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| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 | | 9:34 am |
Code!
HBTM HBTM HBDA HBTM Anyone who figures it out gets the promise of a great deal of treasure as soon as I track down Captain Kidd's gold. In other news: Flipside went very very well - lots of goodnesses occurring, lots of great people. For those of you who weren't aware, we went as Camp Cosmos, where we built a dome and projected (amongst other things) a planetarium inside. It was also controllable - there was wireless surfaceless mouse that one could use to move the sky around, focus on whatever was desired, etc. People enjoyed it, which is all I can ask for. And that's pretty much it. So there nyah. AllonI | | Monday, April 13th, 2009 | | 9:34 am |
The triumphant return.
I have triumphantly returned. Austonians: you may now go on about your lives, comfortable in knowing that, now, once more, hope and joy have returned. Californians: you may now go on about your lives, comfortable in knowing that, now, once more, despair and pain have returned. No time to visit people other than family, unfortunately, but on the bright side, lots of time with my 4-month-old niece. For those of you unaware, babies send out mind-warping rays that turn people into babbling idiots. It was present when she was just born, but now her powers are growing beyond all reason. If you notice the state of California making communally bad decisions with the reasoning being, "Awoowoowoowoowoo! Awoowoowoowoowoo! Boop! Boop! Look at her smiling!" you'll know what happened. All in all a good trip. We had Passover (which was hurried, for some reason, but still enjoyable), ate at each of the three places that I can't replicate in Austin (La Costena, Pizz'a Chicago, and Fatima's, for those of you who care), and spent a lot of good family time. AllonI | | Monday, April 6th, 2009 | | 7:29 am |
Message Of The DayWeekMonthYear
This is a purely informational message for those of you with some vested interest in having me around over the next week: I'm not gonna be. California, here I come. AllonI | | Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | | 10:41 am |
I have odd moments.
Looking through old email messages, and I came across one from me to me sent a couple years ago, containing, in its entirety: "It's not commonly known, but all of us here at IBM live in fear of the Mongolian Death Worms. If you are 'underperforming', or someone with power doesn't like you, you may be brought to the Mongolian Death Worm Pit. They make no threats, no 'if you don't shape up this may happen to you' pep talks. They simply make you look over the edge at the teeming masses of bloody intestine-like worms writhing below. Sometimes, for a moment, a fragment of bone may come into view. Then they let you walk away. This time. All things live in fear of the Mongolian Death Worm. And for good reason." ...I have no idea where this came from. AllonI | | Monday, March 16th, 2009 | | 9:01 am |
JoCo
So last night I went a-concertin'. You will now be informed of the events that occurred there in no particular order. It will not be tremendously exciting for you to read. This is clearly a much more important event in my life than my recent heart surgery or the fact that slowly the everimpending ennui of working at a soulcrushing monstrosity sucks away at my will to live. - Oddly enough, the opening band, Paul and Storm, was more entertaining for me than Jonathan Coulton himself was. This was due to the fact that I had never heard any of their stuff before, but I had 95% of the JoCo material memorized. Still, a good show. - I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Paul and Storm were members of Da Vinci's Notebook, an a capella group, who had a song that I'm quite fond of. You must listen to it - particularly those of you who were there. Note that this should not be listened to at work unless you have headphones or highly unuptight coworkers. - I had an awesome hot chocolate beverage from Halcyon - something called a White Chocolate Peppermint Hot Chocolate. Liquid happiness. - We hung out after the show with various and sundry cool people and one zombie. The zombie entertained us with his wacky antics. We laughed and pointed. - I got introduced to people as "This is AllonI. He's a liar." I was flattered. - I found out how JoCo's mind works. Apparently, even when he attempts to create a happy song, it eventually turns into a song about a sad vampire who commits suicide at the end. There there, JoCo. There there. I warned you! Dull and uninteresting! But you didn't believe me! Why didn't you believe me? AllonI | | Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 | | 9:14 am |
For Mandie
and i remember shards of time best forgotten the certainty of loneliness of never of broken dreams and lost hopes broken shards puncturing my mind like so many laughing mirrors the casual knowledge that my only choice was to live alone or die alone there was that time, yes and then came the moment that i was found and loved and cherished and slowly realized i loved in return two hearts winging around each other on the way to forever AllonI | | Monday, February 9th, 2009 | | 9:24 pm |
A Eulogy
I knew, once, a man who had hats - Hats of felt, fur, leather, Skin, paper, string, Lime-flavored jell-o, A surprised-looking squirrel, And a small bonsai tree. The hats Conferred with each other On the most appropriate way To inform the man Of their general disgust with the way That he lived his life And parted his hair On the wrong side And sneezed upwind. After all due consideration An ambassador was sent - An elderly fez Still slightly crumpled From that time that the man had (As a result of a bar bet) Attempted to perform the Mexican Hat Dance (Jarabe TapatÃo) And had drunkenly slipped. The man In a passionate fury Declared That he would not be dictated to By any piece of apparel No matter how august its heritage Or how glorious its history (For the fez had, once, Singlehandedly, Slain a company of soldiers As they were about to burn down A local orphanage, And had, for its valor, Been awarded two purple hearts, A joint service commendation, A distinguished service medal, And a blue ribbon From the county fair). The fez swore he would make the man relent Fearing the outcome If the lifelong peace Were to be broken. After some time, The hats received a package - A hatbox Containing A tassel And no more. The revolution was a merciless one And blood rained down On a patch of street Measuring precisely three feet wide By two and a half feet long. There is a plaque commemorating the spot Which can be seen On alternate Thursdays Between the hours of eight in the morning And two in the afternoon. AllonI | | Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | | 4:19 pm |
| | 12:45 pm |
The World Revolves Around Me.
Dullness: I find it deeply embarrassing that I consider the death of a human being in the light of how inconveniencing I find it. Y'see, yesterday, I went book shopping. (Yay! Books! Much of a muchness!) In the research that I was doing in preparation, I came across the fact that an author who I was fond of recently passed away. (Donald Westlake. Wrote many things, but the series I'm fondest of is one about a man named John Dortmunder, a criminal with a talent for planning and who has the worst luck in the world. No crime he gets involved with can get anything but more complicated, and usually the best results of it is that he does not end up in prison and that he's earned maybe $1000 from it. It's very deadpan humor, relying on both plot and characterization, and it's brilliant stuff.) There's another book in the series coming out, but after that, it's all over. My first thought, of course, was, "God damnit! Now I won't be able to read any more in the series!" Pfeh. I was also pettily annoyed that the two books I most wanted to buy were unavailable for purchase. Double pfeh. All in all, I came out with many books and a sense that the world had wronged me. I then proceeded to happily dive into the Dresden Files, since I now own them all. All! MUAHAHAHAHAHA! Now leave me to my candy books. AllonI | | Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | | 9:14 am |
More dreamering.
I had a dream last night. Since this is the most important thing to have happened in my life recently, I will share it with you. Are you all sitting comfortably? Good. I dreamed that I had found out that my father had written a book before he died that he had had published by a vanity press. Curious, I managed to track down a copy of the book. It was a humorous look at the world of the secret agent, like something Don Westlake might write. It was about a man named James Pleasant Beach (for some reason, his name stuck with me), who had been a minor secret agent (mostly an analyst, though with a bit of field work), who had retired and who was now a high school teacher. Slowly, he began to realize that all his coworkers, friends, and people he habitually encountered were secret agents, either of his or of foreign governments. He apparently had known enough secret information that the foreign spies were there in case he let something slip and his government's spies were there to make sure he didn't. It seemed to be pretty routine to them all - he was just a minor job to them. This began to make him more and more angry. Finally, in a fit of pique, while sitting alone in a room of his house, he announced something like, "It's a good thing they don't know about my real old job as Special Agent 40. They'd never leave me alone." Unfortunately, there were something like 1/2 dozen bugs in the room, and this statement was immediately reported to a bunch of governments. Suddenly, the routine is broken. His government wanted him to report back in for "debriefing... just in case there's something, um, minor that we missed the first time." Foreign nationals are analyzing the handwriting on his credit card receipts and trying to get him to defect. (One of them, angry that his handwriting indicated nothing, faked his signature in front of him the way she _thought_ it should look and sent _that_ off to be analyzed.) His coworkers are engaging him in elaborate traps to try to get him to tell them the truth about what he had done. And every government assumes that all the effort everyone _else_ is putting into him is both proof of his statement and an indication of just how important he was, and put even _more_ resources into grabbing him. Finally, the book ends with him in a dungeon somewhere, about to be tortured to death (since, after all, he wouldn't confess! He must have nerves of steel to still be keeping to his cover story!) with the torturer telling him that he was sorry to do this. It's just business. Nothing personal. And then I woke up. And the strange thing is that while my father didn't write anything, if he had, I could see him as having written that exact book. AllonI | | Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | | 9:08 am |
An Announcement
My wife is the only woman I know who uses sex to get out of a headache. AllonI | | Friday, December 12th, 2008 | | 12:44 pm |
Huh.
