The rain can fall upon the flower

I may have told you I would post pictures of my latest orchid to bloom. I haven't entirely succeeded. I was waiting for the whole thing to be all nice and flowery at once, but it turns out that parts of it were already wilting while other parts were still in bud, so it didn't really work out. Here's the general idea, though. The flowers are really tiny and it smells strong; I have read that it smells like either chocolate or vanilla, but I think this is yet another example of the sort of overactive imaginations that prompted them to name it "bird's beak." It smelled like a flower to me.

There's a new Crate and Barrel at the mall, which I was drawn to by its eerie illumination and the desire for teacups. The first floor is basically like a regular Crate and Barrel, except slightly larger (no teacups that I wanted, though), but the second floor is pretty cool to look at. It's like an Ikea for people with more money than me. Still, it's gotten me thinking about getting furniture. Maybe I'll check craigslist.

If I do ever get some furniture (and new carpets), I might finally start having people over, which would be nice, partly because of the all the entertaining things I've been thinking to do. For example:
1) Have people over for meals (oh that reminds me of this site that Lucy found)
2) Iron Bartender
3) (Not necessarily steampunk) tea party
4) Watch City Hunter with people
5) Watch Star Trek 2 (and maybe also 3 and 4 in a row. I realize nobody will want to do this.)
6) Oh yeah, that silly Star Trek mystery thing

Lastly, I had sort of an epiphany recently, one on a par with my discovery that I do not like the taste of spearmint. (This is a big deal because I spent the first 15 or 20 years of my life unaware that it was even possible to dislike spearmint. It's such a basic and ubiquitous flavor, it'd be like not liking cinnamon or strawberry. Moving along.)
I have realized that Wii Bowling is the absolute worst Wii sport. I mean, it goes without saying that all there is to it is making a hand gesture 10 or 20 times in a row (and if someone makes this gesture with unusual precision and consistency over the course of three or four frames, that's pretty exciting and we cheer). But, really, the fact that you can make a game out of pointless gestures and have it be fun is sort of the premise of the Nintendo Wii.
My real complaint is that there's never any variation, except insofar as one might have to pick up slightly different spares. What prompted this realization was thinking about Wii Golf, which, though widely held to be one of the lesser Wii sports, turns into a pretty good approximation of Wii Bowling when you strip away the wind and terrain and play ten holes on a perfectly linear course. Boring.

and through many dreadful nights

Oof, long day at work today. Mostly the equipment is just being cranky, which means my subjects got to sit around while I fretted over gas flow meters.

I guess when I see it in text like that it doesn't sound all that terrible.

Lately I've been playing the Scrabulous application that's been developed for Facebook. Now you too can play incredibly slow games of Scrabble over the Internet! It's actually kinda nice; I get to log in and play a turn every day or two, so I have about three games going at once, and am only being brutalized in one of them. And I've been reading a lot about Scrabble.
Competitive Scrabble is pretty weird in a lot of ways. First, much like chess, it's very different at the high levels, and involves a whole lot of memorization. For instance, one will want to know all the 2-letter words (there's about a hundred), the words with all vowels, and the words with Q but no U. Actually, this last one has become less important since 2006, when "Qi" was added to the official list, making an un-U'ed Q much less of a burden. That's the most interesting thing to me: the ways that tiny little changes can affect overall gameplay. This also shows up in the differences between the game as it's played in North America and on other continents. Aside from using slightly different word lists, the stakes for challenging a word that you think is incorrect are much higher over here, so it is legitimately an option to make up words, and it is up to your opponent to decide just how confident he or she is that "zarfs" is not actually a word.

Sorry, that was probably boring. This probably is too: Patron Saints! I forget why I was reading about patron saints, but I have a lot of really random ones bookmarked, such as Saint Expeditus, the patron saint of procrastination, and Saint Quentin, whom the prison was apparently not named after. Also if you are a beekeeper, then you have a whole bunch of saints to choose from, including Saint Valentine, of commodified love holiday fame.

