product acqusition traces lead to <lj user="guipago">

X.x Basics x.X
[ Name ] Michael Guthrie Phillips
[ Nicknames ] I have answered to a hundred names, and will most likely answer to a thousand more.
[ Screen name ] voxpopuli42, Eliz Thann, ronin_kakuhito, voiceofthepeople
[ Birthday ] November 23, 1979
[ Age ] 24
[ Astrological sign? ] Sagitarious, I believe. I'd have to look it up.
[ Chinese zodiac sign? ] Goat, I think.
[ Religion ] Devout Agnostic
[ Status ] Single
[ Eye color ] green/brown bordering on hazel. With speckles sometimes.
[ Height ] 5'10"
[ Shoe size ] 12 or so, depends on brand
[ Parents still together? ] Not for years and years.
[ Siblings? ] 2 half sisters, one half brother
[ Nieces/Nephews? ] one of each
[ Kids of your own ] nada
[ Grandkids ] even fewer
[ Pets? ] Yes, A chocolate lab, a purebred mutt, the dumbest cat in the world, and three fish. I usually have more fish.

[ What do you drive? ] Don't.

X.x Favorites x.X
[ Color ] Deep and dark ones, reds, blues, purples, blacks.
[ Number ] eh? No idea
[ Animal ] Large dogs
[ Vehicle ] Anything that'll get to LEO. From there, you're half way to anywhere.
[ Flower ] the little ones that live on the margins, the ones that pop up first or that die last, the ones that come back and spread no matter what you planned.
[ Scent ] An old forest in the misting rain.
[ Soda ] Diet Coke
[ Book ] depends on the day of the year. Snow Crash or the Moon is a Harsh Mistress or any one of a dozen others.
[ Song ] Happy Phantom today, who knows tomorrow.
[ Cd ] I like the Armitage III sound track, REM's Document 5, BNL's Stunt, Amos' Little Earthquakes, any number of others.

X.x Do you... x.X
[ Color your hair? ] nope
[ Twirl your hair? ] seldom
[ Have tattoos? ] nah
[ Piercings? ] no
[ Have a boyfriend/girlfriend/both? ] nope
[ Homework? ] I wish
[ Like roller coasters ] yeah
[ Wish you could live somewhere else? ] Yes.
[ Want more piercings? ] not at the moment
[ Like cleaning? ] gah, no
[ Write in cursive or print? ] I type.
[ Carry a donor card?] Yes
[ Swear a lot? ] occasionally, but not as a general thing
[ Own a web cam? ] nada
[ Know how to drive? ] the state thinks I do
[ Diet? ] *looks at gut* well, I should be, but no.
[ Own a cell phone? ] No
[ Ever get off the damn computer? ] In recent experience? No.
[ Hablar Espanol? ] No. Watashi wa nihongo ga amari jouzu dewa arimasen.

X.x Have you ever.. x.X
[ Gotten a speeding ticket? ] no
[ DUI? ] no
[ Been in a wreck? ] several, only the one on the bike was my fault or even with me in controll of one of the vehicles.
[ Been arrested? ]never been caught
[ Been in a fist fight? ] one or two
[ Kicked someone in the nuts? ] nah.
[ Stolen anything? ] nope
[ Held a gun? ] Yes
[ Drank? ] Yes
[ Been so drunk you couldn't remember your name? ] nope
[ Considered a life of crime? ] daily
[ Considered being a hooker? ] no
[ Cheated on someone? ] nope
[ Been married? ] No
[ Cried over a girl? ] Yes
[ Cried over a boy? ] no
[ Lied to someone? ] Yes
[ Been in love? ] Yes
[ Fallen for your best friend? ] Yes
[ Made out with JUST a friend? ] no
[ Been rejected? ] who hasn't?
[ Been in lust? ] really now, I'm a guy. of fucking course.
[ Use someone? ] try not to
[ Been cheated on? ] no
[ Been kissed? ] a time or two

X.x Now x.X
[ Current mood ] centerd
[ Current music ] the hum of my case fan
[ Current taste ] salt and sunflowers
[ Current hair ] short, brown, inbetween straight and kinked.
[ Current annoyance ] words
[ Current thing I ought to be doing ] putting words in order
[ Current windows open ]Trillian, Gmail, Schlock Mercenary, Live Journal, Live Journal (on mom's computer so I keep the window count low. hers crashes too much.)
[ Current desktop picture ] ranma and ranma-chan
[ Current favorite band ] hum, no idea
[ Current book ] Broken Angles
[ Current cds in stereo ] Venus Still Orbiting
[ Current crush ] no one at the moment.
[ Current favorite celeb ] Wil Wheaton all the way.
[ Current hate ] I try to avoid that. Hate means that the person matters enough to hate, and anyone I'm going to hate isn't going to matter to me.
[ Current job ] Substitute Teacher/Writer

X.x The last time x.X
[ Last book you read ] Altered Carbon
[ Last movie you saw ] Riddick Chronicles maybe?
[ Last thing you had to drink ] Diet Coke
[ Last thing you ate ] Sunflower seeds
[ Last person you talked to on the phone ] Sherri Mattson, one of mom's priests.

X.x Do you x.X
[ Do drugs? ] nah
[ Have a dream that keeps coming back? ] no, I wish
[ Play an instrument? ] trumped, but I'm really rusty.
[ Believe there is life on other planets? ] Well, duh
[ Remember your first love? ] yeah
[ Still love him/her? ] probably, depends on your meaning of love
[ Read the newspaper? ] rarely
[ Have any gay, lesbian, or bisexual friends? ] well, yeah, no shit, I have more than 10 friends.
[ Believe in miracles? ] nope
[ Believe it's possible to remain faithful forever? ] Yeah
[ Consider yourself tolerant of others? ] unless I'm bored
[ Consider love a mistake? ] nope
[ Have a favorite candy? ] either Andys mints or Symphony Chocolate Almonds and Toffee
[ Believe in astrology? ] nope
[ Believe in magic? ] nope
[ Believe in God? ] neutral against
[ Do well in school? ] usually
[ Go to or plan to go to college/University? ] got one degree, hoping for at least one more
[ Wear hats? ] only my bamboo pesant's hat
[ Hate yourself? ] nope
[ Have an obsession? ] several
[ Have a secret crush? ] none active

X.x Love life x.X
[ First crush ] Jasmine, 1st grade
[ First kiss ] a ways back
[ Single or attached? ] single
[ Ever been in love? ] yeah
[ Do you believe in love at first sight? ] nope
[ Do you believe in "the one?" ] nope
[ Describe your ideal significant other ] I have no ideals, merely things to avoid. She definately needs to be her own person.
[ Have you ever played a game that required removal of clothing? ] not that I remember
[ Have you ever been intoxicated? ] Yes
[ Favorite place to be kissed ] no particular favorites
[ Shy to make the first move? ] yeah

X.x Word association x.X
[ Rock ] garden
[ Green ] grass
[ Wet ] day
[ Cry ] tear
[ Peanut ] butter
[ Hay ] fields
[ Cold ] days
[ Steamy ] towel
[ Fast ] seconds
[ Freaky ] moi?
[ Rain ] mists

Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun.

