Whoa...

Are those photos? Thanks to Frances for these ones.

Here's one of me and Jonathan. For extra credit, spot the oddity(oddities?) in the picture:


And here's one of the bride:

Friday Flight

Friday was spent traveling and visiting. Went over to Redlands for my grandmother's birthday celebration, at which there were many relatives and lots of talking and stuff. After that it was a mad dash back home and to LAX for the flight out to Detroit. So I'm now out near Ann Arbor, MI, with Frances and Jonathan, getting ready for our friend M's wedding on sunday.

And that's all that goes in this post, sorry!

Whoa

I just read a great line in an otherwise very sad article's sidebar: the sidebar was essentially a commentary with a professor of physics, Dr. Timothy Gay, about some of the physics involved in football. This leads to the striking line: "[...]' said Gay, who played football at Caltech." (actual quote omitted)

Whoa.

Whew

Friday was a very relaxing day after getting everything out and taking a breather. The weekend looks to be pretty quiet too, so hopefully next week will be less stressed as well.

Wednesday's Mostly Late Post

Wednesday... Well, I messed around with a lot of figures, panicked completely when my simulations that finished were not actually usable for the intended comparison, and rewrote huge swathes of the paper based on the comments the night before.

On the good front wednesday night I got a call from my brother in law (hi!) reminding me that all the stress had me preoccupied and I hadn't tried to work out final details so that I could make it to a mutual friend's wedding. A call to that friend, and some searching later and I was able to find a plane ticket that was still affordable even with my current low available cash problem (due to dentist visits, previous trips, etc). So that's a relief. Also most everything got done that night except analyzing new simulation data which I will likely use in the paper.

Tuesday's Extremely Late Post

Since I am writing this on thursday, this post is very horribly late! What happened on tuesday... well, I know I was doing a lot of work. About the only other thing of note is that we got together for frisbee, but not enough people showed up, so a group of us ended up tossing the disc for a while. Fun, but not as fun as a game. Also late tuesday night I got some feedback on a draft copy of the paper from the organizer, and thus wednesday was very interesting.

Saturday Late Post

Saturday was filled with writing and heavy lifting. Wrote for about six hours, and then helped move couches and other heavy stuff for Lemming's move. Went well though exhausting, and it was followed by dinner at Robins with the Arcane Gazebo and his brother, so it was a good day. There was some board gaming later, but as I can't recall the name of the game it would be a little silly to tell you that I would recommend it. But I certainly do, it was enjoyable in a risk or diplomacy like way.

Monday

Monday sucked, except for two conversations with people I don't talk to frequently, and a few other minor points (lunch). And I'm moving on to tuesday, which will hopefully be better.

Slow News Day

And today, in the slow news day we have the following items:

Frisbee is harder when you haven't played in two weeks, and one foot hurts for no discernible reason.

Buffy Season 5 starts out curiously and rapidly gets pretty interesting. Looking forward to this one, though just at a glance I think I'll still like Angel more.

I, too, am boycotting Gamestop. Perhaps will post reasons later, maybe will email/normal mail Gamestop with some of the complaints, though I dunno that it will do much good.

I have several DVD's I need to watch: Letters from Iwo Jima and Ocean's Eleven come to mind immediately, and I think there's a few more on my list as well.

Saturday Late

Saturday's post is terribly late! Tragic, but we were busy with playing D&D and that sort of thing. Great game, we stabbed mushrooms and they died. Thank goodness they were not immune to critical hits though, or it'd been really tough to do enough damage.

Shortness

Very short post today. Final Fantasy for the PSP is great, been playing it a lot. Also today our Kara raid managed to get Prince Malchezzar or whatever he's called, on our first try. Pretty nifty. Emailed out a bunch of data today, will have to see how that goes.

Sleepy Day

Today has been a very sleepy day. Between the late night game of OOTS (see previous post) and getting up early to take Ris to the airport, there was not many hours to sleep. After the airport trip an adventure began, as L, Ryoga, and I stood in line at Fry's: We were talking about how sad it was that there wasn't a Fatburger in Burbank any more. Yep, the same Fatburger that we took my mother to, once. Alas, very sad, except the guy in front of us heard us and said that there was another nearby! It was in Studio City (yes, apparently that's a city?), and he gave us directions which we promptly committed to memory and then forgot. This lead to us remembering exactly the first two turns of the directions, and not much else, so we meandered in the general direction for a while. Google was queried for help via text message, and that led to certain people being distracted by other neat features of their text message reply service, though we did get an address out of it. Anyways, the easiest way to describe that trip is to say that Ryoga was driving, though navigation certainly wasn't his fault. At one point we did two U-turns in a row, as right as the first was made we saw a sign for the 101, which was a clue that we should have kept going rather than turn around. Once we spotted the Fatburger, which was in a shopping center next to the street we were on at the time, we made 450 degrees worth of turns to enter the parking lot. It was a very enjoyable trip though, and the burger was as delicious as I'd expected.

