August 25, 2001

i had a friend once. he bought a four track and began writing and recording in his bedroom. after a while he ended up with what he felt was a good solid quality song. after listening to it a couple times he put on the first Papas Fritas album. he only had to get through guys don't lie before taking the tape he made, and smashing it into dozens of tiny plastic pieces.

today. i read every node i've ever submitted. node heaven and all. then, i read every node in my bookmarks. today..., today i know that feeling.

hello! today I'll be at the Oakland Chinatown Street Fair, in the Oakland Museum of California area near the fountain in that shopping plaza. So if you happen to be out and about, drop by. I'll be missing the South Bay gathering today and tomorrow because of that. Snf.

Kit stands on a cliff, facing the blood-red sea beneath a purple sky.

I've been in so much since I was born, and all I could do was whine. Complain how I hated fighting and get on the right side of things. People gave me advice, they wanted me to live to get out of the fire. Yet, I didn't leave. It's just because I don't know how to start the sequence. I knew something was wrong. I haven't tried a thing, and I knew why. I have no place in love and peace.

He takes out a flask, gives a cheer to the sky, and drinks.

Now, I have seen how people have done so much fooling around, and how they redeemed themselves. This is good. I can't see how I can live this kind of life. I don't want to fight to be like them. I know my place. It is to become a fighter all on my own. I'll fight my own battles, over and over, on and on, with no room for rest or companionship until my operational limit is done for. December 28, 2004 7:00 PM in Hong Kong time is my limit. I'm going to be decommissioned and scrapped. I don't want to fight it off. For once, I'm happy looking forward to this limit. I felt like I had a child, and I want to take care of it, raise it, tickle it and talk like a baby in front of this... plan. For once, I have drawn a line to show what I will do, and what I will not do with my life. I will be happy with what I've got.

He falls on his back, looking at the sky and smiles... A streak of clouds hover in the purple sky. Light cuts into the clouds, leading to a sunset over the blood. The sun sets, and sets, and sets.

I hope you have to never hear me whine again. It's too much on my mind too. I wanted another moment of clarity like when I talked to Ruth, but I'll have to do it on my own. I want to sleep.

Kit stands up, dusts himself off, and walks away from the cliff...

12:24

I have spent the morning listening to the long awaited new Aphex Twin album drukQs.
I never really thought of RDJ as the ½ god so many have made him up to be. I actually liked his previous album, but the "hit" singles sounded like nothing more than a bad joke played on the "electronica" trend-snobs at the expense of people who enjoyed his music in the past. And after the brilliant new Squarepusher release, AFX's similar stuff wouldn't have a chance, right?
However, I am pleased to say the new album was a pleasant surprise. It sounds like the old and new AFX styles mixed together with - as Sakke noted - heavy influences from the old Caustic Window stuff. You've got the distorted beats, spastic drill'n'bass stuff as well as the trademark Aphex Twin melodies we've come used to hear since the early days. But instead of seeming like old crap put together to make $$$, the record sounds fresh and versatile. Instead of half-serious bits released just to see if they would sell, the tunes seem like music made for the passion to make music. In my honest opinion, this is the release the die-hard fanboys have been wating for.
The guy might be full of shit giving totally bogus (not to mention unfunny) interviews and continuing the tired cryptic track title bit, but I like the album. With all the good releases so far, 2001 is looking like a great year for electronic music.

As for my own life (if any)?
I'll get back to you on that later.

Well, noding from Lynx now! I'm installing Linux on my machine, thanks to my brother being in London for holidays. I've choosed Debian after battling with Mandrake's urpmi and stuff, not being able to install Progeny successfully and trying Debian unstable and not enjoying it much.

It's kinda cool to install an operating system completely off the net, and I'm beginning to see this all apt-craze, though trying to install some recent packages (from testing), I've managed to screw up X, now I'm trying an update, hoping that having configured stable correctly testing (or even unstable, I'm hoping) will work fine. Right now it's 35m 52s to go.

Well, as you might notice, my previous daylog goes a long time away. I have been somewhat busy with my summer job (some ATG-Dynamo and Java stuff) and I've been staying away from noding for a while. Things are going quiet, I've been having a nice summer, thanks to the job's air conditioner and I really enjoy my coworkers. Having a three-month contract is just perfect for me, as I do not want to leave classes and I won't have time to get burnt there.

Anyway, I guess not having X (and being completely incompetent at Linux) as made me come back to E2... it's not as if I want to get to level 4 :).

My third daylog in a row makes me a HABITUAL DAYLOGGER! HWARF!!!

I found I don't much like doing two jobs at once.

We're under new management at my bookstore, which is a good thing because before we weren't under ANY kind of management. (Our general manager had been promoted so he was gone, and our new one was missing in action for at least a week. The old GM was supposed to be there for about three weeks but first went on vacation and then was taking care of details moving to wherever he was promoted to.) Soooo...in short, everything is disorganized, AND it sucks!

