Funnel Cake

Regular readers of this journal may have noticed the lack of updates about my daily activity, including some fairly significant things I've done. I'm not sure whether I should feel good that I've been too busy to write what I've been doing or whether I should feel bad for not obsessively blogging instead of doing. I've got several long posts floating around my head dating back to the Conference on World Affairs last April. I thought I was going to knock them all out after I graduated, but that hasn't really happened. So this is a random collection of statements. The lack of inclusion of something doesn't mean it's not important, and vice versa.

It's currently Chinese New Year, so I'll take this opportunity to write down several goals for the coming year.

• Get a car. This has been on my list for the last several months, but now it'll step up in importance. The G bus goes from Boulder to Denver West, but it only runs during rush hour. I'm fine with getting two hours of reading in each day rather than getting annoyed at traffic, but the utility of a car will increase regardless. Plus, when I move out I won't be able to borrow my mom's car. After talking with my dad, we're starting to look for used automatic station wagonesque car. Something I can take camping, use to transport my bicycle, sleep in if the need arises, and so forth. Probably something with 4WD and made in the last 5 or 6 years. In a couple years I may buy a hybrid, but the outlay required for a new car when I don't have a particularly strong sense of what sort of car I really need at this point would be unwise.
• Get an apartment. In the Golden/Lakewood/Wheat Ridge west Denver metro area. This has subgoals of things like developing my mostly nonexistent cooking skills, figuring out how to manage bills and deal with service providers, provide a welcoming environment to host friendly gatherings.
• Budget and save. I'll be making enough to have the funds to do and acquire everything I want to, but I want to make sure I make wise fiscal decisions and save money so that I can do something suitably interesting in a few years. Perhaps hitting the road for extensive travel, moving somewhere new, or writing Free software full time :-)
• Be politically active. I haven't engaged in political or social activism since helping run the CU Green Party group in 2000. I've maintained an academic interest in what's going on and voted based on careful consideration, but I've been too busy with school to get involved on the ground. Once I move I'd like to find some appropriate local concerns to connect with. I also hope to play my own small role in this year's general election, but I'm not sure what vehicle that activity will travel in. If the Democrats can convince me that their nominee is genuinely committed to what I care about, I may help get his message out. This is not, however, a given. I'm more likely to sign on to the Dean campaign than to follow Clark, and wooing my energy (or even vote) in support of Lieberman is probably a lost cause. I may, however, eschew the Democrats for the Greens or the Libertarians. Last I heard the Green Party is still considering whether to run for president this year. Nader has decided not to run, which I think is a good thing even if the present administration weren't so extreme. This may be a quiet year from the Greens on a national scale, but I hope they use the opportunity to run a lot of legislature candidates. I think that's the best level to build a party, and it can be helped by big (though electorally unsuccessful) candidates. The Libertarian Party realizes this, and I may get involved with them to help expand the political environment, challenge people who might uncritically vote Republican because they're against Big Government, and work on issues that neither major party is addressing like drug legalization. Even though I disagree with some of the fundamental libertarian philosophy and several of their major positions, I admire the LP's philosophically-based politics (unlike the Elephants and Donkeys who practice power-based politics) and ability to present a clear populist message.
• Find a charming Flwydess. Or at least ask a girl out once or twice. I can no longer use the "I'm in school, I don't have time to devote to a girlfriend" excuse nor the "All of my activities and social groups are 90-100% men" explanation, so all I can fall back on now are "I haven't gotten to know anyone that's induced the $self->fallInLove() method" or "I'm a geek without proper social training, so I'm not sure how to go about asking a girl out." I've been told I did a good job before, but that was after falling in love. I don't know how to say "Would you like to see a movie? ... I'm feeling fat and sassy" or "Would you like to go out to lunch?" Perhaps this is because I rarely go out to movies or lunch anyway, so I'd feel like I was creating an excuse of a situation.
• Develop software in my spare time. This is how to tell you have the right job: you get paid to do something during the day and then you go home and do something similar because you enjoy it so much. I've got a few ideas for programs I'd like to work on, and it'll provide an opportunity to hone the skills (perl, say) I don't end up using at work.
