Categories
family internets life uncategorized web design work

absent? i have been absent?

I have been absent for a few months, due to a huge variety of reasons. I’ve been having system issues. Some of these issues are ongoing and may eventually require me to reinstall my OS. Some have been resolved with new hardware and some vigorous kicking.

I’ve also quit my job and have been taking time to myself, to play and think and forget about the increasingly troubling world outside my immediate environment and all the long hours of often emotionally demanding work*. You could call it a complete mental breakdown if you want. I would not stop you. I was having a hard time getting anything done and was feeling very overwhelmed. I still have a hard time and am feeling overwhelmed, but i’m also learning to live forwardly, if that makes any sense, and to commit to fewer obligations so that i can focus more and not spread myself so thin. Another thing was that, after my grandfather’s death, i almost immediately jumped back into the mandatory 50-hour work weeks. I do not think that was the healthy thing to do. I should have argued for a leave of absence, or just quit then. I recently found myself re-grieving, and it was not fun.

Anyhow, all this boils down to the announcement that i will soon be overhauling this site yet again. This time, it will not be a radical overhaul, just an update of the back-end, and some cleaning up of the bloated CSS.

In other news, i have also recently begun to quit smoking. It is going surprisingly well, and i am down to just a few hand-rolled cigarettes a day.

On a completely separate note:
XBox 360 gamertag: transmothra

Lastly, my car is making weird klonking noises, so if i die tomorrow, please make sure my funeral and headstone are hilarious and completely lacking in both taste and respect.

*The next time you curse out or yell at a customer service person, remember that they are not paid particularly well to listen to people like you for eight to ten very long hours every workday of their miserable lives. Be calm, speak clearly, and don’t expect more than is fair to all parties, and things will get worked out.

Categories
current events uncategorized

The Highest Cost of War

If i were living in a video game, i would probably do video game things: senseless slaughter, reckless driving, and generally causing mayhem. It’s sure as hell fun in a video game.

I’d probably have a real itchy trigger finger; blowing character’s heads clean off would cause me to ceaselessly cackle as i wheel about looking for more victims, and more nastiness to get into.

Soldiers, however, do not live in video games. They kill real people. Actual human beings, with lives and families and friends and day jobs – be they evildoers or just innocent civilians, caught in the line of fire. Sometimes, though, things go wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

Frankly, it’s getting a little tedious, hearing and reading about all the civilian deaths in Iraq. It has been going on for a long time, after all.

That’s why i put off reading this The Nation piece (alt.link.print) for about a week before i got around to reading it.

The Iraq War is a vast and complicated enterprise… Fighting in densely populated urban areas has led to the indiscriminate use of force and the deaths at the hands of occupation troops of thousands of innocents.

I can not and will not blame soldiers en masse or individually. It’s a real bad situation over there, and we need to get those guys out of there as quickly as we possibly can, before more soldiers crack under pressure and bring the whole damn thing down.

It’s ok to be against the war and NOT spit on returning soldiers. That kind of folly is for idiot hippies with misguided frustration. These guys need a lot of help, from many different angles. War does terrible things to a man’s soul. But we must have hope that these inner demons can be defeated, every last one of them, for every last soldier who was there and saw bad things happen.

The bottom line: we’ve gotta get out of that place.

In the four long years of the war, the mounting civilian casualties have already taken a heavy toll–both on the Iraqi people and on the US servicemembers who have witnessed, or caused, their suffering. Iraqi physicians… published a study late last year… that estimated that 601,000 civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion… [They] found that coalition forces were responsible for 31 percent of these violent deaths, an estimate they said could be “conservative,” since “deaths were not classified as being due to coalition forces if households had any uncertainty about the responsible party.”

“Just the carnage, all the blown-up civilians, blown-up bodies that I saw,” Specialist [Jeff] Englehart said. “I just–I started thinking, like, Why? What was this for?”

“It just gets frustrating,” Specialist [Garett] Reppenhagen said. “Instead of blaming your own command for putting you there in that situation, you start blaming the Iraqi people…. So it’s a constant psychological battle to try to, you know, keep–to stay humane.”

Categories
current events internets life uncategorized

religion is phony II

And old high school friend of mine has been posting a bunch of junk bulletins on MySpace about how evolution is a “lie.” I sent him a fairly nasty response, but i thought it worth posting here, at least for the links at the end. I have corrected it for capitalization to make it easier to read; and added emphasis, because adding HTML code in MySpace (the first time around) might have janky consequences.

I’m sorry dude, but that kind of idiocy is pure mind-pollution. Face it: religion has ruined history, and it’s threatening to destroy humanity even now.

