yeah well i guess no more five rings this year

I don't think I'd be able to schedule any Five Rings in before everybody leaves again, and this story is looking like it's going to have to be a four-parter anyway.

ragnarok diary chapter three

The sun returned and the city is slowly approaching normal life again, ending the perpetual twilight blizzard inhabited only by huddled, ghost-like figures. Briefly the tips of the ice-covered trees glistened in the sunlight, like they were made of crystal.

ragnarok diary chapter two

I tried to go to this birthday get-together for some people I know from art classes, over in the U-District, but when I showed up an hour late there was nobody there I knew, so I assume nobody else made it. I couldn't find a bus to take me back, so I decided to walk up Capitol Hill to get back home, about an hour's walk in the snow. My hair iced over, and now I understand why arctic expeditions go insane - it's not the cold, it's not the loneliness, it's not the silence - it's the endless walk through the endless fields of white.

ragnarok diary chapter one

Fimbulvinter is upon us, the Great Winter that precedes Ragnarok, the Last Battle and the end of the world. Already the city is quiet, abandoned, everyone huddles inside for shelter and warmth. I could not see the sunset behind the haze of gently falling snow, but it is getting dark now. It is only going to get worse, they say.

i bet you all forgot about that

I'm still working on Legend of the Five Rings, now that I have immense amounts of free time. Even though you've probably forgotten everything that was going on, it's still going to be awesome, assuming I can get it done in time and find some place to run it, because my apartment is really not good for that.

bhgs: conclusion

Well now I don't know if she has a girlfriend or she's just not interested in dating or what, but I'm giving up. Well actually I gave up like a week ago.

i found the woman i want to marry

and apparently she is Catherine Chalmers. I pretty much fell in love with her from listening to this episode of This American Life, where she talks about photographing animals eating each other. But it's a forbidden love, never meant to be.

hmmm projects

I decided to make a set of 365 photos of sunsets, but when I actually went through my collection and pulled out the photos that would work, I only had 50 from about three years' worth of photography. I guess I'd better step it up.

part three: plot twist

I looked her up on Facebook and it says she's in a relationship, but she also says "don't always believe in what you read on the internet versus what you know from talking to someone ... just saying."

TO BE CONTINUED...?

blue-haired girl, part two

Her name, by the way, is Christina. We had coffee, while we played chess, and I barely won. She managed to out-nerd me, arguably, because she's a big fan of Young Justice and tries to collect their comics. I don't know if that's a dealbreaker or not, but my ideal girl, assuming that she was a big fan of an obscure DC superhero team, would probably be a fan of Suicide Squad, or the Doom Patrol, or maybe the Crime Syndicate of Amerika. But Young Justice? I don't know. At least she's a big fan of Psychonauts. Apparently a big enough fan to end up on their website. She mentioned that and I was all, "oh hey that was your pumpkin? huh." Oh and she's cute, but I knew that already.

I'm pretty sure that you could consider it a date, although any date that ends up with you both searching through back issues at the comic book store might not technically be a date.

the blue-haired girl saga part one

Well I have a crush on this girl with blue hair in the art building who has class across from me so I see her in the hallways sometimes, and one time I took the opportunity to talk with her briefly (about a drawing she was working on), and then we said 'hi' to each other when we passed by for a while, so yesterday i actually managed to ask her out for coffee, which will take place Friday.

Basically I'm really impatient for it to be Thursday afternoon now.

damn twitter been stealing all my internet updates

I discovered that Derek Kirk Kim's brother, Brent Kim, also makes comics. It's like Bizarro Derek Kirk Kim.

i got

a twitter

the internet's opening page

The Opening Page is sort of like Timecube, but slightly less crazy. It still hasn't managed to unseat Timecube as my favorite webpage of all time, but if you scroll down all the way, there's 1920s nudity, so, bonus.

r.i.p.

????-2008



Basically evil and selfish, but soft.

updates!

I moved to Capitol Hill!

Internet is restored!