Which cult classic badass are you? by rook901
Name/Username
Sex	YesNoUndecided
Favorite Eating Utensil
You are:
Quiz created with MemeGen!

and also

Hey, it's Banned Book Week
*edit*
from
Top 100 banned (or challanged) books.
I've bolded the ones I've read for various reasons.

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel (I read the first three and part of the fourth. No plot after number two.)
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell (yeah, actually, in a highschool lobrary, a text with that much info on how to get yourself blowed up in the kitchen is maybe a little questionable)
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras Hee, I brought that to school and shared it.
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford (I so missed the itty bitty titties in this one)
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Stuffes mark X

I just reread the second set of three Valdemar books. Well, mostly. I did skip most of the flashbacks, but other than that I read them.

I'm currently in the middle of Richard K Morgan's Altered Carbon. Sort of a cyberpunk detective novel. Not bad, but for parts of the plot to work he had to set it too far in the future. Some of the technology is not at all advanced enough. (Biggest danger about writing science fiction more than 20 years in the future, the odds are that in day to day technologies you are going to way underestimate their advancement.)

*Edit*
It has a flying whorehouse called "Head in the Clouds" There is no way in hell I could have pulled that off in my writing.

continuation

So, on the 25th I wrote that I'd write more today.
Last thing on the bad list was that my Grandfather has been brought to the Hospital with some sort of leg problem that they were initially calling celluitis. Not sure what it is now. He was in ward one of the icu which is where they put the folks who they figure they may need to operate on immediately at some point in order to save a life. Had the man on morphine. When he became pseudo-stabilized they kicked him out because he is too noisey. I suspect that isn't groaning and moaning, I suspect that it is griping and bitching. I would have mentioned this on the 25th, but my sibilings didn't know, and I didn't want to ask Vanessa to not tell Brie since the entry could wait. Well, he isn't getting worse at least.

Oh, and I now have a sunburn on my scalp, under my thick brown hair. I hate the god damned glowey sky-orb.

So, three days in the sun and I finally have a bit of a sunburn. Oh well. Obnoxiousa part is that I tan red and I burn the same color.
Hung out with Vanessa for a while. She's my little sister's best friend. She got to rant about the vapidness of her age group, especially her sister and sister's friends, and I got to listen to someone talk who wasn't the voice in my head. (She didn't complain the whole time, or even most of the time, but sometimes a good long gripe is therapudic. That's part of why I keep this journal.) Good kid, she is. (She's too old to be a kid, but then I occasionally call people as much as a year younger than me that, so she has to stand in line to claw my eyes out over that one. Eva has dibs.)

I had sesame chicken last night for dinner and general tso's chicken for lunch today. Mom thought both were quite spicy. Not really. Maybe a B-dubs level three or less. I am considering asking if they can make it extra spicy next time.

Didn't get a funnel cake, even though I was sorely tempted. I didn't decide not to because of health issues (though I could afford to drop an awful lot of pounds) but because they are four bucks now. 4 dollars for 30 cents worth of flour water oil sugar and salt. No skill involved in preparation. *Sighs*

Went to the booksale again, got more books, nothing wonderful, but it was a buck a bag. Waited outside the library with Vanessa until her mom showed up to get her. It is just one of those things you do, sort of like never letting a girl walk alone across campus at night, no matter how much you just want to go to sleep before you forget the O-chem that you two just sent 5 hours cram.. studying.

JET Applications became avaliable yesterday I believe. Need to do something about that.

More things to say, not enough recent hours of sleep to remember what they are.

hee hee mumble

Well, some good and some bad.

Good:
Art Show mom's in went well today. We cleared booth cost plus some.
Went to library sale. I spent three dollars and ten cents. Backpack wasn't uncarriable after that, but it is a small backpack. (11 books, most big.)
Had a Wendy's Bacon Cheesburger and Fries ('cause Howard Taylor's web journal reminded me that wendy's has the best fast food burgers in my town.
The friend I had a fight with, well, things are better now. Not bestest, but better.
Did I mention buying books? I did, huh? Oh, well I bought some books.
I went to Staples with mom today. I was going to buy three sets of one hundred blank white index cards with which to play 1000 blank white cards, but mom bought them for me instead. I also saw a spindle of 100 cdrs for 14 dollars, a spindle of 25 dvd rws for 15 dollars, and a DVD RW Drive for 80 bucks after mail in.

Neutral
I'm still making freaking lists.

Bad
No one to play 1000 blank white cards with.
Library sale didn't have half the selection that it did last time. Or more accurately, it had a selection, just not of anything I want.
Forgot completely to get a frosty to use as french fry condament.
No money for CDrs, DVD RWs, or DVD RW drive.
Missed chance to eat fast food ish Chinese
Backdrop to friend and I making up is her having a similar arguement with other people in her journal. Which really sucks and I can't do anything about it. I really wish the topic didn't upset her as much.
One other thing that I'll talk about monday that fairly heavily weights the bad side.

Well, good night and peace all.

As always,
Michael

about my last entry, the line about pseudosocial contact... yeah edit that to five people. Every time I list the three people I'm talking about I get a different set which implies to me that I left some out.

Hum... (expanded as of the next day)

Words are an all together inadequate method of expressing thoughts.
That's (of course) not exactly what I mean, but it will stand in for the moment. After all there are a shitload of thoughts that can be adequately expressed in words like "Hey, let's get some pizza" or "I need to pee, tell me where the bathroom is" or "Why don't we get drunk and screw?" (Two points for the first person to tell me where that's from without looking it up.)
On the other hand, other thoughts are so involved in the conceptual matrix surrounding them that there is no way to really get them across in words. Sort of sucks, that.
For example, I have four things I want to write about here, and the connections between them are important, but putting them into words strips away the connections.
1. I've just spent two days subbing at a vocational highschool.
2. I've been thinking about the methods and requirements for colonizing star systems other than our own under a particular set of restrictions and I wish I knew more people who would be interested in that who were online more often.
3. I've come to realize recently that entirely too much of my pseudosocial interaction is with exactly three people, none of whom I've been able to communicate with very much recently. Oh, and missing that is rather distressing, even when I'm regularly around other people.
4. Actually I thought I had four, but it looks like three, but in light of the last one, I've come up with a partial answer to the question asked by several of my friends "Doesn't it get boring there without anyone around (excepting my family, of course) and how do you stand it?
(Answer to number four is No/Yes, and another one of those concept thought things that doesn't transfer to words well. I was thinking maybe it was Yes/No, but I'm fairly certian that the answer really is No it doesen't except when it does, not yes it does occasionally.)


I'll try to finish this thought tomorrow.