You can not debunk so many fields of natural science with one broad swath of a very dull blade. Science is what it is: an exploration of truth. Sometimes science is wrong, and then it ceases to be science. It is science’s goal to continually reevaluate itself and update its data when better facts come into focus. Science’s entire agenda is based on questioning – gasp! – ITSELF in the search for more and more accurate answers! Can the same be said of religion?

Evolution, however, is testable, and its evidence is all around us. Natural selection is simply a process that happens, not unlike the semi-millennial phenomenon of millions of overzealous Christians propping up a mad buffoon in some leadership role because they’re sure he’ll help to bring about the so-called “end times.”

How about this one: if the world is only a few thousand years old, then how come we can see, with the naked eye, objects in space, such as galaxies, that are clearly millions of light-years away? Can light, originating from these objects, suddenly travel faster than itself? Or, if the universe was “created” whole (the distance between objects vast from the beginning), then why is it expanding, with everything rushing away from everything else at incredible speed?

If god is trying to “trick” us into thinking the world is more than a few thousand years old by planting evidence of creatures hundreds of thousands of years in the past (which we can easily verify by measuring the amount of atomic decay of carbon-14, which has already been proven to have a half life of 5730 years), then what kind of a sick bastard is this deity, anyway?

No, sir, the biggest lie ever told is that there is some mystical figure up in the sky who can (through his human – and presumably fallible – interpreter, of course) get you to DO anything and, even worse, BELIEVE any stupid idea, out of pure primal fear of some terrible “eternal” punishment.

Religion is phony. An outright lie – which has cost untold millions of lives throughout history. Think for yourself and you’ll see what i mean. It’s time to put the toys away and stop playing a sick game of pretend with the goal of destroying all of humanity. That’s just evil.

No one can save us but ourselves. If you think there is some god who, in the whole of the universe, would bother saving the practically infinitesimal inhabitants of a tiny speck floating in the inky black void of space from themselves, then ask yourself where this god was throughout all the genocides and holocausts, all the tragedies and disasters of human history. Testing our faith? That’s just fucked up. If that’s the Christian idea of “god,” then “god” is one seriously warped asshole and i don’t want anything to do with it.

Sorry, R***. Just THINK about it, man. Don’t be duped by hustlers and con-men making big promises about things they ultimately know nothing about.

And now, i present to you some recommended reading:
http://www.ex-christian.net/
http://www.exchristian.org/
http://www.christianism.com/
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html
http://www.losingmyreligion.com/

Lookin’ out for you, friend,
~jer

Categories
internets uncategorized

link roundup

Best of Craigslist: “From an Angry Soldier” – a must-read.

Songbird, a “a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up” – have not tried it yet, looks promising!

Awesome contraption a la Rube Goldberg!

Some Dayton, OH YouTube-ness. (Bonus: look for some great Brainiac live footage!)

Some things never change: what my mom’s been up to lately. (This last apparently involving something along the lines of stealing cable.) (Also i found some interesting busts from the early 90s here, including petty theft, unlawful use of property, and drug abuse.)

Information relating to the indictment (for involuntary manslaughter) of my good friend Derek Bayes, a kind and gentle fellow musician, who, according to anecdotal personal testimony, was defending himself against his girlfriend’s enraged, blind, shotgun-wielding estranged husband (or something very similar), when he accidentally choked the guy to death. According to some mutual friends, when the ambulance and police came, he was still on top of the guy and was crying when they took him away. A trumped up case, especially after the local media got ahold of it and spun it the wrong way round like the bloodthirsty vampires they are. I know Derek, and he is a harmless and sweet man with a good heart. And he’s still sitting in prison, with a couple years left on his nine-year sentence. (Don’t let his mug shot fool you, he was obviously having a very, very bad day.)

Another good friend of mine: Dee, who shares my birthday and who is yet another extraordinary kind human being who was caught up in some bad circumstances. Thankfully, Dee’s free again.

Historic South Park District in Dayton, OH (where we now live).

We’re thinking about buying the house we’re in, and this information has been pretty helpful thus far. Also, knowing more about bad mold can’t hurt!

Categories
current events internets uncategorized

X-Day X: a no-show for Xists (again)

Well, that’s weird, “Bob”… Something weird didn’t happen yesterday….

Categories
internets uncategorized

¡¡noʎ dı1ɟ

.pı1 ɹnoʎ dı1ɟ 11ıʍ ʇɐɥʇ ǝbɐd ssɐ-1ooɔ ɐ s,ǝɹǝɥ

Categories
internets life uncategorized

offline

starting now, i will not be online for a day or two. if you need me, call.

Categories
internets uncategorized web design

IE6 users

I am aware of a problem with viewing this site through the narrow and unrefined lens of IE6. I have a fix for it in mind and will implement it as soon as we are done moving and settled in.

