In any case, in 1984, the town was evacuated; and, in 1992, the state of Pennsylvania took over all the property in the borough through eminent domain. Then in 2002, the town’s ZIP code, 17927, was revoked. A handful of people still live there – 11 according to the 2008 census – but the government owns their land, and I guess just hasn’t forced them to leave.

Naturally, this place is now a bit of a mecca for tourists looking for cool places to visit. There’s an abandoned stretch of highway, closed because there’s coal burning below it and the road surface is all warped; a few real cool graveyards; a couple abandoned buildings; etc. There’s graffiti all over the abandoned highway and buildings; between the six of us, we got tons of pictures. Here are links to theirs:

• Mike’s

And here are mine – sorry for the poor quality, they were taken from my phone:

More »

International Day of Slayer

On June 6th, Hessians worldwide come together to do something upon which we can all agree – listening to Slayer! Finally, one of the most dismissed cultural groups in the world has a holiday to call its own. Join us in our cause to stand unified in our celebration of metal music and let us prove to the rest of society that we too have a voice.

Who is Slayer

Slayer is a band from California. Their music has come to epitomize Satanic speed metal music in the latter half of the 20th century. Their 1986 album, “Reign in Blood” is one of the single most influential metal albums of all time, typified by the modern classic “Angel of Death”.

How to Celebrate

• Listen to Slayer at full blast in your car.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast in your home.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast at your place of employment.
• Listen to Slayer at full blast in any public place you prefer.

DO NOT use headphones! The objective of this day is for everyone within earshot to understand that it is the National Day of Slayer. National holidays in America aren’t just about celebrating; they’re about forcing it upon non-participants.

Taking that participation to a problematic level

• Stage a “Slay-out.” Don’t go to work. Listen to Slayer.
• Have a huge block party that clogs up a street in your neighborhood. Blast Slayer albums all evening. Get police cruisers and helicopters on the scene. Finish with a full-scale riot.
• Spray paint Slayer logos on churches, synagogues, or cemeteries.
• Play Slayer covers with your own band (since 99% of your riffs are stolen from Slayer anyway).
• Kill the neighbor’s dog and blame it on Slayer

This sounds pretty win. I think I know what I’m doing on June 6.

More »

Sea Foam - a deep clean for your engine

Yep…I’m back again this time I’m here to post a series of videos me and Chris took when we Sea Foamed the Acura. When we did it to the Nissan, it was both a really cool process and it yielded impressive results (as far as power/economy are concerned), so we decided to take videos of it this time – both to document it and to help instruct people who desire to try it themselves.

Keep in mind that we don’t pussyfoot around. The Sea Foam manufacturers recommend only doing it in the crankcase (to treat your oil) and fuel tank (to treat fuel system and upper cylinders) for the average consumer. However, we do it the way the mechanics do it for a tune-up – both of the above, plus direct induction to the cylinders for a nice, deep clean. This is a bit more complicated – not to mention fun – so if you’re not good with cars or, at least, technology in general, I don’t recommend this. However, if you are, and you’re simply looking for help on how to do it, view on.

Note that I accept in no way whatsoever any responsibility for damages that result by the viewing of this series of videos.

Seafoaming a 2002 Acura RSX Type-S (Part 3) – hosted by MetaCafe
This is the fun part. The Sea Foam has been induced into the engine via the brake booster line, and allowed to sit for fifteen minutes or so. It got dark pretty quickly at this time of year

In this one, I start it up, and rev it up and down for a while until the Sea Foam has been burned out of the system. All the white smoke is completely normal; in fact, we thought it was pretty cool the first time we’d done it, to the Nissan, which is what inspired us to record this one.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the whole thing – and I hope it helps if you’re planning on Sea Foaming your own car, especially if it’s an RSX. Also, if you really enjoyed them, click the links below each video and rate them high

More »

1991 Nissan Sentra - my old car

Hey look, I am still alive been a while since I’ve made a post here.  Been real busy, between work, play, and buying a car.

