dream 13dec08

there's a house, concrete and a bit of grass i am outside between the house and the fence of the next house and there's a bike chase and a car chase through what feels like the old church on westward or maybe the police station in VG and then there's a diff house or diff aspect of same house feels dark dry kind of shack-like with rickety stairs etc and i leave and things happen i don't remember now but walking down sidewalk on westward and suddenly b is there or mentioned and suddenly part pf the group we're in? and she's married or marrying this guy whose name is john buttersbtu (even in the dream i'm like "wtf is up with that name is it an anagram?" and i am fucking racking my brain going "what's wrong with that name dammit") and at some point with very minimal speaking i communicate w/ her that she's not actually on my shit list anymore and we're not buddy-buddy but at least the mood lightens in the dream and we all walk into a restaurant (or it could be Scoops the icecream joint) -- doesn't matter, we don't order or eat or anything, all these places are just scenery mostly -- and she tells me she's been sick and i say yes i heard about the heart she says no no like throwing up and upset stomach sick all day and i say well shit maybe you have morning pregnancy i mean morning sickness (even in the dream i am a clutz and prone to spoonerisms) and cut to i am back at the shack but outside and leading to a different adjoining house whose interior feels japanese in it's sparseness, but american in deisgn if that makes sense and there's like an art show but filled to the brim with weapons and this feels coincidental until midgets (they look like children, but they are so not children) start a takeover coup thing and we're just fucking running and it's me, vij and two other dudes and we're on foot and then acquire an suv and they drop me in my neighborhood and i'm walking the three blocks to my place when i notice i am by b's house (i am standing by mailbox, letters say 'john buttersbtu' and 'elizabeth buttersbtu') and i am kinda weirded out that they live like 2 blocks from me and i think of our kids playing together AND THEN CUT straight back to the shop and she steps out and comes back w/ an ept and shaking her head 'no' and i say 'well it usually takes like 6 weeks to even be able to tell on one of those, but they are like 99.999 accurate' and she is both sad and relieved and i am a blank slate nothing showing and cut back to chase scene and i am sneaking into the shack so the evil pigmy midget kids don't know i'm on to them or clue in to me being armed to the teeth and intent on fucking up their day and i am halfway up the shack house stairs (the whole house is basically room and then stairs-to-next-room, structurally unsound but securitywise easy to defend) and their plot can be unravelled by basically going to the last room and knocking out this transmitter thing and i am halfway through when they catch on and i'm in a room with just a couple of old people and i know the rest of the way is clear i just want to keep the position from being taken and i am by the door keeping them out and the old woman is offering me sweets from a bag and all i have to do is keep the door closed and those dudes are fucked no way in and i wake up

seriously if you know what this dream is about, help a brother out. perhaps influence of the full moon.

Wherein it is confirmed that I am a horrible person

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MTV Movies Blog » J. Michael Straczynski On ‘World War Z’: ‘The Scale Of What We’re Doing Here Is Phenomenal’

MTV Movies Blog » J. Michael Straczynski On ‘World War Z’: ‘The Scale Of What We’re Doing Here Is Phenomenal’

World War Z was actually pretty good in an amateurish way -- the military sections, particularly the American military personel interviews, all came off as fanboy-ish and fawningly cheesy -- and I really hope they don't fuck it up.

vegan vegetable korma

This is the vegan version; the non-vegan version replaces the coconut milk with heavy cream.

You will need:

4 potatoes, diced
4 carrots, diced
6 onions, really fucking diced
4-6 garlic cloves, minced
1 lb bag of frozen peas
1 lb bag of frozen cauliflower
1 red pepper, diced
1 green pepper, diced
3 jalapenos, diced (optional: seeded)
1 tblsp salt
1/4 cup curry powder
1 tblspoon garam marsala
1/4 cup vegetable oil (avoid olive oil if you can help it)
ginger, minced into paste about 1 tblsp.
tomato sauce, 15-oz can
coconut milk, 15-oz can

Put the oil into pan, add medium heat; put onions into oil until tender (soft but not translucent) then add garlic and ginger. add salt, stir and wait 3 minutes for them to blend a bit. Dump in all the other veggies, tomato sauce, curry powder and garam marsala, stir. If it feels like there's too little liquid in there, relax -- the onion will sweat quite a bit out and the tomato sauce will help things get going. When you put in the coconut milk (at the end) you'll get more liquid as well. Put your cauliflower and peas in the microwave and cook 'em up. when they're done, incorporate into the mixture and add coconut milk by 1/4 can until you get an orange-y yellow color. When the potato and carrots are fork-tender, you're done. serve over rice and/or w/ naan. The coconut milk makes it a bit sweeter than you would perhaps expect, so take that into account when deciding how spicy you want it.

