What else

[prog]

In other news:

I screwed up my ability to pay taxes on time. I have the money, more or less, but it's not in the right location. I'll spare you the details. So anyway, I filed extensions for the first time in my life. The thing that people seem not to know about extensions is that you're still supposed to pay what you owe on-time; the extension's just for the paperwork.

Fortunately(-ish), tax slackers are a common case, so the gov't will happily take your payment later, plus interest for however long you slacked. The rate is based on the Fed so it's cheaper than credit cards. They won't raise too much of a stink so long as they see their tardy money in a reasonable period of time.

The feds got an in-good-faith payment of $1K from me, and the commonwealth got NOTHING. I'll have to make it up to them next month. I need to be a busy beaver with Appleseed work for the next coupla weeks to make sure I can pay all that and everything else, but the work's right here in front of me.

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Climbed back on the exercise horse. I guess it's better that I keep fallin off and gettin on than just stop altogether. The funnest thing about getting back into shape is objectively observing your strength come back, day-to-day. I could barely do five push-ups last week, and now I can do six smoothly. Let us forget that I could do ten easily a coupla months ago. Stupid, slippery horse.

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Been playing a lot of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The best parts of the game are wandering the countryside on a mission, as it really is quite beautiful, and getting into utterly insane encounters due to the fact that monsters and NPCs can, if they wish, locate or follow you to literally any location in the game world. Once I had an ally from the game world's main city show up three levels deep in a dungeon to ask me about a quest I had left half-finished. Also, if crazed goblins ambush you in a cave, you can let them chase you right into the middle of the nearest city, where the imperial guards'll be like "wtf?" and stick 'em for you.

Yesterday I did this by accident, except that I got into a situation where two assassins were chasing me, and a guard was chasing them, and I got them all to run into the middle of a deep lake - I have magic boots that let me walk on water, see. None of these guys had any issue with either buoyancy or oxygen, and the assassins stood around directly beneath me, puzzled, as the guard methodically relieved them of their hit points. Presently their bodies floated up like dead guppies, which was nice, coz they're easier to loot that way. Moments later, the guard burst out of the water on a shore dozens of yards away, and zoomed off over the hills, back to wherever he came from. I laughed.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I did that once a few years ago, because I put it off to the last minute as usual and then couldn't find my W2—I looked all over the house but failed to take into account the remote possibility that I had actually filed it in the proper place. I found it there a few days later, then took my time and did my taxes a few months later when the pressure was off.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And I don't think I actually owed anything that year, so it wasn't a case of having to send the money in on time.

I did get interest FROM the IRS once. They sent me a bill for unpaid tax on earnings from the sale of some stock, but it was actually a same-day exercise and dump of employee stock options that had already been figured in my W2 for that year as regular income. So I pushed back, and the upshot of the whole thing was that they scrutinized my return some more and said I had overpaid on something completely unrelated, so I got some money back from them with interest. Which, yes, I did have to pay tax on the following year.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Also, if crazed goblins ambush you in a cave, you can let them chase you right into the middle of the nearest city, where the imperial guards'll be like "wtf?" and stick 'em for you."

This makes me very happy. I'm so tired of games where the world is really a set of overlapping layers that can't see each other but can all see you, as if they were ghosts and this was Sixth Sense.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Man... Oblivion. There's a game with an uncompromising user interface experience.

Is it worth persevering with? Do the NPCs get any less hideous and zombie-like?

[prog.livejournal.com]

You seen one, you seen em all. You cycle through all the voice actors in the world after a handful of conversations, too. (It's kinda unfortunate that the same actor plays every single black guy you ever meet...)

I actually went "Gaah!" the first time Patrick Stewart's character's guy started flapping his rubbery mouth, with the camera ZOOMing into his face first.