October 2000
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Going to bed disgustingly late makes me wake up earlier than I normally would when I go to bed at 'normal' times. I had the strangest feeling recently while playing with myself. Just as the magic moment occurred, I tensed and held it in as humanly possible until I couldn't hold it any longer. When I let go, my nostrils cleared in a wave of heat.
My nose hasn't been clogged up but I felt it open, a mix of heat along with a strange feeling that I would get when I get water up my nose from a swimming pool. Not as sharp as chlorine, it was more like the bloody nose smell I get when I get pulled over by cops.
So this is the first entry for October, a month I've had mixed feelings about for most of my life. I lost Pudding, my elderly black cat, in October. Daisy, our poodle, and Cleo, my father's cat from years ago, all died in October. I don't remember if Sunny, my lab-mix, passed away in October, I just remember it was rainy.
Last October wasn't the nicest October, no matter how hard I tried. October of '94 was terrible because I was stupid thinking a dialup number to Newark was local but it wasn't and that lead to a five hundred dollar phone bill for all the time I was MOOing on Sprawl. I caught major shit for that and I was stuck using free accounts on AOL which didn't have telnet capacity at the time. I probably dwell on the bad in October because October should be a happy month with lots of cold weather, skeletal trees reaching up to scratch the gray clouds, leaves, fires and Hallowe'en.
To start things off, I'm going to post a dream I had about my grandfather a long time ago. I'm fairly certain that my grandfather is still around in some fashion because he's appeared in my dreams and the fact that he talked with my father, scaring him shitless. He was asleep in my grandparents' house to take care of my grandmother who bedridden and losing her mind and there was a baby monitor in his room and in the den where my grandmother lived. In the night, he heard my grandfather talking to him through the baby monitor (the only people in the house were my mother and my grandmother) discussing how things should be handled from now on after he passed away. There were also times when we saw my grandmother talking to the side of her bed like there was someone there which she never did. Her dementia was being forgetful or not noticing people in the room. I'm pretty sure it was my grandfather.
Anyway, I had a dream where I was at my grandparents' house and I was coming downstairs because I heard something in the kitchen. The whole house is dark except for the kitchen. I don't look in the mirror in the dining room (coming downstairs brings you into the living room, you go right and turn into the dining room and there's a huge mirror on the opposite wall and you see your reflection whether you like it or not) and go into the kitchen where I see someone with my body type, all in black, sitting at the table.
He turns around and it's my grandfather. It was like seeing my grandfather's head on top of my body and I screamed without anything coming out. I knew that was my grandfather, I knew that he meant me no harm but the very fact that he was dead and in my dream wanting to communicate with me just drove me crazy. I don't remember much else.
My father will be writing about a haunted house he stayed in a few nights ago while on vacation with my mother for tomorrow's entry.
What else... Jaybird called with maribou chiming in a lot in the background. Man's gotta learn how to keep his woman in line, I tell you what! This is turning into a lovely weekend.
I scanned in the comics I drew back in college and put them up on here. There's one more comic I want to scan but I'll do that tomorrow and add it to the queue. Just happy that not a lot of artwork was thrown out when I cleaned my room out in March.
There are holes in what I have, I'll probably get print outs from the microfilm copies that the paper has in storage.
The last week of September, 2000, Mrs. Studebaker and I rented a home in the Outer Banks. The town was called Corololla Light and was established in the mid to late 1800's. We were staying in a relatively new home with three floors. The first floor had the heating or furnace room and a car port. The second floor has four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The third floor had a kitchen, living room and dining room and a master bed room with a bath and a half. After being there for only two days, I took out the garbage and felt eyes on me. No big shit for I have felt this before and I was only wearing shorts to take out the garbage on a cold, rainy night. To get to the garbage cans you have to walk out through the car port to the front of the house. Just before you would get to the front of the house, you have to make a right and walk into a darkened recess under the house where the recycle and garbage cans are stored.
The next night, I turned on all the lights outside because the feeling of the previous night really weirded me out. I felt a cold chill run down my back on the way down to take the garbage out, I laughed at myself for being silly, and continued on. Outside it was raining very lightly. Very cool breezes, and I went to place the garbage into the can and I felt as if ice had touched my wrist. I pulled my hand back sharply and hurried back to the safety of light inside the house. I later took my shower down in the second floor of the house, I felt uncomfortable and blamed the weird feeling I was getting outside the house. After toweling myself off, I then felt eyes on me and a cold breeze go through me. I never had a feeling of cold go through me before. I freaked and went upstairs and told Mrs. Studebaker. She thanked me sarcastically and validated my feelings.
Final comment was that this feeling only lasted while it was rainy or misty outside the house. Once the weather cleared up outside and warmed up, these feelings left not only me but Mrs. Studebaker also.
I've come to realize that this page is more about satisfying my own ego rather than actually telling anyone else about my life. It is my way of saying that I love myself even though I can't think such a thing nor can I express such a thing to myself.
I know what this page represents.
I am shouting into the void, saying that I exist when the void does not care that I exist. I have to care that I exist and somehow through some sort of twisted logic this page is spivak telling spivak that I exist and I have a purpose for existence.
My gaming diary is to be a service to my friends at the game but also a carrot in hopes of dragging their attention over to who I am when I'm not at the game. The gaming diary is me trying to give back something constructive after all of my really crappy, derivative RP that people have suffered through during all the sessions they have spent with me. That last sentence was also me prodding people to tell me in a cloying fashion, "Oooh nooo, it's not that way."
My personal diary is a place for me to vent, regardless of what people think of my world view and how they fit into my world view. Sometimes I fucking care about taking people into account with my entries but deep down there's a voice telling me to go balls to the wall and really be me rather than hold back things.
I draw the line at things people have expressly asked me not to share. I'm laughing right now because I could just rattle them off and say "So and so asked me not to share this" and go into detail anyway.
Why?
Because it's funny.
I can put my personal diary into serious perspective. When I miss therapy or something really great happens to me and I have a log of it, I'll bring it along with me to therapy and hand it off to my therapist. She used to read the stuff that I wrote but the last two times I shared things it wasn't read despite the fact I kept forcefully pushing to have her read my printouts.
Por ejemplo: I miss therapy for a bunch of weeks because my therapist is helping her daughter with her new daughter. Wonderful! I hand her about twenty pages and she says that doing this isn't fair to her and I realized she was right without her explaining her case but she said that she would read the entries sometime before next week.
The print outs vanished.
Tambien, I had a really great exchange on the MOO which made me feel like a million bucks and I wanted to share like a little kid who got an A+ to get some recognition from this lovely woman who helps me and acts as a sounding board.
I press the issue because I figure the printout (two pages) would only take about five minutes, get a "Wow, that's great" and get on with working on serious shit that is lurking in my recesses and I just don't get satisfaction. It wasn't a bad thing. It wasn't a drama thing. It wasn't a chick-of-the-week making diary_spivak cry thing.
I wanted to celebrate, even just for a few minutes, and it didn't happen and it pissed me off and I guess it lingered with me.
On the other hand, I reckon that writing this down (and I will be showing it to my therapist) is me making a tempest in a teapot because lately I haven't been feeling terrible. I'm happy. A bit irritated that I never, ever get out but that's because I don't know how to go out and have fun. Even if I did have the cash to head out to a bar I wouldn't know which one to head off to, which one would have the neatest people, which one I could just sit in a corner and scribble on a cocktail napkin without being bothered. Which social places that I could haunt.
What makes this aspect of my life easier is LambdaMOO because it's open twenty-four seven, I don't have to get dressed and I have an audience (if that's what it can be called or considered).
Back on the therapy bullshit, I know I'm not going to therapy because I'm miserable or depressed. I'm going to therapy so I won't be miserable or depressed. Teaching myself to fish rather than getting a trout and starving tomorrow.
It's getting to the point where I should go fishing and see if I know what I'm doing. Going into NYC, talking web design, showing off my work and doing Responsible Adult Things is just fishing in an aquarium, it's not the mighty Mississippi.
