Author: grid

BTW, I’m going here sometime this weekend. Free bus ride home!

Mopsa’s post about weddings made me want to tell all my wedding stories. I have two. Total. I’ll spare you most of them though. Yes, I’ve only ever been to two weddings in my life. The first one I was a groomsman, and the second was only just this last weekend. Have I mentioned on here yet that I caught Laura looking at rings online the other night? She actually called me over to look at some of the ones she liked. Everyone but her insists this is some kind of hint. Of course she denies it.

Yesterday in the car my mom asked me if I’d done anything with my website lately. I guess it is her homepage (which I found kinda sweet, till she said that was because she didn’t know how to change it). I put up a link to thorsday from there today. There was an awkward moment (probably only for me) when I wanted to tell her about this, but didn’t.

Last night I picked up a bunch of new CDs. The most exciting one, (at least at the moment) is the first release from the umbrella sequence. They’re quite reminiscent of the last couple of radiohead albums… which is a good thing in my opinion. I’ve listened to the album twice this afternoon, and it’s great so far. I wish I’d made it to their CD release party, which was the 15th of last month or something.

I also picked up a pretty decent album of The Faint remixes, and yo la tengo’s latest. I need to listen to both of those more before I can comment authoritatively.

I’ve been looking through screenshots of eve: the second genesis, and damn does that game look (and sound like it’s going to be) cool.

I had been looking forward to Planetside, but for some reason it doesn’t look as cool as it did a year or so ago. They’re calling it the first MMOFPS now. I’ll have to at least try it out when it comes out, but I’m curious as to how different the game will be from non-subscription FPS games.

You can probably tell I’m chomping at the bit for a sci-fi MMORPG. I did try out Anarchy online when it came out last summer, but I had so many problems with the game I returned it in the first week. They had already collected my CC#, and kept charging it despite my repeated emails to their support people, and the assurance that my account was canceled. I eventually complained to my CC company, and got the # on my card changed as a result. I still don’t think the charges were ever reversed though. Bastards.

Anyway, by some strange coincidence, I had a conversation yesterday with one of the true Everquest addicts I know, and he’s recently quit! He’s sold all of his level 50+ characters, and swears off MMORPGs altogether. He says they’re just in the business of selling “timesinks”, every new expansion was just another way to waste your time. He’s probably right. I wonder if my cousin is still playing Asheron’s Call 2…

side note: mmorpg.com is actually pretty interesting, and does seem to have a fairly comprehensive list… It even included this weird and (I think) obscrure “A Tale In The Desert”, which doesn’t have any fighting, and apparently one of my co-workers has played before.

how come the Movable Type manual doesn’t document their RSS support? I’ve been trying to find some explainations for awhile now, and maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places, I don’t know. Some support forums have been helpful, but not anywhere near the level of detail I’d like.

What I really want is it broken down for me… here’s what RSS is, and here’s how we do it. bah.

Don’t rock the boat, especially when you’re in it, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

With any luck, tonight Laura and I will pick up tickets for tomorrow’s opening of the 2003 International Film Festival. I’m quite excited about it.

Today at lunch I played my first couple of games of Go in about 10 years. I won my first game, and tied the second. I actually learned the game in Hard Times Cafe, playing against an elderly guy who came to the cafe just to play the game. I was in high school, and just there to hang out with friends, but I saw him two or three times, and he always tromped me, despite giving me a considerable handicap to start out with.

We also played another game called Tic-Tac-Chess, which was really fun. You have a pawn, rook, knight and bishop, who can all move just like in Chess, and you play on a 4X4 grid, placing pieces on the board until someone connects four. If your piece gets taken, you can put it back right away again the next move. It’s very simple, and was super fun. Of course, I probably only thought it was that fun because I won over and over again.

For lunch, I had a microwave Tofu Pad Thai. Out of a box even! It was actually quite good, and certainly not the worst pad thai I’ve ever had.

