iori

We have this girl in our class. Naturally attractive, everyone agrees. For about a year, that's all I ever think about. Her. Let's call her H.

The other day, she sat beside me while chatting with one of her friends. I realised my heartbeat spiked, hands sweaty. Given my IRL nature, nobody could tell nor care.

Looking back into the past, something feels off.
Sometimes, she would sit beside me, take the notes written on the board and leave (same for me). Interestingly, she said "hi" a number of times in those occasions. There was no reason to greet me. Maybe out of niceness, sure, but in those situations it's basically unnecessary. I probably greeted her back too.

From a psychological point-of-view, it makes no sense. Everyone knows I'm not the talking kind. Talk to me, I'll probably give a basic response and that's it. For IT stuff, I blabber on forever, but who wants hear that? Anyway, she absolutely, positively had no reason to get my attention. Guess it'll remain a mystery as to why she said it those times.

Last year, during the exams, I would constantly pretend to look at the other students like if I'm bored (which is true), but in reality, I was just doing it to get glimpses of H. I succeeded, but then the invigilator changed my seat so that the invigilator could watch me throughout the whole week of the exams heh.

I recently found out she has a FB account too. Hasn't been active for a year now, but nonetheless it exists. Now I find myself going to her profile page again and again. And now. I have 2 FB accouts: the public "friends with everyone i know or barely know" one and the new private one, consisting of "true" friends and interests. H befriended the public one a long time ago, when she was active. Recently i sent a request to my personal one as a friend too. You see what's going on here? I want her be one of my "true" friends. This speaks volumes of my obsession over her.

About a year ago, me and a group of guys and gals were together chatting (naturally I barely talked). On of the girls mentions to me that H likes me. I responded with a "yeah right" and she said she wasn't kidding. She may or may have been joking, but then again, there was no reason to bring H into the chat. So why did she mention that fact/joke to me?

2-3 years back, one of my friends mentions to me that H was looking at me one day, and he claims that it was because she liked me. I dismissed it because there clearly wasn't enough info to support his notion. But given I'm personality, I tend to take in every little bit of data around me into account. You can tell, because I remembered that 2-3 year conversation like yesterday.

What I'm saying, I have been naturally attracted to her mainly because... She's naturally attractive. But in since last year, I fear it has become my obsession.

I just want her out of my head, and at the same time I want think about her only lol.
Boy, this sure became a big post. Thank you for reading this pointless rant/blog post.

Let me preface by saying that I drive a retired police car.

Last night I was driving around trying to find a costume shop in the dark (turns out it was closed since last year). I was on a 4 lane highway with 2 lanes going 2 lanes coming. I was at a stop light in the left lane, some woman pulled up next to me, got my attention and she yelled 'I think there's been some guy following me since I got off of work.' Then she realized, 'Oh are you a cop?' We laughed about it and I told her there's a police station a mile down the road on the right. She thanked me.

The light turned green, she sped ahead of me and got in my lane. Sure enough a car followed her and went into her lane. Then eventually she turned left instead of staying on the road to get to the police station. The car followed her.

Not sure what's going on there. Sadly I didn't follow. She didn't follow my instruction where there's a police station, so she must not have been too worried.

Obligatory tl;dr warning.

Family drama just seems to be mounting over here as of late, and I'm just wanting desperately to get away from it all.

Right now, my mum is the only person I can stand. She has seemingly no unlikeable qualities whatsoever and is an absolute saint to all of us. I love her dearly.

My dad, meanwhile, has recently become a ticking time-bomb of rage. If someone dares to speak while he's on a train of thought (ie. all the time because actually he never seems to stop talking) then he'll either passive-aggressively shut up, and just stew in raging silence for the rest of the day... or take out all his frustration on all of us, to the point where he thinks we all hate him and are bored by his very existence. He has some serious demons that none of us can reasonably deal with, because he lets them develop into hideous cancerous thoughts about the world around him that can't be shifted. This came to be obvious to me some time last year when, after I'd become rather frustrated with his constant negative outlook on things, he stayed up all night typing a 2,500 word "letter" detailing how I was an ungrateful little shit who didn't appreciate any of the hard work he'd ever done for me. I don't have said letter any more, but it was the most upsetting thing in the world to read. His thoughts started out fairly honest and reasonable and I initially agreed with how I may have said some wrong things to him, but those thoughts rapidly degenerated into utter madness. I could tell he'd just thought, "James is a bit of a bastard sometimes", when he'd started, but he'd just allowed increasingly fetid and horrible untruths about me and the argument we'd had to spiral out of control from that one thought, and he condensed all of that vitriol into 2,500 terrible words. I spent the whole day feeling wrecked, staying in my room away from him, and seeing no alternative but to write a rebuttal, which amounted to 4,000 words and I had to show him the following day because I spent so long on it.

I realize this all sounds incredibly pathetic. And that things could be much worse, like he could threaten me/the rest of us with actual violence, but the fact remains that it's not normal for my dad to be able to harbor such horrible thoughts so easily, and the way he deals with those thoughts is always so incredibly detached from reality. Could he not just, like, get into an actual argument with me? That honestly would've been preferable.

Meanwhile, my brother seems to be getting increasingly bipolar. Most of the time he's just astoundingly silly and loud, and can be heard at almost any time of the day loudly regurgitating quotes from YouTube videos, or yelling at his TF2 teammates. He also animates with Flash occasionally (which he's still learning), and does voice-overs for other people on a voice-acting board. But even though he has all these things he loves doing, and does them, every week or so we see him drag himself out of bed utterly depressed and then require a lecture on self-improvement from my dad, which won't really reach a conclusion, but will definitely bring up how he's "afraid of success" and all sorts of other stupid bollocks. Neither me or my brother currently go to school or have jobs, so we have all the free time necessary to make whatever we want of ourselves. I'm doing what I love (making music and moving towards finishing our EP) but it's as if he doesn't like doing what he loves, as weird as that sounds. I think he sees it all as work, so he procrastinates chronically. He'll also get upset at the smallest things (like people not putting the biscuit packets back in the cupboard properly - seriously) and make a massive deal out of them. And most alarmingly, today at the dinner table he revealed that he'd been dealing with homicidal thoughts that occurred because people (i.e. us) had the gall to be in his room and he wanted to be alone. But those thoughts were gone now and it was over and not worth worrying about (bizarrely, my dad concurred with this). I'm like, "no, that's actually quite disturbing" - I seriously worry about his mental well-being, sometimes, and this just compounded my concern.

Both these things collided a couple of nights ago when my brother, outraged at how a pack of biscuits hadn't been put back properly, interrupted my dad. At that point I had a bit of an "oh, fuck" moment, because my dad got this look that I can't really describe. After my brother had made a royal song-and-dance about the biscuits, my mum tried to steer the subject back to my dad had been talking about (something actually important, related to our financial position) but he took this as another interruption in the flow of the conversation, and just exploded. He was swearing and throwing insults and making up stuff about what we thought of him, like how he was incompetent and forgetful (he made this shit up on the spot but he believed it!). He has since apologized for the outburst and tried to make amends, but parts of his tirade still hang in my mind, namely how he was so convinced that we all thought he was worthless and boring and stupid, and how when he gets into these moods he can't be reasoned with.

[Rough translation of how it went:]
"You all think I'm boring and worthless."
"No, we don't."
"See? And now you think I'm wrong and a liar."
"No, stop being childish."
"FUCK OFF AND LET ME SPEAK. [insert uninterrupted 4000-word argument here]"

At the end of all this we were all (him included) emotionally drained and thoroughly upset, most of all him because he managed to divert the subject by saying (through tears at this point) that he wanted me and my brother to be successful and not have to work in a boring office job, which is his absolute worst nightmare ever. (This relates back to how he was talking about money before my brother brought up the fucking biscuits.) You may remember that I actually wanted to get a boring 9-to-5 job of that sort at some point because I just wanted to motivate myself to do better and also get some independent financial reward... but that still hasn't happened. And now it looks like if it does, my dad will see himself as a failure of a father.

For some reason my dad's currently talking with his mum on Skype about what happened two nights ago. Which means he's going to dredge up all the emotional turmoil from what happened and get his mum to give her input, which I can't see panning out well because she's likely just going to get him all riled up again. I really hope she doesn't, because for the most part she's really nice, but does have a bit of a habit of unwittingly stirring up a good deal of family drama.

