Ultraviolet

I was suddenly able to remember the smell of dew at dawn and the look of flowers in bloom, just the way we would see them when we would walk from her house to mine and vice versa. I could remember the sweat and dew that would settle on our skin out in the various fields we might cut through, how it seemed an annoyance at the time, but how now I would do anything for that morning sun and the warmth it brings. As many colors as we would see in the flowers and weeds and houses and cars, she'd be wearing something that had more colors, and it all meshed beautifully in that early morning light. We'd try to rush the walking so we could avoid the heat, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I wish we had just kept walking when we would get to where we intended to go. Together, we would never need to sto for anything. Not to be one without a jacket on a cold night, I would still be wearing mine when the morning started to get hot, and I would have nowhere to put it until we arrived. I could smell my sweat and hers, the dew, her makeup, the plants we trod on, and now I have half of a hazy recollection of the same. Relaying these memories back to she who I experienced the events with would be such bliss, to see her own memory light up and form a smile on her face, but instead I sorrowfully tell you about these memories.

I am thankful for good days, and bitter that they are gone by. Happy Thanksgiving, belated.

Sadly, the Doom community is one of the overall most intelligent gaming communities there is.

People who use the term "proggies" to refer programs should be executed, by the way.

There once was a song
by the Murphy's I'm told
By the way, all week I've had
quite a terrible cold
So to remedy that, Friday
I went out and got mighty drunk
And there I was at my school
Singin' m'self some "punk"...

...

...

DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND PASS OUT ON A SLAB OF CEMENT! (etc)

End of story.

I'm thinking about adding 40 hours of work to my week with a new job, dropping the old 16 hour part time thing, and finishing this semester of school like that. It'll be tight, but I think I can handle it with strict adherence to a schedule and a decent bedtime.

The work is so I can save up in preparation to get the fuck out of this miserable shithole of a town. As far as places go it's not too bad, but there is this increasing absense of life here for me, or the realization that I've been rolling on in a rut for years now.

My best friend lives in the Monterrey Bay area in California. She came to visit recently and I was reminded of how much I loved every day back when I used to get to see her. I want that back. There is nothing but school and the security of living with my family (which becomes more stressful for all parties involved as time passes) to keep me here, and school has seemed more like part of a stupid routine than part of a personal objective lately. I think I should go. It seems like I'm wasting perfectly good youth being a good boy (a decent one anyway), quiet, waking up in the morning, eating, going to school, eating, staring at this motherfucking screen, eating, and sleeping again. There's no more meaning to how I live than that.

The hard part is convincing myself that I need to stick around long enough to pay some debts (to my parents, so it's not like they'd track me down and break my knees), buy some good duffel bags, and have a little money saved up to do things right. It's hard to care that far into the future when I've been living like I have been. Part of living here has been convincing myself that it's for a purpose of some sort, though, so I guess I can lie to myself a little longer for the sake of being a little bit more ready for what I'm wanting to get myself into.

Transportation is another issue. My sister passed on to me that she had heard (not clear whether it was said to her or said near her) that our parents would give us ownership of the cars we drive around at some point in the near future. If that is the case, then I won't have to hitchhike out to where I'm going. If not, I suppose I might save a little money (if people don't ask for money for rides as long as I'm headed the direction they're headed). Then again, I suppose there is one-way bus fare. Even if I could buy the car from my parents, I'm not sure I could maintain it well enough to have it ready for a 900 mile trip. It's in decent shape for getting around town, but I'm not sure how it would perform over distance. I need to get it taken care of, but have no money for that either.

The last issue, possibly the hardest one to figure out what to think about it, is whether I should ask my parents for help, or even tell them why I want to do this. At the very least I would leave a note, and I would only communicate so indirectly because I think they will be disappointed that I won't be finishing school in the way that they offered to pay for (paid by them while living in their house). I want to tell them, but there never seems to be a good time. Kinda like that one time I thought I was going to have a kid (which didn't happen, luckily).

There are other minor things such as finding a new optometrist, having the money to pay for that without any medical insurance, dental shit (just checkups, I don't have any big problems), and whatever else, until I can get established, but I'm not too worried about those. I can get my parents to replenish my contact lens supply before I even tell them what's going on with me, and see about getting in a dental checkup in mid/late November or early December rather than January as is scheduled.

EDIT: Wow, I phrased that rather stupidly

Today I found that my Neon still gets 30 miles per gallon doing mostly in-town driving. At one point I think it actually got 37, but I maybe I just got the numbers wrong somewhere that time. 30 MPG is pretty damn good for a 1995 Neon with something like about 80,000 miles on it.

I opened a savings account today. I tried to be disciplined, but I just kept running out of money for stupid little things. If I just live as if the savings account doesn't exist, and put $50 in it every paycheck, then I should have it a bit easier when I need to buy expensive things.

Gotta cut down on the junk food... I notice that when I run out of money I can live without it painlessly. I should be able to resist the temptation to buy it when I do have money, too. That's another thing the savings account will do for me: It'll deplete my checking account somewhat so I have less spending money and may be somewhat prevented from wasting it.

