"Green is the color that everyone sees all around me..."

So, let's see. Where was I? It's Saturday morning, I'm feeling really good, for no good reason. Start talking to the folks camping next to me. They're from NY, they get the joke and really like my 'I (heart) ME' shirt. Looks like Maura Tierney is wearing a Lilith Fair t-shirt, and one of the guys makes a comment about it, I get to entertain with Judaica stories. Or, I suppose, cryptojudaica. Help with their sunshade engineering, fly their kite.

And today everyone I really want to see is playing, I wasn't going to be hanging with the dance crowd much anyway, so I just sorta hang out with these guys. Tracy Grammer, Dar Williams, Eddie From Ohio, all great. Even EFO with Eddie not being able to make it. Crooked Still is still really good, and a lot more polished than last year. Do a 'Wayfaring Stranger' that's just to die for. Remembered I was intending to buy a Railroad Earth CD last year when I heard their set, but they were out by the time I got to the CD tent.

And sometime during the day, Maura was asking about me, and I got around to talking about the Oprah Story, and she was really interested. Like wanting to know details, and suggesting things and stuff. Which was really cool. And made me feel good about myself, and about the story, particularly since there was this other woman who I met at the dance tent, who was also really interested. Now, if I could just get around to writing the second half of the damn thing.

And dancing, Blue Halter Top is flirting with me, I really have the feeling I could smarm her back to my tent if I were that guy. And I were into cradle-robbing. (Hush now, Gwen.) Which is also kinda flattering.

And so it goes, I'm enjoying myself, I'm feeling good about myself, and it's Sunday night, I've decided I don't trust Ani to play the old stuff rather than the new shit, so I'm about to leave. And so I'm saying goodbye. To Her. And we're talking, and I'm suddenly feeling that connexion again. And feeling like she enjoys being with me, wants to see me more, and she hugs me goodbye and talks about emailing me. And, Lord, but she's beautiful. And I echo back her "See you here next year," from last year. And I'd thought, when I thought of saying it, I wanted to be saying I'm taking a step back. But it comes out instead as a joke about how we both wanna see more of each other than we've been able. And I walk away, feeling good about myself, and her, and myself and her. And thinking, "Dude, I am such a sucker."

Well. I might be a little more heartbroken if you weren't pretty much gone already.

Sigh. Seeing her then, staring off into the distance while I was talking to her, not really seeing me there. And I, desperate to feel some kind of connexion, touch her arm, and, ouch, she flinches. No good.

I've put off writing this, mainly because of that. Because I feel I ought to be sadder, like I'm doing something wrong. And saying it brings it out more. But-- okay, I'll say it. Grandma's dead, and I'm not really sad. A relief, really. I did my crying watching her slowly die over the last couple years.

And that last birthday party. She can't sit up, can't even lift her head really. Eyes filmed with cataracts, I hadn't noticed before but you can't miss 'em now. I'm not sure she knows I'm there or knows who I am, maybe it's the alzheimers, or maybe she doesn't have the energy to care. And Mom's feeding her cake and trying to pretend like it's a real party, not some grotesque mockery, and she doesn't want to be there, I feel she's in pain, and Mom, in that patronizing voice used for the very young and the very old, "why don't we open your presents now."

I can't stand it. I can't stand it. I move to look her in the eye and make my apologies, and I'm still not sure she knows who I am and I go to wait in the parking lot.

So, really, it's a relief to have it finally over. The sad thing, the really sad thing though: she was so much in grandpa's shadow. I can't help but think she missed out on having a life of her own. I can't think her life was very fulfilling at all. I can't remember any Grandma stories.

So forgive me for the interruption. I'll get back to that story when I feel like it.

I really wish I could think of a Grandma story.

Thing is, It's not so much the dude that was the problem. Like, I don't feel I have any claim to exclusivity, and a girl's got needs and all. What she's doing while I'm a few hundred miles away, like, whatever. But. I mean, if i'm gonna be with her, I want her to be with me.

And that's the thing. Like... I dunno. We're in a weird place, what with long distance relationship and everything, and we're sitting there and kinda talking, and I'm trying to reestablish that connexion we had, to feel it again, and I'm just feeling like she's not responding, not meeting me halfway.

And there was this group of her friends, and I'm feeling out of place, don't know them, don't know how to deal with them really, and she's not really helping that either. So I'm there, and feeling alone, and the more I try to be with her the more lonely I'm feeling.

And then I see her with the dude.

Sticks. Rocks. Stars.

So. Friday afternoon. I'm feeling all down and shit, and, here we go with the pathetic fallacy. Clouds over the hill. Hard rain, thunder, lightning. Wind like crazy, the tent is leaning, shivering, trying to blow over. And I'm sitting inside, and it's the storm blows over instead.

And then-- one direction, the sun is setting behind clouds, staining the sky gold and red. The other direction, the moutains are illuminated, a pattern in sharp contrast between the sunny and shady side of trees. A third direction, a rainbow. Water covering everything, the world is shiny. Downed tents around me, just have to change my shirt and I'm dry. And I'm here, the world is beautiful, it's just not worth ruining my fun over. And I get Anthrax's "In My World" stuck in my head. I feel a sly smile spreading across my face.

So then I'm walking down the hill, and they're walking up. Choosing my words carefully, as always, "How'd y'all make out?"

A start. She didn't see me see her kissing him. "You mean with the storm?"

"Yeah." The storm. Wench.

Confirm each other's okayness with being rained on. And we're a while further in opposite directions before I let myself go with the laughing.

I was thinking a while back about why I didn't really make many friends in college. There was something in A Secret History that really struck me-- for a while the group really wasn't sure whether or not the dude liked them. And I think there were a lot of folks who I liked and knew casually who might have been friends if they'd thought I'd liked them more.

The problem, I think, largely comes down to the interaction of a few things: 1) I have always had way more free time than everyone else around me. Partly 'coz I tend to need to study less than most folks, and group-studying is a disaster for me, as I never really managed to get how to teach something without patronizing folks. And partly 'coz a lot of the things I like doing best can be done, like, whenever, so what activities I have in my free time can be scheduled around what other people wanna do pretty freely. And I hate to impose on other folks busyness, but more...

2) I don't manage risk/reward about social things very well. 'Coz of that anxiety thing.

And 3) Unavoidable scheduling conflicts feel like rejection, even though there's no real rejection involved.

See the problem? Recipe for sitting back and letting people come to me, 'coz, y'know, I know I'm cool to hang out with. Problem is, you do that, even if you make 'em feel welcome, and usually/always hang out when they want, the lack of reciprocal asking-to-hang-out has to eventually convince folks you don't really like 'em, you're just too nice to reject 'em. Even if you give 'em gummi worms.

So I'm pretty sure I coulda had a fair number of pretty good friends, it's just I sucked. At least it's the sort of thing of which it helps to be aware.

Okay, okay. Looking at final exit poll internals. And I can accept. The biggest issue of the day, apparently? "Moral Values". 22%. So, yeah, I can see how we lost. But Christ on a stick! We have real problems-- the economy, the deficit, the war, Osama, and twenty-five million people think the most important issue in the country is the dirty faggots overrunning our cities. What the hell is wrong with these people?

God Damn. Concession speech? What a fucking pussy. Okay, yeah, it's not even close, there's more than a hundered thousand vote margin. There's still something deeply wrong with these results.

Ignore all of this. It's Demon Rhum talking. I actually really like rum-- I'm very fond of that sugarcane/molasses flavor.

The Secret Service is very good at what it does. Which raises motivational issues. I tend very strongly toward pacifism. And I don't believe in an afterlife. Thing is, I'd rather not kill a guy, 'coz I'd feel guilty about it for the rest of my life. If I could be reasonably assured that I'd die myself shortly after doing it... Well, that's a completely different ballgame. As it is.. What's keeping me from the Barrett .50 cal solution? Thing is, they tell me there's four people who have to die before you get a guy who isn't an asshole in the White House. On the bright side, he'd be the first black president. But I'm not too impressed with him. For one thing, he's about the biggest Uncle Tom in the world. I think you have to go further, though I haven't really figured out how far. And four is hard enough.

And y'know, they'll all talk about me. Reporters will go around to everyone who knew me in high school. And I'll fit the profile perfectly. "He was so weird," they'll say. "He was so quiet," they'll say, "I knew there was something wrong with him." "Dude, I, like, had the biggest crush on him. I was totally waiting for him to notice me." Heh. Well. (There were at least three girls who had crushes on me. Four if you count the girl I was friends with who may have been over me. Five if you count the girl I was intersted in and only found out much later had had a crush on me. I've always been a sucker for a lady with a fiddle.) "Like, I woulda expected the dude with the Amish Hat to do it, but not him. He was such a nice guy." Heh.

We used to go out and buy issues of Soldier of Fortune at the 7-11 to laugh at. They had an insert from Paladin Press with all sorts of books they sold. Like Bazooka: How to Design and Build Your Own. Or the thing about street fighting: "Once you have him on the ground, you have two options: run away, or stick around and kick the shit out of him." www.paladinpress.com is where you'd expect it to be.

In case I want to make a silencer for any number of easily available handguns or rifles.

Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber:

I wonder whether you could do a county-level analysis of where the electronic voting machines were, to see whether that predicted any discrepancies between the exit poll data and the results as recorded. Tricky.

Fuck it. Mosh for the future of the next generation.

There's something deeply, deeply wrong with these results. Exit polls had Kerry up over where he should have been, and over where he ended up among every demographic. There were good reasons why Kerry shoulda taken it comfortably. Okay, so Ohio is still up in the air. And, in the end, it's going to come down to legal action over Ohio. But it's not looking good. I don't know who's on the Ohio Supreme Court. But unless Rehnquist dies soon (and Bush isn't ready with the recess appointment) we're fucked.

My plan: Get drunk tonight. Tomorrow, take some advil. Drink a lot of water. Then see if there's protest somewhere that looks like it'll mean anything, and could use another body. And then maybe drive to Ohio or Washington.

