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May 11, 2005 /

You won’t be able to read this without an LJ account and a membership in Anti-Afflatus, but the mighty Riana has posted a brilliant sequel to Asuka.

Lessig and company have been saying this for so long people have forgotten about it, but this is exactly why it’s good to let go of the protection and restriction of full copyright: if you let people use your cool stuff without begging and paying and declaring intent, there will be more cool stuff than there was before.

Terza

May 11, 2005 /

Aahhhh, I can’t do it! I did manage to write this within the constraints I imposed, but it ends up too incoherent to be a real story, so I’m sacrificing the basic premise in order to satisfy the extra ones. That’s weak. Ergo this isn’t going in Anacrusis, but I’ll gladly dump it on you here, where apparently I have no standards.

I no longer think it’s possible to write a terzanelle in 101 words that’s still a good story, and I’m positive it can’t be done in meter. I’d love it if you proved me wrong.

There’s little to Terza but her frame.
She rolls. Nine sixes again:
at the Thousand-Year Club they’re all the same.

They gambled away bad luck, when
they thought they were wise.
(She rolls nine sixes again.)

When age dulled their eyes,
they’d gamble that away as well,
they thought! They were wise.

Terza chose to lose Hell
(she’d be different here);
they gambled that away as well.

Risk can’t be where fear
is not. Alone she’d be different; here
she’s one more clone.

There’s little to Terza, but her frame
is not alone at the Thousand-Year Club:
they’re all the same.

May 9, 2005 /

I have to run this query that returns a ridiculous result, at least two million rows, and output it to a file with Oracle’s little command-line client, SQLPLUS. I can’t get it to stop printing the results on the screen as it writes to that file, though, which means that there’s this endless speed-scrolling text in a big window behind my little browser here.

I feel like I should be telling my fellow superspies that “I’m almost done hacking the 256-bit upload! Activate the crypto-matrix cybertrap on my mark!“

BUT AT LEAST I WENT

May 9, 2005 /

I now know empirically what I’ve long suspected: the Infield is a vast and sickening waste of flesh, all of which would serve the world better as low-grade taco meat. I hate Derby.

May 7, 2005 /

Bee and Graham are here! We ate some tremendous meals and toured our favorite parts of Bardstown, which entailed me buying a lot of crap. One of those meals was my second time eating the Tierra y Mar, now called the Beef and Shrimp Diablo; I also talked Michael, Lisa and Graham into trying it. We unanimously agreed that it did not put the lie to my earlier ravings. If you are in Louisville and looking to find maybe the best single meal in the city, you need to go to the Mayan Gypsy and order the Beef and Shrimp Diablo with corn cakes and fried plantains. Get the goat cheese and black bean empanadas, too, and try the exceptionally rich chocolate mousselike cake.

I felt expanded in more ways than one after that meal: as if my consciousness were enriched, my senses stretched out and switched on. I felt taller. I felt really, really full.