The Persistence of Folly

Shiny new toy! Well, actually confusing and nonintuitive, but interesting and potentially cool. It's like a messageboard, kinda. If anyone needs invites, gimme your email address.

 testing. posting from mall wifi. think i'll come back to livejournal. recently been going through the whole daria run, i'm about halfway through. girlfriend has the whole series.

i mostly post on blogger now. but i come back here sometimes cos the friends page is a useful way to check up on people, and i like how LJ rearranges your interests in strict alphabetical order. haven't updated that profile in a long time, so here, timecapsule post before i raze those interests to the ground and rebuild

ameslan, anime, asus eeepc, ayn rand, batman, bloodsugar magik, boob physics, books, boots, buffy the vampire slayer, bukowski, calvin and hobbes, cargo pants, carl sagan, cats, chiaroscuro, coffee, conspiracy theories, cowboy bebop, csi, cup ramen, cyberpunk, digital wristwatches, double espressos, douglas adams, ender's game, etymology, fastfood, final fantasy, footnotes, frank herbert, fried rice, gary oldman, ghost in the shell, gmail, good intel, gray dawn dreams, greg egan, haiku, hak nam, half-life, hanging out in bookstores, heavy metal magazine, history, house, iain m. banks, instant anything, invader zim, jim henson, kenneth branagh, kids in rocking chairs, king kong, lewis carroll, looking for my marbles, low maintenance, masamune shirow, me, mecha, mervyn peake, meta, moments of clarity, morse code, neil gaiman, new information, new-book smell, nick bantock, ninjas, noir, notepad, nunchucks, obscure references, obsessiveness, offhand erudition, omnibus editions, pablo neruda, philosophy, poetry, pop culture, pugad baboy, random questions, ranma 1/2, raymond chandler, reading filler text, reading random journals, retractable blue ballpoint pens, robert heinlein, robotech, samurai shodown, sandman, science fiction, secondhand bookstores, secret histories, self-awareness, shakespeare, sign language, signal-to-noise ratio, sophomoric obliquity, spiral staircases, star trek, starcraft, stephen king, subtle flaws, tame paranoia, terry pratchett, the daily show, the last unicorn, the shield, thomas harris, trenchant observations, vagrant story, vampires, verdana, videogames, watership down, wikipedia, william gibson, wonderfalls, writing, xenogears
 

 

Go away, we don't want any.

Photobucket's better than Flickr. Thinking of switching from Globe to Smart too.

My grandmother died this Monday. It was soul-shattering. 87 years old, 9 children, 15 grandchildren, and most of us were there Sunday night. But not a bad way to go, literally surrounded by people who love you.

Bathroom scale at the hotel says I lost 5 pounds this week. It's been a long week. Family's wonderful. I'm not used to love. It scares me a little.

Groucho Marx once observed that Peter O'Toole had a double-phallic name. Heh, I can top that, how about the legendary blues singer Blind Willie Johnson.

Currently reading John Crowley's Little, Big.

Word's gone around now, Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. And my grandmother's on chemo. There is no justice, there's only the inevitable scythe.

Currently reading Logorrhea, an anthology for word-nerds (verbophiles?) with stories from Michael Moorcock, Jeff VanderMeer, etc. Oddly, no China Mieville, he would've been perfect for this.

Still haven't decided what to name the Asus. Maybe something along the lines of a Robert Graves/White Goddess theme.

Posting from the Asus Eee. Yay.

LiveJournal:

"You are currently using S1, which is our older and deprecated style system. We recommend that you switch to S2 to take advantage of new features not supported in S1."

Deprecated? Or do they mean depreciated? Anyway, switched to S2, deeply regretting it. I just want 10-point Verdana, white text on black backgrounds, narrow columns. I don't care about all this other fruitcake.

I'm considering showing up for the Neil Gaiman thing next Sunday. Sure, why not, then I'll post stuff on the Gaiman board.

I've never really understood liking someone "like a sister" until now. There's a girl at work, she's like a tiny, cheerfully vicious version of Summer Glau. She told this story of how she told a small child "Don't try to be cute, kid, or I'll toss you out a window." Which made me kinda love her a little bit.

So a few weeks back, there was an explosion at a local mall, some people were killed, many injured. Within hours the news was out over the grapevine that it was a bomb. A few days later the spindoctors put out the story that it was accidental, a gas leak and improper diesel storage. Not many buy that, but what weirds me out is that even if it were true, an accidental mall explosion isn't really comforting. Are there other unsafe malls out there? Aren't they inspected? And why are the owners meekly bending over for this hosejob? They're being accused of multiple manslaughter, neglect, stupidity.

I can see it as a comedy sketch: "How many Filipinos does it take to build a mall that doesn't, what's the word... explode?"  Though of course some Filipinos would go batshit and lodge a diplomatic protest.

I've been feeling weird, staying off the coffee's elevating my heart rate. Just observing the data on my current state, I'm still rational and functional.

Book recommendation: Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. It's like Dave Eggers + Donna Tartt. Rave review from Audrey Niffenegger. Also I'd like to note that Pessl is a stone-cold fox.

Things are getting grim, but I post sporadically at http://zoneseek.blogspot.com/

I am disgusted at the Desperate Housewives flap. When Filipinos get wound up over this stuff, it just shows that they're touchy weenies with a vast national inferiority complex. Howard Stern, Tommy Hilfiger, Letterman, a show about vapid promiscuous married women, do you really care what these people have to say? Hey guess what, House slagged Indian healthcare and no one blinked. Grow up. Channel all the energy that goes into boosterism into actual achievement instead. For instance, do you think Pacquiao cares what Teri Hatcher said?

I've been putting stuff on my Blogger blog because I figured out how to post to that from my cellphone, doesn't seem to be any way to set that up on LiveJournal.

But anyway, Firefly. C/S just made up their own demented viewing order for the episodes, so far: The Train Job, Bushwhacked, Our Mrs Reynolds, Jaynestown, Out of Gas. The series is quirky but weird, there are some clunkers. But the last ep, Objects in Space, I just read the script on wiki and it kicked my ass. Joss Whedon is amazing when he's writing for evil characters and crazies, and in Objects in Space we get both.

Selection wasn't all that great, a lot of it was religious or children's. I wanted to yell "All hail Xenu!" whenever I walked past the Scientology booth. Only bought one book, The Dictionary of Bullshit, because it made me laugh.

Yesterday I bought books on my way home, after Bookfair, found Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, lovely, and an anthology of short stories by Pulitzer winners. And I'm still savoring Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories that I got at half-price. And the Jack Vance Alastor omnibus before that, and the Basho haiku collection, etc. So lots of recent books, only one from Bookfair.

I was at the 28th Manila Bookfair for four hours and didn't buy a single book, I brought money but nothing really appealed to me. Maybe tomorrow.

The LRT area has a peculiarly grim vibe, the train goes past and through the windows you can see the empty, derelict 2nd story spaces. It's like the place is locked in eternal Sunday afternoon: quiet, dreary, tired. Long dark teatime of the soul indeed. In contrast the EDSA leyline is fecund, fetid, alive even in the early hours.

I've been buying books at National because of the sale, but who the hell is Michael Gan?

  

Actually, hard was the floor. Got rid of my bed, just 'cos. Well, I'm thinking of getting a smaller one, to have a bit more room.

The Neil Gaiman boardies and William Gibson boardies are talking to each other. I can scarcely contain my glee.

• Can't get the word "pauldron" out of my head.
• I'm supposed to read and review some books for book club, I should get on that.
• I get a bit of a buzz after a couple of beers, and oddly for me it feels a lot like a caffeine high.
• People like when I join in the drinking. Makes me seem more human, I suppose.

Bought an office chair. Thinking of getting Globe Broadband. I like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but wish it didn't still feel so much like The West Wing. I need a break.

• Someone's asleep at the wheel at HBO, a McGuffin isn't a false clue or dead end, that's a red herring.
• Came across a name, "Nagalingam," lots of these guys on Google, but that can't possibly mean what I think it means, can it? "Hi, my name is Snake Penis."

Police clearance at city hall took 28 minutes, but involved a lot more walking around. And I remembered this:

Someday, when I have time, I'd like to find out what sort of red tape's involved to get access to that.

Just bought The Complete Poems of Blake. Of course the early stuff is popular and often anthologized, but I've never been able to find the longer, weirder works from the later years. Until now. Yay.