Muxtape Decade Project updated. Go there and listen to songs from the 60s if you're interested. If you're not interested, then don't go there. The only person who's joined us is nathew but that's okay. Remember that you can pick any decade and do a Muxtape for it and I'll link it on that page too.

Semi-cryptic: I've been feeling the emotion that three is greater than. It is good.

I'm wondering about fireworks. Do most people experience a delay in sound? The house I grew up in was a few miles from a race track and they had fireworks twice a year. The sound of the fireworks came a few seconds after the light. I think there was also a delay when we went down to the lake to see fireworks. Last year I was pretty close, but... I wonder if most people who watch these are far enough away to hear a delay in the sound.

Reminder: If you want to join the decade project, your Muxtape for the 60s is due tomorrow. Here is mine: click here to listen to dead white people.

Humanity frustrates me sometimes... as it does to most of the rest of humanity. As I've said before, most of what I don't like about people is how badly they treat each other. I think that what Gandhi said about revenge is very obviously true. (Maybe I should learn more about Gandhi before putting so much faith in him... or maybe Ben Kingsley is all I need.) It's a bad state of affairs if we all have attitude of "anyone who does me wrong must be punished". If someone does you wrong, they probably think they're in the right; if you get your revenge, you think you're right but they think you're wrong so they want revenge against you, and then it goes on forever like that. If you act on your desire for vengeance you're pretty much asking to be hurt. Of course I'm simplifying but I think it's pretty obvious that this is generally how it goes.

It's annoying when I'm writing something and it's all planned out in my head, then I look at what I've written and it's only half done.

Today has too many degrees, but not as many as yesterday. Translation: The temperature is too high.

Today I walked to the library and sweated, because it's being hot out, although strangely I've been feeling uncomfortably cold inside, at least in the morning. I read The New Yorker because I'm an East Coast elitist. The third sentence is: "Meghan says hi." Anyway, the magazine had this article, which made me itchy, and also it says that most of our perceptions aren't derived directly from our senses, but rather the majority is constructed by our brain based on what our senses give us. This surprised and interested me. It makes me think about things; for example, interpersonal relationships. I've always been bad at those. Maybe a lot of your perceptions about someone are based not on the actual person, but what your brain fills in about them. Maybe my brain doesn't do that quite right and that's why I have trouble with people... but probably not.

At the library I got John Hodgman's book and Akira Kurasawa's adaptation of The Idiot by Dostoevsky, because I'm interested in movie adaptations of books I read (I read Dostoevsky so I must be smart) and I've heard good things about Kurosawa but I haven't seen any of his films. It was appropriate because I had just felt like an idiot. I was printing out some things to send to my mom and I couldn't figure out their new system for printing, so... well, I fiddled around with it for a while. I felt stupid about that. I felt like people were staring at me, thinking, "wow, that big bearded guy can't figure out something so easy?" That was probably imaginary. (My brain was filling things in with the wrong details.) I realize now that this is a dumb thing to feel dumb about, but being around people after walking a lot makes me very nervous. I tend to worry about people thinking I'm an idiot when I stumble about with half a brain in public, because people tend to hate idiots.

When I was walking home I thought that would be good to write about but I don't remember why. I'll just assume I was right. This whole entry took a devastatingly long time to write, because I kept getting distracted and also I've been having a hard time with words lately. There was more I wanted to write, but screw that! You don't get to see it! Ha! Blurgh.

Hi. I've been sorta working on things.

#1: Dial-A-Song tribute: slfcllednowhere was trying to get more discussion going on the They Might Be Giants newsgroup. I mentioned, without much intent, that I thought it would be neat if people made their own versions of songs on Dial-A-Song that hadn't been made into higher quality versions. People really liked this idea and it's taken off and one of the people who runs the TMBG wiki set up a page for it and stuff, so... that's cool. I will be doing the song Tumbleweed. I have enlisted kotra to do a keyboard part, which I will sing to, badly. There are also sections to play on recorder, except there is a big range of notes that will make it difficult. Maybe my mom will finally send my flute sometime soon.

