Category: general

Cellist Ruth Phillips is in Salzburg, and today she wrote the kind of meditative, evocative post that I have come to love her for.

We arrive at the fugue, and the bass, the indomitable Alan Ewing, enters softly from right behind me. I am trying not to push the sexual metaphor here, but his voice actually does pour into my ribcage like schlagsahne, lubricating my insides, and it’s celtic ring actually does inject golden decibels into my soul like royal jelly… The tears come at last – a crystal fountain released from within. Any breakfast annoyance is, naturally, instantly replaced by adoration.

The breaking up of her heady prose with phrases like I am trying not to push the sexual metaphor here give me the impression that she isn’t putting on airs…that she actually talks and thinks in trance-wonderment.

It’s absolutely charming.

Sean is playing a game where he sneaks around and then grabs people and lugs them off, threatening them with a knife. I was impressed by the realism the first time I saw it, but then he did it again, and it looked exactly the same. Same exact position, same exact “terrified”, twisted, wide-eyed expression on the victim’s face.

How boring.

This guy (represented by Patterson and Associates–I bet they’re proud) has apparently been passing himself off as Robin Williams. It was only a matter of time before the real thing got wind of it.

Stolen from the Target slave.

Which LJ Friend Secretly Wants to Assassinate You? by PsykoDragon
Username
Who will assassinate you:	lord_lime
Why:	You laughed at their science project in 6th grade.
How:	Threw a fountain pen at your forehead.
Your dying words:	“You can take my mayonaise, but not my soul!”
Quiz created with MemeGen!

I should have known it’d be Kelly.

Maybe my life has been too easy. Maybe I haven’t seen enough pain. When I hear about terrible things happening, I can’t stand it. And when people make light of terrible things, my world seems to implode.

Today in chat someone pasted a joke he’d seen on Something Awful or somewhere. It basically put the events of the Scott Petersen trial into an Oregon Trail scenario. I could easily go into my chat logs and reproduce it here, but if I did I would have to look at it until this blog post gets pushed off the main page, and I can’t stand to look at it.

I was in a pretty good mood before that. I was excited, actually, about writing some stories. I finally had an idea that seemed interesting, and I was already writing. They weren’t anything I could get published. They were just going to be vignettes about my old AMRN characters going to see a psychologist/ship’s counselor about their issues. I thought there was plenty of potential for depth and humor there, and I was eager to explore it.

But then I read that joke, and now I can’t seem to will myself to write. I feel like the whole idea was trite, that I was taking real people with real issues lightly. That it is self-indulgent to worry about “issues” anyway, when people die every day. When people are murdered. When helpless children have their lives ripped away. And here I am happily going through my complacent blind little life, ignoring the pain all around me.

I feel like I don’t have the right to enjoy writing about people’s pain, even if they are fictional. I feel like I wouldn’t do real pain any sort of justice.

The logical part of me realizes that this is a mood, and it will pass. But until it does, I’m helpless. I can’t write, and I can’t even stand to be logged into chats. I feel like the only way is to just get my mind off it, to watch something or read something, or even just go to bed.

I also want to eat something.

I’m angry at myself because I’m so weak. I feel like I should be able to handle things. If I can’t see the humor in a dark joke like that, at least I should be tough enough not to let it cripple me. I would prefer not to see the humor, to be honest. I don’t want to lose the part of myself that refuses to dehumanize. But in order to remain open to pain, do I have to then let it control me?

Oddly enough, writing this all out has been cathartic, and I’m feeling better now. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

Last night I stayed up until around 4 am. Around 2 or 3 I started having this huge craving for pizza. I drooled about it to all my friends who were online at the time. I didn’t eat anything else, though.

Tonight I ordered pizza. Like a moron, I ordered two of them. I’m not sure why. I guess I just wanted to eat and eat and eat. But I ate two pieces…and I’m not really hungry anymore. Oh, I could eat more, but I don’t need to.

So I decided not to, and put the pizzas away in the fridge.

:)

I’m finally below the weight I’d arbitrarily decided was my crutch–the weight I’ve been trying to beat since March. (I got very, very close on March 22, but after that I kept bouncing back up and down.) I am really proud of myself for finally getting past it–and I want to stay past it, and keep going down. With that goal in mind, two slices of pizza is more than enough. (It helps that I have been eating properly for the past week, which always makes it easier to distinguish between hunger and appetite.)

