Feb 2009
- Feb 15
- 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.
· Read more… - Feb 19
- 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.
· Read more… - Feb 19
- just drive
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.
· Read more… - Feb 19
- 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.
· Read more… - Feb 25
- stat
Just came across a tumblr entry which demonstrates a novel (to me, at least) use of the word "stat".
· Read more… - Feb 25
- last night i dreamt that somebody loved me
So tell me how long
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Before
The last one - Feb 26
- meh-mor-eez
Yes, I am subscribed to the RSS feed of Ken Jennings' blog and today he discusses his first five memories of newsworthy events.
· Read more… - Feb 27
- 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.
· Read more… - Feb 28
- retrospect
In these silent moments, I wander my thoughts
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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