I've grown fond of Alton Brown's show "Good Eats;" it's a great way to learn about the scientific principles and processes that go into making food, not to mention the history of whatever you're learning to prepare.

What I didn't know is that Alton Brown was not a chef to begin with.

According to that interview on The Big Idea I linked to ... Alton Brown made the decision to start a cooking show in his 30s, and completely threw out his old career and life to attend college all over again, this time at a culinary school.

Holy. Crap.

The general impression I get from society is that when you're in 30s, that's your midgame, when you should have established your career and your life by then. To see a guy start practically from scratch at this point and succeed the way he has is inspiring, especially for someone like me who is currently cursing the way higher education ensures that you can't bend over without turning your codpiece around first.

screenChaos340 is up!
Yes, that's right. For once in my life I put out a comic on update day that wasn't right at midnight! It's 7:30 PM where I live! REJOICE, MY FRIENDS!

... Okay, so maybe it would be more impressive with a bigger comic, BUT STILL! I CAN BREAK THE CURSE! HAAHAHAA!!! ... haaa ... *falls over*

screenChaos339 is finally, fully up!
Finally over an done with it. All six panels to the comic are uploaded and viewable below. I hope you guys all had a happy Mother's Day (Well ... on Sunday, but still)!

Okay! Up to panel #5 tonight. The final panel will be up tommorow!

I apologize again I wasn't able to handle the whole comic on Sunday, but hopefully this hasn't ruined the funny for ya'll.

Third panel is up so half the comic is now up. As I said yesterday, you'll want to keep checking back as I'm going to try and get at least a panel a day of this comic up on the site. This thing is really kicking my butt.

Okay, you know what?

Given the way things are going, I'm just going to update this particular comic every time I finish a panel. There's six panels in total, two of which are currently done and uploaded here.

Keep checking back, guys.

screenChaos339 is up sorta!
A number of factors, with today being Mother's Day, made it so that I couldn't actually finish the comic for today--well, far from it.

For the time being I've put up the first panel as a kind of a teaser and also to throw you guys off once you see the full comic. I should have the full thing done tommorow, hopefully!

Trying to work on RW and manage my headache, I was looking at the latest news on the Burma cyclone to see how relief efforts are going. A British news outlet has said that the Burmese military junta is obstructing Western relief efforts and that an entire generation of children may die due to the behavior of the junta.

Immediately following that, one of the latest comments to the article was this:

"why cant they drop aid packages from the air over effected areas bypassing the need to land etc?
The Burmese regime should get the attention of the US not Iran, oh wait theres no oil in Burma....

Ivan Dobski, London, UK"

What the hell? Despite the fact the Burmese regime is preventing Western aid from reaching the affected citizens as clearly stated in the article, it's apparently easier to blame Bush and a supposedly oil-greedy U.S. for the world's problems!

The thing that made me laugh bitterly was the comment just before it:

"If the US goes in, I'll be looking for all your anti-US comments next week. Somehow, it will all be Bush's fault.

Jay Tee, Clinton, United States"

Methinks he better edit that comment's opening sentence to say "Whatever the U.S. does" instead of "If the US goes in," because that's pretty much the standard operating procedure for the world at large.

Tonight's maintenance hopefully finishes off a really nasty FUBAR in Phantasy Star Universe.

For some background ... for some reason, Sega of Europe controls the billing servers for Sega of America's NA PC/PS2 servers. I don't know why this was decided, but I can only guess that there were finanical reasons for this (seeing as Sega of America had to close all of the international PSO servers due to Phantasy Star Universe failing to gain enough international income to keep them alive).

Sega of Europe's control has proven to be problematic. Earlier this year (I forget when) the billing servers crashed due to overheating--it turned out the AC was out in the Sega of Europe offices. This caused major problems for people whose monthly payment plan rebilled during that time--or for anyone trying to purchase new subscriptions. Because the billing servers were down, people could not get into the game despite paying for it. Sega of America's staff were helpless to fix the problem, as Sega of Europe's employees were enjoying an extended break at the time. It was fixed eventually, with the SoA GMs apologizing and explaining the situation.

