+2 to blog
Using the synergy bonus that I naturally get from Andy's blog, I now know what my life is rated according to the MPAA:


My life is rated PG-13.
What is your life rated?

It leaves a warm taste in my mouth
For the first time in four years, I have played Star Wars using the d6 system. And it was good. d20 is an extremely good system, overall. Its rules are comprehensive, and easy to learn. But, no matter how hard I tried, it just isn't Star Wars. I immediately fell back into the feeling of the movies and novels when playing d6. I can't quite explain it, but it was wonderful.

The d6 source material is worlds beyond d20, as well. It's a little-known fact that a lot of the d6 sourcebooks came out before the new (Bantam-published) novels did, starting with Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy. That means, a lot of Star Wars authors drew material, ideas, and settings from RPG material. Not in huge ways, of course, but a lot of the design for Imperial Intelligence, for instance, or the Tarkin Doctrine came straight of of Bill Smith, Peter Schweighofer, and Bill Slavicsek's brainstorm sessions. I wouldn't quite go so far as to say that West End Games' Star Wars RPG made Star Wars so cool, but I wouldn't totally dismiss the notion, either.

Then we played some d20, and the contrast smacked me in the face. With d20, you need to calculate skill bonuses, attack bonuses, saves, defense, vitality point, and various etc. constantly, taking feats, special abilities, and each of your class bonuses into account. Not so with d6. With d6, the dice you roll is your ability plus your skill, plus or minus any bonuses or penalties, and then beat the total. All of the d20 stuff I mentioned is taken care in that same manner. It's that easy. Plus, if you know how to create characters, it takes all of 5 minutes. The concept literally takes longer than the execution. Take that, d20.

A random idea
As sort of an experiment, I'm posting my AIM and Yahoo screen names here just to see who bites.

Both are OrderSponge, as it turns out.

Losin' my head on the chemical freeway
I'm coming up on overload...

Well, not really. I am, however, coming up on level 30, and a new hull upgrade. The Tahar Dawn Rising is one mighty fine ship, if I do say so myself.

I saw the movie Timeline to day, and even though it was better than I expected, it still wasn't very good. It kind of reminded me of roleplaying in the sense that nobody was ever quite sure what to do next, or what they were doing, or anything like that. As most of you who are reading this know, roleplaying is fun to do, but not much fun to watch. The movie was the same way: not much fun to watch. It had all the emotional pull of a Ty-D-Bol commercial.

Once I got back, though, there was an instant message from someone who I don't know, whose name won't be repeated here (for their own protection). Anyway, Mr. or (hopefully) Mrs. Anonymous, I would like to just say that, if you are in fact a Mrs., that I think you're cute too, and if you're a Mr., that I don't swing that way and any further attempts at contact will be met with the upmost force.

And if this is someone I know pulling a fast one, I'm going to slit your throat while you sleep. Have a nice day, readerland! :)

My heart beats without rhythm
It shouldn't hurt to move my eyes. It's not that late, but for some reason, I feel like I do after a long day at work. I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old.

Thanksgiving was cool. My relatives are enjoyable to hang out with, which I've always sort of taken for granted, but I really appreciate not resenting family get-togethers. Plus, the food is good. Better than school.

This comic is sadly all too true.

My limbs are moving of their own volition
Monkey see, monkey do. Two can play at this game, Andy.

Books I've read since 28.8.03:
The Hobbit, J.R.R Tolkien
The Dark Wing, Walter H. Hunt
Worldwar: In the Balance, Henry Turtledove
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Crusade, David Weber and Steve White
Brother Assassin, Fred Saberhagen
Chanur's Legacy, C.J. Cherryh

Books I will read by time indefinite:
Count Zero, William Gibson
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
Downbelow Station, C.J. Cherryh
Iwo, Richard Wheeler
The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
Children of Dune, Frank Herbert
The Shiva Option, David Weber and Steve White
Ring, Stephen Baxter
Wild Seed, Octavia Butler
The Divine Comedy, Volume I: Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Hart’s Hope, Orson Scott Card
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis
Robota, Orson Scott Card
The Great Book of Amber, Roger Zelazny

Excitement is hardly the word.

