I'm never washing this journal again

I told myself I wasn't going to be too fanboyish about this, but I'll allow myself a brief moment of abandon. Jared Sorenson commented in my journal! Woo hoo! This, doubtless, means nothing to those of you who aren't RPG geeks, and even to those of you who are, it may sound weird. If you don't recognize the name, then Memento Mori Theatricks may be all you need to know. C'mon...you know you want to play InSpectres. :) So, yes, my life has been given that much more meaning today. Hooray! :) Dizzy with power, I also dropped a comment into Chad Underkoffler's journal, and I got a response to that, too. I'm on a roll. :)

So, yes, fanhoods aside, it's been a pretty chill couple of days. On Saturday night Janie (aplacental) and I went to see Dave Chappelle, which was an excellent, excellent show. We found Sokin afterward and chatted for a bit, but bounced before he was free to take off. It was well worth braving the crowds, and I had a grand time. So that was nice. :)

Most of Sunday got completely taken up by brain exercise. My brain is very out of shape, and it was not prepared for what I found myself doing. Jeff (metalepticfit) dragged me into Philosophy World for a time, which is a place I hardly every go. I spent the better part of the day trying to digest his recent talk of Heidegger, and in doing so I somehow felt compelled to try to approach it. It gave my brain quite the workout, and even after trying to throw some thoughts together and send them off, I was beset with all sorts of mental aches and pains. Blargh, philosophy! Anyway...I kicked around for a bit and goofed off with Janie a little when she got back from her adventures in Queens. Then I spent time working on the fic I posted last night, which is what eventually led to the Sorenson contact mentioned above. (Yay!)

The writing experience really kicked my ass. It's been so long, and I got so tired. I'm keenly feeling my need for self-editing. I couldn't get a smooth flow going, which made me unhappy, and I tried picking at things for a while to see what was going on. Too many adjectives, too long of sentences. A made a rare move toward sentence fragments, but I'm not sure how I feel about it. Dialogue, as always, is a bitch. I dunno, this and that. I find I can never look too closely at something I've just done, so maybe I'll come back to it later. But it always sucks more when I come back later. :) But, whatever. Between the writing and the philosophy, Sunday drained my brain.

Today I basically just dinked around and did the usual online nothingness. The big news that seemed to be prevalent was the ten year anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. I couldn't get too into it. I mean...I kind of understand the celebrity worship thing, and the idolatry...maybe I just wasn't aware of the magnitude of Kurt's impact on our social consciousness. I can understand it from a fanhood point of view, but I couldn't quite get my head around the kind of mainstream media involvement that I was detecting. So, who knows. It could be me...God knows I've only got peripheral contact with media anyway...so maybe I was detecting fringe stuff. It didn't feel like it, though. So, yeah...there's that.

Uh...I bought tuna today. So there's that, too.

Yeah. Not that exciting, huh? :) Well...here's something that I'm not sure made the big-time news or not, but that I felt was worth sharing. There's a ruckus being raised back in San Francisco over an art student being expelled for a violent story he handed in for class, and the subsequent firing of his teacher for the books she was teaching about. Bad times! Here's an article about it. (Incidentally, if any of my SF peoples are still reading me, and if you feel like getting involved, there's some good info in this Neil Gaiman blog entry, which is where I first heard the news. I have no idea how big a story this is in SF, but I imagine it's pretty big.) It's distressing to me that we've still got stuff like this going on in this day and age in America. At an art school, no less. In San Francisco! What's the world coming to? What's the impetus, here...what's the deal? Are we afraid? Are we too moral? I feel I'm not grasping something crucial for this to make sense. I'll leave it alone for now...I cetainly don't know enough about it to examine it. It's just so...strange.

And so I turn where I sometimes turn for solace in times like these...to cool robots! Specifically, tiny soccer-playing robots from Japan. I mean, come on...it's a mini-footy-mech! What's better than that? (As an aside..."footy-mech" makes me think of "futomaki." Mmm...footy-mech.) Anyway, if you can spare the time and/or bandwidth, the movie clips are pretty damn cool, I thought. Oddly, what struck me most about this was that the things is only like a foot tall. Where'd they get that little soccer ball? I have this image that the soccer ball came first...that some robotics nerds were like sitting around, and they had this toy soccerball, and somebody goes (in Japanese), "Hey, guys...you know what would be cool?" Regardless of how it got started, though, it's still pretty neat. It does a dance of shame!

I'll leave you with a story, methinks, about this Irish net cafe guy who caught not only a spammer, but a propagator of the venerable Nigerian scam. No big technical breakthroughs or anything like that...just a neat little tale. The best part is that the guy, when cornered by the cops, tried to eat his memory stick. Classy! :)

Anyway, that's it for tonight, methinks. Peace, everybody. :)