Well now it is tomorrow and I'm not a lot more sure where I'm going with this than I was last night. I've started to try but it just isn't working right. I reread what I've written and it focuses on the themes too much without giving a feeling for the (perhaps more important) connections and subthoughts that are part of this. There lies the problem with linnear forms of communication, like language and especially writing. Problem is that all of the alternatives are just as bad if not a lot worse outside of their specific realms of competence. I guess the biggest problem is that concepts are nonlinnear, though the thoughts that we use to express them come about in a linnear fashion. Though as a thinker, I am bound by time to have the thoughts in some sembelence of a linnear order, I am aware that in a conceptual matrix many of the concepts that come later when I talk about a thing were already there before I became aware of them by focusing on them, that if you remove them they leave a hole in the set of thoughts that from the first step would have brought the conceptual framework into a different shape. And before someone starts talking about circular justification/regression, I want to mention that it is completly acceptable. It is like a bamboo sphere. You can get bamboo skewers from the store and weave them together to form an inclosed space. It can be rather tricky to do so and most likely you'll end up using more of the little bamboo poles than is absolutely necessisary, but you can build a structure that is entirley self supporting, one that if you remove a given piece will fall apart, or at least start to unravel. (Damn, I wish I had thought of this when I was taking epistemology, I think it would have been a useful analogy when we were talking about justificatory structures. I bet I could have even built a meshwork.) When you are done, you have a structure that is made up of many discrete units, each of which interacts with all of the others, even though one in the front never contacts one in the back. (By the way, closed sufaces are much harder to create than open surfaces like a meshwork fence.) I've been working on trying to come up with a method of presenting ideas in a similar manner, where the entire idea is visible from the first while allowing an indepth analysis to start from any part of the structure.
I'm done now. Bye.

a shirt

http://www.zestuff.com/product.php?productid=19&cat=0&page=

stuff

I need a word. Below, I've used angry and upset and possibly other words, but none of them are entirely right.
I was going to post last night about being upset with someone, but my browser crashed and I decided it wasn't worth the effort. Oh well, it really still isn't. Long story short, a friend of mine got mad at me over a difference in world views and decided that since I disagreed and my arguement was focused on logical errors in her arguement, I was ignoring her arguement and marginalizing her personhood. She decided to be pissed off (yes, decided, if you are over the age of twelve, you can decide to get angry or not) and I decided to be consolitary. It seemed to be pretty much the only non-inflamatory possibility at the time. Probably was, and due to the disproportional scale of her previous response, that is probably for the good, but there is a little problem. Ever since the event, I've been thinking it over. The problem is that while I seldom allow being pissed influence how I write or speak, except for effect, this has managed to make me rather angry. This wouldn't be a problem had I voiced it, had I answered her accusitions, but I decided to appologize for what I felt I could instead. Now, if I were like I wish to be, that would have ben it, and I would have been able to let go after I made a choice of actions. Problem is that I can't, and that makes me upset as well. If I were where I want to be, even if I were unable to completely forgive and forget, I would be able to accept that failing. Guess I'm not there yet. Oh, as a side note, I really have forgiven, but I'm still rather upset/angry/dissapointed/whatever the damned word is. Not a lot of upset, but some, and that bothers me.


On a completely different note, I'm runnign a deskop copy of TikiWiki on my other computer now. I had to download appache, php, and mysql to run the software so I'm running an isolated webserver just to run a wiki, but still it is pretty cool. I really like the connectivity (and I am aware that I could do it in html, but it is a lot faster with the wiki interface.)
I'm using it as an interconnected knowledge base for my writing. I'll be putting research for stories into it, information about story settings that are shared between multiple settings, personal writeups of information, all of that sort of thing. Of course before I get my computer back on the internet, I'll have to figure out how to keep this webserver thingy seperate from the net. Currently my entire protection is the fact that there is no phone cord (of course, it may not be set up to be accessed from the internet anyway, I don't know. While I was in the middle of learning to be a modern comoputer geek, I killed my computer and went a year and a half with only my 486. I never went back to learning how things work.

Currently I'm mostly just sketching out the eventual form of the database, but even now the connections are starting to gain form. This is very cool.

Heh, I've been trying to think of messages to embed in my writing. Nothing drastic, nothing so obvious that it will make what I have to say age poorly, but things and causes.
Pretty much all I've got at the moment is second wave feminists and relativists.

Astually I'm sure I could find other groups to speak against, I'm just being lazy.
Ooh, actually, append to second wave feminists all hardcore liberate-the-oppressed groups who won their battles and won't move on. Oh, and the relitivist/subjectivist factions of groups like the post-modernists.

And anyone in any of the humanities that are taught in english who complain aobut how hard their courses are. Yeah, I took your 400s, give me a break.

hum, any other suggestions?

*blinks*

This is something out of science fiction. Specifically Robert Heinlein's story from the early 1940s, Let there be Light.
It is a radio antenna for visible light. They mention that you could use it as an efficient solar electric collection system or to recieve light based radio. What they fail to mention is that every antenna is also a transmitter. You can hook these beasties up to a power source and give off light, probably at high efficiencies and lowe temperatures as well as extrememly long lifetimes.

gah

A while ago I brought you the story of a british reporter detained by our security forces.

Well guess what.

We aren't just abusing friendly foreign nationals anymore.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/17/Hillsborough/Tourist_s_crime_Totin.shtml

A fucking bookmark.

Our oh so wonderful peerless leader needs to step on the toes of his SS a little and get them to back the fuck off.

The funny

Okay, so I read Something Positive. Today's strip is part of a continuing arc where the main character is directing a play, but the funny is in the background art. Drew, I think you'll appriciate the soda machine.
the strip

Oh, and to top all of this crap off, I now have a cold sore. I really hate the fact that I get them about half the time when I'm distressed.

A ray of sunshine

I guess if I get to talk about the bad, I should talk about why the day was going well before then too.
Well today I went through my files on the other computer, searching for partial stories, things to finish or rewrite or just get ideas from. In my mind I had a bunch of 250 word stubs sitting there, mostly an introduction to settings. In reality, there were actually a number of the stubs, but the majority of the storylings are at least a thousand words long and have enough that I should be able to do something with them.
You know what, I wish that you could get away with writing a two or three chapter introduction to setting like in earlier days. I enjoy writing that part so much, but it just won't work today. A whole chapter on pea soup? No way. (Okay, so I never managed to read that far into that particular monstrosity.)
On the down side, I have two stories that I have a problem with. The first is just missing a funny line that I had put in there origionally and apparently cut. The second I had notes on paper for and they are now missing. I was still setting the stage and can't remember all of the plot I wanted to use.

Splat Whoosh

Today just went down the shit tube.
A friend of mine just got really pissed off at me and some how I doubt that an honest appology will do any good. It mostly works out to a radical deviation in our conceptual frameworks which happens to be in a region of particular importance to the other party. It probably wouldn't have happened if we'd been having this discussion face to face. First off, I would have altered the tone of my arguement to fit the other party's resonses. Empathy is much less effective in letters. Secondly she would have cut me off before I managed to dig a hole that deep and either rerouted the conversation to the things I left out or required an explanation of the things I said that she was upset about.
(See, I manage to burn the candle at both ends, both pissing people off with what I do say and with what I don't say. *sighs* A few of the people who read this know what I'm talking about. Believe it or not, I'm even worse in static formats like e-mail. Well, okay, John already knows that.)

Splat Whoosh factor 7 or 8 if I can be allowed to confine splat whoosh to personal effects. I think that is fair as good and bad thins are good and bad to different degrees ad differelevels of focus.
Splat Whoosh is the sound of fecal material striking the rotating oscillator. It is usually a metric of the impact of an event on world affairs, so pretty much any conflict on a personal scale has a splat whoosh factor of zero or one (okay, so assisinations of political figures can be a lot higher, but...)

