Monthly Archives: February 2002

Politics, Rants

Political Moron

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I’m downright ashamed to admit that when we moved, I completely forgot to re-register with the County Clerk to vote, so I am not registered to vote in Solano County. I may still be registered to vote in Yolo County; I’ll have to call the Yolo County Clerk and check with them.

This is very important to me. While I have very little faith in the competence of the people who claim to run our country, I believe it is of the utmost importance that every citizen of our nation actually gets out and votes. It is, after all, the very basis of what our country has been based on: the right to choose our own government, and to be governed wisely by the people that we choose.

On the other hand, those who know me probably won’t be surprised to learn that I am extremely cynical about the state of our political system. I used to be less so; but then Clinton was impeached, and I realized that within our system, partisan viewpoints are much more important than what is just and true. I frankly think that is a sorrowful state of affairs.

I don’t really know if either political party really knows what it’s talking about when it comes to domestic policies. Republicans seem to subscribe to a myth that if government funding for public programs is cut, then people will somehow generously give money to charity to make up for the decimated social programs (but let’s think about this: if you had five bucks more in your tax return, are you going to give it to a charity or buy yourself a burger?). Democrats, on the other hand, seem to subscribe to a myth which says that the government has some level of competency in distributing funds. Personally, I have a little bit more faith in the second myth, which is why I tend to vote Democrat, though I rarely register as Democrat OR Republican. On the whole, I find the party system rather absurd.

My cynicism has expanded of late. While I used to maintain some faith in the political processes in some other countries, I am now of the opinion that, in the face of all of the troubles in the world, there are people who simply don’t want solutions. For example: I honestly believe that neither Israeli Prime Minister Sharon nor Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat want a solution to the conflict in the Middle East. I base this on the observation that none of the proposed settlements have even been worthy of consideration in their estimation.

I don’t believe that the British or the northern Irish really want a solution to the problem of Northern Ireland. And I don’t believe that Colombia wants a solution to their troubles.

I certainly don’t believe that India and Pakistan want to settle their dispute.

I’m beginning to doubt that the government of the United States really wants a solution to terrorism. If we did, then I think we’d be focusing more energy on the conditions that foster the terrorist mindset than we actually do.

I guess I’m not entirely cynical. I do believe that there are people within the government who are honorable and courageous and unwilling to compromise their principles or their sound judgement for what’s popular and trendy. It’s possible that such people have even made it to the national level, though I think that such people are probably weeded out by the time they reach the state level. I believe that the last President with anything resembling honor, courage, or moral character was Jimmy Carter; too bad he was such a poor politician. I had some faith in Clinton’s ability to lead (I honestly don’t believe that his transgressions had any bearing on his leadership abilities), but I find President George W. Bush sadly lacking in character. I’ve been impressed with some of his domestic policies, but more impressed with his willingness to piss off the leadership of other nations to make himself look good at home.

I try to be optimistic about the future of humanity, but I’m finding that it’s more difficult to do that these days. The corporate world offers no refuge, of course (not that it ever did). The Enron scandal is only one sign of what I see as a deep-rooted and ultimately deadly trend within American business to sell out principles and honor in the name of a buck. I believe that companies which prostitute their technology to sell censorware to totalitarian governments such as China and Saudi Arabia represent the very worst in American business, and are a disgrace to our nation’s ideals and principles.

I am a very firm believer in principles and honor, and standing by them no matter what. I believe that, as a nation, we have improved in our ability to stand by the principles that we believe in, but I don’t believe that such ability has come from the top; it has come from the bottom, from activists and people willing to sacrifice everything but their integrity. And I believe that if our leaders had such integrity, we would be an even stronger nation and a stronger role model for the rest of the world. But as long as we insist on racial profiling in the name of "security"; as long as we believe that money is more important than true American values; and as long as we believe it’s okay to play fast and loose with international cooperation; then our integrity is not visible and we are not worthy of the principles and values we claim.

Whew. That’s quite a rant. Normally, I loathe talking politics, and will avoid the subject whenever it comes up in conversation; but I’ve been listening to the news and becoming more and more distressed over what I’ve been seeing, I’ve finally had to get it out of my system.

It’s out now. Thank goodness. Now I can get back to normal stuff.

But the point is: get out and vote.

