I just spent about twenty seconds

Moving a laser pointer around on my computer's monitor.


...And chasing it with the mouse pointer.

Current status

New 14 gallon tank, within a day or so of water being added:

A couple weeks later, fluorite dust starting to clear:

A week or so ago, fluorite dust giving way to tank-cycling bacteria cloud:

Today: Almost there~

Ammonia reads 1 ppm, (parts per million, duh) Nitrates are 5 ppm, and Nitrites read 1 ppm. I figure it'll be fish-worthy in a week or so. The fancy expensive gravel seems to be doing the job, because every plant except the lily that got screwed up by Methylene blue in the last 10 gallon disease outbreak has damn near doubled in size, and the original lily bulb that broke off of that plant is re-sprouting a new one. I'm pretty good at fish tanks, as long as there aren't any fish inside them. Hopefully, this tank doesn't turn into a death-trap like the last one.

=O

So yeah.

Messing with some stuff here. Sorry~

Also, here is a thing

I had this weird little piggy bank shaped like a football and such. Now, I have converted it into a Matt Forte bank, because I'm weird:

2009 Omnibus Blog Stimulus Post

Okay, haven't posted since the last week of February, so I figure I better update on the happenings and goings-on. Busy month.

- Remember that post about how I cured fish disease by just letting the tank go and letting the fish get all unstressed and such? Yeah, so it ended up being kind of bullshit in the end. Without getting into the sad details, adding two new barbs to the tank stressed everybody out, everybody got sick, and this time, even with a hospital tank coming into play, everybody died.

So now, the ten gallon pit of disease has been abandoned, a new 14 gallon tank has started up, and hopefully, it doesn't turn into a pit of despair like the first tank did. R.I.P. Larry, Darrell #1, Edgar, and Bubba.

- Gonna mess with some website-based stuff, so this might look all weird for a while. Right now, it's running where I type stuff in at Blogger.com, and then it posts to my website. Thing is, you lose a whole lotta capabilities and bells and whistles that way, ("Older/Newer Posts" links) so I'm probably going to just go back to hosting this page at Blogspot. You'll have to deal with their stupid navigation bar at the top of the screen, but eh, you're not paying for this shit. And I'm not paying enough to be able to install my own blog software on this site, (and I wouldn't know how to anyway) so there you go.

- I put a bow on my cat. I don't know why. But whenever that thing is on there, she acts all chilled out, like some sort of reverse Mr. Hyde serum, so on it stays.

- Mastodon put out a new album, and it's the first time a CD has pretty much blown me away since the last time Mastodon released an album. Unfortunately, this is also the second straight time that a new Mastodon CD has made me all but forget about the existence of a pretty good new Sepultura CD.

- I'm still doing occasional Chicago Bears-related posts over at the Armchair Linebacker blog, and maybe when it's easier to do stuff like that, I'll put a link to it somewhere on here that's not just part of a blog post. The life of a Chicago Bears fan is a life of pain, but for real pain, check out Neil's posts there. He's a Lions fan. Yeah.

- On the 19th, me and my special lady-friend Sarah celebrated our one-year anniversary. Hopefully, she doesn't wise up any time soon, but if she hasn't gotten sick of my football card addiction, failure to consistently keep dishes washed, and general weirdness by now, I should be in the clear. Here's to many more years of lazy snuggling, trips to Souper Salad, and being able to tell people I'm not gay and having them actually believe me for a change.

In other news related to people in my family not being gay, my brother Jack and his wife Amanda just had a whole bunch of babies. Well, in the name of accuracy, she did most of the work of having them, and it was actually only two babies. But that's still twice as many as most people have, so it counts. Crazy shit. In my new-found role of Crazy Uncle, it falls to me the responsibility of teaching them how to do amazing things with boogers and fire. Hopefully, I am up to the challenge.

