Book of Dagon

I find it interesting how fearless I am compared to others. Maybe it's cause I spent 5 years in juvie-prison, maybe it's because I am more mature or something. I just, for some reason, am constantly surprised at how afraid of stupid shit people are. One that is really hard for me to comprehend is honesty. Especially about something that doesn't really matter. It would be different if it was something of consequence, but, most of the time, it isn't. Fuckers just seem to be afraid of telling the truth about something dumb. Maybe it's because they're afraid of the reaction they'll get. Maybe it's because they're fucked in the head and they don't make sense. I am totally flummoxed. I guess that I am just a dick, or something, but, as I kind of hate people [in general] anyway, I'll say the truth even if it shatters someone's world and gives them reason to erase themselves. Huh, watashi wa wakarimasu. Shigata ga nai, nei.
Well, I suppose that a good part (if not all of) the reason that it bothers me is because I have recently become painfully aware that I am merely existing. I don't really love and I only hate for something to do. Honestly, I don't really care enough about anything to hate. I just use the word to express the ultimate distaste for something. If I 'hate' something, that usually means it just sucks a lot, in my most humble opinion.
I often don't even know why I do shit. I enjoy some things, but it's all just a serious timekiller. I'm no emo kid or anything, but I have realized that I don't really have a reason to live, so, I just exisit. If I cared enough to exert the effort, I'd probably kill myself, but I don't. I just don't see what the point is. I've learned that I do believe in a 'soul' of sorts, but I'm not sure what the true essence of such is. I guess I just feel some sort of interconnectedness among living beings that I just can not explain, so, I quit trying. I dunno, I can't possibly explain to my family that all the shit that they hold dear is pretty meaningless. I don't really care about a career, a car, a wife, a house, a dog or any of that other shit that, regardless of subgenre, people all seem to crave. Maybe this feeling of emptiness is why I tend to throw all of myself into these meaningless relationships in my past. So, I guess, emptiness is probably the biggest contributor to my asexuality. Not seeing the point has a tendency to give you a big rubbery one. Or, a small rubbery one.

So, once again, I have, so to speak, blown my wad all premature and shit. You, dear reader, do not know what I am referring to, but, much to your chagrin, that isn't really your prerogative. It's mine, so, deal with it, bitch. I just don't know why I haven't learned to just hold it [that aforementioned wad] back or stave it off completely. Mayhaps it's because I want that which is not comming to me. Desiring the undesirable is a guaranteed way to depress the shit out of yourself. Or, at least, make the fact that life just sucks in general a lot more prevalent and 'in your face.' The saddest part is that not only CAN I control this wad, but, alas, the 'build up' shouldn't've ever happened. [Gotta' love a doubly contracted word.] I can only blame myself and that just makes it worse. I seriously need to learn to hold that wad until it either goes away or realizes that it should NOT be and never comes, thus, negating the necessity of going away. Myeh. It matters not, I suppose. I guess a lot of it is that, without pain to make things interesting, exisiting is more boring than...shit, I don't know. Something more lame, I guess.

66 6F 72 20 74 68 65 20 72 65 63 6F 72 64 2C 20 74 68 65 20 6F 6E 6C 79 20 77 6F 72 64 20 6E 65 63 65 73 73 61 72 79 20 69 73 20 62 69 66 74 61 73 74 69 63

Shit. it's monday and i dont feel like capitalizing or punctuating...come to thing of it, though, i never feel like doing it. the only reason i even bother to is out of PURE habit or to make a point. some would say im lazy, some would read WAAAY too much into it; like my german friend (whom i need to harass) who though i didnt capitalize because of some strange sense of self loathing. its pretty funny because my self loathing manifests itself in MUCH more bizarre ways.
at least i got to see Antidote last night. of course, i spend the whole time, almost, away from the pit, but i made the mistake of getting in so that i could 'experience' the band more correctly. i was doing a good job of staying 'away' from the action, but there was this lame ass skin head who kept trying to pull me into the action. combined with the music, i kind of couldn't help myself. shorty almost ate it, so, i tried to help him, but, as a result, my leg got trapped under some tool that fell behind me, and i was kind of trapped underneath someone with a pit going on all around me. i'm no bitch, and i love a good pit, but, in the end, my glasses got a bit fucked. gay, but 'twas a small price to pay to see Antidote on their first texas shows EVER. ...and, you can't really beat a shirt+2 cds gor $20.

