I even put up new pictures for the sidebar rotation. I’m on fire!

Someday, when I’m awfully bored, I’m going to let the site randomly (and independently) choose between all the pictures and all the titles I’ve ever used. Won’t that be confusing?

And potentially hilarious. Just you wait.

(Since I’m the only one who will get the Ah! My Goddess reference: the opening song of the OVA is entitled “My Heart Iidesenai, Your Heart Tashikametai.” I threw this into Sherlock’s translation feature, and the associated title is what it spit back at me. The actual translation, according to Anime Lyrics, is more along the lines of “My Heart Won’t Let Me Say, I Want to be Certain of Your Heart.”)

Little of note here in this neck of the world. Malaise continues to plague me, which has become so common that y’all should just assume that it does until I mention otherwise. (Aw, bump it. Brian just pointed out this timely qwantz comic that summarizes this post.)

Excitement in the world: the Republican convention (Giuliani’s speech was pretty nifty, I thought), and an impending Apple Expo Paris where new G5-based iMacs will most likely be introduced. Such thrills!

…

For random entertainment, in the same vein as the infamous Star Wars Kid, check out this video (link found on the Ars Technica forums). Why do these people videotape themselves?

I mean, it’s not like I have a tape of myself trying to do cartwheels as a youngster. Where Marin does cartwheels perfectly, and I get halfway over and then flop on my side with a resounding thud. Repeatedly. To the point where the camera starts shaking horribly, because my dad’s laughing so hard.

And even if that tape exists, there’s no way I’d let it get out on the internet. (Here’s where I would link that video, if I had a way to import a certain tape into my computer.)

Movie Nite was revived on Friday, in the form of Bulworth. I found it surprisingly entertaining, and not terribly dated—despite the movie’s placement during the time of the ’96 Clinton/Dole election. Be sure to check out IMDB’s quotes from the movie, to learn of an innovative solution to racial issues.

After Movie Nite finished, I promptly collapsed into a heap in my bed. I then woke up, and then collapsed into heap downstairs. Something’s sapping my energy something fierce, and I’m frickin’ tired.

Of it, that is. I’m tired of it.

I was supposed to go to PAX this weekend, but wound up bailing because a video-game convention is damn near the last place I want to be found comatose. I’ll take my fifteen minutes of fame in a different venue, thanks.

Wednesday I ditched work and took a four-hour nap. I woke up feeling mildly functional, which was a vast improvement over my earlier, nonfunctional, status. Good thing, too, because that evening Eric and I had been invited over to Brian’s house for dinner.

Yeah, Brian, that’s probably why I was rather quiet—above and beyond my usual reserved self, even.

After dinner we played a rousing game of Clue: Master Detective—a game that none of us had played for many, many years. I proposed a new Clue variant: Idiot Savant, which features three locations, three people, and three weapons. (Yes, you could make the game more obvious… but I think it’s more fun to just have a game where you have a better chance of winning by randomly making an accusation on your first turn than by actually playing any turns.) I—courtesy of Brian deciding to give me one shot before solving the mystery himself—successfully named Miss Scarlet and her weapon of choice, the horseshoe. I didn’t place her in the gazebo, however, which kinda ended my career as a master detective.

Who the heck kills someone in a gazebo, for crying out loud? That’s a recipe for 360° of witnesses!

…

In Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent*, there’s apparently a young boy who goes around and beats the tar out of people using a baseball bat. This fellow acquires the nickname of shonen bat—”young boy bat.” (Incidentally, the idea of someone going around and randomly clubbing people is pretty freaky to me.)

[*I now recognize Kon as the director of Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, and so no longer feel weird describing Paranoia Agent as the new anime by Satoshi Kon.]

Our copier at work has been dying a slow death lately, and has exasperated a coworker, Sharon, to the point of daydreaming about various ways to destroy the thing. Sharon’s occasionally suggested to both Eric and me that we should use our technical know-how to sabotage the machine; to Marin she mentioned that she was ready to bring in her Louisville Slugger and bash the copier to death.

Marin’s first thought? Sharon bat.

…

But, yes, I’m still remarkably tired. Tomorrow morning there’s a meeting at work, and then I’m supposed to join a select team in questioning some person about some scanning service we might start using in the near future. Sadly, I’m barely in any shape to stare slack-jawed at a screen—let alone actually think and be quick on my toes.

