A Peaceable Kingdom

Recused self from Aralis this past weekend, for health reasons. Mitigated glumdom with foolish purchase!

( Cut for MMO blatherage and occasional naughty words )

That's what it was! It was: "You had me at Bahdi el-Zaman."

Does anybody happen to know of a reputable online dealer of tuocha? I want to get some pretty serious fancy stuff for my dad's birthday; I'm happy to just Google around for retailers (there seem to be plenty), but I'm wondering if anybody happens to have any experience in this area. Be pretty odd if y'all did . . .

In other news: Aralis wet but good. Wrote a poem; defaced a different poem (by Oscar Wilde!) with an extra stanza.

Edit: Thanks, everybody! Advice much appreciated, and filed for future reference. Actually, some poking around leads me, more or less, to Hou De. I'm a little scared of them, since I don't really know enough to be shopping at this level, but various sources make it clear that they're on the level.

A little rabbit:



and a tiny baby monkey, being tended to by an only slightly less tiny grown-up monkey:



The monkey was photographed by daemo at ze Biodôme de Montréal—I didn't have my camera with me, but you may rest assured that I was there, and I stared at the little fellow for a very long time indeed. He was hand-sized and adorable. The grownup tamarin was pretty damn delightful as well: about the size of a kitty, except with hands and a charming face and boy does that sound creepy but you have to take my word for it that it wasn't.

The rabbit, meanwhile, lives in the marshy stuff next to my office building. I often encounter him/her on the berm next to my car, in the evenings. There may indeed be a whole succession of hims/hers (though I've only seen a single rabbit at a time, in all cases save one); at any rate, pleasant company. S/he let me get absurdly close yesterday.

So hmm: can anybody think of a real environmental technology, defined reasonably loosely, that was "predicted by science fiction"? I certainly can't—but I really am quite out of step with sci-fi* these days.


* So there!

Hello all. A friend of mine—goldenoak, whose copy of Lost Skeleton of Cadavra I have got to remember to return—is sadly obliged to give up her two kitties, Simon and Apricot. As her friendslist and mine are pretty different, I thought I'd spread the info around some.

There's a lot of detail, including contact info, here: simon_apricot.

• "Homestuck," Andrew Hussie's current mspaintadventures comic.



• Russo's, the produce/garden/foofy food store in Walthmatertown.

It's like . . . try to imagine a really good webcomic that's sort of about computer games, data structures, clown paintings, and parallelism. Try to imagine a store with a lot of tasty fruit in it. Then try going to mspaintadventures.com or 560 Pleasant Street, and damned if a tiny little creative-imp version of yourself isn't sitting in a corner, asking people for a dollar to get on the train. Try.

• Dude! Gratz to Nathan Parker, Bennington '95ish. I went to see Moon last night, when I should have been working, and it develops that he wrote the script! I didn't really know Nathan, just saw him around, but if I recall he was pretty serious about writing back then. So it's very satisfying to see his name in lights.
  
  Independent of all that, Moon was really good. Sharp, quite bleakly funny in places, stylish. Definitely worth seeing; definitely worth not reading any spoilers for beforehand.



• —and as a Bennington alumnus myself, I guess I know as much about awkwardly murdering my friends as the next guy. Still, it shocked me to see Jack Fruit's page on Facebook.
  
  What we did to him, in that sun-dappled backyard on that lost summer day, changed each of us forever. I know I shall never forget the weight of that greased knife in my hand. The struggle. The nervous laughter. What marked us all that day was the fact of Jack Fruit, the indelible memory, not least because he was so incredibly delicious. He was my Bunny Corcoran.

With some reservations, I've just dumped most of the contents of Hasmir's little book onto ze wiki! Songs, sans music, have been here been here for a while. But I've just added pages for extemporized Rhiannic meditations (here) and random stuff (here). I still need to proofread them, having typed 'em in right quick, but they're up.

(For folks playing the home game: these are poems and things I've written at a LARP I play, in the character of a fantasy-analog-of-Middle-East-ern guy who would probably like to be Baudelaire but usually can't pull it off. They may not make much sense outside that context.)

(Actually, for folks not playing the home game, I should note that these don't contain any important spoilers or secrets that I'm aware of.)

Well, huh.

My sister, in her wisdom, has pointed me toward the oeuvre of Baltimore "poet" Susurrus Din. The timing couldn't have been better, given that I went to gothland on Friday night and discovered that I'd left my hair thingy in the car. This facilitated, or rather necessitated, my Gothest Moment Ever:

torn from the lining of my rotting tailcoat black cloth, tails of sorrow black silk rotten black silk a ribbon of darkness of blackness (specifically) to tie back my long hair heavy with darkness or well, like, sweat because I was dancing (in the dark)

• So over on Facebook, these two people are trying to friend me. They have really interesting names: "Darkhollow Larp" (I wonder where the "Larp" surname comes from—sounds Scandinavian?) and "Nero Massachusetts Ravenholt" (a really pithy, musky, proper-ass sort of name, complete with unpopular Roman emperor component).



• I can't find the post now, but I believe I once asked the universe to generate this exact product! Or, actually, a much less feature-laden version thereof. If I ever run a sci-fi game again, I'll have to maybe possibly buy it. I guess. It seems really neat.



• Next time I post an incredibly long gaming-related meme response, I will perhaps not post it as a note on Facebook. Or I'll look up how to filter those, or something. Oops.

• There is a guy at my company (in another office, though) named Sargon de Jesus. This is, I feel, an awesomely awesome name.
  
