fap somewhere else

Does <insert name of roommate here> really think I can't see him over there fapping?  Does he think his current activity is made less obvious if he's wearing a shirt to cover it up?  I can see your arm moving, <insert name of roommate here>, and you're not fooling anyone.  Come on, your computer's a fucking laptop, take it back to your fucking bedroom and fap there, where I don't have to see it.  I at least have the courtesy to fap in private where nobody else has to see me doing it.

2023 edit: someone with nothing better to do and a boner for censorship flagged this post as "sensitive content".

Loose ends

Reading back through my old posts here, there's some loose ends to tie up.

• Blog layout issues with post elements disappearing: This was because I edited the template HTML, and for some stupid reason this prevents Blogger's options from being able to change things.  I fixed this on my main blog a long time ago, I'll do the same here.
• Rumble Racing FAQ, HTML version: I never did make this.  I've also kind of stopped playing Rumble Racing entirely.
• Guitar Hero controllers committing suicide: This happened, then I found two copies of GH5 for PS2 new in box with guitar controller at Wal-Mart for $20 each, so... fixed.   The GH5 controllers have a much more competently-designed neck connection with proper male/female connectors and no neck wobble, and have yet to fail me.
• F1 race torrents: I didn't find any torrents of Formula 1 races, so I stopped looking.  F1 now airs on NBCSN, and I barely watch it anymore anyway.  If I feel like paying money I can watch a livestream on their website.
• Opacity of posts affecting images therein: because I was a n00b and didn't know about the rgba() method of defining color in CSS.
• Tales of Fridays: We never did finish Tales of the Abyss, and I never did figure out the single target->AOE FOF thing I was wondering about.
• The annoying window focus problem: Never did figure it out.  I now use focus follows mouse anyway (thanks, TweakUI!), so it's not really an issue anymore.

If there are any other loose ends, they may very well remain that way.  I don't leave posts as drafts for all eternity on this blog.

3DS streetpass relay

Because Nintendo's Zone locator refuses to work for me with ip geolocation disabled, I have to wander around random places in Charlottesville and look for the "The Nintendo Zone service is available here." notice on my 3DS.  The following is therefore a list of all places in Charlottesville I've found with Nintendo Zone.  At some point I need to try hitting the fast food ones from the drive-thru.

• McDonald's
• Verified streetpassable from outside the building:
• Pantops (limited non-handicapped parking right outside the front doors, was able to get streetpasses from those spots without leaving my car)
• Barracks (may take a bit, but it'll happen.  They have outside seating, make use of it)
• Shoppers' World (streetpassable from parking lot, without leaving car)
• Verified, but streetpassed from inside because I was eating there:
• Ridge/McIntire
• Burger King
• Has Zone, haven't successfully streetpassed:
• Barracks (couldn't streetpass from outside the building.  3DS was going back and forth between saying StreetPass and Internet.  I'll head back when they're at peak around lunchtime so I can blend into the crowd and not end up buying anything)
• Haven't verified:
• Pantops
• Seminole Trail
• Fashion Square Mall
• You'll have to go in to get this one.
• It takes eons to happen, so sit down at a table outside Sbarro and get tortured by all the food smells until dat green LED flashes.
• Also, even though Red Robin is open later than the rest of the mall, the Zone is off when the mall is closed, or so it seems.

Places we have that I've heard have Nintendo Zone, but that I haven't verified:

• Best Buy (I bought my 3DS there, but survey says it's a slim chance I'll go back there anytime soon)
• Barnes & Noble (I need to go there anyway because I have a gift card to spend on manga)
• The AT&T store on Emmet St. near Arby's and CookOut (based on the fact that a valid Nintendo Zone SSID is "attwifi")
• Starbucks (Pantops, corner, where else?  The kiosks don't count (the only one I know of is in Fashion Square Mall anyway), and the cafe inside Barnes and Noble isn't actually a Starbucks)
• I haven't hit up downtown for streetpasses yet, but there might be a Zone down there somewhere, worth a stroll up and down the mall to check

The next steps to take after verifying everything:

• Get a laptop
• Make a list of all the MAC addresses of the Nintendo Zone access points around here
• Set up HomePass using said list
• Far off in the future: get a Raspberry Pi and set up SpillPass-Pi so I can HomePass on demand easily with a dedicated device

Dilemmas

I have wallpapers that are very fappable, but I don't want to get used to having fap material just by minimizing everything.

