chocolate over sex

stolen from a response by magra on this chocolate article in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, top 25 reasons why chocolates are better than sex:

25: it´s easy to find 8 inches of chocolate
24: You can have chocolate all weekend and still walk OK on monday
23: chocolate does not keep you awake yapping after you had it
22: You can have chocolate with little kids and not go to jail
21: You don´t have to beg for chocolate
20: with chocolate, size does not matter...it´s always good
19: When you are having chocolate, it does not keep the neighbours awake
18: You are never too old or too young for chocolate
17: You can have as many kinds of chocolate as you can handle
16: Good chocolate is easy to find
15: You can have chocolate any time of the month
14: chocolate doesn´t get you pregnant
13: With chocolate there´s no need to fake it
12: "If you love me you´d swallow" has real meaning with chocolate
11: You don´t get hairs in your mouth with chocolate
10: Buying chocolate does not give you a bad conscience
9: you can ask a stranger for chocolate without getting your face slapped
8: you can have chocolate on your desk without upsetting your workmates
7: Two people of the same sex can have chocolate without being called nasty names
6: If you bite the nuts to hard, the chocolate does not mind
5: You can have chocolate in front of your parents
4: you can make chocolate last as long as you want to
3: you can safely have chocolate while you are driving
2: chocolate satisfies even when it has gone soft
1: you can GET chocolate

i choose geodesic

thank you mr. churchill, you just reminded me why i've always chosen to destroy instead: it requires less amount of work.

chaotic flavor eigenstates

happy birthday to dad. congratulations, you've finally reached the dreadful five zero and are now officially OLD. and yes, i definitely look better than you, dad.

have you ever met an old friend who annoyed you so much you started wondering whether you were high on crack or were just plain stupid when you first became acquainted with him?

well, i have, and it wasn't pleasant at all. it ruined my mood the day that i can't do work at all. whose fault was it? that little fucker, of course.

i thought writing humanities paper was bad, but it turned out writing scientific research paper was worse. i spent three hours at the library and five hours at starbucks, which, if my arithmetic serves me right, totals up to eight hours worth of staring at my powerbook, and this is all i've got:



that, and an acknowledgement section, of course. mike slackenerney was correct: when writing a scientific paper, always start with the acknowledgment.

why is it hard? well, let's see. it's partly because of the formatting, partly because of the content, but mostly because i have not the slightest idea on what the hell is going on. is it just me, or is it counterintuitive to produce a scientific paper when your experiment has shown NO significant result whatsoever?

i wanted to doodle tonight, but thanks to that idiot my mood is ruined.

ode to the good life

when writing a paper,

start with the acknowledgement.

on a side note, i just realized something about myself: ambitious people annoy the hell out of me.

general relativity

see rob run, run rob run

that miserable bastard is going down. soru is overrated.



this is actually frame one of a little comic strip i'm doing. but the rest will have to wait. i need sleep.

the path that splits from one to many

graduation is coming within less than a year, so that leaves me less than six month to start and finish gradschool application. to avoid the panic that happened four years ago in highschool (honestly i still have no idea how i got accepted into UCSD), i thought i'd start looking at my options and do the usual thing.

the usual thing involves picking a few dream schools, a few more target schools, and a lot of backup schools.

backup schools are the ones that people never heard of, and therefore less competition for me to get accepted. did i mention i hate competition? the only thing that comes out of a competition is the inclination, if that's even the appropriate term since it comes under pressure and not naturallly, to do more and more work, and that's something that i've always been trying to avoid.

creed #2: i shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.

only then i realized that the backup schools that i've picked are so not well known they don't even offer a PhD program in physics. shit.

then i looked at the remaining schools on the list, and thought to myself: what have i done with my life?

the list goes like the following:
UCSD
UCSB
STANFORD
WASHINGTON
PRINCETON
CALTECH
BERKELEY
HARVARD
MINNESOTA

with the exception of minnesota, these are the schools that i've never even thought of ATTEMPTING to get in in the first place. UCSD and UCSB are reasonable targets, but the probability of getting in the rest is infinitesimally small. not zero, but still infinitesimally small.

tony gherghetta told me: "when you finished your undergraduate studies and go into a grad school, you are no longer competing based on intelligence, because the process of weeding out the high-intelligence people from the medium-intelligence people has already been done. in the grad school, your peers have about the same level of intelligence as yours, and the only thing that can distinguish one from the other is the level of determination, motivation, and the hardwork."

well, shit. isn't that comforting?

oh, and if you're wondering why the hell MIT and UCLA aren't on the list, don't even ask. hell would freeze over before i would even think about going to any of them. personal reasons, really. or rather, personal hatred. if i don't get accepted to any grad school i want to go to, and UCLA or MIT begged, crawled, and offered me a shitload of money to go to them, i would still rather go get a master from a shitty unknown school, and try again for the PhD after i get my master's.

why the hatred? why not?

basis vector zero

i'm sure there are worse places, but minneapolis is the first i've ever been where the weather can change so drastically over a period of thirty-six hour. having a room kept at 300K means that at one time your room will be much much colder than outside, and then eighteen hours later your room will be much much hotter than outside.

presentation tomorrow, hope all goes well. it seems like my slides will go over 15-minute time allocated per student, but then that's just too bad.

note to self: sleeping early means you can wake up early and still get seven hours of sleep, but never touch the bed after you wake up or something stupid and terrible will happen, which won't seem to be stupid and terrible until you wake up again three hours later, cursing at yourself.

i think i've given up experimental physics entirely. this is ridiculous. i do not see the point in doing this. so what's my atonement? schutz' general relativity. i have to finish studying the book after all, or grinstein will definitely grind my ass next quarter.

then i realized that i have not been able to get over the fact that franky bites, and hence:



yes, yes, that was doodled on my general relativity book. don't tell my professor.

h2g2

i signed up to be a researcher for the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, a dot-com company founded by our beloved douglas adams.

researcher ID 1744957.

i'll write-up some guide entry as soon as i can find something worthy enough to be put in the guide.

now if only this researcher ID has the power to supply me with free food at different fancy dining places all over the world. yes, i've idolized ford prefect all the way to the 9th gate of hell and back.

behold my version of ford prefect.

SHOWTIME

i'm anxious. the battle is going to be epic.

here's a little advice: NEVER draw a finalized work with sixteen people in it on a 7x10 sketchbook paper.

line shading is rather shitty, but please excuse me for that. actually, blame CP9 for wearing all black. after all that black shading my hand was shaking. hence the wiggly line shading. i had to take out the line shading on lucchi's face entirely because it looked like he was covered in worms. ~_~

this is my 100th deviation, so i thought i'd do something grand. something epic. well, there it is: sixteen people crammed in a 7x10 piece of paper. click to enlarge.

them golden moments

the remarkably shitty weather here yesterday was somewhat similar to the one douglas adams talked about in salmon of doubt:

the following morning the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and dirk decided to call it stanley instead.

stanley wasn't a good downpour. nothing wrong with a good downpour for clearing the air. stanley was the sort of thing you needed a good downpour to clear the air of. stanley was muggy, close, and oppressive, like someone large and sweaty pressed up against you in a tube train. stanley didn't rain, but every so often he dribbled on you.

speaking of golden moments, this is why everyone should love the speedo-wearing cyborg with awesome ace ventura hair and popeye arms:



HE BITES!

i have made a vow to print this out and frame it when i get back to sandiego. the vow shall be fulfilled.

no reading required

this is the fifth, i think, in our mission to get sam out of the river before he starts losing limbs.