Right now, though, my checking and savings account together total to about $15. Meh.

UV - Mockery of Reality says: yo
Cauterized says: j0
UV - Mockery of Reality says: get my e-mail?
Cauterized says: im checking them one at a time
UV - Mockery of Reality says: slacker
UV - Mockery of Reality says: lazy bastard
UV - Mockery of Reality says: pinko
Cauterized says: heh
Cauterized says: went jetskiing today
UV - Mockery of Reality says: terrorist
UV - Mockery of Reality says: real americans drive SUV's on the water

My friend and I used to joke about cauterizing her ovaries with a red hot poker. One day she was all menstrual and complaining about it, and we were working on proposing solutions. I (maybe it was her) mentioned using a red hot poker to cauterize her ovaries. She cringed when I mentioned it. Then I reminded her we were going for fast food... "French fries!" Her face lightened. I reiterated, "Ovaries!" She cringed. We played that game a few times... Every now and then we'll drag it back out because it's fun, the old times.

...every five minutes I get a stomach cramp, which builds up to some form of gasseous release. I burp at least 3 times, then my stomach is calm for something like a minute, and then it builds back up to a cramp again. FUCK. I'm not nauseated or vomitting or anything, it's just this. It's gonna be a little hard FUCKING WORKING IN PUBLIC today.

Suggestions? I figure seppuku is obviously the only way to be sure.

I learned tonight that there is s certain way you can apply pressure to your abdomen, in a circle. Supposedly it as to do with influencing the fluid movement within your digestive tract. Anyway, doing it one way (clockwise or counter) or the other will either relieve diahrrea or constipation, to a degree. I attempted it myself tonight, and found that I was able to take a pretty satisfying shit.

I guess the idea is that you can slacken the flow of fluid to your already saturated shit in order to relieve diahrrea, or you can increase the flow of digestive fluid to your dry brick-shit in order to relieve constipation.

I don't know which direction to tell you to do what, or how to properly instruct you even if I had the directions right, so I wouldn't advise you to attempt it.

Then there was something else about running a closed hand or fingers around the arms or legs, pulling in one long, fast strip, like a wire stripper, from shoulder to wrist, hip to knee, knee to foot, etc, in order to relieve tension. One can perform it on one's self or another. However, I have had issues with my skin being too dry for that to be comfortable. Perhaps I do not need to grip so tightly, or maybe I just have to lubricate my fingertips.

I'm stricken again with the realization that for me, more learning results in less knowledge. It's especially hard to deal with this because I have issues with procrastination, one of the most severe character flaws in my opinion, and because of it I get easily swamped when due dates arrive and such.

I need a certain degree of control in order to fix this, a degree that I can't seem to achieve as I am bound by human limitations.

When I try to learn, I find a wealth of information, but none of it within my immediate range of understanding, and no way to learn from "the ground up" without some educational institution requiring money for it. Even if I could just audit classes from primitive mechanics working toward astronomical mathematics and physics, the structure of society won't let me. I'd never have time to dedicate myself to all the things I feel I need to learn and still be able to support myself within society. If only I did not have to breathe, eat, drink, shit, piss, sleep, and fuck... Every one of those is the reason I can't seem to excell. While I'd love to be independent of those, I'd still like to have the option to indulge in them, but as it is now, they control me.

This all came about as I was trying to read some general information about UNIX in order to find what specific information of interest I should look into in order to write a paper that is due Tuesday. I encountered massive amounts of information that was in no way relevant to me. Even in attempting to read it I learned nothing from it, as I was unfamiliar with the computing platforms the information referred to -- which were pretty much all it referred to. Understanding the information would require me to take days or weeks or months understanding operating systems theory, and understanding that would require me to take as much time understanding computing theory, computer science/architecture, and understanding that truly without relying on a great deal of abstraction would require me to understand electronics, and below that electricity, and below that chemistry and physics. Do I fucking know anything about any of that? No. I know if the manual says this is +5v and this is +5v I'd better make sure I've matched those two, not +5v and ground. Do I know why? Something about fire or some shit.

I just don't know where to start. This is fucking hell. Life's rough without a niche. Even when it's smooth, calm, uninterrupted good sailing, it's purposeless and futile and dumb and gives no reason to continue on in that shape. I've thought about the military option, but that would just be a more difficult version of not having goals and personal ambition for myself, with the bonus that I would likely end up either killing for or dying for (not sure which of those is worse) ideals and beliefs that are not my own.

Aren't we all whores to society that way, though? You go from one jub to the next, just another cog in a machine that keeps the rich people living well and the bombs and bullets pumping out downstream to whoever is on the shitlist for the day. Maybe you dry-clean, maybe you mop, maybe you suck cocks, all just so you can have some money that night to blow on fuck-all -- food and shelter, worthless and temporary -- while you support the weight of the world, quite literally, as relatively cheap labor. If the world leaders and rich people had to do it themselves they'd likely charge a hell of a lot more.

In understanding a world like this, who needs to believe in hell?

This wasn't really supposed to turn out a "my life sux" rant or anything. I guess it ended up more of a "our life sux" rant. I'd imagine anyone can relate. I mean, I would think anyone could look back at things they thought they were doing "for themselves" in their lives and realize that they were not the true benefactors, nor was it to their permanent benefit anyway. So we're all being exploited. People in certain places in the world might "have it worse than we do," but it's only in terms of quantity. The principle is still there. I suppose I should be glad I have my health, unlike many exploited folks in the world who go without food and drinkable water, but we are kindred in the principle of our suffering.

EDIT: I'm not really a goth, as I said in some various posts. Those were jokes that, in a certain context, were actually quite funny, although were likely "inside" jokes. Very, very inside.

Barbeque, bombs, and an insane AI. I think the national "terrorism scare" has somehow crept into my dreams. It's something I don't frequently make a big deal about, favoring a "cool head" regarding that topic so I won't become one of the mindless millions giving away civil liberties in fear for my life, so this is just a little odd.

It started out in a place conceptually, but not structurally, identical to various places in which I have lived. There was a big neighborhood-wide barbeque going on (big American event I suppose -- symbolism?) and everyone was running around having fun. (Trippy side-note: Some screen doors were somehow converted into slim vertical barbeque pits.) Some woman was looking for her kid in the middle of all this and I broke off from the festivities to help her find him. I found myself in a hospital looking around, and then this EMT crew comes barreling through with a gurney and some insane screaming guy on it... missing an arm, I think I remember... He goes quiet for a while, then he starts just laughing these insane intently evil chuckles. I noticed a beeping, increasing in frequency (you know, not the frequency of the individual beeps, but the frequency of their repetition). Apparently this always means "RUN IT'S A BOMB" so everyone, including me, took off. It was a small one, a scare tactic to get everyone nervous and corralled in various places. I saw a blinding white flash and an explosion just ahead, throwing sparks and some debris, but not much else. Still, everyone continued to panic, and rightly so, because there were more bombs. (Isn't it funny how in dreams people just know these things without proof or anything? I wish I had real-life dream intuition.) I started running for an exit when I had one of those time-lapse-and-out-of-body-narrative-perspective experience. I got to watch people running for exits only to find dead ends, end up tripping sensors that set off bombs... I got to see children looking for ways out of the building, trip a sensor, hear the beeps, run away, and find that the bomb was actually in the direction they were running, not where the beeps were coming from. A trap. The bomb went off and the kids' bodies shattered and tore into messy chunks. Their screaming, severed heads -- physical impossibility if not in a dream -- sailed through the air until, like something out of Half-Life, electric beams from damaged electrical equipment in the building zapped them into messier, tinier chunks.

Perspective returned to normal and I left the building. There was a crowd of people, and in front of them police, FBI, NSA, etc. They were discussing how to disarm the bombs. They thought it was a matter of cryptography, but later the bombs started talking in this evil, distorted child-voice, and it became apparent that it was some kind of evil AI controlling the explosions. People continued to try to exit the building and ended up getting killed, etc. I woke up.

I just finished my first case mod ever. I ripped two 92mm fans out of two old power supplies, mounted one as a front case fan, the other on top between my power supply and my CD-RW, a mount for which much drilling and cutting had to be done. Both are 12 volt fans, one is 1.2 amps and the other is 1.4 -- an interesting thing to note is that the 1.2 amp fan is really old (came out of a power supply where the electronics looked like something out of 80's hacker movies), has a huge fan hub so you wouldn't think it could crank out all that much air, but it tops the 1.4 amp fan, seeming about 3 times as strong.

Anyway, both fans are connected to the 500 milliamp connector on the motherboard. I didn't have an adapter, so I had to do it with a wire stripper, twisting my own copper, and lots of electrical tape.

We'll see how this affects performance. I expect pretty good results. It's too bad I don't have any thermal sensors or onboard equipment for that. It's an old board...

From the "INDUSTRIAL" room on Soulseek:

[Faint] IS YOUR CAPSLOCK STUCK OR IS THAT JUST THE MOST INDUSTRIAL WAY TO TYPE?
[Faint] BECAUSE I CAN BE HARDCORE LIKE THAT TOO
[Faint] *STOMP STOMP*
[Faint] exo: capslock is like, right by your A key...
[exo] WHAT?
[exo] WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS
[Faint] exo: So you can find it and perhaps use it.
[iamLupus] faint: you're one in a many line to have this conversation
[iamLupus] its not worth the trouble
[exo] I AM USING IT
[Faint] hahaha
[Faint] you're right
[Faint] jeez
[Faint] that was the best argument ever
[Faint] I just fucking got SCHOOLED.
[exo] IM SO CONFUSED

http://www.hk-usa.com/pages/military-le/rifles-carbines/xm8.html

http://world.guns.ru/assault/as61-e.htm

H&K fucking kicks the ass of fucking everything! The army is looking at using this instead of all the old M16's and M4's! The XM8 can be used in ANY role either of those can, and even several they could never be used in.