Memes and Quizzes, Writing

The Weather Station

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Well, according to this test, I am a chaotic good elven ranger/fighter (see below for more information about that). That works for me. I’m naturally inclined to play that kind of character when I play Dungeons and Dragons anyway. Although I would probably choose a human character rather than an elven character. I just have trouble picturing myself as graceful as

Is this me?
Is this me?

Legolas in Lord of the Rings. I think most of my friends would agree that this just isn’t me.

At any rate, I was supposed to go work at the lab today, but after picking up my car at the service station, I wound up feeling inspired. So I went to Borders Books instead, and spent a good hour or two writing a short story on my Palm Pilot. Stephen King, in his introduction to the audio edition of "LT’s Theory of Pets", explains that he doesn’t always set out to write scary stories; sometimes, they just turn out that way. Likewise, the story that I wrote today, "Ten Foot Tall He Was, with Eyes of Flame", was supposed to be a cheerful little folktale about how people tend to exaggerate the physical traits of people that are important to them. Instead, it wound up being a sort of unholy marriage between Mark Twain and H. P. Lovecraft. Because of copyright concerns and the fact that I’m going to try to get this tale published, I won’t be reproducing it here; but if you want to read it, let me know.

I’ve lamented the fact that I don’t have a laptop computer anymore which is easy to disconnect from our home network and bring with me when I’m out and about. But I think I prefer working on my lowly Palm Pilot, with its spiffy keyboard. My Palm Pilot has no games which are easy to load up and distract me from my work, and it’s a lot easier to carry around. Plus, it’s simplicity itself to download whatever document I’m working on from my Palm Pilot and fix it up on my computer.

Meanwhile, I did some more back road exploration in Yolo Country today. While driving south on Mace Boulevard in Davis, I caught sight of a strange structure in the distance that looked something like a huge golf ball set atop a several-stories-tall wireframe tower. I took a left turn on Road 35, and drove a couple of miles until I was able to get close enough to the structure to see what it was. From up close, it was obvious that it was some sort of huge white sphere set atop a scaffolding tower with a staircase that led from the ground to the base of the sphere. At the base of the structure, there was a barbed wire fence and a small concrete building. On the fence itself was a sign that identified the structure as a weather radar station administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This made me happy, though I have no idea why. Actually, I do know why. Mysterious structures and unusual buildings out in the middle of nowhere are prime food for the imagination. The short story I wrote today, I think, definitely shows some "back roads" influence.

And "Ten Foot Tall He Was…" was a good break for me from "Mother Tsan-Chan". Now, maybe, I’ll be able to get back into that one.

Slow news day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll have something more interesting to say.

Philosillyphizing, Writing

The Tragedy of Traditional Cooking

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I’m sitting here now and actually trying to write a short story. I haven’t tried to do any serious creative writing since NaNoWriMo back in november, and I’d forgotten how difficult it can be to get started. I had the idea for "Mother Tsan-Chan" a couple of nights ago, and spent a couple of hours sketching out the basic idea and trying to identify the obvious cliches that this story could fall into and figuring out ways around them.

Well, I identified the cliches, but not how to avoid them. So I decided I’d just sit down and write the darn thing, and trust that the characters themselves would fill me in on their motives and plans, and the story, as it almost always does, would just take care of itself.

Unfortunately, it isn’t happening. I’ve tried two separate openings now, and neither one of them has "sung" to me. This is the problem that I always have: I come up with fantastic settings and plot complications (ask anyone who has ever played in a role-playing game that I’ve run) but I have a hard time digging the stories out of them. Stephen King writes, in his excellent book On Writing, that stories are like fossils: you don’t invent them so much as you dig them up. And I believe that this is true. To extend the metaphor, these huge and fantastical settings that I create are like the badlands of Montana; I just need to figure out where to start digging.

So instead of working on "Mother Tsan-Chan" or "Incident at Mount Joyce" (the scenario I’ve promised to have done by a week from tomorrow so we can finally start play-testing Outer Darkness), I’ll kill a little time by telling you about the restaurant that Jennifer and I went to earlier this evening for dinner.

If you’re a regular reader of my wife’s journal, you know that she and I are both doing the Weight Watchers thing (I have an ulterior motive: at thirty pounds loss, we get our webserver). The Weight Watchers program involves counting "points", and the number of points in a food item is dependent on the number of calories, fat grams, fiber grams, etc., etc., that are in it. An apple is one point. A Baby Ruth bar, to my infinite remorse, is five points. Sushi is three points for four pieces of tekka maki, or four points for three pieces of California maki.

