Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Tyger's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, May 16th, 2008
3:23 am	"Hey! Yasr florb nard" or, "Why midnight film showings are a bad idea." I could really get into this Narnia thing.( Read more... ) All right, I'm tired now. However, let me just sum up by saying that with my current addled brain and limited film connoisseurity, this could be the best overall film adaptation I've ever seen. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
8:15 pm	UNTIL THE LAST STONE IS DUST (Comment on this)
4:04 pm	Random Thought of the Second Increasingly I am having dreams about going to school, a somewhat odd thing since it never used to happen when I was actually a student. Interestingly, they all take place in the present, and usually involve some very suspect scenario of some authoritative body deciding I somehow cheated them and haven't fully completed my education, compelling me to return for another semester. I believe this is basically wishful thinking from my hindbrain. Last night, though, the story was that I got into UT's graduate school and had just started there. It was detailed. I attended several classes, had discussions with the professors, did coursework, talked about it with friends, etc. Then I woke up in disbelief. Really? I didn't do any of that crap? On another note, I've developed a theory about the more realistic dreams I tend to have. I get the feeling that what's actually happening is that I'm tapping into another universe version of myself and watching, through the distorted tunnel vision of the mind, my alter ego's life. I wonder if once in a while some other I is dreaming of me? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2008
3:18 pm	Storytime, excerpt. No one is entirely sure what the Doorways are, or why they occur. Theories have abounded throughout history, various ones coming to vogue and falling from grace with the popular thought. As science marches on, those theories have been increasingly grounded in reality, yet none has sufficed to really explain the phenomenon. A current leading idea, though problematic, is becoming widespread with physicists today.( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
11:27 pm	Random Thought of the Second I hate the sound of people eating. It's not that I find it disgusting or anything like that; it's just really distracting, for some reason, and really pisses me off. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
1:17 am	Random Quote of the Day All matters and processes are connected, and the way in which they reflect one another may grant us deep insights. Thus, if you wish truly to understand a thing, study something else. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 28th, 2008
8:38 am	Storytime: The Floppy In the summer of ’96, the exact day I don’t remember, I was walking along some street– I don’t recall the exact one– and saw, on the edge of the road just up against the curb, an 8” floppy disc. Curious, I picked it up. It seemed fine, undamaged, not dirty, so I took it along with me. When I got home, I placed the disc in my computer and ran a virus scan. My computer, naturally, wanted to format. I told it not to. Content that the disc was probably not infected, I poked around inside. It was full absolutely, with not a single byte remaining. It was full of activities, games and puzzles, some complex, others childlike simple. Also there was a small video file, interestingly named The_Secret_to_Life. The video was encrypted, requesting a password in order to view it. I eventually found the readme.txt file which seems present on all electronic media these days, regardless of whether it has anything worth reading or not. What it said was this: Hello. Congratulations for finding this disc. Count yourself lucky for having done so, for not one in a million souls have this kind of opportunity. You’ve probably noticed by now the video file with the tantalizing name. Let me assure you, it is no trick, nor disappointment, but exactly what it promises: the final answer to the greatest philosophical question to plague the human mind since life began. Of course, you can’t verify this for yourself, can you? You’ll have to trust me. You won’t find your trust misplaced. For now, what you must do is to do the activities contained on this disc. When they are all completed, every one, the password will be revealed to you. Good luck, and have fun! I naturally assumed that this was a hoax, but some of the activities looked fun, so I found myself giving them a try. Some of the activities were easy. There was an image file, depicting a scrambled 24-piece puzzle, that I printed out, cut out and assembled. It was a picture of a street at night, with a streetlight figuring chiefly in the foreground. Another image yielded a maze, and I didn’t even bother printing this one, simply followed it with my finger to the end. I only got lost twice. Some of them were more complicated. There were instructions for a high-scoring variant of scrabble, to be played with four people ideally, which I still prefer to this day over the box version. Similarly, there was a variant of touch tag, which was so complicated that even when I finally found enough people willing to try it out, that everyone kept forgetting the rules and eventually the game ended with us all shrugging our shoulders and guessing that nobody had really one. There