Na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye

I am suddenly and unreasonably into steampunk right now. I blame Jesse, among others, mainly for showing me this. More about steampunk some other time, or possibly never, depending on how soon I get this out of my system.

So, I went to the Apple Store because I needed a new battery. Some of you may have been to the Apple Store--in fact, so had I--but certain minor elements of the experience were nonetheless unfamiliar to me. I spotted my battery with relative ease, but found that the cash registers were somewhat harder to locate, even with the large display in the back offering a steady feed of shopping and hardware tips. So, after studying the display of designer ipod cases for a little while, I managed to mill around in the general vicinity of some other people who looked like they wanted to pay for things. Soon, the impressively-coiffed Skyler (a name that I had always assumed belonged to the realm of fiction, like Jherana or Da5id) came along with a bar-code-and-credit-card scanner to assist me. After applying the scanner to its respective scannees, he told me that they could either print the receipt or email it to me. "Email it to me," I said gamely, caught up in the slick technofuturism of the paperless, cash-registerless showroom, and gave a moment's thought to which of my email addresses would be the least unpleasant to have to recite. Looking at his scanny-gizmo, Skyler asked "emorenod at ucsd?" I feigned nonchalance at the fact that Apple had found my email address knowing only my credit card number, and made my escape, before secret cameras could determine anything about my buying patterns from my gait, eye movement, and meandering path through the store in search of cash registers and other anachronisms.

And she only sleeps when it's raining

I'm sick right now. My compromised immune system appears to be one of the many consequences of my insufficient meat intake, along with insomnia, indigestion, severe crankiness, and possibly leprosy.
Anyways, I went to bed at 6pm, and woke up a few hours ago and can't sleep (I suppose I'll try the sleeping early thing again tonight when my body suddenly realizes I've been up for 18 hours). So I ate and did dishes, and read another chapter of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (which is so good. it's sad and vivid and literary, and I just can't get enough of it), and now I'm complaining to the internet.

My yoga classes have started up again. So that's nice.
...Sometimes I mention things in my blog and belatedly realize that I don't actually have anything to say about them

I was recently wondering what happened to my old Marvel Super Heroes RPG books, when suddenly I found a whole bunch of them on the Internet. Exciting! My friend Joe, who was a major early geek influence on me now that I think about it, got me into it in high school, and though I only played a few times, it is the first (and arguably only) role-playing game that I really learned the rules to.
Oh speaking of which, you've probably heard about the upcoming release of D&D edition 4.0. I remain cynically open minded about the possibility that there is some use in such a thing; the best argument I've heard so far is that it is necessary to clear out all the rules- and supplement- cruft that has accumulated in 3.x. We'll see. Oh also Starcraft the board game is out, but it sounds far too complicated to convince anyone to ever play it.

Roly poly fish heads

Over the last week or two I've been inching my way towards vegetarianism. So far this has mainly involved not (intentionally) buying any more meat than is already in my house. Ever giving up animals entirely is out of the question, if for no other reason than the number of meat-oriented holidays my family celebrates. Even so, inspired partly by Jake's and Jann's eating habits (and partly by the idea that I read about in some place or another of "playing 'internal challenge games' with oneself"), I figure that I can significantly curtail my meat intake when cooking for myself. Really what prompted this though was that thing I do sometimes where I was like "Wow, this heavily seasoned textured vegetable protein is totally like a McRib! How many goodly creature substitutes are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such soylent green in't"
I have been modestly successful so far. Obstacles include "still hungry" and "wow there's a lot of saturated fat in cheese," but I hope to improve with practice.

Have I linked to Strange Maps before? I don't care, I'm linking it again. Most of them are indeed just kind of strange, but some of them are really great, like the Boston Globe's map of ten electoral regions, or Yates' subway-style Interstate highway map