Thing about nonviolent protest-- it really does need to be done well. You need to make it deeply inconvenient for the people who are being assholes, and you need enough people that arresting you gets ugly. Marching around with signs? Stupid. Doing something annoying when they can just grab the three of you? Stupid. Doing something where they can kick your ass and the people watching on tv will applaud or at least accept? Stupid. Doing anything at all where there aren't TV cameras? Stupid. And, let's face it, most activism is just stupid. But I'm not quite ready to go down to Clark Brothers and buy a high-powered rifle.

I'm considering it though.

A little civics lesson for today: ballot initiatives.

We have two ballot initiatives here in Maine, and they're perfect examples of the reasons folks try to make laws through ballot initiatives rather than the legislature.

First, there's a proposition to cap property taxes at 1% of a property's assessed value. And I have to wonder: who the hell is paying for this? It certainly can't be anyone in Maine with any sense whatsoever. Fact is, a full third of the homes in Maine are second homes, mostly owned by rich folks from out-of-state. And, take a look at Castine or Kennebunkport, they're almost certainly more expensive than the natives'. So property taxes are a great way to raise money while still keeping the tax burden as low as possible on regular Mainers. This is a stupid idea, certainly wouldn't get through legislature, so the folks behind it get it on the ballot and run an initiative campaign.

Second, the bear-baiting initiative. Folks wanna ban it. I dunno if it's a good idea or not. Seems to me the opponents of the initiative have all the good arguments, economic impact, population contol studies, biologists weighing in, and whatnot. And 'fair chase' seems to me like an aesthetic point rather than a moral one. But they're so smarmy, I wanna see the measure pass anyway. Thing is, there's a fairly lucrative bear-hunting industry in the state, and state governments and regluatory agencies are notoriously in the pockets of the industries they regulate. Again, this is something that wouldn't possibly pass in the legislature-- or even recieve a full hearing on the merits.

So the lesson: Initiatives get on the ballot because the legislature wouldn't ever pass 'em. Ballot initiatives and propositions and whatever can be a good idea, but it depends entirely on how corrupt you think the state legislature is. If it's not something the legislature is too corrupt to look at, chances are you're being suckered.

The good ol' voting problem. You know the one-- there's absolutely no way your vote will mean anything. If the vote is close enough that your vote is the deciding vote, it's going to be settled in the courts anyway. And, sure, how people vote in the aggregate means a great deal, but they're going to vote that way anyway, so you might as well stay home. Just as long as you don't convince your neighbors to do the same.

Not that I don't vote. In fact, I've already voted, absentee, in Virgina. Based on the idea that Kerry's gonna take Maine for certain, and I'm still convinced there's a very small chance Kerry could squeak out a win in Virgina. Which would just be adding to the margin of victory, but I think we need all the margin we can get. I'd forgotten about apportionment when I made the decision, so if the Maine 2nd gives Bush the 269-269 tie y'all can kick my ass all you want.

Which is kinda silly, when it comes down to it, deciding which of the two places I live half the time to vote in based on where my vote could make the most difference. 'Coz, of course, it doesn't matter at all anyway. And, let's be honest, since you don't have to actually give any unique identifier when you register, I coulda registered both places just fine. Or, hell, I coulda made a poncho of several blankets, let my beard grow out, claimed I was homeless, and registered about a jillion times all up and down the East Coast. Then my votes could maybe even matter.

Duty sucks as a reason to vote. But it's what there is, I guess. Don't let that stop y'all from going to the polls and kicking out the asshole.

Okay. So, seeing how it seems to play out-- the OBL video won't do much. Probably throw a couple people into the Kerry camp, but not too many. Thing is, it just doesn't have the emotional impact necessary to fire up Bush support. It's just too overtly, and bizarrely, political. Osama busting out Michael Moore's talking points? It makes you go "What the fuck?" So it ends up being something of a Rorschach test. For pro-Bush folks, bin Laden is supporting Kerry, so clearly we can't vote for Kerry. And for the pro-Kerry folks? Well, iocaine powder comes from Australia...

So. The prediction. Maybe I'm just spending too much time in the liberal bubble, but I'm convinced Kerry's gonna win. And by a pretty comfortable margin. Say, 290+ electoral votes. From states with incontestable margins. The evidence: 1) Kerry is polling considerably better than Gore was four years ago, 2) if you consider that undecideds break for the challenger at historical rates, current polls would give Kerry 270+, with 30 or so up for grabs, 3) polling has become significantly less accurate lately as response rates decline, and there's good reason to suspect folks who choose not to respond to polls are more likely to support Kerry, and 4) the Bush campaign has been acting desperate since the debates.

So I have a pretty good feeling about the election. Except, perhaps, for the fraud issue, and with any luck our fraud will be as good as the other guys'.

Well, fuck. I was all ready to make a prediction, and we get the Osama bin Laden jujitsu reverse-psychology tape. Which could go both ways. I mean, I think Kerry did a good job pushing that Bush hasn't made us safer, and this could emphasize. On the other hand, raising consciousness of terror could help Bush, just 'coz people are idiots. I'll see how the spin goes for a bit and predict.

Meanwhile... I ran into Jane Galt's endorsement of Bush. Which raises the question: what kind of crackhead libertarian thinks No Child Left Behind's absurd micromanagement is a good idea? For those who haven't paid attention, the case against NCLB (besides the lefty teaching-to-the-test or cheating-the-test argument) is that schools have to show improvement on the mandated tests for every ethnic group in every subject. Which a number of schools, even if they're good schools, will fail just by chance.

Now, one of the things that happens when a school is failing, the (school district? state?) has to provide students a choice to attend a school that isn't, or lose funds. Which I suppose sounds like a great idea if you support vouchers and live in New York City. In this part of the world, however... See, Portland has two high schools in its district. The other school districts in Maine have one each. We just don't have anything approaching the density of schools required to make a choice of schools a reasonable option. And Maine, for being a rural state, and a fairly poor state, has very good schools. But we still have schools failing, particularly since we don't have many minorities, which makes chance a larger factor. But if we're having problems with NCLB, I can only imagine how much trouble, say, Oklahoma and North Dakota are having.

It's a classic example of federal overreach, of the problems with one-size-fits-all policies, and of government fucking things up whenever it has the chance. And it costs a lot of money for testing of questionable utility. What the hell does Miss Galt see to like in NCLB?

Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

But, y'know, it's interesting. We all know I've got the anxiety problem, but I've never actually had a panic attack before. A long protracted panic attack with breaks, 'coz I can see what's happening and find ways to distract myself. Because, y'know, as fun as it is to be hyperventilating for absolutely no good reason, there are better things to do with my time. Not, of course, the things I really need and desperately want to do, 'coz trying seems to bring on the problem. Nor can I really write like this. I try and I end up telling myself I'm a shithead for not being able to produce perfect prose in a first draft. Asshole.

No pain today. Sweet. Still kinda.. I dunno. Not feeling totally with it today. But. Three advil for breakfast, 'coz the roof of my mouth where I got an injection was hurting, but nothing since and I don't hurt. I do have this terrible itch to suck at the corners of my mouth, but I'm resisting. They tell me not to smoke or use a straw for 48 hours afterwards. Presumably, those being together, 'coz suction would do something to forming scab-things in my mouth. But it's really bothering me.

Ow, ow. Fuck. Just got wisdom teeth out. And, like, my regular dentist, when he has to do anything, gives me a handful of Advil samples to take right there for when the local wears off. This time, no, and, well, I figured I'd fill the prescription for the vicodin and the antibiotic on the way home, and it was only gonna be 15 minutes 'til they got that done. So I waited. So the local started wearing off before I got any painkiller in me. And I got taste back and kinda realized the gauze in my mouth was completely soaked with blood. Ick.

The actual surgery wasn't bad at all. I was more nervous than I thought I was gonna be, and the needle for the local hurt more than it has for other stuff I've had done. But the actual procedure, wedging the tooth away from the tooth next to it, then yanking it out was kinda cool. And didn't hurt a bit. Now I get to see if vicodin is everything they say it is.

Excuse, please. I mean, really. Coq au vin? Seduction cooking? That was supposed to be funny? Please excuse the terribly crude double entendre.

But, then... Why mean one thing when you can mean two? Or two when you can mean three, or four?

Sometimes the craft serves, and sometimes the craft gets in the way. Y'know?

"He's like Pepe la Peu. Very happy." I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. This is the closest an American announcer can come to admitting a cheese-eating surrender monkey has made a slick-ass move and doubled up?

Watching World Poker Tour: Paris. Very impressed by Claude Cohen, implied Jewishness notwithstanding. He didn't win, mind you, but still. The Swede, in the hands that weren't cut for time, played his hand, which is not terribly exciting. But maybe the way to win.

I dunno. I like Stewart's Ace saying to fold every hand the cards let you. But, poker face or no, I just don't have the temperment. I see the potential in the hand more than the chance to get burned. As anyone who's been my partner at bridge will tell you.

'Love,' I say. And... I'm not sure. Like, for a long time I've been all over the 'don't know what love is' thing. All crushes and friends I'm attracted to. But... I've never felt like this before. And to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what I'm feeling now. It just.. It just feels so right being with her. And.. well, okay, what I knew when I first saw her was, "Damn, she's pretty, I wanna ask her to dance," and, "Shit, that woman next to her is so not just a friend." (She does not look that much like her sister, it turns out.) But give it about five minutes, and yeah, I pretty much knew I felt this way. Which kinda weirds me out a bit. I'm not exactly sure I like feeling things that require mystic explanations to make sense. Like, she's awfully pretty, but she's not that pretty. And it turns out I like her a lot, but there have been pretty women I've liked a lot before, but. It's just a completely different feeling.

'Deciding', I say. And, well, it turns out there's rather less decision involved than I would have thought. But, no, that's mainly force of habit, snarking at folks who wanna convince themselves they're in love. Thing is, I get the feeling from the things people do in the name of love, a lot of folks have no more idea than I do (did?) what love is. But we romanticise love. So even if folks don't know what love is, everybody wants to be all up in it. So they talk themselves into thinking they're in love.

'Mistake', I say. Bull fucking shit. This is wonderful. No matter how inconvenient vegetarianism and Vermont.

I've been thinking I should unhiatus for a while now. And, as Hillel says...

Mrs. Waring posted recently about seduction cooking. Complete with recipe. And damned if that entrecôte marchand de vin doesn't sound wonderful. Hell, I'd sleep with her over it. Me, I've been wanting an excuse to make coq au vin again for a while, and I'd think it would do the job just fine.