was a sudoku puzzle, which at the time I had never seen before, that gave me serious trouble. I worked on it for days off and on, growing increasingly frustrated, constantly rechecking the instructions I had found online to be sure I was doing it right. Finally, I gave up until I found a program online that would solve sudoku puzzles automatically; I put in the numbers carefully, pressed the gray [Solve!] button, and it promptly told me that there was no solution. Unconvinced, I went back to the puzzle, working on it for another day before I realized the program was right: the placement of the numbers made a normal solution to the puzzle impossible. There were two twos on the same line. I could have noticed that from the beginning and saved myself a lot of time. The scavenger hunt, likewise, took me some time. Some of the objects were so obscure that I knew I couldn’t simply go out and look for them. I found myself looking around wherever I went, lest there be a robin’s feather (did it count if the robin was attached? I wondered frequently), or an Alaska license plate, hiding in wait for me. In the process I noticed any number of things about my neighborhood and environment that I had never seen before; they had always been there, but I hadn’t been looking. I finished the scavenger hunt in about three months, most of that spent on a small handful of particularly stubborn items, one of which I finally had to get at an antique store, and which still lies on a forgotten shelf somewhere, just so I could call it done for good. But to this day, every once in a while I see something and think, ooh, a toy elephant, and have to remind myself that I don’t need it. It took me almost a year to do all the activities. For months at a time I would forget about them, and the disc, caught up by various other little things in my life. But in time I would find myself bored, near the computer, and the disc would catch my eye and I would think, hey, I never finished that logic puzzle, did I? or, wasn’t there a variant of hangman on there? and I would put it back in. Many of them were disappointments; some of the more involved ones were so unfeasible that they never really worked in practice, and simple left my friends confused as to why they had agreed to this in the first place. Others were fun but over with in a minute, while still others continue to entertain me from time to time even now. Some of them earned me friends in the doing; on a couple of occasions I actually lost a friend in an argument over rules or some such. Some of them were so monumentally stupid that I almost didn’t do them– except that somewhere in the back of my head was a promise that I was earnest to see fulfilled. Finally, there came the day that I perused the disc to find that I had done all the things on it. At first, I was surprised. Then I was doubtful. Surely there was one thing on here I hadn’t done. The word association game? No, I did that, I remember some of the silly word combinations my friends came up with. The mad lib? Yes, I remember thinking I would pass out from laughing too hard. The series of optical illusions? Makes me dizzy just thinking about it. Eventually I had to concede that yes, I had done everything on the disc. What an amazing thing. It seems like I had just started. Then, almost by its own will, my hand gravitated to the readme file and clicked. I was astonished to find that the text had changed. Congratulations. You are a persistent and easygoing person, it seems. Some of these activities were not easy, I know, but you did them. Well done! You should be proud. I know what you’re thinking: they were just a bunch of silly games. But that’s exactly the point. You showed dedication in doing them all, despite the seeming pointlessness of many of them. Now, I bet, you’re wishing you had more. Don’t worry. People are coming up with games like this all the time. Search the internet or your local bookstore, you’re bound to find something interesting. But that’s all for this disc. Sorry, all things come to an end and what not. You’ll live. At the bottom of the file was a password. I was immediately filled with a crazed, emphatic glee. A curiosity long buried in the deepest galleries of my mind was about to be satisfied. And maybe, just maybe, the answer to all my questions. Then I noticed the video file was missing. I looked for it a few dozen times. Yup, still missing. Define soul-crushing disappointment for me. Go ahead, try. I bet you can’t come up with a better example than I can. I recovered, of course. It was just a video, after all. From the file size, it probably wasn’t more than a few seconds long. What could have possibly been on there that was so important? And anyway- where did it go? Did someone delete it? Did someone come and mess with my disc? If so, did they just erase it for no reason or did they watch it first? Was there something on there they didn’t want me to see? Was this whole thing just a hoax, laid out by some scheming friend to see if I’d get taken in? But how could they have known when I was done? It’s not like I was keeping records. I pondered for a long time. Nothing made sense. It bothered me for days, a melancholy that made those around me wonder what was wrong. I couldn’t possibly explain. Even if I wanted to, there was something so private about the whole ordeal that I couldn’t really bring myself to ask for someone else’s take on the situation. I certainly couldn’t go around accusing people for messing with my files or hoaxing me. Eventually, I got over it. We deal with losses, it’s just how we’re wired. The small ones and the big. I went on with my life, took a few of my favorite games, left the disc to molder somewhere (I used to check it periodically in case the video mysteriously reappeared. At first it was every few minutes, then every few hours, every few days, etc. I still check it once a year or so). I wrote down the password on a piece of paper, and now keep it folded in my wallet. That, at least, has never vanished on me. Sometimes I check it to make sure the writing is still there. But even if I lost the paper, I would never forget the password. So I’ve gone on with my life. C’est la vie, I suppose, or something like that. There’s just one little detail in the whole matter that still bothers me, that I’ve never been able to square with. Not the disappearance of the video file; there’s a million things that could have happened with that. But after it disappeared, when I was looking for clues, I checked the file history on the readme.txt file, the one that had given me the password after I finished its challenge. It had never been altered. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
12:23 am	Mythos Bestiary: Sin Singer The sin singer is nearly indistinguishable in its appearance from a nightingale, though its markings are different, and in the wild varies little in behavior. However, the sin singer does not sing in the wild, even when threatened or searching for a mate; it only sings when allowed to roost on a living person, whereupon it will begin to sing, in a clear and almost humanly beautiful voice, all the sins of that person. Once begun, it will not stop until it finishes the list or is killed. If it is still perched when it finishes, it will begin again. The sin singer announces in what is known as Tongues- a speech that, though strange to any ear, is at the same time perfectly comprehensible. Thus, the sin singer can make its call to any listener, regardless of their natural language. Sin singers are greatly feared and avoided, and for good reason. They have been used to perpetrate inquisitions and 'moral purgings' throughout history, giving rise to towering reigns of terror that grew to inhuman proportions before the authority responsible for the crimes collapsed under the inevitable revelation that they were no more pure than anyone else. Superstitions have arisen around sin singers, the most notable being that they will gore out the heart of those guilty of certain sins. This story is frequently used to frighten children into behavior. The other common sin singer superstition is that they will defend to the death any person who has no sins on their soul. Since no such person has ever existed, such a thing cannot be verified. This creature is a class E threat. (Comment on this)
Friday, April 25th, 2008
7:15 pm	Random Thought of the Second I wonder what it means that I can jog and sleep at the same time. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
12:45 pm	Random Thought of the Second It has been said that for every person there is a star, and that their life is tied up in the life of the star. Certainly there are enough stars for us each to take our pick, enough that for every given human death, there must definitely be a corresponding star death, just as for every human birth, there must be a star birth. The law of averages demands it. These aren't the same stars, certainly, and never could be, unless someone managed to live for millions of years (some stars are that brief), but the congruity is there. The stars share innumerable similarities with us, besides the moment of life and death. In brightness (metaphorically), in beauty, in our nature as travelers and explorers of the universe around us, in our shared wonder of the incomprehensible majesties around us, we are all stars. And there is one other trait in which we are significantly alike; for the most part, we are not alone. The majority of all stars are bound up in a binary system with another star. They have, effectively, a mate. They encircle one another, each trapped by the other's gravity, in an inescapable spiral. They stand locked together for a seeming eternity, far separated from any others, together, unto the millennia. But all things must end. The ends of these star marriages match our own. Some drift away, over time, breaking free of their hold on one another to finally wander the emptiness, alone, seeking another. Sometimes they find another, sometimes not. Other pairings are forced apart by a death, one star bursting before the other, leaving the survivor alone, damaged, crippled, wandering. Others go together, joined in death as in life, their husks and remnants still circling tightly for many ages yet to come. And some of them are joined together into one. Their orbits decay, they touch, embrace, then force their way into one another, They merge. For an incandescent moment, they burn brighter and fiercer than ever before. Their light together is many times what it could have ever been apart. For a time they outshine all others of their class, and then they are gone, returned to the dust from which they came. We can all hope to endure such a beautiful calamity. (Comment on this)
Friday, April 18th, 2008
