Hack, Cough, Hack

By tomorrow afternoon, nutritional supplement companies will be queued 'round the block to mine the vitamin C from my urine.

I just hate watching myself get sick. Plus my eyes are itchy. Bleah.

yami · 17:06 · 30 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: I Hate Everything

Service with a Smile

So I went down to the 24-hour grocery at midnight to purchase the ritual $50 worth of hard liquor for my birthday. The guy who carded me barely grunted - something about "just over the line, eh?" but it was too poorly enunciated to make out. You were supposed to wish me a happy birthday, fucko.

Thankfully for my feeble, hungry ego, the whole freakin' distributed republic of blogistan seems to have gathered to cheer me on. Thanks, guys! Now if only you could sing for a group webcast...

happy birthday!

Actually, this particular message only came twice, but it was the same capitalization and punctuation from two wildly different IPs, which I thought was faintly impressive.

As John Lennon so aptly put it: "They say it's your birthday..."

They also say you want a revolution. And in this case, they're right on both counts!

I dag er det Marias f�dselsdag - Hurra Hurra Hurraaa! - Hun sikkert sig en
gave f�r - Som hun har �nsket sig i �r - Med dejlig chokolade og kager til !!!
Tillykke med dagen! (Ras)

Tusind tak, Rasmus! Jeg fik gaven i marts, det var min kamera - men hvor er kager henne??? Jeg havde kun en lille ostetærte og selvfølgelig nogen øl. Nu vil jeg gerne have lidt mere chokolade...

yami · 19:48 · 29 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail, Diary

button bushes

Went to see Scratch last night, as a compromise between Panic Room and Kissing Jessica Stein. I was not impressed - though the film brought up some fascinating issues surrounding the creation of a new genre, instead of exploring them with any depth the director just cut to another concert scene. To make matters worse, the soundtrack cuts came mostly from the middles of sets, where there's lots of virtuosic scratching.

The overall effect was to give me a headache. And not just any headache, but a strange pseudo-hallucinogenic cerebral membrane pulsing condition. For the walk home and a good hour afterwards, everything seemed imbued with a very immediate kinesthetic potential - loose litter wanted to wave hello, fire hydrants were about to wiggle their fire hydrant booties, neatly clipped hedges had almost turned into buttons that would pop down with a satisfying pook if you whacked them with a giant plastic mallet. Evil buttons that would pop down with a satisfying pook if you whacked them with a giant plastic mallet. I could tell they hated me, and that's why I wanted to kick them.

So in a fugue state I kept saying "I should eat a hamburger, cows always make me feel real when I eat them... whoa holy shit those lights are going to turn into bees!" and transformations of that and similar phrases. The whole thing was terribly distressing; I like to notice small details and imagine things about them but being forced to take comfort in a friendly sage bush is just ridiculous.

No, I didn't use any psychoactive substances, unless you count the mood-enhancing herbal supplement I've been taking since the term started. Experiences like this are precisely why I don't try such things; I'm fucked up to the edge of my comfort level without them. When I need a perceptual boost, it's enough to just be around people taking hallucinogens, but that's another story. I'm going to stop rambling and find some beef. I'm hungry.

yami · 14:12 · 28 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Movies

Ho Hum

My profundity seems to be on a weekly cycle; something about that gigantic math set due on Fridays, I imagine, but there are possibly deeper psychologistical reasons.

For my birthday (Monday! expect me to post while not-quite-sloshingly drunk - I may be turning 21 but I still have midterms next week), I have requested, from my erstwhile linux-jockey manservant, a computer that works again. It's almost there - I'm at my desk right now - but the sound card isn't carding. Which is a shame, since what I have is meant to be an expensive purple web browser, email checker and mp3 jukebox. Once the sound will play more than short bleeps, I intend to establish a streaming mp3 spy-server, so you can enjoy my sophisticated musical tastes while I'm in my room, and scrape the bottom of the "bad Danish rap, yodelling, and homework read aloud by a shoddy speech synth" directory when I'm not.