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i've been rather ... um ... depressed(?) lately. im not entirely sure that 'depressed' is the right word, but it kind of connotates correctly. or mayb it conjugates correctly. who knows/cares? back on topic. when i was in the hospital, i did some research on the life expectancy of the 'average' acquired brain injury patient. turns out that most people end up offing themselves within the first 2-3 years after recovery. of course, there isn't a lot of reasoning as to 'why'; im of the opinion that the people doing the research dont look into any notes or anything as to 'why?' they kill themselves. its actually kind of scary, as its something like 80% mortality rate from suicide. my opinion is that they [being the people with ABIs] commit self-icide because life just gets 'too hard' for them to put up with. shit. it was insanly difficult for me to make friends or fin d a girlfriend before, but, NOW, i have like a million things against me for all sorts of stuff. hell, im kind of constantly in fear that im gonna get fired every day i walk into work. i know that its not a very REAL fear but 'tis there, nonetheless. pizza isnt my strong suit, anyway; i just do it so i can afford to go to red7 and buy comics and smoke cigarettes and drink. i dont know. id probably work ANY shit-job as long as it paid the bills, gave me just enough disposable income and wasnt completely mind numbing. fuck. id even do data entry again...and that SUX. shit, id mop up puke and shit and piss from old people if it paid me about 9-10/hr. i just dont give a fuck. im not out to create any kind of legacy or have any kind of support for the progenies i dont have. i dont wanna get married or have kids or any of that. i figure that i most likely will not see my 60th birthday [at the latest], so, its not like it really matters. if im going to hell anyway, why the hell not have a good time before spending an eternity enduring the victim's side of a Hostel-esque situation? i cant think of a reason, can you?..oh, right, i just remembered that i dont care. i will say that i am definitely looking forward to going mad. it should be great fun. fuck, id almost induce it, if i could control the manifestations of my insanity. id be on the most awesome quest to destroy the world since lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

PSP: Why 'mod' (reflash with customer/hacked firmware) your PSP?
Tue, 15 Jul 2008

This comes up on occasion, so I thought I might put a reply here rather than in private; doubly so since I've always pushed for folks to consider ethical and legal implications of their actions and have probably ranted on it before. (ie: As software developers, I believe we must be careful to do the Right Thing, since the implications of our work could cause much aggravation or annoyance. This is why it should always default to 'No' to the question 'Do you wish to format your hard drive?' More, it comes up with increasing frequency in todays busy business world and sometimes we have to stand up for the user and consumer, right?)

Anyway, for purposes of this discussion, 'modding' refers to simply reflashing your PSP game consoles firmware.. something Sony will ask you to do all the time, as they publish updates. The trick is, you can reflash it with Sony's official firmwares, or the more questionable firmware 'mods' you can download online.

First.. why would you do it, knowing there is some risk you might do it wrong and 'brick' (kill) your device?

(Note that nowadays there is little risk; even if 'bricked', you can usually unbrick your device trivially.)

• Principles: When you buy yourself a Ford Mustang, you can put in any seat covers you like, not just what Ford tells you; this seems obvious, but in electronics the vendors are increasingly locking you down. The public at large tends not to care since it is but a small thing, and they're getting used to it. But taken in the light of your car, it would be intolerable. The essence of it is .. if you've bought something and fully own it, you can do to it what you like pretty much. Its the Tinkerer's Right. You can take it apart, and if you break it, its your problem :) Where would our society be if we never fiddled, improved or fixed anything ourselves? There was a time when we changed our own oil in the car..
• Practical: Sony artificilaly limits some aspects of the system, to be pricks. Consider -- video playback is low resolution and low quality, unless it is from officially purchased UMD videos. So while they advertise the device as a multimedia playback unit, and encourage you to play videos on it, they make them crappy. Thats pretty bad behaviour on their part, and borderline questionable to boot .. the old bait and switch. Anyway, using a modded firmware will ditch this little limit and enable full video playback from UMD or from your own video files. This is not the only little shaft that Sony has built into the system for their benefit, and not yours.
• Practical things: You can run homebrew, which is to say .. people release free applicatons, be they games, utilities or whatever, all the time. With the official firmware, you cannot run these. Sony is anal. This is the main treat .. you can play peoples new little games, ported games, and so on. Some great stuff (and a whole lot of crap.) More, you can develop yourself with an open source SDK .. you can write your own little games and explore your handheld console. Heck, this could be your break into the gaming industry, right? (Try the open source gp2x console as well, since it just runs Linux and SDL; life is easier there, and no fighting with the company. Watch for the upcoming Pandora console as well, at www.openpandora.org!)
• Practical: You can run 'disc images' (.iso and .cso files); this is not piracy. UMD disc games boot and load slow and eat a lot of battery power. Usually this is fine but some games take their sweet minutes to load, plus numerous load-times in-game which gets on your nerves; further, UMD games take up a lot of space so you can't generally care more than 1 with you. There are simple utilities to let you record the UMD disc into a .iso or file listing, and then you can boot them on your modded PSP. This is handy as hell. I've recorded a dozen of my UMD games and can keep a rotation of a half dozen on my Sony memory stick. All legal, and certainly ethical and useful. (If you go giving your .iso files to other people, you are then participating in piracy. I'm super small peanut, but I'm a developer who makes a living selling software. Please don't pirate it :)