Something similar to this has happened since the start of Maximum Attack G, on a much more dire scale. It got so bad that, despite having anywhere from 1000~2000 people return to NA PC/PS2 to play it, people got quickly locked out of the game by more Sega of Europe bungling. This time, people who renew or pay for new subscriptions to PSU are recognized as paid by the billing server, but the billing server refuses to communicate with the game servers--and thus the affected people are unable to play the game. The PC/PS2 servers once more became a ghost town--many, many people have been cursing Sega and cynically referring to their membership in the 065 Club (the people locked out of the game recieve an Error 065).

Apparently, with tonight's maintenance, a new billing server will replace the older one and will hopefully end this issue once and for all. Until then, a number of people had their accounts restored to working status (but only if they had notified Sega ahead of time of their issue)--and victims of Error 065 will not be billed this month apparently. I have heard that the GMs are contemplating other forms of compensation but nothing is yet definite.

All I know is, whatever compensation they give, this two-week issue which had taken so many people out of the game is not going to be enough for those affected by it. As the 360 servers are under X-Box Live and therefore escaped this issue, their players are dominating the leaderboards for Maximum Attack G's top 500 scoring players (who will recieve a Spread Needle/G, a PSO weapon, as a prize).

I wasn't affected (my account runs out of time just after MAG ends), but many of my friends were--I'm really dissapointed that this has happened and that it HAD to happen during the one event so many were waiting for, and just after the NA PC/PS2 and 360 player base tried to drum up a grasroots campaign to bring people to PSU since it had gotten such a bad rap from its limited features upon release (not to mention the hackers ruining the game for NA PC/PS2 players a few months after launch) ...

screenChaos338 is up, FINALLY.
I swear this wasn't a plot by me to wait until 05/05/08 to upload this one!

I swear! It's got nothing to do with my favoritism for numbers divisible by 5!

But seriously, it's up now. And the random freezing continues to plague me since that crap with my ISP. It's got something to do with my computer's wireless card--something about the network drivers.

Computers ... I can't live with them, I can't live without them. ;_;

Enjoy anyway, guys!

screenChaos338 is gonna take a bit longer ...
April went out with a bang and left me with a few "presents" that have vexed me in finishing the comic I've been working on for practically the entire past month but kept having to put off. (For example--my computer is randomly freezing yet again, thanks to some BS with my ISP ... that's a bit of a long story).

Remember what I said last week about how I normally would have just updated later in the week to post the comic rather than do a contingency short?

I'm going to post the comic tommorow at some point. I'm almost finished with it, but seeing as I ran out of time to upload it tonight ... Yeah. Sorry about that, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

In the wake of the antics my ISP's pulled on us, the random freezing that plagued my new computer's setup after going wireless has returned.

And uninstalling the culprit I suspected--Windows Updates the computer installed during the whole fiasco--did not stop the random freezing.

I don't know what to do now.

Would've uploaded this earlier this week, but final exams kept me away. And right now I'm dealing with my ISP being SOBs, but I won't get into that.



Some of you remember CAST Away, right? I'm still trying to get that off the ground but more complications've gotten in the way. For now, here's concept art I whipped up before MAG of Codon Alicia, F Gattaca's partner machine (as she looks in CAST Away, anyway).



There's more to Codon Alicia than meets the eye, though--she might appear to be a standard GH440-model partner machine, but the fact her clothing is a completely different color tips off many to the fact that she is, in polite terms, "nonstandard." This might encourage people into thinking she's been illegally modified to become more powerful than your standard partner machine ... but in truth they'd only be right about the illegally modified bit. In many ways, she's quite dysfunctional. This will be explained in the story early on, but there's some hints in the quotes for this pic as to why she is the way she is.



Enjoy!

That was a happy end to a frustrating week. Or at least a frustrating day.

Took the last wave of final exams today--and aced them all. I mean I nuked them.

All the studying I've done paid off!

I didn't update yesterday due to being wiped out, and I've been mostly exhausted today.

The final exam on Tuesday was in my final PE credit class--Weight Training.

During the battery of tests, I almost got laid out by heat exhaustion. Chest pain, nausea, rapid breathing, rapid heartrate, the urge to throw up ...