  And . . . uh, whoa, wait, I notice he's Brown class of '07. Any of you guys know him?



• At some point there'll be a LARP in which I can wear this jacket, right? Right? It's on cleeeeearance.

• MS Paint Adventures is a really good webcomic. It's probably only a pretty good, rather crass webcomic if you haven't played Infocom text adventures, Sierra games, and computer RPGs. But if you have—well, dude. It (well, "it" being the current one of the apparently three different storylines) starts out unremarkable, but by and by Pickle Inspector shows up and there starts being this sort of strange cosmology, and you eventually get to a point where this sort of thing makes a lot of sense.



• Mount and Blade (sorry, sorry, "Mount&Blade") is a really good computer game. Surprisingly. That's all I'm gonna say, though, because you've heard way too much about this already if you've talked to me in the last month.



• My brain-muscle is atrophied! I never post here anymore! I want to tell a story. What should it be about?

Imperial men of Boston, inexplicably exiled from the universe of our birth except for periodic, rain-soaked, Death Elemental–assailed return visits, make note:

Oft have I said "Look dammit, I live right near Moody Street, a place where you have to choose between competing Indian grocery stores if you want to pick up some roti or whatever. How can it friggin' be," I have whined, "that there isn't a store around there where you can get the traditional Indian menswear that so closely resembles our own Ruzician garb. Why must we resort to eBay, to Shukr, to Zarinas?"

(I mean, I know my Aralis character dresses like this weird Tibetan/Mongolian/Iranian hybrid abomination, but that's just his deal, you know.)

Anyway: so there's this little store on Moody Street. I've walked by it a few times, seen saris in its window, and shrugged—but yesterday evening I went in and was confronted by a whole friggin' shelf of very handsome shalwar kameez. I'm told they also have those jackety things you wear to weddings . . . basically, if you're in Boston and you're sick of ordering Middle Eastern threads online instead of buying them in the flesh, I now know a place.

This morning I learned what happens when I watch too much of The Office (too much The Office? too much Office (The)?) on YouTube: I woke up early, sort of dispirited and humiliated, because I'd had a dream in which I'd (a) found myself playing accordion in Stereolab but (b) gotten kicked out of the band for incompetence by Laetitia Sadier, with infinite awkward don't-know-how-to-handle-this politeness, after the first or second gig. ("You should . . . you would be a great stage manager!" she said, struggling for jollity, desperately trying to sugarcoat it.)

@#%^@$#%^$@%^

stupid stupid STUPID WORK I HAET U

*vanishes moar*


edit: oh SWEET I get to work Sunday as well as Saturday?

(btw, there is a certain amount—only a certain amount—of "Cry me a river" here: as an employee operating under weird government-contractor rules, I am getting paid for all this time. No time-and-a-half, mind you, but I absolutely am getting paid. I see a nice bottle of scotch and maybe Mirror's Edge in my future.)

that there are a lot of people I owe correspondence to—goldenoak, kayjayoh, kiddens, kayjayoh, and kayjayoh for example—and I am genuinely sorry to have been such a void for the last couple of weeks. The excuse is that I got sucked into Aralis prep, put stuff off 'til after Aralis, and then got sick.

I have in fact been sick (and overworked—I can usually eff off out of work when I'm unwell, but this time it's just been impossible, guh) since Monday evening. I had no inkling of illness at Aralis itself, but 24 hours after Game Off I came over all coughy and die-y. Pity me!

—but also, more importantly, be apologized to. I suspect that I'm one being of those People Who All of a Sudden Vanish, and though there's something mysterious and ineffable and kind of sexy about such people in theory, mystery has never been a big thing of mine.

I really liked Aralis! Good old A2. I am strongly in favor of that game.

Man, though—it was draining. Nothing bad happened directly to my character. But he's got some unfortunately skewed versions of my own personality . . . uh, traits—he's someone who'll worry at himself, someone whose insights about human nature (such as they are) lead him to bitterness, snarling, caustic remarks. Given the way he thinks, it doesn't surprise me that he spent most of the session somewhere between a lowering funk and a towering impotent rage. Now I know what happens when the dude can't go off and play his accordion from time to time, I guess. Hasmir bin Yeyshan Harat: poster child for the Fool Reversed.

Long story short, an excellent session for internal monolog! I need to get that character's static cleared out of my head now, though; it's not helping me here at the office.

• So I was trying to figure out, last night, why walking up and down my apartment stairwell had suddenly begun producing this sense of . . . grossed-out nostalgia. And it came to me:
  
  There's all manner of renovation going on in my building, and to boot my downstairs neighbors are moving out. (I have this horrible feeling that my careless noise had to do with that, argh.) And there must be some kind of institution-grade cleansing product in use—there's the smell of something along those lines, at any rate, and it's the same smell you'd always pick up downstairs at Man Ray. Some tiredly soapily floral goop, something you'd use to hose sweat and gothdom from tile walls, something you'd use to excise the memory of your (really quite nice in this case) tenants after they're gone . . .



• To my delight I've gotten a wonderful grown-up toy for my birthday: a Garmin nüvi 660, which is to say a cool GPS receiver with a silly name. One of many awesome things it'll do is give you your directions in different languages—like, fifty of 'em, so you can hear "keep left on Route 128" in Afrikaans or Catalan or French (with a European accent) or French (with a Quebecois accident).
  
  But! But! In every language I've tried so far, it says "Recalculating" in that same withering, cringe-inducing tone that every GPS user knows so well. Despite the MP3 player and all sorts of other bits and bobs, this is by far my favorite feature of its.