The truth of the matter is, my dad has been on a bazillion self-improvement seminars, during which he's tried to find happiness through all sorts of neuro-linguistic programming, and even religion. But he's still the same person underneath, just unable to really emote like a normal human being. I think he's beyond therapy of any sort and it'll just be another waste of expenses. I doubt that my brother would fare any better, because they just have those kinds of brains that don't take kindly to change of routine of any sort, and just gradually reform back to their original twisted ways again. I really feel like it's autism... because honestly my brother and I had to have inherited our Asperger's Syndrome-esque tendencies from somewhere. (My brother seems to still be affected by it, but I think I've "grown past" my "borderline-AS" diagnosis now.)

Honestly, because I want to help, but feel powerless to, it's getting to the point where I just want to be away from this family. Move. Run away. It's looking increasingly like a preferable option. I don't want to have to deal with people who are so detached from reality they see goddamn biscuits as being the worst thing in the world. It's just driving me mad, and compounding the fact that I don't feel like I live like a healthy human being in a healthy family environment.

I'm sorry for the long post you probably don't care about. I just had to get this bile out somewhere.

Dunno what to do today. I am hoping to do something special for my 30th birthday but I think I am just going to drink instead. But here I am, 30, still single and still no clear idea of what I want to do for my long-term goals. I've always been going with the flow and where ever it takes me but I think its time that I try to get on a fixed path instead. This is going to be a interesting year.

Edit: I decided to turn this into a not-shitty thread.

So, if you drink coffee, what kind do you drink, and how? I just got into drinking it more, I've been drinking it black and strong.

____________________

Strong coffee made with white vinegar instead of water = very bad.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that it had no cream or anything like that, just straight black.

with Dove Men Care body wash to be exact. Yes I did, yes I did. Now my mouf is all bubbly. Yum!

I get home from work the other day, and smack my keyboard with my hand as per usual, waking my computer up from its 8 hour nap. I toss my keys on the desk and my vid card fan goes to 100%, my display doesn't initialize and in a panic I flick the power off on my PSU. Shit.

Turns out my voltage regulators are fucked and my computer won't post unless I squeeze the rear of the card (where the VRMs are) against the main heatsink, bending the pcb. In GPU-Z my VDDC Phases are off, sometimes showing #1 and #3 as working fine, with #2 conspicuously absent of any reading. Sometimes #2 is working but the others are gone. When I bend the card toward the heatsink all 3 show up as normal...

Freakin' weird, man. So I got a Sapphire 6870 on the way, should materialize tuesday.

I get home from work the other day, and smack my keyboard with my hand as per usual, waking my computer up from its 8 hour nap. I toss my keys on the desk and my vid card fan goes to 100%, my display doesn't initialize and in a panic I flick the power off on my PSU. Shit.

Turns out my voltage regulators are fucked and my computer won't post unless I squeeze the rear of the card (where the VRMs are) against the main heatsink, bending the pcb. In GPU-Z my VDDC Phases are off, sometimes showing #1 and #3 as working fine, with #2 conspicuously absent of any reading. Sometimes #2 is working but the others are gone. When I bend the card toward the heatsink all 3 show up as normal...

Freakin' weird, man. So I got a Sapphire 6870 on the way, should materialize tuesday.

drugs are such an incredibly compelling argument for nihilism and nothingness, in a whacked out abstract, roundabout way. Well, that's just me.

drugs are such an incredibly compelling argument for nihilism and nothingness, in a whacked out abstract, roundabout way. Well, that's just me.

drugs are such an incredibly compelling argument for nihilism and nothingness, in a whacked out abstract, roundabout way. Well, that's just me.

March is a hot pot of birfdays for us DWers.

I really don't know how to explain this, but look at the top right panel. Notice the random spider web-ish lines :





Is that normal for the wireframe to do that? It occurred as I was using subtractive Boolean objects to create the missile rack bores.

