Jonestown

Okay, so, I know I promised. I'd be a better person, and visit more, and all that. I know. But, let's just agree that mistakes were made on both sides, and what matters is the journey, and let he who is without sin, you know? Let's just kiss and make up.

Craziness

My painting and putting together of things Warhammer-related is going swimmingly. I have, surprisingly quickly, fallen behind on the blog devoted to that topic. This is not due to lack of output but rather of too much output, if that makes sense. I am considering just scrapping the blog and posting on one of the various internet fora dedicated to that topic. Mountains and Mohammad can be referenced at this point, if not for worry of being politically incorrect.

Work is busy, but what else is new?

My allergies are being a total pain in the ass, but, again.

Cake

My lovely wife made my mom a cake for her birthday. It is an amazing confection of chocolate and chocolate and still more chocolate, involving something that sounds like Ganesh but which I'm likely mis-spelling. Even though I'm not the world's biggest chocolate cake fan, I thought it was quite good, and the popular opinion agrees.

Making the cake was a Herculean obstacle course of complications and contingencies which my lovely wife navigated with aplomb. She says that she is not a good baker but is a good recoverer, and there seems to be merit in the latter, although I think she's underestimating herself in regards to the former.

We were down in K-town this past weekend to visit with the folks and celebrate said birthday and also Mother's Day, one of the many movable feasts that I am biologically incapable of remembering. I'm bad with dates, though. If I manage to remember someone's birthday it is only through superhuman effort and with an inevitable accompanying nagging doubt that I've actually gotten it wrong.

Serdic, as some of you may imagine, has expressed his appreciation for his own victimhood in regards to this limitation of my mental capacities. I have not struggled unduly to correct this failure in his regard.

Swine Flu

Are we dead yet? No? Pandemic-stricken? Wandering bands of cannibal homeless people eking out barest survival among the shadows of a decaying, The Stand-esque wasteland of post-civilizational detritus? No?

Okay. Just checking.

The Internet

The Internet makes me laugh. It occasionally makes me sad.

I can remember when it was pregnant with promise, heavy and laden with portentious opportunity for exciting new futures. People should have guessed that it would just end up being an enabling mechanism, a new expressive medium for the same banal, repeated, ingrained mechanisms of tribal human identity politics that we've always been saddled with. If Kurzweil is right and we end up in a post-singularity technological rapture moment, the transhuman sentiences inhabiting their computronium and matrioshka brains and still going to be manufacturing cargo cults to be objects of their worship, mindlessly repeating self-affirmatory catechisms and feeling daring as they send each other 140-character message bursts about a really funny cat picture someone sent them.

Except me. I'm totally the exception.

Dear Wizards Of The Coast

Ever since 1993 (dear God, has it been that long?), you've been trying to figure out a way to construct the rules surrounding each turn's end phase without leaving monstrous loopholes that pervert play and/or requiring horrific constructs of abused language that make Webster weep in his cold, lonely grave. Your latest construct suffers from both of these problems and, moreover, irritates the hell of out of me personally.

You will be happy to know that I thought of a way to resolve this problem elegantly and effectively.

You won't care, so I'm not going to tell you.

Regardless, I'm much smarter than you are.

Love,

-me.

Smarter Like a Fox

I'm not that smart. They're just extraordinarily oblivious.

Also

Kurzweil is not right.