elvis, fresh meat and a little whipped cream

2002-07-17T10:13:00.000-04:00

this is a simultaneous entry, so if you read it twice, you have no one to blame but yourself.

almost two years ago, i read an article in the new yorker about blogging and decided to jump on the bandwagon. since that time, a lot has happened in the world and to me and mine. life is like that, though. and that's what this format is all about: life. along the way, i discovered that i liked keeping tabs on what i was doing from day to day. it makes sense for me. writing is a compulsion and this format allows me to feed that need perfectly.

the question now is no longer if i should write about something but under which identity i want to post it.

i once asked a friend (and fellow writer) how she knew when to end a story. "just pick a point," she said. as simple as that. well, i now know that it's not always that simple. the story always continues on and all endings are arbitrary, just like beginnings. sometimes they're the same thing. just like now.

blogger's service has gotten to the point where i'm no longer a satisfied customer. (i realize that i'm bitching about a free service.) i've already moved to livejournal for the comments. at this point, it makes sense to make a clean break and end one phase of my life and move on to another.

i still have my various blogger-based projects: the right click galleries will continue to be published and the souvenir koan may start up again at some point. but the centerpiece is ending. and that saddens me on this wednesday morning.

2002-07-15T15:03:00.000-04:00

(note to those that care: blogger seems to have fixed their little issue with the archives. i'm still skeptical, but let's see what happens. whoops. spoke too soon. sorry.)

i just got finished stapling fifty two-page resumes together for the brassring tech job fair in tyson's tomorrow. i've got my fingers crossed. to date, i've had a lot of leads (great leads, actually) but nothing solid. so i'm plowing through my resources, in search of something to help me pay the bills. nothing is too outrageous at this point.

in other news, shannon and i are eating dinner with my grandmother tonight. that should be fun. i haven't talked to her at any great length since grandpa died but i hope she's holding up okay. i honestly wonder, though, if my mother told her about the seperation yet. weird. family... not quite politics... whatever.

i've gotten micheal's brain buzzing with my idea for a new kind of message board. information management. it's the wave of the future. or maybe it's just a buzzword that futurists use to waive the rules of the present. it's hard to say.

speaking of the future, have you seen this? the us government is going to create a corp of agents called tips (terrorism information and prevention system) who will be recruited from amongst the delivery drivers and cleaning crews of our country to keep tabs on suspicious activity. wonderful. one person in twenty four. that's a higher saturation of invisible informers... sorry, agents, than the stasi had during the height of their power in east germany.

what is it with the government right now? we've got major problems with our foreign policy, economic policy and environmental policy and now we want to add domestic policy to the pile? great. good thinking. i have to say that the current bush administration is sounding the death knell for conservative politicians who espouse reaganomics and harsh penalities for anyone not fortunate enough to be born a rich, white male. and hey, if that means that we have a shrub in the white house for the next two years (impeachments notwithstanding), then i'm all for it.

why worry about any of this? when you put an idiot in power, things are bound to go wrong. eventually. the only question is how catastrophic will it be for the american people? maybe we'll stop acting stupidly and start to think for ourselves...

one can only dream.

2002-07-15T08:48:00.000-04:00

okay. it looks like blogger has fixed their publishing problem but i'm still not sure about the archive situation and i don't feel like fucking with it (yet).

i noticed in the mirror that my face was all dry and crunchy. guess who was being male and didn't think about moisturizer? i hate having dry skin sometimes.

i'm mildly pissed at the dipshit who called me well after i left on friday to tell me about the problems she was having with her computer. pissed because there are two operators here and she could have just as easily called the other guy but chose to call and leave messages on my machine instead. that makes sense. really, it does.

i'm also pissed at myself because our friend's car got towed last night. what sucks about that is that i had a parking pass and even said "where is your car parked?" and then completely biffed it. i think she was pissed and had every right to be. i feel really bad about that. seriously.

but other than that, the night was great. we played simpsons trivia with the hoovers (and carrie learned a valuable lesson about true/false questions) and then we watched robin williams on hbo. we were social and shit. it was fun.

saturday night we gathered with the same group of friends to see the free concrete blonde concert on g street. that was fun, too. except for the people in the crowd. people suck. officially.

hrm. i'm thinking about the rest of the weekend and trying to figure out how not to be cryptic. see, shannnon and i have been having a great time and i'm really enjoying the fact that i'm able to share stuff with her. stuff that i'd only ever talked about in fiction. (if you don't know, you don't need to know, so don't ask. you won't get an answer.)

the upshot is that i'm comfortable (or getting there) and shannon's been very supportive and that combination is making me really happy. and i hope that doesn't change anytime soon. i like that part of my life too much.

2002-07-12T08:51:00.000-04:00

good morning. i'm still waking up, so forgive me if i'm not entirely coherent.

i now have a new haircut and, instead of looking like i have a lesbian mullet, i now look like i have a lesbian buzzcut. i just can't win. oh well, this will grow out and is far more appropriate for summer.

one of the things i did yesterday was sort out what the ending should be for my novel. this is a good thing. now i just have to write the whole thing down so i don't have to concentrate on the "what happens next" details anymore. i hate having to remember all of that. that's why i write it down, if you want to know the truth.

i've learned lessons from each of my novels. good lessons. i haven't always stuck with the lessons, but they were there for me in any case.

what the thunder said: write what you know. science fiction is a good genre, but it's tough to write. much easier to write fiction set in a universe where you don't have to explain the rules, placenames, gadgets and politics for the reader to understand the nuances of what's going on.

the podium: realistic dialogue is important. (and it's not always necessary that the person you live with like your art. even if you've worked very hard at it. not everyone has the same tastes. this was more of a life-lesson than a novel lesson, but you should never ignore a lesson when it flies at your head like a plastic cup filled with ice and captain morgan.)

not fish; duck: this one is easy - make sure you have a single, coherent story to tell. and, just because a piece will fit in, that's no reason to include it. oh yeah, a good beginning is important, too. of course, this one's headed for revision number three soon, so there could be more lessons involved. time will tell.

weapons of devotion: make sure you have an ending. a good beginning is very helpful. and dialogue. and a coherent story (sort of). but it gets depressing when the story starts to build to a climax and you have no idea how to end it. which is why the novel takes that bizarre seventy-one degree turn towards the end. i think it works, but i can understand why not everyone would see it the same way.

stephanie doesn't answer the phone anymore: it's almost too soon to tell what lessons i'll learn here. an early frontrunner, though, is "make sure you have enough time to write." of course, the fact that i'm writing during a stressful time in my life might be a lesson, too. perhaps "writing is a good way to destress" might work? except that it really isn't.

hm. something to think about when i'm done. until then, it's just another long, lonely job. don't get me wrong. writing is fun. but sometimes it can get really boring. especially when you want to get to the good parts and you're stuck having to describe the characters sitting around in the red light district, waiting for the next characters to show up so the plot can really get moving.

so those are my thoughts for friday morning. cheery, huh?

2002-07-11T08:28:00.000-04:00

we were lying in bed last night and i realized that i had fifty-some hours of sick time accrued and my job is over at the end of august. time to take some sick leave. so today i'm at home, sick. "sick," rather. more on this in a bit.

last night was fun. we saw dan from the culture list and his friend, robin.

we also saw the hoovers and realized that between concrete blonde and robin williams on sunday (the show starts at 9pm), this will be the weekend of ze hoovers. or with the hoovers. or something. (and i can see british people reading this and saying to themselves "why is he going on about vacuum cleaners?")

anyway, concrete blonde has turned into an event, which should be fun. still no plans for sunday, though. that's on my to-do list for today, actually.

also on my to-do list for today: job hunting, picking up comics, getting a real haircut (i hate having a do you'd see on a lesbian - it just sends the wrong signals), more job hunting, getting the package from the front office, writing and, for something new and different, job hunting.

should be a full day, i think.

2002-07-10T09:03:00.000-04:00

so work is bugging the shit out of me this morning. the most annoying aspect of working with pcanywhere (and ftp applications in general) is that there is no convenient piece of equipment for you to bang on to make it work properly. kicking your tower just doesn't do the trick. neither does cursing. i know. i've tried.

and i know that my reports are going to be a pain in the ass. the worst part is that it's not worth it for me to try and fix anything. isn't that horrible?

i got no work done yesterday and also no job searching done, which was really stupid of me. the incentive that shannon proposed though, was that for every day i don't do any job hunting, she gets to smoke a cigarette. i agreed. it's a good incentive and that way neither of us has to play the bad guy. motivation i can handle.

and, in other news, the scientific experiment began this morning. yep. we're taking the pepsi challenge. more on this as the experiment progresses.

while i may have gotten no work done, i was able to finish remixing all of the pictures i had in the remix folder. i got sixteen or seventeen (i forget which offhand) done yesterday. very abstract. i also uploaded forty some, so now i have 169 images on my site. the next month and a half of right click images are sorted, so i don't have to worry about them. they'll be presented in order of creation from here on out, so you can see the progression. if you care.

speaking of pictures, i see here that someone has stolen an image from a minor net celebrity and used it as her lj icon. personally, i don't see the issue. yes, there is some concern about identity theft, but it's not like she said "oooh look at my new picture of me." i wonder if there would have been such a hue and cry if she'd put up a picture of lou reed?

and i don't use lou reed as mere hyperbole. celebrity is celebrity and there is no critical mass that seperates one group from another - instead, it's a sliding scale of recognition. i'm quite sure that there are people on the net who have no idea who lou reed is, for example.

for that matter, it doesn't really matter if there is some kind of celebrity associated with the individual involved, does it? it could just be a picture of some other, random person. just like this case.

what i don't get about internet art in general is the expectation that no one is ever going to appropriate something for their own uses. what kind of insanity is that? once it's up, you might as well resign yourself to the fact that something you've made is going to be used without your permission. yes, permission is nice and all, but etiquette is as individual as morality. deal with it and move on. and, if you're that paranoid about having your images borrowed, don't post them. pure and simple.

which brings up the question about my artwork: "would i be upset if someone stole my artwork?"

no. why should i? i borrowed the source images from elsewhere, why would i be upset if it got appropriated in it's turn? i know i made it. that should be enough. i'd hope, of course, that someone who got into my work would do something interesting with it instead of just cutting and pasting onto their website (and i do have issues with someone stealing my bandwidth, but that's a different topic entirely).

practice what you preach.

in other news, the story is moving right along. in my head. i'm still in the "move the pieces around until they fit properly in the story" phase. shannon can tell you that it's not my most entertaining mode (because it involves me staring off into space for an hour or so at a time) but hey, i'm where i want to be. mentally, that is.

now i just have to figure out how to write at home. that's going to be a trick. or maybe not. we'll see.

2002-07-09T09:13:00.000-04:00

okay. the archive situation with blogger seems to have sorted itself out. we'll see. (if it doesn't, you'll have to deal with the direct link and having to find your own way to the most current entry. sorry. out of my control.)

one more souvenir koan piece today and then i'm stopping for a while. i've posted what i wanted to post and a bit more besides. no more memories that i care to share right now. the next round will probably be short fiction again, anyway.

speaking of fiction, i just want to put out an update on what's going on in that arena. one of the things i did while i was in los angeles was sit down and write for an hour or two every day. i ended up with a piece that i thought sat well on it's own, but shannon disagreed. she liked it but it lacked an ending. i hate it when she's right, but when's she's right, she's right.

so instead of a longish short story, i have the start of a novel. i don't know how long the start is because i wrote it out longhand and haven't bothered to type it in yet. and i didn't know what to write next, which is why i ended it where i did. well, now i know what to write next. except that i have no time to write here at work (my preferred place to write) because i have to look for a job. so i guess i'll be writing longhand for a while. this should be fun.

anyway. so that's the status there. other stuff is going on, too, but it's inconsequential to anyone but me. and shannon. and my family. the people that need to know already do. if you don't, then the story is simply not worth relating. after all, i see no reason to go on about the shitty things that have happened to me in the past week (not that anything shitty happened to me last week - i'm just using that phrase as an example). if it's sorted, then it's sorted. going over it again for the sake of having something interesting to say just isn't me.

bah. time to pay the bills.

2002-07-08T08:16:00.000-04:00

yeah, yeah. i know that somehow my hyperlink script didn't allow you to jump to the right page on my blog. whatever. i didn't feel like troubleshooting it from los angeles. so sue me. it still doesn't seem to want to show friday's entry in the right archive. hey. not my fault. (now it does.)

anyway. argle bargle and all of that. i have a lot of things to do today. check email (200 messages from the culture to go through - and if that sounds like a lot, i went through around 200 yesterday), look for a job. all that fun stuff.

so here's something until i get settled.

motherfuck. so blogger doesn't have autoarchiving. or some such bullshit. so you get what i can provide. enjoy!

2002-07-05T23:50:00.000-04:00

vacation has been swell. i have done nothing all week and have enjoyed doing same. i had to park the car last night, which was the first driving i had to do in a week. ah, the luxury.

(i have been so relaxed that i was able to start and complete a full story. now that's what i call a vacation!)

we are, as usual, bringing home too many books. we sent home ten or so in a box and my bag has an additional fifteen or so. thank god i only bought a few of them (the rest were scavenged off shelves of friends).

let's see. clothes on melrose are great but too damned expensive. the ocean air makes things colder than you'd expect for los angeles. the hustler store is surprisingly tasteful (as tasteful as you can get when you sell t-shirts of naked women that say "porn star"). there were more fireworks on the streets of san pedro than the city was able to afford. that was odd.

so tomorrow we go home. 500 list mails to check. mail to go through. a job search to start. whee.

so i think i'll go back to the white stripes and my bartle bull novel about africa. just for these last few hours.

2002-07-01T10:49:00.000-04:00

good morning. it's been really quiet so far and i've been having a great time. so has shannon, so that's a good thing. only shannon could tell you what we've been to so far. i've just been along for the ride. but that's okay.

(this keyboard is really pissing me off, but i think i've gotten the hang of it.)

logjamming was down yesterday, but it's up now, so you can see the pictures of shannon. and yes, those are of shannon. i just kept taking them further and further out into the world of abstraction.

oh. and watch deconstructing harry, if you get a chance. that movie is so me. the wonder boys is very me, too. but deconstructing harry really is me. almost disturbingly so.

2002-06-28T17:59:00.000-04:00

eep. psyche got hurt last night. on a scale of "how bad does that suck?," i'd give that a "real bad."

which brings up the subject of greeting cards that you need for situations like this. where is the "so you some psycho attacked you in the bathroom and gave you a bloody nose - that's a damn shame" card?

i mean, get well soon really doesn't give it that whole "i heard about it, don't worry about having to retell the story because i just wanted to say "hey, that sucks."" vibe that is distinctly different than "what moron stands out in the rain for three hours? i could have told you you'd catch a cold." y'know, genuine friendship over abject laughter.

2002-06-28T14:58:00.000-04:00

blarg.

that was the weirdest meeting i've had in a long time. basically, the guy tried to get as much information about the program from me as possible during lunch. and he more or less dodged most of my questions in return. that doesn't make me feel very confident in his ability to offer me a position.

come to think of it, he didn't even have a packet for me to look over. that's pretty dodgy right there.

do i feel confident? nope.

in other news, the next handful of right click pictures are going to be the series of images that i made of shannon. starting tomorrow, for a week.

and i started a story, but all i have is the first line: "late at night, lisa would wake up and listen to the books talk to one another, their papery voices whispering their stories and secrets to the still air of the apartment..."

2002-06-28T09:34:00.000-04:00

except for the fact that i'm wearing charcoal pants and no tie, i feel like the sixth member of the hives today (okay, so my shoes are brown, not white). maybe the fact that i'm listening to the band this morning has something to do with that feeling. wooo! die, all right! that'll get you moving first thing in the morning!

we woke up half an hour late this morning. that wasn't good. then i sat and talked to my boss for half an hour when i got in. (the interview is over lunch. anyone who tells you contract changeovers aren't stressful is lying.)

drinks last night with leah was a lot of fun. unfortunately, i'm bone-tired and we were only able to talk to her for about two hours before my brain just started to shut down on me. i hate that. i was actually looking forward to talking to her. dammit.

and don't ask about the meeting yesterday. that was just idiotic. bad things. very bad things.

2002-06-27T08:32:00.000-04:00

so i'm wearing a tie because i have to go to a meeting over at the dot this morning. the fun part is that i get to go all by my lonesome because the other guy who was scheduled to go with me has been reassigned to another contract (starting september 1st). so our happy little team is calving. falling apart, moving away.

which is too bad.

i'm really concerned about how these new contractors are doing business. they've stepped over some moral and ethical lines by this point and aren't making me feel confident to want to go work with them. eh. i'll know more tomorrow after my lunch interview.

in other news, i got permission from the lena to talk about what went on. and shannon reminded me that a memoir does not have to be published, which was the right thing to say at the right time. as usual.

it's difficult to get out of the mindset of writing for an audience or even eventual general release, but maybe i should keep my thoughts to myself and a few individuals this time around. just so i can cut loose about what's really going on. i'd hate to have to censor myself in a memoir. that seems wrong, somehow. (which is one of the reasons that the lena was so accomodating about her permission. not that i really needed to ask permission, but politeness counts - especially amongst friends.)

(and, before i get a lot of questions about who lena is, let me just say that that's an alias and, if you don't know, you don't need to know.)

my horoscope from this morning said something about sex appeal. uh huh.