#2: The Muxtape Decade Project: Something I'm doing with some friends. Instead of thinking, I will quote the blurb on the site: "Can you describe things through music? Do you like to make playlists? Can you describe a decade through a playlist? Do you want to try? Then join The Decade Project!" It might just be the three of us making Muxtapes for five weeks and that would be fun, but it would also be pretty neat if other people did it too.

I keep making websites for people that end up not being used. This is disappointing but at least I get some practice. It would be nice if I were paid for it, though. Speaking of which: Do you, readers of my LiveJournal, want to pay me to make you a website? See my site for links and stuff. (Maybe I should update that sometime.) My rates are embarrassingly low. Contact me in some manner if you're interested. (Most necessary sentence ever!)

Yesterday, I went and donated plasma and when I was done I told Twitter. A few minutes later, I got a call from a guy with a Southern-sounding accent (I have trouble placing accents) who said a bunch of nonsense to me, like "you stole my socks" and "I love you". He said we met at the plasma center and acted like I should know who he was. I rarely talk to anyone there and I certainly haven't given anyone my number except the people who work there; maybe it's in my file. The ID said he was using a private number or something. I responded in a confused manner for a while (hanging up on people isn't something I'm good at) until he asked me something like "how big is your dick?" He called back and left a message of him calling out my name and moaning really loudly for a long time, which was pretty funny. After all this happened I thought that the most logical response would be to be really creeped out by it, but I just thought it was funny. Now, though, I am kind of creeped out. I tend to be very uncomfortable when I don't know what's going on. I want to know who this was and why he did it. Obviously he was either trying to mess with me or just amuse himself. kotra says it was probably a friend of mine playing a joke but I don't know who I've given my number to would do that. I wonder if someone who likes to prank people got my number somehow and looked up my name (can you do that with cell phone numbers?) and found my Twitter from that. Maybe I'm being paranoid. There's also the possibility that someone on the plasma center staff likes to mess with people, but I think that's very unlikely.

Here is a meme. You comment asking for questions and I'll give you five questions to answer in your journal, and offer to do the same for people in your journal.

Questions from audesapere:

1. because i'm simply curious: How much do you get for donating blood? WHY WON'T ANYONE BUY MY BLOOD?
$65 a week if you do it twice a week. Most big cities probably have clinics, but I gather the place you're moving to is small so it might not.

2. Do you miss living in NY at all? If so, what do you miss?
There are lots of nostalgia-related things I miss. When I call my mom and she talks about what's been going on there (for example, the Amish family who moved in to the property next to hers; she's become friends with them, which is odd and makes sense at the same time) I feel regret at not being there, even though it was unpleasant sometimes. I have an attachment to the house I grew up in. I miss my mom too, of course. I also miss a few things about the country that can't be done in the city, like playing loud music at night and having pets that ran free. We were looking after kotra's dad's dog a while ago and it felt really unnatural how we had to take her out on a leash a few times a day and carry her poop around in a plastic bag.

3. What are you reading lately?
Right now I'm reading The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies. Before that was Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card, who writes interesting fluff. I think this is my least favorite book of his. I was annoyed by his inclusions of his political beliefs (and offended by how fundamentalist suicide bombers were equated with Islam as a whole; sometimes I get offended on other people's behalf) but I wonder if I would still be annoyed if I shared those beliefs; I like to think so. Before that was The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, which audespere sent me. This is one of the rare cases where I thought the movie adaptation was better than the book. I found the characters very interesting and there were lots of good things about the book but in general I thought it was just kind of mediocre. Before that was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, which I thought was fairly good.

4. What is something you've done lately that you're really proud of?
I'm working at a glacier's pace on a strange dreamlike video. I put together this scene which I'm really satisfied with.

5. What are the specs on your computer?
Not very good. I have 512 MB of RAM and a 1.5 GHz processor. I have about 35 GB available on my hard drive (it would be 80 GB if I got around to saving everything and reformatting to get rid of the broken partitioning) plus 60 GB from a hard drive I've been borrowing from kotra for a long time.