This entry, like all others, is degenerating into babble.
I commend you for reading this far, if you have indeed read this far.
Dull day. MOOed, showered, ate, watched DBZ, gamed and wondered why the hell I got up so early. Nice thing was I caught Johnny Bravo on at 11 a.m.. nice 1 =D pr0pz 2 cart00n n3tW3rK! Now I'm just feeling sleepy, like I'm moving in slow motion. That's all.
Today consisted of making half-hearted cities for Sim City 3000, watching DBZ, playing around with this speaker magnet and the dog choker chain I have and the usual computer stuff.
I wish that two things would happen already.
- Buried under shitloads of content (scans, documents, multimedia) and putting this website together once and for all instead of waiting for the big kahuna to get the budget in order. I'm itching to work and to get compensation for the four hours of work I've already done.
- My mail arrives, is read and I hear back that I'm not crazy or intense or whatever.
Nice thing is that the latter will happen by Friday. The former won't be for a while since boss is headed to Canada for business.
I've tried namezero.com to register a domain and it's nothing but a headache. I have a domain name (not a name that I care too much about) but it's a pain in the ass to log in and upload things. Wondering if I should make my first big purchase some web space and a domain or if I should make sure that New Year's Eve is a good one.
Can't complain. I figure I'm happy because I'm not sad and I am not experiencing the void that I would normally experience when I'm notsad.
My fucking page looks all funky now, the text underneath pictures is slightly bigger than the rest of the text. I got rid of the faded out/#008000 Nov'00 and Dec'00 because the three lines of months for the 2000 entries weren't even.
Christ, I'm trying to rile myself up with something to be hateful but it just isn't working out right now much to my dismay. Earlier I could feel it in the back of my mind, something mean-spirited and hateful and now after playing SC3K my brain's like a big lazy dog.
I measured my site and it comes out to less than 10 megs with the zipped mp3s I've posted over time. 5 megs without 'em.
Makes me sick when I go on Lambda and I see people crowing about their TiVo/DVD/etc gadgets. Sure, I'm on LambdaMOO with people who are into that kind of technology but it just seems such a waste of money just for convenience. DVDs are going to get seriously fucked up the ass when movie companies realize they can implement the code which makes the FBI warning unskippable on other parts of the DVD making commercials unskippable. TiVo's trading customer information with other companies like Time-Warner/AOL just leading to more ads on more overpriced shit that should already be without ads.
I remember when my house first got cable. Most cable channels were free of commercials except for the Philly stations because they were broadcast stations. Now MTV is unwatchable (disregarding their original programming) because there's one video for every twelve ads making MTV like Hustler. Hustler, from what I remember, being filled with ads between every pictorial that's only five pages long. Cable isn't the bastion of "fuck" and bare breasts that I thought it would be, even from when I was a wee spivak.
Anyway, the only luxury/technology I dig is the computer and that's only because it's one fuck of a communications device.
Growing up in this town wasn't really that fun because there weren't many people my age in my neighborhoods. At my old house most of the kids were younger than I was and it rubbed me the wrong way to be playing with them. At this place, there's nobody my age. Just a bunch of elderly jewry watching the clock run out because they missed the cattle car to Miami with young families chomping at the bit to take over before the bodies get cold.
What's really telling about my town is the fact that nobody is online. I've searched Yahoo, Excite, most search engines, alumni sites and more for people who hail from this bedroom community. I've come across five and none have been active in a year or more.
Surrounding towns aren't much better.
At least with the internet I can talk to people anytime from anywhere or play games with them (chess, quake, etc) but the price is that everyone is a toll call and everyone is at least a half-hour's drive from me.
I hope this is just comes with the neighborhood and not a curse on me.
I also hope that this doesn't read as being disjointed either.
Tits.
Goodness gracious, I love tits.
I've never had the chance to rub my hands against plastic boobies but I've had all types. Big ones, small ones, droopy ones. A pair is always a winning hand!
Heavens to Betsy, it's been quite a while since I've played produce stand and squeezed a pair to check for ripeness.
What I really dislike, and I have no idea why chicks turn this around on me, is having my chesticological region touched. Stay away! Steve and Neil are ornaments and not to be played with and it'll only lead to experiencing my wax-on, wax-off block that I perfected so very well with Malyss. Good lord, I remember how my blood pressure would go up in anticipation of her deciding that it's time to say hello to Mr. Nipple.
Oh yeah, how chicks turn that around. They pull some line like "You can't play with mine unless I can play with yours" which is complete bullshit. If you want to play with nipples, go get a girlfriend (and let me watch, please. please???). Just lemme bury my face between those puppies and not come up for air for another hour.
That's not to say I neglect the rest of the female form. Mouth full of tit, index and middle finger up the ass with my thumb pressed firmly against the clitoris while Mr. Happy rubs against the thigh. Funfun. And more.
diary_spivak is telling me that it's bad to objectify women. Fuck him. You, gentle reader, can infer whatever the fuck you want about me.
Yet another day of SC3K, scribbling and all that kind of stuff. Nothing really productive. I just wonder what's going on with the laptop since I heard back from the boss that I should contact the other two people who run the place about the computer. I'll call on Monday and see what's up.
At least right now I have some text content but I'm really short on pictures. Pictures would be a real help.
I have found religion.
Maybe religion isn't the proper word for it because Buddhism isn't really a religion. No, I'm not a Buddhist.
I've seen Fight Club many times, coming up on twenty, and I've been reading the script at least once a day. Not the full script, just bits and pieces. A scene here, a scene there. Searching through it for bits I missed in the movie, bits that didn't make it into the movie, motivations and all that sort of thing.
I came to this realization after talking with Jaybird on Lambda, we weren't talking about Fight Club but we were discussing things that have happened in our lives back in high school and those terrible years and I had this epiphany about Fight Club being a manual for getting that swift kick in the ass to do what you want in life rather than trying to fill up the empty spaces with things that just can't fill those spaces.
This came from reading an article about love being indistinguishable from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). I know when I have strong feelings for someone I do silly things. Leave them messages throughout the day, letting them know when I'm going to be back to the point that I start second guessing myself that I'm either coming across as a freaked out stalker or as someone who is pathetic and desperately wants to remind someone that I am still alive when they're not available.
That kind of thinking is not healthy and I am certain that is how people with OCD feel all the time.
OCD comes from being an unfulfilled human and I understood this after reading the non-exchange between Jack's doorman and Jack after the apartment blew up was part of my epiphany. People just won't let themselves accept the fact they don't know what they want so they try to busy themselves with something else so they feel like they're getting closer to the goal when in reality they're running in circles.
Lately I've been keeping my idle hands busy with Sim City 3000 with its vague satiety of creation I get and I crave.
I'm still running around in circles thinking the little things I do are/should be the most important thing in my life even though they really don't give me pleasure.
I don't know what I want to do with my life and that burns me up to no fucking end.
By doing, I mean (and I'm a lazy thinker right now which is why I use this term) finding my bliss like Campbell said in all those PBS documentaries about how Lucas ripped his mythology books off, I mean how Lucas applied those ideas to the Star Wars franchise.
I'm still happy.
I just need to learn to relax and take things easy.
Sometime later this week I'm going to buy the Fight Club book and read it. Wish I could get myself to go more in-depth with my epiphany but I just got lazy brain, I have excuses and the fact that the epiphany is mine and nobody else's epiphany so it wouldn't be as relevant.
I'd probably chalk it up to excuses, since that's the path of least resistance so it must be true.
How sad.
That disk is really old, from 1988 or so. Jeez. It holds a bunch of really bad porn stories I wrote about these two girls who lived a block away from me. One of them I would make crank calls but got me into having phone sex with her and I'd call her once a week or whenever I was just horny. She called me twice, which was neat but that's all she wanted. Those stories helped improve my writing skills but not to the extent that I honed them in college and while writing stupid stories about LambdaMOOers.