Alas, alas. I've make a terrible mistake, deciding to go and fall in love with a vegetarian.

Thing is, I'm a good cook, and I'm reasonably good at adapting recipes to different ingredients, but basically, I learned to cook from Julia Child, with a bit of James Beard and Fannie Farmer on the side, and um... I just don't know where to begin, really. Like, my basic assumtion is you have a meat main dish with starch and vegetables on the side. I'm thinking I could fake it once with, say, sauteed mushrooms in a port-wine reduction (ignoring the beef stock Julia would put in such a thing), over brown rice, green beans or something on the side. But I'm pretty much screwed if I try to cook vegetarian twice.

Alas.

Am I too proud? Those of you who know me, go here and stick in my name (first and last, capitalized).

Hee.

Y'all may have noticed I'm totally paranoid about putting my name up here. With absolutely no good reason either. It's not like I have any problem with people randomly reading this and connecting it with the real me, nor with people googling my name and finding this. If that were even possible, given how common my name is, even the unpronouncable last name. And there are at least two people more prominent than I with the name. And I use a different name professionally.

But really, it's just... I dunno. A semi-mystic 'names are power' thing. And part of the aesthetic. I just like it better this way.

Fuck.

Country mouse is a different beast than city mouse. A bit bigger. Grey tail rather than pink. And a distressing habit of reaching for food with the front paws instead of the mouth.

You see... The first was okay, though they'd been robbing the trap and dragging it under the stove, and the dead mouse was way under the stove where I had to fish it out with a yardstick. I noticed the head was crushed in rather than the neck broken, but didn't think anything of it. I tied a string to the trap and reset it. The second.. still okay, though a bit of a problem. Was still alive, though it's front leg was firmly caught in the trap an it was clearly almost dead. (From shock? Internal bleeding? It had been there most of the night, I think.) So I just threw it in a plastic bag, tied it tight, and threw it out on the back porch until it got all the way dead. Bought new traps.

The third. The tip of one paw stuck in the trap, was struggling hard to free itself. Bleeding all over my kitchen floor. So I clearly had to kill it, and suffocating it with a plastic bag wouldn't work-- it was active enough to chew out. Letting it just bleed to death wasn't an option, 'coz I really didn't want it to go crawl under the oven and die there. I thought of using another trap, but that seemed cumbersome. And I had this yardstick handy that had already touched dead mouse. Missed completely. Choked up a bit, carefully aimed, the mouse wasn't going anywhere. Whack! It's bent in half backwards, twitches twice, and is suddenly unmistakably dead. And I'm in the bathroom throwing up.

This actually happened a couple days ago, but... it disturbs me too much, and I don't understand why, even. It's not like I have anything but the barest minimum of respect for the life or feelings of an animal, and I certainly prefer a clean kill to letting it suffer. And it's not like it's a gross-out thing. 'Coz I'm cool with that. And while I'm not so cool with violence, that's different.. that's about this certain sick thrill I rather enjoy at the time and dislike myself for later. Which wasn't there at all.

Which leaves... Well, I don't know what it leaves. This thing was alive, and a second later it was dead, and I did it. And the other thing I don't get-- Why is it so obvious? What causes the sudden absolute difference between a living thing and a corpse? The difference between a living thing being still and the absolute motionlessness of a dead thing seems too subtle, but I suppose it's what there is to tell by.

And I still don't know why it bothers me so. Just a fucking mouse, for God's sake.

GameFAQs is having their best game ever contest, and it reminds me I have a rant against Miyamoto (or at least his newer games) queued up. Three Zeldas and a Mario made it to the quarterfinals. Almost four Zeldas, for a while it was looking like Wind Waker was going to beat Starcraft. It's still a longer rant than I wanna write at a sitting, so I'll do it in pieces.

Let's start with play control. I have no idea where the people are coming from who call the play control of the 3d Zeldas and Marios 'tight'. Tight how? Those games have always felt clumsy to me. Like I can't quite get the character to move in the way I expect. Which is a feeling I don't get with many games at all. Dynasty Warriors and Dark Cloud certainly manage to have 3d control schemes that don't feel that way. Eternal Darkness too, so you can't blame the controller. The root of the problem, I think, is that Miyamoto likes to give the character just the tiniest bit of inertia. Which is a fine thing in 2d with a digital stick. But inertia and an analog stick interact in bad ways and make it hard to really go where you want. Particularly if you need to make sharp turns.

The Zeldas have extra problems with inventory management breaking the flow of the game. You need to use more items than you can assign to buttons at any one time, and there's no easy way to swap between items-- you need to pause and go to a poorly laid out inventory screen. Using many items also breaks the flow of the game, taking you to a first-person view for aiming. And the aiming sucks, both in the Zeldas and Mario Sunshine, but it's not something you can fix without tighter analog sticks, and tighter sticks have engineering problems. (The natural way to aim is to point something at what you want to hit. With a tighter stick, you could map the screen area to the position of the stick, rather than having to move a crosshairs on the screen.) But that means you really should minimize the need to aim at things.

Camera control is one thing the games do quite well, being reasonably smart about where the camera goes on its own and giving the player more control than most games. But it doesn't matter much-- the levels are built so tall that you still can't really see where you are or where you're going, and you really need to take conrol of the camera yourself to see as much as you do. And the camera still centers on the character, which means you spend the whole game looking at the character's ass and all the action happens in the background.

Those are the big play control issues. I think there's some small stuff also that contributes to the feeling that the contols are getting in the way of the play experience, but that's the big stuff.

More later.

Of course, it's a pain in the ass writing a story that starts ten years ago and spans thirty. You either have to makes stuff up, and get dated, not so much for the specific names, but for the social and cultural stuff that happens, or you elide most of the world outside your characters' immediate awareness. Which I suppose works fairly well with a tremendously self-involved narrator, but...

Well, I don't really know if it feels funny or not. It probably can work, if you do it right, but you lose one of your basic verisimilitude-enhancing tools by not being able to show people things they're familiar with. And it works both ways-- since my narrator certainly isn't going to start paying less attention to the world as she matures, that means glossing over all the same stuff in the past as well. Which I suppose gives the world a strangely timeless feel. Which it needs, since I certainly don't want to deal with the cat-eyed boy and social technology in an explicit year 2020.

There's an easy way to avoid the problem, but that's worse. I don't want to do research on the 70s and 80s, and growing up twenty years earlier is enough different.. No. It just doesn't work. She changes enough, or has a different enough experience to make her a different person if she grows up 20 years earlier, and I'm not interested in that other woman. Sigh.

Well, finally got myself a car. '96 Prism, good shape, pretty good price. Needs a bit of work done yet, and it certainly needs a cd player before I drive twelve hours in it, so I'm in town for a few days more.

So I'm in pretty good shape for having wrecked my car, except it's been an enormous pain and I haven't really been able to write lately. So instead I've been thinking about story ideas, and I'm left with too many stories I wanna write but won't be able to. I have an Oprah story and two fantasy stories in addition to the Apprentice story I was writing before all this happened, and the usual flock of stories I can't quite write yet. And a magic system based on cartography that fits into none of them.

The Oprah story is actually the one that excites me the most right now. I just wrote a college admissions essay from the POV of my protagonist, in defense of vanity, which she names pride for the sake of the sale. And I've been doing research on cosmetics. Though really, it's only superficially an Oprah story. It's not about the girly stuff, or even the rape (yeah, I know, be careful about dealing with that) and the other bad stuff that happens to her, but about how people change, having the narrative voice change over the thirty years or so of the story. And a bit how things done for artifice are internalized and become natural.

The story idea started while listening to "Cat-Eye Willie Claims his Lover", I suddenly found myself thinking about this guy I knew at Brain Camp. And how "..his hammer hand upon the bedroom door... and twenty years her cat-eyed boy has grown..." makes a great one-twist loop. It's rather changed since then.

Okay, in fairness to Kerry, I have to correct myself. A friend of mine who served in the Army set me straight-- it's an easy thing to get replacement medals, and, in fact, officers will often have multiple sets of medals for different dress uniforms. So you can throw your medals over the fence and put 'em up on the wall twenty years later just fine. And I have no problems with a man serving in a war, then deciding the war is wrong and protesting it, and later in life deciding that his service to his country (misguided as the country may have been at the time) was important to him.

Kerry still bothers me, though. He still comes across as a dim hack, and he's still not giving me any good reason to vote for him. Except that the other guy is much, much worse.

Well. Back south. I've heard horror stories about Greyhound, but it's not so bad. Besides taking twenty hours for a trip that should take ten. Or considerably less, if all the seats on the turboprops flying out of Augusta hadn't already been sold.

Grr. So the latest West Wing: Stupid. Total, total stupid. In the big things, stupid positions on global outsourcing and media consolidation. In the details: 17,000 programmers outsourced to India by one company? Programmers who are unionized? An FCC that regulates in ways the White House disapproves of? CJ trying to get the media to cover the FCC-is-corrupt story, rather than trying to convince Bartlett to demand resignations? Just stupid.

I miss Sorkin.

Ouch. To continue the series of unfortunate events, I get around to checking my mail, and-- rejection. A very nice, but ultimately empty, letter. Not what they're looking for. Sigh. It happens, I know, and I've been trying to prepare myself, but. Rejection just hurts. You put yourself out there and you get dissed. Nothing you can do about it. No matter how much I know it's not personal, they're just doing the job, that's still what it feels like. And I am not really best able to deal with it right now.

Can just one good thing happen to me one of these days?

Sigh. Is there anything happening lately that doesn't suck? I'm sick now. Which means putting off travel plans a bit. Also means blowing a nose which is all tender new skin on the business end. Frequently.

Pigfuckers.

Someone swiped some shit from my car between the time the insurance adjustor looked at it and I got a chance to clean it out. He said also that he'd had it shrink-wrapped before they took it to where it was stored, 'coz they'd had problems with them before, but there was no sign of any shrink-wrap when I got there.

