A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Now You Can Pick Up Anything; the chopstick game

You can play as either Carla or Karl. You need: prog's card table, a pair of chopsticks, prog's room, and prog.

Players take seats at prog's card table in prog's room that has prog in it. After choosing who goes first, they take turns choosing an interesting object on prog's table and trying to pick it up with the chopsticks, in the usual one-handed fashion. If successful, the object is added to that player's score pile. If unsuccessful, the object remains where it lands, or is returned to the center of the table should it happen to bounce into someone's score pile by accident.

You may dispute your opponent's picking-up method by turning around and asking prog about it, while he tries to read over in the corner. Unfortunately, he will always side with your opponent.

Today I got a little further than halfway through Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, taking notes furiously the whole way. God rain blessings upon PocketNotes for making that possible. While I got annoyed at discovering its incapability to export text, and its interface is a bit rougher around the edges than I'd like, it's still the best outliner I've found for this OS.

Replied to mail about my ISBN webservice thing and ComicsML.

I've spent the most recent three hours or so sorting out finances. Wrote many checks, web-paid many parking tickets, sent out some PayPal funds and sent out email regarding a precious few debts owed to me. Things are not as bad as I feared, and things are still not very good. I will survive, but I do start to have doubt about this whole moving-again-in-June idea. As Noah pointed out recently, none of us have full-time jobs, which makes one wonder how we expect to scrape together the capital to move to any of the neighborhoods we're eyeing. (Davis Square, ideally.)

Chez Chestnut will dissolve soon no matter what happens, though; Charles and SO Leslee want a place of their own as soon as they can manage, so they'll be leaving in September if Carla and I don't wander out before then.

I didn't realize until this past week what a steal our rent is, here; it's apparently comparable to some studio apartments. So Carla, who also receives income in freelancey fits and starrts, would rather not be the one to leave, and I start to wonder if maybe, given everything, I should feel the same.

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Yesterday I was surprised to find myself having a mature and honest discussion with my mother about relationships, grown-up to grown-up. What causes my parents to sometimes see me as such, and sometimes see me as a nonautonomous child? Well, anyway. It was a good thing. Mom displayed more insight and wisdom than I would have expected... hrm. Then again, by the sounds of it, she is making a career recently of gently helping my two brothers through their own rocky relationships.

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Do you recall how, last month, I cleaned a pile of paper off the dining room table and found a piece of individually-wrapped chocolate underneath it? Yesterday I cleaned off the entire table, and found, when I was nearly done, that one of the items contributing to the mess was, in fact, an entire box of chocolates. Granted, it had only four pieces left in it, all quite stale, and three had bites in them (later positively identified as belonging to Carla), but still. It gives one pause.

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I love OmniDictionary. Everyone who uses OS X should use this; it's a wonderful use of the 'Services' menu, which I'm only recently starting to appreciate. After installing it, you can select any word in any application, and, with a keystroke, OmniDictionary grabs that word's definition from the Internet, and displays it. Yay.

This morning I finally got around to making an "I'm still alive -- really" post on my home weblog. Didn't link back here, becuase I'm not so sure that all I've written here would meet the jmac Weblog rule: write nothing that I wouldn't want everyone in the world reading. Or as cthulhia put it better, nothing I wouldn't want everyone in my addressbook reading. In other words, I blog the intersection of all the news I want to tell all my friends, and leave the rest for private communication. I suspect I've actually been keeping that rule even here rather well, but we'll see.

This may be put to the test soon, if Carla gets an LJ account, like I was suggesting to her the other day (before I thought about the consequences on my end). Yep, OK... I can already think of one post that would make her say "grr" at me. Politics.

I think one little thing I will do in the very near future is start up my own little hype machine about The Book. Start small, just with a link on jmac.org, and an image of the nice monkey-encrusted cover.

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The 4-digit cafe's carrot raison muffins are THE BOMB, okay?

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A reporter sent me mail today about ComicsML, asking for a callback. Interesting. Last week another author asked me if he could use ComicsML as a topic in his book about web accessibility. And I got cc:ed on a mail earlier this week on another person's discussion of comics accessibility. When it rains... It's a good rain, though. You bet your brisket that I leveraged ComicsML in my statement of objectives rewrite. I wonder what will happen next.

Speaking of, I contacted Lenny's daughter, who said she put my letter in Jon's mailbox Monday morning. I didn't see it there then, so yesterday I called Erik and asked him to double-check for me, and aye, there it was. Huh? Well, I fetched it and surrendered it to the Lab yesterday. The lady who received it seemed to have no issues with the fact that it was a late component. All is well.

The Diesel gambit paid off; I wrote for two hours, and the chapter has enough momentum to roll itself home. There's just the matter of time. I have decided that I can't write well when I'm sleepy... I can't start things at 10 p.m. I found myself doing this after I got home and settled in to continue, but then Carla's GURPS group started to drag itself in, and then they started taking turns coming upstairs and begging me to play. Oops: I forgot I was one of them. I relented on beggar #3, bringing the iBook with me, but of course that was no environment for doing technical writing. I bailed on them politely as I could, after 90 minutes or so. But by then, feh. I email Linda, asking her when the drop-dead date is. I am still silly enough to think I can have this wrapped up by tomorrow. I hope that, certainly.

