Too tired to think

An observation: If you stay up too late once then it will be a little hard to get up in the morning, but otherwise you won't be too badly off. If you stay up too late twice in a row and still force yourself to get up, you'll be sleepy and grumpy the whole day. If you just keep on doing it, you end up completely unable to think or function, except in a kind of zombie-mode where you can't get very much done. You end up compensating by falling asleep in the middle of the day a lot, and generally you end up miserable.

One guess as to which mode I'm currently in.

Another April, another Anime season

It's that time of year again -- it happens about four times a year, actually. Yup, another Anime season is upon us. Not that I have ever actually mentioned this before, but I happened to be paying attention about when the first fansubs started to hit. The Japanese TV season resets about four times a year, and the shows come out in 12 or 13 episode blocks to match it. And because I haven't updated in a couple days, I thought I'd give a rundown of the current interesting-looking ones. These are approximately in order of coolness, according to me.

1. Utawarerumono, literally "that which is sung" or "he which is sung." This show reminds me strongly of Scrapped Princess, which is the main reason for the number one position on this list. Today's picture is a shot of Eruruu, the cute and vaguely furry female lead. She also has a tail, which makes for occasionally exploited and highly odd fan service. The actual story seems to involve some kind of trapped demon apparently waking up in a man's body with his memories missing. We're introduced to a few characters and given a tour of a peaceful village in the midst of a war-torn country. I give the village three episodes of survival, tops.

2. KIBA is a show about teenage kids growing up in a cyberpunk nightmare city. Zed, the lead character, is a delinquent kid who is forever getting into trouble for smashing doors down with a hammer. His best friend and student body president is endlessly bailing him out. Zed actually seems to have pseudo-magical super powers, blah blah blah. It's the same old storyline with some fun twists. It's well drawn, though, and great for those of you who like futuristic sci-fi-like stuff.

3. Disgaea is a quirky Anime based on a quirky game. It starts with an over-the-top cute angel girl who shows up to assassinate the king of demons, who died of choking on a dumpling before she could assassinate him, but it took her two years to figure this out... and so forth. And just when you think it's already pretty strange, who should show up but Flash Gordon. I'm not even kidding. The closing credits music is strangely addictive.

4. Air Gear looked okay. It's kind of a fantasy sports anime about powered roller blades that can go a million miles an hour. For some reason, this also allows you to fly, jump fifty feet vertically, survive jumps off of tall buildings, etc. Kids are going to try this at home and they are going to DIE. Animation quality is good, so it's kind of fun if you like sports anime about non-existent sports.

Oh, .hack//Roots is also out, but I haven't seen that yet. It might be awesome, it might not. It seems to be modeled after .hack//Sign, and if it's as good as that (but maybe with some fighting?) then it could rock. .hack//Sign is still the best music to come out of any anime anywhere; it's a pity the story took such a terribly long time to get anywhere.

Plays, surprise parties, and a braai

Today's picture is of my constant companions, the desk toys. These little guys are what my fingers do for most of the day. It turns out that programming is about 20% typing, 10% compiling, and 70% sitting around cogitating the mysteries of the eternities (with special focus on the mysteries of How To Fix This Bug). For the 10 and 70 percent portions, these desk toys are terribly handy. They're magnetic, and can be arranged in multiple interesting ways.

In other news, I've had a birthday. I feel slightly older. There are several funny stories associated with this, although none of them are very funny, so please keep your expectations low.

The first one starts on Wednesday, which is usually when we have DDR. My siblings had the wonderful idea of throwing me a surprise birthday party. This really was a wonderful idea, however the intial execution left something to be desired. To start with, they locked me out of my apartment. I don't know what they were thinking here. "Hey, it's his birthday, let's try and make him as furious as possible!" is a pretty near hit. Anyway, someone finally let me in, and I walked in to find Cavan and Clarissa sitting on the couches. After a few seconds, it registered that there were balloons on the floor. And dead silence. Now, I don't know about you guys, but at most surprise parties I've been to, the idea is to yell "surprise!" loudly. The purpose of this is to make the surprisee jump, burst out laughing, something. So while I figured out that I was being thrown a surprise party, it took a few seconds to sink in.

