Ben

Really good song: Dance Anthem of the 80s.

Really friggin' fun.

In other news, I'm reading Ender's Game, which happens to be sickeningly good. Like, so good, it makes me ill. He's very good at drawing me in. Card has a really good trick he plays. These kids are all geniuses, so he can have them all have complex adult characters capable of understanding to a T each of the other characters. That way, he only needs to do minor things in the way of characterization and his "geniuses" do the rest.

The other cool trick good sci-fi writers seem to have is to have action scenes that make very little sense because they're in space or on alien planets or something something, and yet make them compelling. Even though you have no idea what the hell is going on, you're riveted.

It's something that...whatever the guy's name is, the Neuromancer, couldn't do. He made up all these words and devices without actually giving any explanation whatsoever. The result was a completely incomprehensible mess. The proper balance, it seems, is between complete nonsense and detailed explanation. I think that's something I need work on, I tend to explain TOO much, and things get bogged down, when I should just be making some vague statements about what's going on and concentrate on making the shit go down.

I'm really enjoying writing the Xenotone. The new voice is much better, it allows me to break things up, make the Xenotone what it is to me now. It's over-the-top, the characters are kind of wacky and it's a kind of crazy space opera thing. Explosions and inexplicably sexy ladies and inexplicably powerful weaponry. I think when I was a kid I was writing slightly trashy action novels and now I've gotten old enough to understand how trashy they are and just run with that shit.

I ended both those paragraphs with a curse. I'm fucking on this.

So I've come to some sort of realization, which I'd love to call an epiphany, but I think that's a melodramatic word and using it would just cheapen what I'm feeling.

I've realized there are bits of us that we cast off, the shell we hatch from that we toss behind us, totting forward to burn ourselves to bits in our future, bits that we need. Bits that we return to on one of our circuits around our everchanging, but always circular, life. We pass by the shell we discarded and we, most of the time, ignore it entirely. It's past. It's not what we are or who we are.

And even when we do take our little vacations into our muddled experience, we're missing the point. We're seeing ourselves as developing, evolving, always changing into something better, or at least more capable of handling a hard, hard, hard world. But the truth is, the truth we never see (the truth whose portent I cannot even begin to fathom) is that we're just shells after shells after shells. We're shedding our skin and producing one more calloused, darker, weathered.

But never do we look back at our shed selves, the trail of detritus, the ashes of our burning, burning life sprinkled like pixie dust as the weather of our memories and think, what have we lost? We've gained something, sure, in pursuit of our always receding horizon, but nothing is free.

One of those shells, some of those ashes, might have been essential. Might have been the blacktop for our potholes.

But what can we do? I mean, we can't just go rummaging through our own garbage. What could we do with what we find? Cobble together some our lost self and look deep into its eyes for fundamental truth? Nothing is so easy, nothing we create is so complete.

Honestly, I have no idea. I just know its worth stopping to examine the eggshell. It's worth thinking of what we once were, if only to get our bearings on the map. Stop, adjust, and move forward.

We've burned everything we've ever loved as fuel and we are propelled, inescapably, forward. We either let the force drive us into the dirt or we try our best to steer.

But we are not cars, we are not hatched chicks, we are something a lot more complicated. Our fuel we cannot so easily refill, it drains US. And its worth giving thanks, like our ancestors used to, to what sustains us and what moves us forward.

I've slaughtered a thousand of me. And I'll kill again. And maybe the ends won't justify the means, but I have to keep going. If only because what I've lost was so, so precious.

And I've run out of metaphor.

I just accidentally listened to the song Dozo by Puscifer and there's this moaning mixed into the background at some points.

I think I actually know what porn that's from.

This is the saddest day of my adult life.

So this is the last fifteen minutes of my birthday and it's time for semi-sober resolutions:

1. I resolve to be nicer. Unless someone is a dick, has a stupid face or has a funny hat.

2. I resolve to not care what people think. Except if their opinion involves the way that I dress. Or behave.

3. I resolve to post occasionally on livejournal. Except for several months from now, where I'll lose my motivation and spend this time playing video games and watching asian porn.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Life is good.

