Misc

-My phone is working again

-Last time I made pesto while adding oil to the blender I had to make a note "I'm out of the good oil. I'm switching to the very good oil." Now I'm also out of the very good oil. It's Spanish imported virgin olive oil. I feel almost bad using it, but have no idea why we had it to begin with.

-Something... I don't remember what.

-Making encounter cards is something I used to do as a DM I'm doing it again. I've been slacking in my DMing a lot recently.

Ki

I had my first Aikido class today, I'm very enthused about it, but that's not really the important thing right now.

I've had a lot of personal experience dealing with Ki. While it's true that I was calling it parana at the time, it's really the same thing, it's just that I was studying something different. I learned a lot about charging oneself, opening ones chakras and the other assorted basics of Paranic meditation. Ultimately I lost most of what I gained because I got busy with the trappings of material life, but I never fully stopped.

The one thing that always eluded me when I was studying this was how people are able to project, or throw, or what have you with Ki. I tried several times to move the flow of every out of myself, but it felt very forced, as though I was trying to move through molasses. I took this to simply mean that it's hard something I had assumed from the beginning, and wrote it off as "Something I can't do yet."

As part of the first classes they introduced us to a few basic Ki techniques, my particular enlightenment came during their absolute intro to the use of Ki. It was a fairly simple exercise. It demonstrated the difference between aggressive actions and those involving Ki. The Sensei held out his arm, and his assistant tried to bend it along the elbow, not to break anything, but simply to force him to move. The obvious way to resist this is to tense your muscles and push back, but that's conflict, and hence not what we're after. After that he demonstrated the other way of doing it. He let Ki flow through his arm, projecting it out to the horizon, so that his body became part of the flow. The assistant tried again to brute force his arm, and without losing a state of relaxation, without actively fighting him he went unmoved. And that's the key. The idea that a contest of strengths took place here is a misconception, because he never forced anything, he simply did not allow himself to be moved.

There were, as always, a few false starts on my end, but as I calmed myself and let my Ki project through me I had a revelation. I saw what it was that I had been doing wrong all that time. I had trained in moving Ki within the body, drawing it in, moving it along the chakras, etc, but I had been doing it wrong the whole time. Ki doesn't move within the body, Ki moves through it, as it does all things. The whole idea of throwing Ki had always been embarrassingly Anime, but Ki projection was a known thing that was done, I had simply forgotten what it was I was dealing with. You can't anymore throw Ki than you could throw a river, or the ethereal concept of flow. Rather you can understand that we all exist within it, and that it runs through us, and we can direct how it runs through us.

I'm not sure if anyone else will really understand what I'm saying here. I apologize if I've gotten to mystic-dreamer-y for you to follow, but to me this is a profound revelation.

Misc

-The code reds were buy 2 get 2 free for the long refrigerator boxes. It was a good deal, even if it strained my arms carrying them all home, but I am so sick of code red.

-My phone charger is busted, or my phone won't take chargers, IDK, I'm working on it, but it's hard to get my phone to charge.

-Fun Fact: Statisically speaking, You have herpes.

-It was kind of neat hearing the kink community panel speak. The most amusing part though, by far, was how they introduced themselves. It's a pretty standard formula. "Hi I'm name, orientation, gender, S&M role." For example, one of the key speakers was "Hi I'm Russel, Bi Male Switch."

-One more note about the panel. They're all Bi switch. I wonder if those two go together.

-Fun with numbers. The US has the highest rate of STIs in the industrialized world, and in aggregate College Students have a higher occurrence of STIs then prostitues. The most rapidly growing demographic for the spread of STIs? Teenagers. And the leading cause of death for those 25-44? That's right, Sexually Transmitted Infections. I think it's quite clear that our society is fucked up when it comes to, well, fucking, and the practices associated with it.

-I'm studying for my tests monday, and while I've been collecting a lot of "Thoughts I never thought I'd have" as per my recent classes, I've just acquired my first compound TINTIH. I call it compound because both parts of the thought are themselves TINTIH. It is "Guh, let's stop talking about female ejaculation and go back to talking about the plight of the developing world."