you can't beat bad luck

spandam always spilled his coffee. well DUH, half of his mouth is covered in leathed strap! so saru devised a way for spandam to drink his coffee: colorful squiggly straw.



but too bad, you can't beat bad luck.

coke i like

i woke up early to go work today, and along the way i found out that i should have just slept in.

an activist approached me, even though i was bobbing my head up and down, side to side, and singing to moxy fruvous' king of spain. she handed me two sheets of paper, one yellow, the other one green. she mentioned something about coke and something about killing coke and something about a chapel and that the green sheet will tell me why the chapel has to kill coke.

the green sheet talks? wow, that's new.

i said thank you and walked away with two pieces of paper, one green and one yellow, on my left hand. the moxy fruvous song finished, so i thought i'd spare the two second gap between that and the next song skimming through the green paper. a chapel killing coke would be wicked.

the thing about trying to comprehend what people around you are saying when you have those white earpods on and volume cranked up and all that exists in your head is the lyrics, is that you can pick up most of the important keywords, but not enough to be able to make sense of the entire message. sometimes, even the keywords you can pick up get so skewed that they alter the entire message one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.

she lied.

the green sheet did not tell me anything. i had to read.

i waited for about three seconds for it to start talking, but all it did was nothing. so i started reading because this is supposed to be one of the days i would pretend to be a nice person.

coca cola abuse of the global public interest, the title said. where's the chapel killing coke?

in 2001, a lawsuit was filed against coca-cola by the international labor rights fund and the united steelworkers of america on behalf of SINALTRAINAL (union representing coke workers in colombia), several of its members and the estate of isidro gil, one of its murdered officers.

the lawsuit charges that coca-cola's bottlers in colombia "contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders."

the seriousness of the situation is best summed up by SINALTRAINAL vice-president juan carlos galvis, who stated: "if we lose the fight against coca-cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs, and then our lives."

other crimes and abuses by coke include:
~ overexploitation and pollution of water sources in india, mexico, ghana and elsewhere
~ benefiting from hazardous child labor in sugar cane fields in el salvador
~ aggressive marketing to children of nutritionally worthless and damaging products (thought to self: huh?)
~ anti-worker policies
~ history of racial discrimination
~ opposition to environmentally-sound bottle deposit bills
~ fraudulent business practices

my only counter-argument: but i like coke.

my second thought: what the hell? there's no chapel being mentioned.

i am not ignorant. the very fact that i took time to blog this whole spiel, only to counter-argue it with four words that expressed my ignorance is proof enough that i am not ignorant. but let's face it: pepsi does not taste as good as coke, and britney spears made pepsi advertising even worse.

not that i'm saying this whole thing is horseshit. i wouldn't know, would i? i've never been to india, mexico, ghana and elsewhere to witness such overexploitation and pollution of water sources. i live in san diego, and we have enough water pollution and overexploitation already. i've never been to the sugar cane fields in el salvador to witness the hazardous child labor. and i don't even know why the hell they would mentioned such a thing as coke being nutritionally worthless and damagin, when 90% of the food we have here in the united states is basically nutritionally worthless and damaging. the other 10% is nutritionally worthy and not damaging, of course, but they just don't taste as good.

if there is one thing i learned from that one horrible physics TA alex winbow, it is that iceberg lettuce contains no nutritional value whatsoever. and even that might very well be an incorrect fact, since it came out of his mouth.

think about it. who did not do the things listed above? i'm sure all soda companies did. as well as shoe companies, food companies, clothing companies, car companies, and the rest of the companies that exist in the world today. maybe they don't need sugar canes as much as coke does, but they overexploit people or natural resources one way or the other. why attack coke specifically? isn't that rather discriminatory? always go for the bigger picture. bring down all these companies once and for all so we can claim ourselves humanitarian and end sufferings in the different parts of the world. if that happens to fail, THEN maybe we can go for something smaller. like coke or microsoft.

or maybe that failed already?

humanitarians, what you should be focusing on bringing down right now is not the big companies, but the future companies that have yet to exist. yes, BUSINESS PEOPLE. everyone who has taken the most ultra-basic elementary course in economics know that it is the main economic (if not psychological) principle that you always go for the bare minimum effort to get the maximum result. it's just how you do business. if it were to be otherwise it wouldn't be called business, it would be called something else. even we physicists employ this principle by believing that we are smart enought to not study before an exam and still aim for an A+. this very basic principle is what lead to capitalism, and most of the time, success. if people have not been following this principle since the day the decided to come down from the trees, we would not have the privileges we have right now. there will be no advancement, no new technology, no one piece, and no internet, which i am currently using to blog this.

i lived in indonesia for sixteen years before i was catapulted up to LA. by zarquon, i had never even realized during that sixteen years that making shoes for nike was considered exploitation since all the kids who were doing it looked perfectly happy to me. they got even happier because nike only shipped back to the US products that are considered "perfect" and threw away the ones that did not pass the standard requirements. the shoes might have a little chip at the bottom, or the seams might be crooked, but nothing else put as big of a smile on those kids' faces when when they go to school or play soccer wearing these "poor quality" products. from our americanized standards it might be considered exploitation because a burger patty with two buns and a thin slice of tomato and lettuce here costs $4 at the very least. in indonesia, a full plate of rice with meat, vegetables, egg, and a glass of cold lemon tea costs 35 cents at most, and it tastes a lot better than that $4 burger. if they were to be paid the minimum wages we have here, there will not be enough veggies and cows to satiate their gluttony. worse, the price will start rising to the standards we have here, and they're nowhere close to being ready for that. last time the prices rose up too high, houses were burned down, chinese people were massacred, women were raped, and the president was overthrowned. can you imagine how catastrophic it would be if the prices were to increase, AND the cows and veggies were gone?

again, call me ignorant, but i think using these excuses is like telling me that children in africa are starving when i don't finish my corn on the cob at a fastfood restaurant. they can have it for all i care, but i am perfectly full, and stuffing the rest of the cob into my full stomach isn't going to make those kids feel less hungry, thank you.

in fact, here's a solution. let's send our people to el salvador so they can work in the sugar cane field. that way we don't have to pay them as much because the standard of living there is definitely much lower than it is here, and we can leave the exploitation of these little kids to their parents. ask around and see how many people you can get to go. i bet not enough to even cover half a small sugarcane field. it is a fact that you can't deny, provided that you've been to downtown sandiego, or any big city downtown for that case, that people would rather sit in the shade, beg, and get enough change to make sure that they're not starving that day. and if it was a good day, maybe they even have more that they can save to buy an ipod. face it. none of us want to do this dirty work. i bet even the activist who handed me this flyer wouldn't be willing to fly to el salvador to work at the sugarcane field, even if i were to pay for her flight.

i mentioned in the above solution that the solution will work so we can leave the exploitation of children to their parents, and you jumped off your chair yelling: WHAT? it's true. in third-world countries, parents make their children work at early ages, that way they can get more crop in, and hence more money. they even arrange their children's marriages at early age, fourteen or fifteen, so they can make even more kids to help them in the field. it's not a surprise that people in a third-world country can have fifteen kids, who each have fifteen kids. if i have a cornfield and two-hundred-and-twenty-five descendants, i think i'd just sit back and play some guitar and make love to my wife so i can make more kids who can make more kids.

last time i checked my highschool history textbook, even the CIA used extreme violence to bring the so-called "peace" in other nations. one that i remember in particular is nicaragua and el salvador, because saunders always said nicaragua and el salvador in a wonderfully weird way. i guess they just want the sugar cane, and not really the peace. just like how they just want the oil in iraq and not the peace.

please people, take care of your own business first before you try to deal with others'. if you really want peace that bad, start from your home. you don't start in san fransisco with five hotels and seven houses when you play monopoly; you start in square one with zero hotel and zero houses. i truly see no point in going to other countries to end exploitation or make peace in any way when we still have endless problems here.

and one of the many problems would be the activist who ruined my groove and now i am going to have to play moxy fruvous's king of spain all over again.

wasted effort

whoever made up the "repeat procedure" part in the standard method of testing hypothesis needs to be shot. thanks to that miserable bastard i have five-hundred more events to scan.

seriously, why bother making a program that selects the events for you? an undergraduate can do this, and i bet he'll be willing to do this for $7/hr.