I just got back from seeing George Clinton at First Ave. There were several moments I must now share. About 2 minutes after George Clinton took the stage (at least 20 minutes after Parliament took the stage), someone passed a fat-ass blunt up to the band. The amusing thing was not necessarily that this happened, but how the blunt was immediately taken to George for inspection, who looked at it a couple of times before visibly deciding “what the hell?” and taking quite the slew of consecutive puffs. His voice was then quite hoarse, and he actually coughed once or twice, saying, “I must be getting old.” This was at least an hour before the part of his set where he introduced his granddaughter to the audience, and she sang “Somethin’ Stank And I Want Some”.

I wanted to remember to write about the guy holding his cell phone up over the crowd (presumably so someone on the other end could enjoy the music,) both because it was pretty amusing and also because it really made me think about how often that must happen, and how five or ten years ago, it wouldn’t have even been possible. The bald guy who nodded at me and said “nice haircut” as I walked by was not nearly as amusing or thought provoking.

About the time I was really starting to “get into” the music… feeling it, if you will, the overwhelming smell of ganja permeated my tiny, tiny-ass personal bubble (the bubble shrinks when you’re surrounded by hundreds of other sweaty bodies packed onto a dance floor,) and nearly simultaneously, this gorgeous girl, with probably the biggest brown eyes I’ve ever seen (exaggerated, no doubt, by the gargantuan size of her pupils,) pressed her way through the crowd past me. It was one of those moments, and we locked eyes the entire eternity it took her to pass by me. We simultaneously said, “excuse me” and “sorry” (I think I actually said excuse me), and then the moment passed, and I was staring at the back of her head as she disappeared into the crowd.

well, this afternoon fills me with dread. And I don’t mean the war… I think I’m going to stop thinking about that all together. I feel ineffectual, and depressed. I just want to go home and play Zelda. At the same time, I want to get away somehow. Unattach myself from this life and float off into some distant sunset. The world is my oyster, but I’m choking on it.

Last weekend we hung out briefly with a friend from out of town. A member of the London Broil. I asked him about how he can survive working mostly renaissance festivals, asked him if he has bills like the rest of us mortals, and the answer was yes… amazingly he does… probably just as many as I do… I guess I’d always assumed only people who essentially have no debts whatsoever are able to live the renaissance festival lifestyle. Maybe someday, I too can live on $200/weekend!

Reading Robert Fisk’s latest essays from Iraq have really given me a dire sense of the casualties I knew would exist, but didn’t exactly know existed. (IraqBodyCount.net claims to be creating a tally of civilian casualties, but their sources are various media, so I’m not sure what to think of them.)

Taking my thoughts in a completely different direction for a minute, (and I assume I can only do this because I am so far removed from everything), if I wanted to be a reporter, and I’m not saying I do… some part of me would want to be there… in the middle of the war. What does it change about you — being near that much destruction? I pretty much think I would still be a pacifist, but I have said before that I would probably change my mind pretty quick, looking down the barrel of a gun. (hence the previous post wanting to buy a gun…)

Anyway, there is some distant rumble inside of me… some part that thinks I will never be great unless I take a step off the deep end. For a moment, reading these reports, I knew that Robert Fisk is a great man, and that if I ever amount to anything near what he has in my lifetime, I will have been successful.

OK, so most of this post is copied verbatim from an email I wrote in response to a friend of mine. Basically, her initial argument was that people cannot argue completely rationally because we are essentially emotional beings. I hope she forgives me for posting my response here, and also for the tiny quote I pull from the end of her email for the rest of my rant. (That’s the part where she sparked the “faith” nerve, and I went off on that for a while.)

I don’t know if it’s just right now, or what, (and maybe I’ll look back at this tomorrow and shake my head), but I feel that what I wrote in response was some of the clearest prose on how I feel about this stuff that I’ve ever written. I’m not going to allow comments on this post because, in general, these subjects really piss me off, and I want to minimize the “fury” factor.

These are not very popular opinions. You have been warned.
Continue reading “Rational Thought and religion”