You exude powerful vibrations of sensuality, sex appeal. Maintain principles; your way is the "right way" today. You will have more responsibility and money. Capricorn in dynamic role.

riiiiight. why does that sound so familiar?

and there was an interesting article in the post about how our culture seems to be going through a crisis of faith lately. my question, though, is whether people really had faith in government or the church or even in corporations? i know i didn't. not as institutions. the purpose of an institution is self-preservation, not some mythical ideal of furthering the general good. i know that's cynical of me, but that's really nothing more than a rational response to the amount of irrationality that makes up our society.

or maybe i've just read too much dystopian cyberpunk.

still, it's good to know that it's not just me that's going through some kind of transition. society at large seems to be changing, too. but that's always the way it is, innit? we live in a dynamic culture and change is the only constant. anything short of that is just a delusion. right?

hm.

in other news, while we were watching mr. show last night (thank you, netflix!), we got a call from our friend the sociopath, who wanted to share news of his impending marriage. i had a good conversation with him and he actually said "you think of me as a sociopath? i'm truly honored." he even thought that four horsemen idea was a good one and wants to get together for lunch or drinks or something with the rest of the crew. in july, maybe.

i just wish that i'd brought the hives to work so i could really get ready for my meeting the way i want to. oh well, fell in love with a girl will have to suffice.

Fell in love with a girl
fell in love once and almost completely
she's in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings
can be so misleading
she turns and says are you alright?
I said I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside,
bobby says it's fine he don't consider it cheating

Red hair with a curl
mellow roll for the flavor
and the eyes were peeping
can't keep away from the girl
these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting
can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

Can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

Fell in love with a girl
fell in love once and almost completely
she's in love with the world
but sometimes these feelings
can be so misleading
she turns and says are you alright?
I said I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
come and kiss me by the riverside,
bobby says it's fine he don't consider it cheating

Can't think of anything to do
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting
she's just looking for something new
and I said it once before
but it bears repeating

2002-06-26T10:35:00.000-04:00

i feel like following a trend today. but only in my minimalist way.

Matt is dedicated to creating the best quality art

Matt is a true Brutarian

Matt is a workaholic, constantly laboring through a workload that would stagger the most prolific artist

Matt is our captain and he is the player we want to build our squad around

2002-06-26T08:11:00.000-04:00

(i wrote this last night as kind of a recap of my day and sent it to the culture list. i thought it summed up a lot of what's been going on, only in greater detail. apologies in advance if the beginning has no new information. the end does, though.)

so the weekend was nice. shannon and i went over to a nice little boutique hotel and pretended to be rockstars in a place we couldn't afford. but we needed the time off from our friends and to just be us and sometimes that's all the excuse you need, really.

romantic, sexual. fun.

we didn't want to go to work on monday morning. at least five different people we know (including us) either skipped work on monday or wanted to. it was a trend, i think.

the only thing i had on my plate all week was drinks with a friend in from out of town on thursday night. she's a writer and she wants to meet shan, who also wants to meet her. (i'm looking forward to that, actually.)

by monday evening, i had lunch on tuesday with my mother, dinner with a friend (which i just got back from) and tentative plans for lunch with another friend. crazy.

and, in the mail, shannon got a notice from the irs that she owes $300 in back taxes. that was nice.

so i woke up and went in to work this morning. it's not even eight o'clock and you can already feel how hot the day is going to get. and my primary computer has no dhcp connection. that was a nice surprise. i didn't get that fixed until ten.

(luckily i have two computers, but i also have work to do that involves long-distance dial-ups, so i had nothing but work email to play with, which was more of an annoyance than anything else, but i'm whining, so shut up.)

oh. and the contract agreement negotiations about the changeover in personnell, assistance and information for our program are going on today, too. so that's an itch, too.

so i go to lunch with my mother. during the course of conversation, after i've bored her about our money situation and the bs about my job, she tells me that she and my father are seperating after 29 years of marriage and five years of conversation about whether or not to get seperated (which i've known about since my divorce, two years ago).

so there are those issues. more than i care to list, frankly. because i have a host of other, more pressing concerns.

i get back to work after lunch and the management has delayed a meeting until i get back (half an hour late) to tell us about what's going on with the contract. which is it's own, fucked up, ongoing saga that isn't worth telling until it's over because.. well, just because.

so. that was my day. oh, and the open house that the new company is throwing next week to try and recruit us all is happening while i'm in los angeles. so i have my own, special, lunch meeting with a company rep from the other side on friday.

and i had a really nice dinner and consumption of alcohol and conversation with a friend of mine, who happens to be a demon (it's difficult to explain, dealing with people who've taken altered states of personal reality and transformed it into something resembling a lifestyle choice).

heh. and it's only tuesday. this is going to be a very weird week, i can tell.

(and now, some thoughts and conclusions....)

last night, shannon and i talked about a lot of different things that are going on in my life right now (as is proper) and we figured out that a lot of stuff is happening all at once for me.

i should have responses back from all the agent query letters i'm sending by... the end of august.

my grandfather's funeral is in... the end of august.

my parents should have their house sold by... the end of august.

the contract that i'm currently working on is up in... the end of august.

and we're not going to chicago like we planned to at... the end of august.

i really wish that i could say there were no coincidences in life, but i would by lying. these things happen. that's just the way it is. but all at once? and then, to have everything major in my life come to a resolution all at once? that's just kind of scary, really.

shannon figures i should write a book about it all. she's not wrong, either. it's been a very fucked up year in a lot of ways. i even have a title and a beginning. i should probably wait until there's an ending, though. that just seems to make sense.

2002-06-25T14:59:00.000-04:00

oy. life took a severe left turn today.

at lunch, my mother told me that she and my father are seperating. after 29 years. that's interesting. lots to talk about there.

and then i got back from lunch to find out that the new contractor has no idea what they're doing and wants to try and headhunt our entire team for an uncertain future with an unproven company on a complicated contract. uh huh.

so our current company is going to find us jobs within other contracts, which is nice of them. except that we don't know what that job is going to be. should be interesting.

so that's my life. complicated, all at once.

2002-06-25T09:59:00.000-04:00

gah! i came in this morning and my computer had decided that it wanted nothing to do with the dhcp server. so, for the past two hours, i have not had an internet connection on my primary computer. (good thing i have a secondary computer, huh?)

it's fixed now, but god that sucked.

anyway, i wanted to talk about how i'm friends with a demon, an alien warrior and a sociopath (the nicest guys you could ever meet, actually) and use that as a springboard into some kind of introspective whine about how i don't have an inner archetype to identify with. instead, i'll just mention that the four of us would make a great set of not-quite-horsemen of the apocalypse for halloween. (i would be famine, of course). the only twitch would be john as an extremely charming pestilence, cause, y'know, pestilence has to have personality these days. but i think we could make it work.

(you know, i initially left out the words "for halloween" in that paragraph and it still made sense. that's kinda scary, actually.)

let's see. i have things to do today. lunch with my mother and shannon (odd), a call to the dmv, a call to the post to stop delivery for next week. you know, the usual.

i posted something the souvenir koan today that is very confused and disjointed, but that's where my thinking is on several issues right about now. just because i can write well doesn't mean that my brain has to be pulled together. i tend to think that it's allowed to be fragmented. sometimes.

i was thinking about a bit from watchmen where rorshach says "there is no meaning save that which we impose upon reality. there is only ever the illusion of order in chaos." (paraphrased, of course, because i don't have a copy of watchmen sitting around the house.) and i think that's very true. meaning is what we make of it. context is the most important thing there is. (of course, i may change my mind next week and decide that los angeles is the most important thing there is, but i doubt it.)

anyway.

i'm sorting through my pictures now and deciding what to post. i have a beautiful series that i made from two pictures i took of shannon. i was playing with them last night and coming up with interesting compostions. we'll see where those end up. i'm kind of curious, myself.

2002-06-24T08:41:00.000-04:00

i had a line all ready for today's title, but i had a sneaking suspicion that i should have tried to make it rhyme, so i didn't use it. (for you completists out there, the line was "i'm in a lemonheads kinda mood, but i'm listening to james instead.")

it's another code red day in dc today (mmm. taste the ozone!) which reminds me that eccles has posted about his trip to america. no pictures yet, though.

i read on moby's website yesterday that his personal email address was posted on the internet, which meant that he was getting a ton of hate mail interspersed with occasional fan mail. i googled for the address and sent him a nice little piece of fan mail. because i'm a fan, obviously. i got a mass mail reply back this morning, which was nice. i know he's a busy guy and i know that he would have liked to reply personally to everything, but i'll sleep well tonight with the knowledge that he knows that real people find him interesting. or something.

"it's the sentiment that counts," is the lesson i'm pulling from that.

i'm learning all kinds of lessons these days. i feel like i'm back in school, i'm learning so many lessons.

we watched riding in cars with boys last night which was a really good movie, but a tough one for me to watch. (i knew it would be both, really.) what hit me across the side of the head, though, was that i had the same kind of hate-hate relationship with my mother at one time in my life. but i'm better now. really, i am. but it's good to know that i'm not the only one who's been there.

that seems like a perverse thought, really, but sometimes it's comforting to know that you aren't unique.

2002-06-23T16:01:00.000-04:00

that was fun. i had a fantastic time. i am fufilled (or i feel myself to be on the brink, which is almost as much fun.)

putt putt was entertaining, as was tenoya's afterparty. we would have stayed later, but we had plans for saturday. eh.

i'm listening to beck (again) and letting my brain go wander.

we watched a documentary on msnbc about burning man last night. that was very interesting. i've read enough about the event from the perspective of the participants, but very little from the perspective of a mainstream news organization.

i've declared myself to be a scientific heretic in my notes by asserting that gravity equals time. i don't know that that's the truth, mind you. it's just something that seems to make sense with my primitive grasp of physics. so if i'm wrong, i wouldn't know how to understand exactly how wrong. perverse, isn't it?

i thought about the abstractions of reality earlier yesterday. just because. how it tends to be a repeating pattern. reality is abstract, culture is abstract, language is abstract, this alphabet is abstract. and so on.

i told shan this morning over breakfast that i wasn't sure what disturbed me more: that i think about this kind of thing all the time or that i wouldn't know how not to think about this stuff. there is no question about whether i enjoy my brain in this state. the only question really is whether it's a good thing or a bad thing.

the only difference between now and two hundred years ago is that there is more information available now about how much information is available. the access is easier, as is the amount of noise generated by cross chatter. hey, cool. i'm making noise.

time to stop.

2002-06-21T08:33:00.000-04:00

i've gotten some good responses so far, which means i definately have to submit my story somewhere. crap. i hate that whole responsibility thing.

in other news, we're playing putt putt tonight. i think we're picking tony up from the metro and taking him to tenoya's afterwards. right? and sarah's got a ride with lori in the gothmobile. if i'm reading the commentary conversations right. so that's sorted.

i called up my grandmother last night and just talked to her. she's very lonely now, rattling around in that house by herself. she's coming down in the middle of july and we made plans to have dinner with her when she's here. that'll be nice. mom's also taking her to the spiritual retreats that my mother frequents - chatauqua and the monastary in erie. i think my grandmother needs the tranquility and space for reflection.

she's also bringing down all of grandpa's writings down with her. apparently there are a lot of boxes of paper. she's giving me a key to her apartment in wheaton so i can go over there whenever i want to and go through the stuff at my leisure. i figure that'll be one night a month, give or take.

it's odd, being in charge of someone else's work. to be able to make any kind of executive decisions that i want. if i want to get him published, that's my call. weird.

the other night i took some pictures of our speaker of memoriabilia and played with layer effects until i had two very nice, very interesting pictures. very different from one another, yet the familial relationship is visible, if you know where to look. what i like about them both is the fact that i was consciously trying to emulate dave mckean and, while i don't know that i suceeded, i had fun with the process. something different, for me. pushing my horizons for the sake of trying new things. i think that's good for me.

speaking of pictures, shannon had a good idea last night. i was noncommital when she gave it to me because i need to chew my thoughts a bit and develop them in the silent spaces of my head. but i wanted to give her credit ahead of time for a good idea. "hey man, why don't you listen to my great idea."

yeah. like that.

2002-06-20T21:03:00.000-04:00

it must be wonderful to be a fundamentalist. to have such strong and firm opinions on so many things seems such a liberating idea.

my mind, for example, is filled with any number of emotionally charged ethical dilemmas that i have come to sincere conclusions about, based on rational thought and a compassionate examination of the issues involved.

just writing that description was a complex task. the actual thought process can take years and is never entirely resolved in my mind; the feeling that i have chosen the lesser of two evils in some situations nags at me.

for that reason alone, i envy fundamentalism for the absolute nature of the convictions it holds forth. there is no debate or concern about the murk of issues. thing are in black or white and that is all there is.

it must be liberating to not have to question yourself on a daily basis, to be unconcerned with personal right and wrong. it's no wonder that the people with these kinds of concrete opinions have the time to be worried about the actions of others.

indeed, there are those among us who bear no portion of the collective (or even individual) responsibility. it is comforting that there are those who are willing to step forward to take up the slack. make no mistake: where there are slackers, there will be slack.

i find the condemnation a bit harsh, though.

it's always important to remember that manners and morals are constructed, inherited, implied, expected, lived up to.

they arrive as the accumulated wisdom of generations of people living life. experiencing disappointment, responsibility, sexuality and tedium in equal measure. vowing to keep their children from making the same mistakes that they have made.

they are, perhaps, what makes us civilized; they certainly serve as a benchmark of civility. the point is, though, that civilization is learned behavior. hunger is universal.

the fun part about being adult is that you need not answer to a moral authority above your ken. you become your own moral compass. indeed, it is easy to get lost. it is easy to blunder, trip and fall.

but there are treasures in the wilderness of civility, you are willing to learn the nature of the beast. and that, i'd argue, is the fun part.

granted, there is little room for such petty concepts as fun in the fundamentalist worldview. i would argue, though, that any viewpoint that cannot handle the idea that contemptuous (yet fun) behavior exists will not survive the memetic evolutionary scramble without extreme assistance.

but that's me.

guilt may exist and i understand the concept, but i'm not buying it. not really.

i, myself, have done things that i wish i hadn't. that's personal guilt. but collective guilt because i want to have fun and the people around me disapprove in general? it is to laugh.

it is almost sado-masochistic to declare that an inclination to fun is somehow bad.

there are instances, though, where context counts.

for example, describing an erotic fantasy that involves a woman sitting on a man, the two of them in facing a mirror, watching and enjoying the pleasure that each takes in the other - that would be out of context for this essay and would, in this circumstance, represent a breach of civility.

but that is an extreme example and i won't use it.

like i said, though, it must be easy to be a fundamentalist and not have to worry about the relative ethical conundrum associated with such a fantasy.

or am i just talking out of my ass?

2002-06-20T08:59:00.000-04:00

romper stomper bomper boo, in my magic mirror, i saw you: allie, joshua, carrie, rachel, andy, karon and what rhymes with rachel? thus endeth the pome.

so many things to talk about. where to start, where to start?

first off, it was great to see everyone who was out last night and to finally meet allie. i've talked to her and commented on her entries, but it was really nice to put a face to the name. now i just have to meet cheeze and amy and my collection will be complete. (insert mwaha as appropriate.)

there were a lot of people out at dremo's last night. and the city morgue is really good this time around. the fact that i have an article in it influences my opinion not at all, really. i just wonder what people will think of it. hrm.

i lied yesterday when i said that shannon pronounced my story very good. what she actually said was that it is one of the best things i've ever written. high praise indeed. i'm trying to figure out where i should submit it. playboy? nerve? i'll figure something out.

i was going to post it as next week's souvenir koan piece (as i alluded in this week's piece) but i'm just going to put it up as a temporary page instead. go here. read it. tell me what you think of it. i'm curious. honestly. it'll be down on monday, though. sorry, but it's just up so people can read it and i don't have to send it to several dozen of my friends.

i have a new topic for next week's souvenir koan, though. i put a book in my bag last night and then certain events of last evening threw odd shadows at me. so i'm going to write about it. life has been throwing odd echoes lately. when you drop a rock in a still pond, what do the ripples mean? or are they just there and that's it? i wonder about these things, too.

i'm finding this new book to be very odd. around about page 35, though, i found a couple of passages that jumped right out at me. "...an interest as much in the idea of making love to her as in the physical pleasures of the sex act itself." and "These descriptions seemed to be a language in search of objects, or even, perhaps, the beginnings of a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression."

read my new story and then reread those passages and you should start to understand why this book is throwing odd shadows at my life. there are other echoes, too. but i'll make those clear on tuesday.

in other news, the contract negotiations are proceeding apace. there were some machinations that went down yesterday, but nothing major. this is going to be fun. not.

lunch with valerie the merciless today. and leah is going to be in town next week! yay! conversations about my books, woo! my favorite topic. well, one of them. sex and literature. those are my favorite topics. okay. enough for now. work calls.

and i want it to shut the fuck up.

2002-06-19T16:58:00.000-04:00

finished story. pronounced 'v. good' by s. not really erotica, though. more of a think piece. with explicit bits. a good short story, though. pointed. one idea, elaborated upon.

dinner at honolulu with the hoovers and eccles was fun. goofy, thanks to 'tai mais.' dremo's tonight for the city morgue.

quiet day.