That’s the first thing I’m here to post – I bought a car got rid of the old Nissan (to the right) and bought an 02 Acura RSX Type-S (down a bit and to the left). Thing fucking rips. I wanted a Z28/Trans Am, but I fell in love with this thing when I got in the driver’s seat. It’s only a 4cylinder, but with Honda’s i-VTEC technology, the motor’s rated at 198horsepower/142lbft. And then there’s the gearing – 4.77 final drive ratio, it’s geared like a hotrod. The top end F-bodies I was looking at only had 3.73 gearing. Ironically enough the EPA rates both vehicles for the same highway fuel economy – 28mpg with 91 octane fuel. One of these days I’m going to see how well it runs with 93, since 91 is so ridiculously hard to find.

2002 Acura RSX - my new car~

Thing fucking flies too. With its redline at 8000, and the VTEC kicking in around 5800, even with the real low gearing it maxes out at a normal speed in each gear. In 4th I can exceed 100, and I’ve still got two gears to go after that. I’m considering having the transmission modified come springtime, see if I can’t have the ratio lowered on 6th a bit. As it stands I’m revving ~3700 at 80mph, if I get that down to 3300 or so I’ll see a pretty sizable improvement in fuel economy, which is important for me. Besides, I can always just use 5th when I want to accelerate moar.

That aside, there isn’t much to tell – that’s why I haven’t posted much. I got smashed and went trick or treating on Halloween, dressed as a pirate. Thanksgiving has been and gone without anything that eventful that I’m at liberty to discuss.

I have found that I really hate fixing laptops though. My buddy Chris has been subbing out work to me, and aside from all the driving (which I really don’t mind), the job mostly entails fixing laptops and printers. Printers I don’t mind so much – I hate printers in and of themselves, but fixing them really isn’t bad. Laptops are a pain in the dick though. Especially motherboard replacements. Looking at at least an hour for these, compared to 15-25 minutes for most printer repairs.

Spore got a bit boring. The space phase was fun for a while, but I just lost interest in it after a while. Which is rather depressing, because as far as galactic conquest games though it was actually a lot of fun – which says a lot for galactic conquest games. I thought I’d love it, unfortunately it seems I was mistaken.

As a result I’ve mostly been playing a lot of WoW, especially since Wrath of the Lich King came out. At this point I’m about halfway to 76 – I went strong for the first week or so but I just haven’t been playing much since around Thanksgiving. After everything that went on that weekend, I just haven’t been that interested in playing WoW. As a result I’ve been very bored.

I got Rock Band, which is a lot of fun when there are people around – the problem is people aren’t generally around that much during the week. Which is where the problem lies anyway.

Wow, this really seems to have turned into a depressed-sounding rant…not really sure how that happened. Anyway, I’ll cut it short – I saw Role Models with Anthony and Brianna on Sunday, which was very funny. I’m not going to review it, but I advise seeing it, it was very funny

More »

Let me start off the body of this by saying that, since Disturbed’s Indestructible came out on June 3, I still have yet to listen to any other music. Like, at all…when I gave my only hard copy to my dad, I listened to an older mix in the car on the way home, then promptly burned another Indestructible when I got here. There’s also been a little radio here and there, but I just can’t put these new 14 songs down. Oh yeah, 14 – it’s worth noting that they released Parasite on the Japanese import special edition. That only leaves one more B-side to finally complete my collection – Midlife Crisis.

As for Munchkin – it’s been fun, but I’m starting to get tired of it. Now that everybody knows painfully well how to play, it’s nothing but rules lawyering – and that’s the reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering, it stopped being a game and turned into a clusterfuck of technicalities. Well, that’s what’s happening with Munchkin, and it’s the same problem. If I wanted to deal with technicalities all day long, I would’ve gone to law school and become a lawyer.

On the WoW side, I’m almost 70. A little bit past halfway. Been questing in Shadowmoon, and a lot of that’s pretty tough at 69. Also, Arena Season 4 comes out in five days, and when it does I’m buying both my season two swords. I’ll totally have better weapons than Tristan and it’s going to be funny as shit~

I also finally managed to get ahold of Kristen yesterday (actually, the other way around, she got ahold of me). Turns out, she thought I was pissed off because she didn’t want a relationship with me…which, although it’s upsetting, I can’t be pissed off at someone because of the way they feel. No, I was infuriated because she’s been leading me on for the past year. And she didn’t think she had been…so we cleared the air, and I came to grips with just being “the best friend” (god story of my fucking life, fuck you friend zone) and helped her deal with the bullshit that fuckwit’s putting her through. Looks like her eyes are opening though, here’s hoping they don’t snap shut again. For her sake.