Brad's Law
In general, people whose usernames describe either themselves or their hobbies (princess0521@..., soccerdude21@..., etc) are either newbies or losers. Or both.

Faster pussycat, kill kill!
I have a physics exam at 9:15 tomorrow, and it's going to kick my ass if I don't study. I'm just not very good at physics. I don't know why, but it's true. Same with math. Which is why I want to get out of both of them as soon as possible.

Anyway, because I have an exam, I am studying like crazy: old homework assignments, that "book of problems" that came with our text I never saw a use for, the whole deal. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also have a philosophy paper and a engineering presentation due as well. *sigh*. It never rains but it pours.

I finished Chanur's Legacy, and let my say that I am profoundly envious of the main male character. He did almost nothing but screw up the entire book and ended up married, not just to one, but to five females, one of which is a starship captain and head of the most powerful clan on their homeworld. It makes perfect sense within context of the story, but still...man.

I am now reading Ring. And it is good, if somewhat depressing. I expect to have it finished within the next week or so, homework permitting. It seems like reasonably fast read. Once that's done, then I'm going to finally get around to finishing the New Jedi Order series. I've been reading those puppies one by one since the beginning, and now that the last book is published, I can finally have my revenge. Or, something. Anyway, it was a frustrating experience but I am now at the end. Horray for me.

Captain Tyaknek of the Tahar Dawn Rising is now level 20. I can't wait to get home tomorrow and start powerlevelling my combat levels. Four more levels of that and I can up my Shield Supercharge and Shield Recharge skills by another rank (and another ability). Ten more levels total and I get my next hull upgrade. Happiness! Here's to you, sweetheart.

I can't get no-o...satisfaction...
Earth and Beyond works, if you consider over 2 seconds of lag (on average) working. Still, I'm up to level 15 (nearly 17) and goin' strong. Needless to say, I look forward to getting my computer home for Thanksgiving break. I joined a clan, the Void Rangers, and they seem like a cool bunch. The usual suspects have joined up as well.

The EGR110 freshman design competition was yesterday. My group didn't do as well as we were planning, but better than we were expecting considering some of the last minute problems that developed. We scored 800/4000 points, which is better than it sounds, especially considering that we did it in 24 seconds. One of my group's members has a roommate who's a physics major already in 400-level math classes, and he helped us out some. I am of the opinion that all of our theorizing actually hurt us in the long run because we never really took chances, but oh well. This only strengthens my realization that I really don't want to be an engineer.

Chanur's Legacy is quite a good book, although it's hard to appreciate some of its finer points without having read the first four book in the Chanur Saga. The main character has sort of a love/hate relationship with the majority of her species, since they are an artificially advanced culture and therefore never gradually adapted to high-technology as humans have. Their government is still feudal, and quite matriarchal to the point of extreme gender separation (males are kicked out of the home at puberty, only allowed to return if they can kill their fathers in combat and take over the clan). It's pretty interesting to see it all work out. I highly recommend the Chanur Saga to anybody, despite CJ Cherryh's sometimes obscure writing style and occasionally blatant political soapboxing.

For the Republic
To my extreme surprise, Earth and Beyond actually works on my PC at school! That's gotta be the only great thing I can say about the online service here. So, given the fact me and some of the guys (started by Nathan) are going to make a guild, I wanted to get my "space legs" again.

I started up an old character, a level 25 Progen Sentinel.

...

The place had absolutely fallen apart! Only in an in-character sense, of course, but the "alien problem" I'd gotten used to dealing with a few months back has apparently spread into a full-scale invasion! Praetorium Mons has fallen! I used to get missions there! In fact, that's where I picked up my first (and last) missile launcher. Centuriata warriors have fallen in droves, and even the massive might of the Progen Republic canoot stand up to the invaders!

