mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2009

Feb 2009 Mar 2009 Apr 2009 May 2009 Jun 2009 Jul 2009 Aug 2009 Dec 2009

Feb

a soundtrack for storming the castle

My oldest friend B had a Commodore 64 too growing up, and he was who I got a lot of my warez from, actually. One of the most addictive, most imagination-capturing games he lent me was The Bard's Tale, a first-person party-based computer fantasy role-playing game, akin to the more established Ultima series and Wizardry series. God knows how many hours, how many sleepless nights I spent grinding through the cellars and the sewers, getting killed by animated statues and unending swarms of berserkers.

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is there a word for that?

I've long suspected that I may have seasonal affective disorder. Despite living in Southern California, and despite the fact that currently, it's 75°F outside and sunny, the critical factor has always been the number of hours of sunlight. So my mood always ebbs when Standard Time comes by, reaching its nadir around the winter solstice, then picking up again when Daylight Saving Time starts up. Rainy days (like the last few) make things worse. Unseasonably warm and sunny days like today make things better, but don't fix things completely.

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As soon as I got my driver's license, I discovered that getting behind the wheel was very therapeutic whenever I got depressed. For some reason, it seemed that I would tend to take these random drives around this time of year. Back then, I would go up into the San Gabriel Mountains, and out to the Antelope Valley. I never really had a destination in particular, but the winding, desolate roads would somehow soothe my soul. It was then when I also learned the particular advantage of driving a car with a diesel engine, which was that if you were inadvertently submerged, the engine wouldn't die like with a gasoline engine, a fact that may have been fortunate because I had to ford a rushing mountain stream on one of those drives.

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the geography of los angeles

Now, I haven't actually lived in L.A. since 1999, but I go there as often as twice-a-month to visit my parents and my sibs. In the time I've been elsewhere, certainly a lot has happened. When I left for college, Echo Park and Silver Lake were still kind of sketchy areas (Echo Park is, after all, part of the demesne of the infamous Rampart Division that had its infamous special anti-gang unit) and I felt like a lot of Angelenos had no idea that Eagle Rock was in the state of California, much less part of L.A. But as R can attest, the hipster population in Echo Park and Silver Lake have certainly increased, and I continue to be astounded at how much Colorado Blvd. and Eagle Rock Blvd. have gentrified. I knew it was a beginning of a new era when a Starbucks finally opened on the corner of those aforementioned streets.

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Just came across a tumblr entry which demonstrates a novel (to me, at least) use of the word "stat".

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last night i dreamt that somebody loved me

So tell me how long
Before
The last one

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Yes, I am subscribed to the RSS feed of Ken Jennings' blog and today he discusses his first five memories of newsworthy events.

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racism and the veil cast by defensiveness

So, apparently the mayor of Los Alamitos wasn't aware of the racial stereotype of black people supposedly liking watermelon, and found nothing offensive about e-mailing a photoshopped pic of the White House lawn with watermelons on it instead of Easter eggs. This, naturally, became a thread on Friendfeed, and eventually, it turned into a discussion of what racism is exactly.

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In these silent moments, I wander my thoughts
the wrack and ruin of the years gone by
the tumult and the despair
the small victories, the trifling triumphs
in all this havoc, I marvel at
how Time consumes possibility
like a ravening beast, it rends apart Chance
rasping the meat off its bones,
reveling in blood and spent breath
and inevitability is what it excretes
Fate is the spoor of Time

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Mar

examining the ruins

I marvel
at the dying glimmering light of the day
streaming through the stain-glass windows
I reminisce on
the panoply of idle Sunday afternoons
the vows are made
the oaths are sworn
in this act of finality
there is a calm solace
a quiet certainty

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fragment lacking antecedents

that which I thought the greatest thing
this I had never lost
for I had never possessed it
it was never mine to begin with

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the city and the stars

Sir Arthur C Clarke wrote The City and the Stars in 1956. It is basically a rewrite of his earlier novel Against the Fall of Night, updated to take into account the then-nascent Information Revolution.

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I will never again want anything as keenly, never again be willing to hurt so deeply, and so never again know such happiness. I guess this is how you die slowly, a heartbeat, a breath at a time.

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Apr

house is a neonatologist, too?

I always get hooked by the opening song, "Teardrop" by Massive Attack, which is like one of my favorite songs. So the episode I'm watching right now has House seeing babies. Crazy.