Severed

I just read what I sincerely hope is the single worst paragraph I will ever read in any textbook ever. I won't be repeating it here, but I'm mentioning this incident to preserve this moment. In the space of that paragraph I went from being intrigued and interested in the academia I was studying to be appalled and depressed enough that I could not go on. I highlighted the paragraph (because it is important) and then put the book down, intent on taking a well deserved break. In one swift blow my motivation was severed.

Insight

In my grand internal discussions the phrase "Haunted by Memory" comes up a lot. It's not one I made up, but it's one that, from time to time, applies to me as I would guess it does most people. What strikes me about these moments is that I'm always reflecting on some little thing I did which w as profoundly stupid, or socially clumsy in ways that are obvious to myself as I am now, and would be clear to me if I were in the situation again. They've brought me a lot of strife, but something has occurred to me.

In these moments I'm looking back on what I was, seeing it, and seeing its flaws clearly. This means that I'm something more then that now. While I'm not by an means stating that these events are pleasurable, or desirable, I would however say that they are good, because if these things keep happening then it means that I'm always getting better.

Quote Dump

I'm emptying my facebook quotes list again. There's probably an interesting story in going back to read all of them, and checking how they've progressed over time, but that's a story I'll hear later.

"To live as I do, in a life of dreaming and escapism, is the highest act of arrogance that can be attained. To be as I am you must look upon the splendors of creation; know the infinite variety and unspeakable beauty of existence, and see the quintessence in all things, and after all of this you must turn to the world and it's creator and say:
"Not Enough."
-ArcaneInsane

"Does it command us to thaw?"
-Kevin Wilson, talking about an oreo cake

"Eventually I had to admit that I had what the robot devil's old music teacher Ms. Melinger called "stupid fingers""
-Will Wheaton

"I told you this would end badly. Polyamory is just too sexy to have a serious discussion about it."
-NocturnalDeva

"BDSM is just cops and robbers for adults with your pants off"
-Dan Savage

"You are the foot on the windpipe of my dreams, sir."
-Alex Klemm

Igor: "I'm an Igor Sir, We don't ask questions."
Von Lipwig: "Really? Why not?"
Igor: "I'm not sure sir, I never asked."
-Terry Pratchet

"This is what happens when someone is a nerd and a slut at the same time."
-NocturnalDeva

"A man chooses, a slave obeys"
-Andrew Ryan

"Arm the Homeless"
-Tom Morello's Guitar

"Some day congress will hear my story, and overnight I'll become a nation wide icon of our corrupted youth."
-NocturnalDeva

"What? You always say I should have faith, well that's me having faith. Random anonymous blackmail."
-Huey Freeman, The Boondocks

Trippy

Ultimately this story is about sleep, and my hate/stab relationship with it, that's not the interesting story, but that's what actually going on.

The interesting story starts on Tuesday, technically Wednesday, when I utterly failed my sleep check. Instead of getting the planned 8 hours of sleep I got three hours of something akin to fever dreams, with the distinct lack of any fever, followed by three hours of denial and the jimmy legs, as Jon Stewart calls it, followed by a collective consensus of "Screw it" and the decision that if I'm not sleeping for those two hours then I should really get something done.

Which of course meant 1 hour or reading and 1 hour of meaningless web banter.

Luckily my classes are fairly early, so I hadn't passed the exhaustion threshold when I went to my sociology lecture. I got through that just fine, took good notes etc. I then shambled to the HUB, bought two liter bottles (two bottles one liter each) of Vault, which allowed me to pull a popeye-esque revival and head to English. English was no less productive then normal, but I wouldn't exactly say that it was productive.

My second bottle of vault later I arrive at my human sexuality class. I'd like to pause for a moment to point out that the problems in the story below have already been addressed, PSYCH 210 has screencasts, which is essentially exactly the same as going to the lectures, so I was able to basically relive that episode of Winter Quarter 08, the Max Willson story, a Quentin Tarantino Production (stay tuned)

Anyway, preemptive countermeasures against parental fears aside, I made it though the first hour of lecture just fine. It was a fairly standard session of class including the generalized nervous laughter and at least one opportunity to respond to my classmates lack of deviance with a combination sigh and eye roll followed by the dismissive muttering of "Philistines..."

The problem came during the second hour when the energy drinks begin to wear off and the various lower cognitive parts of my brain become aware that I'm sleep deprived, at which point they begin shutting down the higher cognitive parts. This leads to a fading in and out of consciousness, where I'm fully aware in 15 second bursts, every minute or so, then black out until the next one.

