fine whine

I caught the beginning episode of The AniMatrix, and I have to admit it was quite cool. I'm the first to admit that I was let down by The Matrix the first time I saw it. For that matter, subsequent viewings didn't make me like it too much more. I'm not sure it was the over-the-top wire-fu or bad writing interludes, but something really overshadowed the great visuals and incredible premise for me. Keanu Reeves was more than passable for the role and Lawrence Fishburne was fantastic, but some of the lines they had to deliver (and their co-stars) went beyond cheesy, past camp, and well into the other side.

But the ani-Matrix shows much promise. The deeper ideas are more in evidence, and the visual style is even cooler than the original movie's. Though it resembles in no small way the film Metropolis, itself no paragon of originality. Not to say it's a bad movie, in fact it's quite good. Don't say that to an anime fan, though, as they seem to find it lacking somehow and will look at you the same way opera fans view "Jackass" watchers. Derision doesn't start to describe it.

So I'm working on my website at the same time, and it too is showing some promise. The whole XHTML/CSS layout process is mildly arduous to adapt from my old, convoluted style of HTML, but ultimately I think it'll be worth it.

So I'm restyling my website (not the blogs but the main site itself), and I'm trying to do it in pure CSS. CSS, for the uninitiated, is a standard for laying out web pages. The concept and specifications have been around for years but the major browsers are only now really supporting it well. My IE5's no good at it, but it renders okay under mozilla derivatives. For windows, I heartily suggest using k-meleon. It's fast, free and rather quite standards-compliant.

So I haven't updated this blog or ketchup for three days. I have prepared a number of excuses to explain this horrible horrible tragedy.

First of all, the keyboard on my laptop (which is my main connection to the internet) has been quitting on me lately after a randomly determined time. All of a sudden I'll just be down to my trackball, since the touchpad gave out long ago, and though I may be relatively proficient in the use of the On-Screen Keyboard, I'm not a fan of typing sentences with it, let alone whole blog entries.

Also, I've been busy. The center stickers on my cheap wheels fell off, and I had to pick up replacement ones. I've got a bigger-than-usual backlog of library books to deal with. My VCR's not working right, and I'm not yet willing to take it apart.

Most recently, though, I've had other things to do. Today and yesterday I was involved in a LAN party, which was quite fun. We mainly played EA's Battlefield 1942 with the Desert Combat mod. So basically it was a bunch of geeks playing soldier in the first Gulf conflict.

It was a lot more fun than I had expected. I'm not a big first-person shooter fan, and BF1942 is, at its core, a FPS. Yes, tanks can be driven and planes flown, but there is still an inordinate amount of running and crawling to be done. It's not going to replace GTA3 anytime soon on my system (particularly since I don't have a good enough system to run it) but I'd definitely play it again.

Anyway, part of the fun was coming up with intriguing nicknames. At times the server was filled with sophomoric anatomical taunting, childish name calling, and worse. For my part, I tried to be clever, striking gold with a one-two punch of "BugblatterBeastOfTraal" (which surprisingly few 'got') and its followup "TraalThePrettyHorseshit" (which was timed precisely to when my team was complaining). Another nerdy reference was "Set Me Up The Bomb". Better, and less geeky than those, was my apt description of my gaming skills and a play on words: "an army of one half".

That said, I'm catching myself back up. You have been warned.

Putting ketchup together (and keeping it up-to-date, so far) was as just fun as I'd thought... and different. My self-imposed rules dictated a distant and impersonal but just slightly colloquial style, meaning I didn't want to use too many "Me"s and "My"s and no "You"s at all.

While this writing style works for a catalog of bookmarks, it tends to limit the contents of the blog. I've had my 'hot thots' page for a long time, but that evolved (and plateau-ed) into a list of pseudo profundities and 'Confucius-say'-caliber comments. Again, not quite the forum for a diary-ish entry.

So, since I've already got a smokin' copy of Movable Type installed, I thought I'd just throw up a new blog for observations and rants. And to be clever, I named it "fine whine", obviously a pun—of sorts. Of course the couple is usually wine and cheese, but to be creative I'm going with 'ketchup' and 'fine whine'.

All of this rambling surely makes no sense to you. And did I mention I hardly ever use ketchup? And even more rarely drink wine?

But I've got a lot of bookmarks to go through to catch up, and even more whining that I can do.