Sleep deprivation and family trouble continue to plague me, and consequently this blog. (It’s been a long week and a half….) Yesterday’s activity of note was a grueling Soul Calibur II deathmatch against Brian; he ultimately prevailed, I’m sad to admit.

Brian’s kung-fu is better than my kung-fu. There, I said it.

Hearing Andy’s take on the unfolding I Love Bees incident has been one of my few sources of humor, lately. (It appears to be a massive—and extremely clever—promotion for Halo II; for a clue about what’s happened, check out this wiki when it’s not down.) The latest phase involved people being at specific locations throughout the country at specific times, so that they can answer a phone call with an appropriate code-word; I only mention this because one of those locations was actually on Arnold Way, in C-town. Crazy.

I did make it to the ballroom dance practice this evening, which did the most anything could do to lift me out of my funk. Spent most of the time as a wallflower (standard operating procedure for me, in life), though I genuinely enjoyed watching people this evening. I was eventually pulled out to dance by Anne, and had an enjoyable chat with her afterwards (I’m not the only recent graduate who’s still in town!); I finished the evening by waltzing with Nadia—a friend of Joe’s and Barry’s (two guys who I tend to chat with) who I had never officially met.

Next week is the last summer dance practice, and so will run extra-long for added fun. I guess I should be ready to really dance. I should be able to… theoretically.

Who put the sleeping pills in my drink this time? I’m so tired…

Recently I was disturbed to see that the amount of Vanilla Coke for sale in WinCo has dwindled to almost nothing. Everybody needs to do their part and buy more of it, before it’s too late.

I mean, that stuff’s like ambrosia. It’s the best variant of a major carbonated beverage… ever. Tropical Sprite Remix and Mountain Dew Code Red pale in comparison to the awesomeness that is Vanilla Coke.

The solution to yesterday’s t-shirt dilemma? The Torg Dream Fighters shirt I bought ages ago, but have worn very rarely. Marcia called the logo on the front of the shirt (I’m not pimping the shirt, but that’s the only place I know of where there’s a pic of the front) “indecent”—but her opinion doesn’t count. So there. (She was—at least—half-joking… though I wonder what she’d think of Soul Calibur II or Guilty Gear XX.)

I hear that Kristina wore one of the infamous “boys are dumb. throw rocks at them” t-shirts today. I also hear that Duane called her on it, though I know not how seriously.

So, between Kristina, Duane, Marica, and me… I bet we won’t have another “wacky and wild (but still decent)” dress day at work.

(I can see the argument that guys would make against that “throw rocks at them” shirt; certain females would be foaming at the mouth if guys wore shirts declaring that girls are dumb, and should be pelted with rocks. I fall more in the “it’s a dumb joke” camp, though I think it can be made better* by modifying it so that it reads: people are dumb. throw rocks at them.)

[*See, by calling boys dumb, the shirt appeals to gals. If the shirt called gals dumb, it would appeal to…er…guys who don’t care about pissing off girls**. By generalizing to all people, you can simultaneously piss everybody off and appeal to the antisocial crowd.]

[**Girls win, in general, because there are always more guys willing to hang out with girls who support throwing rocks at guys than there are girls willing to hang out with guys who support throwing rocks at girls.]

This week has just really been a bad one all around. Family issues have resulted in late-night phone calls all week—leaving my whole family extremely short sleep in addition to the general stress associated with “family issues.” Last week I sent my monitor off because of a white line at the bottom edge of the screen; today I get it back with “no problem found.” (Of course, the line was there when I first plugged it in again… and then promptly disappeared. And then reappeared.) Things that were supposedly cancelled shipped, and things that supposedly shipped (a month ago) never arrived. Etcetera.

Did I mention that I’m sleep-deprived?

Overcoming the odds, I did manage to get Octave completely up and running yesterday evening. Turns out I don’t have to use Apple’s X11 application (at least directly); I can run the program out of a plain terminal window. And now that I have it set up to look for function files in a folder of my choice, it pretty much acts as MatLab used to act—a pain in the ass, but usable. Only time will tell if I’ll ever actually use it.

I darn well better, after all the time I invested getting it up and running.

Work has decided that tomorrow will be a “wacky and wild (but still decent)” dress-day. Although I never got the official announcement email, the chatter of the office sufficed to inform me…. Of course, that chatter was of all kinds of indecent things people would be wearing talk about wearing. This talk of everybody dressed up all sexy-like (recall that almost all the chatter in my office is between females) prompted me to ask if I was supposed to dress up like a pimp tomorrow. People seemed to enjoy that idea.

