Posts Tagged ‘blastoise’

It gets a little randomsauce

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

(I wrote this yesterday but forgot to hit post before transferring to Dinah. Oops.)

Got some Pizza Hut to go with (Tuesday’s) NSFWshow viewing (not in any raids at the moment nor are there any new Law and Order SVU episodes until after summer). I had a code for a free order of Rollers, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had those before, long ago when they first appeared. Time for a revisit? :P

Like the cheese sticks, the Rollers did get better. You still get 4 of them but they are much bigger than they were originally. They are basically croissants that use the Classic Hand-Tossed dough, but are rolled up with cheese and pepperoni (there’s an option that omits the pepperoni, but why would you? :P). In a way they could also be described as mini-P’zones, just without the dusting of parmesan and easier on the jaws. :) Also you get to choose between marinara and ranch for dipping, though I think they work just fine without dip, which you can save for dunking your pizza crust in.

My only complaint with them now is the same with P’zones and P’zolos: no custom build option, still? Even with Rollers, this would be easy, just cap at 1 item beyond cheese.

Ever had a dream of something that you really, really wish would have been real, no matter how stupid it might seem? I’m talking about TV spinoffs here.

It’s… uh… well, what d’ya think would happen if, somehow, the Law and Order doods licensed or otherwise acquired the Kindergarten Cop concept and did a TV spinoff of it starring Chris Meloni as his SVU character? Yes, you heard me, Det. Stabler posing as a kindergarten teacher while chasing down creepers. (I know canon says he resigned but this is TV, anything is possible, especially with how oddball SVU’s individual plotlines had been getting, haha)

I was partially through its equivalent of the “who is your daddy and what does he do” bit and then I woke up. Dammit. This needs to be a real show!

I had more drivel but I’m trying to finish this piece that I’ve been sitting on for the better part of a month and… yeah. You’ve seen the WIPs (King Leo, JammerB and Tony), I just need to finish coloring them. :P

Turtle, Resurrected (Again)

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Once more Blastoise is back, and in proper form. Awesome card is awesome and low-powered (good lord, that 570 was a greedy jerk, eating up not only two six-pin connectors but an additional two pins, where this 550 only demands a single six-pin connector) and everything is all clear across the board. Blastoise is running on 270.61 and most importantly he’s got dual monitor mode back. YES. I’ve missed that so much.

No driver failures, no blue-screens in CoH or WoW, no green-outs on YouTube, no broken textures… good. STAY THAT WAY. Please?

And as it turned out, the raid got bumped to Monday anyhow. So even if I did have problems, it wouldn’t have held me up for anything I had plans for.

Third time’s the charm

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

Blastoise’s replacement video card (the EVGA GTX550) hits tomorrow. A step back from what I was packing before, but, hell, according to [info]seraphzero it works and, slightly more importantly, I get my dual monitors back so I can freaking roll Instant Ramen and other stuff again. (Note to self: Driver #270 or GTFO)

In other news, even though I have all these games and projects backlogged, I am inexplicably bored out of my mind. Do not want! Also incredibly lonely and such, but that’s not new. >_>; Where’s my cat, I need some purrbot time now…

Can’t catch a break

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

Well, poop. Blastoise just can’t win when it comes to games.

Ever since I cleared the first Mass Effect, it’s been back to the usual MMOs until I can get the dude another SSD or something to act as additional app storage. Only then I started having driver issues up the nose, and it only got progressively worse until today.

The 285 driver made YouTube pretty much unusable (most videos would “Green Out”), but 296.10 was even worse– couldn’t play games OR run any kind of video without Blastoise totally upending himself and forcing a hard reboot. Running the beta driver (300-something) kinda stabilized things but not by much. So I went back to the 270 driver that the card came with.

Plan B entailed diving into the settings for underclocking. Now… OCing/UCing is territory I don’t wander into since I figured it’s best not to try to reinvent the wheel, but this particular card (the Galaxy MDT GTX570) is factory overclocked, and it was suggested I manually ratchet it back to the default clock speed. That appeared to work for City of Heroes on the short term, but had catastrophic results for WoW, which would just crash outright after character select.

Oh hell. This had to happen on a raid night, too. Thankfully Dinah the Badass Ninja MacBook is always ready to step in, but…. yeah.

The fact that I’m even having to take such arcane measures to whip MMOs into submission (and they’re pretty low on the gaming food chain) should be signal enough that something has gone REALLY bad in this card. At least unlike the previous, I still have basic Windows and video playback usability, but I’m a couple days out the return window at Amazon so I’m kinda SOL there. :(

At this point I would just say “f you nVidia” and go back to ATI, but I still don’t have any love for bloaty Catalyst. Aaargh. I’m already looking at having to pay the Stupid Geek Tax again since this will be Blastoise’s second video card replacement and this form is barely 5 months old.

On the flipside? Whatever I loot this time will give me back twin monitor functionality. Good lord I’ve missed that. T_T

My Office Sucks

Monday, April 9th, 2012

I’m pretty sure the general lack of art posts (or me just being on Blastoise much outside of raiding) is because my office is quickly becoming a not-comfortable part of what little personal space I have left. Let’s assess:

– My chair is 10+ years old, creaky and falling apart
– My floor mat is cracked and sunken
– I’m down to a single monitor because while New Video Card is AWESOME, it is also weird in that it won’t take twins. Something about virtual display fusion blah blah blah. TRIPLETS OR GTFO.
– I can’t add a third monitor because my “desk” (actually two sewing tables in an L formation) is a total mess with boxes and other old crap that I piled up so Kestine couldn’t wander behind the monitors.

Basically it comes down to me having to make a concerted effort to clean my desk space to free up room for another monitor. Odds are what will end up happening is that I’ll retire my 19″ Samsung CRT (that was Yoshi Day loot from 2003; it’s a miracle it still works, as it’s super-ghosty and is interfering with Painter, which is why I can’t do Instant Ramen even in forced single monitor mode) and pick up TWO monitors– one to replace said CRT and the second to fill the third monitor slot. The secondary display (also a Samsung) is thankfully in perfect working order.

And that’s just the monitors. There’s also issue of my demon chair… this awful thing that makes me fall asleep and one of my hands go numb because it’s an ergonomic nightmare. Too low to the ground, and I can’t scoot in because the floor mat’s cracked and… ugh.

The desk cleanup has to come first, at least. The only reason I dread doing it because it’s sure to be noisy as hell, which means those evil bulldogs downstairs will go into a clusterfwegh of WOOF and then everyone will be all pissed off over the noise. Only way to lessen the drama is to do it while parental units are out (preferably on a vet trip with one of the bulldogs) since there will be less barking and human yelling.

Not looking forward to dropping lots of coin on this overhaul (two monitors + new chair + floor mat) but it’s necessary in the long run. I should troll like hell for commissions when this is all done to take the edge off. :|