There are more things as well, but that should cover why most people do it. I'm not going to go into how, as it can be easy or a right pain depending on your skill set, if you know someone who has done it, and so on. Ask me if you want some instruction and maybe I can sort it out for you but in general I worked out some methods for myself and do that. I don't really follow 'the scene' as it takes a lot of time, and 3/4 of the sceners are idiot kiddies :) (This is one thing I've commented on before.. when you get into some of these things for all the right reasons, you still have to be mindful that others are less kocher than yourself, like going to a seedier hotel.)

Anyway, all the above is just sillyness.. I really only wanted to pass a few notes to a friend, which would be:

• "EBoots" are the executables in PSP land. When you build a homebrew app, you're releasing an EBOOT file which is somethign the PSP will recognize as runnable. In general you create a directory on a memstick in /PSP/GAMES/ such as /PSP/GAMES/WANKER and stick your Eboot.pbp in there. Most homebrew comes in a zip file with the needed hierarchy to make it obvious.
• .iso is same as any other .iso around; a .cso is a compressed .iso, and there are stdio source files floating around for a tool to convert iso to cso and back, which can be handy; some people will 'rip' a UMD to .iso and attempt to extract the movie parts and such to reduce size, but thats work. I just rip the UMD to a .iso, and then run it through the .cso converter on my FreeBSD box, and good to go. Can reduce a file by some 10-50% depending how lucky you are. Anyway, you stick your .iso files in a top level directory .. /ISO or something I forget. Since the bay I've not had time to be ripping UMDs so have suffered carrying one around (Indiana Jones LEGO lately natch), but if you've got the time, slap your .iso's on the memstick.)
• Note for PSP Fat/Slim differences; the PSP Fat (original heavier) unit had less protection in it, so applications could run in kernel or user mode, among other things. The display driver and such is also a little different and so on. In essence, in moving from Fat to Slim, Sony created a branch for people who are hitting the hardware more directly or using the open source SDK which assumed it could work a certain way. Naturally UMD official games were not impacted. Anyway, when looking for homebrew, look for more recently updated versions of an application, or ones noted as being Slim versions or Slim compatible. Some applications built before the Slim existed only work on the Fat models, but most applications of note have long since been converted to work on both, or come in two builds.
• You might see references to firmware 1.50, since it was the most 'open' of the official firmware.. easily exploited. To this dat, PSP Fat owners's can have their modded firmware trick the system by keeping a copy of 1.50 on their system as _well as_ the more recent version of the firmware, and then booting up homebrew under the old firmware kernel, while booting new UMDs on a more recent version (essentially.) For PSP Slim, you _can_ do this, but its a little tricky and generally not needed since everything is updated to the newer kernel versions anyway, as mentioned above. But I thought I would clarify.

So all this verbiage above serves merely to confuse anyone reading. But there you go.

So, because I can't ever feel content with one thing when I see something else that, while serving essentially the same purpose, does the same thing better, ie, being able to have my own 'website' that is just a lame ass journal. yes, lame. lame because I abandoned my livejournal to start a commiejournal, which, in essence, is the same shit.
so, i was listening to Jello Biadra at work today [which is better than listening to jail bait be retarded] and realized that i am really angry about the state of affairs in the world and, micro aqui. i just can't believe that King George the 2nd is president. but, i will have to give thanks that i do live in a country where badmouthing the elected [or engineered] head of state won't end up with me getting buttraped in prison.
so, yeah, fight terrorism: go shopping.