Six weeks is hardly a record for not updating - though it feels more like six years, honestly. So that counts for something. At least when I was previously not updating DCR I was updating other stuff - six weeks of no art at all is crazy shit, man.

Perishable skill, drawing.

More strips later this week, I hope. I can bang out a few more before I'll need to model the building exterior, parking lot, and Whitehouse's apartment. Much like the most recent chapter of ATC, it's one of those funky plot situations where I'll need to model a large amount of what I need to do the book just to finish a single plot thread.

Something to do with all of the vacation time I have yet to use. Exciting!

Seriously. Repeated attempts around seven on Friday and a couple of times tonight have all met with a busy signal. I know the immediate family has a gift for gab, but this is excessive.

19:33 : From busy signal to answering machine. O_o Will try for a more substantial (read: two-way) conversation early in the coming week.

(note to self : call earlier next time!)

20:58 : Hahah. Dad called me back (an hour and nineteen minutes ago, according to the call log). Mission Accomplished!

... and it turns out the A. Bertram Chandler compilation I picked up at Eljays last weekend has a Grimes story he hasn't read in it! :O

I just realized that I'm older than my dad was when he married my mom.

I've known that bit for awhile - I just never really thought about it.

The real zinger is I haven't had a date since I was my mom's age when she married my dad.

That, I think about a lot. The time it's been since I've dated, that is - not the age correlation (took four tries to spell that right) thing.

Dad - 1950.
Mom - 1955.
Momendad - 1978.
Me - 1979.

My excuse (which is real, valid, documented and totally pulled out of my ass so mom doesn't think I'm gay* and will continue to hope for grandchildren) is I've been busy with ATC.

Really busy, apparently.

I'll be 30 in 9 days and I'm wondering if I can voodoo up a date. Though I doubt Giant Eagle deli turkey would impress Papa Legba as much as a recently-very-alive chicken... and if it did, I'd use it to cure my insomnia. 2am and I'm not even a little bit tired, gotta be up for work in six hours. Priorities get a bit jumbled this time of {night|life}.

On the off chance... how does one ritually sacrifice deli meat?

Is there a form I have to fill out?

* I'm not, mom! It was a joke!

This weekend my phone pulled a trifecta - ran out of battery, ran out of minutes, went BOOP! and died on me as a friend was halfway into giving me his current location.

So, money to refill the minutes, which I won't have until Friday.

Today, Apple drops the price of the current gen iPhone from Gastronomical to Reasonable.

This Pay-As-You-Go thing worked in the pinch I needed it for... but it's a real hassle to refill, and the finite nature of the beast is such that I use it only for drunk dialing or the very rare call home. Cost for refill minutes vs. cost of a Real Captain Kirk Flip-Phone from any provider but Verizon, vs. the 100$-200$ down and 80$/mo for two years for the iPhone.

Chicken and egg - I don't know how much mileage I'd get out of such a device because I've never had unlimited access to such a device. I never made long distance land line calls because the fees were annoying. I never make calls on the burner because refilling it is a pain in the ass.

Bills out the ass right now - but if I get off of that ass and haul the garbage I have in storage out of storage, it's damned near paid for. Or in the case of a flip-phone, more than paid for.

Apple or Star Trek?

I'd throw in an "or silence," but I've hit a point in my life where that's becoming less and less desirable.

What I really need from a phone is the following:

1. The ability to place and receive phone calls.

So the iPhone is overkill. But it comes with a lot of other funky bits that make a Day Out Without Internet less.... itchy. Better to have and not need, or something.

Addendum - the iPhone interface is the big attractor. Not necessarily the forty trillion "it's a smartphone! it's an n-gage done right!" features. Every mobile I've ever used has an interface designed from the ground up by Complete Retards. I pay a lot extra to run an OS that isn't the bastard child of Motif and CP/M, so I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of paying for a phone that was designed by somebody who gives a shit about the experience.

Saw it. Loved it. It goes to eleven.

Literally, if not figuratively.

