February 2007

2/13/07
Weird shit.

Around 7:20 p.m. Mountain Standard Time (MST) I decided to see if the NetHack devteam responded to my submission of a bug report about landmines on the plane of air. For those of you playing along at home, if you #apply a landmine on the plane of air and it's triggered by a monster a pit will be created in the middle of the air.

Makes no sense at all.

I had forgotten which email address I provided on the bug report submission form but I did remember that it was one of my three gmail accounts. I checked my alternate and there were no messages there at all. When I checked my real name gmail account for job searches I didn't have anything but a metric fuckton of spam from m0nst3r.c0m along with other dipshit commission-only sales jobs.

So I logged back into heptapod@gmail.com and RIGHT FUCKING THERE WAS A RESPONSE SENT MERE MINUTES AGO most likely while I was checking the other email accounts.

Reckon it's just synchronicity or serendipity or reductive reasoning at work rather than anything else. Still I thought it was kinda neat.

First I learned that they allow jurors to bring laptops into the jury waiting room. I brought along parts two and three of C.S. Lewis's space trilogy along with The Origins of Satan. Now I'm really enjoying The Origins of Satan but I kept the cover out of plain sight lest some weirdo born-again Focus on the Family drone think that I'm one of them, one of them, gooble-gobble.

Now this book does bother me a lot. First and foremost I took most of the shit taught to me at Sunday school at face value. I am bothered that I was such an idiot but that comes with religion. Plus I was young, stupid and needed the money (thank you very much monsignor[ZING]). Cue maribou to say "LOL UR TEH STUPIEN I NEW TIHS LOL". Now it seems that the gospels are mostly Roman apologist fiction trying to make the question of Jesus's birth a non-issue by making his flight in and out of Egypt into a parallel of the story of Moses for example and a fortunate mistranslation of the word 'virgin'. All of this doesn't make the Jews any better in my humble opinion. They're all a bunch of sectarian, backstabbing nitwits which mirror the various and demonized factions depicted in Islam. I'm dead certain if the Jews had gunpowder they'd be detonating themselves in centurion garrisons.

Okay I got off track there.

While watching the introductory video I thought it was very nice that the announcer or narrator kept apologizing to the citizens called upon to perform this service to their community. I can see how being self-employed or having to take care of the pitter-patter of little mistakes can consider jury duty to be a serious inconvenience but half the time he kept saying that "I know you think you have better things to be doing right now".

What? Like working a job that gives me ulcers and drives me crazy? Shit, I can sit here in relative peace and quiet reading my dopey books. My job just outlawed quietly reading at one's desk when work is slow.

So I did get called but I didn't get called. One of the judges pulled me as a possible alternate for a trial but an hour later everyone on that list was dismissed from jury duty.

What did I get out of jury duty? Four hours to read in relative quiet. Woman next to me decided to start yammering on her cellphone about god, of all things, and wouldn't shut up about it so I waddled far, far away. raddidge says, "You always complain about everything. WTF?" Plus I watched bits and pieces of Ice Age which was being shown for the remaining jurors. Meh, I'm glad I didn't pay to see it.

Here's hoping I get called again next year.

By the way, I rode my bike there and back. Man I'm out of shape.

Jury duty let out at 11:55 and they marked it as twelve noon on my employer waiver sheet kinda thing. I was home by 12:15 p.m. MST, readied for work and in the car by 12:22 p.m. MST. Got to work around twenty minutes to one o'clock.

WHY?

Brownie points for one. Also to avoid any awkwardness when they look at the sheet and go "LOL WEAR WER U FRUM TWELF TO FIE?" Still I wonder if I could've gotten away with going home and sitting on my ass for the rest of the day.

I'd probably feel like I had wasted that time with the internet rather than doing work politics and stuff.

Every night I take one multivitamin, a b-complex vitamin and a little gelcap of flax seed oil. Sometimes I'll take an aspirin too.

Which brings me to something clever that crossed my mind earlier today. I'll put it in yellow because that's the color for that topic.

In Vampire: The Masquerade one of the big storylines is the proliferation of vampires who have no clan. There are numerous clans in White Wolf's World of Darkness. Assamites, Brujah, Followers of Set, Gangrel, Lasombra, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere, Tzimisce, Ventrue among other lesser bloodlines. Sometimes the blood just doesn't take when a victim is turned into a vampire by their sire and they become clanless and pariahs. Plus there are plenty of vampires who are being created in modern times who are vastly separated from the original vampire Caine. Some of them have such thin blood that they can't heal themselves or use certain disciplines. Clanless, or caitiff, along with 14th and 15th generation vampires are supposedly signs of Gehenna. Gehenna is the vampire apocalypse.

So I thought to myself, "Time of the thin blood, eh?"

Imagine if you will a vampire, let's say he's a Malkavian, who is hell-bent on bringing about the vampiric eschaton. He decides to create numerous childer but doesn't want them to be of his clan. At night he will capture some poor soul, chain them up in his basement and feed them only water, omega three supplements and aspirin. If he has medical ties he could easily acquire stuff like Lipitor or other drugs and use this as part of his regimen. By the end of the week the vampire brings across the harried, poor soul.

Would the vampire be a caitiff because the blood was too thin for one of the curses of the clan to take effect?

Thank you. I'll be here all night. Don't forget to tell your friends and tip your waitress. Come around for the ten p.m. show but leave the kids at home because things get a little blue.