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August 28th, 2006
08:38 pm
Laptop = dead for a month. ARGH.
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July 30th, 2006
03:28 pm
A survey for you all.
Answer these questions, and you will feel as though you are a renewed human being.
1) What is more useful, a sculpture of a suitcase, or a sculpture in a suitcase?
2) If you could ask Ponce de Leon one question about his life, what would it be?
3) If a genie promised you he would fulfill three wishes of one person in your literature textbook, who would you choose?
4) How many dice rolls do you guess it would take to add up to your age?
5) Genghis Khan is in your living room. What's the first thing he does?
6) You're trapped in your room with an angry rhinocerous wearing plaid. What do you feed the beast in an attempt to appease it?
7) You're trapped in the Louvre in a terrible blizzard and the only way to survive is to make fire from the paintings. What do you do?
8) Which country, if rocketed into orbit, would make the best space station?
9) Thirteen vegetables can be found in the attic of your neighbor's home. What are they?
10) A tornado made of polar bears is heading towards your house. How do you arm yourself?
11) Three elements of the periodic table have to be reacted to stop the earth from exploding! Choose quickly! Which will it be?
12) You wake up to find the Knights of the Round Table have set up headquarters in your basement. They think there's a dragon lurking somewhere nearby in your home. Where is it?
13) You're lost in a jungle with only 15 stalks of bamboo. What tools do you fashion?
14) What color of towel is the best?
15) You discover that Jaws was based on a true story in the future and you are a main character. What person are you?
Have fun evareebody. I wrote it myself.
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July 21st, 2006
07:25 pm
The last things a soldier expects to need until the supply is gone are his boots. After his literally melted onto the top of a Matilda tank from the geographical stove of the Sahara Desert, Humphrey had to make sandals out of his uniform in slowly tearing cloth. With each passing day, he felt more and more heat crawling up from the sands towards his skin. It made him think of his American cousin in the Pacific, not as a moment of sentiment, but wondering if the coal-walking tribesman of those lands felt the way he did during every passing minute.
The sky was a morning blue sharper than any prism could focus, but the sun it perched above the earth at such an angle that no man dared look up to see its glory. Clouds were little more than a passing stranger on this soil foreign to those British warriors on patrol in their mechanical chariot racing on four wheels to the northeast. They were sculpted as new men by the sun, their skin and wardrobe distorted so much by the dunes that they appeared as Bedouins to the untrained eye.
The spare tire was already in use, as well as a miracle fix to the front left that nobody could really explain involving patchwork with used teabags. There were bullet holes in part of the rear from earlier engagements, but fewer than most vehicles already had. There were nine men to six seats in the vehicle, sometimes more depending on the day. Everybody felt damn lucky that there was still enough water and ammunition to last a week, and they knew this was probably the last time they would have that luxury of excess.
“Jack, how far’d command say we’d have to go to find the northern wing?” Humphrey kept his body turned as many inches as he could away from the direct sunlight on his side of the vehicle.
“We should’ve seen them by now.” Jack had cut special gloves so his hands wouldn‘t burn on the steering wheel. “They’re prolly still heading that way.”
Much palaver followed.
“Shoudn’t we head back ‘stead of wasting the petrol?”
“Command decided to have us rendezvous now that there’s petrol to waste, kid. This isn’t gonna turn around.”
“It’s not very frugal.”
“Neither is the bloody desert. Now somebody hand me my canteen.”
“Maybe we’ll find a genie if we’re lucky.”
“Maybe it’ll be a lady. I haven’t seen the shape of a woman in months…”
“A load of bullocks, Geoff. Everybody here has the magazines that Herschel smuggled in.”
“That’s what I mean. The commander found mine.”
“Oh bloody hell. What does he know?”
“Nothing about it. But like I said.”
