raleighnet.org

Just what I needed, another addictive Word Game. I only wish I didn’t suck at it so bad. So far 32,500 is the best I’ve been able to manage.

Hmmmm… There’s something kind of disturbing about Laurie Lipton’s art. It’s a bit too much like looking in on somebody’s therapy sessions. I do like work that challenges me though. There’s a bit of artistic nudity there, so work …. blah blah blah … you know. via

Wow! There are some really amazing photos over at I Am Thumb Head. Iran seems so foreign to me, and it is, but it’s also so similar. I love that the internet can give me this kind of view into other people’s lives and cultures. Via

I remember a while ago coming across a thread over on MetaFilter dealing with Phi, Golden Ratios, Fibonacci Sequences, and all of that mathy weirdness. I had reason to want to dig it up again, but I can’t seem to find it. My Search-Fu is weak, very weak. I found this, but that wasn’t at all what I’m remembering.

Anyway, in my searching I did come across this pretty good backgrounder on Fibonacci himself. I was really looking for a discussion on the golden ratio in art. I came across this which looks promissing, but is kind of light once you really dig in. It’s all pretty cool although I have to admin I tend to skim right past the math. Since it’s mostly math, that ends up being a lot of skimming.

The goal of Krassair is to land the plain on the runway. Sounds simple, but I crashed that mother 20 times before I finally landed it — and I didn’t land it pretty I’ll tell you that much.

So I woke up Sunday feeling completely gross after a week of the worst diet known to man or beast (to say nothing of a few months of winter’s dark, dark apathy). I made a point to spend a few minutes lifting heavy things. Of course, I expected to be weak after such a long period of neglect, and true to expectations, I found myself a sore and sad little slip of a thing who quit much too early to have done much good.

Monday found me hurting a little, but it was a good kind of hurt, so I was happy with it. Tuesday, I was going to lift again, but I was still kind of feeling it, and I wanted to give my muscles a chance to recover a bit more. Fortunately though, when I got out of work, the sun was still hanging beautifully bright and low in the sky. It was still day (more or less) (yea!). This called for a nice long walk.

Here’s the thing though, once I started moving vigorously, the soreness in my chest magically transformed into a heart attack. I kept telling my inner hypochondriac that what I was feeling was just remaining soreness from lifting, and my inner hypochondriac resolutely refused to even consider that possibility. It was a heart attack pure and simple.

So there I was, determined not to stop even though I knew on some deep inner level that I was walking through death’s very door. What could I do? I started trying to walk in such a way that I wasn’t stretching or tweaking my chest muscles. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried that, but let me just say for the record that it is almost exactly impossible. I’m sure it makes you look pretty silly too although frankly that was the least of my concerns what with breathing my last breath and all.

At one point, I heard a siren going past, and my fevered brain filled in the gaps with a fantasy in which I was being rushed to the hospital, and my current state of awareness was just a fantasy as my oxygen starved brain tried to relive the circumstances that brought me to my unfortunate end.

I managed to finish off my walk. Now if I could just find some way to do the same with that part of my mind that invents diseases and crap like that. I bet an ice pick would do it, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, that particular cure might be a little worse than the disease. Maybe pills.

Does anybody know anything about the movie Casshern? None of the text is in English, and I never even heard about it until I saw the trailer linked on K10K. If you haven’t seen the trailer, you really should check it out. The movie looks totally awesome. I don’t even know if it’s going to be released in the US, but judging from what I’ve seen so far, I might even be willing to see this thing without subtitles.

This has got to be the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen on the internet. And let me just point out that I’ve seen Tub Girl and the Goatse.cx guy, so you know I’ve been around and stuff.

I just try to picture in my mind the circumstances under which David Hasselhoff green lit that video (and he must have green lit it unless the editor has mad skills and access to some bizarre stock footage). There’s just no way that looks like a good idea to me. Probably work safe despite my mention of tub girl and goatse.cx. You might not want to watch it before going to bed though as it is the stuff of nightmares.

James D Macdonald has an interesting series of posts on the art and business of writing commercial fiction. No time to read it now, so I’m just bookmarking it for later. via

I took an extended weekend trip down to San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. The scenery down there is unbelievably beautiful. The water was so blue, I was half convinced they had people going out early in the morning to add food coloring or something.

What I didn’t get was much in the way of Mexican culture. I never even felt like I was in another country. I think I saw more caucasians down there than I typically see in Los Angeles.

I’m not sure if that’s just because Cabo caters to tourists (they did say repeatedly that tourism was their only industry). Maybe they’ve just naturally built up the kind of place where gringos would find themselves comforted and unchallenged. It could have been my fault too. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in and around the hotel where I was staying. I was only there for a few days though, and most of the time was pretty tightly scheduled. I tried to get out and see the place when I could.

Anyway, it was fun, and as I said extremely beautiful. I took some photos.