Category Archives: Daily Post
If only I could blog in my sleep
It often seems to me that the best times for me to write, the times when I’m most productive and have the least trouble getting stuff down, is either right after I wake up, or before I go to bed, both times when I’d rather be asleep. This seems to imply to me that the truly best time for me to write would be while I’m actually sleeping. Given the strange dream of half-buildings I had last night, I look forward to technology making this possible.
Yeah, I know. Look I agreed to write a post every day, I never made any promises about those posts being worth reading. It was either this or five pages of incoherent rant about protests and politics, and frankly I’m too tired for that tonight.
The mind is a strange thing
I got a flu shot today. While I was getting it I was thinking about how I never look at a needle when I’m giving blood or getting a shot. I don’t have any special terror of needles, I don’t have any trouble with the tiny amount of pain they inflict, but somehow I just can’t watch it. It feels like if I look I’ll chicken out.
I mean, it’s not like it feels any different whether I look or not, and it’s not like I don’t still know exactly what’s going on. I can’t fool myself into thinking that this guy isn’t jamming a needle into my bicep and injecting me with half a milligram of virus corpses just by not watching, but somehow I just have to look away.
This seems especially weird because decorative piercings, which require much larger needles that hurt a lot more, I watch intently the entire time. I don’t have many of those, so maybe it was the novelty of the thing that made the difference there, but that seems wrong too. It seems like unusual situations would make me more squeamish, not less.
In summary, the mind is weird and I don’t understand it. Tune in tomorrow for more weird stuff that I don’t understand!
Patience, and the lack thereof
Just a quick Daily to get the requirement out of the way. I’m working on something, though.
Topic 286:
Who is the most patient person you know?
Honestly, I think I am. It’s the one genuine virtue I possess. I’m having trouble coming up with more to say about that, so I’ll just wax on about patience for a bit.
The funny thing about patience is that some things just cut right through it. Like a pet peeve, everyone has a few things that they just have no patience at all for. For me paperwork is a big one. I can comfortably sit for a very long time and work out every last detail of, say, a math puzzle. But ask me to fill out some forms and I’ll be growling the first time a field seems slightly ambiguous or it asks me a question with more than one answer.
On that subject it’s almost inevitable that I will be growling at that form sooner or later. I think the only forms I’ve seen that were clear and straightforward were order forms. “What do you want, how many, were do we ship it, how are you paying for it”, if only they were all so easy.
On the other hand, ask me to explain a difficult concept to someone and I can calmly re-examine things and try different approaches for pretty much as long as they seem to be honestly trying to understand. That’s led many people to mistakenly think that I’d make a good teacher, I can only assume that they’ve forgotten how much paperwork a teacher has to do.
Recovering
Last night’s zombie pub crawl was pretty awesome. I met some interesting people whom I can’t remember clearly, and ran into a bunch of people I haven’t seen in ages, some literally for years. Glad I went, even if the damn makeup was annoying and sweated off pretty quickly, managing to be both irritating on my face and basically invisible just a couple hours after we started.
I’m feeling a little delicate today, so I’m going to call this my day’s post and go play videogames all afternoon.
Saturday cop-out post
I have a zombie pub crawl to attend tonight and stuff to do before it, so this will be short.
Topic 285:
Do you like surprises? Why or why not? Can you think of the best or worse surprise you’ve had in the last year?
Depends on the surprise, of course. A surprise $50 bill is great, a surprise tumor sucks. I suppose that’s really just saying I like good news more than bad.
No surprises stand out to me over the last year. Well, none I’m willing to write about here, at least.
The more I think about it, the more I’m sure I can’t write an interesting post on this topic. So I’ll talk about the zombie pub crawl quickly and then wrap this up.
Zombie pub crawl. A bunch of people in their 20s & 30s dressed up as zombies lurching mindlessly from one bar to the next. So it’s basically your average pub crawl with grosser makeup.
I’ve dug out a jacket that’s full of moth holes. The kind of thing I really should have gotten rid of long ago, but kept partly because it’s the only jacket I own that actually fits me, and partly for costume stuff like this. I’m combining that with tan pants & shirt, and a hideous red tie that I got at the dollar store, and then all I need is a little makeup and I’ll look like I wandered off the set of a 1970’s George Romero flick.