Other than that, it went well. They had lots of very good but diet-destroying candy strewn about, some fun decoration, and they actually got me something I wanted (!) as a gift. The latter is by far the most impressive. So kudos to the sibs on that one. That's also the first time anyone's actually thrown me a surprise birthday party, which also makes it fun.

Nextly, I kept getting treated to trips to the theater this past week. I went to the Three Musketeers at the Gaslight Theater in Tucson, which was hilarious. You get free popcorn, table service (pizza and burgers and things) and you get to boo the bad guys every few seconds. There's a saloon-style piano going much of the time, and the occasional sing-along. It was a ton of fun. On Thursday my little sister took me to see Arsenic and Old Lace at BYU. Other than getting a little antsy from having to actually sit still for a couple hours (I don't do "sitting still" very well unless there's a computer in front of me), it was beautifully well done and the jokes were excellently timed and performed. I was laughing through much of the production, even having heard it before. On Friday, I ran off to see a exclusive play at the Hale theater. The play was written by Ruth Hale, and was about her father. It was their first night and had a couple rough spots, but if the actors can iron those out it'll be a cute production. I took a date on that one, which was also fun.

The family did a braai for Sunday dinner, which was divine. I am a huge fan of our particular style of potato salad, and the boerewors was amazing. Hurray for South African grub! It's a pity the stuff is so bad for you (although the way we did the potato salad was actually pretty good, healthwise ... I think I'm going to try that again).

That's all I've got folks, and it's getting late.

Labels, autism, and Refrigerator Poetry

Today's attached image is of a bunch of refrigerator magnets. You've probably seen these before -- you get hundreds of little magnets with random words on them. If you arrange them properly, you can sometimes get something resembling meaning. This is quite difficult to do, which makes them fun to play with.

There is an unusually large collection of such magnets on the fridge where I'm staying -- perhaps two or three hundred words. There were entire swarms of little nonsense phrases. I made up my mind to try and make a rhyming poem with fridge magnets. This is no small task -- even if you can think of a rhyme, it won't work unless you can find it. It took a little over an hour, and what I managed is what you see in the picture. It isn't good poetry, and it's not particularly meaningful, but it rhymes and I'm proud of it.

Today, we visited a friend of a friend's house for lunch and a conference session. This involved lasagna and coconut cream pie, so it was a happy thing. The family has three little boys, who are cute and cuddly. One of them is now two days old, and is cute in a seven-inch-long kind of way. The oldest is a four-year-old who is fascinating to play with. He's autistic, which makes it tricky to talk to him. He clearly does know quite a few words, and he understands quite a lot, but he's reluctant to use the words he knows. He's cute and likes being tickled. He can also assemble a mean puzzle -- his mom dumped out a hundred piece puzzle for him (this kid is four), which sent him into intense concentration while he assembled the first fifty pieces, making very, very few mistakes. It's fascinating to see a kid of four picking up and immediately placing pieces in a puzzle that size without breaking stride. He did get bored and give up about halfway in, but it was a pretty big puzzle.

It got me thinking a bit about the words we use to label each other and ourselves, though. We tend to pick labels for ourselves and then live up to them. People label themselves as "autistic," "ADD," "depressive," "OCD," or "deaf." These are mostly negative labels. Their good side is that they make you more likely to get or accept help; on the bad side, I think they sometimes create a self-image of being flawed or incomplete, and I think that it's wrong to believe this. I think everyone has mental and physical weaknesses of all different types and difficulties. Some are visible, and some are not. Some of them are labeled, some are not. If you've acquired a label you don't like, escape it!

On the other hand, I think people use labels positively too. Like, when somebody decides that they want to take up a career in engineering; they make the label "soon-to-be-engineer" and then they live by it. Once they believe the label, it helps them get past the problems right in front of them without giving up. Things like super-tough calculus classes or difficult certification exams are eventually conquered just because you're sure you can do it eventually -- you are, after all, a "soon-to-be-engineer." I think you can apply similar principles to religion, racism, nationalism, marketing & branding, networking, and a host of other things. We live and die by the way we label things.

That's enough of a rant for now. It's already gotten too long. Good bye for today.