The jeep’s engine made a sound that began to undulate when Humphrey focused on it more over the banter of the men. It seemed like the longer he listened to mechanical things, the less significant the sounds were. It was almost like the sound of a harmonica after a while, playing a single note continuously with an endless gasp of combustion. He knew every part of the engine and could compare the pulse of the pistons with his own. It was a soothing drone that occupied his mind against the unchanging landscape of the desert…
He thought about all the engine fixes the company had him do. At least five in the past week had been done, and two more would’ve been completed had there been enough screws and oil for all of them. The rendezvous crew was going to have enough to finish the mechanical work though, and then operations could be on the move again. They just kept their guns at the ready when ordered, as it was better than worrying about when the supplies would arrive. The calliope of an engine was all he thought of for now…
“Damnit Humphrey, get out of the way.”
He had fallen asleep, apparently, and the sun was shining from directly overhead. Soon the heat of the desert came back like a bad memory and the ragged feel of his clothing. He swung open the low metal door and threw himself out of the vehicle before he got a chance to look around. When his eyes adjusted, he was surrounded by blackened metal icebergs rising from the sandy sea, the remains of their rendezvous crew.
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July 11th, 2006
10:54 pm
Oh no... what is that fellow up to THIS time? Is that a monistic universe?
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July 10th, 2006
12:21 am
Tell us a story!
Okay, okay. I shall tell you of the campaign that happened. As you will quickly discover, I was very evil.
So, I find myself as Fulcrum Makuna, Sharif of a district in a seaside Arabian city. I decide one day to start raising hell and imposing taxes on my citizens in order to buy myself a shiny new galley. With me is a half-orc shaman and a half-elven... something. Because of my noble upbringing, I wear a pair of shiny boots that let me run at ridiculous speeds, and I carry with me a giant mallet called "The Funeral Bell of Justice," because it has a hollow, open end that rings like a gong. I'm a deceitful, cunning bastard of a ruler, and all my subjects hold a bit of a grudge against me.
So, I bought nine mules, eight of which stayed at my manor. One of them pulled my sled through the sandy streets of town, while a shaman rode next to me on top of a rhinocerous. You heard me. I ordered a bunch of privates to start locking the doors of the town, and citizens could only break out if they agreed to my ten gold piece tax (a lot for a pseudo-oppressed working class). Privates start scurrying around locking doors, while my corporals are yelling at me that I don't have authority to do so, to which I replied, "Fuck you, I'm the Sharif motherfucking Fulcrum Makuna!"
I was trying to convince a bunch of ex-convict citizens to join me or else I would get them thrown in jail on sexual assault charges, when the town cataphracts charged through. Pretty much everybody tried to bluff them at once, and they got suspicious and placed the town area under martial law. I tried diplomacy on them for a bit, "Come on brothers, we're all working for the man here!" Of course, that didn't work. I was going to slip out, but the shaman decided to take action and make his rhinocerous charge.
These cataphracts meant business, and they pretty much destroyed the rhino with javelins. In order to help my friend escape, I rallied together my privates who were busy locking doors and convinced them to attack the cataphracts, as "The King has instructed me to do, for they are technologically behind and stuff." To which they replied, "Uh... okay." Of course, they were getting owned.
Another group of cataphracts came around the corner. I ran over to them quickly, and yelled "Brothers, something horrible has happened! These cataphracts have betrayed the citizens and are attacking their own men! They are opposed to the king!" Nobody believed me. "Just get out of the way, sir, and we'll figure this out."
Desperate, I ran around the corner after the mess grew more intense. I rang the hammer bell against the wall of a building to get the attention of the citizens. "Everyone, my friends and colleagues, look before you as the king has taken out his rage against the proletariat, and I, your benevolent Sharif, am trying to defend you!" No reaction, just a bunch of confused people. A group of orphans used the chaos as a chance to horde in a kiosk of fish where one of the convicts had just killed the owner.
I decided to be more wicked and pulled out my taxation papers. "The king has forced me to tax you all ten gold pieces for a new galley for personal use, while your children in the streets are starving! Think of what that money could buy them, and what will become of you!" "We'd rather be oppressed then get our asses kicked." I slammed the woman in the face with a mallet, killing her. "This is the voice of injustice! She may be a member of the proletariat, but her voice was that of the oppressor!" I gonged the hammer some more. "Knock that off!" someone yelled. "Does my bell toll as the sound of the bell of justice for the people, or will it be the funeral bell for your rights?"
