Good mood due to being married and all that. The honeymoon was short but just what the doctor ordered to get my stress levels down.

So of course, one of my (possibly so-called) friends has chosen this weekend to have a meltdown and start screaming at me over...*drumroll* an argument. In Final Fantasy XI. That I (and the four observers I talked to) thought was just random banter.

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with people, when they can get all steamed up over a lousy video game.

Apparently the argument was the final straw on a host of other problems. You see, I'd organized (a few months back) what's called a "static party"...which is kinda like when you schedule to meet your friends in Diablo2 at a certain time, and never level those characters with anyone else, except you do it every week. Sounds great, yes?

Well, four out of the six people involved apparently thought so, I haven't heard from one, and the last person (subject of my rant/gripe) has apparently been hating it for a long time, and not bothering to tell anyone despite the existence of a web forum solely for the group.

I fail my comprehension check. Is this "normal" behavior, or am I justified in being confused and hurt over not-being-talked-to over a video game?

I'm getting married in 50hours 15minutes 24seconds as of RIGHT NOW.

I'm a bundle of emotions, most all of them good.

Good news. The fiancee-parents decided it was in their best interests to keep their promises. They have a somewhat stormy relationship with the fiancee anyway, and they're generally good people, so yay #1 is that we can afford to get married again. =P

Yay #2: A good buddy of mine from work has been talked into making my wedding his first-and-a-half (he assisted another wedding shoot a few months back) professional gig. This saves me ~$650 off the cost of a full-time photographer (who wanted $900, Jase will do it for $250 and me promising to be a reference).

Yay #3: From the "we're dorks" department, one of my friends just sent me a wedding gift, that consists of labeled His and Hers copies of Guild Wars. Sol, you'd like it--it's like all the best things about a MMORPG (lots of folks, lots of chatting) and all the best things about Diablo II (play style, only people you wanna play with come into combat zones with you, no monthly fee, etc) in one shiny happy game.

As of today, 29 days until I'm </single>.

Julia's parents promised $1,000 to help with the wedding, unasked-for. I thought, well, this is nice of them. And we planned with that assumption in mind.

Julia called them today, since wedding bills are starting to come due. And her dad told her that, well, he had to discuss it with her mom because they weren't sure about this and that...

Long story short, promise made, we planned around it, poof it's gone.

So where the hell am I gonna get an extra thousand bucks from?

The answer is probably going to be Julia's going-back-to-college fund. Which hurts even more.

I haven't had a free weekend in six weeks.

Damn pager.

Wedding planning hates me.

My baby girl kitty (gah, she's three and a half) got a red sticker on her file at the vet for attacking the doc. (And when little Aleksandra attacks, you KNOW she has tigers in her ancestry. I think Doc Griffiths needs at least one stitch on his nose)

To be fair, I'd attack the doc too, if I was getting Feline Leukemia, Distemper, and Feline AIDs vaccines all in one syringe.

It'll be better in August. It'll be better in August. I'll be MARRIED and not just planning it, Julia will be back in school, the cats will be calm, it'll be warm and sunny for a goddamn change.

At least I have FFXI in the two hours between getting home from work and going to pick up Julia. Anyone else here play it? Or want to? Or want to hear about it?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143427&cid=12024464

And thanks to one throwaway comment, I now have the burning desire to register "zeriel2movie.com" and make some cheezy flash trailer.

Any suggestions for the soundtrack? Or the plot, for that matter?

TL, if you wanna be my sidekick (I'm thinking "Windows-Server-Boy") you're welcome. I'm in negotiations with actresses now, and you're a "deal breaker" co-star requirement on 90% of their contracts.

This will hopefully not be an ongoing series, but unfortunately I think it may end up as such.

Smacktard #1: The Lady who has the parking space next to me at my apartment.

Look, lady. I know you're not the problem here. The problems are three-fold:

1. The spaces are tiny, even for semi-compact cars, so we have to park close to each other.
2. The retarded monkeys you apparently drive around. One of them keeps smacking your damn passenger door into the side of my car--I see the dents on my doors AND the dings in the edge of yours.
3. The fact you cannot see said dings when I point them out, and so this can't be your fault, it must be the skateboarder kids.

