I met Aly's parents this weekend. That went pretty damn well I thought. They're very likable people, and an interesting blend of concerned and easy going. Just that made my weekend. I was understandably concerned about this element of our relationship, and I feel a lot better knowing that her parents aren't flipping out about us.

Aly & I had an argument about Snape today. That's so siriusly awesome (har har). I'm very happy ; )

There was another cause for joy this weekend, but that's... between us.

She's alycaz by the way.

I also took care of a bunch of old tax crap, paid down some cards with money that recently deposited from my business, and closed two of my plastic accounts. (They'd already been zero balance for a while, I just hadn't given them the official "fuck you and your abusive 30% interest rate" yet.)

And I have work tomorrow... life is good.

So Ms. Slips-Past-My-Senses and I have already stepped past "just dating" and into "this is serious and exclusive." The shift was made official/complete with a FaceBook status change - which is an odd statement about how technology has affected our means of communicating such things to the rest of the world...

...but this isn't a post about FaceBook.

( I'll try not to drown you all in a torrent of sunny adjectives, but I do want to glow a little. )

ALL NEW! Star Wars Gangsta Rap: Chronicles

Thanks Bonnie!

I met a girl; she affects me, slips past my senses to pull at raw essence. She's a paradox, and I am ignited.

I've written and backspaced several paragraphs now. None of them are good enough.

This is a great song by Jonathan Coulton. I liked Skullcrusher Mountain too.

Rocky was wonderful, ritual was poignant. I didn't actually get to perform a sacrifice of financial folly, but that's ok. I'm ready for this lifestyle change anyway, and if I need to I can do one myself.

I continue to have awesome friends, and really blessed life. I continue to look for an awesome girl to share it with.

We were discussing relationships at our Slip Stream game last night, and how some people manage to navigate relationships in which their partner doesn't get their dorky interests but manages to make room for them. I've decided that that's absolutely not what I'm looking for. I look with envy upon the guys who are hooked up with geeky gamer chicks, and that's what I want: a dyed-in-the-wool (wtf does that mean anyway?) gamer-geek who fits seamlessly with my friends and lifestyle. It's a non-negotiable point for me, and I'm willing to wait or just continue being single until I meet her.

Sex, as they say, is like air. It's no big deal until you're not getting any. I'm ok for now, and certainly it's easier to wait for Ms. Right when you don't have that pressing in on your psyche.

This is my favorite holiday... you know, besides DragonCon. (which is Halloween x 100000000000 if you think about it.)

There are layers to my love for Oct 31st. October is the height of Fall, a time when the leaves change and Summer's heat is nowhere to be found. I love the number 31 for a few reasons too, but that would bore you.

Halloween as a child was the original night out on the town. A time of candy and staying up late. A night when even the adults will play.

As an adult, I appreciate that tonight is permission for women everywhere to put on something slutty and have a good time. Yay for slutty!

It's also the pagan New Year, and a time when the "veil" between the real world and the world of the spirits is believed to be thinnest, allowing greater than normal contact with the other side. (And I believe none of that but it's still cool.) Technically the New Year is Nov 1st, but people used to begin celebrating holidays the night before. All Hallows Eve, as Halloween used to be known, was that evening. When I first became pagan at about 20, I began to call it Samhain (pronounced "sow-en"), mostly because it sounds more mysterious if you change the name. These days I prefer "Hallows Eve" or "Halloween". Most American pagans still call it Samhain.

At a ritual for tonight we might burn things that we want to be rid of, or at least symbols of them. This year I intend to burn my financial irresponsibility, and I've been trying to figure out how best to represent that. Writing it on paper is an old standby, but I think it lacks symbolic punch. These are the New Years Resolutions that I put stock in; Jan 1 means nothing to me but a hangover and an inability to remember what year to write on checks.

I remember my 1st Halloween vividly. I was dressed as a skeleton in one of those 1970s bones-on-black-cloth costumes. I'm 5-ish. I have a little orange pumpkin bucket with the thick black plastic strap riveted across the opening as a handle. I suspect that I was pretty damn adorable. My mother has prepared me well: there will be things, scary things, and they are not real.

I kept my fear barely under control, disarming each bogart with my own internal Riculoso!: an internal recitation that this is not real, be it ghost, vampire, witch, or some other fright. "That's not real. That's not real. That's not real either. Not real. It's ok, not real."