This points thing is so much easier to figure out than figuring out the calories in a single banana or piece of steak.

The number of points you get to eat in a day depends on how much you weigh. At my weight, I get to eat between 25 and 29 points per day. Plus, you can "bank" points, by eating less than your maximum in a single day, or by exercising.

And what this all really boils down to is that for the past week or so, I’ve really been craving a steak: a big hunk of dead cow, nicely broiled, medium rare, juicy and tender. And some fried prawns. Steak and shrimp. Turf and surf. Oh, yeah, can you dig it.

We have this coupon book which has coupons and entries for just about every restaurant in the valley (except for the ones that we really like, of course), so today, while I was whining to Jennifer via IM about the tremendous need I had for a steak and the horrific consequences that were likely to befall the cats if I didn’t get one soon, she suggested getting out the coupon book and finding a restaurant that might serve steak that we could eat relatively cheaply at.

So I did. I dug around and found something in Vacaville called the Creekside Cafe, featuring traditional home cooking. There was nothing in the restaurant’s entry in the coupon book which would indicate exactly what kind of traditional cooking would be served: traditional American cooking, traditional Cajun, traditional European, traditional Antarctic… But since I’m willing to go places, sight unseen and without knowing anything about the place beforehand (I’ve seen some really awful movies using this same daringness), I suggested to Jennifer that we try it. She agreed.

So we got there, and the first thing I noticed was that it’s in a strip mall, near a Raley’s supermarket, unobtrusively settled near two smaller eateries with the healthy-sounding names of Joe’s Giant Cheeseburgers and The Donut House. This didn’t bode well to me, but Jennifer, brave soldier, wasn’t quite ready to turn around and go back to Fresh Choice, so we went inside.

For a small strip-mall eatery, Creekside Cafe was packed. There were people — mostly large people, I observed — at every single table in the small restaurant. We stood waiting behind another couple for about ten minutes, which isn’t long in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. I peeked at the specials which were written on a chalkboard on the wall, and noticed that they were serving steak and shrimp (oh blessed day!) and fish and chips, and a variety of other Weight Watchers approved selections.

I also noticed that the clientele in this restaurant seemed to have the highest cell phone to person ratio of any other restaurant I’ve been to since I mistakenly ate in the financial district of Portland once last year. The difference is that while most of the people up in Portland who were dragging cell phones to the restaurants were wearing expensive suits and carrying leather suitcases and sported expensive haircuts, the people with the cellphones here wore jeans and football T-shirts, and sported long hair. There was a cell phone at every table in this restaurant, and just about all of them were being used. I imagined parents talking to children or babysitters, or people getting sporting scores, talking to mechanics at the shop, and so on. Perhaps they were network engineers walking technicians through rebuilding a client-server connection. I don’t know.

The long and the short of it is that here traditional home cooking meant good food, and lots of it. My steak and shrimp dinner come complete with homemade chicken noodle soup, a salad, the entree itself, homemade bread, and a dessert. While the salad was an obligatory sort of affair — a few desultory shreds of iceberg lettuce with a few shavings of carrot and its own volume in thousand island dressing — and the baked potato was depressingly dry and overcooked, the rest of the meal was wonderfully well done. The steak was perfectly cooked and very tender; the cocktail sauce for the shrimp was nice and spicy; and the homemade bread was warm and hearty.

I counted twenty points for the meal, just enough to consume all of the points I had left over for the day, plus the extra points I got because I had worked out earlier.

The waitress seemed disappointed that we didn’t want the dessert that came with the meal. We finally agreed that she could put our chocolate cake in a box so that we could take it home with us. She did, and we settled up our bill and left.

We worried over the cake for the length of time that it took us to drive to Mervyn’s, where we were going to buy new jeans for each of us. We each took a bite; it was wonderful cake. But we’re both trying to be good, so we knew that there was only one thing that we could do with the cake. We got to Mervyn’s, and the cake went straight into the garbage can.

Do you see why this is a tragedy? Chances are that if you don’t, I can’t possibly explain to you the sheer pain of having such wonderful food before you and not being able to finish it all.