Hi.

I haven't felt like writing anything here in a long time. I've had thoughts but not much desire to write them out like usual. I'm not sure why.

Hmm.

Yep.

I watched this yesterday and today. It was kind of great.


Um.

Hi, here's a really weird video that I love and which keeps getting funnier every time I see it.


If you've been wondering what I've been listening to (you haven't), it's mostly just been The Mars Volta's latest album. Since it came out it's been about 80% of what I've been listening to. I occasionally get tired of it but that doesn't last long. Even after hearing each song probably hundreds of times, I still keep noticing new things. Their songs are absolutely packed with stuff. They are antiminimalist.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala (the singer/lyricist; the guy with the hair in my icon)'s favorite word must be "corpse".

I've been wondering about songwriting. I can often figure out why a story makes me feel how it does but with songs I don't understand why they sound good. It's like magic to me. I am curious to figure it out but I kind of worry that if I learned how it worked then it would lose some of its power. I would like to be a musician (a curious musician, Spencer), probably just as a hobby, if and/or when my life takes off, so maybe I will learn about this stuff in the future.

Yesterday I donated blood plasma. When I got there, instead of a movie they were playing a DVD of recent Family Guy episodes. The characters said "fuck" a few times, which startled me. It's quite a jump to go from a "viewer discretion advised" TV show kind of mentality to an R-rated one. Also, a little while ago one of the needle-sticking guys was telling a donor near me that they didn't show R-rated movies because people might object to the language, although I've seen a few R-rated movies there, but I haven't seen any after that so maybe they changed their policy and didn't realize what the Family Guy DVDs had... or maybe he just didn't know what he was talking about.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that after that I felt much more light-headed than I usually do. I was talking to my cousin and my uncle (not my cousin's father but a different uncle; he is portraying a guy with a camera in the next Batman movie) on a video chat and I must have been more boring than usual because for a lot of it I was just sort of staring off into space but I guess they didn't notice. I am rambly. I am still feeling light-headed, which makes this harder than usual to write, yet I keep writing unnecessary rambly things. Um, so it also makes me more short-tempered than usual. Have I mentioned that I absolutely despise the mocking of and animosity towards furries, emos, and other harmless groups? Yes, I have. I don't like writing about it all the time because then I feel dumb (I think my reaction is way out of proportion) but it's a constant source of aggrivation. Aggravation. It especially bothers me when it comes from people I otherwise respect.

I just keep writing, don't I? Jeez. Well, the point of all if this is to post a graph I made that describes my opinion about things, in the style of indexed and Function of (X) and sometimes xkcd:

(This isn't a good graph because there's nothing on the X axis.)

Translation: I respect silly people much more than the people who cling to them, like barnacles, in search of a cruel laugh. Also, being able to laugh at yourself is good but it doesn't make you less ridiculous. Most people probably don't feel this way.

Another thought I've been thinking: A lot of people have the attitude that taking everything seriously is bad. I agree with that, but often people take it to the opposite extreme and don't take anything seriously. I think that this is worse than taking everything seriously. What's the point of life if you take nothing seriously?

Somewhat relatedly, here is a video from the funeral of Graham Chapman of Monty Python. It contains John Cleese and Eric Idle and the other Python people in the background, as well as, I think, Douglas Adams. Graham Chapman had a great funeral.

I haven't felt like writing lately, but I wanted to link to this Ralph Nader interview.

"The smartest people ... descend to a subelementary level of analysis when it comes to the results, and the tallies. If I ask them, 'Do you think Gore won the 2000 elections?' and they say 'Yes,' I say 'Well, who took it away from him? Was it Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush and the five Republican politicians on the U.S. Supreme Court? Well then, why don't you go after them? Why are you picking on the Green Party?'"

I agree with everything he says in this interview—except I think it's kind of dumb to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Party"—and when he talks about things I don't know much about, I trust that he's right. I don't think it's good to trust someone that much, so I should probably not do that.

