Category Archives: Gossip

gossip, speech recognition, books, a secret rendezvous, and a lazy douche 1

> Lacquer – Track 11, The Tosser’s Song
> Depeche Mode – Policy of Truth
> Dondolo – Peng
> Black Eyed Peas – My Humps

So I guess that guy from Brookings didn’t block me at all. He instant messaged me last night while I was talking to Kelly, and we had a long conversation. He had been been hanging out with this friend almost exclusively that is going into the army sometime very soon. The guy (Thomas) said he’s going to be in Crescent City on Friday, so I guess we’re going to see see a movie. He was a bit vague as to whether there were going to be any other people. We had a great conversation over the phone weeks ago, so I hope the same will follow for meeting in person.

I just did the Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial, and I have now found out how to do all of the things that required me using the keyboard. Why I didn’t do this before, I have no idea. It’s timed very well, because I totally blew out my wrists typing obituaries today. They still hurt. And I have two more to do tomorrow, at the least. I hope I feel better tomorrow. Why can’t they just use PC’s there? Well, if they did, I’m sure that they would be incredibly crappy and completely unable to run Dragon.

My math class is Thursday, and I need to do a bunch of homework. I’m really hungry, and I can’t focus. Not to mention the searing pain in my arm. After work I walked over to Rite Aid and bought a tea ball so that I could make some of the loose red tea that I bought ages ago. Joe’s still hasn’t e-mailed me back, but he’s probably busy with classes like I should be.

My dad made chili for dinner, and it was actually palatable. I’m very surprised. Last night I slept for about 12 hours. Misty called me around midnight, and I was totally asleep. I hope she calls tonight, mostly so I can tell her the gossip about the Brookings guy. I think he was flirting with me, but I couldn’t be sure. Jordan has been obsessively messaging him. The one lesson I learned from The Persian Boy is to never be importunate. And Jordan definitely excels at that. How pathetic.

Since the auction on my laptop didn’t go through; I bought books yesterday and they shipped today! I got:

Neuromancer (remembering tomorrow) by William Gibson
The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Concrete Island: a Novel by J. G. Ballard
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

The Ballard titles I have wanted for ever, but didn’t want to play roulette with whether they would be good or not. But come on, it’s Ballard. I guess I was just disappointed by reading Player Piano by Vonnegut, and having it sort of suck. I read later that it was his first novel, so I can understand it’s sucking… but if Ballard sucked, it would destroy my precarious world. Anyway, I have been reading Jane Austen and Mary Shelley for way too long and I need the testosterone/semiconductor-crazed fantasies of some cyberpunk pulp. I have wanted to read The Atrocity Exhibition and Concrete Island since like 2003. It will be incredibly cool to finally get them. And I always wanted to read Philip K. Dick. I heard ages ago that they were making a movie out of A Scanner Darkly, so that was the reason I wanted to buy it. I wonder when it’s coming out. I should ask Josh.

I can’t wait to hang out with Thomas Friday. It probably won’t happen, since he has stood me up before, but it would be cool to hang out with a stranger for once. Well, not a stranger. But someone that I don’t know everything about. I stayed up to 5 a.m. two days ago pulling Misty’s hair through a cap in order for her to put blond highlights in it. She totally owes me a haircut. I don’t know how I would look short again. I am sort of accustomed to this scraggly Beatles-esque look now. I hope me and Misty will hang out tonight. I will bring over my tea, if she wants some. Oh yeah, I promised her I would bake her cookies. I will once I don’t have any more math homework to do. I really need to get on that. I will put some soft music on my iPod and get to it. Now.

Oh, PS: I was overhearing a conversation between the Insipid Coworker of Doom and my boss, and she was assuring him that we absolutely couldn’t scan is one thing in because it was too big. I wanted to walk into his office, smack her, and say “Shut up, lazy bitch. I scan big documents all the time. You just scan it in section by section and knit it together in Photoshop. It’s amazing that since your primary job is to use Photoshop that you have absolutely no idea how to use it. Go suck a cock, you inept cunt.”

OK, must start the homework.

Categories: Gossip,Happiness,Vitriol

Published:
October 5, 2005 – 5:38 pm
Author:
By A.

some catching up to do 0

I am not going to sleep tonight. There is simply too much to do. I took a bunch of photos and a video of me and my iPod in action. Now I’m making a little video that will hopefully be posted later. I have been incredibly busy, for no reason. I guess I should catch you guys up on the last few days when I was lazy and didn’t blog. It’s funny, I blog so much when I have nothing to say but when interesting cool things do happen, I’m busy doing them and not writing them down.

