If it's not Raven, it's crap...

Wie seid ihr denn überhaupt in meine Wohnung reingekommen? Wisst ihr eigentlich, wie ihr mich ankotzt?   - DCVDNS "23" I'm fairly confident that I've mentioned this before, but I do enjoy getting older. Maybe it's because I don't feel like I've experienced any particular set of years that I would refer to as my "glory days". High school was fine. I wasn't overly popular, but I had a solid circle of friends, made good grades, participated in a number of extra-curricular activities, never got into a serious amount of trouble, had cool parents, etc. Going away to college was particularly transformative and generally cool. My mid-to-late 20s were chaotic and full of a bunch of insane shit. So I'm certainly not striving to revisit any of that and, in a lot of ways, I'm actually actively trying to avoid ever going through it again. So each year, I'm like, "Cool...I'm older." A few more gray hairs than before...

There's this TV show that I need to watch. When I write it like that, it makes it sound like I don't want to watch it at all, which isn't entirely truthful. I do need to watch it for work research purposes (always fun to say that). While I'm genuinely curious to see what all the hubbub is about, from various gifs and readings across the internet, I know that the show also features a lot of graphic violence. And that's totally not my bag. Particularly sword/knife violence. I hate it and it's totally anxiety inducing and this show has it in spades. I can sort of handle gun stuff, if it's not too graphic...but, anyway, yeah...I've been sitting here for an hour doing any and everything aside from pressing play. I even read wiki-synopses of the first 5 episodes so that I'd have a slight bit of preparation of what I'm about to see. Or so I'd at least be a little bit ready to skip forward. Eventually, I started googling search terms to see if ...

I've been listening to metric shit-tons of Antilopen Gang tracks in the past two months. Or maybe it's been the past month and a half? I'm not really good at time and calendars. Back in March, one of the founding members, NMZS , committed suicide and, for reasons that I haven't quite yet been able to decipher in my head, it's had a pretty strong effect on me. There are the really obvious reasons, i.e. he was a young guy with a lot of talent. I haven't been able to put my finger on the rest. Honestly, I wouldn't have known anything about the Antilopen Gang (or Anti-Alles-Aktion or fuckin' Caught in the Crack or any of that), if it hadn't been for Frosty . I still don't really like Caught in the Crack, for example. I guess it's like hearing a joke that goes over your head. And I can't really get on board with all of thr Anti Alles stuff. The first album that I heard and liked was Danger Dan's Coming Out EP. The second was NMZS...

I haven't managed to get very far on my interactive story/game/whatever project. It's a combination of lack of time, procrastination (when I do have the time), and a handful of false starts. My first instinct was to get an actual story pinned down -- something reminiscent of a text adventure/Choose Your Own Adventure type story -- and then take that story and re-interpret it in a visual/animated/game-type form. It all made sense in my head. At least it did before I started. And, in some way, I think it'd still be a decent methodology, if the end result were to basically stay in a mostly (hyper)text format. Maybe not so much, if you're in the gaming profession. Or not, I don't know. Shut up. I'm trying to think. Initially, I'd been working with an open source program called Twine , which is designed pretty much specifically for creating interactive fiction and can be very handy if you're creating a non-linear story. Basically you can write a story in...

Sorry, I had to take a break for a few days to figure out how to wrap up this series of posts. I'm not sure if you've been able to follow the underlying (overlying?) thread and I'm not quite sure how to connect this last part to the other parts. I mean, I thought I knew, but then, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, something incredibly bizarre happened that threw me for a huge loop. I'm not even quite so sure that I've fully processed it myself, but I definitely want to get it out of my head before the sands of time erode it from my memory and, as I mentioned at the end of the last post, it's (at the very least) oh-so-slightly connected to some of the themes (friendship, attraction, Haddaway's Query , and just overall day-to-day hijinks in my life) in the other three posts. As you can probably sense, I'm still stalling for time. I honestly don't know where to start. Perhaps, with a joke. Stop me if you've heard this one: Friend 1 : Kno...

At some point, the topics (breakup, her son, how we're getting along, how I imagine that we'd get along in the future) had to be broached. If only to normalize things in the sense of "Yeah, sometimes this is stuff that we're going to talk about and that's ok." It was far less scary than I initially thought (which was some bizarre version of a complete meltdown on my part, in which I scream "Your son ruined my life!!" -- which is wildly inaccurate, untrue, overly emotional and did not occur at all). It did lead to a fascinating conversation that started and stopped over the course of my visit and, coincidentally, carried over into a similar conversation with FQ , a friend of Frosty's who I also have come to see as a friend through the years. Different settings, locations, and circumstances, but generally the same topic. And only really peripherally connected to my particular breakup and relationship situation. Fascinating none the less, each in...

When C.Dub picked me up at the train station, however, I mostly forgot about all that stuff when she gave me a big hug and called me her, " Uncoolest daughter. " The interesting part of my relationship with C.Dub is that while I see her as kind of a surrogate mother, she actually has very little in common with my biological mom. Or rather, the similarities have less to do with the actual things that they do/did or say/said and more about how I feel when we're talking. Due to my mom's illness, the parent-child roles switched fairly quickly and during a time when I wanted to us to be able to relate to each other as adults. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I was traumatized by this, but I'll just put it out there that it's come up, once or twice *cough*, in my therapy sessions. I often find myself incredibly jealous of people who get to have this type of relationship with their parents, since it feels like I basically had to watch my oppo...

The last two weeks have been fairly activity heavy and, finally back from my mini-holiday, I don't feel like bullet-point listing my way through it all. So, basically, this is my attempt -- over the span of a few posts -- to tie together a couple of reoccurring themes that I noticed. It's probably going to be a bit clunky...so consider this your advanced warning. I recently went on my first post-breakup date. It's just one of those things that kind of happened. I knew (and know) that I'm not to the point where I want to start dating people, but it was also a convenient way to dip my toe in the pool (and then be astounded when I don't drown). It probably helped that it wasn't a complete stranger (minor acquaintance of mine and good friend of a friend). It probably didn't help so much that our common friend more or less pulled one of those, "He just got out of a relationship and you just got out of a relationship, so you're bound to have ...

On Tuesday, I spent about 2.5 - 3 hours explaining to C.Dub about IP addresses; cookies (and how websites collect information); the importance of using secure passwords; the basics about how spam filters work (i.e. they do not have a personal grudge against her and her online theater ticket reservations) and how she can "train" the spam filter. I don't even remember how the conversation even got started, but, by the end, the expression on her face made it look like she wanted to do this: I've said it once and I'll say it again: this is really one of those things that I miss the most about having parents.