Great Honor!

<3 chamber music

2008-07-11T02:43:48Z

I'd have bought it if it was just a CD with Santuary of Zi'Tah on it. I also like Tavnazian Archipelago, and Whispers of the Gods, as well. Besieged, though... come on. That shit's annoying enough in-game; its no less annoying with a piano. I would've liked maybe Mhaura... or perhaps even Gustaberg. Even if the zone is boring and grey, the music is nice.

<3 single piano anything.

So ugly

2008-06-30T16:29:28Z

Still can't believe that thing wasn't camped...

Oh that crazy Matt.

2008-06-25T19:24:43Z

New one.

These never cease to amuse me on some primal level. I almost, ALMOST pause in my deep-seated hatred of humanity for the briefest of moments. Were it not a giant advertisement for Stride gum, I probably would.

Incidentally, I despirately want that song from the 2006 video. All I've ever found was the crappy new-wave version.

I don't care if it was in an iPod commercial....

2008-06-13T15:08:55Z

I really hope the rest of the CD is as good as this one track is.

'Kay so I'm a bit out of the loop...

2008-06-09T00:02:54Z

Yeah, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually gone to the FFXI main site, but uh..
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/3287/detail.html
....yeah.

"For monks, we will be adding a new job ability that allows them to restrict their attacks to kicks only. In exchange for a penalty to attack delay, the monk receives an increase to damage and attack power, as well as a bonus to the amount of TP gained per kick."

*insert giddy squeal here*

Monks?? Getting a change??? Swaaah?? That's unpossible!!

Not assuming it's going to be zomg amazing boneriffic or anything, but its SOMETHING NEW. Monks haven't seen a job tweak since Subtle Blow.

*squeal*

Finally... huff huff done....

2008-05-31T01:28:01Z

Linkies first, explainations later (can you believe the name Jushiro was already taken?!)

Finally finished (well, mostly anyway) the Forge World Mk. IV Dreadnought that I ordered over two months ago. I have to say, with all modesty aside, this is probably the finest thing I've ever painted. It took me over a 3 weeks to paint. It's a custom resin model produced by Forge World. I'd never worked with resin before, and it carries its own set of unique challenges. First off, its a real bastarisation of the properties of pewter and polypropeline plastic. It's slightly lighter than metal, but softer. Therefor the same glues and treatments dont exactly apply. It's heavier than plastic, therefor it has the dangerous potential to want to rip itself apart under its own wieght when glued. The absolute biggest problem to overcome was the mold release compound that is smeared generously all over it. The kit came on sprues, much like a plastic model, but with much, much, MUCH (much) more flashing. Flashing is the extra material left over by the casting process, where the resin was poured into the mold. Several days of prep time went into just cleaning the flashing away. The mold release was the last challenge. Paint and glue will not bond to mold release. Each piece had to be painstakingly scrubbed with a toothbrush and dishwashing detergent to get the stuff off before any work could be done, primering or otherwise. The legs were horrible, as they have the most mechanical detail. The first primer job had to be scrapped, stripped, and reapplied as even liberal scrubbing wasnt enough.
I spent hours and hours of work with the dremel and hobby knife, just to make the pieces look right. The right arm(the black one) was the worst of the bunch. It was flat out poorly molded, and I almost shipped it back. Ideally, it should look completely symmetrical to the left, complete with the little sensor package and everything. That part was a mess. I just opted to completely dremel it off, where I replaced it with the honor seals that I had lying around from another model. The right arm was an entirely new experience for me, as I've never done freehand work like that before. I'm good at shading and blending, but I've never just... painted... something on a flat surface, especially something that small.
The only thing that makes me sad about that model is the lack of a name tag. All Mk V dreadnoughts have a sort of scroll embossed on the front of the sarcophagus where you can add a name, since technically a dread is a half-dead marine whose been hard-wired into the chassis. I've always left the tag blank before, since my older dreads were never painted well enough to worry about, plus I never thought I could actually add a name without fucking it up. I like this guy well enough that I think he deserves a name. I liked Brother Cedrian, but unfortunatley, I have no place to stick it, and I dont just want a name sorta chilling out on a random piece of him. I may think of a way to add it later, I suppose.
The base was just a standard Dreadnought base that comes with all Mk V dreads, but I never use, because they take up space on the tabletop, and sometimes you just want them freestanding. Plus the ultra-light plastic dreads dont wiegh enough to worry about them tipping over and breaking. You can pretty much drop a plastic dread from shoulder hight to the ground and you *might* lose a piece. This was not the case here. I needed a base, because with the amount of work that went into this guy, I didn't want to risk any of that. In fact, every joint you see, including the ankles, waist and shoulders, is reinforced with a steel pin to help support the weight. But even with it's simple paint job, the base adds a little something to it, overall. I may go back over it with some flock or sand to fill in the gaps and make it look more realistic.

