The “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” line actually comes from the third and mostly awful Godfather movie, which I still also look back at for its portrayal of the way I least want to die, but that fucker who I had been watching for the past few weeks pushed me over the edge by letting Lae’zel die while simping Shadowheart as his “RP” love interest. So much for my console abstinence—which was hardly a show of principle if I’m to be honest, and more stubbornness to remount the gear treadmill, both in-game and out.
I’m sometimes glad to be proven wrong—what am I saying, as a pessimist, I count on it—the mulefa and war with the angels weren’t unfilmable; I was only unable to predict that budgets for such spectacle would eventually be approved for the small screen. Not like me, too, to quote the books (“There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle”) and fail to make the connection to “Seen and Not Seen” from Remain in Light.
I’m also reminded how I found the series in the first place, from a co-worker whose church-arranged husband strung her along for just long enough to finance his business and obtain a green card. The spinster’s faith is surely unshaken: “L’absurde naît de cette confrontation entre l’appel humain et le silence déraisonnable du monde.” Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe
Work took me to a sparse apartment in one of New York City’s most dangerous neighborhoods, as evidenced by a crime scene right outside, but I felt fairly safe by staying inside with the door locked and lights on. When morning came I was joined by my team, a rag-tag group of folks, young and old, and one of them, a tall Kramer-type with a curly blonde afro, came out of the bathroom allowing me to go in next to shower and change for a final visit to the client today before returning home. I removed my pants, my only pair for the trip, and set them down but noticed there was water, no, urine pooled on the tile, and appalled as I was by the behavior of our resident hipster dufus, I had to prioritize drying them off in what little time I had. Dabbing it with a towel wasn’t likely to be effective, as wet as the jeans became like they had been submerged.
An excerpt from one of several pinnacles of the franchise, accomplishing in a single 45-minute episode what the new series cannot in two season-long arcs. Talk about boring! Fuck Akiva Goldsman, everything that hack touches is shit.
World’s gone to shit at the mercy of Blofelds who must not have left any would-be usurpers unattended with their attractive assistants (my single-line treatment for a Lex Luthor-centered film would be for him to be frustrated by the one he can’t just shoot dead), and I’m Vana’diel-ing it in Hisui this time, delighted that the Switch firmware had extended its Bluetooth connectivity to include headsets, though the immersion is not without effect upon my psyche: I dreamed of a new generation of Pokémon but for adults, which I suppose already has candidates, and one that resembled Team Rocket Jesse could read my mind by enlarging her anime eyes. Seems directing lascivious thoughts toward her prevented aggroing.
健-san says “Headsets are simply annoying”, and I totally agree with him, even for audio. At least in PlayStation Home everything was accessible from the controller, though even there I had to wonder what was the benefit of donning an avatar to participate in real-world simulations. If I wanted to see an exclusive movie clip, couldn’t I just click on a link without any of the lag? Unless they really think it’d be fun to kill 20 rats for the ticket? Were the emphasis on interaction than immersion, then again, I can’t see how that’d surpass what’s long been available to chatters or streamers to boost their presentations with all the hypertext and media the Internet has to offer. Recently I was trying to impress upon our Generation Z/Alpha scion the sheer amount of time we used to spend on voice calls with each other, limitations like busy signals and long distance charges, and the impacts from advances in technology, but despite as much as hemming and hawing may have added to our hours, our connections didn’t rely on emojis or canned memes. One might argue it was a communication golden age, similar to the art of letter-writing that came before, where the value lie in the effort to overcome the struggle to express. Seems to me struggling in VR will instead be to try to get something out of the pinnacle of human achievement.
I refuse the inevitability of contracting a virus whose spread is aided by selfish unmasked anti-vaxxer pricks and almost worse, people who know better but have accepted it, because they’re “tired.” Like those endless videogames of yore, there’s no tiring in the fight against intruder organisms.
And because I probably won’t retain any details about new dreams while I’m still holding onto this one’s, best.client.ever Wing was at odds with her management and while she argued with them behind a glass-doored meeting room, asked me to pick up her drycleaning, which consisted of a branded jacket and was marked on the tag “Very expensive.” She severed her ties and emerged, dressed in a long frilly coat and high boots, with curls like Japanese ne’er-do-wells from the 90’s. I can’t quite place the look—maybe it was one of the ガングロ-type girls the main character saves in オヤジぃ。—but it attracted immediate suitors whom I had to fend off before she got into my car, though I had no idea where to take her in DC.