Later in the evening, we came to a house with (yet another) scary porch. A man in a pretty good gorilla suit jumped up and roared at me. I had just one thought:

"Gorillas are real."

I ran so fast that I stumbled in the grass before I'd even gotten out of his yard. The impact broke the strap on my pumpkin bucket, and the night's haul of sweets sprawled across the lawn and sidewalk. Not only was I about to be pounced on by an angry gorilla, but I'd lost my candy too ; ) Mom yelled at him and made him take his mask off. I still cried. Mom managed me well, and I came out loving Halloween despite this. I'm sure the candy didn't hurt...

Tonight there will be ritual, and then Rocky Horror. I'll be in drag for Rocky, but it'll be too cold and wet to wear that costume for ritual.

So there you are. Cool weather, the biggest Rocky of the year, pagans, a night in costumes, heartfelt resolutions, and scarcely clothed beauties. Sign me up.

I'm taking a break today. A break from the traveling, from the long list of things that need doing, from drunken parties, and from radio stations. A sabbath, if you will. The noise of life has become too constant, and I just need to lift the needle from that hideously skipping record.

I'm going to have poetic day. There will be reading and meditating; I will contemplate fulfillment and substance until I can find my easy smile again. It begins with a shower overlooking a stream, a walk in the cool, sweet air, and a trip downtown for sushi - just my dog and me.

I hope she doesn't poop. That wouldn't be very poetic, but now if she does I'll be obliged to write about it in very floral language. Won't that be awkward for us both?

Now a small part of me is hoping for poop.

I get lost easy. It's been a problem for a long time. When people tell me shortcuts I blanch and ask for the simplest path.

As a gamer, I'm accustomed to having a mini-map. When I get lost in game I just punch [TAB] and there I am, a little green arrow inside of a map. I can see my destination, where I am and which way I'm facing, and how to get there.

You can imagine my delight when I found out that my iPhone has a mini-map feature. I'm a little blue dot now instead of a green arrow, but I can (in theory) get my direction as well. Sometimes this involves waving my phone around in a figure-8 in the air like some arcane idiot, but it more or less works, and it's better than what I had when I was lost in the past: a stupid look on my face. As it turns out, I wasn't completely done using my stupid look.

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They were really good-natured about it. Heather was really good-natured about everything. It makes all the difference - to travel with someone who takes the potholes in stride.

We're still not sure what's going on with the ethereal Radio Shacks in this town, or why they have a phantom phone operator for the non-existent inside-the-Sams-branch. I may call Ghost Hunters. Italian restaurants are also a bit of a mystery in this town.

I can tell you this much: K-Mart and Applebees exist, man, and I've come to realize that existence is a very underrated quality in a store. They should include that in reviews: "Only 3 stars, but this place definitely exists."

It's a big selling point for me.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091009/ap_on_re_eu/eu_nobel_peace

Already? Really?

I'm... annoyed by this. I love Obama. I think he's going to deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, but they've given it to him based on his charisma, his message of hope, and the promise of a better world. Those are important first steps, but this is extremely premature.

I think they've cheapened the prize, and in particular cheapened Obama's prize. Mark my words, conservatives will ridicule the Peace Prize committee for this - it will be all over Rush, Hannity, Beck, and the rest. Starting today.

Later, even when Obama has really earned that prize, they will scoff and mutter derisively about the prize that Obama was "given" because (insert straw man argument here. "He's black." "Socialist Switzerland loves socialist Obama", "Pretty speeches", etc.) What he's done won't carry weight, because the prize was awarded before he even did it.

I wanted this to happen 2 years from now.

I tend to associate country music with the people who introduced me to it, which is to say racists. Whether that's fair or not I couldn't tell you, but certainly I spent years of my life with racist trailer-park residents who loved both kinds of music: Country and Western.

These days I'm a rap & rock man, but when I'm traveling for work I frequently find myself at the mercy of whatever the tuner can pick up, and sometimes that's Country. I heard a song recently that glamorized David Allen Coe, who put out gems like Niggerhatin Me and My Wife Ran Off With A Nigger. His name makes my skin crawl because I still know the lyrics to "Ran off with a Nigger" by heart from singing it with my Dad when I was a kid.

The other day I scanned over to a country song and caught the tale end of Brad Paisley's Welcome to the Future (video link), which happens to be the first time I've heard civil rights glamorized by a Country song. It brought tears to my eyes to hear racial equality penetrating that part of our culture.