Wasn't even anything all that valuable, or that I'll miss too much, except the cds. And most of the cds I lost were the stack of bluegrass I'd gotten from the uncle, which was mostly mediocre. So while I'd like to still have So Long, So Wrong, "Saints and Strangers", and "Twenty Naked Pentecostals in a Pontiac", I won't even really miss them all that much. But it's the indignity of it that gets at me, the sense of being kicked while I'm down.

But they took some really stupid stuff too. My jumper cables. A snow shovel. A first aid kit. Some worthless old books. (Ok, shit. I just looked on ebay, and an identical set went for 125 bucks not too long ago.) But the 15 buck snow shovel? The first aid kit that didn't even have any real drugs?

Assholes.

"It's a total loss, of course," he says. Dammit. But I'm looking through the paper at used cars, and there's a couple Prizms, '94/'95, for about a thousand less than insurance will give me. Same car, except for the dashboard hardware, but it's all in the name. Folks won't pay nearly as much for a ten year old Geo as for a Toyota, even if Consumer Reports actually gives the Geo better marks on engine problems. And basically comparable marks on the other stuff. So that's good news, at least.

I do think I want to look for cars down here, for one thing, 'coz manual transmissions are hard enough to find with the larger population here. I'd probably be able to get a car a bit cheaper in Maine, but that doesn't mean much if I can't find what I'm looking for. And there's logistical problems either way. Though right now, looking at probably driving the Behemoth north, then catching bus/train back is not so cool. But other options are somewhat limited.

Well. That was an exciting trip.

A couple inches snow, going a bit too fast, we're talking 45 here, so not insanely fast, and... I forget what I even had to maneuver for. The road was straight. Wind probably. But suddenly I have no control, I'm sliding to the right, I'm heading straight for a little reflector pole and I remember thinking, "Oh, shit, that'll leave a dent," and then it's down the hill, somehow I turn the car so the side hits first, I'm spinning, something hits me in the face, oh those white things are airbags. I'm stopped. Shit shit shit.

Airbags kick ass. Well, kicked mine at least, my face is all tore up, but I could get out of the car and stumble up the hill in about the time it took for the nice guy behind me to pull over to help and back to where I was. And really, I'm remarkably little hurt for what the car looked like. But fuck, I really loved that car. And I dunno if it's fixable, the insurance dude hasn't called, though they said he'd get to looking at it today. Whatever. Bit later, sitting in the police car with the officer (Played by Josh Charles. Seriously. Looked just like him.) and hearing these reports come in of cars rolled over, 2-3 just while I was there answering his questions. I'm awfully lucky, considering.

So. 6:00 wreck, 9:00 by the time I get towed to the garage. In Newport, a bit south of Bangor, I'm calmed down a bit and my transportation options are rather limited, so I call insurance again, they pay for a rental. 12 by the time they pick me up and set me up with the Behemoth. Only thing left, but I really would rather not have been stuck with an enormous extended-cab pickup that towers over most SUVs. Stopped snowing and the roads were clear by then, at least, but no chance of making it to Delaware for the Seder. Got in around 11.

Had a doctor look at me to make sure I was okay earlier today. Set me up with an antibiotic and ointment for the face, painkiller and some stretching exercises for the neck and shoulder muscles. Turns out the cartilage in my nose got knocked to the right a bit, but no real problem there. I can't even tell that it looks different. No breaks, no spine problems.

Troubles overcome are good to tell, no? Alas, still some money to spend and some annoying things to deal with. But. Could have been much worse. Am lucky.

Well. Off south for Passover, doing the usual night driving for the first leg of the journey. Just napped, I'm fresh for the road. So, off to getting together with family and the eternal struggle to try to get us to agree to use the adult Haggadah, since we can just as easily skip over the unimportant bits, and the language for kids bugs the fuck out of me. Oh, and the eternal struggle to actually get us to hit all the important bits. Everything after the meal and the hunt for the Afikomen is more likely than not going to get skipped, though I can usually make sure we do the third cup of wine, sing dayenu, and then do the fourth.

Sigh.

And then going home for a bit, probably get together with some friends while I'm in town. Which is also cool.

Bunch of stuff on mercenaries lately. I have to say, I don't really see the problem, in the abstract, with using them. I suppose they make wars a bit more common, in that they allow someone with a lot of money and no real popular base from which to recruit soldiers to make war on a weak country, but once you're at war, my feeling is you do what you have to do. It's too late for any moral qualms.

It bothers me a bit, though, that we're paying these people an arm and a leg to fight for us. Terrible planning, to my way of thinking, to have to buy extra soldiers for the aftermath of your wars. The problem, of course, is that to get the troops we need for neoimperial wars the usual way, we'd either have to reinstitute the draft or pay soldiers a lot more.

So the thought occurs to me: Outsourcing. If we really do want to pursue neoimperialism, (and I don't, but that's beside the point) we could recruit abroad for the regular army. Or a sort of auxilia for the imperial army. That is, hire men from the third world-- Africa, Latin America, wherever-- for a respectable amount, probably a bit less than what we pay American soldiers, but still a very large amount of money in their home countries, train them ourselves, and have them fight alongside Americans in our wars for democracy. Probably make them sign up for a long time, 6-8-10 years, to make sure we get out what we put in. But training soldiers is one of the things we do better than most of the rest of the world, and we could fairly quicky get a much larger army with only a small drop in professionalism. And, of course, when the soldiers' service is up and they go back home, you have these third world countries with a large number of well-trained soldiers who are now very familiar with American culture, and that can't hurt for spreading liberal democracy either. Peacefully or no.

I'd rather it didn't happen, and of course it's politically impossible, both domestically and internationally, and there's always problems with large bodies of soldiers of uncertain loyalties. Still, a cute idea, no?

Heh. Borders was sold out of Against All Enemies. Which I suppose is a good sign, not that Maine is a terribly reliable barometer of anti-Bush sentiments. But word has been going around, and DeLong in particular really makes me wanna read the book:

If there is one thing clear from reading Against All Enemies, it is that Clarke is f***ing apeshit. I've never seen anyone so apeshit. Clarke had thought he was leading a successful counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda, and then at the start of 2001 these idiot neocon Cold Warriors came in and messed everything up with bureaucratic bull****. Because the Bush administration blocked his plans, September 11, 2001 happens and 3,000 Americans die. And then the White House takes 911 as a poiltical(sic!) football and runs with it. And then it uses 911 as a phony excuse to launch a war on Iraq that--in Clarke's estimation--greatly strengthens al Qaeda.

I did, at least, in my little trip out today, manage to finally remember to pick up honest horseradish before Passover. Which is actually worth using on beef, unlike that 'cream-style' shit that tastes like vinegar and is all you can usually find.

Speaking of which, I'm thinking Dad might do well to pick up a copy of Clarke's book. As ammo for the inevitable political argument with Goldstein.

Edit: I just noticed, and I have to do it. Even if I do feel kinda bad about sic!ing DeLong.

I don't quite get fanfic. I mean, we see my reaction to falling in love with someone else's character-- I want to take the archetype, remake her as mine, and write her in my own story. Rather than write that character as she is in other stories around the one I read her in. And I'm not particularly interested in reading fanfic either. There's just something missing there that makes me not interested.

I think what it is really, is that I focus on the story, and I see character and setting and such as being there for the sake of telling the story. So I'm not interested in further adventures of X, or X and Y get it on with each other, or other such things. Which is not to say characters aren't important-- one of the reasons I prefer novels to short stories is they allow you to tell stories that are more about the people and let your characters change and grow. But they're important in the context, or perhaps because of the context of the story.

Not that I have any problems with the people who are into it writing fanfic. Whatever does it for you. And I'd be terribly, terribly flattered by someone writing 'fic for my work when/if it gets published.

A couple days ago, I ran into someone's blog answering a question going around about fictional crushes. I tried to think, but came up awfully short. The Lady, maybe, from The Black Company, or West Wing's Amy, though that's really more about Mary-Louise Parker. Thinking way back, Kitiara and Winnowill certainly were once, and maybe a couple others. Still, it seems like I should be able to come up with more.

And then, suddenly:

Her voice in Greek was harsh and low and lovely.

Thus he died, and all the
    life struggled out of him;
and as he died he spattered
    me with the dark red
and violent-driven rain of
    bitter-savored blood
to make me glad, as gardens
    stand among the showers
of God in glory at the
    birthtime of the buds.

...

"Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry.

"And what is beauty?

"Terror."

"Well said," said Julian. "Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming."

I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.

(quote from The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, which is very good. Thanks, Mike.)

The fuck of it is, I really wanna write her now. And I don't have a story she fits in, nor do I find myself really able to keep my thoughts on my characters. I suppose it'll pass, with time and distance from the book. In the meantime, I find myself trying to spin a story out of intersections between Westmark and Pytho's Mask.

(Edit: 'coz I had to go look up html shit to preserve the lines in that bit from the Orestia in my very narrow double-blockquoted column. I hate html sometimes. Not that it would have really been a problem if the lines hadn't been just about exactly twice the width of the column...)

Happy birthday me! Woo. A year older, not particularly wiser, but at least marginally more accomplished.

Birthday presents have been arriving by mail the last couple days, including the first season of The West Wing on DVD and (my precious!) the two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The plan for tomorrow is to celebrate by doing something very much like watching West Wing all day and eating a very good dinner.

Gah. Still not feeling at all good. Not thinking terribly well either, I think. There was actually something worth saying behind that last post that I don't think came out when I wrote it. Sigh. Whatever.

This is the time of year that really bothers me. I don't mind the cold, cold middle of the winter, when you go outside as little as possible, but everything's beautiful and white. No, it's the sixth month of bare trees and gloomy skies that really gets to me. I should get a houseplant next winter, I think.

Been playing a bunch of recent indy text adventures, having been pointed to them by the brother. And am left with some vague thoughts about medium and storytelling.

First, on time: Games are very, very slow. I can read a short novel in about two hours, if it's not very dense. A two-hour movie is about short-story legnth. The two-hour IF-COMP format isn't even that. A vignette, really. Enough to lay out a situation and resolve it, but not develop anything at all. And while a tv series can do something approximately novel-length in a 6-12 hour season, experience would suggest it takes upwards of 30 hours to get that much story in a game. Who has that much time? Who wants to spend that much time? Worse, much of that extra time really isn't spent on anything terribly compelling. Walking from place to place. Collecting keys. Exploring dead ends. Talking to people with nothing to say. Buying better armor. So on. Boring stuff that any halfway decent author or screenwriter would leave out. And the nature of the game is probably such that a lot of that kind of thing is neccessary, but... It's hard to take gaming seriously as a storytelling medium unless folks find a way around that.

