Ok. The next time I complain about a thing, please remind me that on December 31, 2003, it was 62 degrees fahrenheit, and I spent an hour driving around with the top down, and that that's really more pleasure than I've ever deserved in my life.

I had an insight, today.

See, one of my biggest complaints about MMORPGs is that travel is too easy. I want MMORPGs where traveling to a nearby town takes actual time and might just get you killed. Some people should be able to travel from town to town at a much faster rate, but that should be a closely guarded secret.

On the other hand, one of the things that annoys me the most about the MMORPGs I do play is that I spend too damned much time traveling.

I realized today that I'm not actually insane. The reason I hate traveling in current MMORPGs, even though it's easier and faster than I want it to be, is that they make you travel too much. Traveling is easy and fast, therefore you can't dish out a substantial reward when someone travels, therefore you have to make them RUN A MARATHON before you give them a wheel of moldy cheese. In my world, going to a neighbouring town is a challenge, not something you make players do because it keeps them busy for 5 minutes. In my world, there is no such thing as "hit auto-run, make yourself a sandwich, come back, spend 30 seconds completing the mission, hit autorun, eat the sandwich, collect the reward."

I'm fully aware that most MMORPG players aren't interested in my world. It's just nice to reassure myself that I'm as interested as I think I am, despite what seems to be evidence to the contrary.

Ok, this is really starting to get on my nerves.

I NEVER want to use ^W to close a browser window. I use the Dvorak keyboard, so ^W happens to be right next to ^V, which I use ALL THE DAMNED TIME WHEN I'M IN AN EDIT WINDOW SPENDING 10 MINUTES TYPING SOMETHING UP THAT'S ALL GOING TO HAVE TO BE RETYPED WHEN I HIT ^W INSTEAD OF ^V.

So yeah. I'd really like to be able to un-bind ^W, please.

I'm not sure why, but this improvised recipe was several thousand times better than anything I've ever had in a restaurant. I used $14/lb mozzarella and 4-year balsamic, so maybe it's just that those two high-quality ingredients make all the difference. Everything else was just cheap store-bought stuff except the baguettes, which were cheap French bakery stuff.

1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
3 medium (racquetball-sized) ripe tomatoes
2 medium (fist-sized) red bell peppers
1 lb smoked fresh mozzarella
1 package "fresh" basil (5-7 sprigs)
2 baguettes

Quarter, roast, and peel peppers. Finely dice peppers, tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. Combine all ingredients except bread, refrigerate for at least 30m. Slice baguettes into 1/4"-1/2" slices, brush with olive oil, and lightly toast in oven or broiler. Arrange slices on serving tray, stir mixture, and place dollops of mixtrue on slices with a fork.

I wasn't too impressed with Big Fish, which is sad, because it tried very hard to impress me. In fact, that's why I wasn't impressed - every scene seemed to shout, "LOOK AT THIS IMPRESSIVE SCENE!" Then, when it was over, it seemed to whisper, "See, wasn't that impressive?"

If I hadn't known going into it that it was a Tim Burton movie with a Danny Elfman score, I would have figured it out in 10 minutes, and I never would have questioned that conclusion. I want to watch Edward Scissorhands again, now, just to reassure myself that it wasn't that similar. I found that a bit disappointing, especially because the movie's style didn't seem to integrate well with its theme. I could have lived with it, though. I also could have lived with the overwhelming number of Dramatic Cuts and Important Fades - they seemed to be saying quite loudly, "Did you notice that this is an instant classic?" but they clicked as often as not.

The real problem I had with it was that, in all its surreal loop-de-loops, it never managed to encompass the audience. It was like the brooding outcast at prom who's very obviously secretly hoping that someone will ask him to dance, but when someone does he chickens out and shrugs them off. It wanted to be emotionally gripping, but it was too busy astounding us. It wanted to astound us, but it never sucked us in enough for us to care.

It wasn't awful, and a lot of people are probably going to find it enchanting. That's fine; there wasn't anything really wrong with it, and maybe nobody else will find it as distant as I did. Heck, maybe that distance is the point; it would dovetail nicely with the theme.

