Evansville, died Monday, July 16, 2007, at Deaconess Hospital.

She was born April 12, 1953, in Evansville. She was employed at Farm Boy Foods for ten years and was a loving mother and friend who enjoyed music and cooking.

Cynthia is survived by her parents, Ernest and Jewell Ours; daughter, Lori McCormick; sons, Dennis Walters II and Joseph Walters; friend, Dennis Walters; sisters, Victoria Ours and Nancy Ellis; brother, Philip Ours; and six nieces and nephews, all of Evansville.

Private services will be held.

Memorial contributions may be made to Scleroderma Foundation-Tennessee Chapter, P.O. Box 2844, Hendersonville, TN 37077-2844. Condolences may be made online at www.mem.com. Arrangements by Alexander North Chapel, 4200 Stringtown Road, Evansville, IN 47711 (812) 428-0102.

When my connection goes down, it tends to be for a week or two at a time. I don't really mind so much ... it gives me a chance to catch up on pet projects and whatnot. This last time, I started working on a MUD client.

Most everything that I develop nowadays is written in Ruby, and there's already a great client written with it called Muby. The problem with Muby is that its memory footprint can get huge for some reason, and its user interface likes to break.

I'd been thinking about doing this for a while, so I'd already broken out about 200 lines of code from Muby's telnet library. That's one aspect of the code that I'd had no intention of writing. I jacked the actual connection code and some ANSI handling stuff. The rest of the connection methods are simplified rethinkings of what Muby offers.

I'm using a modified version of Term::Visual for the user interface. It looks a lot like irssi/ircII. The problems with it are that A) the text wrapping method was broken due to a miscalculation in another method and B) anything more recent than termvisual-0.0.3 seems to require a library that is only available under Mac OSX.

When it all comes down, the only part of the client that I ended up writing fully from scratch was the scripting support, and it's so piss simple that it's hard to say that I even wrote it. To give an idea of the complexity, here are some of the line counts of the files in question (the comments are intact in all of the files):

194 connection.rb # Connection code, mostly jacked from Muby
106 visual.rb # The main Term::Visual library
137 input.rb # The class for the input window in Term::Visual
197 palette.rb # The color handling code for Term::Visual
383 window.rb # The output window for Term::Visual
52 user_scripts.rb # The user scripting support

I guess the reason for the simplicity of the scripting support is that I want this thing to be plenty versatile. When it comes down, there are only three commands specified for user scripts: print, echo, and send. The first two are literally the same thing ... echo is just an alias to print. It prints a message on the user's client window (it does not send this to the MUD server ... that's what send is for).

Here's the thing, though ... the entirety of the Ruby language (and all Ruby libraries that are installed) are at the user's disposal. For example, say that I wanted to spawn a new window to display my hit points, mana points, so on ... I can just require a windowing library in my user script, set up the window, and let it fly.

The only part of the scripting system that can really be described as "bulky" is triggers. Triggers watch for certain things to come from the server, and then they do something that you've told them to do when they see that text. For example, one of my triggers waits for the text "disarms you" and then retrieves my weapon.

Long story short, I don't have a good name for this thing, so I've just called it Muddy for the time being. I haven't put a license on it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and state that I don't much mind if you want to play with the code and improve it. Since it's just been thrown out there, the code is a bit messy. I've got a bzr repository set up for it locally, but I haven't put one on the web server yet (mostly because the only reason to do so would be the ability to receive upstream changesets, and the version of bzr that Ed's got installed can't handle the repo format created by the version that I use).

If anybody wants to come MUD some time, feel free to drop by ScryMUD ... scrymud.net, port 4444.

So here I sit, waiting for my script to get done running on the MUD that I've been playing for about ten years, and it's taking for fucking ever. It's not that the script's not well-written ... hell ... I wrote it and the client that interprets it, so it has to be. It's just that there's built-in lag for every spell that you cast, and that's all the script does ... cast a shitload of spells.

