Snikt!

Mer's in Boston, but she's coming home now!

While she was gone, I rented Code 46, starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. TK. Samantha Morton is totally hot and you get to see her bush -- it's shaved! -- in this dirty little scene where she's trying to get away from Tim Robbins as her tries to put it to her. She wants it and also doesn't want it.

Ugh, so far the entire weekend has been spent programming. I need to... something.

You know, if I were a producer for the amateur shit on It's Showtime At The Apollo, I would stop booking white guys in sweater vests that play classical violin. Because even if they're really good, what's the audience supposed to say about it? Fuck, I'm just watching at home and I don't even know what to say. Wop, wop.

After breakfast today (Sunday), Mer went to get printer paper and I went to Gamestop, and while I was there, I made an impulse purchase: Shadow Hearts: Covenant. Mostly I got it because Tycho and Gabe liked it (word of mouth advertising!), and I can see why they did. The visual style definitely grows on you -- and the game is "fun," mind you -- but the dialog is just... ugh. Half of what the characters say to each other is throwaway gibberish, like, "He he" (I payed $30 to hear / read someone say "He he?"), and the other half is the most patently cliched "character development." Why, for example, does there need to be, in every stupid cookie-cutter Japanese role-playing game, a character who's got a tough, confident exterior (Squall Leonheart, I'm looking at you), but who gets thrown completely off guard when the needlessly bossy supporting female character gets up in his face? Japan's got girl trouble, I tell you what. The best part is, they used a third-party "localization" company to help them translate it -- to the extent that this company's logo comes up when you start the game -- and the fucking thing still sounds like it was written by one of the human characters in Pokemon.

I maintain there could be a totally sweet RPG that takes place in the context of WW1 (like Shadow Hearts) or, better yet, WW2 -- provided it's not written by idiots.

I am definitely, definitely doing this come March 26th.

Funny Banana At The Allergist

So I took the day off work to day to take the cat to the skin doctor. It was totally rainy and awful, just like when we brought her home for the first time, and the appointment took several hours and was very expensive, but she's now on this allergy therapy that has a pretty good chance of permanently solving her constant chewing / biting problems. Plus, they put this totally adorable little shirt on her to stop her chewing in the interim that she totally hates. She's acting like it makes it so she can't walk, but I'm pretty sure she's full of shit on that one. UPDATE: We had to take the shirt off her because it was time to go to work and we weren't sure if she'd be able to go to the bathroom.

I hung out with my friend Chris yesterday. It was great! We took a walk around Prospect Park and narrowly avoided some predatory brothers on the down-low.

Later on, in our continuing attempts to make vegetarian dishes that are un-revolting, I cooked up our recent favorite, spicy sausage with broccoli and pasta, using Gimme Lean imitation sausage in place of the real thing. It went over pretty well, even with Chris -- he says he's moving in vegetarian circles himself after getting the low-down on how cows get slaughtered in halal kitchens. Apparently it's pretty uncomfortable for them and they make a pretty awful noise. "Why do they have to do that? Why can't they just... shut up?" wonders Chris.

"...And die?"

"Yeah. Just shut up and die."

Mer and I went to the library last weekend and checked out a couple of books. I picked up Children of Cthulhu, which should do a lot towards sating my appetite for awful garbage. A lot of the stories are just the worst sort of... ugh. Just baldly expository nonsense that reveal exactly what was on the author's hack brain when he was writing it -- which is ironic, because the editors wrote this foreword about how uninspired most Lovecraftian fiction usually is. Well. It's a lonely world for people who really, really like Cthulhu.

So I've been trying out some web-portal software to get undecidable.net up and running -- here's what I'm thinking would be cool (this is mostly for M-Biddy's benefit): It's like a news portal that you can log into with your own account, and once you're inside, you can customize this, like, digest of RSS feeds come in, out of list of available sources. Basically anything that publishes a feed, so things like Slashdot but also like any blog on Blogspot, for example, or my Advogato diary. And you see it all in this continuously updated custom personal news page, kind of like Slashdot's front page, but with stories from all different sources all mixed in together. And for people who don't have accounts on the site, maybe the front page of the portal we can use for publishing little essays and things, like those wireless papers you were working on way back when. So. What do you think? I'm still evaluating different portal systems -- none of them seem to do exactly what I want.