I got let go from my job because the manager felt that I "wasn't working out," even though she'd never mentioned any concerns about my performance before!

fuck telecom

I would have got Internet yesterday, but my cell phone dropped the call from the Comcast guy telling me he was at the front door, so he left, and there was no way to get him back, and now I can't get another appointment until the 25th.

best headline ever?

"Portal to mythical Mayan underworld found in Mexico"

new job

Today I started work at Kid's Club, the toy store in University Village. It's like working at Toys-R-Us, only without being a corporate sellout. For instance: they refuse to carry Bratz. "I'm sure I don't have to explain why," they said. Also I get a 50% discount, which I am really tempted to spend on Playmobil even though I have no use for it. Suck it, corporate bitches/Megan!

anyone want to start playing warcraft?

Basically I've always wanted to ride a zhevra ever since I saw them in the game, and now that you finally can the way to get one is really hard for me to do since everybody that's likely to plays WoW already.

e/n

over the nights and through the fires
we went surging down the wires
and we saw st elmo's fire
spitting ions in the ether



in the blue august moon
in the cool august moon

welp i went to comic-con

And I got some comics, and picked up some more sketches of robots. Well, actually, they were all from a bunch of people whom I'd never heard of before, apparently all friends as they were in a booth together with a sign that said "Free Sketches." So I got some free sketches and bought some comics from them, and then later returned with sketches of owls to give them in thanks, because they like owls.

Here are their websites that I can find:

http://www.tylersaurus.com/index.php

http://www.sayunclecomics.com/

http://www.iamjamie.com/

There were six of them there but I only saw five, they were pretty cool people though.

Also my dad has a website now up for his new book, and I did some of the photography for it.

Oh, and I met the guy from Kyle XY but that isn't really very cool because I don't watch the show.

i have photoshop again

And thus I update.

what hath xbox wrought?

Achievements, apparently.

the dark time has come again, let us draw our blades and face our old foe in the valley of mist and birch

So Emma broke up with me.

(Backstory in case you didn't know: I was sort of dating Emma.)

Also, I'm still unemployed.

thunder

and lightning two nights this week now, hoping for a third. I drove out east across the lake to try and capture it but there was no good vantage point, only corridors of trees. I stopped once I got to Snoqualmie Falls, but the storm had stopped by then. But even without lightning there was still the falls, lit up by floodlights and plummeting down into a deep black void.

this was kind of sad

Not sure what's sadder: the fact that I saw a squirrel try to avoid getting hit by a truck and almost make it, but not quite, so I got to see it twitch a couple times before it died, or the fact that I did a little dance when I saw that they officially announced that they're making a Legend of the Burning Sands RPG.

this just in

Please follow this developing story as it unfolds live.

Edit: As of 7:48 A.M., an Australian guy has insulted America and a (probably) American guy has tried to redirect the insult to Africa. That's not really the direction I expected this to go, but I'll roll with it.

also i have become obsessed with this song please help me

i am still working on this i swear

Sorrow's Path is updated with brief bios of the player characters, and will eventually have pictures of them too, drawn by me.

oh man asia, you are pretty insane

So I overheard about how South Koreans are protesting against US beef imports, because they believe that all US beef is infected with mad cow disease. I'm like, "huh, that's strange." And then I find out that they're actually almost rioting about it and demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister. That's almost African-albino-hunting-level insane. You should also bear in mind that the Koreans have a firm belief in fan death, so they may not be the most rational country right now. The best part of the article, though, is that the police are using shipping containers covered in grease to blockade protesters. Presumably there are now some very slippery Koreans out there.

this was inevitable i guess

So, starting with the next big set, Magic is going to have about 25% less cards per set. And they're introducing "mythic rares", which you only get in about one out of every eight packs. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that, but it could be interesting if they implement it right. They claim that they're going to use mythic rare slots for big, flashy rares like Legends, dragons, Planeswalkers, and that sort of thing, and not utility rares like Char, Thoughtsieze, or dual lands, which tend to be the most expensive rares already anyway. Statistically, mythic rares are twice as rare individually as regular rares (since there are only about a third as many mythic rares as rares, and that balances out the one in eight thing), and from now on, regular rares are going to be three-fourths as rare individually.