I've discovered the secret to curing fish disease

First, the bacterial/fungal/whatever shit broke out big-time in the ten gallon tank again, taking out Darrell #2 (The smallest of the three tiger barbs. Poor little guy.) in the process, and I finally got fed up. I just said fuck it, fuck bacteria, and if it's what's gotta happen to save the fish I still have, fuck the dang live plants. So I medicated the shit out of the tank, this time with stuff that's better for the fish but toxic to plants, as seen here:



After the dust cleared and the Methylene Blue faded, everything cleared up and things were great, aside from the near-death of my dwarf lily and a couple of my aponogetons. (The Amazon sword plant in there came through it awesomely, though.) For like a week. Then, Darrell #1 (Even if he's the only Darrell left, I'm keeping him numbered. I'm planning on the next tiger barb I get to be named Darrell #4, for the record.) started getting all white-spotty and eye-bloaty again, and in my frustration, I tried a bold new approach. I did absolutely goddamn nothing. I just let things go. And in the end, my gambit worked: After the initial disease breakout, I'm pretty sure the subsequent infections were sped along by stress from the tank's biological filter being killed graveyard-dead by all the antibiotics. So I just kept my water changes going, added some occasional Prime to neutralize the ammonia, and let the tank cycle again. Once the water stopped being cloudy, so did the fish. Larry and Darrell are as good as they've ever been, and it's all due to a strict regimen of medicinal neglect.
And it's kind of funny, because Barbs are usually the most gangster of small freshwater fish. I mean, they don't have the firepower to just chomp their neighbors in half, like an Oscar or something, but they will fin-nip each other and their tankmates into oblivion in the wrong conditions. Like they even tell you to keep tiger barbs in odd numbers, so that the odd fish out can hide and rest while the other even-numbered ones are bitch-slapping each other. But Larry and Darrell seems to be the best of pals now, even after Larry was a fucking bully to all the Darrells in the pre-columnaris era. I'm guessing it's because they've been to hell and back together, and have that same sort of bond that crippled Vietnam dudes have. Like I'll get a couple new barbs someday, and those two will swim up to them and be all "You wouldn't understand, because you weren't there! WE'VE SEEN SOME SHIT, MAAAAAAAAAAN." At least that's how I imagine it. In reality, they have brains the size of the head of a pin and just have thoughts like, "bubbles... bubbles... bubbles... food. Foooood, foodfoodfoodfood... bubbles..." But whatever. I got my fish back, and that's what matters.

SWEET JESUSING FUCKBURGERS

According to my online tax return and every online "tax return estimate" thing I've checked and rechecked like a hundred times, I'm supposed to get back 966 dollars this year.



THAT'LL BE NINE HUNDRED SIXTY-SIX DOLLARS ON RED, MY GOOD MAN

Just god damn

Now begins Week Two of me not having an operational car. So far, we've ruled out, the battery, the starter, the alternator, and the ignition system. Which leaves only one possibility left:


SATAN.

WAKKAWAKKAWAKKA

Sweet jesus

This is happening inside my body as we speak.

They said it could never happen

But I actually just called in sick to work. Wow. This thing has been weird so far, in the I was the most miserably sick on the first day, but while I felt fairly decent yesterday, the whole "exploding ass" thing was about fifty times worse. Today shall be a mystery, but one that I'd rather not have unfold at work.

Of course, since I called in, this pretty much guarantees that I'll be magically healthy by 9:00.

Sick as a dog

My streak of not puking going back to 1995 is still intact, but the simple act of trying to chew a piece of gum this morning brought that dangerously close to an end. Meanwhile, I'm running a temperature in the low hundreds, my ass has clearly decided that it wants rid of everything in it, and I left work after about 30 minutes today, which if you know me, is pretty much unthinkable. Life is hard. Meanwhile, I haven't eaten anything today, but now that things have calmed down enough that the hasty exit of food will most likely not be through my mouth, I think I might go get a dang Big Mac. And some dang fries. Hells yeah.

Polar bear says:

"Fuck Tim Tebow."

TEN THINGS THAT WILL BE ILLEGAL WHEN AM I KING: PART TWO

SECOND: MOHAWKS ON SMALL CHILDREN

This may come as a shock to some of you, as I'm sure you've all assumed I make a living doing something like being a fabulous rock star or fighting crime with nothing but my cunning and my fists, but the reality is much more plain and embarassing: I work at Wal Mart. And with that job comes the harsh task of dealing with Wal Mart customers - Who just happen to be the absolute worst people in the world. A legion of slothful, half-crippled mental defectives; the worst sort of dog-kicking waterheads who in a just world would be pistol-whipped to death, because to use bullets would be a shameful waste of natural resources. And this is to say nothing of their unspeakable children.
But as much as I'd like to, I can't truly hate their children, or even wish for their horrible and violent deaths, because you see, I believe the children are our future. And if we can teach them well and show them all the beauty they possess inside, they just might lead the way. But I've noticed a dangerous new trend that has arisen among terrible white people in the last few years that threatens not only their futures, but the futures of all of us old folks, as well. It's a bizarre sort of development, in that it crosses all lines of social class, personal politics, and even race, just so long as you're only including terrible white people in your demographics. You see, no matter whether they're terrible white people who listen to Fall Out Boy or terrible white people who are into Toby Keith, whether their choice of terrible white people t-shirt slogan involves veganism, Jesus, the Insane Clown Posse, Barack Obama, Eli Manning, or even the blood-curdling phrase "who's your Baghdaddy?" they're all united by one thing:

They loves to give them kids some dang Mohawks.

And when I am king, I am stamping that shit right out.

WHY IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL:

Kids will always rebel. It's just what they do. And that sort of thing has snowballed over time, to the point where yesterday's rebellion is today's lame crap. I mean, if you came into the mall today, totally rocking greased-back hair to go with your black leather jacket and cigarette pack rolled up in the sleeve of your white t-shirt or with a Dokken shirt, a teased mullet, and "bandanna boots" in full effect, they'd laugh you out of the place. You'd be shunned from society and forced to live in a cardboard box under a highway overpass somewhere, where people would pull over just to get out of their cars and poke you with sharp sticks for being such a lame pussy. Childhood rebellion is like the smell from a sink full of dirty dishes; it only grows stronger over time. But even through all of this, the mohawk has sort of existed outside of normal rebellion. Back in my day, the kids with the rat tails and magic marker-customized Bon Jovi jean jackets just got sort of a "those darn kids today" reaction, but mohawks were different.
The adult reaction to the mohawk over the years has been more along the lines of the way people in old movies would scramble to get off their front porches and run inside to peek through the curtains when some villain rode into town. That shit was dangerous, meant only for violent anarchists and professional wrestlers. Even on someone more or less righteous, like Mr. T, the mohawk signified that he was a serious man who would throw you through a window for any excess jibber-jabbering. But now, they've gone and made that shit mainstream. This begs the question: Once these kids get old enough to rebel against what their parents want them to be, where do they go from here? I mean, god damn, they've already got mohawks. I've thought long and hard about this, and I've come up with just two possibilities.
Possibility One: Anti-Rebellion - Faced with parental figures who want them to look like little Travis Bickles, they may figure that the only possible way to piss off their parents is to go to the extreme in the other direction. So when they get old enough, they'll style their hair conservatively, discover Jesus, get interested in golf and high finance, get a job with an oil company, and eventually get elected to Congress and start a thirteen-year war with Syria. Thanks a lot, soccer-mom.
Possibility Two: SUPER REBELLION - Rather than taking a turn in the opposite direction, they might charge forward on the Mohawk Path, becoming a super-powered, flesh-eating maniac; a man who eats broken glass like peanut brittle and shoots adorable puppies simply out of principle. These mohawked fiends will run roughshod over society, until someone like Batman or Robocop shows up to stop them. And since Batman and Robocop are fictional characters, we would be fucked.

THE PUNISHMENT:

That's an easy one. Take every one of those terrible white people and teach them a lesson. Take all those yuppies, rednecks, soccer moms, and other people whose most daring look to date has been wearing white after Labor Day, sit them down in a dang barber chair, and make them look something like this for no less than 12 months:

I'm guessing that it won't be so fucking "cute" when they have to be the one sporting the ridiculous hair, rather than living vicariously through their damn kids who have no choice in the matter.

