Phobia Acrophobia Androphobia Autophobia Cynophobia Dental phobia Entomophobia Erythophobia Glossophobia Gymnophobia Herpetophobia Hoplophobia Mysophobia Osmophobia Pantophobia Placophobia

What you think it means Fear of acrobats. Fear of androids. Fear of automobiles. Fear of cynics/cynicism. Fear of dentists. Fear of entering, maybe? Fear of Erythosomething. Fear of gloss. Fear of gyms. Fear of herpes. Fear of rabbits or crickets. Fear of MySpace. Fear of osmosis. Fear of pants! Fear of places.

What it actually means Fear of heights. Fear of males. Fear of being alone. Fear of dogs. Fear of dentists. What else could it mean? It's a genus of orchids, not a fear. Yeah. Pathological blushing. Scary. (not a fear) Fear of speaking in public. Fear of nudity, lol. Fear of reptiles. Fear of firearms. Fear of germs, contamination, or dirt. Fear of smells. Fear of everything. Fear of tombstones.

I got a Playstation 2 recently. I guess that's really all I have to say about that. The system's been out for almost 7 years now, so it's not very exciting of news. I figure it probably shouldn't get an entire post, so I'll talk about Facebook now.

I signed up for Facebook a couple weeks ago. I like it better than MySpace. Granted, I wasn't really all that fond of MySpace, so it doesn't take much for me to like something better. I like how more organized Facebook is. I also like how it doesn't load and play a song when I go to someone's profile. That always annoyed me about MySpace. Also, identifying people in pictures has proven to be a great idea. You put your mouse over someone's face and, if tagged, it will tell you who they are. I've gotta get my dad onto this thing. He's got tons of pictures, so I know it'll keep him busy for days.

I've found some people through Facebook that I couldn't find through MySpace, so that's been good. The whole appeal of MySpace was that I could find some people I didn't otherwise have a method of contacting. Another thing that I like about Facebook is that it makes communication between friends easier. There's multiple avenues you can pursue to open and maintain dialogues, and they're not all slow like on MySpace. Granted, you can do more with your MySpace profile than you can with your Facebook profile, but people tend to do too much with their MySpace profiles, and they get to be like 14 MB downloads. There's some profiles that just never stop loading. I don't know what they're transferring, and I'd rather hit the stop button before they finish.

Tomorrow, I'm going to post about GTO: The Early Years. Remember Great Teacher Onizuka? Well, there's a comic out now that chronicles his high school years. I'll go into more detail tomorrow.

I got my breadmaker a week ago now. It makes bread. There's really not much more I can say about it.

Now that I don't have to put effort into making the bread, I can get more experimental with the breadmaking. The other day I put the recipe for regular white bread together, except instead of sugar, I threw in a bunch of freeze dried mango pieces. I was breaking them up at first, but that got to be annoying so then I just dumped them in. I think it would've turned out better if I had ground them up in the mortar and pestle (we have one for some reason), but I wasn't really feeling into it. It still turned out pretty good, though. It just wasn't as mango-flavored as I would've preferred.

Mostly I've just made cinnamon bread. I don't make it with swirls like most cinnamon breads, I just put a lot of cinnamon in with the flour. I like it better that way. I'm going to try a cheese bread sooner or later. The oils found in cheddar worry me in relation to breadmaking, so I was thinking of trying less oily cheeses. I also want to take another stab at tomato bread.

A small post, but it's the second for the day. I just pulled this top list off Facebook:

Top Books in the Washington, DC network:
1 - Harry Potter
2 - The Bible
3 - To Kill A Mockingbird
4 - Catcher In The Rye
5 - 1984

It seems that Harry Potter is more popular than God. I'm agnostic and I find that kind of disturbing.

Before I get onto subjects that can wait like the breadmaker I just receive, I'm going to talk about T-Mode, which happened in Arlington, VA this past weekend.

