I’ve been downloading and listening to some old video game soundtracks, and in the process, I discovered a rather… interesting situation with a tune in an old Sega Game Gear soundtrack, specifically that for Ecco the Dolphin.

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Even if I did actually manage to get my driver’s license and feel vaguely comfortable behind the wheel of a car, I still doubt I’d be doing much in the way of driving.

I still have absolutely no idea how to get from Macon to Athens and back. I’ve gone back and forth fairly frequently, but I still can’t remember exactly where along the route the various turns I’d need to make are. And the roads I need to turn on are just random meaningless numbered highways that I can’t remember, so that doesn’t help me pinpoint things any! If the streets actually had names that were in my mind meaningful, that would definitely help jog my memory… or if I could read a highway map without getting visually overloaded… :-\

And Google’s directions make me go by way of the interstate part of the way, which does NOT help me any, given that the interstate scares me. Maybe in about 5 years or so… OK, probably 10… I’ll feel vaguely, remotely comfortable driving at interstate speeds. Not to mention merging onto the interstate— and changing lanes on it— which scare me even more than driving on it.

Sometimes, I just feel hopeless. ::sigh::

Something mildly amusing for the Fullmetal Alchemist viewers out there (the rest of you can safely ignore it, as it’s all a big in-joke anyway):

Apparently, there is a batch e-mail tool named AutoMail… a perfectly reasonable name, I’ll admit. But no, what makes this funny is that it was developed by a company named, I kid you not, Alchemy Lab. No, really, I’m not making this up.

This amuses me far more than it should.

(…says he whose PowerBook is named Alphonse. Right. Move along, then.)

Dear ‘tententwelvecorp.com’ spammers:

If you really wanted me to buy shares of some fly-by-night stock called Southwestern Medical Solutions, the least you could’ve done was to not spoof a very real and completely unrelated domain name in the return address of your spams. It’s not fun receiving twenty or so return-to-sender notices a day on my catchall account, particularly when they all include the 24KB GIF file you embedded your spiel within to avoid filters.

And the fact that you’re sending your mail by exploiting an assortment of infected PCs all over the world, so there’s no trace of where your messages actually originated from? Not fun, either.

At least a Google search informs me that I’m clearly not alone in having my address spoofed. Of course, that just makes it even more of a heinous crime, as far as I’m concerned.

May you be flooded by hundreds of e-mail bounces,
*@zone38.net

Ah, ATF. Once again, you’ve saved us from the dangerous threat of…cosplay?

No, really— it’s a news item from right here at the University of Georgia: ATF rids Univ. of ninja threat.

ATF agents are always on alert for anything suspicious — including ninjas.

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents, on campus Tuesday for Project Safe Neighborhoods training, detained a “suspicious individual” near the Georgia Center, University Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said.

Jeremiah Ransom, a sophomore from Macon, was leaving a Wesley Foundation pirate vs. ninja event when he was detained.

Note to any ATF agents reading this: please, think twice before you decide to hold any sort of training September 22-24 in the vicinity of the Cobb Galleria. It’s for your own good; trust me. ^_~

Argh. What will it take to get this town to actually run buses at halfway reasonable hours? I’m sure that a good number of people would get more use out of a bus running at 8 PM than one running at 1 PM… seriously, if you work 9 to 5, there’s not really any time to do anything else! And if you work past 6:30 PM or so…good luck getting a taxi; I read an article in the local paper a while back that some cab companies have flat-out refused to give people in other parts of town a ride at night because they were too busy escorting drunk students home from downtown.

And it’s really bad on the weekends. Some of the routes don’t run at all on Saturdays; others (the ones that actually do run more than once an hour) run on an even sparser schedule than usual, or at the least, force you to take a more roundabout route. And forget about getting to campus from the edges of town, or vice versa, on Sundays; the only route running then is the campus weekend route.

It wouldn’t be so bad if (a) everything weren’t so ridiculously spread out, and (b) roads actually had sidewalks and crosswalks in halfway logical locations. But no, we have things like crosswalks spaced miles apart on very busy roads, sidewalks that randomly disappear and reappear, busy intersections without crosswalks… and the traffic around here scares me sometimes. It’s bad enough as a pedestrian; there’s no way I could drive in this without crashing into something! And as for the whole issue of sprawl, the nearest grocery store to campus is about a mile from the nearest edge of campus (which, thankfully, is the south edge at which I’m living)— which is hardly the most convenient distance for carrying several heavy bags of groceries. It’s even worse in the other parts of campus. You’d think the zoning laws would actually encourage the placement of a store that might, I don’t know, actually be convenient for students!

I guess I should be glad that I at least live on one of the campus bus stops, which actually does run into the night (though only to campus destinations and downtown). I seriously don’t see how people can live off-campus and survive… oh, right, they’re un-spacey enough to actually pay attention to all the unpredictable traffic, or at least they can find someone to live with who can drive them around. Meh.

Bizarre music video of the day: Vitalic’s “Poney Pt. 1”. The music video is officially titled “Birds,” in what I can only assume is a brilliant burst of French surrealism; it’s actually footage of a bunch of dogs jumping in slow motion amidst laser beams.

And y’know what? I find this far more entertaining than the sorts of videos that consist solely of the performers pantomiming a performance. Not to mention that dogs in slow motion are absurdly entertaining… at once graceful and oddly amorphous…

And I’ve finished the anagrammed MARTA map. Enjoy… I think some of these anagrams are really funny. Click on the thumbnail below to view full-size.

(I can only hope that MARTA is more lenient about fair use rights than the London Underground, who forced someone to pull a similar parody down…)

(Here’s the real version of MARTA’s map, for reference’s and comparison’s sake.)

In the interest of accessibility, a full list of anagrammed station names follows, each listed with its real-world equivalent.

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OK, that’s it. Now that there are anagrammed versions of the London Tube and Toronto Transit maps out there, I’ve decided that I’m going to work on an anagrammed MARTA map for all the wordplay-loving Georgians.

I’ve already finished the north line… I had to cheat and throw in a couple apostrophes, but so far I have:

0. Vine of Spit
1. Retrace the Pence
2. Vice Centric
3. Unearth Oven
4. Two Mind
5. Terran Sect
6. Drenching Treble
7. Duke Bach
8. Decent Miracle
9. You’d Down
10. Spy Sans Grind
11. Ron’s Nth Grips

(Here’s the real map, for, uh, comparison.)

And for “Brookhaven/Oglethorpe University” I came up (with the help of the venerable Wordplay program) with the wonderful “Pothole Saviour/Everything Broken.” Hee.

This is way too fun.

Hey, kids! It’s mistaken identity time again! Time to shame (but not name, because I’m too nice of a person) those people who are firmly convinced that I’m not who I really am!

This isn’t, for the record, the first time this has happened; back in 2002, I posted a transcript of a similar incident to my site.

Other than altering the username of the mistaken party and asterisking out an expletive (hey, it’s just my personal preference to keep the public parts of this blog on the milder side of PG-13), this is completely unedited…

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