I'm a pervert, but am I enough of a pervert to order those panties sized for men off of J-List?  Survey says no, but if nobody has to know...

I'm unemployed, my lease ends in two months, and I don't have any good leads on a new job.  Yet I'm so introverted/socially anxious that I want to solve the problem myself rather than seeking help, even though solving it myself clearly isn't working.

I want to get fit, but I never really feel like going out and getting exercise, even just a walk around the block until I can walk farther and/or faster without getting winded...

I need a place to vent

Since the people this rant talks about might read my main blog, I'm posting this here.  I'm changing all the names around, but to any one of them it'll probably still be obvious when I'm talking about them.  This is more than just my pent-up frustration, this reflects the frustrations of a good portion of our group.  My opinions also are not necessarily the same as those of the rest of the group.

So, first off.  We watch anime every week.  A specific person, whom I'll call Aaron (yes, I'm starting with A and working up through the alphabet), is the one who provides the computer, gets the episodes, etc.  His position is an elected one.  Yet, our group has had very little to no say in what we watch.  I'm only mildly annoyed at this, as he hasn't really shown anything that I object to, but others in the group have a stronger dislike of it.  However, we all agree that a person in an elected position should listen to and consider the opinions of the rest of the group.  My opinion of what we've been watching lately also differs a fair amount from the rest of the group.  I enjoyed watching two of the series and was curious enough about the third that I didn't mind seeing it.  Others felt like "what's the point of coming to showings when we're not watching anything I can enjoy and/or haven't seen before?"

Aaron basically has a general belief that if you don't come to showings, your opinion matters less.  However, there is a huge flaw in that thought.  Mainly, people who would come to showings if there was a reason for them to do so.  The easiest way to make it so they can show up and enjoy themselves is to involve them in the decision-making process and value their opinions.

Outside of his elected position, Aaron is a nice person.  I get along with him fairly well.  Others take issue with him and some of his interests and actions, but that's normal.  The thing that I think makes me different from the rest is that I try to value what I like in a person and overlook any bad points as much as I can until something happens that just can't be overlooked.  It seems like a good portion of the group sees the bad points and refuses to see the good until the bad is remedied.

Which brings me to the second person, whom I'll call Bob.  Bob has always been a difficult person to get along with.  Most of the time it's fine, and he does have a sense of humor that it's possible to trigger reliably, but on occasion and seemingly randomly he'll either go into extreme defensive mode or just be a total jackass.  This was highlighted recently.  A portion of our group rents a house.  One person signed the lease, the rest sublet.  Well, the person who signed the lease moved out recently.  So, things had to be shuffled around and now it's Bob's name on the lease.  Things changed about the house (at least towards those of us who don't live there) quickly.  Up until the lease change, the house had been a periodic hangout spot after a showing or meeting.  Now, not so much.  If he doesn't know why you're there, or doesn't agree with it, you get told to get out.  This actually erupted into forum drama in not one but two threads that had to be locked, and he ended up apologizing, but not without a lot of effort on everyone else's parts.

One issue is that Aaron and Bob hang out and get along with each other pretty well (they share a number of interests).  I don't agree with the rest of the group, but they really just want Aaron to graduate and move away so that hopefully Bob will go away as well.  So, in other words, losing a perfectly good member of the group to get rid of the less desirable member that he's friends with.

Another thing that annoys me, and seemingly only me, is that the rest of the group sees no foul in talking about anyone behind their backs.  They're generally faulting people for things they might not have a lot of control over regarding their character.  Who knows what gets said about me when I'm not around, and I do know there are subsets of the group that do things that I'm mysteriously not invited to.  I'm not asking to be invited to everything anyone in our group does, but when stuff like this happens while I'm there, I can't rule out the possibility of it happening when I'm not there.

I had at one point considered moving into the house I mentioned previously.  Now, I don't really want to.