Second, words are very, very powerful. At least for the cost. At least for dealing with characters. There's a certain amount of.. physicality, I guess, that you need to get across to do show-don't-tell with emotion. Or you can do descriptor-words on dialog or get inside people's heads as a shortcut. Which you can also get across with very good actors or good voice actors and excellent animators. At a much greater cost, and games these days aren't willing to spend the money or don't know how to do it right. Really, how many games have characters with any significant physical presence? Ico was actually quite good. Kartia, maybe, and similar things, but that was pretty limited. Final Fantasies try, but don't do a very good job. But if you can use text for describing people, and not just dialogue, it's something you can do quite well. Which, now that I think of it, may have been one of the things that made the Ultima Underworlds work so well.

Anyway. Galatea is very much worth checking out. Some of Ms. Short's other stuff too, if you're into that sort of thing.

Heh. The things you find. Probably total crap. Bad etymology is very easy to do, and the efforts to link "melech" and "mikado" seem sketchier than most. But there's the well and the mirror, and some of the Shinto rituals, which do seem to suggest a real connection.

And then there's:

..according to legend, ninjas would be given a parchment by a mystical, supernatural figure called Tengu. The parchment itself was known as a tora-ne-maki – a scroll of the tora.

(No, no! Its ways are ways of pleasantness! All its paths are peace!)

Why do wizards have towers? Is it all Tolkien's fault? It's not like Merlin had a tower, really, except in some versions of the Nimue story, and it's more often a cave. And even that, like fairy-tale towers, is a prison first, and only incidentally a residence. Is there some bit of folklore I'm missing? Did Tolkien get his towers from somewhere?

I actually really like wizards having towers. I just wish I knew where it came from.

Mid-70s, of course, Gygax gave wizards towers at 10th level, and that, as they say, is that.

Ah! Of course!

Thinking about the next project. The "school's for ghouls" story just wasn't working. Largely, I think, because I never got a clear image of the love interest, and wasn't getting one. I could muddle through anyway, maybe, but she's too important, and if I can't convince myself to care about her, I'm not gonna convince the reader to either.

So back to thinking about the Apprentice Story, which I was originally doing the Kabbalah research for before I got sidetracked on the other. But it was basically just a collection of neat images, some characters, and the magic system I wanted to use, without any real plot to tie it together. And I'm thinking possible plots: scratch evil overlords, the apprentice needs to leave his master and journey alone, probably self-confrontation. Channeling A Wizard of Earthsea too much would be bad. And the self-confrontation.. Why? What good does it do? Why does it make him a True Wizard?

(Excuse, please. SPOILERS for unwritten book below. Heh.)

Epiphany. The Burning Bush solution. (See, there's perhaps an argument: Eden story possibly suggests the only significant difference betweeen humans and God is immortality/infinity. creation-implies-destruction and human access to the language of creation suggests that immortality is the cause of infinite power, not the result.)

Ties everything together perfectly. One of the neat images (which was just there to be creepy before) works great both as how the master/adoptive mother gains immortality/power and as reason to be bitter and take it out on the kid. Which gives him reason to have to confront his hurtful past to get at the secret of power. And it makes sense, in the system, but it's original, and not so obvious people will figure it out instantly, even with ample hints. Almost too perfect. All I need now is to figure out a few stops along the journey, and I'm set.

Huh. I have two real blues songs on my computer, downloaded at different times for different reasons: Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman" and Robert Johnson's "Come on in My Kitchen". And just now I realize they both do a variation on "Woman I love/ took from my best friend/ he got lucky/ stole her back again." Mainly 'coz Skip James is very hard to understand-- until I listened to his song right after Johnson's, I was hearing "(something) tobacco gang" instead of "stoled her back again".

Clearly, of course, one references the other, or both a third party, but I don't know enough about the blues to know. Funny coincidence though. And it is about as blue as you can get-- everyone you love is gone, and they ain't coming back.

Oh, God. Oh, God, oh God, oh God.

..and I hide behind these books I read while scribbling my poetry like Art could save a wretch like me with some ideal ideology that no one could hope to achieve and I'm never real it's just a sketch of me and everything I make is trite and cheap and a waste. Of paint. Of tape. Of time.

Of paper. God. Sent off some manuscript queries. Three consecutive chapters and a plot summary. But.. I look back at the book now, and suddenly it looks terrible to me. I'm a dim hack with no grasp of english, my plot is horrible hackneyed tripe, and my characterization is shit.

And.. and... I know it's not so, if I were looking at it rationally, but... Ack. Postpartum depression, I guess, of a sort. Sigh.

Listening to "Waste of Paint" on repeat doesn't help probably. But recall that eeriely accurate intp thing:

"People with introverted Feeling, Fi, however, will deliberately choose to listen to music which helps them change and improve their mood. INTPs could never do that. They feel an unpleasant sense of disharmony whenever a music style clashes with their emotional state."

This actually does help, surprisingly enough. Particularly since I'm pretty sure I can get to 7 and probably 10. And there are some real gems buried in the (long) comments.

Though TNH's off-hand reference to 'slushpuppies' is really not something I wanna hear right now. Sigh.

Well, fuck. 52% in Virginia? Game Over. Time to look forward to November. Let's just hope we can pull it off with such an uninspiring candidate.

Well, fuck. Clark did just well enough to stay in the race and cut into the Edwards vote. Big wins for hateful Kerry. NPR the whole night was pushing the idea of the Kerry/Edwards ticket, which is essentially a huge dis to Edwards.

Thinking about vice-presidents.. Kerry has to win the whole thing, or maybe make a deal with the delegates to avoid a brokered convention. He has no qualities that would make anyone pick him for veep. Except maybe militaryness, but Clark is better for that. The token New Englander doesn't much help the ticket, particularly since the folks in Massachusetts hate him. And experience and electability and such are only good for the top slot. Dean/Clark, Edwards/Clark, Kerry/Edwards seem the natural ways to work it. Clark? I don't see him winning, but... I dunno. Dean or Edwards for domestic policy, I guess. Kerry perhaps for a misguided try at experience.

And strategy. I don't see any good ways to go from here. Dean is pretty much a zombie. The walking dead. The media has written him off, and that'll do it. You need that free TV to get anywhere in the big states. Clark or Edwards (and probably Edwards) needs to win big in Virginia and Tennesee to take the other out. Though, actually, it might help a bit in the media to be able to have the Edwards-Clark-Kerry finishes, rather than Edwards-Kerry-Dean? I dunno. The other thing is, Edwards really needs to prove he can win outside the South. And I'm thinking it might be a good idea for him to campaign a bit in states where Dean is going to campaign heavily, on the theory that Dean has to attack Kerry, and disaffected Kerry voters may well choose Edwards over Dean.

Sigh. It still doesn't look good, though there's still the hope that folks will realize Kerry is awful. I'll still vote for him in Novemer, if it comes to that, but I'd feel a lot better about it if I could hear anybody who isn't being paid by the man say something actually good about him, and not just "I voted for him 'coz he's 'electable.'"

Dammit. Woke up in the middle of the night with my trick knee acting up, and no way it's gonna let me get back to sleep. It comes and goes, the knee hurting, and I have no idea what causes it. Somtimes it's fine, sometimes it hurts if I keep it bent in the same position too long, and sometimes it just hurts. Had a doctor look at it once when it was hurting, and he couldn't tell anything was wrong. I vaguely suspect it may be related to that horrible illness I got for a month when I was seven or so, this is the same knee that swelled up like crazy then. Not that I have any idea what that woulda done permanently.

More sucks besides. The water pump broke, got the plumbers to come by and haul it out of the well and put a new one in. Everything looked fine for a bit, then water started coming out of the top of the well. 'Backhoe' is one of those words you really don't want to hear from the man telling you what he's gonna do about your problem.

Sigh.

I'm vaguely disturbed that Google spits out my little Talmud story rant as the number 6 hit when searching for "tree of life to those who hold it fast." Yeah, Google weights blogs too much, but it's a page that doesn't get updated, so it shouldn't benefit too much from that. Are other people linking to it or something? (No counter on that page, I can't tell)

Heh. This, of course, will make it even worse.

And ever since that bit I wrote about Life of Pi, I've been getting mad hits from search engines about 'tsimtsum'. Even more than I was getting about five percenters. And, well, I think I do a pretty good job of talking about these things, but I'm no real authority. I'm just smart, and better read about Judaica than a lot of people, and spend some time thinking about it. But I'm not nearly as knowledgable as I'd like to be about this stuff, there's huge holes in my scholarship, and I suspect I may give folks who are casually interested bogus ideas. Particularly since I'm starting from a worldview that is not exactly in tune with mainstream Judaism. Seeing as having to follow rules totally pisses me off.

But anyway. Thinking about Kabbalah lately. I'm completely fascinated by Kabbalah, and to a lesser extent, with mysticism in general. Even if I totally don't get it. And even the cheap way of getting the mystic experience seems to be denied me-- my one experiment with hallucinogens (heh. some would call them entheogens.) did absolutely nothing, as far as I could tell. The thing is, Kabbalah seems to be a mixture of neat ideas that are maybe good ways to look at Torah and total, total, crazy shit. And the impression I get is that people either completely dismiss it, or study Kabbalah for it's own sake, and buy into all this 'Oral Torah' stuff, the crazy shit even more than the neat ideas.

But I think Kabbalah serves a real purpose for people mainly interested in Torah. The thing is, there will be people who have mystic experiences, and scripture doesn't give any real reason to stop having prophets. Nor do we have any real authority to say whose mystic experiences are real prophecy. So the thing to do seems to be to wall this stuff off, say it's barely canon, and accept it as real prophecy only as far as it deepens your understanding of Torah. Works for me. And it shouldn't do any harm if you put enough warning labels around it. But, then, you do get the people who seem to be deeply into Kabbalah for its own sake...

