Still tired from the video game symphony at Wolf Trap and midnight dinner at the Silver Diner. (That reminds me: screw you, overpriced Disney restaurants! For over $20 per head for lunch, I expect a truly immersive 1950s environment, replete with anti-Communist rhetoric. McCarthyism throwback, anyone?) I hoped to pay obscene amounts of money ( Read more... )

Mainstream America doesn't often see quiz bowl in raw, uncensored form. Though readers of this journal may occasionally be subject to tournament standings or points per game statistics (as a friend once said when declining to hit on a certain opponent, "I think he prefers girls with a bigger PPG"), a jargon-filled summary is no substitute for the ( Read more... )

There is a couple getting married that wants encrypted messages engraved in their wedding rings. How romantic!

I miss school. I think I might appreciate it more when we all return to academia in the fall.

eta: Follow-up on the encrypted engravings.

( Books read: )

• Is there a more sophisticated expression of the Monkeysphere? I wonder whether it has any academic basis and whether there is any significance behind the idea of having such a limited sense of humanity.
• Vista == OS X. Oh, Apple.
• Art gives you catharsis. That's sort of spiritual in a secular way?

This list is subject to revision.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons by Kurt ( Read more... )

Advisor Guy approved my prospective schedule for next fall. Note the Shakespeare class.

Emilie and I are promising ourselves that once we finish this programming assignment, we're going to purchase a chocolate voodoo doll and chop it up violently, then melt the chocolate and have fondue with strawberries.

There are children ("Little people," as my matrix algebra professor would put it) and their parents invading my campus for college decisions. I tried to sit at the campo for a little while, but a herd of middle-aged women walked by while I was half asleep, driving me to take shelter in the University Center. I used to be mildly afraid of white ( Read more... )

I was just reading an article about these two video game music tours in Wired this morning, and I got an email about Wolf Trap's summer offerings, including Play!

Now there's a reason to be near DC this summer.

Tries are cool. Jokes about tries are not.

I enjoy terrible jokes at least as much as the average CS student, but there are limits to a person's sanity.