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Semester is coming to an end. Shit.

My life is very (very) strange right now.

And so is politics. If only we could lock misters BushGore in a closet and elect somebody worth it as president instead of either of these two.

I’m forbidding myself from playing Ultima IX for a while. I’m spending too much time on it right now — I have too many other things to do. The game is huge compared to games like King’s Quest, Tomb Raider, etc. Wow. Aside from Riven, best game I’ve played.

Oh shit, I’m late for an appointment. Got to go.

Wow, I just wasted another four hours I don’t have playing Ultima IX. In my opinion, it’s the best game I’ve ever played, because of the environment mapping. I can’t get over how big the seamless environment is. I am trying to keep a detailed map, but it’s almost impossible.

It’s all a kind of escapism to try to get away from life, from class, from women… If I had lots of cash, I’d probably be out shopping instead.

Publisher still hasn’t paid me. I’m owed many thousands. Now I’m getting desperate. I don’t think I’ll write more until they cough up the checks they’ve owed me for over a month.

Spent all day (just about) with election coverage on the tube behind me, playing Ultima IX: Ascention and listening to Saucer-Like on Washing Machine over and over again. I also drank way too much wassail. Nifty stuff. I doctored it with some extra cloves and nutmeg just for fun.

Counting is winding down on the tube.

The holidays are here. Things are pretty and a little sad…

Oh, shit! Homework! Once again, got to go.

Thanksgiving day. I went with my family to visit my mother’s brother a few cities to the south. I spent a full three hours arguing with him about politics and religion and only afterward found out that everyone in the house was hiding in another room together because they didn’t want to be dragged into the fight. It’s good for a laugh.

Now I’ve spent most of the night working on my system. I’ve been bitten by the Athlon power requirements problem. My system’s been unstable since adding 256MB memory and moving to a server case a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been re-arranging PCI cards, adjusting BIOS and core voltage settings and moving and removing memory modules for hours, but I could always get a hard lock with heavy AGP activity.

Finally, in desperation, I dropped the 400 watt power supply out of the new case and tossed in the 400 watt power supply from my old tower case. Voila. No hard locks. That makes two out of my last three power supplies that my Athlon couldn’t cook with. Hungry chip.

So now, I’m watching election coverage in the wee hours and having a turkey sandwich. It’s late November — time to do such things. Stable system again, no school tomorrow, trunk full of turkey, neon flashing on the wall… life is good. Ahhhhhh…

I know. I’m going to hit Napster for a minute and grab We Can Work It Out by The Beatles. Perfect. Got to go.

Ahhh… A break from school for a couple of days. Nice. I’m going to spend some more time this weekend working on the site, to try and fill in some of those 404 blanks that exist right now.

Last night, I played around with a little hardware. Official verdict: an i486DX/33 with two 3c509B cards and 256k cache is officially too slow to act as a firewall/router with a 2.0 kernel if you want to pull more than 100KBps.

Meanwhile, I’m finding Florida more and more ridiculous. After this is all said and done, I think we should aim some of those ICBM’s that are still pointing at Vladmir Putin and use them instead to sink Florida.

“More people in this election intended to vote for Al Gore, and that is why he should win.”

Que?! Hello, folks!

The law doesn’t give a damn what people intended to do, it only concerns itself with what people have actually done. You can’t count an intended vote, you idiots!

Hell, if I could get rid of my federal tax debt just by intending to pay it off, I’d say we ought to give Al Gore the shit in a second. But somehow I’m guessing that if he won because he thought somebody somewhere intended to vote for him, I’d still owe my big, huge tax debt, regardless of what my intentions were.

What the hell is this, affirmative action of intentions? I’m about to go become a skinhead.

Outside, in the snow somewhere, two souls are still wandering…

Hmm… Reading my last entry. Not very coherent. My fault — I’d just spent like 36 hours straight watching election (post-election?) coverage. I’m awake now. Sort of.

I’ve just spent the rest of my weekend working to catch up on all the work that I’ve been trying to catch up on. Chapters 7-11 submitted now. I’m supposed to have 12 and 13 tomorrow as well, but it may take me tomorrow and the next day, really. Kerberos, here I come. At least I’m done with ipchains and iptables. Ugh. They’re both so clumsy, they give me a headache.

Hmm… I don’t think anyone knows what I’m talking about there. I’m having a technology-centric couple of weeks. I guess it’s because I’m writing tech stuff right now. Got the box up to 450 megs RAM and got the SCSI drives RAIDing. Also bought a game on eBay that I looked for years ago and could never find.

Bought a set of four Guinness pint glasses on eBay as well and have been enjoying them all week. Wonder if my tech writing has been suffering…? Guess I’ll find out when the editors get back to me.

“The voice of the people.”

“The voice of the people.”

“The voice of the people.”