I cooked this for 24 (modified to: 10 potator, 6 carrots, 10 onions, 2 cans tomato, 1 whole can coconut, 24 cloves garlic, 1/2 c curry & oil and double the peppers) for a charity luncheon at work; looks like we cleared enough to get 3 or 4 kids' cleft palates fixed for Christmas. Also, I burned my hand.

we've been made, boys, scatter and meet at the regroup point

My favorite submissive violining kinkette sends this to me via IM: Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook. The cave thing is a bit heavy on the otaku-OCD nerd angle, but otherwise, totally fucking spot on in every way possible. Whoa.

bacon is a vegetable, right?

From Crackle: A Jewish Man's First Bacon

running up the hill backwards

let's do bullet points this time:

• i posted on facebook about the skullstick and mama sunflower asked for it and picked it up within two hours. sun was less than happy about this, afterwards -- "thanks for giving a cursed thing to my mom dave"
• i have resurrected a mac (well the drive anyway, the mac itself is fucked but i might make it workable if i can find a mobo for it (unlikely!) and then a new drive.
• today i did not go to the book fair, but on the other hand i did get the joy of fixing a flat (two punctures!) and fixing-ish a kitchen faucet that would not turn off.i now know more about faucets than i used to.
• i have a lack-of-caffeine headache.
• i had a 2 hours on-and-off IM conversation w/ baid about her cervix, her pussy in general (and i'm not talking titilating convo here, i'm talking "perhaps you mistook me for a gyno") and her menstrual accessory preferrence (cups, surprisingly, not plugs or pads.)
• cleaned house. this is actually my favorite thing i have accomplished this week. the disarray was really getting to me. the living room is semi-sane now and the florida is getting there.
• got into an argument w/ a classmate last tues and as of today it is resolved. which is good; i tend to brood and i'm glad i don't need to anymore.

what the fuck

there's a wooden (carved) skull on a stick in my garbage can. i found it there when i went out to throw the garbage away. it creeped me out, but i figured wtf, let the garbagemen deal with it. so i dumped my garbage on it and went on my merry way. so now the garbage is gone and the skullstick is still there.

jawsome!

Jeer posted this awesome link in his emofag diary livejournal Thai Dog Rescue. That's cool.

(I failed to post this on 5/4/08).

memories can't wait.

Erasing selective memories coming closer

One day it'll be a choice. I don't like it. I mean, the flexibility is nice to have -- especially for something traumatic that you just want to get rid of; war, rape etc etc. But part of your job in existence is to be witness and to work through your pain and evolve yourself. And I can see this being used nefariously -- and not just in a paranoid Phillip K. Dick dystopian future kind of way, either.

I had (or have? I dunno. We're still "friends" on facebook) a friend who called me up. Let us call her Agnes. She had broken up with the love of her life because shit happened and anyway, time heals wounds etc etc and several years and a marriage later she gets an email from him out of the blue "i fucked up, you were great, if you're still angry I don't blame you but i just wanted to tell you i know you were great" etc. Long story short, they got back together (and are still,) and as far as I know are deliriously happy together. Which is all well and good -- forgiveness is a nice thing, after all, and happiness is a bitch to find, so you gotta work for it. Except about two months into their newfound love she calls me out of the blue saying "hey how do you permanently delete files from a Mac?". I tell her and hang up and then go "Wait. She doesn't have a Mac." But I know my friend, and on a hunch (I'm usually really good at these) I call back and tell her off for deleting his pictures of his ex from his computer. Quite frankly, I feel a bit used and dirty and I am Seriously Unhappy about this, so perhaps I am less than nice. She gets mad, tells me he's backing up the pictures later (...but she's deleting them now...? just distraction BS...) and anyway I don't know the situation. I tell her that it's hardly fair for her to decide what memories he gets to keep, because they're his memories, after all. She gets mad and repeats that I do not know the circumstances, and I say she's right, mea culpa, if I'm wrong, please forgive me. She says nevermind and it's ok, don't worry about it and since then we haven't spoken. Which leads me to believe that I was right. But enough about that.

So now think of someone demanding this of you, literally of your memories. Or doing it against your will. Note that one of the reasons given for not freeing some of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners is not "they're dangerous terrorists and we can't let them go" but rather "they're totally innocent but they know too much about our information extraction (viz, torture) methods to be let go".

Here, have some sonic yoof "Nevermind (what was it anyway)":


Sleep tight, kids.

Alzheimer's

Terry Pratchett discusses Alzheimer's and care for the elderly.

My grandmother had alzheimer's. It is heartbreak.

I knew him, Horatio.

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead - Los Angeles Times

Infinite Jest, to me, in 1997 or so when I read it, was a life-changing thing. It's this huge monstrocity of a book and I don't remember where I got it. I saw DFW on The Charlie Rose show (skip to the 23 minute mark) and he was just so undeniably himself and trying not to be false (particularly in his discussion on the effect that David Lynch's Blue Velvet had on him) that I went out and bought IJ and immediately started reading it and fell into it.