• Reenter the gaming community. I haven't played a CCG regularly since 2000. I haven't been in a regular RPG in almost as long. I don't think I've been to a gaming convention since Tacticon '99. Or maybe it was 2000. Now that I've got a job, I'll be able to afford a CCG habit in a way I couldn't before. I'll have to explore the Denver hobby shops and game stores. I think the Denver Shadowfist community is still fairly active. L5R interest seems to have dropped, but I'll bet there are still pockets here and there. And who knows what cool games have come out in the last three years. I've played a little Game of Thrones with Keith and it seems pretty neat. (Note to self: bring Hedge Knight deck on Wednesday so I can get my ass beat and lose more cards.) I'd also like to run (or play in) a regular RPG. I have limited GM experience but I've got some liberal gaming philosophies and with a little refreshing I'd be all over running Over the Edge, 7th Sea, Feng Shui, D&D, d20 something, or something else freeform and odd. I also wonder if there's a LARP community in Denver that leans more toward the Interactive Literature vein than then World/System side of the fence where Vampires live. Not that I wouldn't be interested in WoD games, but I love one-shot fairly freeform LARPs. I may attend Genghis Con next month; there's a weekend-long LARP and a couple card tournaments I'd be down with. We'll see how things look when I start work, though.
• Travel and explore. I'll have close to 15 days off this year. I'll certainly use two (maybe three) for Dragonfest. I might use four or five for GenCon the next week. Perhaps I'll use one here or there to hit a Kotei or two, though the closest one is over 12 hours away and the one for my region isn't even in my region. Alternatively, I might do better to explore the desert with that time. I feel drawn to southern Arizona, central Nevada, Death Valley, the Mojave, and the rest of that dry land. It's a choice between geeking out with friends I haven't seen in a long time (if ever) and exploring the solitude of austerely beautiful land. Whenever we receive a National Geographic with an article about an inhospitable area I grab the magazine and stare at the pictures in a way most people only experience with a Playboy. I do have something of a geography fetish.
• Read more. I'm already on top of this one. I finished Return of the King and need to get around to watching it with a trained eye. After 15 semesters, I impulsively went to the bookstore in early January. I purchased Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Salmon of Doubt, Perl Cookbook, Twenty Year's After (finaly; local bookstores sell Dumas as if Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo, and Man in the Iron Mask were his only works) and Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions. If I'd only had a semester with a reading list like that. Darwin's Cathedral has proved clearly-reasoned, well-researched, and carefully-presented. My only complaint so far is that Wilson hasn't provided his definition of religion, though he carefully laid out a clear conception of evolution. So it's unclear how much of what he says applies to what I do when I say I'm being religious. Salmon of Doubt is a collection of essays, articles, and other bits lying about Douglas Adams's hard drive when his heart, in a desperate attempt to deprive humanity, lept up and throttled his brain. The book's short entities and Adams's light-hearted style make for good reading on my 10 minute bus rides to and from work. I haven't gotten to the collected pieces of what was to be The Salmon of Doubt. My reading speed still sucks, so I'm starting books at a much higher rate than I'm finishing them. From this summer I've still got bookmarks in The Mind of the Raven, Spiraldance, Don Quixote, the collected short stories of Franz Kafka, and Dracula, though that's only a couple pages in. And on my shelf I have an impressive collection of books that I've started or have hoped to start, ranging from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Ulysses to several of Nietzsche's works to Consciousness Explained (or, as Merlin Donald sniped, Consciousness Explained Away) Dune and Dune Messiah. (I read Dune in middle school and loved all the desert parts and then got turned off at the end so didn't pursue the rest of the series. I'd like to give it another go.)
• Start a new circle. I came up with a good name for my approach to group religion -- the Potluck Tradition. Green Sabbat, the circle I've been a part of since the summer of 2000, formed by several months of essentially open invitation and some herding from Heather. But unlike a lot of religious groups, Heather didn't want power or even to be considered a leader or "special;" she had no interest in being a High Priestess, she wanted to help us share and grow so that now we are all Priests and Priestesses among equals. So rather than a leader-giving/follower-receiving model, taken over time our rituals were more like a potluck. On a full moon one person would find or invent a ritual to share with the group. Two weeks later, someone else would lead us in a new moon ceremony. Not long after, two or three people would organize a holiday celebration, often inviting the public. In this way, everyone learned from everyone else, everyone learned from themselves, we've been resilient to people moving on, we've had a sense of experimentation and feedback, and no one had the stress of planning ritual moon in and moon out. So once I'm situated in the Denver area, I'd like to play Johnny Circleseed and gather some interested people together and see what takes shape.

