…if you were thinking about getting a way-cool Villain Tees t-shirt for Christmas…we’re flooded with orders and won’t be able to get any orders placed today or later out by the 25th. Sorry.

Quick review:

– Spent a good part of last week in bed with a back injury. Suck.

– Went to DisneyQuest over the weekend with Shelly and Kelly. They have an enormous, multistory arcade with an entire wing dedicated to vintage arcade games. Got to play Star Wars, Joust (one of my all-time faves), Battlezone, Tempest, Marble Madness, Zaxxon…many for the first time in years. They even had Space Invaders and Space War machines! Cool.

I don’t know what it is with modern video games, but they all suck. Fifteen varieties of combat games, ten varieties of first-person shooter games, fifteen varieties of racing games, each more formularistic and derivative than the last. Boring. Boring. Modern video game manufacturers wouldn’t know an original concept if it bit them on the collective corporate ass.

– Back in the office: Nothing but disasters. Clients with servers failing, five emergency rush jobs in the last sixteen hours alone, I can’t keep up. Suck.

– Meeting today with a patent consultant for an idea I have. Cool.

– San Francisco is only about three weeks away! Rumor has it Apple is planning something really, really big–much bigger than just new computer announcements. And we’ll get to hang out with altenra. Very, very cool.

– Christmas with my family and somewhat estranged sister. Could be cool, could suck.

And finally, for your moment of Zen: Work-safe and family friendly

A haiku for sunyata__‘s cat

The turkey lasagne and the big game…er, kind of

Thanksgiving, I’m told, is a day when families get together and eat turkey, and afterward there’s a game.

Seems a venerable tradition. Thursday, Kelly, Shelly, and I headed over to share Thanksgiving dinner with a number of close friends, including lightgatherer, moonshadowdance, and my archnemesis. Kelly spent the entire week cooking, making lasagne (including the noodles!) from scratch.

Afterward, we retired for the traditional Big Game–in this case, a LAN game of Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun.

Which Shelly is now addicted to. 🙂

This “game after Thanksgiving” tradition is pretty cool. Think I’ll make it a regular part of the holiday.

Saturday: A day to spend with friends, family, and cute lesbian chicks

Saturday morning, Kelly and Shelly and I headed down south to spend the afternoon with my parents for a second Thanksgiving dinner. Frankly, I suspect this was rather a justification to get me to work on their computers… Got both of ’em running seti@home now, though, so I should be able to start kicing out more work units now.

Then back to Tampa to celebrate a birthday with my friend Scooter, who held her party at a local lesbian bar.

At eleven o’clock in the evening…mere moments after a car slammed into a telephone pole, knocking out power to the bar. Well, hell.

Didn’t get to do any dancing, but it was very cool to spend time with her–I haven’t had the opportunity to see her in a while.

It was FARGING cold, though.

Back to work

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate all things Micro$oft?

A client bought a PC from me last Wednesday. Today, bad RAM and bad video drivers and several blue screens during a Windows XP Pro install later, I still haven’t delivered it.

Gotta love an operating system installer that crashes while installing. God bless Microsoft.

Hope tomorrow is more fruitful.

Celebrity Death Match: Gollum vs. Dobby.

…or, when good electronics go bad.

I finally finished collecting all the components I needed, and this evening I spent several hours assembling the circuitry I’m going to use to borg out Shelly the next time we go clubbing.

The street finds its own uses for things.

The idea is to assemble a real live, working circuit directly on her face, gluing the components in place with spirit gum and running fine Kynar wire between the components. The prototype was built on a Styrofoam dummy head of the kind used to hold wigs and jewelry in beauty salons.

Here it is, in animated glory to show what the circuit does Picture is perfectly work-safe, which is rare for this journal

I was in Publix a few days back–a rarity, I’ll admit, and not something I try to do often–and noticed that Publix has taken to putting opaque covers over the Cosmo and Self magazines. It seems, you see, that customers have complained about–get this–how risque the covers are.

The ultraconservative Wal-Mart chain has also started protecting us from the evil of women in naughty dresses by covering women’s magazines as well.

I don’t get it.

We live in a culture totally steeped in sex. Those magazine covers look the way they do for a reason–because they sell magazines, which in turn sell clothes, cologne, perfume, and fad diet books. The most popular brand of shampoo and body wash in America, Herbal Essence, is supported by an advertising campaign in which a beautiful, soaped-up model moans in ogasmic ecstacy while an announcer breathlessly declares that the product is “a totally organic experience.” It couldn’t be any more blatant if the announcer said “Buy our product–it’s great to masturbate with.”