One thing I did notice is that although I find Helena Bonham Carter somewhat ugly, I also find myself very attracted to her. Not sure what's up with that at all.

Oh, and was anyone else reminded of A Boy and His Dog? It was kind of disturbing; I have a hard time imagining it wasn't a deliberate allusion.

1. What did you do in 2003 that you'd never done before?
Raise a puppy.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I kept a single one. I don't even remember what year I made them; I'll keep recycling them until I knock at least one off the list, I suppose.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
I think my cousin's second child was born this year.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
I sure hope not.

5. What countries did you visit?
I failed to escape the United States for the 26th time.

6. What would you like to have in 2004 that you lacked in 2003?
Willpower and/or self-control.

7. What date from 2003 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
Hm. I guess the best candidate is December 4, 2003, since I'll see it every time I look at my car loan for the next 5 years.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Making it through a semester of law school.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not working on the comic.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I passed out after getting blood drawn, resulting in a concussion, a middle ear filled with blood, and a messed up back. Everything except the back seems to be close to normal again.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A puppy, although it depresses me to think of her as a purchase.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
The aforementioned puppy. She's a genius!

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Elected representatives.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent, car, school.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
School, cars.

16. What song will always remind you of 2003?
Don't think anything will qualify for that.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder?
Happier. And much happier than I was at the actual end of the year.

ii. thinner or fatter?
Same.

iii. richer or poorer?
More stuff, more debt; poorer, I guess.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Work on the comic, exercise.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Pass out, eat, buy stuff.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Eating food with family.

22. Did you fall in love in 2003?
Yes - see #11.

23. How many one-night stands?
I'm not sure I've had one of those in my life, actually.

24. What was your favorite TV program?
The only first-run show I made an effort to watch was American Idol. For precisely that reason, I'm going to say I didn't have a favorite TV program.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
I can only think of one person I really honestly hate, and I've hated him since he was elected governor.

26. What was the best book you read?
Geez, I think I only finished three books this year, and since two of them were "How to Succeed in Law School" type books, I guess that leaves One L.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I think the closest I came to a musical discovery was buying A3's new album.

28. What did you want and get?
A Honda S2000.

29. What did you want and not get?
A Lotus Elise.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?
You know what? The Hulk was bad enough that I feel no compulsion to answer this question.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I probably ate a thing somewhere with some people. I was 28.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Knowing my grade in Property.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2003?
Bland.

34. What kept you sane?
PUPPY!

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I never thought I'd have a hard time answering a question like this one. I guess Mira Sorvino still wins, even though I didn't really see her in anything this year.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
I dunno, I've been pretty stirred all year long. I guess the most stirring thing is what I see as the continued erosion of any meaningful difference between our parties.

37. Who did you miss?
Esther.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
What an odd thing to say. I like "best" even less than "favorite" in this context. At any rate.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2003?
Lay down for 10 minutes after someone sticks a needle in your arm.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
I know it's not the right thing
and I know it's not the good thing
but kinda I want to

Well, this started out as a Mashup, but I sure did wander far afield. Anyway, here's what got me going:

In honor of that New Zealand flick I?ve been reading about in all the popular newsmagazines, we?ll mashup The Hobbit today. It?ll be kind of a relief to do a story that has something that more or less resembles the typical adventuring party for once. It?s one of those big adventuring parties I remember from massive sprawling college AD&D games, but it?s still an adventuring party.

I'm going to put The Hobbit in the world of Shadowrun.* The PCs will constitute The Party. Some sort of retro anti-network martial arts sect took up residence, some time ago, out in the wilderness. They're not anti-computer or anti-technology; they'll have lots of implants and guns, they just really loathe the network and those who jack into it. Unfortunately, a massive dragon has begun terrorizing the countryside at their mountain retreat. Attempts to confront him in the open result in charred martial artists. They've tried to locate his lair, but although they've seen him disappear into the massive network of caves in the mountainside, they've never managed to find his nest.

