• 22:10 Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus. An amazing experience. #

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• 10:13 New post @ zoombaba.livejournal.com #

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I got on Twitter about, oh a month ago, or two months ago (zoombaba), and found it to be about as aggravating as Facebook. The purpose of it escaped me. Updating everyone to my current banal whereabouts, thoughts, etc, didn't seem particularly useful in that moment by moment thing. Who wants to read that?

There's no denying now though, that the future of human discourse is definitely going to be shaped by this tool. As a tool for organization it is profound. Twitter isn't really new media (news) so much as a new way to telephone everyone, all at once. What makes it more powerful than say, text messaging or cell phones is it's lack of overhead structure. Through the web, Iranian dissidents are able to communicate through complete government blackouts -- no matter what the current regime is doing, it's unable to shut down Twitter. The government shut down cell phones, websites, television, etc. But Twitter is so uncentralized, that Iranians are able to protest, communicate, etc. Where would this whole thing be without Twitter? It will be interesting to see the postmortems about this whole thing.

Of course, this still relies on a benevolent corporation, the guys who run Twitter. They forgoed a scheduled maintenance to keep hope alive in Iran. With it also, I now know what the usefulness of Twitter is -- it's not really about me, it's about getting in touch with everyone around me. It's about conversation.

Run list:

The Creation - "Making Time"
Daft Punk - "Around the World/Harder Better Faster Stronger"
Mastodon - "Divinations"
Mastodon - "Oblivion"

Cooldown:
Electric Wizard - "Wizard in Black"

Sitting and typing
Sleep - "From Beyond"

Just watched Obama on NBC with Brian Williams. I think he's my favorite president. I think I like him more than Brad Pitt. Can it be possible?

• 13:01 Super Furry Animals - Lazer Be - - ♫ lala.com/z4K #
• 13:08 Ooh La La - The Wiseguys - ♫ lala.com/zsK #

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• 22:28 My job interviews so far -- fair, great, not so great. Have another tomorrow. #

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• 23:14 I saw Desmond Tutu tonight. Tomorrow I have to apologize to the people I took the ticket from. What a weird wacky week this is. #

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• 10:11 Mr. Grim REAPER why do you vex me? #
• 10:12 Must get off ass and do something. #
• 10:26 @Lankee well then, I guess I won't do dick then. Lazy Sunday here I come! #
• 10:45 Just found a dead squirrel in my pantry. Dog 1 Cute wildlife 0 #

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My D&D campaign (4th edition) is soon to move into a new phase. I've been using straight up modules, sprinkling them with some of my own encounters to get a taste of encounter creation (the Gelatinous Cube was a big hit!). Even still, I've been sprinkling not-so-subtle hints that these guys are going to be kicking their asses soon. Honestly, I wanted to focus on the yuan-ti as the main bad guys, but the players didn't seem too keen on that. I might still rope the scaly ones in somehow, but most of the cool monsters are 10-15 levels away. So it looks like the Shadovar are it.

The question is, what to do with them. I've got something of a "hunting for ancient Netheril artifacts vibe" going. I'm thinking about using a half collapsed Netheril city located deep in the Anauroch Desert. The maguffin is something that gives ultimate power. It would be interesting to have the PCs actually fail, and then use the paragon levels as War against the Netheril (who align with Naraja's nagas, and the drow?).

Hmmm. Might be going somewhere with this.

• 10:13 Testing my twitter #
• 12:37 And now for another amazing insight: my lawn takes a long time to mow #

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This is the TEST shipment you asked for

• 20:56 Hey @snoopdogg what's the deal with the music - Snoop Dogg live bit.ly/14X7qK #
• 09:36 God is light strawberry droolings #
• 13:08 Man, haven't been doing the twitter thing lately. Hmmm. Gotta find people to follow. #
• 18:19 Woo-hoo! Made it to a nice dry place. Now drinking brandy! #
• 13:47 It's f-ing cold. And MUCHO snowy. #
• 19:00 I'm drinking too much port. #
• 06:51 Looks like no snow today. Damn you weatherman! #
• 17:47 Christmas lights woo hoo! #
• 10:14 Tad bit hung over thanks to Egg Nog #
• 21:36 It works. Wow. I don't know if this is neat or stupid. #
• 21:27 I just set up my twitter account to Facebook. Let's see if this works. #
• 21:11 I'm sending text messages to Twitter. #
• 21:07 I'm joining twitter. #

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Bizarre dream last night. Two-parter.

