Category: general

At 53% to 47% Bush (today’s figures), The Presidential Mask Election has trumped the Washington Redskins in prediction accuracy. (Did the Redskins throw the game?)

I just read the most beautiful, amazing thing. Look at this.

“Yup. No storks.”

I think I’m going to cry!

I’m finding that I’m far more interested in writing on The Book than I am in going to work, which could be a Bad Thing. This morning I asked if I could actually leave at my scheduled time (three hours into my shift)! Normally I’m looking for more hours, because, you know, of the whole money thing. But not today!

No, today I wanted to get home and write about Neville Mazarin. I actually wrote a bit while I was at work, but it was from his perspective, and when I got home and looked at it again I realized it wasn’t going to work. So I rewrote it from Tilya’s :D

It’s only the second day, so I shouldn’t assume it’s going to be like this all month, but I’m really enjoying it so far. I’ve hit snags where I haven’t had enough information or I’ve needed to flesh things out a bit more, but I’ve worked through or around them as I went. Hopefully I won’t run into anything that will majorly destroy the plot or something.

Speaking of the plot…this book is going to be about Celia, really! I promise! This Tilya stuff is practically writing itself at this point, so obviously it must belong in the book.

(Hell. Maybe Tilya is the main character, and there will be no Celia at all. You never know…)

(Double Hell, maybe Celia is the heroine of the sequel!)

Yes, that’s right. Today I

1) went to work;

2) picked up my bicycle;

3) voted.

(Yes, I know, I have fabulous hair. What can I say…it’s a gift.)

So, now that those unimportant matters are taken care of ;), I’m ready to start pounding out more novel. Watch out, blogosphere!

Part of me wants to see John Kerry elected, just to see what would happen.

I honestly don’t know which is the better candidate anymore. I’m afraid if Bush stays in, he’ll continue to alienate the rest of the world–I’m not one of those people who can dismiss the rest of the world so easily, because I would like to travel to other countries without being hated and persecuted. I would like to see other countries as just being other places with people in them. I’d really like it if we had no enemies, but that’s just wishful thinking.

But I’m also afraid of what Kerry might do. I’m afraid that he’ll completely undermine Bush’s efforts to stamp out terrorism. I’m afraid it’ll be a step backwards. I’m afraid we’ll withdraw from Iraq and let the insurgents take over. If that happens, I’m afraid that terrorists will see even more proof that their tactics work.

Bin Laden’s comparison of the US to Russia, and the terrorist attrition tactics that supposedly brought Russia to its knees, was really interesting to me. Sean interprets that as meaning Bin Laden is afraid of Bush and wants to scare us into electing Kerry. What would it mean if we took to heart the words of a terrorist? Of a person with no morals, who would kill thousands of innocent people–noncombatants–in order to strike at ideologies? Can we say, “Yes, Bin Laden is right, we’d better get Bush out of there”?

Or is Bin Laden hoping that we’ll arrogantly ignore his warning, re-elect Bush, and continue to funnel money and people into the Iraq sinkhole?

Honestly, he’s set himself up to be the winner either way. Either he gets us to back off, or he gets to continue his war of attrition. That is probably what he is hoping we’ll be thinking…ultimately, I’m sure he was just trying to add confusion. It’s probably best to just ignore the words of a terrorist and make our decision based on the candidates’ merit, assuming that’s possible.

To me, social issues can’t even begin to compare to the war. I want to ensure that the president is the right man to handle Bin Laden. Issues like gay marriage and other social freedoms might fall by the wayside with this limited thinking. I don’t want them to. But the war itself is just so complex. I honestly don’t know how to pick a candidate just based on that most important criteria!

I wish there was a charismatic, brilliant, economic and war conservative, social issues liberal, photogenic, likeable candidate.

Is it true that only 4% of people are undecided? How did all those other people come to a satisfactory conclusion?

In other news…

I’ve been thinking this morning about why I didn’t get the job. I didn’t misrepresent myself at all during the interviews, but I think I did leave out some writing samples that could have helped. I didn’t think to use 2go-Box samples until the very last minute, and that probably hurt me more than anything.

Even so, I don’t have any experience in dedicated technical writing. So maybe that’s all it was.

I’m also feeling strangely relieved, as though I was trying to convince myself that technical writing was cool and that it was what I wanted to do, but now I don’t have to do it after all. Tingeing that, of course, is nervousness: what do I want to do? I really enjoy working at 2go-Box, where I do a myriad number of things, but unless things pick up for that business, I’m not going to make the kind of money I want by staying there.

My friend Mr. Justice (of AMRN fame) reminded me of the idea I had earlier this year for starting my own business. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently.

Why don’t I just do that? Why don’t I just stop trying to mold myself into a “job”? Maybe I am, as Robert describes himself, “unemployable”. Maybe I want to be the owner, the boss.

I think I’ll keep thinking about it.

And here it is.

I ended up not writing about any of the things I’d been thinking about. Instead, I wrote about Gautier Mazarin and Tilya Runwa. (I may change her last name…too Zentradi.) Tilya is a really interesting character, and I’ll definitely write from her perspective again.

I’m painfully aware that the audience has no idea what Tilya looks like at this point. That’s intentional. I’m using third person limited style, and people don’t typically go around thinking about what they look like all the time, unless they are unforgivably vain, which Tilya isn’t.

So there.

Yes, that’s right…the Redskins lost.

Currently, more Bush masks have been sold than Kerry masks, but as I mentioned before, the publicity of the mask sale may have contaminated the result.

