[MP-Ryan]

Had planned to spend NYE this year doing exactly what I did last year - drinking on the beach, alternating across a sandbar between a nice warm river and the sea, then falling asleep listening to the waves. Probably my best NYE ever, but everyone who was keen to repeat it has pulled out, so I'm not sure what I'm up to this year.

For the record, the holiday season in the southern hemisphere rules.

Have I ever told you, over the 6+ feet of snow currently decorating my yard, how much you suck?

[neo_hermes]

*peeks inside*

[Nuke]

just saw a cool case mod on hack a day:

http://hackaday.com/2013/12/31/case-modder-builds-lcd-window-causes-lsd-flashbacks/

[AtomicClucker]

Bah, suffered numerous back to back colds and flus after stress routed my immune system, but finished the semester without crashing badly until Christmas.

Been chilling since the 25th and working on getting better, provided I can survive my chronic insomnia.

Cool news, is next semester I'm done with school, and will debate the value of grad school and possibly a second major in either philosophy, ancient studies or theology in the next five years is plausible. Also started watching and reading stuff by Michio Kaku and other Physicists - I can now see why Materialist/Empiricist and Determinist bent world views are inherently unstable - arguing that "Free Will" is nothing more than a mechanical response runs directly opposite of Electrons jiggling at their own leisure. Who knew that even Science! would challenge dogmatic ideologies perpetuated by its own excess?

That little rant aside, Happy New Year and More Modding Love.

[Klaustrophobia]

apparently it's impossible to find a decent laptop with a trackpoint anymore.  my requirements are simple.  1920x1080 (or better i guess) screen res.  decently powerful, but doesn't have to be a workhorse.  trackpoint that has thumb buttons (lenovo's retarded new idea is that you click the entire damn touchpad with your thumb instead of having goddamn normal buttons).  <$1000.  and most importantly, no mother****ing windows 8.

[Mongoose]

Happy new beers!

[deathfun]

Made it home before 00:00

I now have some wine to consume!
(We got ****ing wrecked at the restaurant)

[Nuke]

so i ended up not getting drunk. it was a ****ty year.

[Beskargam]

ugggggghhhhhrrrghh. I woke up an hour ago and still feel like ****.

[Klaustrophobia]

taken today


new year's resolution #2: skim more, complete.  or started, i guess.  and no, i don't live in the southern hemisphere.

[StarSlayer]

Saw Frozen with my girlfriend, I thought it was very good.  Strong female leads, nice songs and well done animation.  Between this and Tangled I think Disney really has hit its stride as far as making female characters that can do all the heavy lifting.  I was also half expecting the snowman character to be annoying but was in he fact pretty enjoyable.

Spoiler:

My only gripe is I thought the face heel turn by Hans was poorly handled and unnecessary, its like they needed to shoehorn in an antagonist.  While all his behavior prior to the plot twist made it surprising it also just didn't mesh with his aims.  Lets face it, he handled the crisis management of the townsfolk in a benevolent manner and simultaneously kept Elsa from getting blood on her hands by killing the Duke's goons and saved her from a cross bow bolt only to turn around and try to kill her and Anna a little later in some half baked power grab was a stretch.  I dunno.  Other than that it was pretty great.

[Hellzed]

@Mongoose : beers ?!
That's what I had for NYE :
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/st-bernardus-abt-12/2530/
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/la-trappe-quadrupel/4565/
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/maredsous-10-tripel/2527/
And a bit of bad champagne at 0:00. We switched back to good beer at 0:01.

Oh, and I found THE girl at this party. Left the party together, got lost in Paris trying to find an open metro station, finally had a wonderful breakfast in a café.
Then I had to take a train and go back to my life. Which sucks right now.

[deathfun]

I can't sleep worth a damn and have been on an emotional rollercoaster this last month
To boot I've started working more, got pissed off at myself for ****ing something small up on a passport application (easy enough fix apparently, just gotta call and hopefully things will sort out) and have been through hell in terms of holiday ****. **** you guests at our restaurant. **** you dayside for being so ****ing ****TY AT YOUR JOBS

My intention right now is to go back to an old method of sleeping. Alcohol
I hope it works out and will correct some problems of exhaustion and probably mood. Then I can start dealing with the other conflicting emotional crap I've put myself through

EDIT: SO MUCH FOR THAT PLAN
So much for a coma. Two spurts of three hour sleep (I think anyways, I don't remember but I think I woke up to take a piss at some point) and I'm still intoxicated, feeling like ****

[Nuke]

drink another fifth. always works for me.

[Hellzed]

Just make sure that there are still times when you do not want to drink. Make sure that these times are essential to your life.
That's one of the boundaries I had to make up to be sure I was not becoming dependant on alcohol.

[Nakura]

Getting four days at Chick-fil-a next week, yeah!

[StarSlayer]

New Michelin LTX's got a workout tonight, the biggest snowstorm of the season is rolling through NE.  My Tundra is a mountain goat but with the new tires its a Sarif Industries Augmented Mountain Goat.

[Luis Dias]

Found duolingo. Trying to learn german. Give me a year, I got this.

[Nuke]

my 'write a video card in verilog' project hit a roadblock when i failed to source the resistors neccisary to build a 3 channel, 9-bit resistive ladder dac with the parts in my scrapheap. i need 12 resisters of one value, another 6 at 1/2 that value, all 1% tolerance, and 3 low value trim pots < 1kohm. i have resistors in a lot of values, but not enough of the right ones to do anything. i may need to temporarily drop down to a 6 bit dac till i can get moar parts.

meh, looked at dacs on digikey, nothing that works for me. so i went to ebay and found a bunch of 1% resistors for 4 bucks. unfortunately they will take a month to get here. might just get some at radio shack.

[z64555]

My 2-3 week of impromtu mod vacation seems to be almost over. It'll be like another 3 days or so for me to get back up to speed with... whatever I was working with.

Did have some cool happenings on Dwarf Fortress, though. I finally got a fort with over 100 citizens that wasn't starving or drinking itself to death, but I did have a situation.

Population was approximately 80 or so dwarfs at the time, and quite a few of them would vomit a bit, maybe vomit up some blood too. They'd hike it over to the hospital, but as soon as a Doc got over there they would wake up from their "rest" state and hi-tail it out of there.

I couldn't figure out what was the source, I had suspected that they might've been sick of listening to the Mayor give the same old speech about the Increasingly Tragic Tale of Dumplin on months on end, but after a month or two of him resting his laurels, the dwarfs were still sick.

Then, I found a warlock spy had infiltrated the fortress. He was eyeballing the refuse pile one too many times. I had just finished carving out the grave site, so I thought it fitting to lock him in there with some empty coffins and have him become one with the refuse.

That seemed to have helped for about a year, but it sprang back up again. I finally noticed that the dwarfs would go to a drink stockpile, take a swig of something, and then haul-ass to hospital, puking out blood as they went. I checked my stocks to see what might've been up, and I found a new Masterwork type of drink: Nether Grour. The hint right by it, (poisonous), was what tipped me off what was happening. In true dorfy Fun fashion, my drink stock consisted of about 224 units of the Grour, and about 100 total of something that was actually drinkable. I immediately marked the Grour for dumping, and promptly find out that the rest of the drinks were snatched up by thirsty dwarfs.

Well, it almost did drink itself to death, actually.


P.S.
Oh, and I've got a 1 year old Lich running around summoning a Bone Golem every now and then. Yes, this Dwarf was actually born a Lich, and nobody seems to think that's out of the ordinary.

<3 Masterwork DF