First part: I'm working with Obama. Really close. I can't really remember what we're doing but it had something to do with a skating rink. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton is hosting some kind of TV show like American Idol or something. Anyway, three nights in a row they have shows that focus on girls in low-cut shirts with large jiggling breasts. Of course, the show isn't about that, but there's so much of it going on that it's hard not to notice.

I corner the H, and begin giving her a barrage of questions about the ridiculousness of it all. She seems to shrug, pointing out that it all comes down from the network. I finish my conversation about how great it is to work for Obama, and that she's the first to know if nuclear war begins. I say, "Hopefully I'm the second!" The whole time, she's trying to get rid of me.

Second part: I've been flirting with brown-haired petite girl for weeks now. She's very mysterious and guarded. Eventually we date, and then we end up at her apartment. She has comic book and science fiction memorabilia everywhere. It's like a second heaven. We get hot and heavy, we're tearing each other's clothes off. She has small but beautiful breasts. When I take off her pants, she has a penis. It gives me pause for a second. Then I have sex with a hermaphrodite. The novelty of the thing excites me.

What's it all mean? Who knows? That I've never indulged my homo-erotic side? Hillary Clinton is somewhat of a snob, while simultaneously being low-brow?

Meanwhile, in the real world, I spent $20 for me and my girlfriend to see Watchmen last night. Pale imitation of the comic. Very pale.

Did you know that Xanadu is an enormous area on Saturn's moon Titan? Yep, it's no longer a shitty Olivia Newton John movie. I went to NASA to look at the topography of different heavenly bodies as we now know them. Titan looks pretty, how shall we say it -- blurry, but the names are all there, which, of course, fires up my imagination. Today I'm looking at these different places to give me ideas for creating yet another fantasy map, which I'm hoping will be the starting point for lots of a very intelligent, yet very juvenile fantasy stories.

Since this livejournal is really just creating a place to collect my thoughts, kind of like a public, yet still private location, I'm just trying to get a sense of my history. So, I know no one is really reading this. But since I am, I can look back and say, did I start on my goals? Am I heading in the right direction. Or am I continuing to fight myself?

One thing that gives me hope -- Raymond Chandler wrote his first novel when he was 51. I got a new date to hit.

Runlist:

The Sword - To Take The Black
Rage Against the Machine - Bulls On Parade
Pig Destroyer - Loathsome
Metallica - All Nightmare Long

Cooldown:
The Pixies - Into The White
Radiohead - You and Whose Army

So with the new Watchmen movie, I finally picked up the old Watchmen comic, read it cover to cover in about 2 days, and of course am now reminiscing about my long lost childhood. Watchmen seems to have hit all my nostaligia buttons for some reason. Which is good, because it hit all the nostalgia buttons that are me, and not the mass-market nostalgia buttons used to manipulate people in movies like Dazed and Confused or vietnam war flicks or so on. Instead it reminds me of how much more permissive about sex, violence and gore I use to be. Teenage culture always felt very violent (boy culture that is), that starts off as Pokemon (which I thankfully am too old for) when you are five, and ends in horror movies. Now I'm much older, and that kind of thing I kind of grew out of -- got a family, have a son, and a job involving children. Except when all those things came into the picture, I also lost sight of my dreams, and my goals. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but I do know that I fight back my dreams everyday, because I know that people need me in this life. So, here I am, thinking about that time and place where I was going to make a huge impact on the world. I was going to jump down its throat and scream I'm here. And it was going to be in that Watchmen vien -- remember Clive Barker, Hellraiser, all those gritty comic books, NWA, death metal, etc? I look around me now and search for something that gives me that same feeling. It's not like I completely stopped indulging in that kinds of stuff, but hey, for some reason, it feels watered down to me. A lot of it is pointless. A lot of it might have been pointless then.

Oddly, I find violence in culture to be a good thing -- especially if it pushes people to a level they find uncomfortable. I feel like you are tapping into something there, something real, a kind of primal intensity that states hey, there are people getting their hands hacked off in Africa and car-bombs in Baghdad and pedophiles who masquerade as foster parents. The world's fucked-up. Watchmen knows that. It pushes that world to the brink of destruction and then yells, "shape up!"

Which, honestly, is very gratifying to me. It's what I want to happen to the world. Blow the fuckin' thing up. Put all the pieces back together into something better.

Or not.

Runlist:

Bonus Track - The Sword
Return Trip - Electric Wizard
Eric's Trip - Sonic Youth
The Chemistry of Common Life - Fucked Up

Cooldown:
Alexandria - Pig Destroyer
The Chosen Few - Electric Wizard

My e-mail account with Mac just expired. That, my friends, is crapilicious.