Meanwhile, go join the Naked Jugglers' Association.

yami · 12:58 · 27 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Someone Has a Crush On Me

Hmm. I've just gotten one of those "someone has a crush on you, but we won't tell you who until you send lots of annoying emails to all your friends!" messages. To which I say: you lie! If someone really had a crush on me, they would have used this button to tell me about it:

border="0" alt="oral sex donations accepted"/>

Ahem. I mean, that's great, I'm really flattered.

yami · 21:11 · 24 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Wanking

Timely Remarks

Boys and girls, if your torso should be torn asunder in a horrific accident, you will no longer need your eyeballs. Please celebrate National Administrative Professionals Day by becoming an organ donor.

You may also wish to celebrate National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week by presenting your secretary with a thoughtful organ-shaped gift.

That is all.

yami · 16:38 · 24 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Concise Remarks

Someone reminds me that less is more:

brief

Or else this refers to a brief, as opposed to a boxer, in the case of a severe pegleg or really tattered underpants. No comment on that one.

yami · 13:33 · 23 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

More Decision Theory

The other reason I rely on the decision-making power of serendipity, I never knew until I started studying the economics of uncertainty. It seems that in order to make a rational decision, I need to determine how my preferences behave in relation to statements like:

If a lottery with a 1/2 chance of winning a monkey and a 1/2 chance of winning a boat is strictly preferred to a lottery with a 1/3 chance of winning a goat and a 2/3 chance of winning a date with Pauly Shore, then a lottery with a 1/3 chance of winning a monkey and a 2/3 chance of winning a goat should be strictly preferred to a lottery with a 1/2 chance of winning a boat and a 1/2 chance of winning a date with Pauly Shore, if and only if the subject's utility function satisfies axioms (i), (iii) and (iv) of theorem 6.B.9 (the Yucky-Shore sexual preference theorem for rational preference relations).

Even after proving the Yucky-Shore sexual preference theorem for monotonic functions on (Ω, XXX), I am able to verify neither independence nor continuity, and my indifference curves are curvier than Marilyn Monroe.

I wish I could take economics without all the measure theory. I hate this class.

yami · 13:20 · 23 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: I Hate Everything

Magickal Transmutations

I have this bang on my knee, and two days ago it was a bruise. A nice bruisey bruise, with angry pink on the edges that gradually faded towards sallow yellow with tinges of purple in the center. I can't remember where it came from, but since I noticed it I've been watching with pleasant anticipation for the moment of crowning, splotchy blue glory all significant bruises enjoy. But instead, when I woke up this morning, it had migrated to the top of my skin and become an ugly, parasitic, scabby scrape. Boo, hiss.

Unrelatedly, I've been thinking about serendipity today, and how I tend to rely on it for decisions of all sizes and impacts. I am, for the most part, very adept at wanting what I can find instead of what I can't have. To put it another way, I have cheap tastes. My therapist thinks this is because I grew up without much excess money and got used to buying toys from garage sales, the implication being that I never learned to properly define what I want.

Economists have studied how shoppers behave when they're faced with a paralyzing array of strawberry jellies at the supermarket. Such dizzying choices are a peculiarly modern phenomenon - jam or jelly? strawberry or strawberry-kiwi? economy size or novelty jar? do I really give a fuck? - and they make people inefficient.

The guy across the hall is on the phone with his girlfriend. He just called her "honey" in this strangely oozing tone; threw me totally off track. I've never dated anyone who called me "honey" with any seriousness - not in conversation anyway; written forms do accomodate a certain amount of extravagance - and it's probably just as well, because most endearments completely wig me out.

Ahem. I believe I was muttering something about combinatorics and explosions and technology. Yes. I've also been sidetracked by an aesthetic issue, the glorification of killer robots and things you can do with jagged-edged scrap metal - a celebration of the post-apocalyptic, as it were. I haven't documented any of this, of course - facts are meant to be free, not enslaved by silly theories - but intuitively it seems that attitudes towards urban decay and nuclear winter have been moving from honest fear to campy appreciation to genuine appreciation of an idealized post-modern savage. Why? Because we're all sick and tired of choosing between 87 kinds of strawberry jelly, and we'd rather define ourselves in relation to some set of obvious, external, unalterable limits than deal with near-infinite possibilities and associated existential angst. Or at least, that's how my world works.

yami · 23:17 · 22 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Ineffable

Someone’s Thinking Too Hard

h.soav ofpd;!

That's exactly what I said.

yami · 15:58 · 22 Apr 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail