I have scaled these city walls only to be with you

I had a really good Easter weekend. It started with a delicious ham and potato salad meal (and a modest easter egg hunt) with the family. Next I hung out in Silverlake with Jann, drinking tea and browsing comics, and then went out for excellent Thai food and a show with my old college buddy George (who flew out this week with his lady friend for a visit) and Vi. The Rippers, among others, were performing; I enjoyed it. They were kind of berserk, which George suggested is a European thing.
It may also be that they are not entirely representative of the sort of genre I usually go see, but either way, there was more spitting in that one show than probably all the others I've seen combined. Seriously, I don't think I am physically capable of expectorating that much.

Enough about that.

On Sunday we went out to Joshua Tree, which neither George nor I had been to before. This is surprising, since it's kind of a thing that one does at Pomona. It was cooler than I expected; aside from the eponymous trees, there were some really impressive rocks to climb on, and the Cholla Garden was really cool; it was just this vast sea of the nasty little beggars, which are pretty neat to look at, even though they mostly weren't flowering yet. Then we unexpectedly ended up at Pappy and Harriet's, where we had more good food, saw the Thriftstore Allstars, and generally had a good time.

I was planning to postpone my next big board game purchase until summer, when FFG will be releasing its edition of Cosmic Encounter, and the Red Dragon Inn sequel (among other things) will be coming out, but having played Arkham Horror last week, I'm not sure I can wait.


Oh and speaking of religious figures who come back from the dead, here's something James showed me.

You don't have to read my mind to know what I have in mind

Some pretty impressive advances in telepathic technology are underway. Voiceless phone calls, EEG video game controllers, and even MRIs that can tell which picture a person is looking at.

Not much is happening here. The quarter is ending, so I'm taking care of Paisley and Falafel while Adam and Amanda are up in Pasadena. It's been one day, and while Paisley has expressed mild curiosity about my presence, they still don't seem to particularly like me. However, they've already figured out that I'm the one who brings food, so I'm hoping this will provide a certain amount of interpersonal leverage.

Let me tell you about my wall organizer, since I haven't been using it, and I'm hoping that talking about it will encourage me to do so. (Also I don't have much else to say.) It's a pretty neat idea, I think...sort of loosely based on GTD and the Hipster PDA, for those of you who know or care about such things.
It's made from a set of those sleeves that one uses to organize CDs in an album, lined up into three columns of six or so. I keep track of tasks by putting cards in each row, so the leftmost space in a row might just have an index card that says, for example, "take care of finances" Then the middle column breaks down the task into smaller ones, with multiple cards that include "pay credit cards," "file tax return" and so on. Then, in the rightmost column, I have cards that break it down even further, describing the very next thing I should do to proceed, something very simple and manageable, like "Call John about 1099-INT." Whenever I finish a rightmost task, I just toss that card and refer back to the middle column and come up with a new "next action" and write it down, so at any time, I know exactly what I need to do and am not intimidated by the massiveness of the overall job. The best part is that when I leave home, I can quickly pull the rightmost cards out and put them in my wallet, and tada, instant portable dynamic to-do list

Okay that was boring. Hey but check out the Aerogarden! Jess has been talking about it, and I'm thinking of getting one with my tax return. Aeroponics

wonderful spam

My computer's better! I did that Applecare thing, and they replaced the heat sink and fan, which didn't seem to help much, since it turned out to just be a RAM problem. Friggin' RAM.
This would have been an extended rant about how awful Apple is, but my fury has subsided with time (and with the discovery that a third party component was actually to blame for once).

Perhaps in part because I didn't have much to do during this time (and perhaps also in part because I was recently introduced to the wonders of Nintendo DS multiplayer) I've been playing a fair amount of video games lately. It started with "Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine," (part of the Sonic collection for the PS2) which I'm embarrassed to admit that I completely love, hopelessly derivative though it may be. Then I got sidetracked by Geometry Wars DS, which is pretty good too. The different maps are interesting, and I'm liking the drone more than I thought I would, which allows both for advancement and for a certain small amount of strategy. Also I was playing some Democracy on my old computer, and eagerly await the Mac port of the sequel.

Lastly, I'm beginning to reconsider this "not eating meat" thing. I've been at it, arguably, for a little more than six months, and it's been an interesting exercise, but one I feel somewhat less than entirely motivated to keep at. For starters, as I've discussed before, it's not clear that not eating meat necessarily results in fewer animal deaths (which would be my main motivation for vegetarianism). Moreover, I have concerns that drawing the line at not allowing animal parts or their derivatives to go in one's mouth has little to do with the actual material consequences of one's choices, and that the vegetarian identity more generally serves to create artificial moral boundaries, particularly when taken to extremes...for example, when one refuses to use a meaty spoon to stir one's sauce. It seems like that sort of thing betrays little more than an unmotivatedly absolutist stance, and one that that, by its nature, very likely encourages a certain complacent indifference to the real issues in favor of nitpicky distinctions. I've already started to notice these changes in myself, and they're not terribly attractive.
I've learned a fair amount about cooking and meat alternatives and such, and don't expect I'll be guzzling whole cows or anything, but of all the decisions I make from day to day, I feel like "which flavor of Ramen should I eat" is pretty low on the scale of alleviating animal suffering.