I've told you all of that so that you can understand what lead to one of the most trippy experiences of my life. For an hour I, on the edge of consciousness, was getting bits and pieces of a complex examination of the breadth of human sexual practice. So to me the experience was:

"...although the technical definition would include everything from masturbation to the use of birth control..."

blackout

"...Remains illegal in several states..."

blackout

"...a figure radically at odds with the societal image of the male libido..."

blackout

"...has been stigmatized as homosexual despite the fact that 50% of college educated first worlders have engaged in it..."

blackout

"...Has been found to easily result in orgasm in over 70% of people regardless of gender or orientation..."

blackout

"...will develop new parasympathetic erogenous zones..."

blackout

"...despite the spinal injury and subsequent loss of regular stimulation..."

blackout

"...can be brought about through fantasy stimulation alone..."

blackout

"...use a form of hypnotic trance to..."

It's just plain trippy. And that's the censored version. The full one is a full out brainscrew.

Strangers

I'm cleaning up my room right now, and one of the key subtasks of that is converting all of the loose issues of The Stranger into my collection of stranger covers. Because of the way the stranger is done collecting the covers also means that I have a collection of the page 1 adds, last page stuff, and back cover adds, which is when I noticed something. My collection goes back to late 2005, it's probably over 70 covers by now (I'm not particularly attentive about this, and it was hard to find the Stranger in Redmond) and there's a company that appears to have bought out one spot on the back cover for all of eternity. I'm also fairly certain that they did on 14 hour photoshoot, because all of the adds, which show various styles and clothing types etc, are all on the same background with the same model. A new couple of pictures every day, but always that same girl and that same stage. It's odd, she's an unintended constant in the paper.

LF 1M Kara, Healer

I logged onto WoW last night to talk to a few old friends of mine. The game itself doesn't hold a huge appeal to me, but I have old connections that are still fun. Eventually it's pointed out to me that my guild is almost 30 minutes late starting their run on Karazhan because they need another healer. I mention idly that I was a healer 6 months ago, and I'm immediately press ganged into my old role.

There's a brief delay while I reinstall Ventrillo and try to remember exactly how I used to play this game. Logging back into my old main displays the frightening number of separate spells and abilities that I felt were important enough to have at my immediate disposal (32) and the breadth of potions and variant items that went into my old process. The gist of it is, however, very simple, and before long things are beginning to come back to me. It's like making candy out of babies.

I should point out that in the few months of raiding I had been doing I got very little. I eventually left the game because I was frustrated with the incompetence of my peers, and the cruelty of the randomized drop system. Now that I'm back I can see that my guild has shaved some of the fat, and that our actual raiding group, as opposed to the pick up style 5 man instance groups, is fairly well constructed. A few of the people who I had classified as whiny incompetent bastards are still clinging on, but ignoring them isn't too hard.

I thought idly to myself after picking up an item that was a signifigant upgrade over my caster cloak and a moderate upgrade over my healing cloak, eliminating the need to carry two cloaks, that this was the first epic item the character had ever gotten. I got my first real epic item off the next boss, and I got another epic caster item off the last one we did. The amount of rep gained also allowed me to get a fourth epic. This character only has four epics. I got them all last night, on a run that I didn't plan to do, or sign up for, and was violently restricted from dropping out of.

It's amusing to see how much people still need healers.

Misc

-When I sat down to create a new blog post I titled it "On Gods and Champions II" then I realized that I have to leave in 30 minutes and I'm still wearing my Jeans and my robe. I'll have to get to that later.

-I kind of wish I could always walk around in some manner of pants and a robe. I like wearing a robe.

-The same goes for walking around barefoot.

-The phrase "When one door closes another one opens" and all of its related phrases tend to get the actuality of the circumstance wrong in a key way. It's not that one closes and another opens it's that there's a lot of doors. If yours closes go find one of the ones that's still open.

-My composition class was described as the literature one. There are several composition courses, and I've already had four classes that were designed to teach me to write argumentative papers based around a thesis etc, which is why I've done well in four of my last 5 writing classes. In a quick tangent, Dr. Hawkins was a great teacher, it's a shamed they discharged him from Emery, but even more of a shame that I had to do three peer reviews in his class where I told people that they weren't writing an argumentative paper and that most of their work was going to be invalid. Anyway, I was hoping this class wouldn't be one of those because the skill that I wanted to learn is how to write narrative fiction.