The three reasons I haven’t been blogging, in picture form:

3 reasons

The iPod speaks for itself (it looks like it’s covered in cellophane becuase I made a homemade case for it out of an old CD-ROM sleeve until the case I want ships at the end of the month. It turns out that the Nano is INCREDIBLY prone to scratches, and as soon as I got a noticeable one on the LCD I McGuyvered a case for it. The chain mail took forever to make. That is HUNDREDS of links in those pieces. And I spent hours turning my old burned CDs into playlists for syncing to my iPod.

Thing to catch up on #1: we had a second going away party for Kat at Katie’s house on Friday, and it was really really fun. I felt very stiff and weird in the beginning, like I had somehow interrupted them and wasn’t welcome (not true). I kept thinking to myself how I always overanalyze social situations, but once I had a glass of wine I was fine. And by the end of the night, I had gotten to know the new coworker that is starting sometime soon. We both love reading, which is enough to give anybody in A+ in my book. We just got along really well to. I’m glad Kat isn’t getting replaced by some asshole. Not like anyone can replace her, but still. I was outbid on the computer I was wanting on eBay. And it happened when I was asleep too, which really pissed me off. I’m actually sort of glad. Now I have some money and a bit of a safety cushion. And it’s definitely a big enough monetary safety cushion to consider moving in with misty at the end of October.

Thing to catch up on number #2: Drunken Party:

I went over to Misty’s last night, and we had a bit of fun. First we watched The Wedding Date, which was actually not bad considering how much I was expecting it to totally suck. It was exactly as you would imagine it to be, if you haven’t seen it. It was totally cliché, but with just enough spice to entertain. I mean, it’s not like there’s going to be any sort of plot twist in any movie where Deborah Messing is playing a lead role. So we drank a bit and started playing Never Have I Ever, then Misty started talking about what she wanted in life, and I really didn’t know what to say to her. I don’t know what I want to do with my life either. And I guess it’s cool that we can both admit that. We have both unfortunately teamed up to hate Selena. It really makes me sad because I think that the Selena that I used to know was an amazing person, but when a really cool person starts totally ignoring you and rushing upstairs to fuck their boyfriend for the millionth time instead even saying hello to you then they quickly move to my shit list. Also, it didn’t help her shitlist rank at all when I was over there she was busily getting penetrated and I wanted to ask her if I could plug my iPod and one of the USB ports on the computer in her room to charge my iPod since it had died. It’s the little things that will turn me against people. I’m sure I would totally love her if she started talking to me again, but I don’t think that is going to happen. If you’re reading this Selena, I really don’t hate you. Call me or something sometime! Eh, the damage is probably done. Oh well.

That’s strange, I thought I had so much more to say. I’ve forgotten it all by now. Went too long between posts. Eh, it happens. At least I got the major bases covered.

Must show you guys pics I took of my iPod tonight. I tried to include some items to give you an idea of just how impossibly small it is.

me and the sex
Enjoying the sexiness of the pod.

cell comparison

Now I feel like my cell phone is gigantic.

change and a sharpie

Look how freaking small that is!

I’m working on this little iPod movie thingy and it just came out! Props to Intel for my 3.0GHz number-crunching sex machine, and Adobe Premiere and Flash for making bit of self-indulgence possible:

Turn up your speakers and check my self-indulgent, amusing ipod commercial out, cuz it’s going to be gone tomorrow. (fyi–the video won’t work on dial-up connections)

The rockout track is “Little L” by Jamiroquai.

Categories: Gossip,Tech lust

Published:
October 3, 2005 – 3:02 am
Author:
By A.

omfg 0

I got my iPod today. There are no words. It’s simply amazing. And impossibly small. The pictures don’t do it justice. At first, I had a bunch of problems getting windows to recognize it, but I realized the problem was that my USB 2.0 (which was always finicky) needed to be set up with the right drivers. After that, it was amazing. The thing displays photos, has games, and all sorts of incredible extras. The one downside is that it doesn’t work on Macs and PCs. Well, it does but if you want to use it on a Mac you have to erase all the files on it. However, if you connect it to a Mac and it is PC formatted, it will charge the iPod. Which is probably all I would be doing if I connected it to a Mac. No one has outbid me on my computer yet, so it looks as if I will be in a world of brokeness. But at least I will have a PowerBook.
And that makes me cooler than you. :)

That Thomas guy from Brookings was online today. Either he unblocked me or he didn’t block me to begin with. I’m going with the former. I didn’t talk to him. I think the reason he blocked me was because I was far too eager to hang out. He posted new pictures on MySpace, and I really couldn’t picture us doing it. Maybe I will talk to him the next time he signs on.0

My dad is starting to doubt that I’m actually going to college. I need to stay in town longer.

