This is just a piece of silliness my roomie found for me: [link]

I just can't imagine anything funnier, or more embarrassing, than a bull running around with somebodies undies on his horns.

Hmmm. A while back I heard this tune on my car radio. I couldn't figure out who was doing it because the vocalists voice wasn't familiar, and I couldn't figure out the songs title since the station I listen to in the car never announces that stuff. For months I was convinced it was something/somebody else. Then I discovered it was Colbie Caillat's Bubbly. Here's some stuff from the Pepsie Video Awards or something: [link]

I know, I'm a sap for this light-hearted pop crap, I can't help it. For some reason music really really affects my mood. So what's the verdict on her? Is she a hottie? I think so.

And yeah, I'm alive and well.

I FINALLY got COMPLETELY caught up with my DevWatches after last years debacle of being banned from DA for 2 weeks followed by my eviction and loss of internet for several months. YAY me!

In other news. It's Monday Noon here and I'm looking out my window at my neighbors house - or more correctly their roof - covered in OMG! - SNOW? For the second morning in a row, and this batch doesn't look like it has any plans for melting any time soon.

Pics and stories. I've been puttering at several but only sporadically. Just fighting a "mood."

It's been a month at least since I updated PandoraU and I'm still debating whether to abandon that DA page and pull it all into my own gallery instead. So far my habit has been to put together the next render for the story and then spend days and days trying to convince myself that the render and story are done enough.

I had a new and scary idea for the PandoraU with a new cast of characters. The theme? What if one of the major minions of the villains had a falling out with them and decided to escape, with the pet human he'd been given? I've been imagining scenes for it, got one mostly finished and may have finally gotten the bit of story for it written after several false starts. What'cha think?

I'm just finishing another round of running my anti-spyware tools on my computers.

I've met a fair number of people online who had no idea what spyware was. For the uninitiated, it's software that installs itself onto your computer while you are online without your permission so it can spy on what web-pages you look at, what software you use, and just about everything else you do with your computer so the creators of the spyware can figure out what sorts of spam to send you.

If that weren't bad enough, if you unknowingly collect enough of it, it will slow down your computer by stealing process-time away from the programs you WANT running.

Spybot Search and Destroy - [link] - is one of the best FREE spyware removers out there. Just about everyone I know who uses anything uses it.

I have also used AdAware SE which was also an excellent tool, but last year they stopped supporting this version, and I heard several lack-luster reports about their 2007 version. Has anyone heard anything about the 2008 version?

And what other tools do you use?

- - -

And also: I am a gamer-geek. I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons and other similar RPGs for more than 3 decades now. And of course I often read fiction set in the various game worlds to help me set a frame of mind for my game-characters.

When TSR/WOTC/Hasbro brought out their Eberron setting a while back I wasn't sure I liked it. But slowly, after reading some of the fiction set in the world, it's grown on me. A few days ago I became obsessed with finishing the latest book - Word of Traitors: Legacy of Dhakaan #2 - Don Bassingthwaite. If you'd ever asked me if I could read a book that included a war between Elves and Goblins, with the Goblins as the HEROES, and LIKE it, I'd have told you "HECK NO!" But I did, and I did. I am eagerly awaiting the next book now to find out how our heroes get out of THIS mess.

My email provider shut me out of my account last Friday, just before the major holiday here. WTF? So I managed to contact my friend who set it all up for me, and he says he's working on it. That was last Friday, no new word since then, and the account is still refusing to let me log in. I think this is the third time this has happened since I went into this private server thing. I'm getting frustrated by it all, but not sure what to do yet. I've had some offers for invites over at Gmail, and I've still got a link for a free hotmail account, but I'm not sure what to do. Any advice?

I also recently figured out how to create folders for my gallery so that those fans who are interested in specific things can find them easier. I'd like to know what people think about them, and if they have any ideas for improvements. Yeah?

Thanks.

Richard

Another of my utterly strange dreams.

I and some friends decide to go out one night, and end up walking through downtown from our parking. Suddenly the sky and everything is blocked out with gray dingy fog. Down from out of the fog descends towers of stacked-up UFO-discs. Everyone panics and starts running in different directions, only to get "harvested" by the ships landing around us. But where I am everything is somewhat calm. I guess that once the ships fill and leave the tower so the next one up can come down, they need a clear space to leave, and I'm in the middle of one. Every time a ship takes off over me I want to panic and run, but every direction I turn is a ship on the ground, or one landing, so I stay where I am, and eventually the last ships have filled and they leave.

In the aftermath, with so many people missing and everything, life goes totally chaotic. We descend into a sort of Mad Max scavenger society while we wait for them to come back again. A year after they were first here, they come back and release everyone they'd taken, but none of them remembers the past year. Even more odd is that many of those taken now have exact twins, except that their twins are clear slates with no memories except that they are somehow connected with the originals. At first we don't know what to do about the "twins" but eventually we adopt them into our communities after we make sure they are actually human.

The still civilized survivors have built tall towers for housing as a defense against the lawless masses. We even build secret cubbies in them so we can hide deep inside the structures if and when the aliens come again.

Somehow in the dream I'm older, and I WAS a doctor, but I'd failed-out sometime before the invasion. I guess the chaos and disorder of a hospital ER setting had finally gotten to me and I had to retire early with my sanity nearly shattered.

Every so often the aliens stage another harvest, but they never take people they've taken before, which means that those of us who were lucky to have been missed get rarer and rarer.

Finally they catch up to me, even finding me and a few others in one of the cubbies of our building.

The aliens look remarkably like humans, but we guess they are using a disguise of some sort.

Being "harvested" is a bit scary, as part of it we are subjected to sprays that smell like super-glue. One of the things they do with the spray is glue our fingers together, and then glue them to our left ear so we can't struggle very much. Then they knock us out with another spray.

Before that, once they discover that I was a doctor they start to explain things to me a bit. They don't really intend us any harm, but they need our help for part of their reproduction cycle.

It turns out that they need us to act as surrogate mothers for their offspring. They surgically connect their offspring into our bloodstream through an external umbilical so we can provide the nutrients they need to mature. The process takes about a year, and our "offspring" absorb some of our knowledge as well.

Their offspring are always produced in pairs - exact twins, and sometimes this causes a strange sort of backlash, and the host-mother ends up producing an exact clone of themselves as well.

MY offspring turn out to be beautiful twin girls, who inherit all of my knowledge of medicine. I am awakened during their "birth" so I can be disconnected, and eventually returned to Earth, and that's the only time I get to see them.

I am finally returned to Earth, believing my group to be the last that they will harvest.

But then, just as my hermit-inside-a-tiny-community life is returning to normal, they come again. At first I want to hide in the cubby again, but I realize that they came for a purpose, and I can only imagine that the purpose is ME. So I convince everyone that this is what's happening and those who care about me prepare me to be taken and lead me up to the roof of the tower.

I'm greeted by the aliens who thank me for coming, and then begin processing me again.

That's when my cat awoke me for her breakfast. So I don't know any more.



Totally weird huh?

Hm. Well I'm going to have some cheese, but not share any of the whine.

Last journal was partially about the problems I was having with my runtime and all the broken file connections. Well my friend who is the Mistress of DAZ re-appeared a few days ago and helped me fix that. [link] - is the best tool there is for fixing this stuff. I was looking at HOURS of going through files with notepad and fixing file-extensions by hand. This handy tool found close to 2000 broken file extensions in my runtime and fixed them all in a few minuets. I mean I was gonna cry like a baby just looking at fixing the broken connections in my bushytail I use for everybody's tails!

I've fallen a bit behind with my PandoraU story, but it's going. Teach me to decide to revamp the darned costumes again.

I logged into my account at MySpace last night and found some friends I haven't chatted with in a while, perhaps I'll even get a chance to go see some of them soon.

A variety of odd stuff going on in my head, but nothing meaningful I think. So perhaps I'll leave off here for now.