LOOK AT MEE!!

2002-01-30T14:24:00.000-05:00

Last night I slept from about 11:30pm to 8am.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?!

Being awake during the day has allowed me to do a couple things though (because lack of anything interesting happening online to distract me), for example I made a new sculpture. Now I just need a digital camera to document it with.

Also I've done a few webcomics, and it might become a regular series if i muster up the discipline to do so. It's about a family of evil Transformers (beast wars transformers, not the classic.. there's a bunch of reasons why, most of them just having to do with how the characters were first created. Anyway they're robots, and they transform into insects, okay?). By the way, these were drawn at my usual insane hours of the night times, not during the day, unless i had stayed up all night.

Jerkface (riboflavin.wox.org) has been erattic, evil.

2002-01-16T22:11:00.000-05:00

Ok, about that last post. It's not talking about you, me, or anyone I know, and it has no deeper meaning besides that I thought it was kindof a funny quote. Geez, people.

2002-01-16T04:35:00.000-05:00

"hm. well, it's not just that he sucks. it's that he's really more trouble than he's worth. he's smart and funny and is a nice guy sometimes, sure, but he also has a nasty habit of talking about people behind their backs and pretending that he likes them to their faces. and he uses people. and he's really judgmental. but also sort of he has no feelings. so, uh, yeah, that's basically why i don't hang out with girls." - Evelyn

2002-01-14T01:15:00.000-05:00

Its amazing how much your sleep can be screwed up when you lose web access for a few days, and all you ever do is sleep and do stuff on the web. But it at least got me to do a few random web designs just for something to do. I need like a new hobby or something. Preferably one that pays money. In other news, pnaomi got cable modem hooked up last week, so my regular website is back up, albeit probably slower. Hm, lets see.. nope not much else going on. Keep getting invited to do stuff I don't expecially feel like doing, or going out to do (be tony's delivery boy, bughouse, poker, watching enterprise rerun), so i stay home. That just kinda sucks. Probably mostly my fault tho.

2002-01-02T21:34:00.000-05:00

OK so teejay had a new years eve party, and it was really good. Also pretty big. Now i hate to be mentioning drunkeness in every friggin entry in this thing, but unfortunately I got pretty darn smashed at said party. Moreso than anyone else there by a longshot, it seems. I did not notice this, however, until it was time to leave. And it didnt help that a lot of my friends arent drinkers, dont really like hanging out with drunks, and/or had never seen me drunk before. So though I was having a good time, and I don't think being -too- obnoxious for most of the party, I think I might owe apologies to people for my actions in the last thrid of the night. I think. See, alcohol and clear memory don't mix very well, and the act of stupidity that those ive talked to noticed most I just vaguely recall maybe doing something like.. so in some cases the to whoms and what fors of apologizing arent quite clear yet (in others they are, i just havent seen the person yet). Hopefully im overstating things here.

oh and btw, i do know my limit, i just kinda forgot to pay attention to it that night. That last white russian with two shots of vodka at least, and one of kahluha (because it ran out) was a very, very bad idea. Good thing I spilled half of it.

2001-12-19T20:33:00.000-05:00

Wow, did i last post that long ago? Well, as an addendum, we did learn most of those lessons two nights later, when we ended up at a bar full of girls who were way too hot to give us the time of day, but some of them were too drunk to remember not to give us the time of day. Somehting like that.

Ok, so on to what i was posting for, Lord of the Rings is good.. really good. Better than Star Wars, even. No, not episode 1, the original friggin star wars. The film only had one flaw, which was that the sound was out of sync for the last reel. That sucked, big time. I'm going to have to see it an additional time because of that. darn.

2001-11-22T07:14:00.000-05:00

lessons taught, but not necessarily learned, tonight:

1. When planning an outing, always have a definite objective. Even if you're really thinking "head to this part of town, goto whatever bar looks good," tell others, "YES, we are going to Slaphappy's Pub on 3rd and Chestnut, at 11:30 sharp!"

2. When going to Olde City via car, use Market, not Chest-bomb-paranoia-roadblock-sends-you-all-the-way-to-friggin-south-street-nut!

3. Do not let the one whose decision making process goes (We go now! We're not sitting around my apartment any longer! To a bar!) --> (I don't see any bars I like here.. ooh, Pizzeria Uno! Hey, it has a bar..) --> (No pizza at pizzeria?! Evil! Let's just buy some steaks and go back to my apartment!) lead the outing.

4. Evan is a dope. However, one can't blame him for not wanting to wake up his parents for the third time and drive half an hour just to watch some drunks play video games.

5. I can, after all, become a bitter drunk.

And yes, I know a bunch of this is my fault. shuddap.