-Gamely has been screwing with me recently. They've been sending me the 6th and 7th things on my queue instead of the ones that I actively want.

-My sociology prof needs to take a public speaking crash course. The same is true of my comp teacher but I'm willing to let him slide because he's a grad student. I really don't mean this in an antagonistic way, even though that's nearly impossible to communicate, but there are two or three key things you can do to make yourself better by a factor of two.

-I thought of my drama class as an amusing class that didn't really apply. However, it was in drama, along with the plays I had minor rolls in, that I learned how to speak in a stage voice, meaning to speak at a high volume without changing tone or shouting. This little trick has come in handy more times then I can count. Most recently it's allowed me to address the entire lecture hall in a clearly audible voice, something my prof and his microphone couldn't do.

-Those little clip mics never seem to work quite right. If you have to be high tech get a headset, but I really don't see the problem with a hand mic.

-I've now done enough testing to conclude that whatever it was that was making the roof of my mouth and jaw hurt was directly related to taking two one a day vitamins a day. I see the reasoning behind it dad, and I agree that the dosage is for a regular person, of which I am at least two, but ultimately I ran into something. Maybe my diet was already high in some specific thing, I can't say for certain.

-With the exception of my sleeping habits I'm doing a lot better in a lot of little ways. Some combination of the fish oil, the vitamins, the exercise, the sun lamps, and my change of major is probably the cause.

Trumped

So there's a lot of details behind this, but I'm not going to go into them, so lets just say that circumstances conspired and I ended up logging back into WoW this morning. I tooled around a bit, found my old social connections had also left the game, and played around a bit with the characters themselves. Ultimately I logged off, with little to no desire to log back on, unless me & Adam team up as previously discussed. I have another 30 days of play time but I cut off that recurring plan only an hour or so after starting it.

The simple fact is this. The one thing that WoW has over Tabula Rasa is the only thing that Tabula Rasa distinctly lacks. Team play. The grinding, the blocky combat, etc. all make WoW kind of pale when you're not addicted to it. I kind of wonder how I put up with that for so long. To be honest after this I'm seriously reconsidering whether or not I'm going back whenever the next X-pac hits.

The Cure

This is going to sound kind of dumb, and it is, but falling back into an MMO, not as bad as once but still, old patterns, may have actually saved me.

A lot of my problems over the last few months relate to poor decisions made voluntarily, and it''s all based around a relationship that would've been beautiful if we'd ever met in person, and didn't live on opposite coasts, and a large number of other things. I've been trying for a while now to actually separate myself from her but... well. She's addictive, and when I find my mind wandering too often it's wandering towards her.

The readily available highly consuming distraction of the game, not to mention a circuit of places to be an escapist that won't wind up with us crossing our mutually starcrossed paths again, has given me an edge in getting some distance.

I feel like I have so much more to say, but every time I try to put that many simultaneous thoughts an emotions into the form of words all I can do is shake my head and let out a quick sigh.

Problems

I heard once that if the letters of a word are scrambled, excluding the first and last letter, and all of the proper letters are there, then the average person can still read it. To me this was a very alarming bit of information, because it meant that we'd constantly be reading certain things wrong. Today I'm proved correct, by the continuous presence of the word 'causal' in my sociology textbook, and the complete absence of the word 'casual.'

I'm depely wroired by tihs

Sunlight

Reaping the rewards of my fathers fear of depression I was recently gifted with a broad spectrum lamp. I'm fairly certain that's the proper label for it anyway. In street level terminology it's a bright lamp that's supposed to mimic sunlight.

The lamp along with the sunny conditions yesterday and todays return to the Seattle's harsh tutelage on the breadth of colors that fall under the word gray have made me realize my background appreciation for sunlight.

It's a thought that kind of bugs me, because I'm generally a night person, and a cold person, and in many ways a shadows person. I'll grant that this may have started off as a persona cobbled together out of teenage angst and duct tape, one of the many things teenagers make all kinds of stuff out of duct tape, but it's become part of my intrinsic mannerisms. We're around the five year mark now so I think wearing all black has clearly exceeded the word phase, but despite all everything else I kind of like sunlight.