Disclaimer : I've watched every single episode of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY (that hurt), ENT (that also hurt) and The Animated Series. I've seen all the movies. I've owned action figures. I've read piles of books. I sleep on Star Wars sheets, but that's another story - the point is, I could have just as easily spent my youth (and adolescence and adulthood and 30s and so forth) sleeping on Uhura instead of Leia.

I haven't learned Klingon. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

I've steeped myself in Trek long enough to have a deep sense of loathing or disappointment (depending on the movie/episode/series) for the Berman/Braga tyranny. As much as I dislike Abrams and his progeny - Lost, Cloverfield, etc... Star Trek is good. Like, actually good.

Steeped as I am, I'll admit to a certain amount of confusion on my part:

It's either actually a good movie, OR I've been so thoroughly disgusted and sickened by the B&B assrape of Treknuity that I'd give anything done by anyone else the highest score possible. Their involvement in the TNG movies and the fact the TNG movies are all seriously weak sauce can not be a coincidence. The B&B era is Not Star Trek. It's sci-fi for the kind of people who Tivo Lifetime. The kind of people for whom Mind of Mencia is dangerous, cutting edge television. The Scary Movie crew could do better.

Clear the Neutron Blasters for firing!

Without giving anything away, I can say this - I welcome the 11th Trek. It's the best Trek film since The Undiscovered Country... which was the best since Wrath of Khan. To compare 11 directly to 6 or 2 would be unfair for a litany of reasons - but it damned sure blows 1, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 straight out of the water. It's deliciously, deliriously FREE! of the B&B POISON. It could be two hours of Spock singing karaoke in a shuttlecraft and it would still be better than the B&B era. The bar has been set low. So low that a drunken slug could fall over it and still be the Best Trek Since Six.

And yet, despite the standards having been torpedoed down to the level of American Politics, Star Trek 11 is good. Not good as in "better than the fifteen years of anal leakage that precedes it." No. The good kind of good.

Maybe not excellent. Maybe not awesome. But damned sure entertaining - entertaining, and (for the most part), respectful to the Right And Proper Trek that it draws from.

B&B tried for over a decade to destroy all that was Good And Holy about Star Trek. Star Trek 11 is all that is Good and Holy about Trek, giving B&B the finger.

Verily, I approve.

I liked it. Go see it. Decide for yourself.

It's not only farm animals.

... a breathalizer attached to the login box.

Think of all the time that would save!

... to develop a three week production and recreation schedule that can work with a two week pay cycle.

To clarify : Work is a three week rotation and has been for a very long time - five on, two off, four on, one off, seven on, three off, repeat. Pay is fortnightly. The "offs" are nice, but that "seven on" ? That Monday is BRUTAL.

I need to figure out how I can meaningfully augment that subsistence wage and continue to make meaningful, non-glacial progress on ATC.

Ram-assing around like I have been for the past ten years has resulted in incremental progress... but also an unclean floor, wearing dirty laundry all too frequently, and a massive email inbox, months and in some cases over a year old, that I still need to catch up on.

Might want to add blogging and DCR to that never-ending list of things I don't do enough of. Two comics projects stopped to redo the only thing I've ever actually finished, a basket of pushing-30, haven't-had-a-date-in-five-years neuroses, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In other news, the main drag of Bloomfield may not be very exciting, but it smells great.

It did today, anyway.

Postscript:

168 - week
===============================
49 - sleep (average, typically 48-54)
40 - work (37.5 paid)
5 - work commute, rounded up
11 (approx) "wind down" time (now)
5 - wake up time (work, unpaid - shower, packing lunch, etc)
5 (approx, depends) - chores (groceries, laundry, booze)
===============================
6-20 - "going out" (time in theater plus transit plus "drunk dialing")
===============================
33-47 - time for art (ATC, freelance, other), eating, smoking, masturbating*, watching TV, spending too much time alone, everything people call "life."**

If only I could buy groceries and do laundry through amazon. :P And by groceries I mean deli - I don't see half a pound of beef getting to my doorstep in useable condition, even with a Prime membership.

* That's technically filed under wind down time. But, yanno... sometimes I'm feelin' saucy.

