Crocheting is fun.  After an abortive attempt at knitting two years ago around Christmas, I picked up my yarn and needles again on Tuesday.

I promptly set them back down.

My wife explained to me that people are either knitters or crocheters.  At her encouragement, I bought a crochet hook and some red yarn (fond childhood memories) today and found a bounty of  information, including videos for figuring out a double summat or the other.

Bottom line is that it makes way more sense to me than knitting does, and I’ve already made one cock-n-balls related item and a few things that people would actually want.

First, the useful items: a tiny little blanket for a tiny little rabbit and a few practice chains (the wife already has a bracelet and a necklace).

A few crocheted items

And then the cock and balls.  Lookit that fancy tassel.  It’s ready to hit the town!

It's a crocheted dick, oh yes it is.

From this angle it looks like a snake riding a bicycle, which is also acceptable.

Little known fact: snakes love bikes. Snake bike!!

A lot of crappy Left 4 Dead servers lurk out in the wilderness, waiting for the l4d lobby system to deliver succulent players into their slavering maws.

In other words, too many of them cause bad lag and/or allow tank spawns way too fucking early.  So I ponied up for a Left 4 Dead server with my brother helping to admin it when I’m asleep or too drunk to be at the wheel of a game server.  The configuration process took a few hours scattered between this morning and last night, and not a little bit of digging.

The important thing to remember about setting up a Left 4 Dead server for versus is that versus isn’t a switch you hit.  What differentiates a versus server from a campaign server is a handful of options: setting the versus maps into rotation instead of the campaign maps (make sure that “vs” is in the mapname somewhere); setting the default map to a versus map (something that the server owner will have to do); and changing the server.cfg to allow players to play as zombies.

Not that big of a deal for the most part, but nobody really documented the process very well.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

The holidays have officially begun with the first of many family gatherings over the next week.  My wife and I went to her cousin’s house for a delicious dinner and a relaxing evening.  They live about an hour or so away from us and I was initially concerned about driving so far today – the windchill made the temperature plummet from hovering around zero degrees fahrenheit to negative thirty degrees fahrenheit – but in the end the awesome of seeing family outweighed the relatively small danger of something happening with the car or other driving tomfoolery.

Also, man invented long underwar for a reason.

I’ve also gotten on twitter in case you’re into that sort of thing: http://twitter.com/burnfirewalls

Burnfirewalls is also my gamer handle.  I think that “personal branding” sucks (a short, polite version of what I think, anyhow) so I’m just rockin’ the feed that I already had instead of making a special “Greg X. Graves Official Corporate Feedotron: Empty of Human Content.”  In the immortal words of several friends of mine: fuck that, no time.