Okay, so I have a bit of an embarrassing confession to make. I get horoscopes in my email. I read them pretty often, but not every day. Sometimes they are not at all applicable, but they usually apply to me a little bit, and sometimes they are eerily spot on. So I ask you, if you were born between Oct 20 and Nov 21, were you in a creative mood yesterday?

Okay, so I have a bit of an embarrassing confession to make. I get horoscopes in my email. I read them pretty often, but not every day. Sometimes they are not at all applicable, but they usually apply to me a little bit, and sometimes they are eerily spot on. So I ask you, if you were born between Oct 20 and Nov 21, were you in a creative mood yesterday?

Is the question my friends ask me.

I openly tell people I suck at googling stuff. Even though it's not entirely true. Generally, if I need to find an answer to a specific question, I can get whatever it is I need. What I suck at is obtaining information from things I don't know anything about.

Google didn't always suck. I remember when I was in middle school, I would google my favorite bands and find tons of background information about the members, filers from the shows they played, and related bands. I remember pretty distinctly simply searching for "doom" and spending hours scrolling though images and pages reading everything I can possibly know about the game.

I don't really search for the same stuff as I used to, and I don't really know for sure if the internet is just fucking gay now or if I'm just crumbling at the test of time, but I rarely get the kind of interesting results from googling stuff as I used to. The most common problem I have is even thinking of the right terms to search for. I've been wanting to learn more about foreclosed houses, so I searched "foreclosures" hoping to find out what they are, how much they typically run for, pros and cons of buying a foreclosure, etc. Instead I got a huge list websites with home listings that I need to sign up and log in to be able to see the price and pictures of the foreclosed houses they have listed. I generally spend a lot of time switching words around in my searches to get the kind of information I need to know, and often giving up before I even really get started. Searching anything will almost always give you links to really high-traffic ad-infested websites, or to youtube videos that don't tell me what I need to know, or opinionated blogs only marginally related to the searched term.

In fact, I decided to search today "I suck at google" and it wasn't until four pages later that I found an article that shed a little bit of light why google is so lame these days.

http://www.diligentiagroup.com/background-investigations/why-google-search-results-suck-and-what-to-do-about-it/

I was already aware of websites paying big bucks to land first results for certain keywords in search engines, but apparently all sorts of websites are manipulating the system, making unrelated garbage appear on the first couple pages and attempting to disguise itself as something you might be into. Too often I search for something, get overloaded with potentially interesting links to crap and get discouraged from searching any longer. As far as I understand, many other search engines suffer from the same conditions. Did google always suck or is this just the direction commercialized internet search engines are going?

and i often find myself wishing i could build doom maps for a living rather than go through 5 years of building "parametric screen walls" and finding proportions in everything around me.

*sigh*

surely i am not the only one?

After many years of using laptops, I've started thinking of building a PC. I use to build PCs frequently and was up with the hardware back then. Over time I got sick of lugging large PCs/Monitors around and built a small PC (mATX, Mini Case), and a while after I switched to a laptop and didnt look back.

Why am I looking to build a PC again? I would like more storage with redundancy than what external drives can provide. There are also certain Steam games I can't play due to my laptops hardware.

So this is what Im looking at the moment:

Western Digital Scorpio 320G SATA 7200RPM 16M notebook HDD
Kingmax 8G(2x4G)PC-10600 1333MHZ DDR3
Lian Li PC-T60B ATX/Micro Test Bench Black
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0Ghz AM3 95W
Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 AMD SB785 4xDDR3 8CH Audio GLAN SATA3 RAID USB3,0
Thermaltake TR2 470W PSU
eVGA GTX550 OC 550TI DDR5 1G HDMI
Viewsonic VX2453MH 23.6"W LED 2ms DSUB SPK HDMI

You may ask why the notebook harddrive. The reason is the case I intend on getting. This will run the OS and leave me three bays for 3x2TB harddrives running RAID 5.

Of course RAID is not a backup, so will be looking to use my external drive for that and setting the drives up in a way so I can separate the important-must-backup data and stuff I can replace/redownload/etc.

The GFX card I'm not sure on - as I mentioned I stopped custom building a fair while ago and no longer up with recent developments. As far as I can tell, it will be more than up to the task of running what I want. I'm not concerned about running everything at max, but would like to play with an HD TV from time to time at the native resolution...

Any thoughts?

So I spent last weekend passing a kidney stone. Let me tell you, it is in no way fun. Feels like someone stabbed you in the kidneys then kicked you in the balls, then the pain doesn't go away for about 4 days. So anyway, I'm glad I'm done with that. Now I just have to wait for the hospital bill and hope it doesn't bankrupt me. I think I might be able tog et the whole thing paid off by the government, though, considering I'm a poor bastard.

Oh, and yesterday I bought a copy of Heavy Metal for the first time. It's...interesting. I've been interested in the magazine for years, especially since I found out that Moebius did design work for every sci-fi movie I've ever loved, ever. I think now I need to start hunting down some old issues from the 70s with his work in them.

Two days ago I went to login to my gmail account. Rather than listing my deluge of spam and nonsensical emails, I was presented with a curious message: my account had been disabled. I thought, what strange happenings are occurring here?

After getting it reenabled*, I had a look around. Low and behold there were 10 rejected messages, messages I had not sent. I delved deeper and obtained the rejection message and the reason the account had been disabled - suspicious activity had been detected.

Checking the account activity, someone in Turkey had accessed my account and attempted to send the drug pharmacy messages (one to codeimp even).

It wasnt for another 10 minutes that I realized the risk of this intrusion - this was my main email account, with countless emails about accounts and other sensitive data. While it seems they only tried to send messages, they had access for an unknown amount of time and could have downloaded the entire content of the mailbox.

Whats to blame for all this? I suspect a malicious Android app, but I cant be sure, the only evidence was that it was accessed from Turkey on a mobile. Suffice to say all of my passwords are now changed and bad habits suddenly broken; Im a system engineer and should have known better.



*which was a strangely easy affair, just entering a code sent to my phone, that I also entered: what was to stop anyone else doing that and gaining access?

Two days ago I went to login to my gmail account. Rather than listing my deluge of spam and nonsensical emails, I was presented with a curious message: my account had been disabled. I thought, what strange happenings are occurring here?

After getting it reenabled*, I had a look around. Low and behold there were 10 rejected messages, messages I had not sent. I delved deeper and obtained the rejection message and the reason the account had been disabled - suspicious activity had been detected.

Checking the account activity, someone in Turkey had accessed my account and attempted to send the drug pharmacy messages (one to codeimp even).

It wasnt for another 10 minutes that I realized the risk of this intrusion - this was my main email account, with countless emails about accounts and other sensitive data. While it seems they only tried to send messages, they had access for an unknown amount of time and could have downloaded the entire content of the mailbox.

Whats to blame for all this? I suspect a malicious Android app, but I cant be sure, the only evidence was that it was accessed from Turkey on a mobile. Suffice to say all of my passwords are now changed and bad habits suddenly broken; Im a system engineer and should have known better.



*which was a strangely easy affair, just entering a code sent to my phone, that I also entered: what was to stop anyone else doing that and gaining access?

Okay, so I am a day late. Sue me.

So its been a year living on my own now and I am loving it... sometimes. Last year was a really weird year for me as it was the first time I've been frequently socializing and actually been in a relationship. Made a couple of new friends since then and I am looking forward to meeting new people this year.

Relocating has been on my mind a lot this year and I just may take this new job opportunity in Austin... even though I fucking HATE Austin. Though I still doubt my future career goals and been thinking of trying something new. For a while now I've been having ideas of running a restaurant or a shop. I can sense this year being a another weird year for me..

can't sleep cause i'm the unwitting victim of a mild second hand high; (I think just pot, but definitely inordinate amounts of second hand cig smoke). I can't really explain how I am feeling. On the one hand it's hardly noticeable, and on the other my brain pops my eyes open through a strange floating wakefulness (like an air bubble that is forced to the top) whenever I close my eyes to go to sleep. If the air bubble would sink to the bottom, that would be falling asleep--but since it floats to the top, that is remaining awake despite the desire to fall asleep.