So I started over as a Terran Tradesman. War is good for business. The Net-7 news updates still give me pause, though, whenever they tell about the fate of some warrior on the fringe of space. Amah! I knew you were up to no good, I knew it!

Aim for their mainmast!
I just realized that I never posted this, but I saw Master and Commander last Sunday when I was home. It was a really satisfying movie, despite my dislike of Russel Crowe. There was lots of cool naval action, and plenty of British words. It painted a quite, ah, uncompromising picture of shipboard life during the Napoleonic Wars. Its main point seemed to be, it would suck. There were also no less than two teeth-clenchingly disgusting scenes of surgery being performed without the benefit of anesthetic. All in all, a really good movie for anyone interested in history or naval combat. I need to read the book sometime.

Damn the torpedoes
Please.

Pursuant to the story I am working on now, I need a lot of warship names. If any of you guys out there in readerspace think of any cool ones, please let me know.

Sense offender
Equilibrium is a very good movie, despite being heavily reminiscient of 1984 in the sense that it copies almost every aspect of that book in some form or another. One thing it does have that 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 lack is violence and graphic action sequences. Check it out.

My life is boring. School (at least how I percieve it here at good ol' U of P) is nothing more than a retake of high school with harder classes and more homework, plus (this is the real sales pitch) I'm here all the time. I'm lucky to spend maybe 10 hours a week off campus. That's not much. My life is nothing but a really long passing time between classes. It's not cool; I really wish I would've gone to a larger university. I also don't want to be an engineer. We've already established that I don't want to be in the Army either. College is a time for discovery, and I've discovered that almost all of my presumptions about what I wanted to do with the next couple year were wrong. Yippee.

Despite my depressing tirade, things aren't really that bad. I can (and probably will) switch schools and at least majors by the end of the year. And I already dropped ROTC, much to my satisfaction. Math and physics blow hardcore, especially since I'm really not that good at math. I can't wait to not take any more of it.

Eh. What else? Ah, yes. It snowed here, but it didn't stick and as such, I have no related hijinks to relate. A couple of classmates and I did have to explain to a professor from California that, yes, it's still snow and not necessarily sleet if it doesn't stick.

For about 6months or so right before school started, I was just getting hardcore into writing. Then school came along and the radical change in environment and whatever caused me to stop until about 3 weeks ago when I stumbled across NaNoWriMo. From then on, writing has once again become my favorite way to slack off (ironic, considering how much work it is). I really want to finish some of the stories I've started over the years. I won't make NaNoWriMo's 50,000 word limit by December, but for me a personal, long-term goal is to actually get up to that high of a word count by any point, and then start selling the stuff. I really want to see myself in print.

That name sounds like royalty; are you royalty?
Random title generator. According to it, I am "Acting Fuhrer Junior Grade of The Black Army of People, Brad William Wheeler." I could get used to that.

Man, I have no idea what's going on
That line above is from Towelie, or Towely, or however you spell it from South Park. He's my dad's new favorite character. Those of you who know him are not surprised. Some things about him are really cool, others are just odd.

I created my character today for Andy's new Heroes Unlimited campaign. Man, he's armed to the teeth. Charles claims he'll be something of a non-character, but the background I've constructed is quite interesting. He has a lot of personality conflicts, for a robot.

After a relatively unproductive Alternity session, me and Andy went to a book signing with Orson Scott Card. I am in a kind of strange position when it comes to him and his work: I've read much more of his non-fiction (especially his political commentary) than his fiction. Even though I couldn't relate to a lot of his examples regarding his work, I did discover that my appraisal of his personality was pretty close to the mark. He reminds me a little bit of my dad, actually (except with a more sophisticated sense of humor).