Lastly, I keep meaning to show you this, but don't think I have yet. Maybe I did and forgot about it. Also on the subject of senses, and even the one I work on, is this.

It's not supposed to happen like that

Thanks to Nethack, I now think of eating meat as "violating my alignment." Thanks, Nethack.

...Er, apropos of nothing, it turns out that Tommy's makes better milkshakes than you might expect.

Oh, also I went to the dentist recently for the first time in too long. The good news is that my teeth are totally healthy. The bad news is that they're a little too healthy...I was half hoping for them to say "thank God you came in when you did; they're okay now, but you need to improve your clearly terrible habits." I received no such ominous news, but am going to try to floss anyways, if only so I won't momentarily feel bad about lying the next time I see them. Oh, and the dentist thinks I should probably get my lower wisdom teeth out, so I'm gonna talk to an oral surgeon about that.


Last weekend's concert was pretty good. Some observations:
-Goddamn was I ever surrounded by children.
-The children were also very strangely dressed. Some appeared to be going to the prom afterwards, others, to their ballet recital. A common motif was the serious misuse of a single article of clothing: an apron, a hat, a pair of socks, not to mention the various undergarments. The prefix is important there, people.
-Many of them had cameras, and occasionally they would record video of the band, but mostly they took pictures. Of themselves. Watching the band. I blame that FaceSpace, or whatever it is the kids are using these days.

As for the actual show, I enjoyed it. Of Montreal sounds very different live, which shouldn't have surprised me, but did slightly. The vocals could have been clearer, but it lent to the interestingly unpolished overall effect, which I think now adds to my overall perspective on them. Also there were lots of lights and peculiar video displays and all sorts of insane theatrics, for example, when a tiger-headed guy in coattails got into a slow motion fistfight during "October is Eternal."

You make my heart sing

Not much is going on in my life. Another of my orchids has started to bloom, which is pretty exciting news, since it means I'm not necessarily killing at least one of them. Expect pictures.
I'm a little bit worn out these days, which is probably partly seasonal, and probably partly a sign that I'm not doing enough exercising or yoga. Or piano, for that matter, which I find has similar effects on my energy and clarity. I'm mentioning it here because I hope that makes me more likely to do these things. Ask me how it's been going the next time you see me. Hopefully the possibility of shame will have galvanized me into action.

I finished The Picture of Dorian Gray last week. It's an excellent book, and, what's more, it inspired what I consider one of my better halloween costumes. (Face transformation software here--the age stuff is okay, though I'm more entertained by the manga and TG ones, perhaps unsurprisingly). Now I just started reading the transcript from Oscar Wilde's first trial, which also looks to be a good read in various ways.

And, oh yeah, devoted readers of my comments may be wondering how the anime club went. It was nice. I met some pleasant people, and we watched, in addition to the steampunk thing, an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The latter was cute enough, but the former is already pretty darn engrossing. In addition to good action sequences, it has catchy, unique and occasionally appropriate music, and a plot that begs for a cliffnotes version--in short, all that a good anime should have.

Speaking of television, I don't suppose anyone is interested in watching the new season of Project Runway with me a week from today? Anyone? Look, you watch stupid TV shows too, okay

The light that you shine can be seen

I don't have a whole lot to say at the moment. I'm back at work, and glad to be, and, though my sleep and energy schedules are still getting back to normal, I think I kind of needed that little vacation.

Here are some links. Frank Miller meets Adam West. Oh, and I think I linked to the Visual Thesaurus forever ago? This is the same idea, only awesomer.

I've been spending more time looking at indie role-playing games, some of which are pretty neat, and kind of out there. For instance, there are lots of unusual arrangements where the GM's tasks are distributed among the players and so forth. And in Lacuna Part I, in which players explore some kind of David Lynch version of the Matrix, the vital stat is not hitpoints, but heart rate.

I've also been reading this kind of a lot.

Anyone want to see Of Montreal at Mandeville on the 10th?