Wednesday, April 18, 2001

Well. After pleasant conversations with online friends last night, I stumbled into my bed, only to re-awaken at 3:00 a.m.

Was there a noise? Had I had a bad dream? No, I just…surfaced from the lake of dreams. After puttering around a bit, I got on the computer and worked on Mozart until my Mom stumbled into my room at 5:00. At that point, I realized that I was fully awake, not in that “It’s a brisk Saturday morning and I’ve just had my cup of coffee” sense, but in the sense of that inevitable assurance that all of those sleep endorphins have been thoroughly cleansed from your little grey cells.

I had reached the limit of my creative energies, though — a lack of sleep does have its effects on me, no matter how awake I may feel — so I continued to index my books, into my virtual bookshelves. I ended up indexing most of what remained since my last attempt, leaving only two shelves, the books stacked up next to my desk, and all of the books I have in the basement. In total, though, I only have somewhere in the range of 50–100 books to go, which should push me to nearly 500 books all told.

Let’s see…considering the prices of most of these books, that’s probably an average of USD $8 or so per book, at least…so, I own about USD $4,000 worth of books. Wow.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I’d gotten tired of indexing books, and finally settled on some reading. I got another chapter done in The Lions of Al-Rassan. Oddly, I’m not enjoying the book as much as I’d expected to, and I think it’s mostly because of the odd lack of focus in the novel. The point-of-view keeps jumping from one character to another in a very, very large cast…not only with main characters, but als with characters that don’t last long either. I’ve seen things from the perspectives of well over a dozen characters by now, which seems to be keeping me from investing much attention or sympathy in any character’s perspective.

Anyway. I ended up coming in to work early. Well, early for me, that is; I left the house at 8:00. I figured that I can take a quick nap midway through the day, and still leave in time to work out at the gym with Dad at 5:45 without cutting in to my eight hours. I usually work through lunch, so it should be do-able.

Oh, I do have some Cowboy Bebop tidbits for you. I came across an excellent interview with the English voice cast (making some fascinating points about the whole thing), as well as a pair of columns in which I agreed with the first column, then read the second, disagreeing column…and agreed with that one.

And I see that Lost Marble has just released version 2.5 of Moho, and the new functionality is quite impressive. A person could make a full-scale cartoon with this now, though it’s much more suited for something like Mike, Lu, & Og or Ren and Stimpy than, say, Gundam Wing. Still, it has definite potential.

I’m afraid I don’t have the energy to give you a full-scale commentary yet today (it’s 8:42 a.m. as I write this). I could be writing about the (brief) discussion I had with my Mom about her and my Dad’s sex life last night, but I think I’ll spare you that. I wonder if it wouldn’t be worth trying to put together a short animated ‘toon based on an online comic strip.