Wow. I mean, I never forgot this thing existed. To be fair. I just haven't even looked at it in a long long while. I keep forgetting how much of my stupid life is on this thing. In the old days, they had time capsules where you could see what toys you liked as a kid. Nowadays the whole fucking development is splayed open like some post-mortem patient, garrish and bleeding all over the table.

I'm resisting the urge to look back. I really am. I think people have an internal timer that goes off once a year that makes them look back at what has happened since the last time the timer went off. And it happens to be exactly when you're born. Maybe there's something in the circuitry of your brain that hardwires the memory of your brutal birth into a cruel and cold world full of consequences and progressively emptier of dreams. And so, every year, at the same time, you trigger off the reaction where you scan back all the past traumas in flash-vision trying to find something that made that first trauma actually worth something.

Trauma on timer. Annual trauma.

I'm not going to be reflective. Well, too much. I mean, I am, but I'm not going to call it reflective. Refractive, how about?

So my life is pretty good. Some things are working out, a lot of things are not, but I've come to a slow understanding with my peaks and my troughs. Once I get one thing, I immediately shift to another thing to acquire and the first thing loses value so fast, it's almost astonishing. But I think, over time, I've begun to acquire a sense that I need to live according to what's right for me, not what I feel like doing at the time.

Let me back up, because that sounds like "I've learned how to settle! Hooray!"

I've learned how to see through my impulse feelings. Because, as much as I deny it, I'm somewhat impulsive. I've come to a more stable baseline with myself where I feel I, mentally and physically, am robust enough that I can handle just about anything (with enough sick days and fatty foods), so I do not keep needing to grab for the river bank as it passes. I can just sit in the water and be comfortable there. I've figured out, at least, that life is nothing if not incapable of being predicted. NJ weathermen have enough trouble forecasting whether it's gonna fucking rain, why would weather conditions of life be any easier to predict.

And I don't have a degree in it. Yet.

Not that a meteorology degree means anything. Honestly, these weather people just fucking take a stab at it. If they're wrong "Whoops, act of God!" They're like priests, only they don't molest little children...that I know of.

Anyway.

Happy birthday to me.

Fuck.

Okay.

So I've been watching Code Geas R2, which is the second season of Code Geas, which is still just amazing, but I have to say one thing to the big evil empire in the anime:

STOP HAVING YOUR FINAL SHOWDOWNS ON EASILY-RELEASABLE FLOOR-DROP MECHANISMS.

Every single conflict so far has been handled by making some sort of floor drop in some sort of way to make all the bad guys die. It was quaint in the last season. Now Zero's only strategy seems to be dropping floors.

It's like:

Black Knights: "Oh no! How are we going to win this impossible battle!?"
Zero: "Is there a floor?"
Black Knights: "Well, yes."
Zero: "I'll handle it."

Still.

Fucking good.

A pretty hilarious article

I have a soft spot for the psychopaths that perpetrate the senseless and usually flagrantly racist attacks on such winner groups like Scientology, Furries and anyone who takes themselves too seriously on the internet.

They're making a point, while at the same time, not making a point. Their movement, if you can call it that, is entirely destructive without giving anything back. They're out to make other people miserable, to destroy other people's hard work and to, generally, prove that the internet is serious business. In that, it isn't. It isn't serious business at all. Anyone who parades their sexy little digital selves around like they're not, in actuality, a fat, Southern mother of two bending over their Dell eating bon-bons deserves a rain of penises.

For example:


This is a video of an interview of Anshe Chung within the game Second Life. Anshe Chung is some smug little snot who's being paraded around for making modest amounts of money on the stupid little game. If you want to know what she looks like, watch that video to the end. The asian girl holding the giant penis is her.

I can't help but crack up when I hear about these assholes. They are unabashedly destructive. They're not trying to make a point, and they don't pretend they are. They're just out to muck up your day. That kind of honesty in evil is somehow incredibly interesting to me, as well as outright hilarious.

Don't get me wrong, the swastikas and various corruptions of the n-word make me cringe. But it seems, a lot of the time, these people are mocking the very racism they're guilty of. That doesn't avail them of guilt, but it makes it a bit easier to forget it and focus on how many people they're pissing off.

At least they're getting the job done.

Not many movements can say that :)

This sucks.