So, I'm recalling how lame I am. I'm on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet for now and unfortunately I just realized it's going to be really hard to go to my friend Ammy's birthday party and not overdo it. What the hell can you order in a restaurant that stays in such restrictions without being a stupid anal bitch and quizzing the server on what kind of cheese they put in that and whether they'll use low fat (insert substance here)? I've come to this conclusion: Fuck it. My body is not going to notice another 100 accidental calories, especially not after a lifetime of eating anything I want and a week or so on this diet. (This is actually day six of my anal monitoring, my third daylog about it, and my maybe third week of actually attempting to eat more healthfully and in such a way that I will lose weight.) So, I will order what I want, attempt to be cautious, and have nothing else the rest of the night if I feel like I probably overdid it. AND NO BIRTHDAY CAKE!!!

Today's menu:

Breakfast:
1 banana: 105 calories
1 cup of milk: 90 calories
Lunch:
10 baby carrots: 17.5 calories
1 English muffin: 120 calories
1 slice of lite cheese: 25 calories
8 fluid ounces of Sunny Delight: 120 calories
A li'l peppermint candy for lovely and fresh breath: 20 calories

Snack:
Morningstar Farms Chik Patty, fake chicken at its best: 150 calories (holy moly!)

Dinner:
I'm eating at a restaurant, as mentioned. I assume I will probably order a broccoli-mushroom-cheese pita and ask them to go light on the cheese, so here's my estimate:

1 pita pocket: 140 calories
½ cup mushrooms: 10 calories
1 cup broccoli: 40 calories
1 tablespoon Swiss cheese: 100 calories

Throw in another maybe 50 or 60 calories for nameless goo, fat, and oil that they might throw in it, or whatever. And you get:

997.5 calories. About. Maybe. Approximately. WHATEVER.

I'm a bad noder. My nodes suck. They're shlock. They're preachy. They're not informative. They're pointless. They're poorly worded. They're uninspired. They're unimportant. They're uncreative. They're unoriginal. They're just plain stupid.

At least one of those, anyway. I'm not sure which. The people who tell me this, by picking a radio selector and pushing a form submit button, don't tell me any more than that. Except for some insistant fucker who keeps soft-linking there's already a node about this into every node I write. I tried finding what node he/she meant, but I can't find them. Like my glowsticks node; I can't find another reference anywhere on E2, but this anonymous, soft-linking coward seems to think so. I probably shouldn't let it piss me off, but I'm sick of people downvoting my shitty nodes and not telling me why, and then anonymously telling me off through soft-links and then not following up with an explanation. The only time I get explanation is from editors, when they come in with the hatchet and righteously amputate the fucked-up database appendage I tried to fashion from the node-gel.

Here I am, 6 or 7 nodes to level 4, and I wonder why I bother. My nodes suck. I should just punch myself all day to drop my xp down to zero and remove myself from the silly little level game. I don't need the artificial respect of a level title; my nodes suck, anyway.

OK, that's the end of my first rant for the day. In theory, I could put that in a node entitled quit softlinking bullshit, coward or quit downvoting my sucky nodes, bitch, but I'm not a member of the E2 Elite, so I can't get away with that kind of nonsense.

---

I lost 15 pounds due to my fast. I'm sure some of it is water weight, but that's rediculous. 15 pounds in about four days, only two of which were actually spent fasting.

I start classes on Monday. I'm slightly anxious about that, because I haven't quite figured out the finances of college. I've never understood them; they work on some sort of alternate-dimensional laws of finance. I'm an ex-math-major, and I still can't comprehend how these things work. My only suspicion is that they have more to do with how the various offices and staff therein interact with one another than how much money actually comes from various places to pay for my right to work hard at proving myself for a slip of paper that earns me the right to work hard at ,proving myself for more money.

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OK, enough of an intermission. Here's my second rant of the day. I just read August 24, 2001 and stumbled across the biggest load of bullshit I've seen on here in a long time. I don't know the story, I don't know the people involved, and frankly, I don't give a shit about any of them. Apparently ophie got in some kind of fight with a bunch of other people. I dunno, I don't give a rat's ass what about or who did what to who. But here's the thing. Her node's marked for destruction. It doesn't name anybody, doesn't even really get into detail about the argument; it's blowing off of steam, of the sort that would be fine in a Daylog in more normal circumstances. Maybe, just maybe, she decided to have it nuked herself, but I haven't asked her and I don't see why she would; she could always just change it. But that's not the point. If an editor decided it didn't belong, and maybe daylogs shouldn't be used for that kind of thing, then why the hell are all of the other writeups unmarked, despite some of them actually flaming her somewhat directly? Even worse, ONE OF THEM IS C!'d. Now that's bullshit. Time for you riled-up, troll-baited, thin-skinned lusers to step back for a moment and think about that C!. Does the not-hard-linked daylog entry contribute anything to E2? Nope. It's not cool. It doesn't matter to about 99% of the users. Only you and the owners of the dick you're sucking.

Now scroll up to the top of this write-up, click on that radio button next to the (-), and vote your knee-jerk response.