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Nov. 19th, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
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So lecture tomorrow is in support of how I thought "lordship and bondage" worked in Hegel, as opposed to the way that everyone else in my seminar thought it worked.
I know, I know, nobody's right in these things necessarily - but damn it I feel vindicated.Feeling...:  vindicated Auditory Emanations:: Eftos - Suiright |
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and it is curing in the back yard (neighborlady's dog threw a shit-fit once again). Over the cold months I'm going to make myself a bike out of bamboo. Heat-treating is a lot of fun, though it looks like learning to do fiber/epoxy stuff for the joints may be a little less than fun.
In other news: classes are going pretty well, and I'm probably going to spend next year working and taking undergrad psych classes. Grad school next year would totally be a possibility but by this late in the process most grad-student-funding has dried up and no way in hell am I taking out more loans with the economy the way it is.
Reading the Madeleine L'Engle books with Kristin; we've finished A Wrinkle In Time and A Wind In The Door, and have started A Swiftly Tilting Planet. If I ever make babies I hope to have a family along the lines of the Murries. If not I hope to be the crazy uncle to as many other people's kids as can be managed.Auditory Emanations:: Fuck Buttons |
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Party at 7 College tonight. Downstairs. Baltimore themed. If you are reading this you are invited. Joint birthday for myself, Rachel Bargis, Rob Stewart, and Anne Geitz.
Man, I should post more often here.
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Oct. 30th, 2009 @ 10:06 am
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I don't have the time to do this, really I don't, not with grad school applications (holyfuck i need to take the GRE three weeks ago) such things but -
- I want to do National Novel Writing Month.
I've tried most years since about sophomore year of high school, never gotten more than 12,000 words.
I did manage to make an album of music in a month, back in February, but it was pretty shitty, and contained several tracks of obvious filler and wasn't really mixed or mastered at all and so forth.
I should do what I've done the past few years and make a half-assed stab, just for tradition's sake.
Sidenote: when it comes to asking for advice regarding hangovers, am I the dude to ask?Feeling...:  busy Auditory Emanations:: Dead Can Dance - The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove |
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I really should write this paper for lab
But perhaps instead Mister Macfarland
Can just be persuaded to understand
The effort that it takes to take a stab
To explain all the universe so small
- The strange effects of forces at distance,
And laws that together do not make sense
But somehow should together explain it all.
Experimentation calls to our hand
Data we can almost fit, but somehow
All the years of experiment 'til now
Yield nothing we can start to understand.
Somehow a sonnet's easier to write
Than grappling with the microcosmic night.Feeling...:  caffeinated Auditory Emanations:: BBC air conditioner |
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Perhaps, if I'm good, then when I die I'll get to have an endless cup of coffee with Madeleine L'Engle and Robertson Davies.
Also, dino for sale.
Wish the lathe in the wood shop worked, it'd be fun to make headphones with custom-turned earboxes. (I'm sure there's a technical term for that part, but 'earbox' sounds to me to be as good as any).
I love Annapolis in the fall.
Oct. 5th, 2009 @ 10:40 am
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I'm wondering idly whether part of the current trendiness of faux-Victoriana (and the American equivalent) is that it is a reflection of a period when commercialism was untainted by the threat of global warming and such-like. The idea that those who purvey technology genuinely believe that they are changing the world, that perpetual motion is possible, that they have solved a problem for mankind. (And now, one can ironically point out that it was gasoline, not steam, that shrunk the world - and nobody could've foreseen that in the 1880's...)
Apologies if this is not well expressed, but it is an idea that is banging around in my head making noises.
I really should be finishing that Au Lecteur paper for language class that is due by email in 54 minutes.
Sep. 27th, 2009 @ 11:02 am
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Reading gaming news websites makes me realize that I really don't play games much anymore. I mean, the last titles I bought new for playing (other than occasional things for the DS) were Bioshock and the Orange Box (beat Portal, have yet to play anything else from it. I'll get around to doing so at some point when WINE compatibility is better or when I care). I'm intrigued by Braid, I play a good deal of Dwarf Fortress when I have the downtime - but I don't go to PC cafes anymore, and when I fantasize about having big LAN parties in my small apartment, it's Quake 2 I'm dreaming of.
There are projects and projects and projects and of course homework and such.
In all living pretty healthily, which is nice. Not feeling at the peak of my health, which is less nice - dietary something? Need something, too much of something, I don't know.
Working on a muslin for a wool jacket modeled to some degree off of a WWI tunic.
Hegel? Hard. Fun. Need to get a couple bottles of red wine and sit out on the quad with Mr Halter after seminar sometime.
Sep. 16th, 2009 @ 02:33 pm
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Autumn has come. This makes me happy.
Reading A Wrinkle in Time with Kristin, which is also making me happy.
(I hadn't caught when I was young that there is a quote in ancient Greek, for example. How did my mother know how to pronounce that?)
Went to the gym. Am wearing a vest.
Seminar tonight, and life is good.
Aug. 31st, 2009 @ 06:17 pm
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| » Hello again. |
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Haven't updated this in a while, but whatever itch it is in me that gets scratched by posting to LJ has been scratched some other way for most of this summer I suppose.
And yeah in the mean time I finished that damn job and went to Key West and blah blah blah, cool, whatever. Hold on to something, better hold on to you, it really was a wild one but summer has come and gone.
