Category Archives: RANDOMIZER9.COM

ANIMATION, RANDOM REVIEW, RANDOMIZER9.COM, Videogames, Wreck-It Ralph

RANDOM REACTION: Wreck-It Ralph

Thank you, Disney, for finally giving us a really good movie about video games.  Wreck-It Ralph is an homage to all of video gaming, not just the ‘arcade days.’  The best compliment that I can give to it is that you don’t have to know anything about games to enjoy it.  Granted, you’ll get more out of it if you have played video games, but they do a good job of explaining how things work in the world behind the arcade screen.

The video game cameos/references/in-jokes all made sense.  I never got that feeling of “HEY! LOOK! IT’S SO-AND-SO! AREN’T WE CLEVER!” that sometimes comes with movies like this.  Everything just felt right.

Despite being labeled as a kids’ movie, Wreck-It Ralph has some dark moments and is rated PG.  There were plenty of funny moments, and I heard as many adults laughing (including myself) as I did kids throughout.  I am going to gladly watch it a few more times in the theaters and buy the inevitable Blu-Ray release.

YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT!

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CAMPING, CARS, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOM STOPS, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WORDS

11 Things I Noticed After Oklacon

I would drive one thousand miles…

Of course, now that its all said and done, one last list.

  1. I heard more conversations about DnD this weekend then I have in my entire life up to this point.
  2. Not sure which is worse: watching the Dallas Cowboys nearly blow the game on TV or hearing them nearly blow it on the radio.
  3. I put 1,000+ miles on the Excelsior during the trip…whew.
  4. Three days of sleeping on the ground made me really appreciate my bed.
  5. I was fortunate enough to have only encountered one raccoon.
  6. No matter how tired I am, no matter how many hours I’ve spent on the road, no matter how badly I want to get home, there’s always time for a stop at Buc-ees.
  7. Gas at Buc-ees was $2.99 a gallon for regular unleaded, WOW.
  8. The logjam I hit on I-35 South going home had me wishing I’d taken 281 instead, ugh.
  9. RED DIRT EVERYWHERE GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF
  10. Lesson learned: if I come back I’m getting a tent spot away from the bathrooms and the campfire.
  11. I am so glad I took Monday off from work to recover.  After what happened the last time, I almost stayed home!
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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOM STOPS, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WHATS GOING ON, WORDS

40 Things I Noticed During Oklacon

Have some corn squeezens!

I’ve never been to an outdoor convention before, nor to Oklahoma, so Oklacon promised to be a different experience.  Indeed it was!