375 came out today. franky BITES! oh zarquon, that scene is GOLD. gold i say. everyone should bow down to franky now and praise his awesomeness. HE BITES!

i really want to see something like this happening in the next couple chapter:

enlightening fact of the day

how do you describe college classes in one word?

ennui.

bob bless the french.

heave-ho! hi-ho! ho-hey! hi-hey!

this will be one of those oh-shit-ive-got-nothing-to-say-at-all-but-ill-post-anyway kinda posts.

it's true: life is much more peaceful without whining. i've been trying to learn to be happy with whatever i have right now, enjoy every waking moment, and not think about the squillion things that i really want but don't currently have. life sucks, i won't deny that. but among all the suckiness, there exists some little things that can cheer you up once in a while. the key, or rather trick, is to dwell on these little happy things instead of the sucky things.

my research is going nowhere right now, and the fact that my professor has a phone meeting every morning until noon does not help because i can't talk to him until after noon, which means i only have about two hours to try doing whatever i'm supposed to be doing before he leaves his office to go catch the bus. words cannot describe how irritating and frustrating it is when your research is going nowhere and you have to do a presentation in six days, which includes two days of the weekend.

but then i thought to myself: this is annoying. i think i'm just gonna go enjoy a cup of coffee and think about other things that does not make me unhappy. ooo cows. and hence i've been spending lots of nights at starbucks over a cup of coffee thinking about cows.

a girl once told me about how she sometimes gets frightened by her own innerself who is always telling her to control her own emotions. "i'm such a control freak," she said, and apparently it's something that she's unhappy about. but whenever she complained about such a thing, i've always thought that self-control is something that i really need. i've lived the previous twenty years of my life relying on emotions, and all it's been doing is nudging me closer and closer to the brink of insanity. self-control is NOT discarding your emotions. it's having control over your emotions. when you've mastered it, you will be to alter your emotions at will, and that is when the old saying happiness is a state of mind becomes true.

if the girl i mentioned above is reading this, i have one thing to say to her: thank you. not just the stuff about self-control, but i've learned a lot from you during our short occasional encounters.

living in minnesota without a car has been a blow. no words can describe my frustration for not having a car and having to rely on other people for transportation. if you're thinking "it's just a car, get over it," you deserve to be horsewhipped and be forced to read this entire blog, starting from the very first entry. one of the very few things that have helped me overcome constant frustration i experience during the past two college years is being able to drive around alone at night, enjoying music from the radio or the ipod. a car is an essential thing for me to have, but that is not a need i can fulfill during my ten-week stay here in minneapolis.

so i took up walking.

the only difference between walking and driving is that you get tired faster because you are using your leg muscle more than if you were to be driving instead. but both gets you to places, it's just that the latter brings you to farther places, and when some stupid, terrible shit happens, driving away is a better escape method than running away. but when there is no stupid, terrible shit that happens, even walking can have the same effect as the driving that i've missed oh so much.

the ipod i plugged into my ear is, of course, another significant factor, since music makes people happy. especially happy music in particular. like moxy fruvous' king of spain and arrogant worms' pirate of saskatchewan. thanks saru for sharing these lovely songs with me. i owe you lots.

the wise forrest gump once said "life is like a box of chocolates; you'll never know what you're gonna get," which is absolutely true, but too bad the producer started yelling at him before he could say more about chocolates. let me reiterate three of them:

1. life is like a box of chocolates; you'll never know what you're gonna get. so you grab one blindly and put it in your mouth, but you don't keep that one particular chocolate in your mouth for a long time, otherwise it'll turn nasty.

2. life is like a box of chocolates; you'll never know what you're gonna get. if that one chocolate you picked happened to have some caramel in it, you have two things you can do: a) enjoy it, if you love caramel, or b) spit it out, if you hate caramel as much as i do because all it's good for is to get stuck in your teeth and annoy you for the rest of the night, grab another one and hope this one does not have caramel in it.

3. life is like a box of chocolates; you'll never know what you're gonna get. also keep in mind that some chocolate are bittersweet.

here's one to the good things in life.

spare the spud

if you like the song against vegan that i posted yesterday, now you can ENJOY it.

this is by ARROGANT WORMS, called CARROT JUICE IS MURDER. buy the cd and enjoy some great musical comedy. i was wrong when i said nothing good ever came out of canada.

awkward silence

criticize all you want, but know that i am perfectly aware that this is simply a placeholder to the storyline the way "la, a note to follow so" is to the do-re-mi song. in other words, this can be erased out of existence and it won't make a single difference.

i promise, the one after this will be funny. ~_~

DAMN YOU VEGANS!

listen up brothers and sisters,
come hear my desperate tale.
i speak of our friends of nature,
trapped in the dirt like a jail.

vegetables live in oppression,
served on our tables each night.
this killing of veggies is madness,
i say we take up the fight.

salads are only for murderers,
coleslaw's a fascist regime.
Don't think that they don't have feelings,
just cause a radish can't scream.

i've heard the screams of the vegetables (scream, scream, scream)
watching their skins being peeled (having their insides revealed)
grated and steamed with no mercy (burning off calories)
how do you think that feels (bet it hurts really bad)
carrot juice constitutes murder (and that's a real crime)
greenhouses prisons for slaves (let my vegetables go)
it's time to stop all this gardening (it's dirty as hell)
let's call a spade a spade (is a spade is a spade is a spade)

i saw a man eating celery,
so I beat him black and blue.
if he ever touches a sprout again,
i'll bite him clean in two.

i'm a political prisoner,
trapped in a windowless cage.
cause I stopped the slaughter of turnips
by killing five men in a rage

i told the judge when he sentenced me,
this is my finest hour,
i'd kill those farmers again
just to save one more cauliflower

how low as people do we dare to stoop,
making young broccolis bleed in the soup?
untie your beans, uncage your tomatoes
Let potted plants free, don't mash that potato!

i've heard the screams of the vegetables (scream, scream, scream)
watching their skins being peeled (fates in the stirfry are sealed)
grated and steamed with no mercy (you fat gourmet slob)
how do you think that feels? (leave them out in the field)
carrot juice constitutes murder (V8's genocide)
greenhouses prisons for slaves (yes, your composts are graves)
it's time to stop all this gardening (take up macrame)
let's call a spade a spade (is a spade, is a spade, is a spade, is a spade.....)

floopy?

that's right. this is such a floopy weekend.

if you are trying to look up what floopy means, i suggest you save the effort. i've done that, and failed miserably. and don't trust the definitions in urbandictionary.com, if you ever even think about checking up with them. the whole point of using an adjective in front of a noun, is to convey a certain emotion or feeling that the writer wanted to convey for that particular noun, and usually causes the writer to spend an ungodly amount of time thinking about which particular adjective would be particularly appropriate to convey whatever particular emotion or feeling he wanted to convey, and by the time he arrives to a decision, he will have already forgotten why the noun was there in the first place.