2002-06-18T08:20:00.000-04:00

hands down, the best line i have ever seen in an instant messaging conversation comes from tony: "there is a fine line between pleasure and, DEAR GOD I'M ON FIRE."

i'll never get to use this, but i think the best euphemism i've ever come up with for throwing a tantrum is "stomping around like a retarded ostrich."

there's something new on the souvenir koan today and it requires some audience participation. if you want to see the piece i'm talking about, let me know. i know what constitutes a critical mass and, if i get it, you'll know next tuesday. (the genre is sorta-kinda erotica, if that helps. well, it has explicit bits in it, okay?)

i got a note from my grandmother last night (which reminds me that i have to print off calendar pages for july and august). she's going to bring down my grandfather's papers and keep them in her wheaton apartment and let me come in and read or work on them whenever i want to, even when she's in new york. i thought that was really nice of her.

eccles came in from new york last night. of course amtrak is the idiot older child of american transportation, so his train didn't arrive until four hours after it was scheduled to. i'll let him tell the story (it's his story) but i went to bed at 10:30, fully aware that i'd be awakened in a couple of hours to go get him. sure enough, at 12:30, we got a call and off i went.

except that 395 was under construction (midnight is a good time to put up a bridge in the mixing bowl, i guess) and the car in front of me overheated. so i took 495 to van dorn street and hauled ass up to seminary road. except that i took the wrong way around from van dorn to 395 (which is ironic because i lived at that intersection for three years but oh well) and then into the city.

and, of course, 14th street was under construction on the way out, so i took 395 from independance. it's actually quite pleasant to drive in the city when there's no traffic. anyway, i have other things to write, so i'm off. for now.

2002-06-17T09:04:00.000-04:00

so many of my friends are not doing so good. i feel bad about that. lori, shawna, batty, michael's wife. i may not be leaving vampire-inspired comments on your posts, but i do feel for you. for what it's worth.

on the good news front, though, jenna got a job! yay! i knew the pugs were good for something.

(i'm sure that flare is acutely aware of the fact that she owes me some mail. but that's okay. life first, then fun. i understand. believe me, i understand...)

tangentally from that subject, halcyon seems to attract people whose identities are questionable at best, which throws an odd light on what's going on with the story i'm writing right now and portions of my life in general.

i'll start with the generalities. i'm on a mailing list that's filled with people from around the world. we take it as an article of faith that everyone is more or less who they say they are. to be certain, we have the odd person who shows up claiming to be something completely unusual, like the giant komodo dragon, or hotteenchix. but we understand that these are people playing a role. the masks are clearly delimited as such and we don't go much beyond a surface enjoyment of the playacting.

but that's the way we are. we also see each other fairly often (which is quite a trick for a group that's scattered all over the planet). for example, shannon and i are currently hosting eccles for a week-long holiday. we'd met him in london and we encouraged him to come out and visit america. fairly straightforward stuff, but again, that's the way we are.

which brings me back to my original point about my friends going through rough patches versus people who don't exist. i know the people i'm talking about when i mention them. i've actually seen them and given them hugs. (except michael's wife, but i know michael.) it would unsettle me to a great degree to have someone misrepresent themselves to such a degree that they have to halcyon. that just seems like a really shitty thing to do.

which brings me to the question of why i'm writing the story i'm writing. i'm not quite done with it, so i'm going to withhold the actual content/twist of it for now. but it does seem poignant that this story idea would occur to me when such deceptions keep cropping up.

there is nothing new in fiction. i'm convinced of it. maybe this just reinforces that idea. yet again.

2002-06-16T16:04:00.000-04:00

okay. let's backtrack to thursday night. we went out. there were tons of girls wearing next to nothing. tons of cleavage. it was good. i impressed shannon by saying "hey, isn't that a gallery serpentine corset?" (so i pay attention, so sue me).

i got to sleep at about one. i was at my desk the next morning at 7:36 am. i figure that i got up, took a shower, got dressed, ate breakfast, read the paper, took the metro to work, read 105 culture list emails (and replied to a few of them), did most of my morning work, talked to carrie for about twenty minutes, sat through a meeting and then woke up at about 9:40. and i was surly when i woke up, let me tell you.

but i wrote 2000 words on friday because i'd actually got my brain locked into "write write write" mode before i woke up and once it's there, that's it for the day. i mean, i was even writing on the metro on the way home, that's how locked in i was. so that's a good thing.

friday night we went to george's and our party of twenty loud, obnoxious freaks was sitting next to a wedding rehearsal who decided that we were too loud for them to enjoy themselves, so they complained. hell, we had a great time. my friends rock. officially. we took eva home so she could sober up, then drove her back to her car. (i won't mention what she did to poor eccles while she was at our place.)

saturday i woke up way too early again and putzed around until the early afternoon. then we took the metro into the city and saw the monuments, which was actually very nice. we walked around a bit and felt like we'd done something. so there was that. saturday night at catacomb was insane.

we took over a table by the corner and played spin the bottle, drew on each other with a blacklight marker (the photos have yet to be downloaded) and just generally got drunk and rowdy. i stopped drinking before we actually got to the club and was fairly punch drunk by closing time. but that's okay. we went home and got to sleep at about 3 am. and all was well in the world...

for father's day, i offered to play golf with my dad. i wasn't able to get the tee time because of this long rigamarole about an automated tee time system that the fairfax county golf courses have signed up for, so we decided to play it by ear. when we got to the golf course this morning, there was a space for us to play and we signed up for the father-son golf tournament.

we went over and hit a bucket of balls at the driving range and i discovered that my reflexes are actually pretty good, considering that i haven't played golf in a dozen years. i have this problem with hitting off to the right that practice would probably clear up. anyway. we went out and played with another father and his twelve year old son who was so much better than i was.

we didn't win the tournament, but we had a great time and that's the important bit, i think. on the way home, my dad said something to me and i went "huh?" which prompted him to ask "are you still not awake?" "i don't think so," was my response. and i'm still not. but that's okay. i really haven't been awake since thursday afternoon. sometimes life is like that. it doesn't make things any less meaningful, it just distorts your perceptions of them just a tad.

anyway. that was my weekend. in abridged format, of course. stuff happened, i didn't sleep much. all in all, though, people had fun. so i had fun. yay people (enjoy that statement now - you're hardly likely to see it again in the near future...)

2002-06-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

it's too fucking early. my brain is still half-asleep. i can tell that this is the case because i spent the entire metro ride in composing portions of a nice update and, now that i'm sitting here trying to write it all down, all i'm drawing is a great big blank.

the hives work better than caffeine, though. at least they get my body moving.

speaking of bodies, nation was fun last night. eccles brought the weather with him, apparently. the joke was that it went from light drizzle #42 to light rain #3 (according to the official british guide to precipitation determination), although nobody really got the joke. oh well, we thought it was funny.

the usual assortment of bare skin was in evidence, much to the delight of our visitor. it really is a scene that is custom-designed for maximum visual enjoyment.

i started writing something new yesterday on the theory that i had an idea, a first line and a title. honestly, though, i'm hoping that it's just a short story and not a full novel. i don't have the time to devote to a full novel. (please god, just ten thousand words.)

2002-06-13T08:45:00.000-04:00

i keep forgetting to mention this. shannon and i were in target the other day buying soda and this lady was in line behind us with her daughters. one was maybe nine and the other was about six. the older sister was getting a pair of spongebob swimshoes. "but they didn't have any in her size," the older sister said, referring to her sister. the younger sister lifted up her shoulders, shook her head and gave a deep sigh. "nope," she said. "none for me."

we lost it and so did her mother. that's a drama queen, right there. "such a heavy soul, for one so young," i said. and that's about the age that i sort of feel most drama queens present themselves to be, when they act like that. nothing more to add, except that i've been meaning to write that up and just haven't had the time.

(fast forward through yesterday's saga of the parking meter and the reports that required a reboot of the intranet server. they also crashed the page server and, when i went out to put money in the meter, i only had one minute left! it was a whole thing.)

i went out to the airport and picked up eccles during what turned out to be the hottest part of the day. i stood and watched passengers from dusseldorf, zurich, milan, paris, munich, amsterdam and some place called manchester come through the gates because i hadn't brought a book to occupy my time. (of course, i keep picking up books and putting them down, which is probably indicitive of something. i just wish i knew what. maybe my attention is just wandering...?)

anyway. we drove home and eccles got the driving tour of the virginia suburbs, which included traffic ("look, 66 is a parking lot!"), arlington cemetary, the military installations outside of the pentagon and a nice view of rosslyn and crystal city, which is far more exciting that it sounds.

we actually got home before shannon, which was surprising to me. we were listening to the god save the queen single that he brought over when she walked in, so that was cool. we talked for a bit and then went off to bennigan's, where our favorite waiter failed to impress eccles by switching a fish and chicken order.

then we were off to dremo's (now with air conditioning!) for david bowie night. we introduced eccles around and he and i talked about banks (for something new and different) and a couple of other topics. it was a pretty nice night, actually. i got vlad to play the man who sold the world, even though i had to run out to the car to get it for him. it helps when you know the dj and the fact that vlad is fairly laid back helps, too.

we didn't win the raffled (poo!) but we did get to see tony. i understand why he won't be able to make it out tonight, but that doesn't mean i won't miss him.

the same goes for the city morgue people, too. (i place the blame squarely on carrie's shoulders for making them behind schedule. yeah, right.) actually, i'm just being a petulant six year old about the fact that my friends can't stay and hang out with the cool kids because of their obligations. so don't mind me.

and now it's thursday.

2002-06-12T08:51:00.000-04:00

ugh. on-street parking sucks. so does driving up the highway into the city. how do i love the metro? let me count the ways...

still, driving in with shan this morning was fun, even if it meant cursing at the other drivers for ten miles. i found a spot with a meter next to my building, but it means that i have go down there every hour and feed the meter. luckily, my boss is the motherlode when it comes to change. i bought $3 in quarters off of him. cool beans.

i drove in this morning because i'm going out to dulles this afternoon to pick up eccles. yes, the merry wanderer arrives today. just in time for another projected code red day. welcome to dc! (adrian's going to have it tougher - he arrives for a week in august.)

i have to admit that i was a little surprised at the positive reactions (all both of them) that i got to yesterday's souvenir koan piece. even as i was writing it, it felt a little harsh to me. maybe that's just because i feel slightly bad that that's all the feeling i can muster about a decade-old memory? who can say?

speaking of ten-year-old memories, ren and stimpy is getting new episodes. interesting...

the last of the photorealist pieces (for the time being) is going up today, exactly one year to the day that i made it. the next few will probably be a grab-bag of whatever abstracty stuff that i'm impressed that i've made over the past months.

(for the completeist, though, the picture from today is the one that is on the back of my favorite t-shirt. you know, the one that says "don't put your hand where you wouldn't put your face, she said." people love that shirt.)

what else? not much.

i had a great story idea yesterday. i just wish i had time to write it. i don't even know if it's a novel or a short story idea. (i suspect the latter.) usually the best part about having ideas like that is finding out how long they're going to be. not this time. well, not right now. maybe later, when i can enjoy the process. it's difficult to do when your day is predestined to be chopped into managable little hours. i hate watching the clock. but it's better than getting a ticket.

2002-06-11T09:40:00.000-04:00

is anyone else starting to get pissed off at yahoo for putting "vocal" ads in their mailbox? the att one in particular is starting to make me question yahoo's status as "the best free mail service on the web."

i'm really sick of things breaking down first thing in the morning. shannon has a point when she says that she'd prefer to have to do all of her work first thing so she can have some time in the afternoon to relax a bit, but it's trying. hooo boy, is it trying. especially when there are 165 culture emails in your inbox. the list would choose right now to get really chatty.

and, of course, the archives on the souvenir koan decided to flake out on me. blagh.

oh well. we got our new monitor hooked up and we're evaluating it right now. heavy.

and, on suggestion from friends (all both of them), i'm starting to read some erotic literature with an eye towards seeing if that's a genre i could actually do something in. (yes, i'm reading under great duress, let me tell you.) and that's it. for today.

2002-06-10T14:02:00.000-04:00

good news: i was able to get everything done that i needed to for the package that's going out in the mail tomorrow.

the bad news is that work just kicked my ass from 9 to 10 this morning. there should be a limit to the number of people who can call at once. and for such silly reasons! bah.

so right now, i'm just letting my brain decompress. it's not posed to be this compressed on a monday.

2002-06-09T19:43:00.000-04:00

ah. this was a good weekend. i left a little early on friday because the management left early and i needed the extra time to get a head-start on my errands. i got my comics (murder mysteries! yay!) and went off to the mall to get my hair cut (the such portion of friday's post). unfortunately, i think i ended up with a haircut that would be more appropriate for a lesbian. it works well with gel, but there are aspects that i'm less than satisfied with.

dollhouse was fun. tim and i discussed the social ramifications of what would happen if the backstreet boys conducted a demographic shift and suddenly started blatantly marketing themselves towards the gay audience by making a village people tribute album. there would be chaos. forget about the situation in isreal! the future of american culture hangs in the balance and might well turn on a feathered headdress. this is what passes for conversation early on in the night, before the women start arriving.

there were other conversations as well, but that was the easiest to remember and repeat. (or something to that effect.)

we woke up early on saturday and made it down to graffix in time to meet up with fish. we putzed around the studio with fish for a while as he set up and woke up. i ran and got him breakfast and he did shan's tattoo first. i ran down to get money from the atm down the street and, by the time i got back, he was almost done.

mine, on the other hand, took two and a half hours. it turned out beautifully, though. it's a tryptich from dave mckean's particle tarot: the sun on top, death in the middle and justice on the bottom. the fact that dave mckean collaborates a lot with neil gaiman means that i get a reference to both within the same piece. (i also realized that all three of my pieces are british in origin. odd.)

the hoovers were nice enough to give us a monitor, which i still haven't hooked up. as of right now, it's still in the trunk of the car, making clunking noises every time i make too tight a turn. tomorrow, probably.

saturday night was interesting. we haven't been to catacomb in a while, so there was that awkwardness. on top of that, there were demographic groups present that aren't usually represented in the crowd: sikhs (with turbans), a collective noun of lesbians, short women sans undergarments and under the drinking age punk/ravers. (pravers?) we were unable to find the pink cd in the car, though, to fish's disappointment.

we got home and had an interesting conversation about interesting conversations.

this morning, we woke up early because fresh tattoos don't make it easy to sleep. we went up to maryland and had lunch with my parents because my mother's birthday is tomorrow. we talked briefly about my grandfather and the family's reaction and i received the unlikely news that my uncle roy died a month ago (the speed at which the news reached me should indicate exactly how important crazy, stupid uncle roy was to me, personally.) all in all, it was a good time.

after lunch, shannon and i drove down to georgetown. we were going to see the ziggy stardust pictures at the govinda gallery, but decided to go shopping instead. we went to the body shop for more cocoa butter for the tattoos, reconstruction hardware for goggles, commander salamander (have you been in there since they rebuilt the place?) and the pleasure place. fun.

so now we've finished eating dinner and we're looking at the fading sunlight with an eye to how well it lights up the apartment. eh.

tomorrow's going to be busy, though. i have to complete a list of items for writer's relief (don't ask if i haven't told you or simply google if you're curious), which i have to send out asap. and then i have to get the monitor sorted. but the apartment is clean and things are good there. but the other hotline operator is on vacation this week, so the workday is going to be tight. fun fun.

see you when i see you.

2002-06-07T08:50:00.000-04:00

first off, sorry to anyone who finds me to be a wordy bastard. that's who i am. i probably shouldn't apologize, but i wonder how many people are coming here expecting updates on my daily life, only to find some weird rambling idea-laden sort-of-an-essay about whatever's on my mind at the moment. oh well. that's what passes for updates on my daily life, really.

having said that, there are actually things going on. weekly meeting about the status of our contract today. probably no news, which isn't encouraging. but it is payday. so that means i have cash to buy comics and such. (the such part is a surprise).

mmmm.... comics.

what else? for some reason i keep referring to this new chat application as trillium, but that's not it's name. trillian. different beast altogether, apparently.

shannon (and her power base) is down in the dumps right now, so everyone has to be encouraging tonight, okay? tonight, you say? yes. because it's dollhouse! whee. a hot, packed club night. with good music. so there are tradeoffs...

and on that note, i have things to be doing.

2002-06-06T21:34:00.000-04:00

eh. so there's another post in here that i didn't bother to link on lj. it's unfinished because the point kinda slipped my mind between the time i wrote it and now. (i posted what i had to save it while i helped with dinner.) scroll down if you care.

so anyway...

trillium is fun. i've got it set up now, so that a prim little message window pops up when i get mail. that's nice. and today was just an im convention. claire, michael, sarah, carrie. the only person that didn't throw words at me today was tony. (i still say go with the black power fro, man.) i don't know which is stranger: talking to tony when he's about to crash because he's been up all night or talking to claire just before she's heading to bed because she lives in melbourne.

eccles is now less than a week out. groovy. and dollhouse is tomorrow night.

today felt like friday for some reason...