Not that I actually like their kids or care about their well-being or anything; it's just the right thing to do.

Happy Decemberween

They tell me I have an IQ over 150.

At least that's what they tell me.

Goddammit, I knew I shouldn't have said anything

Back in the day, I was all about making posts about my fish tank, and all it ever ended up being was a horrifying chronicle of guppy-death. So I shut up about it, and things went well for a year or so. But I just had to open my damn mouth, and things went goddamn haywire in there. For starters, I had to learn that my old heater was broken and stuck in the "on" position, meaning that if I used it, it would fry the fish, so it had to be unplugged. It had to be unplugged on the first cold night of the year. So overnight, the temperature drops from my normal 80 degrees to around 72, which is a really, really bad thing to happen to tropical fish. The resulting stress caused a shitty outbreak of columnaris in there that covered the tiger barbs in white fuzzy crap and just absolutely destroyed the rubber-lipped plecostomus in about 24 hours. I'm not gonna go into gory details, but after I scooped him out to give him a seaman's funeral, I considered just throwing the damn net away and buying a new one. Anyway, two 25% water changes, thirty-five dollars for a new heater and about twenty-five dollars for medicine later, the three barbs are pretty much white stuff free, and both Darrells are acting more or less like normal, but Larry's acting really stressed out and sick. It's weird, because you'd think the biggest one of the three would get better fastest, but this is something that tok out an algae-eater almost insantly, which is usually something that takes a blowtorch to do, so this illness doesn't have to make sense. Anyway, four more days of dosing with Maracyn and six more of Melafix and Pimafix to go. Hopefully everything works out. In the meantime, R.I.P. Algae Crumpler.

Current Status

Haven't done this in like eight hundred years, so I figured I'd detail what's been going on in fish tank world. First, here's the ten-gallon I got in 2006, still going strong:


It's kind of a shameful thing right now, as I had a mysterious plant die-off a while back that spooked the shit out of the fish, so I had to put the plastic plants back in until things grow back to a decent size. The lily is still enormous and shooting up new leaves faster than the algae-eater can destroy them, and after he chewed the bulb off, it's starting to sprout out the beginnings of a whole damn new plant. But aside from the one in the front-left corner, all my various kinds of aponegetons that used to fill up the tank died back hard, with a few offshoots from the originals trying to make a comeback, and a couple tiny ones that have been there a while and probably won't ever hit any significant size. If all else fails, I'll just start gradually replacing the plastic plants with store-bought fully-grown ones. It's not as cool as growing your own from a bulb, but the plastic plants make me feel so dirty.

As for the actual fish, since the last mention of the tank, I think around the time ice storms forced me from my home, the betta I had in there died, possibly due to shitty tank maintenace and an overfeeding of those little freeze-dried worms that were all he'd eat. The rubber-lipped plecostomus (since christened Algae Crumpler) remains, which is crazy, seeing as how he's lasted two years after being thrown in an uncycled tank by a complete amateur who ended up sending countless guppies and mollies to their doom in unlivable water. Tap water, even. Now, completely cycled and free from ammonia and nitrites, I've got three tiger barbs in there, which in another case of me breaking my "oh man, I can't name a fish, because all they ever do is die" rule, have been named Larry, Darrell, and Darrell. There was a fourth, Darrell, but after a couple months, he got this really messed-up swim-bladder problem. If I had a forty, I'd pour it out for him. Anyway, tiger barbs are nippy little bastards, all into establishing a pecking order, where Larry, identifiable by bigger fins and a spot in addition to the usual stripes, is the clear leader of the pack. Every now and then, he gets in these little fishy roid-rages that leave Darrell running for his/her life while Darrell hides up in a lily pad. Of the other two, Darrell 1 is the other big one, who's fairly peaceful and may or may not be a lady, and Darrell 2 is the little one whose small-man complex makes him chase the other Darrell around occasionally and makes him usually be the first one to swim out in the open after the gravel-vacuum freaks them out and sends them to huddle in one corner. So these things have relatively well-developed personalities for animals with brains the size of a pin head.