So we will be inaugurating John Kerry in January.

I’ll start writing my book, which will be a tale of intrigue, familial ties, the quest for immortality, sexism, and a whole lot of other stuff, tomorrow. I figured I’d give NaNoWriMo another shot.

I signed up last year, and didn’t write anything. This year, though, I have something I want to write. The Mazarin family’s story has intrigued me ever since I first wrote Celia’s character sheet for the AMRN. Now, due to plans I won’t go into here because people on the AMRN read this journal, I’m positive that Celia’s backstory will never come to fruition in-game. Even if it did, it probably wouldn’t work out the way I want it to. Writing it into my very own book solves both problems.

We’ll see how it goes :)

No job for me.

I hate feeling like this. I don’t want to do anything today. Ugh.

May as well announce this while I’m feeling poopy, lest I lose my nerve later. (It’s so funny how I let my moods rule me…)

I’m going to write something in the month of November. I’ve set up a page for it. So far I’m thinking it is going to be the story of the Mazarin family (Celia Mazarin is a character I quasi-play on the AMRN), but I’m not entirely sure. All I do know is that I’m going to write 7+ pages of something every day that month. We’ll see what happens.

Whatever I do write, I’m already expecting that I’m going to work up character sheets and little outlines/timelines. These will change as I go. I figure it’ll be interesting to keep posting revised character sketches and outlines. It will let everyone in on the process (me included, since I’ve never done this before).

[Note: It is now 2:34 pm. I’ve been trying to put up this post all day. Blogger’s up to its old tricks again :P]

I’m only making this post in the vain hope that all the comments I’ve made this morning will miraculously appear on the page. I figure, maybe if I force it to republish, they’ll show up. :/

But while I’m here, I figure I’ll go ahead and remark a little on my life.

I was planning on going to Kentucky this weekend (I would have left yesterday and returned Monday) for Halloween and Connor’s birthday. However, Connor is going to Indiana to trick-or-treat with his cousins, which should be fun :) So, since he would be out of town, I’ve postponed the trip until next weekend, when he’ll be having his birthday party. I hope I’ll be able to make it, but that depends on what happens with the new job. If I get it, I’ll have to see when I need to start and if I can sneak in a trip before then. If I don’t get it, I suppose I can go just fine ;P

Concerning the new job, they told me they would get back to me “by Friday at 5 pm”. Last Friday came and went with nary a peep. I’m told they had another round of interviews with other candidates (not sure how many) on Tuesday, so perhaps they meant they would get back with me this Friday, and not last Friday. In any case, I’ve left them two voicemails expressing my confusion on the issue. Still waiting to hear back. If they haven’t called by say 4 pm tomorrow, I’ll call them.

My lifestyle change hasn’t really changed much. I have lost some weight, but I keep gaining some back. Ultimately the loss is still there–today there’s a net loss of seven pounds–but it’s discouraging whenever the numbers go back up (my largest net loss was nine pounds). I typically end up either starving myself on the days when the weight goes back up, or eating too much.

Counting calories doesn’t seem to be the way to go–at least, not in a vacuum. That is, I’m coming to believe I need to be watching my fat intake like a hawk. I also need to balance the other nutrients (I think I’m getting too much iron, for one thing). I’m hoping DietPower will help me with that, but I have to do a lot of work to watch the nutrients. It’s much easier to just count calories ;P

Well, that’s an update. Here’s hoping the comments show up now.

I just found out about this, like, five minutes ago. Here’s a picture:

It’s hard to get a picture of celestial objects without, like, a telescope, and a tripod :/

Update 9:45:

Update 9:52:

Update 10:00:

Ridiculous Update 10:10:

Here, I was trying to show what the shape was like as well as the color. It’s really impossible to see what I was actually seeing, though. The shadowed part of the moon was a very deep red color.

Another Ridiculous Update 10:25:

I really wish I could show you what it actually looks like. 2007 isn’t too far off; I’ll make it a goal to have decent equipment by then.

The Eclipse, Updated 10:42:

It happened! And it looks pretty richly red:

Really neat. (And impossible to make out in these pictures ;P)

A 5-year-old Iraqi boy will return home Sunday after undergoing treatment for leukemia, which he is believed to have contracted from depleted uranium used in Iraq war (sic), the boy’s mother and Japanese supporters said Wednesday.

When Sean and I were in Japan, there were protestors making a big deal about the depleted uranium. Sean laughed and told me that “depleted” means “not radioactive”, and that there was no chance of anyone getting hurt by radiation.

Are the Japanese overly sensitive, understandably, due to what happened in World War II? Or is Sean wrong?

An anonymous person kindly informed me this morning (what’s with Blogger not putting the date on comments?) that I could get a lot more points if I beat the game by going through from level 1-1 all the way to the end, and that it took about 3 hours.

Well, I actually finished up doing that yesterday afternoon! And it did take about 3 hours. :)

I had seven lives left when it was over, and my final score was 1,312,530. I think I made four combinations and my longest chain was something like 22. Unfortunately I didn’t screencap the win, but here’s a screencap of my high scores list, if you don’t believe me:

It was cool, Sean was watching as I played through the last two rounds, and he was pretty impressed.

I also like that the game translates the frog’s “ribbits” after you’ve beaten it. So now I know what he was saying the whole time! :)

Duncan has a website. Just thought you’d like to know.

(Check out those headshots. There’s a really, really good one in there. Really.)