On the other hand, on the personal scale, I may have just lost a friend. And perhaps worse than that is having hurt a friend unintentionally.

WhooT

There is a Live Action Aeon Flux movie in the works!

*shakes head*

You know what I miss most about school?

Homework.

Homework used to be the focus of my productivity.

I used to get more crap done while avoiding my homework than I can imagine getting done now.

It has been literally months since I've beaten a video game, but with homework, I'd beat twelve or fifteen a year.

Biggest strides I've made on the cookbook? Avoiding Homework.

Most research into interesting things? Avoiding Homework.

Beating Lego Junkbot? Avoiding Homework.

Going to the local used book stores, grocerie stores, and comic book shops? Avoiding Homework.

Practicing Japanese? Avoiding Homework.

the list goes on.

stuffes (edited, but not importantly)

Okay, things going on in my life.
1. I owe less than 100 dollars directly to Oregon State. This is not student loans, this is money I owe the school. This is a big deal because last year at this time it was nearly 2000 dollars.

2. I currently have 27 dollars and some odd cents. This is dreadfully short of the hundred dollars I need. I'm working on bridging the gap.

3. I've been playing Master of Orion 2. There are a lot of things I like better about that game as compared to the third. On the other hand, the fact that it hates NT and likes to stop working at random blows, as does the relitively small size of the galaxy.

4. In the above mentioned game, the racial trate "telepathic" is awesome. I believe that it gives you +10 percent on your spy rolls which is cool, but it also lets you take over planets without troops and without having to worry about little things like converting them to your way of thinking with alien management centers and the like.

Here's my racial loadout currently (you subtract point values):

10 points to start
Trellarian Picture (They are the most annoying race in the game, so I use them to get rid of them.)
Feudal -4 (this govenrment has few perks, but your ships cost 2/3rds what they usually would and if you research the advanced form they now cost 1/3rd of the normal price.) It does hurt research, but that is really only a problem if the Psilons are in the game.)
Research+1 +3
-20% Ship Attack -2 Tech fixes this.
-20% Ship Defense -2 You will be getting tech to take care of that.
A space academy cancels this penalty.
-10 Ground Combat -2 Don't really need it, tech and telepathy take care of it.

Creative +8 This is expensive, but damn it is nice to get all of the tech for any research tree.

Telepath +6 It improves diplomacy and spying, allows immediate use of captured ships, and allows the instant troopless capture and assimilation of enemy colonies. Oh, the spying bonus is the same as the 3 point spying trait.

Lucky +3 this is not a great ability, but I like it. It cuts antaran attacks and makes good random events more likely for you.

Omniscent +3 This ability lets you see all of the ships and planets on the map. With omniscent you never have to scout, you know when the opponents are massing, and you can target your expansion at special sites early on (like splinter colonies and artifacts worlds.)

Oi, I was going to talk about other tings too, but that will have to be for later.

A little something by Spider Robinson

I was talking to a friend and he mentioned Callahan's Bar. Got me thinking. Any of you ever watched the shuttle launch? Or even just a rocket carrying a satalite? I've watched a couple. Robinson has the best description ever:

Okay, you've probably seen film or video footag on TV. But if you haven't been to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on the highway, you just don't know anything about it.

At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it still, tranquil, serene. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Spielberg, rich and vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not perfect - there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse - but basically the world is as it has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on its surface might come up with.

Then Hell breaks loose.

A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad explosion.

Then the Beast's two big brothers wake up - the giant solid rocket boosters - and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue. The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back: it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle stack balanced on top like a Ping-Pong ball on the stream from a fire hose. The bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its terrible shoulders, and slips them clean.

You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming 'Go, baby, go!' like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around you is doing the same, but you can't hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings ninety-seven tons of metal and plastic two million miles.

With five live men aboard.

You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You're a space buff: if anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do - as an intellectual concept. Then you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones . . . and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World War II was real to me, or China: I'd been told about it and had no reason to doubt what I'd been told. Now I got it.

For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter century it had been a news story - one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality - real reality; that is, the part experienced by me - and the two-million-year-old dream had really come true:

The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.

In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear winter.

No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were going to do this thing.

Spider Robinson - Callahan's Key

Cookbook stuff

Hey, I just finished a little piece of the cookbook. It's just the equipment list, but anyone who wants to take a look and see if I left anything out, I'd appriciate some feedback.
I've selected the items below to provide maximum flexibility without taking up a lot of space or costing a lot of money:

Equipment List
The first thing that you are going to need is a set of cooking utensils. Since you are probably living in a dorm or an apartment with limited kitchen facilities and space, we’ve settled on a fairly small list of things that you should acquire. One of the main themes in this book is multiple use. The recipes in the first two sections can be prepared with no tools other than the ones listed below and all of the ingredients used are used in at least one other recipe. The final chapter includes a number of recipes that were too good to leave out, but which required tools that either were too big for easy storage in a dorm room or weren’t useful or cheap enough to include on this list, or the recipe needs ingredients that aren’t used in any of the other recipes.

Things to buy:
Pans and such:
Stainless Steel or No Stick Stir Fry Pan
1 or 2 Quart sauce pan, preferably one with a lid
Large glass or aluminum bread pan
Round Pizza Sheet, just a little larger than the stir fry pan.

Utensils:
Pairing Knife
Large wooden spoon
Plastic Spatula
Disposable bamboo chopsticks. You can use a metal fork too.
Measuring cup, either a wet measure one or a dry measure set.
Measuring spoon set.
Can Opener

Containers:
1 large plastic mixing bowl. This is also good for carrying things into the kitchen.
1 small plastic mixing bowl.

Miscellaneous:
Cutting board, either a flexible plastic one or a small one with a liquid groove.
Oven mitt or dish towel (I prefer the towel)
Sponge

Consumables (things you will run out of, not to eat)
Dish Soap
Zipper Seal Plastic Bags. I’d get sandwich and gallon sized ones.
Paper Plates
Aluminum Foil
Plastic Wrap (optional)
Wax Paper (optional)
Round Toothpicks (optional)

Things to borrow from mom or the dining hall:
Two soup bowls.
A couple of plates.
2 coffee cups.
Metal Forks.
Metal Teaspoons.

Things to save:
Brownie tins and pie pans from the store.
Glass Containers (like spaghetti sauce or pickle jars)
Butter and Margarine containers.

gah.

I've realized something. My brother thinks the prat fall is the height of humor. He spends countless hours watching bad comedic sitcoms, Fear Factor, and America's funniest video. Yeah, he's in like 8th grade. I was past that by then.

Majestic

Been playing Deus Ex again. I've been in the Majestic 12 facicility for a while now, and today I finally got out. I got through the first floor of the UNATCO headquarters only to be killed by the head of Unatco and three of their little wuss troopers. Argh. I took on Majestic super soldiers, cyborg badasses, and alien biologicals (I do admit that part of that was using an automated turret and a stolen pass code to gun down two big old badasses that took forever to die) Next time, when I am done talking to jerk face, I am going to shock rod him then kill him with a baton.

