tuesday like a dog

Let me start off by saying this is not because I’m vegetarian, because I had MEAT this last weekend. Twice even! The first time was when Sam brought some Taco Bell back to the LAN party, and he had an extra bag given to him at the drive through… “Free tacos, anyone?” The second time was at this dive oriental place over by where Laura used to live. We went there before watching a movie on Sun. Someone got the sesame chicken, and I had to have a bite or two!

I am sick. Throat and achy body.

It might have been the oriantal place. Out of the things we got, only a couple of them were any good…

1 side of weekend, hold the impending cold, please.

My weekend was GREAT.

Friday night I got halfway to unicycling only to realize that I had a concert ticket in my pocket. Doors opened half an hour previously. I went to unicycling anyway, and practiced for 20 min or so before heading to First Ave. Apples in Stereo were not quite as exciting as I’d hoped, although they were good. I left before the headliner and hung out with Laura for the rest of the evening.

My computer performed beautifully at the LAN party Saturday. I was the first to get there, and the last to leave. My favorite part were the couple of hours in the middle when we had 12 players (two teams of six) playing Unreal Tournament 2003. That’s some good fun stuff.

Sunday I spent upgrading my laptop to OSX 10.2 (or jaguar). When I say sunday, I mean a good chunk of it, like 4 HOURS. I don’t know why the upgrade took so long, but it was enough time for me to get through 2/3 of UT’s single player missions.

Sunday night Laura and I hung out with some new and blooming friends, watching this amazing movie, Death to Smoochy. I had heard only bad things about this movie, but they were all wrong. I recommend it highly. We’re getting together again on Wed to watch The Adventures Of Buckaroo Bonzai Across The 8th Dimension, which I have yet to experience.

Now, yes, my throat hurts. Lets hope it goes away.

mopsa props

Mopsa writes relatively frequently about her various insecurities. She’s so human it’s sick sometimes. Hyper-human. It occurred to me this afternoon that this is never something I would have expected from her, having known her personality in "real life" — before we both ventured into the blogging wonderland. Mopsa is a formidable woman. Not necessarily imposing, but commanding. She’s witty, intelligent, and downright fun to be around. I can’t think of a single person who doesn’t like her. (Although I can think of people who might not like her, but they don’t count as real people anyway.)

It’s been a weird week. I’ve been talking a lot about how time seems much faster than it used to seem. I feel like weeks are flying by at a pace usually reserved for days, if not hours. For some strange reason I have not been keeping up on my blog reading. Maybe at first it was because I was too obsessed playing with MT (which I have now upgraded to 2.5, btw). Anyway, for whatever reason, I had not read mopsa’s blog in over a week.

How disturbing to discover that she’d been in a life-threatening accident!

====

Dear Mopsa,

Get well soon.

love,
-Grid

PS, your blog kicks ass.

PPS, I fixed my computer last night. I know you probably didn’t even know it was broken, but it wasn’t playing 3d video games, and that made me sad. I had to switch from 4X AGP to 2X AGP. At least, I think that was the thing that fixed it. (We tried two or three things before finding it was working.) Now I’m all excited about the LAN party this weekend.

PPPS, disregard that last PS, it was meant more for general consumption than for your own. That’s not to say I didn’t want you to read it. I like that you read my blog. It makes me happy. I’m glad you’re ok.

osmosis living

By sleeping with it under my pillow
I can absorb my life through osmosis.

Words are but frail shadows
cast on a blank-parchment imagination–
stones cast down from dragon’s heights,
talons fiercely tearing at this flesh.

I want to observe without interaction
and interact without being observed.

This poem is bubbling, boiling,
cooking in a pot at the back of your brain–
heavy, with nothing to feed the hawk’s-eye
but a subtle glance into unknown corridors.

sunsets and game studies

Today has been one of those days where link leads to link leads to link. It all started when a friend led me to this weird email tool called ZoË. That just blew me away. The site is so compelling. I installed it, and can’t really say what the big deal is. Maybe if I had all my emails imported into the thing I’d really like it, but for now at least it’s nothing I’d use on a regular basis.

Actually, the appearance of said friend in my inbox is mysterious enough to overwhelm the application disappointment! I hear from this strange character once every six months or so… and because he lives so far away, I imagine his life in this sort of rich fantasy dreamscape. Very european (which of course it is)!

Anyway, the ZoË website led me into this mad metablogging wonderland of RSS developer’s blogs and various blog-related techno-snob-blogs.