2001-11-09T05:21:00.000-05:00

Somehow got thinking on the music site idea i had again, mostly because chuck was bugging me to do something, so i made a crude mock up of what i want on the average site page. That flash picture wont end up looking quite like that- im discussing how to map stuff with my resident neuroscience expert when i can find him on icq and not 3 minutes from going to bed. And don't let the .py links fool you either, i think now most of the frontend will be in php. Might need a faster, more robust language to do the mapping grunt work tho (not sure, have to research further), and then there the database.. ugh. Man, wish I had a linux box or three to play with.. and broadband to connect them to.. and a digital camera and.. AG! out, materialist demons, begone! I am so tired of breaking up fights between them and the demons of sloth.

Oh and that crude mock up and the site idea its mocking up are so copyright by me, all rights reserved, it's not even funny. Away, idea stealing demons! Oh, wait, looks like that internet economy crash killed most of you already. exxcellent. Maybe if it ever actually comes to be the whole website setup will be open sourced. maybe not. i dunno.

2001-11-04T04:22:00.000-05:00

Alright, so one of the various options I'm considering is grad skool for architecture, and pursuant to that I decided now when I get some random idea for a building or whatnot, I should actually try and design it somehow. So i got this idea for a pyramidlike corner building that plays on the rules of perspective somewhat, made it in worldcraft/counterstrike (yeah "real" designing uses a real CAD program. I'll learn to do that some other time i suppose), and took screenshots. Well, I like it anyway.

2001-11-04T00:25:00.000-05:00

Ha. My old netreach webpage is still there. And I can still upload stuff to it. So a bunch of my website, and the images i use for blogs and whatnot are temporarily there now.

2001-11-03T22:52:00.000-05:00

Ok so turns out my motherboard was having a violent disagreement with my keyboard and mouse, so different input devices and now its all working happy. rock! It is now making mincemeat of all processor and ram intensive tasks, and begging me to get it a new graphics card.. you can hear it in the background.. like white noise.. oh, wait, no that's just all the fans.

2001-11-02T23:36:00.000-05:00

"the one" = typical american action movie, except with jet li (and the martial arts kickassness that implies) and some guy who looks like Bruce Willis's younger brother. Could've used a couple more fight scenes tho (or better plot, characters, and acting, but you can't expect that- see the first four words after the equals sign).

2001-11-01T05:20:00.000-05:00

Add to that last post website ebing down until pnaomi and her bf get dsl at their new condo. Considering the nature of pnaomi, and the nature of dsl providers, this could take anywhere from two days to five years. Mybe it'll be soon though, because bandwidth seems to fall into the small category of things that pnaomi will keep trying to get no matter what, without going "meh".

Which brings me to last weekend's major drunken revelation, that the Great Divide between the tools and the bums is that the former are driven by fear, and the later by laziness. Guess which side im on. I'm pretty sure someone came up with that before, because it sounded like Jason was quoting something when he said the thing that triggered the revelation, but it did provide the long elusive definition of the tool.

Oh, yeah, jason (friend from college, lives in central pa/maryland, displays both bum and tool traits) visited over the weekend for some reason. we saw a movie (waking life, good thing to see if you're in the mood for two hours of crazy good animation and heavy philosophy) and got some thai with sean, but mostly we just went bar hopping, which was even more expensive than i thought it'd be ($26 for four mixed drinks?! that werent that big or that good? worst tip i ever gave to an attractive waitress (and i was scrounging for change to give it)). The stated goal was girls, but none were gotten. There was opportunity, we believe, but we were too inhibited (aka too sober) to recognize and take advantage. Also the girls weren't that attractive. No, they were, they just had facial features sortof similar to this ugly girl we knew from college, with an equally bad personality. So it's all that girl's fault.

Which brings me to today's non-drunk revelation (i didnt drink while at dracula's ball at shampoo, because i knew none of my friends there were, but that was two people who i barely saw, so duh. except also i didnt wanna pay 4 bucks for a yuengling. Anyway the ball itself was pretty cool. very crowded. lots of people wearing cool costumes. I wrote on myself like in "memento", except replacing the idea of finding and killing my wife's murderer to finding the Ultimate Question to the Ultimate Answer, 42. Problem was, i wore the wrong shirt with it. Shoulda worn a button down shirt, like the guy in the movie. that way people couldve seen the cool stuff i wrote on my chest, without me being totally shirtless and insecure and whatnot. Or the other idea i had, which was to wear a bathrobe like Arthur Dent. Anyway the only writing visible was on my arms, and the only person who i know noticed was teejay, who had suggested the costume in the first place. Like 3 other people said they liked my Decepticon shirt tho. Actually i got a lot of people giving me random greetings and such. Maybe they knew me.). The revelation is, that unlike men, women seem to have a large divide between their long term relationshippy desires and their immediate pure sexual desires. Well men have it too i think but not as much. This explains why it is relatively easy to pick up a girl for a one night whatever at a bar or drinking party, but very hard to find a girl for a real relationship. And why the converse is true almost everywhere else (big emphasis on the relatively in both cases), except for the places where neither is possible, which is.. a whole lot of places. And why.. drat, all my other examples apply to men as well as women, just in slightly different ways.. anyway, yeah, that schism is in both sexes, and everyone prioritizes each differently, but I think there's a more distinct separation in women, and a more innate understanding that lust and love work on different time scales. Meanwhile men are completely boggled by the fact that it takes minutes or hours to score with random hookup girl, but it takes weeks and months to get even half that physically intimate with someone they really care about. Ok, so maybe they're not completely boggled by it. I figured it out and ive got barely any experience to speak of (though a bit more than most give me credit for), but it's the reprocussions and corralaries that permeate every facet of female behavior towards us that are just indecipherable. Or maybe not, maybe once you figure this much out the rest makes more sense.. probably not tho. i'll have to do some reasearch. watch some chick flicks, or something (the or something being the far preferable talking to an actual female, and not over icq.)