I start my math class tomorrow, but I think I’m registered for the wrong one. The lady bamboozled me me into registering for something that she thought was the right thing, but I don’t know. If I show up tomorrow and they tell me to leave then I will know.

I put all sorts of pictures on my iPod, photos of Ben and Kelly and Dan and all my past friends. So no matter where I am, I will have cool people with me. Or at least their JPEG equivalents.

Well, not much else to report. I went on a three-mile bike ride as soon as I got music loaded on my iPod, and it was so great to just get out there and ride again. Luckily my car stereo has a line-in port, so I can just connect my iPod directly to the stereo with no FM transmitter. I do want to get a FM ransmitter, but I want one that complements the form of my nano, and those probably won’t come out until Christmas or so.

I’m absolutely excited about my iPod. I can’t wait to show it off at work tomorrow.

Categories: Gossip,Tech lust

Published:
September 28, 2005 – 8:15 pm
Author:
By A.

no time for yesterday 0

Today I’m totally paralyzed. I woke up, checked the tracking number on my iPod, and it’s now in Kansas or Kentucky or some bumfuck nowhere place. It’s probably going to take another week at least. I went to work, got done with that, and walked over to the library to drop off Ulysses. Their Internet was down, so I couldn’t find the titles of any books that I wanted to check out, but I remembered that I wanted to read Snow Crash and something by William Gibson, so I typed to those into the library’s search database. Nothing. I wasn’t surprised. As I walked through the aisles, it amazed me to see a biography of Hillary Clinton. It seemed like every book was published in some year before 1945. I glanced at all of these great authors: Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Dante, and I’m just bored.

What do these dead people have to tell me about my life? How is any of this still relevant? All of this ridiculous musing about God makes me want to fall asleep. There is no God. There is no ultimate justice. What is the point of these novels? Partly because it’s gotten less implausible, and mostly because I have nothing better to read, I’ve been working on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein again. The writing style is just so different from modern writers. Every two seconds the characters are crying about the beauty of something and then crying with suffering or so moved with glee that they’re floating on air. I wonder if today’s prose will go down in history as being so incredibly unrealistic. But then again, what is literary realism? If I read a truly realistic novel, it would be about me sitting here for two hours blogging. Or the 18th century equivalent. Yawn.

I read the Wikipedia entry for James Joyce yesterday and absolutely lost every interest I ever had in reading that book. He adapted it from Homer’s Odyssey. At one point in the drafts, every chapter was named the same as the chapters in the Odyssey. Way to go, James Joyce. You can not only write a painfully boring novel, you can rip it off from a poet that’s been dead since the eighth century. Fucking uberyawn.

So I stalked around the library for a few minutes longer, trying to find something. I saw one novel by Philip K. Dick, but it wasn’t one of his well-known works. And I had this thought that there was no point. That all of these people were dead and would have no idea how to relate to modern society. Me and Amanda were talking online yesterday, and we couldn’t find anything to say to each other because we already knew everything about each others’ lives via blogs. What if we lived in a world where everybody’s thoughts were immediately published and all information was instantaneously available from anywhere? There would be no point in conversation. It just makes me very uncertain that we are living in such times where were blundering ahead into this brave new technological world with absolutely no reflection going on about how this is going to change people and our whole society. Maybe there are people writing about it, but I haven’t heard about them.

J.G. Ballard is losing his touch. He predicted the 90s. Bravo James, but we need some new prophets, and I don’t see them in this cultural wasteland of cut and paste philosophy. I feel like I want to write again, but I don’t know what I want my theme to be. I sort of want to write something creepy about someone who lives in Crescent City for a time and eventually all the veneer is peeled back and he realizes he’s in hell on earth. But I think that’s been done. I picture this scene where the protagonist is running from someone that’s going to beat them up or something, and he keeps knocking on doors but no one will open because they are all high on methamphetamines. Later in the book everyone he meets is high on meth. I’m picturing a character who’s a correctional officer. Maybe all of the hate and violence that they see at the prison would spill over into their real lives and they would all go crazy and try to destroy the town. But that’s all been done before too. Should I bother retelling these themes of paranoia and loneliness in society? Or are they new because technology has compounded them?

OMG!!! I got the funniest e-mail ever today. It was from Taggart, my ex from Sacramento. I guess word got out that I was moving down there, and he wants us to “correspond like civil adults.” I guess by correspond he means fuck. I get those confused myself sometimes. It’s an egregious typo. God. Who the fuck does he think I am? Even if I was living down there, I would never talk to him again. As my mother would say, “A leopard doesn’t change its spots.” I was so thrilled at it though! To think that a hot guy actually would consider being my fuck buddy! Glorious. Oh my god, I just concieved of looking through my old posts to see if I could link to a salient one about Taggart, and around 250 posts came back when I typed his name in the search box. My god. I’m glad I’m over him.