I wonder if that was a thousand words that I just wrote there. This was my procrastination. I had planned on writing a thousand words of "Mother Tsan-Chan" tonight, but I got distracted. I suppose that, too, is tragic.

Or, perhaps, my sense of tragedy is simply oversensitive.

Cats, Goofy

From the Secret Diary of…

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There have been many times when I’ve been in the house by myself, and heard a noise coming from upstairs that sounds just like typing. This often happens late at night, when Jennifer’s asleep and I’m downstairs reading, or during the day when Jennifer is at work and I’m puttering around the house doing chores or, well, reading.

"But of course it can’t be coming from the computer room," I say to myself. "There’s no one else in the house." Eventually, I figure that it’s one of the cats playing with a toy that rattles, or one of the electric litterboxes, or something like that. Because there was obviously no one working in the computer room.

Or… Perhaps there was…

Today I was poking around our home network, looking for a particular file that I’d stashed on our server, when I stumbled across this particular document. It was in the web directory, accessible for all the world to see. It was password-protected, but the password — "fuzzy" — was very easy to figure out. It was only after long deliberation over whether I should delete the document, post the document for the world to see, or change my medications, that I decided that the world needs to know what is happening under our very noses.

From the Secret Diary of Azrael (the Cat):

Day One

Today was good, cause I got to eat and sleep and play a little bit. I almost took over the world, too, but then I fell asleep in a sunbeam. It might rain tomorrow, so prospects for world domination tomorrow are good.

Day Two

Jingle ball of doom had to be subdued. Then the laser beam tried to eat Rosemary and I had to beat it back. This place keeps me so busy, sometimes I don't get more than 18 hours of sleep a day! Have you ever heard of anything so pathetic?

Day Three

I could have sworn they were behind that door! For hours I heard them talking! And I wanted to be with them, so I cried outside the door! Then I realized that they were talking behind me, so I turned around and went back into the office room with the jingle ball and there they were! Wow!

Day Four

This is horrible! It's awful! For TEN YEARS she pulled all of my fur off of me today! Ow ow ow! I was so mad I had to kill a superball. Tomorrow the world will be mine!

The next day...

He left the fireplace on in the room with the big soft bed. I almost took over the world but the kitty cup was really warm and had to be slept in. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't done it?

Tomorrow is another day...

Jennifer keeps telling me that I’m just making things up. But now I have firm proof!

Meanwhile, I thought that the Olympic figure skating competition tonight was really spiffy.

This Random Thing Called Life

The Briefest of Clarifications

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Okay, so there were these three penguins, right? Penguin Number One says to Penguin Number Two, "Start the car!" And Penguin Number Three says, "Boy, those bells are loud."

Waa haa haa! Ha ha! Ha! Ha ha ha haaa! Hoo, sometimes I kill myself, I really do.

Well, okay, so sometimes my sense of humor is a bit, um, esoteric. While I was driving home from the library, I found that I really was having that conversation in my head, the one I recounted in "Overheard Self-Talk". And I laughed, because I thought it was funny. And I thought I would share my mirth with the world.

So laugh, I say! Laugh! Laugh! Laugh! Laugh! Because trust me, this is funny stuff.

Well, okay. Maybe it’ll work next time.

Self Absorbed Whining

Overheard Self-Talk

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"Nothing has changed, you know."

"Huh?"

"I said, nothing’s changed."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, look at yourself. You’re trying to cop a new attitude. You’re trying to fix your thinking. You’re making a desperate attempt to get over yourself."

"What, like that’s not good?"

"It would be good if it meant something."

"Ah."

"I mean, so you’ve decided it’s okay to be who you are. Today you even went to the library to check out Chinese literature and Tibetan music, things you’ve never really explored before, right?"

"Uh huh."

"And so what? You’re still a failure, you know. But now you’re a failure with a positive attitude."

"I don’t know, that Tibetan music is pretty cool."

"Yes, but instead of being out playing around, you could have been back at home, learning new skills and figuring out how to program a JDBC-enabled JSP application to interface with your Linux box to make real-time connections between your website and your computer at home. The employers would LOVE you if you pulled that off!"

"Um…"

"Not to mention all that studying you should be doing to get your career in gear."

"I…"

"Oh, that’s right. You’ve decided to put your career hunt on hold because your obsession with it was taking over your life, right?"

"Yeah…"

"Hah! What a wuss. See these trees?"

"What about them?"