Has anyone noticed that we are sounding an awful lot like communist China or Soviet Russia again? And our transition of power is looking about as shaky, too. Until now, I’ve been neutral because no party had pissed me off enough to cause me to support the other, but that has now changed. The Democratic party has pissed me off now, especially if America suffers a revolution because of this.

(Think it’s not possible? Watch.)

What do they think this is? The eastern bloc? Keep recounting and voting and buying people off until the “right” man is elected and “the voice of the people” has spoken? Nader is right, this whole damn thing is corrupt.

I’m a minority officially. But I’m on the verge of hating minorities because they hate white people so much and the government so much that they are about to start a race war and a political revolution just to make their point. Who do they think they are?

Plus, it makes me laugh that Clinton and Gore, two men who desperately want to be remembered by history in the presidential context, will probably go down in history as the president/vice president pair responsible for two of the three largest constitutional crises of the last hundred years.

Today I got a lovely surprise from the UPS guy… Four copies of my first book… in Japanese! Apparently, I’ve been translated. (Publishers can do that without telling you; it’s in the contract.) It’s very wierd to see four hundred pages of my own work in a language I can’t read.

Sushi! Hibachi! Saki! Wasabi!

That’s all of the Japanese I know right now. Later on, after I learn Japanese fluently, I’ll read my book and be impressed with myself…

So many people are complaining about the electoral college at this point that we will probably loose it. Polling shows that it will likely be eliminated via a constitutional amendment.

Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that it has actually performed correctly, just as the founding fathers intended. Notice that most of the states (30 of them) went Bush, though many of the big states (New York, California, etc.) went Gore. The founding fathers put the electoral college in place to ensure that the smaller states would be heard rather than simply being rolled over by the big states.

If we elect purely on popular vote rather than on electoral vote, the voice of a small state like Montana will never matter again, because the vote power of the huge population in California will completely overshadow it. Of course, the problem here is that most of the population in these big states will now be very upset that their candidate has lost and will probably have enough votes in congress to amend the constitution to give themselves more power!

This is not what the founding fathers wanted, despite what the news media are pushing.

No doubt about it, G.W. lays down madder rhymes than Gore.

A lot of work to be done over the next few days. I have an entire fourth of a book to write, plus a paper, several workshops, a presentation on a work of German literature, and a few films to see. I should be very stressed, and in a way I am, but *shrug* mostly I’m not.

I’m having a little trouble understanding what’s real. I keep watching my legs as I walk and seeing them going forward, then backward… And I wonder, “when will these jeans wear out?”

So I’ve been drinking huge pots of green tea all night, alternating with pints of Guinness. Earlier, I spent a couple of hours sleeping with my sister’s Beagle, who licks a lot. Plato would have liked her, I think? I don’t know.

Sunday.

I’m going to take the bus from now on. It’s winter and I want to see the city. I want to see everyone’s breath and all of the coats. I want to get wet. I want to be cold. I love, you Winter.

I am down to having no friends and a two-week pile of continuous work again. The revolving people-door spins quickly in my case, and my lifestyle isn’t of the sort that can keep new faces flowing into it all of the time. I can feel myself slowly becoming strange, isolated, like the people who commit odd crimes and later appear on television when they get the death penalty. In order to keep a decent friend-count at any time in spite of the movement of life, one must have regular contact with new people in some environment outside of the context of “drinks with friends” that one already has. Generally, this environment is work or maybe this hobby or that pastime. I have no work outside my small cubicle because I am fully independent. Work is nobody other than me, me and me. I have no hobbies and no pastimes other than chewing on my teeth and looking out the window. I’ve never liked to do anything, much less to do it with anybody. I was always a creepy kid. Now I’ve become a creepy adult.

Not good. My isolation will kill me, sooner or later. Maybe this is why I like to drink so much lately — I hate having people everywhere, but I hate being alone as well. Anybody want to give me advice?

It may be impossible to continue at this work rate in total isolation for very long. But on the other hand, the only way to get out of total isolation is to give up most of the work. If I do that, there’s no reason for me to un-isolate myself anymore. Catch-22.

Haha.

The holidays approach. I begin to feel a little lonely. Sometimes, I think that a man should have a wife and a job that makes him sweat and that’s all he needs. I don’t have either and now while it is a little cold and wet, I begin to want companionship…

Unfortunately, I am a man and I know that the inevitable is still true: as soon as I have companionship, I will wish that I’d never sought it ought.

The barre chords are coming along.

I can remember —

I don’t want to remember. There are things better not remembered. I’ll have another drink and close my eyes and wonder what’ll come next — where I’m going — if I can. But you see, inside… inside, I am playing in the leaves. It is autumn and I am nine years old — nine! — and everything I see around me is beautiful and safe, touched by the hands of angels… we are playing in the leaves, my black dog and I. Somewhere… somewhere where I’m not crying, he isn’t dead yet and my grandparents aren’t dead yet and my uncle isn’t dead yet and my parents aren’t old yet and I’m not old yet and I don’t know anything, anything, anything, anything, anything, anything…

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