I was reunited with old co-worker Laura Armijo, maybe because at the time she lived in Lakewood, where we went this weekend to cash in our Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards before they become worthless, and a roomful of Mark Malinski clones, all armed with automatic weapons, waiting for a signal to start blasting away at each other. Apparently we had the ability to restore our consciousnesses into new bodies, so death was nothing to fear, though I concentrated a few more times as if to upload the latest backup, just in case. All I had to make the best of it was to take her gun and give it a go, but before the activity began I succumbed to my doubts and backed out. I left the arena and took a seat at a student’s desk and played a holographic game on the tabletop with my hand, but Shining Knight whose presence I otherwise took entirely for granted approached and startled me by stabbing me in the gut, smirking as he retreated. For this I gave up sexy Wing?
As long as the virus isn’t transmissible through ingestion, bring on Soylent Green!
First dream of the year, at least that I can recall, was about a missing girl whose suitors seemed to care less about her mental health and whereabouts than their own poor experiences with her: David Barreiro complained about being led on, and another character I felt was based upon the Terry Silver baddie in the latest season of Cobra Kai (whose six hours or so I binged in half that time by skipping the through the new kid’s subplot) continued to pursue revenge wearing special clue-gathering spectacles. Me, I was looking for a Lego car I had left in her place, which I eventually did inside a box or coat pocket; it wasn’t a set piece but built with standard gray and clear bricks and carried some sentimental significance.
In the other, I had been married previously, twice in fact, and never formalized our divorces, though my last wife was decent enough not to make it a big deal.
Not so much the fear of seeing rocks, feeling them, petting them nor even being pelted or crushed by them, but walking across them, as we saw this morning: I was part of a team that seemed to consist of co-workers from both current and previous jobs wrapping up an onsite client visit to a warehouse. The manager there offered me one of their uniforms for me to wear next time, so I waited for him to fetch it for me while my party left for the car, and surprisingly through all the commotion at the end of day (as well as typical disappointment from my dreams), he came back with a new green/navy reversible down vest. It was cold outside and I put it on over my own coat, which was probably the hooded Uniqlo one I’ve been wearing around the house this month. My wallet and phone were in my back pockets, too, also unexpected since I usually lose them. The parking lot was way off in the distance from the building exit, past a ravine-like field which had to be crossed by rock formations along the edges. People were still coming and going, and to avoid one oncoming fellow I opted for a lower path to his left that I soon realized wasn’t going to get me to the other side as all the jagged boulders ran out and sank into the dark pool below. I leaped to an abutment to the side but it wasn’t stable enough to support my weight, gave way like rock shouldn’t and I had to grab hold of one flimsy attachment after another. Onlookers gasped while I relied on my pull-up strength to stay above water, but as I inevitably felt my butt submerge—no wonder I was left with my things—the lesson of this short segment dawned upon me, always to take the high road.
After the bathroom break, I was driving the XTerra again and exited off a freeway intersection into an elongated entrance to one of our gated communities. (Last I swear I saw Sylvilagus was along this path to CPE on an early lockdown run before the Asics mask, but surely my two signature bandanas was a giveaway…?) I asked John Chen if he wanted to be picked up, but he wasn’t interested, no surprise.
Update: Rained like it does here once a year today and during whatever is the opposite of sleight of hand that happens getting into the car (namely, the transfer of the contents of my back pockets to my front rather than sit on them, hindered by anything I’m already carrying, in this case a wet umbrella mid-collapse), my wallet fell into a puddle as premonitioned earlier. I picked it up out of the water quickly enough that the last of the paper inside would be unscathed, maybe because I knew I was better off it dropping than my phone, there was no pause for misery. It was almost comical, too, the first time ever in the drought-stricken Southland when I remember driving through Texas torrents that made the windshield look like aquarium glass, like the surfeit of silly storylines on this season of Curb that required suspension of disbelief in our annual precipitation.
It started with a foray into kale, taken plain out of those pre-washed boxes sold along produce department walls as a means to balance my diet against all that brominated vegetable oil and lunches at places that allowed me to refill it, but when that grew too painful to continue, I resorted to adding ingredients more in keeping with the gut flora in my digestive tract, eventually trying to reproduce the Cobb Salad I missed from my daily outings. Something was bound to go wrong with my recipe, however, as haphazardly as I sourced it, bland turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving, mushy avocados the in-laws bring by, and the packaged greens probably least trustworthy of all, and now I’m on my fourth day of bloody stool (third, if you count actual production thereof) after a killer stomach ache, neither of which would ordinarily be noteworthy if not for the coincidence of my worsening day-to-day performance. Are any of these symptoms worth asking the doctor about or do they just come with age?
Something was bound to go wrong with my recipe, however, as haphazardly as I sourced it, bland turkey leftovers from Thanksgiving, mushy avocados the in-laws bring by, and the packaged greens probably least trustworthy of all, and now I’m on my fourth day of bloody stool (third, if you count actual production thereof) after a killer stomach ache, neither of which would ordinarily be noteworthy if not for the coincidence of my worsening day-to-day performance. Are any of these symptoms worth asking the doctor about or do they just come with age?