Fortunately, a grizzled old wizard appeared after the dragon's reign of terror began. He hooks up with the sect and informs them that the entrance to the dragon's lair is sealed behind a great wall of stone which only opens at the dragon's command. The weak point in the dragon's hideout is that the wall itself is controlled by the dragon's computer network - by gaining access to this network, they can open the wall and at last surprise the dragon in his lair. (The sect may wonder why a dragon even has a computer, and how he got it set up in the middle of nowhere, but it's not exactly their area of expertise - the wizard should eventually sway them.)

So, of course, in order to crack into the network, the sect is going to need the services of a decker. Fortunately, the wizard knows just the detestable fellow they need, and is more than happy to lead them to him. The decker is another PC, a down-on-his luck decker living in the slums of the big city who can eventually be badgered into joining the adventure. Although the travel to the big city was fairly simple, the return trip will be fraught with great peril as the martial artists struggle to keep the decker from accidentally engineering his own demise. Eventually, they will manage to infiltrate the decker into the dragon's server room, and plug him in.

While the wizard leads the rest of the party to the great wall, the decker deals with a network unlike any he's ever experienced. Naturally, he stumbles across a mysterious program which he acquires for himself, and ends up in a fierce battle of wits with some otherworldly creature - definitely not human, or anything like it, but definitely not purely software either. Eventually, he manages to penetrate the system's defenses, but he'll find himself trapped into destroying the system wholesale before it kills him.

The punchline to the whole story is that the wizard is himself an agent of the dragon, and that the computer system was a sort of invisible fence set up to confine the dragon to this remote area. The great wall the party is waiting at is merely a dead end, and the dragon is at this very moment erupting from the mountain to conquer Cleveland.

* Actually, although the setting is Shadowrun-inspired, I'd be tempted to graft the parts of the Shadowrun setting I like into a system I like better - you could do interesting things with elves, dragons, and the Net in any of Cyberpunk, Gamma World or Paranoia. At any rate - it's got to be a world where a real, live dragon is out-of-the-ordinary but not unheard of; where there's a fair chunk of people with jacks in their heads; and where no one is surprised to be sent on a quest by an ancient, bearded wizard.

So maybe it made more sense in context, but I just walked by two cow orkers, and one of them was talking about how RotK went all Hollywood, and didn't follow the books, with things like Frodo's finger being bitten off.

More lame cuisine:
Chef Boyardee Cheesy Nacho Twistaroni is fairly serviceable if you happen to be in the mood for pasta with nacho cheese sauce.* Dumping in a can of RO*TEL Extra Hot actually turns it into a fairly entertaining dish, though.

*I have no idea why any human would be in that mood, but there it is.

Comic strips I had stuck in my head during RotK (don't look if you don't want to suffer similarly):
Heah and heah (not work-safe).

Alright, so I've figured out where things stand, and I'm not particularly pleased with arrangements.

Basically, I have two meters. I have the headache meter, and the energy meter. The energy meter fills up when I'm sleeping, and drains when I'm not. The headache meter fills up when there is physical pressure against any part of my head (as from a pillow) and drains when there is not. Each meter has some threshold, and when it's above that threshold, I'm capable of functioning like humans do. Both meters drain at roughly an equal rate, but the headache meter fills up much faster than the energy meter.

In short, activities which simultaneously drain or fill both meters don't get me any closer to, say, emptying the dishwasher.

Why, oh, why, did I not learn to sleep standing up like Mr. Ed told me to?

Once more, breaking my self-imposed ban on posting spam subject headers:

Happy Holidays from Equifax

Yeah, I don't even rate punctuation, let alone an exclamation mark.

Note to self:

Apparently, you are always, always, always, forevermore, going to pass out after even a teensy vial of blood is extracted from your arm. Just hobble over to the bed and wait for it.

In other news, OW.

Ugh.

You know, the other two finals, they sucked, but at least I walked out of them thinking "Man, that was painful," and not "Fuck. Am I going to bother taking that class again, or should I just call it a wash and learn to enjoy programming again?"

Not since differential equations have I felt so badly about a final.

Ugh.

I like that I specifically instructed myself as follows in my Property notes:
"DO NOT BECOME CONFUSED"
I followed it with actual instructions about how not to become confused. It just goes to show that the me of the past knew the me of the future fairly well - I really needed the explicit instructions.

Whoa.