Well, fuck. Edwards got a less-than expected fourth, even if it was basically a tie for third. The hateful Kerry pulled off a big win. Well, two sources of hope left, I guess. Edwards or Clark (and hopefully Edwards) could win big on the 3rd, grab the media spotlight, and kill the Kerry-is-a-winner idea. Or Dean could use his fat stacks to stay in the race long enough for voters to get turned off of Kerry, or for Kerry to make a big mistake.

Neither looking terribly likely right now. Sigh.

I hate titles. Or rather, I hate having to find titles for my stuff. I tend to think of things I'm writing, or thinking of writing, as 'the X story'. The War Story. The Apprentice Story. The Powers Story. So on. But these don't work for shit as real titles. As amusing as it would be to see The War Story: Beowulf meets Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a bookstore, it ain't gonna happen.

So, yeah, I need a title. Something about 'fate' or 'destiny' or something, I think, to go with the blurb on the back: 'blah, blah, the young Lord Adrian meets a mysterious woman with an astonishing prophecy-- a meeting that would shape the destiny of nations.' Preferably something that could be taken ironic, 'coz we find out partway through that she made up the prophecy.

If I liked titles as obscure references, I'd be tempted to use Hear It Not Heaven. Which has problems, for one, that there's basically no religion in the world. (though I guess there's a floating island in backstory, which shows up more in later books...) Also that the book is entirely sympathetic to the kings and nobles of the land waging offensive war for personal gain. Ah well.

Problem is, there's only one proper ending to that story, the way she's laid it out, and it's hard to do in the medium. After a suitable number of scrapes with Daddy's goons, and sufficient flashbacks to give us a full accountof the family, the situation, the choice to flee, she has to really take flight-- she has to get into her plane, take off, and just disappear into the night. Implying that she's found some mystic destination not of this world where she'd be truly safe, but leaving it up to the reader to decide if that's what happened, or if she crashed into the sea or the mounains somewhere, of if she just ran and is running still. Perhaps it could work in the medium with one last post, from Jim or Susan about how she disappeared, but otherwise it requires blogging from places she shouldn't be able to to tell it right.

Which I suppose works just fine if it's not real. And if it is real, it shouldn't end tidy enyway. Whatever.

"Speaking of livers," the unicorn said. "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver. You must offer up your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."

"Well, let's see," Trippi says when I suggest that his supporters might not show up when it counts. "They can go to a frickin' meeting once a month, but they aren't going to make it to a caucus, which is--what's that--a meeting once every four years?"

Well.

What this really demonstrates, I guess, is that Trippi is no Mankiewicz. He's got the enormous group of hard-core Dean supporters, but doesn't seem to really be able to use them. 18% is only something like 22,000 people in the caucuses, and Dean should have been able to do better than that. And with the stories I've heard about the poor get-out-the-vote effort and terrible handling of going after folks whose candidate couldn't get 15%, I kinda think everything we've heard about Dean's orginization is overrated. Sure, he's got a lot of people, and a lot of cash from those people, but I suspect they're not nearly so organized as one would like. And, yeah, you can play down the caucuses, 'coz they require more commitment than primaries, and your new voters may be unwilling, but they're also very small, so your hardcore supporters have more influence than they otherwise would.

Not, of course, that the actual results hurt Dean that much, though his reaction may. He still has a lot of support and money, and he's still got a pretty good chance of winning.

My man, of course, picked up a far better than expected second place. Which is really the best place to be after Iowa. Edwards just needs to do passably well in New Hampshire, take it to the bank in South Carolina, and he's in the best position to take the nomination. And he's smart, and he has ideas, and I like his politics, and he's by far the best on TV. The best on TV thing is key, I think it gives him the best chance of winning in November if he can pull of the nomination.

I'm not quite sure what I want to happen in New Hampshire. Clark can't win, or he'll take South Carolina, and that kills Edwards. Dean needs to get hit again. There's the danger that if Kerry wins convincingly, people rally around him, but Kerry is a dim hack who's mainly running on the idea that he ought to be president. Which kills him in November, a good enough reason to not want him to win, even if you don't cling to the antiquated notion that your president should be able to manage things like vision and leadership. Lieberman can't get the nomination, and he certainly can't win if he does, but he could split the New Dem vote if he manages to do well, and he could certainly cause problems in South Carolina with his black support.

So. We probably need Kerry-Dean-Clark or Kerry-Clark-Dean in an almost-tie, with Edwards a respectable 4th, ahead of Lieberman. Then kill Clark and Lieberman in SC, pick up the whole South, and... Fuck. I see Kerry winning that scenario, unless he manages to self-destruct somewhere.

And I'd rather have anybody but Kerry. For me, Kerry will always be the guy who threw someone else's medals over the White House fence, turning what could have been a poignant display of conviction into political farce. And really, it cheapens the sacrifice of the other veterans there, having poster boy Kerry be a weasel and give up nothing to make the statemment. Grar.

Some time back, I was riding a train with a couple friends. Bob, or rather, excuse me, the Reverend Doctor Bob, was wearing the priest shirt, and the folks across from us asked him to say grace. Rev. Bob, D.D. made such a mess of it that I ended up taking him aside and teaching him the blessing I'd learned from Grandma over years of Christmas dinners.

I don't think she remembers the words now, which is sad, but not entirely unexpected, and she passed the buck on saying grace to Mom. But we are a folk serious in our faiths, or lack thereof, and the buck got itself passed right along to me. So I ended up saying bruchus over Christmas dinner, which was kinda weird.

The dinner itself... I'd wanted to try my hand at Coq au Vin for some time now. This is essentially a chicken boiled in wine, the wine and cooking juices then boiled down to a fabulously rich sauce, though it also involves things like cognac and fire and singeing the hair on one's hand. Am very glad I tried, 'coz it ended up every bit as good as it sounds, though I think if I were to do it again, I'd put the dark meat in a few minutes before the white-- the white meat was just a tad overdone.

There is at least one very good thing I picked up from the francophile father.

I got a hit for the site from someone searching for "am I too proud?" I should make a little online poll. Start with, "Do you need to ask?" and end with, "Will you post the results on your site?"

I have to thank Johnson for introducing me to Jess Klein. (Though I suppose we're square: I introduced her to EFO, trading musics of our home states.) "Springtime" brought me out of my cabin-fever-writer's-block funk last winter, and "Draw Them Near" I will forever associate with Haibane Renmei. And there's this great love vs. pride theme that Klein keeps going back to.

'Coz really, it's easy enough to decide to fall in love with a woman and make everything about her, and it's sweet enough for a time. But. There's a time when it stops feeling good, and it doesn't get anybody what they really want in the end. It's still the easy path.

The CD with "Strong Enough", alas, is apparently out of print. Which gives me justification for napstering, but I really want to pay her money to own the song. I mean:

I am not saying that I don't want you to stay
But if you left me now, well I'd be fine anyway
And if that sounds callous, well it's from standing on my feet
So heaven help me, I've prayed for this, but I won't get down on my knees

Great stuff. And... Oh! Well... Maybe not. I guess, no, there really isn't a pun there. But I should have at least noticed the possibility before, me with these great thick walking-barefoot calluses.

So we got the Butcher of Baghdad. Woo. In a reasonable world, this would be entirely a good thing. And there is a lot of good to it. The partisans will be less of a threat to both our troops and the Iraqi people, being less coordinated, and possibly prone to infighting. (See, there's exactly one good reason for the people who are able to directly wield power to keep the Hobo of Tikrit around-- so the guy next door doesn't claim he's Big Man instead of you.)

But. Bush was already showing every sign of looking for the earliest opportunity to say the job's over, let's go home. And the military/security problem isn't the hard one. The political nationbuilding is the hard part of the job, and the part that really needs to be done right if we're going to make anything good out of the war. I'm not looking for a silk purse here, but it would be nice to get something to keep the change in. And the capture of Saddam is a very good excuse to say we've done what we came to do. But we haven't, and won't for a long time yet.

At least we found him now, and not next October.

(Though Bush could still try to schedule the Iraqi show trial for election season...)

Jesus fucking christ. On a fucking stick. Angry argument with the brother about angryness with third party with whom, as far as I'm concerned, everything is cool. Dude, I like you. I don't like the brother so much right now, but that's 'coz hes an ass.

And he's a crappy driver too.

Various people have been running around with the lj 'meme' with pizza-eating. Now, this wasn't really the point of the so-called 'meme', but it strikes me that pizza-eating really doesn't mean much. Pizza is a flashy food, the eating of which is necessarily exhibitionist. Burger-eating is where you really get at the nature of a man, for burger-eating is a private thing, between a man and his burger. No one notices burger-eating, except your asshole brother.

There was a confrontation, a while back, at the In & Out burger in San Jose. Now, I will forever love this In & Out burger for offering eight-and-a-quarter for the shittiest job on earth, and thus proving that, under optimal conditions, the free market will provide almost a living wage, even for the shittiest job on the planet at In & Out burger. But this story isn't about In & Out burger. It's about the confrontation with the brother at In & Out burger, involving burger-eating and much mutual mockery.

See, the brother laughed at me at this In & Out burger. He laughed at me for gently reaching behind the In & Out burger and cradling it in my hand as I lift it to my mouth. But the brother's approach to the In & Out burger? He grabs the In & Out burger firmly with both hands, flips the burger over on the way to his mouth, and eats her like that, upside-down and firmly grasped in both hands.

I still think I'm the better man.

Unrelated, I'm vaguely worried about an email I bcc:ed to myself while I was in town (for the sake of having a record) and never recieved here. Give it a day or two and try to recreate what I was thinking, I guess.

Just bought Tanglewood Tree. Good stuff, but.. Grr. It's frustrating. See, I'd managed to forget, really, Mrs. Grammer's performance of "The Mountain" at Falcon Ridge, except to remember it was very good. Hearing it again, I remember it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard, her singing "I see the mountain, and that is all I see." And I can remember that performance, listening to the song on the cd, but I can tell that the not nearly as good cd-perfomance is replacing the live perfomance in my memory. It's already pretty much happened with "When I Go" and "Gentle Soldier of My Soul".

I really badly need to see her live again as soon as it's remotely reasonable to do so. There are live shows in the Northeast come spring, I guess.

Heh. Also need to listen to "Cat-eye Willie Claims His Lover" enough to actually get the words right when I sing along.