Stuffs

Hey, I just got a new Gmail invite. Anybody need/want one?

an interlude

I will not stand for this

Everyone Feels This Pain
Show your support

Thank's <lj user="seiryu_16">

You are 69% geek

You are a geek. Good for you! Considering the endless complexity of the universe, as well as whatever discipline you happen to be most interested in, you'll never be bored as long as you have a good book store, a net connection, and thousands of dollars worth of expensive equipment. Assuming you're a technical geek, you'll be able to afford it, too. If you're not a technical geek, you're geek enough to mate with a technical geek and thereby get the needed dough. Dating tip: Don't date a geek of the same persuasion as you. You'll constantly try to out-geek the other.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Hee, a little unfairly balanced toward the girls. A guy taking the quiz can rightfully assume that there are two choices for the first question and just stay with that, which kills a fair number of geek points. I girl has to use the drop down menu so ends up seeing all five choices. Oh, and if you take the quiz, you may want to look at the HTML and get rid of the background color code. It made mine unreadable.

Merg

You know there is some really stupid shit to get nastalgic about. Last night I was having frozen pizza for dinner. My brother ended up eating six of the eight slices so I also had the remains of a bowl of popcorn I'd made for Brie earlier. Bad pizza and popcorn brought to mind being in the dorms. (Actually in the dorms I usually had Pepperoni Hotpockets and Popcorn, or more frequently, frozen egg rolls and popcorn.)
Been a while since I've posted. Not sure why, guess I've just not had anything to say.
Here's a line of "resoning" from the underside of my idiocy for you:
I'm unemployed and I'm trying to both get a job and become a published writer.
I've been holding off on starting any big projects (other than the cookbook, which is going slowly) until after I get a job.
Since I got back here, more than a year has passed.
Still no job, and more than enough time to write a book if I had done it then.
*Sighs* Me dumb.

(Screw the silly cliche about "you are a writer even if you are unpublished." Thanks mom, but there is nothing special about the ability to sit infront of a computer and bang out ten or a hundred thousand words. I'm not infavor of the whole don't ever write for free concept, I mean other professionals donate their work too, but if I am not being published, if I am not making at least a partial living off this, I might as well be writing ads or fan-fiction or political flyers. Actually, I could have some fun writing flyers I suspect. I always wanted to create viral memes. Well, at least I'm not doing fan-fic. Or Startrek novels, but then except for the three or four best of those I've ever read, they are just fan-fic that someone got paid for.)

Ooh, I beat Crescent Hawk's inception. The final area takes as much time as the rest of the game. Mapping it out and tracking the codes on paper makes it much easier though. No wandering randomly trying the same codes on the same door over and over and over again. Crescent Hawk's Revenge is a very different type of game (sort of RTS from way before Dune 2) and rather a bit harder. I'm about half way through it (I stopped to beat CHI) I want to play me some Battletech!

Been doing some design work on zero pressure organisims. (Critters what live in high vaccum that is.) Lots of fun. I'm sticking to basics, problems to be solved, not the chemical mechanisims of the solutions themselves, as I'm an indifferent chemist at best. Now I just have to come up with a use for them.

This is a recording...

I've said it before, I'll say it again, I'll shout it to the rafters and in the streets:
The Roman Catholic Church is full of Shit

I swear I wonder how in good conscience can a person accept confirmation in an organization like that one? Might as well just be a scientologist.

Conservatives

While this is technically a pissy thing, it is so funny that I'll forgive their lame asses:
There's a liberal under my bed

I'm trying to figure out how to make a similar them child friendly for the opposition. I really can't find it though. The conservatives don't do G rated stuff.

*chuckles*

The AFP has picked up and ran a story out of the Pravada.
This story.

For those of you who don't know, the Pravada is a russian newspaper. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, it was the official mouth piece of the Party. It was a joke around the world because of the stories it printed that were obviously wrong, and usually also obviously outright lies. Well, with the fall of the USSR, it has become a tabloid newspaper. AFP running one of their stories is like the NYT running a story about the alien elvis bat boy clopne from the supermarket tabloids.

Ooh, if you haven't read it yet, get yourself a copy of "Just a Geek." It is an autobiographical work by Wil Wheaton (Autobiographical, not an autobiography.) A very good book, I cried when I read the material for the first time (the book is about his life and it uses entries from his blog to demonstrate what he's talking about.)

gods...

This is the reversed transcript of a game of 20 questions I played with computer at http://y.20q.net. I'm not sure I could have identified it on that question set. (that's 15 questions total by the way.)

I am guessing that it is a kudzu vine?
Yes , No , Close
14. Can you peel it? No.
13. Is it usually colorful? No.
12. Does it get shorter from using it? No.
11. Are there many different sorts of it? No.
10. Would you pay to use it? No.
9. Would you use it in a garden? No.
8. Do you use it in your home? No.
7. Can you lift it? Yes.
6. Do you know any songs about it? No.
5. Is it smaller than a loaf of bread? No.
4. Would you find it on a farm? Yes.
3. Does it have leaves? Yes.
2. Is it found in salad bars? No.
1. It is classified as Vegetable.

*cries*

I was reading an article today and I came across this paragraph:

“It allows Kerry to say with some justification that the recovery may be sputtering and that the job market is very soft,” said Greg Valliere, chief strategist of Schwab Washington Research Group. “A lot of people thought when he was saying that earlier in the summer that he was a Cassandra, that he was exaggerating things. But now he can make both those claims.”

A point to anyone who can tell me what is wrong with that statement.
Our education system has failed.

by way of <lj user="pope_guilty"> by way of <lj user="housepsinner"> byway of <lj user="tinman_661">

A Day in the Life of Joe Republican

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joes employer pays these standards because Joes employer doesn't want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he'll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

It's noon time, and Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joes money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.

Joe is home from work, and plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark!)

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the hosts keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn't tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.) Joe agrees that we don't need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, he's a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like he has.

Gotta love the republicans.

So, the GOP's used the last four years to screw over the nation repeatedly, and they've done it to a chorus of "Well, he's not fucing an intern." Looks like they are getting what they deserve over in Tennessee. Their current Senatorial Candidate is sort of the distillation of all things Republican.
Well, okay, I admit, he's only part of it, he doesn't seem to be trying to start illegal wars or anythin. But then his idea of social reform is of the "special" sort.
Have I mentioned that republicans are scum?

the stillness of an empty world.

So, this is going to be a slow week. My local friends are all either gone or no longer local. My sibilings are going to visit their dad. Mom is heading up into the icy north (somewhere on Michigan's UP. Silly mom, she's taking the long route and adding at least two hours to the trip in a desperate attempt to avoid being in the same timezone as Chicago.) So I'm staying here and watching the dogs. I already talk to the dogs. I'm just afraid that by the end of the week they'll start talking back.
On the other hand, assuming that the printer works, hopefully I'll get at least one or two things finished and mailed off. I've got one piece that just needs some revision and one that I haven't actually started writing yet. Maybe I'll get a couple things ready by the end of the week.
It is alays nice not to have to deal with my brother nagging me to use my computer when I am using it though. "Can I get on soon?" Of course, he starts asking after I've been on the computer for about 30 minutes and gets angrier and angrier while he waits, then he's on the computer all friggin day. I've started answering randomly since he asks so much. Actually, his idea of soon and mine are in different orders of time so I can honestly answer either yes or no pretty much any time.