For now, why not get the juicy taste of the Twenty First Century in your mouth with a shiny new web browser? They’re Box Modelicious!

Firefox | Opera | IE7 | Safari

Categories
internets uncategorized

Dramatic Chipmunk*

Best 5-second video EVAR.

[youtube]a1Y73sPHKxw[/youtube]

*Actually, a prairie dog.

Categories
internets uncategorized

Spock rockin’ the Bad Brains

Greatest video ever: mashup of Leonard Nimoy’s infamous “Bilbo Baggins” video with hardcore legends Bad Brains’ awesome song “Pay To Cum”. Grok this:

[youtube]rqQtoMyi2xQ[/youtube]
Categories
uncategorized

my pc diagnosis

I think my latest PC problem is due to the power supply unit and/or the video card. I’ve been looking at rectifying this in the near future; however, i will have to wait until my budget allows for experimentation in this regard.

Categories
internets life uncategorized

Hello, again

Somehow, Holly and I managed to get this thing working again.

Information travels at or near the speed of light. Spam, it seems, doubly so.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks installing updates, reading through old email, trying to figure out if I should just do a fresh install of XP, or possibly Linux, and just generally trying to catch up with everything that I’ve been missing for the last couple of months.

Oddly enough, i had damn near twice as many unique visitors during December, when I had not made a single post here or anywhere else. Which seems to say that I’m a hell of a lot more popular when I’m not even around. I suppose that, in a way, that’s better than many alternatives.

As for a real update… I’m working a lot. An awful lot. Emphasis on the awful bit.

So. Um. Hullo. How have you been?

Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

You can quote me on that

For those designers who want to do the fancy-pants block-quotes thing, here is the CSS. Note that you have to put a DIV element in there to give it padding and close the quotes. That’s because the current specification for CSS do not allow for more than one background image for any single element. This may change in the future, but for now, we must write fairly non-semantic markup in order to achieve the cool effect.

blockquote {
background: transparent url(path/to/quote-left.img) left top no-repeat;
}
blockquote div {
background: transparent url(path/to/quote-right.img) right bottom no-repeat;
padding: 0 50px;
}

… And this is what it looks like:

I used to be really, really humble.

It just made me big-headed.
x jeremy jarratt

I added a :hover behavior to mine. What will you do?

Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

Big Urgent Tweak Test

Look out for my B.U.T.T.! I’ve just finished uploading some tweaks to make the Big Urgent Wish theme a little nicer. Please, as always, wear your helmets, and let me know if anything falls on your head. I could always use a good laugh.

I hope to have a sanitized version available soon.

Categories
CDs internets media uncategorized

Latest Chickenfish CD Reviews

Whee! My latest reviews are up at The Chickenfish Speaks. I feel truly sorry for the lashing I gave one new age composer. The rest I’m pretty proud of.

You should check out The Chickenfish Speaks. It’s a great site with lots of cool stuff!

(I’m jeremy mutant, BTW.)

Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

Validation

Whew! So far, Big Urgent Wish passes XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS level 3*!

I have only done the index page, though, so more work is no doubt needed.

 

*although, due to the opacity: .6 in the CSS for the thickbox plugin I’m using, it doesn’t validate as CSS level 2

Categories
internets media uncategorized

Spore

Will Wright is an incredible genius! The man behind the “Sim” games, his new game, Spore, is most definitely going to be the most amazing and mind-blowing game ever created. It will be a very, very, very long time before anybody ever tops this one. Watch the entire video to get a sense of the sheer godawful scope of this gargantuan thing. Mere words simply cannot do it justice.

[googlevideo]8372603330420559198[/googlevideo]
Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

Big Urgent Garbage Hunt

The B.U.G. hunt is on! See if you can find all the problems with my new layoutI’ve already identified the ugly 3rd-tier dropdown menu thing on the navbar at the top, but I haven’t had much time yet to test everything out. fixed Later tonight I’ll tweak it and try to get it to behave itself a little better. Please post your comments here (be sure to include your OS/browser). And thanks!

(Things are bound to be a little on the messy side for a few days while I convert this thing over to the new theme.)

EDIT: Yikes! Single posts & pages are also totally unstyled! fixed

Categories
friends internets local uncategorized

Body by Xmas

My friend Mike, who’s a fantastic drummer and gifted in so many ways it’s not even funny, filmed this hilarious video. Check it out:

[youtube]fQzVYVe3JYY[/youtube]
Categories
current events internets media uncategorized

Keith Olbermann vs. George W. Bush

Check out this angrily passionate editorial by the great Keith Olbermann re: the new, absolutely diabolical Military Commissions Act. (Read up on it and know that this is terrible and insane.)

[youtube]uqxmPjB0WSs[/youtube]