2001-10-25T02:53:00.000-04:00

status report: degree from one of the most academically respected universities in the country, 21 years old, no job, no prospects of job, no girlfriend, no prospects thereof, most of friends out of town, living in parent's house, in a boringass anonymous suburb, stuck on sucky family computer in the middle of the family room where I can't pretend I'm not living with my family until i get a faulty ram chip replaced.

stuff i can do about it: continue nonworking frustrating job search, take dumbass $10/hr or less job that will temporarily make my life suck even more but in the long term maybe possibly help me in some way, take random courses and do random stuff to pad resume with quasiusefulness, flee to some city and live as a bum (unless i first do the crap job, in which case i have enough dough to avoid bumness for about a week), apply to grad school, make art and try to break into the bullshit art scene.

currently i am choosing option z, despise everything.

2001-10-15T21:56:00.000-04:00

i won a free processor! AMD athlon xp 1800+. And motherboard, fan and heatsink! Woohoo! I had to show up with teejay (thnx teejay btw) at 6am at some parking lot near the philadelpia zoo and stand around for an hour and a half to win it. yeah. score one for the unemployed.

2001-10-14T23:50:00.000-04:00

best concert ever. Or at least until the next time I see Orbital. Actually, their other concert i was at might have been better, but they came on after Crystal Method and a lot of loud so my hearing was busted. I really shouldve written this after getting back from it on friday, instead of now. Becasue then I wouldve done a much better job of saying something besides "it was really good". 'The Girl with the Sun in Her Head' was somewhat remixed and really euphoric as it should be, 'Belfast' they somehow made really dancable, 'Satan' rocked harder than a lot of rock concerts I've been to (and im not talking about they might be giants), and well they did most of 'The Altogether' which i dont like as much as their older stuff, but it did give the set a whole lot of variety.

um yeah. im still stuck in blue bell.

2001-10-04T02:24:00.000-04:00

but it's wearing off.. fucking blue bell.

2001-10-03T18:29:00.000-04:00

current mental state: it's sort of like that episode of seinfeld where george does the exact opposite of what his instincts tell him all the time and suddenly his life stops sucking. Except unconcious. And not that drastic. And im not bald, fat, or in new york.

2001-10-02T13:41:00.000-04:00

alright, i now have something to actually blog about, so blog I shall.

thursday: drove to connecticut college to visit my sister. It's small but nice, and there's nothing to do for fun there but drink. Despite having partied like three days a week since getting there, none of the freshpeople seem to have figured out their limits yet. My sister, who wasnt drinking (that night) takes care of the drunks, while i follow drunken party degerancy to its logical conclusion. My sister apologizes a few days later because there wasnt much going on that night.

friday: drive to boston to visit evan tired, slightly hung over, and totally wtfed out. Find harvard no problem, but take half an hour to find a parking spot and evan. Finally meet up with evan and his girlfriend (yes, he has a girlfriend now), hang out, deal with parking, take a nap, try to plan going to a jazz club or something, end up at a top40 dance club place near boston u with a bunch of evan's friends, but its all cool.

sat: wait a long time after waking up, then go for breakfast at au bon pain at like 2:30. eat while watching street performers and throngs of random people in harvard square. walk around the area discussing open source and intellectual property and all that crap. Goto tea house, play pool. Return to dorm, meet up with this cool neuro grad girl, and a big group food and party outing ensues. After taking forever to accumulate everyone, end up eating really good thai food, then , after another wait, try to find this MIT party, an epic quest. When we fnid it, it sucks, but it has cheap guinness. Lose some people, walk to central square bar, lose people, get a drink or two before 2, walk back to dorm, lose people, watch the big lebowski (evan and his gf hadnt seen it. I hadn't seen it in a while with beer).

sun: get up late, eat at diner place, intend on heading home at some point but tired and talking to people over icq/im. Talk to evan about moving up to boston or something (because it's become painfully clear that i need to GET THE FUCK OUT OF BLUE BELL), seems doable, save the job finding, which is the same as anywhere else pretty much.

mon: drive home. new england and the hudson valley jived relly well with the cowboy bebop and boa/lain music i burned on wednesday. Realized that the internet may eventually kill mandatory specialization.. or at least i hope it will. Got home, found that my dad is totaly cool with e moving to boston, with a very few caveats, but there's still the job thing. Noted that evelyn had made a (relatively) whole lot of blog entries while i was gone, a good number of which involved her quasi-inadvertantly messing with the heads of boys. Did I mention that this whole trip was originally supposed to be to go see evelyn? funny that.

discussion and analysis will follow, but not necessarily here.