To be fair, I should say that the racists I knew didn't set out to be evil people. They wouldn't think of themselves hateful either, and I'm not sure it's a fair label. They just genuinely believe that there is something wrong with the non-whites. They believe in this image of the black man: prone to crime, inept, lazy, a drain on welfare, bigger dicks than them, and so on. They don't see themselves as being morally wrong because they're totally unaware that they have their facts wrong. It really is a philosophy of ignorance and fear more than hate. It's important for us to remember that, because it applies to more or less all of our villains. People rarely set out to be evil, and we should not hate them as though they had. But back to my main point:

I frequently imagine myself going back in time to meet famous figures and to tell them of the successes that they didn't live to see. To let Darwin know how very right he was. To let Galileo know that everyone knows his name all these centuries later, how amazing the cosmos is, and how we scoff at the church's folly. To tell Jefferson that his experiment is still here, still a free nation, and the most powerful country in the world (and WTF dude? Free your slaves!)

So here it is for Martin Luther King Jr.:

It's a pleasure to meet you sir. I'm from the future, from 2009, and I want to tell you some things. Everyone in my time knows who you are. Your name is synonymous with civil rights, and non-violent struggle. We have a national holiday in your honor. "Nigger" is possibly the most unacceptable word in the English language today, unless the speaker is an African American. *laughing* No one says "Negro" anymore either actually, even though you did. Racism still exists but it's very clearly on the way out. I'm here to tell you these things because you'll be assassinated soon, and you won't live to see them. But you can't let that stop you, because in 2008 we elected our first black President, and we couldn't have done it without you. That's right, there's a black family in the White House.

I just wanted you to know that, and I want you to know that without you I believe Civil Rights would have headed towards Civil War, bloodshed - and if violent civil strife in the rest of the world is any indication - eventually an attempt at genocide or a fracturing of the country into enemy states. Thank you for your courage and sacrifice. Thank you for your non-violence, and thank you for your dream. America is still reaching for it, but mostly we're living it.

Oh, and one more thing: stop cheating on your wife man.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

The position of each bird on the electric lines is used to represent a note on sheet music. There's a little discretion in whether slightly offset birds are counted as part of a chord or as a separate note, but it's still pretty surprising that this sounds so good.

Enjoy!

I didn't take that many, and they're on my iPhone so they're not great.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mishlai/

Also, I'm some kind of flickr retard and all of my pics are in one photo stream. I don't care enough to fix it however, so you'll have to live with my inadequacy ; )

It was fantastic to see everyone!

You can bet your bone sword I'll be playing this.


http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drfe/20090814

You've all seen really good sand artists before I'm sure. This one goes beyond "ooh that's neat" into the realm of provoking emotion in the viewer. In my mind, that is the essential definition of art.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo

I've been having a great several weeks, but today was crappy. Just work stress; this too shall pass. I wasn't letting it bother me at first, but over the course of the day things just kept piling up. Stressed out people stress me out, apparently.

Also: FUCK THOSE OVERREACTING BASTARDS!!!!

I'm going to go have a couple of glasses of merlot & nerd out over some technology.

That is all.

Continuing...

There are a number of problems, which I will list briefly. I've put them into some rough categories:

Unexpected stuff
1) The experiment indicated that the DNA did not mix up as much as they expected.

2) The genes did not express cleanly as I described earlier - Yellow, Red, and Nothing. Instead there was also Green, as well as unexpected hybrids - Orange, Pink, and so on.

Both of these are troubling in their own right, but are likely to be understood and overcome. I'm interested in these points, but not that worried.

Problems of method
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This article described research in which a colony of bacteria were used to compute the answer to a simple problem. The Guardian article used bold wording like "A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that could solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon."

But as I'm about to describe, such sentiments are very premature. It may indeed be that bacterial computing will one day bring us faster-than-silicon computing, but I'm not holding my breath. In addition to the limitations of modern day bio-technology, there may be more fundamental problems.

It's possible that the power of evolution might save the day for us, however. I'm still studying the issue, but there's such a lack of worthwhile coverage on this that I thought it might be valuable to post something preliminary. I'm going to explain the basics of how bacteria were made to compute in this post, and then go into more detail later.

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I've recently been introduced to Adele and Movits. I like both, hope you do too.

Adele has an entire album that's amazing. I haven't heard anything else from Movits yet.