Smacktard #2: Dumbfuck in an Manual-transmission Elantra

Okay, I'm driving on the crowded North/South main street in the college town nearest me (North Atherton, at the Blue Course Drive intersection) last night. Traffic's thick but bearable. I leave a nice big gap, as always, when we come to the stoplight. Only guy in front of me is some dude in an Elantra. So he stalls out, or turns off his brain, or something. And drifts backwards. Ten feet, with me honking the whole time, into my front bumper (I can't go anywhere, as the semi-smacktard behind me is RIGHT behind me). Then he turns and starts gesturing wildly at me. So I calmly wave him with a "move forward" gesture. The light turns green, and he pulls immediately from the left lane, cuts across the right lane, and makes a hard right onto the side street. Wisely, I kept driving for three reasons:

1. My car was undamaged, it was a very low-impact collision.
2. I don't really give a rat's ass if his car was damaged, it looked fine and frankly I don't need to deal with insurance crap over someone else's malfunction.
3. Had I followed him and he actually pulled over to talk, I would have beat him and his car severely with the coal shovel I keep in my trunk (for digging out of my aforementioned shitty parking space)

That's all I have for the day, kids.

Shrinking Zeriel Project = 187. Yes, I'm trying to stabilize around 185.

X2: The Threat. Like Freelancer or Privateer, only on steroids. Not for everyone, but if you liked the above two games it might be worth the $30. Hard to get into, after about three hours it sudden started to open up for me.

I wonder who I offended to get modded offtopic on all four of my recent comments? I don't even post on the frontpage anymore. C'mon, if you have a problem with me, step up.

Yeah, winter is slack time for my company. Which means it's crunch time for us infrastructure people--upgrade the production systems at the low ebb, y'know?

Shrinking Zeriel Project: 192ish. I seem to have plateaued. Probably related to the lack of motivation to exercise.

I want a new job. I don't need this shit with my boss being alternately snarky and condescending all day. He thinks it's funny. I've told him repeatedly that it's not. He seems to want to be friendly and easier to work with in other respects, so I don't know if he's just brain-dead or actively trying to fuck with me.

Also, I don't make enough money to do what I want to do (namely, support the fiancee while she works on her novel, degree, and freelance writing).

Wedding planning sucks, too. But that's a rant for another time, I think. When I'm less busy.

So don't think I don't love all y'all just because I haven't posted in a while. I'm still lurking, but too busy to type. =/

Shrinking Zeriel Project:

208lbs Trend, 205.6lbs on the scale.

In other words, in just over 10 weeks, I've dropped nearly 35 lbs. ...go me. =)

Shrinking Zeriel Project: 224.8lbs trend, 220.6lbs on the scale. Go me.

Election: Concessions and no Florida crap this time. Maturity returns in some small measure. Go Kerry. Here's hoping Bush does SOMETHING to make the part of me that's Republican happy (hint, PNAC hegemony crap ain't it, and neither is fiscal irresponsibility).

Election, again: I've been branding people around me as suffering from "raving liberal/conservative syndrome". Do you suffer from the following symptoms?

• Emotional reaction of comparable strength to the birth of your child or the death of your mother, with regards to the election results.
• Inability to discuss members of the opposite party (or of both major parties) without the use of ad-hominem attacks.
• Desire to leave the country with no plan and no job waiting for you OR desire to fund the people in the first part of this question.
• Desire to see [Dick Cheney|Hillary Clinton] on the ballot in 2008.
• Disappointment that Kerry conceded instead of turning Florida into a 2000-esque fight because [he'd probably win|we could REALLY make fun of them lib'rals then.]
• Desire to make every conversation you partake in today cover the election in some way.

If you answered yes to any of the previous symptoms, you almost certianly suffer from raving conservative/liberal syndrome (RCLS). Please smack your head on your desk repeatedly until the symptoms recede or you lose consciousness and stop ranting at Zeriel how all Bush voters are clearly brain-damaged. Yes, this means you, my office-mate.

Oh, yeah. Set my AC modifier to -5 and browse my journal at 0.

Some guys just can't handle getting trolled, I guess.

