Know how I can tell it's spring? 'Cause all of a sudden it's fucking cold out and there's more snow in the foothills than there has been since December. And it might actually snow here tonight too.
Just in time for me to take a week off for spring break. If only I were actually going someplace warm instead of just planning on being lazy for a week.
But hey, at least I get the bonus of allergy season starting up too. Yay.
Evidently my blahg turned 2 a couple weeks ago. No wonder it's been acting all childlike and squirrelly. At least it's potty trained. Mostly.
I think there was some other important anniversary of another horrible awful no-good stupid event recently too. I don't want to talk about that one though.
For the discerning modern college student there are a variety of popular modes of transport. We shall examine here two traditional examples.
First we have the simple motor car, a favorite of many. Drawbacks include parking issues on a cramped campus (illustrated here by illegally parking in a faculty lot), and the inherent douchiness of driving around a $114,200 Audi R8 as a college student.
We shall assume that as the day brightened and the frosty morning chill wore off, this student decided to drop by home and pick up a more seasonal and breezy ride. Also a favorite among students, the motor scooter offers that can't-be-beat wind-in-the-hair motoring experience with a bonus of abundant free parking near campus. Additional pluses on our example below include the forward-mounted rocket launcher and advanced fan-propulsion and lifting rotor system to evade pursuit by campus security. Far superior to any mere German sports coupe on a sunny day.
Teaser headline in TPM's "Daybreaker" e-mail this morning:
It's as if the headline is missing a certain something... Something like:
Position On Incest Remains Firm.
Yeah, that'd work.
The preview image may be fuckeded, if so just click the damn thing. Also, it's probably too slow. Photoshoooop seems to want to make it slow, and I can't be arsed to fix it right now. Sosumi.
UPDATE: Substance came to the rescue.
A certain zombie insisted in comments on my earlier masterpiece of photoshoopery that it was deficient because the bassoon's mouthpiece was being used as a trigger and not being blown into as it should.
FINE!
But see, then the "fire" coming out doesn't really fit (unless our soldier has really bad breath). So then I had to take that out too:
I guess that works. Not sure I like these better than the first one, but it'll be easier to animate if I ever get around to that.
UPDATE: As suggested by "Schroeder" in comments:
(needed two versions for use on various backgrounds)
For teh Zombie:
I should send the PSD file to Substance for the full animatronic treatment. Or I could figure out how to do the cheezy animations myself.
Update: For full effect you really need to click the image to see it in its full-resolution transparent glory. Just sayin'
That righteous Substance McGravitas recently posted one way to handle messing with some text files. There are easier ways to go about it, and I am a helpful beer snob:
Sample file contents:
% cat pissoff.list fuck you you fucking wanker go fuck yourself % % cat wanker.list useless git bollocks bloody hell %
What Substance wants to do is take those input files and wrap them in some simple XML. PERL is perfect for this job. Here's a quickly whipped up program to do so:
#!/usr/bin/perl
if ($#ARGV < 0) {
print STDERR "\nUsage: abuse [files...]\n\n";
print STDERR "I know you came here for abuse,";
print STDERR " but you still need files as arguments.\n";
print STDERR "Output goes to STDOUT, you probably "
print STDERR "want to redirect it somewhere\n\n";
exit(1);
}
print "<XML>\n";
foreach $file (@ARGV) {
if (-r $file) {
open(FILE, "$file");
@lines = <FILE>;
foreach $line (@lines) {
chomp($line);
print "<words>\n\t<data>$line</data>\n</words>\n";
}
close(FILE);
} else {
print STDERR "Can't read $file -- skipped\n";
}
}
print "</XML>\n";
Save that as a file called something (in my case I saved it as "abuse" -- just 'cause). Make it executable:
%chmod 755 abuse
Now run it with our two files:
% ./abuse pissoff.list wanker.list <XML> <words> <data>fuck you</data> </words> <words> <data>you fucking wanker</data> </words> <words> <data>go fuck yourself</data> </words> <words> <data>useless git</data> </words> <words> <data>bollocks</data> </words> <words> <data>bloody hell</data> </words> </XML>
To store the output in a file, simply redirect the output somewhere using standard shell redirection:
% ./abuse pissoff.list wanker.list > fuckyou.xml
It took me twice as long to write this post than it did to write the code. PERL is a damn handy thing to have around.
New OSU "Beaver" logo:
Designed by the wizards at Nike, along with corresponding new uniform designs for all the various sports.
Here is the current logo that one is replacing:
That one was a redesign they did back in 2000. After the original Benny Beaver had been around since 1951. You'd think we could hang onto this one for longer than that, but I guess not.
Anyway, here is an actual beaver:
(creative commons photo credit: Tancread@flickr)
Uncanny, eh?
