Your wallpaper, I has it

Mason, you asked and you shall recieve. Numerical value is of no pertinence.

good
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great
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Ode to Team Slayer

Ode to Team Slayer
By Michael Allison

How despondent would become the forerunners,
To see there installations shamed
With behavior such as this.
When always one ally is a Dives
There truly is no aggro reset.

In conflict to the Dives’ demands
Your also ever-present Leeroy vetos a perfect game.
“Team BRs on Snowbound” becomes
“Loading New Map” becomes “Team Slayer on Foundry”.
Said game becomes lagging opposition,
Which quickly becomes disappointing carnage report.

Dives shouts, sighs, scrams.
Leeroy asks to team up…
…and then strikes B.
Your resignation leaves but one remaining former teammate,
Brought down by one to fourty-nine,
Alone and AFK.

This is but a draft, and I may extend this by at least another stanza or two. And yes, this is for English, and despite my horrid poetry abilities, I believe this will get a high mark.

Huh?! Jesus is evolving!

Congratulations! Jesus evolved into Terry Goodkind. Would you like to give Terry Goodkind a nickname?

After reading for hours on end today, I finally finished the last book of the Sword of Truth series. I was, to say the least, astounded at the quality of writing I found within the binding’s of Confessor. Although this book has of recent been criticized for it’s ending, which has been disputed many a time over blogs, casual conversations, etc… It seems no one willing to speak up has grasped the concept of marketing, let alone good writing. You see, Terry Goodkind thought that people would discuss the book if he left the ending vague enough to be disputed. Obviously, judging by the hordes of people blogging about it, he was totally wrong.

Anyway, I also downloaded Vista Service Pack 1. It’s actually quite good! It has a couple small improvements to Vista, but considering it’s Vista, I’m glad it only screwed up one thing when I installed it.

I really didn’t have a purpose for this post. I just needed to post. I’ll post something substantial later (like this: “I’ll post something substantial later today“, with a whole extra word (read: today)).

This post needs a title (and sucks).

I warn you, this post will suck. No, really. It’s going to suck. Why? Because I’m lazy, and I really don’t want to write something long and interesting right now, I just want to summarize a couple things. What are those things? Read on, devoted reader (and if you’re reading this, you really are devoted).

First off, E. Gary Gygax, the original creator of Dungeons and Dragons has failed his saving throw vs. death a few days ago. This is really quite a sad turn of events, and, although I never knew him, I love his work, and I’d like to offer my sincere (even though I just made an awful joke in the first sentence) condolences to his friends and family. He has influenced the lives of gamers everywhere, may he roll nothing but 20s in the Great Dungeon in the Sky. I found a rather funny eulogy over here, and of course, the Order of the Stick did a sweet comic on the subject as well. Godspeed, Gary, godspeed.

The other piece of news, on the political front, is the fact that Obama appears to have broken the record for most money raised in a month or something. I dunno, it was just kinda cool. Daily Kos has more.

So that’s all for now, kids. Glad you took the time to read this crappy post, and expect less lame ones in the future. Please.

~Hawk

In which Hawk makes several lame attempts to post, and fails horribly.

Greetings, my not-so-devoted readers! It is I, once again, and I find myself writing this to remind you all that I am, in fact, still alive, even if life, the Universe, and everything seem to have conspired once again to prevent me writing such a content-free post as has quickly become our the most common (read: only) kind of post available on this blog. Now, dear reader, I invite you to watch as I scramble to find a topic for this post.

I could write about my life, but said life has been almost ridiculously uninteresting of late. I did have a rather interesting argument about Machiavelli with a friend, but I’d rather not disclose the details of that conversation, mostly because it ended with me making a complete fool of myself, and for some reason, that’s not something I’d really like to post here for everyone to read in glorious Technicolor.

Or, I could write about politics, since this blog was originally conceived for discussion of that topic, but very little has happened in that field of late, or at least very little of which I have been informed of.

