Not falling asleep until 3, sleeping until 11:50 (and having weird dreams involved rearranging my books and then (or maybe at the same time, dreams are freaky) being stuck in a flooding quarry with the cast of Chuck.. fortunately, it turned out to be a VR illusion, go figure), then sitting down to try to crank out a few thousand words about mental mutations, then getting a call from a neighbor reporting that Toaster is wandering the back yard, finally getting the big doofus inside, then having Beth realize that Rocket is ALSO outside, and then having to spend a half hour in murderous heat and humidity chasing a cat who is in total “Wow! Whole new world! Must run HERE, and then HERE, and then…BUTTERFLY! Get butterfly! Faster, pussycat! Kill, kill!” mode.

#FirstWorldProblems #FML

Protip: It’s not a “Secret” order if it’s reported by one of the world’s largest news agencies. I’m just sayin’…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/02/us-usa-syria-obama-order-idUSBRE8701OK20120802

So, wait. You can get a job as a “Gender Expert” in Sweden, and every municipality has to have one?

Dude, I am so there. “Yup, that’s a woman. That’s a man. Woman. Man. Man. Woman. Man. Woman.” I admit, there’s a couple of cases where it’s not clear, but I figure I’ll be right at least 90% of the time, and for a government employee, that’s gross overcompetence.

http://www.mega949.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=104673&article=10308828

Not that I actually have anything important to say, mind you, but I’m trying to break the habit of letting things slide for months on end. (Next Post: December, 2013. Title: Starting to blog again.)

Anyway, to keep the context trivial and meaningless, while it’s not unusual for me to know I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming (pretty common, in fact), last night, I did something, or experienced something, I hadn’t before. I was dreaming I was asleep, and dreaming. I mean, I was asleep and dreaming, duh, but in my dream, the dream-me was also asleep, and also dreaming. Upon waking, I realized the only thing missing was Leonard DeCaprio running around trying to plant an idea.

Oh, also, as for making “Inception” references two years after they were topical… the Simpsons did it first.

(BTW, this post wasn’t just to make the out-of-date reference; I really did have that dream-within-a-dream thing, and it was new to me. Don’t know if it’s common for anyone else. I tend to tune out when people talk about their dreams. I mean, is there anything of less interest to a person than someone else’s dream? Sheesh, who’d waste someone’s time with stuff like that?)

So, we watched the first part of History channel’s #Hatfields&McCoys yesterday, filmed in grey-o-vision. Apparently, Calvin’s dad wasn’t lying when he said the world was black&white before the late 1930s. Anyway…

The lawyer dude? The Littlefinger of Kentucky. Or Tennessee. Or whatever redneck-infested hellhole this takes place in.

Me, during the show:”You know, if this was HBO, this scene would have full frontal nudity, would be 10 minutes long, and while they were making out, they would have told each other the history of the Civil War.”

A lot of setup, and the fact I noticed this makes me uneasy, because I don’t WANT to be one of those dain-bramaged Americans who can’t watch something unless there’s an explosion every five minutes. But I like the fact they’re establishing the feud wasn’t triggered by one random event, but was built up from multiple perceived slights and affronts.

Other than the sleazy lawyer, there’s not a lot of clear-cut bad guys, or any attempt to stage this as one good, noble, and pure family vs. one evil, vile, family. It’s just two families of inbred redneck hicks killin’ each other.

I understand this was filmed in Romania. Two thoughts:

• I don’t know why they bothered; there’s plenty of places in Kentucky that still look just like they did in 1880.
• Now we know why Game of Thrones is running out of scruffy, unkempt, men.

Semi-mild spoilers, I guess, not for this episode per se, but for a lot of the series…

There was one small line in the episode that was a serious eye-roller, mostly because of the nature of the series and the fact it’s in its fourth season…I would have written the scene in question as follows…

Peter Bishop:”Spontaneous combustion? That’s a myth.”

Olivia:”Really?”

Peter Bishop:”Oh, yes, I read about on the Internet a little while ago… I remember, it was right after we chased down the genetically engineered human/porcupine hybrid with bat wings, who was created by the megalomaniac scientist who also created the mercury-blooded shapeshifters, who I first met on my parallel Earth, which I was seemingly thrown out of when I was put into a machine built millions of years ago and buried across two other parallel Earths, which I wasn’t supposed to even live to enter, but my life was saved by a renegade from a race of men from the future who can travel through time and create divergent realities.”