Also: A few days ago I plucked a giant hair out of my eyebrow. I don't know how the hell it got there. I didn't even realize it was there until kotra pointed it out.

Mike Gravel ends his political career. That sucks. I guess this is the last time I'll be using this icon.

Here's a video I just made:



Here's a really long, parentheses-filled explanation of that video:

I like playing around with musical instruments, so when kotra found his old recorder from school I played it all the time, much to his annoyance, since he's extra sensitive to loud, high-pitched noises, and I'm quite used to them after playing flute for like 12 years. Eventually I got better and learned the fingerings (which are much easier on a flute) and started playing along to songs, like Ouroborous, my favorite new one by The Mars Volta (which is what I'm playing in this video!). I decided to learn how to play the whole thing and adapted it so that it would make more sense with only the vocal melodies, since the song is packed full of instruments (you can here it hear! (yes, I did that on purpose)). I realize now that, even though I cut down on some of the repetition, it's still too repetitive. I've been wanting to make a video of this for a while—not like "hey, look at how great I am" but just as something to work towards, whether or not other people like it—but I wanted to use kotra's computer but I didn't want to do it when he was here so there weren't many opportunities to do it. I was worried that it would be visually uninteresting (though of course videos of people playing instruments usually are) but the cat jumped into my lap so that made it a lot better, even though it messed up my playing a little.

I made another video yesterday. It is here. This is intended to be part of a dream-like video full of random things, kind of like kotra's Miscellaneous videos but more scripted. I don't know if I'll finish the whole thing but this scene alone makes me very happy. I was surprised at the really strong sense of accomplishment I felt when I had it working exactly the way I wanted it. I wonder if I could get a job as a video editor, though probably any entry-level job in that area would require lots of applicable education.

I made pudding, from scratch (milk + sugar + corn start + salt + margarine + vanilla). While doing so I made use of my old Discman, which I've had for about 10 years. It no longer works right; it has trouble playing sideways so I couldn't put it in a pocket but I wasn't moving around much so that was okay. I listened to The Spine, the 2004 album by They Might Be Giants, and I was reminded that I like that album a whole lot. I think it might be my second-favorite of theirs after Flood. It came out during an unusual summer for me, which was full of ups and downs but mostly ups. I didn't have much money, as always, but I bought the mp3s from their online store. This came after sort of a lull in my liking of the band. Before this, they had been my favorite band for a long time (probably before I'd gotten that Discman) and I listened to their hundreds of songs all the time, but then I began to lose interest. Interest was renewed when The Spine came out, and I got to see them perform in Michigan (then a few months later at the college next to mine) and I was reminded how much fun they were. I guess that lasted for a year or so; now I only listen to them occasionally, though they're still my favorite band. The Mars Volta has yet to eclipse them even though they're almost all I've been listening to lately.

That was a lot more than I was planning on writing.

Today on C-SPAN was the Libertarian Party presidential debate. Seven people, including Mike Gravel, the reason I/we watched, tried to convince the delegates that they would be the best to run for president as a Libertarian. The platform of the Libertarian Party is basically freedom; mostly, freedom from the government: "Keep the government out of our wallets and out of our bedrooms." They were a bunch of anti-tax, anti-war, pro-gay rights, pro-drug legalization people. Before this I thought I agreed with half of libertarianism; now I think it's more than that. I don't like their anti-government stance. We need better government, maybe less, but almost getting rid of it, as a few of the candidates advocated, is not a thing that would be good, nor would it make us free. Mike Gravel phrased it well, as he is probably the least anti-government of them; to defend his stance on universal health care he said that if someone is without coverage then they're not really free. Government is necessary; we need to be protected through regulation (though currently, corporations are more protected by the U.S. goverment than citizens); people who need help should be given help. I can understand the notion that taxation is theft, but I don't see it that way. I prefer Jesus's "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's", which I may be misinterpreting, but people do that. I actually don't understand taxes, so here's a dumb question: Money comes from the government, so why don't they just keep some of it, instead of giving some to us and then taking some back?