2001-09-18T04:01:00.000-04:00

destroy destructionism!

2001-09-16T03:01:00.000-04:00

Huh, reread that last entry just now, and it came off kindof different than i'd intended it. Made me seem kindof jerky, when really i was tired, mentally and emotionally, and i had a few things id been meaning to put here that i hadnt bothered to yet, and i didnt have any reaction to the events of the day that thousands or millions hadn't already written down. Or maybe i did, hence that weblog. I think im just more detached than most people. Like, im seeing all these flags out and on cars and "God Bless America" on all the store marquees, and im just kind of disturbed. Patriotism is supposed to be a good thing, but it can also bring about a lot of violence and intolerance in times like this. Over the last century especially, i think it's hard not to say that nationalism has done more harm than good. I hope this doesnt turn into another vietnam or world war or war on drugs. Justice, not vengeance. On Tuesday, i was shocked, numbed, saddened, and angered. Except the anger wasn't at the terrorists, it was at the people angry at the terrorists. The ones who were calling in all seriousness for nuking the entire Middle East. Fortunately, I think most of them have calmed down a bit, just wanting to destroy Afganistan instead, and not even with nukes. Unfortunately, it looks like they may get their war. Also, these guys were pissing me off yesterday.

In other news, today I quit my job.

2001-09-12T04:05:00.000-04:00

Hm, never did get around to expounding on the folk fest. Well, it was just generally fun, and for once none of my friends got pissed at each other by the end.

Everyone is blogging stuff about the wtc/pentagon stuff today. people are setting up weblogs just to blog about it. People who've never even seen a computer are somehow getting online and blogging about it. But they only get a short time to do it, because their goldfish has to get on and blog too. It's that crazy. I myself, if you couldn't tell already, arent going to rant about it here. I've ranted elsewhere, in a slightly more interactive medium, already, and since ive been watching the news and whatnot since 9am, my brain is pretty tired of it right now. Ah, but i did finally get the one piece of news i was waiting for, which is that my friend in lower nyc is ok. Prolly coulda found that out if i just asked people on icq earlier, but i didnt feel like icqing about this whole thing today.

So that kindof consumed my day somehow. I had intended on mailing something, but the mail is all screwed up, and intended on continuing trying to decide whether to stick with this ice sculpture delivery job (3 days a week, but its th-sat, dont get done till sometime between 5 and 8, and dont know what that sometime is until it gets to be that sometime) or switch to temp data entry (a rerun of sucktitude that pays a little less, but stable hours). The ice thing could easily become full time, but i dunno if i can take that, and the temp thing always has the shot at showing the company im not a moron and them hiring me for some random crap. In my usual fashion, i am being completely indecisive, and holding with the status quo until some magical option 3 comes along. Except every time i hear something about the job market, it's gotten worse. Anyway, i wanted to figure that out, like, last week, and still havent.

yep. nothing like whining about your lack of job options on a day where x thousand people have been killed. i've watched those crash scenes a few million times now and my brain still thinks its a movie.

2001-08-28T02:59:00.000-04:00

FOLK FEST! yeah, that was good. maybe more on that later, i dunno. I think my website is down temporarily because pnaomi is moving. or something. I came across two weird cool things sunday that weren't even connected to the folk fest in any way. First, that day's family circus comic did not completely and utterly suck like it always does. It had one frame of little billy or jeffy or whatever the fuck his and his dumb sister and mom going into some school supplies school, saying something along the lines of "school sucks!" Next fram, they're on their way out, carrying loads of new stuff, saying "YAAAY! I can't wait to get back to school!" Looking at itthe right way, it's kinda interesting commentary on how commercialism supports our less than stellar institutions, and vice versa. Ok, I didn't say it was a great cartoon, just that it didn't make me want to get out a knife and maim entire families, like that comic usually does. Oh, yeah, and the other kindof cool thing was that when flipping around radio stations, i happened by 103.9, formerly wdre and now apparently a rap/hiphop/r&b station, and there was actual quality DJing going on. You know, with the record scratching, and the playing with the tempo, and the creating something new out of the mix of two different songs. It wasn't the sort of music i normally listen to, but it was really cool. Actually it wasn't all that far from the music i normally listen to. A lot closer than most of the crap they play on "alternative" stations these days. On a semi-related note, i think rappers and folk singers may have a lot more in common than most people realize. If someone could merge the.. oh, wait, yeah, Beck.

2001-08-20T01:06:00.000-04:00

Sean somehow found a webring of chicks that dig scrawny pale guys. For those that don't know, I fall into that particular class of guys. I browsed a random sampling of the sites.. the first one was a nicely designed homepage of a cute geekish girl. Most of the rest went to nicely designed sites of scary geekish girls. However, people with webpages are scary in real life by default, so I'm not sure that was an accurate sampling. I guess my overall reaction is "fightened but intrigued," or something. Oh, and they all seemed to really like some form of indie rock. I really like some forms of electronica. I guess that means no scrawny pale guy digging chicks for me.

today=worst hangover ever.

2001-08-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

I now have yet another weblog, not because I created one, but because slashdot gave me one. Probably they gave you one too. They also added some other random features, which I think were mainly added to keep all the trolls busy for a few minutes. Um, lessee.. Evan is back from europe, and the combination of jet lag and video games is making his sleep pattern even more insane than mine is. He reccomends spain. Got back to working on one of my counterstrike maps, and I really wish I had a digital camera because people who post pics of copy machines on the web don't seem to do it with using the images as the source for a texture map in mind. Evelyn seems to be mad at me because she interpreted "i think you should go play on the roof" as "I wish you were dead." I certainly didnt mean it that way though. Roofs are fun! I get the feeling that my life might have been a bunch better if i had woken up and hour or two earlier this afternoon. Oh well. This is the boringest week since chicago.

2001-08-14T18:09:00.000-04:00

this morning while i was drifting off to sleep i opened my eyes and instead of the black wiping up like usual, it irised in to a little black dot and disappeared. I've been trying to get it to do that again, but it won't. Oh, and i'm finally making another thing like this, except simpler in the plaster portion, which is just stalactites. or is it stalagmites?

2001-08-11T01:12:00.000-04:00

is there a word for ennui that isn't boring or french?

2001-08-09T06:07:00.000-04:00

massive amounts of people i know were supposed to goto shampoo tonight, but then massive amounts of people decided not to. Instead, there were massive amounts of people who know people i know, and people who know them. All of which were like 16ish, i think, and many of which only had conversations that only made sense to their group of friends, leaving me with no in on the conversation or anything. Except perhaps for one of Cliff's hunter-wannabe friends (i think his name was mike, but i didnt really catch it), who turned out to be somewhat cooler and less hunterish than i had assumed at first. I don't think Hunter's ever gone to a goth club wearing a long skirt, fishnet shirt, and makeup. (Cliff: dont give me the i-told-you-so, that post was non-serious, and I fully realize that it's usually not a good idea to instantly judge people. k? Osik: no, the guy was not gay, or at least he did a good job of saying he was straight and acting straight despite crossdressing. Those searching my weblog with a fine tooth comb for hypocrisy: Yes, I know that there's really no such thing as acting straight or gay, outside who one sees as a potential mate, but there is a certain amount of truth to the stereotypes)

Ok, i went on too long about that, just to save myself a few dumb icq messages tomorrow. To balance it out, i guess ill go on way too long about other stuff too. I'd always wondered what the deal was with those people who just lounge around in the back at shampoo, and then tonight I was doing it. I didn't feel quite as much like dancing tonight, and neither, it seemed, did most of the people who I knew (directly) there. So we lounged around and tried to talk over the loudness. It was actually kind of fun, even when I couldn't hear what the person was saying and just nodded and/or laughed. Talked to Erin a bunch, something I haven't done in a while, actually haven't done often at all. Probably this has something to do with that big crazy crush i had on her in highschool where i was afraid to even talk to her for fear of screwing something up (yeah, I was a moron(and how)), and the subsequent mutual awkwardness that lasted a few years after. It's reassuring somehow to be able to have a normal conversation with this person now.
Hmm.. so.. darn can't think of anything else to go on way too long about at the moment, i should just sleep. Just a quick re-revisit, I should have noted that being like hunter is not a bad thing at all, except that he has this way of repeatedly getting trapped in hellish situations. I mean, he was Tony's roommate once, for god's sake! Man, I havent seen hunter in like a year.

2001-08-07T00:03:00.000-04:00

money or goods for services! cha-ching!
teejay had a party for once. potluck, and it actually turned out being a decent party, except for the alcohol supply being exceeded by demand, and the influx of hunter-wannabe friends of cliff. Why they want to be like hunter, I'm not sure, since I hear hunter's life is pretty toilety right now. They're started along the path to hunterdom, though, dropping out of school, wearing all black, and doing various drugs while managing to stay moderately intellegent. Except I think they all might have forgotten the part about getting a job at a small local internet startup called cdnow, back in 1997 or so, and becoming computer gods.

2001-08-06T04:32:00.000-04:00

It's always fun when your big senior art project's crazy obscure esoteric conceptual basis is backed up by physicists. Now it's only a matter of time until art expressing the world as a scale-free network becomes commercially viable, given that such art can be put into contact with the primary nodes of cultural taste.. guess that means I should start making some again.

2001-08-04T03:00:00.000-04:00

planet of the apes felt like a bad episode of voyager, except its main character was about 2567 times less annoying than janeway. Also, it had the most broken ending ever. the ape army was cool, tho.

2001-08-02T18:35:00.000-04:00

booring. I have gotten nothing for my services in the last three days. Well, except for maybe the food on my table and roof over my head, but those don't count.

