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2006-03-28

Non-Dating Tip #1

Filed under: General — 19day @ 11:38:57

Just for fun:

Here’s a tip for when you see an attractive girl/guy at a club or something. You walk up, and ask them if they want to dance/go for a drink/talk. When they give you the inevitable rejection or laugh at you, just stand still, look them unwaveringly in the eye, and say:
   ”You’ve just killed our children!”
and walk away as fast as dignity allows.

At these times, it’s best to put the other person on the defensive.

2006-03-22

Now parge the lath

Filed under: General — 19day @ 16:59:13

This is a short post, but it had to be posted since I can’t find the damn quote anywhere on the interweb through google at least.

I’ve been having a rather rough time at work, involved in new work and people use terminology and assumed knowledge that reminds me of an article from Coding Horror which has the hilarious example of a complicated dialog box a user would have no idea what to do with: If you want to tech the tech, you need to tech the tech with the teching tech tech. Tech the tech? Yes / No
The article also includes that Far Side cartoon analog of what dogs hear versus what we say.

For me, I best represent it with one of the funniest simpsons quotes ever (in my opinion at least), even though I don’t know really what it means, or even until recently, what the words were. Google was no help finding the quote, oh yes, I found the episode alright, but not the actual quote I wanted. I eventually managed to figure out, given the context of the quote, what things it was referring to and find the words given my vague phonetic memory of them. I put it in my MSN tagline anyway, even in case it was wrong. Later that night I went home, and popped in the DVD of that episode with subtitles on, and I was so close, got one word wrong, but it wasn’t even one of the weird ones, alas.

The quote itself reflects how I can read an email from someone at work about the stuff I’m working on, and still have no idea what’s going on, who I should reply to, and so on. The season is 4, the episode is 7, the title is Marge Gets a Job. The house is sinking, the foundation needs repairing, so Homer trying to save money buys the cassette tape of The Half Assed Approach to Foundation Repair. Actor Troy McClure goes too fast for him, and utters the phrase that captures my current mindset:

“If you can’t find metal stucco lath, use carbon-fibre stucco lath. Now parge the lath!”

2006-03-19

Sorry, Mario is in another castle

Filed under: General — 19day @ 21:37:49

Almost in response to my earlier post on women in videogames, but not quite since the response arrived before my post, and was in preproduction for longer, and .. well, whatever. It is interesting that some time after my post I find tell of a game that sort of tries to reverse the Damsel in a Dress cliche plotline I mentioned before.

Super Princess Peach is the game, and boy, is it pink. I haven’t played it, not likely to either, but the screenshots indicate quite the pinkness. And it shows that even when they try to reverse the trend, and give us the flipside, in this case being that the Princess is to rescue Mario, they screw it up (in my opinion) by making it cutesy, and rediculous.

Angry Princess

Hell hath no fury like the princess’ wild mood swings

I seem to recall that in Super Mario Brothers 2, the Princess did quite well as a character, all by herself. In this game however, she has a parasol, as her main weapon. Well, at least it isn’t a frying pan, or say a vacuum cleaner like Marge had in that weird Simpsons arcade game. But still, I guess the umbrella is her ‘Yoshi’.

Crying Princess

Where…. *sob* … is … *sob* …. my….. *sob*… lithium

What I think is sillier, is the special abilities she’s endowed with. Which are, essentially, her womanly runaway emotions. When you power up anger, you’re all firery and boomy. When you power up your amazing capacity for sadness, you let loose torrents of salt water that somehow inspire the plants around you to grow. Happiness causes you to trip out and float around the screen. And apparently there is a Restore-Life emotion that I wish I possessed myself.

Princess Playing Paltry Parts

I see angry, happy and sad, that last one must be climax

So you, your parasol that eats people while smiling, go in, beat easy easy enemies (remember, this game is for girls), and rescue Mario. I say she should leave him for Luigi, but what do I know.

I’m being intentionally hard on this game, partly for the laugh. I mean, obviously this is meant for little girls, but I think even little girls are capable of thinking little of a condescending, non-challenging game where everything is a uniform shade of hyper-pink.

If they truly wanted to exploit women, what they should do is just release two versions of a mario game, the normal one where Mario shows what a stud he is, and the alternate with the Princess in the drivers seat. That way they will still sell the original to all the boys, probably sell the personalized ones to the girls, and probably a number to those people who want every possible edition of everything who will buy both. To sweeten the deal, make it so they are slightly different, and call it Pokemon. Then watch the cash flow.

