February 2009 Archives

At Restaurant:

Me: So, on the way over here, I was telling Todd that I figured out what it was I don't like about sewing. I like embroidery, but not sewing garb. It's the piecing together. It's my least favorite activity even on my Wee Dragons (TM).  He asked me if we needed to hire a small Mexican child to live in the closet and sew for me. "You wanna eat tonight? Sew! Sew!"

Todd: Well, you know, I figure he can live in the closet under the stairs.

J: No, if he does that then he'll become a wizard and that's a lot of trouble right there.

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C: They still haven't made the chocolate-peanut butter pizza!  I am giving them such a frowning!

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J: You should have heard my son on the way over here. He said that C was a cranky, old man.

C: Yes!

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At the house watching an episode of the horrendous 70's series "Quark":

J: That spaceship looks like a shark in a hot dog bun.

A: Or a pregnant guppy.

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Me: Dude! Those guys are wearing tights!  And, not the manly SCA kind of tights either!

B: Women's tights.

Me: Yeah!

K: You can see the Bettys' butt cheeks through their shorts and you're worried about these guys' tights?

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Me: Random half-dressed woman alert!

A: In the future, there is no underwear.

C: Thank God for that!

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A as he's removing the disc: Yeah, so you see why it was practically free and I was still robbed.

Me: A, I think I speak for everyone in this room when I say, dude, that was painful.  Thank you for showing us your love by inflicting that amount of pain on us.  Thank you.

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During Krull:

J: She totally has 80's roller skating hair going on!

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C: Go into the Butt Crack of Destiny!

A: I wasn't thinking butt crack.  I was thinking a little more yonder.

N: The Gash of Doom!

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Everyone: It's not a glaive!

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A: The Green Crack of Destiny!

C: Hey, she's a hippy. She's green!  Woo!

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K: So, he's offering ruling of the galaxy and lots of bling, so my question is, "Are you hot?"

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The only 10 year-old kid present: Qui-Gon Jinn is a good looking guy!

(Liam Neeson is indeed in this cinematic mess, and that statement broke the child's mother.  I gave him a high-five.)

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During the scene with the "Fire Mares":

K: What are they going to do, lasso them?

Me: Yes, they have lassos.

A: What are they going to do surf behind them?

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Me: So, why did the "glaive" have to hover there for ten minutes before it stabbed the Beast like a toothpick?

The 10 year-old: It had to collect it's awesome power!

Me: Fair enough.

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J: Just once I'd like to see a fantasy movie where the great evil power is destroyed and the castle doesn't collapse.

Me: Wouldn't that be great?  The heros could move in and rule on high!

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All: Oh my god!  They didn't list the script writer so we had someone to blame!

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I highly recommend a  Bad Movie Night of your very own.  It is totally a bonding of your politically incorrect powers.

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A. is totally paying for that 30 minutes of "Quark".  It's on now.  I will find something so bad he will wither!

UPDATE: Apparently ya'll made some serious noise as Facebook has retracted their TOS change and returned to their old TOS until they could address the concerns people have raised about the wording.  I first heard about it on Twitter this morning, then Kat posted in the comments what they sent her.  Also found this over at CNET.  Way to go, guys.  And, honestly, it's nice to see a company actually, you know, listen.  Congress could learn a lot from them.

Yeah, I never bothered with getting a Facebook page.  Or MySpace.  Ya'll are lucky I even have a Twitter account.  My thing was a) I have a hard enough time keeping up with my blogs, and b) the only reason I have for getting either account would be because Everyone Else Is Doing It.

Didn't Mom used to say something like, "If your friends jumped off a bridge, does that mean you have to do it, too?"

People should listen to Mom more often.

When I started the original Kumquat, it was a means to vent my frustrations about the Bush administration.  Yes, originally, it was a political blog.  And, yes, it was a friend who told me about blogging.  It sounded a lot like LiveJournal at first, of which I had used for a brief time but really wasn't impressed.  (LiveJournal was one of those Everyone Is Doing It moments.)  I liked the blogs. They could be pretty much anything you wanted.  While some could argue that LiveJournal is pretty much a blogging program, it always seemed to me that it was slightly different.  When I was on LiveJournal, people were pretty much treating it like that,  a journal.  Something you lock and hide under a virtual mattress to keep your little brother from reading it.  With a blog, well, it was anything goes.  I like blogging.  I think blogs are very cathartic to a lot of folks, but more than anything, I have seen amazing art and writing come from blogs.

Now, maybe I'm not getting the whole MySpace/Facebook thing, but I'm pretty sure they are a result from a desire from the populace for a different kind of social networking.  With both of them, nintey percent of the time when I hear someone talking about them it's something along the lines of "Oh my God! So-and-so suddenly emailed me!  I haven't seen her since high school! She found me on MySpace/Facebook!"  And, you know, that's great if you want to be found by so-and-so from high school.  Me?  Yeah, not so much.  (Remember, I'm a geek girl.  Geek girls don't receive any more respect in high school than geek boys.)

An old college friend told me she has her MySpace page because it's an easy way to share photographs, something she's trying to do professionally.  See, that seems more like a viable reason to get a MySpace page.  MySpace is The Place you want to be if you're trying to get discovered.  Mostly if you're a musician or band.  You can find a lot of great music and art on MySpace.  Okay, that I can see.

But, guys, ya'll better check their Terms Of Service and make sure you get to keep your music, art, photos...

You see, Facebook has implemented a rather nasty change to their TOS that pretty much says anything you post there they own.  Forever.  Even if you cancel your account.

Nice, huh?