Overall, this thing wont win any Golden Daemons, but I think I'll have a hell of a time ever topping this thing. I dont know that I even want to try, as long as this guy took to slap together.

Just got back from a Braves game

2008-05-23T03:59:43Z

And very drunk. Just wanted to get that out. I swear it wasnt my idea. Totally. I'm typing pretty good, though.

Just in case you forgot...

2008-05-09T19:28:18Z

...how freaking disturbing this video was. This shit gave me nightmares as a kid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzShg7yXik

Creepiest shit. Ever.

2008-05-05T23:05:13Z

http://www.destinationcreation.com/informatives/?p=128

Things that chap my ass

2008-05-03T17:23:57Z

- Not having a weekend for 3 strait weeks, and not having much of a prospect for another 2

- Installing CoP

- Accidentally buying 'That's All' by Genesis from iTunes twice

- Everything that encompasses the Robins Honor Guard

- Reading in this month's Air Force Times that my old career field despirately needs Staff Sergeants one year after they kicked me out of that career for BEING a Staff Sergeant.

Interesting thing, that last bullet. Apparently Staff Sergeants and Tech Sergeants have been bailing out by the bucketful in the last 3-4 years. This of course perked my interest, as I AM one of said demographic. This article was literally tailor made for me, as I met every criterion that was brought up. So natually I was gleeful at first since it shows that other feel as I do, and have purportedly been treated just as shittily as I have. Of course, it also means that simply others have been lured away by the rising benefits of going gov't contractor, which I refuse to do. However, as I read the article further, I became more and more perturbed, as there is huge talk of bringing back the special reinlistment bonuses for critically manned career fields. WHICH I AM NO LONGER A PART OF. The AF raped us of our reinlistment bonuses *literally* 3 weeks before I reinlisted back in 2004. So when others where getting $20-30k for reinlisting for 6 years, I got diddly squat. Not that I particularly cared at the time. I would have reinlisted anyway in those days, as I genuinely loved what I was doing and had fully planned on making a 20+ year AF career out of it. But now, they're trying to shepherd people back into it,(amongst others) and joy of joys, I'm not elligible because I'm still in training in this job, and will be for at least another year+ provided I were to reinlist this year. I pretty much just rested my head in my hand and laughed as I read. Not much else I can really do in cases of such dense irony.

Dreadnought Redux

2008-04-22T03:40:58Z

Thanks to a flubbed order by Games Workshop, I got a free Dreadnought. So I figured I'd sit back and take my time with this one and produce something worth a damn. It's hard to really do anything impressive with Space Marine models, since they're usually pretty blocky or flat textured, but I'm quite happy with how this one came out.

Distance
Arm side
Cannon side
Front
Rear

It certainly wouldn't win any awards, but compared to my last one, it's a distict difference. The biggest thing I did was get rid of that stupid black outlining I put on the other one. Really dont know wtf I was thinking with that. In it's place I drybrushed some diluted yellow over all the edges to lighten the red and highlight the details (what few there are). I'm actually going to go back to the other one and redo all that crap. The more I look at it, the angrier I get with it. The combat arm I drybrushed with a couple layers of increasingly lighter blue, since it's supposed to have an energy field around it, plus it looked nice. More inks this time around, too. Most notably on the smokestacks and the gun barrels. Also, that little doo-dad on the front of the sarcophagus doesn't look like flying shit this time, either.

Zoh Mai Gawd I finally gotz one!!

2008-04-21T20:15:51Z

Okay, not really.
A RL friend of mine who stopped playing a little ways back is lending it to me. He's pretty heavy into WoW atm, so I get to look like a cool kid for a while. It's becoming a fine Jushiro tradition to never accomplish the crap I work hard for, but then have stupid luck fall in my lap at odd intervals for doing absolutely nothing.
See how I skip with joy?

What the Eff...?

2008-04-18T21:06:23Z

So my local Gamesman called me to tell me he was able to successfully get everying I requested from Games Workshop to get back started with 40k. Most importantly, the paints. ....except for one item, the pots of Brown Ink. GW cancelled thier line of Brown Ink. The most innoculous of colors, and quite possibly the color I used THE most next to say, Choas Black, or maybe Blood Red. I use it for everything from tarnishing Necrons, to rusting tank tracks, and making gun barrels look sooty.
See, GW puts out thier own line of paints called Citadel Colour, and they're expensive, but are of unusually high quality. They have perfect consistency, dry fast, and are sufficiently durable, without being too thick for modeling. You'll pay $3.00 for 12mL, but its 12mL of pwnage. I've always used Citadel paints since the first day I started modeling, and I just sorta know how to work with them, the inks especially. Now I have to find an off-brand brown ink of the proper hue, and it has to be suitably water soluable. I suppose regular ole' India Ink will do, provided I can find it in brown. Pflargle...