So, yay. Here’s hoping I can keep it up!

Via Zach Braff, here’s the film Michael Jackson’s defense attorneys don’t want you to see.

I especially like the vintage Hanna-Barbera art and music. :>

I just saw the greatest video ever. (Thanks, Kevin!)

Hey! Everybody gotta wear clothes. And if you don’t, you get arrested.

[…]

With her mustard socks and her ketchup sash, she’s a real hot dog.

[…]

And she probably won’t be running alone with this versatile outfit. Perfect for stoppin’ traffic and startin’…who knows what?

[…]

He’s wearing the B-Boy look: B for breakin’ and Boy do that look tough.

Check out Styling with Mr. T [1984] at iFilm!

…I forgot that people used to wear socks with high heels…

So apparently

AniMinis are the latest funky bite-sized DVDs that pack a big-size taste for a new generation of hip kids.

Like, omigawd.

Is Hayashimizu-senpai (seen in Fumoffu) Tessa’s older brother? All I remember hearing about the brother is that Tessa looked up to him and felt protected by him, that he was there when the family lived in Okinawa, and that he was able to do some crazy calculus at age 4. Reasons for this theory: well, white hair! And he’s very clever, and always reading. Also, when Tessa “transfers” to Jindai for a week in Fumoffu, she meets Hayashimizu, and his fan (which often sports amusing phrases) says “妹” (imouto), or “little sister”. Coincidence?!?!?!?

Side note: Full-Metal-Panic.com is a pretty cool website. (Hover over and refresh that splash page to find the secret areas. The “warning” text on them is funny :>)

Side side note: Sousuke is hot.

A Google search for its name reveals that the submarine in Full Metal Panic, the Tuatha D? Danann, is named after mythical people of Ireland. The good ol’ Wikipedia does it again!

Here’s a “napkincam” “live” blog report from a charity screening of RotS.

That finger was not in the Wendy’s chili! That stupid woman put it there, hoping to get money. Man, I love how we can find stuff like this out nowadays. Probably ten or twenty years ago, she would have gotten away with it.

Okay, I don’t get this at all.

Looks like JR West president Takeshi Kakiuchi isn’t going to commit career seppuku after all. The times, they are a’changin’. (Although they haven’t changed yet; the article title says he “refuses to quit”, after all.) Meanwhile, bereaved families of the train derailment are finding some small comfort in the message histories of their deceased loved ones’ cell phones.

In today’s rant re: Donkey Konga 2 and the reviews thereof, Tycho notes:

I’ll tell you that I’m tired of hearing every person who reviews the fucking game tell me what kinds of music they don’t like. I don’t give a flying fuck what kind of music you listen to. What I want to know is if these new songs provide interesting, original rhythms I can play solo or with my friends when they come over. Will it extend the amusement I get from the peripherals I purchased? I don’t want to know what’s on your fucking iPod, and I don’t care if this music does not create in you a state of elevated consciousness. I’ve played through every song, and half again on the punishing difficult mode, and I vouch for the gameplay provided in this expansion. The tunes provided by Donkey Konga 2 include many popular “radio” songs which supposedly amount to a kind of despicable mainstream outreach program – as opposed to that solid gold line-up in the first Donkey Konga. I suppose these new “tracks” simply lack the ironic kick of the first game’s “Bingo Was His Name-O” or the haunting, recursive nautical shanty “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

Haunting, recursive nautical shanty!!!! God, I love that man.

Oh, look, that thingy where it asks me to enter a secret code is gone now. I hope they don’t put it back ;P

Sometime between my last post (20 minutes ago) and when I went to post about the latest Penny Arcade (5 minutes ago), the good folks at Blogger added the following to my post screen:

Ugggggh.

The latest post at The Darth Side contains an intriguing explanation of the Dark Side of the Force. I was trying to find a good excerpt to encapsulate what struck me, but unfortunately the theme is drawn out over a matter of several paragraphs that really work best when read all together. Hopefully the Dark Lord won’t mind such a large citation.

