Talking with a friend sort of brought this all to a head.

Things have grown staid and commonplace. People don't comment in depth or as much as they used to. I have trouble being open with my writing, given the number of people I know in RL that read this journal.

Six years worth of entries is hard to abandon, but I'm sure there's a relevant quote about how your possessions end up owning you if you're not careful.

Most of all though, I don't like having to filter a lot of posts. I don't like having to filter any of them at all, actually.

So I will be leaving for a new journal.


I update this journal from time to time, though it's mainly RL minutiae that won't interest anyone aside from RL friends and acquaintances.



There's a Livejournal Syndicated RSS feed of my flickr photostream here so you can add it as a friend on lj if you want to keep up with my pictures.


It's time to move on.

It all started innocently enough back in '01. Some company named 'Rockstar' put out a video game. It was like playing a cross between the best cliches of pulp detective novels and a combat system right out of the Matrix films. Some crazy fool turned it into a movie, and after seeing it tonight, I came to a few conclusions.

One, the first video game was better than this movie.
Two, this movie was still better than the second video game in the Max Payne series.
Three, a few punches can put Max Payne in a hospital bed, but he can laugh off a shotgun blast to the chest from three feet away.

If you're reading this, all you care about is 'should I bother seeing it or not?'. The short answer is, if you like stuff being shot up reaaaal good, go see it! If you're interested only in seeing Oscar-worthy movies, you'll probably want to skip this one. And for those of you sticking around for my humorous take on the movie...

( Long and full of spoilers, but rather hilarious: [and I'd be tickled if anyone submitted it to metaquotes] )

An old adage is 'don't mention politics or religion in the...' workplace, bar, etc, etc, any place where you're forced to be with others that may not share your views.

The thing is, religion and politics aren't topics for rational discussion in the real world. Both stem from decisions made at a gut level that have little or nothing to do with logic. However, to quote a favorite author of mine, Ray Bradbury "If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."

Life occasionally needs a few of those things.

When it comes to politics, I'm as jaded and pessimistic as the bitterest of old men. If a politician's mouth is open, he's lying, and if it's closed, he's lying by omission. This leads to a somewhat fatalistic approach to the political scene, and so I know that even though it will be a choice between the least of two evils in just about any race, some times the choice is interesting enough to say 'Aw, fuck it' and go with what your heart urges.

That'd be Obama in this case.

Which is weird, as I'm closer to a libertarian than anything else, and would probably be a Republican if I thought there was any point to the party. However, I've decided that voting based on party rather than issues is a moronic approach. Despite being pro-gun and pro-life among other things, I'd still vote for Obama because he's JFK to McCain's Nixon. On paper, Nixon was the far better candidate, yet look at how things turned out.

Maybe I'm stupid enough to think there might be a difference, a better difference if Obama was the president. Truth be told, presidents don't affect the nation that much. Life continues on as usual for US citizens, regardless of who the president is. So why not go out on a limb?

This is one of the niftiest web gadgets I've ever seen. It allows you to search for photos by color, and multiple different colors at the same time, shades of gray, complimentary colors, any ten basic colors you can think of.

The results can be absolutely fascinating.

Shades of orange

Really red stuff

Shades of blue

The most saturated portion of the spectrum

Very contrasty black and white photos

Images from yesterday afternoon / evening:

Via hexapod:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

"The structure of the arms, upper or lower, has a consistent and similar curved rhythm, starting from the base of the elbow. A double curve develops, holding to the under-arm exterior position of the member. The arms in a rear view figure. The linked arms and the underarm curves hold true, but with one modification: since the collarbone yoke is obscured, we invert the armature and join the arms on the contours of the upper shoulder, holding the boundaries of the trapezius muscles."
-Dynamic Figure Drawing, Burne Hogarth

Crap. Now everyone will think I'm artistic or something like that.

I found this stuff at a local grocery store (Tom Thumb) while searching for something I hadn't tried yet.

The gamble paid off with delicious results!

If you're a fan of good food, this is something you'll want to give a try :D

Austin GDC 2008

Went to the Austin Game Developers Conference, it was ten kinds of amazing :D

Dominic and I got in as volunteers, as the $300 base ticket price was a bit much. As it turns out, the volunteer option is also ten kinds of amazing. You get an all access pass that costs everyone else $995.00 for two days of very easy work. You get there a day before the conference starts and stuff brochures in attendee bags for two or three hours, then you volunteer one day during the conference and basically sit and watch the talks and hand out evaluation forms. Wow.

We had a bit of an adventure getting a hotel room, as we didn't make reservations beforehand. Who knew a hurricane was coming?! And that tons of refugees would take shelter in Austin?! Yeesh! We ended up driving 150 miles to College Station to stay with Dominic's brother the first night, and after that we were able to find a hotel room for the other nights, though it was a major pain.

The talks the first two days were interesting, but in terms of depth, pretty shallow. But there were a few talks that stood out, namely the Academic Round table, run by Dr. White! and the EVE Online talk about scaling their servers to meet the demand imposed by the huge number of players. I actually ran into bsdcat in person at the EVE Online talk, which was pretty darn cool, though we ended up not being able to talk too much as I had to leave early on the last night.

As it turns out, Dr. White, a math / CS professor Dominic and I had for class when we both went to the University of Dallas was there. He'd moved to Cornell and been promoted to the Director of their game development program there, which couldn't have been more deserved in his case. I knew he'd moved to Cornell a while back, but I had no idea he was that into computer games hah! He was actually hosting one of the talks at the Austin GDC, the Academic Round Table, which turned out to be one of the most in-depth and interesting talks there. Which was rather nice, as I just went because he was one of my favorite college professors heh.

The EVE Online talk about scaling server support on Wednesday was also very impressive - there were actual equations in the slides! Just about every other talk was very topical in their approach to the subject, much like a quick overview of the subject that wasn't too useful to anyone who knew the first thing about the subject...

And the fact that the parties each night were open bar was also a blast :D

All in all, it was one of the most fun conferences I've been to, short of QuakeCon heh.

I went to see Babylon A.D. tonight, and while intrigued, I didn't expect much out of it. I mean, it *does* star Vin Diesel. Sir Anthony Hopkins he ain't. I was pleasantly surprised though. It's a very good sci-fi movie that feels much like Blade Runner with a breath of fresh air. While it has the potential to be the next Blade Runner, it reaches, but never quite gets there. A better director, a larger budget, who knows what could have been?

However, 'not quite Blade Runner' is still pretty damn good. Far better than Terminator 3 by a long shot. In the end, I liked it more than 'Children of Men', which might be a more professionally done movie, but in some ways this film felt like a far more real version of the future, if that makes any sense. Aside from a few things that pulled you out of the immersion of the moment, like the use of vehicles in the movie that would be as dated as a 1970's Cutlass Supreme is today. I'm not sure what the future will be like, but there aren't going to be shinny 1990's Humvees running around like they do in the film. The SUV's are a bit suspicious in that light also.

To the only question that matters to you though - "Is it worth seeing?" Yes.

I'm somewhat surprised by the negative reviews I see online, and the level of vehemence behind them. When Spielberg's "A.I" came out, I didn't see people this pissy about that movie, even though "A.I." is a far worse movie than "Babylon A.D." WTF internet people? What *are* you smoking? Ignore my deluded cohorts and go see this movie. Go in as a blank slate, neither expecting to be disappointed nor amazed to the point of being overwhelmed. However, you should expect to come out having enjoyed this film.

Mrs. Montag works at an architect's firm. Not too long after she started working there, I noticed the two of us became sick with minor bugs on a far more frequent basis than we had previously. It was at least once a month most of the time.

A while after she'd been working there, I found out that one of her co-workers, Jamie, worked part time as a kindergarten teacher. Jamie was a very nice girl, but when Mrs. Montag mentioned that Jamie had been sick, sure enough, a few days later, we'd also be sick.

Time bore out that correlation was indeed causation in this case. Jamie got a new job about two months ago. Since then, neither I nor Mrs. Montag have had any minor sicknesses.

It's AMAZING!

Currently at QuakeCon. OMG. SO MUCH FUN!!

This guy sums it up pretty well:

So now that I have nicely upgrade computer (intel quad core), I can actually play some modern games. One I've been playing the last few days is Assassin's Creed. It's very fun, though it has some Grand Theft Auto style shortcomings - ie, repetitive missions, you're just playing what's essentially a series of sandbox levels. Oh yeah, and it has rather long and boring cut scenes that you can't skip. That's one of the greatest sins of game design. Don't punish the player.

But much like GTA, Assassin's Creed is still a blast to play. You can make him jump and climb and leap over EVERYTHING!!! There's nothing like jumping from rooftop to rooftop at top speed, running and leaping over several death-defying drops (Parkour) to a guard three buildings away and stabbing him in the face. It's great.

I have to give it props on the accuracy of how things look when you're sword fighting. They actually do the things people do in real life, they swing the same way, and the same things happen. It's not fencing, but you practice with one or two types of swords, and you get a feel for what's possible and not when looking at movies and games. The designers deserve massive praise for the accuracy of it all.

But yeah, you play Altair, who's basically a twenty-something flying squirrel on crack who happens to look like a human. And goes around stabbing people in the face. And the back. And the neck. And in the foot too! Terribly violent, but terribly fun!

Too hilarious not to post. Sign was from a picture I took about a year ago, after passing it every day for a few months, I had the thought 'wow, that sign would be hilarious if I put some different text on it'.

OMG, I need one of these!



Engadget: Yamaha Tenori

Unfortunately it's $1,200 now, but if they ramp up production (only making 100 units a month now), it may get down to the $250 mark. I love sequencers...

Finally giving my computer a long needed overhaul (AMD Sempron 3100, 1 gig ram, don't ask).

Mobo Combo with Intel CPU
Core 2 Quad Q6600 ( 4 x 2.4GHz - 1066FSB - 8MB Cache)
Biostar P35D2-A7

Hopefully this will be a bit better. I've got 2 gigs of ram waiting for it. 1 gig just isn't enough any more.

House on the Cliff


Haven't really drawn in a good four months (photography is a demanding mistress), but today it got the better of me.

The rest of the photos can be found on Facebook, or on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/montag-snaps/sets/72157606010500182/

This has to have been the most fun I've had at a wedding since my own :D

Happy 4th everyone!

To any of you who wondered what such a process involves:

Human psychology has always fascinated me, though some might claim bias on my part as I'm a human being. Aside from that, there's no end to the strange quirks of the human mind. Strange and fascinating quirks...

One of them is Confirmation Bias. Humans tend to think in certain ways, and when searching for information or interpreting it, the information tends to be viewed through a filter of previous experience that seeks to conform it to previously held beliefs and preconceptions, while avoiding to relate it to ideas that would contradict those.

In other words, to a cop, every suspicious person is guilty.

The problem is understandable - the people the police deal with the majority of the time aren't upstanding citizens. They tend to be called in for the opposite type. And if you deal with criminals day in and day out, it shapes your perceptions. Pretty quickly, every suspicious person seems to be guilty. And if you're dealing with criminals day in and day out, a high percentage of them will be guilty, which only serves to embed the confirmation bias of seeing every suspicious person as a guilty person even deeper.


Confirmation bias can be quite deadly though. Take the Virginia Tech shooting. Steven Lubet of Northwestern University Law School wrote a fascinating paper "How Lawyers (ought to) Think", and his first example was how confirmation bias affected the cops who were trying to solve the first murders. They come in to find a RA (Ryan Clark) dead, and a freshmen (Emily Hilscher) fatally wounded. The police secured the dormitory for 30 minutes, but then let everyone go, as interviewing Emily's roommate revealed that she'd been with her boyfriend Karl over the weekend, and her boyfriend was an avid gun owner. The roommate insisted that Karl was a very non-violent person, but the police rushed off to find him because the facts fit previous experiences.

Case closed!

Or not. As it turns out, another student, Seung-Hui Cho was still on campus, reloading and heading over to a large hall on campus to go shoot some more people. Killing 32 and wounding 28, he committed suicide. The cops were nowhere to be found, as they were off stopping Karl's car and searching his house for the murder weapon.

Unfortunately, a large percentage of the time when a woman is found shot to death, a boyfriend / lover / husband / ex-husband is responsible. And so if you're a policeman and you find a dying woman who's been badly shot and talking to her roommate reveals that her boyfriend is an avid gun owner?

Case closed!


Thousands upon thousands of years of evolution have discouraged overthinking things and going with what works the majority of the time. Unfortunately, 'majority' and 'all' aren't synonymous.

Stay tuned for more fascinating entries on cognitive psychology!