New Month

Things I will be doing, or want to do, in August:

1. Visit Mylanda in FL
2. Write more - specifically thesis writing, which hasn't gotten very far, but I feel less apprehensive about.
3. Write even more - short stories, maybe poems.
4. Sleep.
5. Get a basic logic running for complex output feedback in my simulator.
6. Eat more (I think I've averaged somewhere between one and two meals a day this month. Not good.)
7. Write down more of my RPG ideas, rather than keep the plots all in my head.
8. Watch more Angel episodes.


I think that's mostly it for my ambition this month. How about the rest of yall? Anything interesting on your agenda?

This could be a ... (Open Thread)

Maybe it's an airplane? What do you all think?

Sleeping Z

Zzzzzzzz......

So, what's on your mind?

On my mind currently is that I'm very tired but I've got some work overdue which has taken too long. It's looking like I'll be able to finish up by tomorrow so that leaving friday will work. Whew.

Oh, anyone up in SF want to say hi? We'll be there some friday/saturday, not sure how much free time but would love to say hi to anyone who is around :)

No Content, part 2 (open thread)

Oh how I wish I
had something to say today
I'm not a poet

Distance

L is away up north-ish in San Francisco, visiting Weronika and getting to see her sister, who is in the area for a little while. The set-up to the trip was exciting, in that the shuttle was delayed for over an hour and so Lem drove her to the airport (thanks!), which barely got there in time (flight had been delayed, whew). So now I'm sitting around at home, watching the rats play (read as: watching the rats get into armloads of trouble), and thinking. Here's what I'm thinking:

I miss her when she's gone. It's one of those things that you can't really notice until you're apart, how much you love someone and rely on their presence.

Three Panel Soul

If you haven't seen the webcomic Three Panel Soul, check it out. Today's was especially close to home for me: I've seen those hallways. I always wonder if the world is loading as I walk through them.

Some background on this comic: It's written by Matt Boyd, drawn by Ian McConville, the same team which brought us Mac Hall, one of my all time favorites.

Hide and Seek

Where's Scotty?

Lu Bu can't find him... or maybe he's hypnotized by the camera.


Where's the rest of the blog post? It's hiding!

Random Assortment, part 2

Rather than actually write content here, I'm going to post some random things.

First off, it was brought up that there's a Serenity game to play, and we may have the people present/necessary to play it next weekend, or at least get started there. So, with that in mind I finally got it together and sketched out all the plot for at least the first adventure. No fully detailed stuff yet, but it's progressing nicely. If you're reading this post and you haven't heard about the game but want to play, let me know! I'm aiming for a group of 5-7 people, and hopefully regular games once or twice a month. Also, if you've got great ideas for Serenity villains, plot points or just any ideas about the universe, let me know via email or the like (otherwise I can't steal them to use on the unsuspecting players!). Finally, for those confused by the previous paragraph, here's the deconfusation: Firefly is a TV series by Joss Whedon, made into the movie Serenity (also the name of the ship in the TV series), and there was also a pencil+paper RPG book released, with a pretty good system in which we are going to play the previously mentioned game.

Second, I thought I'd post two links which people may not have seen before:

Comics Curmudgeon. If you like making fun of the newspaper comics, or want some interesting commentary on them, this is the place to go. The writer usually selects 3-5 comics each post and has something interesting to say about them, usually pointing out the silliness.

Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed). Commentary on sexist things which show up in comics, from a feminist's point of view. This blog has really given me a different perspective on some comics, as well as society in general. The most recent pair of posts (Jul 5, Jun 29) were interesting for different reasons, the first because it exposed a situation which must have been pretty frightening, and the second because it was really well thought out and covered some ideas I hadn't seen before (mainly the concept of "Otherness" and how the kids in the comic book had different approaches to it and different reasons why they were set apart). In any case, I had a hard time starting to read this blog as the main writer can be very angry in her words, which I find distracting, but after a while it seemed to mellow out and there are a lot of good ideas, examples and things to learn from.

Edit: I should note, both of these links are thanks to L, who reads a lot more than I do, and also a much more balanced selection of topics than I usually read.