Emo

My strange fascination with emo took an odd turn a few weeks ago when i tried to come up with the most emo sentence ever. I camo up with this:

Oh rapture, Ameliorate the lamentable fissure of my cardiac organ prior to the vascular decompression of all emotion!

Excuse the errors, its dark and this is a strange computer.

Level Ten

I got to level ten in Tetris today. It was pretty freakin' intense.

Ice Fortress Part II

The wall is almost six feet tall now. Plus it has spikies to make it look more mean. Observe:

"Procrastinate"

pro·cras·ti·nate
v. pro·cras·ti·nat·ed, pro·cras·ti·nat·ing, pro·cras·ti·nates
v. intr. To put off doing something, especially out of habitual
carelessness or laziness.
v. tr. To postpone or delay needlessly.

Something we all do, I'm sure. But it's time for another bogus etimological study of a word! This one is real simple: Procrastination, usually, is associatively a bad thing. We think "Why am I watching five episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise instead of reading my political philosophy?" Or, whatever it is we do: spin aimless in a whirly chair, doodle, listen to music or, heaven forbid, turn on MSN Messenger and start a conversation. Who knows where that could lead you?

But really, are these thing bad? In relation to getting work done, you might think so. But, take a look at the word "procrastination." It starts with the letters "pro."

pro
adv. on the affirmative side [ant: con]

How then can procrastination be a bad thing?

Poor Bastard

So I was sitting in my Clasical Mythology Exam writing a short answer question involving the story of Orpheus and Euridice as told by Vergil compared to Ovid.

And I realised, wow, it's a pretty tragic story. I mean, Orpheus is just this dude in love, and he marries Euridice and expects happiness, but instead gets a dead wife with a snakebite. So, Orpheus is so in love with this girl that he travells to the underworld with the intention of getting her back, because her untimely death is unfair.

Hades and Persephone are moved, and let him go with his wife, but tell him not to look back. But Orpheus can't help it, he's way too into this girl and he looks back with the intention of making sure she's okay. It was a caring glance, one made out of concern and love. All Euridice has time to say is "Goodbye" and then she's taken back to the Underworld.

And I'm sitting there, thinking "dude, that totally sucks."

I think I might write an emo song about it.

Hmmm...

My exams (finally) start tomorrow. Maybe I should quit procrastinating?

Waffle Iron

Somewhere, in the complexities of the last couple years I lost sight of something very important:

I long ago decided I wanted a cat named Waffle Iron.

More recent conversations involving sacks of kittens have not involved mention of this name. They should have. When I get a cat, it is going to be named Waffle Iron.

You think it's a terrible name? Need I remind you of the Both Brothers' cat named Thigh-Head?

Today, I ate well

A far cry from last year around these times, to be sure. I seem to remember being low and food and trying to hold out until the Holidays arrived.

I went downtown and forced Rosemary to try a potato burrito. She claims to have enjoyed it, just like everybody else.

Then later on I went to Kevin's house and we played a bunch of Star Wars Battlefront II and conquered the galaxy, plus we ate some awesome sandwhiches we made.

Ice Fortress and Potato Burrito Prospects

There is a wall. It is currently about twenty feet long and about four feet tall. It has one ninety degree angle in it. It is made of ice.

It is The Ice Fortress. Gavin and I made plans long ago to build a snow fort. I don't think either of us imagined this. It just started to grow, and then grow some more. We applied all of our snow fort building experience to The Ice Fortress, and then Ryan came out and helped as well.

We took our recycling bin and stole some shovels. We began shoveling a snowband into our bin, then I would stand on it, compress it, and then refill and repeat. We would then lug the heavy bins of tightly packed snow over to the fort, upend them and a brick would sit, awaiting the fitting of the next brick.

We layer one level of bricks on top of the first.

Then we poured water all over it.

Today, I walked across the top of the wall, just to prove i could. I stood there for a minute and view third phase, daring anybody to try and attack. Then i remembered - the fortress, she's not complete. Not yet.

Tonight, we added another layer of bricks, giving it more hight. Still not enough, but we've used the entire snowbank. We need a new snow source. We iced it again tonight, and tomorrow, we'll probably work on it more. It will be a mighty fortress with four walls, capable of standing up to any barage of snowballs that can be thrown at it. We hope.

In other news, it looks as if I will finally get that potato burrito I've been looking forward to tomorrow. Finally. Geeez.

The Mid-Nineties: Artistic Apocalypse

I was alive then. Maybe you were too. The Mid-Ninties - the time that everybody thought was okay while it happened, but might have just been worse than the eighties in retrospect. In fact, the eighties weren't even all that bad. They gave us things like MacGyver and New Order. What'd the mid-ninties give us? Seaquest DSV and Hansen.
I had intended this to be a comment on some of the terrible movies that came out of the nineties, but really, the arguments do sort of apply to popular culture over all. And, of course, the antithesis is always present. To say the Mid-Ninties were devoid of anything good is of course not true. I'm talking general trends... what good movies came out in 1995? Braveheart? And?

My point is generally simple - I've been talking movies with Ryan and Paul all day and I've been forced to admit that there have been some times when movies in general were great. Late sixties to early seventies had a lot of classics - notables include Taxi Driver and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Animal House, etc. Not to mention Star Wars. The late eighties and early ninties pulled some real classics - this was the golden age of sequels. A movie was made, if it was successful, a sequel was born, usually within a year. Case in piont: Wayne's World (Wayne's World 2), Ghostbusters (Ghostbusters II), Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure (Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey). Interesting to note that this trend falls within the comedy genre. And yet, you don't see anything like this in '94-'97 What movies with sequels came out in this time period? Species, for one.

Kurt Cobain was dead. Pop took over. Species was a blockbuster hit. Seaquest DSV was on air for three seasons. The mid-ninties were a barren wasteland for pop culture.

Your antithesis? The Shawshank Redemption. The Tragically Hip - Day For Night. Law and Order.

Homer: Greek Poet

From the translation of the Homeric hymn to Demeter found in Morford and Lenardon's Classical Mythology seventh edition

"Demeter, regal daughter of Rhea of the beautiful hair, you will know the truth. For indeed I revere you greatly and pity you in your greif for your daughter of the lovely ankles..."

What a weird epithet.

The Robot Senators of Mars

The Robot Senators of Mars march to deliberate on issues we have never heard about.

Adventures too varied for a proper title

In short:

Fajitahs.
Bus Crash.
Subway.
The Dave Matthews Band.
Lawrence (aka Justice).
Street Meat.

Details tomorrow ... ?

The Crisis is still occuring

Upon my spectacular failure to actually do Nanowrimo this year, I discovered again my interest in that terrible novel Crisis if Idealism: A Space Opera. Although I may have run a quick spelling edit of it last year, I am currently thinking over major plot changes and additions. I am considering how to best tell the story without having to rely on the focalisation through Jonathan Brooke, because he's such a crappy character.

And all of a sudden, without warning, old ideas about the story start flooding back, and new ones start pouring in, and again I'm obsessed with getting these ideas down. Right, this time. I have made a few major decisions already. The chapters, they might be out. Sections may titled instead by the character through which they are focalised. This, of course, is minor. But consider - Jonathan Brooke up until the end of the cast away section. A decade of life on an abondonded planet, not just a few months. Switch to Ignus Fortworth, and the day he receives a strange distress call from a nearby star. Ordered by the spacing commision to investigate, and suddenly, a message from Elder Lucas of Port Orpheus telling him to keep a lid on the mission.

Ten years of extra narrative time! What happened to all the other colonists that were supposed to follow jonathan? Their number has gone from twenty to hundreds in this edit by the way. Well, it seems out villian at the end of the story starts a war with them, disgusing his ships as alien craft - hence the needed construction of The Angel of Redemption. A whole bunch of plot holes clean up with this added narrative. More sides to the story, more plots, more excitement, more power in the surprise ending with the involvement of Lucas! Perhaps even the combination of Captain Fortworth and Grinder, since they're pretty much the same character anyway. It makes more sense. And the ability to write the scene this entire novel was based on, under the glassy buildings of the Port Orpheus space dock....

The excitment is killing me! Months of work, but I just don't care! It must be done....