2002-06-06T19:07:00.000-04:00

where do the lines of art and artifice disolve? holy fire has a section about a theorist who offers an item for examination and asks for an estimation of it's value based on itself. then he modifies that value based on a manufactured history, which he changes and changes again, until the point is made that the value of a thing can have no more intrinisic value than it's history. what it is, a story. not what it is, an object.

that same theorist also offers up for examination a picture of a sunset. is it beautiful? is that beauty in any way modified by the fact that it has been digitally enhanced? is it any less beautiful now that it's authenticity has been sullied? does the fact that it is a photograph (a digital photograph at that) detract from the fact that it is not the real sunset, but only a captured record of a portion of that event?

this would-be socrates asks outright, what is art and what is artifice? (artifice being the use of tools necessary to produce the art, in my dictionary). it's a good question. at what point does true appreciation of the art require a comprehensive (or even cursory) mastry of the tools needed to make it? would someone who had never used photoshop appreciate a subtle tweaked photograph? would they recognize the art that it had become? (would they call it art?)

in many ways, modernism leveled the playing field of artisitic appreciation. the notion was floated that there are no philistines because the critical tools that were previously needed to judge the artistic merits of a piece no longer applied. which meant that anyone's opinion of any given piece was valid. from the junkie in the gutter to the impeccably up-to-date haute couture queens. and the housewife. and the college student. and the rabbi. and the imam. the list goes on.

it's a liberating idea and a little scary, because the moron down the street from you shouting drunken insults from his car window has as much right to his opinion (and it is as valid) as the opinion of person you really seek the most approval from. but hey, once you get past that, you're golden. what matters is how willing you are to seperate the bile and anger from the genuine critical points. and how willing you are to admit to your failures. but i digress....

especially now that a technical hierarchy has grown up like digital coral. anyone who has ever designed a webpage knows how difficult it is, which means that

2002-06-06T08:24:00.000-04:00

insecure, what ya gonna do?

there were thunderstorms over dc and rosslyn last night as we came up 395 to get to dremos. the lightning was spectacular. several wonderful, brilliant bolts that stood out against the night sky, paused in their brief, incandescent glory.

so i've been thinking about songs about thunder and lightning all morning. underworld came to me first. now i kiss you dark and long.

but now i'm listening to james. sometimes, when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul. the rain makes a great sound on concrete.

(shannon's gonna give me shit because the lyrics i quoted are all over the place from two or three different songs. but i love the words that tim booth wrote...)

don't mind me. i'm feeling the effects of reading too much bruce sterling. holy fire is such a good book. not his best, but i like it for very particular reasons. couture. art, not artifice. meditations on why junkies are the exact antithesis of wisdom and control. and so on.

i have things to do today (and i'll actually get them done, too).

- lunch with kyle.
- tweaking the contrast for the flyer.
- install and setup trillian.
- send the article to joshua.

anything else? if there is, it's not on my to do list...

2002-06-05T17:51:00.000-04:00

okay, programmers who have time on their hands and/or want to do something interesting.

i have a challenge. it would be really helpful if, in livejournal, there was a radio button that i could click to tell the browser (leave a cookie, presumably) that i have read a particular entry. if that entry gets comments, the "read/unread" setting defaults back to unread. that way, i can go through my friends list and see if there are any new entries. and the ones i've read aren't there anymore.

my network administrator at work likes to say "anything can be done. the question is how difficult is it to do?"

so there you go. how difficult would it be to implement this?

2002-06-05T12:24:00.000-04:00

this morning i made plans for lunch with my family for my mother's birthday. and i made plans to go play golf with my dad for father's day. i think my dad almost dropped the phone when i suggested that we go play golf, he was that shocked.

my golf clubs (which i haven't touched in at least a decade) are still in my parents basement. and i'll have to wear shorts, i suppose. do i even own shorts? i should check on that.

oh well. it means a lot to him and that's what father's day is all about.

warning - topic shift

i was thinking about the strip mining of culture (again) because john seabrook used that exact phrase at the end of nobrow. "strip mining of subcultures." i think it's an apt description, really. nostalgia and pop culture have become yet another subculture that exists to be strip mined, i think. which makes sense, if you consider that nostalgia highlights those aspects of the past that were popular, meaning that strip mining them will produce proven numbers. it's all about the numbers...

i figure that the first genuine subculture that really got screwed by strip mining, though, was disco. i have nothing to support that. it's just an idea that i feel like throwing out there. we'll see how that bounces, shall we?

warning - another sudden topic shift

when i was thinking about the whole self-esteem thing, i was also thinking about conformity (we conform to what our own, internal ideas of what we should be, even though we tend to blame that conformity on others. i think. it's an idea that's still in progress...)

and, i was thinking about the difference between drama and a saga.

dramas have endings. that's what makes them dramatic. they are definable, finite stories. this happened, this is the ending.

ongoing storylines are something else completely. those are sagas. and i decided yesterday that if you're going to tell me about your ongoing saga, you really shouldn't expect much of a response from me unless it's in old english rhyming couplets. of course, having said that, i probably won't stick to that rule, because who really has the time to rhyme while things are going on?

still, you get bonus points for a) singing b) musical accompanyment (saxophones or bagpipes preferred, but a cello will do in a pinch) c) sonnet format.

that's all. now go back to work. slacker!

2002-06-05T10:10:00.000-04:00

wow. my dad just sent me my grandfather's obituary. strange. eerie.

2002-06-05T08:30:00.000-04:00

first off, the post has a great review of the hives album veni vidi vicious. the band is playing at the black cat on june 15th. they are fantastic live. short show, but full of energy.

second, starting today, i'm putting my last dregs of purely photorealistic stuff up on the right click gallery. i only have a week's worth of material, so the next seven days will be fairly explicit stuff. you have been warned.

everything past that starts to get into the realm of more abstraction. from slightly abstract to completely off-the-wall stuff like what i posted yesterday. you might say that i have range. if i considered myself an artist, that is.

i am a writer, though, which means that i have that irrepressable urge to move things around until they make sense. to that end, i was considering the order of what i've written and i decided that not fish; duck is a follow-up book, but it makes more sense as a follow-up to weapons of devotion, not the podium.

so, to make sure this is clear to my readers (both of you), here's the handy guide. i wrote what the thunder said first. then the podium. then not fish; duck (which has elements of what the thunder said in it). then weapons of devotion.

the order you should read them in is the podium, weapons of devotion then not fish; duck. (what the thunder said doesn't stand well on it's own and isn't included in the rotation as a seperate novel, in case you were wondering.) is that clear? good.

finally, something i've noticed over the past few months is how many of the people i know have severe self-esteem issues. gradually, i've come to the conclusion that everyone has self-esteem issues. this should be self-evident, i suppose, but it really isn't. i mean, so many people don't seem to get the fact that they have self-esteem issues that they miss the point that they are no different from anyone else.

we are all fucked up people who don't think we're good enough. once you grasp that, i think, a lot of what people do starts to make a lot of sense. maybe.

2002-06-04T08:29:00.000-04:00

good morning. not much to post right at the moment. my knee still hurts. i'm tired and six feet under was really, really good last night.

i got a positive response from writer's relief and i sent off a request for their new client package. so i'm that much closer to actually doing something with my writing. (at the same time, i'm fairly close to calling not fish; duck a complete wash and not ever bothering with it again. for the third time.)

there's a new piece on the souvenir koan today. and the picture on the right click galleries started as a portrait. i'm very happy with the way it turned out, though. very abstract and in the mode that i've been working with lately.

more later, when my brain wakes up.

2002-06-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

first off, thanks to everyone who has expressed their condolences about my grandfather. he's been going for the past four months, but this was the end and i'm actually kind of happy that it's over. he was tired and it's not very fun wondering when someone is going to die. especially when that person is a very good friend of yours. i miss him.

we went to the hives in baltimore last night, which was fun. (the alternative would have been to watch the season finale of six feet under and i don't think i would have been able to handle that show. not yesterday.)

the hives show was, as usual, spectacular. they were only a few short feet away from where we were standing and they were fantastic. they played die, all right, which was one of the two songs i really wanted to hear (the other being metric system in time). all of their songs are good, though, so i wasn't at all disappointed by their choices.

the show was being taped for mtv2's concert series, which was interesting. look for us in the crowd.

the theater was hot (but not godawful hot, if you know what i mean). still, the band is from sweden and obviously are not used to the heat/humidity combo. the rhythym guitarist looked like he was going to pass out at any second from heat exhaustion.

one really cool thing they did was at the end of hate to say i told you so, where every member of the band just stopped cold and held the pose for a full minute. that took practice. showmanship. that's what makes the hives great.

of course, during the concert, i fucked up my knee. i woke up this morning and it make a noise somewhere between a snap and a pop (but no crackle) when i extended it. that was nice. so i'm hobbling around the office today. whee.

2002-06-02T11:17:00.000-04:00

my father called this morning, waking me up to tell me that my grandfather died this morning. according to my mother, he had been comatose for most of the week and simply stopped breathing this morning. at least he died peacefully, in his bed. i don't know when the service is going to be, but my mother is going up there for a few days.

i'm not as upset about this as i thought i would be, but i've dealt with and grown accustomed to his passing (and he did pass away. slowly.) over the past few months. still, the idea that i'm not going to get intelligent, witty notes or calls from him makes me sad. he's not going to ever talk to me about writing again. that's sad. i miss it already. i really missed talking to him about my trip to london. things like that are what i'm going to miss. who he was, warts and all.

i've got other news, both good and bad, but i'm not going to worry about it right now. now is just time to wake up and face the day.

2002-06-01T19:00:00.000-04:00

we threw away paper today, in anticipation of eccles, who arrives the week after next. (and dan arrives in dc the day after eccles leaves. and adrian will be here in the middle of august. we're just the culture list crash pad this summer.)

there were four trash bags full of paper that went by-by. and i organized all of my various piles of crap. in doing so, i discovered that i have seven rough (some are very rough) piles that each represent a story idea. sometimes it's just a seed (like the information about the apothocaries) and for some it is forty or fifty pages of notes and references that i want to work in. of course, that doesn't include the notes about the next revision of the podium (whenever that will be) and the notes about not fish; duck. i even have a pile of notes that wouldn't fit into not fish; duck and will probably inform an entirely other story. at some point.

so i guess i shouldn't worry about what to write next, huh?

i'll skip the extended "when will i have time to write?" histrionics. take them as read and let's move on.

we went uptown to the textile musuem, which is in a really nice area north of dupont circle. it was a beautiful day in general and everyone was doing stuff in the outside garden. maying tie-dyed fabric and weaving and using printing tecniques. lots of kids.

the gallery they had was very interesting. basically, people had made digital images and then used digital looms to create fabrics that were print-outs of the images. really cool stuff. great textures. (the museum is free.)

when we were in the gift shop of the musuem, i was looking at yo-yo ma's book on the silk road cultures, but decided that $25 was too much for a book that i was only marginally interested in. there was a neat book about different costumes that had been made up by contemporary designers. that was great fun. the great part about the fifth element were the costumes that had been designed to let you, the audience member, know that this was the future. i think a better written movie with the same attention to costume detail would be a very interesting experience. maybe. when i have a million dollars.

2002-05-31T12:40:00.000-04:00

news on the work front. the contract that we're in is a specific category and our company graduated from that category, which means that the bid has now, (semi)officially, been given to someone else. which means that our management (at the very least) isn't going to be in charge of our contract as of the end of august.

so who is going to be in charge? good question. the dot hasn't officially given out the contract to the new company yet, so nobody knows nothing. my company would like to subcontract it's employees (us) to the new company so that we keep our jobs, something i support wholeheartedly. until we know who we're going to be working for, though, it's really tough to make those kinds of negotiations. so now we're in half-assed employement limbo.

but someone needs to make some decisions soon. and that's all i'm gonna say about that.

we had fun with lori last night. she had some great lines, too. classics like "there's a definate line between creepy and spooky. spooky good, creepy bad." and "you think about kangal too much."

there were many cute girls, dressed in many skimpy outfits. and who doesn't like looking at girls in skimpy outfits, really?

we were very catty, though.

i just recently finished pixel juice by jeff noon, which is a group of short stories from the pop-culture addled mind of that great british futurist. he uses words in a very interesting manner, coining phrases and puns like man. very good use of culture mixing that comments upon the contemporary uses of media and advertising.

i went from that to nobrow by john seabrook (which i'm still reading). seabrook writes for the new yorker and has been engaged in a long-form discussion of taste, culture and the relationship between mass culture and subculture. i'm particularly intrigued by this last bit, because it tends to overlap a lot of what i got from bruce sterling about how the subcultures tend to be harvested for art and attitude before they have a chance to ripen and mature. seabrook says almost the same thing, even though he uses different terminology.

so i guess i'm reading holy fire by sterling next. it seems appropriate to jump right into a critical discussion of couture and futurity as a counterpoint to pixel juice. one is more media-saturated and the other is more sub-culture oriented, but both have a very studied approach to the idea of media and how it influences and is influenced by society.

and there was a whole rant about strip mining popular culture in reference to the new scooby doo movie, but that also impacts nostalgia and the subtexts that we tend to read into media artifacts from our past. (my grandfather once told me that when he was growing up, there was no perceived homosexual subtext between batman and robin because that kind of relationship did not exist within his realm of understanding - very literally, he and his friends did not know to look for that.)

compare that naivity about batman to the amount of after the fact interpretation that is placed on scooby and the gang. shaggy may have been a stoner who could hear his dog talk, but that's not something that is ever stated explicitly. instead, we have read the context of the society into the text and come up with something completely other.

oh well. i understand why we strip mine culture - because it's a proven commodity. and i understand the impulse to nostalgia - because it reminds us of a gentler time. and i understand the impulse to apply contextual revisionism the media of our youth - because it shows that we have grown up and now "get" what was going on.

but why do we focus so much on the past. what's wrong with looking forward and finding something new to enjoy? are we that scared of wading through the dross of new art in the attempt to find the one book that will spark imaginations for years to come?

i dunno. it gets me down. that's all i'm saying.

2002-05-30T08:51:00.000-04:00

ugh. i'm wearing a tie today because i have to represent the contract over at the dot headquarters for the monthly policy meeting. wunderbar. you have no idea how thrilled i am about this. honestly.

we didn't make it to dremo's last night because we got caught up in a whole big conversation about stuff and expectations and things of that nature. you know how it goes. anyway, sorry to anyone who was expecting us. it was very unexpected.

i did a complete windows 2000 install on our home computer last night, though. shannon's mom called, so i turned around and started the install. we were watching monty python on bbc america and every ten minutes or so, i'd get up and hit next or something. it was one of those kinds of nights. very low key.

2002-05-29T09:40:00.000-04:00

so i was listening to a hard day's night yesterday and i felt like nice guy eddie in reservoir dogs. i must have listened to that song a thousand million times and i swear i never heard him talk about things. but there it was. i even went to this archive and yep, there it is: "You know I work all day/To get you money to buy you things." i knew there was a reason that i liked the beatles and now i know for sure. they were down with the whole stuff and things terminology. sure, they never mentioned stuff (as far as i know) but hey. if you understand things, you understand stuff. it's like reciprical or something.

once again, i have my reports ready by nine. that's a great feeling. and everyone polled, too! well, except for indiana, but she's an idiot. (maybe i shouldn't say that.)

shannon sent me some lovely photos of her being supportive on saturday night. there were a couple of good shots of carrie, too. i might make art with one of them.

not much on my plate for today. we're off to dremo's tonight and did we decide that shannon was going to graffix today to make the deposits?

and the situation with the dsl at home continues to resolve itself. it's working great, except that sometimes the connection drops, even though it shows as still being connected. like an idiot, i forgot to get the driver for the ethernet card from joshua and i don't have all the networking portions of xp installed, so i need to do that, too (which requires the cd). it can wait until they get back from convergence, though. i just have to remember not to let the connection sit inactive too long.

(update: this article from wired actually tells me much more about what's going on.)

oh yes. we made our list for the dinner on friday night when eccles is here. who knew we had so many friends? oy. we need to send out a general invite. and clean the house. and i have to make shannon's fliers. so i guess i do have things to do today, after all.

maybe write some, too. wow. that was easy...

2002-05-28T14:50:00.000-04:00

howza. micheal and i decided to create a weblog dedicated to just links. it's called pubic hairs on the coke can of public discourse and you can find it here. (not that i think about it, the title "just links" never occurred to me. maybe i'm just biased...)

anyway. for those of you who enjoy my eclectic collection of links, this should satisfy. for those of you who prefer that i just stick to miles-long rambles about my life, well there you go. the content has been seperated for your reading pleasure. yes, you.

2002-05-28T10:14:00.000-04:00

friday: it was girl's night out, so joshua came over (his wife was out being one of the girls) and we installed windows xp on my home computer. that was fun. the dsl is still having some issues, but verizon tech support informs me that that's a switch issue, not my modem driver.

funniest thing from the evening was seeing two girls who had driven onto a median strip, knocking over a wooden signpost in the process. i can understand not seeing the median, but the signpost? they were still there when we drove past in the other direction, only this time there was a tow truck to help them off the median and two cop cars (any event in east springfield tends to attract police cops 'cause there's not much going on down at that end of town...)

saturday: club night. we saw greg at the bar, hung out with lori and just goofed off. oh, and i teased carrie, driving her to drink. ("alcohol, my only friend...")

sunday: drove up to philly for dracula's ball at the trocadero. the actual event sucked (the venue was crappy and the drinks were overpriced) but everything else was pretty cool. we drove past maryland house and many museums, including the decoy museum (me: "that's not the real museum"). it was hot and muggy on south street and we drank more alcohol than we shopped, but that was okay, really.

we saw ian and shawna and batty and shannon didn't go over and talk to johnny indovina like she wanted to, but that's okay.

i talked to a literary agent (who handles horror and genre fiction) at the vendor area and she passed on a rumor that bantam dell is looking for literary fiction. i count that as a good thing.

oh, and we kept running into voltaire and his entourage of twelve-year-olds. that got old fast.

monday: we drove back and, on the way, stopped at waffle house in elkton but decided that it was too full (okay, i decided). we also stopped in towson to pick up tickets for the hives for next sunday. $3 a ticket, presented by mtv2 and all the way up in baltimore, but still...

so that was the short version of my weekend. very, very busy. and summer has arrived in dc. with humidity. oy vey.

there's something new up on the souvenir koan, too.