Comcast…where do I start? How about at the beginning. A couple weeks ago, they blocked my incoming E-mail (SMTP, port 25) because I was “receiving too much for residential service”. The first CS rep I spoke to was a fucking retard, I hung up on her while she had me on hold. The second, however, was intelligent and helpful, and told me that I was blocked most likely due to spyware sending out spam. Well, that’s impossible, you need to run Microshaft’s garbage to have spyware, which I don’t.

We finally narrowed it down to a block due to incoming volume, though. I managed to get my sending capability back by connecting to the relay server on an alternate port (587 I believe), but obviously I can’t tell every fucking E-mail server in the world to connect to me on a different port just because my ISP blows cock. So, they finally roped me into upgrading to business class to have the block permanently removed by pulling the “there’s nothing we can do manually” bullshit. It’s a good deal anyway, $12 more per month and they double my upstream, give me priority tech support, etc.

So, I had to argue with them for a while to get them to not send out a tech to install the shiny new modem, charging me $99.99 in the process, because I am a god damn tech. They do, however, need to deliver the new modem (why I can’t just pick it up from the nearest Comcast office, which is like 10 minutes away, remains a mystery to me). They were supposed to be here on Monday, but apparently they fail at knocking loud enough for me to hear, so they just left me a note saying “sorry, you weren’t here, blah blah, you’re beat”.

So apparently I was supposed to call them to set up a new time, and apparently I was supposed to read their collective minds to find this out. I called today to say WTF, and they set me up for tomorrow morning. Finally, almost three fucking weeks without E-mail, wonder how much business that’s cost me. Fucking worthless assholes. If you can get FIOS or even DSL, get that and not Comcast. They fucking fail.

Anyway, it’s a short one (aside from the Comcast rant), and I just haven’t had the time to write lately. Or see/listen to/whatever anything worth reviewing. I’m planning to see The Incredible Hulk soon though, and I’ll do a review of that. Yeah I know I didn’t deliver on the Munchkin review, and I wanted to review Iron Man and Indiana Jones, but I just didn’t get the chance. I’ll be sure to do this one though.

PS: Check out the WINE 1.0 and openSuSE 11.0 releases if that’s relevant to your interests.

More »

Well, to start, Mike brought home this sweet card game called Munchkin – I’ll do a post all about it soon, but the best way I can describe it in a nutshell is “the most awesome card game ever”. Trust me, it’s sweet.

I’m working on two websites – for Kelli Jane, a small company who sells high-end linen products and whatnot; and Green Jobs Philly, a new nonprofit effort to help clean up Philadelphia as far as the environment is concerned. Kelli Jane isn’t a tight deadline per se, but they’d like to have it done quickly – and I’m looking to have Green Jobs Philly done before June 6…which, quite frankly, isn’t going to happen, although not for lack of trying.

But that’s enough about work. Work is boring to read about. Everybody’s in town right now except Robin, so we’ve been partying hard like any good little group of Anons. We’ve been playing a lot of Munchkin, and doing a lot of drinking. We had a Memorial Day barbeque here on Monday (and a pre-Memorial Day barbeque on Sunday) – and before that, we almost got arrested Tuesday night. Go us. And the pool and jacuzzi over at Tristan’s apartment complex have opened up – so we’ve spent some time there. Finally met Anthony’s girlfriend Brianna – who is, in fact, really fucking hot. Nice going, Jerkula.

Oh, and one of these nights we got Kristen and Julia to put my ‘doze box’s keyboard on both their heads…with shoes (sandals, but whatever) on top of that. It was, quite possibly the hottest thing ever. If only they were killing zombies at the same time.

Which brings me to another point…I finally got tired of the whole situation with Kristen. If she wants to be miserable with Cody that’s her choice. And I’ve found that the easiest way to stop getting stuck in loops of just thinking about how great she is, is to focus on the things about her that I don’t like. Such as her incessant non-conformity.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope everyone else has been having a good time.

More »