Anyway, I bought Hart's Hope, and he signed it (as often occurs at book signings). It was kind of weird, there were like these 10 or 15 people who were like Card groupies. He and his wife obviously recognized them, and they were chatting it up and stuff. One guy even had an "Endercon" t-shirt. Man, I just don't know about that stuff.

Finally, in other news, I discovered to my slight dismay that the busses back to U of P stop running at about 6:30 on weekends, and the book signing didn't get out until about 8:00. So, I had to take MAX back to Gresham station and hitch a ride home from there. It was kind of a pleasant surprise; I kind of like being home, believe it or not.

An unusually long post today, but I'm sure you'll get over it real fast.

Oh, right
It's pathetic how much faster the internet is here than at school.

I think I know you
So I think you'll try my new message board. Free is a very, very good price.

Usefulness
I was browsing around in my IE favorites list and came across this little jewel: the Science Fiction Writers of America web page. It's actually a professional organization, kind of guild-ish, actually. Some of their chat transcripts are kind of weird, almost; reading your favorite authors chatting it up like *gasp* real people is a different experience. Their "Writing: The Craft" section is really good for anyone who writes science fiction, and useful even if you don't.

Hoo-ah!
I just completed registration for all of my classes this morning. Not only did I not have to worry about several prerequisites that had concerned me, the registrar lady commended my on my form-filling-out abilities. What a life. I'm taking the usual mix of calculus, physics, and computer science. The only classes I'm really interested in is my CS lab, which promises to be mildly amusing, and advanced writing. The latter is a prerequisite for some of the more advanced writing courses, and I hope to take those someday soon (at U of P or otherwise). As I said previously, I really hope that there is at least a small creative aspect to it.

Man, I got such a bizarre night of sleep last night. I didn't go to bed until like 2:30, which shows my judgement, but my roommate was reading at his desk, with the lamp on, so I had kind of a hard time falling asleep, and what sleep I did have wasn't especially restful. I'm not sure if he ever went to bed or not; he was reading at 5:30 and I know he has an 8:10 class. Anyway, I'm running on 2 mugs of Earl Grey. Speaking of which, do they really have "tea rooms" in America? Has anybody ever seen one? Do people really say to themselves, "Man, I wish I had a convenient place to drink tea and talk with other people drinking tea. Yeah, that would be cool." I don't know. It's not something you think about, though.

Duuude...
This is going to blow you away. I only totally beat it once.

Speaking of mind condoms...
I had a math exam today. That is to say, I was bent sideways over my math textbook and violated in a horrible fashion. Why does that man insist on putting such unholy questions on his test? Proofs, man! Why does he insist on forcing us to reinvent the wheel on our exams, instead of just using it? It was very, very not fun.

After that, I spent about 3 hours working with my group on our engineering project. It's turning out pretty nice: it can drive now, and the lifting mechanism on the front is over half-built. Speaking of which, that CA glue stuff we use is just downright nasty. It's literally super-glue. It's really, really easy to glue yourself to something, and even if you don't, the fumes it puts out are almost debilitating. One of my partners, Adam Russell, just about passed out by gluing stuff too close to his face.

I register for classes tomorrow. I'm taking 15 credits worth, and none of it is especially interesting. I'm taking Advanced Writing, if possible, and I'm slightly pensive about it. While I don't expect it to be great, an "essay-a-week" thing would not be cool. Not at all.

On a NaNoWriMo note, let's just say it's a really good thing I don't have much stake in successfully completing it. I notice that I have yet to receive a single unsolicted comment on my "teaser" from the previous post. I'm interested in hearing about it. I don't get many comments at all, actually, which disappoints me.

Because I know you care
I know you'll visit this.

Gah!
Remember when I bid HaloScan never shut down? Well, it did. It also roughly coincided with some bizarre HTML errors on my page (everything was loaded to the sidebar, including my posts). Sometimes I hate the internet.