  1. Parking on top of the hill made me appreciate having a Honda CR-V instead of a Dodge Neon all the more.
  2. Standing in the slow registration line wasn’t all that bad after 7+ hours on the road.
  3. I was a little worried about finding a decent radio station, then realized I should have been more worried about reception.
  4. Apparently only loud people stay up late at night…argh
  5. Chopping wood in the middle of the night?  SERIOUSLY?
  6. I know darn well there’s no signal, but I keep checking my phone. I may have a problem.
  7. About the only thing I could do with this phone was update this list.
  8. As is the custom, Artist’s Alley was located in Mos Isley.
  9. The hard ground kept me from sleeping at night, but at least I was warm. /shrug
  10. There were no smut writers at the artist’s meetup, or at least none willing to own up to it.
  11. The weather was pretty nice once the chill got out if the air…unfortunately it got a little too warm on Saturday.
  12. Doesn’t seem to be much concern about ‘breaking the magic’ here…then again there isn’t a ‘headless lounge’ either.
  13. I enjoyed the ‘Furry common sense’ panel, learned a lot of ‘good to know’ information.
  14. Love the little ‘codes’ they put on the badges.
  15. They had ‘predator’ and ‘prey’ designs for the baseball caps, clever.
  16. Bears are omnnivores, so I could go either way…fark it, I bought one with a predator design.
  17. Someone reportedly got cactus needles stuck in their hand, not sure if there was a mouse available to assist.
  18. What would a ‘redneck’ fur like Mr. Drunky up there be called?
  19. Bad Science was DEPRESSING, though Dr. Nuka kinda turned it around at the end
  20. Favorite new phrase, heard during Bad Science: “Animal Malfunction”
  21. Got my first badge commission done. I liked it, and I paid for another one.
  22. I really need to establish a fursona, the second artist I purchased a commission from had all these questions and I was all “I DON’T KNOW!”
  23. Some guy called me ‘Ed’ and totally confused me until I realized it was on the badge I had commissioned and was now wearing.
  24. Nothing like thinking you lost your wallet to make for an exciting evening.
  25. One benefit of being an early riser is there’s always hot water in the shower.
  26. Big thanks to whomever left the giant bottle of body wash in the showers.  Not that I was out, but ‘fresh mango’ wasn’t quite the vibe I was going for…need to check the label next time.
  27. I woke up on Saturday morning to find someone asleep on top of a hill…WTF?
  28. Finally realized what I had forgotten to bring: A roll of toilet paper.  Granted, they had plenty, but still, I always feel better having a spare roll.
  29. The bathrooms got progressively worse and worse as the weekend progressed, but I’ve used outhouses, so no biggie.
  30. Second thing I forgot: an air mattress.  I sleep on my side and my hip bone was constantly touching the ground as I slept…ow!
  31. The Mini Moon Pies were okay until the sun came out on Saturday,  oh well.
  32. Trebuchets are cool.
  33. Everything felt inverted: I eventually purchased a badge to identify myself as being straight.
  34. The fursuit parade got moved FORWARD an hour? They know we’re OUTSIDE, right?
  35. Never been to a con that had two fursuit parades, so that was cool.
  36. Sat in on a International Anthropomorphic Research Project group chat and learned a little bit more about myself.
  37. Someone made an interesting point: we use funny animals to entertain our children and expect them to forget about them once they grow up.
  38. When I heard they were making stone soup, I got a mental image of people throwing Cheetos, Pocky and M&Ms into the pot.
  39. Judging how much heat is coming out of a propane stove in the middle of the day is tricky.
  40. When the wooden handle on your saucepan catches fire, there’s too much heat.
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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOM STOPS, RANDOMIZER9.COM, WORDS

20 Things I Noticed While Driving to Oklacon

Smiles?  What? Oh, its FIVE MILES, derp

My trip to Oklacon 2012 is now over and I had a fun time.  Due to a lack of access to the tubes while I was there, everything is going up late, so ‘bear’ with me as I get caught up. 🙂

  1. I have to start off with the oddball store names I saw on US 281: “Aristacats,” “City Drug,” “Mr. Cut Rate,” “Stop-n-fetchum,” and “Feedlot Restaurant.” Best one? “Scooter’s Adult Bookstore.”
  2. If you are in a small town, isn’t it presumptuous to call yourself a National Bank?
  3. Taking the scenic route was a good idea, lots of beautiful country to see.
  4. “Mountaintop Land Bargains” – not sure if company name or actually selling land on mountain tops.
  5. If the speed limit sign outside of a town has a red border around it, it means they ain’t fooling around!
  6. Best thing ever: “Pie happy hour”
  7. I was so happy to finally see a “Speed Limit 75MPH” sign.
  8. I think my heart skipped a beat when I first realized my cell phone signal was gone and it wasn’t coming back for 3 days.
  9. Passed by a store called “The Store.” And I thought the HEB marketing department was lazy.
  10. I’ve seen town names on water towers, but a silo?  I guess you have to work with what you have.
  11. Stuck behind a slow pickup after about two hours, surprised it took that long.
  12. A restaurant named “Hamburger Hill?” REALLY?
  13. I saw a bunch of classic cars pass by at a stop light in a small town.  It must have been Homecoming Night.
  14. Cutting horses?  Its a cry for help, methinks.
  15. Dear Dairy Queen, please make all of your restaurants like the nice one south of Mineral Wells. Thanks.
  16. “Keep Mineral Wells crazy?” Maybe they should have a furcon. NOTE: The next few are after I entered OK.
  17. “Bridge ices before road?” Thanks for the science lesson, roadsign.
  18. A lot of casinos here, hmm.
  19. Dafuq are ‘jake brakes’ and ‘engine brake?’
  20. When I first saw a 25MPH speed limit in a little town, I expected to see a horse-drawn buggy somewhere. I never did so I concluded that they were just being jerks.
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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOMIZER9.COM

Oklacon 2012 Journal #3: Road Trip!