Apparently, at 11:30pm last night, my brother's baby girl was born. I'm an uncle now. This is an odd sensation. AllonI | | Monday, November 10th, 2008 | | 12:59 pm |
So who was this guy again?
I haven't been posting here for a while. (Cue the faux startled cries: "No, really? I saw a message from you just several months ago!") No, no, it's true. And I sort of have a reason for this. My life, at this point, has little drama, no angst, no discomfort. There are few ripples in a reasonably contented pond. Which is nice enough to live through but I see no reason to subject other people to it. I don't have a massive force driving me to write - I slowly realize - so why do I need to do it? Even the side projects I'm working on at the moment are either computer code (one of which is Neat and will be going up on my website as soon as I redesign it (my website, not the toy) from scratch 'cause it (my website again) is a look-I-made-this-in-five-minutes real-website placeholder), or are pieces of other people's projects (which are neat as well but which I am less inclined to scribble about). So I write nothing, not even aimless meandering, and people start wondering what happened to me and will I ever return from The Land Of The Lost? Well, to answer your questions: I live. I breathe. I continue to work. I continue to play. What else is there? Too much, sometimes. AllonI | | Friday, August 15th, 2008 | | 11:20 am |
Regarding supervillains.
Due to the suppressed desires of my wife, as an anniversary present, I intend to turn the city of Austin into a frozen wasteland, killing all the people within, so that she can go sledding. (No need to thank me, dear. I do it for you.) And that brings me to realize the real, true problem supervillains have - extroversion. They all are extroverts, wandering through the streets in wacky costumes, killing random passers-by and just generally drawing attention to themselves. They say to themselves, "I need attention! I need fear!", never realizing that when you rely on other people for your own happinesses, you'll never be at peace. Even when they rob banks, they do so in the most flashy possible way, thereby guaranteeing that some costumed crusader for "good" will take note and stop them - if not immediately, then certainly before their plans come to fruition. It's really a symptom of the codependant relationships these people have with the people around them. I'm going to do things entirely differently. Firstly, the bank robberies I perform will be quiet affairs, used entirely to gather funds for creating my freeze ray. There will be no wacky contraptions, no minions in themed disguises (as what? icicles?), no clues left behind because I think the hero isn't smart enough to figure them out and I want to laugh at them, nothing. Ideally, the only way people will be aware that a bank robbery will have occurred is that they're counting the funds in the morning and notice that there's less than there should be. Secondly, I will have no countdown during which time I announce my decision to others to turn Austin into the aforementioned frozen wasteland. It's no business of anyone but myself. The people to be turned into eternally frozen blocks of ice will swiftly die, peacefully slipping into oblivion, so they won't care, and other people will just have to wait their turns. I'm trying to accomplish something here, something for myself and for Mandie, and I'd appreciate it if you were just a little less negative about the whole thing, okay? Hopefully, we'll all be able to get through this with a minimum of fuss and bother and go on with our lives. Those of us outside of Austin, anyhow. AllonI | | Sunday, July 20th, 2008 | | 10:19 am |
Literaturgical Thematology
Things I've noticed about storytelling (written, audible, visual, etc.): - The likelihood of success of a plan is inversely proportional to how much the audience knows about it. If the audience has been told the intricately plotted plan from the getgo, it is guaranteed to fail. If the plan consists of a vague idea and "we'll play it by ear from there", it's probably going to have major inconveniences and unplanned for events in the way but will succeed in the end. If the audience knows nothing of the plan (aka "Here's our plan...", fade to black, next scene), it will go off smoothly and any perceived hitches will turn out to have been accounted for in the plan. This applies to the plans of both the heroes and the villains. If the plan is unknown to start out with, but one of the major characters works out what the opposing side's plan is and states it to the audience before said plan is completed, it fails. - Corollary: The importance of a piece of information is frequently proportional to the amount of time between the moment when we find out that the information exists and the moment when we find out what the information consists of. If someone is trying to give a main character a message and the main character keeps putting them off ("we're too busy right now, tell me about it later"), the message is critical to the current situation and/or the character's life. A messenger allowed to give their message immediately will slightly move the plot forward, but no more than that. Exceptions: twist endings (not known about long, but critically important), red herrings (known about for a long time before being revealed to be distractions). - Chekov's gun: if you see a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must be used in the third act. My codicil: _Unless_ the gun hanging on the wall helps establish characterization, in which case it is only likely for it to be used, not certain. - In any group united together for a common goal in some non-continuing work (such as a movie or a lone novel, not necessarily true for tv or book serieses), the number of deaths will be between one and three, leaving a minimum of one alive. - No one is blind. Anyone who seems to be blind is lying about it - they either have vision or some other sense that compensates for it. Mute people (who have not actually have their tongues cut out, as in the case of servitors of evil kings and princes) just don't talk very much. This is not necessarily true of other infirmities. - Any conflict between characters who are not fundamentally evil is based on at least one major miscommunication and will be resolved immediately once the miscommunication is resolved, rather than being based on different but equally valid philosophies. If there are different but equally valid philosophies involved, either one of the characters will slowly convert to the other philosophy or a piece of information will come up that invalidates one of the two and the one possessing that philosophy will immediately change sides. Exception: comic books - when two heroes with different philosophies in their own comics get together, the conflicts between their schools of thought will not prevent them from working together (possibly after the traditional hero-meeting-hero tussle). The split will break them apart at the end, usually in the treatment of the captured villain, and each will return to their own comic unchanged by the experience. More if and when I come up with more. AllonI | | Saturday, June 21st, 2008 | | 7:57 am |
Dream Logging.
