SpawnPoint

So, spent the first night here at the new house, and while I didn't get much sleep, it was still a very special occasion.

Woke up this morning to start work in my office for the first time, and it was a welcomed change.

So other than the half broke couch (they're going to send a technician here on Wed morning to try and fix it, which they won't be able to, so they're more than likely going to have to get us a new one.  Hopefully letting us keep the pillows, so we can have 2 more pillows =) ), everything's kosher.

I was, and still am, willing to throw down as much money as we can afford to into making this place the most baller house I can afford to make it, so when friends come over they'd like to come back  lol  Not to mention when people come over, they don't feel like they're just entered the dump of the city.

I am especially proud of the most expensive expenditures I've spent in the last few days:

1) 37" HDTV LCD Samsung wide screen TV
2) 19" Samsung wide screen monitor for my computer (906BW model, same one as Mr. Me II's.  I love it too)
3) A leather high back manager's chair for the office

Honestly, I am having a blast here.  Hopefully we can throw away most of the boxes that's littered everywhere right now, from the TV, the monitor, the chair, the office desks, etc.  I made a comment last night about building a dinning room table out of the boxes that we have  lol  Use the smaller ones as the center pylon, and use the big Samsung TV box as the main surface  hahahahaha

Nah, that is actually our next investment, a decent dinning room set, and a coffee table.  After that, I think we're done spending dough, and instead have to concentrate on paying it all off  hahahaha

God bless credit  =)

Anyway, Understeer, getting back to work.

So, the last couple of weeks, Krystal and I have been busy getting our house ready for move in.

This morning, the couch that we bought was delivered.  Although it has problems, it's not that big a deal, at least we have a couch now!

Last night, we bought a TV stand, and the night before that, I put together the computer desk for Krystal.

Tomorrow we go and pick up the new TV - a Samsung 37" HDTV LCD screen.  Hotness.

I can't wait to fully move into the house, although, I definitely won't miss the actual "moving" part.

I am ready for the joy of being in the new house, but not the pain.

Dang it...

So while over at Krystal's mom's house the other night, her mom stops us to show us videos she's found on Youtube.  And as usual, we kind of sighed and rolled our eyes, then stopped our attempt to leave the house without watching the video.

To my surprise, it wasn't something crazy and completely ridiculous for once.  It was a music video, and as soon as I heard the voice I recognized it.

It was James LaBrie that fronts Dream Theater.

I then looked at the information about the song that was on.

The song was called "Day 11: Love", by a group named Ayreon.  The name sounded familiar.  I think I saw it once on the Wikipedia page on LaBrie.

So then I sat down and listened to the song and watched the video, as Krystal's mom explained a little bit about the song.  She then pointed out a part for me to pay attention to.

Oh snap.

Mikael Akerfeldt from Opeth is singing on the song too?!

I was pretty much 300% interested in this Ayreon group immediately.  However, at 1:30am, I was a little more interested in sleep than to run a search on Google about this group, so it had to wait.

Next day, during work, and my slacking off, I found out that Ayreon was actually a project by the man named Arjen Lucassen, whom was a pretty ingenious musician.  His style comprised of progressive rock and heavy metal influences, and mixed them with traditional folk music.

Yeah.

How does it sound?

If this guy didn't write the music, I can see it being a complete train wreck and the album would be completely ridiculous, to the point of even silly.  However, on this album, "The Human Equation", everything fits like a well designed puzzle, and the traditional folk music actually flows well with the heavy guitars and even the vocals.

Speaking of vocals, this is another forte of the album:  there are 11 vocalists on the album.

Each vocalist represents a part of the story:

Me (main character represented by James LaBrie)
Fear (represented by Mikael Akerfeldt)
Best Friend (Arjen Lucassen)
Reason (Eric Clayton)
Love (Heather Findlay)
Pride (Magnus Ekwall)
Wife (Marcela Bovie)
Father (Mike Baker)
Passion (Irene Jansen)
Agony (Devon Graves)
Rage (Devin Townsend)

If you are into metal at all, you might recognize some of those names.

This album is amazing, not only from the musical point of view, but lyrically as well.

The album is a concept album, meaning that the entire album revolves around a concept.  The concept usually is portrayed through a story, and thus, each song is a part of the story.  One of the best examples, and to be frank, I consider it THE BEST concept albums of all time in the history of rock/metal music, would be the album named "Scenes from a Memory: Metropolis Pt. II" (we'll call it SFAM for short) by Dream Theater.

"The Human Equation" has a similar feel to SFAM, obviously with a different musical style and storyline.

The story within "The Human Equation" is about a man that has fallen into a coma, and the personal struggles, memories, and emotions he goes through within his mind, and also his best friend and wife's minds.  Each song represents a day, and in each day, something different happens, and the songs take you on a journey through the story, the emotions, the struggles, and most importantly, through the story.  Each song is a roller coaster ride through the different genres of music that intertwine with each other to form this unique sound that is Ayreon.

The album is an hour and forty-two minutes long, printed on two CDs.

I bought the limited edition version, which has a special cover, the two CDs, and a bonus DVD that has videos on the making of the album, interviews, and a music video for the song "Day 11: Love".

The ending of the story.....

Bah, I'm not telling :)  You're going to find out on your own.  However, I will say this much: the ending is interesting, and will make you go "hmm...?" :)

Honestly, I have no idea why people act like such e-thugs on their own servers when looking for scrims.

Sunday, the PHXX clan had 3 to 5 members on most of the afternoon, so we decided that we were going to look for scrims to practice for the upcoming CAL match, which is on de_contra.

Ghost found us a few teams to scrim, but honestly, they were all jerks.  I'm only using the term "jerk" here because I have to keep this post rated G, well, at least PG-13, so replace the word "jerk" in your minds as you wish.

All of these teams were disrespectful, hateful, and racist.  Not exactly sure why, because they were probably a bunch of kids or even older guys that still lived at home, and never have actually met a real woman before.  They cussed us out, they called us racist names and all these other things, and their answer were always "this is MY server and I can do what I want", and then continued, and actually worsened, their racist comments and cursing at us.

If these were kids at around 12, yeah, I can understand why they would try to act all hard like that.  But like I said, these were probably a bunch of 20 some odd year olds, or even older, kids that live at home, probably overweight cause they don't move further than like 2 feet from their seats, and eats pizza every meal.  And these people were being e-thugs.  Ignorant e-thugs at that.

Here's the punchline - they weren't even that good.

We lost, yes, but not because of how good they were, but because of how poor we did as a team, and individually.  When we get to 1 on 1 situations, we wiped the floor with them most of the time, which shows that we're not all that bad as individual players.

Another thought I had running through my mind was that, with all that cursing and racist comments, I was thinking they actually might be trying to drive away teams so they don't have to scrim?  So why were they idling in the IRC channel looking for other teams to scrim?  I don't get it?  Mental illness?  Mild retardation?  What's going on?

There was one instance where we did a 3v3, and just as we started to adapt to how the other team was playing and was whooping them 2 rounds in a roll, they went "had to go, you baddies"  and signed off.  Talk about sore losers.

I don't know why most teams are like that, but it seems, so far, that in all the scrims that I've been in, teams are 99% of the time jerks.

The only time that a scrim isn't with jerks, is with fellow SP clans like EC, or KI, or even back in the day PWND.  These are good guys, and I enjoyed scrimming with them.

Hope we find some decent clans to scrim with again soon, because scrimming is fun, but not with a bunch of jerks that try to act like they're Vin Diesel over the interweb.  That is about as lame as Stephen Hawkin's legs.