I guess I haven't journaled in a while, so here is an assorted stack of lots of stuff about my life. To give you a chance to avoid reading it since it is boring and extremely long, here's a summary - playing WoW a lot, working on new website stuff, Linkin Park is great, Jonathan Coulton is great, Ted Leo & The Pharmacists are maybe good, not sure. Okay, read on or stop!
Of
course I have been playing WoW relentlessly! I have 10 characters that I am simultaneously leveling up, because I like variety and I can exploit the rest system to constantly earn double XP. I am covering every possible class, race, and profession, except for Troll and Gnome. If you are into WoW, you can see how my guys are doing any time with these handy links (incidentally, stuff like this is one of the things I want Dumb Accounts to do someday!):
- Teemosil, the Blood Elf Rogue (name: an Arrested Development reference - the TV show, not the band)
- Cowbearcat, the Tauren Druid (name: Taurens are like minotaurs, and druids can turn into both bears and cats!)
- Dedmanwalkin, the Undead Mage (name: come on!)
- Lockula, the Orc Warlock (name: she was my character for the 10-day trial, so she needed to be named quickly)
- Hoinkle, the Human Priest (name: same deal as Lockula, just more random)
- Quelastima, the Dwarven Paladin (name: spanish for "what a shame", my 3rd trial character)
- Huntmotron, the Blood Elf Hunter (name: apparently, he's a robot)
- Fightypants, the Draenei Warrior (name: my favorite character name ever!)
- Bluebull, the Draenei Shaman (name: oddly, the Draenei also look like cows, kind of. But they're blue)
- Foxworthy, the Night Elf Druid (name: the random face maker gave him a handlebar mustache, so I decided he was a redneck)
But you will be shocked to learn that I am not
only playing WoW! I am filling out paperwork for a merchant account to solve all the ordering woes we have. And boy oh boy, those have gotten intense. I will have a big expose' on those issues much later. I've gotten a good start on the new layout of the site. Because of the Dumb Accounts and new ordering system, I'm revamping the entire thing. You will be shocked and amazed! I think it's cuter. I'm consolidating tons of things so that it's just a smaller site all around, and I'll be getting rid of extraneous stuff. The focus will be on community stuff, and buying games. Everything else is off to the side or gone. Hamumu shall become the destination for Dumb people worldwide to hang out and do dumb things! I have huge ideas for stuff to do with it, but I'm keeping it under my hat a bit just because I don't know yet of my ability to deliver on this stuff. I'll be working on it though, and I plan to keep adding new features to the site all the time. Things that'll make it worth coming back and doing stuff here even if there aren't any recent games out. The site itself will be your entertainment!
In other news, we recently obtained a bunch of new music, and I was listening to it today. The new Linkin Park is awesome. It's not much at all like the earlier ones, and that is sad, but it is great in its own new ways. The big surprise I find is that they get very political! Really not something I ever expected from them. I mean, there are 12 songs on the CD, one of which is instrumental, so 11 that have lyrical content. Three of those are blatantly political (27% that is)! One's about Katrina (in a really cool way - not ripping on the government for doing a bad job, but more like shame on society itself, in a sense), one is of course about Iraq (best song on the CD, maybe best song ever by anyone ever in all of everdom), and one, well, it doesn't come right out and say what it's about, but "Your campaign's a disguise, replaced freedom with fear, you trade money for lives" and "Your time has come to be replaced" and "I see liars and thieves abuse power with greed".
I love political/protest music. And I love Linkin Park. Not just the music, but the way they go about everything. They're just great. Like each song in the CD booklet has a little snippet about how it was made and some of the musical ideas in it. Their second album (first?) included a big movie about creating the CD artwork, because they're all really into art and they all had a hand in it. People really bash on Linkin Park, because they're so earnest and "think they're so deep", or whatever. But the funny thing is that they
are, and it's just lame frat boy stuff to rag on them for it. It's the same kind of thing that says you're not cool if you like X, or if you don't like Y. They're the geeks creating something special and being called losers for it while the real losers are wasting away accomplishing nothing. I wouldn't call it jealousy, but it almost comes from the same place. The middle school nonsense of insulting people for doing well on tests. Not that I'm saying it's required to like this band, you can think they sound horrible if you want - it is just music, and entirely subject to taste. It's the people who disrespect them on entirely different grounds that are weaksauce mcnuggets. Linkin Park is a bunch of geeks, but geeks are good. And besides that, I like how they share a little behind the scenes stuff. I inevitably like a song more when I know something about what it means to the artist, or stories about how it was made.
Another huge pile of CDs we got was everything Jonathan Coulton has ever done. He's also awesome, in quite a different way. "I made this half-pony, half-monkey monster to please you. But I get the feeling that you don't like it...what's with all the screaming? You like monkeys. You like ponies. Maybe you don't like monsters too much. Maybe I used too many monkeys. Isn't it enough that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?" He did a really cool project where he created a new song every week for a year. Four of his CDs are those 52 songs. Some of them are awful, especially on the first CD, but some of them are amazingly awesome, like Code Monkey, the ever-popular Re: Your Brains, Tom Cruise Crazy, and just a whole lot more. Like Linkin Park, only moreso, he offers detailed notes on how every song came to be, some of which is quite interesting. And some of the songs, I listen to them and it makes me want to go read those notes and see what's up.
The other bunch of CDs was Ted Leo & The Pharmacists. Them, I'm not as sure about. They've got some really really great songs, but most of it is heavily distorted and overdriven guitar, and it's just tiring to listen to. I'm just not sure yet. Ted also gets political, but I think he's kind of known for it (by those that know him... I only found out recently myself!). The oddest thing is that, as far as I can tell, they mention ghosts in like half of their songs (3 or 4 of the songs have it in the title). Ted has some weird obsession. Ectophilia?
Oh, and by the way, after that last journal entry I should mention - our satellite connection came back a day later, in really bad shape. Then after another day, it started working for real. So hooray, internets all around!