2002-05-24T09:58:00.000-04:00

it's friday and my body is stiff and sore. not for any particular reason, just because it's friday and i tend to believe that i store all my tension in the lower part of my thighs, just above my knees. to be honest, though, i don't have much to be tense about.

work is going okay (although the management is being suspiciously close-mouthed about the status of the contract negotiations). nobody's getting back to me about any of the resumes i sent out, but i haven't been as assiduous about that as i could have been, i think.

the last word on my grandfather was that he's been transferred home and that he would be getting home hospice care. i'm not sure if i should call and find out how he's doing, though. maybe after the weekend.

i did 23 picture remixes in the past three days and probably more today, as work permits. i'm still contemplating what order i want to post them in, though. june 12 seems to be some kind of anniversary, though. i'll see what happens when that comes around. (what day did i post earlier? the 16th? that was wrong.) at any rate, i'm really happy with the general direction of these pieces, even if the specific presentation issues aren't quite sorted out in my head. and not all of the pictures make me really happy. but that's an aesthetic issue, not an artisitic satisfaction issue.

speaking of this, though, brings me to our home computer. i have to go out and buy more memory for it so i can upgrade it to windows 2000. the stupid thing crashed twice on me while i was using photoshop last night. the first time was horrible because i had some great colors going on and i completely lost that image. oh well, art is fleeting. but i have to defrag the computer and that particular function seems to be not working so well. blah.

on the writing side, i'm doing pretty good. i had a good idea for how to intersect the souvenir koan with the sf ideas i had the other day. more on that when i actually get those stories written. but that's the future and this is the present and i still haven't typed up the piece i wrote on sunday. it's intimidating me. it's tough to admit that, but sometimes that happens. the emotional power of the piece digs right down inside me and makes me flinch. and i'm a raw enough writer that things like that are going to happen from time to time. knowing that they will and actually dealing with them as they come up, though, are two very different things.

i'm optimistic about the writer's relief project. the podium is a good book. it's just that i've reached the end of my abilities in terms of getting it published. i need help from here on out. and i'm glad to pay for that help if it means that i can realize my dream of seeing someone on the metro reading my book (this has always been my measure of success).

i heard a secondhand report that not fish; duck is a weaker novel than the podium, though. it's the truth and i know it's the truth, but that doesn't keep the demoralization from creeping in. i don't think i ever found the center of that particular novel and i'm acutely aware of the fact that i need a lot of external help to get it back on track. unfortunately, the prospect of tackling that book a third time is almost as intimidating as anything else i have on my plate right now.

there's something i want to talk to tony about, when we see him on saturday. and this is kinda funny.

so that's it. status check = generally okay. fairly happy. minor dips and dimples aside, things are looking good. oh, and the bobby-headed monkey on the dashboard of my car is now sitting up straight (the material came off his butt, so i revelcroed him). i know you wanted to know all of that....

2002-05-23T12:36:00.000-04:00

allright. this is more of a links-heavy post. you have been warned.

let's see. what have i got? a chicken without feathers? ugly. brains? tasty braaaaaainsssss.....

i think i forgot to mention the real basil fawlty article. oops. why you shouldn't sleep around. good advice, really. the misanthropic bitch updated. not once, but twice. read. enjoy. laugh and be glad that someone has the balls to actually say that stuff out loud.

the best quote in this article about what the fbi are currently investigating is "If it's your job to hunt Islamic fundamentalist terrorists," said Rafael, "Then it's your job to know that they don't hang out with Jewish lesbians in San Francisco."

and, finally, more aotc-related material. both from locus. first, an honest reviewer. second, someone who may or may not be a fan.

2002-05-23T11:55:00.000-04:00

bwah. my mind is a bit frazzled this morning (which would explain why i'm updating so late in the day. well, for me it's late..)

i got a response letter from writer's relief last night that basically said they couldn't help me because i hadn't given them enough material to work with. the postscript on the letter indicated that i needed to submit a bio, a synopsis and some indication of what it is that i expected to gain from them. taking that as a good sign, i called them up and asked for clarification.

the lady on the phone was very helpful and gave me a lot of pointers about what they were looking for. she also said that she would put a note on my submission that there was more on it's way so that i could reenter the submission process. so i spent this morning typing up the supplementary material and sent it to the lovely and talented shannon for review. she just got off the phone with her suggestions and now i have hardcopies that will be sent out forthwith. so there's that. fingers crossed and all of that.

speaking of art, i had a conversation with my friend about my digital artwork yesterday. it was insightful enough that i decided to hold onto it and reprint it: i had a very definate style with the polaroids and i deviated heavily into pseudo realism with the right clicks i'd been doing. but lately, i was drifting back towards the polaroids, to uneven effect. but now i'm really veering sharply away towards insanely abstract.

my friend thought that was funny, but i can't see the humor.

i noticed, though, that the first right click i ever did was made on june 16, 2001. it boggles my mind that i've been doing this particular series for almost a year. it doesn't seem like that length of time has passed, to be honest.

ah well. going with the whole subject of porn, here's an article about a teacher who forgot that his personal monitor was still hooked up to the main classroom display and decided to do some porn viewing while his students were taking a test. "sick leave." sure. whatever you say.

i'm currently reading "good in bed," which shannon recommended to me a while ago because she said it would help me understand some of the mindset of what big girls go through when they think about sex and dating and so forth. i knew a lot of it, but she's right: it does put the reader front and center in that mindset. a good thing, as far as i'm concerned. and a good story, too.

it reminds me of this book review that i read in salon yesterday. it's the sexual memoirs of a french woman who's had an open marriage for twenty years. it's very frank and honest and i tend to like that in a story (the fact that it has sex in it is just a bonus, really).

heh. i wonder if she'd heard the headline about how semen contains antidepressants? probably not.

rather than cram the rest of my archived links into this post and run the risk of veering from the theme of writing, sex and art, i'll just hold on to those until this afternoon. how's that sound? good. glad you approve.

2002-05-22T10:02:00.000-04:00

oy. what a morning. first i have stupid people in the field who leave their applications open overnight and don't really think about how outlook could interfere with the operation of the ftp script. that drives me nuts, lemme tell you...

fortunately, that is about the extent of the complaints, which means that there are a lot of good things. nothing so crude as actual "this is what i did yesterday" content (although i did remix ten pictures and came up with a handful of good sf story ideas, all of which i'm really proud of). instead, you get links. but cool ones, so that's okay.

first, we were playing around with google on the culture list, googling for ourselves and i discovered that there is a more famous matt rhodes out there. (not such a big surprise, to be honest.) even more interesting is the fact that he has a livejournal and is only five jumps away from me, acquaintance-wise. weird.

what else? bruce sterling linked to a picture and had this to say about it: "Here are 56 Spaniards who play Quake. Instead of wiping each other out with nailguns and chainsaws, they've managed to stack their character into an awe-inspiring tower."

speaking of linking to celebrities, neil gaiman's post this morning struck me as really funny, in that distinctly deadpan british way that they have of telling stories. of course, he's british, so it makes sense that he'd write like that. but it's still funny to me.

here are some lessons learned from watching 24. great misuses of english from old videogames. and a demo page for realistic video game drivers. cool shit.

finally, we have friends. friends rock. like kyle, who can get away with saying things like "wearing your wife as a wristwatch" because it's funny and he's who he is. (note: edited because the entry i was pointing at was locked and rights protected. sorry.) and micheal, who posted the case for cocktails, which is pretty good. (the site also has a link to the ten greatest beatles moments which just rocks. pardon - rawks.) and kari, who sent me a very nice email this morning, which i have yet to respond to. but i will. this afternoon. probably.

2002-05-21T09:59:00.000-04:00

(i stole this from the culture list, but i thought it was an interesting enough discussion that it's worth bringing up here. of course, this means that it's going to be a bit geeky. okay. very geeky.)

brad asked what order the star wars series should be watched in to maintain the maximum amount of dramatic tension. you know - the revelation that darth vader is actually anakin skywalker at the end of empire strikes back is the biggest flag and, if you watched the entire series in order, you would lose the dramatic power of that whole scene.

so. i propose (and so did brad) that you watch them out of order. but what order? what works to keep the suspense tangible throughout the course of the series?

(yes, i know that the acting and dialogue are bad in the latest two installments, but we'll leave that out of the discussion for the time being. the story's the thing and always has been.)

my order: a new hope, the phantom menace, attack of the clones, empire strikes back, episode iii, return of the jedi. see? darth vader isn't mentioned at all until episode iii (presumably) and this way, we get the flashbacks that lead up to the big scene in empire. plus, we get to compare the thematic echoes between the lightsaber battle in clones with the battle in empire. (come on, you didn't notice that the pieces of machinery that dooku throws at yoda are similiar in size and shape to the ones that vader throws at luke in empire? for shame.)

well, that's my geek moment for the day.

what else have i got for you?

google has a nice little collection of the logos they've used over the years, along with a happy dilbert cartoon. china has announced that they are going to build a moonbase by 2010. thank god someone is.

an article (with pictures - the most important part) about the woman who got a complaint from a neighbor who said that she pruned her hedges into phallic shapes on purpose. (see why the pictures are important?) maybe the neighbor should take the quiz to help her determine "is your neighbor a terrorist?"

2002-05-21T08:09:00.000-04:00

good morning. i'm still waking up, but who isn't at this time of day?

i've put up a new picture in the right click gallery (updated daily) and a new piece about names in the souvenir koan (updated tuesdaily).

it was a quiet night last night. this is shannon's big work week, so she's going to be home late all week (sadly face) but that just gives me time to sit and be creative. and you all know how much i hate to be creative.

more later, in all probablilty.

2002-05-20T15:46:00.000-04:00

it's been a slow day here at the hotline. i got so bored that i actually did some art. i started slowly, with a picture of joe's hands. then i remixed a picture of shawna with sam's head up her skirt, taken last year at neo in chicago. then i did some abstracty stuff (we watched the end of pollack just before six feet under came on) that came out okay. then i mixed two more images, to varied effect. i'm going to wait until i get all the way through my current crop before i start posting these images, though. just because.

however, online has been a different matter. online, i've been networking like a motherfucker.

shannon sent me the website for the law firm we went to for the graduation reception yesterday. i sent them a resume. fingers crossed there. and carrie's batting for me at her firm, too. (thanks)

i talked to michael for a bit about nothing in particular, but that's what most conversations are, anyway. he's a nice guy, though and i think he's got interesting things to say.

and valerie the merciless (robert's wife - and yes, i now know robert's last name. of course, i also know pysche's first name, so i'm just all that and a plate of cheese fries, aren't i?) got back to me about the podium. she'd inquired about it at dremos and i sent it to her. she read it over this past weekend and told me i should get it published. she's pulling out all the stops for me, apparently, and sent me the address of a published friend of hers. i promptly sent a note off to her friend. anything i can do, really.

like i said, it was a networking kinda day.

congratulations to flare for getting something published in uber. it's a good story and funny, to boot. i hope she didn't get too many comments at work about the smile plastered all over her face.

oh yes. if you have come to this site because you googled for "goth" and "sex," then turn around and go home. if you feel like staying for awhile, please do. but also understand that there is nothing especially kinky about goths having sex. except for special occasions.

2002-05-20T09:39:00.000-04:00

it's monday morning, which means that there's not much that i would count as exciting in my world. our friend will graduated from george washington university yesterday and we went to his reception afterwards, which was held in a really nice law firm on pennsylvania avenue with a great view of the city. (i still wonder how indiana got hosed and ended up with such a short street.)

links, though, are here en masse.

everyone and his brother has been linking to the memorial for the death star from slashdot. it's cute, though. going along with the theme is this article that presents a case for the empire. and, of course, lucas chimes in to let us know - in no uncertain terms - that episode ii is not a parody.

the cover art for the new iain banks book is out. i think there's going to be some controversy, despite the fact that the book concerns the events of september 11. especially since the book comes out on september 5th.

oh well. there's a site about everything, including zippo tricks. did you know that carrots used to be purple? (i didn't.) james is putting out a live album. that would have been a good show. and an article about why continuity is just silly.

2002-05-19T11:50:00.000-04:00

we saw the pet shop boys last night at nation. we had a good spot on the balcony level, which meant that we got to see their very beautiful light show - they were backlit through most of the show. have you ever seen a forest of q-tips backlit by the dawn, swaying in a low-lying fog? that's what the crowd looked like from all the way at the back of the auditorium.

the only problem i had with the concert was that it wasn't a $40 show. half that, maybe. they played some good songs, but the overwhelming majority of the show was from their new, slower, more mellow album. and that's not what i was hoping to see. (i realize that it's presumptuous to expect a band to play only their old material, but hey, i'm allowed to have opinions as a consumer, right?)

we caught the end of pulp fiction last night when we got home, which is still a great flick. every little bit of the film still stands up on its own, all these years later. and then we caught six feet under, which is getting really, really good. although i don't know what brenda is up to. ho hum...

2002-05-18T09:03:00.000-04:00

yet another test. this should work. i hope. (if not, you'll never know.) (thanks micheal for the new script.)

i'm up early on a saturday because i had a nap yesterday afternoon before we went out to play laser tag. the event itself was a lot of fun (as it always is). we got a good group, too. the romper room magic mirror saw joe, eva, carrie, joshua, brian, rebecca and falafel. (i picked falafel up from the metro, so i can assure that that is her name.)

we're going to see the pet shop boys tonight at nation (followed by velvet nation). tomorrow is will's graduation party. we're going because will is our friend and even though he's moving away to go be academic, we're still proud of him. we're trying to think of a limp biscuit-themed gag gift for him. (the story would take too long to explain here.)

and that's our weekend. shannon's week ranges from busy to hectic and then we're going to dracula's ball on sunday in philadelphia. busy busy busy.

that's all for now.

2002-05-17T13:38:00.000-04:00

before i forget, i want to thank michael and kyle for their javascript advice and assistance. it's not their fault that things aren't working right. that would be lj.

some links for the content-junkies who are finding themselves alone on a friday afternoon with nothing to read.

did you know that six-month-olds better than adults at differentiating between monkeys? it's true. and you can fool a contemporary fingerprint verification device with a simple procedure? (the cool thing about that one is that it uses gummi bears as an active ingredient.)

and then there is a writeup about the use of etherPEG in a room full of bloggers on laptops. very interesting application. even more interesting writeup.

and that's all i've got, really.

2002-05-17T11:08:00.000-04:00

groovy. okay. that worked. good. good....

onto the content.

saw episode ii last night. before i get into my review, i just want to make it clear that i am a dyed-in-the-wool star wars fan. i have the utmost respect for the franchise. (and if that doesn't make you go uh-oh, i don't know what will...)

my expectations for the series as a whole were diminished by episode i. episode ii met those newly diminished expectations.

the film is nearly all spectacle. the broad-stroke storyline is wonderful. nuanced, interesting and gripping. unfortunately, i felt the film was just one step short of the reality that i have come to expect from the franchise. (i don't just mean the cgi, although that is also covered by this remark.) a lot of the movie felt posed and, outside of the fast-paced sequences where the film became an action adventure romp, there was very little spontaneity.

great pains were taken to tell a complex story of political intrigue and romance. neither story is really sold well. at no point, did i really feel the weight of the dramatic tension that moved the film.

you know the guy at the circus with the ten foot legs and the really long pants? the romantic dialogue was that stilted. i really wonder if anyone ever explained to lucas that you should really read the words out loud after writing them down. (if this is his take on romance, it's no wonder he's not married anymore.)

so what did work? hayden christensen, for one. he did a very convincing job of portraying a young man caught up in the swirl of his emotions with only a portman in sight. ewan mcgregor was (as always) wonderful. his sense of humor really carried through and provided a very effective foil for his apprentice. natalie portman was decent, although she was more screen-candy (nice nipples, natalie!) than anything else. christopher lee was very, very good as well.

on the whole? i say see it. but just remember that this is not the series that you remember from two decades ago. lucas is older and more cautious. he doesn't seem to trust himself or to trust his audience and it shows. as a fan, i wish it didn't.

2002-05-17T11:05:00.000-04:00

test. one two three. this is just a test. if you can see this in a new window, then it worked properly. i'm still having teething problems, though, because i want that window to look very sparse and all, but the script i have needs to be put in the header of the page and i don't think that's going to work properly. if anyone has any info on how to encode stuff like menubar=no, scrollbars=yes, resizable=yes, width=626 into a href tag, then let me know. i'd appreciate it. a lot.

