Tonight is a big night in Kingdom of Loathing. The new, secret challenge path for Fall rolls out at 8:30 PM. The /hardcore chat channel will be full of laughter and roaring arguments and ingenious spading. On the exclusive channel for past champions, all the big players will be discussing who's going to dive in, who's going to sit it out, and who's ( Read more... )

Reading about LED lightbulbs. I'm so excited!

John has gotten his PhD! Rejoice!

I am so happy for him.

Now we are off to get sushi. (that's right, I'm in Boston. which you'd know if I ever updated here.)

Mike was supposed to have left for Austin earlier today, but it turned out that he wasn't able to get his car repaired and smog-checked in time. Over the next 6 hours he rented a U-haul, got his car hitched to it, and went from not having packed a single box to having everything he owned secured and ready to move. And now he's on his way. The man ( Read more... )

The freakin' loving kindness meditation follow-up paper. In late 2006, I asked Barb for funding to do a one-year followup on our meditation participants, to see whether they kept meditating and whether the changes in their lives were sustained. I had to do it on such a shoestring that I couldn't get anyone to write an automated email system, so the ( Read more... )

Oh my gosh! For the first hour, this workshop on doing scientific illustrations in Illustrator was seeming kind of worthless. The speaker's teaching a lot of valuable things that a layperson could only learn through awful, tedious experimentation with Adobe's bizarre-ass interface, but it turns out they're all the same things that I've already ( Read more... )

My god.

"In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation's drug issues ( Read more... )

Cloud cult was indeed awesome (they weren't quite double-secret-bonus awesome, but that's also affected by the energy I'm able to bring to the experience). I'm convinced that they -- or, you know, the aggregate persona expressed in their music -- have a vision of divinity that is very close to my own. Except that they're totally swimming in it, ( Read more... )

For the past 6 months or so, I've been having trouble reading. It's weird... I've always processed words automatically -- Looking at a sign and seeing what it says are a single, indivisible action. But lately whether it's a sign or a book or a computer, I have to concentrate for a second to look at it properly. It feels like my eyes have forgotten ( Read more... )

Yay!!