I can't find a disk image of Appleworks for the IIc to use with my Apple emulator. Wah. I have this morbid curiousity about what I wrote. I know it'll definitely be painful to read but in a fun way.
Last night I dreamt again but I don't remember too much about it. Started out where I was learning that I was raised in China and it made me bitter and maladjusted because I didn't learn the language and I couldn't communicate with the Chinese kids anyway.
The dream shifted to my old house, which was in the condition it currently is in, the image of my old house, the way my old room was and how everything was laid out in my house was different. The hallway leading to my room was twice as tall as the hallway was and there were doorways leading into clones of the rooms below.
I kept visiting the upstairs clone of my bedroom which lacked a door and a wall. The thought of my old place still nags at me and I have no idea why the thoughts won't go away.
One last thing, space is not a curve. Nyeh.
There's this really long road that's half a mile down from where I live and last night I dreamt that all the trees along that street had been shaped into spikes. Their crowns chopped off, the bottom two feet of the trunk still had bark but as you went upward the tree tapered and the exposed wood shone in the light because it was just a giant vampire stake growing out of the ground. Further down the road I could see that there was the tallest tree in my town (in my dream, at least) which had its crown chopped off quite crudely and just splinters rose skyward because it wasn't shaped into a stake yet.
It was definitely a dream reality since the road just went up at an angle rather than being made up of two hills which made the view more disconcerting since there was no branch cover overhead and a clear blue sky that verged on being blank since I couldn't see the sun at all but it was certainly daytime.
As I walked up the road, eyes fixed on the tallest tree, some black guy walked alongside me telling me how they were wasting time and energy making the trees into big wooden spikes because it was more costly to do that than just trim the branches and how they needed to hook all the chainsaws up to ropes to make the job feasible. From there, the dream had me in Chinatown where I went to this Chinese restaurant called Democrazie (that spelling read as being Polish in my mind) where they didn't have fried dumplings and the waitress was really snooty about it saying, "This isn't a McDonald's Chinese restaurant." I knew I should've looked at the menu but I was self-assured I knew they would have dumplings.
The woman I was with, who I don't recognize and she was in shadow the entire time, ordered lemon curry for me which was a large fried dumpling filled with rice that tasted like lemon.
It was pretty good, especially when I found out that they hid bits of chicken breast inside of it. After that meal, I just wandered the streets of NYC and kept walking past the restaurant.
Other than that, today was more of the same except for the fact that I created an abandoned city with SC3K using the all-building cheat. It's something that I've wanted to make for quite a while or at least tweak sim city so the buildings which are built are just ruined or abandoned or rubble instead of the shiny new buildings.
I'm doing alright, just now I'm wrestling with intensity that comes from a lack of trust on my part which has no known basis in reality and a feeling of not deserving anything good and because there is some good in my life that it could be ripped from my hands at any moment.
When I get the latter feeling, I become intense because I hold on even harder until my knuckles turn white and the struggling stops and I realize that the struggling was from the object of my attention/affection trying to get free just for air, not to run away and never be seen again.
That's how I sabotage myself.
I just don't know if I'm fucking up other people by being intense or if it's me deluding myself into thinking I have some sort of power over people, whether it's constructive of destructive.
Bleh. I hope that was not cryptic. I feel a bit better now getting that out.
One last thing, I really like Devo and it's only my insecurity that makes me think she doesn't.
Woo! New host and no ads, no frames and no branding on my page! My html is as pure as I composed it in WordPad and Notepad!!!
Just got back from a lovely dinner, chicken fingers, a hamburger that was too big and a bottomless cold beverage too. Mmmmm.
Today's a great day and I feel better after last night. I hope that kind of shit doesn't portray me as needy because I project my short patience with emotionally needy people (in general, i have nigh infinite [i discovered that patience was not absolute a few months ago much to my dismay] patience with those i love) onto other people. This is a good thing because if more people were like this, there would be more swift kicks to the ass to get folks out of slumps and fewer antidepressant addicts who use those drugs as a crutch because their doctor/therapist can't be bothered to deal with their deeper issues or they want to give up control of their lives to something else and find solace in that.
I do make exceptions for the people that I love and those who really need those drugs (to the best of my knowledge, IANAD) like Mynx's son Milo.
Enough of this. This entry is long enough already, has enough emphatic tags and I tried hard to stay away from being diary_spivak too.
I've stopped playing Legend of the Five Rings a while ago for one main reason. The tournament winners were always Phoenix with Lion and Toturi's Army in a close second and I did like playing in the tournaments but there didn't seem to be any fun in it because one would be certain the winner would be a Phoenix cheese deck or some Ninja abandoning deck or a corrupt Toturi blitz.
Yeah, I reckon I wouldn't feel this way if I ever placed in a tournament but at least I always gave a real fight and was never run over in two hands by some opponent, even with my "weak" faction, Naga. It was still tiresome.
The other bits that had me quit the game were money, the changing of the card backs thanks to the IOC (fuck you very much) and the fact that the Naga were being put to sleep again and wouldn't be around in Gold Edition.
Dragon's fun, but I only had one deck archetype that would work for me and it was my shugenja blitz deck, the other kinds of decks didn't work for me since I didn't have the power/money cards and I really wasn't up to shelling out the dough to aquire those cards either.
It was fun while it lasted but I'm much happier with games which don't require frequent spending to stay competitive.
Like chess.
No more spending money to buy shit that I don't need. Now to work on the stop working jobs that I hate bit.
Autumn's here and that means I'll be wearing my leather jacket more often which is a happy thing, I tell you what. In the front tiny pocket of my jacket are a few rocks that are special and are always in my jacket.
The lapis is broken, sadly, but I still keep it with me because I like the deep rich blue. The heart-shaped hematite has always been in that pocket, I put it in there after I bought the jacket. The other hematite is in there because it purty. Me like purty rock. Shiny. The other two rocks, the blue one being identified as possibly azurite by Devo, were part of a gift I got from Malyss two years ago around Christmas. The other stones are in my room somewhere. I have these rocks because they give me a happy feeling.
Lately I've been writing diary entries long before they would be due, as if I have a fucking due date for this page, and I dunno if that is a Good Thing (tm) because there's plenty that I could be doing which would be constructive but I just want to write, write, write and write about me.
If you're bored, check out this automated natal horoscope that I got at Abacus Astrology. Here's my critique on the description it spit out after I hit the submit button. There's a contradiction where it says "Your immediate reactions to situations will not be overly emotional, but rather more rational and logical in nature" but in the next paragraph it says, "Your actions are to a large extent guided by your emotions, and this can cause you to overreact to situations or to be unrealistic". Which is it? "Your mind also has a practical, well disciplined side" followed by "Your mind also may be somewhat erratic and uncontrollable" in the next paragraph. This example's a bit superficial since the explanation is fair enough and there is some duality to people. Finally, "You will work extremely hard at your permanent relationship, but sometimes the intensity will be too great" is dead on for me and I'm sure those who know me (or have emotional scars from me) will also agree that it fits me. It also explains what I was getting at in yesterday's entry near the end. I rate this automated horoscope with 78% since there's some stuff that's fudged (NoOoOoOOOo) but overall it fits pretty well. Right now I'm second guessing if I was snowed and I'm only dwelling on what I saw as being 'right' rather than the whole horoscope as a single entity.
See, the way I see most fortune tellers is that they tell people what they want to hear or what they would love to hear about themselves from other people. To bring back customers they do their version of soothsaying where they ask their clients questions, rather than actually taking a leap or using their innate abilities, that are really leading. They're not too astute but at least they have human stupidity and vanity working in their favor.
When I used to read tarot cards, I haven't for a while since I misplaced my tarot cards, I would tell my subjects to tell me nothing about their lives or agree/dissent when I state something that I see in the cards because that only feeds into things that I can pick up and use to my advantage. Afterwards I'd ask them for a critique, like if I was way off or on the mark or just wandering around aimlessly hitting on certain things but missing other things.
