Tag Archives: pictures

Relaxing with friends, and big giant space bugs…

Posted on by
8

Shelly and I spent part of the weekend last weekend with phyrra and nihilus, with Shelly and phyrra doing girl stuff while nihilus and I geeking out on laptops. The girl stuff involved hair dye, with very cool results:

Afterward, they subjected us to many hours of the TV series LEXX, which is, if you’re not familiar with it, a show about a sex slave, a dweeb, and a dead guy as they journey through the universe on a gigantic bug-like living spaceship that destroys planets and eats people. It features lots of brains and body parts, people being sawn in half, and the most gratuitous shower scenes outside of anime. I still haven’t quite decided how I feel about the show.

The beach, Georgia, and urban decay Florida style

Posted on by
18

A couple days ago, Shelly and I went to the beach, and admired the sun setting over Clearwater’s urban decay. It was quite lovely (the urban decay, that is; Florida sunsets are always lovely), and the beach was utterly abandoned save for us.

My client–the electronics firm that wants to hire me and send me up to Atlanta–received notification last week that their venture capital funds had been transferred from the overseas VC group, so the move is on. Some of the principals of the company have been in Atlanta for the past several days, getting ready to sign the lease on the research and manufacturing facility they’ll be moving into; the place is nothing short of amazinf, a 33,000 square-foot, brand-new facility that’s completely gorgeous. Shelly’s been apartment hunting all week; we’re in the process of narrowing down the likely places to live, and we’ll be taking a trip up there in a couple of weeks to check out the places on the short list. phyrra and nihilus have volunteered to accompany us and help us look, which rocks.

On the one hand, not owning my own business is going to take some adjusting. on the other hand, the potential exists to make an absolutely obscene amount of money, and one of my contacts at another client (a large nationwide retail chain) is relocating to the client’s corporate office in Atlanta, so I’ll likely be continuing to work with him; since I’ll still have clients of my own in Atlanta, working for a startup is not as risky as it could be.

We’ve been spending a great deal of time with nihilus and phyrra lately, and not all of it has been playing World of Warcraft. 🙂 Spending the night at their house last night was absolutely delightful, and I’m really looking forward to continuing the trend. The friendships Shelly and I have been building with them and with S and her partner M, and the frienships we have with the Smoosh and other people in Tampa, are the most difficult part of leaving here for Atlanta; odds are good we’ll probably still be spending a great deal of time in Tampa even after the move.

American culture and the N-word

Posted on by
20

There is a word a simple two-syllable word starting with the letter “N,” thatcarries with it literally hundreds of years of associations and ideas about the role of a particular subset of people in society. the word carries connotations of race, class, and even social status, and at one time was applied only to a highly specific group of people.

The N-word word carries cultural connotations in modern American society that are increasingly divorced from its original meaning. The racial and cultural assumptions behind the word are becoming increasingly blurred; nowadays, in some subcultures, people may refer to one another by the N-word even when it’s clear that the word in its most basic meaning does not apply.

That word, of course, is Ninja.

I bring this up because New year’s Eve was the birthday celebration of cyber_wolf_2020 and datan0de, and the theme for the party was–you guessed it–ninjas.

When ninjas go wild, it is a frightening thing. Continue reading →

Toward a Unified Understanding of the Human Condition

Posted on by
22

For thousands of years, scholars, philosophers, artists, and religious teachers have struggled to understand the human condition. Elaborate theories, both moral and pragmatic, have been propounded to explain the bredth and diversiy of the human condition; everything from battling angels and demons to the hidden workings of the id and the superego have been believed to be responsible for the things we feel and the way we understand and interact with the world around us.

All of those ideas are wrong, as I realized while showering this morning. The human condition is varied but bounded, and it took Hollywood to give us a model that explains the diversity of the human experience while also showing us how it’s bounded.

All of life, you see, exists somewhere within the space delineated by the movies Reservoir Dogs, Being John Malcovich, and The Princess Bride.

Each of these three movies represents the extreme outer limit of one aspect of the human condition. All of humanity–all religion, all philosophy, all creation, all expression, all experience–falls somewhere within the space marked off by these three movies.

The human condition is not represented as a three-dimensional spece with each of these movies along one axis, because no part of the human condition can fall at the origin of such a space; that is, nothing within the human experience contains no relevance to any of these three movies. Instead, if some part of the human condition has very little, say, Reservoir Dogs in it, then it follows logically that it must therefore contain a great deal of Being John Malcovich, The Princess Bride, or both, as illustrated below:

Continue reading →

The Christmas cat

Posted on by
48

So. We’re deciding if we want to keep him.

Cons:
– Pet deposit.
– Moving to Atlanta soon.
– Vet bills and other expenses.
– He’s very…talkative.

Pros:

A productive weekend and thus and such

Posted on by
4

So, Shelly’s back in town! She left Thursday to go spend some time with merovingian, and came back Sunday. I got quite a lot done while she was gone, and also had the opportunity to spend some time with s and her boyfriend.

S and her boyfriend and I spent part of the weekend building a new St. Andrew’s cross, to replace the one we left in Boston. This one is painted metallic silver; the effect is, I think, kind of interesting…

This morning, Shelly got a copy of the new video game World of Warcraft, and she’s already an addict. She’s been glued to the computer since she got back from class this morning,a nd probably will be until she goes to class this evening, I imagine.

At some point this evening, s and I are probably going to be going on a…well, I don’t know quite what to call it. We’ll be spending some alone time together exploring the possibility of a romantic relationship–can you call that a “date”? “Date” doesn’t quite seem like the right word. A spending-time-together thing to see if we want to start a relationship. Thing.

Thursday: Thanksgiving with the Haus Boheme crowd, which should be fun.

Friday: Tampa Fetish Party with friends, possibly including s and her boyfriend. I made this for Shelly, which she’ll probably wear:

It’s entirely made from zip ties and 7/8″ rubber O-rings; takes about fifteen minutes to make. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out.

Saturday: Dinner with my parents.

Sunday: PolyTampa.

In other news, I’ve been approached by a couple of different publishers who’re interested in the book on polyamory I’ve been working on. One of them wants to see an outline and some writing samples; the other wants an outline and three chapters. So now I actually have to get off my ass and start writing again; I’ve been neglecting the project ever since Boston. Yikes! Now that the idea is beginning to turn into reality, it’s beginning to turn into work as well.