You can't make this stuff up

So I'd like to be able to say I went on a great quest of self discovery or an awesome long vacation or something, but really I just fell off the Internet for awhile. During that time, some things happened:

n) My brother donated his Katamari games to me after admitting to himself that he will never buy another PS2 to play them on. And I fell in love with this song. It made me wonder what kind of backstage dealings, if any, are involved in getting your song placed in REALLY HARD LEVELS and benefiting from the increased exposure of a stage people have to play LIKE FIFTY TIMES to pass.

But the music is good!

Now I'm finally trying out Okami (I KNOW, I NEVER PLAYED OKAMI), and... what? What was this hype for? This game is Zelda in every respect, except that the decisions about where its difficulties should lie are wrong instead of right. Thanks, but I think I'll just play Zelda. Yes, it is very pretty, but my failure to love almost anything else about it made me finally notice I'm so familiar with running-around-games in general that I hardly see them as visuals anymore (a very helpful mode that I still can't get into with rhythm games)-- and even then, some people manage to do the 2d drawing effect without putting all the decorative field objects in camera-synchronous orbit. I may return it and get 3 of my 15 dollars back.

c) I am participating in MetaFilter's Mix CD Swap this year! I probably need to commit to a track list pretty dang soon, but the second half flows together so much better than the first half, and there's only one song with any words in it and I don't know if it's too jarring when you're halfway through the CD and someone suddenly starts singing, and these are the things that bother me :< ....So the booklet and packaging aren't finished either because of this, and yeah I have many woes, I guess.

c.2) Speaking of MetaFilter, I also attended the tenth anniversary party! I had a fun time despite my handicap of being completely unknown because I am a relentless lurker, and there was surprise belly dancing, and themed cake, and afterwards bardom* which I bailed on after about 20 minutes because that is how I roll, and the promise of a pool party which has not yet materialized and I need to stop failing at keeping in touch with the people I met!

The next totally awesome thing I will be attending is Dr. Sketchy's burlesque life drawing EXTRAVAGANZA, where I suspect I will end up being all "mm, fascinating, yezz, *drawdrawdrawmissthepoint*"-- but maybe not! And, hey, either way.

f) My old Mac died on Monday (the 3rd). I got it in 2003 to go to college with... I never named it. There just wasn't a name there, that I could find. But I loved it, until I kind of started to hate it, but I still loved it, just differently, like a difficult grandmother. I choked it with chat logs from IRC-- I know I should stop thinking of them as my boys since I haven't spoken to them in years, but I just can't-- and roleplays where I was a well-adjusted average human with no powers or anything-- I don't roleplay anymore, but if I did I can't imagine ever doing it any other way-- and ill-gotten cool things, as I learned how, and photos I took, exactly one of which I still think is impressive, and interesting free software to assist in hobbies I never developed. I'd sort of been willing it to go on and get out of my life for a while, with its no DVD burner and USB 1.0 (!) and less than 1GB of memory and no working left Shift key and only 15GB of empty hard drive space. But I'm not sure I'd even know how to process it if it turned out to be unrecoverable. I've made great progress this last year or so in letting things go and not fetishizing my personal history, but this I want to keep. My ever-cluttered desktop, the why-didn't-I-think-of-this-sooner Things To Put Somewhere folder, torrents in plain sight and stupidly highlighted in bright green-- even the Date Added metadata in iTunes, telling me when I started liking what. I must continue to have it.

r) Ugh, Calabash! Do something


*Hello?-- OH that's right I turned off spell checker on my laptop Firefox.

I just discovered there is a Broadway musical version of Frog and Toad! There is a link, just in case you are not familiar with Frog and Toad. Anyway, I discovered this by finding it at Half Price Books just now and I cannot wait to listen to it.* Here is how that went:

CHECKOUT GIRL: Frog and Toad!

ME: I know! I didn't know this existed!

CHECKOUT GIRL: I know! I used to read Frog and Toad over and over when I was a kid!

ME: I know!!

Look! Look at it! Look at those two guys; how perfect and adorable are they? Man, I buy myself the best presents.

...I keep shaking salt into my hand and licking it up, as a snack. I should probably move the salt shaker further away from my desk.

I also picked up Palimpsest, which I've been meaning to do for a while. (Free related short story.) The author keeps a Livejournal, which I like-- in fact I first heard of her by having a tiny chat with her in the comments at Cleolinda's-- but she always writes Very Seriously in it, which turned me off for a while. Always does. I know I take too much pride in things like knowing better than to refer to my own thoughts as "musings," and I should probably grow up more and keep working on being secure in myself for positive reasons instead of having to make a note of everyone I find Doing It Wrong. I'm pretty sure, at least, it's not (purely?) out of a sense of superiority, but a desire to take things as a lesson for myself. Or is that what everyone's sense of superiority is like?

Really I think it makes me uncomfortable to see someone so confident that people will care what they have to say, since I know I don't have that kind of confidence. I never even began to try to develop it until the last couple of months-- mostly to keep up with, and keep in check, a girlfriend who will happily go on about her boss' secretary's errands for as long as she feels is necessary to sustain the conversation. (But she is a darling, etc.) This still leaves me not knowing what I can reasonably expect will matter to people in general, and I'm all about erring on the side of caution.

...So that's why I can't conclude a line of thought gracefully have negative reactions to some people sometimes!

Now I just have to figure out why there's a small, bloodshot bump on the surface of my eyeball.

*And by "cannot," I mean "will," because it's my bedtime.