Tomorrow, or Thursday if I can't get my shit together fast enough, I return to Annapolis. And it really only struck me a few hours ago that this might be the last time I am in this house for any real length of time. For the past few years this house has been a-house-in-which-i-live more than a 'home', but after tonight I might always have a place of my own that is in no way this place. Seven College next year again, but then after that I'm not coming back here - I'll stay on there, or move elsewhere for a job, or whatever.
This has left me in a really weird mood.
I'm definitely taking my typewriter.
Aug. 18th, 2009 @ 10:51 pm
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So the kids at work really, really like Michael Jackson.
When I was their age, the whole "Michael-Jackson-is-probably-a-pedophile" thing was going on... seeing them this into him, and this apparently oblivious to that element of his story, is sort of weird. A bunch of them choreographed the dance to Thriller and presented it today, and some others are practicing to sing Billie Jean for everyone sometime soon.
I am really, really sick of hearing MJ's voice.
Also, they play a game that I knew as tag but they call swine flu in which the person who is 'it' has to cough and sneeze.
Which parts of popular culture filter down to them is really odd to watch.
Jul. 17th, 2009 @ 05:39 pm
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| » We're going to need a bigger boat |
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Just finished reading The Raw Shark Texts.
It is the most Platonic thing I've ever read. Everyone reading this, go and get a copy, right now, and read it, right now. And thanks to Tucker for introducing me to it.
It's a book about an amnesiac running from a conceptual shark. I wish I could say more but I can't, I don't want to ruin anything... just, damn. it is good.
Jun. 24th, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
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Touching...
...hell of a story.
Jun. 22nd, 2009 @ 12:05 am
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| » update. |
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Camping at Sky Meadows last night with Kristin. It was a lot of fun, hard to start a fire with such wet wood but we managed. Need to camp more this summer.
Night before, Annapolis. RPG and ice cream with the apartment crowd and such-like.
The night before that, and the night before that, I was in New York, which was pretty awesome. Also very good to see Tucker, Becca, Zack - all those people that I miss because they're in New York.
I also have a new umbrella and shoes, due to my lack of preparation for the horrible rain that New York greeted me with.
Work starts on Tuesday. I think I can manage to summon up a decent attitude for it.
Jun. 21st, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
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| » This modern world |
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I'm updating my LJ...
...from a bus.
Cool.
Jun. 17th, 2009 @ 04:44 pm
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Meg graduated yesterday.
I bought a Danelectro Chili Dog pedal today. It generates two extra signals in addition to its input, one an octave below signal and one two octaves below. This plus the old Realistic reverb unit feedbacking is HELLA NOISE also bass amp, mics, and recorder...
DC tonight, New York tomorrow.
Current playlist: Mountain Goats, Death From Above 1979, Captain Chaos, Captain Beefheart, Butthole Surfers.
Jun. 16th, 2009 @ 07:20 pm
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| » But my love is like a dark cloud full of rain/That's always right there up above you |
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The Mountain Goats.
I suspect that I would have been much happier for much of the time from maybe eighth grade til a year or less ago had I not been caught in a race to the bottom, searching for the most painful emotional content life could inflict upon me - and if life wouldn't inflict pain, then by God I would. So I painted myself the old romantic hero and I just about forgot how to find beauty in anything that wasn't painful, incisive, or at least covered in gobs of a certain sort of irony.
Sure, it's a thing many people that age do. From what I've seen, it's a thing that many people do, and especially people like myself who've never particularly been tested in that regard, creating unhappiness to fill an experiential void. I've been a lot happier since I began to see the extent to which, in my case at least, it is self-created. (That, and since I began to see how fundamental endorphins are to my psychological well-being).
In light of these realizations it would be easy to view such impulses with condescension, as something childish or not fully formed, at the very least something which I have moved beyond. But God, The Mountain Goats. Music that lets me indulge fully, grab hold of and understand things I've never lived, and come out of them cathartically refreshed rather than just vaguely more depressed than I was before. Landscapes out of a stained window, beer can in the cup holder, the alternate introspective beauty and frantic desperation.
The masochist within is inexorably drawn to these songs, but the veneer of almost-wishing-it-were-me is gone.
God, these are some beautiful songs. Beautiful and terrible and alive.
Jun. 10th, 2009 @ 05:49 pm
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I think I'm the only person in this family who has turned a television off in the past week.
Seriously.
In other news, I'm a huge fan of summer thunderstorms.
Jun. 9th, 2009 @ 11:31 am
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| » flipping through late-night television I realize |
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that Pat Robertson has a hella mobile face
Jun. 3rd, 2009 @ 11:58 pm
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| » Projects |
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- Repaired an accordion today. It is old - likely from the 30's, quite possibly earlier. There is still some restoration to do (it's okay mechanically, but the leather bits need replacing after 80+ years of wear/storage) and it's not really in tune (and I'm not sure I'll be able to manage tuning it, but if I build a strobe tuner then it should work.)
- Strobe tuner? I need a synchronous AC motor, then I need to cut some custom gears or wheels and possibly pick up belts, but I think this is doable.
- Clockwork drum machine. Need a spring and to build an escapement and... maybe do a music-box to start with, then work up from there? Doable, but needs more research.
- Allelectronics.com has a bunch of motors, controllers, and throttles from a now-defunct electric scooter company. I'm going to convert a bicycle into an electric motorcycle, bitches.
In other news, I think that American Pie features red leather chairs that are the same ones that are now in the Chasement. Also, my car smells hella moldy, and I really miss school-people, and I have a job that I don't want but I know I can't really complain because unlike everyone else I have a job for the summer.
Jun. 3rd, 2009 @ 09:49 pm
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autophage's journal