Another possible topic would be computers, a great interest of mine. I suppose I could write about Apple’s new MacBook Pros, which many users say is not a significant upgrade for those machines. My two cents consists basically of the opinion that a complete redesign wasn’t really necessary, and the new machines, which have increased CPU, hard disk space, and memory, are sufficiently upgraded. In fact, I may even find myself purchasing such a machine in the near future. Also, while browsing the web, I have come across Ubuntu Studio, which professes to be a version of the highly popular Ubuntu Linux OS designed specifically for multimedia creation. I thought my readers may be interested in such an OS, and I may at some point download Ubuntu Studio, but as yet I have not and have no opinion to give.

After that short roundup of recent topics, I find it time to bring this post to a close once again. It appears that I have, in fact, written a post, although it’s quality is questionable. Dear reader, I leave its judging up to you, and I once again apologize if it does not live up to whatever standards you set.

~Hawk

P.S. The NSA is watching!

Sorry, guys…

The last week or so I’ve been enjoying vacation, and then catching up with school. I thought I would post something as recompense for a delayed desktop cleanliness guide, urged to do so solely by my own heartfelt sense of responsibility, certainly not by my nagging colleague. I haven’t written or read anything major for over a week now, excluding the false biography of Hawk I created with Nick and Krissy’s help.

DISCLAIMER: The following two sentences (including this one) may or may not contain “gamers’ humor”, which in itself is an oxymoron. Oh, and “the cake is a lie, bitch”.

I have, however, raised my highest skill in Lone Wolves (Halo 3) substantially. “I also have this cake.”

Yes, I originally defined this blog to Hawk in such terms as “a joint political blog”. Joint meaning belonging to both Hawk and I, and political meaning primarily pertaining to politics. Basically, it’s turned into the Seinfeld of blogging. This idiot child of ours is still growing though, and perhaps we can save our original intent from our natural tendency to go off-topic yet. Considering the length of this aimless, extraneous paragraph, perhaps not. We shall see.

By now I’m sure many a reader are wondering where the substance is in this article. “Where’s the beef”, so to speak. The beef is right here: in the explanation of my beef. And no, I’m not getting paid to insert terms that remind you of certain websites or restaurants in quotation marks at convenient intervals. It’s just a habit of mine. You see, this teacher at my school assigned an interesting project to his class: create a poster depicting the character of your favorite potential presidential candidate. I’m not part of his class, but that’s what I gathered from asking friends I believe to be reputable sources about the subject of the assignment. One of my peers, that I’m hesitant to call my friend, but whom I don’t dislike, was flaunting their John McCain poster all of the free portion of his school day yesterday. Anybody having read my blog knows my hatred of assumption, and absorption (my odd choice of diction). In other words, I dislike it when people simply assume the opinions of their friends, idols or parents. Socializing mostly with people my age, I deal with mostly the latter. Although I share an opinion with my father, and with many of my friends and those who I look up to, that’s just coincidence, and my political stance making my choice of friends biased. I like to think I think for myself, and value that almost above all. The individual I was talking about before doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. He’s not a bad person, or an immoral person, although he tends to think very 2-dimensionally at times. But when I tried to engage him in conversation, he basically walked away. It was aggravating. I didn’t really push the matter further (he’s about two feet taller than me and has a short fuse), but it really annoyed me. He constantly refers to himself as a republican, this 15-year-old (in other words, an individual who isn’t a registered voter), and thinks he’s portraying himself as intelligent going around asking people who they’re voting for. He doesn’t ask why. He doesn’t pry further after their response. He’s not looking for conversation, or even to convince them to vote his way; he simply quotes McCain commercials and slogans.

However, this isn’t the only thing that annoys me about this particular incident. It’s also the fact that he was invading everyone’s privacy. I, for one, have no problem expressing my stance politically. However, I know for a fact that some people would rather keep their opinions to themselves. I find it a bit disrespectful for a 15-year-old boy with no idea of the complexity of the issues he’s talking about to go up to an adult and tell them who they should vote for. This comment, coming from someone who’s a hardcore enthusiast and participant of youth for political activeness (for lack of a better term), should be taken as one that’s thought out with great care.

I apologize for this rant being cut short by the time. I just finished getting a drink and changing clothes before retiring for the night, so I don’t fall asleep in Latin tomorrow like usual. I also apologize for the lack of politics in this post on our “joint political blog” and idiot child. Instead of discussing politics, I ranted about others’ lack thereof, once again venturing into the realm of extraneous, unrelated writing.