My favorite is when he tells me that I can't be on the computer all day when that's exactly what he's going to do. He tried to argue that since it is in mom's room I can't use it as much as I want. That is true, but it isn't bound by the restrictions he's thinking of. I can't use it when mom is trying to sleep. I explained to him that I bought this computer so I could use it. It is in mom's room currently as a convienience until her computer gets fixed, but that does nothing to change why I have the computer.

I so want to get back out to the Northwest. The midwest is about my second least favorite place. (I know people who actually want to live here. They are fools.)

*sighs*

So, just got my next great rejection letter on the eternal search for a job so that come November I can start paying back student loans. And I saw a great deal on some tee shirts that I very much wish to have. www.goats.com is having a sale on their Republicans for Voldemort and their Jesus Loves Dick shirts. One of each for 30 bucks. I have so many friends who I want to give these shirts to. Most of them would even appriciate it.
Gah, at least Voldemort only wants to enslave and rule the world. The current republican candidate takes his advice from Christians of the "let's try to bring about the apoclypse" sort. Have I mentioned that republicans are scum? (If you are offended by that then you are most likely a republican and thus part of the problem.)

I have found something that is rather disturbing for my prospects as a professional writer. Every once in a while I start worrying about things. Especially things like "how am I going to pay off my loans." This only ever happens late at night. At it's worst it has meant a series of days with two and three hours of sleep before waking up and going to class. Well, in the aftermath of recieving the rejection letter yesterday guess who ended up not sleeping (by the way, the whole insomnia thing isn't exclusively about what's worrying me. For instance last night between bouts of money worries I was also thinking about this computer game I've been playing (MTG: Duel of the Plainswalkers) If there is anything more annoying than not being able to sleep because you are worried about something it is not being able to sleep because you are thinking about the electronic version of a collectable card game you played in highschool. I mean at least the first source of sleeplesness is somewhat justified. What this has to do with writing: so it was getting later and later and I was staring at the ceiling. I eventually decided that if I wasn't going to sleep, I'd do some writing. I grabbed the clipboard of paper and turned on a light and started writing (and it ended up not being a story at all, more just notes on a setting. *le sigh*) Well after about 3 minutes of that I put the notepad down and turned off the light. I was asleep shortly thereafter. I'm not sure that I like the fact that writing puts me to sleep. (At least I don't get the same response from sitting in front of a computer writing, but since we are using my computer as the internet computer and because it is in mom's room, I can'd use that when I can't sleep because mom is already asleep by the time that becomes an issue.

So after a long night, I woke up this morning at the urging of a chocolate lab at about 7am. He'd already been out once but my dogs go out twice in the morning. Well, I brought him out and stayed there because he's been slipping his chain (stupid labs have a bunch of extra skin so his neck is as big as his head) and running off recently. Usually he waits until the second time out to poop. Apparently he already pooped today because he just sat there. All he wanted to do was slip his chain and go meet interesting girl doggies. Yeah, I brought him back in. I am rather tired and now I probably won't go to sleep until tonight (I am really bad at napping. I don't nap. If I try to sleep during the day it usually becomes a real sleep time and I end up being up all night until I can reset my sleep schedule.)

oi

So, I got another confirmation of my suspicion today. Completely unprompted, my sister (who asked if she could read it a long time ago) asked me if I had done any more work on the book I was writing. I stopped ant tried to think of work I had done on my cookbook and then realized that that wasn't what she was asking about. *sighs* there goes my dreams of using this to fuel my financial well being for the moment. I was really hopeful too since I am having a hard time writing short stories. (I just can't seem to come up with decent story ideas of the shortish variety. Well, I guess there are a couple of fragments that may work out yet.) Funny that the only short story idea that has really worked out for me (with the exception of one that I'm stuck trying to figure out how to end it so it works with the beginning) barely even has characters and the characters who are there, except for the narrator, never actually speak.

I want to do some Samuel Prior stories, but I'm stuck on both of the ones that I am working on right now. The first one I started is in the middle of his story line, and I got stuck because I knew the basic shape of his history but couldn't get key pieces to work out while still progressing with the plot, so I started the second Samuel Prior story, the earliest one I intend to write. I guess this makes way more sense to me than it does to anyone else. A little history.

I've got a SF setting I am still working on, something that runs from the day after tomorrow until the end of time (well, my timeline only runs a few thousand years from now, but still...) One of the major themes is that while History is contingent and it can hinge on the actions of individuals, just being a superior person in the right place at the right time is not always enough. Through out the setting, I plan on using the Prior family. The Priors will have become influential through the actions of their founder, and I plan on having them figure in many of the key points of human history. Of course as humanity expands to the planets of our solar system and then to the stars, the best and most daring of the Priors will, in accordance with the blessing/curse of their name, expand as well. Many of the Prior children will take advantage of the family's emphasis on physical and intellectual training and be fairly highly skilled adults.
Samuel is fairly early in the family's history. Born before humanity has headed to the stars, Samuel is one of the youngest to take part in the war against an expansionistic theocracy that began in the Belt. The gruesome death of his fiancee at the hands of the mysogenic theocracy inspires a slight career change. Instead of becomming a Naval officer in the United Nations Space Forces, he switches tracks to their intelligence branch, specifically as an assasin. He carries out a private vendetta in his role as assaasin and kills several of the most important leaders of the Army of the Prophet. At the same time he loses a lot of his humanity. After the war, he continues working for the UN's intel division, though not as an assasin. Having avenged his love's death, he now has to deal with what he has become. The earliest story will begin a decade after the war while he is still sorting through the confict that killing so many people (including innocents in several occasions where he destroyed entire spacestations to kill one person.) Though I don't want it to be the actual focus of the plot, much of the conflict in the Samuel Prior stories should be him coming to grips and overcomming the monster that he had become. This entire series of stories within this setting will be about the redemption of Samuel Prior. The first story in the series contains some scenes that have been difficult for me to write, mostly because they are a little darker than I am usually comfortable with working in, and that has been a lot of why I haven't finished it yet. (Other stories in the setting will be more lighthearted than that. In fact, the only story I am actually done with is a fairly lighthearted story about hang gliding in the launch tube of an magnetic catapult, and focuses on the thrill of flight.)

humm...

Well, last night I had something that I had expected confirmed. One of the stories I'm working on isn't really suitable for the short story field. I had really hoped to sell the entire tale as a series of short stories and then make it into a book, but I guess I'll have to go the other way. oh well.