2001-07-31T04:29:00.000-04:00

people are often willing to exchange money or goods for services. Yesterday chuck forgave a small debt and bought me dennys food for helping build his new computer (which i didn't ask for any compensation for). Today tony burned me the new crystal method cd for bringing him a sandwich (i didnt agree to do it until he offered the cd, and i figured out i could get dinner and cereal for myself while i was at it). Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here. Wait, no there's not.

2001-07-29T07:01:00.000-04:00

This is an all in good fun, often joking even when it doesnt look like it, nobody get insulted, ok? post.

Thursday night/friday morning after getting back from a club i wanted to post something along the lines of "When a girl comes out of nowhere, grind-daces you into the wall, and says 'you're the sexiest man in the world when you're dancing' she ought to be legally required to.. i dunno, not go away five minutes later?" but blogger was being dumb, and then later i realized that when she went away, i really should've followed her like a fool, instead of standing there confused like a fool. At least that way if/when i got shot down I wouldn't have not following her like a fool as a culprit, thus getting me one step closer to something legit to comlpain about.

Evelyn needs to stop having parties. Or at least stop having parties where not that many people show up, and those that do have an age range of like ten years, don't know more than 3-5 other people at the party from any context outside of Evelyn's parties, and don't have any particular desire to hang out with most of the people there (not that i dislike them either. not even the annoying ones that somehow werent nearly as annoying this time). Also, her dad needs to stop being evil, but you knew that already.

Tony's birthday party, I can't really complain about, because, while it was not so great by party standards, it was pretty decent for a night of hanging out. And because we planned it about an hour in advance, and because it would be complete hypocrisy for me to bug people to be more social, and because it was supposed to be at teejay's pool.

Um, what are party standards, anyway? For some reason we're conditioned to compare them all to some ideal where random cute people of the opposite sex show up, everyone talks, has a good time and meets a few new friends, people get drunk, but not too drunk, and then everyone gets laid, but also the party isn't a degenerate stupidfest of debauchery. Except that never, ever happens. Especially when at least half of the people invited don't like drinking and/or aren't looking to get laid (that night).. actually, im pretty sure a whole lot of my friends dont share that standard for parties.. where the heck did I get it? Oh yeah. Stupid college (yes, the parties sucked there, too).

2001-07-24T21:28:00.000-04:00

So, I started a new project, writing a work of fiction on a blog. The idea is to have each post be a separate document or part of a document, like a newspaper clipping, or a diary entry, or an image, that string together to form a story. Not exactly a brand-spanking-new idea, but something I wanted to try out. Anyway it's a science fiction story that's been bouncing around in my head for a few weeks looking for the right medium. here it is. Yes, I'm going to change the template.

2001-07-23T15:12:00.000-04:00

this was really incredibly good news yesterday. Even dubbed, edited, and on cable at 1 am, Cowboy Bebop on TV can only be a good thing for the state of the universe.

2001-07-22T20:23:00.000-04:00

Ok, something's screwy with that guestbook now. Actually I think it's something screwy with the server, because i can't upload anything either. I guess I'll just have to wait until pnaomi gets back from seattle and bug her about it, though she may be aware of the problem already but unable to fix it yet on account of being 3000mi away from the server. Stupid people with lives.

Oh, wait, what am i talking about, i was just at a largish party yesterday. Kati's graduation/birthday plus like two other bonus parties on the premises. The highlight of that would have to be this game called "wink", which was the final contribution of Angela to my social group before she dropped off the face of the earth. The rules are pretty simple, but hard and pointless to explain, except that everyone is put into pairs, and one pair member tries to get somewhere, while another tries to hold them back, and there's no standing up allowed. Also key is that the game is always played in co-ed groups (it's not always guy vs girl matchups, but a good portion of the time). So, um, yeah, there was about an hour where i was beating up, or getting beaten up by girls. I'm not that strong of a guy, so I got a fair share of the latter. Darn. I find it hard to see being wrapped up by a woman and not being able to escape as a bad thing. Maybe if I was one of those guys who actually care how much they can bench, I'd see different. Oh well. There is one fatal flaw to wink, however, which is that after the party, the girls go away, but the pain doesn't. I guess that's what social skills and aspirin are for.

2001-07-19T03:13:00.000-04:00

i jumped on the weblog bandwagon, so why not the grandaddy of them all, the guestbook bandwagon? As far as I can tell, the point of most guestbooks is so that people can be amazed how many people go to their home page. Except, i have server logs that can do that. So, i'd prefer if the guestbook could be used for people to respond to my website, writings, art, etc. (positively or negatively), but hey, if you wanna post "Hi! I'm Becky Berkinswyth from Sydney, Australia!" hey, knowck yourself out, it's better than me just having that one test post.

ususally i don't care about the dumb webbys, but i checked it out anyway, and this site is cool.

2001-07-17T17:24:00.000-04:00

No matter where you go, there we are. You are just getting settled - putting the empty boxes out by the curb, figuring out which coffee place is most convienient on the way to work - but when better to seek out the company and conversation of your fellow alumni?

-today's junk mail.

stupid cold, go away faster already.

2001-07-15T03:59:00.000-04:00

WHOA. From the very inane details in nick's weblog that I just mocked, I deduced that he's living around the University of Chicago, the very University of Chicago that I just graduated from. I know that duck pond! i know that minimalistic sculpture! it's right where i was going to put up a wired network sculpture, but was way too lazy. Wow. If I had known that before, I might have made an effort to see him while I was still there. Maybe. As it is, then, i can say this: HAHAHA! SUCKAAA!
Fortunately for him, though, he's just there for the summer, so he wont have to experience what a vortex of toolish evil hyde park really is... of course, by the Hyde Park Vortex Theory, he may never leave. mwaaahhahahahaha!

2001-07-15T03:25:00.000-04:00

today i went to denny's with sean and teejay. we all ordered pancakes, but teejay ordered a little after sean and i. sean and i got the pancakes like two minutes after we ordered, and teejay got them like twenty minutes after sean and i had finished eating, and his butter was really melted, more melted than mine or sean's. also, we saw rishi(sp?) and goadi(sp?), some friends of my sister's, or they used to be friends, i dont know, and also teejay knew them (because he knows everyone), and they had just gotten back from area:one, because unlike me they weren't practically broke and unlike teejay they didn't have to work today. bastards. in the car today i was listening to some cd of my sisters of some pop-ish rock band that's surprisingly good, though their influences are almost too obvious. they did a pretty good cover of "mrs. robinson" that i have on mp3 except my mp3 says that its by weezer. i hate it when fools mislabel mp3s. the same thing happened a few weeks ago when song that was labeled "bjork" when i downloaded it but sounded kindof unbjorklike so i figured it was early stuff from before she went solo was heard in the living room, and my sister said it was some other singer who was definitely not bjork. which reminds me, i should find more music from whoever that was. Also at denny's we were talking about weblogs and how nick's tells every boring little detail of his day even though everyone tells him to stop doing it but he wont and it'd be funny to have a weblog where one minute all sorts of crazy stuff happened and then the next entry would be about what kind of oatmeal you had for breakfast, and it was all equally made up. well, teejay thought it was really funny anyway. just for your information, i never even looked at nick's weblog before going and finding that url to link to. hm, i don't think that last post was insane enough. oh well, im not at the stage of just making up stuff out of nowhere to grab ratings points yet. do weblogs have ratings points? they should. it'd be really corrupt and amusing.

2001-07-15T03:01:00.000-04:00

I was just thinking, it'd be pretty fun to declare my unrequited love for someone in my weblog. Sure, the someone probably wouldn't appreciate it too much, but it'd be fun, in a poetically humiliating way. Problem is, I don't have an unrequited love right now. All my unrequited relationships are sort of hazy and undefined, and I don't know that they would go very far if I could requite them. In fact, the closest I've ever had to unrequited love has been unrequited intense infatuation, and I gave that up because it's just no fun after a while (man, I wish I had a weblog back then. It would have been much more interesting to read than this). Yeah, all unrequited intense infatuation got me was about a dozen lessons in how not to court a relationship, one or two bad poems, and two or three years worth of stalking jokes from chuck and julie and like ten other people.

So, where was I? Unrequited love. I've got none of that, besides a general vague longing for affection that everyone has once they're old enough to find their parents annoying. So, as much as I'd like to self centeredly bear my soul for the entire internet to see, just for the exhibitionistic fun of it, my soul doesn't have any particularly pressing agenda at the moment.

How horribly inconvienient.

2001-07-14T23:53:00.000-04:00

well, nothing interesting happened today or yesterday. I was right. you see, i only believe unrelated things affect me in some important way because it's TRUE! It's chaos theory, people!

hey, uhh.. what's with the straightjacket? come on g-mmph! mmph!

2001-07-14T20:00:00.000-04:00

oh, yeah, and the other big problem i had with that test was that it had all these yes or no questions where my real answer was "sometimes", or "do you x because y?" when i do x, but because z. Basically it tried to box you in to categories too much. Of course, most personality tests do that, and most people do that, too. We're not really equipped to understand the world without categorizing things. Actually, we're not equipped to understand the world, period.

that sounded deep, so I'll leave it at that.

2001-07-14T17:43:00.000-04:00

stupid pnaomi's weblog pointed me to a stupid personality test that i stupidly took and got these stupid results:

Disorder | Rating
Paranoid: Low
Schizoid: High
Schizotypal: High
Antisocial: Low
Borderline: Low
Histrionic: Low
Narcissistic: Low
Avoidant: Moderate
Dependent: Low
Obsessive-Compulsive: Low

schizoid=loner, which i'm pretty borderline on, just by virtue of being introverted
"Schizotypal: Many believe that schizotypal personality disorder represents mild schizophrenia. The disorder is characterized by odd forms of thinking and perceiving, and individuals with this disorder often seek isolation from others. They sometimes believe to have extra sensory ability or that unrelated events relate to them in some important way. They generally engage in eccentric behavior and have difficulty concentrating for long periods of time. Their speech is often over elaborate and difficult to follow."