Last week, a singer in a local band asked me if I'd be interested in singing in another one. Dropped a phone number, haven't gotten a call back about it yet, and that's a bit of a let-down. Granted, people are busy lately, but I rather miss the whole performance thing.

That local band that I mentioned ... they play at Cecil's pretty much every weekend. You should check them out. Of the bands that I've seen around here, they're probably the tightest live set going.

When I say things like that about bar (read "cover") bands, people always start screaming about the fact that they're not playing their own music, so there's no reason for them to not play very well. I don't understand the logic behind that. I'd imagine that having written your own stuff would mean that you'd be able to play it well, but that appears to be the exact opposite of the status quo. Granted, as with everything, there are exceptions to that rule. The problem is the signal-to-noise relation involved. There are, taking a cursory glance, somewhere to the effect of about forty local bands that play predominantly original material. Of those, about three of them play REALLY well. Of those, I find two of them to be listenable.

I sang tonight, on stage, for the first time in about nine years.

Missed it.

Apparently, this past Friday was "Show The Captain Your Tits" day. For some inexplicable reason, I now have pictures of sweaterpuppies from across the nation saved to my cell phone.

I'm not exactly sure what this means. It could mean that I'm officially a morning radio host, and it's Flash 'Em Fridays on The Captain (WCAP) in the Morning.

Either way, world, thanks for the mammaries.

Wonder what will happen THIS Friday.

That's right ... another one.

I want to be yet-another-white-rapper. I don't want fame, I don't want fortune, and I really don't care much about hip hop. I just want to stand on a stage, say "holla back playa," and have several hundred people yell "BACK PLAYA."

Happy new hangover.

Also, 데너스를 메게은 사랑해.

Ain't like it will be doing me much good. In the last three hours, I've taken in about three pints of Jager, two pints of Goldschlager, six grams of acetomenophine (six-thousand milligrams for those not playing the metric system home game), and a whole metrick fuckton of spite.

... and I'm sober as Jehova.

This whole massive tolerance to everything needs to end. I need to feel something other than numb. Apathy becomes me, but it's not very becoming and all.

... sitting here ready to slit my throat.

My roommate has about half of her stuff moved out.

The other half should be gone tomorrow.

That includes the cat, and I cannot even express how sad I am that he is leaving. He's been about the only being that I could really count on for support over the course of the last two years.

No, life is apparently not required to throw me a bone.

If life is going to treat me like a beaten, battered dog, wouldn't it be rational to assume that it would be obligated to throw me a fucking bone on occasion?

So, I couldn't take another weekend in the middle of nowhere. Rather than that noise, I rented a car, proceeded to drive the absolute hell out of it, and ended up fifteen hours away in Houston, TX.

I had a great time.

Ended up at a bay kegger with a few people that I knew down there.

I fell asleep on a swinging chair about a hundred feet away from Galveston Bay.

I made it home in thirteen hours, just in time to drop the car off and walk to work. Through the entirety of the drive, I tried to justify coming back home. I just barely succeeded.

I wish I'd stayed.

01:03 <Non Moi> Well, I coudln't find any better socks... So I went with my damn little ankle socks... And the back of my shoe rubbed me raw, so I think my shoe tried to make me commit suicide...

01:03 <Moi> were they air kevorkians?

First rule of Pilsbury Fight Club: No biscuits.

Second rule of Pilsbury Fight Club: NOOOOOOOOO BISCUITS TEE HEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

So, I did have a great, nay, INGENIOUS idea the other day. I need to get together a handful of these "emo" kids, dress them up like true thugs, and teach them to spit rhyme.

Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing, we get a brand new stereotype ... my friends, I introduce you to the onset of the G-mo movement. Now I just need to trademark the term before Google, Inc., does.

I've already got the first hit single ready to go for them ... Word To Ya Motha (Because I Hate My Parents).