Don't Call People 'Sweetie'

What are we, Harvey Fierstein? Seriously.

For fuck's sake -- FireFox just crashed and I lost a whole entry. And that was like, a week ago. I get sick of this thing sometimes. Long story short: Last weekend, Mer and I went ice-skating in Prospect Park and then had dinner at Junior's, cheesecake capitol of the world. We took the bus home, horribly stuffed and woozy. Mer said, on the bus, "Well, we'll always remember the time we ate dinner at Junior's."

Now it's a week later. I've moved my shit onto my new pad, undecidable.net. Kelly Clarkson just played some shit on SNL; she was wearing this top that was cut down to her pelvis and she has, like, no tits, which was sort of hot. It would also have been, you know, sorta if she had bigger tits. So, you know. Whatever.

Bill's at the Grannys. I mean the Grammys. I'm writing Scheme.

I Am Getting Kind Of Arrogant

I had this dream just this last night that I was at my dentist's office rescheduling an appointment I'd made for a cleaning and had showed up too late for, and who should I see in the waiting room but the hon. Rudy Giuliani! He sees me write my name down on a form and he goes, "So, Julian, what do you do for a living?" and I reply, no joke, "I enable the economy of this city, you creep" (whatever the fuck that means). He got kind of visibly flustered and muttered something about being careful about who I shoot my mouth off to and how I should hope nobody has a file on me, etc. I go, "Oh spare me, you fucking monster." Muh?

Later on in the dream I was at some kind of college graduation party, and happened to be standing near enough to the president and his daughters to hear him say that he'd selected the wine being served at the party because "it smoothly blended the lotion of childhood with the lotion of adulthood." WTF? I remember tittering to a group of faceless sardonic friends, "Lotion? There's lotion in the wine? The wine is poisoned!" I don't even get it, though. Lotion?

I am so goddamn sick of the pathetic antics of the assorted capons and centrists in the DNC and the Senate. Jesus Christ, people, either grow a pair like Barbara Boxer or... you know, get off the pot. I'll tell you one thing, though -- I'm not voting for them any more.

Creighton Sings the News

Okay, what's in the news? This, for one thing.

McCook County State's Attorney Roger Gerlach says the proposed ordinance is not an attempt to put him out of business: "As long as they have some opaque clothing over the crucial parts of the human body, they can dance all they want."

Jesus Christ that makes me mad. Look, I don't to live in your shitty little town if I can't see some goddamn titties when I damn well please. And you want me in your town: I'm rich; I shovel the walk when it snows; I can internet enable shit. Fuck.

How much are we all praying for the fuckhead Pope to die? The unwanted and uncared-for children of the Mary-worshippers and assorted savages to whom he forbade birth control should be given the privilege of pelting him to death with industrial waste as he lies wheezing and twitching like a monster in a filthy birdcage on the floor of the U.N.

M-Biddy and I have registered a domain together and are goin' in on some hosting together. So look for undecidable.net to make an appearance in the next couple of days. Yuh-harrr!

My grandma sent us a set of plates and cups with pictures of birds on them that she got as part of a donation to the Audubon Society about a month ago, and I just wrote her a thank-you note. I happened to be reading this Robert Penn Warren poem called Audobon in Norton on the ride home, so I quoted her the bit below, but I naively wrote that the name of the poem was "From Audubon." Oh well, envelope sealed:

Their footless dance

Is of the beautiful liability of their nature.

Their eyes are round, boldly convex, bright as a jewel,

And merciless. They do not know

Compassion, and if they did,

We should not be worthy of it. They fly

In air that glitters like fluent crystal

And is hard as perfectly transparent iron, they cleave it

With no effort. They cry

In a tongue multitudinous,often like music.

Look, I'm not some homo that quotes poetry in his 'blog all the time. I promise I won't do it again for a while.