Waiting for a sign

Right now I'm listening to The Scarecrow by Avantasia. And every time I listen to this album, I get flashbacks to the very first time I heard it. I get this thrill inside me, and not just because it's an excellent Power Metal album. I always flash back to my first impressions. Like, hearing the first song and thinking, "Oh, my God. Is that Roy Khan?" Then I hear the second song, and I'm like "Oh, my God. Is that Jorn Lande?" Then I hear the third song, and I'm like "Holy fucking shit. Is that Mike Kiske?" I mean, Christ. Helloween pretty much gave birth to Power Metal, and here is the original lead singer of the band, assisting in the birth of one of the genre's finest hours.  It's like if I published a book, and Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein got in a fist fight over which one of them was my biggest influence. Which would be real impressive, as they're all dead, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, no long-winded essay here. Just, if you're looking for something new to listen to, give Avantasia a try. And if you like it, take a look at all the people that collaborated on it, and give their albums a listen. You may just find a whole new vista of music to appreciate.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Align yourself

I've been seeing here and there demotivators based on the alignment chart from Dungeons and Dragons. In particular, ones showing all nine alignments, using characters from shows/comics/movies/etc to illustrate the various alignments. The first one I saw showed how Batman, depending on the writer, can fit into any of the nine alignments (though the one for Chaotic Evil was a bit of a stretch).

While sitting around at work yesterday, I started coming up with an alignment chart based on characters from Firefly. At first, I thought "Nine characters, nine alignments, perfect." Then it occurred to me that I'd have to really stretch character interpretations to make three of the guys on the show evil. So, I ended up going with three bad guys from the show (well, one was from the movie). I figured I'd get complaints from doing a Firefly chart and leaving out (insert name of whatever character I left out here), but I figured I'd get even more complaints if I made (insert character name here) evil for the sake of getting all nine on the chart.

Tonight, I found myself continuing the trend with Babylon 5 characters. I'm thinking I might do Stargate SG-1 next, or I might get bored with this and move on to something else.

I'm including the charts in this post. Before any of you get all uppity and shout "Hey, why wasn't X included?" I'd like to point out that Wash is not on the Firefly chart. If I can be OK with excluding one of my favorite characters, you guys can suck it up, too.

 

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

I was thinking about those letters you sometimes get from family members who live far away and/or travel a lot. I've noticed that it seems that it's always the wife who writes the actual letter, even when she's not be the one who's the blood relative. I tried to imagine what a letter from the husband might sound like.

Dear Phil and What's-Her-Name:

I'm just teasing, Janie. I remember your name. Well, we had quite a year! Jimmy came home for a week from Des Moines or Spokane or wherever the hell it is he lives now. He's got a good job up there, which is good because I worked my ass off for ten years to pay for that degree! We met him at the airport, and he bitched about my driving on the way back, like he always does. We sat around and shot the shit for a while. We had some of that new beer Budweiser makes that's made from wheat. Humperdorf or Humperdink or whatever down the street told me it's pretty good, and he oughta know, being German and all.

Here's us in front of some
mountains somewhere

In May we went on a trip to England. By the way, DON'T GO TO ENGLAND IN MAY! The weather sucked, though the food wasn't as bad as everyone says it is. We stayed at some nice chateaus were they make wine, or was that when we went to France last year? Well, now that I think about it, I don't remember anyone at the place speaking too good English, and I'm pretty sure "chateau" is a French word. So that was probably France. Beautiful women there. In France, I mean. England probably had some lookers as well, but it was raining all the damn time so I couldn't see. I wonder why they call those guys Frogs? Or is that the French again?

