Plaidophile

Outlook: GOOD

Total game time: about 7 hours.

Ending: Beautiful.

My dad's reaction: Obnoxious.

The director of music programming at TruSonic replied to my letter, amazingly enough (and fairly quickly, too), and totally satisfied my concerns and even updated the FAQ in response.

Just killing time before going to bed...

Driving to Albuquerque tomorrow for a variety of reasons. Coming back the second of January or so.

Question of the moment: How many pears could a paring pair pare if the paring pair pared paired pears?

Last night I discovered Ouch Those Monkeys from somesongs.

This is definitely the coolest stuff I've heard in a long time, and there's lots of it.

I just got a job interview scheduled up in Albuquerque. Yay!

Been sending out resumes willy-nilly, mostly to tech-specialist recruiters.

Today I just got an email from what's left of mp3.com letting me know that although mp3.com is dead, TruSonic (their independent-musician royalty licensing program) is still alive, and invited me to enroll back up. So, I did, and ran into some oddly familiar issues...

Below is the email I just sent to Vivendi's TruSonic division. Maybe someone will actually read it.

12/24/2003 Forgot to mention, they actually responded to me pretty quickly and addressed all of my concerns in my open letter. 'sall good.

New song, for SongFight.

You know what to do.

In various Discordian texts (such as the Principia Discordia and the Illuminati Trilogy series of novels), much is made about "fnords," words which are supposedly displayed constantly by agents of the Illuminati but have their existence denied, to the point that everyone supposedly both writes and reads the words without noticing it.

Of course, the Discordian texts are just humorous fiction, a parody of relgion intended to keep people guessing, based on just enough shreds of truth to make people feel uncertain and, hopefully, to question the information they're fed.

However, although it's not quite the same, there are still fnords all around us, little snippets of information where we've been drilled into not knowing them, when really those bits of information never existed to begin with.

Those of you who are struggling to find that unintended thematic content in a work of literature will probably appreciate this thing I wrote quite some time ago for Everything2, rescued from the bowels of archive.org:

Super Mario Brothers: A Literary Criticism

It's been a while since I've posted a recipe, so might as well post what I just made for dinner. It's good.

My Earthlink DSL has been operating great since April, until the last few days when, during peak usage hours, I'll have spurts of connection problems, where I'll have a perfectly good line-level connection but will be unable to get a new IP address.

So of course, I submitted a trouble ticket to Earthlink to let them know about the problem.

Guess what, they think I'm a moron.

12/10 01:20 More wonderful cluefulness.

02:23 Ad nauseum.

12:18 PM Fuck it. Their network can go to hell for all I fucking care. My service commitment ends in April, and then I'll just find another provider, which will probably still just go through the same Covad concentrator anyway, unless Comcast finally has cable Internet by then.

Yep, I was right, VeriChip is extremely weak. Expect to see homebrew stolen ID number transmitters about a week after the tech becomes available.