...Wherein I shamelessly plug myself

2008-04-09T01:49:02Z

So, I dug out the paints today and some unpainted 40k models that've been sitting around... unpainted... for well over 4 years now. Coincidentally lining up perfectly with the time around which I first started playing FFXI...

Anyway, this one model is what I managed to plunk out in two days, which is pretty sad for me. These were taken with my little Canon PowerShot S410... which took a surprisingly decent photo from so close.
Dreadnought Front
Dreadnought Rear
Okay, so yeah, that's not really impressive. I haven't painted in like 4 years and I needed something with lots of easy colors. I'm frankly surprised I remembered how to drybrush and blend inks, despite doing a pretty piss-poor job of it here.

So, to vindicate myself, here's some of my old shit at the hight of my game.
Necron Lord/Destroyer Lord
Closeup of Lord (front)
Closeup of Lord (rear)
They're supposed to look ancient n' shit. In case you thought they were just left out in the rain.

And yeah, I can do other stuff besides giant robots and metal skeletons. I also do a pretty mean giant cockroach.
Carnifex Front
Carnifex Side
Carnifex Head
That's pretty much the culmination of my ink blending abilities. Three shades of ink, and 5 different shades of brown paint, layered about a dozen times. The camera struggled for some reason on those, I had to take like 50 pictures of each angle to get one that looked good. But to toot my own horn, the pictures don't do it justice. It looks like real damn roach, and I'm sitting here in Georgia, which makes me a bonafide roach expert. My whole Tyrannid army of about 97 models of variously sized creatures is done up like that. I actually had a woman at the store who was afraid to touch them.
To think that I spent 4 years of my life painting that shit, and it's all been collecting dust in my closet. It's pretty cool to dig it out now and then.

Holy asscrap, a post (read: dump)

2008-04-06T22:45:34Z

I've pretty much stopped trying to figure myself out. Damn near everything I do anymore these days is about as random as can be. Like this, for example. I haven't popped on LJ in over a year, but for some reason I started going through it this week. Not even going to try explaining that one. My last entry was pretty damn Emo, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, I guess. A year ago I'd have called it seething rage.

So, what have I been up to? Lessee...

I spent 7 months of 2007 in Mississippi attending a Tech school for a job I didn't want, and still don't. I pretty much realized about 3 months into it that I was done with the Military. That was a pretty big (read: catastrophic) moment in my life. During that time, I shimmied from about 4 different MMOs (I seem to log time by which game I'm playing, it seems). Quit FFXI since it had reached the same point at which I had quit the first time, I.e. me sitting around doing nothing while waiting for one grind or another to become available to me for the same drab rewards and still not being one of the cool kids in the cool clubs doing all the cool things. I played Anarchy Online for a while with my boss (read: Idol) Mike Hampel, 'till I went to MIssissippi and realized AO STILL had no class balance. I jumped to WoW (onoz! Heretic!) since all my RL buddies were playing at the time. The expansion totally made that game playable for me. The endgame of original WoW was not for my liking, but BC fixed a lot of my grievances. We ended up forming a pseudo raid guild of almost entirely personal friends, and we completely dominated Karazhan, with me as main tank, in every damn piece of Kara tanking gear, with a bunch of Herioic jazz and some stuff from Gruul's. We just couldn't keep the people together for the 25 man shit, though, and we eventually frayed until we didn't even have enough people for Kara. And Zul Aman was total crap, so I quit that, too. Then around October I picked up EQ2 again on a whim, and had fun with that until recently, when I realized that Sony STILL doesn't know how to do... uh... well.... fucking anything. Kunark was fun again as a nostalgic thing, and 96% of the fun of that game comes from finding stuff from original EQ with a 500-years-in-the-future twist. Seeing all the major starting cities as high level dungeons, seeing that Terrorantula somehow got even bigger, wondering how the fuck Xalgoz is still alive, etc.