Thanks for continuing to read this drivel, and please excuse the quality of the writing (I was tired),
Michael

I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.

I think we’re good to go. I really think so. Everything seems to be in its proper place, if that’s possible. We’ve found a theme and sidebar widgets which Mike and I seem to agree on, and someone capable of making us agree on design issues is worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. And the truly amazing part - it took us only six days since the blog opened to reach this laudable state of functionality. It had been basically ready for three or four days now, but the two of us, being the lazy bastards that we are, deigned to post. Perhaps it was because we had no interesting subject matter, but personally I think the cause is simple: as I mentioned earlier, we’re lazy. It is my profound hope that blogging as a team will help us overcome this weakness, but you never know…

Moving on, I suppose I should write something on politics, since that was supposedly one of this blog’s core topics, so I’ll try to put something together. Although I certainly have strong opinions on the subject, I really don’t keep up with the news as much as I should (my distinct lack of a working television can make it difficult), so it fell on the capable shoulders of Nick and Ethan to inform me that apparently, Wisconsin seems to have seriously, if not definitively, hurt Hillary’s chances of winning. Since both the aforementioned Ethan and Nicholas had written a post on the subject and their respective opinions, I felt compelled to throw in my two cents. I am hardly a supporter of our dear Mrs. Clinton myself, and a part of me is very, very happy to see her chances decrease, but another part of me would prefer any member of the Democratic party, which I find myself heartily supporting, over republicans such as John McCain, the Senator Palpatine of our age. However, my pronounced dislike of Hillary eventually won the internal debate, and I find myself profoundly happy for her loss, and I’ll end on that joyous note.

In our almost-daily Instant Messaging session, Mike mentioned something about putting together an instructional article on how you, the reader, can keep their computer desktop clean, stylish, and neat, so I felt I should alert you to expect that in the near future as well.

Until we meet again, I leave you with this XKCD comic, which reminds me of myself to an almost frightening degree.

Hawk

Yes, this was my idea. I saw this going …

Yes, this was my idea. I saw this going better in my head actually; this blog was supposed to have a beautiful, clean-cut layout, a proper sidebar, and be completely organized by this time today. However, since I somehow doubt anyone will mistakingly wander into the realm that is Zealous Couch Potatoes until we’re finished, I’m not going to lose sleep over it. We’re fortunate we didn’t choose www.gopgle.com for our domain, though… Moving on, this will be a blog about the varying political opinions and moral values of my peer Hawk and I. Speaking of our moral values, I’ve come here to warn you of our possible sporadic lack thereof. At times, we’ll rant about topics we ought have no say in, like abortion. We might bore you with stories of our thrilling social lives, even. We implore you to bear with us, and continue reading despite what we may put you through sometimes. On the other hand, we encourage you to respond with your angry, irrational comments if need be. Argument is the lifeblood of blogging.

Thank you for reading, and once again, I ask you to be patient; we’re slowly progressing towards a blog containing an acceptable blend of style and function. By the time most of you read this, hopefully we shall have achieved such a goal.

This is the dawning of the rest of our lives!

To a degree, it’s rather ironic that I find myself writing the post that will, if everything goes as planned, be starting off this blog. Why? Well, the “Joint Political Blog” thing was mostly (read: entirely) Mike’s idea, and yet somehow I still find myself sitting here at the keyboard, trying to write a decent blog post that doesn’t suck and is over two lines, the latter of which I seem have succeeded at.

So, you probably find yourself wondering “What’s this all about, anyway?” Well, that’s what I was suppost to be writing this post to explain, but I suppose I meandered away some… Moving on… Mike recently closed his old blog, there is no aggro reset, to move on to other projects, one of which was a “joint political blog”, which I seem to have been invited to. What I gather is that it’ll be something along the line of Daily Kos, meaning it’ll basically be a bunch of us nerds ranting about how Bush sucks, and the election, and future political topics. Recently, Mike decided to add random assorted geekery to the topic too, so now it’ll be a bunch of us nerds ranting about how Bush sucks, the election, and gadgets. Expect more posts soon, my not-so-devoted reader!

Hawk out.