Watched what I have recorded again, read spoilers for the (actually 4) episodes I missed. Decided the televisionwithoutpity guy is an arse for dissing Management for giving the watch to dead girl. No respect for tradition there. And actually, that perhaps shows Management cares more about people than Samson thinks. I managed to miss every episode in which Ben and Sophie talk, I thought they were conspicuously not having them talk for some reason I didn't understand. So, now that I think I know what's going on, I've decided I don't know who begat Sophie. Still some questions. Is Nicholas really the Tsarevich? Could "Dude, where's my bear?" Lodz be Rasputin? Have decided they followed tradition after all and made Management the Devil, largely from comparing the Carnivale symbol with the Templar symbol. Which, given that Managagement is reasonably sympathetic, or at least on the same side as the protagonists, suggests we get the 'Devil-on-the-side-of-humanity vs. The Authority' Eden-is-good story. I approve. And, if you think, Ben (Scudder too) is very much taken with the Serpent, and the really creepy thing about Justin (razorblade communion aside, gawd) is that he uses his powers to control people. Still don't know what's up with the tree guy, though I don't think he's Scudder any more.

I had the thought that a lot of Carter's songwriting pushes the exact same buttons-- there's this wonderful Southern Fantasy, or perhaps American Fantasy, tradition that I absolutely love. Stewart's stuff too, for that matter. Though none of the three stand on that merit alone.

Wow. Carnivale is amazing. Best TV show ever, I'd say, not that that's saying much. Even if they still do horrible end-of-season cliffhangers. I'm reminded of the second book of the "Song Of Ice and Fire" series, which ends with a sword being raised over a dude's neck. We find at the beginning of the third the sword's never brought down. Was suckered once, and I will never again believe anyone is dead until I see the body.

Need to watch a few more times. Even if it is 8 hours. 11 if I actually had all the episodes, alas. And I expect I'll still be left with more questions than answers. I think I at least know who begat who. I'd like to try to pause somewhere I can get a good look at the lodge symbol.

I wish I knew where I'd seen Ms. DuVall before. Ah. A quick stop by imdb reveals it was most likely the atrocious How to Make a Monster (why the hell did I watch that?) and the merely terrible The Faculty.

Mm. Very pretty sunrise over the city. Not really waking up where I expected to, but the head feels remarkably good for having had the folks I was with decide I couldn't drive. A problem, I suppose, of going drinking with folks you don't really know. I still maintain I woulda been fine by the time I'd got to the car. But that's not something I'm going to argue too strenuously. Just to be on the safe side.

It is kinda weird that I've been out drinkin' with some of the groom's friends while having managed to avoid actually meeting him. But I trust Mrs. Huttenhower's taste in people.

Speaking of which, there's still a stack of books in the car I intended to lend to Ms. Johnson, and I don't think I really have a very good way of getting in touch while she's in town.

It's a shame, I have entirely too good memory for stupid-ass things I've said while inebriated. Alas. But since some of us (bob!) said stupid-ass things without, I figure I'm okay.

So, yeah, two turkeys and a wedding. Not quite movie material. I'm still absurdly proud about having been able to introduce the uncle to music he likes but hadn't heard of. I'd been hoping to use his expertise to get some similar stuff, so I wouldn't be spending 8 hours of a 12 hour drive listening to "I Go Like the Raven" on repeat. Turns out he didn't know Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer. So I played him a few tracks, and we pretty much agreed we could find people who played that sort of folk dance music, but doubted they had lyrics worth listening to while driving. He did leave me with a fat stack of bluegrass, promo cds he'd been sent but already owned.

Mm. Good weekend. I need to go Metro to the car.

God dammit. I am really fucking angry right now. I probably shouldn't be-- 'net is a wonderful place for misunderstandings. Will at least try to calm down before sending off angry email.

A long time back, I was working as a peon at Blockbuster. Which was a shit job, but a lot of it I didn't mind. I didn't mind the menial work, or the asshole bosses I had to tell every week I couldn't work on Shabbat, or even most of the dealing with customers. The one thing that really, really bothered me was that my first name was on the nametag. Some guy would come in and say, "Yo, [Arc], what new releases do you have this week?" And I wanted to smack him. I wanted to say, in a cold, cold voice, "You don't know me. That's Mr. [Seed] to you."

But I didn't. Folks can get away with contemptible familiarity with those forced by circumstances into menial labor.

Ok, Mike. Excerpt from the boring beginning of my boring draft:

Lily rolls her eyes at me. Ms. Lynch is going on about basic magical principles. Blah, blah, force of will, blah, blah, proper visualization, blah, blah, incantation is a tool to help visualization. I know all this stuff already. Looking back at the blank stares of the rest of the class, it’s clear they just aren’t getting it, though. I sigh and shake my head. I scrawl, It’s not all their fault. Fucking Hollywood teaches that it’s all about reciting bad poetry, and slide my notebook over to Lily. It comes back, black ink beneath my blue, they’re still idiots. We share a smirk.

"Today’s exercise will be to cast a light spell. Remember, visualize, then project your will into the world. It can be very hard until you get the knack. The lab sheets have a few different methods to try, you should see what works for you. Lab reports are due Friday. Any questions?"

Lily calls out, "Can we leave after we’re done?"

"It’s really quite tricky. I don’t expect--"

"Hello, world." A roiling ball of red-orange light appears in Lily’s hand. Show-off.

"Yehi or." The words bring to mind the purest white light, and with a gentle nudge I bring a bit into existence.

"Bloody fucking cross!" Lily shields her eyes. "Think, Ben!"

Oh. Right. Idiot. "Sorry." I drop the spell.

Someone from the back of the class says something about dorks I don’t quite catch. Ms. Lynch, grudgingly, “Fine. You can go, after you’re done with the exercises on the lab sheet.”

Am blocking like a motherfucker. Barely 1600 words. I haven't counted words before, and I'm realizing that 50k words in a total rough draft is really not much. Ten good days would do it I think, though it's a bit hard to tell 'coz I've always edited entirely too much as I go along. And I'm not remotely having good writing days right now.

Heh. Damn straight.

It's beautiful country around here now. Or, rather, it's always beautiful country around here, even now. The leaves are mostly gone, with only a few recalcitrant oaks holding out. The wistful summer greens are gone, replaced by somber browns and greys, the dark, cold greens of pines, the occasional arterial red of a blueberry patch. The sky is grey, the sea is leaden.

It is not a beauty for picture-postcards, but rather for quiet experience and slow appreciation.

Headed down to the local bookstores today. Hmph. I want my chain stores. But didn't feel like driving all that far. Blue Hill Books, it turns out, has a travel section about as big as the entire Literature secton and bigger than the combined genre fiction sections. Local interest, no? I guess since everybody leaves for a few weeks every winter to avoid going crazy...

But no, not much good for snagging some fluff fantasy.

Ah, fuck me. The other thing I just noticed, the date. Well. One of those being-a-hermit problems, sometimes you just don't notice. Which is part of why I like to make a point of it, I guess. Well, remember it for next year, for sins against God, the Day of Atonemement atones, no?

But fuck it, it's important. Having the day of rest and reflection is really really nice for all sorts of reasons. For one, 'coz going all-out berserker-style is fucking unhealthy. As we see. No matter how much you get done.

Hee. Good thing that pitas hard-drive-death ate that post about how I'd never, ever, not in a million years even dream of writing on Shabbat.

Done.

I should be crazy happy right now, but somehow it hasn't quite hit me yet. Bah. 'Somehow'. I know exactly how.

See, I remember sitting down to get back to work around sunset yesterday. And I vaguely noticed it getting light. Then I vaguely noticed it getting dark. Then I finished. There's three empty coke cans and a canister of oatmeal with a fork in it beside the keyboard. I vaguely noticed I was hungry and thirsty too. But somehow didn't wanna take five to cook the oatmeal. And I'd nothing else that didn't need cooking. Even out of raw spaghetti.

Then I realized I was fucking hungry and fucking thirsty, and tired besides. My right leg mysteriously hurts when I put weight on it. And I'm done!

Heh. And I noticed I'd been listening to "I Go Like the Raven" for over 24 hours straight. That song is seriously starting to threaten the position of "I'll Be Missing You" and "The Everyday World of Bodies". Guess it's not just a good driving song, but also a good obsession song.

I'd go out to a fancy restaurant to celebrate, but my tastes are better than this town, and I don't trust myself to drive somewhere I'm not too good for. Being tired and all. Food-snob at the edge of the fucking world would not be a happy life if I couldn't cook. I did make it to the grocery store, came back with a rib roast, some new potatoes, a bottle of Burgundy. And some snacks besides. Roast in the oven, potatoes peeled, gonna throw 'em in the pan with the roast halfway through, they need basting. Make some nice buttered peas too. Throw myself a little party. Y'all celebrate too.

That sleep thing? It can wait. I'm done.

Okay, I do need to do a once-over revision before sending it off to collect rejections, but I'm gonna try to nanowrimo the other thing, revise in December. Distance should help. Sleep too. (Hee. I don't think my writing was terrible, despite sleep deprivation, but my judgement is quite possibly impaired right now. I am aware I'm writing with a somewhat different voice than usual here, and was not aware of it in the writing. My third-person narrator voice is completely different anyway. Still...)

Woo! Done!

Excuse me for being incommunicado lately. Last few days (4? 5?) I've been just going all out with the writing 'coz I'm so damn close to finishing. Leaving no energy to spare for writing other stuff. Pitas ate some entries before that I think too. Which is probably not the best for quality, but something just hit me, and I wanna be done.

So, later.

Got the Temple of Elemental Evil CRPG. Am enjoying it, though the bugs are kinda frustrating. But the latest iteration of D&D is a really good system, and ToEE is almost completely faithful to it. I would prefer combat to be locked to a grid, so you can tell better when you're flanking a guy, but also 'coz there are times when you could fit two guys side-by side in a corridor, but if you're careless the first guy stands in the middle and takes up the whole thing. And you can't quite tell if the corridor is just too narrow.