Theoretically this should mean that mythic rares are twice as valuable as they would be if they weren't mythic, and regular rares are 75% as valuable, so I stayed up too late last night teaching myself Excel to do some statistical analysis, calculating the overall price of rares for Lorwyn and Mirrodin, and seeing how the price would change if 23% of those cards were mythic and therefore cost twice as much, and if the others cost 75% as much, to a minimum of $1.00. It depends on what cards you consider mythic, but there's an overall price increase of anywhere from 4% to 20%. So mythic rares will likely make the game a little more expensive if you're going after singles, although it depends on what singles you're going for. And there's a couple other factors that I didn't consider: valuable uncommons will also be dropping 25% in price, and mythic rares have a higher chance of showing up in the foil slot than normal rares, so that might in fact offset things to more like a one in 7.5 chance of getting a mythic rare.

They sort of tried "ultra-rares" before with the Planar Chaos color-shifts, and it didn't really have a significant effect on their price. In my opinion, mythic rares are not particularly bad for the game, assuming that they stick to the guidelines they've said they will. But they're not particularly good for it either, and I don't understand their reasoning that adding ultra-rares attracts new players because its what players are used to in other card games.

Ultimately, though, the only way that mythic rarity makes a real difference is in buying singles. There's absolutely no effect on gameplay, and that's what I really care about. If anything, having fewer cards per set should hopefully lead to a higher overall card quality. It might be annoying if I'm trying to get four of some mythic rare that theoretically costs twice as much as it would have, but there's already ludicrously expensive cards even at regular rarity, and most of the ludicrously expensive cards I want, like dual lands, would hypothetically become cheaper. But I guess Connor is going to have some tough going buying giant indestructible colossi in the future.

are my neighbours on drugs? evidence i overheard that indicates maybe

"What decides where hair grows? What is hair anyway?"

by crom, by mitra, and by set!

If I don't post any pictures at the sister blog this week, it's because:

A.) My laptop is moving into the realm of "completely and utterly non-functional" as its wireless card, one of its USB ports, and its PC card reader are now down, leaving me with no way to pull photos off my camera until I get a card reader for my desktop, and no good way to edit photos until I install Photoshop on my desktop.

B.) Age of Conan came out.

my new favorite marvel comics continuity issue

"Belasco - A lot of doubt and questions have arose over Belasco's account of his and Dante Alighieri's journey to Pangea. I tend to agree that it is highly unlikely that the ancient Pangeans' amusement park would so closely resemble Greek and Christian beliefs about Hell. Therefore it is extremely probable that Belasco reconfigured the park based on "The Inferno," and not that the park inspired Dante. So what is unknown is exactly when Belasco first journeyed to Pangea. Presumably it was after the 1320's, when Dante Alighieri's "The Inferno" was published, but it could have been anytime afterwards. Also unknown is how he lost his arm."

Edit: maybe it is late and I am easily amused, but I also love that step one of the Atlantean's plan to take over the Earth using the power of the Serpent Crown is to get a bunch of magic artifacts, melt them down, and build a bigger Serpent Crown.

my new favorite invasive plant

Trumpet creeper is so good at climbing wood that it's impossible to remove from walls without breaking the wall, and sometimes it dismembers trees. In the south, it's nicknamed Hellvine.

My least favorite is blackberries, by the way.

my new favorite advertising company

Is Publicis.

let's talk about love

Not that love, that love can go fuck itself. I mean Love, an MMO that's being developed by just one guy, through the magic of procedural content. I absolutely want to see Love more than any other video game coming up, but ambitious projects like this tend to fail. Will Love follow the same fate? I don't know, because there's really almost no information about the game up there whatsoever. Even the screen shots don't seem like they're actual screen shots. What kind of game is it? What do you do? What does it look like? All I know is that it allows multiple players to shape the world simultaneously. I imagine it as a cross between Shadow of the Colossus and a flower. But right now Love is whatever you want it to be.

i guarantee that i am actually working on this

For Legend of the Five Rings, I took like half the official map (centered around Crane, Scorpion, and Lion territory) and copied it onto a big sheet of paper, in large flowchart-like form. Each point of interest gets its own little location node, making for about 120 locations. I wrote a rough plot outline for each of those, so wherever you go there's something reasonably interesting to do. That's stage one. Here's some of the more interesting ones, basically spoiler-free, since the game might never even go to these places:

In a gambling-based city where everyone wears masks, one of the players is mistaken for somebody else and ends up targeted by assassins.

Rumor is spreading around a port city that the Mantis Clan is press-ganging ronin into their navy, and tensions are high. A ronin stumbles into a tavern beat up, claiming he escaped a press gang. The drunken ronin all start a riot and capture the Mantis embassy. Imperial troops arrive, looking to kill every ronin in the city, including the players.

A bitter student at the Doji Courtier Academy wants to hire the party to get revenge on the most popular girl in school.

A samurai child runs away from his parents to live the ronin life, trying to join up with the players.

The players arrive at the Shrine of Lost Sailors to find it abandoned, with no signs of violence and no convenient journals lying around.

A peasant girl's parents hire the players to escort her to the city to be trained as a geisha by the Scorpion Clan. She, however, would much rather run away with her lover.

The peasants in an extremely superstitious village believe the players to be ghosts when they arrive at the village.

my new favorite demon

Phenex, who is so named because he assumes the form of a phoenix when summoned, is a Grand Marquis of Hell. He's pretty awesome, because he teaches all wonderful sciences, and he's a poet as well. And he's tragic, because he apparently hoped to return to heaven after 1200 years. But he didn't, because Satan is a liar.

The Mandate of Heaven

I would post this over at the campaign blog, but since that's meant to be kept in-character, I'll post it here: my design rules for my Legend of the Five Rings campaign.

1. No conspiracies. The death of the characters' father is less tragic if it turns out it was all part of some grand villain's evil scheme. There is no hidden mastermind, and no central evil villain. Any sinister plots that show up in the storyline will have to stay away from the characters' personal lives.

2. Avoid simple dualism. Whenever moral dilemmas come up, they need to be more complex than good versus evil. The players should be forced to make tough decisions rather than having one right path.

3. Keep things open-ended. Rather than being a linear plot, there should be multiple choices to make at each stage of the game. To keep things from being too freeform, many of those choices will have to be somewhat binary, but, as above, not in a good versus evil sense. The game starts out being node-based, traveling from place to place on a well-defined map, and getting involved in local plots or accepting jobs on an optional basis, but as the central plot becomes more clearly defined, there should be a definite story arc and ending for it. There should not be one set ending, though.

4. Actions should have consequences. The choices that the characters make should shape the game world, and even tiny events should have effects that can be revisited later.

5. Avoid high fantasy. Although magic is tough to avoid, with a priest in the party, it should be played as fairly "realistic," for example, having to actually pray to the kami and keep good relations with them in order to cast spells rather than simply fire off spells whenever you feel like it. If gods appear, they should be in the form of dreams, omens, or abstract visions. Monsters should be rare and not particularly flashy and magical. Definitely no ancient prophecies, at least, not true ones.

6. No annoying allies. All friendly NPCs should be useful or at least charming, and not place undue demands on the players without doing something for them in return.

7. Honor should be important. Since some of the player characters probably want to maintain a high Honor rank, and they're forced to live as scruffy, pragmatic ronin, keeping that high Honor rank should be a challenge, making players choose between being successful and being honorable.

Sorrow's Road

Thus begins the chronicling of my Legend of the Five Rings campaign.

thanks a lot, money, you've really let me down :(

I was all excited to watch Battlestar Galactica tonight, and then I remembered the reason I'm not watching it is that I don't have cable any more. Drat.

ten words

I took my shot at entering Penny Arcade's World of Warcraft ten-word-story contest:

"Her hands clawed upwards, aching to breathe through dead lungs."

koroshi

Turns out I'd posted this on the wrong blog and didn't notice for a week. Did anyone else?

Lindsay Ann Hawker's murder is pretty interesting despite being fairly straightforward, because it resembles a Japanese surrealist novel. She was teaching English in Japan, was invited to the flat of one of her students where she was murdered and left in a bathtub on his balcony, filled with sand. The suspect escaped police capture, took off his shoes before the chase, and may be in disguise as a woman. It's been a year, and he still hasn't been caught.

this blog will now alternate between talking about things i enjoy and chronicling my failures, which is what all blogs should be about, really

Last Thursday I went out to First Thursday, because my cousin's husband had a gallery opening. As I was leaving, I ran into some girls from my art classes, including the cute girl in my painting class, who asks if I'd like to come along and wander around Pioneer Square with them. Yes, of course. So I wander along with them visiting galleries, getting free food and free wine, and we all eventually end up getting drinks and playing pool at a bar. SPOILERS: Turns out she has a boyfriend.

hhhkkkkkkhhhhhhhhhhkkkkk

I have considerable difficulty getting to sleep. I'm way too self-aware, and that leads to me being unable to lose consciousness without first pummeling it into submission by getting really tired. So I'm on about a 4 A.M. to 12 P.M. sleep schedule, and that keeps getting pushed up. If I push it up far enough, do you think I might be able to sleep like a normal person?

tell me

that the last sentence in this article is not a great opening line for a short story.

Or closing line.

seriously what the hell

I think it's actually physically impossible for me to get a date, I mean, a universal law similar like nuclear force, only for relationships and also in reverse. Even if I do manage to get a date there's a retroactive law of causality that causes it to become not a date.

I'm getting into romantic comedy territory here. It's not even depressing any more. It's annoying, and it's fucking ridiculous.

so i have a massive patron crush on this woman at the library

Which all started when I processed some holds for someone named "Dorothée Malfoy-Noël." There's a lot of people with cool names on the holdshelf, but that's up at the top. Eventually I ended up checking out some DVDs to her, Leni Riefenstahl and Werner Herzog, I think, and it turns out she's gorgeous and has a great French or possibly Russian accent. Although by her hyphenated last name I assume she's married. You can look her up on Facebook though and see for yourself how gorgeous she is.

sometimes sorority girls write excellent dialogue

Girl on campus talking to her friend, with a really sweet voice: "I kind of live for the days when I see him and look cute. Not that I want him to think I'm attractive anymore, I just want him to see me and think, "I fucked that up."

2am best time to blog about world of warcraft

Today I tried to get to 58 tonight, to get my undead warrior through the Dark Portal. It looked like it was achievable, only half a level to go and I had all these quests to run around and do shit: find a ghost aunt, find her husband's ring, bring it to a gnome who's actually a dragon in disguise and hangs out in the inn in a town filled with mindless undead, bring her a book too, then take it to some guy = MASSIVE EXXXP. But not as massive as I'd like (and here I almost typed "ass masive") because I was still just a little bit away.

I figure I'll kill Plaguehounds. Tirion Fordring wants me to kill plaguehounds, I can understand why he'd want me to kill regular plaguehounds and Frenzied Plaguehounds, that makes sense, but killing Plaguehound Runts just seems cruel, they've already been abandoned by their Plaguehound Parents and got picked on at plaguehound school, now I have to kill 20 of them, seriously?

There's only one poor little forlorn Plaguehound Runt every five miles or so, so I have to wander around and watch 20 of these look up at me with their [Sad, Sad Eye]s as I brutally slaughter them? Couldn't I just kill the five million Frenzied Plaguehounds over there? Oh no, Tirion Fordring, you hate all things cute and adorable, you are the worst crusader yet. I will not kill plaguehounds for you and I certainly will not bring you food and I hope you starve and die over the winter.

I gave up and went to bed.

neighbours

Today I actually met one of the people who lives across the hall in my apartment. Not at the apartment, though, at the library because when I checked out books to her I recognized my address. She seems nice I guess? Their room is the one that always seems to be watching animes and she doesn't seem like the kind of girl to be watching animes.

pie!

Today I was in the library's pie competition. That's an internal competition, by the way, not random library patrons entering pies. So I made my first ever pie Wednesday (because I didn't have enough time today or yesterday). It was an Ohio Shaker Lemon Pie, and, although delicious, it didn't win. It was probably my favorite, but that's because I'm currently favoring very tart pies. Hence me making a lemon pie.

ten female vocalists that i would totally do (based mostly on their songs)

Martina Topley-Bird
I'm just a girl
With featherweight curls
When I heard this song in Indigo Prophecy (during a shower scene, incidentally), I knew I had to have it. And then I tracked down the British release of her CD, because on the American release they decided to leave off some tracks.

You won't get the impression from this one track, but she's really, really versatile.














Adele Bethel from Sons and Daughters
You made the first move
When I was near you
Turned wrong to right
Sons and Daughters sound like they are just waiting to beat someone senseless and a large part of that is Adel Bethel's borderline-screaming.



Ninja from the Go! Team
It's the blast from the past
Superb in every word
Ninja is not only a fine rapper and dancer but a great guitarist and drummer, because everybody in the Go! Team can pretty much do everything. And she has cute socks.

That Asian girl in the Go! Team seems pretty cute too, but I never really got a good look at her.




Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth
I don't wanna
I don't think so
Another entry in the "girls who sound like they can kick everyone's asses" department. She doesn't sound like she'd be married with a daughter, but she is. Oh well.






Hello Saferide
Would you freak out if I said I liked you?
Do you walk the line?
Is your IQ higher than your neighbor's?
Is it very much higher than mine?
Easily beats out Kimya Dawson for "most adorable singer ever." I guarantee that I would be good to her and respect the fact that she is scared of feet.


Leslie Feist
We'll collect the moments one by one
I guess that's how the future's done
This is the first Feist song I heard. The album version is much more produced and happy, which changes the meaning. With full pop production values and a chorus behind it, this song sounds like she's going to do all the things she says, get old, get married, get a house and have kids. With all that stripped away, it sounds like she's dreaming of something she knows she'll never do.

Mattie May Thomas
You keep on talkin' 'bout the dangerous blues
If I had me a pistol I'd be dangerous too
There's no picture here because there isn't one. She made maybe four recordings in her life, back in the Thirties. She was in prison. That's all we know. Other singers sound like they might kill people, Mattie May Thomas probably actually killed someone.

Ambrosia Parsley from Shivaree
Some may say I'm for you to use and throw away
Yeah that's what they say
But they'll say most anything to keep you away from me
But that doesn't mean that other singers can sound more like they'll kill you. The best part about Shivaree is the air of vague menace.

Which doesn't really come up in this song, oh well.




Neko Case
Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag
Past empty lots and early graves?
Neko Case is the person responsible for making me like Tacoma. Also she sings country songs about the Green River Killer.






Meiko Kaji
Iin na naomosa
Mitsumete aruku
Yami wo dakishimeru
Janomeno kasa hitotsu
(I walk with the weight of the Milky Way on my shoulders
But an umbrella that holds all the darkness that there is)
She's an actress in '70s Japanese action movies that I haven't seen, and she sings the theme song a lot of the time. This one is from Lady Snowblood. Oh, and also Kill Bill.

the jessica saga

Not so much of a saga as an anecdote, but a really interesting one though. More interesting than 82% of my life, anyway.

About a month ago, I'm riding the bus downtown and there's this really strikingly pretty girl on the seat across from me, talking with her friend. Which means I don't really have a good chance of talking to her, but she seems really interesting (and extremely cute). Unfortunately, I'm probably never going to see this girl again, and that makes me a little sad.