As I said, I'm basically done with the Military. After this year is done I'll be Mr. Smith. This job sucks, my shop sucks, and for fucking Christ's sake I'm so GOD DAMN sick of Robins Air Force Base. This...thing... is basically the pintle upon which the depression I've been grappling with rotates around. Do you realize that 90% of the reason I even agreed to retraining was because I wanted to get out of here??   I got orders while in Tech School, and I was all giddy... then I realized that they were for my old job... because someone at the MPF is fucking retarded, and they got cancelled. They never sent me new orders. I came back to Robins after I graduated, and after reporting BACK to my old squadron, waited for orders that never came. So I'm still here. And I'll be here until January 2009, when I punch out.  My friend in Alaska tells his troops my story when they bitch about how the Air Force has treated them, AND THEY SHUT UP. As if to mock me, the shop that I left because I was sick of running now has about 7 sergeants running it, when I was the only one there when I left.

All my friends here are gone. The last 2 left this month for Texas. And I'm still fucking here. I get up, go to work, come home, and go to bed. My only form of social interaction is playing XBox or something with the few guys that I've managed to keep in touch with. It gives me lots of time to think. And that's when shit goes downhill. If I don't keep my mind occupied with something constantly, I'll sink into these abysses of self-loathing for weeks at a time. I wont beat around the bush. My handgun started looking very, very friendly on my last one. That's not being emo, either. Fortunately, the feeling was brief enough to scare me out of it once I realized exactly what I was thinking. At one point I was going to go to the clinic because I was constipated (lolz), but I realized that it wasn't because I was stopped up or anything, it was because I hadn't eaten in 3 freaking days. Going to see a professional wouldn't really fix anything, because I know where my own problems are, for the most part. The situation I'm in prevents me from starting anything that would help, like classes or whatnot. I'm set to deploy somewhere this year around June, and those cocksuckers voluntold me to do Honor Guard for 3 months, and my daily schedule is as random as a die roll. I thoroughly expect to be called in to do a funeral service or color guard any minute now.  Honor guard is about the worst thing to happen to me since retraining. Those bastards are about as nitpicky as anyone I've ever met. Every five seconds I'm getting critiqued on the last 17 things I did wrong and where my uniform (that they gave me btw) has flaws. Pickpickpickpickpickpick. That shit just wears on you, man. I come home and I just want to stomp the shit out of a puppy... And then cry because I love dogs... No seriously, I'm not trying to go all Whiney McGee here, but I feel a proper LJ dump wouldn't be right without laying it all out in proper rank and file.

So, I've been just trying to keep myself occupied. Keeping an unending stream of books/novels/etc flowing into my hands has helped. I've had a terrible craving to play Warhammer again.   Man, it's painful. What's really painful is at one point Warner Robins had like 5 geek stores to buy/play it in, including Outer Limit Comics, my very first hangout here. But it seems they've all closed down for one reason or another, except for Outer Limit, which is now 35 minutes away in Fort Valley (read: Podunkville). I mean it makes sense. Casey the owner was always from Fort Valley, and he only set up shop in Warner Robins because he had prime real estate there. But I guess maybe the gas prices made things to problematic for him to commute every day? Saturday was pretty much the the prime day to get a game of 40k in there, they'd have at least 6 tables set up and we'd get one of our extremely long 3vs3 matches going and that shit was great. But every damn Saturday lately it seems I've been doing some funeral service or traveling or something. (Like yesterday's folding-a-flag-in-the-rain-while-sinking-up-to-my-ankles-in-Georgia-clay fest.) The other problem is Games Workhop released a new 40k ruleset, and that means I no longer know how to play. Big deal, you say? No, it's not a big deal, really. I'm just making up excuses so I can continue hiding from the world and complain about how I want to play 40k again. No seriously, that's how my brain works. Read the top line. Random. *shrug*

At this point I'm pretty much just rambling for the sake of typing more shit, so I should probably just stop right here.
Also: I worship this man. Seriously. I have a chewing-gum shrine of him that I prostrate to at noon every day. Those of Muslim persuasion often name themselves Muhammad in honor of thier prophet, well I'm changing my first name to Yahtzee.

jushiro @ 2007-01-24T13:43:00

2007-01-24T18:44:47Z

Hurray for having the last week off before leaving for Mississippi...
Boo for having to spend it all writing troop evals before I leave... -_-

jushiro @ 2007-01-02T02:55:00

2007-01-02T06:55:11Z

So, I've known about this since Dec 1, but anything I would have said at the time would be naught but biased bitchering (new word!) and me generally whining as per usual. It's pointless and juvenile! Well... it's been a month and I'm still pissed as hell and I'm STILL going to bitch and whine.

I got back my stupid retraining package and the stupid cockbags at AFPC gave me fucking Ground Radio. Ground fucking Radio. Yay. Hoo-fucking-ray. That's, like, almost I.T. Only not. It's Ground Radio. 7 Goddamn months in tech school starting January 28. In Mississippi. Again. AGAIN. AGAIN!!!!!! And they've still not given me a new assignment after that, so I *STILL* have no frigging clue where I'll be this year. I've tried, TRIED to be optimistic. Maybe I'll like it. ...And maybe I'll grow a second head with one eye. Both equally probable. My first instict was to shred the training rip and tell them to bob on my man-apple. But that would mean 2 more years at Robins. Hmmm. Retarded job I'm guaranteed to hate, or spend the rest of my career at a base that is slowly leeching away my soul.. I can't stay here anymore. I'm almost guaranteed to get sent to Korea after tech school, but anywhere is better than here. So I signed thier stupid rip, and God did it hurt.

So guess what? I sat on my ass on New Years Eve because there is no fricking reason to celebrate. One shitty-ass morbidly depressing year out of the way, and a fresh, clean, shitty-ass morbidly depressing year starts up again. At least I know 2007 is going to blow. Unlike 2006, which started all optimistic and shit. "Ooh yay! I got promoted! Bestest year evAR!" I wish they'd given me something mega-retarded like Security Forces or something so I'd have an easier choice. Either route here was retarded. This was just a big, stupid waste of time and tax payer money. This is why civilians and military don't mix.

I apparently run an underground Tarutaru porn ring...

2006-12-16T17:33:55Z

Dear Santa...

Dear Santa,

This year I've been busy!

In May I turned temporaltokaki in for running naked in the mall (3 points). Last Wednesday I got in line at the supermarket at the same time as someone else and I didn't yield (-8 points). Last month I bought porn for hamusutaa (10 points). In September I bought porn for rathanel (-10 points). In April I punched ddrwolfgirl in the arm (-10 points).

Overall, I've been naughty (-15 points). For Christmas I deserve a lump of coal!

Sincerely,
Jushiro

5/5!!

2006-12-15T21:07:32Z

My hair's covering it up, but it's there...

Success!!

2006-12-09T18:05:01Z

Curry chicken attempt #2 success! Attemp #1 occurred on Thanksgiving, and was a sad failure. I'm not -entirely- sure what I did wrong, but it was pretty bad. Pretty sure I overdid the chicken, since it was dry as hell. And the whole thing was just a big, gloppy mess. Pretty sure I screwed up the rice, too. Yeah. I pretty much failed everywhere failure was possible.

But this one came out pretty good ^.^ I used Fat Free sour cream this time instead of Low Fat. And I cooked the whole thing at a lower temperature, too. It tastes good, good texture, and I added enough curry to make my eyes water.

In local news...

2006-12-05T17:01:51Z

Local monk dies in freak avalanche. News at 11...

Black choco!

2006-11-18T00:32:56Z

Them're some crazy talons. Napoleon Dynamite would definitely approve.

Me = win

2006-11-13T23:08:42Z

Today, I made /real/ fettucine alfredo with chicken and brocoli. I mean, the sauce: all me. it came out a bit too thick, but not bad at all for a first try. Granted, I didnt make the pasta, because I dont own an expensive extruder, nor do I possess the knowledge/skill to produce a pasta dough, but the rest of it was pure Jush. And I mixed all up into a huuuuge pile, like you're supposed to. Food is so much better when it comes from your own hands. Now, if I could just find where I jotted down that Curry Chicken recipe I saw on TV... I don't get nearly enough use out of my rice steamer.

New compy!

2006-11-09T01:11:06Z

Okay, so I got it last wednesday, but I'm lazy.
All I'll say is, I powered it on for the first time, and a man and his dog walking by my appartment exploded.

Hand studs

2006-10-26T13:39:36Z

So, I went to the clinic yesterday to have my "hand studs" looked at. Only my usual doctory-type person is being deployed, so I got some contracted quack instead. She only casually glanced at my hand, not actually "looking" at any of the aforementioned growths, more as watching from 3 feet away as I pointed at them. I specifically asked for some sort of immediate treatment, such as cryotherapy or that wicked sounding soldering-iron device I've heard about. Instead, she tells me she doesnt know how to perform such a thing, and prescribes -yet another- topical acid pad remedy (read: big, fat, placebo). All those things do is take the pain caused by cryotherapy, and drag it out across several painful weeks, while having to wear a band-aid the whole time. The only reason I didn't outright laugh in her face, is the little lable on the side that said they were 40% salicytic acid. The little Dr. Scholl's pads are like, 3%. That's a pretty good jump in potency. So I guess I'll humor her(read: myself) and try them out, then immediately ask for cryotherapy after a week or so.