after this long thought process, this particular writer (or blogger, if you will, since he types and does not write) decided to use floopy, partly because that was the only one that he could think of within that ungodly amount of time he spent thinking, but mostly because he did not have the slightest idea what the bloody hell it means, and this, as inexplicable as it may sound, is exactly the particular kind of emotion that the noun following it is supposed to convey.

reading THE SALMON OF DOUBT is like reading douglas adams' blog. collections of short articles, journals, thoughts, experiences, etc., etc. if you are a mac user, or is aspired to be one, then you might enjoy what douglas has got to say about macs, as he had written quite a few articles for MacUsers magazine.

weather is one factor that makes this quite a floopy weekend. it was a humid ninety-five yesterday, and, as if that was not bad enough, it went to a humid ninety-eight today. but nature does not stop there; it started pouring about an hour ago, and if you think the temperature outside is now below ninety-eight, it is only extremely likely that you are wrong. if sandiego weather hates me so much such that it rains whenever i don't have my umbrella and the sky clears up whenever i do, minneapolis weather seems to be too lazy to pay a particular attention to a certain someone and tell itself that it will be screwing this certain someone over and over again until he breaks down and cry, and instead decides to just make it rain or hot or both raining and hot whenever the hell it feels like and keep telling itself that eventually someone out there will break down and cry.

either that or that miserable bastard rob mckenna just passed by minneapolis.

another factor that makes this also quite a floopy weekend is what i would call "coincidental happenings." i met a girl named kacey two weeks ago on my way back from the wok a little bit past midnight, and ended up talking to her until four in the morning behind coffmann memorial center. there was one thing that made this not a smart thing to do, but i did not realize that until the day after when i realized that i had been violated in every possible way by mosquitos.

she and i went to a cafe somewhere in minnesota last night to hang out, and when we stopped at a random gas station, also somewhere in minnesota, i saw one thing that i thought i'd never see before i die.

a bullet-proof glass.

it was an inch-and-a-half thick bulletproof glass, and there were THREE layers of them. the guy working at the gas station said that he just got robbed last week, and that the bulletproof glass had just been installed the day before. what makes this interesting, however, is the fact that the bulletproof glass is just installed on one side of the counter, and the rest is covered in non-bullet-proof glass. i guess whoever installed it assumed that armed robbers work so hastily that they don't even have enough time to think that they could find a way around the bulletproof glass.

the rain has stopped, but the weather is still ridiculously muggy, and i feel ridiculously lazy today. i think it's time for me to take another nap.

oh blueno

come on now, who DOESN'T love the big guy?

dance to the techno!

holy shit. i just finished downloading TWENTY initial D albums.

00. Initial D Theme Collection
01. Initial D Sound Files Vol.1
02. Initial D Sound Files Vol.2
03. Initial D D Selection
04. Initial D D Selection 2
05. Initial D D Selection 3
06. Initial D D Best Selection
07. Initial D D Non-Stop Mega Mix
08. Initial D Super Euro-Best
09. Initial D Second Stage Sound Files
10. Initial D Second Stage D Selection 1
11. Initial D Second Stage D Non-Stop Selection
12. Initial D Extra Stage OST
13. Initial D Battle Stage
14. Initial D The Movie of Super Eurobeat
15. Initial D The Movie OST
16. Initial D Special Stage OST (3CDs)
17. Initial D Vocal Battle
18. Initial D Vocal Battle Second Stage
19. Initial D Vocal Battle Special feat.TAKAHASHI Bros. RED SUNS
20. Initial D Vocal Album (2CDs)

FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY THREE SONGS. 1.36gig total. too bad i don't have a car i can drive while listening to these.

docktor?

went down to the basement to grab some snack from the vending machine, and came across an office of a professor. her name is:



now, isn't that interesting? doctor docktor? awesome.

careless talk costs life

don't worry, we'll get him outta there.

eventually.

the unexamined life is definitely worth living

the idiot who once said "some things are better left unsaid," is currently laughing in his grave at this very moment, for life has proven him right, and plato wrong.

seriously, unless something has been well thought of, articulated, prepared, rehearsed, rehearsed again, simulated, corrected, rehearsed, simulated again, corrected again, and then simulated again one last time, it is for everyone's best, really, that it stays in your head and does not come out of your mouth. failure to do so may result in social awkwardness, hostile situation, and zarquon forbid, some terrible and stupid catastrophe.

thank zarquon the one right now caused nothing more than a mere social awkwardness for a good twenty seconds.

BIG BIG BARREL

i find myself reading online comics instead of selecting events. VGCats is awesome. this is one example: so wrong. and the ingenious vader.

memories

read, and cry out those happy tears.

i am going to go watch all of the goals that united scored that year first thing when i come back. yes, i have all of the goals they scored that particular years archived in my PC in sandiego.

i swear i wasn't high

i should NOT have gotten myself a sketchbook. crazy nonsensical shit happens.

how may i help you, sir?

perfectly normal beast on wheat, please. sliced thin. yes, toasted. hm? everything but onion and mustard. and can i have extra mayo as well? thank you.

i have not mentioned this, but now i will, so by the time you finish reading this paragraph, i will have mentioned what i have not mentioned earlier at the beginning of the paragraph: i have finished all five books of the hitchhiker's guide series. yes, i have; it wasn't any bluff. in fact, i finished it last night, right here in starbucks. the exact same seat, exact same drink, exact same table. unless, of course, out of nowhere they suddenly decided to switch all the furnitures around, which means i'm not sitting on the exact same seat and table as i was last night. but that does not matter. what matters is that i have finished all five books and that i have been thinking all night long whether or not i should make a comment on the ending of the series.

if you had known me quite well, you should have been able to guess that the very fact that this entry exists means that i have decided to comment on the ending.

and if you had known me better, you should have been able to figure out that i would have been able to figure out that you would think that the very fact that this entry exists means that i have decided to comment on the ending and that i would have then decided to not comment on it, just to mess with the head of those who know me quite well.

but if you had really really known me, you should have been able to figure out that i possess a natural tendency to mess with everyone's head, including but not limited to the ones who know me quite well and the ones who know me better, and that i have decided to comment on the ending anyway, making all that effort to come up with the train of thought that would have lead to the ingenious conclusion on the paragraph above go to waste.

now, if you had been smart, you would have read all three paragraphs above without even thinking a tiny teeny bit of thought, because they're pointless anyway.

no, i will not spoil the ending. i just feel the urges to tell the world that the ending was extremely, remarkably, and utterly unexpected. so extremely, remarkably, and utterly unexpected, i still don't know whether or not i should like it. i guess in the end it's always better to not do anything about anything, because all doing anything does is messing up the balance of the universe. now it makes a complete sense why nature hates everyone. all she's trying to do is keeping herself in balance, which is pretty easy to do, but people keep throwing rocks, crumpled receipts, paper planes, suction cups, coffee beans, ice cubes, pennies, broken chalks, cigarette butts, broken printers, perfectly good imacs, styrofoam cups, burned rubbers, paper bags, plastic bags, and basically anything small enough to throw without requiring much effort, at her.

no, ipods are not included. they're bloody expensive.

