Whose idea was this Pikachuriffic weather?  It seems the weather isn't believing in summer.  I would like it to clear up before Newburyport, zam.

Blah blah blah baseball blah blah the Dodgers are awesome and Andre Ethier is cute blah blah blah I miss being able to watch Yankee games blah.

I'm thinking that tonight might be an aromatherapy night after biking.  It'll be lavender all the time with scrub and then hopefully essential oil burning while being a slug on the cough and reading, some Enigma or something playing.

Great.  Now Heat's dead too in another emotional gut-punch scene.  Four party members left.

End of line.

There's a hopelessly aesthetically pleasing law student who's a work-study for the library and we talked for a bit a few weeks ago but I've forgotten his name.  Must ask for it next time I see him, which isn't often.

Wow, last weekend was busy- hosted goldfishsara which proved to be pretty amazing, and purpureusfinch came over to help self and taranhero help the salda007 move, which involved a hilarious staircase.  But before that, Scott and I nuked our common area.  We have so much space now, and we'll have even more once we get rid of silvergoose 's remaining stuff.  It's so clean, Scott kept exclaiming how awesome it was and doing something that resembled a pirouette.  I'm surprised I didn't pull any silly moves myself.

Thursday night I slept poorly.  Also, I'll need another sleep study so that they can recalibrate a respirator.  I'm to be back on it, but I don't know if I'll tolerate it any better.  Sigh.  It may be the most effective when you don't rip it off in the middle of the night, but that's not applicable.  I apparently have very petite nasal passages.

Two weeks until a well-deserved rest in Newburyport.  That will be time for video games, photography, ideally webstuff and LARP planning, but may involve just a bunch of spacing out.

Someday, I thought to myself this afternoon, I'd love to go to Argentina.  Beautiful music, architecture, good food, I can watch the dancing and enjoy!  Perhaps next summer or the summer after.

And then I read this.

What the carp?  I know I sure as heck can't go AWOL from my job one week.  Not without getting seriously fired and never being able to hold a job again.  The amazing lack of sense displayed here makes me scratch my head very hard.

I still want to go.  But note: must let bosses know of vacation time beforehand.

Harvard lays off 275 employees, citing endowment loss

Interesting note:
"Yesterday’s announcement also drew criticism from student leaders and renewed calls by some groups for top administrators, including president Drew G. Faust, to share in the economic sacrifice by cutting their own pay, as the presidents at Brown and Stanford universities have."

Did not know that, but it's kinda encouraging that some universities are doing that...

This month has pretty much been a wash, between the weather being horrible, my health alternating between uncertain and sick, and that all contributing to a case of being a headcase with allergies to boot! Mareep has the itchies. Tomorrow it's supposed to be nice but we shall see. Will be a more happy human soon, yes?

So here's a semi-official announcement-
Next year, I, draythan, salda007, and Josh B will be running a LARP at Brown, unless the world explodes before then or there are never ever any buildings, or FGS puts a moratorium on such things.  Said LARP is titled Nothing to Fear: Playing the Angel.  It's a cyberpunk campaign set in future Los Angeles.

The website's http://playingtheangel.wikispaces.com/.  There's plenty of info up there, but plenty more to come!

I admit I have certain quick judgments I make on people, sight unseen, by seeing their parked cars:
BMW: Probably a self-important ****. This is car I see most often parked across two parking spaces.
Toyota/Honda: Blank. Driven by so many people, self included, I don't have an opinion.
Lexus: The car I see second-most often parked across two parking spots. Probably a tool.
Subaru Outback and its variants: Someone who likes the idea of sportiness, where I have no idea what sportiness means.
Infiniti: Not afraid of lichen growing on the car. See rolling wave commercials.
Volkswagen: Awwww. Likes Eurotech.
Audi: Probably a loud and expensive person. May talk with hands.
Chevy: Some poor sap who probably has to repair the thing every two years.
Saturn: A person who bought the coolest American car at the time, who may now weep bitter bitter tears. Poor soul.
SUV, any kind: Suburban mom/high school student. Go get a job that will let you actually use that abomination's capabilities.
Hyundai/Kia: Not afraid of the ol' Japanese/Chinese stomping grounds' capabilities! Doubled by owning a Samsung phone.
Oldsmobile: Either a very old or very capable person, if that thing's still running!
Monster Truck: ... ... ...

These judgments are minimally based on reality, often incorrect, but have not previously been enough of a priority previously for me to address the flaw in my character for.

Also, it seems I will be doing a sleep apnea treatment song-and-dance again. Here's to dental devices?

I am confused. I carry an MP3 player, a Nintendo DS, and two BlackBerries. I own a GPS, a PS3, a digital camera, and a desktop computer. I love computers, happily spend my day working with them, and look at the some more when I get home. I play plenty of video games, read my books via screen, and listen to music via my Sansa at work.

...and I hate bitty gadgets.

There's no rhyme or reason to it. I despise the practice of texting in general. It's visceral. I am scared of little sleek black shiny things with buttons that do a ton of stuff if you press them. I want a ten pound block to represent all my technology.

But portability! Portability is in fact necessary, it seems, in this day and age. So I continue carrying my GameSlave, my Sansa with small slider for locking, my phone for work and my phone for home. No, what I want, oddly enough, is the ability to login to my giant block of tech from large blocks of tech that are scattered all over the place.

I hate small screens, small memory chips, small headphones, tiny keyboards, itty-bitty touchpads, infinitesimal buttons.

Perhaps this says something about my eyesight and coordination, as I prefer larger icons and more coarse screen resolutions (until a year ago I used 800x600, now I use 1024x768). Perhaps it says I don't like fine granularity, or subtlety, or finesse. Or perhaps I am simply being cranky and Old.

( Read more... )

Using Depeche Mode to perk myself up. Mixed results.

And now we enter the part of year where weekends are mostly free and I don't go to work Fridays (some wfh necessary sometimes, though). This is wonderful.

I've felt inspired again about music- for several months I just haven't felt like making any. My choices are to go back to the piece I was working on, or start something new for in parallel. I've usually worked on songs in sequential order, so I wonder what it would be like to juggle them? Hmm. Or I could rearrange the Chrysanthemum song. It could use more melody as well. Hmm, some canoodling with keys is required for that...Had an inspirational listening and synthesizing experience at Alex's.

Also working on LARP. Time to make lists for abilities and stuff. Then, cyber-works and plot. Aie.

There are Anglophiles and there are Francophiles....what do you call those who love and sort of wish to emulate Germany? I love a good deal of their music, I love their words, I love their horrible ideas for appropriate candy.

Someday I should go to Berlin, Munich, Bonn...

When reading the Ethicist (NYT), I wondered about ethics. About how, as I've gotten older, my beliefs have become crystallized but fluid, giant rocks poking out of a stream.
If I lie it is only because there is something wrong with me. Or the world. But taking that guilt upon myself is easier. Still, when I have it was an acid that ate for years.
If I cheat there is definitely something wrong with me. It is another form of lying.
If I kill there is no taking it back, no real atonement. The value of a life must be understood and restitution must be made.
If I steal or covet my neighbor's sheep I show I lack more than that I desired- I lack security and trust in myself.
If I do not honor my father and mother, I am the greatest fool I could be.
If I am unfaithful (what an odd definition for an atheist) in my interactions I have betrayed myself. And perhaps committed what I feel in my gut is a mortal sin. I do not follow my gut. It has no brain. But its illness often conveys useful information (that the chicken was undercooked).
If I am disloyal I have nightmares that don't go away for years. But that is not proper penance for something I prize so highly.
If I do other wrongs, I must seek to make them right once I understand them. But sometimes there is no remedy.

Some may ask what is wrong. Sometimes it's a difficult question. In my paltry experiences with life, I haven't had to make many (few, if any) difficult moral decisions, at least consciously. I do not know if this will change. Perhaps the decisions may become harder as one accumulates power over others, and especially if one loves that power.

Last weekend was pleasing to me.

Having that many NPCs so we could rotate out when tired and the hill got to us was awesome. I got to drive home with relative okayness, although I subsequently melted and slept for 17 hours.  I was amazed by the NPC ability to also keep the tabards in reasonable order this time- being on hand to accept folded tabards and put them back made a wonderful difference!

I wrote my first module for Aralis! It resulted in much hilarity- from one page of character descriptions, Alex, orpheusinhades , and Adam managed to wonderfully insult all of us repeatedly in a fashion that repeatedly made me have to nom on my lips to prevent dissolving into laughter.  Ahh, sexism at its finest.  In a yurt.

Plus, there was a bear. In the woods. Running around same time as werewolf fight.

I'm in NJ, enjoying my vacation. But I keep forgetting, there's nothing I want to drink here, and almost all of the food is disgustingly wholesome and there are almost no carbohydrates. Plus the coffee maker was moved and misplaced, and I want to feel like I can indulge in at least one vice? It was a humorous matter to find it.

Went to play tennis today for the first time in years. Played against a wall. I can't run worth stupid, but I'm a lot stronger than I was in high school and my arm didn't start complaining until about 50 min in. Despite good shoes, my feet still despise running.

Playing Digital Devil Saga. Has crazy-whack premise. AOWM, apparently. I really like what they've done with the environment- it's a really bizarre world.

Eeek feel deluged with things when that isn't actually true. Working on sleeping more. Have games games games to work on. And then personal stuff, like violin, and fitness, and writing, and reading, and socializing, and videogames, and composition to fit in. I need to remember that some of these are not so high priority and should be fun rather than needs!

I go home next Thursday for a weekend with the New Jersey family. Mwah and mareep!

Empty space is worrisome and cold.  When I don't expect to shiver it's made more sinister.  Eating knifeless is now default (but it always has been!).  That said, empty space contains possibility and peace.  It's blankness that I see sun filtering- there's an old warmth in the image of a window letting the sun in on an almost empty room with hardwood floors.  There are no softwood floors.  In the future we will have particleboard floors to go with our divination robots, flavored mayonnaise, and transpersonal hovercraft.

Coldness is not a function of youth but rather skinniness.  Shivering brings out angles and edges of a person odd to contemplate on top of teeth of flowers, a sleepiness of fate-faith, so many voices of those secure but unsure, once-time ambitious.  But today insides are lit up as if at night, and the drear suffuses all constructs.

3 of cups (agreement, frivolity, socializing)
6 of staves (mobilization, organization, confidence)
Queen of coins (abundance, comfort, generosity)

I am not sure of my exact state of mind then, but it involved thinking about the writing I had just done.  Perhaps also employment.

An unkindness of ravens has nothing on a plague of pigeons (see Birmingham Rollers and collective bird-nouns for more fun), pigeon-flock descending.  How do they know to take off at the same time, seemingly without prompting?

I wonder how much you see when I write not about me.  I felt that writing about other things was something others could do, because only I could write about me really- or I'm the only one who would.  How simple is it?
I am not a loft of pigeons.  I am not that monument to history.  I am not the golden dome State House.

Hello been playing Persona 4 is good game.
I've dropped the class, because it continued to expand and eat the universe and my sleep. And I don't need Qt eating my sleep and mental health.
Little else to report, been sleeping and treasuring free time. Zzzz. Have been excited about gaming, and thinking about spring. Achoo!

So I'm going to go see Depeche Mode at the Comcast Center in Mansfield on 31 July. Would anyone be interested in joining me? It'll probably be expensive, but I haven't seen them in ages and I love the show David Gahan puts on.

I'm not a big fan of the new single, but we'll see about the rest of the album.