2002-05-16T10:38:00.000-04:00

i think the best part about the lj link device is all the weird names that have come up. poop, elvis, jesus, god, satan, fuck, barbie, miss cleo. all of these are valid lj usernames. makes me wonder if fucknuckle is signed up... (nope. still available as of this writing.)

purgatorio was fun last night. interesting vibes from tony. but then again, tony always sends out interesting vibes. last nights were just... on a slightly different wavelength. more directed.

joe was there and we talked about his writing for a bit. he's got some good stuff. nice images. good turns of phrase. he has a story that he wants to tell and i encouraged him to write it down. i always encourage people to write their stories down. the world needs more artists. we need more people expressing themselves in healthy, artistic directions. repeat after me: "killing bad. art good."

work was a tad frantic this morning. we had to grab all of the 2001 data asap so we could run the data pump and do various databasey backup things with it all. (sometimes this job is sorta-kinda interesting. mostly, though, it's just whiny people bitching about deadlines and network connections and stuff like that. which really falls into the "this blows goats" category.)

anyway. i'm done with all of that (for now) and the arcane processes have passed over into the hands of the database doods at the end of the hallway.

sigh. i did have to deal with the idjit from virginia this morning, whose phone was cutting out. that was fun, lemme tell you. and then the lady from pennsylvania called asking me a question about the deadline that she was s'posed to meet last night. "okay," i said to her. "you've been dealing with kelly for the past two weeks about this stuff. why did you call and ask me?"

yep. the morons were out in force this morning.

speaking of morons, here's a little piece about currency origami you can do to make the twin towers show up on a new $20 bill.

an interesting take on enhancing instant messaging with an odd plug-in. (haven't tried it myself, but it's pointed at giving text-based chat more inflection, which is always a good thing.)

finally, an article that is subtitled why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race, which sums it all up, really.

oh yes. and episode ii tonight. fun! friends, family, and a movie. what more could you ask for? except a midget lesbian with a monkey. but that would just be frivolous, really.

2002-05-15T15:44:00.000-04:00

i can tell that this thing is going to be a great new toy. it's a little bit of programming goodness that tells you how many jumps away from another livejournal users. (it goes by friends you have in common.) for example, my username is only four jumps away from satan (through batty) and five away from god (through carriemonster). amusing? you bet.

on a slightly more sober note, all girls should read this when they turn thirteen (a random number i pulled out of the air, in case you were wondering). if i could, i'd say "don't let assholes push you around sexually. they won't respect you and you'll just end up feeling dirty when you look back on that time of your life."

2002-05-15T09:52:00.000-04:00

so we picked up 18 by moby last night and i'm listening to it right now. i really like it. it's very atmospheric and melodic. not as bluesy and rough as play was. cleaner. more anaseptic. but not in a bad way.

i've noticed that i've been writing a lot lately. why, though? well, usually at this time of year, i'd be gearing up to write a new novel. this year, though, i don't have the motivation or a story i really want to start on. but the desire to write is still there, which is why you're getting more and more content. it's probably not a temporary abberation, though. i'm just a wordy bastard by nature. and sometimes i feel like just going wild with the whole self-expression thing.

there were three los angeles cops on the metro this morning, all in full uniform. probably on their way to the national law enforcement officials memorial. nothing wrong with that, of course. we get tourists of all stripes here. just odd to see cops from across the country on the metro with their guns on their belts and everything.

even stranger was yesterday's experience walking home from the metro. as i was walking under the overpass, i heard coughing. i looked up and saw a man sleeping on one of the concrete abutments that supports the road overhead. i just found it odd that he would be sleeping not five feet from the roadway above. it must be noisy up there. it's noisy enough on the sidewalk. when i walked past this morning, he was still there. and twenty minutes later, i was standing next to la cops. odd convergences.

anyway. onto the links. (which i've already collated and sorted and all. check me out!)

an article about how domestic cat meows have evolved to be more harmonious to humans. wasn't that nice of them to put our comfort first, for once? another article, telling women how they can roll their own tampons (posted without comment). a site with pictures of a tesla coil that has been applied to the job of shrinking quarters. and the obligatory george bush face that you can put silly hats on. and lips. and eyes. (courtesy of eccles)

other interesting bits include the gallery that clean sheets put up for their annual masturbation celebration. (take a wild guess about the work-friendliness of that one.) the side note to that one is the website for kevin hundsnurscher, one of the photographers in the aggregated gallery. i like his stuff and there's a lot of content there that i have yet to paw through.

last, but certainly not least is the offical site for donnie darko, which i mentioned yesterday. shannon turned me onto this because the movie was supposedly set in fairfax. huh. very strange site. very strange movie. but good. i recommend both. now.

2002-05-14T13:19:00.000-04:00

note to self: tuesdays. the souvenir koan is updated on tuedays. right must remember that.

according to this article, though, memory loss is all about how your brain doesn't synchronize properly to recall the memories when you want them to come up. so i don't have a bad memory. i'm just out of sync. (insert bad boy band joke here.)

i like this article about the practicalities of geneology. one of the ideas it presents is that there are not enough people who have lived in the past to give every single human being a different set of unique ancestors. there is a lot of discussion about "most recent common ancestors" which i find interesting.

bored at work? play games.

apparently, nocturnia heard that eccles was on his way and decided to throw a party.

and finally, an interesting article about the current state of the interoperability of instant messaging systems reminds me of my homemade hierarchy of internet text. interestingly, the hierarchy is organized according to the expectation of privacy and the relative speed of dynamically updated conversations/commentary about a given piece of text.

accurate attribution is not an issue because the entire hierarchy operates on internet applications that allow entire conversations to be saved and verified using the same protocols as are used to conduct them. at the same time, editorial control is not an issue because chatrooms can (and often are) moderated, just like mailing lists, message boards and group blogs.

(this sort of kicks a lot of the struts out from under the whole blog vs. journalism arguments, but i find those silly from the word go. a magazine article does not automatically confer authority on a given subject. instead, it provides a wide distribution range that a weblog would have to work harder to create.)

the hierarchy is as follows:

chat
email
message boards
blogs
zine articles

that's it.

2002-05-14T12:41:00.000-04:00

new story on the souvenir koan.

2002-05-14T09:49:00.000-04:00

we watched two very interesting films last night.

first up was following, a short (70 minutes) black and white film by the director of momento. it was very obvious that the two films were by the same man because they had similar themes (betrayal and a peculiar, almost voyeuristic approach to interpersonal relationships) and both used a flashback/flashforward technique that was surprisingly easy to get used to, once you understood what was going on.

what was interesting about the film was that it only had four speaking parts, which meant that it was a very character-driven drama. there was no sense that the story was really building up to something until the very end. any kind of explanation of the story itself would very quickly find itself in spoiler territory, so i'll just say "watch this!" it's short, it's good and you have no excuse not to.

the second film was donnie darko, a movie about a schizophrenic teenager who is haunted by an evil-looking rabbit and finds himself obsessed with predestination and time travel along with the usual teenage problems of sex and bullies at school. it was an odd film, with very good acting, great effects and an oddly compelling storyline. like donnie, the audience is compelled to keep watching, if only to see what the whole thing is about.

the ending wrapped everything up nicely, but didn't provide a pat conclusion that tied up all the loose strings. instead, it gave the audience the final piece in a puzzle and left us to figure things out for ourselves. like a handful of other films we've seen over the past year, this one left us wondering how it got made on the basis of such an eclectic script. whatever the finacing story behind this one was, we're glad that it made it through production. hollywood should put out more movies like this.

ten minutes before the ending of donnie darko, the phone rang and we let it go to voicemail, which we really shouldn't have done (as it turns out). my brother, alone in my parents house, got freaked out because the area thunderstorms had knocked out power and left him alone in dark. one of the problems my brother suffers from is an inability to deal with situations that fall outside his normal routine. and blackouts fufill that criteria.

so we called him back, talked to him for a few minutes, then drove up and picked him up. we let him sleep on the couch last night and got him to the metro this morning so he could get to work. sometimes you have to do these kinds of things. we all have responsibilities.

i can understand where his anxiety was coming from, though. in between the movies, we looked outside and saw an eerie sight: sunlight on the parking lot across the street with dark, menacing clouds behind it. we got pictures, but i don't know how well they'll convey the absolute dichotomy between the two environments. it wasn't the calm before the storm because the wind was really moving by that point and even making the streetlights sway. perhaps, though, it was the last of the sunlight before the clouds took over and took us into night.

driving up to montgomery county on the highway, we really noticed the wind. my car has a very low profile, but the wind was pushing it all over the road. and dust from the various construction sites along the beltway was being kicked up in clouds and sheets. the old neighborhood was really spooky with no lights on, not even streetlights. there were leaves and smallish branches all over the streets, which got to be a minor issue when we drove back along the george washington parkway. nobody expects debris like that to be flying at you. i don't, anyway.

2002-05-13T11:23:00.000-04:00

i'll probably get in trouble for writing this, but when has that every stopped me? besides, these are words. the only people hurt by words are the ones who allow themselves to be.

my subscription to red clouds ran out on friday. no big deal, really. it forces me to find a new set of source images for my art, though, which is not necessarily a bad thing. it's odd, though. i've been flipping through images of people having sex and displaying their genitals for the anonymous masses for so long that it's become somewhat comforting. i'll miss it a little. as you can imagine.

the thing i liked best about red clouds, though, was the fact that they knew their audience. they knew what their viewers wanted and they provided it. and not just the people who ran the site, either. content over there is provided by the viewers, for the viewers. it's a very democratic kind of place, really.

i put a new wrinkle on the subject matter because i used it for art, but that's a different conversation. this is about audience.

i was at an engagement party on friday night for a friend. there were a number of people there from within the scene and they were all very liberal in unloading their vitriol towards a certain local dj. (everyone knows who i'm talking about, but i'll preserve his anonymity anyway.) no one was willing to be the first to dis him, but once the subject was brought up, everyone joined in.

i find this interesting because of who this person is. he's a dj. he's a personality. and nobody seems to like him or respect him. i have my own issues with him because i find him to be an arrogant asshole who really doesn't have anything in particular to be arrogant about. i'd never seen hubris in the flesh until i'd met him.

the principle issue everyone seems to have with him is, again, audience. this time, though, the point seems to be that he doesn't listen to his. admittedly, a dj's job is to dictate to the audience and play music that other people are going to enjoy, but at some point, the audience gets to stand up and say "play this. please." whether or not the dj is willing to sublimate their ego to the requests of the people on the dance floor really is one of the markers of a good dj. in my book.

(to be clear, i'm not a good dj because i don't take requests. i am a dilettante, though, who is barely ever behind the decks and i usually bring an agenda with me.)

but, y'know, we all have issues. some are worked out in private and some are worked out in public. when you become a public figure, you cease to have the ability to determine how private your issues should remain. when you seek an audience, it should not be an unexpected surprise when the audience talks about you. makes jokes about you. complains about you. these are the joys of being a public figure. ridicule rides shotgun with celebrity. this is why it's always a good idea to pay attention to the persona that you are projecting.

i think about this stuff because i am attempting (in my own, cack-handed way) to move towards a degree of celebrity for myself. i am a writer of novels and i would like to be a writer of published novels. at some point, it would be nice to be a writer of best-selling novels. but not because i want to be famous. rather, because i want to get paid to do what i am good at and what i enjoy doing.

it's scary to watch someone who is a public figure because they were not cool as a teenager and they have a keenly-felt void in their lives to this day. i cannot imagine living that life. i cannot imagine wanting to be adored simply because i want to be adored. i like to think that my motivations are more solid than that. i like to think that my personality is more stable than that.

that doesn't mean that i am, though. it just means that i like to believe that this is the situation. honesty in all things - especially to yourself - is vital to maintaining a balanced world-view. after all, i have an audience. i have built it and i cultivate it. i enjoy it. there is a degree of vanity in this site. in these words.

recognizing these things is not bad, though. it is important to realize that just because you are a public figure (and i would not go so far as to call myself a public figure simply because twenty friends read my stoned, sunday-afternoon ramblings) doesn't absolve you of assholic behavior. in fact, it should make you pay closer attention to your behavior. you are responsible for your actions. even moreso when others are watching them. just because you do not feel the keen glare of the public gaze doesn't mean that it's not there.

strive to be the best. accept your faults and work around them. these are good things to remember. the audience is not there to laugh to you, but they will if you fall down. that is no reason to resent them, though, because if you have cultivated an audience, there's probably a reason. it may not be a good reason, but that never stopped anyone from enjoying their 15 minutes.

i'm sure there's more, but that's all that's coming out of my head at the moment. i'm tapped dry. my throat hurts and it's lunchtime. so i'll leave you to your thoughts. for now.

2002-05-13T10:10:00.000-04:00

some good writing that i want to share. first, from warren ellis: "Five years of rich kids in pink dungarees twitching in time to car alarms,"

then from amanda on the culture list about why leather pants are sexy:

I wish I knew. They're shiny? They smell good? They creak in interesting ways? They're flattering? They're made from dead animal skin and as such the bovine spirit has entered the pantswearer and bestowed upon them the deep sexual magnetism of all things moo? Maybe it's some kind of genetic memory from the days when men who wore leather trouser-analogues were likely to stay alive long enough to bring home the brontosaurus? I myself have no idea what the appeal is (but only black leather, most brown or other coloured leather is a waste of good leather that could be black), nor do I know what's so appealing about uniforms, all I know is my old mantra that a man in uniform instantly has more attractiveness points than he would without it (unless "without it" implies...never mind).

2002-05-13T09:37:00.000-04:00

still ramping up for a rant on audience. no time right now, though. i just hope i can remember all of the little points that i was hoping to make.

some links to keep you happy until then.

a really good article about a piece of blog technology that should be built. wired has an interesting article about a face found in an aphex twin song. wild site about found words that are very unusual. a site collecting vintage luggage labels. and another one with maoist propaganda posters. weird.

2002-05-12T15:13:00.000-04:00

quiet sunday, which is how this weekend thing is s'posed to work. wake up, read the paper (sort of), grab lunch, play frisbee in the park. watch some of the tao of steve. you know, the essentials.

we had a fun night last night. we had drinks with tony at mccormick's, which was a lot of fun. tony's a nice guy, with interesting things to say and it's nice to be able to talk to him without having to shout over the loud music. apparently, he had a lot of fun afterwards, but i'd like to hope that he enjoyed the drinking with matt and shannon part just as much. or proportionally so (it's not every night you get to sleep with a rock star).

greg sent me down to archibald's to get cigarettes, which was odd. it didn't really register that it was a strip joint until i went in and the doorman asked me if i wanted to sit at the bar or have a table. i told him i wanted cigarettes and, as i went downstairs, i noticed the naked woman dancing on the stage. then it clicked. funny thing, though; the woman dressed in a lace bodystocking - that came down to just below the curve of her ass and was sheer enough that i could tell she was wearing a thong, a garter and nothing else - didn't really give me the clue. maybe because i've seen outfits like that at clubs and be able to not bat an eye at such a sight can do a lot to make you feel sophisticated.

still and all, the idea of a strip joint across the street from the capital hilton (where the president often has press dinners) is kinda funny, if not predictable. two blocks down from my cousin's bar and another block from there to our leetle gothic club. it's amazing how small our world is, when you really think about it.

we've been having an in-depth conversation about inversions on the culture list. the shocking part (for everyone except the four of you who actually got that reference) is that the conversation is 100% on topic. our mailing list is (re)known for being resolutely off topic. this is, perhaps, some sort of record or something. i'm also impressed because i'm holding my own in the conversation. i know the book well enough to give detailed conversational analysis about the events within.

the book is two stories by two unreliable narrators and the trick of the story is understanding what actually happened, because much of it is lied about, covered up or speculated on. clues are provided, but it's still a complex read. but satisfying. to be honest, literary conversations like this were one of the reasons i joined the culture list. i stayed because of the friends i've made and the community that i feel part of, but the literature was the bridge and i think that's fantastic.

literature is a very, very important part of my life. not only am i a pop-culture junkie, i'm also a geek for words and designs, which become stories when one is applied to the other.

that's probably one of the reasons why i have very intelligent, very interesting friends. i like being challenged, intellectually. my mind enjoys being engaged. solving problems, understanding things, absorbing new information, experiencing new situations. these kinds of things make me happy.

i may not like people, but i enjoy selected moments of humanity. i develop a taste for reliabilty, though, which means i reread the same books, relisten to the same music and talk to the same people again and again and again. if the experience delivers for me, then i want to be able to identify what it is that i am enjoying, so i can seek it out again, elsewhere. i do not want to get bored. i do not like to get bored.

the fact is, though, that boredom is not really my problem. i don't really get bored. i get creative. i write. i photoshop. i doodle. i make stuff up. my limitation is, though, that i do not like to leave projects uncompleted. there is a story idea in one of my journals with the words "write this, you bastard!" next to it in my handwriting. unfortunately, i can't really understand the notes as they are recorded. i write in shorthand that makes sense at the time, but is incomprehensible years later. so frustration at my time limitations tends to get in the way.

fuck. i think i've been rambling. sorry. anyway, no point there, just random thoughts. i've got two pieces written for the souvenir koan and i'm not sure which one to run. i'll figure something out. by that point, of course, i hope to have something on the nature of audiences. maybe dredge up some material about belief. i dunno just yet. time will tell.

2002-05-11T19:56:00.000-04:00

the official number 3,000 went to eva.

now that that's sorted out, let's talk turkey. got a lot of stuff to say, but not a lot of time, really. so i'll just do little content bits. bites. whatever.

went to see spiderman today. good flick. it was a romp. sam raimi obviously had a blast directing it. that's good. i'm not a huge superhero fan these days because of what superheroes have done to the comics industry, but this reminded me of what i liked about the subject. and, to be honest, this was a good superhero movie. there are damned few of them that aren't parodies or just plan crap. it's good to see something where everyone was on the same page AND where the audience got the message. score another one for the good mr. raimi.

we went up and had dinner with my parents tonight. i forgot to get my mother a card for her day tomorrow, so we bought one and ran it up there. then we discovered that the visiting hours had extended over into evening meal time. so we ate and had a good time. my dad got pissy at us, but that's hardly surprising. he does that a lot. and we made plans with my brother for dinner on tuesday.

other stuff is floating around in my head, but i'm still in composition mode. so nothing more for now. i'll let you know.