Also, the showing tonight is a movie I know nothing about and a movie that's largely out of context from a bigger series that I have no interest in.  Surprise, the rest of the group had zero involvement in choosing these movies.  I don't think I'll be going to the showing tonight.  I would have much preferred another theme night where people bring in an episode that fits a specific pre-announced theme.  Those are always fun.

Now, Charlie, whom I get along with pretty well, is considering running for the position of "director" and managing the showings, since Aaron wants to concentrate on his 4th year classes, which is reasonable.  Charlie told me his plan and I like it a lot better than what we currently have.  Our showings have three slots, which generally we watch three or four episodes of each series per showing, so that it works out to about 4 hours.  He's sticking with the three slots (we tried four a while back, it died horribly, and two is too few, three just seems to work perfectly), but, if I remember correctly, dividing it up as such: The first slot will be a 26 episode series that will go on the entire semester.  The second slot will be two 12 or 13 episode series, when we finish the first, we'll start the second.  The third is essentially a variety slot.  Basically, in this slot, we'll show random episodes.  If a bunch of people have been talking about a specific series around the rest of the group and enough people are intrigued, we'll slap an episode of it in so they can see what exactly is being discussed.  There's also those series that just wouldn't go over well being shown for an entire semester (or even half of one), but would be perfect for a single night.  Other times, the variety slot would be a rotation of short OAVs and movies.  It seems like a pretty good idea.  Also, we'd still have a couple theme showing nights per semester, which gives the group at large even more opportunity to choose what gets shown.

Now all we have to do is get people to stop (verb: combine the meanings of discredit, insult, and discriminate)ing against other people's tastes and saying they need to stop feeling a certain way or liking whatever they happen to like.  Our group has been trying to maintain a "whatever you like, you're welcome here and free to talk about it" mentality, but with random bigots thrown in it gets difficult to maintain that.  Also, we kind of have a double standard because we openly don't like furries, but then again nobody likes furries.

Also, regarding showings, the group has been trying to reacquaint itself with its western side for a while.  We've technically always been a general comics and animation group, but the core content of the meetings and showings for quite a while has been purely manga and anime.  A fair amount of the group for whatever reason (or lack thereof) doesn't like anything western.  I'm personally open to the western stuff, but since I haven't ever been the biggest fan of it, I don't know what's out there outside of the mainstream.  Bringing showings back into the context, one of the series we watched was a western series, but so many people didn't like even the simple idea of seeing something animated that had English audio that I'm pretty sure that we don't have a western slot for next semester.

This brings in Aaron's belief that if you don't come to showings your opinion doesn't matter.  Also, there is indeed someone who came to showings just for the western series, and left after it ended.  We really can't say we're trying to bring the western side back into the club if we don't even try.  Zero (well, one) of our meetings so far have had anything regarding western series as the topic.  That one meeting was early on in the semester and since then we haven't even touched western stuff as a topic.  The one person who was exclusively into the western stuff resumed not coming to meetings.  Either we need to be a 50/50 group, or we need to be all Eastern stuff and advertise ourselves as such.  One or the other.

It's Official...

...unixkcd breaks every other comic.

FIX YOUR SHIT RANDALL

Annoying Problem

Besides Windows, my computer has an annoying problem that manifests itself randomly. It's happening right now, and on a much larger scale than it ever used to.

When I click a window's button on the taskbar, it gets focus as normal. But if I try to click anything at all on that window, even on the title bar (say, to close the window), the window loses focus. The only way to make it regain focus is to minimize and restore it with the taskbar, which for whatever reason still works with the mouse.

How the hell am I typing this then? Keyboard events still work fine. I can change tabs in firefox with Ctrl+Tab (not sure if it's built in, Tab Mix Plus has options for it though), use Tab to move through the links on a page, and Enter to "click" links.

This is really annoying, as you can tell, and I don't know the fix for it. My only recourse at the moment is to reboot. Which I hate doing.

Edit: okay this is really weird. I wanted to link to this in an update on twitter, so I went to bit.ly to shorten the post's URL. Since they use web 2.0 faggotry I couldn't just hit enter on the shorten button and have it work. So I clicked it, and now mouse events work as expected once again.

Web 2.0 is anti-accessibility. Adding that to my list of reasons why I hate it.