Your LJ RPG Team
LJ Username
Sex	MaleFemaleGender Neutral
Favorite Color
Weapon of Choice
Your Partner	midnight7
Your Warrior	trailchaser
The Giggly, Flirtatious Magic User with Big Breasts	seiryu_16
The Talking Animal	trailchaser
Main Archenemy	howardtayler
Evil Incarnate	howardtayler
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Good things maybe

So, in case you've been living in a hole for the last 30 hours, yesterday the Separate and Unequal amendment (Hatch, Frist, "frothy mix" Santorum and some other senators) failed to even get to the level of a vote. Yesterday the senate had a roll call vote for Cloture on this amendment. The vote was 48 in favor, 50 opposed with two democrats abstaining (Kerry and Edwards both refused to vote so their "no" vote on an issue of procedure wouldn't be used against them in campaign) two democrats breaking ranks and voting yes, and four republicans breaking ranks and voting No. To win a vote for cloture, an issue must gain 60 votes in the Senate. Essentially it is a way to see if there is any way in hell that they can get the 68 votes needed to pass an amendment on to the state legislatures. Of course, even though the republicans technically lost this round in their eternal campaign to make government larger and more intrusive into the lives of the citizens (wait, isn't that supposed to be a democrat thing?), they were never trying to win. This was an entirely political maneuver. They brought this act up now both to deflect attention to Rumsfeld's war crimes, and Chaney's impending indictment on fraud and bribery charges as well as to make the repression of homosexuals an issue in the upcoming Senatorial election. Essentially, they were forcing Senate Democrats from conservative regions to either vote to discriminate against a traditionally liberal segment of the country or to face a much greater challenge this year when they come up for reelection. This is of course, what they are doing instead of tackling issues of import to our actual nation. Gods, Republicans are scum. But then we knew that already.

product acquired from <lj user="belismaker">

Whoo Hoo! The seperate and unequal ammendment for homosexuals was defeated, at least for now.

5 words that describe you
1.: friendly
2.: focused (just never on the right things)
3.: smart
4.: easily amused (see 2)
5.: enthusiastic

5 websites you visit daily
1.: www.livejournal.com
2.: www.fark.com
3.: www.gmail.com
4.: www.ucomics.com
5.: about 30 comics sites: www.fanns.com, www.blue-comic.com, www.sluggy.com, etc

5 CDs you couldn't live without
Most of my music is mp3s of stuff not avaliable in the states except as illegal chinese knock off disks but if I had to pick.
1.: Tori Amos' Little Earth Quakes
2.: Armitage III OST (the one with the two extra songs)
3.: the Xenogears Creid album.
4.: the Cowboy Bebop albums
5.: Escaflowne Albums (I really do own non-anime stuff, I swear.)

5 favorite books
1.: this interweb thing-a-ma-jigger
2.: The Chronicles of Amber - Zelazny
3.: Something by Heinlein. Either Stranger in a Strange Land or The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
4.: Neverwhere - Gaiman
5.: Something conversational by Asimov. Probably "I, Asimov"

5 favorite songs
1.: Summer Days-DAI
2.: Phantom World - Armitage III soundtrack
3.: One Week - Bare Naked Ladies
4.: Finest Worksong - REM (not really a favorite probably but it is tied to a memory set I like to dredge up.)
5.: 6 verse version of This land is Your land - Woodie Guthrie

5 random facts about you
1.: I chew on pens.
2.: I graduated in 4 years with a major, 3 minors and most of a fourth.
3.: My study skills suck very much
4.: I am a proponent of the "train dogs with praise and treats" school of dog training.
5.: I was one of the only people in the Technology and the Family class who said they would accept immortality.

5 countries you would like to visit
1.: Germany
2.: Japan
3.: England
4.: New Zealand
5.: PRC - Hong kong

5 words or phrases you always use
1.: "boo"
2.: hey la
3.: abunai!!!
4.: well enough
5.: how goes it

5 articles of clothing that are your favorite
Such a girl question. I only own 8 distinct articles of clothing
1.: my white socks
2.: my outside shoes
3.: shorts
4.: button down short sleeved shirts
5.: loose legged kakhi pants

5 favorite movies
1.: Jacob the Liar
2.: X-men
3.: Shrek
4.: Riddick Chronicals
5.: Big Fish

5 things you are obsessed with
1.: Space Flight
2.: Cooking
3.: Fishies
4.: This here interweb thingy
5.: Classic gaming

5 girls names you like (even if you never want children)
1.: Amber
2.: Athena
3.: Fiona
4.: Elizabeth
5.: Michiko

5 boys name you like (even if you never want children)
Yeah, this is why when I have kids, thoug I will reserve the right to veto suggestions, I'm letting their mother decide.
1.: Stephen
2.: Erick
3.: Alex/Alexander
4.: Nicholas
5.: Michael (not for my kids though. I always thought that naming your children after yourself was stupid.)

5 hobbies you have
1.: The life sciences
2.: Reading
3.: computer games
4.: role playing
5.: world building

5 foods that are your favorite
1.: Artichokes
2.: sesame and soy sauce sauteed chicken breast
3.: big, thick skinned oranges
4.: Sesame Chicken (sweet and spicy not tofuy)
5.: BW3's wings (the mid heat levels with actual flavors)

5 favorite computer programs
1.: ArcView
2.: MS Office
3.: Master of Orion 2
4.: Mame/SNES9X/ePSXe
5.: Netscape 7

5 boardgames you like to play
1.: Colonial Civilization
2.: Stuff by Cheapass
3.: Dungeon
4.: Settlers of Catan / Shogun / Samurai / risk and other similar fairly simple strategy games.
5.: Chess / Go

spline reticulation

If you don't remember a soothing feminine voice telling you that she was reticulating splines, you probably don't have my taste in games.
I've played the windows version of that game recently. Very dissapointing. They seem to have modified the simulation to make it harder to grow the interesting sturctures in cities. Oh well.
So I finally figured out how to get getright to work with the-underdogs.org. It seems that if you type in the wrong address for the referer, it doesn't work at all. Let the large old game goodness begin (in several hours. I mean afterall, the whole reason I needed to make getright work was that I'm on dialup. I did download the old TSR fantasy empires game. It is pretty good but the arcade sequences are impossibleish on a modenr computer. I wish Ihad bought it back when I was first playing MoO and MoM (Ooh, incommng nastalgia.)

So somehow, trader joes has come up three times in less than a week. I wish I had a car and money. I so much want to go get some unusual ingredients and do some experimenting in the kitchen. Of course I'd also like a much better stove/oven. Ours blows a little.

Today's Nukees is great.

Been reading Terry Pratchett's Diskworld stuff. I managed to find the first six books and am thus reading them in order! I just started book three.

I was so looking forward to verbally abusing nate online today. I mean I sat down at the computer and there he was on AOL IM. And I was about to start typing and he logged back off. Le Sigh. Oh well, he's been online a lot more than usual recently so I guess no complaints.

Oh yeah. Check out www.cockeyed.com Especially awesome are the How Much is Inside part and the Pranks section. These are things I wish I had discovered in college. Kind of like wishing that I had discovered Ozy and Millie while I was still rooming with Nate. ( Millie is my hero. ) So much additional havoc.

So I was thinking of doing some fan-art for UC but there is a fairly major problem. Mom's ultra mega super scanner. Yeah It is a scsi device and I don't have a scsi card. Oh well. Maybe next time. Not that I actually posess drawing skills in any reliable form. I have many talents and skills, but representing people places and things in a visual medium is not one them. Well, actually I am a decent cartographer as long as I don't try to fancy it up and I keep things technical. This does make it a little difficult for me to design things on paper. I ran into some difficulties with that while I was last working on the concept stuff for the Sarthaki for one of the settings I'm working on creating. It would be so much easier to work out an evolutionary history for them if I could draw.

