Greatest Hits of my Previous Blog: Chronologue (12/31/2008)

The day before the day before yesterday Brendan came over. We took a walk and played a game.

The day before yesterday I walked past some cows.

Yesterday I walked over a mountaim toward a beach, and was present for the discovery of a Cthulhoid lemon.

Today I am celebrating the new year.

Tomorrow is unknown.

The day after tomorrow I will take a short flight and eat a fancy dinner with mostly children.

The day after the day after tomorrow I will fly toward home, and be picked up by a nun. The day after that is the day before my bullshit life resumes.

Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog: An Unlikely Scenario By Any Measure (1/8/2009)

[In lieu of writing actual new posts, which I've failed to do for a while, I've decided to occasionally repost old stuff from my previous blog that still kinda makes me laugh.  This series, such as it is, will be called Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog.  Hopefully this will actually be new to some of you.]

Words that don't exist, but should

There should be a word for...

• ... sorrow caused by the good fortune of another.
• ... the feeling of vertigo caused by jumping from a high place... in a video game.

Can you QWOP and chew gum at the same time?

 

One of the information processing tasks that our brains take care of for us automatically every day is how to walk correctly.  It turns out that this is an enormously complicated task, requiring visual, touch, and proprioceptive information to be recieved, analyzed, and reacted to on very short timescales, all of which happens automatically after about the first year of life.

Abberant Blog Neglection

Well.

It has been in excess of a fortnight since I blogged anything at all.  The start of school always hits me hard, even though there's very little work involved, and the way that this semester has shaken out it's been starting for three weeks now.

But rest assured, I have not been idle!  I am even now considering the beginnings of two reviews.  The first is of a comic/comix biography of Niels Bohr, and the second is of none other than Cryptonomicon, which I only just this morning finished, having been reading it since October or so.  Crypto will take some serious digestion, but I will give it my best shot.  I actually found a plot hole, but it concerns something surprising that happens in the last five pages of the book, so I don't think I'll mention it.

The Lesser Vowel Shift

Ten years ago this summer I spent a few days in Italy with a high school group.  One night we, and several related groups, were having a banquet/party at a charming little restaurant out in the country.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing a Surfeit or Deficiency of Sleep From Being a Burden, and for Making It Beneficial To Me

Abstract

For the most part, I sleep fairly well at night, insofar as that I don't often wake up, and I can usually get to sleep quickly as well. However, as far as I can remember, I have never ever been happy to get up.  Whether I'm forced to get up after 5 hours, or reluctantly drag myself into the world after accidentally sleeping 11 hours, I always feel rather terrible; this feeling is what leads me to sleeping for too long, which only makes things worse.  I'm only ever driven out of bed by the alarm, or by shame, and it takes shame a lot longer to penetrate the fog on my consciousness.  It's possible that, for whatever reason, this is just my lot in life; however, I think I can throw some science at this problem over the next semester and find the exact right amount of sleep for me.

Book Review: Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is utterly present in Doorways in the Sand.

Now, I've given Zelazny a small amount of shit in the past, at least in the limited context of this blog, but only in the interest of being an honest reviewer.  I now feel obligated to give the old boy some love, publicly and on the Internet, at the cost of my nil critiquing cred, but fortunately that won't be necessary; I actually read Doorways, and enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any other book ever.

Several Thoughts

A couple of things have occurred to me, none of which is large enough to make a full post out of.  I guess this is what Twitter's for, but I can only manage so many Web-2.0 life outlets at once.

The Good

The extent to which the alignment system of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons influenced my philosophy of the world is very nearly embarrassing, although the writings of Michael Moorcock helped too.  Good and Evil is a fine spectrum for some stories and some religions, but Law and Chaos are so much more interesting.