Hellbent

playing video games in blue jeans

that's all I'm saying.

white chocolate, dark cacao, and some other stuff. Incr-edible.

xorceror: My new neighbor freaks me the fuck out.
Chesterules: he hits on you?
xorceror: No.
xorceror: He looks like he was an extra in Deliverance... he drives an old pick up truck that is filled with garbage. He's been there 3 days and has yet to unpack anything. No furniture, no kitchen table, NOTHING. There's a small folding chair in the middle of the room.
xorceror: He's got red lights in his apartment.
xorceror: And he stands at his sink all day.
xorceror: When I go out for a cigarette, he turns his head slowly at me.
xorceror: WHAT THE FUCK.
xorceror: He sends chills down my spine.

My mate and I were driving to get some dinner and he's like "let's check out this new grocery store" so we take a right turn off the main road and follow this plaza drive which goes a bit before getting to an isolated parking lot for this one store, Aldis. It's very hard to see from the main road and the fact that it's set away and by itself was a bit strange. There are only a handful of grocery stores where I live and I know them all pretty well, so I was like.. where'd this new store come from? never heard of it.. weird. We go inside and as we enter we see a poster on the door advertising $23/hr manager position. The aisles are strangely minimalist and there are cardboard boxes everywhere with food in them. There's hardly anyone in the store... no one is at any of the cash registers. A man with a distant, isolated expression on his face pushes a floor cleaner around the store. Fruit is stacked on cardboard boxes. A container of grapes rests haphazardly and half opened. There's hardly anyone in the store (did I mention that already?) The few people there seem a little too ordinary and comfortable in this strange place. Are they really part of the same town? Are they even part of the same universe? I can't tell if I've entered into the future or the past. Even the attractive lady with nice legs seems to have a veil of doldrum about her. The prices seem really low. We go up to one of the referidgerator doors to get some milk and as I pull out a gallon of rBST free whole milk for only $3.19, I see a giant, unlit, cold, industrial and completely empty concrete room behind the minimalist milk shelf. Giant fans are blowing on the far wall facing me.

We get to the check out line and James notices there are no plastic bags. Only empty cardboard boxes near the entrance to the checkout line. We grab some and while I've always been in favor of reusing cardboard boxes to plastic bags, the whole setup feels very cheap. We start asking the checkout girl where the store came from. Apparently it's only been here since December. It's owned by Trader Joes but until recently was only in Germany. I mention that the store has a very temporary feel to it. The cashier gives me a quick look like I'm way out of bounds "temporary..." she odles. I then ask if she thinks the store will be around very long. She's quick with her affirmative response: "Once we open a store, we never close it. We've been opening about two stores per week."

She gives us instructions on how to return our grocery carts. Give a quarter, get a quarter back.. or something. I didn't fully understand the process; was still trying to get my bearings on how we suddenly stepped into the Truman Show.... James isn't able to figure out how to chain up the grocery cart to the rest of the carts. I give it a try--clip in the dangling clip to the one in front, and we go back to my car, very bemused, but eager to get back to the real world.

I am writing a letter to the parole board for a friend's early parole. Can I write he should be granted early release because the justice system failed him? or is that just not okay? What if the unanimous consensus among his friends and family is that he was granted too harsh a sentence?

it's a bit tricky, because my friend has no fear of the law, and this is the reason he got in this mess (as I see it anyhow). Should I delicately acknowledge this fact about him, while stressing that outside of his uneasy relationship with the law, he is an upstanding and outstanding individual?

This should probably be thrown up on the mount washington thread, but it's buried somewhere :D

my youtube channel has 666 views.

Also, three tourists climbed over the fence and fell down this waterfall. One of the three people slipped and fell into the river and then the other two went after her and all three went over the falls and are presumed dead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQpHGO9CQf0#t=40s

jump to 40 seconds in the video.