Oh yeah, and I've also got this one now, a two-gallon:

Since she's awesome, my special lady-friend Sarah provided much of what you see here, like the two big plants, (and a third gigantic, awesome one that I accidentally snapped while moving stuff around, and it's finally fragment is that little tiny one on the bottom-right) the Buddha statue, and Picasso, the Betta you see swimming around in there. When we got him, he was this tiny little baby-sized thing with bleached-out, almost transparent fins, but now, he's fully crown, hella-colorful, and fucking pissed. He feels no pain and fears no man, and while the barbs run for the hills when I do stuff in their tank, he swims right up to my hand, and flares his gills like one of those desert lizards. He is the Charles Bronson of fish. He spends his time blowing those little bubble nests, challenging my finger to fights, and swimming around, which is something bullshit-artists will tell you that Bettas don't do.

Seriously, most of the crap they'll tell you about these things when they're trying to sell one to you is absolute, cruel, fish-murdering shit. They don't live in puddles in the wild; they live in damn rice paddies. They aren't stationary fish that love living in a goddamn pint of water, they swim the hell around, and in nature, they're in thousands of gallons. They need all the same shit a regular tropical fish needs, with a few differences. They don't need a huge tank or anything, (and depending on who you ask, putting them in a big tank can actually stress them) but I'd say they need at least a gallon, preferably between two and five. definitely not the little bowls and cups people always have them in. If the container is too small for a filter, it's too small for a Betta. And yes, unless you're good enough to remember to change out some water every day, they need to be kept at tropical-type temperatures, and they need a filter. Not a big ass powerful one, because it knocks them around, but one of those little air pump-driven Whisper ones works just fine, and if you know how to make a decent sponge filter, (I tried and failed, for the most part) that's even better. So if somebody tries to sell you a little fish bowl for a Betta, you should call them a son of a bitch, and if they try to sell you a "Betta vase," you should mercilessly beat the shit out of them. Fuck Betta vases. The plant's roots don't do shit to clean the water, and a Betta is a damn carnivore, so it can't live off the plant. The only reason a Betta lasts as long as it does in those is because it takes them a month to starve to death. So instead of buying a Betta vase, you might as well just buy the fish separately, get a couple little pieces of wood and a stapler, and just crucify the little sucker. It's basically the same thing as getting a fucking Betta vase. Fucking people.

But yeah, anyway, I sure hope the heater in there works.

Hard Times in the First World

So I was out and about a while ago, buying expensive heaters to keep the frigid Oklahoma winter from killing my Betta and getting more groceries than I intended to buy, when I decided to stop by Ross. If you didn't know what that is, it's one of those clothing stores where most of the stuff is somehow damaged or irregular, and costs like a fifth of what it's supposed to as a result. I didn't find anything I wanted there, as their male clothing seems to consist entirely of knockoff Affliction t-shirts, and it's bad enough looking like a walking advertisement, but even worse when you appear to be advertising winged skulls that birds have been crapping on.

So I made my way toward the exit, and that's when I saw a guy I totally didn't notice on the way in through the same door. First of all, it was strange, because it was the only time I've seen a bargain-type clothing store have a security guard posted a the exit. But it gets even stranger when the security guard in question has on combat boots, fatigues, and I swear to god, a damn beret. And standing there as he was, sternly looking forward with his arms clasped behind his back, I was hit by the revelation that this guy looked exactly like one of Public Enemy's security guards.

It then hit me just how difficult things have gotten economically, when someone at least somewhat tangentially responsible for "Fight the Power" and "Don't Believe the Hype" could fall so low as having to pull guard duty at a place that specializes in slightly-irregular Perry Ellis socks. I wanted to say something, but I just kept on my way to the exit door, fighting the urge to throw up a Black Power fist or ask about how James Bomb was doing.