** I may have more "free time" than you do right now Dad, but I'd kill for some OT. I won't trade you commutes, but I do envy your paycheck.

Spring has sprung. Weekend before last it was a whiteish centipede thing squirming around in the drain. This past weekend it was ants in the bathroom. This morning, this monstrosity.

Slow moving, fortunately. Slowed further with dish liquid and crushed with a glass.

I fucking HATE bugs.

Top of tonight's to-do list : clean the sink. Starting with a serious application of boiling water. Good thing it's garbage night!

Update, around 3pm : According to this site, that's an Oriental Cockroach. >_<

Update, around 1am the next day : I HAVE THE CLEANEST SINK IN TWELVE SYSTEMS. Pity the fucking drain connects directly to fucking R'lyeh.

22:17 < solios> fagbot: doot jj abrams
22:17 < fagbot> YOU INSULT ME!

21:52 < solios> (upstairs neighbor)--
21:52 < solios> midnight on a tuesday is NOT orgy night, people...
21:52 < ejp> yes it is
21:56 < mdxi> 8ball is tuesday night orgy night?
21:56 * fagbot shakes the psychic black sphere...
21:56 < fagbot> It says 'My Reply Is No,' mdxi
21:56 * mdxi shrugs
21:56 < solios> fagbot: 8ball is sunday night orgy night?
21:56 * fagbot shakes the psychic black sphere...
21:56 < fagbot> It says 'It Is Certain,' solios
21:56 < solios> makes more sense.
21:57 < solios> Sixty Minutes.
21:57 < solios> gotta have something to do during Andy Rooney.
21:57 < ejp> o_O
21:58 < mdxi> now that's a challenge

Doesn't roll off the tongue as cleanly as "Anarchy in the UK," but there it is. Email and a picture from Jen, which she's given me permission to post:

Center : Jen. Center forward : Beer, I imagine. Center far back : Jen's work.

Thanks to Newegg and an unusual run of sobriety, Athena (my Mac Mini) has been squirted with pimp juice.

The internal hdd was an 80g/5400rpm, now 250g/7200rpm. Dunno how warm it'll get - I'll have to remember to check after tonight's photoshop session. The OEM drive was carbon copy cloned to the new disk using a cheap USB enclosure.

Ram has gone from the default 2x512 modules to 2x2g modules. While the OS sees the full four, the hardware can only address a hair over three. I did some extensive reading on this and after a price comparison, figured the 10-15% performance increase I'll be getting from a matched set will give me ridiculously more value than the half shot of whiskey I'd buy with money saved by buying 1g and 2g modules.

Anyone who tells you all you need to pop a Mini is a putty knife is either lying or using a metal one. The plastic putty knives I bought through Amazon are pretty thick (somewhere between a sixteenth and an eighth of an inch) - I started the pry-open using the bottle opener on my swiss army knife and then, once I'd opened a big enough gap, used the putty knife to wodge it open the rest of the way. This procedure used two putty knives and worked exceptionally well. One of the case tabs got bent a bit, but otherwise... the thing was harder to put back together than it was to take apart.

Tools note : There was no way in hell the screw bits on my swiss army knife would have fit into the phillips heads in the Mini. A regular screwdriver (I have a few, including a big honkin' short sword of a driver clearly designed with home defense applications in mind) doesn't cut it. Fortunately I'd kept the blue-handled long-necked driver that had been included with the processor upgrade I'd bought for one of my G4s from Small Dog. It's magnetized, and the head is the right size to get the job done. This upgrade would have been a miserable pain in the ass without that little piece of kit.

Bit of advice : If some piece of kit you buy comes with tools included, don't throw the tools away! Screwdrivers, allen keys, extra screws, wingnuts, bubblewrap... trust me. Some day, you'll need 'em.

Three gigs of ram!

I CAN RUN PHOTOSHOP AND A WEB BROWSER. TWO, EVEN!

I may die.

Total price : ~$160 with shipping. ~$80 for the drive, ~$18 for the enclosure, ~18$/module for the ram. $0.70/each for the putty knives. Free shipping for Amazon and around $20 for FedEx second day for the Newegg bits.