It was one of the things that helped keep me together during a couple of tough times. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again had me in stitches and his mathematical writing (A History of Infinity) is too smart for me, really, but totally fascinating.

It would be a mockery to say that I'll miss him -- I'm sure I've never been within 500 miles of him, don't even know anyone that knew him -- but his writing changed my writing, my perception of what writing could be and how you could put yourself in it. So the world is sadder and dumber without him in it.

Here's a PDF of his fairly short piece Consider The Lobster.
Here's his commencement speech at Kenyon.
Here's his review of a dictionary (yes, really).
His piece "The Depressed Person", in Harper's.
Here's the best fansite I've found: The Howling Fantods.

a heathen

Cory Doctorow's got a story over at Tor.com which is pretty cool. It includes a sly little reference to The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll (the 0.75$ error leading to a spy-ring thing). That book was the first thing I ever read about hacking, in probably '89 or '90; the first time I heard of telnet or unix. It's dated as hell now -- fuck, it was dated as hell in '90, I bet, but it's got humourous little flourishes that make it entertaining even now:

(from http://vx.netlux.org/lib/mcs00.html)

Dave knew my ignorance of obscure Unix commands. I put up the best front I could: "Well, the e flag means list both the process name and environment, and the a flag lists everyone's process—not just your process. So the hacker wanted to see everything that was running on the system."

"OK, you got half of 'em. So what are the g and f flags for?"

"I dunno." Dave let me flounder until I admitted ignorance.

"You ask for a g listing when you want both interesting and uninteresting processes. All the unimportant jobs, like accounting, will show up. As will any hidden processes."

"And we know he's diddling with the accounting program."

Dave smiled. "So that leaves us with the f flag. And it's not in any Berkeley Unix. It's the AT&T Unix way to list each process's files. Berkeley Unix does this automatically, and doesn't need the f flag. Our friend doesn't know Berkeley Unix. He's from the school of old-fashioned Unix."

The Unix operating system was invented in the early 1970s at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In the late '70s, Unix zealots from Bell Labs visited the Berkeley campus, and a new, richer version of Unix was developed. Along with hot tubs, leftist politics, and the free speech movement, Berkeley is known for its Unix implementation.

A schism developed between advocates of the small, compact AT&T Unix and the more elaborate Berkeley implementation. Despite conferences, standards, and promises, no consensus has appeared, and the world is left with two competing Unix operating systems.

Of course, our lab used Berkeley Unix, as do all right-thinking folks. East Coast people were said to be biased towards AT&T Unix, but then, they hadn't discovered hot tubs either.

From a single letter, Dave ruled out the entire computing population of the West Coast. Conceivably, a Berkeley hacker might use an old-fashioned command, but Dave discounted this. "We're watching someone who's never used Berkeley Unix." He sucked in his breath and whispered, "A heathen."

a plague for your dowry

xkcd's strip today brings up house of leaves by mark z danielewski. which is a genius book. nightmare-causing, take your breath away reading, for real. some of the writing is not as poetic as say harlan ellison's "speculative fiction" but it's certainly more claustrophobically horrifying. i finished this book at the bar, the day before my last conversation with the woman i thought was the love of my life. still is? i don't know. i stopped thinking about it. she's still the love of my life, but now in the past tense I guess. It's just one of those things where you associate something with what was happening -- e.g. Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" 2nd disc is to me an incredibly erotic piece of music, just because of associations -- and House of Leaves is just a picture of a raw gaping wound. It doesn't hurt, but it reminds me that there was a tender part exposed and hurting.

So but what do you do? How do you just drop it? No one I know who's gone through hellfire and brimstone can adequately explain. And it's such a personal, subjective thing. If there's a universal that I have found in this, it's that people tend to pull back, reserve more of themselves and give less away. And that's so horrible, so very sad. But I see it time and again in my friends, and I see it in myself. The nerve numbed, you learn that you don't know what's normal anymore, so you learn to not trust yourself to keep from getting hurt. 

Sterling and I ate sushi, a while ago, and we talked about it, again. Except this time she was sober because of the pregnancy, so this time she remembered it I think. And it boils down to: I know it's not all my fault. But I feel like it is. I blame myself, even though I know it's not like that. The bitch of it is, I am sure she blames me too. Which is galling, especially considering the condescending attitude she gave me when last we spoke. Really, that's how I keep my anger going.

So yeah, this started as "look! comic link to awesome book!" and is now about me me me me. Well it's my blog so fuck you if you don't like it. Get yr own.

Enjoy this amazing and very entertaining speech by Malcom Gladwell on the lessons of happiness, self-knowlege and hidden desires inherent we can learn from spaghetti sauce:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html

Here's some awesome music:

Grotus - Brown

Pogo/Faggotron - Alice