Burning Leaves

News from the edge

2006-09-28T15:20:27Z

Your eyes will bleed.

In other news, the other half and I are domestically partnered, and I lopped off the tip of my thumb in a freak vegetable-chopping accident.

That is all.

Food.

2006-08-01T16:00:53Z

I ate more fresh fruit last month than I ever have in any given year. Indeed, it was a month of fruit! I must atone for this crime. Therefore, I shall consume the meatcake.

Ripe! All ripe!

2006-07-21T16:44:30Z

I have eaten of the pluot. It tastes of Hawaiian Punch, only without the chemical aftertaste. Beneath its mottled greenish skin, the flesh is the color of radioactive meat.

I think I will have another tonight.

Airline tickets?

2006-06-13T15:12:34Z

I'm flying to Indianapolis in a couple months, and I still haven't picked up tickets. Lazy me! Which of the online cheap airfare middlemen (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, etc) are dependable, and which ones should I stay away from?

Can't sleep, snakes will eat me.

2006-05-26T15:47:27Z

Things have been pretty good lately. I've lost ten pounds on the "eat all the same things, but not quite so much of them" diet, I'm taking a summer class in Adobe Illustrator that should help me move toward design work, and the weather has been really nice lately. Money's been tight, but when isn't that the case?

It's a sign of how well things are going that the worst thing that's happened to me lately is that someone spilled soda on my backpack at the X3 showing last night. Well, that and the fact that I actually watched that crappy movie. It makes the Fantastic Four movie look like a real gem of filmmaking. I wish I could un-watch X3, and I certainly wish I could take back the money I spent.

The writers clearly didn't know what the hell they were doing. The director didn't know what the hell he was doing. (Well, except for spending most of the special effects budget on the one thing he knows well: EXPLODING CARS.) The actors, bereft of good direction or a good script, didn't know what they were doing. (By the end of the film, even Ian McKellen was phoning in his lines. Brr.) The only ones who knew what they were doing were the producers; their agenda was clearly to sink the franchise in a fit of pique over Bryan Singer's departure. Ugh.

Something good came out of it, though. Well, two things. First, I got to see a bunch of people that I hardly see much of anymore. And second: the trailers rocked! Superman Returns looks totally awesome. Ghost Rider seems hokey but fun. My Super Ex-Girlfriend looks silly and fun. And then... SNAKES ON A PLANE! The movie may suck, I dunno, but... SNAKES ON A MOTHERFUCKING PLANE!!!

Ahem. Back to your regularly sponsored LJ.

Shopping: the Aftermath

2006-03-27T15:59:50Z

New shoes feel like prosperity.

New sneakers feel like comfortable prosperity.

Still alive.

2006-02-21T16:21:29Z

Life continues to move along at its usual pace, tick tick tick.

You know you've gotten into a routine when you show up for work on a holiday.

That's one day I'm glad I'll never see again.

2005-12-23T19:35:20Z

Due to the transit strike, it took me four and a half hours to get home last night.

Okay, only about three hours of walking. I took a couple of half-hour breaks to deal with a two-hour bout of heart palpitations, something I haven't had to deal with since high school. Of course I get them again when I have no choice but to walk six miles. I'd have gladly taken a cab, but of course every driver I hailed refused to leave Manhattan. Oh, and crossing a bridge with big segments missing from the safety fence is *great* when you're afraid of heights.

Also, note to self: the 59th St. bridge trolley car goes to Roosevelt Island, *not* to Queens. Duh.

Why do people keep writing things that I cannot unread?

2005-12-16T21:10:02Z

It's the Quentin Tarrantino Muppet Movie.

(not really a movie, but still)

Iä! Iä!

2005-12-07T16:10:53Z

Oh Great Cthulhu!

I have been an extremely assiduous devotee this year.

In October, I exposed peaseblossom to soul-rending horrors (250 points). When the stars were right, I sacrificed matt_snyder to Cthulhu (500 points). In February, I burnt my copy of the Necronomicon (-75 points). In September, I stopped neezbeez from defiling Lovecraft's grave (-20 points). Yesterday, I wore an Elder Sign (-10 points). In May, I called down the wrath of Yog-Sothoth upon sugar_devil (65 points).

In short, I have been very good (710 points) and deserve to be promoted to High Priest.

Your humble and obedient servant,
firebranch

Submit your own plea to Cthulhu!

Minority Drinks!

2005-12-05T16:25:54Z

It's Back!

2005-11-18T23:37:34Z

The big black cube sculpture on Astor Place is finally back! It's totally velvety clean, without a scrap of graffiti. (We'll see how long that lasts.) Finally, a return to normalcy! Yay!

Just a few "bad apples"?

2005-11-04T22:16:52Z

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives which led to US soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official charged.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.

"The Secretary of Defense under cover of the Vice President's office ... regardless of the President having put out this memo ... they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen," Wilkerson said.

He claimed the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the US military to abide by the Geneva Conventions against torture.

"There was a visible audit trail from the Vice President's office through the Secretary of Defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.

See, this is why I don't want to try oysters.

2005-11-02T17:34:49Z

The great oyster beds of Long Island and the Chesapeake produced mammoth mollusks up to a foot in length. On a visit to our shores, William Makepeace Thackeray, the English author of Vanity Fair, commented, rather vividly, that eating one was like "swallowing a baby."

I Vant To Suck Your Sacred Blood!

2005-10-24T21:15:29Z

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9785289/site/newsweek

Recuperatin'.

2005-10-21T16:15:25Z

It's been a week and a half since I got sick, and I'm only finally starting to feel normal again. If my immune system handles the avian flu this well, I'm in trouble.

I went out to dinner last night with Conn and my parents at a nice little Italian restaurant we know in the East Village (Cremcaffe). The service may have been a little sluggish, but the food was good like always. The sauteed broccoli reeked of garlic. Yum!

My parents are in their seventies now. It's strange and uncomfortable to watch them get older. Since I only see them about once a year, the changes jump out at me a lot more clearly than if I saw them every day. My mom's always been small but tough. I don't like seeing her turn frail.

FindPlay

2005-10-18T22:07:43Z

Find people in your area to game with through FindPlay: http://findplay.anvilwerks.com/

Unfortunately, it shows people within a 35 mile radius. This is, like, light-years in terms of NYC.

Ill.

2005-10-14T15:53:17Z

So, Conn's sister and brother-in-law came out to visit last weekend. We had a fun time, with lots of good food -- a bunch of people went to our friend Tami's steakhouse on Friday, and we had brunch on Sunday, followed by Peking duck. Unfortunately, those were my only two meals on Sunday. We spent most of the day wandering through Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art without food or drink. As a result of one day's dehydration and stress, I've been sick all week! I'm only at work now because I ran out of sick days for the year. :-(

Fortunately, the doctor says it's just a virus, rather than (say) strep throat. So a few more days of rest and tea and soup should get me through it. But man, sloshing around through the rain while sick is extra not-fun. Ugh.

My parents will be in town this weekend. I hope I'm in good enough shape to spend time with them.

Watch it, you!

2005-10-06T20:34:59Z

Mmm, pancakes.

2005-10-03T16:13:25Z

Made pancakes twice this weekend. They rank pretty high up on the chain of comfort food. Fresh and fluffy out of the pan, good pancakes don't need butter or syrup. And for extra pancake goodness, replace some of the milk in the recipe with heavy whipping cream, then thin out the batter with extra milk until it's the proper consistency. Yum!

Back-to-work Wednesdays

2005-09-28T22:13:11Z

I stayed home from work yesterday because:

A) I felt crappy;
B) The new Windows XP disks were coming by UPS and someone needed to be around to pick them up, and
C) I wanted to be in shape to run Donjon that night.

Man, I love staying home on weekdays. Somehow it's more relaxing than staying home on a weekend. I guess there's still a grade-school thrill to it, like I'm playing hooky or something. All I know is that the Sci-Fi channel was showing a Firefly marathon, and I watched six episodes back to back. I'd never watched Firefly before. What a great show! Solid stories, good cast, great chemistry between cast members, and Whedon comedy gold in every episode, even the darker ones.