In other news, Andy has a new campaign in the works, using Palladium's Heroes Unlimited system. He's going for a campy superhero-style game, and I personally thing that it'll be a lot of fun. I'm thinking of playing a robot designed much like the flying hunter-killer robots from Terminator. He'll have a pre-progammed AI, with an appropriately eccentric personality. Basically, though, he'll derive extreme pleasure from the destruction of evil and protection of good. I was considering playing the same thing with a female personality, but we know, thanks to Brute Force, that artificial women are just plain bad news (no matter what Duran Duran thinks).

Added a new BlogRolling link, it's my roommate's blog. Enjoy.

Current NaNoWriMo word count: 3140

It doesn't feel like a Tuesday
I've joined the ranks of the truly pathetic and hopped on the bandwagon with this NaNoWriMo thing. And no, don't worry; I started writing after November 1 on a little side project of my own, inspired by some of the books I've been reading as of late. I kind of doubt I'll be successful, but I really need to get back into writing. I feel more complete when I've written something. I'll probably be starting a blog to update keep you all updated on my wonderful work. Or whatever else you choose to call it.

I want out of this outfit
Military SF has its own set of cliches, but I really enjoy it, especially anything by David Weber. His Honor Harrington series really epitomized the genre, as far as I'm concerned. Crusade had an interesting premise: a group of colonists were forced to flee an Orion (the race humanity was fighting a war with at the time) through a blind warp point, a point that no survey ship had ever escaped from. There, they met a pre-technological society and "uplifted" them, to use David Brin's term. Ninety years later, when men and Orions were allies, they emerge from the jump point ready to make jihad on the enemies of Holy Mother Terra. Lo and behold, men had fallen under the influence of the "satan-Khan" and were in a state of apostasy. So you got it, time to make a crusade to free Terra...from the humans.

That said, all of the battles they fought were extremely bloody. Because (usually) the only way into a system was by a known jump point, ships could be fired upon by fixed emplacements almost immediately. Losses in the first waves often approached 100%. Dozens of battlecruisers and dreadnaughts might be lost in minutes. That's no way to fight a war.

I cannot locate my pants
Fortunately, I own a trenchcoat.

...

This morning was a good morning, seeing's how I got my registration info for next semester signed, and my physics professor neglected to show up for class. Nothing particularly impressive if you're not me, but I get what I can take.

Brother Assassin is some of the only psuedo-realistic science fiction I've ever read that takes time travel seriously. Apparently some local disruptions in spacetime make time travel possible in a particular system, meaning that, due to an accident with the first colony ship, humans actually landed some twenty thousand years before they arrived. So everybody was happy for awhile, until the berserkers arrived and reduced the surface of the planet to cinders. The surviving population lives in caverns, watching the past with probes hovering just outside reality, waiting for the berserkers to attack the past to destroy the future. When the berserker do attack, the humans use probability generators to a) place nuclear weapons at the same location and time as the berserker's arrival point or b) send remote-controlled infantry to fight the berserkers on the ground. It's pretty cool stuff, considering it was written in an age where you really didn't have to think this hard about SF.

I'm just so...happy
Those of you involved in my roleplaying adventures know how cool the Warships rules are, and how pissed I was that the PDF comes with exactly one design ready. That meant that, to have tons of cool space combat, I had to design a whole bunch of ships. It won't surprise you, then, that I wept sweet tears of joy upon finding this.

Furthermore, my lust for even more designs means that I will, in fact, award experience for completed starship designs (destroyer and heavier only), with the amount awarded based on class, originality, and expected effectiveness. No, it's not strictly realistic, and it does remove some of the surprise associated with playing a know-nothing character, but I don't care. At all.

Last but not least, it would be fun just to play around with the Warships rules. It's relatively simple wargaming, so if anybody's interested, let me know.