That was my mother, you bastard!" He took it to the face and died also. The mob then turned against me, pulling knives and shards of glass and other horrible things. They stabbed me a few times, and I jumped away, fleeing the kingdom as a traitor. ^_^
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June 6th, 2006
10:29 pm - Irrational Games
I've been doing some research on game theory for my Speech summer course, as I have to give an informational speech of a topic of my choice. What my research led me to was one of the most bizarre fields of mathematics ever, though, which was infinite game theory; taking preexisting games and removing parameters so that they never end. Imagine the possibilities in irrational games. Chaopoly would be my favorite. It would be played on a continuous where every point on the plane is a different property, so that no matter how many times each player passes go, they would never reach the same property twice, especially if the distance traveled was a chaotic value between 0 and 6, a spherical die :)
Pool in the universe of the physics of Zeno's paradox would also be an interesting occurence. Imagine a pool table where once a ball is hit, its speed is determined by the proportions of the distance traveled versus the distance to the hole. Because the speed is comparative as it was during the times of Zeno instead of accurate like it is in modern times, the ball would inversely deccelerate, and no matter how hard the ball was hit. It would never actually reach the hole.
This isn't really irrational math, but imagine parametric chess, where each piece is given a specialized velocity. Turns are not back and forth, but a continuous process, and as a result, all pieces are capable of moving at the same time provided they are not blocked. Imagine as knights mercilessly gallop down the queen of an opposing empire as she struggles to flee, while a horde of pawns overwhelm the rook attempting to horizontally escape. It would be glorious if chess worked in a real time situation.
I was having a good time with this one.
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May 3rd, 2006
07:24 pm
Dream complications, it seems my mind has created a bizarre loophole. When I've dreamed lately, it hasn't been direct, but rather dreams about myself recounting dreams to others or laying in bed remembering them. The dreams I remember in the dreams are in vivid detail, involving strange things like towers in the desert with torches at their zeniths or a frightening cloud-like beast that resembles my sweet old grandmother.
I'm trying to decide what sort of process would denote this due to the bizarre fact that none of the dreams I remember in my dreams occur, but I relate them. Perhaps this has only been a fluke, but the process of dreaming occurs in the rearrangement of mental data and the interpretations thereof. Somehow, the rearranged data accounts for another undergoing process, as if a seperate dream has occured while I am not dreaming and the processer is trying to rearrange previously rearranged data?
I can't think of any reason why this should happen. You may think I am making something large out of nothing, but this does not seem to match the format of a dream state at all. I'm rather curious as to what sort of importance it could have.
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February 27th, 2006
09:55 pm
My bones really do ache... but that's supposed to be impossible, right?
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February 22nd, 2006
10:29 pm
Broadcasting to you live from the Omni Suites in Chicago, IL.
Is something wrong with the fact that I was able to pick up a wireless network at 4/5 conditions miles over rural Minnesota?
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January 29th, 2006
06:28 pm
I found out that the Mona Lisa image was A) Leading people to believe I was a girl and B) Leading people to associate the way I look with Botero's painting. So, new userpic is up. Make what you will of it. :)
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January 26th, 2006
08:57 pm
Yesterday, I ate a bowl of chili con queso illegally, and I could have been put in jail for it. Ah, but I suppose you are wondering how that is possible? Well, during our lunch break from the Jazz Festival, I went over to Bonzer's Pub to gather some lunch, but I only had about 20 minutes to eat because I had promised a friend I would meet her at 12:30. So I said to the waiter, "Is there anything here that I could eat in a very short period of time?"
"Sure, things are kind of slow right now anyways. Just say what you want." It was then that I ordered the con queso, and they gave me a colossal bowl that probably contained a gallon of the substance (which was quite delicious) with a plate of chips to rival it. I ate as much of it as I could very quickly, then left twelve dollars on the table and walked out the door.
