maitriaya

"these are crazy days but they make me shine"

reading back through this thing to find an old entry I feel like I used this journal to be abusive and mean to my friends and people I really care about. I'm sorry. It's long past, but I don't feel any better about it. I wish I could make it through this life without hurting anyone by speaking without thinking, but it's taking me a long time to improve at it.

being sick is less good than not being sick
news fucking flash

unemployment and depression are a terrible combination. On the upside, a huge amount of money I've been waiting for is finally arriving in 3 business days. I have a variety of personal projects I want to work on real bad and you the reader can help me with a couple.
First I'm working on a board game I want to get finished because I've got a lot done for it. Anything anyone wants to add would be loved, I'd really like to organize some kind of think tank or something for it. Soon I could provide pizza or something.
Second, I'm doing the nano. I'm a little behind, but it'll get done. I'm happy about that much. If anyone wants to read unedited wall of text, I can send them something to read mebbe.
lastly, in order to keep myself seeing friends and people I am proposing another game. Kevin got me thinking about a campaign I'd like to run and we're probably going to do it in 3.5. Looking for one or two people to join, thinking of keeping it small, but the basic idea is a kind of political intrigue campaign with dark investigative elements.

Otherwise it's mostly videogames. Wish I had enough money to afford more but hey

so tomorrow morning I'm going home for a few days. I hope to visit some people, maybe get my spirits back up. if I can shake this, then I think everything will be just fine.

I don't use this thing anymore or indeed talk to anyone anymore I guess but saturday is my birthday and you should come over around noon or so and we can play board games and have snacks and watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and then go to montage. I think that'd be really fun and I'd love for people to do that.

expect an energetic and exciting post full of how much I love Batman: Arkham Asylum and how it's basically the best video game ever made in my argument. Also other things, just too tired these days.

The first day of August marked the beginning of Gambast, the festival of animals. For one month, Tristram and his fellow Just ascetics fasted during the daylight and eschewed the human gift of speech.
Tristram spent his first Gambast as a follower of Caliban meditating on the loss of his family, and the lessons of sacrifice. A year later, he spent Gambast in study, copying texts on the verge of collapse. For long days, he would take down the verses, sometimes forgetting to eat or sleep until the candles burnt out. Sometimes, even, he would just remain in the library, waiting patiently for daybreak to give him enough light to continue his work. He fasted devoutly, and never spoke a single word.
After the conclusion of Gambast, Tristram continued in his new ways, scribing until the point of complete exhaustion. A member of the cleaning staff was dispatched daily to check that he was eating enough to survive, and to scold him on the unmolested state of his bedding.
For a while it was joked, in the stale and dusty way that the monks of Caliban joke, that his title and assignment of "Just" would be revoked and replaced with the more suitable, "Emphatic." The Emphatic Brothers joked that he would put them to shame.
Now, two years later, as Gambast breaks against September, Tristram has decided at long last to end his silence.
But now, he finds, he has nothing at all to say.

if you have some sort of opinion on the new health care plan and you haven't read some of the stuff on factcheck.org I'd advise you to suspend your opinion until you do.

so yeah, anytime after like 3 is fine, I'll have my room a bit cleared up by then.

I miss Trinity a lot.
We went out to the coast for a couple days, and it was great. Saw the aquarium, and the beach, and it was like 50 degrees cooler than portland.
Newport is nice.
Went to the tillamook factory, had ice cream.
Our room was a spa room, it had a giant tub with jets, a king size bed, a fireplace, a kitchenette, the works. God it ruled. It was just so perfect.
Now it's a billion degrees, I'm packing up all my junk to move tomorrow while the sun rests directly on top of my shoulders, and she went home to sleep (I hope).
It was so wonderful, so free from anxiety or worries. I had the greatest time. I always do with her.
I miss you a lot Trinity.