kotra and his brother and his sister-in-law went to see the new Indiana Jones movie and so did I. There was a trailer for the Hellboy sequel which used Mein Herz Brennt by Rammstein; I thought that was neat. The movie itself, well... here's where I sound pretentious and maybe offend people. It was entertaining and fun to look at but it was also pretty dumb and holy hell was it ever lacking in originality. I don't usually watch this kind of mainstream movie so maybe it came as more of a surprise that it should have. I left feeling very cynical about this particular product disguised as an art form. Why do we have to keep having sequels that do nothing for us but maybe make us say, "Oh, that's pretty/funny/exciting"? There is no need for a movie that hardly contains anything new. Our culture seems to be stagnating. More than ever, we are recycling things we already know, which prevents us from growing and having meaning in our lives. (This may seem hypocritical after my last post with the Weezer video, but I generally like humorous references, and also I hold short videos to a different standard than films.) Maybe this is a result to that thing that happened a while ago that freaked everyone out where two buildings were knocked down (which of course is much more worthy of our attention than the destruction of the entire city of New Orleans). Are we so traumatized by this that we can't bear to pay for movies that we could potentially not be entirely comfortable with? It's interesting that John Hurt was in this movie as well as Dogtown, which is like the polar opposite of movies like this. (I didn't think Dogtown was great, but I thought it deserved to exist.)

Here's a video by Weezer that I think is cool. It has Internet celebrities like Tay Zonday. This is not an original idea but I still like it. It seems that trapezzoid's Potter Puppet Pals were supposed to be in there but FedEx lost them.


It looks like I stopped regularly updating again. For some reason I feel like I should write in here all the time, even if I don't have anything worthwhile to say. Today I went to the post office. On the way there, some guys were yelling at each other angrily; one was standing at a building and one was walking away, ahead of me, so I was between them. (It's probably not necessary to explain this.) The guy at the building shouted, "You're a fucking weirdo!" The guy walking ahead of me shouted, "Yeah, you're a fucking faggot punk!" Then: "Have Jake call me!" I was amused by this but tried not to smile because I thought he might have been in the mood to accost me with "what the fuck are you smiling at?" or something. At the post office I was mailing a box to a friend and I wrote the addresses on with a marker and I did it wrong, writing them upside-down or something. I felt stupid, especially since I did this twice the last time I tried to mail a box, so it ended up being covered in addresses.

Yesterday I did the blood thing. Apparently I'd gained six pounds since Tuesday... but my pants were looser than they have been in a while, to the point where it was almost uncomfortable to walk because I had to keep tugging on them. Yesterday I was back down to the Tuesday weight but now it's back up again. My body confuses me. After the bloodening I went to Fred Meyer and discovered that the alarm clocks actually are in the electronics department. Maybe they're in other places in other monster stores.

Wednesday, I talked to a guy about a job. I was very nervous about this, incredibly nervous. Knowing that it was probably obvious how nervous I was made me even more nervous. (I have trouble telling how much I communicate nonverbally. I assume anything in my head could be figured out by the right person. I blame Robert Jordan and his books full of characters who can tell how other characters are feeling based on subtle clues, which makes me worry that everyone can do that, but he died so I forgive him.) I met him at a coffee shop. I was fifteen minutes early because buses, much like busses, don't give you much leeway... at least in terms of leeway. I'm just going to assume that makes sense. When I got there, I went directly to the bathroom then came out and looked around for the guy whose picture I had hunted down but couldn't really remember. Looking at people is another thing that makes me nervous because of my glasses-needing eyesight and also I don't know if people are recognizing me or just looking at me. I didn't see him; I sat down to wait; then he came over. He was in the one place I hadn't looked and I don't know why I didn't look there. He first had me sign a non-disclosure agreement saying I wouldn't talk about his project, which is basically Grand Theft Auto but with preschoolers. Not really. He did most of the talking, explaining what he was doing and what he was going to be doing. I was sweating, which I think was mostly due to the ten blocks of walking from the place the bus let me off to the coffee shop. This probably made me seem even more nervous. I don't like it when people I don't know know I'm nervous. I feel like they know more about me than I want them to know. Know know know know. Nobody can do the shing-a-ling like I do. Uh, anyway, my impression was that due to my lack of experience he probably won't hire me as a programmer, but there's a small chance he'll ask me to be a debugger.