As it comes to an end / and we start again!
For those of you who's happiness depends on an intimate knowledge of my current reading, I've foregone The Shiva Option in favor of one its prequels, Crusader. Shiva wasn't that great, to be honest, at least the parts that didn't involve large scale, deep space combat. It's ironic, then, that Crusader is so much better written, since it's by the same two people, written 10 years ago. Weirdness.

Traditiooooon...tradition!
It's nice to see LucasArts getting back into their groove.

Microcosm
I was looking up customer reviews on Amazon for The Shiva Option and its prequels, and discovered these two reviews for Crusader:

Excerpt from first review: "This story has many similarities to historical conflicts. The genocidial destruction of the Rigellian Protectorate in the Third Interstellar War parallels the actions of Rome in the Third Punic War. The actions of the Thebans reflect the fanatical behavior of both sides in the long conflict between Christianity and Islam, particularly in the Eastern Roman Empire and in Spain."

The entire second review: "I liked this book.It has good plot and good chacters. Its just that it says so much about the Third Intersteller War and The Wars of Shame that i got tried of it. I also want them to write about them. But it goes on how the Federation's navy is badly under strength and then in he loses so many SD's in Parsifal,Loreiel,and Thebes that it seemed to contrdict one another."

Both are copied straight off the page. See a slight intellectual dimorphism? Check the time of this post; you'll see why I find this so hilarious.

Canned Wisdom, Inc.
Two great bits of wisdom guaranteed to make you a smarter, sexier, more productive, less odiferous, and overall better man or woman, depending on which you started out as.

First, from my good chum Nathan: "The Latin language just contains too much awesomeness to let it stay dead." Word.

The second, from CollegeHumor, regarding how to remove names from your AIM buddy list: "When all else fails try eeny meany miney mo. You would be surprised how easy it is to remove names from your buddy list after catching a tiger by the toe. The cuts and bites you will receive is nothing compared to the insane challenge of capturing this wild cat/beast by his paw sector. NOTE: If he hollers, let him go. I repeat, let him go."

Socrates, take that.

If at first you don't succeed...
Goodby Enetation, hello HaloScan. May you never go down and spawn dozens of script errors whenever my blog loads.

The inescapable laws of entropy
I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by Matrix Revolutions. Although it was barely the Matrix, and had a markedly different feel than Reloaded or the original, it was not a half-bad movie. The ending is even remotely plausable and (except the very, very end) fairly satisfying. The battle for Zion was even pretty well done, eliciting the traditional war-movie feel, dampened only slightly by the cliche' of it all. I will say no more on this, except that if you liked the first two movies at all, this one is worth seeing at least once.

In conclusion, I would like to say that this is hilarious. It's flash, though, so you'll need all the relevant plugins.

And in the darkness, bind them
Why, oh why can't I play computer games, even ancient ones like Sid Meier's Alpha Centuari, online from my dorm room? I don't ask for much, and a ping in excess of a full second is one of the things I don't ask for.

Emotionless and cold as ice / all of the things I like...
Brad was not very happy earlier, because he had class all morning and into the late afternoon, without having breakfast or lunch in between. So, I was quite hungry and ready to kill by 3:30, which was something of a liability considering that I was working on my competition device for EGR110 (Intro to Engineering). It's sort of a forklift-type thing, with treads and a lifting mechanism on the front. The hard part is, we have to integrate three motors (two with servos and speed controllers), two battery packs, and an RC receiver into a 5 by 10 piece of plywood, and the thing has to work afterwards. It's a fun project, but a lot of work.

In case you were wondering, there was no point to that. Just keep reading.

If everything goes as I have forseen, I'm going to be seeing Matrix Revolutions tonight with my dorm. I said I wasn't going to see it on opening day, but this is an offer I can't refuse. I'll let you know the extent of its suckage/rockage later tonight.


