Tentacled Monkey

I am so fucking burned out with work right now that it is borderline treason. I'm the lone tech writer for a mid-level software company and I am just fighting it everyday. Unfortunately going independent doesn't guarantee the amount of pay I need to provide for my family, and I learned the craft in-house. Also, my NDA pretty much excludes me from anything without a battle.

I'm sick of people giving me the specs for a doc and then changing it 90% through but not extending the damn deadline. Or having a doc due to a client to validate the format and style of the document, but then the day it is due tell you that is must be a final draft, they'll be checking for content.

This is on top of the other duties that I already manage, two separate bug tracking databases, a number of delivered apps, and being the only person, at least at times it seems, that can translate programmer speech patterns into discernable text for a client to understand.

I was wiped out in Hurricane Ike, lost fucking everything (Hell I only owned one pair of pants until yesterday!), having to move to another region of the state, my wife losing her job, losing two of my cars, the lit goes on and on...

Meanwhile, the people in the office who were also affected, some slightly some as bad as me, seem to think I am not working or some such bullshit. Fuck me! Did I mention that I had insurance on everything, but not flood insurance! So nothing was covered, I lost upwards or $150,000 in stuff and got $7000 from FEMA. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against FEMA! Without them I would have been homeless and no chance of survival afterwards. My beef was with the god damn insurance companies. Technically the damage should have been covered under my current policy. But the insurance company decided after the fact that a storm surge is a flood! I am in the same boat as a renter as a guy who lost his entire home and is not able to rebuild for whatever reason! I had 6 fucking feet of water in my house for two fucking days! If you have ever survived a flood you know what it's like if not shut the fuck up and be happy it wasn't you.

Long story short is that I am back to working paycheck to paycheck, slaving for the man with no real end in sight.

I decided to bitch now, just because I can't fucking take it any longer. I am one of the forgotten, one of those poor bastards that couldn't afford to stay in the strike zone after Ike and can barely afford to live elsewhere. No one has helped us out except for FEMA and some exceptionally nice people at the KofP in East Texas, and what little furniture that we have now is due to their kind donations.

So why write this now? I'm fairly certain no one reads this shit anyway so why not! Besides if I don't at least throw it down somewhere I'm certain I'm going to go fucking insane.

I'm mindlessly ranting now, this shit isn't even making sense anymore....

So I started playing Bethseda Software's latest title, Fallout 3, yesterday. This game is absolutely awesome. Imagine if you played the original Fallout combined with the latest Half Life. It is amazing, simply stated and bold, but no less true.

The game play is ideally suited to PCs, thankfully! In my opinion Bethseda screwed themselves with Oblivion IV by having an almost retarded key mapping, making it almost impossible to play. They definitely learned from their mistakes with this release. Playing Fallout 3 is a treat the majority of the controls center around the gamers faithful 'WASD' without making any actions feel awkward.

The graphics are amazing, you get pulled into this world of destruction and hopeless endurance easily. You can run anywhere, there are no load times or zone changes except when you enter a building. I played yesterday for about 12 or more hours and now sit at level 5.

Two words of warning thoguh, if you don't have the power to push this game things in the distance will not appear until you get within a set distance of them, unfortunately this refers to bad guys as well. The other item worth noting is that you can get really lost really fast, especially early on.

Other than that, possibly the best game I have ever played, definitely the best this year. Hands down.

Well Friday night and Saturday morning Hurricane Ike plowed into the Texas coast. As a result we have lost everything save the few items we had with us when we evacuated. tens of thousands of dollars worth of books, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of computer and electronic equipment, and more importantly to me everything that belonged to my four year old daughter.

You can try and prepare yourself for the amount of destruction that has occurred but you really can't imagine it until you see it. Hundreds of houses that had at least three feet of standing water and many like ours that had 5 feet standing and at least 7 feet at one point inside.

I am effectively homeless, but I have my health and most importantly, my wife and daughter. I am not sure if anyone comes here any more but if you do, don't forget about us in Bridge City Texas. The media already has, and the destruction I saw in there today deserves some attention. It is absolutely heartbreaking.

I will see if I can get some photos online in the next few days.

Hope everyone is OK!

Well, Hurricane Gustav will go down in the history books as another false alarm for the state of Texas. All in all, the forced vacation to San Antonio cost me about $500. The only reason it was that cheap was because we shared a room with my in-laws.

But San Antonio was surprisingly fun! I have to go back at the end of the month for business, so I now know what to see.

There is supposed to be another Vampire game this weekend so I'll let everyone know if my Set finally gets killed by that damn Brujah. ;-)

Well we evacuated for Hurricane Gustav on Saturday at about 2pm and drove towards San Antonio where we had a free room. It took me 9 1/2 hours to make the 6 hour trip, not bad by most people's reports so far. A friend of mine that left 2 hours after me took 18 hours to get to Austin, so we were pretty lucky on the evacuation theory.

So yesterday we went and saw the Alamo and the Zoo both of which were cool. The Alamo was a lot more emotional than I had imagined it to be. Today we are going to hit the San Jose Mission, Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum, and the Witte Museum where they have a traveling Leonardo Da Vinci hands-on exhibit of his inventions.

We are thinking that we will just get a lot of rain and some winds in South East Texas, but nothing too major. We still are unsure of when we can actually go home, but I imagine it won't be until late tonight or early tomorrow.

Vampire
So I started playing the old Vampire the Masquerade with some friends of mine here in the last several months. Its been nice, but I made one greivous error in judgement when creating my character. I assumed the others in the group would have created a fighter type ass-kicking vamp and they did, so I created a heavily socialized Follower of Set. Granted I was allowed to be at 7th generation but let's face it Serpentis is not exactly known for its combat effectiveness.

So far we have had run-ins with a few prot-zombies and some mortals, nothing too dangerous, no the main problem with my character is the heroin addicted Brujah that is in the group with us. So far he has frenzied three times, one time almost killing me and another character in the fray. So I have made it a point to act like a Set and have been trying to use ghouls as "flesh shields" to try and alleviate any damage that I might take. But, alas, I also am almost worthless in a fire-fight. So I need a ghoul that is also well versed in combat. Without the "flesh shields" I am not going to last very long in a combat scenario.

Dark Heresy
A few weeks ago I acquired the Warhammer 40k RPG Dark Heresy. This book is awesome and is truley one of the best RPG books I have ever seen. It is gorgeous. Aside from that The system is fast-paced and deadly. The setting fleshes out alot of the information attained not only from the table-top game but from the novels as well. In the game you play an Acolyte of one of the Calixis sector's powerful Inquisitors. You start as a new recruit and work your way up through the ranks, if you live that long, to become an Interrogator or and Inquisitor, neither of which are covered in this book.

I am so excited about this game that it is retarded. I have a group lined up and a place to play but as of yet we have still not decided on when to play. I need to read up on the rules some more and one of the packaged adventures to detrmine what will happen. But allof that aside I am really excited about this game, and I think it shows.

OK I haven't been here in a while, whatever. But I have good news! Everyone must watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. This show is absolutely hilarious! Neil patrick-Harris is amazingly funny and Nathan Filion, yeah the captian from Serenity, is just plain funny. Dr. Horrible is the common man's villain with his freeze-ray, nothing to do with cold I assure you, his matter transporter, and the hidden love of the girl from the laundry-mat, Penny.

Its directed and written by Joss Whedon and everyone involved in this project deserves a big pat on the back.

Now if only he would read the Evil Overlord's List it might be perfect.