So T-Mode started as a video game convention with an emphasis on tournaments. They've since expanded into anime. I can only guess they did this to get more attendees, which would work better if they did anything at all to promote their convention. They actually had some decent guests that weren't local, some coming all the way from Japan. Too bad their marketing department wasn't even remotely as good as their guest relations department. Despite the guest line-up, very few people had even heard of T-Mode. This is a sad thing for a con I first heard about in 2004 when they ran it in Herndon.

So, for hanging out and meeting new people, it was a decent con. I'm guessing they had an attendance of about 300 people. I wasn't expecting it, but there were actually a good number of good-looking women there, many of which weren't jailbait. I'd say of the attendance I saw, there were about 30-40 good-looking women, which is a good number. Unfortunately I didn't pick up any of them, which is sad because I was kinda depressed about losing my girlfriend recently. Of course, the depression and reason behidn the breakup were probably major factors in my lack of social abilities for the weekend. I'm not going to go into details here about the breakup, especially since it's not relevant, but it was pretty bad for me, so I've been rather depressed lately. I figured getting out to a convention, however small, would be good for me, and maybe it was, but I was still too depressed to make much of the situation.

Those factors aside, as far as a convention for just attending events, panels, and convention-type stuff, it sucked really bad. The organizers didn't know how to organize, the drag-queen staffer (he wasn't really in drag, he's just so effeminate that some people thought he was female... not an attractive one, but female nonetheless) just spent all weekend going around being a bitch to everyone, and it just seemed like the staff wanted to prevent anyone from having fun. While they were having trouble figuring out how to run karaoke while everyone was in the room waiting for it to start (and by everyone I mean about 15 people), this one guy got up on stage and a capella'd the opening rap from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. People started rapping along with him. Now, granted, they did wait until he finished to yell at him to get off the stage, but I thought he was pretty entertaining as opposed to the nothing they had going on.

I think I'll write up a full on con report for T-Mode, though. It will be shorter than my other con reports, because there's not so much to write about, but I think it would make for an entertaining con report. It has just the right combination of good, bad, and eventfulness (it's a real word, yay!). Yeah, I'm going to do that.

Sad that I started writing this 3 days ago and am just now getting it posted. Ah well.

Well, I haven't actually gotten the breadmaker yet, so I'll post about Bioshock for the last time.

I beat Bioshock earlier in the week. As the reviews I read suggested, the ending was rather disappointing. The ending cinematic was very short, and doesn't really answer any questions except for giving you an idea of what happened next.

Now, because of how it ended, and because the only plot choice you make during the game seems to have had an effect on the ending, I wonder if there's multiple endings. I must now play through the game once more, choosing the other option, to see how it goes. At least that gives me something to do since I got bored of WoW.

The gameplay was good all the way to the end. There were a couple parts that frustrated me, but only a couple. I actually felt a lot of the game was too easy. I think this doesn't so much come from the challenges presented, but more from the fact that you can't really die. When you die, you immediately get resurrected at a nearby tube (I forget what they're called). There are several of these tubes throughout each area. Being resurrected at such a tube has no drawbacks except that you have to walk for up to a minute to get back to where you were (which, being a long-time WoW player, means absolutely nothing to me). No progress is lost, no penalties are imposed, you're just back in the action. There were times when I didn't even bother trying to survive because I could just res and get right back into the action without problem. So, yeah, that aspect is kinda lame. The rest of the game is pretty kick-ass, though.

There are a few annoying bugs, but they're not game-stopping. The main problem is the subtitle timing. It's way off. That causes you to miss a lot of the monologues. Another problem is the default volumes. They've got everything the same. Well, the music and sound effects drown out the voice, so when you're in combat, you can't hear what people are saying, and you can't look at the subtitles both because of the timing problems and the fact that you're in the middle of combat. So, throughout the game, you're missing a lot of what people say. The last problem is a minor annoyance, and that's when you get the boots near the end, you can't walk over corpses. You have to walk around them. You can't even jump over them. Unless you've got the telekinesis plasmid equipped, it is actually possible to get stuck at that point, although unlikely. Like I said, that's a minor one, but the subtitle timing results in a big loss. I'm going to wait for the next patch before I play through it again so that I can pick up the chatter I missed the first time through.