The thing about shooting in the dark with divination is you tend to read things which are universal to all humans but the client will personalize it and suddenly feel awed that you know oh so much about them and their deepest feelings when their deepest feelings are what everyone has but nobody really talks about every day.
I'm certain there are those who are out there who can read cards, make sense out of the stars and planets, see the future in tea leaves or cutting open a pig's spleen but they're rare as hen's teeth and they don't charge for their services. Getting their services on the other hand is tough since these types have some credo where they will not look into the future for certain things (fuck you, just do it. you're putting your own beliefs on this kooky shit because you don't want to ever be wrong, like giving five out of six digits for the lottery) or certain people because the people have a bad vibe about them.
I can give or take the latter part because there are people I won't read for, but that's just because I dislike them on sight, principle or their reputation.
It's arrogant of people to say things along the line of "You don't understand because it hasn't happened to you yet" because it shows that the speaker has not come to terms with their situation and from that one can correctly infer they have not achieved a sense of true objectivity regarding their situation. Since they are so close to the subject, their pain, their defensiveness and their emotions get in the way because in their minds those emotions are still theirs and they feel belittled if others try to step out of themselves and understand a situation or rationalize a situation they haven't experienced. Around others who have similar experiences they feel at ease and wallow in their own misery and shared stories.
Misery loves company.
I'm writing this to fill up space in my diary and to explain what I meant in yesterday's entry where I said that I have little patience with needy people and those who have nothing to talk about except for the pain, real or otherwise, in their lives.
I'm no better most times but I know when to shut up when I'm told to shut up or when someone changes the subject because I'm getting to be a serious drag. Most folks can't grasp this and get all offended, especially after they say "I won't get offended". This is where I am more evolved.
Of course things are different when they come to the people I love but that love is a strength I draw upon which makes me move mountains for those who have touched me.
Ooooh, diary_spivak stuff. Great way to end a mean-spirited, cold hearted diary entry.
Looks like there's some bad to go along with the good I've been seeing a lot of lately since Tim cancelled the game hours before it was going to start. Grrrr. I was looking forward to the game too. I ended up going to anime night and sat through Blue Submarine 6 which was pretty but not that engrossing. The 3D and the 2D animation crossovers were distracting but the voice acting was really, really good.
The end.
Nothing new. Ate a bowl of ramen at the computer, currently looking through female goth cams, wondering how I'm going to spend the twenty dollars I have in my pocket and I'm about to thunder upstairs to get disc number one from the Frank Sinatra compilation CD.
This disc is more upbeat than disc two which I played over and over and over and over and over last year around this time because it was in tune with my feelings plus I really dug "My Way" which was something going through my head from my stubbornness and the fact that in therapy I was having the idea of doing things my way beaten into my fucking thick skull.
No plans. No direction. No worries.
Can't complain. Love for you.
First off, those Israelis are nutty. They say they're pushing for peace when they decide to just fire rockets at Palestinian homes because two off-duty soldiers were killed. Heh. With that logic, America should be aiming nukes at all countries that speak arabic for immediate launch to avenge the deaths of the four (or more) sailors killed when the USS Cole was bombed earlier today.
Their puppethead leader Barak is crying because the USA will not say "Israel has overextended itself" and have us choose sides or push this conflict further because either side is legitimized by a third party's opinion.
Let the fuckers beat the living shit out of each other until one side or the other is dead. If that does not work, get everyone out of Jerusalem and nuke it. Vaporize the Dome of the Rock. Watch Golgotha burn. Christians have the Vatican (or whatever other city they revere if they're protestant or one of those other flavors). Muslims have Mecca. The Jews have their little gift from 1947 from the British Empire and whatever they consider holy.
For all I care, they can revere Auschwitz since they love taking on the same tactics against the Palestinians they might as well embrace the place which was part of that kind of philosophy.
That's enough. Now about anal intrusion.
As you all know, cats love having raisins put inside their nuthatches.
Rocco likes coming into the bathroom, when I go take a dump, to see what the heck is going on and chat with me.
Turns out he has ideas of his own about humans. After observing me and my habits for the greater part of a year he has concluded that cats do love having raisins placed up their nuthatch but humans have a thing for wadded up paper.
Rocco thinks humans want to be treated like old fashion muskets with wadding and he does have a valid point. He sees me reach for the toilet paper, how I wrap it around my hand, pull it off then lift my leg to put it... somewhere. According to him, that somewhere is my nuthatch and it baffles him since it doesn't have the same texture kitty-kitties run for when it comes to Sunmaid. Rocco's proof is the fact that the paper vanishes after I stand up.
Sadly, he doesn't understand that the paper gets flushed (the flushing noise is actually the sound of me scratching the water with my hand) down with the rest of the hideousness that I grunted out.
It all makes sense but I know it's wrong.
Other than that, tonight is the Hunter's Moon at 4:55 a.m., I'm pretty dandy, I was naughty as a guest, and how are you?
Lovely, lovely moonlight.
More good things.
Bought gnocci at ninety nine cents a pop and a big jar of Prego meatball sauce. Either it's luck or this is a result of fixing the fence down at the church when I went to get my car from their lot on Thursday night.
I forgot to mention that on Tuesday I played chicken with a cop from North Plainfield while driving home and didn't get pulled over. Mind you, I didn't know that the car was a police cruiser.
Heh, cruiser. Hello thailor, feeling lonely?
Anyway.
I turned off my high beams and then he flashed his high beams at me which made me think, "Fucking dickhead" and I flashed him once and continued my merry way thinking that this pussy is in need of a wake-up call.
My car went a bit to the left just so the tire was on the yellow line as the car passed me going in the opposite direction. That was when I saw the lettering on the side.
Whoops.
I was still going the speed limit. I had my seatbelt on and there didn't seem to be any cars whipping around to chase me down like wolves after a wounded deer. I got to the stop sign and he cruised right up behind me, I turned and kept towards the right (since I was headed home on Rt. 22) and the cop followed me but he seemed to want to pull alongside me and chew me out. No dice because to get onto 22, I have to use a seperate lane with its own stoplight and by the time I was there he was stuck waiting for the left turn light to happen without me on his right.
I zipped home, laughing. Nice thing is that I didn't get the crazy assed bloody nose feeling I'd usually get when cops are tailing me in hopes of unnerving me so they can fill their quota.
Know what I hate?
Art schools.
I applied to a few of them, most notably The School of Visual Arts (SVA to the art fags) in NYC and the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning. At every school, they turned me down for admission because they didn't like my portfolio. I could sort of understand the Kubert school not liking it because I was not cartooning in the same way that they taught. It's pretty much a training ground for drones to work for DC or Marvel.
At SVA and Pratt, they didn't accept me because they didn't like my portfolio or my art. This surprised me because I was going to school to learn how to draw better. My drawings and comics weren't terrible but they weren't some top notch photorealistic illustration bullshit that I figure they were expecting to see, nor was my artwork as bad as Michael Diana (some cartoonist who got arrested in Florida after some college serial killer incident because his comics were all cocks and death. poorly drawn too. it became some cause celebre for the first amendment). Arrogant fucks.
I figure they just want students who already know how to draw exceptionally well, who have an inhuman understanding of composition and who have mastered all media and merely want to hone their skills. The instructors don't want to work, they want students to give them money, do the work and then push them into the art world with a stamp of approval saying "This Person is Certified to be an Artist".
I ended up at a local college and that worked out quite nicely for me. I chose it because they had a cartooning course and I contributed comics to the college paper.
Way back then I lacked the capacity to be what #90845 calls "diary_spivak" and I worked off my rage. Sadly that rage was misdirected towards folks who I thought drew better than I could draw rather than exacting revenge at SVA or Pratt or Joe Kubert in a fit of Columbine-esque rage extinguishing their faculty in a red mist and the few self-absorbed students who felt their creations were the absolute shit. Pumping round after round from my shotgun, shattering bones and 4B pencils, tearing flesh and bond board, spilling ink and blood, screams echoing throughout the building because some peckers thought that my art wasn't good enough to admit me as a student to their institution.