I guess I’m going retro today and listening to The Golden Age of Grotesque. It seems very fitting. From “Para-Noir:” “I fuck you because I am your whore / I fuck you because you are a whore.” I should listen to something else. This is bringing back bad memories. Some Lacquer is in order.

If I had a band, I would call it Veneer in homage to Lacquer, but nobody would make the connection. And I’m sure there’s probably twenty bands that are called that. But I would do it anyway.

It was really nice walking around Crescent City today, this lady asked me for directions to the library. And she was about a block away. I sort of felt like telling her not to bother, but she might want some romance novels or something and then she would be perfectly satisfied with the selection.

This entire post has been so that I can stop thinking about how I haven’t e-mailed Matt back about the web site. And about how I bid on this $250 computer that isn’t worth $250. I found this much better one with a 1.3GHz processor for $200. And a working screen. But I guess I could use the broken screen one for my dad’s computer. Or follow through with my plan to buy a working screen off eBay and install it myself. I have two days for someone to outbid me on the $250 one so that I can buy the $200 one. I think that if pressed, I would get both…though if I got into some sort of bidding war, I would be totally out of luck. Well, it’s something else to occupy my mind while I wait for my toys to come in the mail. I seriously need to e-mail Matt today. I think the real reason that I’m not e-mailing him is that I don’t want to do the site updates, even if he pays me. But I don’t know. What I need to do is to do the work and then ask him for payment for further services, but that would involve doing the work. And I would rather sit here and do nothing.

So I’m paralyzed. I need to email Matt. I need to tell Misty I’m not moving in with her. I need to finish that web site. And I don’t want to do anything but complain about my pathetic pseudo-intellecual dillemas.

Categories: Ennui,Gossip

Published:
September 27, 2005 – 8:17 pm
Author:
By A.

parties and work 0

I voice-chatted with Josh until like 5 a.m. I was bored. And I wasn’t sleepy at all. Must have been the hot chocolate. I woke up around 5 p.m. and I immediately showered and got ready for Kat’s party, since I wanted optimal hangout time before I had to go to work. I got to the parking lot at 6:58, but stayed in my car until 7:01, when I walked over. I’m usually always fashionably late, but contrary to my own lateness philosophy, I was totally on time and the only one there. So me and Kat hung out, ate chile and listened to Ella Fitzgerald (name might not be correct), this cool jazz singer lady from the forties. We had a great conversation, and it was really cool to hang out one on one. Then the Insipid Coworker of Doom arrived, repeating like a ventriloquist’s dummy “I made five loaves of banana bread!” seventy fucking times. The banana bread was incredibly delicious though, I had to give her that.

It was about 7:45 by the time everybody else showed up, including about five twenty-something guys that I didn’t know at all but everybody else seemed to know, so I was a bit frazzled (as I am introverted around strangers) and was unable to come up with anything cool to say. But Matt and a bunch of the others that I knew had shown up too, so it was ok, we talked a bit about the Bill Stamps Jr. stuff before I had to go. Matt was all “you have no excuse not to come back [after work], it’s on your way home.” It’s really not on my way home, but I’m going to go back over there after my work is done here. And oddly, things have been going really fast and I just might get out of here way before I usually do. I only need two more pages.

I shaved off the little beard-ish thing I had been growing, now I feel like a twelve-year-old. I should have kept the stubble.

Anyway, I learned earlier today that my iPod is being shipped ground from Hong Kong. Okay guys, riddle me this. How is “ground” shipping between countries separated by an ocean possible? I’d better get it by the end of the week, or I will be very annoyed.

Well, my luck officially ran out. Something just broke on the press, and someone from Brookings has to come fix it. And the fixing process should take 45 minutes. Fun fun. I’d better go read some blogs.

Categories: Gossip,Meditations on work

Published:
September 24, 2005 – 10:30 pm
Author:
By A.

oh dear 0

I just got an e-mail from my web hosting company telling me that the server that hosts my website is directly in the path of Hurricaine Rita. How weird. It might go down when the hurricaine hits Texas. Cool! I hella have everything backed up, so I’ll see how cool the company is.

I got my cool WebCam today! It’s SO great! During my audio/video chat with my mom, my camera had incredible resolution and color depth, and hers looked really bad…like there was a tank of water or something in between her and the camera. Well, you get what you pay for. And I paid for sexiness. I attempted to do a video post, but it didn’t really came out as cool as I wanted. I don’t think that my computer supports USB 2.0, that’s probably why My motherboard’s manual gives all this lip service about eight USB 2.0 ports, but there is nothing in the device manager about it. When I get my iPod I’m sure the software will tell me whether my system is USB 2.0 compatible.