Yesterday was interesting to say the least. I got to work at 9am and worked until 4:30am today and the boss served up margarita drinks at around 1:30am. We were trying to get the 'soft finish' done on the book she has been working on for over five years (I only just joined the project recently). During the day severe storms were forecast for western Massachusetts (where I live and work). At around 4pm tornado watches were posted. At around 5pm tornado warnings. So we're trying to get this thing done, and there is this tornado threat looming and we're tracking these intense dopplar radar super cells on our smart phones as they charge toward us. At around 5pm or so a tornado (or two or three) ripped through the countryside and third largest city of the state (Springfield) 20 miles south of us. A friend's house was hit. The tornado and its destruction is front page news on http://news.google.com (or it was at around 11am.) www.csmonitor.com...What-are-deadly-tornadoes-doing-way-up-in-Massachusetts? I'll post a video of the twister soon. 200+ people were injured. It was the worst tornado to hit the state in 16 years. The last one ripped through my hometown of Great Barrington (60 miles west). "The last killer tornado in Massachusetts was on May 29, 1995, when three people died in Great Barrington, a town along the New York state border. The victims were in a car that was tossed about 100 feet away." http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/28108539/detail.html

Read more: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/28108539/detail.html#ixzz1O8iIiGD1

At around 3:45am we watched the International Space Station, its arms tilted just so to catch the light and appear almost like a UFO sailing through the night's sky. I earned 44 hours of work in 19 hours (including a $250 bonus). It was an exciting day.

Maybe for some the loud obnoxious whine of the lawnmower is a signature sound of summer, but for me I will not miss it. Imagine a world where the only sound going by your window is the whir of blades slicing through the grass. This is the future sound of summer.

when you're feeling blue, does music make you feel better?

i don't have tv and just was wondering what interesting things I've missed out on in the last year or so. What's good on the bube tube?

I bought an iPhone battery replacement kit and started prying the iPhone apart at the wrong place. I'm wondering if I could have damaged the speakers at the bottom of the phone. I pried beneath the chrome instead of between the glass and above the chrome. Later I did it correctly and replaced the battery. When the iPhone was put back together (I actually had a sciency friend do most of it for me) the speakers on the bottom of the phone were no longer working. These are the speakers that work when the phone rings or when you watch youtube videos. The speaker at the top of the phone when you are talking to someone works fine.

The headphones do work, but not the speakers. This website said that this is a fairly common problem, but the fix doesn't make sense in the context of what I've done to my phone. Any idea of the likelihood that I damaged the speakers or how I might fix them?

Last night in chess, I goofed and Ben's queen skewered both my rooks. There was nothing I could do to save both of them, so I positioned my bishop to A6.. (damn, I should have taken a picture) .. so that it'd be in position to pressure his king, which hadn't castled. My queen also had open floor to the king. In my offensive haste, I forgot that my king would have to deal with check after he took my first rook, allowing him to take my other rook! (which had just taken out a key pawn of his). I thought the game was done. But my bishop and queen were giving his king such hell. I had dispatched of his key pawn to protect his king, so there was nothing he could do about my bishop. I wasn't able to checkmate him, of course, since he had two rooks and a queen now protecting his king. But despite this immense power, I was being such a nuisance! My pawns and maybe a knight were positioned such that my king was well protected. It was an unconventional game in that he took one of my bishops early in the game to cause stacked pawns. I kept putting him in check. Started moving one of my pawns for another queen. He finally got an opportunity to pressure my bishop out of there, and put me in check with his queen, but my bishop was prepared for this and moved in front of my king to threaten his queen. He was so exacerbated by my bishop at this point and had such a material advantage that he took my bishop with his queen! He failed to take into account that his king was blocking his rook to my advanced pawn's landing square for Queening, and that he would not have enough time to prevent it. He resigned.

It was sheer astonishment and amusement that my bishop could have caused him so much grief that he'd sacrifice his queen to get rid of it--never seen such absurdity in chess before. I've likewise never seen a bishop be so powerful.

Why do I love the sound of children's voices in unknown games
So much on a summer's night,
Lightning bugs lifting heavily out of the dry grass
Like alien spacecraft looking for higher ground,
Darkness beginning to sift like coffee grains

over the neighborhood?

Whunk of a ball being kicked,
Surf-suck and surf-spill from traffic along the by-pass,
American twilight,

Venus just lit in the third heaven,

Time-tick between "Okay, let's go," and "This earth is not my home."

Why do I care about this? Whatever happens will happen
With or without us,

with or without these verbal amulets.

In the first ply, in the heaven of the moon, a little light,
Half-light, over Charlottesville.
Trees reshape themselves, the swallows disappear, lawn sprinklers do the wave.

Nevertheless, it's still summer: cicadas pump their boxes,
Jack Russell terriers, as they say, start barking their heads off,
And someone, somewhere, is putting his first foot, then the second,
Down on the other side, no hand to help him,
no tongue to wedge its weal.

I never knew there existed trees beyond the borders of cities!"

On Feb 7, 2011, at 4:55 PM, Jason Root wrote:

Hi Professor Harris,
Thanks for the great semester (and Beowulf class). I was wondering if you might have my final paper from last semester (or my final paper from Beowulf, Spring 2008)?

Thanks,
Jason

------------------------

Hi, Jason,

Definitely your most recent paper, but probably not the Beowulf one. I won't be in this week or next (I'm on paternity leave, and the baby arrives on Friday). The easiest way to get your paper would be to leave a big manilla envelope with your name on it in my mailbox. When I come in to school, I'll fill it with your paper, and put it back into my mailbox. You can then check periodically to see if it's there.

How's that sound?

SH

On Feb 8, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Jason Root wrote:

Okay Harris, that sounds fine. ...and congratulations!

Jason

------------------------

Sir, you really need to work on your email etiquette. If I didn't know you better, I'd tell you to go jump in a lake. --sh

[edit]clearly I need to play more doom and spend less time in the social sphere.

the girl i am writing about--i don't even want to be her g/f i just want to be her friend. I mean, I'd consider dating her, but she has a b/f.

So I met her in a class at an all girls school (cause where I go to school there is a 5 college consortium where anyone from those 5 colleges can take classes at any of the other 5 colleges). We had lunch, bought our books, hung out at the museum--were getting along well, were fooling around more than getting work done--left the museum, waited for the bus--her bus came before mine, but mine would also work for her, so she waited with me for mine--finally we went our separate ways. Next day we went to a geology talk together. She enjoyed the talk, all seemed good. The next day we had plans to go to another talk. I decided to go down to her school to meet her there and ride the bus back with her. It occurs to me that she wouldn't necessarily call me or text me when she got out of her class, but rather once she was on the bus up to my school. So I text her where she's at, and she's on the bus--I then realize I don't have enough time to get back to my school (sorta lost track of time--her school has awesome food) so I call her and she seems maybe slightly agitated that I call her right after she texted me that she's on the bus--tell her i messed up and i will be late for the talk, but that i can give her directions where to go to get to the talk (since it's at my school). she said no worries, she's with a friend from my school and he's going to the talk with her.

Okay.. that was kinda weird--I mean we talked about going to the talk together... so.. what's with her going with her friend? She said she'd save me a seat, but there was no way of me getting over to where she and her friend were sitting without interrupting the talk. so i found the nearest seat i could to be as unintrusive as possible (incidentally the next mass email for the next geology talk stated "be prompt!" grrr). After the talk, we very briefly talk about the talk, she introduces me to her jock friend, and she mentions having somewhere to be and splits; i'm like okay... whatever.

Next day or so we end up texting back and forth about nothing important, music, geology, classes etc... she says she's taking a really cool course on ..the NonHuman, about what disgusts society most. I ask her if her professor allows sit ins. Long pause on her end of no reply... my roommate and his girlfriend both think that was not a smooth move.. I don't really get it, something about following her or something... WHATEVER. She finally replies "Most likely not. There are like 20 in the class." She then sends another text switching the conversation back to music.

The next day she texts me letting me know classes are cancelled--we text some more about what we are going to do with our days off... it ends me with me asking her if she knows any good places to go glade sledding since she said it was awesome. She says Nope.

Later that night around 11:30pm i send her a text asking if she wants to go sledding tomorrow. The next day she replies "sorry, I'm busyyy". Then a few hours later texts again: "Oh that text referred to today, I spent the night at umass [my school] and didnt' check my texts" --now i'm pretty sure her b/f doesn't go to umass. so where did she sleep over? I suppose she could have a good friend that goes there--but that struck me as kinda odd.... She also didn't mention if she was actually, then, available to go sledding. I just replied "oh, haha" and didn't ask if she was available since I had to be somewhere.

We don't communicate for 2 days.

Then she sends me a text "so seeing as you have been over 21 for awhile and I am just shy of 20..."

I call her and we discuss it and she opens the dialogue with "just so you know when i turn 21 i am not going to buy people alcohol--what if something were to happen--what if you bought me alcohol and I died!" After she said this, I gave some thought to whether I should support a freshmen party in this way. Finally I decided I would, but first asked her what was in it for me. She said I could come (to the party) and I was like maybe... but she said it wouldn't be fun--bunch of freshmen guys from umass who do crew. I took this as her way of saying she didn't really want me at the party. So I asked for $15. She said okay. To protect myself, she agreed (and actually suggested) to come all the way up from her school to my apt which is like an hour bus ride. This way her and her friends could load up their backpacks and not attract any attention. I welcome into my apt, show them the booze--they work out the money between them.. and a slightly odd thing happens: she says to her friend "give him 85" -instead of to me--that just struck me as slightly odd... if you are going to give me $1 and change less than the agreed amount (the tab was 71 something) shouldn't you say to my face "is 85 okay?" Anyway, her and her two crew boy friends (one of them from the talk the other day) say g'bye, and she says 'see you monday' not offering me to come to the party, but still cordial.

My roommate saw the whole transaction as low on her part--that I was used (even though I made an easy $14). It also bears to note she bought me lunch the first day we met since I had no cash on me, which I paid her back for.

My roommate thought I should press her on the point that she wasn't inviting me to the party after providing her the bulk of the alcohol for it. I was going hiking/extreme sledding early the day after her party, so I didn't really want to go to it anyway--but when the weather was looking more like rain/sleet than snow, I texted her letting her know I'd be able to come to her party.

She replies: seriously?
me:Yeah, why not
her: "idk I just didn't think you'd be interesetd considering it's just me babysitting 12 guys from Umass...
Correction: freshmen guys. There's a reason I went to an all womens school"

okay.. this is just retarded. She told me the first day i met her how she doesn't like the grovelly nature of freshmen guys.. and now she's inviting a jury's worth of them to her party? to babysit them? Like.. umm.. what?

me: I don't follow the last part [about reason she goes to all womens school]
her: I went here to avoid being with freshmen guys, I'm making a joke don't laugh i'm not funny.
me: Hahaha, failure on my part. I don't mind freshmen guys, as long as it's not really just you and twelve of them :P
her: "Yeahhhh it might be like that for a good portion of time...."

All this time my roommate is reading the convo and saying she's full of it--the party is going to be a rager--she just doesn't want me there....

A little later she changes the subject again: do you think the prof will like me if I argue hip bones NEVER EXISTED on the platycarpus?

I reply saying I haven't worked on the lab, but if you support it fine--
her: Haha oook. So come tonight if you want but I can't promise it won't be awk... im already stressed it will be arrg
me: you need some *girls* there too, otherwise it will be.
me: Ahhh... ageism.. wait, what? [yes, I actually sent these last 2 texts]
her: idk I hate organizing these things it stresses me out

now.. in retrospect, I think she was telling the truth, but my roommate wasn't buying it at all--so I text: "i'm trying to feel out the real reason you don't want me at your party" [damn... shouldn't have listened to my roommie!]

her: It's going to be mad uncofmortable for all people inovlved and I don't even want to do it anymore!

me: why?
her: why what
me: Why will it be uncomfortable?
her: because a lot of my female friends might probably flake shortly after we've begun.
me: are your equally concerned with the welfare of all the other guys too? [my roommate actually sent this text, not me]
her: what do you mean? the guys are here for sure
me: Why would the guys stay if all the girls leave? [that was me]
her: well my bestie and prolly another are spending the night
me: well your pad is pretty big, I can just crash on the floor.
[beat]
me: .....kidding.....

I then call her she doesn't answer. 15 minutes later she calls back, was on the phone etc... explains to me in what to my ears sounds very sincere about the whole situation... that there is another party near her dorm and she's afraid that people will only come to her party for a short period if at all (her girl friends I guess). Says she meditated that morning and realized she can't wait for the whole party to be over with.. that parties at mt. holyoke are more personal--where everyone who attends gets introduced--that she wouldn't be able to spend much time with me... (...12 freshmen guys...) there was probably some other stuff in there as far as her explanations went... she asked me if I was kidding about sleeping over--I said yes of course... she said she was having her boyfriend over next weekend and that one of her guy friends said he'd be sleeping over--she was like, "no way!"

The next day I did my extreme sledding and skiing (with none other than our very own Magicsofa).

So given this excruciatingly detailed account, do you think she just doens't like me or was using me for alcohol? (I personally don't think so). What do you think the real reason was for her not wanting me at the party?

Yes, I prefer minutia detailed blogs about my life to doing homework.

been watching back to back to back episodes of "6 feet under" this evening (well, the tv is playing them and I am working on dtwid). Someone said "hellbent" and "knee deep in human waste" in the show (in different episodes). It's an okay program (oh no, now someone is crying).