I'd figure if the instructors were that good that they would actually accept the challenge to teach an artistic moron like me how to illustrate to society's standards of "high art" rather than just sit back on their tenured laurels, smile and watch students do exactly what's expected of them artistically because they don't have to learn. They just need to fill up time and the school's wallet to get that little certificate.
If any of you pussy-assed cocksuckers who are 'artists' and attended some 31337 school don't agree with my perceptions of these art schools, let me know and don't fucking lurk in the shadows like some faggot.
Anyway, Kean College has a great art department which surpasses Rutgers' art department and I figure that is no mean feat. Plus Kean College has a fucking cartooning course and a newspaper that has comics made by students rather than some syndicated, liberal strips which are the Dilberts of college cartoons. I don't know about the paper since I haven't seen it, but back when I was in college the newspaper was the best.
I found this really keen program called Terragen which makes black and white terrain bitmaps and has a feature where the user can take a picture as if they were standing on that terrain. Here's a picture I took on some plains and a picture I took of a mountainous area. I'm trying to figure out how to save the bitmap as a bitmap or how to convert a .raw file into a bitmap.
Yesterday was an extraordinarily holy day. It was that very day one year ago that I saw Fight Club.
I have started an experiment to see if I am correct with my hypothesis that most women don't care about men beyond the man's wallet and will pounce rabidly onto someone who is a 'good provider' and will enable them to engage in their breeding hobby. I have created a hunky profile online and I placed a heartwarming ad on a personals service touting the fact that this personality wants children, is financially secure and doesn't want any game players.
I even have a Sarah McLachlan lyric as a quote to come across as 'deep'.
I'm going to have fun with this and I'll keep you, gentle reader, up to date on my shenanigans.
I have bullets.
It's oh so very neat to hold them in my hand. Tiny, blunt instruments that can end someone's life in a blink of an eye. I don't have the point and click interface that would make the bullets useful.
I'm sorely tempted to see how far I can abuse this little nugget of death until it finally goes off and does something. Throw it into a fire. Beat it with a hammer. Pry it open and pour the powder out. Lots of stuff, but throwing it into a bonfire seems to be the most entertaining prospect.
The bottom says "40 S & W" and "R * P".
That's all I had to share.
Quick update to the diary:
HEY YOU PUSSY ASS DIPSHITS! HIDING BEHIND YOUR PASSWORD PROTECTED WEBSITES WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE? Get the fuck over yourselves already. What's the problem? Afraid someone will poke fun at your failed marriages? Say your hatchling is fugly? Post your naked pictures to *anonymous?
I'm better than the lot of you, which is sad if I'm using you as a measure for being 'good', because I don't give a flying fuck about people seeing my naked ass, reading about how I'm pathetic for still living at home or being a drama queen. You're all bigger fucking cowards than the *anonymous crowd except you have this artificial aura of being 1337 or something because someone's got three digits, another person is supposedly wacky and a marijuana smoker and all that kind of shit. You come here now, suck my dick and find a big hot urine surprise tickling your tonsils.
Oh yeah, I do want to be Whoopi Goldberg. I'll post that entry tomorrow.
I tried to get this pumping mechanism on a shop vac to work today but it just wouldn't behave the way it should and pump water out of the catch basin.
I think I started work today except all that I did was download a .mov file and then transfer it to another site online. Ooooh. Tomorrow I go in at 9:30 and I'll be there until about 1:30 in the afternoon. After that, I might decorate my father's business for Halloween later.
Lately the preview guide on my cable system has been listing the six o'clock hour of Cartoon Network as being Blue Submarine #6 but they're still showing Tenchi Muyo and Batman. Tenchi's fun to watch the first time around but it's dull and the Batman cartoons aren't any good because they have Robin. I wonder how CN is going to deal with the shark chicks in Blue Submarine #6 because they're all topless.
Not much else except for gaming.
Just a long day that left me feeling stressed. Being happy bore me through and I actually said, without any self-doubt, that I was happy. Part of why I said I was happy was because I knew I really didn't need material possessions (stuff I don't need) to make me happy because I'm fairly certain I know what I want.
Scared the shit out of some guy who felt he could take up a section of a crowded train for his own personal office when I wanted to sit in the seat opposite him (it was the only one), I said "excuse me" to squeeze past and he made no motion so I jumped up on the seat, stomped and growled then stared straight ahead while muttering various quotes from Fight Club and growling under my breath.
The World Trade Center was neat because it was half in clouds.
Everyone was wearing Mets and Yankees regalia. Surprise.
I'm tired. Just got up. Went to bed around eight and it's now nearly six in the morning. I've been up for almost two hours. Woo. I was awakened by a dream about Steve Martin being snowbound and I was able to make it springtime outside but springtime meant that I was able to make the snow melt enough so I could kick a path out of his house. When I got outside someone was having a snowbound barbeque and I saw there was a lot of meat being grilled. Hungry, I waddled over and before I could grab any meat, my dogs ran into my dream and stole it all leaving me only two cold half-cooked steaks that I threw to them anyway.
I'm only going to link to dreams if I write more than a paragraph about them. I kept myself busy today making updates to the main site, not the site they hired me to create, then made phone calls and started getting myself in gear in regards to what I am going to do with the old site (easy renovation with lots of work rewriting the html from the bad stuff the other guy who used frontpage cranked out). I have to work out how to do the other site because it's going to be in Spanish and English and I don't want to have four different sites, one that's English w/Flash, English w/o Flash, Spanish w/Flash and Spanish w/o Flash. At least making the site bilingual will be just gruntwork instead creating entirely new content. Definitely need to find someone that speaks Spanish much later on.
That's going to be in store for the weekend. Next week I'm going to fuck around with the site I'm making from scratch so that it works in IE as well as Netscape. Shouldn't take too much effort on my part.
Must remember to send in my invoices regarding the time I've spent doing web work.
I'm feeling good. I don't have money in my hot little hand but that's coming up soon and it'll be socked away in the bank except for bits which I'll use for myself and Christmastime. I don't need this money but it certainly would be helpful. The only thing I have to pay for is car insurance and I'll do that all in one shot. All my other expenses are basic like food and clothes.
Still happy too.
I'm still surprised at people thinking I'm skilled at this because I write my html in notepad/wordpad instead of using Frontpage, Dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG editor, that I know what a meta tag is, the fact that I can explain what I'm doing in idiot terms and I'm not entirely flustered at the computer.
I've seen what my predecessors have done and I haven't been impressed because I know that I can do better but I hope my best is good enough for my employer.
I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.
Rocco's a very strange kitty. When I went to bed an hour after returning from NYC, I decided that I was going to pleasure myself. Halfway through, I jumped out of my skin when I felt something batting at my crotch through the covers followed by a weight walking up beside me. Rocco had sneaked into the room while I was going into my room and thought that a mouse was under the covers or I was playing a goofy game with him.
It was really, really distracting.
Microsoft FrontPage is evil.
I'm busy. I'm happy. I don't have to venture into the big blue room.
I thought I lost a site that I created but it was just hiding in a folder I had forgotten I created so that means I don't have to make it all over again. Just poke it and prod it so it doesn't look like complete crap on IE. Looks fine in Netscape but Explorer wants to see things differently, I tell you what.
I had a keen idea for a fire earlier today when lying out in the sun waiting for my new browser to download after writing HTML for five hours straight and checking it at w3.org's HTML validator. I'm going to take a soda can, cut the top off, bury it in the pebbles in the back yard so only the opening in the top is visible and keep feeding it until the aluminum warps or melts or the rocks around it get too hot. Maybe I'll do a ritual to summon a pocket sized spirit too.
You know what?
When you touch a woman, it should be with the kind of light touch one would use to elicit a single pure tone from a wine glass. Your hand should just graze the skin at certain points but glide over the invisible down that covers her body. The racing of her heart barely being telegraphed through her taut skin and ghostly hairs.