I will drive 500 miles

One of the bigger challenges of my trip to Oklacon is going to be the drive: according to Yahoo Maps, the shortest route from San Antonio is more-or-less a 500 mile straight shot up US Highway 281 to Roman Nose State Park.  While I will be bypassing the messes to be found in Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, there will instead be lots of stopping at lots of small towns along the way.

Being from a small town myself, I’m okay with that.  It is going to be nice to be out on the road seeing things besides gas stations and fast-food joints.  Also, given my intolerance for spending long times in the car, there will also be plenty of opportunities to stop for rest, drink, food, and attending to certain biological needs. 🙂

This will be the first true test of my new vehicle.  Just going to Houston was a pain in my 2005 Dodge Neon (aka The Reliant) and I was not looking forward to taking longer trips in it.  I’m hoping that the increased interior space and more comfortable seating found in my 2012 Honda CR-V (aka The Excelsior) will make the trip more pleasant.

The thought of the fun to be had at my destination should be enough to keep me going, but if all else fails, there’s always coffee.

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CAMPING, CONS, FURRY, JUST SAYING, Oklacon, RANDOMIZER9.COM, STEAMPUNK, WHISKEY-TANGO-FOXTROT

Oklacon 2012 Journal #2: Vacation From Myself

Rockin the 8-bit tie!

I have resolved to start taking more ‘real’ vacations; a ‘real vacation’ being a trip during which I go somewhere or do something that I have never seen or done before.  Thus, I will be attending Oklacon later this week: it will be the first road trip I’ve had in awhile, barely my second furry convention, and my first ‘outdoor’ convention.  As such, I’ll be camping for three days and some new friends will be coming along.

While that is all fine and dandy, it also occurred to me that I could also take a vacation from myself.  I attend fan conventions regularly, but I’ve never really gone through the trouble of putting a costume together for a convention.  Granted, I’ve tried once or twice but its was still me, just wearing an 8-bit tie or a half-assed steampunk-type outfit; no glue, no gears, no goggles, so no steampunk.

As geeks/nerds/otkau/what-have-yous, I think we’re fortunate in that regard.  Like the Rekall sales weasel told Quaid in Total Recall: “What is the same about every vacation you’ve ever taken?”

“You!”

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Oklacon 2012 Journal #1: Off the Grid

Furries under the stars!

Oklacon is just a few days away, and I am in the process of getting things ready: making a list of equipment to bring, topping off stuff with fuel, getting warmer clothing out of storage, making sure I have plenty of batteries, and so on and so forth.  In viewing various posts here and there I had heard of something called ‘cell phone hill’ so on a hunch, I decided to check Sprint’s coverage.

Yikes.  It looks as if I’m going to be outside of Sprint’s coverage area, so I’m going to be roaming, which probably means no data.  Now, I presume that no data means no internets, and I find myself just a little bit apprehensive at the thought of really being ‘off the grid.’  As you may guess, I’m one of those people that is always checking my smartphone or laptop for e-mails or Facebook posts or tweets or comments on my blogs (like this one!) and so on and so forth.

While the thought of not having access to the tubes is a little bit scary (I think I may have a problem), on the other hand, its something else I can take a vacation from, and it’ll probably do me some good…I hope!

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Mac Musings

Buy me now!

I own a 24-inch iMac.  I bought it when I had some extra money on my hands and I wanted to see how ‘the other half’ lived.  I’d also had a Gateway crap out on me after just three years.  The iMac came with Leopard, which I obediently upgraded to Snow Leopard, and I haven’t upgraded OS X since.  Yeah, I know, I’m a terrible iPerson for not shelling out the cash for Lion or Mountain  Lion or Griffin or Hydra or whatever their next update is going to be called, but I have no desire to.  I appreciate that OS X is probably wonderful for people that ‘aren’t into computers,’ but I am not one of those people.

In addition to Snow Leopard, my iMac boots into Windows 7.  To further add insult to injury, I keep a Windows XP virtual machine handy in OS X for when I need to do ‘real’ computer work, because OS X just doesn’t do it for me.

I cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.1 and remember futzing around with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS in order to play Wing Commander.  I remember making a 3.5” bootable floppy with a batch file I wrote called Kenny on it for those inevitable times when I would have to reformat my PC after poking at Windows 98 too many times with a sharp stick.  Plug n’ Play started out as Plug and Pray and we all wondered why we had to reboot our machines after changing the lousy screen resolution.  The Unix lab at the University was for Computer Science majors only and the servers had monitors that were as big as my TV set back home.  I remember the sysadmin telling us to clean out our core dumps when the drives filled up, and one guy being labeled “The JPEG King” because his directory was full of megabytes (yes, MEGABYTES) of porn, which was promptly deleted by the sysadmin.

Good times, and yes, I mean that seriously.  For folks like me, part of the fun of owning a computer is goofing around with it and watching what happens.  I don’t do that much anymore, partially because Windows 7 is pretty darn good, and partially because I’d rather be putting words together instead of spending hours under the virtual hood of my PC.

I completed the final text draft of my next e-book “Seven Super-Short Sci-Fi Stories” a few days ago, and all that remained for me to do was take those words, squash them into an e-book, and upload it to the iBookstore for all to see and buy.  Of course, uploading it into the iBookstore would mean I would have to boot into OS X and send the .epub file to them using Apples super-special uploader program (iTunes Producer) because it, of course, its OS X only.

The first time I had tried to do so for “The Rules of Tech Support,” I encountered a problem with the .epub file I was trying to send.  The file worked just fine in Kindle, worked just fine on Nook and even passed ePub validation, but it just wasn’t good enough for Apple.

Luckily, Apple technical support helped me make my file Apple-friendly and all was well.  I was a little miffed to find out that the problem was that one line was missing from a specific file.  This time, I knew that I had to add that one line before trying to send the file to Apple.  I added the line, recreated the file, and waited for the upload to complete so I could start waiting for someone at Apple to bless it and put it up for sale.

The second time, for “One Sheet Stories” the process went without a hitch, so I was baffled, because this time I got a different error.  Crap.

I sent an error report to Apple, but I knew from previous experience that I was going to have to wait until at least until the next day to get a response.  To Apple’s credit, I always get a response within 24 hours whenever I send error reports, but I wanted my book uploaded now.  On a hunch, I fired up the aforementioned Windows XP virtual machine, did the exact same thing I did in OS X.  I resent the file and was rewarded with success.

While I was happy to have accomplished my goal, I was irked that OS X had failed me where Windows had handled the task with aplomb.  Sadly, if I wish to continue publishing e-books onto the iBookstore, I will need to keep the iMac, but like any good geek, I will always have a backup Windows machine handy.

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Short Steampunk Subjects

Positively steamy!

I like things that are short.  Quite a few of my favorite types of media are short: theatrical cartoons, Three Stooges shorts, Aesop’s fables, and Isaac Asimov’s short stories, to name a few.  Curiously enough, my own writing consists mainly of short stories.

I initially kept my short stories to just one side of a page out of sheer habit, but as I write more I am finding myself becoming more comfortable with going beyond that self-imposed arbitrary limit.  Curiously enough, my very first short story came in at 12 pages, which I felt was way too long, so there’s that, too.

There’s just something about quickly getting to the point.  Sure, a one-page story doesn’t leave much room for character development, but it also means that a message can be delivered effectively without getting lost in the rest of the story.  It also leaves armchair psychologists with little room to to find deeper meaning in between the lines.

It may also explain why I enjoy comic books.  In addition to enjoying the exploits of Superman, the Green Lantern Corps and Mega Man each month, I have also taken a liking to the various Steampunk titles currently being printed by Antarctic Press.  In addition to artwork relating to the book’s theme featuring comely lasses, each one has also featured two or three short comic stories featuring the works of Rod Espinosa, Fred Perry, and other creators.

I really enjoy those short comics.  I read them, have a quick laugh or smile, and move on to other things.  But unlike the one-issue comic stories I discussed previously, which are ‘fire and forget,’ those short comics (especially Perry’s) have me wondering about just what happened before and after the story.  How did that Bad Guy end up as a pony?  Who ended up winning the Fairyland Steampocalypse? Just why did Dr. Frankensteam create her Monster?

I also wonder if I am being given glimpses of a bigger tale that has been untold, or are these the scattered pages of a work that is not yet done even in the creator’s mind?  Or perhaps, like myself, all they want to do is make a quick joke or point and move on without having to write a whole book.  I can certainly relate to that!

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