Showing posts with label geekery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label geekery. Show all posts

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Sorry, Sorry, Nothing to See Here

Very busy, had company in town this week, and in my (scant) free time, have been off doing other pursuits. So I am updating quickly to confirm that I am still alive.

In other news, now that I have (semi) conquered PC gaming, Mike thought it would be fun to do the Star Wars RPG together. Me, I feel like I am crossing some geek threshold, because it is one thing to play KOTOR on the computer, but it is entirely something else to sit around your coffee table rolling dice. I am intrigued, though. I have never done this before. It involves a lot more math than I expected. But I don't know what the plot is yet. Because he won't let me look at it.

In the process of gearing up for this pinnacle of geekery, I discovered what might be the coolest site ever: Star Wars Artists' Guild. It's a bunch of people who have drawn pictures of their characters, all different species, only they are far better at it than I am. I'm so impressed and fascinated by the art there.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Oblivion: Just a Tribute

Today I finished the main quest in Oblivion, which I'd been putting off for quite some time. There are still things I haven't done in the game, and quests I haven't finished, but I feel like giving it a rest for now. I have a second character that I'm going to use to do Shivering Isles at some point.

To be filed under the category of "geekiest things I've ever done," I made a little highlight video of my character Thayet's trip through Oblivion. I've had a lot of fun with her... about 200 hours of fun, to be precise (yeesh). I thought she deserved a nice sendoff!

Damn You, MacBook, and your 2 Fingered Scroll

I was on my old laptop this morning, and I had to get off because not being able to do the two-fingered scroll on the trackpad was driving my fingers up the wall. And I supposedly do not even like my MacBook, which I only have because work gave it to me. But that two-fingered scroll... man, I got used to it fast. Even Mike, who is one of those Mac people, does not understand because his doesn't have the two-fingered scroll. It also doesn't have a magnet-y cord, or Photobooth, so I don't understand what's so great about it that makes it better than a PC. Because clearly those things are the coolest features.

I usually don't want to be on this computer on weekends because it reminds me of work. But that two-fingered scroll...

Sunday, September 9, 2007

I Know You Want My Fruity Oaty Bar T-Shirt...

It's all right. You can admit it. I go through spurts of internet T-shirt collection. This appears to be one of them. There are SO MANY geeky yet cute T-shirts.

I love the internet. Sometimes I wish I could actually, like, crawl into the tubes and LIVE IN the internet instead of in real life. (But not really. The view's not great and you'd never get fresh air. And you'd get fat from having no exercise. But the shopping would be great.)

This shirt is especially fun because you don't even have to know what it's about-- it just looks like one of those retro tees. FYI, though, in the movie Serenity, the big bad government plays this wacky Japanese-inspired commercial for Fruity Oaty Bars, which has a subliminal message hidden inside that causes one character to go berserk and knock out an entire bar full of people. So, ya know, if looking at my boobs causes a sudden desire to kill people, now you know why.

Friday, April 13, 2007

I Want an R2 D2 Mailbox!

There are 400 of them. The U.S. Postal Service made them in celebration of the Star Wars stamp series that comes out on May 25th. Apparently they have been spotted across the U.S. And what is up with there being one in Baton Rouge and not here? (I don't know why this surprises me... there aren't any street corner mailboxes here, period. They never put most of them back after Katrina.) They're pretty cute. I kind of want to be a geek and hunt one down to take my picture with it too!

But wait, it's better! They have a site where you can go vote on your favorite stamp. Whichever one wins, it will get its own sheet. I cannot pick! They're all good.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

In Which, In Trying to Justify Today's DVD Purchases, I Prove I Am A Huge Geek, In Case We Weren't Aware

Me: I'm trying to decide if I should buy the Battlestar Miniseries.
Sweetie: Honestly, I'm surprised you haven't bought it already.
Me: But I don't know if I want to buy it new or used. But if I buy it new I can combine it with something else and get free shipping. So I'm in my wishlist, but most of the stuff I want is all pre-orders for this summer. And I'm poor and shouldn't be spending money on DVDs.
Sweetie: Just buy them.
Me: Well, I haven't bought anything for myself in months.
Sweetie: Why don't you buy an X-Files?
Me: We haven't bought any X-Files in a while, have we? And why haven't we? We left off with Anasazi, which is one of my favorite episodes and a huge cliffhanger! How could we not have bought Season Three yet to find out what happens? Mulder was missing! And they find the train car in the desert with the alien bodies in it and Mulder goes, "Oh my god, Scully, what have they done?" And the Cigarette Man goes, "Nothing vanishes without a trace. Burn it." And... OK, fine, maybe I've seen it a few times.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Geeking Out In Upstate NY

My brother got me Lego Star Wars II for Christmas, and I spent a couple of hours putzing around in it. (It's a children's game, yet I keep falling off cliffs.) I can't install it on my computer, to my disappointment. My laptop only has an ATI Radeon 7500, which is several years old and doesn't support pixel shading or some such nonsense. I will have to either put the game on Mike's PC with the dead LCD screen, or get us a gaming tower that we can set up with the nice monitor (not a bad idea, actually). For now we put it on Bryan's new laptop.

We also installed a wireless router here and had a supremely geeky moment where we were all on our separate laptops in a family chat. Which would have been cute had we not been sitting roughly four feet apart at the time. Now all we need to do is plug in and boot up Neverwinter Nights on our respective computers and go raid dungeons together!

Ha. Or not.

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

In Which We Use Our Mad L337 Haxor Skilz

I am peeing myself laughing. Seriously.

It didn't get to be popular until after I graduated from college, so I missed out on most of the fun, but I do have an account on Facebook. So does my brother, and a number of people I know from college, though most of us now have accounts associated with our graduate schools. Recently, Facebook stopped requiring a college e-mail and just let anyone sign up to join. This week my dad, who is a professor, found out that some of his students had created a fake profile for him on Facebook. It was obviously fake because our last name was spelled incorrectly. My dad asked, "What does it say? Can you see it?" I said I couldn't. You had to ask my fake dad to add you as a friend in order to see the page. I doubted they would add me, since it was blatantly obvious that I was related to him. Nevertheless, I said I would attempt to infiltrate the page. Apparently, the kids who made it were not the brightest bulbs in the box. They added me as a friend, giving me access to the page. There wasn't a lot to it, but some things were mildly offensive. I mentioned it to my brother tonight before dinner. He said, "I'm going to add them." I told him not to, because two of us might tip them off that we were onto them. And besides, maybe they just added me because I'm a cute girl. (Which was their FIRST mistake. Heh.) I gave my brother my account info so he could sign in as me and see for himself. Then I went to cook stir fry.

I get done eating dinner, and the phone rings. It is my brother. Seems our darling community college students put the dumbest password ever on the Facebook account, and Bryan guessed it on the second try. It gets better. They made the mistake of using the same password for the Yahoo e-mail address they used to set up the fake profile of my dad. My brother wastes no time in changing both passwords to something only we would know. So basically, we own them. They are locked out of both accounts. We own their entire identity. I feel no moral qualms whatsoever over this because it was a fake identity to begin with. And they messed with the clan.

The question became what to do with our dad's fake profile. Clearly, we now owned their account. We had to fuck with them. Immediately we went in and deleted all the stuff we found borderline offensive. Like the pictures of the Rockstar energy drink and the Hooters Girls. We left the rest of the pictures, except we changed the captions to make fun of the students who made the site. It was clear who had made the site because they added themselves as friends. They were, in fact, my fake dad's only friends. They had put a picture of N Sync in their album. Bryan went and tagged the picture with the kids' names. (When you tag people in a photo album, it sends them a nice little email, which makes this even more amusing.) I said, "We should make an album of really, really lame pictures and tag them in it. Except I'm trying to think of something gayer than N Sync... but it's just not coming." Hey, we're not the ones who put the N Sync picture on there. Fitting, indeed. We changed our fake dad's "Current Status" to "laughing an evil laugh." We added a couple of activities (Hacking. Kicking Ass. Taking Names. Failing Moronic Students.) I threw in some stupid hacker speak. Then we added ourselves as friends and wrote notes on our fake dad's wall, agreeing with the previous notes that, yes, it was a fine site indeed.

We also made a group, titled it "I Tried to Make a Fake Profile for my Prof But Got Shut Down by Hackers," complete with a picture (see left), a group description that says "You all got owned," and we set ourselves up as the administrator, and gave ourselves the title "L337 HAXOR #1." Then we personally sent them all invitations to join our group.

Mike pointed out that if they had secret password questions, they could get back their accounts. We changed the password prompt on the Facebook account to something only we would know. But the Yahoo account proved more difficult. They used "What is your birthday?" Well, their fake profile for our dad listed a birthday of 1/2/55. We went for that. Score. Except there was a second question. "What make was your first car/bike?"

"Fuck," types my brother on IM. And then, a few seconds later, "These guys have sunk to a new low of retardation."

They used our dad's car.

We finally had to stop. But I can't help dropping in every 20 minutes to admire our work and giggle helplessly over it. It is just that beautiful. Of course, we'll probably just delete the account once we've had our fun. But I hope it confuses the hell out of them. (We suspect it's a couple of them getting a laugh out of pretending to be our dad, which would explain why the password was so easy.) I hope they're like, "Dude! Who changed the page? Dude! It wasn't me! What the--??" It is pretty obvious from our snarky comments that it was us. But I likened it to my favorite scene in the movie The Sting, which I happened to watch a couple of weeks ago. The gangster's guy fumes, "I KNOW I gave him four threes! He had to have made a switch!" And Lonnigan snaps back, "What was I supposed to do? Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?" There's no way these kids can report us for stealing their identity. Because they stole our dad's first.

Our dad has not seen "his" fake site. He doesn't really need to, now. He was going to try and have it deleted by the Facebook administrators. It's not necessary.

...We'll just tell him we took care of it. ;-)

Friday, December 1, 2006

An Actual Conversation @ Cooter Brown's Last Week

Bryan: So you're saying you don't like The Princess Bride?
Mike: I hate that movie.
Me: He's so weird. Everyone likes that movie.
Bryan: But... you like other stuff like it, don't you? You like Star Wars. Do you like Willow?
Mike: I love Willow.
Bryan: Well!
Me: I know!
Mike: Willow has Madmartigan. The Princess Bride only has that guy who keeps going on about "you kill my father, prepare to die." It's repetitive.
Me: Willow does have Madmartigan.
Bryan: I can't believe you don't like The Princess Bride. The Princess Bride is great.
Mike: So do you share your sister's opinions about the Star Wars prequels?
Me: Of course he does.

Straight from the mouths of actual real-life geeks who grew up in the 80's. (But I really am watching Willow right now.)