santa's loaded with attitude
he's loud and drunk and smelly and rude
his workshop's been closed by an auditor
and mrs. claus ran off with her chiropractor

what's with the randomness above, you say? nothing. that's just a part of the lyrics of a song that's currently playing in my ipod. thanks saru for the song. it's stuck in my head now. your fault.

this blog's been going for over a year now, and started only because jim wanted me to have a blog but i was too lazy to register for one, so he did it for me and gave me the name e1n that i have been using until now. came from a dog in bebop, but he's a cool dog, so whatever.

i feel like i can relate to arthur dent. of course, everyone would think that he leads a boring life, but if you read book four, you'll see that he's got his share of an adventure. one that he experienced because he wanted to, not because he got dragged into it. but that was enough adventure for him, and finally he settled down again, even though this time even i would think that such a life he led in book five was extremely boring. but i can understand why one would want such a life, because right now such is the life that i want. at least for now.

boredom sounds frightening, but it actually isn't. the key, or rather trick, to live through boredom is to cherish the small things. a keychain once said "don't worry about the small things," and ended up sitting at the gift store for the rest of its life, which is rather unfortunately, eternity. if only it had said "don't worry about the big things," it would have been bought by a twenty-year old indonesian man wandering around universal citiwalk with a twenty-one-year old indonesian man, and would have been a permanent accessory on his multi-purpose backpack.

a friend, or so i assumed, once said that i should go to parties and have some fun because life is about having fun. the last part i completely and entirely agreed, but not quite so on the earlier parts. i may have listed this at one time, possibly sometimes last year during the annual sun god festival in ucsd, that loud noises, alcohol, and eight human beings per square meter is not really my definition of fun. call me agoraphobic, and i'll see big lightning splitting the sky and hear loud thunder roaring, and on the top of a mountain, similar to the one in the lion king, i'll see you getting rewarded the title master of the obvious.

i might have been working since 8am this morning, and might not have stopped until the library closed just fifty-three minutes ago, but i had fun today. not from the work i had to do, but from plenty of other things:

~ one slice of sausage pizza and one of cheese.
~ coffee frappuccino.
~ loop&loop music video i finished downloading last night.
~ not a raindrop coming down from the sky.
~ sitting at starbucks with my laptop, listening to asian kung-fu generation, and drinking another coffee frapp.
~ beautiful voice of younha.
~ pencil and sketchbook.

help yourself to some of life's simple pleasure, the great homer once said, and you know homer is always correct.

no, homer SIMPSON. not the idiot who wrote the odyssey. what the hell were you thinking?

we apologize for the inconvenience

this will be one of those OMGWTFBBQLOL moment.

if you have not read, or thought about reading, because obviously that's one way to start off the first verb, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series, i suggest you pick up a copy and start reading them.

and if you've read the first one, go pick up a copy of the restaurant at the end of the universe and read through that one, sentence by sentence. and after that, pick up a copy of life, the universe, and everything, and do the exact same thing you've done with the restaurant at the end of the universe. and after that, pick up a copy of so long, and thanks for all the fish, and do the same thing you've done twice. repeat the procedure, which by now you should already be aware that it is rather repetitive, and therefore will no longer be repeated, because then it will be redundantly repetitive, and that's... well, not a good thing, for mostly harmless, which is the last book of the series.

i myself finished so long and thanks for all the fish just exactly fourteen minutes ago, and was extremely pleased to finally understood god's final message to his creation. on my way back to the dorms i was contemplating whether or not i should spoil it here for you who are too lazy to go through four books to find out what it is, and exactly seven minutes ago, which you should add two minutes from the last time i mentioned something along the same line about the time when you are calculating backwards in order to find the exact time this happened, because two minutes have gone since then, i decided not to. why not? well, to quote the book,

there is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

god's final message to his creation is, or rather doesn't, of course, address what the universe is for and why it is here, but because i had gone through nine minutes of thinking, throughout which also included changing into sweatpants and setting up my powerbook so that i could blog this, and finally came to a conclusion that it is as equally significant, it would probably be for everyone's best that i do not spoil it, because then god would instantly change it so that people would still have to pick up a copy of the book in order to know what it actually is, and that would waste my effort of trying to tell you what it actually is.

that is part of the reason, but mostly because i am perfectly aware that nature hates me and tends to always screw things over and that something similar to the following might happen:

and then, one thursday, nearly two thousand hears after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. this time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

that was how the first book started. it then continued on with

this is not her story. but it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

it is a very intriguing way to start a book, in particular the fourth book which i had just finished thirty-one minutes ago, with the exact same two paragraphs, or rather, the exact same first paragraph, since the second was elaborated to inform the reader that the terrible, stupid catastrophe was that the earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, but then continued on with

this is her story.

douglas adams is an excellent writer. i have always been befuddled whenever a random online form asks me to fill in my favorite author, since i've never actually had one. jonathan swift usually comes to mind, but that's because he's the only one i could remember from senior english class in highschool, and never gets picked because i hated his stupid satire. that, and the fact that it is a rather hard thing for a foreigner who had never been confronted with the english language for more than two days a week, one-and-a-half hour each day, to have to read his modest proposal and write an essay on it. alexander pope comes to mind next, but people often mistaken him with one of those old men from vatican who has got nothing better to do than to shepherd a herd of imbecilic catholics, or so they say, so he never gets picked either. then isaac asimov comes to mind but gets flushed down the toilet almost instantaneously because i have never read any of his artificially intelligent book. george w. bush is next in line, but then the brain dumps three hundred fourty two megabytes of error messages saying that he is not an author, has never written a book, is not capable of writing one, and in fact, is not capable of writing at all.

then the train of thought stops there because the brain rather obviously crashes for not being able to cope with the extremely, remarkably, and utterly absurd thought of george w. bush attempting to write. it is so extremely, remarkably, and utterly absurd, in fact, that the brain once threatened to retire and teleport itself to a happy little peaceful life inside the head of a turkey if i ever thought about such a thing ever again.

but now it's different. the brain can live peacefully inside this small head because there will no longer be any absurd train of thoughts. not ones concerning george w. bush and books, at least. i have now found my favorite author, writer, philosopher, or whatever in zarquon's name you want to call him.

and for those more critical human beings who, on every possible waking moment, always go through what the first book claims to be the three distinct and recognizable phases, those of survival, inquiry, and sophistication, otherwise known as the how, why, and where phases, i will elaborate as a respond to the inquiry phase.

because first of all, quadruple-compounded triple compound sentence is an ingenious sentence type to use in any piece of literature which main intention is to create a flabbergasted look on every reader's face and make them re-read the entire paragraph at least three times, even though the paragraph only consists of one sentence.

inserting a statement such as "the previous sentence makes sense. that is not the problem." a little past halfway into the fourth book to implicitly inform any reader who have not noticed that such a sentence type has been used over and over throughout all four books is another story which i will not digress into for now.

the statement above, of course, refer to the previous sentence, which is of the type that i have briefly describe two paragraphs above and, by itself, makes up half of a short paragraph at the beginning of chapter twenty-one. it goes like the following:

the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is, as has been remarked before and often accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing. it is, essentially, as the title implies, a guidebook. the problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizable number of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.

and two lines below the statement goes: read through it again, and you'll get it.

the second thing that will further address the inquiry phase is of course, the infinitely majestic digression that almost every single long paragraph in all four books possesses.

the third that will justify douglas adams' supreme position as my one and favorite author, the way arthur dent justified the supreme position of the towel in the list of the most useful thing to take with you when hitchhiking round the galaxy by putting it over his head so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing, is his ability to insert the best, non-cheesy romance scene i have ever read, in a book that is full of bizarrely non-sensical things, and to start such a scene with almost a whole page of satirical comment on english sandwiches. refer to chapter twelve of so long and thanks for all the fish, and you'll understand why i think it is by far the best romance scene a novel can have. also read chapter eleven to understand what lead to such a well-written romance scene, and chapter thirteen and fourteen for the nature-influenced conclusion of such a well-written romance scene.

i am a physics major, a third year undergraduate, and if there's anything i've figured out about nature, it is that it always manages to screw you over.

but if there's anything i've further realized about nature, it is that it upholds the old saying BALANCE OF NATURE extremely well.

so long,

and thanks for all the fish.