2006-03-09

The worst mistake that you can make is to think you’re alive when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room

Filed under: General — 19day @ 13:24:37

I’m not much of a dreamer myself, I tend not a dream much (or rather, remember my dreams much) at all. I find I sleep too deeply for that, since I usually have dreams that I remember when I’m lightly dozing, waking up every 10 minutes, but I rarely have the time for that these days. I rarely have dreams that are so vivid that I think they could have been real, like a memory of something that actually did happen, but I had one recently that I actually forgot about, and then it suddenly came back to me and I had to check that it was in fact a dream and not a memory.

The dream itself was fairly short, or at least the segment I can remember. It’s scary because it actually happened in the context of being in bed, asleep, so it’s easy to place it as a memory of something that happened in the middle of the night than as a dream. Anyway, I was in bed, and a tooth was starting to feel sort of itchy, like, at the nerve, so I started massaging it with my tongue. I get that feeling sometimes when something goes under the gum, like irritating popcorn bits. Then the tooth started to come loose, and I could even taste the tanginess of areas of the mouth my tongue is not supposed to come into contact with, and the tooth was swiveling, and I touched it with my fingers and tried to align it so I could bite down and keep it in place until morning when… when I would do something about it I suppose, in a sleepy half-panic. I evidently woke up that morning but didn’t remember the dream, until now. I just checked my teeth, I couldn’t tell whether it was dream, or memory. It appears to have been dream.

It is actually not the first dream I’ve had about my teeth coming out… and in fact, it is one of very very few typical dreams. The other of which are falling, and being chased. Being chased is easy, since it harkens back to the days we feared predators, or it might be the alternate sensation of chasing something but it’s more the feeling of running with anxiety and maybe when we wake up we just choose the representation of ‘being chased’, but I’ll group them together. The falling dream seems to be, at least sometimes, a result of the falling sensation that occurs when the brain disengages motor control and puts us in paralysis for the purposes of sleeping without flinging ourselves around. This also leads to the fun hypnic jerk, which as far as I ever learned, was due to this disconnection, which causes a twitch in the body as a reflex action. Sometimes this is so strong that it actually wakes the person up again (thus completing the pattern of the falling dream, waking up just as you hit, or somesuch).

Why “teeth falling out” is part of this collective unconscious dream grabbag, I don’t know. It appears to be just as common, and some of my friends (of whom I’ve asked) have reported similar dreams, something involving the teeth. There are many interpretations of this, but I never put much faith in dream interpretation, so I haven’t looked into it. A popular theme is that of anxiety, so you symbolically lose your teeth as the anxiety causes the loss of your self-determination or similar. I don’t know, if it was that, everyone would dream of their mouths exploding every night (perhaps we do).

I don’t know if sexual dreams are considered part of canon in that dream grabbag. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, since the being chased and teeth and falling would sure cover three of the four basic instinctual emotions, fear, fight and flight. My prof jokingly referred to them as the Four F’s, but I suppose the last one could be rendered as Fornication easily enough without resorting to slang. I have had laughingly few sexual dreams that I can recall, worse still because I seem to self censor them. It’s not that are covered with black bars or strategic houseplants, but that they can’t be seen. Further, in the dream context, I’m not aware of not being able to see things, I merely accept the censored parts as symbolic representations. Like, for example, I had another dream about being abandoned by friends (my subconscious is just rife with problems, eh?) but one of them was indeterminate, as a person, just a symbol for another friend but not a specific friend, and no memory of a face or anything recognizable to identity the person in the waking world. Same thing for those sexual dreams, in fact, I seem to put a lot of effort in the surroundings… in one of them, even in the dream, I remarked how incredible this girl’s room was, it was huge, with all kinds of pillows, decorations, paintings, knick-knacks, just amazing, and I even thought, in the dream “wow, this is a lot of stuff”, where did all that come from? I don’t know, and why do I censor myself, is my imagination really that poor, is it intentional? Not that I’m incredibly eager to star in my own x-rated dream, but I’m still curious what goes on in that rats maze in my head.

I’ve only ever had one lucid dream, it was really weird, it wasn’t completely lucid because I couldn’t really control everything. But part of the dream was in this room with this big pillar, and I got control enough that I flew around spiraling up the pillar, but somehow I feel it was more like I was dreaming that I was having a lucid dream or something. I’ve never managed it again.

As far as I know, only three people have ever dreamed about me, that I know of. My mother dreamed about me killing the dog accidentally (thanks), a friend dreamed about me in some vague sexual context, probably as a warning. Another friend dreamed that I was in her house, breaking stuff and insulting her parents. So all and all, people have a great subconscious opinion of me.

To close, here are quotes from Waking Life, a movie I suggest you see, if you have the patience for it:

Man on the Train: Hey, are you a dreamer?
Wiley: Yeah.
Man on the Train: I haven’t seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore.

Man: As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough

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