I do have another account, my gmail account that you may reach me at (those of you who are still reading this blog). Just remember -- there's a dot between the zoom and the baba. And of course, it's all at gmail dot com.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to a lot of metal lately. A lot of doom metal stuff like Electric Wizard, Sleep, the mighty Boris. It's like a second adolescence, or something.

Anyway, there you go.

So we've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft in our house. I mean a fuck ton. I've got a character I've been playing for over a year so far, my brother's got one, my son has like ten. My girlfriend has one. It's crazy.

I jumped onto WoW when I left my wife as one of several things I could do now. I could determine how my living arrangement looked, I could listen to music that only I like, and I could play World of Warcraft. So, as a joke, I made a female Gnome Warlock, randomized her name and got Doirlinnia. Now she's level 43, and I've been playing her off and on for over a year. Some weeks I play her really intensely. Some weeks I never touch her.

And a funny thing has happened.

I'm halfway around Azeroth now, and I'm doing things like ... watching the sunset in Strangethorn Vale. Looking up at the sky in Teldrassil. Going back to lower-level zones and reminscing. I'm nostalgic. I've solo'ed this whole time, so it's funny. I only I know of these things. I didn't share them with anyone, but I also didn't have to compromise them because of that. I'm not sure if I should be worried about this or not.

Just came back from running ...

Runlist:

Halfway Home - TV on the Radio
WannaBe In LA - Eagles of Death Metal
Another Way to Die - Jack White & Alicia Keys
No Epiphany - Fucked Up
(I Used to Couldn't Dance) Tight Pants - Eagles of Death Metal

Cooldown: 
Say Aha - Santogold

Have I come out of national siberia? It's very possible. It might have been the job I had was too damn draining and I didn't even know it. I'm still parsing it in my mind. Until then, here's the runlist from today.

Runlist:

Halfway Home - TV on the Radio
Play Your Part (Pt. 1) - Girl Talk
Play Your Part (Pt. 2) - Girl Talk
My Apocalypse - Metallica
Give Me A Beat - Girl Talk

Not that anyone is reading this anymore except the xanax guy, but I'm motivated to post.

Exactly what after 97 weeks?

My runlist:

Heavy Metal Drummer - Wilco
Passing By - Zero 7
Commodore Rock - Ladytron
Free Loving - Les Baxter
Orphans - Beck
Baby - Bebel Gilberto
Believe ESP - Deerhoof

But I'm not.

Instead I've been on this music-buying binge with iTunes, all started because I went and saw "Stranger Than Fiction," that quirky Will Ferrel flick about him being a character in a book. Some of the music stuck with me, so I started researching it on iTunes.

Turns out a bunch of the songs are old Spoon songs. Instead of picking up the soundtrack, I purchased about five or six Spoon songs. Looks like the best stuff is from an album called "Kill The Moonlight." I think I remember when it came out four or five years ago. I'm getting less hung up about "missing the boat" with music these days, so I'm unafraid to buy music that was cool and hip, well, four or five years ago. I think the feeling I have about buying old music is that you are not in on something that's happening and on a bunch of people's radar screens. Instead, you are spending your time being alone, in the dark, with your toys that no one finds interesting anymore.

So...then I ended up buying a couple of other bands' music from that soundtrack, including punk pop "Whole Wide World" song, which Mr. Ferrel and Maggie Gyllenhal make out too. Talk about an unsexy couple. Man. She not good looking, and he's Will Ferrel for crying out loud. Then I found a couple of other quirky bits I grabbed, including a 60s garage band song, "LSD" by Pretty Things, and some kind of kitschy Burt Bacharach style band, the Free Design's "Umbrellas." Strangely reminiscent of Stereolab. Without all the electronica beats. And now, here I am, reading reviews of albums I own on Pitchforkmedia, getting kind of nostalgic, and downloading a fucking album by a band called Brightblack Morning Light. It's got a good review.

Life's a strange mess. It's isolating. I feel a little constrained at the moment -- in this moment. 2006 was probably my hardest year emotionally I've ever had. I've been getting nostalgic about my life, or more properly the life I've never had, the one you hear in movie soundtracks and watching high school flicks. And the past year I felt that really hard.

If I was feeling that now, I wouldn't be writing about it. I'm glad 2006 is over, and I'm looking forward to looking forward instead of backwards. It's gonna be a productive year. I've got a new job, and now I'm back in school because of it. Furthermore, the job is scaring the shit out of me, so I go to work every day like a deer in the headlights. But it's a teaching job, which is what I was shooting for in the first place. I've got a lot to say about that, but I've seem to have gotten sidetracked. Maybe later.

I have homework to do now.