When I told people where I ate, there were some very wide eyes.
What I did not realize is that Bonzer's, in order to keep their smoking customers in recent bans, had to qualify themselves as a bar by state standards, and as a result, they are now considered an official liquor vendor. In other words, any person under twenty-one can be prosecuted for being on their grounds. ^_^;; My guess is that because of the rush I was in, they didn't ask for ID because it distracted their focus.
Yeah, that law is very effective. I was such a threat to society, especially considering I was under 21. That means I can't handle being near alcohol no matter what, right?
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January 17th, 2006
January 11th, 2006
10:16 pm
I'm going to Chicago in a month :o :o :o
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January 8th, 2006
January 1st, 2006
12:50 am
I just spent a whole New Years party talking quantum mechanics and philosophy. It was the greatest New Years I've had in quite some time. :)
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December 13th, 2005
06:18 pm
It was within a deep, wild Norwewgian jungle that I first encountered the castle that would thrust fear deep within me. Between clusters of palm trees and ferns scattered about the landscape was a large stone edifice designed for the sheer purpose of defending a treasure countless years old. In the fifth century AD, this place was a battleground for the greatest of Viking warriors who dared to face each other in combat. After global warming struck, however, Norway sank deep beneath sea level, and only the mountains remained, becoming tropical havens for tourists and adventurers alike.
Here, it was rumored that the norse god Odin had hidden a turkey baster made out of the purest steel forged by Thor. It was designed to defeat a horrible demon found by the Vikings in the Westward travels across the ocean, a half turkey, half dragon (dragurkey, to the educated amongst us). The creature was conquered by Leif Erikson, and cooked for a group of freeloading Americans with the magical baster. The day was celebrated for years to come as "Thanksgiving."
After miles and miles of seeing nothing but chlorophyll, I stopped to rest on a fallen log near my destination. It was then I began to hear a distinct pulse coming towards my general direction as if nature had plagiarized directly from Jurassic Park. I stood up cautiously, my eyes panning about to find the unseen threat that may be nearing. I prepared my machete that had carved through this terrible Norwegian dismal, waiting for the threat to arrive. At last the trees parted and revealed the gruesome beast therein.
The behemoth had a reptilian frame the size of at least fifteen men with giant incisors barred between the edges of its beak. Brown scales and feathers intermingled about its skin, giving it the look of a bird, yet the ferocity of a dinosaur. Red, bulbous growths hung from its twelve foot long neck, and a large, peacock-like billow of feathers shot out from the end of its torso. The creature leaned forward upon its obsidian talons and let out a screeching gobble that filled me with terror.
Yes, my friends, it was the first time I ever faced the wild dragurkey.
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December 3rd, 2005
10:14 pm
My birthday is on Tuesday. Sacrifice goats in my honor. Or just leave comments claiming you did, and I'll give you benefit of the doubt.
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November 27th, 2005
01:16 pm
I just got what is easily the most awesome spam message ever. Basically, its stereotypical "Get Windows Software for cheap!" etc. junk, but the name of the sender floored me.
"Shiva V. Hologram."
...wow.
On a further note, if you haven't seen the Chuck Norris list, definitely look at it.
http://www.4q.cc/chuck/index.php?topthirty
"Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs."
"Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits."
"If you can see Chuck Norris, he can see you. If you can't see Chuck Norris you may be only seconds away from death."
"Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK's head exploded out of sheer amazement."
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November 20th, 2005
07:22 pm
A recipe
4 liters of Mountain dew
3 packages of gummi worms
4 Tbsp. sugar (for good measure)
5 small packages of blue raspberry kool aid
5 cups marshmallows
Dice the gummi worms, them mix everything together. Everything. Serve as a soup.
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I don't know what to name it. What do you think?
Nor have I ever made it. Any souls brave enough to make it with me?
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November 15th, 2005
11:06 pm
Bloody dopplegangers.
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