Photoshop

So there is this great photoshop contest over at www.fark.com.
The theme is books that should never be made into movies.

I've read over half of the books in the entries.

I agree in most cases.

http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1026143

Very amusing.

Nothing on IMDB about the rumored Ringworld movie (how would you catch the sheer scope of that book? It'd be like trying to do a Rama movie but worse.)

Beat System's Twilight.

Had a cold sore. Abbrevia (an expensive cold sore medicine) worked on it. It is essentially gone now, 4 days later. And one that hadn't progressed to a cold sore was gone within a day.

Whee Fun

So today I:
Woke Up at 8am to put the dogs outside. They usually wake mom up at six, but she doesn't remember putting them out, so they did pretty good.

Took a shower.

Put on some Off and went out and watered the plants. They needed it a lot. Ten I dragged a thing of topsoil into the back yard (well, I put it on my shoulder and carried it. They only weigh like 40 lbs) and planted the broccoflour. It may be a little late for that. Oh well. I restaked the tomatoes. One of them has flowers and green tomatoes. I also replanted the blue berries. I put themin bigger holes with more of the good top soil. Hopefully this will make them grow better.

I dragged the hose around front and watered the plants there.

Mom left.

I came in.

I got on the internet. After 50 minutes my brother called from his dad's house and made snide comments about me being on the internet to the internet answering machine. He then told me to get off the internet and hung up. (He wanted to ask mom (who wasn't here) a question.)

I started a new download.

He called back 7 minutes later and yelled at me to get off the internet.

My brother needs to work on his phone skills. A while ago, I wouldn't give him the key code to make an illegal copy of a multiplayer online game I own. Instead of trying to reson with me he started calling me a moron. We were on the phone. With the fourth repeat of that little bit of wit, I hung up.

I eventually got off the internet.

I went and took a shower.

He never called.

The brothers McClure showed up.

We went and played tennis for three hours.

When we got back here there were four new messages

None of them were from lloyd David.

I'm a little worried about my little dog. Yesterday, I gave him a doggy treat (an off brand milkbone) and he didn't eat it. He loves doggy treats, even more than padfoot does. I picked it up and held it way up high and he jumped up and grabbed it. And helf it in his mouth for a while and still didn't eat it. I think he has a sore tooth. I gave him another one today when I left, but I don't know if he ate it or not. He did eat some dogfood this morning that I had started to soak in milk (I know it is bad for doggies. Well, really it just makes them gassey, but still...) He ate the still crunchy dog food. Maybe he just wasn't hungry. (unlikely)

Well, not much more yet. but there are a lot more hours of today.

Oh, I did start working on the second story in the arc of the story I just finished last night. nothing on the computer.

And I am playing System's Twilight (a mac puzzle game) I had to look up one answer for one word puzzle. It was Lintle, and I should have gotten it right (even though I didn't know what the word meant till today.) I'm on the final puzzle now. Joy.

Take care folks.

Metaphysicsnet, the nomina are made up but the phenomina are real (maybe)

Don't actually have anything to go with that yet. check back later.

stuffes

So today I read The Parched Sea (The first of Troy Denning's Ruha novels) and downloaded stuff. Origionally I was just grabbing another copy of sim earth (I own the game, but I don't know where the disks or box or manual is) but then I decided to look at the-underdogs' hall of fame and I decided to grab some of those games. Most of them I just copied the webpage to grab them later, but I saw system's twilight (yet another of those games where the developer was on crack and decided to develop a game for the smaller part of the market share only) so I also had to get a Mac emulator and some other stuff (mission accomplished by the way) and now I am playing the puzzle game. We'll see how long it takes to beat it.

It has been a quiet day, with the kids at their dad's house and mom gone for most of it. I am glad that I can handle quiet days. I mean I do enjoy having people around, but it has never been a great need of mine. As much as I like being around my friends, I can wait until next time I see them. There is never that much of a hury.

All wet

Well, since I never change more than a quarter of the water in a fish tank at a time, I have allowed myself to run out of dechlor.
Which has never been a problem.
Until tonight.
My Brother.
Shattered.
My Tank.
with a chair
(not on pupose.)
But now I am very glad that my computer is in mom's room instead of on the floor under the table in my room.
Even though almost all of the water exited the tank, only one fish came out.
I put them in a bowl made of metal and filled with bottled (not deionized or distilled) water. Then in a kitty litter bucket. Now they are in my redundant fishtank.
And my carpet.
Is wet.
And my room is very.
very Humid.
But the faN is running
and the Air CoNdItIoNeR is conditioning
and I can deal with the cold.
and the fishies are all catfish.
cause I haven't been here to take care of them.
and only the survivors survived.
and the other hardy fish I had have a two year life span on average.
(I should buy more gambusia)
(If you want to buy me gambusia, they're avaliable from www.carolina.com and my mailing address is:
Michael Phillips
232 Glad St.
Hanover, IN 47243)
(Not that I'm asking.)
(and I bet I can find them locally cheaper.)
(And if you want to come play in a creek.
)Especially(if(the(creek(is)on)your)property)
I could see
to getting some new fishies.
of the more interesting kinds.
with my seining net.
and a bucket.
Darters mostly, but other non-chub/minnow species would be welcome as well, but I want to also avoid most catfish and the centrarchidae (bass and bluegill) since I have a little bitty catfish, and the only acceptiable cats are mad toms.

Well, good night.

from <lj user="Seiryu_16">

How to make a ronin_kakuhito

Ingredients: 1 part mercy 5 parts brilliance 5 parts empathy

Method: Combine in a tall glass half filled with crushed ice. Serve with a slice of lovability and a pinch of salt. Yum!

Username:

Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

If you were on a battlefield right now, versus everything...
Name
Gender	MaleFemaleAnimalUnsureRather Not Say
Age
Lover or a Fighter?
Fight for good or evil?	For GoodFor EvilFor Neither
Battle Cry
Weapon of Choice	Tactical Nuclear Weapons
Appearance	Leather Jacket, while riding your trusty steed
Your Battle Cry...	Could use some work
Foes slain upon first strike: - 69%
What you fight	Aliens
You fight....	Because you have nothing better to do
This quiz by Ferggs - Taken 14600 Times.

New - Kwiz.Biz Astrology and Horoscopes

Evil all around.

Wow, our dipshit in chief has something in common with the Catholics' dipshit in chief.
Bush


The Catholic Church

While I realize that shared evil comes as no supprise to some of my friends, I have others who believe that the Catholic Church under its current leadership is a good thing, regardless of how much John Paul 2 is undermining the results of the second Vatican Council and the church's ability to stand in a position of moral authority.
Funny how Bush is doing the same thing to the US, undermining key pieces of our guiding documents (eg the constitution) and removing our ability to claim the moral high ground.
And I'm giving those of you who wrong-mindedly support the church in its idiocy the benefit of the doubt on the Bush issue. If you still believe that Bush is a good person or president, I suspect that there really is no hope for you.