slow down don't fuck with my high

[pipsqueaky]

I am trying to get over my general writing laziness and post more. But it's harrrrrrrd. All that effort! All that typing! Can't you people just read my state of mind through osmosis or something?

Okay, here's some self-motivation. Things That Have Made Me Happy Lately:

• Tomorrow night I will be in Seattle, with many awesome friends plus a bonus Puplet. (Actually, tomorrow morning I will wake up in Dallas, fly to Kansas City, continue on to Chicago, go to work, and then journey to Seattle. But I digress.)
• I am totally addicted to The Vampire Diaries, in all its cheesetastic gloriousness.
• Just finished the third book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and am starting on the fourth. I have not been this completely absorbed in written fiction in a really really long time. Martin's grasp of characterization is amazing, and every time you think you can predict what happens next, he throws a GIANT curveball (I nearly threw the third book across the room at one point). My theory from earlier still holds, BTW. I can't believe I'm going to finish this installment and then have to wait for the next one. No fair!
• I saw Mike Doughty in concert last Friday at a brand-new Chicago music venue, Lincoln Hall. Both the venue and the show were trés fantastique. (Although Doughty got annoyed by talkers in the audience at one point and actually stopped in the middle of a song to ask them to shut up. Heh.)
• While visiting with the fabulous f1renze in Atlanta two weeks ago (more on that later), we saw the BEST MOVIE EVER. Anyone who has not yet seen Whip It, starring Ellen Page and directed by Drew Barrymore, needs to go right this very minute. I'm NOT KIDDING. It has women being awesome and tough and smart and athletic and brave and caring and spunky, and it's like 2 solid hours of passing the Bechdel Test with flying colors, and Maeby from Arrested Development is in it and she has the most adorable friendship with Ellen Page's character, and Juliette Lewis is stunningly hot, and Flo and I kept turning to each other in the theater and flapping our hands and silently going "EEEEEEEEEE!" I want to see it again sooooo badly. I want the DVD NOW! Go watch, you will not regret it.
• Another wonderful movie I saw recently, this one a bit older: Imagine Me And You. Lena Headey and Piper Perabo as two unbelievably adorable women in love. Awwwww! And bonus Anthony Stewart Head as the slightly-daft-but-very-kind father.


• Geek Time: Last week a guy at my company gave a presentation on some music composition software he's been developing. It's called Noteworks, and it's not released to the public yet but it looks SO COOL. It's basically taking the concept of a visual representation of a song such as sheet music, which is arranged in a linear fashion, and expanding it to look more like a neural network or a directed graph. You can lay out a sequence of notes on the screen and have it loop back in on itself, or connect to other sequences; you can have nodes that randomly select which path to follow next so that the output is always new and surprising. Here is a YouTube video of how it works. I am probably not explaining it very well, but all you need to know is that the combination of music and programming and neural networks made my head go splodey with joy. (One other cool thing he mentioned was that he'd been using Noteworks as an outreach to deaf people, to give them a new way to interact with music, because it allowed for far more visual variety and beauty than traditional composition methods. I found that quite awesome.)
• All my smart vidder friends are doing vid commentaries (for, well, vid_commentary). Because they love me.