Today was a long day, I shaved a web site by approximately 35% in size (pics and all) and the only stuff in front of me seems manageable other than actually creating another web site. Regarding creating the other page, I figure I'm at least 1/4 finished once I make it look the same on IE as it does on Netscape.
I was watching Animal Planet today and saw a special on lions which made me think of /The_Cat/. I wondered what big kitty-kitties use for nuthatch pleasure. I asked Rocco but he didn't know and attempted to assault me with a roll of toilet paper. So I phoned Claws and she said the answer was obvious.
Pygmies. Old, wrinkled pygmies.
She's such a wise kitty-kitty and Malyss takes her for granted.
I almost didn't update my diary tonight because I'm burned out big time on anything related to WWW but I remember my audience (all five or six of you) and I don't want to let you down.
Good night.
One more week then it's time to fall back and return to normal time. None of this cocksucking daylight savings time which is fucking useless.
Today was a good day because I found two things that I lost quite a while ago and it was driving me crazy that they weren't in the places where I did leave them.
I found my Champions book which means that I don't have to rely on my memory of the gaming system to create characters, ships and bases.
My gameboy has turned up after all these months which is a good thing. Now I have something to keep me occupied on the train rides into NYC! I just restarted Pokemon Blue for the third time and I'm pretty sure I'll stick with it until the end. Too bad I don't have a link or know anyone with a gameboy so I can trade pokemon.
Today wasn't much of anything, tomorrow I just have to go into the city for an hour and then come back home do a little catch up on work and that'll be about it. Must remember to make up invoices and to give out particulars for manufacturers to produce items that will be sold on the other site for promotion.
@whee, or something.
I almost rear ended a car. Why? Because there were three women wearing tight shirts using the stairmaster in the window of the local YMCA. God, it was hypnotic.
My brain's fried from checking the work web site three times in Netscape and Explorer and making sure every link (including the email ones) works the way they should work. I'm dreading the phone call I'm going to get tomorrow of "The email links aren't working" or "The page is all screwy over on the executive producer's computer" even though the consarn thing works over here on two different computers on two different browsers.
I have my fingers crossed.
Wednesday will be a busy day since I'll be composing some javascript, a mouseover and an OnClick which will make the page's menu bar flash when the mouse goes over and a sound will go off when the user clicks on it. Yes, I know this can be done better in Flash but I don't know Flash nor do I know anyone who has the program so I can learn it. The boss wants me to do everything and doesn't want me to sub contract a friend or whatnot. Oy. So far it seems he just wants the site to be all flashy because it's a bit light on content.
I feel good. Can't wait for tomorrow's game.
I know I mentioned this on LambdaMOO but I'll just post it here for redundancy and the sake of history. I'll be buying little boxes of Sunmaid raisins which I will be giving out on Hallowe'en to any kids who come around trick or treating dressed up like a black cat.
I will certainly get a giggle out of that.
I can't get the theme music from Pokemon Blue out of my head, I go around the house going "bam bam bam, badada da da da dadadum".
Lately my dreams have been about snow, lots of snow, and I don't know why. Some have dealt with being shut in my house during a blizzard, dealing with the horror of folks tramping into the house with dirty boots leaving a mess for me to mop up, being snowed in, barbeques in the snow and last night I dreamt that it was very sunny outside but the snow was coming down in big, heavy snowflakes and didn't amount to much on the ground much to my dream-self's dismay.
Some of the dreams are a bit old which I should admit but lately lots of my dreams have dealt with snow. Am I going to die in the snow? Is "something wonderful" going to happen in the snow? Will there be a winter on par with the winter about five or six years ago where we had fifteen blizzards in the month of February and the other winter months were almost as snowy?
I have come to realize that my diary entries are more like sermons rather than diary entries because I know I have an audience and I wonder if that detracts from the content I decide to put up here because I really do want this diary to expose a lot of my personal feelings. Personal feelings that I don't normally share in person or in conversations because I like the facelessness of the computer monitor and not feeling judged (which is a stupid thing to feel).
But I still know you are out there. I can hear your breathing.
I equated these to sermons because I remember taking Inquiry and Research in college and the teacher was a reverend and he told the class how he wrote sermons every day because it was part of his job. Now, I don't have to equate any of this to the bible and just ramble off the top of my head about any little thing but I should be writing more about myself (without being boring, weepy, not understanding why I'm always sad [I've always been proud of the fact that I've always understood the source of my drama and sadness and avoided it like the fucking plague and never brought it up in hopes of having other people help me out of it.], etc...).
Maybe I have been writing about myself and it's just that the diary has changed like I've changed in the past six months with regards to my life. My brain's just used to seeing the kind of stuff I was writing way back when I started this site in the last week of September 1999.
What it all boils down to is that I don't want to be creating boring content because this web site is all about content. When the site gets boring, it becomes a waste of bandwidth because it no longer serves a purpose, becoming flotsam and jetsam on the vast ocean of the internet amidst the multicolored background .gifs, animated skulls and pentagrams, poorly composed writing and all the other hallmarks of the rest of the world trying to make their mark in a new world.
I can't begrudge them that since the only way to claim new land for oneself in this world is by conquering other lands or becoming a multinational corporation that owns 90% of the food industry. There's no physical act of settling anymore. No one is taking a parcel of land in the middle of the woods and turning it into a farm which grows into a state and into a country and blah blah blah. The internet fills that need after the devastating tease that everyone experienced back in 1969 with the first man walking on the moon. Space opened up new frontiers and hopes in the hearts of mankind on a crowded planet but after the mid seventies, all bets were off and NASA lost all their funding and space travel for Joe Citizen was exorbitantly out of reach.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars will be out of reach for much longer. Robots will do the work for us because it's safer. Human life is precious and it can't be risked in any fashion in the name of discovery. People don't need to risk because others will risk for you. The others won't even be human so you don't need to relate yourself to that object and therefore you don't have to dream because dreams only breed contempt and dissatisfaction which are the hallmarks of revolution and why would anyone want to revolt against a government that takes care of you like a cherished child who is beautiful and unique.
I do hope that men do walk the face of Mars in my lifetime and that puts an end to the focus on orbiting earth and creating useless space stations which end up infested with fungi and will be burnt up in the atmosphere because they're no longer useful.
Then again, maybe there's little space exploration going on because folks don't have the instant gratification that the media would consider interesting and show to us every night instead of showing the tiny tragedies of our neighbors and someone else's fight in some far away country.
One last thing, a few days ago I caught a special on A&E regarding the tensions between the Palestinians and the Israelis and it was shocking to hear this little Israeli kid talking like a Hitler Youth in regards to the Palestinians. I'm glad that the Nazis taught these terrible people a thing or two about how to deal with the world and there will be a generation that will be oblivious to the irony of being just like their former oppressors.
Lastly, I was wrong about why Israel was created (churchill didn't want the jews either and gave them a homeland so they wouldn't emigrate to england). It was parcelled out around the end of WWI when an English prime minister was giving away prizes to this one scientist and the scientist asked for a homeland for his people. He got it. Israel only got statehood after WWII but I figure that was to keep the Jews from wandering around without citizenship trying to emigrate to someplace that doesn't want them in the first place.
I'm not an anti-semite. I'm anti-Israeli. Just happens that country is full of Jews.
Just got in from the Tuesday night game and I'm feeling alright. I think I'm just tired or I'm coming down off of the high of being creative and having things go my way. No, I'm not sabotaging myself but I'm getting some realism in my life. No real reason.
I am going over a riddle in my head.
It'd be nice to be noticed for being good looking rather than always feeling that I have to work so damned hard to get attention in other ways like being funny or being abrasive or being intelligent. On the other side of the coin, a voice rages against me saying that people should like me and be attracted to me for what I am because if I ever engaged in self improvement it wouldn't even be masturbation. Losing weight, getting fit, being vain, it wouldn't be for me. It would be for others who wouldn't notice me anyway and too bad for them that they don't know me. Still it is a bit of a longing in me and I'm trepidatious to squash it out for my own good.
