Sony has actually refrained from bringing up anything particularly stupid and/or hilarious between now and my last post... so I give you a few bits of my current life, instead. Feel free to turn around and go do whatever else it was you were going to do.

Anyone remember this? You know... from back when CyanChat was cool... before everyone got "too old" and started taking things far too seriously and made the place generally not so fun to hang around? Err... sorry. Anyway, I had a nice time going back and remembering all the names on that image that I haven't seen in... forever. The image was made during a transition, really. There are lots of new names on there, and lots of old names... it's weird. Sort of the best of both worlds for me. (Kind of.)

I've decided that I want the Battlestar Galactica DVD set. No! Not the new one. The real one. The cool one. At first, I wasn't so sure it was the show for me... but, thanks to the massive backstory on everything that Capella's been filling me in on, I've come to appreciate it and all the trouble they went through making it. ...and then how the new one self-destructed itself into the atrocity that plagues the SciFi Channel. 1980s-era science fiction, for the win, man.

I've heard lots and lots of good reviews about Half-Life 2: Episode 1 since it's release... so I decided to bite the bullet and see what all the fuss was about, since Valve seems set on releasing their next game in episodic format. It's amazing. Naturally. It's Valve. Have they ever released something sub-par? I read a review where the guy mentioned how since the game was small (I finished it in about eight hours, actually. I looked around ALOT and listened to the incredible amount of dialogue.) Valve could pay attention to the finer details... and geez, was he right. In this game, you have Alyx as a side-kick for most of the game, and her ambient chatter is amazing... This game is one of the most complete feeling games I've ever experienced. First-Person Shooter aside, Half-Life is awesome. A small example that was particularly sweet: We were venturing through street tunnels under City 17... It was completely and totally pitch black without the flashlight. I make sure there's no zombies that'll launch themselves at me before shutting the light off to recharge the battery, like I've done hundreds of times... and, suddenly... I heard a zombie-moaning sound but... it was somehow different. So I swing around to the source of the noise and immediately snap the light on, ready to smash the zombie with the Gravity Gun (which, I might add, gets excessive use in this game... SO FUN!!) and the light reveals.......... Alyx. Who bursts into laughter and declares "I got you!" Geez, I could of panicked and killed her. But that was sooo cool. Yup. It was. Played it once on Normal, going through it again on Hard. The graphics... the dialogue... the sheer depth and realism is just... amazing. Get it. Now. (Except you people who like to typecast FPSes. Don't get it. You just won't see past that part! (Hwahaha.))

I've been trying to build a new router out of a version of BSD. My goal was for one powered by OpenBSD. But to insure uninterrupted internet access, I converted my FreeBSD server into a sort of makeshift router. Unfortunately, after toiling for days configuring the dumb thing to actually allow connections? I found out that port forwarding was controlled by a service that needed to be restarted to make changes. That's unacceptable, I'm sorry. My Linux router with the program IPTables make changes immediately, without restarting anything... I'm not too happy. As a result, my server isn't on the network right now, since the firewall is still configured as a router, and if I plugged it in right now, it'd screw up my entire network. So I need to figure out how to restore everything without recompiling the kernel AGAIN. Ugh.

On a related note, I recently purchased a new LAN switch. 16 ports of local area network goodness. I'd outgrown my old switch of 5 ports, and TW showed me an awesome deal on a NetGear FS116. It's very nice. It's only twice the size of my old switch (maybe even slightly less) with three times the amount of ports. The old switch will retire to Xbox Halo LAN parties, in which only four things must be connected to it.

I've also been browsing deviantArt recently. (Bad GS. You know what that does to you.) Well, I came across a few tutorials of how to do things like fur and such (being the animal art buff that I am... which I don't really talk about much... animals in general, mind you, people... let's not get into any stereotypical "furry" crap you all like to flow into). I've never really paid much attention to these tutorials before, but I decided to read one just for the heck of it... and, wow. It's neat that people are trying to share their techniques on how they do stuff. Actually makes me feel that I have a chance at art, too. (hah) So now, as a result... I want a tablet. A Wacom Intuos3. No smaller than their 6x11 widescreen model. A whopping 400 bucks, ugh. These things are horrifically expensive... I'm kind of in a perdicament over the thing, too. It's like... on one hand, I've never really tried digital art because I have no skill and no tools. So if I buy a tablet, that could very well open the door. On the other hand, what if I get a tablet and I don't like it, or it doesn't open the door like I thought it would, and I wind up spending 400 dollars on something I'll never use.

So I'm beating my brains over that... bleh.

Anyway, I'm tired now (finally), so I'm going to sleep now.