Anyway, after that, we visited Gretta, who's living in Zurich now. It was nice there, and I got to see my grandkids. I taught them "pull my finger." Great kids, though I could swear that one of them looks a lot like that Hispanic guy that used to live down the hall from her when she first moved out. Your mother thinks I'm insane, but I don't know. I don't remember anyone in our family ever having hair that dark. We were supposed to go on a tour of the city, but my knee was acting up from all that rain in England, so I stayed behind while your mother went on it. Did you know they get The Simpsons out there? You wouldn't believe how weird they all sound in German. Funny, and all this time I thought they spoke Swiss out there. I asked Gretta's husband, and he said there isn't any such language as Swiss. Can you imagine that? That's gotta be weird, living in a country without its own language. Well, besides America, that is.

Oh, your mother said that Zurich is lovely. She's got about four zillion pictures to show you if you ever stop by to see us (hint, hint).

And so we're home now, resting our bones before the fire and all that stuff old farts like us are supposed to do. I spend most evenings at the V.F.W. Hall, and God knows how your mother keeps busy. You should give her a call some time, she pines like crazy for you kids. It's funny, you spend years scrimping and saving for your kids, praying for the day they move out so you can get some peace and quiet. And then one day you look around, and realize they're gone, and you don't have a clue what to do with yourself anymore.

Well, I gotta run. Hal Johnstone died last week. You remember him, guy from the V.F.W. who always gave you that cinnamon candy you hated. We're having a memorial or some crap for him tonight, and I gotta press my good pants for it.Hope you're doing well.

Love,

Dad

P.S.
I remember now. The French are Frogs. The English are Limeys.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Explicit content ahead. Viewer discretion is advised.

Last week, I was on the Wikipedia page for fuck. It was not the random wandering it might sound like. I'd gotten there while looking up the etymology of the phrase "screw the pooch." You can imagine how. I was there to try to find out where the word comes from, and I guess unsurprisingly, no one's sure.

I'm in your wikipedia
defacing your pagez

Anyway, it looked like someone else had gotten there before me, and had decided to have a little fun. In the middle of the article, something like the 3rd or 4th sentence in the second paragraph, someone had written something like "ooooFUCKYOUfuckfuckfuckyouOOooOOoofuck!" After applauding him for his creativity, originality, and high-brow sense of humor, I went to edit the page to remove it. However, someone else had gotten to it before me.

I was informed by a friend that Wikipedia has bots that go through the site removing vulgarity. They work pretty quick, too, as the brilliant observation made by the gentleman quoted above was removed less than one minute after it had been added. When I was told that, I found myself wondering if the bots would be so quick to spot defacement that was more subtle, especially on a page that's full of vulgarity by necessity. So I hatched a scheme, one that if the guy who'd been on the page before me had seen it, may have responded in an awed "no way d00d, u r teh g31gh!"

I figured, what's the point of defacing Wikipedia if it's gonna be noticed and removed before you can even show it to your friends? I wanted something more insidious, something that'd make you go back and say "Hey, did I just read that right?" Not that I think that I'm some sort of evil mastermind for plotting to edit a webpage with malice aforethought, but I've been Trolling since the World Wide Web was getting slapped on its backside by its obstetrician, and I've never been satisfied with doing the same-old same-old, so I figured I had to do something to keep my hand in.

What I did was simple. At several points throughout the page, I inserted the adjective "fucking" into a sentence. For instance, "Non-English-speaking cultures tend to recognize the word's vulgarity, however, it is generally not censored as fucking frequently as in English-speaking cultures." You probably noticed it, as you had advanced warning it was coming. However, the bots that caught the other guy in under 60 seconds didn't spot it at all, and it was about an hour and a half before my "contribution" was noticed and removed.

Subtlety is the key. A friend of mine posted a comment to another page which is still there. I won't say what page, or what the comment was, because I want to see how long it'll be before someone notices it on their own. It's been there since sometime last year, and I find it hard to believe that no one's spotted it for what it is. I guess no one's paying attention. That's what I get for picking a page as high-profile as "fuck." Next time, I'll have to pick something like the page of Dame Edna. I bet it'd be years before someone spotted a fake comment lurking in there.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights