nathan and i played warcraft 3 multiplayer. he kicked my butt three times in a row. i'm beginning to think that warcraft the original was my finest hour. how sad.

we also watched _hot pursuit_ which is apparently the second movie that john cusack was ever in. the high points are the rambo homage near the end, and ben stiller playing a pirate. (sans eyepatch, sadly...)

yay! i just got fainted at on live journal. i am very pleased with myself now.

China Molds Business enterprise way: Expand to set up, pursue outstanding, regarding quality as this, win victory with.


teresa nielsen hayden has a theory that in the future, everyone on the planet will speak a language that they think is english, and that these languages will not necessarily be mutually intelligible.

i'm thinking she's right.

back from st. louis for nathan's grandmother's funeral. five hours in a car for each of the past four days. but some good time spent with nathan, and i got to meet random new family members of his, and i got to hold dalton, the newest nephew. nathan's brother remains convinced that i am going to steal dalton the first chance i get. this is totally wrong. if i do it the first chance i get, they'll suspect me. if i wait a while, they'll be all confused and think it was a random stranger.

see how clever i am?

Salon.com Books | Ordinary people, extraordinary evil

book review at salon:
Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing
By James Waller
Oxford Univ. Press
336 pages
Nonfiction

i expect i'll be reading this book shortly. (off to go see if the library has it...)

abby and i used to have guinea pigs as pets when we were little. my last guinea pig was named trent, after trent reznor of nine inch nails, because they were both dark and hateful. well, trent the piggie was just dark, really, but no one knew that but me.

in today's training class, i got to use the word orthogonal. and then i got to explain it to several people. ah, well. expanding people's vocabulary is good.

my seester and her boyfriend.

i think they kinda like each other.

today's word, brought to you courtesy of me is disingenuous.

Main Entry: dis·in·gen·u·ous
Pronunciation: "di-s&n-'jen-y&-w&s
Function: adjective
Date: 1655
: lacking in candor; also : giving a false appearance of simple frankness : CALCULATING
- dis·in·gen·u·ous·ly adverb
- dis·in·gen·u·ous·ness noun

from John M. Ford's poem 110 stories about the twin towers falling:

That's got to be a rumor, but who's sure?
The Internet is stammering with noise.

these two stories are mine, or i am theirs, or something.

groggy, listening to morning radio, what? what? they must be joking. run upstairs to the computer, try to load cnn. try again. hit reload again, as it dawns on me that cnn doesn't go down unless it's from overload, and if cnn isn't resolving, then millions of other people are doing the same thing as i am and something. is. wrong.

hell; i haven't cried about this in months. but now i am. if you're up for it, go read the poem.

i got sucked in by the last two minutes of buffy this morning, instead of watching the local weather report. so i had to ask nathan for his version of the local weather report.

(if you are reading this, and don't watch buffy, go shoo and buy season one and two on dvd. shoo. watch them and then come back. i'll be here.)

anyhow. it was the prom episode, which makes me sniffly at the end.

wild horses couldn't drag me away...

okay! now it's been clear and calm and cool all day. i am wearing long pants by choice, and not because i had to wear them to work. kinda nice.

today's minirant: i like it better when people's subjects for their posts have something to do with their posts. even if it's a quote from somewhere else. if you're just working your way through your vast memorized stack of quotes, i'm not so excited about reading it. what i really hate is when it's obviously a quote from somewhere but i don't know where, and as far as i can tell it's not related. then i get the definite feeling that the author knows that all the cool kids will know what they're talking about, and that since i don't, i am obviously not one of the cool kids as far as they're concerned.

it's pouring like hell. i don't like this weather.

Ellen Goodman: Those who do the least for women's rights

Every year we celebrate Aug. 26, the anniversary of women's suffrage, in our time-honored tradition. Our one-woman jury assembles to dispense the Equal Rites Awards, those coveted prizes given to people who labored mightily over the last 12 months to set back the cause of women.

what a fine idea ellen goodman has. this article is both funny and wince inducing.

The Sacramento Bee -- sacbee.com -- Molly Ivins: Phony political event

molly on our pal shrub:

"Apart from the government," he began at one seminar, "what can we do?" Is he the president of something besides the government?

More noise for leather boys

SO HERE WE have a San Francisco group called the Stop AIDS Project, partially funded by the Centers for Disease Control. The Stop AIDS Project has organized a series of classes, some of them with provocative titles like "Great Sex," "Sex Toys for Leather Boys" and "A Walk on the Wild Side."

Now, of course, it could have called the classes "Opportunities in Recreation" or "Some Devices of Interest to Processed-Cowhide Hobbyists" or "Toward an Ethnology of Post-Native Cultures Along the Pacific Flyway," but probably it wanted to attract as big an audience as possible.

Why? Remember: Human suffering bad.

i found this via laurel's windowseat weblog. laurel says some good stuff about this article.

I realize that I am more than just my online persona. But I am also more than just my in person persona. Who I am online is no less real than who I am in person. It's just differently mediated. All this is true, provided I choose to share my real self online. Turn Off Your Computer cult members can't perceive the realness of the online world, not because its realness doesn't exist, but because they refuse to present their own real selves to the online community. And, as C.S. Lewis observes, "How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?"

the article is found here. it's primarily about people who say "turn off your computer and go do something real!", but it also expresses a lot of things i've been thinking about how authenticity is valuable to me, and how i value people who try to be their authentic selves, whenever and wherever they are, and how i mistrust people who misrepresent themselves, especially if it's on purpose.

in my head, there's a difference between being snarky and being mean.

i consider myself to be pretty snarky. but i also put a fair bit of effort into not being mean.

sometimes i am mean. sometimes i'm even mean on purpose. but i usually try not to be.

you, there, the one reading this; do you see a difference between the two? if so, what? tell me about it.

things i don't appreciate very much:

• muddy thinking
  
• muddy writing
  

things i do appreciate a lot:

• clear thinking
  
• clear writing
  

someone i know is being a big slimeball. big huge slimeball.

ah, well. zie isn't being a slimeball to me personally, and zie knows better than to whine to me about it. so i will just fume quietly and offer advice as requested.

sleeping alone when i am not used to it is no good.

there's only so much snuggly comfort that a puppy can provide, you understand.

a few dreams:

i was in the bathroom, taking the little round clear size sticker off of my logical access work polo shirt (that part makes sense, just trust me) which was hanging inside out on a hanger in the bathroom. i first thought it was nathan's, but then i noticed that it said logical access, and i realized it was mine.

i had just gotten out of bed for a minute, and i was looking at the blankets and straightening them. there were our regular sheets, and on my side of the bed, there was a light blue fleece blanket, and on nathan's side, there was the pink wool blanket that we own that in real life we keep in the car. i thought that i hadn't realized that nathan got cold too at night, with the airconditioning.

i was in a big house, which was mine, even though it wasn't the house i actually live in. my parents lived there too. i was watching something on tv with my girlfriend, and then i needed to get up and take a shower (which i actually did, in real life) so she and i wound our way through the ever changing rooms until we got to my parents' bathroom, which had a walk in shower, and a hottub big enough to swim in. i was swimming in it, on the russian side, and she said something about "look out! there's torpedoes!" and i leapt out of the hot tub and sat on the side and she swam over and i was worried that there actually were russian torpedoes in the hottub. my girlfriend had no name in the dream, but she was about as tall as me, very skinny, her skintone was like her hair grew out of her head a dark red color, and her hair was actually a light marine blue. and she had slightly bumpy skin on her stomach, nice to the touch. oh! and one of my co-workers was there, nagging us about not having turned the tv off, but i asked her nicely and promised i'd owe her big and she was going to go turn off the tv for us.

ta-daaa!

i am not, in fact, sad at work in the morning. i am sad at home. i seem to have messed up my knee at swimming last night (note to self: do karate kicks slowly and carefully. even though it's more fun the other way.) so i am limping around the house.

well, that's better. it's now very late, i'm gong to be sad at work in the morning, but i've finished off a few score more orcs.

so fuck you
and your untouchable face
and fuck you
for existing in the first place
and who am i
that i should be vying for your touch
and who am i
i bet you can't even tell me that much


oddly, i'm angry again.

fuck you and your principles that bend whenever you think it's a good idea. fuck you and your desire to explain things to me.

right. maybe a bottle of cider and playing warcraft 3 for a while would be good. probably.

i am plagued by attractive bad ideas. plagued, i tell you.

(not that i want to not be plagued mind you. i just wish they were attractive good ideas. and the bits of my brain that dwell on the attractive parts longingly, while i am hanging on to the part where it's still a bad idea by the skin of my teeth, well, those bits of my brain can just shut up.)

i adore jon carroll. i do, i do.


They're even better than death!

"So I brooded about this for a day and came up with the following revelation, unavailable in any other opinion column in the nation: Taxes are good."

i do, in fact, voluntarily vote to have my taxes raised. yes, please, allow me to give more money to the government so that they can do things with it that i think are useful.

(as a not-unrelated note, the roads in michigan suck. they don't tax those people enough.)

i would like to get to the having things not bother me about this any more stage. where do i sign up for that stage? i think i missed the line.

home from detroit. my grandfather's memorial service was yesterday. his box didn't want to fit into his spot in the crypt, which my grandmother and step-grandmother were in, already. they were going to put his box on top of my aunt mimi (my stepgrandmother) who was on top of my grandmother. i wanted to ask them to please put my grandfather in the middle, but didn't.

i don't want to see naked pictures of you.

no, really, i don't.

either i already get to see you naked, in which case that's better than pictures, i don't get to see you naked but want to, in which case pictures would just be difficult and frustrating, or thirdly, as far as i can tell, you're probably trolling for compliments. in which case, brushing up on your writing skills and your ability to compose an elegant sentence is a better way to get me to say "oooooooh" at you.

i just don't understand people sometimes.

(if you've sent me writing to look at in the past week, this is not directed at you. and if you haven't posted a poll to the internet about whether or not you should put up nekkid pictures, this isn't directed at you, either.)

oh, the cuteness.

kimonos for yapdogs.

(if anyone can tell if such things are orderable off of that page, let me know.)