Major gripe number one: messing with the experience system. I'm not sure what they did, but I suspect they did something, 'coz you get in a lot of situations where the 3e system breaks down. The idea behind that system, encounters have an 'encounter level', experience is based on that level, rather than on the individual monsters. And doubling the number of monsters increases encounter level by two. So ToEE seems to have quite a few places where there's a bunch of monsters you could figth together or in groups, depending mostly on where you are when the fight starts. And I don't know how they handle it, but probably poorly. Something I did notice: one of the key ideas behind the 3e experience system is that you get experience for overcoming obstacles, not for slauthering your enemies. Alas, there's a band of gnolls you can threaten or bribe into leaving you alone, and you only get the experience for killing them. Grr. 'Threaten' is as real a skill as ass-kicking. Gold is as much a resource as healing potions. And the game balance in 3e kinda depends on it. A lot of why they could get away with having rogues go up levels at the same rate as everyone else is that experience philosophy. (come to think of it, I haven't seen a trap or lock yet, so I don't know if you get experience for that stuff either.)

crap. I forget system gripe two for the moment. Oh, right: talking to people. There's conversation tree options that open up when you have the various talking-to-people skills at high enough level, or perhaps if you make a high enough roll with your talking skills. The problem is, in a PnP game, the whole party would be there for the talking. If you wanna be nice, the cleric uses Diplomacy, if you need to shake down a guy, the fighter uses Threaten, if you wanna sucker a guy, the rogue uses Bluff, and so on. Roleplaying it all in addition to the skill rolls, of course. But in ToEE only one party member does the talking at a time. So it's very much more convenient to load up the rogue (who's the only one who can) with ALL of the talking skills. Which ruins the rogue for any sneaking, though you can still fit in your trap and lock skills, if you roll until you get absurdly high stats. Which is kinda a sucky way to do things, and besides, it leaves the rest of the party without much worthwhile use for the skill points.

Heh. Acadine has a cute point about rabinnic Judaism and fandom. Another point of comparison: an awful lot of the stuff produced in both traditons is just not very good. Sigh. And I have to drive an hour to get this guy too. Ok, I suppose I really drove an hour for the Kedushah and cute talmud stories. Alas, they used a different tune so there wasn't the bit where the whole congregation comes in on "kadosh, kadosh, kadosh", and the guy didn't tell any cute talmud stories either.

Sigh. I miss Zemel.

So. Life of Pi. I'm afraid I have to spoil shit to say what needs saying. Mainly 'coz there wasn't enough foreshadowing (or any really), and, really, I don't think Martel recognized the need for foreshadowing.

I talked to a couple people who'd read it, and they were all, 'Meaning? Bah. It was a cute story with a boy and a tiger and a twist at the end.' But, reading it, I kept coming back to the ship. What does he mean, naming it Tsimtsum? Is it about tsimtsum sinking, becoming undone? Or is it just a starting point?

Some background: Tsimtsum is a Kabbalah creation-myth. The idea, God, being pure and infinite, cannot create anything without introducing impurity, ungodliness, evil. So God withdraws himself from a portion of existence in order that the world be created and life exist. The actual act of breaking and creation is perhaps done by the Demiurge, a perhaps evil aspect of god made for the purpose.

So I get to the end of the book, tsimtsum nagging me the whole way. And there's a second, alternate, story, in which the killing done by the tiger in the first is done by the boy instead. There is, in fact, no tiger in this second story. And Martel asks us to choose between the two. But there is no choice if you get the kabbalah. The second is what happened in the real world, the first is the spiritual realm to which he retreated to save his purity, with tiger as demiurge doing the destruction-neccesary-for-life.

Looking back, there's plenty of evidence. Pi did his Religious Studies thesis on Isaac Luria. He likes the three-toed sloth because it soothes his 'shattered self'. He introduces himself to his classmates as two halves of a circle. But there's no predicting it until the very end.

Worse, Pi is perhaps being Jesus. The suffering, of course. The 'This is God's hat, these are God's pants' bit. And his full name, Piscene, brings to mind 'Jesus Christ, son of God, savior.' No dying, except perhaps symbolically with the blindness, then perhaps being reborn on the island. But if that's so, it ruins the point of tsimtsum. Who needs tsimtsum if God can in himself become imperfect and human while still remaining perfect and divine?

At the same time, it supports, with an argument about the absurd extreme, that old view of Yetzer HaRa I so dislike.

And the thing is, I get the feeling that he doesn't really mean any of it. The second story is very poorly supported if he actually wants to make the tsimtsum point, and there's absolutely no explanation of it for folks who don't know the kabbalah. And so I get the feeling it was mostly a throwaway thing he thought was cute without completely considering what it meant. But it ended up completely changing the meaning of the book for me. Sloppy.

Yes, I'm still quite disgruntled.

Just finished reading Life of Pi. Kinda disgruntled about it, but I'm gonna see what folks who don't know the Kabbalah thought before ranting.

So yeah. I'm back north, and I'm writing a lot again. Feels good. Will resume writing here.

Saw Hannibal. Damn. Were Julianne Moore Jodie Foster, it'd be wonderful. I mean-- not only is Foster a better actor and prettier besides, she managed Clarice Starling perfectly. Including the look and the accent of Appalacia, which Moore has problems with. But. There was the pig scene. The second pig scene, I suppose. And from that point on, it didn't matter. I was totally, 'Eeeee! I can not believe they did that. And that. And that.'

I admit, I'm a sucker for evil, if it's aesthetic enough. And-- the ugliness is part of the aesthetic, the dying as ugly as you live making the whole pretty. And there's the competence and wholeness thing... that Clarice and Hannibal, while diametrically opposed, are still better than everyone else. And they recognise that in each other. Tension arising in the fact that, while Hannibal can accept Clarice in his world, Clarice cannot accept Hannibal. But she wants to.

Grr. I still don't feel able to write the Lily story as it ought. But I'm getting closer.

The brother counters, while I'm away from aim:

games are shit? i'd have to call you on that one. (i'd say, rather: how many memorable book moments, or movie moments? how many talking-to-people moments? strong memories are hard to construct.)

Worse, it seems to me that the nature of the medium should lead to more intense experiences. At least if people understood how to use it right. It's perfectly reasonable that they don't, games are a new medium. Took a lot longer than this for people to understand film. And it's not like I have any great ideas about how to make games work either. But really, until we have people who get the medium, games are shit. The good ones are awfully fun shit, but they're still shit.

Talking to the brother, discussing gaming stuff, the question comes up: favorite gaming moments?

Absolute top of the list was a game of Myth 2. Bacon, Gimble Dark, playing against 5 other very good ffa players. I start northeast, send spiders center, manage to grab the ball and bring it back to the hill overlooking the river. Get surrounded, spend the next 6-7 minutes skirmishing with people on all sides of me. Usually two at once. I take a rush from a guy who's lost his fetch and soulless at one point. And, about a minute to go, the noose is about to tighten, I make a run for it with the ball, someone is about to catch me, and time runs out. I win, being the only one to ever have control of the ball. Total mastery, of a sort I'd never managed before or since.

Others, in no particular order: Watching a game of Doom where the brother is surprised by a hellbeast in a dark corridor and freaks, jams his finger down on the trigger button, turns around and runs, firing at empty hallway.

Ico, a shadow-thing has grabbed the girl, I run to stop it, and another hits me toward a pit, and I cry out, thinking not that I'm going to lose and have to start over, but that they're going to get the girl.

Myth again, Myth World Cup '98, WCC vs. Infinity Watch, I demonstrate I have total mastery of Myth 1 melee skillz.

Silent Hill, running into the creepy ghost babies.

My birthday, a while back, in an arcade with friends, this one guy keeps pumping quarters into the Virtua Fighter machine, and I keep giving him the Jacky smackdown.

Notably, they're all about either fear or pride, and #1 is about both, as there was always the question about whether I'd get caught. And I'd argue that the fear in these cases is not about metagame fears of losing, or having to restart, but about being afraid of what was going to happen in the game itself. Or about being personally invested in what the fear is about. I dunno. I can't even really explain why the ghost babies were so creepy. Perhaps any sort of immersion creates moments that are just as memorable, but fear is just easier.

Also notable is that very few of my favorite sorts of games make the list. No RPGs at all. Only one strategy game, and Myth was an exceptionally good game. I'm sure I could think a bit and expand the list, but I would still be adding mostly action/adventure games. Which raises another point: I really haven't had many truly memorable gaming experiences. Certainly not compared to the amount of time I've spent playing and the number of games I've played.And honestly, it's probably because games are crap. Yeah. They're shit. And it's a real shame, because they're fun, and the medium has an awful lot of potential, but no one quite knows what to do with it.

Springfield Mall kicks ass. Noticed they had a store "Fan Club". Done in way too much pink, sold anime and associated merch, including what appeared to be cosplay outfits. And on the way out, I saw "Fancy World", another fangirl boutique. Not that I'd ever go in one of those places. Too much pink hurts the eyes. But it's awesome that they have 'em.

So, yeah. Not only do they have two bookstores, two music stores, two theaters, two video game stores, two gaming stores, they have two of every concievable store one could want to patronize.

Woo again. Bravo is showing all of West Wing, one a day, from the beginning. I think tivo counts it as a different show, which sucks, but I got lucky and noticed it yesterday just before the pilot.

Thinking bad thoughts about Shigeru Miyamoto. Intend to dis him out properly when I get around to compiling supporting evidence.

Just had the horrible thought: What if MMORPGs learned from the cokemonkey studies? Right now, they're set up so you go out, press the key a bunch of times, get your fix of level, repeat. Taking longer as you get addicted, of course. But... We all know that's not the best way to get cokemonkey in a total buttonpushing frenzy. For that you want to randomize things a bit. So what if, instead, every time you got an experience point, you'd have a tiny little chance of going up a level?

Of course, since cokemonkey is paying monthly to play everquest, you don't really need to do that. You do need to get your customers hooked enough to keep playing, (or perhaps interested enough to keep playing, but that's harder) but you really don't want them online any more than necessary.

Which is what I'd want in an MMORPG anyway. I like the basic idea, but... I don't have 14 extra hours a week. And a lot of the point is to feel like you're making progress, and the rate of that progress is geared toward people who are willing to spend a lot more time in-game than I am. So I want faster advancement than MMORPGs have now, and that also means faster advancement relative to people who play more, so I can go to tougher areas, do