super fascinating look into the origins of one of the most sampled drum loops ever. this is all news to me…had no idea whatsoever they’re pretty much all sampled from one b-side from 1969. yay for new trivia!
originally from the cracked article “6 inventors who got jack shit for changing the modern world“
anime musings, part three. i’ve found anime to be a nice weekly distraction now…as long as i watch the episodes in a timely matter that is. most of the time i don’t, so they gather in my “to sort” folder until i watch them all in bulk. still fills a nice niche however for those rainy/cold/shitty/fuck i need to get out more but just can’t be bothered days.
bakemonogatari | odd as hell, but fascinating to watch. there’s little action, and alot of exposition…it’s more of a cerebral anime dealing with character development than anything. highly experimental too.
darker than black | this is actually season 2. i somehow missed season 1, so i just wiki’d it, caught up, and went straight into dtb2. a little confusing at first, but the stories are quality. and alot of people die. seriously…don’t get attached to any character that happens to wander onto the screen. they’re likely to get strangled, shot, electrocuted, or eaten alive by cockroaches by the end of the episode.
fullmetal alchemist | oh so much better than the first fma…which itself deviated greatly from the original manga source. this ones more true to the manga source, and it pays off.
haruhi suzumiya | great, and disappointing at the same time. they wasted too many episodes on the insane endless eight arc, which didn’t leave much room to bring in more of the light novel stories. blargh…at least there’s the chance of a third season.
needless | brainless action, and dragonball-esque fights that take 3 weeks to resolve. it’s surprisingly comedy-oriented however…and there are alot of those moments that work. otherwise nothing spectacular.
queen’s blade | seriously…jk. it’s shit. barely televisable hentai.
the sacred blacksmith | better known as sacred boobsmith. i gave it a chance, since the animation was top notch (manglobe…who did champloo). but shit are the characters dumb as fuck and the stories pedantic. it’s already been tossed off my hard drive.
to aru kagaku no railgun | the majutsu sidestory following mikoto instead of toma. thumbs up eh. and i didn’t point it out in the older anime roundups, but yea…majutsu’s thumbs up too.
you know what today is? it’s the 5th anniversary of me having sold my soul to the dark overlord of world of warcraft. ya, it’s been 5 years since i started this cocaine of mmo’s. i’m not sure who could’ve guessed back then how big it would get. people anticipated the game to be a massive success…but, yea…i’m not sure they knew just how massive. prior to wow coming out, everquest was considered a success at a “whopping” 400,000+ subscribers. wow currently sits at over 11 million subscribers and counting. and given that it’s shown no signs of letting up, i thought it’d be fun to celebrate this 5th anniversary by giving a thorough historical recap of my time with the game, for all two of you out there who give a fucking shit.
VANILLA WOW
so the year was 2004, and the world was different. the “horseless carriage” had just been introduced, and there were talks of “flying contraptions”….just kidding. it was a different world tho. the economy didn’t suck, but we did have a halfwit for president. as a result, the world was pretty bleh, so it was the perfect time to introduce an mmo where people could escape to. fonz, mike, and i jumped on board on launch day, along with a few bajillion people around the country. we were tossed onto the realm “khadgar”, where i rolled a perky human mage and went about toasting hapless sheep with fireballs. then the server (along with a couple others) promptly shit itself under the strain of a thousand nerds. damnit. we got a message saying that the server would most likely be “shit” for a while, so we headed to another server, “llane”. this was a brand new “second day” east coast server, one of a couple they brought online to handle the crush of people apparently trying to escape the real world. i rolled a night elf hunter this time, slapped on the name “moya” (my last character in morrowind was moya, hence i reused it as legacy), and off i went.
that’s moya attempting to navigate the subway between ironforge and stormwind. shit was complex, k? after a few months power-leveling on my own, i hooked up with my first guild on the server, emperor’s thousand. it was a relatively small, casual guild…noticeable given that i was the highest level toon in guild at the time i joined. the people were cool, and we had fun. i however eventually got a bit bored (i was part of the first group of 60’s on the server), and joined up with a hardcore raid guild called ‘rapture‘. i bailed on them however after a few days after i deemed the hardcore lifestyle “retarded“, and went back to et. the boredom lingered however, and fonz and i ventured off for a brief period of time to the doomhammer server to run with ars discordia, an ars clan guild.
i rolled another hunter named “northern” and took him to 60 relatively fast. that’s the guild above getting the main tank burley his thunderfury btw. oohs and ahs. the guild didn’t seem like a fit tho, so we found ourselves wandering back to llane and et. some time later, the guild had a bit of a meltdown (partially instigated by fonz, mike, and i), and we reformed into ‘orichalcum‘ with me as the guild leader (kek!). shortly after that, we began successfully running molten core with an alliance of guilds. a few months into that with a couple boss kills under our belt, we decided to merge into one guild called ‘etherion‘. riveting shit, isn’t it?
i forgot to mention too. back then, everybody and their fucking sisters was a night elf hunter, so i had at some point rolled a priest named “jema”. nobody wanted to be a healer, so i figured shit…i can do that. the priest pretty much became my main throughout the entirety of “vanilla” wow. i spent my nights playing healer “whack a mole” with people who liked standing in the proverbial “stupid shit”. i had also leveled a paladin named “soja” to 60, but shelved her because pally’s sucked massive. then came the burning crusade…the first expansion.
THE BURNING CRUSADE
i went back to my first toon, moya, for the duration of bc. that last image was near the end of bc and during the beijing olympics. we got spiffy limited edition tabards and a pet dragon…word. bc for me was summed up with one word…alts. a fuck-ton. maybe it was something to do with what the game became. but in the interim that was bc, alongside my hunter and priest, i also rolled a draenei shaman (sonatine), a draenei warrior (murata), and brought over my second hunter from doomhammer (juno) and took him to 70 also. i was nearing absolute boredom, so the upcoming second expansion, wrath of the lich king, was a godsend.
WRATH OF THE LICH KING
the top picture is of me graduating with the first class of death knights…wooha! the aforementioned alts of bc probably burned me out on all the ‘classic’ classes. so when the new death knight class came out with lk, i rolled a night elf named “veil” and never looked back. at this point tho, the guild had evolved into something “shit”. i had stepped down as guild leader and officer during bc, and thought i had left the guild in capable hands. leadership however eventually made its way into the hands of what i would term “retards”, and their direction and mine gradually shifted apart. fonz had already left for the pvp server chromaggus and another ars guild, ars brute squad before the expansion came out…he had similar reservations with the guilds direction long before i did. so when the 3.1 patch hit, i said “fuck it” and left the server, along with a few friends that were still on llane, for chromaggus to rejoin fonz.
chromaggus is where i currently reside with my new blood elf death knight sonatine, and my transferred characters jema (horo) and moya (juno). word…i’ll see you in-game.
i’m taking full advantage of my relax-iness. i was sifting thru older posts and came across one that listed my past places of residence. i think it’s time to update the list. not that there’s not much to add, given that i lived at my last apartment for the better part of 5 years. but heh, i threw amsterdam in there. 4 or so months of living off albert heijn has to count for something…
| TW | – kaohsiung, taiwan (born) |
| TW | – kuang fu, taiwan (pre-school) |
| TX | – point comfort > guest house |
| TX | – point comfort > 223 wood st. > 3 years |
| TX | – port lavaca > 137 seascape dr. > 1 year |
| NJ | – lake hiawatha > knoll gardens > 3 years |
| NJ | – montville > 5 crane dr. > home |
| NY | – cornell u. > class of ’22 dorms, 2nd flr > 1 year |
| NY | – cornell u. > eddygate (2nd flr) > 1 year |
| NY | – cornell u. > eddygate (4th flr?) > 1 year |
| JP | – kyoto, japan > new miyako hotel > 1 month (does this count?) |
| IT | – roma, italia > sant’anna 6 > 1 semester |
| NY | – cornell u. > college ave. > 1 semester |
| NY | – cornell u. > eddy st. > 1 year |
| NY | – manhattan > 137 e.13th st. > 5 months |
| NY | – manhattan > 342 e.8th st. > 5 years |
| NL | – amsterdam > 357 keizersgracht > 4 months |
| NY | – manhattan > e.110th st. > current |
hoo fucker it’s been a long couple weeks. work has been…interesting, and play has been equally so. i had written up a post pertaining to last friday’s face-first run-in with religious types, but i’m still finessing that entry. these situations usually help me to add solidity to my foundation of ideals…conflict usually makes my brain fire on all cylinders. i’ll just leave that post for another day. in the meantime, i finally find myself with a brief respite.
i tossed this trailer on my facebook a while back, but meant to post it here too. facebook makes me lazy…especially with movie trailer posts since it’s so easy to just press the little “share” button. blah. i still dig the trailer tho. the cast is pretty boss too…sam worthington, liam neeson, and ralph feinnes. and unlike alot of the comments i’ve seen out there, i think the soundtrack that goes with the trailer is spot on…
i sort of just upgraded mt, and then neglected to take it for a spin until now. i have however since tweaked the design and layout to a point that i’m fairly happy with. it’s a ‘variation’ on what the old journal used to look like, which i suppose is moot considering i didn’t even keep copies of the old layout files. oops. anyhoo…its purty enough for me at this point. the ajax script was a wee annoying to incorporate when combined with how the archive pages are stored (had a hiccup in the coding for a few days)…but even that’s sorted out. go me! and i say that with the knowledge that my web skills are pretty shit these days, compared to my more outgoing days in the distant past.
GENERIC JOURNAL ENTRY
huh, and i noticed that while i was posting up my journal entries for prague, i didn’t even bother to log into my journal my social shenanigans. so in turn, i have to dial the journal all the way back to the beginning of october. gar.