So today was fairly uneventful. I woke up feeling about the same as the sky looked, which is not so big a deal. I've been going through some ups and downs and it just seems I've tumbled into one of the downs again. I've started to learn not to let it...well, get me down. Not to preoccupy myself with it, just realize that I need a weekend of fuck-all to sort of recharge, get back on track and convince myself that my life hasn't really fallen into places I didn't want it to.

So.

Something that's been scaring me is how hard it is to meet people without being in school. The only people I talk with at work are at least ten years older than me. They're great people and fun to talk to, but it sort of limits opportunities to make new friends, the kinds of friends you can go out to bars with and do some such silly thing. Hanging out with thirty-somethings is not exactly what I'd like to be doing on a friday night, thank you very much.

What's scary is that I'm starting to wonder if the happy times in college are dead and gone. If the happiest, most exciting years of my life are now behind me and all that I'm facing now is year after year of work. Just work. Work work work and mix in a social gathering here and there, a few desperate ploys for friends/relationships/attention, and then back to work.

It's an idea I hate. More than hate. It's despicable to me. But is that why so many people get trapped into these college modes, where they don't want to leave and find themselves surrounded by people almost a decade younger than them, feeling and acting no more mature than any of them? Are they really not that weird? Maybe they're just trying to squeeze the last drops of enjoyment out of the best years of their life before moving on (if they move on) to the real world?

It's scary.

Really scary.

I know I can live fine. I have no worries about getting into grad school, getting a good job and living a good life. I just don't know if that good life is something I want to lead. I don't know if the opportunities are worth following.

I think I could use some real problems.

Anyone have any?

Shit! They figured out how to do Jazz!

We're done for!

( And so on and so forth )

So. In conclusion: Go Obama. You da man.

I have Brawl.

Did my heart love 'til now? Foreswear its sight! For I never saw true beauty 'til last night.

Let the loss of my carefully cultivated life commence :)

When politics wasn't quite as hilarious?

When we were only having vaginal intercourse with the middle east? (Meaning it was a lot more comfortable for all concerned)

When playing video games was still outrageously uncool?

When the Simpsons was funny?

Oh my god. The Simpsons doesn't even try anymore. I'm wondering if people actually watch the show or read the script prior to the shit being shown. It's just BAD. There are some parts that just don't make sense, much less are they any funny at all. Like, if I met someone with that sense of humor...I don't know what I'd do. Weep. For humanity.

You see little hints of the old Simpsons peeking through, as if there's one writer left from the old days who's just shouted down by people who think by dumbing down the characters to random expletives they can produce humor. He's like, "Hey, instead of having Homer catch on fire and run around screaming as if that's why the Simpsons was entertaining in the first place, why don't we have him say something clever, yet entirely nonsensical."

Homer wasn't really STUPID in the old Simpsons, he just said things that were a kind of pastiche of stupid American culture. As pretentious as that sounds...

Like, when he's supposed to be cleaning the basement he's like "Aw, what's with all this cleaning? Are we so vain!?!"

Not exactly stupid. Just ridiculous.

It's just such a shame that the Simpsons has not only jumped the shark, but it has walked up to the shark, yanked its jaws open, stuck its head inside those jaws and clamped them down repeatedly until it turned into a pile of bloody, chewed remains of what it was before. And no show has really stepped up to take its place. Family Guy was never Simpsons funny, and now even it is turning stupid. South Park was never Simpsons funny and now it's gotten a little in love with its own philosophy.

They need to bring the Critic back. That show was fucking hilarious.

On another note, I need to get a life.

So I was huddled over my sink cleaning jello from a mixing bowl (tell me that doesn't sound like some horrible euphemism) and I was thinking about how silly it was that the Lindbergh kidnapping turned kidnapping into a capital offense.

Then I was like "Gee, I wonder, is it STILL a capital offense?"

And a number of years ago, that would be the end of it, I'd be like "Good question, I'm gonna go masturbate", but NO. Thanks to the miracle that is Wikipedia, I now can answer all the inane questions by spending time that would otherwise be put to something infinitely more productive.

And now I will share my search with you.

The Wiki skinny

Quick summary: Basically, guy flies plane across the Atlantic, gets real famous, big-time American hero because he has that kind of jawline and that kind of hair cut, and marries a rather mundane short little women. They have a baby, they and their cute little American home are every American's cup o' tea. Then, America's cup o' tea baby gets stolen and all of a sudden it becomes the biggest thing since...uh...World War I.