The Consumerist has an article on it.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

That's right.  They have happily adjusted their TOS to the nastiest snatch-and-grab I've ever seen.  With Facebook, it's like your little brother wanting your cupcake and you telling him no and he licking it and declaring it his now because you don't want his cooties.  Well, Facebook has slobbered all over your accounts, people, and so it's now all theirs.  To be used any way they see fit.

This is wring-your-hands-and-cackle nefarious here.  Seriously. The hubby has a facebook account, but the only reason he originally signed on was because there was a picture he wanted to see.  That's some underhanded work right there.  "Yes, kiddies, we know you want to see those funny pictures, but first you have to register with us...and SIGN AWAY YOUR SOUL!"

I'm hoping they'll get enough flack for this they'll change their TOS, but until so noise starts happening with the Facebook users, ya'll need to take advice from The Consumerist:

Make sure you never upload anything you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's now.

Oh, you also agree to arbitration, naturally. Have fun with that.

Yeah.  If you have a Facebook page, I highly suggest you start organizing folks to fight this because I have a feeling a whole lot of people are about to lose rights to stuff they posted thinking, that like blogging, their stuff was safe.

Sometimes the attempt at bullying these sites practice remind me a lot of high school...

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You know, I'm just as guilty as anyone else for not checking TOS because most of the time they are standard because it's something for a game or an OS, the same wordage we're used to seeing.  There is almost a comfort in those TOSs.  It seemed easy to avoid the suspect ones.  The ones that popped up on random sites or places I had never really knew anything about.  Those, I didn't bother and moved on.  But, here we have a big one.  A big guy we trusted to have that same old comforting TOS we can just click through and not worry over.  Now, they are effectively using their TOS to steal stuff from us.  How nice is that?  Make some noise, folks.  Make some noise.

Seriously.  Here you have a game like Fallout 3 where you get either be a blithering saint or Right Bastard, and what do most people go for?

Dude! You have to be relatively civil or pretend to be nice all day long.  Why the hell would you choose the good option?  The Husband said it was because you got free stuff.  Yeah, well, when you're bad as bad can be, the slavers think you're awesome and give you all sorts of cool items.  And, no, despite what some idiots have said, you do not lose your apartment at Tenpenny Tower if you help the ghouls take over.  You just have to wait until they finish "cleaning up".  (If you kill Tenpenny you get his sniper rifle which is ungodly cool until you get an upgrade later.)

You might ask why as a Right Bastard would you help the ghouls?  Because while the game may not follow my ultimate designs, I figure that once I'm the evil overlord of the Fallout world, the ghouls will make great minions.  Besides, Roy gives you a ghoul mask which makes the feral ghouls think you're a friend and attack anyone who attacks you.  Minions, dammit!

And, evil is just damn fun.  I have raise whole levels just robbing people blind.  Okay, this is a problem with the game.

Dear Bethesda,

If you're going to give experience points every time a character twitches, putting the level cap at 20 is about as useful as a parka in the Sahara.  Your game is too damn big for a level 20 cap.  Whoever thought that one up should go back to his Etch-A-Sketch.

Thanks,

Kamikaze Kumquat

At the same time, there is something infinitely satisfying with taking everything of worth from a town and then blowing it to hell.

There is also something to be said for befriending someone like Tenpenny who thinks you're going to be his BFF and then whacking him when he leasts expects it and taking everythings he has.

The way I see it Fallout 3 lets you live out your evil overlord fantasies.  Granted, it's only within the limits of the game, but every decision I make is based on "If I ended up ruling the post-apocalyptic world" and damn if that doesn't make it even more fun than it already is.

I keep saying I need to go back and play the good side.

Funnily enough, I thought playing bad would be hard, but it awoke something in me. The need to just be a cloud of pure mean after spending the entire day being good in real life. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Playing good? Now there's the challenge.

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I was seriously disappointed in the miniscule XP I got for being a Contract Killer.  Surely someone's ear is worth a helluva lot more than that.

I declare this geek blog open!

Yes, there is still some minor tweaking going on here. My logo, for instance, isn't finished, but that is a minor thing.  I figure it's time to move the old geek blog over from Blogspot so I can get its blood flowing.  Blogspot has been a good host for many years through the many faces of the Kumquat, but it's time to give it its own home.

Especially since the domain was my I Love That You're a Geek Day present.  Woot!

So, I hope you guys enjoy the new home, the new look, the abject randomness that will happen at times, and the quiet insanity that always seems to lurk in the background.

Now, what to talk about for my first official blog post on the new blog?

How about Halo Wars?

As good as any.  The hubby played the demo on the 360 last night while I watched. It was funny because the reason I handed him the controller was because well, it was Halo and you guys are aware of my problem with FPS games without being drugged up on Dramamine. It turns out - much to our surprise because we have been completely out of the loop - to be a happy little RTS.

Now, while I'm not very experienced in the RTS genre because I usually end up in the turn-based strategy world, I have to admit this one looked pretty fun.  It was pretty, challenging, and with the right amount of screams of pains from the enemy.  I'm going to try my hand at th demo later and get a real feel for it.

I'm not sure if it will impress Halo fans if nothing else than because they don't have that first-person dodging-flying-guts perspective, but if the demo is anything, it should be at least fun.

Fun enough to destract us until Starcraft 2 comes out.  We hope.

Damn you Blizzard for being thorough and caring about the quality of your games!

Okay, not really.

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Admittedly, it is a breath of fresh air for a company to actually declare they will release the game when it is finished and they are damn well good and ready. Blizzard and Valve at least do their best to impress.  Companies like EA could learn a lot from that.  (Spore. God, what a unbelievable waste of money.)