WHOP!

it is a known fact that careless talks cost lives, but the full scale of the problem is never greatly appreciated.

for an instance, when walking back from eating a late dinner consisting of eight wontons in a noodle soup, i glanced around at the quiet atmosphere around me, then up at the clear night sky, then at an empty bus passing by, and finally said to myself: "i think i'm quite content with my life right now," three thousand four hundred and twenty five butterflies in china died, fell to the ground, and got washed away by the blowing wind. then somewhere in the south pole, all the ice melted, creating a huge wave that dragged thousands of helpless sleeping penguins all the way to the coastline of brazil, where they eventually died not because of the stroking heat, but because they did not have money to buy brazilian icecream.

this is somewhat similar, although clearly not as massive, to the fates of the vl'hurgs and g'gugvuntt after discovering that the source of misunderstanding that led to the most devastating war between the two races was a human being named arthur dent, whose careless talk "i seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style," got carried away by a freak wormhole into the galaxy where these two races lived, and decided that they would launch a joint attack on our galaxy, which was positively identified to be the source of the conflict. a terrible miscalculation of scale, however, caused the mighty ships that had traveled thousands of years through the vast, empty space to end up being swallowed by a small dog, obliterating the entire battlefleet.

i went and bought life, the universe, and everything at the bookstore today. no, not literally. it's the third of douglas adams book, and the one that cracked me up the most of the first three that i've read. it was so bizarrely amusing that i decided not to go back to the lab after lunch and treat myself to an early friday by spending the rest of the day reading the book. bistromathics is beautiful, and i definitely need to get the ultra-complete maximegalon dictionary of every language ever because i really want to know what flolloped, flurred, glurried, gupped, willomied, and floopy mean.

trying to learn how to fly isn't hard. i mean, arthur managed to do it. the only trick, or knack to this is learning how to throw yourself to the ground and miss. the former is easy, but the latter is rather hard. once you are able to do this, though, keep in mind:

do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. they are most likely to say something along the lines of "GOOD GOD, YOU CAN'T POSSIBLY BE FLYING!"

it is vitally important to not believe them or they will suddenly be right.

also, if you are particularly amused with the whale scene from the first book, you will find out why the bowl of petunia said "oh no, not again," as it popped into existence and fell down from the sky. who would have thought that the bowl of petunia could hold a grudge against arthur dent? here's a spoiler on what the petunia claimed to have experienced at that moment:

i got yanked involuntarily back into the physical world, as a bunch of petunias. in, i might add, a bowl. this particular happy little life started off with me, in my bowl, unsupported, three-hundred miles above the surface of a particularly grim planet. not a naturally tenable position for a bowl of petunias, you might think. and you'd be right. that life ended a very short while later, three-hundred miles lower. in, i might again add, the fresh wreckage of a whale.

a bunch of awesomely bizzarely nonsensically hilarious lines from this third book, which has now become a personal favorite:

~~ none of these facts, however strange or inexplicable, is as strange or inexplicable as the rules of the game of brockian ultra cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. a full set of rules is so massively complicated that the only time they were all bound together in a single volume they underwent gravitational collapse and became a black hole.

~~ wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. after a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting

~~ the unsteadiness of building's flight made him feel sick with fear, and after a short time, he took the towel out of his bag, and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitchhiker round the galaxy-he put it over his head so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

~~ the party and the krikkit warship looked, in their writhings a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and ceertainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying. (this one managed to keep me laughing like a madman for a good ten minutes or less)

~~ zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, decided just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.

~~ he hoped an prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. then he realized that there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.

oh, the salmon of doubt is tomorrow.

happy birthday to columbine, if she happens to be reading this.

diagonal frame, third panel down

my life is a comic book, i swear. this happened today. LITERALLY.



from jorge cham's AWKWARD PLACES TO RUN INTO YOUR ADVISOR. now go worship his comics.

i don't know if i should be sad or happy, now that i realize that my entire life has been somewhat comical, and will be somewhat amusing if made into a comic book.

photonic wind

finished restaurant at the end of the universe yesterday. a wholly remarkable book, just like the first one. where else could you find an elevator that insists on going down when you want to go up? no other book has managed to make me laugh out loud while sitting at starbucks enjoying a cup of coffee.

my 21st birthday is this november 7th. so if you're thinking about getting me something, i suggest you this:



besides, it's only a mere $870. all you need to do is get 870 people to pitch in $1, and send the chair to 3425 lebon dr #934, san diego, CA 92122. then you'll have the self-gratification of having made my year of 2005 complete.

ah, how i love good chairs. when i have my own house later on in my life, you can be certain that my first priority is to get a comfy chair, a comfy couch, and a comfy bed.

doubledecks

three bombs exploded in london's subway system today. then another one exploded at the back of a double decker bus. so far thirty-seven people are confirmed dead, and hundreds other injured. if you know anyone who live in london, or just a big fan of british football, right now would probably be the best time to ask if they're okay.

be careful with public transportation. the US is also a member of the G8. it would not be a surprise if we get a follow up attack. let's not have a seven-eleven, shall we?

on a side note, WOMEN: if you're aware that you just put on a lot of make up and perfume, please. TAKE THE STAIRS. everyone knows how bad the ventilation inside an elevator is. and if your perfume was able to neutralize the body odor of that unknown fat sweaty guy who was in the elevator with me earlier today, you were definitely wearing TOO MUCH perfume.

i paid $8 for a copy of the restaurant at the end of the universe. any book that starts with a two-paragraph intro that goes like this:

there is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

there is another which states that this has already happened.

and a chapter two that starts like this:

like all vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed. the unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protruded from it at unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships, but in this case that was sadly impossible. uglier things have been spotted in the sky, but not by reliable witnesses.

in fact to see anything much uglier than a vogon ship you would have to go inside it and look at a vogon. if you are wise, however, this is precisely what you will avoid doing because the average vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born-or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the vogon had never been born.

in fact, the average vogon probably wouldn't even think once...

is bound to be an awesome book. read away.

on philosophers

i feel obliged to share this from the great hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy book because it reminds me of my roommate david who quit his molecular biology major and switched to philosophy and music.

a sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew open and two angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and belts of the cruxwan university burst into the room, thrustind aisde the ineffectual flunkie who tried to bar their way.

"we demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men elbowing a pretty young secretary in the throat.

"come on," shouted the older one, "you can't keep us out!" he pushed a junior programmer back through the door.

"we demand that you can't keep us out!" bawled the younger one, though he was now firmly inside the room and no further attempts were being made to stop him.

"who are you?" said lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. "what do you want?"

"i am majikthise!" announced the older one.

"and i demand that i am vroomfondel!" shouted the younger one.

majikthise turned on vroomfondel. "it's all right," he explained angrily, "you don't need to demand that."

