Sunday, January 30, 2005

10:59 PM - With periods between the letters, apparently.

how do you spell o.b.s.o.l.e.t.e?

My mind is still reeling from a conversation I just finished.

Cyclona was visiting, and we were geeking out a bit and talking about choosing new cell phones orBlogger, which I use to write this journal. Pretty soon I was way out of my league into CSS, PHP, RSS, and who knows whatever else... Apparently my site is ancient technology because I use HTML tables to do my formatting. Out of this, though, I may get a lesson in new technologies and a major site redesign in the vaguely eventual future. Hooray for learning and progress!

Things took an unexpected turn, however, when Cyclona tried to show me someone else's blog. Suddenly we were awash in words like "Debian" and "TomCat" and "international intrigue." I felt like I was in the middle of a mid-90's techno-thriller movie, and was about to be whisked away for a chase scene involving men with intimidating eyewear. The whole episode was distressing because my relevant skills were reduced to "providing comic relief" and "designing our spy costumes," which was oddly disempowering. I've always thought of myself as a technical person, skilled at removing spyware from Windows machines and coding my website by hand, and suddenly I felt myself overwhelmed and awash in obsolescence. For the next few days at least, I'm sure to eye the people I meet in the Bay Area with suspicion, knowing that there is a terrifying underworld of technical knowledge and power which lurks, at least for the moment, beyond my grasp or understanding.

On a much more pleasant note, I got to see Cirque Éloize again today. It was a really good experience, and made me want to go play with them. I really felt the urge to get up out of my seat and play with the performers by the end of the show... I think that was the intention of the show, really, but probably would have annoyed my fellow audience members and caused alarm for the security folk. The show was great, and I got to see a couple of old SF circus people, including trapeze teacher Aimeé, so I had a lot of warm feelings. (Which I perpetuated with turnip cakes and warm Taro Milk Tea. Yum!)

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

1:07 PM - bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

I can't see.

I've been in a bit of a funk lately. Yay! My computer is developing all kinds of display issues, again, and so I know it's going to be time to take it to the shop. After my last experience, though, I feel like preparing to take my computer in for an AppleCare servicing is like armoring up for war. I get this feeling not only from taking my broken computer in for service and facing the "can't you just live with it?" attitude, but also from trying to get actual medical care from my "insurance" or get Comcast to stop wasting paper by sending me countless advertisements. I am feeling very anti-corporate today, and on days like this I like to feed my anger by reminding myself that ultimately, if you can look bast the corporate bureaucracy, there is a real person responsible for the problem at a given company, and that person has the power to create change. That person will experience the gale of my scathing fury when I find them.

In lieu of writing the rest of this entry, I'm going to cop out by having two links to other writers who are echoing some of my thoughts and experiences at the moment.

I’m guessing the ultimate goal of this legislation was to end homosexuality, but it will not work; not letting gay people be together is not going to get rid of those “scary” gay people because, um, two gay people never got together and had a gay child, only straight people can make gay children.

"At level 33, I've finally started having the experiences in World of Warcraft that will really end it for me. I have stopped utilizing the game world as a source of creative impetus and have begun instead to consider using power tools on human beings in ways explicitly forbidden by the manual. It's not even Blizzard's fault this time, and I'm looking forward to Thursday's sixteen hour service outage so that I can really examine my life and figure out what is so spiritually injured about it that I feel compelled to be a dwarf all Goddamn night... What I learned tonight is that I should only group with people for whom I have several references and a complete employment history. I want to sit down with a mysterious wizard before we enter some kind of dinosaur hole and ask him which letters are and aren't in "Team." I want to make sure he understands that just because he can project bolts of elemental flame doesn't mean that he was chosen by god for some special purpose and thus cannot die. I only had to go down a few times before realizing that this fucker was actually playing another type of game, against me, one that was not firmly delineated by the application. He was playing a game where you run directly into a troll camp, and then Trolls kill him, and then they kill you just because they saw you guys hanging out."

Saturday, January 01, 2005

4:37 PM - titillating

;-P~~~

Happy New Year! I survived a week with the family and am successfully back in California.

New Year's Eve was a bit of a mess, with the bustle between working late, two parties, and a soiree. I did meet some new people, and see some good old friends, which was really nice. Today was a lot more relaxed, though, with a late breakfast and a matinee screening of Bad Education, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Any film that can show me Gael Garcia-Bernal's pubic hair and stimulate me intellectually is worth a recommendation. I was a bit frustrated that all of the gay characters in the film seemed like villains, because I feel there is always a nasty trend in the media to correlate homosexuality with villainy, but I think I wouldn't really accept a gay Superman either.

Look out Jimmy Olsen.

The past several years have had themes to the movies that I have seen in the theaters. For 2004, the theme was "Bad Movies that I saw in an effort to socialize with friends who wanted to watch Bad Movies." This led to the The Chronicles of Riddick winning an award for most pro-wrestling moves in a science fiction film that includes hand-to-hand fighting as an integral part of the plot, even though everyone's carrying blasters and heavy weaponry... Needless to say, 2005 promises to be interesting!