It also raises my old game of antagonizing the sun. Granted it was just a game, but I've been playing that one for a while, so I feel a bit hypocritical.

It's also lead me to think about a few things. The theoretical rituals I've been turning around in my head as part of my knee jerk affection for rituals and my fear of turning my Champion into a religion, but we'll have to discuss that once I go into the details of my particular Champion. More so it's made me reflect on why I stopped practicing Wicca.

In general I have no problems with Wicca, beyond the standard suite of problems that I have with religeons, most of which Wicca shares. There's a lot of bullshit new-age-ism that seems to come with the standard wiccan, but those are problems with that person not that religion. The whole time I was delving into it I had a weird bit of dissonance though. Looking back I can see pretty clearly was it was. The moon, the earth mother, the fact that every major author and teacher was a woman; the whole religion is very feminine, and that's fine if you're female, but I'm not. I was lacking a bit of that connection that many of my then peers spoke of. I probably berated myself for lacking talent because this was back when I was a moody teenager instead of pretentious college student, but I think the problem was that my relation to those iconic images is inherently different because of gender, and even though I could never find a wiccan who bothered with it, I always felt a stronger connection to the iconic figure of the "Lord" whose avatar is the Sun. It's interesting, in a highly pointless way, to reflect on this, and where it could have lead, and upon the potential open market of other mystically minded young men looking for someone to take back the word Warlock in the way that Wicca has done with witchcraft.

Then again between World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons the term "Warlock" has gotten a fairly concrete association with evil. We'll probably have to get a different name...

Unknown Knowledge

I read a phrase just recently, I think it was in the Zombie Survival Guide. The context of it is forgotten to me but it was "Just as a man who often rises in the night knows the location of every object in his room."

I thought about that, then closed my eyes, walked to my computer, to a few things on my headboard, across to my closet, the printer etc.

It's interesting to think that I learned how to move around my room in the dark without every having thought about the need or practiced the skill. It makes one wonder just what else they may be learning without realizing it. Perhaps even what one is learning right now.

Thoughts

I have my shoes on, I've eaten, I'm packed, and I have 3 minutes left. There are only 8 episodes of Big Bang Theory out there in the data piracy sphere, so I've already seen this one, meaning it's not enough to full occupy my mind.

And I'm wondering how creepy it was when I was taking pictures of everything. I kind of miss doing that. Particularly yesterday, it was a beautifully photogenic day.

I wonder where my camera is.

Never mind it's on my headboard where it's been since PAX.

Now I just have to dive into the blackened deeps of my closet to find the charger...

Winter 08

I can never sleep the first day of term. This one has a lot more baggage then normal, that can't be disputed, but it's still a recurring theme.


Don't college schedules always look so sparse? On Tuesday and Thursday I barely have class at all. It just doesn't mean I don't have work. Social studies classes do so love their assighned reading.

This schedule is also incomplete. I've always liked the ideas behind the UW experimental college, but this is the first time I've signed up.

Thank you for registering with us! Please verify your name and address:

Registration Line: (206) 68-LEARN (206-685-3276)

Email: asuwecoa@u.washington.edu

Website: www.exco.org

Course Name: Aikido with Ki, Sec. 1

Location: UHC 5031

First class meets: 28 January 2008 at 7:00 pm

Instructor: John Soriano

What else...

I can't link it to you, it requires a student ID, but my Psych lectures are available in Podcast form, which I think is several kinds of awesome.. I'm already prone to listening to podcasts of things while indulging in my primary entertainment source (Gaming) and now I can fight for the AFS and my GPA at the same time.

Also bonus points to my hopeless slacker score for mentioning Tabula Rasa in a post about the new quarter of classes.

...Yeah, I'm out of things to say. I'll go do some more useless prep, and general chronocidal uselessness.

Epic Moments in Gaming, Tabula Rasa

It's an odd system.

Adrian Slyz was a fun character. I got a lot of miles out of him, he's done a lot, but he's spread too thin. Part of the problem of exploring all of the things a character can do is that in the end you're okay at everything and you're getting your ass handed to you by people who are really good at their one thing, and they're handing it to you with your own hand which they blew off with their grandmastery of weapon X while you're trying and failing to beat them with your proficiency with weapons a-w.