"all right!" bawled vroomfondel, banging on a nearby desk. "i am vroomfondel, and that is NOT a demand, that is a solid FACT. what we demand is solid FACTS!"

"no, we don't!" exclaimed majikthise in irritation. "that is precisely what we don't demand!"

scarcely pausing for breath, vroomfondel shouted, "we DON'T demand solid facts! what we demand is a total ABSENCE of solid facts. i demand that i may or may not be vroomfondel!"

"but who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged fook.

"we," said majikthise, "are philosophers."

"though we may not be," said vroomfondel, waving a warning finger at the programmers.

"yes, we ARE," insisted majikthise. "we are quite definitely here as representatives of the amalgamated union of philosophers, sages, luminaries, and other thinking persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off NOW!"

"what's the problem?" said lunkwill.

"i'll tell you what the problem is, mate," said majikthise, "demarcation, that's the problem!"

"we demand," yelled vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not be the problem!"

"you just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much. you want to check your legal position, you do, mate. under law the quest for ultimate truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. any bloody machine goes and actually FINDS it and we're straight out of job, aren't we? i mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a god if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

"that's right," shouted vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

suddenly a stentorian voice boomed across the room.

"might I make an observation at this point?" inquired deep thought.

"we'll go on strike!" yelled vroomfondel.

"that's right!" agreed majikthise. "you'll have a national philosophers' strike on your hands!"

the hum level in the rooom suddenly increased as several ancillary bass driver units mounted insedately carved and varnished cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give deep thought's voice a little more power."

"all i wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculation the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything." he paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before continuing more quietly. "but the program will take me a little while to run."

fook glanced impatiently at his watch.

"how long?" he said.

"seven and a half million years," said deep thought.

lunkwill and fook blinked at each other.

"seven and a half million years!" they cried in chorus.

"yes," declaimed deep thought, "i said i'd have to think about it, didn't i? and it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. everyone's going to have their own theories about what answer i'm eventually going to come up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? so long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life. how does that sound?"

the two philosophers gaped at him.

"bloody hell," said majikthise, "now that is what i call thinking. here, vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?"

"dunno," said vroomfondel in an awed whisper; "think our brains must be too highly trained, majikthise."

so saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door and into a life-style beyond their wildest dream.

david, you know what to do now. forget med-school, man. it's all about being a philosopher.

ole!

this article sums up everything that is so great about european football.

i remember crying and laughing and running all around the house at 5am, right after solskjaer slotted the goal that sent the champions' league trophy to old trafford.

and this



sums up everything that was once great about chelsea. gianfranco zola, roberto di matteo, gianluca vialli, ruud gullit, mark hughes, dennis wise, frank leboeuf, ed de goey.

then the sexy football was taken away and replaced by a monotonous, tactical football designed to provide victory, not entertainment. this is the moment the beauty of english football fell apart.

SnapS

some pictures from minnesota, especially for mom, dad, and my sister at home.



window in the dorm room. imagine how cold it must have been in winter; FOUR THICK LAYERS OF GLASS. i wouldn't be surprised it it were bulletproof, too. in sandiego we have two thin layers that you can break by simply spitting on it.



stairsteps down to the riverbank. a place to avoid at nighttime because some idiot thought it was a good idea to have the water sprinklers on the right water the left grass and vice versa.



riverbank. you can't see it but behind those trees is the river. THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER. and no, this ain't a good place for a picnic. the only ones enjoying the picnic will be the mosquitos.



coffman memorial union. don't ask about the history of the name, or who the hell coffman is. all i know is that the $280 lunchmoney for the 10-week period can be used here. starbucks, deli, pizza, hotdogs, and burgers. the bookstore is located here, too, so i guess this place is sorta like ucsd's price center.



the river. yes. gross. apparently the closer you get to the river, the number of mosquitos increases exponentially. in conclusion, besselJ function will not work as a solution here.



standing on the bridge across washington avenue, looking east. this is the direction i head towards when foraging after 7pm. starbucks, village wok, harvard market, erbert&gerbert, dairy queen, applebees, espresso expose, chipotle, and more food places that i've never been to because they require me to walk more than 3 blocks.



same bridge, looking west. tall buildings on the right is downtown minnesota. the bridge-like thing on the left is a bridge across mississippi.



a building which name i can't remember right now. supposedly a place for gathering, and a place for tons of highschool students to hold their graduation. the first two weeks here, there was always a graduation ceremony every evening.



tate lab of physics. this is where i go to every day at 9, and this is where i leave from every day at midnight. for the first 3 weeks, at least. after that i decided that the library is a better place to crash.



mississippi river, north of the bridge. yes, that is where we dropped sam. or at least, where we would have dropped him.



same river, south of the bridge. nothing interesting, really. it's just a damn river. and it's not even BLUE.



the bridge that connects eastbank and westbank campus.



a building on the westbank that looks like the head of AT-AT from starwars. supposedly a science/engineering building, but i could really care less.



parking structure on the west bank. is it just me or this thing looks like a mcdonald's playground? all they need now is some slides and tunnels. and little kids.



westbank. and no, that is not the chinese restaurant i visit almost every night. notice they still have powerlines here. in sandiego all the powelines are underground. apparently the old SD mayor got too much bird crap on his convertible because of birds hanging out on the powerlines, so he ordered all the powerlines to be replaced with underground cables and all the birds flew to minnesota for refuge.



some funky looking street on the riverbank. thought i'd take the picture because it looks funky.



the "lab." i would call it an "office," but then it's not exactly one either. that's the computer named "minos-pc2." it's athlon powered, don't remember the exact processor speed. dipu sits there occasionally, but he wasn't there that day, and that is why you see my powerbook sitting on there.



another angle of the "lab." computer on the right is "minos-pc1" where jeremy usually sits, and the one on the left is "marshak." the marshak is assigned to me, but pentium 2 400mhz is so slow i almost gnaw my legs off. so when the lab is filled with grad students, i sit there, but i don't use the computer. after all, i have my sweet little powerbook with me, why would i need a PC running linux?



still the lab. that is the couch that i claimed to be mine because no one wants to sit there anyway. recently it's been giving me back ache because i slouch there all the time, so i move to marshak. good quality couch for napping. i would just sleep there every night if it weren't for the mosquitos. you can see my brown folder and my favorite orange pencil on the desk. also my umbrella on the other desk.



last shot of the lab. on the far corner is two fridges, a microwave, and two coffee machines. the fridges smell and they look gross, but not as bad as our fridge back in la cima. you know a fridge is beyond help when you have to hold your breath, close your eyes, pour half-a-bottle of rubbing alcohol all over the inside, toss the bottle in, close the door, then run outside for fresh air. i wonder if sam ever found out what the greenish goo sitting at the bottom of the fridge is?

the microwave has a piece of paper taped on it that says DON'T FORGET TO DO A PI RADIAN ROTATION EVERY 30 SECONDS.



the art gallery. i know this is art, but what kind of an idiot would design a building covered in metal plates? that looks like a retarded, rejected version of superman's fortress of solitude. the only aesthetic value it's got is the one that's been flushed down the toilet.



THE WOK! best roast duck ever, good wonton soup, reasonable price, open until 2am. a college student could not ask for more.

LOOP&LOOP

the few days spent to download a zip file containing 60-something songs from ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION was definitely well worth it.

LOOP&LOOP is a really awesome song to listen to while walking from point A to point B. point A and point B being any arbitrary point on earth. kimi to iu hana is also another one that has become a personal favorite. if you happen to come across any of their songs, i recommend you check it out.

