April 14, 2009

These moments are the hardest to say but the easiest to recognize. An instant where we connect from across the room, where we're not anything but people.

Below is a few riddles from my homenode. There have been eight so far, but I neglected to write all of them down and so you only get four here. They're actually pretty hard to create as the last one demonstrates. There is a flaw in it, which makes its answer wrong. A good riddle will only have one answer, an okay might have two or three, and a terrible one will be unsolvable or too solvable depending on how it's phrased.

Creating a riddle requires an interesting kind of backwards thinking. You create the answer and then set about creating word puzzles about them. The person (it's tempting to call them "victims") trying to solve the riddle has to do the exact same thing, but in reverse.

Answers at the bottom.

1.
Sparkling on the ground like a bag of gold
It is young and yet old
You'll find it down south where seldom it goes
In warmer climates when it prefers cold

2.
When I get to the floor
I dance around my partner
Around and here, around and there
Around and everywhere
I tiptoe on wires
I travel underground
Sometimes I'm found in the clouds!

3.
Ivory Towers in a line
Each supported from behind
Always forward, never back
Running along a single track
They say hello in passing
And often that's the last thing

4.
When it’s quick it’s something else
When it’s slow it’s in transition
You can wear it, but not on you
When you set it about with gaseous companions
It will fight the smallest wars for you.

As I write this I am twenty-three. When you read it, I will be twenty-four. Since my last birthday I have written twenty-three write-ups, a fairly nice number, and when I post this, it will be twenty-four write ups. I was adding up all the characters according to my write-up headers yesterday and found that I've typed some 99,504 letters in the course of the year for this website. That's a lot of letters and that's not including private messages and my chatterbox racket.

Twenty-three write-ups out of seventy-five. Most written in longhand before I typed them up. I don't know why I prefer writing in longhand, but I think it has little to do with the composition process and a lot more to do with a very selfish and silly egotistical reason. I love the way my handwriting looks. It looks like a drunkard's scrawl with exaggerated loops on the G's and Y's. My signature used to follow this drunken overly ornate style until I worked two years at JCPenny's optical shop. Every night I had to count up the change in the register and sign several sheets of paper promising Penny's and the folks who rented space out from Penny's for the shop that all the money was there.

This ruined my signature. It lost all the letters in my first name except one and the letters in my last name became a crushed little squiggle. I can't imagine how much a famous person's signature distorts when he signs stuff for fans. I bet J.K. Rowling and Stephen King's signatures were incredibly different before their fame (though I bet King's changed more, being much younger when he archived success).

When I was in high school I became very interested in writing and drugs and what effect drugs had on writing. The result of my experimentation is on this website as The Voyage of the Roofer Boonhurst, first written in a Roswell Military Institute notebook in handwriting that wanders around the pages unbound by such silly things as lines or margins. Most of it is legible with the exceptions of a night where I was coping with extreme allergies. I look seven or eight Benadryl and the resulting changes on my handwriting is... interesting. Letters seem to compress and expand at will and the sentences completely ignore other sentences as I apparently wrote over them again and again.

I don't remember anything from that night, except that the Cowboy Bebop movie was playing and that it had pretty butterflies in it.

The astonishing thing about handwriting, or mine at least, is how little it has changed. A few years back, I requested my personal information from Albuquerque Public Schools. They had in their possession a few WRAT standardized tests (Wide Range Achievement Test) and my handwriting at twelve is the same as it was at eight.

I have paper from even younger. Five and six. The letters are sloppier, but the sentences stay on the lines fairly well, as opposed to now where my letters a better, but my sentences tend to dip below the lines when I'm not paying attention (and I often don't when I'm writing dialogue as I write it extremely fast).

At some point a few years ago, I taught myself how to write in mirror. My handwriting doesn't change much in mirror except my G's and Y's tails typically underline the words they're attached to.

I used to know cursive too, but I've long since forgotten it. In high school nobody wrote in it, and if you did the teachers couldn't read it and made you do whatever assignment you had over again.

I've changed a lot, but my handwriting has changed little. It's amazing that all these different people could share their penmanship through the ages...

1. ʍousʇuǝıɔuɐ
2. suoɹʇɔǝ1ǝ/ʎʇıɔıɹʇɔǝ1ǝ
3. suʍɐd
4. ɹǝʌ1ıs

Birthday past \ / Birthday future

I really hate to beat a dead horse and I'm sure I will be accused of doing that; at the risk of that, and being redundant to a certain degree, I feel like I simply must weigh in on the Butterfinger McFlurry situation. This is because as many of you well know, I tend to, like donfreenut, compose writeups that are "egregiously silly" as Mr. Nut in what is written in his homenode. Some of you love them. Some of you hate them. And some of you don't care about them at all. But as a fellow Warrior of the Silly, I feel I have to offer an opinion, even if I am inviting possibility of eye rollings in my general direction.