WILLIAMSBURG!
well…sometime in the not-so-distant past, i made it a point to hang out in williamsburg with kayako. it was a dinner meet-up, with neither really deciding where to go til i made it a point to say “i’m down for anywhere really…even your neighborhood…hint hint“. i just felt the need to get out of manhattan and away from my usual watering holes that weekend. so we ended up at dumont burger…i think it was. it was good stuff, tho at that point i was feeling a little under the weather (sickness possibly). we hung out later at k’s place mixing fancy drinks and then imbibing the aforementioned fancy drinks.
i met my family for brunch the next morning so i could give my niece her gift i got in prague. she sort of tossed it aside and then sat on it. adorable. on the bright side tho, she calls me uncle now and is growing up frighteningly fast. ohny was that weekend too, but i wasn’t feeling so hot and ended up holing away in my apartment the rest of the weekend (sorry margie!)
FRIED CHICKEN HUNTING
the following weekend was a group trip with hosan and company to congee village to check out their chinese version of fried chicken…called garlic chicken. that was all kinds of awesome. sadly, that was the highlight of that weekend, as i spent the rest of it staring at my apartment ceiling. k, big stretches of time doing nothing…super. oh here we go…we had our second dinner with building-mates at el paso on 104th. it was good eating…drinking too. we’ve been trying to do it every other month, but this is obviously easier said than done. still fun tho to eat around the neighborhood, because god knows i wouldn’t bother if left to my own devices. the following friday was also dinner at max and patsy’s. we were expecting frightening scottish fare, but instead got pretty rockin’ lasagna. thumbs up. and finally…yesterday was a small get-together with cornell aap alumns in dumbo at rebar. that was fun…and a first. they got some feedback from us about what to do and what not to do. do’s included short surveys, more meet-ups (preferably with liquor), and more often…because its too easy to lose touch with people. don’ts included long surveys…and no liquor. or something. yea. k…this post took too long, blah. stupid fancy formatting.
this weekend is a photoshoot for a yoga studio. at 7:30 in the morning. yea, it’ll suck massive.
h’okay…that took a bit of time. after some deliberation about the best approach to upgrading the myriad of customizations i did to the original template, my best solution was:
1. save out the database.
2. nuke the whole site.
3. create a new blog and import the old database.
yea…i’m that creative with my solutions. not that i could help it…they totally revamped how templates and style, etc are applied. so as of right now, i just took a pre-existing template and butchered it until it started resembling my old site. i’ll make tweaks here and there slowly til it’s more in line with my old site…friends links, about pages, color schemes, etc.
testes, testes…one two three.
after this mornings deluge of annoying as all fuck spam, i was ‘persuaded’ to finally upgrade my archaic publishing engine. not kidding…i was still using mt 2.6. the current version is 4.3. crikeys. anyhoo…looks like everything was upgraded seamlessly. i hope.
addendum
ah fuck…the comment systems fucked up. erm, ill have to get to that later. don’t have time right now really…
last full day in prague. we started it off with a trip to the mucha museum, where i learned how to pronounce mucha (hint, he’s not spanish…it’s moo~ch-ha). we then wandered aimlessly a bit before deciding to head up the astrological tower in the old town square. that was some awesomeness…seeing the whole city like that (and especially on the last day after we’d wandered the streets for a week). i was craving a doner (they do it a wee differently than the style imported to nyc), so got that before taking a break back at the hotel. we also got some pastries from one of the stands in wenceslas square…something called “trdelnik”, then sort of slummed it (we were literally down to our last few dollars) with cheap beer, night-time photography, and an early bedtime. sad face. the next morning, we took liberal advantage of the hotel breakfast, then headed off to the airport.
bai bai prague…
continuing on!
thursday was designated ‘get in shape’ day…sort of. k, that’s a lie. but it turned out to be a bit of a workout anyhoo…lots of climbing and stuff. elaine wanted to head up the hills we always walked by in mala strana, so we strolled that-a-ways in the morning…towards petrin hill. the area was similar to the other park system we walked up two days prior, except with extra attractions! like the eiffel tower clone (petrinska rozhledna), the hunger wall, and the mirror maze…which was this small faux-castle with a mirror maze inside and a diorama of some battle that happened on the charles bridge. fascinating stuff.
we made our way down the hill back into mala strana and decided to go see the wallenstein gardens too, which were nice and full of peacocks. we then stumbled onto the vojan gardens by accident (we were looking for bathrooms), walked past the lennon wall (dedicated to john lennon…no one really knows why), had a sausage lunch in wenceslas square, then a beer break at skorepka in stare mesto. i ordered a liter of the tuplak…of course i didnt know i was ordering a liter, but…yea, surprise! it was evening by then, so we caught the free goran bregovic concert in the old town square (very cool btw…check the youtube video above), then ate a shitty dinner at a touristy italian restaurant near the town square. your service sucked!