I’ve also skipped shaving today. My hair is really too long for this look but I’m not willing to cut it just for this. I’m also going to use more deodorant than usual since I expect to be too warm in those clothes and I’m not really willing to smell like the walking dead tonight. Though if I could make myself smell like fresh earth, as though I’d clawed my way out of a grave, I might do that.
Well, that’s all for today. I’ll have something else to tell you tomorrow. Huh, if I drink too much while I’m dressed as a zombie tonight I may wake up feeling like a zombie tomorrow. I’d better watch out.
What popped into my head when I saw this photo.
Photo courtesy of Luca Sartoni.
It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood a fairy usually went to alone, but Tink knew she had to get answers. Uncomfortably aware that anyone, or anything, might be hiding nearby, she put on a bold face and headed towards the meeting site. She only hoped this Deep Wing character, whoever that was, could give her the information she needed.
Walk Without Rhythm
So, here‘s what I got from the Daily Post today. It’s a fairly interesting post about rhythm in words, sentences and paragraphs. But I was intrigued by the very end, which I will repeat here:
Pay attention to which sentence configurations you find most appealing. What makes a given arrangement more appealing to you than another? Can you think of ways in which you might use different sentence lengths to accomplish different rhetorical goals?
If you’ve read, well, any of my writing, you’ll know that I like to use long, complicated sentences with lots of commas, purple prose, and sometimes digressions in the middle. Sentences that often could be acceptably split into two or more. Meanwhile, my paragraphs often have very few sentences, and sometimes could be reasonably connected to an adjacent paragraph. Read the rest of this entry
Bouncy bouncy
Topic #283:
If you found $1000 worth of superballs, and had a free afternoon, what creative use could you put them towards? Can you think of a clever way to use them or a prank you could pull on a friend or co-worker? Write about it.
You know, my first thought is just to take them all up to the roof of a skyscraper and dump them over into the city. Can you imagine watching three or four thousand balls bouncing around like mad? People would be finding them miles away for weeks! I wonder what the headlines would say? “Rain of balls causes havoc!” Read the rest of this entry
Everything’s a pain. It’s still hot, too.
Hopefully that title got all the whining out of my system for a while.
So in naive anticipation of cold weather, I’ve returned to the manly art of crochet. I’ve decided to start off this year’s projects with another scarf, partly because of my limited skill, but mostly because I like scarves. A big part of that is probably because I can only wear them comfortably when it’s genuinely cold, and I suspect I only really like the cold weather because where I live Summer lasts for eight solid months. Read the rest of this entry
Big Fat Test Post
This is nothing more than a test of the QTM blogging software for Linux. Unless you’re a Linux user yourself, and also a blogger, you probably want to skip this one. Read the rest of this entry
On the many flavors of Linux
I’m a Linux user, and have been for years. I’ve used many different distros since the late ’90s, and for the last three or four years I’ve been pretty stable with Ubuntu. Sometimes I’d switch between the Gnome & KDE versions, but it was always Ubuntu. I’m using the latest version right now, the one that tied up my computer most of the day.
And I hate it. The “Unity” interface is no longer optional, and they’ve taken away my applets. For a couple years now it felt like each new release of Ubuntu was less what I wanted, almost as if they were deliberately trying to push me away. I’m thinking it’s time to start shopping around distros again.
This might make things a pain in the ass for a while. But I’ve been keeping up with the Post a Day thing pretty well so far. Granted that’s mostly by posting crap that nobody would actually want to read, but maybe if I can get used to writing in quantity then I can improve the quality gradually. Anyways, if I miss a day during the next week or two, trying out new Linux distros is going to be my excuse.
Not much of a post
Feels like I’m phoning it in here, but I’m in the middle of the Ubuntu upgrade and can’t do much with this computer right now. I didn’t think it would take this long. You’d think I’d have learned by now to wait a few days before I start the upgrade, but no, once again I jumped right in when there’d be a huge rush swamping the servers.
Now off to read a movie or watch a book, or whatever the hell people used to do to kill time at home in the evenings. I’ll try to have something more substantial tomorrow, unless the new operating system turns out to be completely broken or something.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 