Three days in and gridlock has fallen off of the internet already. While everything was working fine when I left the house around 0815, the machine proved unpingable from work on my first try, about 90 minutes later. As it's also unreachable from elsewhere, Something Went Blooey.

This could be any of the following:

1. Theft/Robbery (something I'm more paranoid about now)
2. Power failure
3. DSL Modem lockup
4. Gridlock lockup
5. Failure between Gridlock and the rest of the internet
6. Some other form of witchcraft

2-5 have all happened before. 2 a few times - it may be 2009 but it is definitely not The Future, and outages Happen. 3 was grossly frequent when my sister (and later Randy) was assraping my line on Carey Way, and was a significant issue in the interim living space. It was also an occasional problem when I was just minding my own business - spooling two or three youtube videos would be enough to make the modem throw up at times. As there's no WAP on the line, a locked up modem, if that is the problem, could be a result of operations on gridlock. 4 has happened once or twice, and is usually a result of 3. 5 has happened a couple of times, though if that's the problem it's lasted longer than usual.

I'll know what the problem is when I get home. If it's in the 2-4 range it's fixable. If it's something else, I'll be offline again until further notice.

Whee!

15:59 - a call to Speakeasy to confirm I'm up and running and to make sure my old service is shut off branched into "did anything go blooey?." The nice lady confirmed that my circuit is live, which knocks 5 off of the list.

18:20 - bleah.

18:24 * solios proudly makes out his first real rent check.
18:24 <@solios> (the first one was pro-rated)
18:24 < xeno> \o/
18:24 <@solios> yes, PROUDLY.
18:24 <@solios> confused me a bit, that. o_o

Left to right : My rig as it was at The Old Place (six months of my life I can't wait to get some distance from), said rig around the same time the next day, and My Entire Life for the early part of march.

The rig-as-it-was shot isn't entirely accurate - the scanner sat on some kind of heavy-ass moderately portable table-and-chairs thing up until a few days before the shot was taken. It now rests on a milk crate and is positioned so I can scan big stuff (read : everything, as I draw on 11x14 and scan on 8x11) by moving it across the bed, instead of rotating it.

  

The new place is still a work in progress, and probably will be for awhile. Hell, I still don't have internet - which these days is a lot like not having electricity, clean underwear, or teeth. I do have this, however:

And that's more than awesome enough to make up for the temporary lack of a home line, I think.

Bits of camera data from the last three months, including the only two images from the superbowl madness that aren't out of focus:

  
  

Swiped from here and possibly out of date, the Pittsburgh noise ordinance:

AN ORDINANCE

October 1, 1998

For personal reference, this handy FAQ on how to deal with these things, and the froogle search for decibel meters.

Three day weekend. Woo!

Verizon, brain trust that they are, somehow failed to do the work they were supposed to do yesterday. Whatever it is they need to do, they have to do it before Covad can swing by to give me DSL Without Telephone. The next time Verizon feels like coming by to do the work is the 27th.

Three day weekend without internet. Crap!

===========

Update, 20090323.09:12 : The honeymoon is over. Friday through 10pm Sunday evening was fantastic (excluding the hangover I got from barhopping with Xopher.tm). Then my upstairs neighbor came home with company, turned his gangster rap up to airport levels, and proceeded to be a complete and total asshole for the rest of the night. Where "the rest of the night" is turning it down from "hear it clearly*" to "hear the bass clearly" after knocking on his door at 00:15 monday,** then continuing with the THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA THUMPA until some point after I passed out, which was around 02:30.

His "excuse" for this behavior is that Monday is his only day off. I get that. What I do not understand is how or why he feels this gives him the Divine Right to blast his shitty music at nightclub levels at 11pm on a Sunday night, urinate off of the second floor balcony, and carry on like Bloomfield is a cul-de-sac on the South Side.***

As I was promised Quiet by the property manager, and Quiet is why I took the place, and Quiet is what I had until last night, and I'm here for a year... if this happens again, the situation will be Dealt With. Somehow.

That aside, an altogether fine and enjoyable weekend.