First of all, life is about balance. The purpose of silliness is to counterbalance the very serious situations out there in the world. Imagine a world with all the endlessly dark, disturbing, evil and depressing things going on without anything funny or silly. That would warrant mass suicide wouldn't it? So real quickly, to stop myself from going on for many pages about it (I'm not interested in actually getting deep into the debate over whether BFMcF should have ever been there or not) that writeup was about sillying up something that was otherwise dry and drab, using tossed-in non sequiturs and sometimes profane nonsense to do it. And it was hilarious. Well, I thought so. And hundreds of others -- I believe the final ching count for it was well into the 130s. So that was it. It was hilarious silliness to make you laugh. Nothing more, nothing less. If you even begin to analyze it beyond that, you're wasting your time, you didn't get it and you never will.

The real point of this is that it's kind of a requiem of sorts. I'd thought about doing a "Requiem for Butterfinger McFlurry" node but I knew full well that it wouldn't have lasted unless it was written more eloquently than I have the ability to do. Maybe even then. But anyway, when I'd first came into the catbox that day last week and saw the subject, "Farewell Butterfinger McFlurry" and the surging argument, I immediately became incensed. I rarely get very angry about something as most who know me will attest to. I'd incorrectly assumed that the high-ranking stick-in-the-muds who'd always hated BFMcF had finally gotten their wish, that they'd decided to end the debate over its existence and just kill it once and for all despite what protests may incur. I hadn't realized at first that it was its creator, donfreenut, who had actually ordered the hit on that and almost every other writeup he'd ever done, angry over the removal of the permanent Mark of Destruction. I thought he had a good point about how that had become part of its charm, and therefore, in a roundabout way, a part of its content, but then I think he overreacted. And that's all I'm saying about that debate.

It really screwed with my head, though, when I'd learned the truth about what had happened. I was still angry, but didn't know where or who to direct it toward. That is a very frustrating place to be in and I'm sure all of you have been there at one point or another in your life. I just could not bring myself to be angry at donfreenut. I had always held him in such high regard. I loved everything he'd written. He had this style of writing that, even in his serious nodes, could make me laugh because they were so modestly authoritative with this weird tongue-in-cheek machismo that only donfreenut could convey. That may be an inaccurate way to describe it but those are the best words I could think it.

But I am very disappointed at his course of action and found it petty in a way and very un-donfreenut of him; he always seemed so cool to me, like e2's very own Fonzie. At least to me. Many, I'm sure, will disagree.

I'm getting off course though. I wasn't really here to talk about him so much. Where was I? Oh yes, I was upset about BFMcF being removed, didn't matter who'd done it. I thought, and I'd said it in the catbox, that a part of E2 had died that day, part of its soul was gone. Part of its history. It had become the symbol of the never ending debate over E2's identity, whether or not it should be too serious for any irreverence, if in-jokes were appropriate or tolerated. If silliness has a place here. And even though, as it turned out, its own creator had handed the executioner the gun to shoot it with, in a way its removal meant that a part of that war had been won. Score one for the Serious Squad. Butterfinger McFlurry and its egregious silliness were finally gone, that thorn in their sides, that affront to everything good and decent was finally put out to pasture.

But they do not realize what has been lost. Gone will be all the "What's with this Butterfinger McFlurry thing?" questions by newbies. Gone are the belly laughs by users when they discover it, ones who Get It, who, upon that discovery, realize that, Yes, E2 can be quite hilarious and non-sequitur, a fun place to hang out. It was one of the biggest weights attached to the silly side of E2 to counterbalance all the seriousness and religious debates and stories about death on the other side. And now it has been cut free. Is E2 out of balance now?

Maybe. OK so I understand many of you, if you've even read this far, might be thinking, "Oh get over it, it was just a silly writeup, come on!" You might be right. I hope you're right. I hope that all the other silly writeups, maybe some of mine included, will still serve the purpose that BFMcF had. But you cannot argue that a piece of E2's history is gone. People can now read about Butterfinger McFlurry but not the Butterfinger McFlurry writeup itself. Now new users who wish to see just what the big deal, if it was truly funny or not, was won't get a chance to (unless it still exists somewhere that I don't know about yet).

I don't know about you, but I will sure miss it. I will forever be part of "tha McFlurry crew" even if its "head nigga" is gone.

karma debt pointed out to me the perfect node title that describes the situation (and I wish I'd thought of it) - I felt a disturbance in the fun, as if a million playgrounds cried out, and then