ASIA ENGINEER is releasing their ETERNAL POSE single CD this july 27th. i have pre-ordered mine from yesasia.com, so you should too, if you like one piece's ending #15. if you are too cheap to order one, then you'll have to wait until i convert it into an MP3 file and host it in the blog. and that won't happen until i get back to san diego, which is around the end of august. so far there are 14 ending mp3 singles and 4 opening mp3 singles hosted, so feel free to download until i run out of bandwidth. please leave a message saying that you stopped by to download some shit. that way i can tell whether the 220 hits/day average is from people who are utilizing this blog, or from people who came here by accident.

i am contemplating whether or not i should make a website for my comics. people have been telling me to do so, and so far the only thing preventing it is my laziness. but now i'm seriously thinking about it, since i really have nothing to do after i come home from lab. i have accumulated about 20 or so comic strips, and i think the number is sufficient for them to qualify for having their own website.

this way i'll get a headstart on an alternate career as a mangaka if i ever get dropped out of college or grad school.

another problem is a name. i need a website name, but i want something completely and entirely random. one that will make people go "wtf does that have to do with anything?" so far the considered ideas are:

www.dot.net
www.dotdotdot.net
www.submesonicbrain.net
www.e57124575.net
www.uweiyhasdifhb.net

the last one, however, is no longer considered, because it is too hard for even myself to remember.

then again, i am a procrastinator who holds the creed dearly, so we'll see how far this gets before i call it quit because there's too much work to do.

mr. L. prosser

oh how i love this book.

"i'm afraid you're going to have to accept it," sair mr. prosser, gripping his fur hat and rolling it round the top of his head; "this bypass has got to be built, and it's going to be built!"

"first i've heard of it," said arthur, "why's it got to be built?"

mr. prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped and put it away again.

"what do you mean, why's it got to be built?" he said. "it's a bypass. you've got to build bypasses."

bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. people living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. they often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.

mr. prosser wanted to be at point D. point D wasn't anywhere in particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from points A, B, and C. he would have a nice little cottage at point D, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of time at point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. his wife of course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. he didn't know why-he just liked axes. he flushed hotly under the derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers.

o the digression. douglas adams is amazing. such a digression is something even the driscolls cannot do.

doctor jones

sam called to complain about kevin and i dropping him down the river. he was worried that there might me sharp rocks at the bottom.

now i feel obliged to continue the story.

kevin and i weren't actually THAT bad. we decided to go help sam out since he was too wasted to swim back to the shore, but we did not want to jump in and drag him to the shore because the river was uber-gross. sharp rocks, however, weren't something that should be his main concern.



sorry, sam. you're fucked.

by the way, don't tell me there's no alligator in mississippi river. i am PERFECTLY AWARE of that. let's just say that i like to do things that nature does not.

DAI

finished downloading TPR's DO AS INFINITY ARTIST SPOTLIGHT. it's a one hour and fifteen minutes worth of music videos from the do as infinity. the MVs being played consists of:

for the future
boukensha tachi
shinjitsu no uta
yesterday and today
we are...
under the moon
tooku made
rumble fish
rakuen
heart
desire
tangerine dream
raven
hi no ataru sakamichi
fukai mori
mahou no kotoba ~would you marry me?~
under the sun

ah, i've almost forgotten how great and emotional DAI's MVs are. i almost cried watching tooku made for the god-knows-how-many times. and mahou no kotoba was hilarious. never thought ryo would actually be that wacky. and van-chan just looks as pretty as ever in a wedding dress.

van-chan, marry me?

from beijing with love

watched stephen chow's FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE yesterday. too bad there was no subtitle, so i didn't really quite understand the storyline, but just like every single stephen chow's movies, some scenes are just hilariously funny even without knowing what they're talking about. and some scenes get really funny once you kinda figured out what they're saying.

this is one like that that i feel obliged to share. click to enlarge if it's too small to read:

CONvergence

my first convention ever. i've never been to one, so i did not really know what to expect. in the end i just ended up wandering around like a newbie, which i was. but there is always a first time for everything, and now i know what to expect whenever i go to another convention, and i know what to not do to not come out looking like an idiot.

much thanks to kitsune-chan and her mom, who provided me with a ride to CON. =)

the main reason for me wanting to waste three green pieces of paper with the number 20 on them, is james kakalios. he's a UMN physics professor whose recent work on analyzing the physics in comic books made him famous. that is, according to him, something that even his 100+ scientific journal publication could not do. we really should all just go into the entertainment business.

his book PHYSICS OF SUPERHEROES is coming out on september 29th. i am definitely getting it. i think professor barbara jones might also be interested in this unconventional teaching strategy. it wouldn't hurt if i made an oral report about this when i get back to UCSD.

i don't know since when an anime is considered a science fiction, but there was an anime showing. got a chance to watch the first 5 episodes of ONEGAI TWINS, which, aside from all the cheesy, typical shoujo anime jokes and lines, was quite remarkably hilarious. a typical shoujo series would have a guy as a main character, and would have AT LEAST five different girls falling for him. well, take that and add a GAY guy falling for the main character too, and you get onegai twins. not everyday would you see a gay character in a shoujo series (unless it's a yaoi shoujo, which case leave me out of this), so that was a pretty slick, totally unexpected yaoi twist. props props. mina was cute, too, but that's an entirely different ballgame.

also got to see an episode of COMIC PARTY, which seems rather lame at first, but in the end it seems like it's got a good potential to be quite an entertaining anime series after all. a story about a few highschool students in exploring the world of doujinshi is somewhat promising, and i'm somewhat tempted to start a doujin myself, but then this comes to mind:

procrastinator's creed #10: i shall always begin, start, initiate, take the first step, and/or write the first word, when i get around to it.

add this to the one above:

procrastinator's creed #12: i know that the work cycle is not plan/start/finish, but is wait/plan/plan.

and you have a perfect recipe to never start anything. i hold the procrastinator's creed dearly, so don't expect anything.

some of today's spoils include four laminated posters:
__ natsume maya and aya from tenjou tenge.
__ chibi naruto, jiraiya, gaara, hinata, iruka, sakura, rocklee, kakashi, pakkun, a strawberry cake, a chicken leg, a christmas tree, and that one ungrateful brat sasuke.
__ skuld, belldandy, and urd from ah! megumi-sama.
__ the entire mugiwara kaizoku-dan on a grassy cliff.

three bumper stickers:





the third will be a gift for david. i can't think of anyone else more appropriate to give it to. the first two are mine, of course, because those are pretty much what i tell myself everyday.

a new chopper plushie:



and last but not least:



oh yeah. i love toys. now how the hell am i going to bring all this shit back to california?

t3h 3v1Ln355

if you did not see this coming after the silhouetter with ipod, you deserve to be horsewhipped, just like me. i did not see this coming either. the idea just popped up when i was trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with a 5000-line code writen by a guy with a PhD. apparently he didn't know that division by zero is INFUCKINGDETERMINATE.

anyway, 373 came out, and these villains are getting quite despicable. well,... just lucchi actually.but before they get so despicable i won't even want to hear their names, i thought they deserve some luvin.

you know how in some movies, the evil characters always have their own theme song? jaffar in aladdin, scar in lion's king, the evil witch in emperor's new groove, kim jong il in team america... well, the CP9 deserves one, too. a DISCO song. so pick some random disco song... any should fit. hopefully.

and yes, blueno CAN'T dance. so he's just jumping around like an idiot.