2002-05-10T11:12:00.000-04:00

okay. the numbers aren't going to increment any higher, so i might as well go ahead and post and push the counter over the top. (it's at 2,996 now.) yes, i'm a dork. i pay attention to my referrer logs. it's a little vanity, but i forgive myself. (you'll note, though, that there is no site meter on the right click gallery. that was deliberate. i don't want to know how many people are looking at that on a daily basis. i'm still very torn about how important that kind of art really is to me. i could continue on in this vein for a while, but i won't. not here.)

so. instead of real content from the brain of me, i'm going to dump a large handful of links onto the table. other people's stuff. interesting stuff, though. (everything is work-friendly unless otherwise noted. shannon, i'm looking at you.)

like the worst in website design. (from the culture list.) and an article about how people with body piercing are obviously looking for trouble. subversives. defiling their body like that. how long until people start to declare that piercing is a gateway activity for further mayhem? i wonder.

a very weird site from italy about dentistry. great pictures. speaking of pictures, bert is still evil. when will he ever learn?

ben brown is publishing daily again. let the heavens open up and the choir of angels rejoice. or something to that effect.

this link goes to a questionable site, but the text on the page is quite nice, actually. it's lessons that one couple has learned in thirteen years of marriage. funny, interesting and good for everyone to know. just don't click on any of the links on the page and you should be fine.

this is a cool site about different kinds of art generators that people have developed on the web. run your mouse over the title graphic. groovy, man. while we're on the subject of weird stuff like this, allow me to point out the secret life of numbers. very interesting. if you're a geek, that is.

let's see. what else? instructions for a woman who wants to learn how to pee standing up. twenty billboards along a random someone's commute. checks that say wage slave and other cool, anticapitalist slogans.

and a really well written college entry essay. i agree with a lot of what she says. we are defined by our works. or we can be, if we let ourselves. (courtesty of the rotten lil girl.)

okay. i'm starting to get little glowy lights in my peripheral vision, which means that my body is starting to process the lsd stored in my body fat. and that means it's time for lunch. read. enjoy. talk back.

d'oh! and i need to get mom a card before she goes to sedona on sunday. oops.

2002-05-10T08:35:00.000-04:00

fucking risperdal. my brother has been on anti-psychotic meds since before i got married. if you looked at the list of stuff he's been on, it would be like reading the street names of some middle european small town. they had him on zyprexa up until last week and then decided to take him off of it. okay. except that they gave him risperdal as a crutch for when he was having anxiety attacks. now, i used to work in a pharmacy (two pharmacies, actually) and i know how often the fucking doctors prescribe risperdal. it's like fucking pez to them. got a headache? seeing things? not making sense? risperdal is the answer.

except that it isn't. it's the first drug they turn to because it has so many potential uses. but any drug that requires a secondary drug to keep the body twitches in check isn't necessarily a good thing, in my book.

so. my brother. they put him back on zyprexa at a lower dose and he seems to be okay. except that my parents are going out of town for a week, so i've been tasked with making sure that he has someone to call if he needs anything while they're gone. no big deal, really. i don't mind. i've done it in the past and it's all part of being a good son and a good brother. i'm just glad that dad told me about the medication change before they left, though. it lets me know what's going on and to keep an ear out for the phone. but i'm still pissed about the risperdal.

anyway. on to other things.

i finished the manuscript found in saragossa. interesting book. longer on structure than actual detail, but still a good book. not something i'd idly recommend, though. more a book for authors to read. now i'm reading island of the sequined love nun. i love christopher moore's book titles. it's actually pretty interesting. about cargo cults. i like cargo cults.

we went to alchemy at nation last night. that was odd. there was some kind of urban contemporary concert in the main space and the goths were confined to the side room and the patio. so that was okay. the fun part was my hair. i hopped in the shower before we left and starting messing around with it. when shannon and i were done with it, it was somewhere between flock of seagulls and the lead singer of prodigy, with a misfits lock in the front. cool as fuck, really. i got a lot of really positive comments. well, some, anyway.

i talked to vlad and neil (hi neil!) and commiserated with phil about planetary. it was fun.

2,985 as of this morning.

2002-05-09T14:15:00.000-04:00

i have done fuck all today. and enjoyed myself while i did.

i was going to edit my article for the city morgue, but alas, i do not have that file on my hard drive at work. bummer. i thought i did. guess not.

something approaching content: a faux front page about the local genre discussions. and the new eu logo. (i like the logo, personally.)

2002-05-09T10:25:00.000-04:00

two things i forgot to mention:

1. this pipe bomber in the midwest doesn't seem to have the most coherent friends. predictably, they were all baffled by his behavior. no kidding. the one statement that really stands out, though, is the acquaintance who said, "He used to have long, bleached blond hair and kept to himself, kind of like the grunge Seattle scene." huh? did he just say that the entire grunge scene had bleached blond hair and kept to himself? did he just anthromorphize an entire scene? i know i keep going on about improper use of language, but this just seems like such a perfect example.

please note: when talking to reporters, it is important to use clear language (short, precise statements are recommended) so you don't sound like a fucking dumbass!

2. my site meter tells me that i'm creeping up on the big 3,000. very close. 2,944 as of this morning. sarah daisy was the big 2,000 last time. who will it be this time? i wonder.

(okay, i'm just a dork. but that's okay. i embrace my dorkiness and say "you shouldn't be reading what i have to say if you are in some way offended by my dorkish behavior." right? oh, and just to add to my wonderful reputation that i'm building up here, i totally identified with wil wheaton's little story about trading a landspeeder for the death star. except that the big kids down the block used to steal my action figures. i swear they got both greedo and walrusman. honest to god.)

2002-05-09T08:47:00.000-04:00

stoopid internet. so here's a funny story for you:

i picked shannon up from the metro yesterday and took her out to dinner at bennigan's (the fry cook was in excellent form last night - the chicken strips were beautifully golden brown). during the course of dinner conversation, i told her about the links that i'd put up here yesterday. (she doesn't follow my links from here because they aren't always work-friendly and i've been lax about labelling them in the past.) i told her about sweetrelease. predictably, she didn't think that a product that changed a woman's odor was necessarily a good thing - women have enough hangups as it is - but the idea of changing a man's flavor. well, that's a good idea.

she said that if i bought a bottle, we could conduct a scientific research project. you know: day 1. still no change. day 5. still no change. and so forth. the only problem is that i don't have actual credit cards. i have a check card. and the stoopid internet seems biased against it. first ticketmaster spit it out at us. then this place. so i'm slightly bummed. but i shall recover. scientific progress shall not be impeded!

in other news, they're doing work on the parking garage at the springfield metro. over the past few weeks, they've been stripping out the sealant between the concrete slabs, which was slightly disconcerting. i'm not sure that i wanted to see the next level down when i was walking through the garage. it didn't fill me with a huge sense of confidence about the structure. well, now they've started to reseal the gaps. the funny thing is that if you walk around, you can see the dribbles from where they sealed the gaps in the ceiling. very odd. okay. that story really didn't have a point.

moving on, here's a article about the top ten new copyright crimes. funny and nonsensical, as all copyright crimes tend to be.

purgatorio was fun last night. we saw all kinds of people through the romper room magic mirror. mr. and mrs. the merciless, tony, the super-organized girl and almost a host of others. (well, what do you expect? it's on wednesday night in the back room of a pool hall in arlington.)

and, to cap off the morning update, this is the info for next week's event.

2002-05-08T13:01:00.000-04:00

various things that are coming out soon(ish) that i'm excited about:

-new albums by moby, david bowie and underworld
-the film about a boy with soundtrack by badly drawn boy
-the fact that planetary should start up again in the fall
-new books by michael chabon, iain banks and neil gaiman
-a new collection of sandman comics

2002-05-08T12:19:00.000-04:00

who says supporting data collection isn't glamorous? dateline did a piece about the most dangerous roads in america. and they used the data collected by the program i work on! check that out! in your face, national registry of historic places!

2002-05-08T10:53:00.000-04:00

you can tell that it's spring/summer in dc because they put water in the fountain in the courtyard at the department of transportation. i'm over there once a week, so i get to track these things. just one of those little indicators, really.

catching up on my emails from various friends in europe. fionna swears that it was shannon she saw in helsinki on may day and refuses to listen to any arguments to the contrary. rik just mailed to say hi, which is always appreciated and eccles has bought his plane tickets. which means that we'll be hosting an honest-to-god culturnik here in dc in june.

despite all of this activity, i find myself with absolutely no desire to do anything. at all. nothing creative. nothing work-related. is it wrong to want to sit outside and enjoy the sun and not think? for some reason, i have this nagging feeling that it is.

huh.

anyway. here's a (non-work friendly) link about an herbal suppliment that will improve the taste of um... well, your secretions for your partner's enjoyment. during oral sex, that is. it's funny. with different flavors, too.

oooh. and a response to the two towers petition from yesterday. (thanks rik!)

2002-05-07T11:02:00.000-04:00

this is cute. pooh punditry.

and this is the relaunch of the souvenir koan. it's not fiction this time around, even though it says it is on the side. this time it's recollection. memories and the patterns those memories have created for me. read and return next week.

2002-05-07T09:07:00.000-04:00

i didn't really do anything i intended to do last night. i wanted to mail my submission out. i didn't. i wanted to write a bit. i didn't. so what did i do? i worked on my setlist for my (still tentative) return to purgatorio. funny: i sat down and planned out a list by dead reckoning. when i added up the times, the first list came to 30:37. the second one came to 30:47. then i listened to both and decided they needed more work. so i have no idea what they're like now.

shannon was upset that i included no kompressor.

strange things on the links plate this morning. this is so very, very wrong. sort of like novelty buttplugs. but not quite. and a spoof about atomic physics. a really neat building that hasn't been built yet. and a group of people that just need to step back and relax just a tiny little bit. yes, i understand that this is a sensitive subject, but come on. political correctness should only extend so far. grab a straw and suck it up!

there was a good line in a review in this month's spin: "the lyrics read like magnetic poetry on the fridge in a group home. someone buy this man a proper noun."

2002-05-06T13:33:00.000-04:00

what i did today:

1. installed an outlook patch for california. six computers later and we're only one state from declaring that project officially done.
2. inspired by moby's post about jeff koons, i went in search of some art with ciccolina (the italian porn star who was married to him). do you know how difficult it is to find a complete set of artwork featuring those two? i still haven't entirely succeeded.
3. i played the helicopter game i found on micheal's blog. (side note: micheal says the nicest things.) based on my results, i'd say that letting me be the pilot on a two-dimensional helicopter ride through a massive cave featuring floating rectangles is probably not a good idea.
4. thought about writing up something for the souvenir koan. i'll probably tackle this tonight, instead.

and that's been my day, so far.

2002-05-06T08:57:00.000-04:00

nothing new or interesting to report since last night. instead, here's an article from the new york times. it's interesting. i promise.

April 30, 2002, NY Times

Fun With Your Zip Program: Sort Through Texts, and More
By BRUCE SCHECHTER

One of the basic truths of the digital age is that almost anything - the plays of Shakespeare, the genetic sequence of DNA, or the twitching of a seismograph needle - can be reduced to a sequence of ones and zeroes. More striking is the discovery that these sequences are largely full of hot air - redundancies that add nothing to their meaning. Clever computer programs can "zip" or compress these files, streamlining them for speedier transmission. Zipping programs have long been a boon to computer users with slow modem connections.

But now a group of Italian physicists has shown how these same programs can be used to analyze and categorize text quickly. Using little more than the zipping programs found on most personal computers, they can easily distinguish between texts written in 10 different languages and almost unfailingly tell which of a large group of texts were written by the same author.

Writing in the January issue of Physical Review Letters, the scientists - Dr. Dario Benedetto, Dr. Emanuele Caglioto and Dr. Vittorio Loreto - explain their work with an analogy to Morse code.

To keep the number of dits and dahs to a minimum, Samuel Morse considered how often each letter was used in an average English message. The letter e is the most common in English so Morse encoded it as a single dit. The next most common letter is t, so he assigned that a single dah. A relatively uncommon letter like Q takes four taps to encode: dah dah dit dah.

Compression programs work in a similar fashion, except they invent a new code for each message based on patterns unique to that message. The program might, for example, find that a text uses the word "compression" frequently and save space by substituting a two-letter abbreviation.

The Italian physicists understood that a compression scheme invented to compress a text written in English would do a poor job on one written in Italian.

"Transmitting an Italian text with a Morse code optimized for English will result in the need of transmitting an extra number of bits," they wrote. They conjectured that just how many extra bits it takes would be a measure of the distance between English and Italian.

To demonstrate this, the researchers used a zip program to compress a text written in one language. They then appended to the original text some text written in Italian or another language and compressed that document. As predicted, the compression program did not do as good a job when the languages of the two texts were different. They tried the same trick on a group of texts all written in Italian, but by a variety of different authors. They found they could distinguish between the authors more than 90 percent of the time.

The scientists performed a further test of their technique by analyzing a single text that has been translated into many different languages - in this case the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The researchers used their method to measure the linguistic "distance" between more than 50 translations of this document. From these distances, they constructed a family tree of languages that is virtually identical to the one constructed by linguists.

The researchers say linguistics is just a "playground" for them to sharpen their techniques. The same methods, they say, might help create order out of the rapidly accumulating libraries of DNA and protein sequences, earthquake catalogs and other geophysical data. They might even lead to a solution to one of the most troublesome problems of modern computer science: filtering the junk e-mail from your in box.

2002-05-05T16:59:00.000-04:00

we did so many things this weekend.

friday night, shannon and lori headed out to see hedwig at the signature theater in shirlington. by both accounts, it was fantastic. i like the music and i thought the movie was good, but the girls deserve a night to themselves sometimes. i don't feel like i missed anything, though. although lori's comment was good: "you stick something in my face and i'm going to lick it."

booger gave me a ride up to dollhouse and we swapped mates around (although lori is still conviced that we did it wrong because she went home with her husband that night and that didn't seem to be the way swapping worked in her mind.) the space was, as always, hot as hell. but the music was good and the people were fun. i had two seperate conversations that i'm holding onto, which leads me to my next paragraph.

i've had a few (or more) conversations over the past few months that i want to hold onto, but they are slightly disconnected from the day-to-day inanities of this blog. luckily for me, i have somewhere else to post those kinds of interesting interludes, be they real, fictional or somewhere in between. before, they were fictional. now i have some non-fiction to post. i'll let you know when the souvenir koan kicks in again, though. should be soon. i have four or five things on a list so far and i know i can dig out a few more. i find them interesting and that's enough for now.

so. saturday. we headed out to congressional cemetary, only to find that 14th street was blocked off. not a problem, though, because the cemetary is at the end of 395 and we were headed in the same direction as the detour anyway. we got there early and wandered around looking at some of the stones and such. over the course of the day, i saw the cenotaphs of henry clay, john calhoun, and john quincy adams. and the graves of mathew brady, john phillips sousa, tip o'neil, j. edgar hoover and the guy that explored minnesota.

it was a fun day. a lot of our closest friends showed up and there was much drinking and laughter and general merriment. we wandered around the cemetary on a tour and, when we got to a grave in the back where a very famous madam of the nineteenth century was buried, we discovered that the cemetary backed up onto a jail. we were all standing around the grave and we started to hear a lot of thumping from behind us. when we looked, we could see faces in the windows and hands pounding on the glass. very odd.

later, after an alcohol auction (box o' wine went for $20), we went back to the madam's grave to pour out two remaining cans of mgd that nobody wanted. as soon as we started pouring, the pounding from the jail got really, really loud.

the money that we raised ($425 that is matched by a congressional grant) went to help maintain the cemetary, which is actually really cool. it's a neat place, but it is in terrible shape. there are a ton of tombstones that have fallen over and the roads are potholed something fierce.

that night, we went to catacomb. joe and jenny showed up with their narghile and it just got funny and crazy. tony and joe agreed to dance at amateur night at wet on some upcoming tuesday night (tony has joe's moves down pat, but smoother). we just have to get them each a pair of breakaway cargo pants, so they can do it right. tony actually said that anything we want him to wear ("including a pink tutu"), he'll wear. he just thinks it's a great idea.

he and joe were both on fire last night, actually. it was good to see tony in such a good mood. he's been going through some rough times lately and it's good to see him smiling and happy. joe and jenny hadn't been out in a long while, either, and it was good to see both of them, too. all in all, it was a good night. (joe lost the directions to the afterparty at scott the 70s satanist/pornstar, though. he was disappointed. apparently tony went, though. we have yet to hear details.)

today, shannon and i watched the end of shanghai noon (owen wilson is so hysterical). then we headed uptown to see party animals at the old woodward and lothrop building. unfortunately, the walk for the cure was still going on, so traffic around 14th and pennsylvania was awful. we tried to head up 11th street and found out that we couldn't go any further. i asked the cop at 11th and e how we could get to 10th and f from there and he said that we had to go up to 17th street and loop around.

shannon was ready to just say "fuck it" and go home, but i refused to admit defeat. we took 395 under the mall to l'enfant plaza and parked right in the heart of the ugliest part of the district (next to the hud building and all those industrial nightmares that house the postal service and the l'enfant plaza mall). we walked through the garden behind the smithsonian castle and got on with the tourists at the smithsonian metro and took the metro up to metro center.

the exhibit was wonderful. there are two hundred animals on display (100 donkeys and 100 elephants). i don't know when they get put on the streets of the city, but it was cool to be able to see them all in one place, all at once. there were a lot of really neat designs and we took a handful of pictures.

afterwards, we went across the street to check out the new digs for grafixx tattoos but they aren't open on sundays yet. then we had lunch at potbelly sandwiches. yum.

then home. shannon's napping and the laundry is almost done. it's been a beautiful day in the neighborhood. i hope your weekend was as fun as ours was.