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twitter vs tweet: there's more than one way to do it

transitive verb 1. to utter in chirps or twitters 2. to shake rapidly back and forth :

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only for a moment, then the moment's gone

I haven't been wanting to write lately. Partly because my attention span has been whittled away by my increasing participation in the phenomenon known as twitch media, exemplified by Twitter, Friendfeed, as well as the new Facebook. But also partly because I've been in a state of disordered transition for the past few months, haphazardly figuring out what I want to do with my life. I still don't really know, exactly, but I've at least decided which direction to go in this garden of forking paths.

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watching the sun set in the rear view

Most people complain about the smog in L.A., but, perhaps disturbingly, the smog makes for some pretty spectacular sunsets. I was driving southbound on the 405 earlier today, passing through Orange County on the way to San Diego, and here, the freeway veers eastward, putting the sun in my rear view. The sky looked like it was on fire.

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May

the subjunctive mood

The month of May always, always makes me think of possibility. It is, I suppose, merely a function of the lengthening of days. The sunset continues to inch further and further north, and closer and closer to 8 pm, while the earliest rays of dawn encroach upon my dreams earlier and earlier.

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always, always uncertainty

May gray is in full effect, and I'm dragging in the mornings, my eastward commute cloaked in sea-borne fog. Everything felt out of sync for some reason, and instead of listening to the morning shows, I ended up plugging in my iPod.

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I haven't been sleeping well lately. Which sucks, because how I feel when I wake up pretty much dictates how the rest of the day goes.

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like a ladder to the sun

For a while, I couldn't get the Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero" out of my head. The lyrics are pretty sparse, but people have come up with interesting interpretations. The idea of the song referring to a prostitute does seem to fit. But, maybe because the bass-line reminds me of an engine, or a propeller, "zero" makes me think of the Mitsubishi Zero, the mainstay of the Imperial Japanese air force during World War II, and of kamikazes.

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lost my train of thought

So that 5.0 earthquake in Lennox threw me off for a bit, and I'm just trying to reassemble my thoughts.

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The hill loomed before him. His legs began to ache, and maybe there was even a little numbness in his fingers. He was just terribly out of shape. To put it bluntly, his body was a shambling ruin, encased in pounds upon pounds of fat. He drew deeper, sharper breaths. The cold air raked his lungs, sort of how he imagined an aerosol of glass would feel, only he knew he was exaggerating as usual. Sweat beaded, then trickled down his face.

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Would it be the mountains? Or the sea? It had been a long time since he had seen the south-facing beaches, so he decided it would be the sea. He would go west, west toward the sunset, following the ancient road leading out of the city, the King's road, though no king ruled any longer.

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what is gone is gone

He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.

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running Mac OS 9 in Leopard x86

I was never much of a Mac user before OS X came out, mostly because I thought Macs sucked, and until OS X, they never had preemptive multitasking. But I did use System 7 quite a bit in college, because if you wanted to go to the printer and publish a magazine, you had to send them a QuarkXpress file, and the only machines we had access to that had the specs to run Quark were Macs.

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Jun

the axes of the city

L.A. does have Cartesian axes in practice, even if they aren't really acknowledged. Broadway and 1st Street is origin. Addresses are numbered from here. The y-axis is Broadway, and it runs all the way from Lincoln Heights to Carson. The x-axis is 1st Street, which extends from the unincorporated area of East L.A. to just east of Beverly Hills (although not quite continuously.)

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the fractured city

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apophenia, again

I suppose it's no accident that I ended up in the profession I'm in. From the beginning, my mind has been tuned to look for patterns. The finding of patterns is actually quite easy: everything has a pattern, every bit of data, every tiny stimulus can be fitted to a scheme. The big trick, the thing that they pay you big bucks for, is figuring which of these patterns actually match reality.

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Jul

Betrayal? What was there to betray? Abandonment? But what claim did I have, what duty did she have?

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Destiny as simple as booking a one-way trip
on a train winding through the canyons and passes of decision
along the lonely gray strand of time
where the waves crash and break into quantum foam
chances realized then dematerialized
and not even a scrap of hope remains

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Aug

drought, flames, ashes

When is the right time to write? It never seems the right time when the words come. Paper, pen, or even keyboard, touchscreen are never in reach when the words bubble up, unlooked for, unheralded. And before I can write them down, they evaporate, like a single cup of water spilled heedlessly upon the cracked, dry earth as the sun beats down mercilessly.

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Dec

Truth be told, I'm just trying to figure out something to write before this year and this decade come to a close. The last time I logged into this blog, it was still the height of summer, although fire season was at hand. It's easy to lose track of time in this land of no seasons. In Southern California, not very many leaves turn color in the fall, and the first snow falls only on the mountain tops.

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