Just another blog with nothing really to say except to express myself to no-one in particular with no particular reason other than other people are doing it. If you are reading this, you may have to tollerate posts with good recipes, great guitar, and video game references all at once. I hope that you are not too put off.
Menil Collection with Zac and Lucy, then later waiting for Othello to start at Miller Outdoor Theatre
Watermelon sorbet taken a little too literally:
My dad's guitar recital, vocally accompanied by his wonderful wife:
All the fajitas my new skillet can cook at once:
My splint at the minor emergency clinic for my fracture:
Good company for healing, Tobias Funke on my lap and kindle by my side:
Sometimes I want to paint him blue.
"Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are." - Soren Kierkegaard
"The only way to predict the future is to have power to shape the future." - Eric hoffer(Poetically said and flamboyantly not true)
"We employ the mind to rule, the body to serve." - Sallust
"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future." - Jessamyn West
Lament for a Syllable
Some days it builds up,
a stirring from within me,
to spew out Haiku
In a little while,
faster than you'd even think,
it feels natural.
Every new sentence and its syllable structure find a sweet balance.
Once it's effortless,
the careful counting of words,
then you start to play.
After all, what is the meaning of a[n] Haiku? What's a single breathe?
Though you still may hold to twelve syllables at once, your thoughts will run wild...
It's not just a game, every word you hear whispered, considered with care...
No longer interchangeable as grains of sand. They are diamonds!
And still you hear them.
You hear the soft whisperings.
They sound like longing.
Longing for meaning.
Words demand to have purpose.
They beg to be heard.
As important as the sound each word will create, the silence after.
Hitler disagrees:
"I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don’t take zombies into consideration. I’d fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line." - Harry Dresden
With gentle effort I avoid frustration,
the healing clink of minor failure,
steady and soothing the chimes sing,
only to cease with a deafening ring.
To feel the healing,
the rolling waves,
sweet angelic choir,
halting with a clack!
Apparently if you search for Chinese health balls in the health and personal care department at Amazon you may also find a quality selection of ball gags.
"Advertisements... contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."
— Thomas Jefferson
Fracture in my right elbow from a fall on friday night. Man, that stings, but it's so minor that it wont even need a cast. So, no guitar for a little while. And I'm dead broke at the moment. Living poor will fix things, but, man, I am glad I have my cushio normally because that is all gone. Breaking my arm ate up my entire savings cushion and I need to rebuild it. 950$. That's going to make it a very very rough few months. Very, very rough. So, to the bank to deposit checks today, after going to chuck's to pick up monies and do some more technical work.
It was a huge relief to be told that I wouldn't need surgery, and my arm is already starting to feel a lot better. And I will count these all as things that are far better than the alternatives and possibilities.
I got invited to google music and have been playing around with that. It's a very cool service, but it may really be obsolete considering how I use Pandora and youtube. It just feels a little wasteful to actually save and store and maintain a music collection. Time, space, money, and energy. Plus, rellying on that makes me miss out on all kinds of new music in a number of areas that I would have missed completely. Though, sometimes it is very awesome to discover music before even pandora has it available. Mammalian Locomotion.
Anyway, I also wanted to include Peppers Amadeus Bond in this post. He passed away last week and will be sorely missed. When he died, I lost a piece of myself, because I loved him dearly. He was an amazing cat who lived an epic life, from a kitten who purred every waking moment, to a giant lion like cat that was royal and brilliant in size and behavior. From 2008-2011. RIP. You will be sorely missed.
I will end this entry with a contemplation on the nature of Rock:
- "And they took my mood ring! And I don't know how I feel about that."
Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.
— Nietzsche
This rings particularly true to me, anger and resentment seem more and more to be entirely rooted in a lack of understanding and empathetic vacuum. Everyone universally struggles with their pain, and pain is a relative but very real thing. In any situation there is death to the soul, and absence of something. Even the absence of adversity is an source of great pain as it is adversity under which the soul grows and glows brightest. THe human soul doesn't just need pain, it is able to find it anywhere, and always has and always will.
Oh, and by the way.. fuck yeah, the 80s:
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
-Roald Dahl
I haven't blogged in way too long and it's about time I changed that. Honestly, I think I may have been spending far too much of my personal time playing games, which is not a normal thing for me. Normal to play games, but it is usually in some form of moderation. However, Deus Ex is just too crazy good for me. It does have flaws and in a lot of ways it is lacking compared to the original, in other ways it outshines it, but unlike the second Deus Ex, this one caters to the way I like to play games in the same way that the original did.
It's a very special kind of game that lets me feel and put the effort into being a stealth computer hacking sniper ninja. The original is one of the only games that ever captured that feel for me, it was like Thief, only if I got caught I could whip out my rocket launcher and play Bad JC if I hadn't saved in 6 hours and didn't feel like giving up that chunk of my life to fixing a dumb mistake. Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a lot of this same feel, and a really well developed structure and beautiful environments. For all its flaws, I do consider it a modern classic, and it is good enough to overshadow the orignal, which, for all ITS flaws in some ways is a far supperior game. Examples include the ending, where your actions in the game moved the plot forward. Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame feels that the new game is just find the fastest way to the end and then go back and loot all the other routes, but then, I could have sworn he said he played the original, which was the exact same game. It's one of my favorite games of all times, but the level structure is not inferior, and in many ways is very superior, though, most of his other criticisms are dead on acurate.
The "End game choice" machine is stupid and makes the "watch all the different endings" achievement even more absurd.
One of my biggest complaints about the game is that there are achievements for pacifist playthroughs and no alarm playthroughs... but there is no counter anywhere in the game where you can see if you were responsible for someones death enough to discount the one or if that alarm that was running whenever and for whatever reason is enough to disqualify the other.. it's a whole game and not knowing is a major commitment to a decision. And on top of that, for the pacifist achievement.. the Tranquilizer rifle can KILL people on ACCIDENT... with something like a headshot which is designed to knock people out faster and quieter... is the only way to do the silent KO to use the incredibly not silent takedowns that are only available from point blank range? It's actually kind of inspiring, even though it was frustrating to believe halfway through my second playthrough of the game that I had to start over and waste all that effort on the ground that since I liked headshots with the tranq gun that I had more than likely killed with it before. It makes me want to do a 100% lethal run of the game using only non lethal weapons to kill.
But seriously, from what people are saying about that achievement it sounds like you become entirely responsible for the lives of your enemies.. if you knock them out and they fall into electrified water that you couldn't save them from, well, there it goes... if you knock them out and leave them in a room that blows up, goodbye achievement... if you arive at a level and they lock themselves in a room alone and don't let you in to save them and drink the punch just to spite you... well, you get the picture. I'm not just responsible for not killing them, but making sure that their unconscious bodies are undamaged for the rest of the game, it feels like.
Anywho. I've ranted long enough. I could go on, but I don't think anyone would be interested. I've already played the game for 85 hours, after I finish beating it this time, I am going to take a break. Hopefully it will be nice and cool outside by then.