Mal: You know, they say mercy is the mark of a great man. [stab] Guess I'm just a good man. [stab] Well, I'm all right.

Then everyone eventually showed up for Donjon and... ugh. For reasons I'm not going to go into here, the session didn't happen. It's left me in a sour mood which today's sub-par Young Avengers has failed to dispel.

On the other hand, I have Serenity and MirrorMask to look forward to this weekend. Yay for quality sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking!

And this was supposed to be fun.

2005-09-26T15:52:13Z

I've come to the conclusion that I don't really enjoy running role-playing games all that much. I mean, it's okay, but I'd rather play. The problem is that it's very hard for me to find games that satisfy my roleplaying needs. osito71's D&D game is very good for what it is, but there are lots of other styles of play that I want to explore. So I've tried to run the sorts of games that I'd like to play. But it doesn't seem to be working out.

Maybe I'll just stop trying to run games, and find myself another hobby to occupy my time for a while.

Grr!

2005-09-15T15:13:59Z

Someone left me a message on my brand new cell phone. But when I tried to listen to the message, the voice mail system asked me for my passcode.

I never set a passcode.

I'm probably gonna have to call Verizon and argue with them for a few hours to get them to reset my passcode. Yay. :-p

Please take your "I Love the 90s" CD offer elsewhere

2005-09-12T18:18:49Z

I watched Latter Days with refsson on Friday evening. It’s a well-done gay romance/tearjerker, and while it’s not brilliantly innovative or genre-breaking or anything, it has a solid cast (Jacqueline Bisset, yay!), and fulfills its promise of yanking at your heartstrings without being too ham-handed about it.

It yanked at my heartstrings a bit too hard, and a bunch of old emotional scars tore open. For me, the 90s were the decade of looking for Mr. Right (or Mr. Anybody, really). I thought that if I hooked up with the right guy, my loneliness and general-purpose angst would melt away. All I got were some one-night stands and a handful of lousy dating experiences, including a few guys who really messed me up emotionally. (Yes, I’m talking to you, Steve Carvalho. You’d damn well better be living happily ever after with Cain in San Francisco.)

So anyway, a whole bunch of crap came flooding back, and I cried myself to sleep on refsson’s shoulder that evening. I spent the rest of the weekend dealing with the resulting mood swings. osito71’s D&D game helped, as we finally achieved a well-earned victory over an old nemesis. Plus, refsson brought me some pie. Mmm, pie.

Then yesterday, I watched a couple of old The Real World episodes on Logo (the gay cable channel), from the Pedro Zamora season in San Francisco. I was actually watching because Judd Winick, one of my favorite comic book writers (and the creator of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, on Cartoon Network) was also on that season. My 90s angst boiled up again, but I was ready for it this time. Everything’s under control now.

On a mostly-unrelated note: based on the first two episodes, I’ve fallen in love with the anime series Naruto. Despite being an obnoxious little punk, Naruto’s a deeply sympathetic character. I must see what happens next!

Post-lunch rambling.

2005-08-22T18:40:11Z

On the way to the comic book store, I almost got splashed when the garbagemen were tossing dripping trash bags into the back of the garbage truck. The smell reminded me of something, but it took a while to figure it out. That smell always underlay the reek of chlorine at the neighborhood pool when I was growing up.

I liked swimming as a kid, but I stopped around when I hit puberty. Between body image problems that kept me from taking my shirt off and always getting a hard-on around hot swimmer guys, I wound up avoiding the place. Not that I could swim very well anyway; the chlorine burned my eyes, so I would never duck my head underwater. I still swim poorly, even now.

----

One of the booksellers hawking books from a streetside table on St. Mark's Place had a copy of an old Yeats compilation that I picked up at a used book store fifteen years ago. I used to write lots of poetry back in high school, and some later on in college, but I haven't had the impulse in several years now. I occasionally think of writing poetry, but only in the sense that I miss doing it, not because I actually want to. The impetus is gone. I guess it's been sublimated into my gaming writing -- and my relationship with Conn.

I'd rather be happy than create art.