That's a huge wall of text. It's the kind of thing I would probably skim through if I came across it on my friends page. I'm way behind on my friends page again.

There was a big park near the coffee shop, so, feeling calm now that the thing was over, I walked through that park without aim. There was a big pond that had some ducks in it. As I was walking by I noticed that some of the ducks were at the edge of the pond near me so I walked over to look at them. Four mallards were floating there, making their duck noises. Then some other ones came over and they all made noises at each other, or perhaps at me. I wonder if they were seeing if I would feed them. I saw a sign, and it opened up my eyes, which asked us not to feed the ducks because, for one thing, then the ducks would become dependent on us, and also there were a bunch of other reasons. I don't think I've really looked at ducks much, at least not in a long time. It's cool how when they float across the water it looks like they've got motors because nothing on them seems to move since their hidden webbed feet are pushing them along. The park was nice and I thought it would be ideal for stressed-out city dwellers to unwind, except that that didn't apply to me, but then I realized I have been very stressed lately. I haven't experienced nature in a while, even the sort of artificial nature that a city park gives you. I grew up around nature—I spent many summers here—so I guess I got tired of it, which, I gather, is not the reaction most people would have.

Ducks are funny.

Talked to a guy about a job. It went okay, I think. Now I am wandering around a park, pressing buttons.

Yesterday I took my keyboard apart because it was really dirty. (I heard somewhere that the average keyboard has significantly more germs than the average toilet bowl. This must mean that toilet bowls are actually quite clean.) I unscrewed it and knocked the keys out with a screwdriver and soaked them in soapy water for a while then cleaned them off and put them back in. I've done this before with a different model and it worked fine. When I put it back together I discovered to my annoyance that some of the keys wouldn't go back up when pressed down. I studied it closely and noticed that there were tiny bits of plastic in the holes for the keys (they keyholes?) and some of them were altered slightly, thereby messing everything up. I figured out that those weren't necessary so I carved them out with a screwdriver. This took a long time so I was doing this for a while. Now it's working okay, and also it's cleaner. Yay. If our culture were less materialistic, things like this would be more easily serviceable because then we wouldn't be expected to just keep buying new things.

Today I donated plasma. I have apparently lost 10 pounds since the last time I did this, which was a week and a half ago. They were concerned about this. I told them I had been sick for a few days and I must have been eating less than usual (though I don't remember what I've been eating). They were okay with this but I'm not entirely confident that that's the explanation. Maybe it's related to all the water I've been drinking, or the soda, which would be ironic because soda is supposed to make you fatter, but maybe the caffeine increased my metabolism. I don't know about these things. I don't feel like I've lost any weight but I guess it's not a big change for someone of my weight.

I seem to have lost a friend. This makes me unhappy. Everything about it is incredibly frustrating.

There is a cat here. We are borrowing kotra's mom's cat again while she is away. Yay, cat... although this one is grumpy.

Hi, it's very hot here today. What part of "Pacific Northwest" doesn't the weather understand? Today we did some last-minute researching and filled out our Democratic primary ballots. I regret not starting this research earlier. I wrote in Mike Gravel for president. People keep telling me I shouldn't do this and I don't know how to respond. It just seems like the thing to do. I supported his campaign, so I voted for him. Anyway, I said I would. I hate it when I say I'll do something and then I don't.

We walked to the library and dropped off our ballots and sat around for a while and walked back. Did I mention it's really hot out? Yes, I did. When we got back I was sweating a great deal and I was exhausted. That was a long time and I'm still up. This is partly because of the heat and partly because I'm worried about various people. It could be that I worry too much. Oh, and now I'm feeling infuriation and disgust and disappointment. People are hard to deal with sometimes.

kotra points out that I don't respond to comments much anymore. I should probably do that because I want to encourage comments, but I often don't feel like I have anything worthwhile with which to respond.