"Don’t they kind of remind you of when you were working in Portland and had a chance at getting a career because of some lucky break that your old boss decided to give you? You could have had a real career, you know, if you hadn’t frittered away your college years."

"How’s that again?"

"See? Loser! Loooooser! Having a better attitude about things doesn’t change the fact that you’re a LOSER!"

"Yeah, but it’s a nice day, the back roads between Dixon and Vacaville are beautiful… And I will hopefully be volunteering to do literacy tutoring again. And I’ve just started a new story this morning."

"So what? Get your ass in gear. Get a career! Get a life!"

"Shut up."

"Make me."

Sigh. See what I have to put up with?

Self Absorbed Whining

My Name is Richard, and I'm a Thoughtaholic

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Did I confuse you with the extracts from my diary? I’m so terribly sorry.

This past weekend I was at DunDraCon XIX in San Ramon, California. Unlike Dragon*Con, which Jennifer and I went to back in September (a week before It happened), DunDraCon is focused entirely on role-playing games. I started going regularly two years ago to be help market and playtest The Outer Darkness with Evilpheemy. That first time, I wasn’t able to actually play in any role-playing game sessions, because I actually had work to do (it really was quite annoying: I had my laptop computer with me and had to spend too much time logged in from my hotel room), and because my shoulder was in a lot of pain; last year I was sick, and spent much of the time in our hotel room covered with gross hives and sneezing my brains out. This year, though, I finally got to play in some actual games. Not only did I get to play in several board games and card games (my favorite is still Give Me the Brain! by Cheap Ass Games), but I got to play in some actual role-playing games as well. The Delta Green game that I played in was all right, but the Call of Cthulhu game that Evilpheemy ran was outstanding.

In August, Evilpheemy and his wife will be heading out to Wisconsin to attend GenCon to market The Outer Darkness and network out there. In September, I’m off to WorldCon in San Jose to make my own contribution. In truth, I actually prefer conventions that aren’t entirely devoted to role-playing games. I like a variety of panels and events. At science fiction conventions, you’ll meet artists and writers (at least two of my favorite writers, David Brin and Tad Williams, will be at WorldCon) as well as actors and even musicians. There were late night concerts at Dragon*Con, and those were fun. Jennifer and I probably won’t be going to Dragon*Con this year, but I think that WorldCon will be just as fun.

And I had a strange revelation while I was at DunDraCon. It was sparked by Evilpheemy, who has already been the source of at least one piece of major, life-changing advice in my own life (he spoke seven words to me a couple of years ago, which ultimately resulted in my marriage to Jennifer and many of the wonderful things that have happened along with that — I can’t reveal those seven words here, but chances are that if you need to know them, you already do). And it was sparked by something that happened while I was driving down to the con on Saturday morning.

Evilpheemy had read my last self-pity post last week, and called me on my cell phone while I was working at the lab, and make a career suggestion for me, one that made a lot of sense. More on it at some point in the future. He mentioned to me that he had been following my career "lamentations" for quite some time on line, and that sparked a chain of thought in my mind which culminated with me realizing, on Saturday morning, the following:

That in the past ten years, at least, I probably haven’t spent more than a single day obsessing over the issue.

That can’t be healthy… Can it?

Well, certainly, it’s important to consider your contributions to the world, how you’re going to live your life, what you want to contribute to make the world a better place. But I realized I’ve let this obsession of mine get to the point, at times, where, ironically, I couldn’t work… because I was too busy worrying about how I was going to work, and what I was going to do. And that’s just nuts.

The worst part of it, though, was when I realized that I’d also thought a couple of times to myself, "Well, if nothing else, my life insurance will pay for the house, so Jennifer will be fine…" And that’s when I really decided that I needed to make a change.

"Hi. I’m Richard C., and I’m a thoughtaholic."

So, maybe I should just kind of quit whining now. Quit obsessing over it. Quit focusing on what I’m going to be when I grow up, and focus instead on just living my life: staying open to new ideas and new experiences, seeing what comes along, and trying out new things and taking joy in learning new things. Perhaps I can spend less time being angry about how things aren’t turning out the way I think that they should be, and having fun in seeing what comes along.

There’s still the matter of the bills that need to be paid, of course… But, actually, I’ve never been worried about that. What I’ve been worried about was finding a job which I can feel like a grown up doing, and taking pride in. And that’s what I need to stop doing for now.

And I can refocus on the things that really are important. I know that I am one of the luckiest men in the world; I have a great family, I have the most incredible wife I could possibly imagine (honestly, how many men have wives — or fiancee’s, technically, I suppose — who would have let them wander around Ireland for a month?); I have good and honorable friends that I’m blessed to have and that I’m proud to claim as friends; and the standard list of blessings including shelter, a car, good access to edible food, and so on.

And so this morning, Jennifer and I drove out to Home Depot to pick up some lights for our office and some parts for the shelves that we’re working on. I glanced at a book of landscaping and deck ideas and got really excited by some of the pictures and diagrams that I saw. And I realized that defocusing my "what’ll-I-do-when-I-grow-up?" obsession gave me energy to be excited about working in our yard, on the shelves, on our house. It was a good feeling. A great feeling.

And driving home, we passed by fields where the fog was rising from plough lines in the ground. I was enchanted. When we got home, I installed the light on my side of the office and decided that I wanted to go back to the field and take a picture. The fog had burned off by then, but I drove around on some of the back roads, even managed to get a bit lost in the southern reaches of Solano County for a few minutes (Dixon has some marvelous back roads in the agricultural areas) and saw some great old barns, some great landscaping, and the old Dixon cemetary. One of the elementary schools in Dixon is called Tremont, which is the same name as one of the back roads several miles from here, which you can take to get to Davis. I wondered if there was a connection.

The lesson being, I suppose, that sometimes you can find some really amazing things… if you’re willing to keep an eye open, to accept that some wrong turns are inevitable, and accept that the things you wanted to find — like the field of fog that I wanted to take a picture of, or some idealistic notion of a One True Calling that I’ve been desperately trying to find for at least the past ten years — just might not be there.

DunDraCon, Nerdgasm

Excerpts from My Diary

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Saturday:

Dear Diary,

Today I mostly just sat around talking with people. Though I knocked off a couple of spies in my lair, I wasn’t very successful at detonating the unexploded bombs in France with the mad cows. I almost finished, though.

Then I got a call summoning me to San Francisco so I could help with surveillance while a CIA director met with a representative for the People’s Liberation Army of China. They were going to discuss the problem of the Tcho-tchos in China and the United States. Turned out the Tcho-Tchos were smuggling drugs to fund their secret cult activities up in Washington. We went up to Washington where we met their ancient god. We barely managed to banish it back to its home dimension. Poor Danler lost his head. Literally.

Sunday:

Dear Diary,

Rough day so far. The invasion of Dork Tower went well, but lunch took a long time. Fortunately, the sushi was free.

(Later…)

Rose from the dead, and spent a few hours working in a fast food restaurant. I hate having to share my brain with the other employees.

(Later…)

Saved the world from the spreading darkness of Sauron. Frodo helped.

(Later…)

(Later…)

Those hillbillies (or, as I like to call this particular clan, the "hellbillies") can be rough when they’ve summoned a star vampire….

This diary was later found covered with blood in the Appalachian hills..
Computers, Twoo Wuv

Bean Trick: Or, Another Three Reasons Why My Wife is Cooler than Yours

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Usually, when I decide it’s time to zark a computer to death, it’s my Linux box that bears the brunt of my incompetence. Last week, though, I booted into Windows to check out an image I wanted to work on, and discovered that I was unable to hook up to the Internet through Windows 2000. I tweaked this, fiddled with that, and finally decided that what I needed to do was uninstall and reinstall the TCP/IP protocol that my computer needs to connect. No problem. Click on the protocol. Click on "uninstall". Click OK. It takes its time, and then tells you that you need to reboot the machine. No problem there. You reboot, and then you go back into Network Settings to reinstall the protocol from its nice little cache on the hard drive. No problem, right?

Right.

"Insert Windows 2000 Installation Disk to continue."

D’oh.

This is a problem. I don’t happen to have that disk right now. It’s with my brother-in-law, who lives out in Napa, quite a ways away from here. Not an impossible distance, but longer than a casual daytime drive.

All in all, it’s a bad thing. I haven’t been able to get on-line from Windows for over a week now. Not that I miss it, of course; I’ve been working in Linux pretty solidly for about a month now, and I’m getting very used to it. In many ways, I like it much better than Windows. But that’s a hobbyist thing, really; it’s like the difference between the guy who wants to drive his car from one end of town to another versus the guy who wants to tweak his engine, adjusting a gap here and tweaking a valve there and fiddling with an intake valve under that camshaft (or wherever you’d find an intake valve). Okay, his car probably isn’t as pretty, but he’s got a lot more faith in it, because he is pretty much responsible for it himself… and if it explodes, he knows who’s to blame. And I like how much I can customize Linux; just for fun, I’ve been playing with some screen capture software, and I made a snapshot of my desktop, which I’ve placed below. It’s based on H. P. Lovecraft, of course, since I’m still on that HPL kick; any day now, Evilpheemy, "Incident at Mount Joyce" will be finished and we’ll be ready to start playtesting Outer Darkness.

With Linux, I feel like I get more out of my computer, and I understand it better.

But meanwhile, I frequently stay up until the wee hours playing with my computer, adjusting this and tweaking that, and generally enjoying the heck out of myself. Jennifer doesn’t seem to mind that I typically end up sneaking into bed at 2:00 or so, still too wired to sleep. That’s reason number one: that she puts up with my weird hobby.

Jennifer likes to cook, and that’s reason number two. She likes to cook good food, and she does a very good job of it. She came home earlier this week with a quick-and-dirty recipe for green beans that involves garlic and soy sauce, and we’ve had that twice this week with dinner; tonight, we had it with this amazing lasagne that she makes, which involves some vegetables so cleverly chopped up that the texture almost makes you swear you’re not eating vegetarian lasagne. Jennifer likes finding recipes like that and bringing them home and preparing them, especially if they’re quick and easy. She’s got a knack for it; I call it her "Bean Trick", in honor of the bean recipe and our linguistic obsession with bean words in our house.

"Bean head!"

I get easily bored at times, and this can sometimes take odd manifestations. A couple of weeks ago, while heading off to the University to work in the lab a bit, I decided that I was bored with going left, then right, then left and down to the highway. And so instead of taking that second left, I went straight, and found myself being forced to take another left; then I took a right, just for the heck of it. Then I found myself taking a right. And so on.

The back roads of Solano and Yolo Counties are amazing. There are acres and acres of farmland, of course, but there are also wetlands and grasslands, bird sanctuaries, marvelous old Victorian style houses, and an abandoned church with an old graveyard that someone has moved their modern double-wide trailer onto; naturally, it’s that last bit that caught my attention the most. There is also a large damp field near one farm where an egret has taken up residence. The first time I drove past it, I took our digital camera and tried to get a picture of the egret; unfortunately, it was way too far away from the edge of the road, and the photograph shows nothing but this tiny white speck in a sea of light brown grass and mud. I erased the picture from the camera. Unfortunately, the back roads are a bit inconstant, it seems, and I haven’t been able to find that bit of marshland again.

The upshot, though, is that I’ve been able to find at least two routes Davis from Dixon that stay far away from I-80. I doubt that either route saves any time except during the heaviest rush hours on I-80, but there’s still something rewarding about speeding down a farm road which is barely wide enough for your car, let alone your car and the tractor that’s pulling a wagonload of hay. With the windows down and the soudtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? blaring loudly.

We’ve had weird car karma over the past couple of weeks (more about that some other time), and last night we wound up driving separate cars home from Davis to Dixon. I offered to lead Jennifer along the back roads so that she could see what I’d discovered. She probably wanted to get home sooner than that would have entailed, but she was a good sport, and we drove those roads. Bear in mind, that was the first time I’d driven that route in the dark; I almost got lost a couple of times, but managed to get us home safely. Jennifer puts up with weird stuff like that from me, and that’s the third reason.

There are two more reasons, but I won’t detail them here: just think about wholesome implications of the phrases "love monkey" and "gum drop bear", remind yourself that today was Valentine’s Day… and that’s all you need to know. It was clean.

And if I were the silly sentimental fool that I have been known to be in the past, I’d have spent this entire entry talking about how much I love Jennifer and making you, my one or two constant readers, a bit sick; but instead I wanted to share at least three ways in which Jennifer has made my life so much more interesting and exciting than it ever was before, by giving me space to do random things in, and participating in some of them with me. This whole marriage has been a complete life upgrade for me. In a way, it’s almost like the difference between Windows and Linux for me; with Jennifer around, I just feel like I understand things better and get more out of life.