Now, what else. Ah, yes. My philosophy professor is a pretty cool guy, and one of his interesting habits is figuring out the bizarre origins of a lot of the movies and stories we see nowadays. The example he came up with today was the orginial "Lord of the Rings." I guess in The Republic (by Plato, Mr(s). 200 IQ), Plato attempted to explore the philosophical difference between good and evil by using the parable of a shepherd who found a ring in an old cave. When this ring was manipulated in a certain way, the wearer would become invisible. The shephard used this ability to take over the throne of his kingdom, and reigned until some jealous subject offed him. Sound familiar? The basis anyway?

Fine night tonight
I had a rather interesting talk last night, in which it several aspects of reality that I had thought immutable turned out to have muted since I last took stock of them. So, if I seem a little off-balance for the next few posts, that's why.

On a happier note, kittens! Aren't they adorable?

Suicide Rider Homing All the Way Killer
I have just been informed that my status has been relegated to "sheep," considering that I started this blog withing like 3 days of two other friends. All I have to say to that is that I've always considered myself more of a pack animal than a herd animal.

This Farpoint Station will be an excellent test
As you can see, my book list on the right is now a spiffy list of amazon.com links. I don't get any money from them or anything, but they're all worth checking out. In the process of implementing this change, I also learned a valuable lesson about saving changes.

The Mafia: Now you've got a friend in The Family
Just finished Snow Crash last night. Great book all around: funny, lots of action, cool setting. The only flaw that I can think of is the 30+ pages towards the middle where the main character ("Hiro Protagonist." Really) does nothing but discuss Sumerian mythology with his computer. Oh, that, and the fact that the Hiro carries around a katana and a wakizashi and never uses both at once.

Use a condom next time you screw my brain
Background: I go to University of Portland, in Portland (surprise) Oregon. Now that we're on the same page, I can relate the following anecdote.

One of my classes this term is Introduction of Philosophy. Every student has to take it, so it's one of "those" classes where the football players and the stoners sit in the back and pass notes while the short Asian kids methodically take down notes and care because it's expected of them. That said, some of the things we discuss are fairly interesting, not to mention bizarre. And bizarre it was today, with our study of Hume and our introduction to metaphysics and ontology.

Hume's an empiricist, which means he thinks that we can only know what we can perceive (or conjecture from our perceptions). The main thrust of the section that we read was that because we cannot directly observe cause and effect, it has no bearing on reality because we cannot (literally cannot, much like a whale cannot fly) understand it. What we usually think of cause and effect phenomena, when boiled down to its component parts, is nothing more than a set of actions that follow one another, but there is nothing labeled "cause" that we can see.

If he's right, it basically tosses out all of science, since the scientific method is immutably based on cause and effect.

Disengaging brain-to-mouth inhibitor
I was just made aware of this NaNoWriMo thing. Now, I consider myself to be a "pretty good" writer, so I can say with certainty that writing 50,000 words (175 pages) in the space of a month is nearly impossible for most mortals. This basically amounts to spending all of your free time for a month spewing language onto a page and hope that it makes some sort of sense. Abso-frickin-lutely incredible. Which isn't to say that I'm not tempted, but with school and all there's no way it would happen. Hell, it took me three months during the summer to write half that word count of short story. And short story's a lot easier than novel, because you get to start over part way through.

I actually haven't done much writing since school started. The change to new surroundings twisted my routine so much that I haven't really been able to find the time. It's sad. On the other hand, all of my work for the Alternity has re-stimulated the creative centers of my brain, so maybe all you lucky web denizens will see some all-new, all-original work before long.

Last Stop on the Number Nine
The grand opening of my blog. You're probably feeling that giddy sense of excitement way down in your gut; the kind you get when you're opening a Christmas present from "that special someone" and you just know you're going to love whatever's inside. I know I feel that way.

*ahem*

In the future, you can expect my musings on everything from the state of the union to the state of my own love life (which is, at this point, quite static), and everything in between. Heck, I'll just start off with something random, just to get us going. I hate Michael Moore. What a stupid, whiny bastard. Plus, he's Canadian! Can it really get any more annoying?