So I had a dream last night about roleplaying games. Which means I am a big geek. Those of you who don't care about such things (either dream logging or rpgs (specifically Mage: The Ascension) or both) can skip the remainder of this message in which I describe the geekiness. I had a dream in which ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nationelectric was teaching some sort of college class (I believe some sort of acting class, but I'm not certain). As a part of it, he decided that he was going to run a one-shot Mage: The Ascension game for the 30 class members and me in which we were all Mages playing a soccer game. The class members were all really young and annoying, I recall. The rest of them were creating specialized soccer players, but I was having moral qualms about minmaxing. And I was trying to figure out which spheres would be best for a soccer player. I had been assuming that we'd be playing out in the world somewhere, which meant that we'd have to use coincidental magic. I had settled on Entropy to make people slip on coincidentally wet patches of grass and was considering Life to make myself buffer and to create giant insects for my side if it were needed when I woke up. So there you are. AllonI | | Friday, June 20th, 2008 | | 4:38 pm |
Further informational message.
My cellphone should now be working normally again with luck. However, I have lost phone numbers in the process. If you wish me to be able to call you, please regive me your phone number(s). AllonI | | Friday, June 13th, 2008 | | 11:23 am |
Neat!
I have an apprentice! It's written in his .sig file and everything. (In case you actually need the boring context for this: we've just got a couple of interns. I had forgotten how young college kids are. Their first task was to write examples for the API, which is my department, so they were given over to my tender care. One of them is in the Java API (which I'm connected to), and the other the Perl API (which I control utterly muahahahaha), so the Perl API one is, ergo... Always two there are.) I need to remember to mold him to being an unstoppable death machine. Note: wire up the cortex bomb _first_ - remember what happened last time. Which, technically, would make him a death-machine-that-can-be-stopped-in-onl y-one-way-that-only-I-control, rather than a strictly unstoppable death machine, but that's semantics. Sure, there's always the chance that the Plucky Band Of Heroes will manage to do something like hack into the cortex bomb to set it off when my seemingly unstoppable death machine attempts to fulfill my fiendish plans, but frankly, I'd rather get captured by the PBOH than get offed by my own creation. Getting killed off by my own unstoppable death machine lacks dignity somehow, and the PBOH can always be escaped from in order to set up the sequel. So. I've got some faceless minions, I have a dark apprentice / seemingly unstoppable death machine, I've got my lair (yes, a house in the suburbs lacks panache, but you have to work your way up to a volcanic island / missile silo / moon-based lair as time goes on), all I need is an evil plot and I'll be well on my way to RULING THE WORLD! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Note to all of you that are my faceless minions: this would be an appropriate time to join in on my mad cackling laughter. If you happen to be spies _pretending_ to be my faceless minions in order to steal my plans, you should uneasily join in the laughter, causing the minions surrounding you to give you funny looks. If you play your cards right, this could be the slipup which causes me to imprison and torture you! AllonI | | Monday, June 9th, 2008 | | 10:04 am |
A strictly informational message.
My cellphone is currently Dead, and any phone messages to me will be ungotten. Contact Mandie or our home phone instead. Should this change, I will inform you. AllonI | | Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 | | 10:45 am |
HBTM.
It's my birthday today. Go ahead and say something congratulatory. AllonI |
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