(Little do they know how little I know about being a pimp; I’d go so far as to call myself the pimp of last resort.)

Some people have decided that this event should really be a “wear something related to what you do outside of work” day. In that vein, I have a couple old Macintosh t-shirts floating around somewhere. (Mac OS 8.5 featuring Sherlock, anyone? How about a shirt listing all the great Mac OS innovations, including such gems as OpenDoc?* Both shirts, of course, are way the hell too small for me.) I also have a handful of anime t-shirts (the kinds that came with artboxes**), the majority of which look terrible. Or, of course, I have my ancient high-school yearbook shirt***.

[*OpenDoc died an obscure death a long, long time ago.]

[**I’d never pay for an anime t-shirt by itself. Unless it was one of those black NERV shirts—those are nifty.]

[***The Ampersand of Quality, featuring both a large ampersand and the frog that graced the cover of the Spring Supplement. A modern-day classic.]

What’s a dork to do?

I actually made a tiny bit of progress in a math text today; I learned that Markov chain problems could be easily handled with matrices, whereas I had fought them in Probability II using repeated conditioning. (That probably doesn’t even mean much to those who have a clue what Markov chains are. Basically: I fought tooth and nail over something that would have been quite easy had I been shown this other method.)

When I described this epiphany to Eric, he was reminded of Octave—the freeware equivalent to MatLab—which would be handy when dealing with matrices. [While MatLab isn’t as nice as Maple (both are mathematical software packages), a free MatLab clone wins hands-down over an expensive Maple license.] This evening, then—after dancing—I downloaded and installed Octave (via Fink, a nifty way of dealing with Unix-based open-source software).

That became a messy prospect which culminated in my having to run X11 (a Macintosh version of Unix’s X-Windows) and type in arcane command-line commands.

I managed, but there’s a damned reason I own a Macintosh. (Still, for free software, I can’t complain… much.) I’m working on reducing the number of messy strings I have to type to get Octave running, but have only succeeded in losing hours of my life.

I performed my duty as a driver today. Instead of checking out the two attractive girls getting out of their car, I was watching where I was driving and so was able to slam on my brakes when two dogs dashed out in front of me. The second dog came dangerously close to death, despite my best efforts to stop the car.

I also wasted all my precious adrenaline in that encounter, and so was drowsy the rest of the day. My original plan had been to ration my adrenaline to make it through work—too bad for work that I encountered those dogs.

…

It seems that I’ve become friends with the people behind the counter at Subway, which has the twin perks of being able to chat while ordering a sandwich and being given large cookies when I ask for cookies. It’s not anything grand, but it is kind of nice.

Saturday I ate pizza on the roof of the new branch of American Dream Pizza with Brian and Eric; good pizza, and the roof is a nice change of pace. As one of the others first noted (I forget who), I’m not sure how often the roof will actually be usable. Oregon is famous for its “liquid sunshine,” after all.

After pizza we watched Eric’s MST3K tape of parts: the clonus horror. The great thing about MST3K episodes is that you catch more each time you watch, so the show remains fresh.

We then watched This Land, which was hilarious regardless of political persuasion. We also (re)watched Steve Ballmer’s infamous “Monkey Dance“, which was made even more hilarious because it was Eric’s first time watching it.

Otherwise, it was another extremely quiet weekend. As usual, I squandered my free time; while I enjoy doing nothing, it does make the rest of life a bit more challenging.

Though I don’t tend to watch the summer olympics (as I told Eric, the winter ones are more interesting because there’s nothing else to really do in winter), I am tuned into the opening ceremonies.

Watched the delegations from Afghanistan and Iraq enter the arena. The Afghanistani flag bearer was (as Marin noted) female; the Iraqi delegation had an old man who was doing his best to get the crowd to react even louder than the warm welcome they had already provided.

Awesome.

I’ve just realized that I’ve failed you, dear readers; I let the paper get recycled before I could document it for posterity. That said: guess who was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last week?

…

Sakura Kinomoto. Of Cardcaptor Sakura. As in anime. (No, they didn’t use their traditional dot-art technique on her.) And I’m talking above-the-fold, to the right of the What’s News column—not hidden away on some subsection. Color me impressed.