[It occurs to me almost as a side note–and perhaps I’ve had this “revelation” before–that I am obsessed with blogs because they epitomize what got me interested in the internet in the first place. They are communication, pure and simple: ideas and words. Blogs are fascinating because they facilitate communication in the same way the web was initially lauded for its ease of idea dissemination. Blogs are what the web was meant to be!]

From some developer’s blog, I discovered Game Studies which is an online academic magazine about… well, about studying games and game development. Very interesting. (And far too much to read right now!)

I spent fairly much the whole day surfing.

On my way to work this morning, I drove past a woman walking down the street crying like something horrible had just happened to her. She was sobbing, and stumbling along, holding a white handkerchief in her right hand next to her face like she was going to use it. I was really moved, and told myself the only reason I didn’t turn around right then and there was that I had to be to work for a meeting. (which I did.) Of course, had I turned around, what would I have said to her?

And now the round red blinding circle of the sunset is piercing my retina through the blinds of my air conditioned office… and I feel I have wasted my afternoon.

the internet: instant miscommunication

My problem is that I have all these things worthy of blogging… ideas, ramblings, opinions, cool links… and as soon as I decide to write, they flee from my consciousness like rats from the sinking ship that is my brain. I was going to title this entry “extra ordinary”, but I’m on AIM with a friend who provided the superior one above.

I hesitate to link this, because I’m going to take it down eventually, but I just added some fest pictures from this year to the ones that were up from last year. (I’m taking those down even more soon, but you can see the dir listing in /fest if you want for a few days.) The pictures will give you a better sense of the level of debauchery that takes place–and the reason I go back year after year. ;)

OK, one more topic, in this fleeting fly-by-the-seat-of-your-non-sequitur blog-entry: Pop Cap Games. The makers of the supremely addicting Bejewled. I love them. They have outdone themselves with a game my mother calls a cross between Scrabble and Tetris, and is aptly named Bookworm. I’m not telling you to play it. Because, if you’re like me, you’ll never want to stop. Instead, I’m just telling you to just look at it, and absorb the fun that I’m having through internet-osmosis.

I darn well done it.

I’ve gone ahead and manually coppied and pasted all my old comments into movable type. None of them had a timestamp other than day of the week and time of day, so they all look like they were made today. (I briefly toyed with the idea of having them at least look like they were made the date of the post, but it was going to be too much work.)

About halfway through the process, I got sick enough of it that I stopped coppying people’s URLs and email addresses, (at least, for those of you who post regularly) so if they’re missing here and there… well, tough shit. ;)

The bottom line: It took me about 4 hours. Four-fucking hours. Remind me never again to use any non-standardized method for storing data. Those comments were a clusterfuck. I couldn’t even sepparate by newlines, because there were (seemingly randomly) newlines thrown in on occasion!

I have yet to go over to my blogspot template and add a redirect. I’ll do that now…

“The life of every man

“The life of every man is a diary, in which he means to write one story, and writes another.”
–Bess Streeter Aldrich (Cheers For Miss Bishop (movie based on the novel Miss Bishop))

This quote reminded me of Tiny’s dreams and rainbows post, which I always wanted to respond to, but never did because I felt I’d just be another person saying “me too”.

Well, now I wouldn’t say “me too”, I’d post that quote, proving that Tiny is actually the one saying “me too”, only he’s said it longer and better. And really, this quote (from a movie, based on a book!) probably isn’t even the first time anyone has said something like this. people say things like this all the time, and it’s like there’s this giant “me too” chorus of people, around the world, holding hands, singing it, screaming it, living it, yes living “ME TOO!!!” from the tops of mountains that aren’t high enough and at the bottoms of oceans that are really just small lakes and ponds… ponds that dry up, evaporate into cloud layers (like the one outside–clouds with imperceptible silver linings) and then rain down, in the midst of thunder and lightening, rain down on the rooftops of sleeping dreamers, and rain down occasionally in the sunlight forming rainbows out of the wrong story.

but the wrong story is the one you’re living, and you better read it, baby. you’d better read it.

This past weekend will live

This past weekend will live in my puny brain as memorable for many reasons. I am not going to go into those reasons, other than to say that there was some nudity involved, a hot tub, and much drunken kissing.

Today is one of those hot and windy fall days. The kind that screams that fall is fast approaching, but does not (yet) blow leaves across the streets and sidewalks.

I just want to sit on a concrete slab downtown, and people watch.
I feel diffuse and exuberant.
Tonight we are juggling fire.

My eyelid is swoolen. I

My eyelid is swoolen. I think I might have some kind of strep. I’m going to the doctor this afternoon.

The movable type conversion isn’t happening as fast or easy as I’d like. Maybe after I get back from the doctor I’ll work on it some more. On the other hand, I have a character here that is almost to level 10!