Today is my last day of work.

Next week, I’m back to school.

Three entries in three days. Yay.

I could have gotten a GMail account a long time ago. Being a nerdly person myself, I have a handful of nerdly friends who started using GMail back when it first came out. They offered me invites right, left, and centre, and every time I would refuse. I was, after all, quite content with my deirdrakiai.com e-mail address kindly provided by Dreamhost.

Now, GMail is ubiquitous. You can get invites from anywhere, almost defeating the purpose of a small elitist beta-test in the first place. (Some say they might just do the invites forever, to track down spam and that sort of thing.) And, when everyone’s doing something, I tend to try and stay away from it, being the true non-conformist I am. (For example, I developed severe allergies to Hotmail around 1999 or so, and haven’t touched it since.) Therefore, you’d think that I’d be strong enough to resist the GMail hype. Well… you’d be wrong. I caved into the pressure last night.

But wait, there's more! »

So, last night, a friend shows me Potter Puppet Pals (here and here), and then I remark that hey, I used to know the guy who made that! (over the Internet, though. Not in person.) As it turns out, Trapezoid used to be a regular over at the SCRAMM forum, where I frequented circa 1999-2001 or so. (SCRAMM, for the ignorant, was an adventure game engine that never ended up being released, most likely because it was WAY too ambitious a project.)

Want proof? Thank you, archive.org! (Mind you, you can’t really click on any of the links to the individual messages. If you’ve got a lot of spare time, you could always sift through some of the ones that ended up being saved. By the way, I’m Squinky, just so you know.)

Trapezoid then went on to become an Internet celebrity who made a lot of funny Flash animations, and I went on to… finally finish Cubert Badbone. Whoo.

As for other people who frequented that board… Trumgottist and Erwin (whom I used to always confuse with Erkki) have gone on to be fellow SLUDGE developers, ComradeNarf has been doing voices for Project Joe (last I heard, anyway), Stacy made SLUDGE tools that are now hosted by yours truly, and Brand X (you can’t see any of his posts here, but he’d always sign them with “Long time reader, nth time poster” and that was funny) became MrColossal and now does loads of cool AGS stuff. I still wonder what happened to Neole, KS, WorldMaker, Outrageous Evan Courageous, and - oh, what the hell - James Slaughter himself.

Well, since people were getting confused about the new replies to the interactive story being on a separate page, and since I’m too lazy/inept at PHP to remove the text box from all but the last page, I decided to do away with the separate page thing altogether. Now there’s a lot more scrolling to do, but at least this way, people will no longer be confused.

And yeah, that’s about it. Except for the fact that I’m tired and I have a cold.

Yesterday, I wrote a poem called No One’s Friend. I’m quite proud of it. It’s in iambic pentameter and switches points of view. Whee!

I also added a “Friends and Hero Worship” section to this blog, in which I have placed links to various blogs I read. If you’ve got a blog you’d like me to put on this list, let me know.

Oh, and I want to buy one of these, but they’re SO EXPENSIVE. But they’re also going to be SO RARE. And since I do a bit of knitting myself, I recognize that they are SO HARD TO MAKE… but I dunno… $150 (US, mind you) for a stuffed two-headed baby? *goes crazy*

…actually, I just checked, and I can’t even buy one, because they’re out of stock. Oh well. Now, I want to learn how to knit wacky stuffed animals.

This just in: Terry Pratchett hates JK Rowling! Or at least, he complains that she thinks she’s trying to subvert the fantasy genre when in fact, she really isn’t.

I agree with this; however, despite the seemingly obvious evidence that Harry Potter is a fantasy series, I’m not quite sure whether that is true. Sure, it’s got wizards and witches and magic, but that, to me, is not the focus of the story. In my opinion, Harry Potter is a teen soap opera with elements of fantasy thrown in, and a well-done one at that. I enjoy reading it, but for different reasons than I enjoy reading actual fantasy novels. However, I feel slightly guilty because I also think the series is overhyped, but that’s a different story.

But wait, there's more! »

So, what am I up to these days, anyway? Well, for one thing, I seem to be getting back into Dance Dance Revolution. (I was, of course, very obsessed circa 2001 or so, but then got tired of it.) Someone, a little while ago, showed me Flash Flash Revolution, which led me to download StepMania, which I currently play with my fingers and am quite addicted to. Now, I wish to play with a dance mat in order to get at least a little exercise from such an addiction. A little exercise couldn’t possibly hurt a computer geek such as myself, after all.

I’ve also been watching anime. I have discovered that Sailor Moon in its original Japanese form sounds way cuter and way less irritating than the English dubs I used to watch ten years ago. Strangely enough, I wasn’t a big fan of anime ten years ago, as bad English dubs were all I had been exposed to. However, the advent of high-speed Internet and access to such gems as Cowboy Bebop and Full Metal Alchemist has certainly shifted my opinion for the better.

In other news, don’t forget to contribute to the interactive story! Remember: if you’re getting tired of the current one, you can always take advantage of the rare privilege I’m giving you to start a new one. Also, if you’ve always wanted to try the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure form of interactive storytelling, Tim the Furnish of Hungry Software fame recently put up a new SuperStory. I’d definitely suggest checking it out.