Do I do for myself to get the acclaim of others on a physical level which isn't me or should I be happy with myself and accept me for me and hope others will accept me for me.
I am not an artist.
Bleh, I've been in a text based environment so long that I can't think of anything to do in computer graphics or my idea of making art is just using my hands and drawing stupid cartoons instead of making crazy wild eye popping effects.
I have an idea for doing this mouseover thing which I've been struggling with all day and it will involve using the cracked Paint Shop Pro that I have which is absolutely dreamy to use. I'll just make two images with transparent backgrounds (the site doesn't have any background images except on the links frame and that's where this mouseover doohickey has to go... this is only the beginning. they also want it to make a noise when you click on it. my brain says that's easy enough in javascript but i remember sound files being treated differently from image files), the first image will be the text in plain old font but when the mouse goes over the image link it turns metallic. It goes with the theme of the company.
Jesus, the whole idea of using flash is scary and I have no idea where to start. I think webmonkey has a flash tutorial but the program intimidated me.
Alright, I opened the program at 1 a.m. in the morning and I've been working on this project for most of the day so I'm pretty burned out.
I need to stop stressing about this. I know what my priorities should be, like getting those invoices together because if I don't do those invoices I don't get paid and if I don't get paid I continue living like this, but I keep distracting myself with other jobs that I know I can do just right.
Buh. I'm already stressing myself thinking I'll get fired and I've only been really working for the past week.
I'll be uploading this diary entry, uploading a typo change and then reading a log from LambdaMOO last night because that'll help lift my spirits despite the way that the log started out. Hoo boy, I thought I had screwed up royally by putting myself out there too much or by seeming too aloof and distant.
Anyway, all is well. All is well.
Not much of a day. I spoke with someone who can help in the manufacturing department for the web site's merchandising and I'll be setting up a meeting sometime soon so that can get under way. Tried two more solutions to this mouseover problem but I don't seem to be getting any closer. Perhaps I'll have a clearer head tomorrow.
I went to a Hallowe'en classic car show with my father earlier this evening (where I networked with a publisher) and just hung around. The cars were keen, one VW bug was made up to have teeth and it was biting a dummy in half. All bloody too. Other cars were haunted and the rest were just there for looks from folks who do nothing but attend classic car shows.
Just feeling weird right now, in a bad way, so I'm not going to write any more tonight.
I missed going to the Raisin Acres Hallowe'en Parade. No money and no reasonable way to get a car to head on down to Raisin Acres and watch the happy parade.
Sigh.
So, I kept myself busy and had an idea for a design on the site. Unfortunately I don't know how the fuck I'll get sound to work on the web page in Netscape. Looks like only IE has the sound for events like onClick and such.
Still need to find someone who knows Macromedia Flash. Still need to get the program too. Jerri_Blank promised to send me a copy but I haven't heard from him nor do I want to hound him with "didjagetit? didjagetit?" over and over. He's already been kind enough to get me Dreamwaver 3.0 with the Fireworks program.
I also surprised myself tweaking a page with tiny little javascript so if someone looks at it in IE, they'll see it one way and if they look at it in Netscape they'll see it just the same and it works. Lastly it turns out that the web page didn't work at work because the boss' IE is screwed up or had stylesheets turned off. It works for me and on two machines and that's all that matters. Arrogant, ain't me?
I'll go watch a live cam for a bit, idle and then go to bed to play Pokemon.
Only sucky thing that happened is the fact that I misplaced the code to make the tm item and Diopter paged it to me earlier today.
I am not my job.
I have to remember that since lately my entries have been about the work I've been accomplishing.
The only things I'm looking forward to are getting another gameboy with pokemon red, saving up for Christmas and using just a portion of that money to do something nice for myself. I'm a bit unsettled that I'm waiting for Tuesday night to swing around so I can bring my computer along to the game and screw around on Heromaker and stuff. The laptop's a fucking tool. I don't bring a hammer to the game and show it off saying how cool it is.
I need to find my center again and get back into who I truly am because I've been inching away from it. What "it" is, I don't rightly know but there's a bit of a shift.
My therapist said that she saw an improvement in my mood and that my change was evident in my face and how I carried myself.
My only worries right now are going overboard and smothering someone with affection, getting this fucking merchandising thing off my plate and onto someone else's plate, finding something to occupy myself so I don't get sucked completely into work the way I can get completely sucked into the internet. At least with the internet, I'm socializing.
Lastly, I'm gonna share how I've been able to explain computers to my father. My father is really into cars, especially classic cars, and he's rebuilt a few which is impressive. When I thought about him growing up and what cars meant I realized that computers are just like cars except that there will never be a market or a strong community that looks back on old computers and wants to rebuild them.
There are fast cars and there are muscle cars, the same way there are fast computers and computers with muscle to really compile code and take care of tasks. Computers nowadays are places for folks to socialize, especially to meet chicks. Back in my father's day it certainly helped to have a nice car to pick up a woman. Okay, I'm stretching things but the analogy worked. I talk to my father in terms of cars, engines for processors, operating systems for the controls and so on and he gets it. I figure that it's made computers less scary and encourages him to play more with this machine and his own machine. My mother on the other hand is unreachable as far as I can tell even though I have tried to show her around and how to enjoy herself. So she uses Quicken and can do a thing or two in Word, that's all she needs to do.
Enough squeezing a stone for blood, there is no more. Good night everyone.
I dreamt of work, kinda.
And it seemed real.
It started like a flashback where I was in the city to meet with the boss and he was giving me some things to do and expressing concerns about the site which I handled while talking with him. I left and went home where I drove around for the better part of the evening in my father's 1966 AMC Rambler, stopping in a parking lot to start a fight then to drive circles in a parking lot until I parked.
I found myself looking at a new home development, upscale and 1/2 under construction, and I saw this big house and walked over. I found out the boss was dead. It happened so quickly and I didn't show emotion. I didn't see the body and I walked around listening for a wee bit until I decided to go back outside. It felt like the wind was knocked out of me. As I was going outside to sit on a big rock, the boss' wife came out and I did the human thing of offer a hug for sympathy and condolences.
That was when sadness hit me. Either I caught up with the deep emotion going on inside of her or I was finally feeling it come over me. I could feel my chest clench and my breathing become difficult as if I was breathing pudding. We hugged each other very hard and then we went back to the house. Now I was avoiding a room to see the body, it was lying in state there not at a funeral home. I went around onto the back porch where I found his wife in the hot tub and I got in completely clothed. I think she tried to come on to me but she didn't touch me and I didn't feel right doing that so I left the hot tub (clothes were dry coming out, neat) and left the house.
I walked through the fields from the new housing development and ended up in a small town (not small like Raisin Acres, as if any of you would know what that's like, more like Millburn which explains even less) and saw that my father's car was just fine where it was parked and went into a white building. Inside was the NYC office where I met up with the boss' wife and she gave me a signature book with something in it that left me with the impression it was from the boss before he passed away. I held it tightly and left.
I knew that I no longer had a job.
This saddened me more because I have my own hopes and dreams for what to do with my life and this job is a Good Thing (tm) because it's an opportunity to do something with myself.
Outside there were some guys in black suits who were standing on the corner asking me what kind of business I was attending to in the building that brought me there. "It's personal", I snarled and they seemed to understand and back off. When I got back to my father's old car I had come outside of myself and became more of an observer in the dream than a participant. When that happened, I think that my dream self took on a new form other than the big hairy man beast that I am in real life. There was a chase of those guys in black suits coming up from their corner and the former dream host was running away from them. Someone else was running alongside him trying to help him get away. My former dream host threw the book to the unknown ally who went into a white limosuine and drove off with the book safe in his hands. The dream host was assaulted by the men in black suits.
When I woke up, I kept my eyes closed in hopes of trapping the few dream vapors behind my eyes and to compose it all in my head's conscious brain rather than have it slip away with the other forgotten dreams. I was glad the laptop was in the cabinet at the head of my bed so I could write this down. Also when I awakened, I had this feeling my boss truly was dead and I was fully prepared to enter a world where he was dead, as if the dream was prophetic, but the realization dawned on me that it was just a dream.