A while back on the Internet, I was reading about this guy in New York who saw a girl like that on the subway, and made a really cute website dedicated to meeting her. I don't really have the Internet skills to pull off that sort of marketing campaign, but I do have a pencil and a notebook in my bag. So I write a note saying something along the lines of:

This is kind of creepy but
I think you're really pretty
and maybe I could buy you tea sometime?
My phone number is ###-###-####
Oh, and by name is Erik by the way.

When she and her friend get up to get off the bus, I hand her the folded-up note, and say, "You should take this."
"Okay," she says, a little confused I assume. And then she leaves. I figure it's a real long shot and I'm never going to see her again anyway.

A week or two later I get a text:

Hello Erik. This is
Jessica. You might
not remember me,
but i'm the girl
from the bus awhile
ago. I just found
the note again
after clearing off
my desk. How do
you do?

We look each other up on Facebook. Unfortunately (for me anyway), it turns out she has a boyfriend. But she'd still like to be friends, which is still good. After some complex schedule renegotiations, I finally buy her tea at this really good place on the Ave, about two weeks ago. She's really nice (obviously) and we spend about three hours talking about really nerdy things. She'd been referring to me among her friends as either "the bus boy" or "Mr. Bear," so we drew each other pictures of Mr. Bear, who has a monocle, cane, etc. Hers is better than mine, which makes me a little ashamed to be an art major.

So we're pretty good friends now, which makes me really happy because it's really unlikely that we would have met, and also I'd assumed I would never see this girl again.

places i'd want to go if i could part one: gunkanjima

Hashima, called "Gunkanjima" because in silhouette it resembles a battleship, was developed as a coal mining town but was abandoned in the 1970s.

It is currently closed off to the public but there are some pictures.

And an album.

It was featured in the final level of Killer7 and is therefore my only Wikipedia edit.

i felt the rise of that old familiar feeling. i hated it... welcomed it.

I wanted to read the kind of book where everybody dies and nothing works out in the end, so I went out and bought The Maltese Falcon. I kind of want to live in the noir world right now, where you get ground down no matter how hard you try, until the end, where you wind up lying face-down somewhere with a hole in your heart.

Don't get me wrong, that's not a bad way to feel.

betty boop meets dracula

Yes!

global warming

My "Plants and the Human Environment" class has basically just been talking about global warming the entire time, which makes me realize that I don't really care about the long-term impacts of global warming. It's definitely happening, and we definitely caused it, but it would be difficult to reverse the effects without getting the participation of everyone on the planet. And that's basically impossible, so it's more practical to deal with the effects of climate change than try to prevent it.

Thinking that global warming is something you have to try and fight makes the assumption that climate change is inherently bad, that we're all being punished for our lifestyle choices. It's a very scientific martyr complex, the atheist version of "God sent Hurricane Katrina because of the gays." I can't really assign moral value to climate change. To me it's just something that happens, and it doesn't really matter what caused it, because we can't really stop it.

If the climate changes, and sea levels rise, the human population will become less sustainable. But this was going to happen eventually anyway. Ecosystems, in fact, all physical systems balance out in the long run. The choice we're faced with right now is whether to try and save up our potential resources and keep spreading the human race over as much of Earth as possible until everything's completely rationed and everyone lives in tiny little boxes, because that's the way things are going to become sometime in the next thousand years if we don't start going to other planets. A continually expanding population like ours isn't sustainable forever anyway, so why should we worry about making that happen later when it's so much easier to force ourselves to confront the consequences of that fact sooner? Humanity is never, never, ever going to be able to plan long-term. It's just not the way our brains work.

There's an impending extinction event, but it's a kind of extinction event that hasn't happened before. I don't worry about the morality of extinction, because that happens all the time and clinging onto species diversity is something people do because they can't deal with death.

i think you all know what my new year's resolution was

I was with friends, so I took a break.

But now I'm alone, so I'm back.

You know who's awesome? Dr. Orpheus.