Last night around 1am the fan for the fireplace went on. I asked the others living in the house if they turned it on and they said nope. Although there is one other person I need to ask. But no one would have any reason to turn it on. My friend who lives next door said he saw a ghost on his bed when he went to sleep last night. I have been getting 'attacked' from time to time by ghosts? ... something... when I go to sleep at night. It feels like my body (and mind) are being taken over for a period of time and I have no control over my body and very little over my mind--i have to struggle each time this happens to regain control... it's sort of like trying to wake up from a bad dream. I suppose it happens about once a week. I've described it elsewhere on the forums as night terrors.

can't sleep cause i'm the unwitting victim of a mild second hand high; (I think just pot, but definitely inordinate amounts of second hand cig smoke). I can't really explain how I am feeling. On the one hand it's hardly noticeable, and on the other my brain pops my eyes open through a strange floating wakefulness (like an air bubble that is forced to the top) whenever I close my eyes to go to sleep. If the air bubble would sink to the bottom, that would be falling asleep--but since it floats to the top, that is remaining awake despite the desire to fall asleep.

I don't feel stoned, just slightly off in a completely novel and dissociated sort of way. Drugs are so weird and always give me the experience of having my mind flushed down the toilet (oh gno where did my mind go give it back!) No really, that is just the awful beginning of an excruciatingly trying journey through madness, through nihilism, through nothingness, beyond void: in the vacant space where my mind was is replaced with from the murky nether a very strange, unreal, incoherent, vacant, broken, foggy, fragmentating, inconsistent, inpenetarable, bottom drops out, ininterpretable, onious, shattered, skipping, stuttering, slipping away, falling, surreal, voidful, vacant, unreal, memory-failful, bending, imploding, floating, splitting, falling, shattering, ADD to the umpteenth power, degenerating, fragmentating, Groundhog Day looping reality that leaves the "me" who is experiencing this without my mind and without myself--just a mindless void experiencing a scrambled and broken program of utter incoherence to the point of catastrophe of being. It all adds up to some awful nightmare that is so inexplicably impossibly WTF that I freak the fuck out in excruciating crisis of being. I don't know why people do them or how they can possibly enjoy them, let alone to the extent that this mad house was doing them earlier. Thankfully my friend kicked out his brother and all his friends (there were a lot of them). Pot et al. is so awful.

Newark is under a blizzard warning.
Southern New England to get 1 to 2 feet of snow.

My sister got greenlighted to direct a feature length movie with a $7,000,000 budget!

:) go sis!

My roommate just asked me how good at doom I am.

Me: "I'm good. Not great, but good. For someone who has been playing doom for as long as I have, I'm good."
Tardo: "How can you be good at doom? It's such an old game. It doesn't require any skill. There are newer more sophisticated games that do. How can such an old game require any skill?"
Me: "I wish I had a mic right now so I could record the monumental retardation of this conversation."
Tardo: "I can understand in new games how you can need skill, to stalk and whatever. But Doom is such an old game and simple game. What can possibly involve any skill?"

In other news, I want to make a thread where I can just bitch and moan to high hell and say whatever the fuck I want. I feel like going on a long rant about all the stupid shit in the world and the faggity people that piss me off and how I hate all the stupid shit that is piled high all around me. I think I am just bitter for still being sick. But I am just in the mood to blow off huge quantities of steam. To be as insensitive and inconsiderate as humanly possible. Do you ever feel like just going off and not exercising an iota of self restraint? Wouldn't it be nice? To just go off on how Technician is such a fucking twat? Or how I secretly loved that Kristus wound up in Losers shortly after telling me to stop posting? Feel free to use this space as a shitting ground. Go on! Tell me how much I suck or the rest of the world sucks and how you wish I'd die a horrible death in a vat of acid. We spend our whole lives acting in a civilized and restrained manner. Sometimes we should be able to just say the fuck whatever we want. There should be a single day of the year set out just for this purpose. I say December 11 is as good as any. I want to hear your unchecked wrath; your vile hatred and disdain for all that is shitty. Don't hold back, let the world have it.

I dreamt last night that a moderator PMed me offering me a moderator position, because one of the mods had been acting like a turd and lost their privileges. And I was wondering what the hell I did to earn the opportunity for such a position. I think that's the first time I've dreamt about doomworld. How the fuck is dreamt not a word. God I just want to kill the stupid.

In other news: I did a youtube search for "hilarious video" just now and this was the first result. Yesterday I went on my blog to post something and saw I had a new follower on it. It was the guy who posted all the pics that are in this video. i find that kind of strange. Especially since yesterday I debated posting a blog about the guy's photos, but didn't bother, and then the next day I run into him again!

Finally! What I've always wanted!