I start my new job a week from Monday. On Friday at 5:30 I finally got the code I've been working on lately to a state where the whole system can be tested. I'm aware of several bugs and missing features and hopefully I can have the whole thing working perfectly, and sporting intelligible documentation, by this Friday. I think I'm going to set my alarm for 7 (instead of 9) to get a running start for my new job. I'm to show up on 2/2 at 8am; I may be able to arrive later on a regular basis, but my academic ways free of commitments before 10am are probably over for quite some time.

Speaking of which, this weekend was probably my last chance to stay up really late. On Friday I watched Amélie with malakim_angel and several of his friends. After the sensible people left, we listened to some music with visualization and I induced the downloading of Bushwhacked, Rocked by Rape, and The Letter U and the Numeral 2. (Oh yeah, Gabe... mlechan is the journal of the fabulous gaijin teaching English right now.) I finally returned home at 3, I think.

On Saturday I helped my mom set up for the Colorado Welsh Society's St. Dwynwen's Day (sort of a Welsh St. Valentine) celebration. I forgot to bring my camera, so I couldn't take pictures of St. Andrew's Church, but it was neat. I then took my mom's car and tried to find several items at FlatIron Crossing which I saw a month and a half ago, but which are no longer present. I also learned that the Wizards of the Coast store there is closing on Wednesday, so I bought a D&D Player's Handbook version 3.5 at a 30% discount. Even though I've been in a few 3rd Edition games, I hadn't acquired new AD&D books since high school. I've been a poor gamer geek exemplar for essentially the entirety of the d20 System's life, and the rules are a bit fuzzy to me and I still think of characters exclusively in terms of 2nd Edition mechanics. So I figure a 3.5 PHB is a handy thing to have. However, after several stores over multiple days I struck out in finding the several ideas I had for birthday gifts for shadowpryde, so I'll have to surprise her later. The part of her party I was present for was at the least entertaining. It's been too long since I've been in a room with five or more other individuals whose brains take every utterance and try to determine the minimum-edit-distance to another strange word. Yay for Pun Parties! The main activity that occurred while I was present was introductions, which was a 45-minute affair in which the audience induced the hostess to consume a blender's worth of alcoholic ice cream and subsequently vomit. I was sorry to leave before things heated up, but I departed from new friends to old friends, driving from south Aurora to downtown Denver, noting 3 Arby's and 4 Good Times. I'm starting to feel pretty comfortable behind the wheel, but downtown Denver and I have not made friends. Fortunately traffic and cops were all elsewhere (and I hadn't had anything to drink yet). I made a left turn on red onto what I subsequently discovered was a two-way street. I then almost turned the wrong way onto a one-way street from two lanes over on a red light. As I pulled up near where I thought my destination was my wheel smacked the curb, my hand jolted and bumped the horn, and I looked around with dread hoping that the person honking at me hadn't hit something. Roight. Deep breath time. After a little wandering I found the focal Arby's and Josh's apartment. I met Josh in middle school through Computer Club. He was the first person to introduce me to Magic: The Gathering in the fall of 1993. It didn't make any sense to me at the time because (1) we only played for a few minutes, (2) early Magic was not as beginner-friendly as it is today, (3) I did what I was told without knowing why, and (4) I drew a Chaos Orb and made the mistake of trying to figure out what it did. Computer Club had many other defining moments in my development which I may write about in the future. Josh's personality doesn't seem to have changed much since I last spent time with him in high school, though he's significantly more mature. (I think I may be less mature in some ways than I was in middle and high school. But that's also another post.) Josh works for an organic wine importer, so I had a few very tasty glasses before engaging in wide-ranging discussion while I returned to a legal BAC. I finally climbed into my hammock at 4am.

During Gabe's party I shared what I have so far of the Top Ten Movies Everyone Should See. This isn't just a list of my favorite movies, because I think there are lots of movies that I dig but that some people shouldn't watch. Requiem for a Dream is a prime example. So for your edification, in no particular order, a work in progress:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Not only is this a hilarious dark comedy starting lots of great actors having a good time (including a very young James Earl Jones), this movie illustrates in an approachable and cutting way a way of thinking with major historical importance which was, quite simply, MAD.

Koyaanisqatsi

This film demonstrates the power of carefully selected moving visual imagery without words. It helps the viewer step back and turn a queer and reflective eye to everyday life.

Dark Days

This is quite simply the most powerful documentary I have ever seen. There are probably more important documentaries, there are certainly documentaries that were better produced. But I've never seen anything that taps into the raw reality and amazing power of life like Dark Days, which tells the story of people who (used to) live in abandoned subway tunnels under New York City. It may be so powerful because, like a good anthropologist, the director lived with the film's subjects. But he went one up on the anthros. He wasn't a filmmaker looking for a project. As a young adult, recently out of school and arrived in America from Britain, he moved down there because he was fascinated and made friends with the folks. One day someone said "Somebody should make a movie about us." "I could, I guess." It's an entirely organic and honest film.

Modern Times

A Charlie Chaplin film made in the Talkie Era, so it's got sound, but the only dialog comes from a record player. This film is my favorite physical comedy exemplar, and uses sound brilliantly without abandoning the soul of silent comedy.

Duck Soup

I think everyone should see at least one Marx Brothers movie; this one is widely considered their best. I list it especially because of the mirror scene, which is the best minute or so of film I've ever seen. Marx Brothers movies had everything -- puns, romance, physical comedy, running gags, absurd throw-away jokes and scenes, and huge Warner Brothers musical numbers which were horribly out of place. They even have something resembling a plot, though they don't get distracted by advancing the plot when there's humor and mayhem to be had elsewhere.

Casablanca

One cannot attain a proper understanding of post-war American culture without watching this movie. Watching it for the first time is a bit odd, because everything seems so familiar. The characters are all archetypes without being shallow, and we resonate deeply with them all.

There's room for expansion there. Something from Ozu probably ought to be in there, and since he more or less made the same film over and over, which one is there doesn't matter a heck of a lot. I'm tempted to put Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and The Matrix there, but they belong more on a list of "Defining Moments in Genre" than "You must see this movie even if you don't usually like such movies." Nosferatu is the best horror film I've seen, and it's 1923 German special effects are way creepier than the ultimate computer-generated Hollywood monster. The climax scene is essentially told with shadows and it's quite chilling. The Matrix is an example of perfectly establishing a new world where every detail is cleverly placed, the special effects are so much more than entertaining, and everyone is a hot bad ass. But if someone doesn't like any sci-fi action films, I don't feel justified in saying they still must see the Matrix. The ones on the list meet that requirement.