Tons of people get involved, including a 75-year-old teacher from the Bronx who apparently at one point, in pursuit of a suspect, dressed up like a woman, with his collar pulled up to hide his handlebar mustache.

I'll repeat that.

A 75-year old schoolteacher from the Bronx dresses up like a woman and pulls his collar up to hide his HANDLEBAR MUSTACHE.

I tell you, you don't get super-sleuths like that nowadays.

Anyway, the ransom is given for the baby, the baby is no where to be found, except by a trucker who stumbles upon a baby corpse.

So eventually they track down the guy who took the ransom, find out that he was most likely the kidnapper and sentence him to death.

But Congress, in its infinite wisdom (I think it was Republican at that time...or Federalist or some shit), being so moved by the media-perfect drama of the case, decided to make a law called the Federal Kidnapping Act, which allowed federal authorities to step into kidnapping cases when they crossed state lines.

Fine. Whatever.

Problem is, a number of states decided to take it a step further and make kidnapping a capital offense. Because, you know, capital punishment is a deterrent.

Man. It's like if, in response to Britney Spears stumbling her fat ass around to the tune of Gimme More, Congress passed a resolution banning Mallomars.

Get real.

But yes. The Supreme Court overturned the capital offense part of kidnapping in the 1970s, so it is no longer a capital offense.

But the FBI just LOVES IT.

Apparently kidnapping cases are high points in a lot of these guy's careers. Which says something about the FBI.

And now that I've cited kidnapping, capital punishment and Britney Spears in the same journal entry, I'm ready to get back to that masturbating.

God bless Wikipedia.

I'm sorry, I know very few poems, songs, anything that capture coping like this so perfectly.

Someone once told me that I reminded them of the xkcd guy.

I wish :)

(Plus, it seems like this guy gets laid about as often as sappy political drivel is converted into youtube video. Which is upsettingly often.)

I have decided to pick up a MD AS WELL AS a PhD.

For your own safety,

I advise taking care of your brain.

That is all.

Excellent.

A+.

There.

I said it.

Now go see it.

...

Okay, now that I've filtered through the mindless masses that obey my command without question, because I know there are so many, I'll talk to you, of more discriminating taste.

Cloverfield is good. Way good. I thought at first it was just gonna be another monster action movie with special effects and destruction, which is all well and good, but not anything worth mentioning. But, I'm sure this won't be spoiling anything, it's all shot from an amateur-styled camera, someone's holding the camera and walking with the group. So you get it from the perspective of the fleeing masses. Which is extremely interesting.

Not only is it an innovative idea, it's played very well. The timing is perfect, the camera holds steady for the scenes it needs to and flops around and shakes enough to make it clear that someone's running or has fallen or something. It's realistic, the fear the actors show. And even the plot is realistic. It does the romance plot without coming out as too corny or too LOVE CONQUERS ALL-y.

It had me gripped the entire movie, hoping the main characters would get through, laughing at the comic relief's stupid inserts. The wrecked New York setting is excellent and doesn't rely too heavily on CG, though, you can't avoid it when you're making a giant monster movie.

Also, the love story made me feel sappy. There. I'll admit it.

BUT ALSO, THE EXPLOSIONS AND DESTRUCTION AND VIOLENCE WERE SUPER AWESOME.

Whew. Recovered some of my masculinity.

Either way. See it. It's worth seeing in the theatres. Trust me.

Well.

I'm back.

And let me tell you. What a thrill this week has been. An endless rollercoaster that reached dizzying heights of enjoyment, so much so that every morning when I woke up I had a little orgasm just THINKING about what the day had in store for me.

Now, replace everything in that last paragraph with its complete negative opposite and you have something close to ( the truth. )

There's a lot of things I'd like to say. ( And boy do I say them )

This is new. I'm going off on my own, folks. I'm becoming a real adult. I wouldn't trade the events of these past few months for the world. Because of them, I'm ready. And I'm more excited than I can ever put to words (No matter how many I use :))

At the risk of sounding horribly (horribly horribly) cliche:

Look out world.

I'm back.