archiving of june was postponed a bit because of two things. one: i'm lazy, two: poor geometry keeps explodiating. see, skizzers is hosted on geometry, the main server at interserver. their other servers are other geometrical things, like i know one is decagon. anyways, it appears that some time on monday geometry broke, and broke *hard*. it stayed down till early yesterday, and when it came back up, bits of it were still rather broken, like all the mime-types were reset, which is a decidedly Bad Thing. it meant that all kinds of useful things just stopped working, like all cgi's, all php's, etc. that all seems to be fixed, but some things still arent quite there, like it appears that e-mail is now not working at all, whereas a few hours ago it was just re-sending me all my mail from the past two days over and over, while denying that the messages exist on the server.

but this is all stuff i can't control. as for everything else, lets see. i've been accepted to the uml honors program. i've already got my honors classes queued up, and i'm considering either getting a minor in philosophy ontop of my cs degree, or going all the way and double-majoring. i figure it'd be fun. i like philosophy and i like computer science, and i figure if i cant find something to do with that type of combined degree, then theres something wrong with me.

my trip was overall rather nice. reaffirmed that yes i really do want to go through with this entire concept, and that yes, i am still considered a genius for no! discernable! reason!. ib exam scores are released in a week. i'm still not completely convinced i want to check mine. i mean, they're completely worthless to me, and part of me is sick of failure. yet another part of me is convinced somehow that this last ditch effort was my time for change. but. urm. i dont know. i'll prolly end up just flipping a coin.

i'll probably be changing the colours around here when i get around to fixing the counter. cause sadly, thecounter.com decided to follow the trend these days of charging for services no one wants to pay for, which means i get to install shit all over the place, and carefully remove things that no one really needed in the first place. this will be done some time before the eleventh, since thats apparently when everything in the whole wide world occurs. [07.05.01@03:25]

alas, i was incorrect. i was rather convinced that exam scores were being published on the 11th along with everything else in the universe, but it appears that they're being published tomorrow at ten. i'll be checking them, but i'm not sure if i'll be telling people. i dont want to make this into some type of contest. thusly, if for some odd reason you would like to know if i made it or not, track me down on icq. WARNING: THIS MAY RESULT IN GLOATING, TROLLING FOR SYMPATHY, OR BOTH. [07.05.01@20:51]

feels like punctured lung. but i dont know what that feels like. sharp burning pain just left of centre. my left, not yours. not painful if i breathe shallowly, though, at this rate, i'll pass out soon. yes. breathing in deeply does hurt lots. and now vision is blurring, and shooting pain is starting. seems. seems to be subsiding. going to fall over now. [07.13.01@04:13]

i'm better now, really. here's a quick breakdown of how i've been spending my time. its real simple. 2% forums, 5% pimpwar, 8% watching tv, 10% tinkering, 15% making clouds, 20% diablo ii, 40% sleep. for the past few days its been kinda heavy on the tinkering, what with the websites i played with, and the code, and the hardware, and all sorts of fun stuff. but this is what it looks like its stabilized to.

on an unrelated note, i'd like to say that its been some time since i've hated a song with such force as i do the drowning pool song "bodies". the lyrics, i believe, boil down to around two lines and counting to four. its just.. so incredibly braindead. i cant stand how lame and uninspiring it is. i actually saw an interview with the "band" on this bluetorch show and apparently they wrote this song about a moshpit. but they dont really want the kids to hit the floor. cause like, its mean 'n stuff. but they say it over and over and over because it sounds good. hitting the floor would be bad. now, its one thing to have a "band" like linkin park, where they're just lame and whiny, and so desperately want to be cool and goth but cant commit to it, but then theres drowning pool, where they dont even try to be big and tough and scream-ified in interviews. its like they dont care about conflicting images.

and i'm rather quickly losing faith in the youth around 'ere. early last week the dj's on 97x were complaining about how some kid kept requesting some linkin park song. like. over and over. taking the standpoint of "WELL! MAYBE IF WE ANNOY THEM, THEY'LL LISTEN TO US11!1". now it appears they're going through the same thing with drowning pool.

so i've been dealing with my mp3's quite a bit. for some reason, i've been listening to a lot of green day. i blame it on how i re-discovered that everything by green day was so good^tm when i took my trip up to lowell, since i had the first track on the lowell mix mp3-cd set to the track 'waiting' off their current cd. it think i might break down and go buy nimrod because of it. cause. urm. i cant seem to find a decent enough rip of it, and i know i can get it at sound exchange. prolly pick up a dvd of something when i'm there, too.

now, though. its 0336. and i'd like to go start on the tipping point. so off i go. [07.19.01@02:37]

so thats it, then. The Game ended yesterday. or two days ago. it really was a great experience. according to the puppet masters who orchestrated it all, theres a novelization of The Game in the works, which will hopefully be published by the end of the year. it'll rather quickly go into my collection of novels i keep at an arms-length, along with ender, discworld, and the guide. sad to see it all go, though. no more puzzles to go through. no more nights of paranoia. it'll all feel too dull. like i can't just sit down and spend five or six hours reading through speculation, making sense of puzzles, getting josh to write a hex to ascii converter so i can read a page, it really was fun. not sure if the puppet masters are planning on writing up a gamasutra post-mortem, mainly because the game isnt technically over. you can still go through and do the entire game from the start. most of us were amazed it went on after the movie ended. pleased, but still amazed. most of us were even more amazed when we found out it was being done by a small group working under microsoft. anyways. yeah. this was really a big thing for me. it was one of those things that was just so new and so different. i think the thing that really made it all special was the sheer level of organization us cloudmakers had. we were cracking stuff hours after it went live.

bleh. its nearly five. i really need to get some sleep. all this reading is killing my eyes. but alas, it keps me sane. the tipping point really is an interesting book. its weird, though. so far, all the things its talked about have been concepts i was already familiar with. memes, epidemics, connectivity, hivemind-ness. all things i've known about and experienced. its nice to get a more formalized view of it, though. nowthen, i'm going off to go finish it. then i can finish re-reading what i have of the discworld series. [07.26.01@04:03]

right. i think i'm losing it. i have to be. this cant possibly be happening. its just past 0330, and i'm sitting here eating a packet of ritz crackers, and watching television. i was flipping through the network stations, and stopped on abc because i thought i recognised one of the anchors. it. urm. was one of the old mtv news anchors. allison stewart. she's doing the abc incredibly bloody early national news. once she finished mumbling about how mr. brazill will be sentenced today, she moved on to the national weather. and. urm. from there they did a scrolling deal of weather in random cities around the country. behind it, they played some video of people jet-skiing in colorado. and had old-school beastie boys for the music. it was all just.. incredibly surreal. and then they played a segment that consisted of this guy at a press conference yelling about how "this yogurt shouldnt say it has strawberries! it shouldnt be allowed to have pictures of strawberries on the front! it should have to say 'THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS NO STRAWBERRIES' and possibly have some big [NO] signs over the berries! because there arent any! its just red and has some really good engineered strawberry-flavour!" and then went on about how people are too stupid to read the nutrition information box, and instead rely on the pretty pictures on the front. whats best is when they asked around, no one gave a shit. they interviewed around three or four people in the supermarket they were at, and none of them cared that the thing that said "STRAWBERRIES!" didnt really have strawberries.

is this really how sad things have gotten? such a level of trust and apathy? oh well. i'm not one to talk. i realized earlier thismorning that my problem isn't that i'm out of things to do. i have plenty of things to do. i have colourschemes i can work on, i have five or six videogames to finish, i have actual w*rk i could be doing, i have research to do regarding the copyrighting of my attendance program i wrote, i have updates i really should be making to jedi-outcast.com, i have people i need to add to the cam page, i have all kinds of stuff i could be doing. but. urm. i just dont feel like it. i just exist. not that i want to just sit here and do nothing, i just do nothing.

i think i'm going to go read for a bit now. then pass out for a few hours. [07.27.01@03:03]

i finished max payne today, or was it yesterday? and i just now dropped by the massassi temple to look around at some stuff on the showcase forum. max payne has officially spoiled me. everything there just looked.. wrong. people trying to make realistic levels for a four year old engine. it just doesnt work. and even the levels that used the LEC textures. they look like dark forces looked to me back when i got jedi knight. i think its only now that i really understand how badly out-dated the jk engine is. but alas, its time is nearly up. it'll all be over when spring rolls around. [07.29.01@05:22]