This morning’s edition of Power Lunch (my folks like to watch CNBC during the day) was hosted by Bill Griffeth and Rebecca Quick (those photos are horrible). Bill’s an awesome anchor on his own—he used to hold down Power Lunch by himself—but the addition of Becky really gave the show an extra kick today. You may think that I’m kidding, but I’m totally not*. As far as financial news goes, Power Lunch with Bill and Becky is my ticket.

[*Even though I wrote this while channelling the spirit of a stupid fan, I can’t possibly touch the quality of Donna’s VD and Unicrons page. I know I’ve linked to it before, but even the name’s enough to crack me up. (Oh Sweet Moses… be sure to check out the survey, and read it all the way to the end.) In all seriousness, though, Power Lunch is actually pretty entertaining, as far as financial news shows go—Griffeth has a sense of humor.]

Time for some news briefs**: Marin and I have started in on Cowboy Bebop, so sometime soon I’ll rejoin the rest of the anime-watching world. (For those who don’t watch anime: everyone and their dog has already seen Cowboy Bebop.) I’m still horribly slow at studying, though I did manage to finish two chapters this morning. Work is backlogged to all heck, and has no hope of ever getting caught up.

[**Sorry—still trying to get CNBC out of my head.]

Andy tried calling both Nate and Nick’s cell phones this evening (they’re currently engaged in a cross-country road trip to move Nick back to Portland, now that he’s done with law school) without getting any response. He’s now started a dead pool on them. I’m not in—yet.

I appear to not only be sleep-deprived, but horribly sleep-deprived. This heat really isn’t doing anything to help, but I can’t blame it for the mess I’m in.

Hence: time to hit the hay early for once, and see if I can get a more-than-full night’s rest. If not… bad times ahead. Yeesh.

What have I done to cause things to fall apart? Why can’t my electronics actually work like they’re supposed to? Which deity did I tick off this time?

It’s not my G5 this time, but my monitor. The display began to add a decorative white line about a quarter of an inch from the bottom of the screen—needless to say, my tastes differed from its tastes. The good news in all of this is that it’s under warranty, and Sharp is even paying for me to FedEx it back to them. (The bad news is that I nearly broke it trying to get it back into its packaging, and that’s not covered by warranty.)

So now I’m running off of a monitor I lifted (er… borrowed) from my dad’s PC. Though functional, it only has a decent refresh rate at 1024 x 768; I already miss the extra real estate (not to mention the crispness of the picture) of my LCD.

Boo hoo. Sob. Whine.

The heat around these parts has made it difficult to sleep at night. This is an unnecessary additional reason for not-sleeping, and only serves to make me that much less functional throughout the day. My memory has already suffered, and my ability to speak coherent sentences seems to also be impinged. Loss of rational thought cannot be that far behind.

I’ve gotten in the habit of reading some web-design blogs, on top of my general blog reading (highlights of which may be found on my ⁄⁄LINKS page):

SimpleBits

// hicksdesign

mezzoblue

A List Apart (okay, so this one isn’t a blog)

On one of those sites (I forget which one, now) I learned that sidebars on the left are bad—in terms of page readability—and thus should be avoided. That surprised me, as I don’t think this layout is that shabby (then again, I don’t have too much in my left sidebar). Hrm. I could see people with extremely wide browser windows suffering because I lack a fixed-width layout (extremely long lines of text aren’t all that much fun to read), but otherwise… bah. Still, I find this kind of stuff interesting. I’ve learned all sorts of things (not that I’ve actually put any of them into practice) from browsing these sites.

I swear, spammers are getting more creative. They’ve even adopted the use of l33tsp3@k to try and get through filters. Crazy.

Let’s see… the weekend roundup: on Friday I got a pounding headache every time I exerted myself, so I stopped exerting myself. That is to say, I went in to work—and while I might not have been on top of my game, I still did OK. On Saturday a wicker basket gave me a splinter in the pad of my ring finger; the splinter then proceeded to break in half as I tried to extract it. (sob) Finally had to resort to surgery, which was lots of fun. Saturday evening Brian kicked my ass in Soul Calibur II (sob), and then I threw various anime episodes at him. Today I… er… don’t remember what all I did. Lots of mundane recordingkeeping.

And also tearing unnecessary pages out of my old school notes (I’ve kept some math and business notes on the off chance they might be useful, but—until today—they were found in spiral binders that also held lots of pointless notes). And then vacuuming up the fifteen-thousand tiny paper scraps that littered my room like confetti.