And just for the heck of it, here is the snapshot of my computer’s desktop:

Perhaps not all that exciting, I guess. And it looks quite a lot like Windows in some ways. But trust me, it’s a big change.

H. P. Lovecraft, Nerdgasm

… And then the blasphemous entity laboriously slid its way across the barren landscape

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H. P. Lovecraft was never really appreciated in his own time, you know. For some reason, his stories about ancient, uh, blasphemous creatures — Elder Gods, Fungi from Yuggoth, the Great Race of Yith, Cthulhu, Shub Niggurath, and the foul Nyarlathotep — just didn’t really strike a chord with the general reading audience of the 1920’s and 1930’s. Sure, he probably had at least as much influence on modern genre fiction as Edgar Allen Poe; remember when the Joker got stuck in Arkham Asylum? Lovecraft made up that name, Arkham. These days, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Lovecraft or something that he created will be cited in some horror story somewhere. Ever hear of a book called the Necronomicon? Sure you have. If you’ve ever seen a cheesy horror movie, you’ve probably heard of this book. In Evil Dead, some kids find it in the basement of this cabin in the woods, and it’s one of those things you know the characters in a movie shouldn’t do, and no matter how much you scream at them to NOT OPEN THAT CURSED TOME! they still do.

These things happen. They open the book, they all turn into zombies, and life goes to hell.

Yep. Lovecraft invented it. Lovecraft’s use of the fictional Necronomicon was so clever that even today there are people all around the world who believe that it’s real. There’s a cheap paperback you can get in the tacky occult section of your local Waldenbooks, called The Necronomicon, but that one was invented by a couple of college students in the 70’s.

Why didn’t Lovecraft become popular during his own day? Here’s a sample of his writing style, taken from one of his more action-packed stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth":

…Nothing that I could have imagined — nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way — would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw — or believe I saw…. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream — flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating — surging inhumanly trough the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of nameless whitish-gold metal…. and some were strangely robed…. and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black cload and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head…. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaley…. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

That’s pretty much the most action packed section in this fifty-page novella in Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre. No, it’s not an easy read.

So what makes Lovecraft stick to us, like a bit of blasphemous cake inhumanly stuck to our ribs, causing us to gain one or two loathesome pounds? It’s hard to say; but I think it really is the cosmos that Lovecraft had painted for his readers. The universe that Lovecraft wrote about was not one ruled over by a kindly, benevolent god, or even one of order and sense. In Lovecraft’s universe, ancient entities wrangled with each other in eons-old struggles, and if they thought of human beings at all, they thought of them as a mere irritation at best, something like a flea. It was this vision of cosmic indifference that Lovecraft bequeathed to modern horror fiction.

Lovecraft didn’t even consider himself a horror writer; he was a "cosmic fantasist". And he really wasn’t called a horror writer at all, until after the second world war; and then a vision of a bleak and indifferent universe, where vast powers struggled indifferently to pitiable small humans seemed very realistic to a world of people who had seen nations slaughter millions for no good reason at all.

So, anyway, I’ve been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, as a way of getting myself geared up for working on the project that Evilpheemy and I have been working on together for a couple of years now. Maybe it was all of that Lovecraft reading that explains the dream I had the other night.

In that dream, you see, I dreamt that Jennifer and I had, in addition to the seven cats that you probably already know about, another three. We had never seen these cats; their shyness put Zuchinni to shame. Somehow we knew that we had these three cats, but they never emerged to eat, drink, play, or even use the litter boxes, not whenever we were around. Even when we moved from the house in one town to the house we live in now, these three cats came with us, but we never saw them.

And then, suddenly, I saw one. Out from its hiding place to play with another cat. But this cat, which Jennifer had named Rosemary, for some reason, inviting confusion with the other cat by the same name, didn’t really look like a cat. It was a silvery-purple color, and glittery, sort of like Seven-of-Nine’s jumpsuit in Star Trek: Voyager, and there were sparks shooting out of it.

It was a very eerie dream. Trust me on this.

When I get sick — and I’ve been sick with a cold these past few days — I get very intense dreams. Some of them have less than holy inspirations. And some of them are just plain weird.

And that’s pretty much it, I guess. A vignette about one of my favorite writers, a recounting of a nonsensical dream.

If you’re hoping that this journal is going to be coherent all the time, you really ought to be rechecking your medication.