* Of which I recognized Tom Petty at one point, and The Beastie Boys at another. The rest was a mix of hip-hop and loud obnoxious whooping and stomping around like the place is a race track for pony players. When it comes to noise violations, I actually prefer hip-hop. I don't know the artists, I don't know the lyrics. If it's music I've heard, then my brain has a funky habit of filling in what I can't hear. And in a situation like this, "can't hear" is preferable to "filling in."

** During this conversation, he had the temerity to say that the thirty minutes or so of me and Xopher.tm being obnoxious friday night had "kept him up." This after I let him roll at Maximum Motherfucking Volume for over two hours without saying anything about it.

*** If you want to be seriously obnoxious, South Side is the place to do it. All of the residents between 12th and 23rd are either deaf or busy being very loud very late themselves, so it's not like anyone is going to notice or care.

Last update : 20090310.16:21

Craigslisters contacted: 8

Replies: 5
- Replies that smell funny : 1
- Appointments made : 4
-- Places not looked at due to communications snafu : 1
-- Places looked at : 3
--- Places lost out on : 1
--- Places that will get back to me : 1 (did, best move-in date moved back)
--- Credit check / rental applications filled out : 1
--- CCRAs paid for & delivered : 1

Credit check passed, lease filled out, checks written, utilities switched over (my name is now in the Equitable Gas system - ew, ew, ew!). One to three weeks for internet, move-in scheduled for Wednesday night, giving my Thursday in full to get everything set up, fully vet the plumbing, etceteras.

Oh yeah - it's in Bloomfield. The place won't win any awards but it's more space than I need... and only marginally more expensive than my full wad of rent and utilities when I was at Carey Way.

Further bulletins as events warrant, of course.

Looked at a place in Oakland on Friday. Too small to fit my equipment and my bed - I'd have to pick one.

Looked at a spot on the slopes today. It's fantastic - but I'm in a pool of candidates and will be advised of the decision no later than the 8th.

And about a half an hour ago, the owner of the current building stopped by to say he's turning off the water soon, and changing the locks tomorrow.

Hello, urgency!

Update, 20090302.12:08 : I'm living in a kitchen. I brought my bed, my clothes, and my laptop. Everything else I own, it turns out, fits exactly into my storage locker.

The kitchen is understood by all parties to be temporary.

The spot I looked at on Sunday re-listed later that night. Reading between the lines, I spent a nasty Monday of coming up empty on CL and other internet channels. And I found out this morning that the place I looked at in Oakland has already been snapped up... so being willing to live without my futon frame is a moot point.

The search has now expanded from "South Side and Oakland" to "Anything one bus from Oakland, except Carrick.*"

* I've lived in Carrick and exclude it for good reason. This includes anything on Arlington, as their idea of being "on the busline" is a 51a that runs about as often as STS service to the space station. The primary sticking point for South Side is I know the major bus routes and can do the hunter/gatherer thing without hassle. Moving to a new neighborhood means finding a new grocery store, etc.

21:11 <@aestuo> < used to write star wars fanfic
21:12 <@mdxi> aestuo: are you also a nazi furry cosplayer boba fett?
21:12 <@aestuo> no
21:12 <@mdxi> aestuo: good. very good.
21:13 <@solios> I wrote an FF fanfic once.*
21:13 <@aestuo> ha, I thought so too
21:13 <@solios> when FFIV still had the new car smell.
21:13 <@aestuo> heh
21:14 <@mdxi> Cecil was very angry. Gosh darnin, this isn't right, said Cecil. Too bad, said the king. Kweeee-hee-hee-hee! Now go get me some crystals! Poop, said Cecil.
21:15 <@mdxi> wait, that's not fanfic. that's the plot.
21:15 <@solios> the basic concept was that when the team left the planet in the Lunar Whale, they noticed that the area they left from was contained in some kind of energy grid (which I called a "repeater field")... and that after Finishing The Plot, they returned to the planet and out of curiosity landed outside of it.
21:15 <@solios> this was born out of my failure to grok an archipelago smaller than the japanese island chain as an entire PLANET.
21:15 <@mdxi> "Come here," said Rydia, lips pouty and wet, "and show me why they call you 'Red Wings'"
21:15 <@mdxi> there we go
21:16 < ejp> you're both damaged.
21:16 <@solios> mdxi++

*In my defense I was, like, 14. And I wrote it on a Brother word processor. And I had the good sense to stop after the above concepts were detailed.

Saturday, the lamp of one of the work projectors refused to light up. A coworker with less acrophobia and more experience pulled it this morning, revealing this:

Truly, a high quality part!

Some time within the next two to six weeks.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

13:32 < xeno> Two Pa. Judges Accused of Jailing Hundreds of Kids for Bribes
13:37 < ejp> fagbot: doot PA
13:37 <+fagbot> I LOVE DICK...NOT YOUR DICK JUST DICK IN GENERAL..DICK AS A CONCEPT...AN IDEALIZED HULGAHLUGHAG
13:37 < xeno> fagbot++
13:38 <@solios> wow.
13:38 < xeno> Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.
13:38 < xeno> Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.
13:38 < xeno> O_O
13:38 < ejp> fagbot: doot that again
13:38 <+fagbot> WHAT THE NUTS
13:38 < ejp> indeed

For the quarterly bout of whinging, this one's remarkably less emo than previous ejaculations. It would appear that the near-elimination of sucralose from my diet is beginning to pay dividends.

16:40 < mdxi> sjobs taking medical leave until june
16:45 < solios> he died at the same time as Montalban and McGoohan. Bad batch of coke (or some kind of hyper-virulant syphilis from the chilean whores)
16:45 < solios> Apple's buying time to get the android online.
16:46 * ejp wonders what a replicant spodding looks like
16:47 < solios> often confused with replicant masturbation
16:48 < mdxi> just don't ask them to FIND anything
16:48 < solios> then they go all fagbot on your ass
16:48 <@ejp> fagbot: find your ass
16:48 < fagbot> ejp: O_o

March 19, 1928 – January 13, 2009.

Image surfaced in a google search and allegedly came from goon-magazine.de.

Read the LA Times obituary, a BBC overview and the BBC obituary.

If you're one of those rare under-cultured sorts who has no idea who this man is, or are somehow unware of The Prisoner and its cultural impact, read McGoohan's wikipedia entry, and this interview. That should get you started. Buy the show while you're at it.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Troyer: What about the philosophy, the rationale of the Village? What did you tell them about that? Its raison-d'etre, not its mechanics...
McGoohan: (very deliberately) It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.
Troyer: To what end was that process of breaking down the individual will?
McGoohan: To what end?
Troyer: For the Village, what was the purpose, the goal?
McGoohan: I think it's going on every day all around us.

It's been forty years (a matter of weeks to the day) since society was so stylishly and thoughtfully challenged. That all comers have failed to be as engaging, as thought-provoking - or as accurate - says a lot for the state of modern media.

One of the largest and most long-lasting contributions my father made to the development of my worldview was to tape re-runs of The Prisoner during a run on CBS late-late night in the {late 80s|early 90s} and letting me watch them. Nothing I was exposed to in my formative years - with the possible exception of Robotech, but I'm trying to be serious here - has had such a broad-ranging impact on my creativity.

Number 2 : Do you still think you can escape, Number 6?
Number 6 : Oh, I will do better than that.
Number 2 : Oh?
Number 6 : I'm going to escape and come back.
Number 2 : Come back?
Number 6 : Escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the Earth, obliterate it, and you with it.

=== Added ===

As my dad mentions in the comments, I blogged about The Prisoner previously (and more eloquently, which is proof that booze kills brain cells). Back then, they were muttering about a remake... now they're actually following through. As an Industry, as opposed to a focused, pissed off individual with connections.

As xeno quotes in the comments: Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment and will die here like rotten cabbages.

High Fructose Corn Syrup : Anal leakage, running the entire scale from "misting" up to "hurricane," depending on volume and duration of exposure. During peak saturation (approximately 2001), I was changing underwear (and outer-wear) twice a day. Like you needed to hear that.

Aspartame : Headache, joint-ache, and a general mental "wooziness" accompanied by the total obliteration of short term memory. Symptoms equivalent to a finger of whiskey and the non-puking aspects of the flu, simultaneously. The last time I exposed myself to this vile TURNS INTO FORMALDEHYDE FUCK YOU RUMSFELD shite was during a pepsi/iTunes promotion. The work water fountains are even more disgusting, and I wasn't about to give Apple my credit card information. To this day, aspartame-induced buys remain my only iTMS purchases.

Sucralose : Anxiety. Symptoms vary depending on intake - a sugar free Sobe Adrenaline Rush will induce anxiety to such a minimal degree that it mixes in with the rest of the "buzz" whereas a No Fear (whatever they call it, that's the brand name) sugar free rents my brain out to Baikonur for rocket testing. I swear, the top of my head's going to blow clean off. As the side effects of aspartame are disgusting and the side effects of sugar deeply diminish my work capacity, this has been my "artificial sweetener" of choice for the past two or three years. Which explains a lot, really. The local minimart regularly runs out of sugar free sobe and has yet - EVER - to run out of the No Fear variety. Now I know why. Odds are pretty fucking fantastic that a sucralose reaction is a big factor in recent mental difficulties. The question is : what to replace it with?

Sugar (specifically sugar-based energy drinks - Red Bull, Sobe, etc) : Feels like my teeth have been dunked in sandy acid; a sludgy, rickety "high" of tunnel vision followed by a rapid plummeting crash into synaptic molasses. Energy drinks like the Mountain Dew branded "Amp" or the sugar-friendly version of Sobe Adrenaline Rush* taste gritty, leaving an "unclean" feeling in my mouth, followed by the aforementioned rickety pep. For Emergency Use Only.

Caffeine : Focus and a degree of pep, until it wears off.

Ritalin, Adderall, other prescription amphetamine salts** : Same as caffeine. Lasts about twice as long and after awhile I start to feel like the nerves in my thighs are starting to itch.

Starbuck's Doubleshot Espresso : Yes, it's a Starbuck's product. Fact is it's the only drink that provides Awake and Go without Grit, Drip, or Rocket Brain. The fact it's a pain in the ass to get my hands on whereas the rest are legion... well, that's medical america for you. As that google-proofed philospher dude said back before they put the dead guy on the stick - consider diet.

Regular Coffee : Makes my sphincter sneeze and drizzle like it's got hay fever. Yeah, you needed THAT visual. If I liked spray-painting the walls with my ass I'd still be drinking the stuff.

I'm sure Chuck Palahniuk would dunk your brains in an orgy of anal and neurological delights. Burroughs would get hung up about the rectal mucous and obsess about that and venusian invaders for an entire book.

I'm neither. I am, in fact, impeded. Diet informs and this here is a question of extent. Deprived of my SAUCE would I be Mister Rogers, Dave Lister, or Dick Cheney? How much of who I "am" is a result of chemical stimuli or more relevantly my "improper" reaction to said stimuli?

Prinny, dood.

My chief consideration, as always - there's never enough daylight. If I could subsist on four hours of sleep I damned well would. I will be on some kind of upper until I either spontaneously combust or calcify. Or both. Picture that.

* Both the "amp" and the sobe probably use hideous amounts of HFCS - I don't have empties here to check. Not the point. Point is they taste gritty, not yummy. And they impact accordingly.

** Last actual exposure to prescription-grade amphetamine (or amphetamine of any kind, actually) was in 2006. Example provided for context.

William Anders (Lunar Module Pilot)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell (Command Module Pilot, Commander Apollo 13, pilot of Gemini 7)

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."

Theology is one thing.

This - Apollo 8 - surpasses theology. If you're of a more established tradition, the above transcript isn't a new thing. If you believe that there is no God but Man, however, then at this moment - December 24, 1968 - god SAW the light.

And it was good.

(The relevant portion, 1.2 meg .WAV)

23 February 1932 – 18 December 2008.

Man must be in space - that is what we are destined for. There is nothing else that we can do.

-- Majel Barrett (Wikiquote, unsourced)