I don't think I have ESP, but otherwise that's all at least a little bit true about me. Apparently not thinking just like 95% of the population means I have a disorder. Bah, I say! Eccentricity is fun! The world needs its weirdos!

I'd write more, but I've gone on this rant before, and probably will again, and I'm gonna go get chinese food in ten minutes.

2001-07-13T17:03:00.000-04:00

Oh, wait, it's Friday the 13th? Well that changes the metaprobabilistic calculations completely!
I'll get back to you when I figure out all of the far reaching implications...

2001-07-13T16:59:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so after that rant, I hung out with a bunch of different people in the last two days, doing a bunch of different stuff, and a lot of it was like back in the "good ol days" or whatever. Of course, now that I'm saying things are kinda good, they'll start sucking again.. and any further pronouncements will have no effect because I'll expect them to. In fact, I might have negated this one already. No, probably not.

2001-07-09T22:25:00.000-04:00

hmm.. something still bugs me about this page layout...

you mean how it SUCKS?

Shuddap.

make me.

SUICIDE KICK!

now I feel better.

2001-07-09T00:25:00.000-04:00

activities of the last week or so:
last sunday: i forget, probably not much
monday: frisbee for the first time since last summer. fun but painful
tuesday: went to a dance club. spent $5 on gas and $4 on a beer.
4th of july: watched a few things explode
thursday: bowling, $8, watched a video rental i'd already seen in theaters.
friday: fireworks at wissahickon. met some people there, but not as many as expected, then most of those people disappeared, found some other people and went to brownies (bar/club), which reminded me of highschool at wissahickon in it's mind numbing mediocrity. $9.50, cover plus a beer i thought there was a special on.
saturday: tgi fridays, $15, rented a really bad movie. I was wary of going to fridays because im running low on cash, but they said a largeish group of people was going to be there. Except then three people (out of 8) didn't show up.
today: decided not to spend money on entertainment tonight, and try to keep it that way until wednesday (when final fantasy comes out). Couldn't find anything to do.

$41.50 total for the week. I have $22 left.

My friends used to just hang out at people's houses all the time, and have a lot of fun doing it. What gives? Why is it that the only things that seem somewhat amusing anymore involve loud music, booze, and/or staring at a screen, and most of them involve spending more money than they're worth? So far I've got only a couple possible reasons. One is that my social group from highschool has been slowly falling apart- of course, not too long ago, such social groups were destroyed as soon as people went to college, but then came instant messaging. Even with that, though, people are getting on with their lives, moving far away, or having schedules that all conflict (tony goes to bed at 10. joe gets off work at 10:30. jasmine, jennie and feroza work at random times and are as reliably unreliable as teejay used to be. Teejay now resides permanently in a separate universe.) and all developing into different people too.

The other is a bit more specific to me (though sean says he went through much the same thing), which is that all the interestingness has been sucked out of me. It was mortally wounded when I entered college and found that everything I found fun or interesting was scoffed at by everyone around me. Even though it recuperated some when i got back home, and i eventually found people at college sympathetic to my views, my interestingness has been slowly bleeding to death ever since. It didn't help that my college was generally considered one of the least fun ones around (a popular t-shirt calls it "where fun comes to die") or that the moment of my culture shock came when i had just gained some social self confidence, but was emotionally pretty messed up. The thing is though, Sean said he experienced much the same thing at Penn State- and there isn't a much more different college from the Univeristy of Chicago than Penn State, besides perhaps that they're both big and diverse, and when one comes into them with a very unconventional viewpoint, its going to be hard to find people there who have something in common with it, even if they do exist.

hence, the only ways of having fun left are what people wanting my money throw at me. Yes, that is hyperbole, thank you for asking.

i dunno if there's any conclusion to be drawn from all this.. maybe just that life isn't a huge mcdonalds ball pit (or, in sean's case, a vat of mayonnaise).

2001-07-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

yet another test post..

2001-07-05T20:20:00.000-04:00

ok, so maybe this will actually work right now.. yeah..

2001-07-05T20:13:00.000-04:00

After months of people bugging me to make a weblog, i talk to somebody about weblogs, and they say they
sound egomaniac and dumb. That was five minutes ago.

Things to look foreward to:

- Bitching about not having a job, and blaming the bad tech job market, the U.S. economic system, and the city
of chicago for it.

- The trials and tribulations of trying to find things to do and/or girls to do things with in blue bell and philly.

- Updates on whatever random artistic endeavours I'm doing instead of getting a damn job.

- Thoughts about life.

- Random posts that have absolutely no relation to anything, and are compete lies.

Rules and Regulations:

-Do not bug me to update this weblog. I will do it when i feel like it, be that daily, hourly, monthly or never.

Money Back Gaurantee:

-If you are entertained by this weblog in any way, simply hit yourself on the head with a frying pan and pass
out. You'll feel better in the morning.