It must be understood that the Force is, above all, singular. The so-called “sides” arise from differing matters of perspective. (If you study the way of the Sith you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend entirely on one’s point of view.)

The opposite of the singular Force is the all-encompassing void of death. Time began with the Force, and will end in desolation. This is the way of things, and an inevitable consequence of the flow of events from the past into the future.

Without the inertia of the fall toward the abyss, the Force would have nowhere to go.

For in the chaotic tumble toward doom the stuff of the worlds enact loops of complexity that change the grade from life to death, introducing valleys, peaks and cycles. Between creation and destruction comes a flutter of improbability, a brief sonnet of meaning against the noise of time. Life!

It is the causal contagion that ties every ounce of us together through the network of the Force, our actions resonating against our almost-actions and our non-actions in a web of fleeting possibility that spans this galaxy and beyond. The beat of a child’s heart detonates supernovae, the beat of a bug’s wing tilts the orbit of worlds.

We are all connected.

Anyone who awakens to the Force knows this. The divisive issue is what to do with this knowledge.

When you can run the mechanism of the universe forward or backward, scrubbing through possible histories with a thought, a theme develops. You cannot escape it. Death, death, death. It is the final destiny of all things, great or small, matter or idea. But there is astounding beauty in the arts of the not-death, the filigree dances of life’s loops as it spins from light to void. If you are human, it moves you.

It should move you. But this is what the Jedi Order denies. They preach that the heart of a beast cannot judge the destiny of a galaxy. They preach dispassion and detachment, a condescending compassion for the damned. They stand by the sidelines and watch history happen, intervening only in trivia that offends their effete sensibilities.

Every Jedi knew the cycles of civilization, and every Jedi knew an age of barbarism was nigh. And yet they did nothing.

In contrast, the way of the Sith is predicated on a love for man. We have inherited the godhead of the galaxy by colonizing its every world. Though lesser species might have flourished given infinite time, it was our kind who got there first. We have won this galaxy with thousands of generations of our blood and our dreams. We call the others “primitives” because we are their kings.

And we will not sit idly by as it all careens toward a morbid interregnum. Inspired by our passions we will act to bridge the gulf between civilizations, shortening the period of disorder by decisively maintaining connections between societies from one side of the galaxy to the other. We will weather the storm.

Hate! Love! Misery! Joy! These are paths to the dark side, for to invest in the emotional life of civilization is to care about its fate. To care is to suffer, and suffering is real.

The Jedi were mere spectators.

I’m intrigued by the thought that goes into the writing of this blog. For example, there’s a purposeful logical contradiction there (did you see it?) that helps explain Vader’s anathema toward the Jedi. It arises from what he was taught, not what he can sense. And yet he is not completely duped…he has begun to question his master. It will be interesting to see if this contradiction will reemerge and be reconciled in the latter posts.

I’m not sure how CheeseburgerBrown will handle the day of Vader’s death. It seems unlikely that Vader would think to blog as he’s dying, or that he would even have a way to, but his thoughts at that moment are too intriguing to pass up, in my opinion.

This article from Aiken Online discusses how a unique, education-geared CMS called Moodle has helped teachers at Aiken High School be directly involved in each student’s learning experience.

Ms. Kaplan and other teachers find the interactive features attractive because they allow the learning process to continue outside of class.

“We try to make this a supplement,” she said. “I had no one fail last year because they were all practicing online (at home). I had kids who did not have Internet access at home, and they’d go to their friends’ houses to get on, or they’d go to the public library on the weekends.”

The Web-based curriculum also allows teachers to monitor their students’ homework more closely. The software records which tutorials the students visit and how long they spend on them.

“If they’re not working, I can tell,” Ms. Kaplan said.

Students can count on immediate feedback from teachers through the interactive Web site.

“If they ran out of time in class, and I didn’t answer a question they had, (my students) can write it in their (online) journal,” said Janet Rhodes, an eighth-grade science teacher at Langely-Bath-Clearwater Middle School. “I can pull it up when I go home and answer their question. It’s a great way of communicating, and they really like writing me notes.”

Students are receptive to the Web-based technology because it’s engaging and easy to use.

This is great, and I hope it starts happening in more schools!