This evening I discovered the next movie that I will see, without a doubt: Shawn of the Dead. I still need to see The Village, actually, if only to be able to talk about it with others.

Yeesh. I feel like I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off—and that’s despite the fact that I haven’t really had much energy lately. (I’ve just been taking care of a good heap of the mundane activities of life that I had been putting off. Turns out I probably put them off a bit too long….) Cleaning up these odds and ends has handily filled my free time.

That, and the fact that Marin and I agreed to house-sit for a coworker this week. The problem with this is that we need to keep the plants and grass alive until Saturday, and those plants and grass appear to like water. (Or, rather, they appear to dislike a lack of water.) We spend more time fighting a hose in the evenings….

The meeting this morning was (for once!) action-packed. We had shocking revelations, awesome color-changing action (namely peoples’ faces growing red with anger), and Brent (apparently; I don’t remember using these words exactly) denouncing one of the management’s new benchmarks as worthless. Even the post-meeting chit-chat was chock-full of tasty morsels of intrigue. It was almost all I could ever hope a meeting to be.

(I had to mark it down for lack of tears, if you really must know.)

Of course, I can crack wise about how entertaining these meetings are only because I’ve managed to maintain some distance between myself and the organization. After today’s meeting, I can wholeheartedly say that I’m glad I didn’t accept the offer to become an actual employee. The knowledge that I don’t need this job to survive—that I’ll be moving on sometime, anyway—is the major reason I stay sane.

In anime news, Evangelion’s opening theme in surround-sound runs a shiver down my spine. The vibrant colors, purty box, and whatnot of Eva Platinum are nice, too—but they don’t give me a chill like that opening.

Van Damme.

I’ve made a bit of progress in catching up on sleep, as demonstrated by my ability to stay awake throughout the day (where “awake” is loosely defined as “eyes more open than shut”) with the assistance of a mere can of Mountain Dew. Next I hope to regain my ability to string together coherent sentences when talking.

Yesterday’s dance practice was comparatively successful, inasmuch as I actually got out and danced some. I know enough night club two step now to not bore a follow for half of a song [my obvious strategy, in light of this, is to not start dancing until the song is half over (^_^)V], and even successfully tried out a new waltz transition between flip-flops and the barrel roll. I now possess the knowledge to chain all my waltz moves together, if not the discretion to avoid using video-game terminology to describe my abilities.

Today I went to campus and chatted with professors, and I now have the email addresses of a few people I can contact about issues related to the actuarial job hunt. The sad truth is that, while I’m a good worker, I can’t sell myself worth beans. Consequently, my only real hope for finding a job is that my work (school, actuarial exam scores, references) will be able to speak of me better than I can.

I’ve been thinking about what to say about flügtag, and haven’t really been able to come up with any great way to describe what went on. The truth of the matter is that it was kinda slow; perhaps the idea of creating contraptions and then throwing them into the Willamette is simply one that sounds more hilarious on paper than it is in practice…. Still, I did see a fifteen-foot puffin (complete with “wings” out, as if that would help it glide further) be hurled off the edge of the platform. The puffin was decapitated as soon as it left solid ground, so that the person inside could dive out to safety—which was kind of entertaining. Also memorable was Hair Force One, “piloted” by a group of guys sporting mullets. They had a nice video of themselves being asses (or, rather, asses sporting mullets) in some local mall, which culminated—predictably, but satisfactorily—in them getting tossed out by the security guards. Otherwise, though, we fried in the hot sun and gasped at the $4.50 lemonades that people were trying to hawk. Also impressive was how packed the event was; many people made time in their day for flügtag.

…

Marin and I have been slowing making our way through Magical Shopping District Arcade Abenobashi over the last week. As one might expect from Gainax, what initially seems to be a “random parody of the week” show turns out to be a “random parody of the week with a backstory” show, and what initially seems lighthearted fun is tinged with a bit of sorrow.

I’m enjoying it; I like both Sasshi and Arumi. But, then again, I was sold (in the first episode) when Sasshi simultaneously burped and gave a thumbs-up as his way of agreeing with what Arumi was saying.

…

Word on the street is that there’s a meeting tomorrow morning that should make for some good times (where “good times” means “increased staff angst”), and I wouldn’t want to miss that. I live in exciting times!

