The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

I’m slowly recovering from a series of mild mental shocks to my system… these shocks were vague and decentralized, so it’s hard to talk about them.  Maybe there’ll be some tangible results, although I always hope for that and it never happens.  I guess I have to put more effort into making it happen, instead of sitting around and hoping.

I just finished rereading Snow Crash (yes, you could consider that one of the shocks), and am now very much stoked about having re-realized how awesome the book is.

Imeem.com seems pretty interesting, but I’m not sure yet what separates it from the existing social networking sites out there.  It has a special focus on media, but MySpace.com has a good deal of the functionality Imeem.com has.  Only advantages I can see to Imeem.com so far are playlists and a more organized and aesthetically pleasing layout and interface.  Will ease of use trump the massive existing userbase and idiot-friendly facets of MySpace.com?

Tony posted something yesterday about having an ultimate goal in life, one that you try and bend every action and opportunity toward fulfilling.  I don’t have an ultimate goal in life.  I have about five hundred million smaller goals, many of which I may never accomplish, due to the laziness and ennui that I feel every day, but I don’t have an ultimate goal.  Hell, maybe that ennui is due to the fact that I don’t really have a main, unstoppable passion in life, something that I want to do above all else, and beyond all limits.

For the longest time, my ultimate goal in life was an emotional one, to find a significant other to share my life with.  After my first relationship, which ended tragically, I never wanted to feel either the ache of being alone or the pain of losing a significant other again.  Now, a bit over a decade later, it seems that I may have achieved that goal.  I won’t say that this is definitely it, but things are looking good for that prognosis, and I feel truly optimistic about it for the first time in my life.

But that means I’m left with no ultimate goal… and what’s more, since I have spent most of my life and energy focusing on that one goal, one that was especially ephemeral and not very conducive to actual life achievements, I have very little foundation upon which to build efforts toward further goals, ultimate or not.  Maybe that’s what this blog is ultimately about… my eternal and fractured search for something to head for in my life.  I no longer have the wild fancies of youth that I need to be astonishingly famous and fantastically rich (well, I’d still like to be fantastically rich, especially since the closest things I have to driving passions right now are cars and motorcycles, and they’re expensive), so I think that now my ultimate goal will just end up being some career(s) that I will actively enjoy existing in for the rest of my life.

LibraryThing is a neat site where you can input a catalog of the books you own, or maybe just ones you’ve read or liked.  I haven’t really done much with it yet (when do I ever do much with anything?), having only put in two books, but it seems like a pretty good idea, and maybe something I’ll play with more later.

It’s a good thing I figured out how to use the “more” function in WordPress, or every single danged one of you would be forced to read through my adventures as Sareth, apprentice of Phenrig, on my journey to recover ancient artifacts and uncover my destiny.  Oh, and those of you who haven’t played the game would be exposed to SPOILERS, TERRIBLE SPOILERS!!!  AGGHGHGHRRRGHLE– Read the rest of this entry »

Listssss:

• Work (half done)
• Dark Messiah (I have traded this in for Twilight Princess, for the moment, and intend to concentrate on it until it is done.)
• Alice’s concert

The night started well, with Ryan, Andy and I all ready to go at around 6:30PM.  Brandon was out due to a meeting for work that he got roped into, so it was just the three of us.  We spent a good chunk of time on our usual aimless discussion about what the hell to play (Note to self: advance preparation!), and finally settled on good ol’ Warcraft 3 again.  Once in our Battle.net channel, we decided to go with Defense of the Ancients, instead of a normal skirmish.

It’s probably worth noting that I suck at DotA.  Precise timing and micromanagement are not my strong points, and both skills are heavily required in DotA, as much or more so as plain WC3.  Not only this, I’m not very familiar with the game or the custom heroes involved, meaning that I have very little information to go on to win the large-scale rock-paper-scissors battle of hero matching.

Ryan stuck with the Dwarven Sniper for all the games we played, and did fine.  He usually got the most kills of the three of us, due to the Sniper’s long-range, high-damage, single-target Ultimate.  I didn’t really keep much track of Andy, and all I know is that he played Rikimaru during the last game.  I started out with Lifestealer, since I remembered him being cheap goodness before (fast attacks + life stealing).  But in the first game, I got annihilated over and over by the AI hero I was facing… The Oblivion.  So, of course, from then on I used The Oblivion.  We won one match like that, but then for our third and final, we went up against the bitch from hell… Luna Moonfang, the Moon Rider.  She spanked me like I was a naked executive at an out-of-town whorehouse, over, and over, and over.  “Frustrating” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

After our ignominious defeat in that game, Andy had to leave to minister to a friend, which left Ryan and I… with no idea what to play next.  We had tried for weeks, unsuccessfully, to get a full game of Supreme Commander in, and we finally succeeded last week.  I guess it had left me sated for the moment (damn, SupCom gets epic!), because I didn’t feel like playing it anymore.  Then, between grocery runs being necessary, installations taking forever, and patch downloads taking several times forever, the rest of the night was whittled away by the decision to go for Battlefield 2142… self-pwnage approved.

So I got “work” done yesterday, which I guess is a good thing.  The gym disappeared into a maelstrom of laziness, and Twilight Princess turned into WoW and gaming night with the guys.

I think I need to incorporate Brandon’s maxim of “chaos is okay” into my life.  I’m too in love with the idea of everything being completely neat and orderly.  Like if I decide to start going to the gym on a given week, and I miss Monday, I then write the rest of the week off.  Bad Eug!  It makes starting anything and keeping it going that much harder… like I don’t have enough trouble as it is.

It is also bloody hot in this room.

To Do:

• Work (halfway done at this point)
• WoW (farming and also with Alice)
• Exercise of some kind, gorrammit, I don’t care what it is, even if it’s just fifty pushups, just do something!

The last scab on my hand fell off last night, meaning that except for the fact that there are two large patches on my palm where the skin is two layers less thick than on the rest of my hand, I am pretty much healed.  Well, that and the fact that my shoulders and wrist are still giving me shit.  Okay, okay, guys, I promise I’ll never crash again!

I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my time working on a temp job that Brandon was good enough to hook me up with.  It’s a pretty sweet deal… highish part-time hours (or more if I want it) at a higher pay rate than I got at my previous crap job, and the best part is that I can work from home, as well as any time during the day that I want to.  Thanks, B!

In gaming news,  Alice and I have returned to Azeroth after a month-long absence.  I thought she’d be itching to play our existing low-20s characters, but instead we started a pair of Night Elves, a priest for her and a druid for me.  To be fair, I was engaged in an epic battle in Supreme Commander when she wanted to start playing–hey, Ryan and I must hold off the forces of Supreme AI, for great justice!–so she started the priest on her own.  Anyway, druids certainly aren’t shamans, but I’m enjoying my return to the hybrid lifestyle.  I still miss my Tauren shaman on Silvermoon (now moved and still not played)!  Spells, buffs, healing, whacking things with big sticks… all in the name of protecting my priest, who insists on being a tank. 

On the chopping block today:

• Work
• Gym with Alice
• Twilight Princess

From Connie.

Terrible Twos… If you opened it, you have to do it.

Two Names You Go By:
1. Eug
2. Bolo

2. Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
1. Very Old Nautica pajama pants
2. Red shirt from Japan, advertising a brand of soap

Two of Your Favorite Things to do:
1. Operate motor vehicles (cars, motorcycles)
2. Sing

Two Things You Want Very Badly At The Moment:
1. Income that doesn’t involve wanting to kill myself every day
2. My hand to be done healing

Two pets you had/have:
1. Molly… finally, a cat of my very own!
2. Joe Newt Gingrich and Sam Nhut Pham, my fire-bellied newts… deceased

Two people who will fill this out:
1. ?
2. ???

Two things you did last night:
1. Played a game of Supreme Commander with Ryan
2. Went to Baker’s Square

Two things you did today:
1. Moderated (work!)
2. Made mac and cheese with sausage bits

Two People that live in your house:
1. Alice
2. Natalie

Two things you ate today:
1. Crispix
2. Aforementioned mac and cheese with sausage bits in

Two people you talked to last:
1. Alice
2. Brandon

Two Things You’re doing tomorrow:
1. Watching Gilmore Girls (I hope!)
2. Driving Alice somewhere, more likely than not

Two Favorite Holidays:
1. I don’t
2. like holidays

Two favorite beverages:
1. Sprite
2. Calpis