Olivia:”So, spontaneous human combustion is just ridiculous, huh?

Peter:”Absolutely. We can rule out anything that silly right off. We should get back to my father, who experimented on you as a child and gave you loosely-defined psychokinetic abilities. Say, have you heard from your adoptive mother, the cyborg, lately?”

Olivia:”Not since we interrogated her parallel universe counterpart while trying to prevent renegade psions from forcibly merging two universes into one by altering their vibrational frequencies. Well, at least for this case, we know it’s not spontaneous combustion. You’re right. That’s a pretty wacky notion.”

In regards to: http://leasthelpful.com/post/19571560348/i-loved-twilight-but-the-prequel-is-really

So, over on the SWTOR message board, someone posted this, whining about how the planets weren’t 1-to-1 scale models with 24 million or so square miles of explorable terrain:

To which I replied:

They ARE.

That is their PURPOSE.

That is WHY THEY EXIST.

MMOs are about moving from one murderzone to another, with the reward being different colored trees and differently shaped and named victims. Also, you get to play dress-up with your character and earn the right to wear new kinds of colored and textured outfits, and also to have an ever-growing list of particle effects you can use in order to commit pixelated genocide. While committing acts of violence, you can talk to countless invisible people who natter at you incessantly, thus making playing an MMORPG pretty much indistinguishable from having advanced paranoid schizophrenia.

If you don’t find that enjoyable, this genre of game (note I said “this GENRE”, not “this GAME”) is not for you.

I do find it enjoyable. Bring on the particle effects! I’ve got new zones to murder in!

It’s no more pointless than any other leisure activity, like bowling. (“Knock down pins! Pins come back up! Knock down pins again!”) 

’nuff said.

At some point either waking or dreaming, I realized I was having a dream, and then the following line came to me, which I must work into a story sometime: “‘I wasn’t have a dream’, he said, and then yakoved, ‘The dream was having me.’”

Beth and I saw movie, streamed from NetFlix, called “Arctic Blast”. Our main takeaway from it was, “Hey, New Zealand looks like a pretty nice place to live.” According to this film, the ozone layer is like a thin sheet of a saran wrap that supports a vast layer of super-frigid air, and if you tear a hole in the ozone layer, the super-frigid air will pour down through the hole and travel the world, looking like a bank of fog. As long as you don’t let the fog touch you, you won’t freeze. You can, for example, stand on one side of a thin wooden door and see someone instantly frozen on the other side, without feeling any cold yourself. It’s like Cloudkill, only, with cold. Aside from the ridiculousness of the physics, meteorology, etc, isn’t “the ozone layer” a pretty 1970s kind of eco-disaster? We are so beyond holes in the ozone now. Then again, I understand New Zealand is a little behind the times, in general. I mean, they’re just getting around to making a movie of the Hobbit there; we had one made by Rankin Bass in the 1970s.

From the SWTOR “Known Issues” page:

For the Jedi Knight mission “The Defector”, flirting with Kira Carsen during the Ship Intercom conversations following the events at the Abandoned Mining Base will prevent players from being able to receive further companion conversations from Kira Carsen.

Workaround: Avoid flirting with Kira Carsen during “The Defector” mission. Players who have already flirted with Kira will need to wait for a patch before they will be able to have conversations with Kira but will still be properly accumulating affection with her in the meantime.

Oh, yeah, other news… the usual. I’ve actually been taking time off for the past three days… no day-job work, no review work, no professional writing work, not even “updating my blog” or “working on Stellar Warriors” work. Just… no work. This is a long, long, long time for me to do nothing that isn’t part of some task/goal/obligation, but I needed a few days completely to myself. Most of my “non work” time is, really, “working on some project” time. That’s just how I am. 

Anyway, that ended today, as I’m back to editing/writing reviews, having officially taken today off from day-job work. (I have, actually NO paid time off, so this means giving up a days pay.. sigh… but if you add up all the hours in a year I’m NOT stuck commuting or otherwise forced to waste otherwise useful time in work-related activities I wouldn’t be paid for, I probably do better than almost anyone with a 9-5 type job. 

Oh, speaking of SWTOR, I did something a few days ago I’ve never done in an MMO before… refused a quest because I didn’t think my character would do something like that, even for money. Hopefully, I didn’t end up locking myself out of a lot of content because of it.