Thanks to Tim from Lebanon, I once again am in possession of my lost disc golf disc. (Needless to say, Tim rocks!) This apparently marks, in Brian’s knowledge, the first successful callback from a lost disc.

Thanks to my unending foolishness, I was so tired that my mind was lagging about ten minutes behind the rest of the world—an experience not unlike F-Zero’s unwillingness to draw obstacles (say, clown dividers) until far too late for you to do anything about them. Today I tried working a half-day in the morning, followed by a half-day of reading textbooks in preparation for my next exams; I got the half-day of work done right. My Principles of Corporate Finance text looks remarkably readable… judging by its first two pages.

Doh.

I’ll try again tomorrow, but I think I’m going to have to study in the mornings and work in the afternoons—something about work just makes me tired. And I’m at least three times as easy to distract when I’m tired—and it’s normally pretty darn easy to distract me from study when there isn’t an exam imminent.

I fried in the hot Portland sun for flügtag—but you should have seen the other guys.

The trip north took a small eternity, mostly because I had to run a few thousand errands while on the way. One of those errands saw me to Target in Albany, where Tammy (formerly of the OSU honors college) ran me down in the parking lot to say ‘hi.’ As a result I got to meet Tammy’s daughter, Emily, for the first time—she had these remarkably clear, beautiful blue eyes. Amazing. Also amazing was that Emily didn’t react to me the way most babies do—that is, she didn’t stare intently at me, and then tilt her head to one side as if to try and figure out what’s wrong with me. (I’m half-Japanese, and my town is overwhelmingly caucasian… so I really don’t look like most other people that babies see, and they seem to key in on that. At least, that’s my best guess as to what goes on in their heads.)

After this meeting, I got on my way again… and discovered that what Shawn, the guy behind the counter at 7-Eleven, said was true: everybody in the world (except Shawn) was heading out of town for the weekend. I-5 was quite busy every time I was on it. I hate traffic.

Arrived at Andy’s, and dug into some GameCube F-Zero with him, Kevin, and Joel. It seems the game starts dropping detail as more players start racing at the same time, and some of the levels suffered horribly for it—one, in particular, only drew upcoming obstacles an instant before you would run into them. It was courtesy of this poor game performance that Andy could declare that I got clown-blocked by running into a clown divider head-on and getting stopped cold.

Have I ever mentioned that I hate clowns?

Anyhoo, F-Zero soon devolved into Soul Calibur II, where my knowledge of how to battle using the GameCube controller gave me many a decisive victory. This was followed up by a preview of the first two episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Looks to be a good show, as many others have said before me. I even found the tachikoma to be endearing, in a way that Jar-Jar Binks never was.

On Saturday Andy and I visited Powell’s (I picked up more cheap Steven King books, per tradition) and then met up with Julie (Andy’s friend) to hit flügtag. [Since it’s late, and I need to get up early for work tomorrow, I’ll leave the details of flügtag to another post.] I then drove home, sporting a brand-new combination of farmer’s tan and sunburn.

…

Seems that Craig broke his femur (!!!) a few weeks ago, and so is now in Corvallis convalescing (I love that word). Yesterday evening Brian and Craig came over, and partook of The Wizard and more Soul Calibur II. Brian was mildly interested in the movie, as I enjoy quoting it (or adulterated-quoting-it, as in the case of “I love the glove; it’s so bad”) at inappropriate times. I was personally taken aback at how Corey could confuse games in a movie that amounted to a giant ad for Nintendo:

“It’s like the Adventures of Link. He has to find Zelda, you have to find a house. Same difference!”

Except that everybody knows that in the Adventures of Link, Zelda is sleeping in the castle you start at. The point of that game is to wake her up, not find her. gasp! This was redeemed, as is every other crime committed by the movie, by the scene where two adults took to ramming each others’ cars repeatedly, while an old man (the personification of the audience, we later determined) silently drank a beer on his porch. As for Soul Calibur II—Brian and Craig were both much more fierce competition than I had experienced Friday. We ended up playing far too late into the night.

So I once again end this weekend far more tired* and injured (in terms of my integumentary system**) than I began it. I’m also supposed to start working in the mornings tomorrow. Yay!

[*Yes, I titled this entry after I wrote it, and it’ll be the last thing I do before I go to sleep. I promise.]

[**Trivia: the integumentary system is the largest organ in the body. I’ve always thought that this is something of a cop-out; I mean, who cares about skin? Some organ—it just delineates us from not-us. And sweats.]