So, that's my final review of Bioshock. The game is great up to the end, and then the ending is brief, abrupt, and kinda sucky. Fortunately, it's not one of those games you play for the ending. Instead, just about every moment in the game is its own reward. So, while it is a short game, it's well worth the money. Oh, and at some point, it's obvious that they gave up on the idea of making the game scary. After you deal with the artist, there's no more scary stuff. I think that's good, because the game wasn't really scary up to that point, anyway. Bioshock had nothing on System Shock 2 in that department.

Okay, I've actually got five things to post, but I'm going to spread them out over the next five days so that you get something new each day. The items are: New sewing machine, new breadmaker, Facebook, Playstation 2, and also I beat Bioshock.

The first thing I'd like to cover is my new sewing machine. It's a Rex Cordless Sewing Machine I got at Overstock.com. It was $20, is handheld (but you can also set it down on a table), is very small for a sewing machine, runs on batteries, only has two stitching speeds, and works pretty well. One of the reviews I read state that it's not good for making clothes, only for quick stitches and sewing things up, but since that's all I needed it for, it suits my purposes quite well. One of my flannel sheets had a big rip in it, and stitching it by hand was a real pain, so I had only put in enough stitching to keep it from ripping further. Last night I went and sewed up the entire rip. It was kind of a pain, but it went much faster. Then, since one of the hems had mostly ripped off, I ripped off the rest of the hem and re-hemmed it. That was actually really easy. I have some pants that are too long that I may actually cut and re-hem now.

My next sewing project was to patch up the holes in two pairs of pants. I already got some cloth to use for the patch. The holes are both in the left knee. I don't know why, but the first thing to go in any pair of pants I wear is the left knee. Since the sewing machine is small, there's not a lot of room to bunch up the pants in it so you can get to the knee. This sewing job was a real pain and didn't go so well. The stitching is better than hand-stitching, but the accuracy was very much off. The sewing lines came out crooked. What I have to do is hand stitch the patch into place then go over it with the sewing machine, then cut out whatever excess patching is left. Then I'll have repaired pants. I put the patch on the inside so that, while you can still see the tear, you can't see the patch, and most importantly you can't see my knee. I figure the tear looks rugged but the patch makes it less ghetto. Yeah, I'm kinda reaching there, but the pants are broke, and I plan to make the most of them.

So, for $20 (that includes shipping), it's a nice, portable sewing machine. I don't think I'll be taking it to any conventions, as quick costume repairs usually just involve safety pins, duct tape, or even staples. Still, if you need a sewing machine and are poor, it's pretty good for the money.

A long time ago, I got the Pantera album Far Beyond Driven. At the time, I didn't really care for it. It was too hardcore for me. It's certainly not the most hardcore album I've ever heard, but it was just over the line of what I would find pleasant. Then, one day a while back, I was feeling depressed and angry, and I put the album on. It washed the depression away (mostly). I was still angry, but it was a feeling I could deal with. It was like a cleansing of the soul by fire. I still didn't care for the album casually, but I knew it had a practical purpose.

I needed that album again very recently. I think I now understand why people say it's such a great album, and I can wholeheartedly agree with them.

Now, from this, you might get the impression that it's emo music, but I can assure you it's not. Hell, most of the time I can't understand the lyrics. It's definitely not whiney, and while listening to emo music makes you feel like a pussy, Far Beyond Driven has the opposite effect. It can really help you to get through your day. It's not that it actually takes away your pain, but rather gives you an empowering feeling that allows you to deal with it, and that really helps. I have found, however, that listening to it more than once doesn't really do anything extra for you. The first time through, it's done whatever healing it had to do, and it doesn't keep working. Well, I'm going to pick up Vulgar Display of POwer, so maybe that'll take it further.