Monday, August 18, 2003
Last night, I watched a bug crawl across my bedroom floor. It was a surprisingly educational experience. It would clamber tenaciously over the uneven weave of the mayonnaise-colored rug for quite a few seconds, making steady progress. It wasn’t hurrying or frantic; it just kept moving. Then it would stop for a few seconds, and take the lay of the land. Then it would continue on again. It struck me that this […]
August 15, 2003
Time for IRC prayers: Our Father, who 0wnz heaven, j00 r0ck!May all 0ur base someday be belong to you!May j00 0wn earth just like j00 0wn heaven.Give us this day our warez, mp3z, and pr0n through a phat pipe.And cut us some slack when we act like n00b lamerz, just as we teach n00bz when they act lame on us.Please don’t give […]
Thursday, August 14, 2003
Brennen writes, in the midst of a wonderfully mood-invoking post: i suppose airports are amazing things, in their own waysignature elements of our civilization, ca. 2003 (Hmmm. Brennen’s way is better; I should include quotes in a <div> tag. It just feels right.) I don’t know that airports are signature elements of our civilization, if we take that phrase to mean a thing highly representative of a culture. Airports are designed […]
August 12, 2003
Very good online comic. Dreamy in style, very sophisticated, with an interesting plot. I decided not to go to my Monday Group last night, as I’m still rather tuckered out from last weekend. So, instead, I stayed home and watched movies. I’ve seen three anime films in the past two days: Kaidohmaru, Ghost in the Shell, and The Cat Returns. They’re all about as different as they could be. Kaidohmaru is an impenetrable […]
Monday, August 11, 2003
So. Let’s say you want to become the best human you can be. You want to improve. You want to be more than you are. You want to know twelve languages, conjugate Latin verbs, know people from every social stratum, fence, and have a chiselled physique. Okay. Try playing The Game. Choose three or four areas in your life that you’d like to improve. They can […]
Sunday, August 10, 2003
Otakon report: I had a great time with Saalon, but the con itself was a disappointment. Most of they anime showed was already out or uninteresting, the dealer’s room was pretty much obsolete in this age of internet anime merchants, and the con was packed with overexcited anime fans. It was that last which really ruined it; I can live with a merely average con, but when you’re […]
Friday, August 8, 2003
Oops! Forgot to write anything of real substance for today. Which, perhaps, is good, as so much is going on in my life. I suppose I’m best served by shifting into Immediate Update Mode until my life slides back into a less turbulent phase. I stopped by my parent’s house last night to swap out my truck for their SUV. It’s a Nissan Pathfinder, a good, solid SUV that doesn’t dominate the road like an angry […]
Thursday, August 7, 2003
Well, I had every intention of posting yesterday – had a couple of paragraphs ready to go, in fact – when the internet went down at work, and stayed down until mid-afternoon. And at that point, I’d forgotten about updating the journal. Yesterday was a frustrating day. A friend of mine has been out of town for a good chunk of the summer, and we’d arranged to meet for coffee (well, I’d drink tea) at a nearby Starbucks yesterday afternoon. […]
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Warning: Long, rambling post today, responding to several online discussions and finishing with my enthusiasm for a film. Brennen‘s right; I didn’t read all of Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn article before I wrote my response. But I did skim it to ensure that the paragraph I responded to was pretty much in tone with the rest of the article. And, sure, I can see why Orwell would believe that military might is the ultimate sign of political […]
Monday, August 4, 2003
Brennen quoted a bit of George Orwell: Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. I can’t agree with this. Orwell’s argument appears to be that the fascist system — “a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes” — worked incredibly well. It created great economic prosperity, and it turned Germany from a gasping, starving […]