At two points I fell to my knees and couldn't keep going--the coach who teaches this class had to come and check on me.

I still did okay, though. Better than before in some respects, worse in others, marking me wholly as Average (rather than Poor and Excellent in muscular and cardiovascular endurance, like before).

I need to pull myself together and finish all the notes/assignments for the second and final wave of final exams tommorow.

Two final exams this week. One is tommorow. The other is coupled with a second normal exam on Thursday.

Four labs.

And an essay, which I'm about to finish and submit electronically. Oh, and some of the other assignments I finished earlier today.

This is gonna suck. ;_;

screenChaos337 is up, or at least something like it.
Boy, April has not been a good month, has it? I was unable to finish the comic I was working on, and couldn't think of a contingency to do in place of it--well, aside from what I've posted.

The reasons for this are explained in the rambling column for today's comic. Until then, I hope you're at least partially amused by my situation here ... ?

Maximum Attack G kicked off yesterday and we're already off to a running start on PSU's NA PC/PS2 servers. MAG's arrival brought a lot of people back; after the Winter Event, the only significantly populated server on NA PC/PS2 was Universe 02 with two and a half stars (this is either 500~600 or 200~300 people depending on whether or not a full star means 200 or 100 people.

And yet here I am amusing myself, goofing off with Fraps!

Today was also one of several days the GMs would appear in game and answer any questions the public had. I had a question of my own, so I checked it out. But as everyone knows ... I'm kind of a silly person. Or just weird.

09:18:03 Melchior
Not too much

09:18:17 F Gattaca
Hiya.

09:18:17 Melchior
was there a question or an issue we can help with?

09:18:28 F Gattaca
I did have one, and then I'll scoot off, heh.

09:18:34 Melchior
Fire away, Gattaca :)

(F Gattaca fires his SMG for a few seconds.)

09:18:39 F Gattaca
YEARRRGH

09:18:42 F Gattaca
Oh wait.

09:18:45 F Gattaca
You meant the question.

09:18:46 F Gattaca
Haha.

09:18:52 F Gattaca
Ahem!

screenChaos336 is up!

Still no word from the remaining voice actors that were tapped for the April Fool's flash movie, so I'm still unable to work on it. I WILL get that thing done, though ... eventually ... maybe.

Until then, let's drown ourselves in holy relics!

screenChaos335 is up! It's the 13th! Watch out for hockey-masked nutcases!

Enjoy!

National morning news says the area from Dallas right up to the Red River is under threat of tornadoes.

Here I had been hoping to get back on schedule for my physical training class at college, but it looks like it won't be today. I'd rather not go out to the airbase gym only to be stuck there. If a tornado warning sounds, they lock the base gates.

Even if it's not tornadic it could be dangerous out there. I've seen all kinds of crazy destructive weather ... Cloud bursts are almost as bad as tornadoes. It's like being in a hurricane.

Just heard on the news another possibly tornadic storm is about to hit my county.

What a way to open the tornado season.

Past few hours saw a tornado warning for my county and sirens blaring at the town I live in.

We got an onrush of hail, the size of golfballs.

I had little to no warning--luckily my USB drive still seems to be working, but I was in a mad rush to try and update the backup data the best I could. I don't know if a tornado even touched down--almost as sudden as it happened, the hail quit coming down and the storm lost its momentum just as it passed our town.

I think that may have been either the second or third time in all my years out here in Texas that I almost had to take shelter, though.

(I've actually BEEN in a tornado before, but that was when I was only a few years old. Maybe that's where my deathly fear of tornadoes comes from, because these things almost give me a panic attack.)

screenChaos334 is up!
Okay, I promised you guys I'd do a flash movie for April Fool's--well, I did after you guys threw various bricks and heavy objects at me for the prank I pulled. I've been working on it as time allows, but I've been held up for several reasons.

One, one of the guys who's lending his voice for it wasn't able to get his mic working until last night, so I haven't gotten all the recorded parts yet. Wouldn't matter if I did anyway, though, because I still have a lot of work to do myself.

I'll let you guys know when that movie's done. Until then, screenChaos333 will remain a blank panel.

Anyone have a machine that can stop time?