By the way...GNAA is still the worst trolling group on slashdot today. Y'all need to take a cue from Trolling4Dollars, the_mad_poster, and other masters of the art.

The "You have 458 new messages" thing at the top of the slashdot mainpage made me giggle, at least.

Warning, this journal is full of vitriol I've accumulated today between windows upgrades, so if you're unaccustomed to angry Zeriel and would rather not see it, close the browser. Really.

Thing one: People who don't understand firearms and melee combat and the relationship between the two.
I saw a bunch of people bitching today about some police shootings where cops were being criticized for shooting melee-armed (knives and clubs) assailants who were 20ft away.
People. If you've ever taken a serious tactical pistol course, you know that 20ft is considered the absolute closest you can let someone with a knife get to you before he has a credible chance of knifing you before you shoot him. That's just fact. The qualifier for "expert pistol" is 21ft, starting from holstered pistol. Now, most cops in this situation aren't draw-and-firing, but they likely aren't expert-rated marksmen either.

Thing two: My fucking whore of an ex-girlfriend, who, in addition to telling everyone she knows that I'm a rapist and she isn't pressing charges because "she doesn't want to get dragged through the mud by [Zeriel's] lawyer" (ha ha, bitch, you mean the detective who we both gave statements to told you that you had a 0% chance of getting the DA to attempt to prosecute on such a bullshit accusation), has now just disbanded the acapella group I helped create--after running me out of it--for no good reason whatsoever aside from "she's sick of doing it". Bravo, you stupid cockpunch, screw it up for everyone just to get one more tiny cut in my side.

Thing three: Take a compliment, people. If you ask me to read your writing (this one goes out to you, my fiancee), especially when said writing IS PUBLISHED IN A MAJOR REGIONAL MAGAZINE, do not then say "oh, not really, it's not great" when I tell you I like the two pieces you did.

That's all my vitriol for the week.

BTW, Diet Day whatever (19?): 230.1lbs. Go me.

Annoyance is when a machine pages due to full hard disk at 2:30AM.

Irritation is when a second machine pages due to full hard drive at 4:45AM.

Anger is when a third machine crashes utterly at 6:15AM, and said machine is the main processing machine for the main revenue-generating business unit, and it can't be remote-rebooted so you have to go in to work to kick it.

Seething anger is when you subsequently have to go in to work at 8AM anyway because your boss can't concieve of not having a sysadmin in the building for a few hours during the workday.

Rage is when the office is subsequently out of hot chocolate, and there's nothing but cheap decaf coffee and donuts your diet won't let you have.

Incoherent rage is when the guys leave for lunch without getting a pickup order from you, despite knowing that with the other sysadmin away, it's policy that I'm not allowed to leave the building even for lunch during my shift.

Blind, fearsome, total hatred is when the development team blithely returns the Visual C++ CD that's been the one black spot on your software license audit for EIGHTEEN MONTHS, after claiming all this time they were clueless as to it's location, when it was apparently sitting in the CD drive of the dev server they don't let IT touch.

Now someone hosed their Windows XP machine and they want me to nuke the OS from orbit to be sure it's fixed, despite the fact that it's broken because they insisted on not letting me handle the install the first time around.

I'm going to be getting the sledgehammer out of the maintenance closet very damn soon now.

ASZP Day 22: 231.3lbs Go me.

Damn cheese fries at the bowling alley last night, but for you I mighta hit 231 today.

Oh willpower, why do you desert me when Ryan and Jeff order fries?
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I left a comment on religion on Sol's journal here, and there are a lot of other interesting responses from other people.

Gets one to think about their beliefs a bit, seeing the answers a cross-section of relatively smart and creative people have.

I can never shake the feeling that no one ever sees the whole picture, and there are so many different ways to approach the divine.
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Yeah, so I hear a lot about people chatting on IM and exchanging e-mails and such. And y'all are pretty cool people, so I want in. *grins* You can see my e-mail address, and my IM name is JYRamius (registered it for an online RPG in 1995 and it stuck. Hard.)

There's at least one or two of you that I need to give my phone number to, one because I told you you could call me if you needed someone to talk to, and one because I live in the same town and we need to go grab a beer or something.