Meanwhile, life is just barreling along. Beyond the ever-growing queue of when-the-book-is-done activities (which by now probably has "pick up a musical instrument" in it, rendering everything after it irrelevently unattainable -- this is my own personal Godwin's Law of activity queues), the world around me and the people in it continue to change, maybe accelerated by holiday fervor, I dunno, cuz I can't touch any of it while I'm locked into this mode, totally stationary in regard to planetary rotation, and hence SHOOTING OFF INTO DARKEST SPACE from your point of view. I owe people some juicy choice nummy-num letters, letters I start to write many many times, with which I'll try to reconnect myself to stuff. They're not easy letters to write in the first place, and the fact that I can't keep my mind on them right now doesn't help. I know they'll get out eventually, and my beautiful friends will joyfully reel me back in, but only when the you-know-what is you-know-what, and until then brrr it's cold out here between the stars.

On the more practical side, I am worried about my nonmotion with regards to getting an Arisia room (last I heard this was sorta being done by committee -- bad idea), and any number of bills I keep suddenly remembering I haven't paid since I moved. And a parking ticket I got a long, long time ago in Waterville. Crap. But who has time to think about that stuff?!

I have mentioned I feel like I'm right back with the UMaine newspaper again, right? I'm locked into this absurd, hallucinatorily untouchable meta-state, where I pretend to be not a member of your MERE HOO-MAN SOCIETY while I sit on my perch and look down at you wee people as I chronicle your wee-people lives. And your XML. Foo.

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I do not think I will risk the LotR showing. Poop. Even if the chapter's done, it would give me zero time to prepare for the meeting, and this I do not wish to do. However, I'll be seeing Maine Crowd #2 (which has crossover with the first one) this weekend, and maybe we can see the movie then. Shrug? It's also likely I'll get a chance to watch it with some locals, maybe even before then. We'll see what happens.

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Joining Carla's group was a mistake, a decision made on my first full day in this house, right at the start of the honeymoon. I am having zero fun roleplaying, and Carla... is no Josh. This is not to say that she is a bad GM, but I have grown to like the style of the other GM in my life (heh), who is, simply put, a master storyteller, able to handle player action and player inaction with equal finesse. Josh does not say "I will stick dice up your nose unless you roleplay" at me. (For that matter, no player in the Josh-group has ever complained to the other players about themselves being the only one bothering to roleplay.) Carla's games are also very linear, or at least this one is. We started out in point A, and one of our PCs was told that he got the idea that there's a guy we could talk to at point B. OK. At point B we talked to a guy, who told us to perform action C, which taught us about location D. La la la. The Josh-led campaign, on the other hand, is a sprawling epic, and nobody knows what the hell's going on, though we each (both as players and characters) have individual ideas, and we know when we're following a right trail.

It's funny I write like that about Josh's game, because during the campaign's former half, I was constantly debating whether or not to drop out... I liked Josh's style then too, but I didn't like my character so much. It's grown a lot on me since then, though my character is still the same.

Tonight I was telling a remote friend (who is about three times more introverted and nonconfrontational than I am(!)) to break the bad news to a woman (with whom I am also acquainted, though she is remote to both of us -- all hail the Internet) who has been more-or-less stalking him for years (as in inviting herself over to his house every few months, a process that involves flying from North Carolina to San Diego) that he was not interested in further romantic relationship with her. He does not want to do this because it would shatter her (she breaks easily), but I advised that not telling her would just let her stew in drawn-out, unrequited longing, while he'd continue to feel guilty: far worse for both of them.

And here I have trouble giving myself the same advice when it's just a bloody RPG group that I've been with for a month?

This house officially Wins. I did good by coming here, and have said as much to the preinstalled peeps, with whom I seem to be swimming swimmingly. Charles acknowledges my skill at memetic boxing, and Carla invited me into her GURPS Discworld campaign. We've all played the official house game of Lost Cities many times, and we chat and share food and coffee and do this and that with respective other friends as much as you might expect, and yes indeedy my Social bar is perhaps greener than it's ever been. Even the cat seems to think I'm OK.

So yeah. Props to cthulhia for encouraging my move here, both in advising me and in speaking in my favor to the residents. I am a heppy heppy ket.

Neighborhoodishly, I didn't realize how quiet the surroundings are until my first or second night here, when I heard a very distant emergency vehicle siren and realized that it was all the traffic I could hear at the time. How different from the Medford/Highland intersection of my last apartment! This despite the fact that there's so much good stuff in walking distance; Trader Joe's 5 minutes thisaway, Bread & Circus 7 minutes thataway, and Central Square with its T station and coffee shops is but 10 minutes up yonder. Compare with my east Somerville place, where I had an array of convenience stores to pick from, and that was that.

Driving seems a puzzle. Cambridgeport is more or less griddish, but every day a random selection of roads are blocked off by construction equipment, making the neighborhood streets an ever-changing labyrinth. As for Mass Ave, it's just as confusing during the day as it is at night, but it rewards those with cool heads with as many chances to loop back and try again as they need, until they finally bang into their heads the pattern of which lanes to occupy when, so as not to get prematurely flung off at any of several flinging-off points. I have come to the conclusion that Massachusetts Avenue is not a single road, but a collective organism made of lots of smaller roads, each with their own personalities, who have nonetheless decided to band together under a single name. Learning and accepting this makes navigating it a bit easier, for me.

There is a dishwasher, a concept so alien that even after being introduced to it I refused to accept its existence and washed the dishes once by hand anyway before thinking: hm. Charles has since educated me on dishwasher protocol, which I appreciate.

Apparently I am alone among the three in using the house phone line, so all phone bills will go to me until I finally get around to nabbing a cell phone, at which point, Charles figures, we may as well cancel the thing.

Despite all this talk of assimilation, I still haven't actually moved in yet. The landlords return this weekend, allegedly... I'll go research this now. Wish me luck.