Anyway, I must get to the gossip. Somebody left a message on my dad’s answering machine claiming to be from the college asking why I wasn’t taking any classes this semester. I haven’t listened to the message yet, but I will once my dad goes to sleep. I think that it’s faked. Why would the college do that? They don’t even mail in grades anymore. It’s probably one of my enemies. And I will soon know. I can tell if it is Kelly or Dan (the people that work at the college, not my cousin and her boyfriend who oddly have the exact same names). So of course I immediately told my dad that I’m taking classes in Brookings, but it was quite unnerving nonetheless. Now I want to go listen to that message right now, but I shouldn’t. I’ll just get all agitated and I want to enjoy my evening. If the iPod gods shine on me, my pod could ship on Friday!! I’m trying to get myself to not go and change my order to expedited shipping for $10. My accursed bank charged me at $10 transaction fee because I guess I went over my balance, but that’s totally not true. I looked at my online banking and no transfers were set to go through that would have done that. I think there just ripping me off. So I’ve decided to keep $200 in there at all times so this bullshit doesn’t happen again.

Me and Misty hung out yesterday, quite randomly. I had gone to the library to check out Ulysses and was reading when all of a sudden I got hungry and decided to see if Safeway had any of those delicious focaccias. I walked over, and was trying to decide whether to just go home and eat or to buy the foccacia and stay in town longer, when Misty came over and said hi (I guess she was grocery shopping). We caught up a bit, but she had to go back to class soon so we decided to meet at Circle J later. I bade her farewell and read by the beach until it was time to walk over to Circle J. I had this real horrorshow pastrami sandwich and John was there to take our order. When he dropped it off at our table he said that I should come over more often or something to that effect.

I guess it was Providence (Hawthorne uses that word every fifth sentence, why can’t I?) had brought us together, and we had quite a bit to talk about: mostly the topics were incredibly funny behavior at Misty’s birthday party which I had missed (who pees on ducks), my concerns about how strangely Ben seems to be acting lately, and Misty’s situation with Selena. Also, she basically invited me to come live with her, and I accepted, of course. I wonder if I will really follow through. If I ditched my car, living in town might save me quite a bit of money. I’m not sure though. She has to talk to somebody else that she promised it too. And of course we would have to sit down and go over the specifics of everything (adding up and dividing bills and all that fun stuff).

I also set up a Yahoo 360 account. It was so dumb, they only allow you 300 letters for your favorite books/movies. Only a Neanderthal could fail to come up with more than 300 words worth of good movies or books. But I do feel hella hardcore that only one other person on the whole site listed The Hacker as one of their favorite musicians. And nobody listed the glorious carbon-copy club anthems of Lacquer. I’m so alternative now. Not.

Well, I think I’m going to delve back into my novel. My handsfree mouse is freaking out today and I don’t know why…perhaps it’s the multitude of devices with LEDs attached to my computer. The device tracks infrared radiation sources, which LEDs are.

Categories: Gossip

Published:
September 21, 2005 – 6:11 pm
Author:
By A.

an incredibly cool day, for once! 0

> Daft Punk – Make Love
> Lacquer – Go With the Flow, No Love (I love this lyric “This is no love / this is just for fun / just for fun and all the sex”)
> Elastica – Vaseline
> Massive Attack – Dissolved Girl
> The Hacker – Sleeping Machines

I have so much talk about today! It was an incredible day. I got up extremely early so that I could go up to Brookings and register for my class. I had a lot of fun on the way up listening to my “THE F****ING SEX” mix I burned for the San Francisco trip. It has that song “Oh My Gosh” by Basement Jaxx that is the ubersex. Anyway, on the way up I remembered that that guy from Brookings that blocked me had mentioned that he went to the college up here. I pictured the various scenarios of how we would react to seeing each other. I decided that if I saw him I would just ignore him and hope that he didn’t recognize me with my short hair. It was totally improbable that we would see each other anyway, since my class is only one day a week up there.

I went in, got a registration form, and started filling it out. I couldn’t help but listen and other conversations around me. There was this one woman that had gotten skunk smell on her somehow… something about her husband getting sprayed and their central heating system. Then in this other woman walks in and starts talking and I realize that it was the guy that blocked me’s mom. LOL! It was indubitably her, she referred to him by name and to his job. I went over and gave the lady at the counter my registration form, and at that moment I was the uberJames Bond in fuckin’ hella stealth mode in my grubby pinstripe pants and my worn-out Elastica t-shirt. EEK! I AM SO FUCKING STEALTHY! Mouhahaha. I love knowing everybody in the world through My Space. Well, everbody in the world that’s gay.