before I lay me down to rest I feel like writing a little here about something I really like.
People like to talk about Alan Moore. Obviously the favorite topics of discussion are Watchmen and V for Vendetta, not only because they've been made into blockbuster spectaculars that didn't suck, but because they're probably his most popular of works. Respectable, I love both of them. I love Top Ten, Smax, Miracleman, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Promethea as well. But what I wanna talk about right now is the underdiscussed and underrated piece of brilliance that is From Hell.
I dunno, maybe it's overlooked because the movie was a pile of barf, but From Hell is my favorite Alan Moore book of all time.
The first baffling thing about the comic is that he sat down, took all the events, facts, observations, random trivia, bizarre arcane histories, and everything even remotely related to late 1800's london and jack the ripper and decided to form it into a story. The first laugh is when you realize that, in a story about masons and their role as the self-appointed "architects of history" (see: the chapter where Nettley is introduced to Gull, Nettley is forced to endure a long rambling history of london, the dionysiac architects, and man's role in stealing religion and mysticism away from women in order to strip them of their sex's power.), we're dealing with a writer who has actually taken history and shaped it into a creative work OMG LIKE AN ARCHITECT SAM!!!?!>!
The way the story shifts from person to person is fascinating. From the prince of wales we meet sickert. from sickert we meet the ladies. from the ladies back to sickert. from sickert to the queen. from the queen to gull. from gull to the higher ups in the police. from the bosses to abberline. from abberline to the women. The narrative snakes around, telling so many stories, but all essentially the same one. And all the little details are there and they're fascinating. People discovering the bodies, thinking they're just drunks. The hysteria and misinformation spread and those that profit from it. Everywhere there's a plot and an angle. Everyone has their own story, Gull doing his great work at the bidding of Jahbulon, Abberline losing himself while trying to solve an unsolvable riddle, the ladies trying to free themselves from a force they could never understand.
That's what's good in the book, there's a level of empathy for the characters that you gain through context the movie was too busy to provide. The movie took the confused and unwilling Abberline and turned him into the mystical police officer that sees the future in intoxication, and tried to turn the murderer into a mystery man in order to "thrill." In these places the book has humans, a befuddled detective forced to solve a mystery he doesn't want to confront, and a widow's son raised to the highest service of the queen. There's no superhuman powers or mystery to the book. It works better for the story to just put it all out there.
Also, it's totally cool when you realize that "Who will help the widow's son?" (supposedly the secret distress call of one mason to another) actually applies literally to a few of the characters in the book. There's all these little clever ironies and double-meanings hidden throughout the book that you can find every time you read the book. And damn should you reread it. It's like a billion pages long and there's about 9 panels on a page max. There's so much there that you just can't absorb it all. I find myself going back all the time when I read it.

Yeah I'm gushing, but it's just such a good book and I felt like writing something positive. I could keep going on about things I love about this book, I could edit this and make the writing clear and reasonable, but I'll borrow a line from the damn book:

"Invoke not Reason. In the end it is too small a deity."

So yeah. On friday I will be kicking off a month of temporary unemployment. My work is remodeling and there's no job for me to do, so I'll be hanging around. There'll be lots of hanging out to do. I think I'll start doing monday games as soon as I can, I've got a good one slated. So let's all have some fun. Goodnight and may god bless.

omg placebo is playing in september

I've finished a lot of books without talking about them here, so here's some quick impressions of what I've read this year:

Gravity's Rainbow - Super fun to read, the prose was all the hell over the place and the stream of consciousness actually led somewhere.

Ulysses - An exercise in headache induction wrapped inside some of the most poignant and poetic text. Read just for the love of reading, not for constructs like "plot" and "character development". Plot is an overrated device anyways.

Spook Country  - Gibson is still gibson, even when he's not writing cyberpunk. That's a good thing.

A Wild Sheep Chase - Really interesting and well written, I had to reread the last 100 or so pages because it threw me.

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Probably my favorite Murakami book of all time, and definitely in the top ten of books. It's like cyberpunk Haibane Renmei written by Kafka and Gibson.

The Sound and the Fury - Holy crap is this book ever enjoyable. Seriously, read this.

Swann's Way - Read this too. I need to read all the books in the series, but damn if this one didn't have me trapped in irresistibly beautiful melancholy.

Blue Angel - my first  book by Francine Prose, and I'm ready to read the rest by her. Incredibly funny and accurate satire of college writing courses.

then there's an infinity sized pile of  Osamu Tezuka stuff like Black Jack,  Phoenix, Buddha, Dororo, and the slightly related manga "Pluto" which is just completely fantastic.

Overall, reading for the enjoyment is going well. Marquez is next, the comes maybe some Cormac McCarthy and Robert Bolano.

In other news, life goes on. Work is work, but it pays. Weekend was fun, lots of fireworks and fine whiskey. I feel like I'm ready to settle into retirement and spend my days reading and eating/drinking.

I'm thinking saturdays for an alternity game of some sort, either that or mondays. Those are pretty much my only free days on a weekly basis, but if you've got suggestions I might be able to work.
I need to find more time to write. That's a fact.