9:21 pm	Random Quote of the Day The only thing we ought NOT to fear is fear itself. Never be afraid of that. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 14th, 2008
9:04 pm	Random Thought of the Second The way I see it, writing is like copying off of a cassette tape. You hit play, and write down what you hear. But it's a wonky player, so sometimes the sound comes through real choppy, and you can barely tell what's being said at all, and sometimes its too slow, so getting everything down takes forever and you have to really concentrate, or its too fast and you keep falling behind what the tape is saying. And it's a dark room, so you have to grope for the button, and sometimes you hit the rewind by mistake, so you wind up with a part you've already heard, or you fast forward and miss a bit. Getting right back to where you started is a pain. And no matter how attentive you are, something messes up, or gets skipped, or there's a part where you just couldn't make out what the tape was saying, and you have to go back and listen to the whole thing again to try to fix the copy. Although, probably the tape is warped in the first place, because it never seems to come out perfect no matter how many times you run it through. (Comment on this)
7:57 pm	Random Quote of the Day "All right," she said, "I'll ask this, then: What is death? Really, what is it?" The Lord of Death cackled madly. "You're asking ME? I've been trying to find that out for a hundred thousand years. It's impenetrable, that inevitable decay that underlies all we treasure. All things end, becoming less than nothing. It's... an obsenity, a vulgarity, a rotten singularity that undermines our very existence. No, I cannot tell you what death means, only what it does." (Comment on this)
Friday, April 11th, 2008
11:25 pm	Random Quote of the Day "Do you really think I'm beautiful?" "One look at you, and Helen of Troy would defenestrate herself in despair." "Hmmm, that's fairly graphic." "Isn't it though? True romance is always a bit morbid." (Comment on this)
11:17 pm	Random Thought of the Second There is no such thing as pleasure; there is only pain that we enjoy. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008
11:18 pm	Random Quote of the Day "Never fear the dark, child, for it is equal to the light, in goodness and in beauty. For while the light provides, tantalizes, and distracts, darkness encloses, protects, and enshrouds. Better yet, it can be a force of great growth, for while the light reveals [things] to us, the darkness forces us to reveal them to ourselves. And know that the God dwells equally in light and darkness. Indeed, divinity is easiest found where light and darkness meet." (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
12:35 pm	Dream: I dreamt I strangled a girl. Granted, she was an apocalyptic zombie-raising evildoer, but still, a bit disturbing. Gave me a good story idea, though. Imagine hordes of zombies, but instead of rampaging through the American countryside, it's Victorian England. The zombies aren't your typical half-rotten brain-munchers either; no, they're living people being controlled, sharply dressed, clean, their hair intricately done, no obvious signs of supernatural tampering aside from the blank faces and the fact that they relentlessly attack any normal person who comes within earshot. They don't eat their victims, nor do the slain join their number. But they come back if you kill them. They never stop attacking or slow down, and the only way to permanently incapacitate them is to decapitate or mostly destroy their bodies, whereupon they sort of melt. Now, the legions move in 12 distinct yet allied groups, each controlled by a mastermind who retains his or her mental faculties. I'm guessing they've given up their souls to the devil or something in exchange for power. So, the storyline works in pretty basic video game parameters: kill zombies until you find their master and then dispatch him or her. This done, the controlled legions melt. Interestingly, the masters refer to their minions as "Jews." I'm not sure what that means. The main character (into whose head I've taken a backseat) is apparently untroubled by moral qualms, perfectly happy to lay waste to whole armies of the cursed to get to their controllers. Still, the penultimate endgame was disturbing. This is the part I remember most vividly, as I awoke shortly after. Having somehow lost my weapon, I'm forced to take a bit of string and strangle one of the masterminds, a young lady with an innocent-seeming disposition. The other remaining mastermind, a foppish young man, watches with, lets say, an erotic glee. After blocking her air ducts for far longer than it should take to kill a person, the other mastermind picks her up in a most gentlemanly manner and points out that unless I am able to separate her head from her body, no normal means of killing will suffice to eliminate her. It's just as I was casting about for a tool to meet that end that the dream ended. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
11:39 pm	Random Thought of the Second Why is it so hard to find laws online? Are they trying to keep these things secret? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
4:28 pm	Random Quote of the Day "He who knows he has enough is rich." -Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 21st, 2008
1:01 am	Also, does anyone want a cat? Female, calico, housetrained. Attention whore (moreso than a regular cat). (Comment on this)