So what it comes down to is that we, as a culture, are both fascinated and repelled by sex. We want, hate, and fear it; we can talk about it, but only in a juvenile locker-room “nudge nudge wink wink” kind of way. Serious conversation about sex (or, God forbid, actually doing sex!) is beyond the pale.

It’s kind of ridiculous, really. We can watch movies about chainsaw-wielding maniacs who dismember sorority girls by the bushelful, but if someone actually has an orgasm on screen, it gets slapped with an NC-17 rating to protect us from the horror. We literally hate and fear sex more than we fear death.

What the fuck? How did we get so dysfunctional and schizophrenic? It affects every part of our social discourse. Our national government is overrun with cheating, philandering divorcees like “bouncing” Bobby Barr (the man who made Larry Flynt say “My god, that man’s a pervert!” after he was caught cheating on his wife with three prostitutes in a seedy hotel) trying to pass legislation to “protect” the “sanctity of marriage” (by, if you can believe it, forbidding people to marry). We’ve got a music industry that exerts pressure on its artists to censor themselves to please retail outlets like Wal-Mart, which appears to believe that carrying music with racy lyrics will inevitably lead to the utter collapse of Western civbilization and a corresponding decline in gross sales.

It’s ridiculous and it’s embarrassing. We as a culture need to grow the fuck up already.

Fun stuff

I just ordered this (warning: link not work-safe!) for Shelly. I can’t wait to see it on her; I hope it arrives tin time for our trip to San Francisco (and Power Exchange) in early January.

I am falling, I am fading, I have lost it all…

Last Sunday, Shelly hosted a Lain marathon. Lain is a six-hour Japanese animated movie about…

Well actually, it’s kind of hard to describe what it’s about. It’s about a character named Lain, who’s an eighth-grade schoolgirl who seems perpetually baffled by her life. The thing is, see, she’s not actually a person at all; she’s a physical embodiment of the collective consciousness of a computer network. Problem is, she doesn’t know it. She’s perpetually losing the things that are important to her, because she wants what anyone else wants–family, home, a sense of connection to the people around her–and by her very nature, those are exactly the things she can’t have.

It’s an interesting, if flawed, story, and it asks a lot of questions about the nature of existance, the Void, the meaning and purpose in life, the way we define ourselves…

It’s also got a theme song called “Duvet,” which has been stuck in my head since Sunday. You can download it (legally!) in MP3 format from the band’s Web site here. It’s a beautiful song, though quite sad, and the lead singer has an amazing voice.

You need to download it. Seriously. Yes, I mean you.

Dangerous thoughts

I’m bringing The World’s Most Obnoxious Pencil to game night tonight. lightgatherer has warned me that she’s going to do “things that will frighten me” with it. I’m frightened already, actually.

Now off to head home. It’s been something of a wasted day; I’ve been headachy and vaguely lightheaded all day, so it’s interfered with my ability to get anything done.

I have a couple of low-power oscillators, some 3mm LEDs, and a size N battery…I feel much better now.

It sucks when…

…it’s 10:47 PM, you desperately need a 7555 low-power CMOS oscillator/timer IC, and there ain’t no such thing as a Radio Shack that’s open 24 hours.

The sharp stick has been there for my entire adult life. It’s a particularly direct and acute manifestation of the Void; I am constantly aware, every day of my life, that just as I had a beginning, I will have an end, and that the things which I create are the only things which will reflect who I am as a person in the future.

I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to be surrounded by people who have the same sharp stick, the same compulsion to create. The creative urge is not a comfortable one; a person creates not because he chooses to create, but because he must, or the sharp stick will torture him and eventually destroy him.

Shelly and Kelly and I have begun working on a manifestation of that compulsion to create.

It’s a book on polyamory–a unique book, in my experience. It’s intended as a no-nonsense, practical, hand-on introduction of ethical, loving non-monogamy for a mainstream audience, not an audience that’s already polyamorous. And unlike all the books on the subject I’ve seen so far, it attempts to explain not just the hows of an ethical non-monogamous relationship, but also why someone would want to in the first place.

So far, we’ve got a very detailed chapter outline and about four thousand words of text. Wish us luck!