Today's post contains swearing! Yay!

Yesterday I was feeling crappy... I mean, shitty, but now I feel fine except my nose is stuffy and everything smells wrong. The last time this happened I couldn't smell anything. This seems to be the only kind of sickness I get: sore throat, runny nose, head hurting. Oh well. Maybe something more interesting will happen to me in the future.

I still seem to have the bad mood I had yesterday. Somehow I'm annoyed at everyone. I try not to let this affect how I deal with people, because I'm aware that it's my fault I'm annoyed so I think to do so would be stupid, though it seems like that's what normal people do. Conclusion: Normal people are stupid.

Here's an angry rant to reflect my mood. If you've read my journal a lot then you're probably aware that one thing I absolutely despise is the cuture of hatred towards the mythical beast known as the "emo". (I'm probably going to repeat stuff I've said already but oh well.) My hatred for this is such that if I hear someone complaining about how they hate emos, I automatically think they're an asshole, which may be unfair. I think it's just a lame excuse to treat people like shit under the guise of "They're complaining about things I don't think they should complain about! This is absolutely horrible! The only possible response is to be a dick!" The excuse itself is stupid but what it excuses is worse: Anyone who complains about anything can be given the label of emo. The result of this is that sometimes people are afraid to express feelings—to be humans instead of emotionless drones—because they don't want people to think they're emo. You're not one of us! Conform or die! It's similar to homophobia but for people who like to pretend they're smarter than that. This is one of the things that make me sick of humanity (specifically, humanity's inhumanity towards itself) and wish I could just cut off communication with everyone. Of course, there are lots of things that make me wish that, and of course, it's not going to happen. I like people too much, which is why I hate them.

Anyway, here is a comic that seems to agree with me.


Um, so, politics. I should really be a hypocrite and fill out my Democratic Party primary thing. Mike Gravel isn't on there, which is disappointing; I figured they'd still have people who ended their campaigns. I will have to write him in. He's the only reason I registered as a Democrat anyway. I think I will also be voting for Steve Novick because he's a hobbit pirate and Teddy Keizer because I talked to him in person. (Note: these are not my real reasons.) I should research all the other people at some point. Boo, homework.

Being sick means never having to say you're lazy.

Here is some awesome:


This site is funny.

Hi. Also, this.

Tonight I feverishly watched this guy talk for about three hours:

That is, of course, Ralph Nader, and I am, of course, good at taking pictures. He looked like that to me anyway since I have crappy eyesight.

He said a ton of things I agreed with and a few things I disagreed with. Mostly, it was good. Yay, Nader.

kotra asked him one of the questions I mentioned earlier. I didn't feel like asking it and he seemed to think it was a good question. The result was kind of awkward and resulted in the shortest answer of the night. Oh well. Here's a video.



Here's an incomplete transcript if you're having trouble understanding the low quality audio. ( Read more... )

I begin to feel sick. This is all Ralph Nader's fault, because I've been losing sleep in order to make sure I'm awake for his thing tomorrow. Also, this is surprising:

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader may influence voters across party lines come November, according to the Diageo/Hotline poll -- contrary to the assumption that he could be a spoiler to the Democratic Party only. When respondents were asked who they would vote for in the general election between McCain, Nader and either Obama or Clinton, Nader pulled roughly the same percentage of voters from both parties.

It's good to hear but I don't understand why Republicans would want to vote for him.

Here's another book meme. Actually, it's the same as the one I did before, but I'm using a different list.

The meme:
The following list contains, according to Modern Library in 1998, the best English-language novels of the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Library_100_Best_Novels
Bold the ones you've read.
Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Underline the ones you own but haven't read yet. ( Read more... )

Of course this list has its flaws but I think it's interesting to do this with a list that has a different intent. We were given this in 11th grade and had to choose one of the books to read. I picked Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, who had recently died.