I don't feel stoned, just slightly off in a completely novel and dissociated sort of way. Drugs are so weird and always give me the experience of having my mind flushed down the toilet (oh gno where did my mind go give it back!) No really, that is just the awful beginning of an excruciatingly trying journey through madness, through nihilism, through nothingness, beyond void: in the vacant space where my mind was is replaced with from the murky nether a very strange, unreal, incoherent, vacant, broken, foggy, fragmentating, inconsistent, inpenetarable, bottom drops out, ininterpretable, onious, shattered, skipping, stuttering, slipping away, falling, surreal, voidful, vacant, unreal, memory-failful, bending, imploding, floating, splitting, falling, shattering, ADD to the umpteenth power, degenerating, fragmentating, Groundhog Day looping reality that leaves the "me" who is experiencing this without my mind and without myself--just a mindless void experiencing a scrambled and broken program of utter incoherence to the point of catastrophe of being. It all adds up to some awful nightmare that is so inexplicably impossibly WTF that I freak the fuck out in excruciating crisis of being. I don't know why people do them or how they can possibly enjoy them, let alone to the extent that this mad house was doing them earlier. Thankfully my friend kicked out his brother and all his friends (there were a lot of them). Pot et al. is so awful.

My girlfriend had a baby this August, though she had to give it up for personal reasons. Both of her other children were with their fathers: one a junkie who kidnapped his daughter and severely neglected her, and the other an ex-junkie who thinks he's too good to let her see their son. She told the father of her third child that she'd have no problem aborting the pregnancy if it wasn't going to have a home and a family. The father swore up and down that he'd do the right thing. Shortly after, the drug dealing and abuse started - once so bad when she was six months pregnant that she had to visit the hospital and the fetus's heart stopped three times.

When she was eight months, we got in touch. We met a long time ago but went our separate ways. I took her in and sort of unofficially began dating her, though I made it clear that I wasn't ready to be a father. She had no problem with this and chose to give the baby to the woman who took her daughter in when the father went to jail.

Fast forward four months, this past Tuesday, when my girlfriend gets a phone call from the police. First with an accusatory tone, he was asking the nature of the relationship between her and the foster mother without explanation. Eventually she learned that Jonathan, the baby, was found in his crib not breathing. He was taken to a children's hospital and it was estimated that he'd spent about 30 minutes without air. The only part of his brain left functioning was his brain stem.

We took an 8-hour drive down to Charlotte to see him. When we finally arrived, we found that he was being kept alive with machines. He would barely take breaths with a respirator. He was pretty much completely gone already, and only technically alive. There was a lot of commotion over who legally owned the baby, who had the right to deny tests and remove life support. Of course, nothing they wanted to do would've made the child better, only removed liability from them.

We kept getting visits from the foster mother's church group. I figured I'd have to bite my tongue for the next few days. My girlfriend was understandably going through a crisis of faith, so that didn't help matters. Why would you tell a grieving mother that "God has a plan"? They didn't even bother offering help or strength, they were only interested in proselytizing. First they'd pray for a miracle, for Jonathan to get better; then when it was obvious there was nothing to be done, they prayed that Jesus would take him. I understand that people have coping mechanisms, but it's going too far in this situation for something based on false hopes.

Anyway, we finally decided to unplug the machines because the baby gradually lost the ability to breathe on his own. The two moms took turns holding him as he stopped breathing and his heart slowed. I don't know if you've ever seen a death, but it's completely surreal. As the blood stops flowing and settles, the skin takes on a pasty, plastic texture. The eyes and lips turn blue. We can no longer sense the tiny involuntary movements that tell us someone is alive - and the next thing you know, you're just holding a thing, an object. It has no life inside it and your brain can tell the difference, though what you're looking at has barely changed at all.

My girlfriend is taking it about as well as you can expect. She has to mourn by herself, without people telling her that everything will be OK and they're so sorry for her loss. All I've thought of to do is try to make things as normal and predictable as possible, and hold her when she stops for a moment, because I can tell when it hits her again. I hope that's enough.

Handed in my resignation four weeks ago (have to give four weeks notice). Today is my last day, will be having TGIF drinks at work then going bar hopping. I think my weekend will be a write off. Then in 7 days time I'm flying to Brisbane for a long holiday and will start looking work once my funds run low.

So fucking glad I quit, more so than the fact I'm moving countries. Doubt I'll work in an enterprise environment again for some years.