Other parts of the dream towards the end were a jumble. the signature that was inside of the book was thought to be an original, forgotten Picasso sketch and it just might've been one.
I drew it from what I envisioned in my dream-head and I think I did see it in the dream but I can't be sure of that.
I just know.
And while I was getting back from the house after I realized the body was lying in state, I phoned someone where it was raining and talked about how one of my dogs was missing. The dog was a doberman (in reality I have two labs) and I told the person on the other end of the phone that I didn't know where he went off to and I would be checking the side of the main road that's a hundred feet from my house to check the gutter for his body. The other person didn't talk much and I do not know who they were. I had a realization to check the dog pound which made me happy and think that he might've still been alive but when I hung up the phone I knew I wouldn't look because I was feeling bad anyway.
Right now i'm remembering a class of dreams I had a lot of during the late eighties through the mid nineties and they really pissed me off because they'd always tease me. The premise was simple, I would be in a video game arcade filled with games that I never saw before and was itching to fill with quarters but every one was full or the ones that were available were unplugged and I couldn't find how to plug them back into the socket. I'd end up pacing the dream, waiting for a game to become free and feeling the growing frustration that there were all these cool games and I couldn't play them. I would never remember the names of the games or what they looked like or played like when I woke up.
Recently, I had a dream like that but the arcade was empty and the games were all old and boring. I kept playing this one game which was amusing about a spaceship flying over the face of Mars and encountering various obstacles which were more like puzzles than a shoot 'em up scrolling game though it had those elements as well. By the time I got to the purple level I couldn't play any more and I found out the games were slowly dying and only a few sad pinball games were still working but I didn't want to play those lest their patheticness rub off on me because simply seeing them in the darkened arcade was depressing.
Whew. That's a lot of dreaming stuff.
If any of you have any dreams that you want to share, submit them to me and I'll plop them down here. Same goes for anything else like a diary entry or a rant or what you think of me. Just thinking right about now that my diary is getting a bit stale and I'd like to see some submissions to liven things up. Then again, I might be too close to this project and I'm projecting my assumptions on my audience who are coming here because it's like viewing a car crash, they're genuinely interested in me or just random voyeurism. Getting submissions is my way of avoiding being repetitive or predictable since I'm serious about putting decent content into this page.
I've seen too many flashy sites with little content or crappy sites with little content and the majority of the web is like that. Good thing that the web is so large that one can be assured of finding something good to read or learn from. Plus sites with little content are easily dismissed in search results which is a Good Thing and the lack of content helps with the web's natural selection. I was talking to Moonflower yesterday and she showed me her web site (a pennsylvania goth scene site) and told me how some woman on her goth mailing list was complaining about how Moonflower's site wasn't pretty enough and she countered with how the links all work, lots of content and it doesn't take hours to load. That certainly fits with my philosophy of web design.
This leads into something I've been pondering about the state of the web. It is becoming more like television, visually and fundamentally. Visually with all the advertisements (that's part of capitalism, just lump it and get junkbuster and ignore the ads like everyone else), blink tags (the blink tag was implemented because originally people thought they needed something blinking or flashing to keep someone's interest but the tag became reviled) and content that is being generated by algorithms (at shopping sites) or committees rather than flesh and blood human beings. I wouldn't be surprised if folks started thinking the web wasn't accessible to them the same way that television isn't accessible. In my estimation, the best one can do to get involved in television is to attend some party school for journalism, have good looks and a velvety voice. Outside of that, you're part of the audience rather than a participant.
Will the web become unreachable where people are intimidated to participate because they don't think their contribution will be given any consideration (that's why nobody really creates programming for public access cable because they're vain and want to get recognition in their community for being on television and they know nobody watches public access cable) or they assume some sort of specialized education is necessary (go to w3.org or webmonkey, spend a weekend there and then apply for a job to stand out head and shoulders above those who only know how to use microsoft frontpage.) or according to some elitists (and I paraphrase) "The Web is full. Go home." (Fucking Condor, he took that page down and has a real site again. I'm sure the few Lambda folk who come here know what I am talking about.)
I hope not because this is an instance where if you can do something, you should unlike that scientific ethics quote I've seen from the Linux/GNU sheep at slashdot.org of (and I paraphrase) "Just because we can do something, does not mean we have to."
TV has become stale because all the shows are made by the same kind of committees and people are discovering the internet because they can have a voice (even if it's shouting down a well like this page). I'm not that naive that they're also flocking to the web so they can masturbate to each other on netmeeting too, that's more of a factor but if it gets them on the web some percentage will stay and involve themselves in other ways (even other kinds of masturbation, like this page). The good content will rise to the top by garnering an audience while the bad content will just fade away without some committee culling it because it won't please the advertisers or they're simply not interested in the content.
Enough of that.
I was just reminded of why Scooby Doo depressed me when I was a wee spivak. The gang was always driving around in their van, they never went home or seemed to have a home. They weren't a band (which I thought when I first saw the cartoon because they would have those stupid musical montages and the musicians were the scooby gang) and they didn't seem to call anyplace home even though they kept coming upon Shaggy and Scooby's relatives. Then what happened to everyone else when the show became just Shaggy and Scooby? Did they go home? Were they kept prisoner by some supernatural entities? Was Fred arrested for videotaping hot Velma on Daphne action and they were just a year short of being of age? Did they finally get day jobs which kept them from driving all over creation to reveal that all scary monsters are actually grumpy old men who want to aquire real estate? The Scooby gang never even seemed to cash in on their meddling. They were never offered a big reward either. How did they afford to keep the mystery machine running? Where did Shaggy get all that money to pay for his pot?
Even when I was a wee spivak, I knew that Shaggy was a stoner.
I reckon I'll never know.
Congratulations if you waded through all of this.
I found a crack for the evaluation version of Flash 5.0 and I'm going to get into learning how to do stuff in Flash sometime today. Turns out that I didn't get much done trying to learn Flash today. All I have to create are fucking buttons that make a sound when the mouse goes over them. I'll try again tomorrow.
Nice thing about the switch back to standard time from daylight savings is that I tend to wake up earlier than my body clock says it is. Got up at eleven today and spent most of my waking hours playing pokemon blue. I have to get fresh batteries :P
I currently have:
- Gastly @ level 30
- Drowzee @ level 32
- Fearow @ level 30
- Wartortle @ level 35
- Gyrados @ level 33
- Weepinbell @ level 32
Right now I'm a bit disappointed with gastly and I'm thinking about switching back my level 29 pikachu to replace him unless I find some good TMs gastly can learn to make him a formidable opponent. The fact that he ignores most physical attacks isn't enough if he's not dealing out serious damage.
I also uploaded the old maribou and Brack pages which I had over on the old site. Those pages will probably be the last pages I bring from xoom/nbci to eccentrix. Nearly everything else is still at the old page except for the four main section pages (index /personal /moo /gaming).
I realized that I am a very immature person last night and I want to see what I can do about this because last night I was getting myself worked up for some reason I can't remember today. While letting the dogs out, I realized that most of this immaturity is coming from the very fact that I'm not getting what I want when I want it which is right now.
These kinds of feelings make me withdraw from the world. I withdraw from the world because I think in some twisted way that people will reach out to me and that is definitely not a healthy thing.
Whatever you (I write this in the universal sense) do, do not reach out to me. Let me stay withdrawn.
I need to have the concept that the world does not care about me impressed upon my mind once again so I can either get on with life on my own terms or I can just wither.
Oh yeah, I'm glad that Courage the Cowardly Dog won the scarediest dog contest on Cartoon Network.
Happy Hallowe'en everyone! Choose which entry you are going to read because there are two entries for this spooky day. Will you read the diary entry of spivak on a relatively even keel or will you dare enter the house of dramatic horrors that is diary_spivak???