2002-05-03T14:26:00.000-04:00

small things today.

a review of episode ii (from michael). it looks really, really good. i'm looking forward to seeing this movie like you wouldn't believe.

on an unrelated note, here's an article about how much sex education should be pointed at children. and the random masturbation synonym generator. because it's silly.

oh yes. and if you don't read nerve, you should read today's issue. many good articles. hie thee there at once!

2002-05-03T08:27:00.000-04:00

rereading my post from last night, i see that i forgot to mention one of the big things that's dragging on me: the fact that i haven't been able to make solid, reliable long-term plans. my ex-wife used to hate that about me. she hated the fact that i had accepted the fact that life is mutable and that anything can happen between now and six months from now.

i see what she was talking about now. i want to make solid plans. i want to have a future to look forward to. to work towards. but right now, i'm so wrapped up in "catching up" that i can't do that. and it pisses me off. i don't want to be an irresponsible twit. i want to be the guy that other people can rely on. i want to have something tangible after several years? months? of effort. i want to have something to show for all of my work. (something besides a trio of unpublished novels, i mean.)

when did life get so uncertain? i hate that.

i also hate the fact that i disappointed shannon last night (money and the fact that i threw away our home dry-cleaning kit by accident. the second one wasn't a big deal, but it was adding insult to injury). like i said, i want to be reliable. and yesterday i wasn't. big time. and i hate that. this is the last apology i'll offer about it, but i still feel really bad.

we watched buckaroo banzai last night, which was funny. it was good to laugh and be silly and not worry about things for a few hours. i liked that. escapism did not fail me.

tonight, we're going to dollhouse. i get to swap booger for shannon once we get there (it makes sense if you know that shannon and lori are going to see hedwig beforehand and we'll meet them at the club). and that's my morning. nothing exciting. just me, fretting at my own stupidity.

2002-05-02T18:16:00.000-04:00

i'm spitting off my balcony just now and i look down at the tree directly below me. last week, it was a bare twig sticking out of the ground. now it has leaves. when did that happen?

there are two good quotes from the manuscript found in saragossa. "An animal wills, remembers, combines, weighs up alternatives and decides. It thinks but it doesn't think about its thinking..."

and

"Conscience is partly man's own creation, since what is bad in one country is good in another. But in general, conscience warns of what abstraction has placed under the one or the other sign, that is, good or evil. Animals are incapable of such abstraction. They therefore have no conscience and cannot be guided by it. So they are therefore not susceptible of reward or punishment other than that which we inflict on them for our convenience and not for theirs."

i found them to be compelling statements, which means that i spent a good ten minutes on the metro staring off into space rather than actually reading the book in my hand. it's an odd sensation, because i'm used to grappling with these kinds of things from time to time. the culture list is there whenever i feel like exercising my mind. and i appreciate that. but lately, my brain has been shutting down. lethargy has set in.

some of it comes from situation. i'm destitute (not horribly so, but it's a bummer being in debt. and overdrawn. and a week away from payday.) i'm in a state of limbo over a number of different things in my life. my grandfather is in the hospital, i'm looking for a new job, we've decided to not go to our favorite club anymore (which is a big step for us - we've been regulars there for two years), i'm taking what i hope to be substantial steps towards getting my novel published. y'know. things are going on. but that's the problem, i think. my brain is too active on the "let's do things" side - of necessity, mind - but not so much on the "get organized" or the "be creative" portions of my brain.

that's a problem for me. i'm a mess. i'm organized only when i have to be because i like clutter. or i can't be bothered to maintain organizational structures (which means i'm lazy). i'm leaning towards laziness, myself. so i have things that it would be good to get organized for. finding a job. getting my finances in order. getting published. writing out the story idea lodged in my mind so i can give it kyle for feedback.

the other thing is my creativity. my mind is active (or needs to be) but lately i've been travelling over familiar ground. only because the authors that i'm reading right now are travelling it as well and they do a much better job of using the territory than i ever could. so i'm envious. not a cardinal sin, you understand. but it galls because i can recognize the limitation in myself. i think. and, in doing so, i think about thinking.

i can see the creative apathy in my art. the fact that my subscription to red clouds is running out is probably a good thing. it will force me to look elsewhere for good images to work with. when i get around to working with images again. i think i'm going to stop for a while. i have enough for the right click gallery, but i'm just redoing the same effects over and again. i'm not saying anything new.

which is part of the problem. i'm a writer. i write because it's good for me to express myself where and when the mood strikes me. otherwise they get trapped inside, spinning around like a moth in a bottle. and the impulse is to set those moths - those ideas - free. but lately, i've only had one set of ideas in my head. granted, they're fully formed and waiting to be set loose. but i just don't feel the pull to write them down.

the drive is not gone. it's just that i don't feel like working with these ideas right now. i want to get ambitious. and i know i can't. not right now. it's frustrating, let me tell you. circumstances. what a pain in the ass.

okay. funny story and then it's time to go get shannon.

oops. i was on the modem line and wasn't paying attention. (which got me into a bad place today. blah.)

funny story, then dinner. someone on a message board was talking about how "threesomes are a pain in the ass."

my comment to a friend who'd read the same thread was "if they're a pain in the ass, she should be using more lube." heh.

enough. dinner time.

2002-05-02T09:23:00.000-04:00

various weird things on the internet. another odd clock. from the same site is this wild ribbon (try leaving the browser window open and going about your daily business and see what patterns your mouse movements have made). a weird flash movie about peanut butter. the oddest lyrics you've ever seen (i like the one about the hippo).

and a neat looking sci-fi book. the link thing from boing boing won't work, so here's the description:

The book is set against a backdrop of copyright-maximialist galactic civilization in which all sensoria is mediated, and depending on which license fees you pay, you see and hear different parts of the real world (i.e., banners, facades, etc). Nanofabricated artefacts and genetic material is all copyrighted ad infinitum, so that rightsholder robber-barons extract royalties at light-speed-lagged removes. In the foreground is a cult whose mission is to prevent humanity from artificially evolving itself into a post-sapient species that builds spaceships the way beavers build dams.

let's see. what else? not much. shan beat me at othello last night. we didn't even finish the board. we just got to a point where neither of us could play anymore and the game was over.

tonight we're planning to watch buckaroo banzai. that should be fun. and life is just meandering along. so no real news, y'know?

2002-05-01T08:53:00.000-04:00

again with the blahs. i think i'm burnt out at this job. maybe i should listen to something other than tommy dorsey first thing in the morning. something peppier. with more pep, that is.

so. links. i know you want them. you know you want them. how about something interesting about attention rights? like we don't have enough advertising being shoved down our throats, right? we need to have the judicial system telling us that for every song we listen to, we're also legally obligated to listen to an ad that supports that song. uh huh. pop up ads for intellectual property. wonderful. as copyright infringement becomes less cohesive, the best bet is always to put things in that are going to make people respect intellectual property less. good strategy.

and here's something from clean sheets about masturbation. just because.

i'm thinking seriously about what to do with my writing. where to go. what direction to head in. that sort of thing. just pondering, but getting ready to make a move, too. more as i get details and am ready to release them. and i'm ready for nerve to get back to me about my article. any time now. (yes, i know it's only been two months, but still!)

and i've noticed that i'm back to once-a-day posting. sorry about that. i've been lethargic. nothing interesting to say, really.

2002-04-30T09:06:00.000-04:00

it's still early. not even nine. but here i am. at work. blah. count blah, to you.

some links that'll get you going, i think. first, we have vampire lesbian kickboxers (thanks, eccles). a game called way of the stick, shamelessly stolen from emdee's blog. apocamon, which is a version of the revelations of st. john the divine as if done by the makers of pokemon. very odd. the adventures of stick figure man, which is another good one. and an article about a man who was found dead in a lagoon at walt disney world. nobody dies at disney.

last night, i went to blockbuster and picked up the one, a movie with jet li. it had all the neat special effects and all, but it wasn't that spectacular a movie. but one of the cameos surprised me. there was a scene in a morgue and one of the coroners was mark borchardt, who was the subject of the documentary american movie. when i looked him up on the imdb, there he was. not only does he have a bit part in the one, but he was also in two other movies. interesting....

so that was my discovery from last night. and those are the links i've collected to date. have fun. i know i will.

2002-04-29T09:16:00.000-04:00

i am matt's complete and utter lack of enthusiasm for this job. and code assist won't run properly on pennsylvania's computer, to boot. as if i didn't need a reason to run screaming from my desk at eight in the morning.

there was an article in the paper this morning about how people who don't show a lot of remorse at the death of loved ones aren't cold fish. instead, they display a more balanced view of reality and are correspondingly better able to deal with adversity. i showed it to shannon and she told me i should cut that out and keep it with me to show to people. i guess i do tend to be at one remove from my emotions. at times.

right now, though, i just want to give in to the hate and the apathy. give in and turn to the dark side.

i like to think that if the only things i have to bitch and complain about are money and my job, then things can't be all that bad. it's true, too. everyone complains about the same things. but a job should be decent. if you're going to spend eight hours at a place, then doing so should not fill you with dread. categorically not.

and right now, i'm not very happy at all. at all. i repeat. i say, at all. (update: feeling better now that code assist has been installed. that just ate up 40 minutes of my life, though. i'll never get those back. never ever.)

in other news, michael dirda has decided to stop being one of the top reviewers for the washington post. i'm disappointed. not only will i not get to read his reviews (one of the reasons i looked forward to the book world every sunday) but i this also means that i probably won't get to see him review anything i've written. oh well. he's planning to write a novel or two during his absence. so that's not so bad. i suppose.

asa barber, who writes the men column for playboy has been diagnosed with lou gehrig's disease. except for the diagnosis, none of that means much to you. but it's on par with michael dirda leaving, except that barber's not leaving. not yet. still, it's not good when bad things happen to good writers. and i happen to like asa barber's columns. (i am one of those people who actually reads playboy for the articles, believe it or not.)

and there's an article from the university of florida that i just wanted to mention briefly. it's not very well written and the author flaunts her prejudices, which is the first thing they teach you not to do in freshman composition classes. guess she didn't learn too well. but then again, neither did her editor, because that piece shouldn't have made it to publication. it's unimaginative, uninformed (any place that serves alcohol has the right to deny service to visibly intoxicated patrons and many bars and restaurants have been known to take keys away from drunk patrons rather than let them drive home drunk), poorly worded (another adjective, perhaps?), insulting and makes it's point through the use of an extremely strained tautology. i mean, come on. smoking has been scientifically proven to harm the health of people in the immediate area of the smoke. second-hand smoke? overeating is not known to adversely harm the health of the people sitting next to you. unless she knows something we don't? (which i doubt.)

i'd write to the author of the article and explain all of this to her and tell her to get a new career ambition (although working in a restaurant seems to be working out quite well for her at this stage) but i can't be bothered. besides, if she keeps this tone up, she'll find out that there are damned few job openings at major newspapers for whiny little girls who think they have the chops to imitate the misanthropic bitch. rude awakenings are good things, sometimes. not often. just sometimes.

2002-04-28T11:21:00.000-04:00

sunday, rainy sunday. hm. i should check to see if i've used that opening before. nah. can't be bothered.

woke up yesterday at nine thirty cause i asked shan to wake me up then. i woke up at eleven last saturday and we were rushing around all day as a result. i didn't want to do that this weekend, though. i actually wanted to do something. not anything in particular, mind. just something.

so. the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. so we went to the silver diner for breakfast (where visible tattoos are not an issue for the wait staff, but neither is service, apparently). then we drove up to hains point to see the giant coming out of the ground. if you've ever seen the movie the net, the beginning has a scene with a guy on a cell phone at a park with a giant coming out of the ground. that's hains point. neat sculpture. and from the point, you can see national airport, the war college and one of the air force bases that's over the river. and you can even see the wilson bridge way down the river. it's a neat little park. very easy to get to, too.

then drove around the mall for a minute or two and came back into virginia. we went to a thrift store where we bought ten books for three dollars. good deal. borges, christopher moore, zelazny, orson scott card, two frederick forsythe books. the list goes on, really. then we came back down to springfield, got ice cream at maggie moos and went over to gnc for some golden seal.

when we got home, there were four messages on the phone machine. two of them were from greg, who wanted people to come over to his place and hang out. shannon declined to go, on the theory that she really wouldn't enjoy herself. which makes sense, actually. all we did was sit around and play soulcaliber. that's pretty much all we ever do. and greg wondered why shan didn't want to come.

i got there at fiveish and came home at eight. i took shannon up to catacomb, got my hand stamped (two for one is a great thing) and then went back down to greg's for some more hanging out. i left greg's at eleven and went back up to the club. our friends mandy and misha were there (hi guys!) and it was a fun evening, all in all. oh. and we gave christopher a ride back to his house. he was a nice guy.

today we just have laundry and stuff like that to do. the new issue of playboy is in and it looks like it's got some good features. and i still have to check out the book world. no idea what that's like. but it's rainy today. blah. so it's probably a low-key day.

2002-04-26T11:26:00.000-04:00

i took the time to go get my comics yesterday. sooo many new things to read. metabarons, transmet, sip (oooooh! great issue!), promethea (another spectacular issue!) and a slew of other stuff that's really only interesting to me. and i got a copy of previews! rawk!

i'm still reading the manuscript found in saragossa. stories inside of stories inside of stories. very convoluted. but in a fun way.

work is odd. we started an outlook rollout yesterday and i copied the format of the progress spreadsheet from back in march. my boss took the time to send me an email this morning that said "nice job on this matt, well put together." !? well, okay. if you say so. that's just me doing my job properly...

and yes, michael's blog now has a trademark.

2002-04-26T08:03:00.000-04:00

seraphim shock. as a band, they're kind of odd. sort of punk, sort of metal. but they all look at their feet when they play, so it's like a shoegazer metal crossover. goth, the new emo? who knew?

i was sad to report that there were no topless nuns, though. there was a girl who came out with fishnet stockings, a garter belt, a thong, a lipservice waistcincher (which was more for effect, cause it didn't do much cinching) and a pair of little black x's taped over her nipples. so she was topless, for the most part. but she wasn't dressed as a nun. still, boobies, eh? pity she was only on stage for about three minutes.

still, as stage shows go, those guys knew what the crowd wanted and they provided a very brief hint. enough to draw the punters to the stage, but not enough to satisfy. i was not entirely disappointed, let's put it that way.

jaxx was fun, though. the space is great and they have day-glo band names on the walls. every bad metal band you can think of: the nelsons, ratt, cc demille, blue oyster cult, wang chung, dokken, vanilla ice. and they've all played at jaxx. that's the best part, somehow.

speaking of nudity, today's right click image is a cubist redesign of an old image that i had floating around on my hard drive. the original didn't turn out nearly as well as i'd hoped it would, but the cubist remix was a real surprise.

2002-04-25T12:57:00.000-04:00

okay. so i was digging through my referrer logs this morning and stumbled upon... emdee's blog. huh. ultra-sekrit? and no, they still haven't removed my ad. maybe they're working on processing the paperwork. or something. or maybe because i don't have blogger pro yet.

i'm running the rollout on the outlook patch that we've been kicking around forever. aside from outlook doing weird things like deleting hyperlinks in emails, this thing should be a dawdle. very easy.

and no lunch with my mother today. she was trying to get out of a luncheon, but no dice. so we rescheduled for next wednesday. good thing i brought my lunch today.

2002-04-25T08:50:00.000-04:00

ah. good morning. (unless you're a telemarketer. then you can just fuck right off.)

finally caught this week's episode of six feet under last night. incredible episode. so much happened! was it just me or was nate senior stoned in every single flashback they showed? very odd.

lunch with my mother today.

our dhcp server at work went blooey yesterday, so we had no internet access (except email) from two on. my second computer still doesn't have a dhcp connection. that's not good. still, with no sites to surf, i fell back on the old, reliable photoshop to keep me entertained. i went through my image files and reorganized. i discovered that i had uploaded a single picture that hadn't been posted yet. (the one i posted today.) after that, i went through and culled out the pictures that i thought should go up at some indeterminate point in the future. after some remixing (i did some cubist stuff that actually looks really cool. cutout filter. try it) i have forty some additional pictures. just for the record, i currently have forty six pictures posted on the right click gallery. i'm wondering if i should just stop at 100 or if i should keep going. probably keep going.

we're meant to be going to jaxx tonight. i'm actually looking forward to seeing seraphim shock again. their floor show features topless nuns, which is always a crowd-pleaser. we saw them in new orleans last year, but the nuns had black tape x'ed over their nipples, which just doesn't have the same impact. the show is listed as all-ages, so maybe we won't get to see nipples here, either. pity, really. i mean, has no one under the age of eighteen never seen a nipple? or a vagina? whu?

speaking of which, check out the counterfeit euro.

2002-04-24T11:05:00.000-04:00

legos. we love legos, right? oh yes. yes, we do.

here you can make a lego you.

and here you can learn about jesus through the wonders of lego.

because lego rocks.