So, I've been all pleased with Firebird because I can select a line of text, then type ^C^T^K^V^M and have a new tab open with Google searching for that text. And then I thought, "But you know, it would be nice if I could just do that with a single keystroke." It turns out, I can't. But there is a fairly neat feature - "Web search for..." that you can get from the context menu. Upside is, you can do it all with the mouse. Downside is, it opens in a new window, not a new tab.

But the really, really cool thing is that, right below that, there's "view selection source." OMG. Does ANYONE realize how long I have been waiting for a browser to implement that?

Long enough that I'm going to use a supremely dorky ASCII heart, right now. <3

"Do you ever deviate from the venti caramel frappucino?"
"No, not really."

I'm like that. Sometimes, it's because I'm vegetarian - some places, I order one of everything I'm willing to eat every time I go there. But most of the time, it's just "the usual."

"Sorry, man, we don't have sour cream anymore. Devil's food, and what else?"

It's not that I'm just picking my default choice. I carefully consider my choice every time. It's just that some places, careful consideration always leads to "the usual."

"Mozzarella alla caprese, no oregano, and fettucine alfredo?"
"Yes, thank you!"

I wonder if I should feel like I'm in a rut.

Also, I have perfected my white trash tiramisu recipe. All you really need to know about that is that it involves instant espresso and jell-o instant chocolate pudding. But, hell, for $4 in ingredients, it's more fun than just instant pudding.

Oh, yeah. In more bizarre news from last night, I have a new manager.

Nothing like getting a new manager while you're on vacation. I guess I'll meet her on Monday.

Also, since the email announcing this was not marked "confidential," I will include one revealing snippet:

"solving for solutions that have not existed"

Well. 2 exams down, 1 to go. And apparently this next will be the hardest of the bunch. It's also got the most memorization.

I would KILL for some feedback on the first two exams before I go into this one. Psy.

This last exam (torts) had one of those multiple choice questions that just totally ruins your day, where there's an answer that LOOKS like it's supposed to be the right answer, but there's a word that's the wrong word, and you don't know if it's that way because it's the wrong answer, or because it's the right answer typed wrong. And then there's another answer that's not as good as what you wish the other answer was, but it's still better than what the other answer actually says. Like this:

The best way to check to see if pasta is done is:
a) time it according to the package
b) pull out a piece, let it cool, and bite it - if it's mushy, it's done!
c) it's done when you can squidge it in half with your fingers
d) throw it at the wall and see if it sticks

So, of course, b) wants to be the right answer, because biting it is proper. But it gives the wrong test - mushy = overdone. So of the answers as written, d) is the best. Maybe. I mean, it's almost as believable that maybe the professor LIKES mushy pasta as it is that he would deliberately make the answer that is always the "wrong" answer be the "best" answer.

Yeah. Very frustrating. I ended up choosing the "wrong" answer, instead of the "maybe I'm misreading it" answer.

The actual question, I don't remember too well. I think it was a contributory negligence / negligence per se issue, and the question was "What will happen if P sues D for negligence?" when A had violated a statute but may have had a good reason for doing so. And the answer I think was incorrect was "A finding of negligence, unless P had a good excuse." I may be misremembering it. But I mean, it just didn't make any sense. If it said "A finding of contributory negligence, unless P had a good excuse" it would have been the right answer. But the question specifically was asking about P's negligence. The answer I ended up choosing, I don't remember at all.

I had planned to go back and take another look at it to try to remember the question, but I ended up taking forever on the essay question - I got bogged down in something that was probably worth very, very few points. Psy. I hate hate hate not knowing how I did on these things for another month, yet.

Hate.

Ok. Apparently, finals turn me into a non-stop eating machine. The closer I get to the first final, the less time elapses between eating and being ready to eat again. I ate half a pint of Ben & Jerry's. I sat down, planning to read. 10 minutes later, I got up and finished off the pint. I did some laundry. I vacuumed. I put the Dreamcast away, since it had been plopped on the floor in favor of the TiVo. This all took 15 minutes.

And now I'm thinking, "You know, Chipotle sounds nice."

No wonder I gained 20 lbs my first year of undergrad.