Evidently the students seem to like the new look, so that's good I guess. Of course the real reason for the change is most likely to encourage the thousands of idiotic football fans to buy replacement replica outfits so they can "support" their team while they watch "student athletes" continue to be exploited by the NCAA. I'm sure OSU and Nike came to a mutually profitable understanding about all this. I'm also pretty sure only a tiny portion of this (if any) will actually ever trickle down to the University's general fund. So it is, so shall it ever be.
I wish this wasn't part two of a continuing series.
Oregon's Dumbest Glibertarian is at it again, with another column in today's college paper.
I can't be arsed to do a full-fledged analysis, so I'll just go through a few of the lowlights in the first few paragraphs. You can read the rest on your own if you have the brain cells to lose.
Recently, the sequester has been a big topic. Congress has been debating the sequester in an effort to strike a deal to avoid the “catastrophic” problems we would otherwise face. The political left says without an agreement, cuts would send us into another recession and people wouldn’t be able to eat. The right says that without coming to an agreement, the military would face huge cuts, leaving us vulnerable to attacks.
Ok, other than the scare quotes around "catastrophic" that's not all that bad to start. For bonus points, try to predict where he's going based on this opening paragraph. Anyway, continuing:
But the sequester isn’t alone in topics debated by Congress this year. As the calendar approached Jan. 1, Congress was debating the debt ceiling to avoid the fiscal cliff. We technically went over the fiscal cliff since a deal wasn’t made by Jan. 1. When we “went over the fiscal cliff,” nothing happened. The earth didn’t collapse inward. The sun didn’t burn out. And with the sequester, we don’t have anything to worry about either.
Ah, that's more like it! I especially love the exceedingly grand straw man cliff he fights. And "going over the fiscal cliff" now means "technically, the calendar went past fiscal cliff day and even though the issues were dealt with the next day before we had a chance to hit the ground at the bottom of the cliff, we still totally fell over that cliff." That is exactly the same thing as if the evil useless government did nothing 'cause they're a bunch of know-nothing poopyheads covered in poop.
Continuing directly:
But the real questions and debates shouldn’t center on whether Congress will make an agreement in time, or which side is correct about the repercussions if a deal isn’t made. The real question we should ask is, “Why does the decision of only 535 congressmen in Washington, D.C., control what happens to all 300 million people in the country?”
Wow. He may have managed to outdo the stupidity with this. He actually does not seem to know that our wacky system of government consists of a "representative democracy" where "we the people" elect "representatives" to "represent" us in the decision making process. Really, he doesn't understand this. Read the rest of the damn article if you don't believe me — that is the article's entire point.
He says some other really stupid shit and manages to get a bunch of stuff wrong about The Great Depression and economics (as usual) too, but I don't have the energy to go into that.
At this point I should really start taking bets on which wingnut welfare publication hires him.
All of a sudden after a couple halfway warm days, the frogs are out in force.
Those in the midwest buried under yet another snowstorm can either take this as a taunt, or as a reminder that spring will eventually show up...
Once again the fucking idiots in charge of this country have managed to manufacture a completely unnecessary and imaginary crisis and freak right the fuck out about it. And then let it actually happen. Our gloriously useless press is more than happy to cheer on the debacle. They go along because this imaginary self-created crisis perfectly reflects the unfortunately very real beltway consensus that if only there were some perfect, reasonable, moderate people or party in government everybody would get together and talk about reasonable, moderate solutions to this completely imaginary and unnecessary crisis. All while ignoring the few, y'know, actual reasonable people yelling at them. 'Cause "Eew, ick, who wants to talk to a liberal they're always right about everything and so uncivil and so smug. Let's see if we can see what John McCain thinks! He's mavericky!"
Fuck. There haven't been enough fucks in this post yet. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
You may be able to tell that I'm more than a little annoyed by this. Yeah, it's personal. My livelihood relies on money from the ebil gubmint. I actually end up saving we taxpayers a pretty decent amount of money because I do the work of the equivalent of about 10 six-figure-salaried federal workers back in DC. I know this is true because they call me to do projects they can't manage to finish. And I don't mind, really -- they're good folks, generally. They mean well, they just work in a completely dysfunctional bureaucracy that values the quantity of meetings you attend over the work you produce.
Nothing has been solidified yet, but there's a pretty decent chance my project (a long running project that actually benefits the general public) will get chopped because of this. We've already been running bare-bones ever since the cuts a few years ago, and we can't absorb another one. It's too bad, I've been producing some especially good work recently -- I finished my most recent project on time and on-budget yesterday in spite of them constantly interrupting me with work on unrelated projects. It's pretty darn cool and has been well received by the folks that have heard about it and seen previews. It may all just be flushed down the shitter along with thousands and thousands of similar projects done by similar unknown wage slaves all over this country just because we're ruled by a cult of Austerity-worshiping center-right fools.
Fuck.
I can get another job, and have options lined up. I'll be fine. Fucking pissed, but fine.
Oh well, might as well see what else I can get done before we get chopped...