Dreamvirus's New Writeups

December 4, 2008 (log)

2008-12-04T11:07:03Z

Today I woke up to about 2 inches of snow outside our bedroom window. The baby woke me, crying because he thought he was hungry, but then when I tried to feed him he decided he wasn't, and just went wide-awake instead. No chance of sleep after that. Normally this would be a very bad start to my morning at 8am, but I always feel invigorated and overjoyed by even the sight of snow, and when I came downstairs to make coffee and saw the peaceful whiteness everywhere, I smiled to myself like a kid. I mean, there's peaceful, and then there's the kind of peaceful that comes with a thick layer of fresh snow all over a quiet country town. Little stone walls and trees covered with the stuff. Kids out flinging snowballs at windows dressed in hats and gloves with the labels still hanging off them, because for some reason no one was ready for this winter. I blame Al Gore. He told us all that we were only going to get warmer, so everyone forgot to buy hats.

It's time for...what? Traffic…

Iron Noder 2008: The Results (thing)

2008-12-01T21:24:06Z

Iron Noder 2008: The Results

The month is over, the panicked noding has stopped, or at least paused, and the results are in. This is the list of who's who - the winners, the not-quite-so-winners, and the almost-rans. This is where the wreckage is picked through and statistics salvaged. Finally, this is where everyone gets some kind of award, title, or mention (no matter how far I have to stretch to do it...)

THE UBERNODER

Reward: bragging rights

dichotomyboi

OK, so I didn't say in advance that there would be a title for writing the most nodes, but I feel it's worth commemorating. After a battle that dramatically ended less than a minute before midnight, dichotomyboi and The Custodian ended up tied for the title of Ubernoder, with 42 writeups each in the month of November. However, shamefaced at his own underhanded tactics (posting a 4-line daylog at the last possible moment), The Custodian gamely conceded the battle, leaving…

November 30, 2008 (log)

2008-11-30T22:33:45Z

I just returned from an awkward family dinner. I'm used to my own family's awkward dinners — my parents split up 20 years ago — but this one was my girlfriend's family. I really like all of them individually, but together they just don't seem to work; there are too many things unsaid and unsayable. I don't want to say too much about it because it's their business, and because it's not inconceivable that one of them could eventually discover my writings on here. It wasn't unpleasant for me — funny how one's own family problems can make an occasion unbearable, but someone else's just doesn't have the same effect. I ate nice food and had fun showing off the baby. I felt like Doctor Evil with Mini-me. Holding a baby is a licence to do all kinds of things socially that you normally wouldn't do for fear of embarrassment. It's amazing how many people will simply come up and start talking to you when they see a cute little baby in your arms. I wandered around the hotel showing him

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Grange Road (poetry)

2008-11-29T23:58:21Z

Grange road runs like a crazy ribbon
from an old blackened church exhausted by births and deaths
up to thick new woods on the slopes of the Dublin hills —

and we've known it for this small slice of time,
a year we've spent in a strange house
full of musty books and stale chocolate,
rusting knives and forks,
a thousand stolen sachets of café sugar,
the shivering patience of lace curtains
on windows overlooking the road,
catching the odd glint of red at sunset
over slate rooves and cold chimneys.

We've known it for what it has been,
alive at night with drunken teenagers
kicking over bins, smashing car windows,
hanging around the Londis asking you
to buy them vodka
(they'll bring it to the park —
they'll drink it hastily in the darkness —
they'll break things in an ecstatic rage —
and blindly let the road swim them…

Warp Spasm (fiction)

2008-11-28T23:44:27Z

The Unborn Versus The Undead
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

"It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost."
— Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Unconscious

…

Tabiya (idea)

2008-11-28T20:51:05Z

A term in modern chess that means the beginning position or theoretical starting-point of an opening, the word Tabiya comes from the Arabic tabbiyya, pluralized as tabiyyaat, which translates as "battle array". The word has come to modern times from the old game of Shatranj, which originated in India and spread to Persia where it achieved widespread popularity. Shatranj was a slower game than modern chess, mainly due to the different properties of the pieces: Baidaks, the equivalent of pawns, could only move one square forward on their original move rather than two, and other pieces such as the Fer (queen) and the Alfil (bishop) had reduced mobility compared to their modern chess counterparts. This led to a much greater delay in direct confrontation of the two opposing sides, and the opening strategy pursued by most players was simply to manouever their pieces into a certain prearranged pattern, after which they would begin to calculate…