Two days in and still not through the backlog, I’m beginning to know a certain fear of my RSS aggregator.
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We came back with all our teeth!
Bee was incredibly gracious in putting us up (and putting up with us) all week, and we owe her a lot, but to repay it in rent she’d have to stay with us for four months. Not that Maria or I would mind, because Bee is awesome. I also finally got to see Graham perform live with the Bathtub Marys–I’d only seen seen him in rehearsal and heard him on mp3. We spent seven hours trying to absorb the Met (art, not opera) with Leonard, then had dinner and games and a subsequent Saturday Day Basketball with him and Sumana.
Louisville seems a lot shorter after nine days in Manhattan, but then it seems a lot sunnier too.
Twister is a felony
Brendan: So which is better–dragon princesses, or dinosaur princesses?
Maria: Oh, definitely dragon princesses.
Brendan: You think so? I don’t know…
Maria: Oh, come on. Dinosaurs only happened because the dragon bloodline got watered down.
Maria and I (and Michael and Danielle) are going to New York! On a trip! Ballers: You can come over on Tuesday, but we won’t be here, so you may have to play games in the hall. I am pretty sure that is illegal!
I am not making this up: MSN and careerbuilder deliver an article about “What Kind of Procrastinator Are You?”
Sometimes I think MSN is a gigantic joke on the same order as Modern Humor Authority, but ten times subtler and more sinister.
Rob Thomas has been invited to my birthday party since 1998, of course, but I’m a little surprised myself that Jason Dohring is the first actor from Veronica Mars to be invited. Okay, that’s all. I’m done! I promise not to post about Veronica Mars anymore, even though it’s ALL I THINK ABOUT WHERE ARE THE NEW EPISODES WHERE WHERE
Also, added “my birthday party” to the War on Clarity.
Brendan Talks About Things He Doesn’t Understand
Reading Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun, finally, I came across this sentence:
“Beauty is found in the tension between our expectations and reality.”
Which contrasts interestingly with Rebecca Borgstrom’s assertion that suffering is the disconnect between desire and reality (which, as I vaguely understand it, is derived from viparinama-dukkha and sankhara-dukkha).
That’s not to say that together, they imply that suffering is beauty; in fact, Borgstrom (who I think would not disagree with Koster’s statement) has specifically denied as much. Whatever I’m fumbling at here is more subtle than that. So why not crush the subtletly beneath our old friend proof-by-analogy?
According to our premises, beauty is derived from expectations and suffering is derived from desire. Sumana has said that hope leads to expectations, secret or otherwise; I believe that. I also believe that desire invariably produces hope. So desire leads to suffering and hope; hope leads to expectations; expectations lead to beauty; beauty leads to desire. Insert ASCII diagram here. Suffering is the byproduct of the desire-hope-expectations-beauty loop.
Or make up your own better diagram, and tell us about it.
Volscian made picture of Rita! And it’s awesome! So awesome that I blew up!
I really like the idea that Rita has tired eyes and a kind of round face–no Carrie-Anne Moss here. I hesitate to pronounce the picture canon only because I’m pretty careful about when and how I state that any given character is of a particular race; it’s perfectly valid to assume Rita is white, but also valid to assume she isn’t. Still, if I were ever to print out the Rita stories or anything, that would make a pretty great cover.
Yeah, you can tell I’m not famous because I obsess over fanstuff.
I just finished The Book of the New Sun and I’m not going to talk about it for a while; I learned my lesson when I tried to write up The Blind Assassin a few years ago and came off like a blatherskite. (Search for it if you want, but I warned you.)
I’m not sure if The Book of the New Sun was good, but it was amazing.