Anyway, I put on the sex mix and danced/drove home, rushed into my suit, and sped to work. I was totally on time. Woot. However, I did an Insipid Coworker of Doom thing and took a minute to buy my iPod while at work. It was SUCH a bad thing and so against my work philosophy, but I couldn’t help myself. Come on. IPOD!!?? As in: once in a lifetime occurrence! Well, once in a lifetime if you make what I make. And I have totally done work for more than two minutes when I wasn’t on the clock before. So sue me. Anyway, the black iPod nano is selling so well that it’s going to take five to seven business days for it to ship, and another five to seven business days for its actually arrive. Total cost with student discount: $245. For another $65, I could’ve gone a real iPod. But I didn’t want a real iPod. I would drop it. And it would break. And I would cry.

And to make an incredibly cool day even better, Matt (*random dance break to Lacquer*) Okay, I’m back. “No Love” came on and I had to do a commerative iPod Nano dance. I can’t decide which will be the first song for me to rock out to on my Nano, “No Love” or “X.” Hmm. Decisions decisions.

Anyway, Matt asked me for my numero telefono to possibly hang out this weekend. How ubercool! And Kat is having a party this Saturday too! Even if I have no social life most weekends, at least I share four hours a day with the coolest, most intelligent people I know.

Warning: paragraph-long technology diatribe:
Today I witnessed an aspect of Mac OS X that I had never experienced before. I was on the one Power Mac G5 at the office, and I went to log off as another user, and the screen turned into one of the sides of a cube and the cube rotated into the other account. I was all OMG! I totally wasn’t expecting that at all, and even though I had seen screen captures of the feature, it really surprised the crap out of me. It was quite sudden and didn’t have the smooth, liquid transitions the rest of the OSX interface has. I have OS X on my work machine, but it’s an old iMac (one of those all-in-one Macs with the different colored backs from 1998-ish) and I guess the graphics card can’t support such effects. I really like what Apple did with OS X. We can run it on machines that are five and six years old. Try running Windows XP on five or six-year-old PC. Microsoft has already said that the new edition of windows, code-named vista or what ever they have decided to call it now, isn’t even compatible with most of today’s PCs. The strategy there I think is to just drive hardware sales and make people buy new computers just for an operating system that is solely designed for a high-end PC. But the jury’s still out on windows Vista, and it might be good. But I doubt it.

I guess that’s all to report. I bought my book on eBay for about $60, when the college 115 for a used copy. UberJames Bond. Uberonline price sleuth. What else can I be today? Let’s try literary critic.

If you guys don’t know, the last week or so I have been reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I’m about halfway through it by now, and I thought that eventually the pretentious 1800s language what sort of melt away like after you’ve read A Clockwork Orange a few times and start yourself calling your friends malenky malchicks. OMG I just found the coolest thing ever! An A Clockwork Orange translator! Let’s translate an earlier paragraph of this post!

Paragraph one in Nadspeak:

“I have so much to govoreet about today! It was a zammechat day. I got up extremely early so that I could itty up to Brookings and register for my class. I had a lot of fun on the way up slooshing to my “THE F****ING IN-OUT-IN-OUT” mix I burned for the San Francisco trip. It has that warble “Oh My Gosh” by Basement Jaxx that is the uberin-out-in-out. Anyway, on the way up I remembered that that guy from Brookings that blocked me had mentioned that he ittied to the college up here. I pictured the various scenarios of how we would react to viddying each other. I decided that if I viddied him I would just ignore him and hope that he didn’t recognize me with my short luscious glory. It was totally improbable that we would viddy each other anyway, since my class is only odin day a week up there.”

Anyway, the book is incredibly boring and it’s all about these rich people feeling all horrible because their son dies and they feel so horrible and all these horrible things happen in and they all feel horrible and they’re so rich and miserable and rich and melancholy it makes me sick. And the main character most of all because he created this monster that completely randomly went 100 mi. straight east and new to kill his creator’s grandson who he had never met in a town he’d never been to. That is even a bigger leap of faith then assuming that one can create a living creature from nothingness. In my humble opinion, a book should only have one big leap of faith. She wants to me to believe that you can create life from nothingness (which I will give her, for the purposes of a novel). But she also wants me to believe that this re-animated corpse can speak perfect English? That is just fucking retarded and im-fucking-plausible. At least she could have included some kind of disclaimer, like “If you are reading this after the year 1900, press a match to this dot here on the corner and hold for ten minutes or more.”