So now I'm Alexander Slyz, a clone of Adrian Slyz even though I don't look anything like him and all of my training points are free again. Nikolita Slyz is also technically a clone of Adrian, and she's not even the same gender.

The word clone is being misused.

That's not my point though, the point is that I have a shiny new clone point and I've spent it cooking up my boy Alex who is Archduke of the rocket launcher and it's time to test out my new rig.

The first thing I notice is that my new rig doesn't have all of the missions in his mission log, which shows that I have a lazy cloning technician because he managed to hand off the ancient secrets of the Logos that Adrian had learned, but all of the orders he had from the AFS brass just kind of fell through the cracks.

So it's time for a game of warp point hopscotch. Hop to the foxtrot outpost, find everyone there who has a mission for me. For those of you playing the homegame, Missions are what we call Quests in Sci-Fi games. Then I hop on over to the hydro plant.

Which is currently being raided by the Thrax.

Shit.

Okay, because I've never seen a Control Point defense actually work I make grabbing the quests my priority, it takes me 15 seconds, and a quick mental note to read what they're actually about when I'm not being bombarded by alien scum. I head towards the front lines, a large azure force field that stands between us and them. Most importantly, it stands between 30 of us and about 100 of them. This is also why I didn't rush through that force field, they're crammed up hard against it, and if I did manage to squeeze my way in I'm not sure even my new badass Graviton Armor can hold up to that much brutality.

I run up a set of steps thinking that I'll take cover behind one of our automated turrets and let a few rockets fly into that swarming mess down below. I get to the turret just about the time they finish turning our finally crafted machine into a pile of tinsel. It blows up in my face and I take cover in the smoldering wreckage. The smart money here is on running away, but I have a rocket launcher and the consequences for death are minimal so I decide to get in a bit of "field testing" before I hop back to that warp pad.

FOOM!!! click click click, FOOM!!! It's really impressive how much faster I fire with my newly enhanced skill. I find out later on that the beeping noise I heard about 8 shots in wasn't the base's perimeter alarm but rather my weapon informing me that it's overheating and slowly destroying itself. At the moment though I'm blissfully ignorant, and the rockets keep flying. Around rocket 10 they're all looking bad, it's amazing what blast radius and choke point defenses can do in combination, and they're also all looking at me. It's about this time that bullets begin pinging from every direction off of my aforementioned graviton armor.

Let me explain what Graviton armor is made for. Graviton is unlocked at Tier 3, when you become a commando, as I just have, and is used by Guardians and Grenadiers at the highest tier. I'm planning on being a grenadier, so my armor is very important to me, because this kind of deeply deranged tactic of fighting everyone at once is exactly what grenadiers do. Their weapon of choice is the propellant gun, more colloquially known as a flamethrower. This is the class that walks right up to a swarm of angry monsters, and soaks them all with the burning anger of the Gods. Graviton armor isn't strong enough to let you occasionally get yourself into this kind of situation. Graviton is for people who are supposed to be doing this.

My armor gauge is failing. So are all of their health gauges. I've already mentioned my love of area damage right? When my armor gauge gets to 0 I won't technically be dead, but its worth note that my armor points are much higher then my health points. Factor of 5 higher. It's also kind of hard to hit my armor, but my health has all the resistance to the hail of lead I'm taking as the average household ferret. It's going to be close, very close.

15 rockets.

20 rockets

10% armor remaining....

Experienced gained? That's nice and all, but the most important thing about it is that it means something died. More, then more gained, they begin falling in droves. The whole pack of them collapses, my weapons overheating alarm continues to beep in merry protest as it finally gets a chance to cool. 25 rockets fired and they're clear, and I'm still just barely alive. And...

Wait. We won? I've never seen that before. Holy damn... HAHAHAH!!!! The Hydro Plant is still ours. The first successful defense I've ever seen and who leads the charge?

Alexander Slyz. Clone of Adrian Slyz, AFS Master Rocketeer.

Impulse Destroyed

Sonic runs ads in Seattle. Sonic, however, doesn't have any locations in Seattle. I was fairly intent on driving to the nearest one partially out of spite and partially because I was certain they had to have one nearby if they're running adds here. The three nearest locations, in order are:

Hillsboro Oregan

Spokane

Post Falls Idaho


Only one of those is in this State. Never before has an impulse of mine been so quickly and thoroughly destroyed.