When things get complicated. I go quiet. Right now things are getting moderately complicated so I haven't been posting much. Here's a short update.

I tried near the beginning of this month to induce a radical change of habit by writing five hours a day. The first day I managed 2 hours, the second 1, I skipped the third, struggled past 1 hour on the fourth, and have been writing in 10min fits and starts for the past 2 weeks since. Ok, this last week I didn't write a single thing that I can recall. Today is Monday, so maybe this week will be a little better.

A while ago Blizzard decided the best way to make people civil towards one another on the internet was to make them sign their full names to any statement they made of the official forums. The idiocy of asking people to out themselves to a community that is notorious for immaturity, flaming, and ridiculous vendettas that sometimes span years and servers should be self apparent. I and enough other subscribers canceled our subscriptions and gave enough negative feedback that the decision was reversed within three days, but even so the thread announcing that reversal is going strong at 300+ pages. To put it into some context, the initial thread where the change was announced was locked as it approached 2500 pages. Considering it was open for only 3 days, that's 833 pages a day, 35 pages an hour, and about half a page a minute. This does not take into account that this is only discussion on the main thread. New threads were popping up every second and being deleted just as fast. Like many other posters mentioned, I've never seen any large community react so negatively and so unanimously about an issue on the internet.

Even though Blizz backed down my account remains canceled. I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to renew it. On the one hand, my mage has hit a dead end. There is no raiding in my guild to speak of, and I don't care to RP in the server I'm on. If I walked away from him now I wouldn't feel all too bad. I've given up on seeing the Lich King by the expansion, and no one even seems to be looking at the Ruby Sanctum.

On the other hand I've been getting a hankering for moving away from PvP and spending some time RPing again. For me this means going back to Sentinels, and while RP is a lot of fun, and a lot more creative than anything else I've been doing lately, it also is intensely time consuming. I'll just have to see how I feel when it comes time to pay again.

And, I'm moving out to Denver in a few weeks. That's the complicated part.

Wikipedia sometimes introduces me to fascinating things.

Juan Pujol

Another good link for posterity:

Rules for writing fiction, by writers, to writers.

Hitting 'next blog' up in the blogger dashboard is probably the most useful aspect of this little pre-fabricated blogging service out there. Sometimes you can stumble upon interesting things, like unschooling. I personally think this is a great idea, but requires a certain sort of family environment to be really effective.

June had 0 posts. Why? Because it was a terrible boil of a month and its end was an immense relief. July is building up slowly, but with a transfer request and college application pending things are looking up. Another difference: I struggled through The Education of Henry Adams all through June and finished it on the first of July, along with the quick read Taroko Gorge. Taroko Gorge was an early review book for librarything, and as a rule I am suspicious of anything free, but it turned out to be a decent book, and being able to read within five hours was a nice change of pace after the 2 month task of The Education.

I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle now, and anthology of his works that includes the novella The Last Unicorn. I used to watch the movie adaptation religiously as a kid, so I'm looking forward to revisit the story through the original telling.

My room is now cleaner than it has been in over 4 years. The massive amount of crap that has been slowly pushing me out of my own abode has been defeated, for a time, until by my fatal neglect allows its inevitable return.

Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.

Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.

I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.

My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.

I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.

Did I get what I was going to get done done? No, but in not doing that I got something else done. I keep trying to cultivate something like artistic merit but the stop and go method that employ means I don't improve all that much. So for the last 24 hours or so I've been in go mode and drawing bad pictures in the hope that they will lead to better pictures.

I also found some interesting things on the internet.

A book on (unintentional) innuendo in Christian imagery. Good for an irreverent chuckle.

A video of many nerds recreating a scene of A New Hope. I hope the full film becomes available.

Today I resolved to do four things: mail a package, get some car soap, check my work schedule for next week, and use up a gift card for Rita's Ice.

The post office at the store was closed when I got there, the store sold no car soap, I have 0 hours scheduled for the second week in a row, but at least I had enough money on my card for a custard.

So far my day is 1 for 4.

I'm going to go wash my car with soapless water to at least get the bird turds and tree leavings off, and then do some research for a project that I'm hoping will occupy me during the jobless week.

Cool Link of the moment: http://s.xdg.us/ An online music radio run by a bunch of people with very eclectic tastes. I'm on the DJ list, actually, though only for the duration of my hourless unemployment.

What a weekend.

Friday I had planned to go north to Lunacon for the day. To force myself to actually go when the time came I had preregistered, and told my dad to pick me up for the 7AM train into NYC. The week before I had destroyed my sleep schedule with an all night LAN and a 7AM shift almost back to back, and did not get to sleep until 3 or 4 AM. That gave me three hours of sleep before my dad was at the front door. I had planned to bring a number of things with me on my trip. Camera, a few copies of my resume, a snack for lunch to save some money, and a birthday card for my friend, who I would be meeting the next day. I realized before we had even made it to the train station that I had forgotten all of these things, and on top of that I had forgotten my belt and my voucher indicating that I had pre-registered. I was confident that the voucher would not be a problem, but I did end up spending the whole day hiking up my pants like a high school nerd.

The trip from home to Port Chester took about 6 hours. I loitered in NYC for a bit to get an offpeak ticket, and decided on the 30 minute walk to the convention from the train station, since I was so early.

At that point I was under the impression that the convention would start some time around noon. When I arrived I immediately realized that something was off, because it was around 11:30 and there was no convention to speak of. Sure, there were enough people that looked like they belonged to the convention to assure me that at least I had gotten the date and the place right, but obviously I had gotten something horribly wrong with the time.

Turned out that the convention didn't actually start until 6PM. I was 6 hours early. So I spend most of my convention time helping people set up. Everyone there was nice, I picked up a number of books by independent presses (more on that later), talked to some people, hung up some art, played a game of Fluxx, and then left at around 7PM.

The question now was if I was going to make my way all the way home, or stay in NYC overnight so I didn't have to come back the next day for my friend's birthday. I ended up staying at a cousin's apartment in the Village. The noise from nearby bars is constant, and was like a lullaby to my ears. There is something about the dull murmur of a city seeping through the walls that puts me in a state of utter peace similar to the sort of feeling people attribute to the wilderness.

The next day was much more sensible than the 7 hour, 80 dollar trip to hang up art that I went through on Friday. I realized that morning that I had agreed to go to a barbecue restaurant during Lent, when I don't eat meat, but there was enough veggies and fish to sustain me. We did a good amount of walking, stepped into the library, Forbidden Planet, and the Strand, had a pizza supper at Joe's Pizza, which is run like the pizza version of the soup nazi's place, and then went home. I managed to get back just as my phone died, and passed out immediately once I got home.

Fun, but a rather expensive way to spend my weekend. Certainly not something I can afford doing often.

Cool link of the moment: The Owl Box. It's just a webcam in an owl box, but if, like me, you are a fan of birds, it's neat to see an owl up close as she chills out and fusses over her chicks.