And if I read the word countenance one more time I’m just going to blind myself with paper cuts to the eye sockets. She has no control over what’s going on. She will fast forward through hours where it would seem important things would be happening, and the characters will all of a sudden be so devoted that they will die for something and then a minute later they will have a complete change of heart. It’s like bad daytime TV… except for hundreds of years old. In a book.

I simply must buy good books (or even bad sci-fi books that I can devour like a naughty carton of bon-bons) on the Internet. But I spent too much money this month. No smartness for me. I have that one by Freud that it took me years to find in a bookstore, and it just sits there. I guess it’s because I read his other work The Future of an Illusion and gained a valuable insight onto his point of view of where civilization was headed. I agreed with him, and now Freud bores me.

Anyway, I need to get off the computer because my wrists are just killing me and it’s going to take quite a bit of typing to correct the errors that the voice-recognition made on this post. Farewell, malchicks and devotchkas.

Categories: Gossip,Happiness

Published:
September 19, 2005 – 6:10 pm
Author:
By A.

there is no ultimate masterplan / so here we go again 0

> Miss Kittin – Masterplan
> Massive Attack – Weather Storm

There is no ultimate masterplan. I guess I just have to to listen to my audio goddess Miss Kittin for life advice. I just went through my archive of photos and OMG they brought back SO many memories. Oh god, I’ve had SO much fun this year!!!!! All my time in Sacramento and the San Fran trip…god. I wouldn’t take it back for anything. I guess I would have kicked myself a million times harder if I would have gone “Sorry, Kelly, I don’t want to give up my stable job to move in with you and Dan” rather than have said yes and had my dreams dashed by someone that wasn’t me.

It’s just…looking at those pictures, I just felt this amazing love for everybody I’ve ever known. I haven’t felt that in a long time. I’ve retreated into my lair. I need to be more extroverted. Take a class in Brookings. Do something with my life. I’m really sad that that thing with that guy Thomas didn’t work out. Even if he wasn’t cool at least it would’ve been drama. Must delete him from my MySpace. Oh yeah. I was going to start writing again.

I should probably clarify: it’s going to be jejune. It’s going to be banal. Insipid, trite… anything you can hurl at me I will give you wholeheartedly. I just need a fantasy life. And everything is pointless. Whether I spend my life imagining I’m a cyberpunk or imagining I’m doing the work of some imaginary higher being, in the end, it’s all the same. I had this faint inkling of a plot earlier this month, and I think it evaded me. We’ll see.

Step one is getting my old stories on there. I should do that tonight. Nah. I have to put something off to give my life a sense of meaning.

I think I’m going to give in and get an iPod Nano when I get paid. That will definitely be coolness that will go down in history. I need to fucking call Ben. Well, I have like six times and he never returned my calls. Oh well. I definitely need to call Misty.

Oh dear, I had a Freudian slip and said Mindy. For Mindy Fischer, my like best friend ever in the late high school/early college era. I miss her so much, but she got married and moved away and became a different person. I really loved her…like, as more than a friend. We would cuddle for hours. I miss that. We made out one time too. But it totally wouldn’t have worked. All I wanted was a platonic relationship, and she wanted a husband. Correction: a husband so she could have endless amounts of guilt-free married Christian sex.

I think that I would be much more bisexual if society didn’t have us locked down to this either-or crap of HOMO HETERO or BI. Okay, I like guys best, but that doesn’t mean I’m a Kinsey 6. I just never met a chick cool enough after Mindy. I wish I could sink into that bisexual malaise of everything being sexy, but I feel like I have to self-enforce this rigorous religion of homosexuality. I will even delete perfectly good porn if it has one girl in it because I’m afraid someone will eventually see it and go “you’re not gay!” I guess it’s all about being part of a group, or something. It’s much more comforting to be gay, bi, or straight than to be in the anomalous gray area, where everyone really is. I don’t know what got me onto this. I should go to sleep. I miss my friends. I miss everyone and everything.

Categories: Gossip,Nostalgia

Published:
September 12, 2005 – 2:27 am
Author:
By A.

sadness, new people, and Pentium D — for de-freaking-licious! 1

> Daft Punk – Technologic (Vitalic remix)
> Fannypack – System Boomin’
> The Hacker – Radiation
> Propellerheads – Take California

It makes me so sad. One of my favorite people ever has had to stop blogging. I just hate it when people can’t express their feelings and ideas with the rest of the world.

I’m sure that someday my blog will get me into a lot of trouble, but I just have to take the bad things with the good things. I don’t know how I would get by if I wasn’t able to share my thoughts and feelings that the rest of the world or even just to write them down. My blog is my immortality. I would feel like my life was slipping away if I didn’t record everything that happened. I went back to read entries from a year or two ago and my was reading about the last time I went to Manhattan and all of the memories came back. It was a very beautiful experience and that would all be lost if I hadn’t written it down.

And it’s really funny to see yourself as an unreliable narrator. I never knew how different I was until I read some of my entries from 2003. I was so immature!

But enough with the melancholy, there is this really cool person I met online named Thomas. We were supposed to hang out today, but one of his coworkers quit or something and he had to stay late at work. And then I had to work at 8 p.m. So we’re supposed to do something tomorrow. I guess we’re going to go to the beach or something. I wonder if it’s a metaphor that I have to work on Labor Day. I’d better get overtime. Actually, the real irony is the death of the labor movement in America. How long has it been since the AFL-CIO disbanded?

Me and that Thomas guy talked on the phone for an hour or so, exchanging funny anecdotes and such. It was a great first phone call. He kinda knows I might be looking for something more than a friendship, and didn’t say “NO that will not happen,” or anything to that effect, so we might hit it off. I must say he was extremely affable. I hope he’s as cool in person. I’m used to hanging out with such taciturn, tactless people like Royce and Ripley. Actually, I’m not used to hang out with people at all. It’s been so long since the Josh/Misty/Selena/Ben/Joe milieu died. My social skills have died. Well not really.

Oh my God. Thomas was telling me this story in which Jordan kept calling him, wanting Thomas to come over to his house and Thomas being all “eww.” it just shows the obvious: that I’m a social butterfly. And Jordan is two steps up on the evolutionary ladder from a flatworm. Eww.

I don’t know why, but I really miss Joe. I sent him an e-mail a few days ago but he didn’t respond. On the bright side, my drive might arrive tomorrow and cheer me up. I couldn’t get the RAID hack to work, so I’ll have to old-school it with this old copy of Norton Ghost.

I spent the entire day today cooking up a new computer based on Intel’s Pentium D (dual core, two processors in one) line. The processor itself is $340, and the motherboard that supports the advanced features I want is like $200, and that doesn’t include a video card or RAM. The system ended up being about $950, a significant amount more than I think that I would be able to sell my current computer for. But you never know. Once I get my new drive I’m going to start listing my computer on eBay with high reserves to see if I can get someone to buy it. And Thomas wants a new Mac. I told him that the new Mac Minis were only $500, and he wants to buy one. Delicious!

The main cost associated with the new computer that breaks my budget is a new case. I love my computers to look sexy, and sexy cases cost a lot of money. I found this one that I absolutely love that has this like armor plate thing on the front of it and a multi-function LCD on the top. But it’s $100, without the power supply. :(

sexy case

Well, I guess if I’m not moving away I might as well buy myself a new computer. I think those dual core Pentium Ds might handle voice-recognition and web design a bit better than my current 3.0GHz P4 with hyperthreading. I should get that case. It would get me inspired to build a new system. However, I can’t bring myself to squander my savings. I’ll buy the components piece by piece while I try to sell my current system.

Categories: Gossip,Melancholy,Tech lust

Published:
September 4, 2005 – 2:04 am
Author:
By A.

hmm 0

Random trivia of the day.

Cool photographer.

> Propellerheads – decksanddrumsandrockandroll [the album]

This album is fucking great. I love their remix of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” And I’m supposed to be hanging out with some dude from Brookings. Aw, we’re not going to. Well, so much for that. He has been talking to Jordan. Jordan’s trying to get the guy to have sex with him. Yawn. It’s sad that all Jordan can do is drink and fuck. Well, actually I find it quite amusing.

I am absolutely in love with this Propellerheads album, the review didn’t do it justice. And oh my God. One of my best friend I ever started a blog! And it’s just as amazing and cool as I always hoped it would be!

Orgasm.

I’m so bored. I was counting on doing something today. Crap. I should start that new novel.

I guess I shouldn’t be deriding Jordan. I want to have sex with the guy too. But I’m so much cooler than Jordan! GRR! I haven’t had sex in like, forever. That was the reason that he didn’t want to hang out today, that he was horny and we might have sex. Oh DARN.

I’m so bored by people that aren’t complete sexual libertines. Holla to the libertines!

Tomas (the new Internet acquaintance) says holla. That expression is so 1992.

We’re supposed to hang out tomorrow after two. That would be so cool! I don’t know why I’m so bent on hanging out with him…I guess I just never hang out with my friends any more. My old milieu is dead. I need to forge ahead and make a new one.

Categories: Gossip

Published:
September 2, 2005 – 6:10 pm
Author:
By A.